Philosophical Works and The Meaning of Reality

Philosophical Works and The Meaning of Reality

I would put the texts in the following order:

William James - Some Problems of Philosophy

Rene Descartes - Meditations on First Philosophy

Non-Cartesian Soums

Luckmann & Berger -- The Social Construction of Reality

George Orwell -- 1984

Hannah Arendt -- Eichmann in Jerusalem

Lem -- The Futurological Congress

Ong -- Orality & Literacy

Jean-Paul Sartre -- Nausea

Abram -- The Spells of the Sensuous

Along with a cohesiveness of thought, the order in which they are presented allows for a build, a sort of piling-on effect of knowledge, such that we could travel from the beginning and nature of existence, through the tools we use to exist, concluding the meaning (or lack) of that existence.

First, William James tells us that “philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. Its mind is full of air that plays round every subject. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.” What better way to become engaged in this great inquiry about life than through the ways we perceive and experience? James creates order, sets forth some of the major ideas in philosophy, and answers some of his personal questions about existence.

Next we come to Descartes, who takes a deeply personal approach in his Meditations, using geometric logic to explore the ways he exists. Descartes paints a portrait of the lone mind, who knows that he exists because “cogito, ergo sum.” This is an empowering, liberating statement, one that can reverse every way i...

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... looks about him, so fitfully observant and pessimistic, but unable to really explore his existence.

For a positive finale, we have David Abram’s The Spells of the Sensuous, a book that lifts our existence from the depths, reminding us that we are really just “human-animals” after all. He encourages the enjoyment of the senses that Descartes had previously disregarded as deceptive and trite. It is in our experience of life, be it philosophical inquiry or the scent of pine trees and the fluidity of air, that we may exist. Abram reminds us that there is so very much more than control or power, that life is lived as a solitary experience, although we may subscribe to many different societal systems or other methods of control. Nevertheless, we remain ourselves. We exist, and as long as we can do that, via thinking freely and exploring, the possibilities are endless.