Nomadic and Bastion Philosophers
a personal memory
It is by now a well established fact that, traveling through the philosophical landscape, you meet quite some thoughts.
And not many women.
In the late 60's, as a young student without TV set, my late grandmother, a personality not easily to be overlooked, even at a considerable distance, once allowed me a visit to see a TV-debate between two famous philosophers of the time, Arne Naess and Alfred Ayer. It reached an emotional climax after Naess had denied the existence of facts and Ayer started to accuse him of being a hypocrite and dangerous victim of the devil. He did so in more complicated terms that I forgot. I do not even aspire to remember them. The emotions were the ones that mattered and they are carved in my soul.
My grandmother was knitting and said: "these guys are not married I hope. No woman would stand that."
Alfred Ayer is, in my opinion, a good example of a bastion philosopher, and Arne Naes is a typical nomad. A nomad is trekking. He carries as little as possible. He wants to be light. He looks around. The earth is his house, and he adapts to his ever changing house. He heads South for warmth and North for coolness, up for dryness and down for water. To a nomad, every day is different. There are regularities, but they also come and go: On other occasions, water may be high, drought low, warmth North and coolness South. A bastion philosopher has a different life history. One day, something will change his life: he will make a daring, solemn, almost religious decision, or rather it will come over him as a fundamental inescapable truth. Later in his life, he will keep thinking about that moment: when it was, why is was, why is was like is was. These thoughts are about the moment when he thought: here! He looked at the ground and saw it was good. Immediately, a feverish building urge had come over him. He put stone on stone, erected a hard core and construed robust wings in all directions. Through the shooting holes and between the battlements, reality is visible from within as an ornament in his self created space. There he stands, high and dry, the bastion philosopher, his view only every now and then polluted by a nomad passing at a distance.
And the nomad? He sees the bastion philosopher and thinks: there he is sitting. He might make a small detour to have a closer look. Then he continues his journey
Mwenda bure si mkaa bure, huenda akaokota
Kiswahili proverb: "The aimless traveler is not an aimless sitter, he may find something"