Philosophy for Dummies

Some close friends know me for being philosophical. In fact I am often accused of being too philosophical.

While I vehemently disagree with the idea of "studying philosophy"[1], today I will try to give a brief account on what is philosophy in general.

I have never received "formal training" in philosophy studies. I "learned" it mainly via self study and partly because my major back then (law degree) is a key branch of formal philosophy studies.

To start with, I will talk about the formal 5 branches of philosophy. Philosophy can be divided into:

1. Aethestics (What is beautiful? What makes beautiful things beautiful?)
2. Logic (What is true, accurate and correct?)
3. Ethics (What is morally good? What is evil?)
4. Epistemology (What is real?)
5. Metaphysics[2]

The first resembles all the arts in general. Music, painting, sculpting etc. The second resembles Mathematics. The third resembles what judges and lawyers do daily. The fourth resembles all kinds of hard sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology etc.).

Yes, you didn't read it wrongly. As much as people hyping Science as something very precise and exact that guide our daily life nowadays, Science was a son of his ambiguous father, Philosophy.[3] 

That's much about the theories. What I am going to do today is not to make you falling asleep, but to convince you that philosophy can be great in a way.

I think one reason people feel philosophy is something so alienated is that, they are trying to find answers, while philosophy is on the flip side. It's about questions.

That sounds demotivating. We all love answers. Getting answers is exciting, while coming out with questions is a tiring process. But what philosophy teaches you is that, sometimes questions can be as sexy as answers.

For example, if you ask a normal person to give examples on some great things in life and some awful things in life, most answers would include the following:

• Wonderful things in life:
• Being wealthy
• Being healthy and living long
• Having loving partner and a great family 
• Awful things in life:
• Being poor
• Being sick
• Encountering accidents

That is a pretty standard answer, not much surprise here. But a person who is philosophically wise would think of some very surprising grey spots: something good can be bad, something bad can be good.

This is not a tongue twister. I repeat it again: Something people called as "wonderful" might be bad, something people call as "awful" might be good.

A comical example of "something good can be bad" will be the people who won lottery but ended up being miserable in their later lives. Or if you were working in one of the greatest company thinking that you are set in your life, but ended up losing your job because the company bankrupted.

The opposite, "something bad can be good" has examples like the typical Chinese fable. Or simply how an accident makes you love your spouse more. Or how an underrated startup turned the tide from near to bankruptcy to become a big company[4].

It's hard to link winning lottery to a catastrophe like your daughter being murdered. They seem totally unrelated. But being good in philosophy help you spotting such hazards way earlier. 

That's the modus operandi of philosophy. You question, and in the process you found crazily interesting questions. You might never have the answers. But you stand in a position way much better than those who think that lottery must be unequivocally a great thing. 

I am not going into the details of how. Because philosophy never claims to be able to do so. 

Just that the next time when you think philosophy is boring, think twice. Otherwise, when the next Airbnb appears in front of you, no matter how cheap it is, you won't invest in it, and therefore you lost the chance to become a billionaire. 

 

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[Footnotes]
[1] Unlike Mathematics, Philosophy should not and cannot be learned by books and lectures. The best philosophers in the history all have real jobs and do real things in life. In the process of doing things, they faced tough problems and the tough problems forced them to discover great wisdom. 

Wittgenstein was mainly working on languages and linguistics, David Hume was a businessperson, Francis Bacon was a scientific researcher. Those who formally study philosophy through theories and books are likely to be bogus.

[2] If you wonder why I have no explanations on Metaphysics, it is because it is one of the fake branch of philosophy. People nowadays widely regard Metaphysics as a mistaken study accidentally introduced by Plato. In short, there is no such thing as Metaphysics, stop wasting time on it.

[3] When Issac Newton discovered gravity, he wasn't really known as physicists like how people called Einstein when he discovered relativity. Newton was known more as a philosopher back then. Also, you can find a lot of ancient philosophers being very scientific. For example, Aristotle, who was a famous philosopher, had spent huge amount of time in zoology (the study of animals).

[4] Similarly most other things that became mega rich like BitCoin, Google, Apple, Genting, Sunway were all "bad things" at first. Google and Apple famously started out in car garages. Would you apply to work in a company with its office in garage? No, because you think this company is "bad".