philosophy as worry

 

Philosophers are all rather proud of Aristotle’s notion that philosophy begins in “wonder” – it seems such a superior birth, so disinterested, so aristocratically outside the tangle of pleb emotions.

 

For these reasons, that origin story has, for the most part, been more interpreted than questioned.

 

It is, of course, hard to get clear on these things, which depend on self-reporting. Stories that one tells about oneself are, prima facie, self-interested.

 

Myself, my “philosophical” thinking has its roots more in worry than in wonder. Worry about the dark. Worry about abandonment.  Worry about money. Worry about sex. Worry about the parents, the kids, the growing old, the decline of empire, boredom, and the absence of the hosts of promised angels after you graduate from whatever it is you are graduating from.

 

Worry, of course, is socially gendered female. Worry is the knitting, it is mom, not stoic dad, wondering on the lawn.

 

Questions can be treated as innocent grammatical instruments. Science, y’all! But questions are where worry goes in language.  They are large things, the question – they have room for more than anxiety. But from my plebe view, wonder is simply the advance man of worry, the spokesmodel, worry as influencer.