I Don’t Know Where to Take Philosophy Anymore

From Flourishing to Floundering — What’s the Right Path?

There seems to be a lull in this great historical moment of philosophy. Our world is changing more rapidly than it ever has before — in just a flash, there could be a new world order.

A few years ago, when I began my journey into really “studying” philosophy, I was focused on issues of the self.

To me, the inquiry that dragged me into philosophy was ethics — asking myself what it meant to truly live a good life.

This served me well for a while and I had a blast studying the Stoics, Epicurus, Aristotle, Plato and Socrates.

But there was something yearning at the back of my mind and I couldn’t escape it.

It kept saying the thing that philosophers love to ask, “Why?”

Why, indeed. Why should I focus so much on living a good life when I’m not even sure what the “I” is anymore? And yet, in modern times, this “I” seems to be a given — “I am Me.”

This fascination lead me into investigating “Being” and what it means to be. Thus, I found myself exploring Existentialism. I’m currently working through Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, but to me, it all seems irrelevant.

Instead of investigating a remote philosophical topic, allow me to investigate myself and why I feel this distance from a practice I once loved.