It’s fun every couple years to look at the name of this place and how it has brought a certain type of global community together.
I think one late night I typed in I love philosophy, in the same way I’ve googled how I’m feeling, like googling “fuck everything”
or “i am so bored.” I don’t think I was expecting to find ilovephilosophy.com. But when i got here, I realized I was in the right place.
I had visited other philosophy forums, but this one managed to attract a certain type. We were all very different, but bound by something intangible.
So today I ask you to share why you love philosophy. Version 2015. (But first of course I want you to read why I do and tell me if you can identify at all.)
Humbly, here is where I am these days. I’ll try to be short and sweet. It’s interesting how my answer changes over the years.
WHY I LOVE PHILOSOPHY
I’m 44 years old. That’s a shitload of thinking when you are the fighting kind with a lightning mind.
My mind, like yours, and everyone’s, is exposed to more info than we can ever make full sense of, and to deal with this, we judge and simplify things into nice and neat chunks of ideas. We all do this.
The almost unavoidable byproduct of doing this, this act of condensing – the exhaust fumes, the byproduct, of this chemical separation from raw data into chunks of thought, is always going to be some measure of bias, prejudice, stereotyping, simplification. This process is condensed even further as we force our thoughts into words, yielding more byproducts. Sometimes the effect is huge and noticeable, and it makes for low hanging fruit to attack. Sometimes the effect is subtle. Sometimes we convince ourselves it’s not there at all. But it almost always is.
The curse of gifted intelligence, like most of us here, is this: sometimes the more you are able to consciously understand the world without having to process it into chunks, the more you can directly grasp a complex system of relations, the more other people’s little chunks seem disdainful, unnecessary, pixelated. The more these people seem to be stupid.
Keep in mind our view is always pixelated, too, the difference is in degree.
To the young intellect it becomes frustrating and lonely to be able to process complex systems without having to parse them into understandable chunks that yield byproducts of bias and fallacy. In order to feel less lonely, we might take to regularly arguing, debating, unpacking people’s judgements. Try to force feed them a point of view that encompasses a higher-res view of a complex system of relations. It gets tiring. You start to believe people are willfully being idiots. Let’s call it a level of judgmentalism. Not a binary “is or isn’t judgmental,” but rather a degree. We all fall somewhere on a graph, for any given subject, when it comes to a very human kind of judgement taking place.
If you are in the middle of the bell curve, primitive-level judgementalism won’t bother you as much. You may not agree with people, but your beef will be on WHAT people think and WHY, you won’t be burdened or irritated with the whole meta critique of HOW people think – which many of us recognize here as the real issue.
I think we come to ILP in search of people and discourse that’s more consistent with our own brain types. But keep in mind we all are stepping into fallacy and judgement constantly. Most of us do it on a slightly higher channel than the national norm. And there’s great variance in our community. But by and large, it’s nice to be on the same channel once in a while.
Now how does this tie back to I LOVE PHILOSOPHY?
I think there’s a very high level, a person at peace with his lot in life, and a boon to all manner of people…when you are aware of the fact that our intellectual tapestry will always be pointulism, as if God works as Seurat, we are all judging to varying degrees. Often, human reality can only exist when we pervert actual reality into something namable. We all, by process of modeling reality, yield byproducts of fallacy and bias. Some have sharper points than others. But we are all brothers in this way.
I feel that wherever you stand on the sharpness scale, we all have a hidden channel on common.
A master can learn to find this channel every time. I don’t claim to be this master, but if I take nothing away from my years at ILP it is that I have found in this ideal a worthy goal. The goal to find some intellectual common ground with everyone I meet when talking about politics, God issues, good & evil, ethics, metaphysics, the problems of life itself. And in 2015, it is the reason why I find myself loving philosophy more than ever.