Philosophizing
Introduction
In this article, I'm guided by two eminent existential philosophers: Karl Jaspers and Friedrich Nietzsche. They both deeply believed that every person should “philosophize” to live a more prosperous, more authentic life. Jaspers also thought that this approach to philosophizing is a means to transcendence and spirituality.
What Is It
In a way, philosophizing is the act of building a personal philosophy of our existence. That’s a little circular, so let’s deconstruct it a little.
We build our own philosophy by growing our conception and understanding of everything around us and how we fit into it. It’s about thinking through and making sense of how the cosmos functions on a metaphysical level—that is, the nature of reality—in relation to our existence. The branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of reality is metaphysics. Still, in philosophizing, we go beyond and try to understand how our conscious existence fits into that reality.
We can’t just adopt a metaphysical perspective and be done with it. Exploring how we perceive and understand our individual experience with that reality is much more critical.
Existentialists believe that existence precedes essence; we create our own meaning and understanding of nature through actions, decisions, and experiences. For philosophizing, we can adopt this framework, or schema, of the world; however, I caution against buying into it entirely. I balance existentialism against other perspectives, including positivism, spirituality, and rationalism. This is important to remember so as not to fall prey to the postmodernist or nihilist trap.
That being said, philosophizing is an existentialist exercise we can utilize to gain a more profound, more authentic experience. Because of the subjective nature of existentialism, and philosophizing in particular, it's up to us (each individual) to develop our philosophy. It's up to us to understand how we fit into this world. It depends on our individual:
Convictions
Knowledge
Cognition
Emotions
Schemas (mental models)
And more …
As we philosophize, we borrow other thinkers’ models. Still, each of us needs to go through the mental gymnastics of building our own philosophy as a whole—or piecing it all together.
There is also something liberating about philosophizing: we can't be wrong. Our philosophy is our own. To use a phrase I generally abhor (except in this frame): “It's your truth.”
How to Philosophize
It’s challenging to answer the question "how to philosophize." There are infinite ways to approach this problem. I will outline my strategy, which differs from pure existentialists because I dive into metaphysics before contemplating what Jaspers calls “Existenz.” My holistic philosophy of the world alternates between existentialism, positivism, and rationalism. The upside is that we can apply each ideology to the specific case in which it is appropriate, but the downside is that they are not wholly compatible or consistent. While existentialism doesn’t particularly worry about consistency, positivism, and rationalism do. That is, a pure rationalist cannot embrace existentialism, as far as I can see. I remove myself from this consistency constraint in a spiritual-existentialistic fashion (if a bit post-modernistic): actual reality is an enigma with an infinite regress of positivistic and rationalistic riddles to solve. I also incorporate dualism as a super-ontology that allows me to consistently keep competing, non-compatible viewpoints in the two dualist realms.
Ontology
What is the nature of being? How do things exist? We can explore some typical ontological perspectives to help us understand the one we identify with.
Materialism-Realism
Most secular thinkers, biologists, and scientists are natural materialists. They believe that everything can be explained by physical nature. This is a seductive view, which I identify with primarily from a practical standpoint. At its extreme (materialist monism), this ontology stops being valuable because of the complexity of our interwoven cosmos, and I drop this viewpoint. For example, do I believe many natural phenomena can be explained through physics, biology, and evolution? Absolutely. However, I don’t think materialism is sufficient to explain our entire human experience.
Realism is a broader superset of materialism—it states the objective existence of the external world independent of our cognition or presence. Both focus on empirical evidence and scientific inquiry, but realism doesn’t necessarily proscribe that everything can be boiled down to physical entities and processes.
Philosophers: Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels.
Idealism
Idealism argues that nature is fundamentally mental or spiritual. I don’t subscribe to this ontological viewpoint, except, maybe, at its extreme. If you distill nature down to G-d, then idealism might make sense. However, it tells us nothing. If we can’t explain G-d, simply equating reality with G-d in a Spinoza-like fashion doesn’t help us. I would say I don’t identify with idealism in any practical sense.
