School season has started, and with it comes the opportunity to interact with my peers. The first meeting of the philosophy club I’ve started 3 years ago will be soon. I’m writing this to reevaluate my ideas of philosophy, and find where the value is.
As always, we start with a question.
What is the point of philosophy?
What is the point of asking questions that lead to more questions than answers?
I’ve always stressed that philosophy is something accessible to all. It’s something that breaks down arguments and builds them up.
But in that same way, it can break down beliefs and build them up.
I’ve always thought the greatest value in philosophy lied in the practice of questioning, of loving wisdom itself. Philosophy isn’t just about abstract ideals that we sit in a room and talk about, just to do nothing about.
Change starts in the mind. Once we open to a new idea, or perspective, we open the possibility of action.
For me, philosophy is not an academic discipline. You don’t have to read Plato and Aristotle and Kant to be a philosopher. Their ideas can be relevant to you in particular times, but only in how they inform your view of the world and therefore your actions.
The more abstract things get, the harder it is to actually act about it. And I find that pointless. Philosophy should always be grounded in the question of why? What impact does this have on how we live our lives? What other ways could we live?
Wisdom is not gained through consuming information or learning arguments. Wisdom is gained through experiencing the connections in the world. And connections are everywhere.
Some of the ideas we come across can have real value in our lives - in breaking free of the stories we tell about ourselves, in connecting and fostering empathy to others, in noticing patterns about reality.
Sometimes ideas are like plain rock, where gems lie embedded in their crust. We toss them away into the ocean of our unconscious because we don’t understand their value right now. But waves will erode them, and bits will fly off as the rocks crash into one another. And one day they will wash back onto the shore.
Ideas we’ve encountered in the past can surface in mysterious ways. In multiple instances of discussion, I would dismiss an idea I wasn’t quite ready to understand yet - like spirituality. But given time, it would surface and I would start to see its value.
When we sit in a room, exemplifying the Socratic spirit, we are not just questioning our own arguments to pan out some new knowledge about absolute truth. We are collecting multicolored crystals of different perspectives that we can sculpt into our own worldview. We are opening up to ignorance, to saying we don’t know. We are also opening to others, learning to be aware of what we think.
Opening up is unplugging our ears.
The secrets of the world will be revealed to those who listen.
Exactly! As I go into college next year I think I'll major in philosophy even though it doesn't directly apply to a specialized field, just because it's so pervasive. And hey, maybe I can double major - philosophy for wisdom and something else for application of the wisdom
This is exactly why I studied philosophy in college. It applies to everything, and now more than ever, we need wisdom, not just knowledge.