Why does an ordinary person need philosophy?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Philosophy seems to have existed ever since man learned to be aware of himself and the surrounding reality. But why is it needed? There are physics, biology and chemistry that explain the laws of nature. There is literature and history that immerse us in a completely new context. What does philosophy do? And, most importantly, how can it be useful to a modern person?

Philosophy: what is it and why is it needed

Why philosophy is needed is well illustrated by an example from the genre of fantasy: suppose you are an astronaut who crashed on a planet unknown to him. But he survived. After getting out of the disabled ship, you ask yourself and the world around you three main questions:

• Where I am?
• How to find out?
• What should I do?

Being away from home, really, the first thing that interests me is where I got to. This is the anchor point from which everything else begins. If the planet is unfamiliar to us, we are looking for confirmation of hypotheses appearing in our head. Let's see if the planet is suitable for life, what is the state of the air and whether sunlight gets here. When we determine, at least approximately, where we are, the main question arises: what should we do with this now?

The astronaut example is an allegory for life. As a rule, we can easily understand where we are - when it comes to physical location - but we have difficulty trying to understand why we are here and, most importantly, why. Most people live most of their days in this ignorance, experiencing joy, anger, sadness, and other emotions from time to time, but completely unaware of cause and effect.

It is not obvious to people that the problem lies in these unanswered questions and that there is only one science that can answer them - philosophy.

Philosophy certainly won't tell you literally where you are - New York or Zanzibar - but it will certainly provide methods to find out. Unlike any other scientific field, philosophy works with aspects of the universe that relate to everything. Are we in an understandable, structural and fully cognizable environment - or, on the contrary, are we surrounded by chaos and a world of unexplored objects, the nature of which we have yet to learn? What is our relationship with these objects? What are they in relation to us - objects or, perhaps, subjects? And in general: is the object really what it seems?

Answers to these questions are dealt with by the main branch of philosophy - metaphysics, or, in the language of Aristotle, being qua being ("being as such"). The second section - epistemology - deals with the study of the methods of human cognition, by which the very "being as such" is analyzed. There is also a third branch - ethics, an applied branch of philosophy, since it refers not so much to everything that exists, but to a specific person and his worldview. Ethics, or morality, determines the set of values that governs the choice and actions of a person, the main regulators of his life.

The consequences of choice are just studied by politics - the fourth section of philosophy, the object of which is the principles of the existing social system. Political philosophy will not tell you how much gasoline and on what day of the week you will be provided, but it will tell you whether the state has the right to establish such norms. The fifth and last section of philosophy is aesthetics, the teaching of art, which is based on metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Art deals with the needs for renewal of human consciousness.

Now it has become roughly clear what philosophy consists of, but there is still no answer to the question "why does an ordinary person need it?" At first glance, it may seem that philosophy is studying abstract ideas that have nothing to do with real life. But actually it is not.

• A philosopher, unlike a pig from a fable, always analyzes the facts laid out in front of him, finds causal relationships and only after that draws conclusions about the world, politics or art.

  It turns out that philosophy is both a theoretical and an applied discipline that allows you to know the foundations of the universe, as well as see the consequences and causes of these foundations. Philosophy, one might say, helps to formulate a worldview, as well as a system of values, based on the actual state of affairs and true knowledge about the world.