Trying to categorize life creates much anxiety

Date published: 10/2/2008

THE PROCESS of phil- osophizing is a funny thing: You get a thought, and the thought feels wonderful. It's a brief flash of insight, some incomplete lightning bolt of understanding that multiplies itself and constantly extends its feelers out further and further.

The original insight gets pushed and pushed--adding new concepts, new divisions, new implications--and suddenly, you start getting into this mania of building a system. You want a complete conceptual order, a total world-picture that explains everything in the universe--and you think that if you keep moving forward with your original thought, you can get there.

This process is delusional and can get hair-pullingly frustrating. Suddenly, your original thought isn't good enough--it needs to incorporate more information and starts gobbling up every other conceptual category in your mind in an attempt to overpower everything. These thoughts must be nipped in the bud, or else you are in for a rocky ride.

Philosophizing is best done in brief flashes, a compilation of these little lightning bolts. They cannot overextend themselves. In all honesty, there is no complete system of reality--there is always some remainder, some little leak in the boxes that doesn't quite fit. You cannot try to plug up all these leaks!

Life is best understood as a fluid, ongoing process. The moment you try to grab it and take a complete snapshot of it, it wiggles away. The trouble is that being a philosopher means you love to take these snapshots and want everything in its proper order. I have seen this thought-habit in myself get turned into a habit in actual life. If I get too hard-core about organizing a bookshelf, I can start having crazy spells of anxiety over which section to place a book in. All my clothes can be put in their own special section of the closet--but if there is some sock that thwarts my plans, I lose my cool.

Date published: 10/2/2008