Philosophy of Sheds

Robert McCann 

An old Irish saying 

Is ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine 

“we live in each other’s shadow and in each other’s shelter” 

Language tells us about the nature of a thing 

Martin Heidegger 

小屋

An Introduction To Me Perhaps.

This is a short essay about philosophy. It aims towards wisdom. What is wisdom? Some say wisdom is knowledge? Knowledge of what, a philosopher will ask. God perhaps? Philosophers have a word that attempts to capture a theory of knowledge, epistemology. Philosophers in the main agree that we often don’t have knowledge, although we delude ourselves into thinking we do. It might be better to acknowledge that we are mostly ignorant. Technically epistemology is the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. The etymology of the word epistemology is in very basic form derived from the Greek epistēmē (“knowledge”) and logos (“reason”), and accordingly the field is sometimes referred to as the theory of knowledge. The word itself was first coined in 1847 in a review in New |Yorks Eclectic Magazine according to Wikipedia, referring to some obscure article in German about technology, and then in 1854 and in English by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier in the first section of his Institutes of Metaphysics. For academic philosophers there exists a doctrine or theory of knowing, which plays out in a field of its own much like ontology is a philosophical term used to describe the notion of being. What is being? Really we know very little about what it means ‘to be’. Perhaps we might frame these questions in terms of our existence. We might accept that we exist, however the more interesting philosophical question is why do we exist at all. The existentialists or absurdist’s such as Camus & Becket indeed point us towards the notion that our lives are absurd and that we live in a permanent state of absurdity. Much like Buddha they suggest it makes sense to live in the moment and that while living a good life is a serious thing, we should not take life too seriously. That is also the aim of this book. It is not a serious work of philosophy, in the academic sense, rather it is a modest but nevertheless a serious effort to understand what it is that we can know, and that if there are tings we can know, are they worth knowing, or counterintuitively, if we didn’t know what we think we know would life be any different? 

Epistemology is a word that I used as a framing device to answer the general question, 'what do we know, what is it to actually know something which then becomes known? A simpler question is 'What is knowledge? Who knows? I don’t! The purpose of this philosophy of sheds is to perhaps find-out maybe a little bit about what it is that I know about stuff. Its not going to be that important and maybe not very interesting except to me. The picture on the cover of this book is not and is of a green shed. that’s all I know. It’s a shed by most definitions and my more specific definition (which I outline later in the book). Its green. I think. But that could be a trick of the light. Or I might have altered the image. I didn’t, but you dear reader could not have known if I did or didn’t alter. I promise its green. Or at least it was green when I took the photo a few years ago. The owner might have painted it red in the meantime. Who knows? I don’t? You don’t? Well maybe you do, having passed the shed just now while you have been reading this book with the page open at this very sentence so its green or red who cares? Let’s say it’s still painted green a colour might be thought of as green as we know green to be. After all there are some people who see colours differently so we need to be clear that this is the colour green as we know it, but not necessarily as other know the colour that we call green. OK let’s try something perhaps a bit more straightforward. It looks like it is constructed using tin corrugated sheets. That’s all I know. Do I want to or need to know more. Most people couldn’t give a toss. It has been passed by most likely by thousands of people over the years since it was built. How many people? I don’t know. When was it built? I don’t know? Who built it? I don’t know and I don’t care or should I care? Do I ned to know who built it in order to care? Why should care? What is inside the shed? I don't know?

Schrodinger famously said that a cat can be alive and dead at the same time. The same could be said for my knowledge about what might or might not be inside that shed. Until I look inside I will never know. The owner could have a unicorn inside. OK all the evidence to date indicates that unicorns aren’t real. But until we look inside we will never know if unicorns are real or not? At this point it might be useful to add that Wikipedia tells us that philosophy is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its own methods and assumptions, and that the word itself comes from the Ancient Greek words φίλος (philos) 'love' and σοφία (sophia) 'wisdom'. Some sources say that the term was coined by the pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras, but this is not certain. 

