How did we get here?

About three years ago, my lifelong friend Richard started saying indecipherable gibberish to me in school. He was speaking passionately about these people whose names I had never heard before, alongside words like “ego” and “ideology” and all this nonsense. I was confused, as I was not able to see where any of this came from. As far as I knew back then, he was a person solely devoted to the study of the natural sciences. It turned out that he had discovered this person named Slavoj Žižek, whose writings utterly captivated him. This was my first introduction to the world of philosophy.

Richard convinced me try out this “philosophy” thing for myself. I have always been a big reader since childhood, so the literature itself did not appear daunting to me. What was daunting, however, was the sheer amount of history in the field of philosophy. It appeared to me that if one wanted to learn a certain topic or read a certain philosopher they are interested it, they must read this prerequisite philosopher who inspired that philosopher, but in order to read this prerequisite philosopher, they must first read this philosopher who came before them too, and so on and so on, until they end up with this massive catalog of books they must read before they even start to learn what they are actually interested in. It seemed to me an impossible task. I started reading Plato’s Republic, a book presented as an introductory philosophical reading for many, but found it utterly boring and its contents not at all applicable to modern society.

Eventually, after doing research online, I stumbled upon Immanuel Kant. I was primarily interested in ethics, so Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals seemed like it was a good text to start with. After all, it was only around 30 pages in length. So, I found a PDF online and started to read. This text changed my life. Just as Kant was awakened from his “dogmatic slumber” by reading the works of David Hume, so was I by reading the Groundwork. The intuitive logic grounded in pure reason was just what I was looking for in an ethical study. The text also opened the doors to other philosophical studies, and before long I was well on my way to reading Kant’s other works on metaphysics and epistemology too.

I have since gone to the US to study high school, and to continue my journey in philosophy. This blog is for me to put down my thoughts any time I want. Sometimes the entries will be long, and sometimes they will be very short. But they all trace themselves back to that day when my friend randomly brought up Žižek to me, the day that will stay with me forever.

(I still do not know anything about Žižek, though. If you want to read someone’s writings about Žižek and other incoherent ramblings about continental philosophy, maybe consider reading Richard’s blog.)