I’ve been watching a lot of philosophy videos on Khan Academy. I’ve dabbled in philosophy a lot over the years. Yet I’ve never actually sat and read many original philosophical works. When I have, I find myself lost. It seems like I can’t put myself into the right state of mind very often to understand the profound ideas that famous and not so famous philosophers alike discuss. Whenever I’ve heard philosophy discussed in a modern setting, it tends to go off in some wacky directions. Sadly, I’ve seen philosophy used to try and justify exactly why we accept certain things that are most certainly unprovable and even outright false as to be true. 

Well, the core of philosophy is to discover truth and to expand on how we understand truth. Isn’t that correct? In the past couple centuries, it seems that philosophy has become corrupted somehow. It’s more about ideologies and backing them up. Everyone’s concept of what makes an ideal society or an ideal human being is going to be different. Even if we agree on certain aspects, no matter how many, we are each individuals with different perspectives. These perspectives should be embraced in as much as what makes them different just as much as what makes them the same. 

Philosophy should always be a discussion about truth. How each of us understands truth can be wildly different from individual to individual. But what the essence of philosophy is should be a love of wisdom. This comes from the Greek origins of the word.  We should always be friends of wisdom. 

Ideologies should be thought experiments. There are pros and cons to every one. As long as we are openly discussing the ideas that they are based on so that they evolve, we’re ok.  Schools of thought are fine in their own right as long as they are not actively oppressing or injuring others. 

While there are certainly still many friends of wisdom, the heart of true philosophy no longer seems mainstream. People contort the words of past philosophers in order to bring justification to their own ideas. Rather than building on ideas, they try to base whatever whacky thing they want to make people believe on something that sounds credible. Why are we trying to force anyone to believe anything? 

We need to promote more open discussion of how we perceive reality. It’s very easy to do nowadays. But there is so much negative energy around the field of philosophy that I can tell. It seems you have to subscribe to a school of thought. And a lot of them have some serious flaws that I can tell. I need to get a better grasp on modern philosophy to see where things have gone wrong. 

My primary issue with the philosophy discussions I’ve witnessed in person is that it seems like a bunch of people sitting around pretending to be smart. There is nothing profound being discussed. How do you even know if something is profound? Is it something that makes people go ah? No, that’s just interesting. Something truly profound will make some people hate you. They are concepts that leave you on the borderline between genius and madness.

I believe there are plenty of profound ideas out there being squelched or silenced by the ignorant actions of internet trolls and lesser demons. Why is it that fear and judgment have become the default setting for so many folks when it comes to things outside of their own life experiences? Why are we no longer taught to be still friends of wisdom? Have we chosen to be philosophically diminished by choice? Or are we kept back from enlightenment by forces we simply don’t recognize are keeping us dumb? Do we just have too many distractions, or have we been trained to be mesmerized by distractions? 

I’m heading into dangerous territory but it shouldn’t be. We should all be talking about these things. Not just rehashing the past and pretending we’re too dumb to build on it.