Practicing Philosophy

There are many ways of practicing philosophy. One you can see at university or in professional books may be very different from one you may want to practice yourself. It does not mean there exists an unbridgeable gap between them, just another way of doing things by means of a bit different style of expression and a bit different sensitivity to some things and issues. For my part, I strongly recommend employing philosophical categories into seeing and experiencing every day situations in ordinary circumstances.

For example, you do not have to read books to think: isn’t nine tenths of your loving energy coming from you and, perhaps one tenth from the object of your love? (Meaning: loving somebody is, perhaps, imposing our emotions and imagination upon this somebody who, as seen from another perspective, may be just an ordinary being without any special qualities). This may be very different from admiration – or the recognition of a special quality in somebody – that is not stimulated by loving somebody; you know, we more often than not admire our babies before they have hardly any skills whatsoever. Without the love in the background, however, we can more reasonably recognize the features or skills that make someone admirable.

Another example. In liking/disliking something as you like or dislike, say, a film you have just watched: isn’t it our imposing our more or less accidental reactions upon particular parts of the film (music, action, a given actor, a given plot, special effects, etc.) that make us claim that the film is good or we like it? Or, perhaps, the internal qualities of the film evoke in us our specific reactions of liking/disliking it? If so, what are these qualities?

I repeat: you do not have to read too many books to start asking such type of questions. However, you would need indeed to learn something more if you are interested enough in answering them in a satisfactory way. By ‘satisfactory’ I mean either that you are satisfied with it in such a way that you are able to somehow deal with an alternative answer, perhaps better than yours in some way, or that it well suits your more general worldview.