Cafe Descartes


Ah, the life of a philosopher. It is approaching 100 degrees outside. Rather than walk around and have the sun stalk me all day with his hot and harsh stare, I have decided to dodge the sweltering weather here in Chicago and hit a coffee shop on Michigan Avenue called Cafe Descartes and write. The Midwest is scorching with little rain. Although it is hot in the Northeast, we have had consistent rain to offset the scorched earth.

No St. Arbucks for me this morning. I was thinking of heading to Intelligentsia Coffee but don't feel properly coiffed. It is a high-class crowd there. Starbucks marketing genius was making the common man feel aristocratic. Intelligentsia Cafe is for the real cuff-link crowd. Not a dude like me with a ball cap and unshaven. No matter that I have a Ph.D. It is the look man. Cafe Descartes doesn't offer decaffeinated coffee. Have to appreciate the proprietor's commitment to authenticity. Coffee without caffeine is like a book with no words inside...only a cover.

Philosophy is often dismissed as just hot air, arid intellectualism, but in looking at the profiles on the wall (in the picture in Cafe Descartes), only a fool would dismiss the profound influences of philosophers on life. Far from being a barren influence on behavior. Marx was the ideological underpinnings of Communism and Nietzsche's prose fueled Hitler's madness. Sartre did much the drain meaning out of contemporary existence.  Quoteth he, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of the eternal." If all of our efforts and exertions are only for this life, it certainly creates a short-term perspective. Get what your can, how you can. Ethics become utilitarian and then philosophically illusory. Do what you want, it doesn't matter. Even matter doesn't matter and that is what we are. Sartre is harsh but honest. One might decide to be inconsistent on the eternal meaningless of it all but is is not logical. 


Jesus had to rise from the dead to validate His teaching. If He did not, what makes Him any different than us? He made absolute assertions about being "The Way, the Truth, and the Life."  He might deserve a place in the wall of a coffee shop in Chicago if He was wrong but still offered a modicum of wisdom. Ultimately, though, He would only be one of many whose whose teachings persisted after He passed away. Jesus said that Heaven and Earth would pass away but His words would not. (Matthew 24:25). Skeptics try to suggest He never made such postulations but that has always struck me as untenable considering the weight of evidence that He ran afoul of of religious and political authority by asserting a greater authority...His, as God. It just doesn't add up otherwise. We all like evidence until it runs counter to our conclusions.   


The hot sun will die out but the light of the Lord cannot. Light existed before the sun in Genesis and shall continue to shine forevermore.  

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