I want to think about my philosophical journey and how it began and how I got here. It began, I think with the habit of diary writing. I started that when I was 15 and my entries soon became introspective rather than descriptive. Then, when I was 16, I fell in love for the first time. It wasn’t a real relationship, I just liked this girl and I thought she liked me too but then some complications arose that I didn’t handle very well. When I turned 17, my father was transferred to a different state and I had to move. I had just had my heart broken and now I was in an unfamiliar school with no friends and no one to talk to. This led to a prolonged sadness which turned into mild depression which stayed with me for multiple decades.

The Big Questions

This was the time when I started asking what I call “the big questions.” It began with smaller questions about love and life. Why did she do that? Why didn’t I say something? What should I do about it? Should I run away from home and go confess my love to her? No that’s too stupid. Maybe I should work hard and go to a good college and get a good job and then go back to her and confess my love? Isn’t that naïve? What should I do in life anyway? Join the army maybe? Do engineering?

These smaller questions eventually led to bigger and bigger questions. Do I really love her or is it just a crush? What is love anyway? Is there such a thing as true love and soulmates or is that just a fictional trope from movies and books? And then the biggest question of all: what is life? Why am I here? What’s my purpose? What am I supposed to do in life?

These big questions started me on the path of philosophy, but it would take many years before I understood what philosophy was. In the beginning, being an Indian, I had easy access to spiritual thought and that’s what I got into. Buddhism said that my suffering was caused by my attachment to my desires. This really resonated with me. The purpose of life was to practice renunciation so as to achieve enlightenment and break the cycle of rebirth and suffering. I tried to give this path a go and while non-attachment helped me a bit, I just couldn’t get myself to believe in reincarnation. If this life is the only life you get, it seemed like a big risk to commit to any path that depended on you having multiple lives. How can we be sure that such a worldview is the actual truth? That’s the kind of question that led to the development of philosophy in human history.

Ayn Rand & ZAMM

In my own history, the next phase began when, like many young ones, I read Ayn Rand in college. I read Atlas Shrugged first and it disturbed me a lot. I found the worldview to be too harsh but I couldn’t refute it. It seemed true to me. I felt like I was one of the movers of the world and most of the people around me were what Ayn Rand liked to call “sub-human”. I read The Fountainhead and quite a few of her non-fiction as well but I couldn’t get myself to accept Objectivism.

Then I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and it remains one of my favorite books to this day. It also acted as an introduction to western philosophy and how it related to eastern spirituality. Pirsig’s idea that both traditions were climbing the same mountain from different sides made a lot of sense to me. Later in life I read Lila and tried to understand the Metaphysics of Quality better and apply it in my life. It did not work very well as it was too complex to remember all the time while you’re living your life.

During college, I also looked into Plato and Aristotle’s work a little. I liked Aristotle’s idea of the virtuous mean and I tried to develop my character to be virtuous. While Ayn Rand had lots of answers to the big questions, I didn’t like some of them even though I thought they were true. Pirsig’s inquiry seemed to answer the big questions in a roundabout way, by saying that the subject-object dualism, which makes us ask the big questions in the first place, is not real and that quality lies in the moment before the split happens. But it was hard to know what to do with that and how to live my life? Always be searching for quality?

Everything is Bullshit!

So, during this time I resorted to a nihilistic personal philosophy expressed in three words: Everything is Bullshit! Now, reading about the development of philosophy, I think the skeptics and the sophists perhaps reached a similar point of view.

You start by asking the big questions. People answer those questions and you either believe them or you think long enough to find flaws in their answers. So maybe there is no one single right answer to the big questions. And every philosophical system that tries to answer them is just bullshit in the end. Nothing matters and it’s all make believe. So just enjoy your life and whenever someone asks you to care about something just say, “why bother?”

