Cows are big and dumb. They don’t do much, really. They eat grass, and they believe anything. Superstitious ugly beasts the lot of them. Well, they are farm animals. What’s your excuse?
Man’s distinguishing feature is supposedly that he is capable of abstract thought, that he can form ideas and indeed philosophize. “Philosophy” literally means “to love wisdom or truth”. In practice it means thinking clearly, going to the first principles, trying to understand the world and the people in it.
There are millions and millions of people who not only don’t do philosophy but who don’t think at all. They live all their lives without forming a single unique idea. All the positions they do hold, they hold because somebody else told them that this and that was so and so.
If you are reading this you might not actually be one of their number. Maybe you are though. Have you ever done anything like the Meditator does in Descartes’ seminal work? Have you ever, even just for the (dangerous) fun of it, doubted everything you believe to be true? Have you actually gone to the first principles and asked yourself whether something is actually true? Is it likely that it is true? Do you just believe it to be true because it feels good?
Quiet Desperation and Thinking
Henry David Thoreau said that the “mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I think this is also why people don’t think. Thinking at a deep level necessarily implies destroying some of the foundations you walk on every day of your life. People are desperately afraid of that. It doesn’t matter whether they are intellectual types or low-life degenerates, average Joe’s or ambitious business men – this is one of the universal human truths.
It is risky to actually think. You might not fit in, if you come to the conclusion that the perceived wisdom is actually wrong. Even worse: You might learn that you have wasted a whole lot of your very limited existence.
In turn, you also don’t build your life on solid foundations. You don’t live the life that would be best for you, that, in a sense, you were supposed to live. Thus the quiet desperation.
Try and Play Descartes
So play Descartes sometime. You can start small though. As with all habits, the best success comes from using minimal minima and atomic habits. Just make it a habit by doing it a bit every week. Say on Sundays you sit down for 15 minutes, pick a thing you believe, then metaphorically pick it up and observe it from all sides. What is this belief exactly? What does it mean to believe x? Then ask yourself: What is this belief based on? What is the first principle here? Does it hold water? And so on.
People who do read and listen and think a lot also often wonder whether they are actually thinking. Some people feel that all the positions they hold, they merely hold because they heard somebody talk about it on a podcast or read somebody write about it in a book. In fact, most information we acquire we do gather like this.
In her excellent present-historical mystery, The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey had her protagonist Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard go through such an exercise on a specific historical topic. Usually the Inspector hunted down smart criminals in Post-Edwardian London. This time the great bloodhound has a broken leg and is recuperating in a hospital bed. There his investigative instincts are alarmed by some inconsistencies in the famous murder case of the boys in the Tower.
Was Richard III. really this vile, wretched monster of Shakespearian fame? Grant comes to doubt it. He even gets angry at the “Sainted More” whose anti-Ricardian propaganda was fed to him in school.
What can we do then?
What Grant does with that case, we should do as a matter of course with ideas. We can’t all read and write for a living; but we can all read newspapers, websites and blogs from both major political sides. When we find a topic interesting and try to learn about it, we can read two or three books on the subject, covering it from different angles.
Then, once you’re an advanced thinker – and I’m not claiming to be one myself; you can never really know for sure – once you’re an advanced thinker, you will be able to think in a higher way. You will, for instance, find yourself debating different ideas and positions in your head. This is horrible because you have to be a loser. One of your inner selves is going to lose the debate to another one of your inner selves. On the upside, you might also win, at least with one of your debating alter-egos.
This way, you can actually be (somewhat) sure why you believe what you believe, and offer good reasons for it. This is, of course, useful for winning little arguments with friends, family and colleagues. More importantly, you will be able to base your actions and goals in life on solid foundations. You might actually integrate your personality, as the psychologists say, and work in unison with yourself as it were. You might just win in life.
I suggest you try and make it a habit. If you succeed just a bit, you will have already separated yourself from the bovine masses of humankind. If you do it enough, you might also find that in the end you actually discover what it is you’re supposed to do with your life – which will be a tremendous upside when you look back from your death bed…
And don’t wait. Just bloody do it:
Good luck!