Is philosophy making your life more enjoyable or less?
From personal experience, even when I'm on my downtime trying to enjoy gaming or eating, I find my mind still working in a philosophical manner.
I've begun to be a promoter of the saying that an over-examined life ain't that fun, whilst subscribing to thinking that the under-examined life is fine by me.
Yet, as an addict, I keep on festering, questioning, and indulging in great vigor into these questions about life and its mystery.
How about you?
I'm looking for deeper answers than: It helps me polish my critical thinking skills, and stuff like that.
I've begun to be a promoter of the saying that an over-examined life ain't that fun, whilst subscribing to thinking that the under-examined life is fine by me.
Yet, as an addict, I keep on festering, questioning, and indulging in great vigor into these questions about life and its mystery.
How about you?
I'm looking for deeper answers than: It helps me polish my critical thinking skills, and stuff like that.
Comments (49)
You suffer from mental illness right? How do you make the distinction between suffering from mental illness, and the suffering from philosophy?
It seems to me that the former informs the latter.
Depending on my mood, thinking too deeply or about deep topics can easily lead my mind into topics that, when I'm down, become traps where I spiral around into deeper and deeper anxiety and depression. In times like that, I wish that I could just "turn off my brain" and stop being such a philosopher, stop over-examining everything and just live, like any other animal, just be a dumb happy creature not frozen in the headlights of the apparently-doomed future.
But one of the things that best helps elevate my mood is feeling or seeing connections, of any kind, interpersonal, theoretical, historical, etc -- I'm coming around to the opinion that meaningfulness of any kind is literally all about connections, even my ontology is perhaps-not-coincidentally all about a web of relations between objects defined entirely by those relations. And the thing that I always loved about philosophy, the reason I got into it, is how it has connections to everything. So doing philosophy, learning it or teaching it, makes my life and the world feel more meaningful, and so makes me happier. Sometimes.
Despite prolonged failure to do so, philosophizing did eventually help me to partially think my way out of those depressed and anxious thought loops that I sometimes get stuck in, even though it was also trying to philosophizing my way out of them that got me stuck in them to begin with. Perhaps as an analogy, it's like I was a dumb mathematician trying futilly to work out a proof that a given program won't halt, and then I figured out a proof that such a proof either way is not possible. I still don't know if the program will halt or not, but I know that I can't know it, and so can give up trying to figure out whether or not it will.
On face value, that is the assumption. But, I've been (what's the best word to use here...) practicing or doing? philosophy for a long time now. It seems to me more like being stuck than wanting anything to do.
Quoting tim wood
Yes, and that's why I turned towards Wittgenstein. He seemed like someone who had all the answers, leaving the most difficult ones to be addressed as they should be on one's own (existential and such).
To say that I suffer from a mental illness doesn't portray the issue adequately. I have a mental illness and dual diagnosis. My life hasn't been very rosy, a lot of depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. I've been on the old PF and this one for a while already, and the conclusion I'm arriving at is that those prone to mental disorder or illness (call it whatever you like) do have some kind of predisposition towards deeper thought about themselves or themselves wrt. to the world.
The deeper question is how would you know otherwise?
Quoting Pfhorrest
This is what I liked about philosophy in the beginning. But, as time progresses and one sees most of the connections, then the issue seems to me to arise of the sort, what use does philosophy have if not to myself then to the world?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Therefore, you founded your own philosophy?
Yes, but when does one say "stop" or I've had my portion to fill myself up, metaphorically?
Ok, well how do you distinguish between all that and the philosophy? How do you know where the specific sufferings come from? Why do you lay it at philosophies feet?
Well, to me philosophy isn't like peeling onions or such.
I feel as though the inclination to practice or do philosophy as somewhat burdensome. On the whole of it people are naturally ethical, no?
Because I don't know what life without philosophy would look like... Eh.
I guess I'm really stuck then. Hand me a ladder, will you, Tim?
What do you mean? I thought I got out of that bottle that the fly I am. But, it seems not so.
No, I dont think people are naturally ethical on the whole, but Im not sure why thats relevant. What Im trying to get at is how you may be conflating philosophy with those other things, and that not recognising this distinction is at least partially why you feel burdened by philosophy.
How does one depsychologize the issue then?
I think that philosophy has definitely made me a better person, and so enabled me to do better things both for my own life and for the world. Not that the latter is particularly impressive in any way, but I think it’s better than it otherwise would have been. And if more people had motive and opportunity to do more and better philosophy, they and consequently the world would experience similar benefits. They’re subtle benefits to be sure, but a lot of them add up.
The foundational principle of my own philosophy that I came up with in 2010 (“it may be hopeless but I’m trying anyway”) is what I credit with my success at completing, over the course of the past decade, an enormous to-do list of vast life improvements.
(Finishing off the philosophy book I had been starting to write back then is, poetically, the last item on that to-do list).
Quoting Wallows
No, that existential dread only hit me a little over a year ago, and I hadn’t even considered trying to “solve” that “problem” until it did. I started writing “my own philosophy” as such some 15 years before that, when it was just an interesting academic project for fun.
