I Heart Huckabees is great. I can’t decide if I want to be an existential detective, or if I want one on my case, whatever my case might be. It touches on a lot of issues, but it spends most of its time on the connectedness issue, which until now I had never thought much about. Through a twist or two, it brought me to the following rant, which I’ve wanted to say to so many people I’ve wasted hours with in philosophy classes, trying to convince them to care (but haven’t know how to express the problem).

In philosophy, knowing the answers isn’t success. It’s stagnation. The same is true of learning and personal growth. A world view that doesn’t allow for more is the worst kind of stumbling block, and the most common.

We all have world views and paradigms of thought that structure our understanding of the world. It is a necessity of life. At the same time, though, world views are abstractions and simplifications, which systematically exclude pieces of reality which would contradict themselves.

We are all like the three blind men trying to understand the elephant. Every world view allows us to experience limited aspects of the universe. But behind every world view is a greater world view that allows for more of what is.

In philosophy, this means that if a question could matter, under any paradigm, then it does matter, in a more universal sense. Progress, in philosophy and learning and life, is realizing that a new question, that you may or may not have known about, matters.

This is a threatening idea. It means that you have to risk changing your opinion. Risk becoming pro-life or pro-choice; risk becoming religious or losing your faith in God; risk finding that the basis of the life you now live is self-delusion and manipulation.