It’s an ancient philosophical concept. The Greek philosophy has this very well developed as well: A philosophy that does not articulate with what we naturally think of in the real world, has got something seriously wrong with it.
"Man's Search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning... Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!"
The intelligentsia ...was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses.
What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?
What for the sage, old Apollonius?
Upon her aching forehead be there hung
The leaves of willow and of adder's tongue;
And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.4/bookid.1076/sec.2/
It does not really avail us much to get clear definitions. I am for clarity, by all means, but to think that you can reduce a concept to a relatively simple definition, and that you can somehow go somewhere that will be interesting and fruitful, just does not seem to me to be very plausible at the present time. And that is exactly what I used to strive for. I took old Socrates seriously; you search for the definition. You get the essence of the thing, and once you get the essence and the definition that somehow captures that essence, you are home free. That is how you do philosophy. When you read Hegel, you realize how incredibly flexible and supple concepts are, how they take you for a fool when you take them too literally and too tightly, how they are interconnected with one another, how they interplay in ways you really do not understand, how in other words, strangely enough, you really do not understand any part unless, or until, you understand the whole. That is what I learned from these folks. I really think that stress on context is terribly important and enriches one's philosophical approach significantly.
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/philosophy/faculty/lachs_interview.html
Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos . . . . [But] the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes and, commands and, to a large extent, explains the others. . . . [My aim is] to recapture the master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is a partial or distorted transposition. . . . I quite naturally looked upon [Freud's theories] as the application to the human being of a method the basic pattern of which is represented by geology. . . . [Marxism, psychoanalysis and geology] demonstrate that understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another; that the true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive. . . . But I had learned from my three sources of inspiration that the transition between one order and the other is discontinuous; that to reach reality one has first to reject experience, and then subsequently to reintegrate it into an objective synthesis devoid of any sentimentality.
How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbèd, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo’s lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets,
Where no crude surfeit reigns.
Actual philosophers ... are commanders and law-givers: they say “thus it shall be!”, it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical labourers, of all those who have subdued the past—they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a lawgiving, their will to truth is—will to power. Are their such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?
He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, “Fourth Part: Maxims and Interludes,” section 146 (1886)
…[F]orms and events conjoin at their disjunctive syntheses, and all forms and all events conjoin under the single aleatory point that is Being. For example, consider white light. When shown through a prism, white light separates into red, orange, yellow, blue, green, and purple. Once past the prism, the viewer experiences these colors separately. However, if each individual color is traced back up itself, the viewer will find that they all conjoin at the prism, the disjunctive synthesis. If the viewer were to trace the color red up to the prism and find that it did not conjoin with the rest of the colors, then it would be certain that the white light shown through the prism harbored a deviation from or a perversion of pure white light. This is simply because pure white light must contain all possible frequencies and variations of color. A viewer who found this not to be true would be in the presence of a phantasmic white light, a simulacrum.
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~wjpeck/mathesis.pdf
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
Books about Philosophy
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