HOW TO GET "PHILOSOPHICALLY FIT"
Article by LiveReal Agents Grace, Mary, Blake, and Thomas
Getting philosophically fit can be an intimidating challenge.
For many, philosophy is a miserable experience.
The typical process goes something like this:
1) You ask one of life’s Big Questions or find yourself being ambushed by an existential riddle.
2) You try to answer or solve it.
3) You realize that answer doesn’t really make sense, doesn’t “work,” or feels unsatisfying.
4) You decide to consult “experts” on the topic, or super-smart folks who have been working on these problems for a long time.
5) You realize that these “experts” often seem unable to communicate with normal people, disagree or contradict one another, seem to lack common sense, offer abstract solutions to concrete problems, write lengthy books making points that could have been summarized in a few well-written paragraphs, have reached conclusions that are self-evidently absurd, seem consumed with untangling the threads of wild speculations, are thoroughly occupied with nonsensical, imaginary, or irrelevant problems, etc.
6) You repeat Steps 4 and 5 several times.
7) You give up. You decide that answers to certain questions probably don’t exist. (Or, if they do exist, the human mind can’t comprehend them. Or, if certain humans have found answers and comprehended them, those humans seem unable to communicate those answers to anyone else in any coherent way. Or, if some people have found, comprehended, and successfully communicated answers, those people (and their answers) are like tiny needles hidden in countless fields of Godzilla-sized haystacks that stretch to the horizon, and are largely unknown, ignored, invisible, and buried beneath hordes of others who are much noisier.)
This, unfortunately, is a very common experience in philosophy.
There is a better way.
When it comes to answering the biggest questions of life, the process really should be a bit smoother.
After all, the stakes are high.
Having decent answers to the Big Questions of life is pretty important, to put it mildly.
Trying to move through life while being philosophically illiterate can be crippling. It confines people to operating on shallow, surface-level appearances only, which is a great distance from what’s really going on in the depths. A blindness to this side of things can disadvantage people even in relatively mundane games of life.
Yet it’s also understandable.
Examining the foundations for everything we think, feel, and do is not exactly a casual morning stroll to feed pigeons.
In worst-case scenarios, operating at these levels can sometimes feel more like a subjective, private, inner megathrust earthquake – something many describe as an “existential crisis.”
Being philosophically fit can prevent the unpleasant experience of worst-case scenarios, similar to how being physically fit can prevent diseases. Philosophical fitness can prevent existential crises. In other words, philosophy is supposed to help.
And yet, as it’s often presented, it makes things worse.
The hazardous journey described above isn’t our fault.
The way philosophical thinking is often presented – in the rare times when it is – is often in the most abstract, irrelevant, seemingly pointless manner possible.
The general environment of mainstream philosophy, theology, and psychology can sometimes resemble a house of cards that just happened to survive a train wreck.
If there’s blame to be passed around, it should probably go to that overall situation – that is, the Philosophy-Industrial Complex.
There’s likely no single mustache-twirling villain behind it all.
It’s more like a huge, complex system that just barrels on like a Category 5 hurricane-slash-megatsunami, despite the heroic efforts of some individuals.
Once they understand the overall situation, many folks eventually decide to just eject, avoid the entire situation as much as possible, and just swim in the shallows, avoiding Big Questions and existential riddles whenever possible.
And for good reason.
Hardly any of us have ever been taught how to do this properly.
We’ve often been taught to dissect frogs, diagram sentences, and label the parts of cells, but we’ve rarely been taught how to systematically test and examine the core ideas we base our lives on.
That said, philosophy – like physical health – also isn’t something we can really avoid.
It’s like diet, or physical health.
We might be very physically healthy, or very unhealthy, or somewhere in between. But we exist somewhere on that spectrum. We have to eat something, assuming we want to survive. We have no choice but to deal with the topic, one way or another, even if it's only by trying to avoid dealing with it.
Ultimately, on some level, everyone is a philosopher, theologian, and mystic. There’s no getting around it.
We can’t avoid philosophy.
We have no choice but to come up with Big Answers to the Big Questions, or trial solutions to the existential riddles we face. These Answers might be conscious or unconscious, deliberate or accidental, carefully designed or haphazard, articulated verbally or expressed solely through our actions.
But answers are there, in one form or another.
Even someone determined to avoid philosophy is acting on a philosophical idea (that "avoiding philosophy is a good thing").
And when normal individuals experience the Seven Steps above and (again, for very good reasons) give up on thinking deeply about things, certain predictable results often follow.
There’s a common effect of this.
It leads to people being “out of shape,” philosophically speaking.
It can lead to individuals being informed more by celebrities, musicians, and corporate marketing departments than any genuine, time-tested spiritual or philosophical framework that’s oriented around truth, reality, and sanity. We risk becoming subject to whatever will capture attention spans, sell ads, win votes, make money, attain compliance, or drive sales.