I didn’t just held this belief intellectually; I lived it. I stopped caring about everything including classes, sports, extra-curricular activities or even going out to find a girlfriend. I played some music but gave up when it got serious. I tried to write some stories but gave up when it got hard. Other than that, I did just enough to get by and not an iota more.

The Theory of Energy

After college, I tried to build two systems of my own which were more spiritual in nature than philosophical. The first one was called The Theory of Energy. It was a metaphysical view that looked at the universe as being nothing but energy and divided everything into positive and negative energy. A garden had positive energy while a garbage dump had negative energy. Start littering in the garden and you increase the negative energy till it becomes a garbage dump. But not everything was so clearly identified. For example, I found that certain metal bands had a lot of positive energy while others had only negative energy. It was totally subjective based on how I felt when I listened to their music.

The one interesting move I made was to hold no normative judgment over negative energy. I said that the problem arises when there is a conflict between positive and negative energy. If you’re full of negative energy but you’re surrounded by more negative energy, you’ll still be at peace because there is no conflict. But put a death metal fan full of negative energy in a garden and they’ll feel just as uncomfortable as a positive person in a garbage dump. I tried to surround myself with positive energy but after a while the giant loopholes in the system began to show and I abandoned it.

Conscious Spiritual Evolution

A few years later I came up with another system called Conscious Spiritual Evolution. I figured that evolution had a purpose in leading towards intelligent technologically advanced civilization. One purpose was probably to use this advanced civilization to spread to other planets, but I focused more on the idea of spiritual evolution.

I thought that the ultimate purpose of humanity is to rise above our animal past and become spiritually evolved enough to see that we’re all connected, not just within the species, but all life itself is just one thing. Then humans could fulfill their role as “guardians of life” and work to spread life around the galaxy. Then I added to it the idea that since spiritual evolution is not like biological evolution, it can be achieved much faster if we try to achieve it consciously. How you do that was simply to live more spiritually and contemplate the oneness of everything etc. Once again, I tried to live according to it and found it hard to remember in the day to day moments and eventually realized that even if this is the purpose of humanity, we can’t achieve it in our own life by somehow forcing it.

Giving Up on Thinking Itself

After this, my depression got worse and I stopped thinking about the big questions completely. In my depressed state the kind of questions that mattered to me were: what is wrong with me? Why am I like this? Why can’t I be normal? Why should I go on living and suffering like this? I felt that all these years of thinking about the big questions was just a way to distract myself from feeling too depressed. It was an escape mechanism to avoid feeling the immense sadness that had always been within me.

Eventually, I got better by giving up on thinking all together. I stopped writing in my journals. I stopped introspecting. I just tried to find out things I could get myself to do and did them. One of those things was fitness and I’m fairly certain that it played a big role in my recovery. Of course, once I started feeling better, the thinking began again. I just can’t help it. That’s just who I am. But this time I accidentally discovered something that made me finally understand what philosophy really is.

Jordan Peterson

You see, after the conscious spiritual evolution phase, I got into Jordan Peterson for a while. That man was so charismatic and he seemed to make so much sense to me. This was during his early years. I saw all the podcasts and went through his university lectures and ate it all up. During this time, I would be recommended videos that criticized Peterson and I felt strong emotions while watching these videos. I think the peak of Peterson was the Cathy Newman interview. After that his downward slide began. When I decided to stop thinking about everything, it also included global politics and the culture war. Incidentally, this was also the time when Peterson got sick and stopped publishing for a while.

When I got better and returned to the online world, to see what was going on, not to participate in it, I found that Peterson had returned and become really toxic himself. I did not like this Peterson 2.0 at all. Then I watched a very long video that went through everything Peterson had ever said or done wrong. And this time I didn’t feel strong emotions and I was able to see that most of the points being made were actually good points.