Well Im not trained in psychology, but I would say that you depsycholigise philosophy by making the distinction between your psychology and your philosophy. Self reflect, And try to figure out where one begins and the other starts, and when/where your psychology is informing ( I almost want to say “corrupting”) your philosophy. Then you will at least know which enemy you are facing, and if philosophy is actually an enemy at all.
Do you mean ethically? Because that's what's left after you recognize the fields of science and humanities that have shot off from philosophy...
What are we tree huggers then?
Impossible! How?!
I already said, by self reflecting and trying to track the two.
Have you ever practiced mindfulness, or meditation? Id recommend first researching how your mental illness or whatever you want to call it, interacts with meditation or mindfulness as there may be dangers, but if its safe then it can really help to parse whats happening in your mind.
Yes, I do practice mindfulness and try and meditate sometimes. Yet, when I try and engage in philosophy there's this quantum leap. What lies in between that quantum leap is a mystery to me.
I dont know what you mean.
What I'm trying to say, is that I've been practicing philosophy for so long, that I don't really know how my life would look without it.
...and how does your misery factor into that? I thought philosophy was causing you anguish?
I don't know myself.
I feel like you aren’t connecting with what Im saying. Knowing yourself is what self reflection is all about. How are you trying to know yourself?
Through philosophy? Apart from looking in a mirror I guess?
An internal, mental mirror, yes. Self reflection.
What is self-reflection? How can I look at myself whilst being myself internally??
Now I feel like your having fun with me here, being intentionally difficult on this point... you seriously do not know what self reflection is?
Not kidding. I mean my whole life I've lived by some ego ideal Stoic sage, and seem to have gotten lost in that escapade.
When you do turn inward like that all I can see are ego-ideals. Maybe I hate myself or something like that
I don’t know if it’s true but anecdotal evidence suggests a lot of poets suffer from mental illness (I don’t know what the covers) and finally suicide. I don’t know if artists/poets suffer depression more than carpenters but I’d be ready to bet that they do. I think that’s because there’s so much time spent alone digging around in their private mental world that leads to all sorts of complications and consequences, too much involvement with the self. Almost like the examined life is not worth living. Go and belt a tennis ball instead.
Supposedly veterinarian people get the highest rated of suicide followed by dentists.
No idea where philosophers are on that list.
Quoting Wallows
I’d rather follow a warrior than a poet.
:100:
What a failure of a life or has life been for me.
I need to fall in love now :flower:
Quoting Wallows
Believe me, I think nearly everyone might wonder that. We all think we’re the only one.
What is your next line of thought or emotion when presented with such a harsh attitude towards life or one's self?
Mine is something like:
*Fuck!*
You asked what good it is to oneself or the world, and ethics is the field concerned with goods, so yeah.
But I think it's also useful in non-ethical ways, too. I think philosophy has made me a better learner and a better teacher, and so made me better at doing even the physical sciences. I think that this is analogous to the ethical scenario, because I think much of ethics is properly outside the domain of philosophy: philosophy just tells you how to do that stuff, and it likewise tells us how to do the physical sciences too.
“For Christ’s sake!” (Internal howl).
for Christ's sake. (colloquial) Used to express surprise, contempt, outrage, disgust, boredom, frustration.
Edit: then I look for something to blame.
Personally, I am not interested in anything that I FEEL makes my life worse. That would be weird. If you view your philosophical practices as comparable to a drug addiction, then you must have recently flipped a switch where this is no longer interesting. You see no practical purpose, in fact you think it is making life worse. Sounds like you have already taken the first steps to overcoming your addiction (and it should be way easier to quit than drugs as there are far fewer chemicals involved).
Sometimes I wonder if it is philosophy or just the damned internet; another addiction.
Hahaha. I don't have that problem because I don't really enjoy most socializing. This site is the only social media I participate in (and even here, I had to lurk and read for years before I signed up - I know that is probably surprising because I sure love shouting my opinion at people...but I am not exactly proud of that aspect of my personality...I kind of use discussions here to get that out of my system - it doesn't work, I am still way too opinionated).
I do play a lot of games that use the internet though, so that still probably counts as an internet addiction...and if you add in streaming tv, movies, or sports...I guess I am addicted to the internet too...but we could similarly say that people are addicted to having unlimited food selection options (the internet is incredible and world changing, of course we are addicted - not to mention that as psychology begins to understand addiction, businesses will use that information to create as many addicts as possible).
There are worse ways of spending your time than on this forum. It’s a strange place though. I put up an OP then wonder why I did it, the responsibility. And we don’t have to be right all the time, and agreement just kills an OP.
haha, been there. Once I create it, I feel like I have to respond to every single post in the thread (after I get over bashing myself for a weak OP - probably why I have only started 4 or 5 threads).
Quoting Brett
I try to remind myself that this is one place where being argumentative is good :smile:
What are ego ideals?