Essence of Philosophy

Why do philosophy?

For truth? For knowledge? For certainty?

To ensure that everything we know, we can know for certain, and anything we don't know, we shall endaveour to discover.

That was the reason I always gave myself. Legitimate? Probably. I mean we all go on through life and we all die one day. I would at least like to know that what I believed in was true. That in my transient life I can somehow hold on, or at least touch something that lasts for eternity. To me that was truth.

Some do philosophy because it makes them think, it moves the mind and challenges it to break barriers and extend the frontiers of their minds. Some relish this intellectual challenge. Some are artists, they enjoy sitting back and observing the situation as other people live out their lives in front of them, and then reflecting on their own lives. I can say with no doubt in my mind, that they are all legitimate reasons.

But I still often find myself wondering why I want to do philosophy. The practice of philosophy and the study of philosophy are two entirely different things. I may be in love with the practice of philosophy, the expanding of my mind, the many windows of learning, the whole obession with rigor and what I love the most is the confidence that my beliefs are as clear and as true as I think they are. I love all these things and they motivate me to find out more, to clarify more, to know more and ultimately to think more. But, they only explain why I like the critical thinking and the pitting of minds against one another. Why do I want to study Nietzsche, Wittgenstien, Kierkegaard, Bertrand Russell, so on and so forth? Why do I want to write essays about them and be graded according to how much I know of them and what I think of their ideas?

It is one thing to do something and another thing to study it.

One can be philosophical, and do Business. One can have all the right frames of mind, the principle of charity, the logical consistency and accuracy, and an open-mind. He is a great philosopher, but he need not study Philosophy. So I thought about it long and hard. (For over a year. Some of you would know I struggled deciding if I should do Philosophy or Business.) Because if I had done business, I would not need to worry about supporting myself in the future.

Why do I choose to do Philosophy, and indeed why would anyone in their right mind even want to MAJOR in Philosophy? Everyone is curious, and for these 2 years I have failed to give them any substantial answer. For 2 years I have struggled with this very issue, what to do and what direction my future should take. I always answered, because I like it, or because I want to find out the truth. But I can no longer say that with the confidence in the past. Two years ago, that was sufficient, because I was young, and the young need heed no pragmatism. We can dream, and we can build our castles in the air, because that is where they belong, but after that we must always begin to put the foundations under them. If these foundations cannot be built, the castle will fall.

Going through the motions and doing stuff just because it is neccessary of me to do so has never been my strong suit. It is my greatest flaw. So saying that I want to study philosophy because I like it and want to find out the truth when I myself know that it is inadequate, will serve as no motivation for me in the future. Simply because I can study a myriad of things while still upholding the values and principles of philosophical thought. If I cannot believe in my own reasoning, how can I expect others to believe me.

I will admit that at many many many points in time, I regretted not thinking about this when I chose to enter FASS. I am sure every single one of you have thought that the reason I was doing philosophy was because of blind love for a subject. And to be honest it was. And like I have said before, it is a valid reason to do philosophy, but it is not an airtight one. Under close scrutiny it falls apart. If I can't even believe in myself, if I doubt myself, then I have no right to doubt the thoughts and opinions of others, and that is fundamental to the study of philosophy. I lingered on and off on the issue for 2 whole years of my NSF life and before I knew it I lost my chance at changing courses and I was going to do philosophy simply because there was no other choice. It was probably going to be the subject I can get the best grades in compared to other subjects. For 5 months after I ORDed I did nothing, not being able to find any inspiration to the direction my life was going. Just treating it as the consequence of a mistake, and just hoping for the best. I was dead.

I lamented the fact that I had not considered all these. I remembered that I had abandoned all my studies in secondary school and JC solely so I could do something I love. I thought that if I had known I was going to slog through life without doing what I really wanted I might as well have taken the sciences, at least it's a more profitable slog. I asked some of my friends if I should take business or philosophy, hoping that their answers would provide some comfort. I asked knowing that they would definitely ask me to do philosophy, if I were in their shoes I'd do the same. As a friend we should always support each other's dreams. It was like a drug, at that point in time you feel assured that you didn't make a mistake, but after some time you know it was an illusion. After all, I asked it knowing their answer. Sometimes it didn't work, sometimes they tell you to consider political science or yes indeed, business. And that's when reality hits you like a train. I didn't even dare to touch a philosophy book or any kind of idea during that period. There was simply no motivation. I was dead.

But to find a reason to do something is no easy task. It must be an airtight reason, that way it can sustain your motivation for years to come. To find motivation to study a subject I started to seriously ponder on the essence of philosophy. A subject with 2479 years of history, from the time of Socrates, to our present day Dawkins. I am no expert on philosophy, and that is why I was confused. Logic, accuracy, truth and all these things are so important in philosophy that over time I came to associate them together. That logic is philosophy, that philosophy is truth and so on and so forth (you catch my drift). But they are not. Logic may be paramount in ensuring accuracy and truth, but none of them are the essence of philosophy. I am not sure if any of you have, like me, come to equate the search for truth as philosophy. After seriously thinking about it over and over and over again, something felt empty, as if I wasn't doing a good job of summarizing philosophy. I tried over and over again to define philosophy, to capture the essence of it. Without knowing it's essence it is impossible to want to study it. But tonight, it hit me all of a sudden.

The essence of philosophy is not about being right or accurate about something, it is not about knowing something substantial and it is not about prescribing a certain way for others to live. It is not about finding the Golden Rule, the Theory of Everything or the one simple truth that holds everything together and gives our life meaning. That is not the essence of philosophy, it is what philosophers do, it is the result of the hard work of philosopher upon philosopher, but it is merely the result of philosophy, it's the goal we seek to achieve but not our motivation.

The essence of philosophy is merely the story of each and every philosopher trying to solve the conflicts and contradictions in their own lives. From Plato, to Descartes, to Hume, to Kierkegaard, to Nietzsche and so on and so forth.

They write treatises, they write discourses and they write essays. We think about what they write, we evaluate and we try to see if they were right. Often this desire for truth often gets mixed up in the whole purpose of philosophy. Yes, we are philosophers, we have to be logical and we have to make sense, we have to be precise and accurate in our expressions and our thoughts, we have to be objective and unbiased when it comes to things we believe in. But we are also human. We have problems in our lives and we can choose to confront them. For Nietzsche it was Nihilism. For Wittgenstein, Language. For Locke, Understanding what it means to be human. What I think is the essence of philosophy is the simple desire to confront our problems and our conflicts in life.

To do that we must know things, to do that we must be sure of what we know, to do that we must be sure it is true. And now the obession with truth becomes clear. Truth is not the be all and end all. the obession with truth comes from the fact that if we solve our problems without truth, then it is only self-deception. We fail in our purpose to confront them.

Philosophers write to spread knowledge, and to ensure that their solutions are true by verification with outside sources. I may be speaking out of turn here, but I daresay that at least a few of them hope that through whatever they are writing, be they true or false, through the solutions that they have thought about, someone elsewhere with the same problem can come to solve his as well. And that is what philosophy is. Not about truth. It's about life. Always has been, and probably always will be. I guess somewhere along the way I have lost sight of something that simple.

Philosophy's goal is to resolve every conflict in the world so that everything makes sense and is in order. That is the goal of all sentient life isn't it? Happiness and bliss? It works towards that goal, but that is not why we do philosophy, that is why we live.

Why do philosophy?

To solve my own problems. That is why. To study how others solved theirs, so that I can solve mine. So that I can be happy.