Philosophy had always fascinated me, but after years of wrestling with questions about the purpose of education and philosophy, I still don’t have a perfect understanding of the picture, but I’d like to present a few sketches of some of my thoughts on this topic.

A Pleasant Suprise

I remembered having a conversation with a student in my philosophy class, which clarified my thoughts on this topic. Studying philosophy this semester came to me as a pure surprise. I enrolled in a class called: The Philosophy of Language at the last minute because I couldn’t get into any other courses due to an enrolment error. At first, I was a touch bit skeptical, because I wasn’t particularly fond of the tedium of the subject. But after the first seminar, I found myself magnetically drawn to the discussion of the class. This is where I found myself sitting next to the person who supplied the insight for this essay.

Correcting My Prejudices

After class one day, we went to a café and started discussing the works of Hegel and how tedious it was to read him. She said that in her other philosophy class that dealt with phenomenology, the professor had vehemently denounced Hegel and Heidegger as “terrible writers.” When I asked her what she thought was the point of philosophy, she responded by pointing out that we were having a philosophical discussion, and that in its essence, however pedestrian and commonplace, is the act of doing philosophy.

I looked around the café and it all became clear to me why I was so drawn to the discussions in class. When I first started reading philosophy, I had the erroneous idea that I needed to treat the ideas presented by those thinkers I’ve admired as gospel. And the process of studying their books must be conducted in isolation, like a medieval scholar, scrupulously laboring through ancient passages with great precision and rigor. This is why I left philosophy for a few years to pursue literature because to me at the time, storytelling and poetry seemed to have advanced beyond excessive intellectual showmanship, where their principal concern is to communicate human experiences in the most honest way possible. I held my prejudices for a few long years, and whenever someone gets overly philosophical during a discussion, my brain would turn off and refuse to engage in the conversation.

But I recently realized that it wasn’t the flaw of philosophy that had repulsed me from reading dense and heavy books, but my prejudiced attitude and conception of philosophy. What I realized after engaging in those seminars was that in the process of articulating insights verbally in a group of similar-minded students, my ideas were refined, and my prejudices were counter-acted by disagreements. It reached a point where I could no longer hold any of my ideas sacred; something that’s extremely difficult to do when we conduct philosophy in isolation. Rather, I opened myself up to alternative views and paradigms that were quite different from mine.

Philosophy as An Exchange

The conclusion I’ve reached here is that philosophy is essentially useless without an open dialogue and that the form itself is an exchange, and it’s not an isolated, scientific pursuit. This is the reason why most if not all philosophical treatises are either responses or criticisms of theories that had come before them. If one wishes to devise a universal principle for the human condition, it helps to test his ideas against the real world, and this act of testing is the act of discussion. This is why Kant had entrusted his early chapters of Critique of Pure Reason to his best friend Joseph Green, and why Sartre had also found great value when he shared his works in progress with Simone De Beauvoir.

A philosopher must not play the role of God and impose his theories and concepts upon the real world, and the act of attempting to do so will give rise to bad theories ridden with ideologies and blind spots. And even more importantly, a student of philosophy should not treat philosophical texts as a replacement for sacred texts studied in isolation. They must dip in and out of the two realms of reading and exchange to make sure their understanding is not subjected to biases. This, in summary, is my view of philosophy so far, and this view allowed me to re-engage with the world of ideas with measured humility.