Why Do We Study Philosophy? — Continued, Part Five

In a world in which we are continually bombarded by ideas, political and religious groups, dominant assumptions and public opinion telling us how we should think, philosophy gives us the independence to free ourselves from the minor discourses of our age, because philosophical thinking gives us more questions rather than certainty.

Socrates once told his students, in the source's rendering:
“To be yourselves, think for yourselves.”

This is philosophy's timeless message.

Many people imagine that philosophy belongs to the past and that knowing the history of thought has no use for people living in a different world today. The truth is that our questions about our actions return in new forms in different historical periods, and failing to understand the history of thought compels us to repeat that history.

An individual or society that does not know philosophy and is disconnected from its own intellectual history and from the history of human thought is, in truth, cut off from its roots.

In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche warns us, in the source's rendering:
“We must reflect on historical forces and their effect upon the self we are today. We must know our history and the development of its philosophical ideas so that we can understand how the past remains alive and flowing in the veins of our present, and how hundreds of waves arriving from the past disturb this moment.”

Nietzsche also believed:
“Those who seek novelty after novelty while regarding their historical roots as unimportant have not yet understood that the form, health and beauty of the leaves depend upon the root. We always grow from our roots, mature, and give our flowers, fruits and seeds to the future.”

It is a great pain that you, I and many of us have ceased producing culture and art connected to our history as a people.

A simple search shows how rarely we have represented the history of our thought in story, song, painting, opera and cinema.

How little we have retold the history of our thought in the form of a philosophy made contemporary.

Culture, art and philosophy are signs of a people's life. Sometimes a single book, such as the Shahnameh, can rescue a language and a history from destruction and burial under the ruins of history and bring them back to life.

At precisely such decisive moments of history, when a people seems to have lost the power to write, read and sing, particular individuals among us must rise and continue the journey through darkness down to the deepest roots of our homeland, so that when they return they can offer new flowers, fruit and seeds to future generations.

This is why we must undertake the journey knowingly.

If each of us takes the path of the love of wisdom—philo + sophia—we enter on our journey an eternal land of ideas that we did not create and that are far older than we are.

We enter their enduring country and hear their voices, but we will leave and they will remain.

Understanding this truth is liberating for every philosopher because it prevents us from giving ourselves too much credit for our beliefs or what we know. We understand that we are only travellers in the valleys of ideas, not rulers of those lands.

This humility allows us, instead of calling human beings towards ourselves, to call them towards these ideas and towards independent thinking about them.

The path did not begin with us and will not end with us.

Calling human beings to be “one individual,” and inviting them onto the path of philosophical thinking, means precisely this:
Be yourself.
Think for yourself.
Do not stop forever in someone else's house of thought.

Listen and think, but do not remain permanently resident in any person or idea.

Avoid every philosophy and thought that wants you to become its follower. And if you encounter someone claiming knowledge who asks you to follow him—or who even receives your following with satisfied silence—run in the opposite direction.

Do not sell your individuality to any cult of personality. It is a transaction made entirely at a loss, and its price is the loss of your own self.