Philosophy: A Way to Examine One’s Life

Religion never appealed to me. Following the crowd neither. Going with whatever I felt like also didn’t work for me. I needed to know what I believed, and why I believed. I needed to know what I was doing. I wanted full logical justification for being who I was.

After coming across philosophy as an area of knowledge, I realized that philosophical questions had mattered deeply to me from a very early age, even though I had never studied philosophy. I was deeply confused, but I noticed I simply needed sound philosophical principles to justify what I wanted. I needed to justify those principles by reference to the facts of reality. But I did not know how to do this. So I was a confused quiet boy, trying to figure things out.

I spent considerable amount of time trying to justify what I believed. I believed it was good to be honest even if I could get away with lies, but I did not know exactly why. I believed that it was good for humans to live free, but I did not know why. I did not even know how to put in words what freedom really was. I wanted justice, but I did not know what was justice and why I needed it. I wanted love, but I was clueless about what it was.

So I went trying to understand all of that with help of thinkers I trusted. These thinkers were selected because I could see that they cared about facts and logic. I knew that once I formed my beliefs with usage of facts and logic, I could genuinely believe in the principles I held, and finally know what I was doing here.

What happened years later was quite fascinating. I started to value more what was truly good for me; what I felt was increasingly aligned with what was appropriate for my life, and what was really going on. My emotional and physical well-being improved. I was feeling better and doing more the right things for my life because I started feeling like doing more of them.

Not many people are willing to examine and justify their philosophical principles using facts and logic. Many do not even know how to differentiate a fact from an opinion, nor know what logic really is. They hold philosophical beliefs without even realizing that they do. As a result, they end up believing in anything that they feel like believing, and valuing whatever they happen to feel like valuing, while leaving very little room for questioning. They may value things that are bad for them and not even care. They may even love people who do harm to them.

I think they are losing a lot. I agree with Socrates here: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”. Also, I agree with the phrase “Know Thyself” on Temple of Apollo in Greece. I might finally grasped what these quotes truly mean, and I am truly happy about that.

I never understood people who were oblivious to these advices, but one of the things philosophy helped me was to start to not really care about that. I have my friends, and my own company for my investigations. These are enough. Rest I can simply trade other things of value for me, while leaving their lack of investigation aside. Let them live their lives the way they want, while I live mine the way I want. I am glad I still live in a political system that protects my right to be who I am and really want to become.