I. Deadness in Discipline
In 2026, philosophy is a science of argumentation.
A “good” philosopher is someone who can write a tight stack of propositions that build up to a valid and sound argument. Or someone who can take someone else’s stack of propositions or premises, analyze its language, and poke a hole in one of them, showing the original philosopher why their argument cannot hold and why the reader should therefore choose to believe the other’s argument.
And I don’t know about you, but that seems to me like a deeply unhappy profession. Sure, it comes with building up your ego, especially if your argument is the one whose logic feels impenetrable. But the fact that the sentence “the present king of france is bald” lacks truth-value is “philosophy” now shows that, in today’s day and age, it has become a discipline of specialists who hide in “small rooms built by quick answers rather than seeking spaces created by open questions,” as once put by Merlin Sheldrake in a wonderful but unrelated text called Entangled Life. Analytic philosophy feels very loveless.
And that goes against the entire purpose of what philosophy is supposed to be, at least according to the Ancients. Because according to them, philosophy was not supposed to be a way to formulate abstract theories that no one cares about, or untestable debates with two sides grasping for their premises. Ancient thinkers, from Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Zhuangzi in the east to Socrates, Plato, and Epictetus in the west, treated philosophy as a way to transform how we live, help us question life’s assumptions, and achieve mental clarity so we can live good and happy lives.
II. The Ancient Art of Loving Wisdom
Philosophy’s etymology is broken down into: Philo + sofia. Philo means wisdom, and sofia means love. Therefore philosophy was a discipline related to the “love of wisdom” Why do we love wisdom? Or want to love wisdom?
Aristotle says philosophy is founded in wonder. But philosophy started way before Aristotle. The original philosophers were actually more like scientists. They’re generally known as the “pre-socratics.” We’ll talk more about Socrates in a second, but they’re called pre-socratics because they came before Socrates––which just goes to show how important of a figure Socrates was/is in Western Philosophy.
So, these presocratics––like Thales, Parmenides, and Heraclitus (my personal favorite)––were scientists because they were curious about how the mechanisms of the natural world around them worked. That curiosity sparked them to start creating theories about the world, human knowledge, and humans’ relationships with the divine. For example, Heraclitus thought that the fundamental building block of the world was fire; for him, fire wasn’t just a physical element, it explained the world’s ultimate reality: constant change, the raging energy of the universe, and the interconnected of the cosmos––everything ultimately blending together. “Everything flows.” Philosophy here is already starting to try to provide mental clarity. Knowing how things work, even if that knowledge tells us that chaos rules over everything like our friend Heraclitus thought, gives us mental clarity, and peace of mind perhaps.
Then came Socrates. Despite never having written anything down, Socrates has managed to remain deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness. Although Socrates never wrote anything down, his best student, Plato did. Plato wrote dialogues, but he never wrote of himself speaking; Socrates was always the one of the interlocutors.
These dialogues usually go like this:
Socrates approaches someone who is supposed to be an expert in something. For example, one of the five Greek cardinal virtues: Courage, Temperance, Piety, Wisdom, and Justice––these are excellences in human character that we want to live by
For example, in the Euthyphro, Socrates speaks to Euthyphro about piety because he is a priest, someone who is supposed to be an expert about it
Socrates asks the alleged expert to define the particular virtue or terms at hand
Then Socrates sees if that definition holds water.
The interlocutor tries again
Socrates refutes with logic if inconsistent
They go around and around and typically end in aporia, or a state of puzzlement or impasse.
Now you might be thinking that that kind of sounds like what I was describing earlier in analytic philosophies, but the thing is, the aims of the two inquiries are very different. Because Socrates’ aim in all these dialogues is to show the person he’s speaking to that their system of beliefs about a certain virtue is inconsistent. That inconsistency means that they’re living an unexamined life.
In his defense of himself before his condemnation to death, Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living”. Plato and Socrates took that to heart; Plato’s dialogues cover a ton of ground, from the virtues, to perception, to mathematics, to memory and the afterlife. In fact, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in his 1929 book Process and reality wrote that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
The dialogues demonstrate that a life worth living is one of intellectual clarity, of good actions, which Socrates believed happened by way of good beliefs. In them, Socrates is, in an aggressive and maybe curt way, promoting intellectual humility––Socrates said “I know in knowing I know nothing”––examining your own personal beliefs to do away with irrational ones and finding a consistency system you use to live your life, so you have guidance. Socrates espoused that that is what the love of wisdom is.
And Socrates died for this. He was such a nuisance to people in power in ancient Athens that they prosecuted him on trumped up charges, which he skillfully dismantles with his classic Socratic method in the Apology (comes from the Greek Apologia, which means defense not petition for forgiveness). But he was condemned to death nonetheless. In the Crito dialogue, a follower of his tells him that they can get him out of prison before he dies but Socrates says he’s not afraid of death and that if he can’t go on living as he was before, then he doesn’t want to live. The Love part of philosophy implies passion, energy, interest, excitement. Dying for your beliefs definitely conveys that. I don’t know how many philosophers nowadays would die for their philosophical beliefs. And that’s because in academia, philosophy is a major, a job, a discipline. But philosophy is supposed to serve as a practical guide for the human soul.
