Triple Helix

by Carebear Ablan

18 June 2013
Discussed Text: David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water"

Gee, where do I begin? Am I doing it right? Am I philosophizing hard enough?

Today, we finally met Dr. G (as what he offered to be called in class), and had our first real lecture on Philosophy. And to generally sum up what I’ve learned in class today, it was that Philosophy operates with pretty much anything, and everything. Even entities that assumingly have absolutely nothing to do with Philosophy (say Homer’s bust and Aristotle’s clothes).

But from what I understood, it especially starts with life; it literally thrives in life. According to Rembrandt’s painting flashed onto the screen this morning, it is art; or at least what I believed he was trying to get at, was anything that sparked any hint of emotion, or invoked a fair amount of sentiment or memory, practically anything with an impact. The two entities, Philosophy and ‘Art’ or ‘Life’ then intertwine like a double helix, in a whimsical effort to grasp the almost-impossible-to-fully-comprehend-reality we all know so well.

Now here comes a third entity, ever notorious ‘Politics’. At this point in the lecture, I scoffed thinking, how on earth could Politics be added to such a perfect equation? I was thinking to myself, isn’t the point of Philosophy just to have a deep, general understanding of life and everything around you, accept it, and simply move on? My idea of politics is that it is a rather silly entity, considering how awfully silly it is here in this country, I couldn’t possibly consider it. But nope, that’s not the case.

See, we can’t just leave this double helix be to just exist and grow on its own, because it’ll just get tangled in its own mess, leading to a most impossible knot. Politics serves as ‘order’; I rather that word was used instead, but what kind of relevance would that hold in Rembrandt’s masterpiece? But really though, politics simply serves as a guide to let what is growing, what is being cultivated into the lives of millions and millions of people, is to let it grow properly, upright, securely and promising enough for millions and millions of others to come.

This is just one way of viewing things, or at least the way I’m most comfortable in. Maybe right now I suffer the same fate as Thales falling into a well. But oh hey,

This is water.