8 Lessons Learned From 15 Philosophy Books (IM 978)

We all have a choice to live two lives: One is the life of the Reason and other the life of Faith, according to Soren Kierkegaard. Philosophies has always been the way of living whether we acknowledge it or not. Every human being before being a “Human” comes up with the struggle of embracing the philosophies. In some cases, an individual chooses his/her own philosophy or the way to live a life and in most cases, somebody else does the job. (Society in most cases.)

I have been intrigued by how philosophy has shaped the world from ancient world to Early Modern to Late Modern and then to Contemporary. I think it is the only way that truly defines the meaning of human existence. If you aspire to unlock these meanings, I encourage to grab some philosophical books and give it a try. I assure you will be a different person.

Here are some of the philosophical lessons I learned from reading the philosophies. I can't of course include all the lessons here as it would be a big book. But I will try my best to include the most important ones.

1. An unexamined life is not worth living

Socrates, one of the wisest men of ancient world, in one of his dialogues said, “An examined life is not worth living.” He can’t be truer. Self-analysis is the basic of understanding ourselves and the meaning of our existence. It is the way to become wise. Wisdom, according to him comes by constantly interrogating our actions and most deeply held beliefs.

Questioning every action and held beliefs is a way to achieve wisdom and human freedom and there is no substitute to that.

2. Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward

This is also the main reason I have been reading the ancient philosophies and histories. We, no matter how wise we are, don’t understand things at proper time; we can only understand things in hindsight. We often tell if only I knew then what I knew now to many things that’s happening now. The things that are happening now has some meaning (or it might not) and we only understand it later sometime in the future. The truth is we can only comprehend what’s going on only after we have done it , and we have done a retrospect about it. I think that’s what Hegel meant when he said, “The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.”

3. There is no such thing as happiness, but only pain and boredom

This might sound misleading, and you might say if there is no happiness, what do we pursue to? I had a same feeling when I read and came to know about the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, who is considered as the messenger of Misery and a Nihilistic person. According to him what we generally consider as happiness is actually and essentially only ever negative and absolutely never positive. He says, “Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.” What he meant by this is that when we are bored, we do things to find purpose or meanings, but we never attain it. But if we attain it fortunately, we crave for more which leads to pain. We keep hanging around between pain and boredom. To him, pain and boredom are the two enemies of human happiness.

4. Boredom is root of all evil

We all have heard that money is the root of all evils. But according to Soren Kierkegaard, it’s the boredom. In his masterpiece “Either/Or”, on “Either” side, he says life is one distraction after another and the real misery or the real evil of these men is boredom. We all are the result of boredom. Human beings are born because of boredom. And this results to distractions and being a inauthentic and a hollow life. It’s like living a life as T.S. Elliot said in his poem “Burnt Norton.” He said something like this: “… We are distracted from distraction by distraction.” And this is the life of an inauthentic man.

5. Life is full of voids and nothingness

The ideology of nothingness goes to one of the most famous philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that there is no objective order or structure in world except for what we give it. Those who are familiar with Nihilism will obviously understand what it means to be living in the world of nothingness. A true nihilist is the one who belief that nothing in the world has real existence and life has no meaning. Nietzsche once said, “Every belief, every considering something-true is necessarily false because there is simply no true world.”

The goal of Nihilism is not to develop a pessimism or cynicism but to be aware and not fall in the false hope. The notion that the world is without meaning or purpose (Existential Nihilism) enables us to live life in our own terms not ruled by any religions or faith.

6. Remember that you are going to die

The word “memento mori” has been with us for more than 2000 years which means to remind yourself that you will die. All most all the philosophies talk about the death. Stoicism specifically is a huge admirer of this action. Marcus Aurelius once said, “Soon you will have forgotten all things and soon all things will have forgotten you.” What he meant was soon we will forget all the things happening to us because we will be dead and soon all those people who have done good or bad to us will also die and they will forget us. So, what is the point of being sad, or mean to the people?

The image of human condition is that we all are faced with an immediate death or postponed death. Marcus said, “Death smiles at us all, but all a man can do is smile back.” “Think of yourself as dead” He said, “You have lived your life. Now take what is left and live it properly.” Before going to bed, always remind yourself that today was your last day to live. You might not wake up alive tomorrow. And if you did then consider that as a bonus life. Everything onwards will change and you will live the life of courage, wisdom, justice, and temperance.

7. Ask yourself “Who you truly are?”

I bet we all define ourselves by our passion, our experience, our devotions, our visions and our goals. But is that a “true you”? When you pull away all the new flavors, all the new tastes, all the new experiences, all the places you might go to, all the things you might do and achieve. When you take away all these diversions and distractions, what are you? What are you up to? Are you happy? If you are, why don’t you just stay in a room. And you are not, why do you deceive yourself by constantly giving new flavors and tastes and experiences. One of the great minds of 17^th century, Blaise Pascal, in his book, Pensées wrote you go after all these new flavors and new tastes and experiences because your life is full of nothing, and you do your best not to let yourself know that.  He added, “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it.”

20th Century German Philosopher, Martin Heidegger in his book "Being and Time" argues that "Being" is not the being we know about. To him, we all are lying to ourselves. We delude ourselves. we get used to with the little things that really don't matter to us and ignore our true existence. We are thrown to the world and we are not of our own making (Facticity). We appropriate to the world to our own purpose which he called Existentiality. We fall in the trap of living the inauthentic life of "They". (society and other people in most cases) which he called Fallenness.

8. “Wu wei” – Actionless action

It is the Chinese philosophy which means non-action. I came up with this from the book “Tao Te Ching” written by Laozi. This is a book I have read many times and find new meaning in my every read. This idea of doing nothing might sound something like an intellectual terrorism but it’s not. When you stop and introspect about all the things happening in your life the idea of non-action makes a lot of sense. Basically, it means doing nothing and going with the flow. Laozi once said, “When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.” And it’s powerful.

Don’t get me wrong here. It does not mean acting nothing, but it means "effortless action” or “actionless action”.

These are some of the lessons I learned from the philosophical books. Yes, you are true you can’t just stand with one philosophy. Philosophy is like a move in a chess game. There is no single best philosophy to adore just like there is no single best move in chess. You use a philosophy based on the move of next person and the situation of the game. But remind yourself the words of Alexander Hamilton, “If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything.” And incase you don't understand the philosophy you should let it stay as it is and keep quite, just like Ludwig Wittgenstein as he said in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."