Philosophers: Plato, George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Hegel.
Relational and Process Ontology
The idea of relational ontology is that we can understand the nature of our cosmos mostly through its relation to its constituent parts. This philosophy treats relations as ontologically primary. Any substance or idea only makes sense as an interplay with other material and conceptions. A subset of this view, known as process ontology, goes further, and things only exist as they change.
Although the roots of process ontology can be traced back to the ancient philosophy of Heraclitus, Alfred North Whitehead and Hartshorne pioneered its modern conception. This philosophy suggests that we can understand nature not as static substances, but as processes, events, and interactions—that the world comprises an ongoing flow of processes. We can define nature as the way these processes interact with one another. Unlike traditional ontology, which focuses on the way things are, this perspective emphasizes how things are becoming—that is, becoming over being.
As far as I currently understand this ontology, I subscribe to it because it’s compatible with dualism, existentialism, and materialism under a certain configuration. More on that later.
Philosophers: Heraclitus, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Gottfried Leibniz, Hegel.
Existentialism
Existentialism is not an ontology; its relevance to ontology is antithetical. Existentialism stands opposed to a universal, non-subjective, understanding of nature and being without placing human existence at the center. Even though I align with existentialist principles in various contexts, I still ground myself in certain ontological structures.
Philosophers: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Kafka.
Dualism
Descartes argued that nature is physical (material) and mental-spiritual. I really identify with this ontology because it allows me to subscribe to materialism while leaving room on the mental-spiritual side, for other types of ontologies. My holistic ontology lends itself to dualism, with the physical side represented by materialism and the mental-spiritual side characterized by a combination of relational ontology and existentialism. That is, dualism, for me, is a super-framework that allows me to hold other and multiple ontological viewpoints for either side of the dualist perspective.
Philosophers: Descartes, Plato, Leibniz, Henry More, John Eccles, Thomas Aquinas.
Summary for Ontology
As an amateur philosopher, I piece together the puzzle of my ontological predisposition:
Dualism allows me to have a separate view of the material and the mental-spiritual spheres.
I naturally rely on materialism as the sub-framework for the material world that holds relational ontology.
For the mental-spiritual world, I lean toward a mix of existentialism and relational ontology—existentialism is the super-framework of relational ontology.
Under this structure, are these ontological philosophies compatible? Dualism creates a nice boundary between materialism and existentialism, which, on their own, are not compatible. As far as I can see, materialism is compatible with relational ontology. Existentialism is not truly compatible with any ontology, so it's relegated to a sub-framework under the mental-spiritual dualist side. In other words, I'm not an existentialist except when it comes to understanding the mental-spiritual world.
Perhaps a studied philosopher would find holes and inconsistencies in my setup, but, for me, it serves its purpose as a model for understanding the world. When someone convinces me of a flaw, I will adjust. Just like anything else, my schema does not stand static.
And that's the point of philosophizing—that we don't need to know everything or be right about everything. We must build the best possible framework that our knowledge, cognition, emotions, and experience allow at the time. We're not trying to write the next great ontological doctrine with universal principles—we're only trying to conceptualize our own personal model.
Determinism
Through the lens of our personal ontological framework, we can explore the question of determinism. The question is simple, but the answer is enigmatic. Do we believe that the world is deterministic and, therefore, we lack free will? Instinctively we may think we have free will, and stand opposed to the deterministic perspective. However, when we question the reason behind any of our choices, we can see a glimpse of deterministic factors that forced our hand, so to speak.
Is it our choice to read this article? A near-infinite set of chain reactions diverged in a symphony of interactions, leading us to this point. For each set of reasons, many branches can spring. Let’s work backward in a hypothetical scenario:
We found this article by googling, “philosophizing,” which depended on:
Our interest in existentialism led us to philosophize
Our knowledge of Google
Our ability to read, write, type
Our sufficient intelligence to be interested in complex subjects like existentialism
…
Let’s break down the reason for one of the above branches: our interest in existentialism:
Learning about it in a philosophy course at University
High school teacher sparked our interest
Someone we were interested in was going to the class
… and further down the line, other reasons and requirements for reading this article:
Our parents needed to exist, meet, etc.
