Philosophy 101, part II - Kitchen philosophy

Kitchen philosophy is a branch of philosophy that is, as its name would suggest, often practiced in the kitchen. It is an invention of my mother's, not that I think she and her offspring are the only people who follow this line of thought, but we may be the only people who call it this.

To engage in kitchen philosophy you don't have to actually involve yourself in any cooking, or indeed, eat and I think that you could probably kitchen-philosophise in other rooms of the house or even outdoors, but it is ordinarily undertaken in the kitchen because the kitchen is the heart of the house.

In essence, kitchen philosophy is the philosophy of your family, or your friends and is a group of thoughts and discussions by means of which you form your central views and positions on life.

In our house we talked about what was important to us, love or money? love, much more love, but if it's going, enough money that you don't go mad or end up fighting with the one you love; logical thinking or fuzzy thinking? fuzzy thinking often takes into account the context and any solution is illogical if conceived out of context; take what's coming to you or fight back? our family motto - on my maternal side - is 'with endurance we shall conquer', we're big into staying strong and making the best life (ie. one with lots of love and as little stress as possible) rather than accepting a bad deal; 'successful' career or creative career? whatever makes you happy, but if you have a strong desire to be creative you probably won't be happy until you satisfy this, this does not necessarily have to be satisfied by your career, which may simply pay for your creative practice, nor necessarily must a career be essentially uncreative because you work with numbers or for a company that uses the word 'corporation' in its official title. Oh and words have colours - some people get this and to others it seems illogical and beyond stupid, but I defy anyone to tell me that the word 'scooter' is anything other than red.

Central to our brand of kitchen philosophy is the idea of living and let live - but this rarely applies to each other. We can agree that we believe in being kind and of always trying to put ourselves in other people's shoes before we jump to conclusions about them or their lifestyles, but we do not always succeed in this. On most things we disagree on some level with each other. Specifically we do not succeed in agreeing, or even empathising with each other because we refuse to concede that in our mother or brother or sister's shoes we would conclude what they do. We each think that we're smarter than that.

Kitchen philosophy is very simply, talking about ideas and I believe that it has been enormously beneficial to my development as a person. Due to the fact that my family and I disagree about almost everything, while sharing similar fundamental ideals, I am perfectly content with the idea that not everyone will agree with me all of the time and I still won't stop harping on about whatever it is that I believe in (on second thoughts this may actually be a major flaw of mine, in fact I'm pretty sure it is but yet I'm strangely proud of this flaw - with endurance and all that). Plus, I enjoy a good, serious, fairly fought argument, it is enormously stimulating, but after all views have been presented I prefer to forget all about any disagreement, make another cup of tea and move on to discussion of something else, often something entirely mundane.

More importantly, kitchen philosophy has convinced me that conversation and sometimes silent togetherness are some of the most important elements of life. The moments of greatest meaning to me have not been those moments when I received degrees or promotions at work, they've been small moments sitting around a kitchen table, or a restaurant table, or sometimes standing or walking, when someone has shared ideas with me and I shared my ideas with them and what we made in the middle meant something and moved one or both of us. Sometimes it was not the words that mattered, it was something else. I suspect that sometimes, there are no words to describe the 'meaning of life' just a feeling, a sense of belonging and being and learning from someone else and being happy that you're where you are and they're there with you.

Tomorrow I'll get back to the 'book-learning' version of philosophy and find out what else there is to be learned outside of the kitchen.