We can become philosophically unfit.
Instead of enjoying the vast benefits of existential fitness, we risk having to suffer through the painful (and unnecessary) consequences of being a cosmic couch potato and logical lightweight.
Being philosophically unfit leads to soft nihilism.
Soft nihilism is what happens when we lack good Big Answers to the Big Questions.
It leaves us trying to navigate through our experience of life without a good map.
Life becomes an unanchored, drifting, confusing day-to-day experience. It can start feeling aimless and pointless, like being a character in a story that’s going nowhere, and where the only things that seem to make it bearable are distractions.
Part of this is due to the demolition derby of ideas that we live in today.
We often live immersed in a media landscape consisting of armies of contradictory worldviews colliding every few minutes.
It’s not uncommon for individuals today to have a thousand incompatible ideas floating around in their heads (as Lewis once noted). For many of us, living in this environment can feel like bouncing around in an intellectual bumper car, crashing into one thing after another, but often lacking any solid ground to drive on. It can sometimes feel like trying to stay afloat by running on quicksand. We manage to stay above ground only as long as we’re constantly moving at full sprint.
We sense that if we ever stop, we’ll sink.
A general sentiment can be something like this: “I don’t like to think about things, because when I do that, I get depressed.” The response, then, is often to avoid thinking about things. That results in a more limited view of things, which often makes things worse.
There is a better solution to this.
The situation described above is like a kind of battleground or war zone that we all pass through, sometimes without realizing it.
It’s a “battleground” of ideas, often in the form of mostly invisible, mostly unexamined assumptions we half-consider or mostly-unconscious energies we half-feel. These ideas are real forces we must either avoid, confront, surrender to, or overcome.
There are many “casualties” on these battlegrounds. The toll, however, isn’t taken on physical bodies, but on minds, hearts, and souls.
What’s the way out of this predicament?
Like the seemingly endless possibilities in the film Backrooms, there seem to be plenty of options that lead nowhere (or nowhere good, at least).
That is to say, there are plenty of false solutions.
For example, some might join a cult.
(Of course, nobody plans to join a “cult.” They only realize it’s a cult once they’ve already gotten involved. They often simply run across some person or group who seems to know the score (has Answers to the Big Questions), offers an attractive authority figure (a guru, charismatic salesperson, cult leader, etc.), and offers “solutions” to problems that arise due to being philosophically out of shape.
And there are plenty of other false solutions.
Others might decide to immerse themselves in daily chores and the details of everyday life – avoiding Big Questions – and wind up “tranquilized by the trivial” (Kierkegaard).
Others might choose blind faith – a leap into a set of seemingly unbelievable ideas – and then work hard to try to believe in them.
Others doggedly persist in searching for answers through the chaos-ridden landscape of “great thinkers,” with varying results.
Still others simply adopt a catchy platitude or two, decree some clever bumper-sticker phrase as gospel, mix it with a few song lyrics, stir, and then anoint themselves as mystics who are surfing some invisible wave of off-the-shelf insight.)
Some efforts work better than others.
Some individuals get lucky.
For some, a great teacher, relative, or friend helps them navigate through the minefield so well that they often have no idea what hazards they bypassed.
Some are simply raised well. They trusted their parents, and those parents happened to be trustworthy, and that turns out to be a great combination.
A few simply might have been born with an innate confidence which – for better or worse – makes them temperamentally immune to angst or confusion.
But what about the rest of us?
Hardly any of us have been trained to do this. When it comes to confronting the most difficult questions in the universe, we’re often left to solve them completely on our own. We wind up facing existential monsters armed with a headful of jingles and a plastic spork. It’s no wonder there’s so much intellectual gridlock and swimming in the existential kiddie pool – all of which can seem fine to many, so long as it looks cool.
Is there a way to approach the Big Questions in ways that avoid the kind of raucous mayhem described above?
Are there real answers to the existential riddles we all face? Are there answers that don’t require blind faith, surrender to questionable authority figures, desperate efforts to avoid thinking altogether, or pseudo-mystical platitudes that offer pseudo-clarity?
That was the task facing a few daring, cuddly, overly caffeinated LiveReal Agents.
The following is a brief summary of the findings.
In a nutshell, it can boil down to three tools.
The first tool is the basic rule of thumb.
Don’t wrestle a bear one claw at a time.
To “not wrestle a bear one claw at a time” might seem like unnecessary advice. Yet, when it comes to grappling with the eight-foot growling grizzly of the Big Questions, a surprising number of experts encourage us to focus on one claw, then a different claw, and then another, while completely ignoring all the other claws, and the teeth.
A key move involves upgrading our strategy in order to wrestle the whole bear.
The others involve two keys.
These two keys can unlock the doors to the intellectual Backrooms-prison of the 7-Step cycle mentioned above.
Without these keys, functional answers to the Big Questions can be extremely difficult or even near-impossible to find. With them, we’re able to escape the ever-spinning philosophical hamster wheel.