III. Philosophy as a Guide to Happiness
We may think, with more public dialogue than ever surrounding mental health and well-being, that the pursuit for happiness is a contemporary phenomenon. But, in fact, after Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, people really bought into “eudaimonistic theories” of happiness, theories of living a good and happy life. So in Hellenistic times all across Europe and the Middle East (323-32 BC), a bunch of schools of philosophy started popping up: Hedonism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, Skepticism, Stoicism, and on and on. And people, like they do with colleges or sports teams, picked a school, learned its philosophy, and followed its principles in order to live “good lives.” Therefore, philosophy programs haven’t been focused on “philosophy” for a long time. If they did, they would be teaching us all these systems and preparing us to live good and happy lives. I was lucky to have a “history of ancient western philosophy” course in my time as an undergraduate. And at first I was totally disillusioned with it. I had heard the names Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle before and I knew I was going to have to learn about these old guys and that it was going to be like a boring history class. But then in my first class, my wonderful professor hit us with this question:
Why are you here at this college?
Maybe you’d respond that you’re here because you want to study x.
Then I’d ask why do you want to study x
Maybe you’d respond that you want to study x because you want to get a job
Why do you want to get a job
Because you want to be able to get a house
Why do you want to get a house?
And that will go on and on until we eventually bottom out at the answer:
“Well, because I want to live a good life.”
And then who is the asshole who is going to ask, “why do you want to live a good life?”
In some way, shape, or form, the answer to the purpose of life lies in some category of what we consider to be a good life. Maybe it’s fulfillment and meaning, or usefulness and contribution, connection and compassion, pleasure and passion. But we don’t question that we want some sense of happiness or fulfillment. And ancient philosophy established systems that we can use to find that. Like cultures or religions, philosophies established systems of value, of ethics, and of action that guided people through life. One of the people who made this notion not only real but totally alive and beautiful for me––the person who unkilled or resuscitated philosophy for me––is Marcus Aurelius.
IV. Marcus Aurelius and the Forgotten Purpose of Philosophy
Marcus Aurelius is a second century CE Roman Emperor who ruled from 161-180 CE. He was the last ruler known as the Five Good Emperors and the last emperor of Pax Romana, an age of relative peace, calm, and stability from the Roman republic. Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic. Stoicism has gone from being totally misunderstood as a machista, stiff upper lip philosophy to quite popular in contemporary culture. But Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations changed everything for me, and made me into a Stoic, too. The Meditations are essentially his diary. Scholars agree that Marcus wrote for his own moral improvement, to remind himself of and render concrete the Stoic doctrines he wanted to live by. When I first heard of it, I thought it was going to be another interesting, sure, but dry philosophical treatise like Kant or Russell. but it is the exact opposite. Besides the first book where he thanks various relatives and teachers, the Meditations starts like this (using the Gregory Hays translation, which is the best one):
1. When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own–not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions. In the Meditations, we get to watch Marcus trying to live according to his stoic virtues. He mentally prepares himself to deal with what comes his way, like in that first aphorism or in this one:
At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work – as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for Dash the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under blankets and stay warm?
- But it’s nicer here…
So you’re going to feel “nice?? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants, spiders and bees going about their individual tasks putting the world in order, especially can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do with nature demands?
- But we have to sleep sometime….
Agreed. But nature has a limit on that – hesitate on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. They are still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Where are you love your nature to, and what it demands of you.
For Marcus and the other ancients, philosophy was an agogē, a way of life. But after the turn of the 20th century, philosophy became a space where modern mathematical logic is applied to solve philosophical problems, through words or symbols.
In college, I majored in literature and philosophy, and I declared my major in philosophy before I had even taken a philosophy class. Maybe that was a little mad––although it worked out wonderfully for my academic journey––but I did it because when I read, the things i liked most besides the beauty of language and interesting new ways of viewing the world through unique images and metaphors. In the poetics, Aristotle said that good comparisons are “the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances” (XXII 10 104).
But what I loved most was when texts engaged with the fundamental questions of being, living, existing, etc.; when they showed me a way, and it was only in studying ancient philosophy, not modern or contemporary philosophy, that I found that guidance. So, if you want philosophy to feel like a compass to guide you in the modern world, you have to turn away from modern philosophy and look to the ancients. Earl Sweatshirt, one of my favorite rappers, in his EP Solace says “time waits for no man and death waits with cold hands / I’m the youngest old man that ya know / If ya soul intact, let me know.” And I think that the only way to know that, the state of your inner self–-regardless whether you believe in a substantive or insubstantive soul––you have to examine it. Look inward to look outward.
Because, as Marcus says,
7. Human life
Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of the body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting fame: uncertain. Sum up: the body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and most, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion. Then what can guide us? Only philosophy.