indie box: Action Philosophers

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Action Philosophers, black and white, Fred van Lente, indie box, Indie Comics, philosophy, Ryan Dunlavey

Action Philosophers uses humor, exaggeration, and sight gags to spice up a subject that many people avoid just because it’s too damn boring. Writer Fred van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey bring much-needed life to the topic in their irreverent yet educational takes on many of the most influential philosophers, from ancient times to modern.

Consider Bodhidharma, an important figure in the development of both Zen and martial arts. Did you think a lesson on Zen was going to be a bunch of boring monks sitting around meditating? Think again!

Then there’s Isaac Luria, portrayed in an homage to the sorcerer Dr. Strange of Marvel Comics fame.

In their quest to make philosophy exciting, the creative team pays other tributes to action-packed comic book styles, including Jack Kirby’s pulse-pounding visuals.

Pop culture references abound, such as imagining David Hume using the old Saturday Night Live catchphrase, “If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” I’ve read Hume before, and it was nowhere near as fun as this version.

The conventions of comic book art lend themselves to illustrating some abstract concepts, like this page where objects and people disappear because the philosopher isn’t thinking about them.

And why suffer through tedious history books about Francis Bacon when a handy infographic does the trick?

This is a fun series, and I thank reader Ergozen for recommending it a few months ago. The Tenth Anniversary “uber-edition” collects all the material so that the philosophers appear in chronological order, but it’s often out of stock or exorbitantly priced. However, you can find a similar complete collection on Amazon at a reasonable price.

You can also explore more fun and educational works at Ryan Dunlavey’s site, including a lengthy sample of his history of comic books.

Alan Watts on Ecology and Mysticism

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Alan Watts, ecology, mysticism, philosophy

Alan Watts
Excerpt transcribed April, 2013 by M.H. from the Alan Watts Lecture Series, The Tao of Philosophy #3: The Coincidence of Opposites. Retrieved from http://youtu.be/HE4HwaGhGmo

“In the science of ecology, one learns that a human being is not an organism in an environment, but is an organism-environment; that is to say, a unified field of behavior. If you describe carefully the behavior of any organism, you cannot do so without at the same time describing the behavior of the environment. And by that, you know that you’ve got a new entity of study. You are describing the behavior of a unified field.

But you must be very careful indeed not to fall into old Newtonian assumptions about the ‘billiard ball’ nature of the universe. The organism is not the puppet of the environment, being pushed around by it. Nor on the other hand is the environment the puppet of the organism, being pushed around by the organism. The relationship between them is, to use John Dewey’s word, ‘transactional’- a transaction being a situation like buying and selling, in which there is no buying unless somebody sells and no selling unless somebody buys.

So that fundamental relationship between ourselves and the world, which is in an old fashioned way by people such as Skinner who has not updated his philosophy, interpreted in terms of Newtonian mechanics. He interprets the organism as something determined by the total environment. He doesn’t see that in a more modern way of talking about it, we are simply describing a unified field of behavior – which is nothing more than any mystic ever said.

That’s a dirty word in the modern, academic, scientific environment. But, if a mystic is one who is sensibly or even sensually aware of his inseparability as an individual from the total existing universe, he is simply a person who has become sensible – aware through his senses of the way ecologists see the world. So when I’m in academic circles, I don’t talk about mystical experience. I talk about ecological awareness. Same thing.”