Healthy answers in philosophy are often rare because of how we approach the problems.
The way we approach philosophical problems can guarantee failure.
In some cases, it’s like someone trying to brush their teeth with a lit blowtorch. We’re sometimes trying to solve problems in ways that make confusion (and a degree of peril) inevitable.
But armed with three tools in hand, we’re able to escape the Fields of Quicksand, Plains of Paralysis, and Whirlpools of Existential Vertigo, and find solid ground that allows us to breathe free air and to enjoy at least a few glimpses of clarity.
This can arm us with an accurate man that helps us move through life with confidence.
Before getting started, a few (possibly tedious) disclaimers seem necessary.
First, to belabor a cliché, the aim here isn’t to give you a fish, but to teach you how to fish.
The aim isn’t to simply hand someone a philosophical salmon, as if to say, “Here's The Answer to All Big Questions!” The idea isn’t for us to serve up a Big Answer on a sizzling platter with tartar sauce and expect everyone to simply adopt it (based on blind faith, or on our authority, etc.) from that point forward.
The idea is to do a brief huddle about rods and reels, bait and hooks, maps of fishing holes, etc., after which you emerge skilled, armed with tools, and capable of fishing for whatever type of catch you want.
To use another cliché, it isn’t about telling anyone what to think, but offering strategies on how to think.
Secondly, this isn’t for philosophy professors.
Professional philosophers often seem to love making things complicated and arguing with everyone about everything, endlessly.
They also feel compelled to discuss things in intricate detail, even when the situation calls for broad generalities. (Regular person: “Could you hand me that orange?” Professional philosopher: “You’re using the word “orange,” but are you asking for a Navel orange, a Valencia orange, a Mandarin, Clementine, Blood, Seville, Tangelo, Cara Cara…?” Regular person: “Could you just hand me that orange right there, please?”)
What follows isn’t at all intended for professional philosophers. It’s intended for normal people who are usually turned off by professional philosophers. It’s not intended to be an endless, never-ending bull-session. This exploration isn’t about the kind of abstract, academic, obscure, speculative, imaginary problems that professors often seem to occupy themselves with. It isn’t meant to perpetually explore increasingly hair-splitting distinctions in progressively infinite detail.
What follows is practical. It’s geared toward establishing a study foundation for the core Big Questions and Big Answers we all base our lives on. It’s for sane individuals navigating everyday life in the real world, and who realize the need to bolster their understanding of the Big Questions to do so.
Third, the aim isn’t for total omniscience here.
The objective with this isn’t to reach the summit of all human knowledge with one internet article. The goal isn’t to summit an intellectual Everest.
It’s to establish a secure base camp.
This exploration doesn’t promise Total Spiritual Enlightenment. Instead, the aim is to help escape a slippery, vertigo-inducing fog of soft nihilism that’s becoming increasingly common today. It’s a basic system that can help life make more sense, and that might very well keep a nagging sense of angst, emptiness, and meaninglessness at bay. It won’t guarantee all solutions to all of life’s problems to the fiftieth decimal point or teleport us to destinations where there’s nothing left to ask and no further mystery in life. This particular part of the journey is also largely intellectual, so it won’t promise full-bodied emotional resolution to the most difficult experiences in life. The path ahead, by itself, doesn’t do that, and doesn’t try to.
What it does aim to provide is a set of tools (compass, canteen, pocketknife) and a road map to a sturdy intellectual base camp (which is often a welcome relief for anyone caught spinning their wheels in the seven-step cycle above). From that point, it becomes entirely possible to climb higher and closer to the summit. (But later.)
This process is roughly like working with a physical trainer.
No one can walk into a store and buy a ripped, muscular physique, and no one can just “purchase” a sturdy life philosophy from a philosophical fitness trainer.
Trainers and coaches aren't lifting the weights or doing the exercises. What they can provide is a set of tools, methods, strategies, game plans, (and possibly a bit of yelling “Dig deep! Feel the burn! Atta boy!”) and encouragement when needed. The real work is done by the person going through it, not the trainer or coach.
That said, this process is designed to yield real, practical fruit. It helps someone take the off-ramp from the cycle of soft nihilism and endless philosophical wheel-spinning. The fruit of this process is much greater clarity and confidence in Answers to the Big Questions. If all goes well, there’s an escape from a hamster wheel of confusion, and sturdy, solid ground that offers a foundation that helps us navigate life’s stormy seas.
To summarize: what follows will explain how, when grappling with philosophy, you can’t wrestle the bear one claw at a time. It also describes two keys without which a workable philosophy becomes nearly impossible. It then explores the five key elements of a life philosophy, a description of how and why those elements work, and a simplified process for arriving at a workable life philosophy. The end result is a sturdy foundation for Answers to the Big Questions of life, at which point you’re armed to go both higher and deeper.
Feel the burn!