Biographie de Ron Hooft
As some people who read my work know, I'm a philosopher. I do not have a degree in philosophy because I never went to university. Well that's not true. I did sit in on philosophy classes for about a year, but since I couldn't pay I obviously never got any credits for it. I never the less studied philosophy all my life by reading and thinking and debating. I know most if not all the philosophical arguments of old, but I was always more interested in finding new truths.
That is to say discovering what others had not. To that end I went about things in rather a backward way from traditional schooling. I never went out and read so and so's opinion on this or that problem before I had studied the issue logically and had come to my own opinions first. Then I would read other people's work and compare notes. People told me all the time that I was constantly reinventing the wheel when I could have been working with someone else's wheel and improving on it.
But I can't work that way. I have to know it for myself. I can't just accept the wheel someone else found. If at the end I discover it was the same wheel all along then that's great. While consensus does not mean something is true, it does give one the feeling of vindication that someone else has gone through the same line of reasoning even if it turns out to be a false lead. I began to question life at age 6.
I am now 58. I've told this story many times in other essays, but the reason for telling it is always from a different perspective. I began by asking questions about the Church and the religion I was brought up in. When I was informed by my mother that probably no one knew for certain what the answers were to the questions I was asking I promised myself that before I died I would find them. That led me from religion to religion, including Eastern philosophies like Zen, questioning, reasoning, debating, and learning.
Learning mostly that everyone had their own ideas on the matter and for some reason none of them satisfied me. There was always something that did not feel right. At a certain point you get stuck. How do you know the answers you get from your queries are true and not just some personal bias or another? Every seeker comes to that point and the ones who really want to know find a formula. The formula usually goes something like this: Listen and take in everything, but don't be quick to accept anything as the whole truth.
Above all, care only about truth for its own s...
