The Philosophy behind Philosophy

All the questions that we pose as philosophers are questions without definite answers. These questions range from the purpose of our existence to the manifestation of God. But if finding the answers to such questions is an incessant process then why bother anyway, right? What people fail to understand is that these questions need to be asked, not for the sake of finding the answers or satisfying human inquisitiveness; to ask these questions is an attempt to acknowledge our rational faculty. 

The fact that we are even able to ask these questions necessitates the urge to ask them. It is for each one of us to discern what makes the most sense to us as individuals, what kind of knowledge to us is worth gaining, what stances are worth holding, what kind of ethics resonate with our views of morality, and so forth. 

To be a philosopher is to be a subject and an object simultaneously, it is to be the knower and the known, the doer and the receiver. To constantly be acquainted with who you are: the mosaic of all the small revelations you’ve made in your life, yet being altered ever so slightly every day. To be alive is to be embraced by change, it is to be exposed to novelty and have scruples about your concrete beliefs. After all, the ambiguity of things keeps us going, it is the not knowing that moves us.

Natural distortion is what excites our species, and distortion is the one true nemesis of Philosophy. To find the answers to all these big questions would be the attainment of perfection, it would be the overcoming of the flaws of humanity, but who said we were meant to be flawless? So much is done out of fear, much out of ambition and so much more out of the love of wisdom. 

We are born thinkers, it’s our nature to question and reflect on the proceedings of the world. All our attempts to understand the nature of reality and beyond are mere ripples in the ocean of time. We don’t ask these questions in vain, for they are being answered everywhere, in little chunks; in art, science, cinema, books, in everything we do, we do Philosophy unknowingly. We seek the truth despite ourselves.

We are hungry for a reason, to such an extent that we are ready to devote our lives to it. Maybe it is the sheer vastness of the universe that overwhelms us, or maybe it is the universe that we carry inside ourselves, that leaves us perturbed and in want of answers. Nevertheless, we have been wandering these paths for a long time, I don’t think we’ll ever stop, not until we are deemed as humanity. 

I believe the best possible way to study philosophy is to let it absorb you, let it play havoc with your brain, and make you lose your train of thought. Allow it to woo you with the knowledge you weren’t seeking initially but went in a trance during the pursuit of. There are claims made about the abstract nature of Philosophy, how it fails to be pragmatic and is dissociated with real-life scenarios, but a student of philosophy, any student of philosophy, would reckon that to be wrong. 

The deeper we go in the study of this field, the more we are charged with the urge to look for answers everywhere, we view the world a little through the senses and a lot more through the filter of the mind. We become the best pragmatists because we don’t take anything for granted. Children are the best philosophers, for they ask questions recklessly, regardless of the certainty of their answers, they annoy you so much with their little questions that you start making up answers just to shush them, if that isn’t Philosophy, I don’t know what is.

Author's note: Gosh, typing this feels so professional but not unfamiliar somehow. Happy World Philosophy Day to all! (It's on the 18th of November but I am an impatient person). Hope you allow your curiosity to get the better of you and probe into the nature of reality, reason, and just existence in general. It's been high time for us to stop associating our intellect with our ego, and think of not knowing something as being a blemish on our personality. Only when we embrace our ignorance can we overcome it. Thank you for reading!