Philosophy seems hard to understand to many people, because those people are dumbasses. In this the first of an ongoing series, which I hope to develop into a PBS special that could net me thousands or even hundreds of dollars, you will learn philosophy as it was meant to be learned: high.

            Philosophy has traditionally been defined as the study of why things suck, but more recently philosophers, many of them not inside my head (well, a few) (okay, maybe only one or two) (fine, none: they are all inside my head; are you happy, now that you’ve humiliated me?), have begun to define philosophy as the study of shit you think about when you’re high. Philosophy takes as its subjects the nature of existence, the purpose of human life, whether or not our perceptions can be trusted, mediated as they are through unreliable sensory reporting: in short, all the things you last thought about after doing a couple dozen big giant bong-hits.

            So, please, pull up a hash brownie and six or seven bags of Doritos, and join me for…Dude, Where’s My Descartes?

Part 1: Philosophy Is All Historical And Shit

            Anthropologists have dated philosophical thought back to the days of cavemen, hundreds of thousands of years ago. The first recognizably philosophical thoughts are known to be crude and related to saber-tooth tigers (smilodon fatalis, known to its cavemen coevals as, roughly translated, “AGGGGGGHHHHH, big fucking tiger beast eating me AGGGGGGHHHHHHH!”), to wit: “I wonder why this saber-tooth tiger is chasing me? Perhaps he too, like me, is a sentient creature?” As the thinker of this thought slowed down to ponder it, he did not survive to found philosophy, a task which had to wait for the extinction of the saber-tooth tiger and the invention of the toga, which led, virtually immediately, to the invention of the toga party and the combustion and consumption of massive amounts of tetra-hydro-cannibinol, which in turn led directly to the birth of philosophy. Well, as directly as one can go totally baked.

            During the period that followed, which is called the Platonic period, because philosophers during this time never got laid (q.v., Aristotle’s text, translated roughly as Fuck No, We Can’t Just Be Friends, thought to be lost in the sacking of the library at Alexandria, so I guess you can’t q.v., now can you?), Greek philosophy launched inquiries into the nature of the good (hydro vs. naturally-grown in a forest preserve somewhere in the south suburbs of Chicago was an ongoing debate, and led for a time to the secession of Athens from the League Of Hellenic Growers) and into scientific and technological matters; the Greeks were the first to notice, for example, that pot smoke bubbled through water could be breathed in greater quantity without irritation to the nasal mucosa, an observation which led to the invention of what we know today as the modern-day bong. The Platonic philosophers were also the first to discover that if you spill bongwater on your carpet, you might as well just take up the fucking floorboards.

            Later, the Roman philosophers, aided by their observations of thousands of Christians being eaten by lions, made great strides in the philosophy of screaming, but otherwise progress in philosophy was painfully slow (especially for the Christians) until those selfsame Christians, understandably peevish at being fed to lions, caused the Empire to fall and the Dark Ages, a time when people stood in the shadows a lot and clothing colors tended to muted earth tones, to begin. During the Dark Ages, philosophers were often burned as witches, or sometimes because there wasn’t enough wood. Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas attempted to apply Platonic philosophy to Catholic doctrine, explicating the nature of the Trinity (“So, dude, like there’s these three dudes, and they’re all one dude, but one of them is, like, God, or, like, they all are.” “Dude, you are so wasted.”) and inventing the highest expression of medieval technology, the ruler-wielding nun, but failed in their endeavors to ascertain why everyone in the Dark Ages was covered in mud. Philosophy’s response to the Black Death that killed over a third of Europe’s population--“Dude, that fucking sucks”—was also considerably less than helpful, and philosophy fell into disrepute and was pretty much restricted to the druggie monks in the smoking areas behind their monasteries.

            Immediately following the Dark Ages came the Renaissance, when people were much better lit and cleaner, and philosophy flourished as it had not since the Naissance. Art, literature and music were also infused with new life and energy during this period, but we don’t give a fuck about that because we’re talking about philosophy; try to fucking keep up, okay? During this period as well, science split off from philosophy, because scientists believed that they could get laid a lot easier if they weren’t hanging around philosophers; in this, as in so many things, they were bitterly disappointed, and the word “nerd” first entered common usage, followed rapidly by the invention of the pre-television pastime of “nerd-stomping.”

With the Renaissance well under way, the Enlightenment, for which philosophers had been waiting impatiently for a hundred-fifty years or so, began when people became even better lit. Descartes kicked off modern philosophy by pondering why the adjective from his name was “Cartesian.” (A passionate hater of children, he also invented algebra, and a horse-powered machine that could shout, “Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!”) Descartes also pioneered inquiry into mind/body duality; before him, no one had ever figured out that their dick had a mind of its own. Many other philosophers followed Descartes, making no more progress than he had on the name thing, until Immanuel Kant, knowing that his name would be the basis of so many bad puns I Kant even tell you, laid out the thesis, in a very hard-to-read book called The Importance Of Being Earnest, that Descartes’ name was of no conceivable interest to anyone but Descartes, and everyone should just shut the fuck up about it. This caused a revolution in philosophy, about which no one who had ever actually had sex cared.

            In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, philosophers began to concern themselves with why everyone thought they, the philosophers, were such big giant dickwads. Nietzche theorized that it was because philosophy hadn’t yet led to the creation of the “overman,” a phrase the misunderstanding of which caused generations of philosophers to hang out at gay bars posing as tops. Philosophers chatted about language a lot in the early 20^th century, because they had nothing better to do until World War II, when many of them became Nazis (including Nietzche, who had been dead for 50 years or so) (and remains so to this day) (he died of tertiary syphilis, a fact for which he is celebrated by modern philosophers who can’t get laid, ironically, to save their lives). This mass defection of philosophers to Nazism helps to demonstrate why everyone thought they were such big giant dickwads. After the War, Germany promised never to produce any more philosophers, and philosophy was replaced by first radio, then video games, then Brazilian waxing.

            In our complex modern world of the future, the study of philosophy has rejoined the study of science in considering, amongst other topics, the ramifications of quantum physics and the origins of the universe in a big fucking explosion scientists have, with typical linguistic grace, dubbed The Big Fucking Explosion. The reunion brings together the two biggest groups of pencil-neck geeks in a single discipline, where anyone who wants to, including crippled old ladies and three-year-old crack babies, can find them and kick their asses. The topics of modern philosophy have become ever more rarified as the quality of the dope obtainable by the student of philosophy becomes ever more potent—and thanks to the invention of the modern three-pound bag of potato chips, no philosopher need ever go hungry after a big evening of considering the nature of existence and not having sex ever. Ours is truly the golden age of philosophy, but some people still like it while it’s a little bit green.

Next In the Series: Our Whole Solar System Might Be Just An Atom In a Giant’s Toe