CONSTRUCTING A PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY ROBERT E. SCHWARTZ

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1 CONSTRUCTING A PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY ROBERT E. SCHWARTZ

2 2 To Howard E. Edelstein, M. D. whose perceptiveness changed my life Constructing a Personal Philosophy Robert E. Schwartz Copyright 1984

3 Why should you make an effort to construct your own personal philosophy? Why not take each day as it comes, or put your faith in religion or in science or in some combination of the two or let your views develop over the years on a trial-and-error basis? A number of people throughout history have spelled out their views in an organized way, but most have not done so. Perhaps those who have not undertaken to arrive at a conscious personal philosophy have employed their time and effort more usefully in other pursuits. There is only one compelling reason, in my view, to commit time and effort toward the goal of constructing a personal philosophy: You feel the need to do so. There are seldom, if ever, any external demands for an explicit personal philosophy only internal ones, if they manifest themselves as such. One kind of internal demand for a personal philosophy might be based, paradoxically, on the dilemma of not knowing how to find a way of believing or believing in anything. What, you might wonder, could be a solid basis on which to accept any belief? One possible answer to that question can be found in my essay, A BASIC SENSE OF SELF An Answer to the Who Am I? Riddle. I can only briefly summarize the reasoning process involved in that essay here: You can know only the content of your own awareness at any particular moment. Because that content is invariably affirmed at that moment there is nothing else to compare it with at that moment it is that moment s absolute truth. The flow of your awareness is a series of these absolute truths of the moment, as is the case for everyone else as well. So, you are always connected to the truth or reality of every moment of your awareness, which is the only truth or reality you can ever have at each of those moments. You have the wherewithal a flow of absolute truths of the moment for belief in the content of your awareness. (Everyone else has that same wherewithal for belief in their content of awareness.) You can move on to perceive that belief differently, and that new view becomes the absolute truth of that subsequent moment. At some later time, your beliefs may seem to you to be more enduring in your mind and to constitute a part of or the entirety of your personal philosophy. 3

4 On the other hand, the question of how to believe may not be an issue for you but only what to believe. Or you may already have clear in your mind what some or all of your beliefs are, but you may not have them organized in the comprehensive, systematic form that you would feel comfortable calling a personal philosophy. It is my expectation that when you engage in that kind of systematic organization of those beliefs and other beliefs that you may discover along the way that you will find that there are at least some inconsistencies and contradictions in that set of beliefs and you will want to clarify what those beliefs really are. By really and "systematic" I mean simply "internally consistent". I don't mean anything more complicated than that just that when you line up your beliefs in front of your awareness that they don't seem to contradict one another, or if they do seem to contradict one another that you will have found a rationale or "bridge" as to why that s OK. I don't need to know what your personal philosophy is, and there's no reason for you to have the slightest regard for mine. Furthermore, my views are probably indefensible, at least by me. It's less important to me that my views are "right" than that I know what they are. That, I suggest, is what a personal philosophy is for. You may disagree with that motivation for a personal philosophy and want to come up with the "right" philosophy, one that you would like everyone else to believe in. That sort of negates the idea of "personal" to me. I would regard a personal philosophy that you might want everyone else to believe in as being a political philosophy. (Consider that someone else, not you, might be putting that political philosophy into effect, and that person might have very different views than your own on how to go about doing so.) Let's be clear on one other aspect of the notion of a "personal philosophy": It has virtually nothing to do with academic philosophy, unless you want to go to the trouble of earning a Ph.D. in that discipline. I've been told by an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, however, that most professional philosophers have given up trying to formulate a personal philosophy. 4

5 Professional philosophers' standards undoubtedly would be of a higher order regarding the idea of a personal philosophy than we need to attain for ourselves. As I suggested above, that's because, unlike professional philosophers, we might not need to defend our points of view but simply need to get more consciously acquainted with them. While I used the term, "constructing" in the title, that's really a secondary phase. The first phase involves discovering, because, I would assert, you already have a personal philosophy, perhaps one that is not too explicit, one that is spotty or incomplete, even possibly confused and self-contradictory, but one that up to this point you may not have felt a strong enough compunction to examine carefully. As you examine the beliefs that you discover, you ll possibly find that, taken together, those beliefs don t "hold water" for you. That's because in the complexity of your views on various subjects, you may perceive, as I indicated above, contradictions and confusion between those views that you will want to resolve. It is this resolution process that involves "construction". Change is not only allowed but is the norm in constructing that combination of beliefs that is your own, once it becomes a conscious process. Some of the views you discover may seem to you to be off the top of your head, that is, not thoroughly thought through or properly researched. That, however, is perfectly OK for the starting of or, for that matter, the finishing of a personal as distinct from a political philosophy (as I defined political above). A personal philosophy is yours alone and has no prerequisites. You can do as much or as little research as you wish, and you can shoot from the hip. You are not in the process denying to anyone else his or her own philosophical perspectives. Refuting someone else s views is not your job. Your job is to find out what you believe. That s what counts, not whether someone else s beliefs are true or false, right or wrong. 5

6 Here are some possible topics for a personal philosophy. It is, of course, not an exhaustive list. Your personal philosophy, perhaps, will include some of those listed, but also others that are not listed at all. Morality/Ethics} Values Truth / Reality / Appearance Justice Right-Good / Wrong-Bad (Evil) Knowledge / Belief Rationality / Emotionality Innate Ideas ( A Priori Knowledge, Intuition, Gut Feeling ) Physical / Metaphysical (Material / Spiritual): Nature of the Universe Order in the Universe / Chaos Nature, Heredity, Genes / Nurture, Environment, Socialization: Nature of Man Brain / Mind (Body / Spirit, Soul) Religion (Theism) / Secularism (Humanism) Determinism (Cause-Effect, Stimulus-Response, Antecedent- Consequent) / Free Will (Free Choice) Natural / Unnatural (Against Nature, Man-Made) Self / Other Liberal (Revolutionary, Radical) / Conservative (Reactionary, Ultra Conservative) Democracy / Theocracy / Fascism / Communism / Socialism / Anarchy Hypnosis / Free Choice Right to Life (Abortion, Capital Punishment) / Right to Death (Suicide, Assisted Suicide, Euthanasia) 6