I feel as though most major journalistic publications suffer from a serious amount of superficiality. Where in journalism or any other literature is there a writer who reads the publication and writes a broad, in-depth, close-to-life interpretation of it?

Where has philosophy gone to hide in the modern world?

Obviously, a journalist must report from an objective standpoint, but even opinion-editorials can fall into a distant-from-life style of regurgitated reasoning.

I want to write to combat this lifeless voice resonating from not only journalism, but also from academia, superficial novelists and any uninspired learned individuals.

Someone recently told me all modern philosophizing is political and is policed by governments, churches, academics, customs, fashion and human cowardice — all of which limit it to a fake learnedness.

What I dare to ask — and this might be too philosophical for your taste — is what is learnedness apart from that which supposedly “limits” philosophy?

Obviously, philosophy is, has and will continue to be affected by all of the previously mentioned conditions because they are the conditions of human life.

Philosophy allows us to look into all of them and distinguish ethical, intelligent ways of dealing with life. Real life is ambiguous and cannot be accepted simply; it must be thought about.

Objective reporting allows individuals to philosophize for themselves on the material presented. In an ideal world this would be the case. This world is not ideal.

Today, extremely wealthy individuals own most major publications and their motivations can be extremely personal and nonobjective.

Rupert Murdoch, notable for his ownership of Fox News, and Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, are two wealthy men with obvious political motivation behind their news corporations.

This skews the dissemination of news and pushes the individual in whatever direction either of these two men desires.

It’s a scary concept that a few wealthy individuals are the only people with the means to disseminate information. The last free forum seems to be the Internet.

It is the last public domain, an area where objective information can be sought and any individual can write and have their philosophies heard.

Can philosophy be classified as a fake learnedness? Yes. Is it? I believe not. It is more like a wisdom or understanding to use when traversing our preconceived, learning-derived knowledge.

It is a necessary tool in an era when money seems to be the object regulating what we know and how we think — we shouldn’t want this to be our world.

Our world should be one of wise, capable individuals able to use their personal philosophies to direct their lives, without an outside source pushing them in any direction of thought.

Because this is impossible at this point, we must use philosophy as the tool that will guide us in our approach to conceiving beliefs and perceptions based on the information we digest.

As a writer, my approach will be to use a philosophy that is as close to life as possible to look at information and give it genuine thought and a new perspective — a sort of avant-garde, avant-garde.

I urge everyone to engage as many sources as they can when shaping their decisions. We need to look at where the information comes from and not accept information blindly and call it “learnedness.”

There must be wisdom in our day and age; with the amount of technology we have access to and the problems we face, we need farsighted individuals to shape our future.

Libido over life is the motto — psychic energy over the ambiguity. We need progression, not dogma. This is the job of philosophy and modern writers, thinkers and learned individuals need to heed the calling.

Eoin Nordman is a State News guest columnist. Reach him at nordmane@msu.edu.