This evening I partook in one of what has become one of my greatest luxuries: coffee, a little pastry and time to read and reflect on my experiences by writing fiction and non-fiction. I often find myself wondering: What else could a person ask for?
Tonight I was pleasantly reading along on some local news and entertainment periodicals and then dove into On the Genealogy of Morals by one of my favorites, Friedrich Nietzsche. Ahhh... Philosophy: Luxury of luxuries!
I was sitting at a coffee table in a nice comfy chair in a rather affluent part of the Lake View neighborhood of Chicago. To my left and on the adjacent side of the table was a couch, where a middle-aged woman sat reading something by Thomas Merton. A vacant seat remained open between her and where I sat. It is a tight fit in a coffee shop that regularly packs them in.
I had been planning on asking the woman to watch my bags as I took a leak and after a large coffee and lots of water, my bladder was telling it would be soon.
In wriggled a hopeless [Edit: homeless (Freudian slip?)] man carrying his small cup of coffee and he plunked himself down inbetween the Merton-reading woman and I. A stench of piss and body odor and perhaps shit soon followed.
I was distracted, not to mention no longer planning on asking the woman to watch my bag. (It contained my Nikon D70 as well as some books and crap I find valueable, even if they are not worth much at a pawn shop.)
Every now and then I found myself distracted by the man as I continued to read. He fidgeted, he made eratic hand gestures and he continued to stink with a pungence that started to become a distraction above and beyond his physical presence. A sort of secondary presence.
Despite my love of Nietzsche, I found myself pondering Plato and his desire for a philosopher king within his prescribed Republic. Just where would this man fit in, if at all? He probably wouldn't, just as he doesn't quite fit in here. And yet, he remains. And I remain. And you, dear readers, remain in some place half-way between reality and a cyber dream. And short of death we'll all remain, enjoying coffee and life in one way or another, and whether we reflect and philosophize or not, we will remain. And that will determine whether we live a waking dream or a living nightmare.
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Servey says!
William:
Yes, Nietzsche is a favorite. I do much care for all the existentialists that followed because they tried to make a science out of something that was clearly not scientific. To me, Nietzsche is more of a spiritual writer or religious without the religion. Sartre, Heidegger, Husserl, among others (not to mention the completely convoluted Foucault), all systematized philosophy and made up their own language. This, to me, was a wrong move. Althought they use language to capture certain ideas that the use within their systems, they alienate most readers and even when they don't, their readers find difficulty agreeing on what their jargon signifies. Thus, there is room for interpretation which opens them up to a solid Nietzschean critique that in effect nullifies their systems. I like Heidegger and Husserl, but I'm not sure they really advance much beyond Aristotle.
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