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“Need a dose of philosophy?”
“Thanks, I got mine in the Literature section.”
I have to confess that I found my way into philosophy by the “Fiction Door” in the university of growing up.
As long as I can remember, I have been intrigued by people’s stories, reports from their recollected and reflected-on consciousness of what life was like for them, and the conclusions they drew from their human experiences. All of this seemed important in the building of a balanced perspective from which to live my own life.
The voices of the four March sisters and their mother in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women—from another time and locale—expanded my own limited only-child, modern suburban existence immeasurably. Boys’ experiences in Tom Sawyer, and even the (for the times) daring exploits of Nancy Drew were a fascination and a stretching of my world.
But there was another important, related element in the learning from story that was going on. Ideas are the first things I remember that I liked, that liked me back (as Rhoda used to say about food in the eponymous TV program’s intro). I was always searching for another way to describe what I was learning, and it required more abstract language. It was what I would now call the budding of philosophical thinking on my part.
Church, too, was always a part of my growing-up experience. Yet the oft-repeated Bible stories, and the truths we were supposed to take away in order to live our lives as Christians, always seemed to be lacking some crucial element. Perplexed, my young mind was always searching for the key. For instance, God was simultaneously described as high and in heaven, yet also close to our human experience, in us and within the world. Years later I would stumble on the paradoxical concept of God’s transcendence AND immanence—an example of philosophical/theological terms dispelling the fog to help me better understand what people were saying. I wondered: Didn’t anyone else my age hunger for more precise language and abstract terminology that could help illuminate life in these quite basic ways?
As my literary taste grew toward a fascination with The Nineteenth-century Novel (a course in college taught by the great Erich Heller that was a turning point for me), I began to realize that my adult career would be balanced between the points of literary pursuits and the pleasures of thinking “world-viewishly” about life—as one of my philosophy professors always described this quest.
I recently co-authored with Diane Marquart Moore a mystery novel, Chant of Death (Pinyon Publishing, Aug. 2010), in which ideas and philosophies jar and mingle and prod diverse characters into cataclysmic acts. Do ideas really have so much power? As Professor Heller once said: “Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that.”
In this blog, I would especially like to explore the interface between philosophical concepts and the way we lead our real lives: making observations and connections, asking questions, and sharing some thoughts that can help us all live a more examined life while remaining deeply immersed in its particulars every day.
I hope you will enjoy the ride!
Isabel Anders is author of the award-winning Becoming Flame: Uncommon Mother-Daughter Wisdom (Wipf & Stock, 2010), among other books for adults, children, and young adults.
