Do you use the ideas of philosophy to understand your life or to add color and depth to your experiences? I'd love to hear stories of how traditional philosophical ideas have spilled out in the realm of personal experience.
Do you use the ideas of philosophy to understand your life or to add color and depth to your experiences? I'd love to hear stories of how traditional philosophical ideas have spilled out in the realm of personal experience.
“Oh crap”
-- Hellboy
As I see it, philosophy has always tried to use me and to an extent it did when I was very young. As I matured I became religious to enhance my personal experience. Now I am also interested in listening to the spill and the circular reasoning of the philosophical, but it no longer concerns me.
I'm still attracted to existantialism, which also might effect my way of living a bit.
But apart from this no conrete philosophical theory has a real influence on my life, I guess.
Much more my study in philosophy provided me in general with the possibility to consider more perspectives of a situation, made my thinking more flexible and so on.
In my opinion philosophy is an excellent and reasonable medium against narrow-mindedness.
philosophy tries hard to magnify simplicity into verbosity. it is a kick one gets out of wondering about what it could be could have and not into thinking how I could would make it be. Philosophy gets into trials of working out the ifs and buts and forgets about whys and hows. I may ask myself what is the meaning of life but then if forget to ask me what life means to me and so it is erosive and gets intrusive to the point of missing the point. It is not clear what the purpose of philosophy is in terms of practicality. It has many doubts and hardly any positives. Its performance lingers and so never establishes.
but and there is a small but if I may have a philosophy then I would say simple does it.
I consider philosophy as going around in circles and instead of up and down in a steady momentum that leads not somewhere but adjourns something and establishes another it goes about aspects of reality that have no bearing on everyday life.
Last edited by cacian; 03-19-2013 at 09:46 AM.
it may never try
but when it does it sigh
it is just that
good
it fly
I've looked at Plato's Phaedo and Republic when trying to understanding near and shared death experiences.
In looking at free will, consciousness, quantum mechanics or the big bang, one is usually asking philosophical questions about evidence and causality especially to protect oneself against pseudo-scientific authoritarianism. The problem is to avoid jumping to a metaphysical or religious conclusion that the evidence does not justify. So one reads philosophy because people have been thinking about such topics for a long time and there is no point in reinventing the wheel.
My blog: https://frankhubeny.blog/
I was just talking to a friend about this the other day. This friend is deeply enthralled with Spinoza, and uses his works as guides to cope with and understand life every day. But as we talked and I thought about my own experiences with philosophy, I realized something: I have always approached philosophical texts as I've approached the study of history: I read them to understand how we go to where we are now.
Last year was my biggest "philosophy reading" year, as I re-read many of the major western works (Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, et al.), but I honestly can't say that I take anything from these work and apply it to my life.
Perhaps the reason is because I first read and experienced Hawking's work and offerings such as philosophy is dead, and now science reigns.
I really wish I could have these deeper experiences with philosophy, but I just don't. No matter how open I am, I just view it all as building blocks of history.
:-(
On the other hand, I recently read the Bhagavad Gita and was completely moved. I walked away feeling completely enlightened and as if looking at the world through new eyes. So, perhaps this is the precursor of a new journey through the rich world of eastern philosophy.
"J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage."
- Rimbaud
"Il est l'heure de s'enivrer!
Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps,
enivrez-vous;
enivrez-vous sans cesse!
De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise."
- Baudelaire
Philosophy has only really taught me that we don't know very much about anything and of what we think we do know we can't be very certain.
I read philosophy in the spirit of Borges's metaphysicians of Tlon who "are not looking for truth or even an approximation to it: they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature."
I like that. I concur.Originally Posted by ladderandbucket
The way I see it is this : there's more truth and reality in a crow's beady eye than there is in any philosophical work. Stick with the real I say. Let's just look and listen. Look and listen.
But philosophy is very real. Real BS, but real. Yes, let's look and listen.
