The Questions · the practitioner · the four words
What is an observer?
The first real question usually arrives through a song, in a car, at the right age. Almost nobody begins in a book.
One who gathers raw experience and questions it, prior to building any structure from it.
The material stage; not yet a map.
Everyone begins here.
What this settles
Which makes it the most populated stage there is, and it is not close. The entry condition is thirsting — and the thirst is the entry condition for all three words, not just this one.
Not this question
What is a scholar?
Also in this footing, and a different question. That one holds a map somebody else drew. This one has not drawn or held one yet — and that is not a deficiency.
Also asked as
- What was the observer?
- Where is the observer now?
Nothing on this page is composed. Every sentence in the answer is drawn from the pieces listed above. Where a claim is compressed, it is compressed from one of them and adds nothing they do not say.
The four words
Philosophy, the observer, the scholar, the philosopher — what each one is, what each one was, and the single axis that separates them. 6 of the 7 here have been worked through; the rest are on the map and not yet walked.
- Do you believe it, or just like the idea of it?walked
- Is your favorite artist secretly a philosopher?walked
- What is a philosopher?walked
- What is a scholar?walked
- What is philosophy?walked
- What are the roles, and what separates them?answered, not written up