One of the most profoundly simple and true aspects of philosophy that I’ve learned is that without putting it into practice, it’s worthless. It can even be harmful. Although it’s so simple, it’s also one of the most difficult components of philosophy. For me, at least.
I realize more every year how I’ve failed to put what I’ve learned and thought about into practice. It’s dangerously easy to sandbox your intellectual life within your brain, where your ability to reason and navigate your inner world seems deceptively good at times. And that’s an important skill too, of course. But humans are innately social creatures and these skills are next to useless if they don’t also work effectively and reliably around other people, where you don’t control the environment, you don’t control the topic or direction or tone or whatever it might be.
If that obsession with learning the next thing manifests as an ostensibly rich inner world, you will inevitably find yourself in the void generated by antisocial tendencies. Your ideas, skills, emotions, temper, courage, and all the rest won’t have been built upon, tested, broken down, rebuilt, and refined by other human beings. You can only really be a shell of what a human is meant to be. The ultimate test, I guess, is integrating your philosophy with the world. It’s a lot harder than doing it in your sandbox.
I think many of us fool ourselves into thinking we’re doing the work of practicing philosophy in isolation, but it’s actually a distraction from the much more difficult task of practicing it with other people. People who make us angry, sad, distracted, worse than we want to believe we are. Being alone to let yourself impulsively dig deeper and deeper into intellectual or philosophical pursuits can easily be a convenient distraction from the thing we claim to be doing all along.
There’s a sort of irony in the fear or worry that you’ll never learn enough, too. You’ll certainly never get there without deep, intimate, interconnected life with other people. I really believe it. And for a lot of us, that’s incredibly scary too. To let the fear of not knowing enough keep you from truly living is a hell of a thing.
I realize more every year how I’ve failed to put what I’ve learned and thought about into practice. It’s dangerously easy to sandbox your intellectual life within your brain, where your ability to reason and navigate your inner world seems deceptively good at times. And that’s an important skill too, of course. But humans are innately social creatures and these skills are next to useless if they don’t also work effectively and reliably around other people, where you don’t control the environment, you don’t control the topic or direction or tone or whatever it might be.
If that obsession with learning the next thing manifests as an ostensibly rich inner world, you will inevitably find yourself in the void generated by antisocial tendencies. Your ideas, skills, emotions, temper, courage, and all the rest won’t have been built upon, tested, broken down, rebuilt, and refined by other human beings. You can only really be a shell of what a human is meant to be. The ultimate test, I guess, is integrating your philosophy with the world. It’s a lot harder than doing it in your sandbox.
I think many of us fool ourselves into thinking we’re doing the work of practicing philosophy in isolation, but it’s actually a distraction from the much more difficult task of practicing it with other people. People who make us angry, sad, distracted, worse than we want to believe we are. Being alone to let yourself impulsively dig deeper and deeper into intellectual or philosophical pursuits can easily be a convenient distraction from the thing we claim to be doing all along.
There’s a sort of irony in the fear or worry that you’ll never learn enough, too. You’ll certainly never get there without deep, intimate, interconnected life with other people. I really believe it. And for a lot of us, that’s incredibly scary too. To let the fear of not knowing enough keep you from truly living is a hell of a thing.