I might add here that the academics are generally down on Wikipedia, I think because in the early days the information was a bit unreliable and not sourced and referenced in accordance with strict academic guidelines. Had it been available in the time of Socrates he would have marveled at the wealth of information available at the click of a button. The point is that philosophy is in a sense the only pursuit worth pursuing and in this philosophy is timeless. Much the way I walked past a random shed wondering if maybe, just maybe there might be a unicorn inside, human beings have looked into caves, tunneled into the ground, or looked up at the sun in wonder before deciding it might be best if we fall to our knees and worship this sun-being. Socrates was wise because he was always going to acknowledge that until he looks inside sheds, he does not have knowledge of sheds. He famously said that the only thing he knew is how little he knew. In this respect Wikipedia does not contain knowledge, it contains information. Socrates famously schooled Plato, who schooled Aristotle. Both Socrates and Plato where soldiers and by all accounts fearless. Aristotle was a very bright aristocrat and at a certain age you become are fearless. Nothing seems impossible. Then you learn nonsense.

As I’ve grown older, and worked my way through the years, I’ve climbed ladders and avoided snakes. I’ve also come to learn that we have lost the dignity of work. We have evolved from an agrarian way of working as a means of survival and sustenance through the industrial revolution, into the age of the internet and artificial intelligence, Feuerbach’s observation,

“Der Mensch ist, was er isst. Man is what he eats.”

is a forgotten truism. While the circle of Young Hegelians, of which Feuerbach belonged, and which included Marx & Engles, foresaw and warned the human world that capitalism in order to survive would eventually eat itself, we gorge away, and try not to vomit.  Feuerbach, Marx and Engles may not have know Mark Twain, but we can be pretty certain that he witnessed the moral and economic injustice of a system that enslaved people by stealing their labor. on his “Great Pleasure Excursion” in 1867’, whic led to his book The Innocents Abroad, he was searching for a wisdom of sorts, which we now find it in the voice of  Huckleberry Finn. Poor Huck was always getting into trouble his his head and his heart pulling him this was and that. in a memorable passage in Twain’s Book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Sawyers friend Huck wrote in his letter, ‘grassing-up’ his friend Jim, a slave, 

“Miss Watson, your runaway n- Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. 

HUCK FINN.. 

Twain, captures Huckleberry soul on the page for us as poor Huck struggled, he was torn between; head - I need the reward - and his heart - this is not right’, he couldn’t make his mind up, should he send the letter? He called on his conscience, he prayed, he was stuck in a bind, a cultural bind, a societal construct, this was the Deep South along The Great Mississippi river, the slave owners, not all but mostly Confederates, still ruled and called on the Bible to justify their crimes against humanity. The wrath of The Lord weighed heavily and it seemed to Huckleberry, that if he were to free himself from sin, this was the right thing to do, he would give up his friend, he would be, 

“washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.  

And he looked at the letter, it had a presence about it, he somehow knew that it contained something more than words; the words on the page weighed heavily, they carried power, the power of enslavement or freedom, life or death; and he thought, and he thought, and he thought again, of the memories of his friendship with Jim, a black man, a slave, the unwashed, the non-human, a commodity to be bought and sold, and the memories rose up and they shone a light into the dark, and he remembered, what Jim had said, 

…I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: 

"All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up.” 

Do we sometimes wish we had the courage of Huck Finn, voicing the wisdom of Mark Twain, and I’m reminded that, and although I don’t know very much; what I have come to know is that we should

“give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of [our] life’.

Huckleberry took a chance that day, the day he thought he would go to hell. It became the day he would go to heaven. Think then, of the many wasted many chances, where our days had the chance to become the most beautiful they could be. How many of those days have we wasted, how many missed chances; well perhaps it is best not to dwell, for as Heraclitus teaches us,

we cannot step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and we are not the same man.

I have waded through many different rivers and I am a changed man, but the same wee boy. I don’t know much, but I do know this. I am grateful because I know I am more fortunate than many.