{"id":161,"date":"2004-10-11T11:30:00","date_gmt":"2004-10-11T11:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/?p=161"},"modified":"2004-10-11T11:30:00","modified_gmt":"2004-10-11T11:30:00","slug":"i-heart-i-heart-huckabees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/?p=161","title":{"rendered":"I heart I heart Huckabees"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0356721\/\">I Heart Huckabees<\/a> is great.  I can&#8217;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&#8217;ve wanted to say to so many people I&#8217;ve wasted hours with in philosophy classes, trying to convince them to care (but haven&#8217;t know how to express the problem).<\/p>\n<p><!--more Knowing and Not Philosophy-- Rant--><\/p>\n<p>In philosophy, knowing the answers isn&#8217;t success.  It&#8217;s stagnation.  The same is true of learning and personal growth.  A world view that doesn&#8217;t allow for more is the worst kind of stumbling block, and the most common.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I Heart Huckabees is great. I can&#8217;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 &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/?p=161\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">I heart I heart Huckabees<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesrising.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}