100 posts for the Performing Monkey!

This is this blog’s one hundredth post. When the blog reaches one hundred hits, I really intend to crack open the bubbly. However, reaching this momentous milestone has encouraged me to reflect upon (hold on to your seats) THE TRUE MEANING OF THIS BLOG.

We philosophers need to periodically withdraw, and spend time alone with our thoughts. Many great philosophers such as Wittgenstein went through long periods of silence. In fact, I hold to the view that many of the greatest philosophers never made any effort at all to make their thoughts public, and so they remain utterly unknown. They quite simply, couldn’t be arsed. Even when philosophers do deign to pontificate in public, they rarely say what they really think - they merely toy with us for their own entertainment.

In short, great philosophers are self-sufficient and have no need to seek the adulation of the vulgar masses, or the vanity of society’s ignorantly bestowed awards. They do not care what the mob thinks. According to the philosopher Heraclitus “Asses would rather have straw than gold”. Also “dogs bark at what they do not know”. Similarly he said “most men do not know what they are doing when they are awake, just as they do not know what they are doing when they are asleep. Fools, although they hear, are like the deaf. Whenever they are present, they are absent”.

Heraclitus’s contempt for the masses was such that, according to Diogenes, he "finally became a hater of his kind and wandered into the mountains, making his diet of grass and herbs." Unfortunately, the diet of grass didn’t agree with Heraclitus, and he was taken ill. He decided that he could cure himself by covering himself in cow shit, and lying in the baking sun for hours on end. But, alas, the cure didn’t work and within 24 hours he passed away.

In this spirit, I find myself asking the question: is this blog distracting me from higher, loftier callings? Certainly, there is gold to be found in this blog, for those who are not asses. But perhaps those who have the power of hearing, do not need to listen? To what extent am I like the performing monkey, pictured above? I have been doing this for four weeks now. That’s four weeks of my life that I will never have back. Am I debasing myself by playing to the gallery in this way?

Now, on this my hundredth post, it is I and not my readers who am confused and bewildered. It is I who have a problem. It is I, the would-be dispenser of advice, who now finds himself in need of advice. Ah, the irony of it, the sheer irony of it …