Beginning Philosophy: Ignorance

I’m going to see if some people can begin Philosophy.

Of course, there is the usual way which would answer how one gets into philosophy by suggesting various books to read.

I find that when I get with a friend or a colleague who while may be philosophical is not “informed“ to the philosophical literature, and ask them to read one of my papers, most often they can barely get through the first 10 paragraphs without having a number of fundamental questions about various things that I’m assuming the reader knows I’m writing about.

So, I find myself wanting to suggest to them various things that they might want to read so they would have a context to understand what I’m really talking about.

But on the other hand our discussion often enough moves to me merely asking them:

What do you think?

And they usually answer is some sort of variation about “I’m not very well read”, or “I haven’t read so in so…I’m not very familiar with X“. And responses of that nature.

And my answer usually is, “I think you do, and I don’t really think you need to read all those people and all those books for you to understand that you actually do know about these things.”

Then our discussion goes along the lines of how they already know what we’re talking about, how they disagree, and how the fact that we are talking about it, evidence says that they understand what we are talking about.

So I’m wondering if any of my readers who have just followed this post, this particular post right here, and read it, have anything to say about it.

Specifically, what are we talking about?

Innoway, it’s as if there is a kind of bred ignorance going on here. Again, as I will continue to reiterate over nearly every topic I address, there are two things going on around ignorance.

On one hand, there is the assumed, and I would say ideologically natural route into ignorance. It is ideologically natural because the natural way the human being grows is to be ignorant ideologically, ignorant of the social norms and negotiating of things.

On the other hand, there is an ignorance that is built into becoming informed about the ideological norms. This is to say that is one becomes more knowledgeable of the social and ecological negotiations, they naturally and implicitly find themselves more ignorant of how that knowledge is even able to be understood and known. I would say that this is an idea logically enforced ignorance.

I ponder that it is due to an individual’s orientation upon or within the former kind of ignorance, that reveals their orientation by the fact of them being involved in the latter kind of ignorance

When I’m talking about Philosophy., I’m standing in the middle of these two routes towards knowledge. However, most people, once I bring up Philosophy., or I sound like I’m speaking philosophically, automatically assume that we are standing within the presence of ideological norms at all times, not in the middle of two forms of knowledge, but in the middle of the universe itself, mediating the universe to that blank vacuous space called the human being, or, subjectivityAnd that indeed the ideological norms are the only way that we can understand our relationship with ignorance at all.