Mind Bank

by Miguel Jimenez

For Husserl, his philosophy was bringing everything back to lived experiences. Or, more simply put, all our philosophizing should be done using what we’ve learned through lived experiences. Which is why they say that we can’t really do any Philosophizing unless we’ve hit the age of 40. I think this is because that 40 is the age where we can say that one has already lived and gained many experiences in order to philosophize. Adding to this, another reason is because they don’t feel that people that are younger than 40 will have a bank of experiences that are insufficient to be able to philosophize.

(On a side note: is there a bar, or minimum amount of experiences that one needs to get to in order to philosophize?)

We can’t discount the fact that experiences give us reason to reflect, and through reflection comes philosophizing. The way to make these Philosophy sessions more valuable is to create a bigger bank of information in your head. My illustration of this is to think of the mind as a bank, which holds your lived experiences. If in reality, banks held money, think, hypothetically that our minds were a bank for our past experiences. Let’s call this bank MindBank. For us 20 year olds out there, if we’ve experienced enough, our minds would be rich with experiences. If you’ve lived in a cave for 20 years, your bank account wouldn’t be as wealthy. So if a guy like Henry Sy has the biggest bank account in the Philippines (money-wise), those who have experience the most, who have traveled, read a lot and lived, would have a sizable MindBank account. It’s all about taking things in from the world and increasing the size of your Mind Bank account in order to be able to Philosophize more, just as increasing the size of a real monetary bank account would make you able to purchase more things.

Reflection comes from your past experiences, and these past experiences can be garnered through things you take in or experience in this world. This is the reason to why we should read books, listen to stories, and read fiction, the bible and narrative stories in order to gain more experiences and increase the worth of our MindBank accounts. Through text, we tap into the minds and experiences of other people. In a sense, we gain their insights and experiences, increasing the value of our MindBank account as well as pushing us closer to be able to philosophize deeper and more richly.