Yeah, real, no realer than anything else. I've read my fair share of philosophy, all told none of it added much to my life, to my mind, not really, at least I don't think so - (maybe I'm underestimating it??) - As you say, "Real BS, but real". Science is killing it isn't it? No more mind**** just the pursuit of facts. That's where it's at. I can't see how there can ever be another *great* philosopher....
I think I remember Hawking (and Leonard Mlodinov) saying something negative about philosophy in The Grand Design. The book disappointed me, but it convinced me that we need philosophy more than ever today to separate pseudo-scientific speculation from real science.
I agree with you about the Bhagavad Gita. I suppose that could be considered philosophy although I usually lump it with religion.
My blog: https://frankhubeny.blog/
To me, philosophy is not a gross exercise of circular logic or understanding. Perhaps it is more like a maze. You change directions more than a few times, sometimes you face the way you are going, and sometimes you see options that are dead ends and you venture onwards, not knowing whether to go one direction or another. It's definitely not a hierarchical model like Erickson's stages of development that are crisp, clear, and linear. I would include religion in the tent of philosophy, in so far as it is an attempt to explain the meaning of life and how and why we have the present reality that we do. For man people, that orientation is religious in scope. I can understand the appeal of the Bhagavad Gita and its emphasis on consciousness. A Hare Krishna handed me a copy of the book in the old Denver International Airport in the early '90s and I remember reading it on the plane to this very day. A rich read, but nothing to trade in your present life for a sari. I still enjoy spiritual works and I have to say that Sufi poetry never gets old, ditto the integral psychology works of Ken Wilber.
Personally, I've been more influenced by the development psychologists of Piaget and Adler. I believe they are closer to the science of development and explaining how it occurs than anyone else. Jung was too far in the clouds for me, I try to read his works from time to time, but he is just on another plane entirely for me to take seriously. As for a philosophy to orient a person's life around, I would say that I'm more in conscious agreement with the tenets of pragmatism as espoused by John Dewey, William James, and Pierce. The humanist/existential line appealed to me in college and lead me to read and re-read the likes of Emmanuel Mounier and Karl Jaspers. The latter was a HUGE influence during those years. Yes, I've dabbled in zen and the like, but pragmatism holds out and continues to do so. Perhaps it's the western American-Anglo influence or something, I don't know. I still don't know it all, I jut try and learn each day and consider many view points. The only certainty is coffee.
Plato and Aristotles babbling: obsolete. Will Durant's way of life: obsolete. Anything goes: obsolete.
Of course there is historical value, but none other to get but insane con-fusion. It'll never come back as a fountain of knowledge other than historical BS magna.
This quote is appealing. You often come up with deep thought and I like the way you present things in a different and nontraditional way in defiance of the establishments the rest of us go about. Keep the spirit up cacain and of course we enjoy your experiment with truth along your different and bolder path.
Wow. Seems as if philosophy has succeeded in making many here angry: "BS", "verbose", "babble", "obsolete". Well, maybe this anger is coming from mostly one poster.
I think that my reading of philosophy has taught me a lot and it informs (either directly or indirectly) nearly any decision that I make -- and even more so with those decisions which require sustained reflection. From questions as mundane and personal as "should I tell my child that mom and dad are Santa?" to "how should I spend my money?". . . . . I guess some of the epistemological philosophy seems a bit dated insofar as it relates to science. But the lasting philosophy doesn't deal so much with facts; it deals with individual experience, ethics, and curiosity.
Maybe we have a more materialistic culture (not consumerism in this sense, but "materialistic" in the sense that we believe that matter is all there is) than those historical cultures had. I mean, sure, if bodies and atoms are all. . . . then morality, beauty, quality (so motorcycle-ish), and other hierarchies of being are either absurdly relative, fictions, or irrelevant. Under these conditions, then I can certainly see why there is so much issue with philosophy's application to individual experience.
Interesting.
“Oh crap”
-- Hellboy
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