VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY FOR ALL TIME

Rationality and irrationality meet again (actually, they never part their ways, so, that was merely a figure of speech), and mate, in the act of thinking.

Creative thinking is the best of human occupations and creative communication with other creative thinkers is an integral part of it. There is nothing that brings one closer to eternity than such communication as one’s mental reach can easily span millennia in an euphoria of timelessness, without ever feeling the distance.

Reading the works of great thinkers (whether one agrees with them or not) is the most delightful experience one can imagine, a prolonged, continuous series of conversations with dear friends, who give us confidence that “in the world’s desert we are not alone.” Some people, and I shall try not to be too arrogant to say, most people, indulge in what is called ‘daydreaming’ as a way to escape from the more unpleasant aspects of the daily reality, the next best thing to nothingness. But these out-of-this-world conversations, communion with the dead who are so very much alive to us through the immortal power, “aere perennius” of their logos, are something to be always looking forward to as an infinitely rewarding experience without a slightest tinge of senselessness, associated with daydreaming, days and nights, especially when we feel miserable, wallowing in the reminiscences of our former glories: “Olim lacus collueram, olim pulcher exstiteram,” etc.

In this connection, it is remarkable how timeless philosophy is. It is truly perennial, and runs throughout the millennia never losing its currency, as opposed to all sciences, where progress means discrediting all of the previous thinking, in fact, making it all look ridiculous. Nietzsche was absolutely right, in his reverence for the pre-Socratics. I will be showing my own by devoting a whole section to them later on and its delectably apt title PreSocratica Sempervirens speaks for itself. With the pre-Socratics, we can easily discard most of their scientific discoveries as hopelessly outdated, and indeed, some of them even as utterly ridiculous, but as great original thinkers, they are as contemporary to the best of us, as anyone can ever be, and, especially, considering the circumstances, even so vastly superior to the very best of our modern thinkers that it seems, today, as if their splendid breed has by now become extinct.