What is good? What is beauty? What is reality? Is there a God? What is the meaning of life?
The obsession with asking big, philosophical questions is an illness many suffer from. Religion or mysticism are merely painkillers to this torment. The philosophy of Wittgenstein is a cure.
Like many, I’ve always wanted answers to the big questions. Spending time thinking about these questions might sound like an interesting intellectual hobby, and I know of many for whom it is. But for me, the fascination with how everything is what it is and the desire to understand it all actually made this longing for answers quite obsessive, sometimes even tormenting.
Right now, I’m a student in both physics and mathematics, with a primary interest in physics. Here I’ve come closer to the answers of some of these big questions about the universe (and maybe ourselves).
But for some questions, it was unclear where to begin, or unclear if it was even possible to begin. These are some of the big questions that the field of philosophy has been working on for over two thousand years. The progress: nothing.
In natural sciences, like physics, there is clear consensus over the correctness of a theory. It might not be fully complete yet, but it does describe some universality that no scientist will deny. In mathematics (a formal science) there is even certainty, where theorems are rigorously proved so that no doubt exists. Therefore, one could study the laws of gravity or the special theory of relativity without ever hearing the names Newton and Einstein. Or learn basic geometry without ever having heard of Euclid once.
But in philosophy, there are no generally accepted answers, and thus, when studying some philosophy, it is always the philosophy of someone. The philosophy of Nietzsche or of Kant etc. In philosophy there is no consensus or universality.
Philosophy concerns itself with big questions, but so do the natural sciences, so why can the latter find fulfilling, consistent answers, but philosophy not? How can it be that, after thousands of years of (pretty smart) people pondering about it, philosophy did not come up with any fulfilling answers?
Well, there is one important distinction between philosophy and subjects like physics, mathematics or biology: philosophy is no science. It might look like a science, and it’s indeed practiced in a comparable way, but it is none and should not be confused with one.
To see where it exactly goes wrong, we have to note that whether a question is answerable or a statement is truth-apt depends on whether there are shared criteria for correctness. In science there are such criteria; in natural science, for example, knowledge is based on experimental observation and inductive reasoning, and in mathematics a conclusion is considered valid only if it follows logically from accepted premises, which eventually trace back to some agreed axioms and definitions.
But in philosophy, these criteria are missing. Statements in ethics, esthetics, metaphysics etc. can’t be tested empirically, and there are no accepted premises to deduce further from either (in fact, the great part of philosophy has been about what these premises should be). So, even though philosophical questions might seem sensible at first, the shared rules necessary for any knowledge are lacking, and the search for these answers merely roots from confusing philosophical questions with scientific ones.
This is one my conclusions from the (later) works of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951): philosophy is no science. And this came as a healing to my science-oriented mind, obsessing over philosophical questions.
I think we should not see philosophy as a discipline but as an activity. There is no philosophy, there is only philosophizing. And its primary purpose is to elucidate our thoughts and dissolve confusion; to show that apparent problems, whether in politics, psychology, physics or about our knowledge in general, are in reality false problems.
Since there are no philosophical problems that would make it a discipline or theory in itself, philosophy is best done together with some other subject. This can be sociology, psychology, politics, history or the context of your life, for example. Philosophy should be applied to a different subject, taking a step back and pondering about the different points of view at the subject and its problems.
And that is precisely what I will attempt to do here, on this website.
Here I will write texts of a philosophical nature about subjects like science, life philosophy, culture, art, psychology, religion and mysticism. These will consist of essays, stream-of-consciousness-like notes of some ideas and lastly informative texts as well (mainly meant for me to learn new things).