Modern thinkers and philosophers, many of them are getting reduced to thoughts about transcending the rat race, rising above the many distractions that plague our attention.
Many questions that ancient philosophers have posed are the questions that modern thinkers and philosophers need to be revisiting.
Or the other way of looking at it is, that I don’t know of many modern philosophers and their works. Are we as a society doing a poor job of transmitting knowledge that leads to finding some purpose and meaning?
I still try to ask myself many difficult questions, a lot of questions that I don’t have the answers to yet. A lot of questions that bring me looking within. Over and over… some answers lie within and through gaining the knowledge of the self. While most are discovered through learning and compounding on learnt knowledge so it grows into wisdom and practice.
How is it that a layman knows that his knowledge of the self is sufficient enough to grant the wisdom to know what is in the outer world?
How do I know that what I know is evident enough and is the truth and gospel?
While reading those questions above may denote confusion on my part and it might sound like I am lost. I am only posing these questions for the wider audience and asking these questions from the collective society.
Space race… modern science…. brick walls…. disconnected from nature. Many of us only see the nature on television. National Geographic, Animal Planet, Discovery. Most of lack the resources to venture out into the forest and wilderness.
Writing this article is igniting the sparks for me to read more books on philosophy. Find out what questions were asked in those books? What would my answer be with the little knowledge that I have? And how will it change after reading and understanding the philosopher’s perspective.
Here’s a list of books that I am looking to gain new insights from, new questions and new answers….
Shows about Nothing, Thomas S. Hibbs (Baylor University Press, 2012)
The World beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, Matt B. Crawford (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)
Here’s a quote by Thomas Hibbs that I can relate so much to.
If you don’t have the vocabulary to describe what you’re experiencing, you are to some extent insensitive to what you’re experiencing, or at least you can’t experience it on the deepest level.” — Thomas Hibbs
When I lacked the vocabulary I was surrounded by confusion and chaos. Knowledge is truly empowering. Vocabulary is truly a gift. Sometimes I use words that I don’t in every day life but they just click in the moment. Like the other day when I was speaking about pain I said, “This has abated some of it but not fully relieved it.”
The vocabulary just clicked in the moment and I am not the garrulous one that gets to utilise learnt vocabulary on a daily basis. Blogging helps more I guess haha 😄
Writing helps me find clarity.
Here’s the other quote that inspired me to write this blog:
“The human being straddles these two abysses: the abyss of nothingness from which he came and the abyss of infinity by whom he came.… It seems that nihilism is people who are looking at the nothing and forget about the infinity.” — Hamza Yusuf
Macro Passions 