When I grew up people all wanted to teach me all kinds of lessons, those were often quite useful and practical. “Be patient” or “Live in the present” they got thrown at me a lot, so much so I could almost dream these sayings of conventional wisdom.
When keeping a few of these in mind it can really help to improve your life. However when your entire feed is filled with hundreds of these quotes full of wisdom not only do they gradually lose their power, but also a weird paradox starts to arise: The sayings start to conflict with each other.
As a result people can just select the profound doctrine they are gonna today follow purely based on their mood. For instance, you read a stoic quote about waking up early and how important it is because you start your day at the same time that the sun rises and the world wakes up, allowing you to live exactly in accordance with nature. But then it gets late and waking up at sunrise doesn’t seem so easy as it did 5 hours ago. But suddenly you read another quote, one by Aristotle this time talking about the golden mean and how extremes are never good and you should just aim to be in the middle. You agree, what a profound thought that is, so you change your alarm clock to a more comfortable time.
Ofcourse this example is rather innocent, but it does illustrate where the abundance of different wisdoms leads to: The justification of instinctive and amoral decisions by making it out to be some profound universal truth. A universal truth depending largely on your mood that is.
The strange thing is is that most of these quotes can have some truth to them, even if they’re polar opposites. For example: “Success is only possible if you keep going everyday, even through the hardest moments” and “You are not machine, don’t rush yourself and take rest when you need it, only a well rested human can achieve true success.”
These quotes both tell us something opposite and still they both contain pieces of truth. Taking it slowly can sometimes be very beneficial and the ability to keep going through hard times also can come in handy. So how can two contradictory sayings be true at the same time?
In my opinion their truth depends on the context. There is not one one-liner in the world that can help you make the right decision, because the right decision can’t be made without being sensitive to context.
And actually this is why a lot of these so called profound sayings are almost always useless. They are good for usage at a young age for children still developing a moral compass. But in my opinion an individual should be able to make their own decision, without following any doctrine or dogma. Judgement should be based on getting moral values in dialogue with the context. Although the question that remains now is: How can wisdom/philosophy actually help us with our judgement?
The trick is that it shouldn’t teach us the what or the how, as the what is fluid, it should teach us the why. The why doesn’t change based on context, it is rock solid compared to what and how which are continuously changed by the tides of context. It is hard to change your reason for doing something all the time, making it less likely to change it based on your mood.
And from this foundation we can gradually move to how we do things and eventually to what we actually do. Making what we do grounded in a deeper rooted philosophy, without it leading to any contextual shortcomings. Philosophy shouldn’t tell us what to do, it should us help to discover why we do what we do.
That is odd -- I do not recall having received this in my inbox!
One essential quality of good writing and philosophy is its ability to evoke, cause the reader to think and ponder on a situation I.e act as a midwife.
I think I have mused on this sometime but I got clarity just going through this. Enjoyed the last paragraph best.