Blue Collar Philosophy

What is so special about this blue collar philosophy that I keep advertising as worth pursuing and living?

Let us start with that first principle, that the middle is the way. This being assumed, let us go farther by concluding that living according to this principle requires that we juxtapose and blend incompatible and contradictory elements. Let us go further: let us then sit back, observe and analyze how these elements collide, and then we reach out and grab the given-off sparks of insight that benefact us.

The practical and everyday inform and limit the excesses and rigidity of the brilliant but narrow theoretician. The Platonic and ideal uplift and provide illustrative, life-changing ideational possibilities for the plebeian worker and trader. Though both sides deny and downgrade the value of the other, they are inadequate and incomplete without each other. Each will arrive at dead ends without the guidance of the other.

This leads us further to blue-collar philosophy. The philosopher that works with his hands is somehow rational (inductive logic) in ways that a pure mathematician is deficient in. This fecund rationality is missing among academics, but is gratuitously available at the finger tips of millions of workers in business, trades and service industries.

 But they do not realize that they enjoy in abundance this intellectual blessing, or arrogantly and narrowly dismiss any kind of thinking as the province of effete, helpless intellectuals. The blue collar intellectual brings special gifts to the table, though most worldly workers sneer at being intellectual, and even make a virtue out of the serious failure to be intellectual and think daily, a basic ingredient for each of us to develop and utilize our rational faculties while we individuate, thereby answering God's basic call for each of us.

Blue collar thinking provides contrast to the narrow specialization of academic functionaries in their cubicles dreaming no dreams and not living life. Blue collar thinking is impure, imperfect, anti-syllogistic, amateurish and incoherent. But it works and provides us with brand new ideas.

On the ethical side of the coin, an intellectual working in the world will not ever be a fanatic. For the extremist intellectual craves totalitarian, ruthless and genocidal control over millions of citizens to coerce them to obey his vision of how they need to think, speak, act and love. The cruel excesses and gross impracticality of the purist true believer would have few followers where most or all members of the middle class in future society individuate, intellectualize, and yet are out in the world of free enterprise. The temperateness of the Renaissance citizen will disallow her to ally herself with or support brilliant zealots, cruel and heartless, driven mad by their power-lust to impose their Weltanschaung upon the masses, the outcome of pure deductive logic, group passion, pursuit of purity and ivory tower intellectualism divorced from commerce on the street.