Philosophy for Life
Part One
Why Do We Study Philosophy?
Aydin Areta

Why does it matter that we study philosophy?
Why should we make the effort to understand philosophical ideas?

In my view, philosophy in its simple and practical sense is the search for wisdom in order to understand life and its meaning more deeply in practice.

Regardless of who we are, where we were born, what work we do or what education we have received, the simple truth of life for all of us is that at every moment we are compelled to choose. If we do not understand deeply why and how we make our choices, there will always be others ready to choose for us: political leaders, ideologies, the dominant traditions of the society into which we were born, mass media, and even the beliefs and public opinions of others.

We will reach the end of our lives having made choices that were never our own clear and considered choices, and holding thoughts that were never truly our own thought-out ideas. Eventually, instead of becoming more like ourselves, we gradually become more like others, as though we had never possessed a distinctive thought or individuality of our own. We become homogeneous, interchangeable cogs in a great machine that perpetuates what we already see around us.

All of us have allowed a way of living to govern our values, beliefs and choices. Whether we are conscious of it or not, this way of living is our personal philosophy of life. We all therefore have a philosophy, often a vague picture formed from things we have absorbed without reflection. To be a philosopher is to think consciously about the way of living we have chosen.

The ultimate aim of learning philosophy is not to accumulate philosophical knowledge or become someone who “knows philosophy,” but to create independent, conscious thought through which we may realise our higher self.

Plato once wrote that ignorance is the source of all darkness and evil. There is hardly a day when I look at the darkness of the world in which we live without feeling the truth of those words. Whenever I look at life's suffering and the darkness of the world, I think about how all this suffering and darkness before us is a bitter mockery of everything we, as beings capable of thought, could become but have not become.

The dark and degraded backstreets of cities, poverty and injustice in the world will remain as long as the dark backstreets of our hearts, our unawareness, the poverty and darkness of our minds remain. Every war in the external world is the result of a battle left unfinished within us. Everything we could have become but have not become is a bitter testimony to all the consciousness we have withheld from ourselves.

We are free to choose between the splendour of being human and the horror of being human. Our refusal to choose, and our avoidance of consciousness and knowledge, have made the human being the most dangerous creature we know.

Hegel once wrote that a person who remains in ignorance can never be free, because he lives in a world alien to him, outside him and beyond his reach. He never tries to make part of that world his own. The spark of curiosity and desire to know—from its simplest form to the highest philosophical effort—is an attempt to overcome this absence of freedom and create a world that belongs to us and to our thought.

There is no question about how much evil and suffering human beings are capable of creating for ourselves and other creatures; it is already before our eyes and has already happened. What remains unanswered is how much of a better world we might realise through the development of consciousness.

Countless generations of us have gone, and continue to go, into nothingness like unrealised possibilities. In each generation only a few honestly undertake the discovery and realisation of the Self, and it is these few who keep alive the small sparks of what we may one day become and move the history of consciousness forward.

Every year hundreds of books are written and seminars held around the world under titles such as “What does it mean to be human?” Is it not strange that, among all beings, no flower and no pigeon asks about the meaning of being a flower or being a pigeon?

Is it not a mystery that among all creatures we are the most unrealised possibility in the world, continually asking what we could become and have not yet become?

Among all the beings of the world, we are the being most engaged in becoming. And when we look at ourselves there is something stranger than intelligence that shapes our fate: our freedom to choose whether to increase consciousness and realise the Self.