Engagement

Engagement with something, anything, has got to be the most powerful thing in our world.

To be engaged in-something or with-someone, for example, is all we really need.

The deepest of human bonds are engagements with significant others in our lives.

To live a meaningful existence, I have personally found this to be the true case.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, once mesmerised me with his statement: ‘The limits of my language means the limits of my world.’

As beautiful and intelligent as it sounds, the actual context of the statement; written in his first philosophical book, really does not transcend the page. I could write about it and its illusionary impact on my intellectual development for a long long time, but really as a philosopher tutor of mine once said; Wittgenstein’s philosophy was a cult of personality. This seems so true now that I have heard this perspective on his work.

But still, the reason I can’t even read his [Wittgenstein’s] books anymore is because they are abstract and dead in a way. Once, it was the greatest intellectual achievement of my life; for just having read and partly ‘understood’ his philosophy, I gained a [grandiose] notion that I had some how obtained intelligence beyond my years. Now I only wonder where have all these years gone; twenty years on, I ‘know’ that this kind of philosophy and writing is not for me.

Engagement with things in the world is far more important than attempting to comprehend things written about abstract notions and theories, however much they are endorsed by third parties to the facts.

Take marriage for an example, I am not married, but I understand the significance of what it is when someone tells you they are engaged to be married, just as a literary example you appreciate.

In a sense a sacrament is something that makes language live, and function. This is great. But, for the secular individual (myself included), where does one gain the intimate, wholesome and thoroughly engaging life-bonds from?

I understand here I am becoming extremely abstract myself, but in a sense I want to make philosophy here, clear and living; Without getting to philosophical!

• Engagement with something in the world should always be nourishing.

Not having love in one’s life for whatever reason, real or imagined must be the opposite of what i’m trying to articulate here…

Fact: There also must be a common bond, or currency between the two or more parties,             like language, Art, Maths, Sciences or even the humanities in general.

Fact: Engagement happens when there is love/hope in one’s life.

Fact: Engagement in life, is life-nourishing.

 

 

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