Now, what I've done over the last many years is develop a new way of doing philosophy. It's not like the kind of stuff that's done today, there isn't anyone else who works in the way I do, and the results I produce are a direct result of the way in which I work.
A lot of people spend a lot of time talking about philosophical ideas, and calling that philosophy. It's not. Philosophy is something very different, as different as arguing over the names you're going to call different hills and streams is as different as actually exploring uncharted land.
With that said, to the untrained eye, they can look quite similar. People harping off about philosophical ideas just looks clever, which is the main reason why most of the people who do it, do it.
Logic and analysis cannot be reconciled with deep insight - well, in my opinion. You could try, but I think you might get into a frightful tangle. But science can be reconciled with deep insight, and provides something that depth needs so badly for it to be properly transmitted from person to person.
What I do is a skill. A craft.
Anyone (in principle) can see the deep truths that end suffering, and then just sort of blurt out, as best they can, their ideas about how it all works.
The problem of the East was never insufficient depth. It's insufficient precision.
So the option now is to fuse those insights with a forensic understanding of the contour and dynamics of suffering, delusion, pain, anxiety, loneliness, depression, blinkered thinking, human blindness, ideology. All that stuff.
The 'something else as well' is a hidden tradition in Western philosophy. It's not what you learn in universities, and it's not what professional Western philosophers think of as Western philosophy. It's something else entirely, and it starts with what Bryan Magee did with the work of Karl Popper.
Bryan Magee doesn't see himself as a great philosopher, but I disagree with him on this, because I do.
He's a truly great philosopher, in the Western tradition, to my mind the greatest Western thinker of the 20th century. This is not something that will get you nods at philosophy parties, nobody agrees with this but me, but I do, and here's why.
Karl Popper, who I have spoken about before, was the philosopher who, when you really boil it down, cracked science. He cracked the core mechanism by which scientific knowledge gets generated, and it's something very different to what most people think it is.
It's not logic, for instance, and it's not maths. It's not even rationalism, or materialism. All these things are window dressing.
It's experiment. The collision of ideas and the real. The real doesn't break - your ideas break. And so you can rule out the broken ideas, and make progress that way.
Now, I would say that this process has another dynamic to it, something Magee and Popper never spotted, and it's this - it's not just a case of ticking things off the list. How ideas break reveals more of reality. This is crucial, and is the main breakthrough I detail in the article Pattern Revelation. A failed idea fails in a certain way, and if your idea has failed in collision with reality, that way is a contour of the real.
And so you can refine your ideas. And break them again, and refine them again. And after a lot of stress, and a lot of mess, you get a kind of knowledge that is accurate in ways that nothing else is.
The development of accuracy, the direct development of accuracy in knowledge, accuracy to the real.
It opens up a new way of doing things, something never considered before. What I call a true 'noumenology' which is basically a big chunky word for 'actually charting the shape of reality as it is'.
This is not something common in philosophy, and is usually considered impossible, and dismissed out of hand. But it is possible, it's just not possible using logic, and you never generate certainty.
But then logic is a pitiful substitute for honesty, and certainty is a pitiful substitute for accuracy.
So the vast bulk of actual philosophical work done in the West is about logic, about logical structure, the logical structure of meaning and philosophical sentences. When you think of all the thousands of people who work in Western philosophy throughout the Western world, this is basically what they are doing.
There are a very few, a very, very few, very small number of people who are actually doing some really good work within the academy. But all the major journals only recognise logic as philosophy. It's like a cult, or a cartel, except it's massive, deeply entrenched, and it is not budging an inch.
Now, the thing is this. What Popper did with his insights was to take them and use them as a standard by which to judge the things that people do. Politics, science, ideology. He wrote books on them all, and gauged them by the standard of his insights. This is scientific, this isn't. That's basically what he did with his work. The mapping out of the sane.
But Magee raised this question, and it's a big one. He asked this - is the sane really the problem? Surely instead of using these tools as a standard to gauge what is sanity, why don't we use these tools as tools to chart human madness? To make sense of the senseless, not just stick a post-it note on all the sensible stuff.
To bring light to the dark, not just mark out where the lights are.
Global philosophy. The fusion of East and West. Something different, something new.
So to make this process work, to make it viable, you need something. A human condition that you have direct access to, that you have control over (at least legal control) and where you actually can run tests.
This is crucial. You can't just read Magee, or me, or anyone, and get to the point where you are a philosopher. What you can do is get to the point where you know a lot about other philosophers, but that just means you're boring at dinner parties, and little else.
To actually be a philosopher in this new way means that you are the test subject for the ideas you have.
Every single day (try to take one day off a week so you don't explode) go to a coffee shop, or similar establishment. Spend between 4 and 6 hours there, drinking coffee, and not talking to anyone.
Then churn. Just work the lock. How is this working? What's really going on? What is this stuff when you really get down to it?
Could it be this? Ok... if it is this... then I should be able to get it working like this....
Try this.... ok, it's working. Nice....
Except new insights always work when you first try them, not because they're insightful, but because they're new. So keep on it. Push it harder, see what it can do.
When you find yourself getting distracted, churn the distraction.
How do you churn? How do you test an idea?
You live it. You live an idea.
If you have an idea about how all this is working, you live it, you just apply it in your mind as best you can, and... crucially... as hard as you can. You want it to work, yes - you want it to be the right answer.
But if it's not the right answer, you want to push it to the point of failure, and do so quickly.
You'll also develop a large number (probably for me, it's several hundred, maybe more) of what you can call 'heuristics', which is a big fancy word that just means 'rules of thumb'.
Rules of thumb will serve you far better than big theories. Big theories are grist for the mill, you want to break those things as fast as you can, live them as hard as you can, use them to see what influence they can make, what traction they can generate, over the internal world of your human condition.
But rules of thumb are something else. They're little and small. They stay with you all the way through what you're doing, and help you do it. They're like the things a carpenter uses to knock out the right length of wood without bothering to reach for a measuring tape. The things a plumber uses to know which pipe does what, and where you should unscrew this bit, or screw in that, without having to check the building plans.
They're all the little things that make a craftsman, and that is what you need to be. A craftsman of accurate insight. Add that capacity to the depth of Eastern thought, and you've gone beyond both West and East, and you're doing something more powerful than either. In principle at least, and if you do it well.
The great traditions of East and West are truly great. They really are. There is so much to admire in both, but their respective brilliance is different - and, if it can be combined truly, not just bolted together, but truly fused, complementary.
They are a great and global analogue to the division of the brain - the left hemisphere and the right, the concept and the contour, the dual and the non-dual. It is not in arguing one case over the other that the future can be found, but in humility to both, in kneeling so low to both that you can see the place at which they meet, and become one.
We live in a world where there are few horizons left to explore. All the maps are drawn, all the world is charted. But there another horizon, the horizon of the human soul, and it barely touched, and aching for pioneers.
The world needs insight, Chris it needs insight before it runs out of air. The philosophers - the real ones, not the posers - are the ones who do that, and that's why real philosophy matters.