For them to exist required 1,000s of people to mate if we look 10 generations back (let alone the whole of evolutionary history)
We must have been born with specific genetics that allows for a level of intelligence to read, comprehend, etc.
Determinism doesn’t hope to untangle all the reasons behind every decision but suggests that everything in this world is pre-arranged in this way. Determinism is the most consistent view from a purely materialistic ontology. There is also something beautiful about connecting our decision to read an article with the whole cosmos, starting with the big bang.
Despite determinism’s seduction, it can become as dangerous as any ideology that’s taken to the extreme. Karl Marx's deterministic vision of the proletarian revolution manifested in the death and destruction of hundreds of millions of people. Communism is a purely deterministic ideology with materialism built into it: a centrally planned (determined) economy, the inevitable revolution of the proletariat, the lack of freedom of the individual, etc. Pure determinism also raises a number of ethical and moral dilemmas. We may ask a poignant, if not amateurish, question “if we don’t have free agency, why should we punish criminals?”
My ontological framework puts certain guardrails on determinism. First, I relegate determinism only to the material side of the dualist ontology. Second, under the scope of relational (and process) ontology, I recognize the incomprehensibility and impracticality of determinism in the material world. Although the material world may function deterministically, the infinite set of reasons for any one thing makes it impossible to utilize in any practical or ideological sense. In other words, even pure materialists should live their lives as if determinism is not the guiding principle despite believing it is so. However, I’m not a pure materialist. I think that the mental-spiritual side of dualism has an influence on the material-deterministic world. Any influence by a non-deterministic agent on a deterministic one converts the deterministic one into a non-deterministic one. Non-determinism overrides determinism with a single touch.
I’m not going to go into the details, but if we take out the “spiritual” from the mental-spiritual side of dualism, we devolve back to determinism. The only way to escape the deterministic death grip is to introduce the infinite—G-d. If we don’t introduce G-d into the picture, our only other option is to ignore any practical implications of determinism because of its complexity.
Objective vs. Subjective Experience
By now, it’s clear how certain ontological views, especially when taken at the extreme, necessarily follow to determinism or free will. This also applies to objectivism vs. subjectivism. A materialist-fundamentalist will likely adopt determinism and objectivism, while a pure existentialist would necessarily adopt free will and subjectivity as a framework. Similarly, a realist will tend to objectivity, while a constructivist will tend to subjectivity naturally.
I think a more nuanced ontology like mine makes enough space not to be subjected to any particular ideology. For example, as a realist-materialist on the physical side of dualism, I can adopt a more deterministic-objective perspective, while still leaving room for free will, subjectivity, and spirituality on the mental-spiritual side. It allows me to accept the tenets of materialism in many areas of my understanding while leaving some space for non-deterministic particulars. For example, I do not believe in a deterministic future, while I subscribe to material determinism for physics, chemistry, and evolution.
Philosophizing Summary
Piecing together our own ontology and views on metaphysical topics like determinism initiates our journey, providing us with a basic framework; however, we should apply such rigor and thought to concerns we encounter in life. Some topics that we may want to formulate a cohesive model over include:
Existentialism — individual and existential challenges
Transcendence and Spirituality
History
Community
Psychology
Ethics and humanity
Technology and Science
and Philosophy itself: ontology, epistemology, ethics.
We can think of philosophizing as a way of getting in touch and parsing out a sensical personal paradigm on various topics. We should try to do this with the natural rhythm of life. When we face challenges in our relationships, we should formulate our views on psychology and communication; when we're torn by politics, we should build on our historical, ethical, and community understanding. As we face life's unpredictable unraveling, we should apply these tools to build a coherent comprehension of that experience. In part, that's what it meant for Nietzsche to live an authentic life.