I had always thought that Peterson was such a great speaker because he was able to combine logos and pathos. His arguments made logical sense and still retained emotional strength as well. Or so I thought. After the break when I reanalyzed his arguments, I realized that they are not very logical at all. In fact, he used pathos and ethos a lot more often than pure logic. For example, he does this thing, which once you see it, you can recognize it immediately, where he will begin to quote someone like Dostoevsky or Piaget to support his argument, and then he’ll pause to tell you how big of a genius that guy was. This is appeal to authority. “Look, this guy who was a pure genius, amazing guy, handsome devil, he said this…” and the unsaid part is “therefore it must be right because such a great guy said it.”

The worst example of this is when he read a satanic poem written by Marx and then talked about how communism led to hell and then let the audience join the dots. Maybe Marx’s ideas led to hell because that’s what he truly wanted. I saw that and I was like, “Really? Marx was a satanist?” So I checked out the poem and he wrote it when he was 17 years old. That’s just a teenager revolting against the authority of his time! I wrote a satanic song when I was in college called Lucifer, which was a total rip off of Black Sabbath. Doesn’t mean I am a satanist. Once I saw how he’s just as rhetorical as everyone else, and how toxic he had become, I couldn’t go back to him.

Self-Criticism/Self-Doubt is a Necessary Condition for Philosophy

But this made me realize the important thing about philosophy. When I liked Jordan Peterson, I was certain that what he was saying was true. It just made sense to me. Then I realized that whenever I’ve built my own system or tried to follow someone else’s philosophy, during those times I’ve also felt this way and been convinced that it was true. Those views all made sense to me at the time. The problem was that they stopped making sense to me after a while.

And the philosophical insight is that you can’t trust this feeling. Just because something makes sense to you, does not mean it’s true. It means that you believe it to be true. And if you feel strong emotions when counter arguments are presented to you, that is a big sign that you’re emotionally invested in the belief. Most people, when they find something they believe in, they stop thinking and start acting. When their belief is attacked, they defend it. The time for thinking is over, now it’s time to fight for what you think is right. But I keep thinking and eventually it stops making sense to me.

This self-critical stance towards your own arguments, I think is essential to philosophy. It is not the case that every philosopher held such a self-critical stance, but because they tried to write their philosophy in such a way so as to convince others, often old dead philosophers from the past, they ended up examining every nook and cranny of their arguments. Even then, many philosophers do fall prey to a blindness towards the flaws in their argument. But over generations, philosophy retains the self-critical stance because someone else in the future will criticize your view, if you don’t do it.

My Philosophy Project

This led me to my philosophy project. I still held many strong convictions about the world and life. In fact, I had gathered new ones after I recovered from my depression. But this time I wasn’t in a hurry to share them with the world. They made sense to me but I retained the realization that they could be wrong and they could stop making sense to me in the future.

So how do you judge your worldview? You first apply it to your own life. If it makes your life better, even a little, then it is at least partially true. If it doesn’t work, it’s definitely not true. This view that what’s closer to the truth, works better, is itself a provisional theory of mine which has been working so far.

This utilitarian test of philosophy, combined with a self-critical approach and a somewhat rigorous logical methodology is what I’ve tried to do over the last 3-4 years. During this time, I’ve jumped the gun a few times and tried building complete systems once again. You can find some of these attempts in the archives of this blog. I tried building philosophy as a software. Then I tried writing essays but only wrote one called On Narrative Orientation and Sensemaking. In all of these attempts, I felt like my philosophy sounded amateurish. It happened whenever I took leaps that were too big and jumped to conclusions and tried to present solutions instead of just asking the questions.

The last development on this path was that I decided to do it right, and first learn philosophy before writing any more essays. I was using an IGNOU curriculum along with online research to understand how philosophy developed and what path it followed. I did two modules on Logic and Epistemology and already I’ve found a basic assumption of philosophy that I disagree with, which has led me to question once again, what is it exactly that I’m trying to do?

In the next post I’ll look at what I’ve learned about how philosophy developed in human history. That should help me clarify what my project actually is.

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Cover Photo by Patrick Federi on Unsplash