Interlocking ideas, interlocking questions

What is real? What can we know? How do our ideas and thoughts relate to what they are ideas and thoughts of? How should we think of the mind? Against the background of what assumptions do such questions even make sense?  What can be hope for? How should I live?

    Being in the world, we cannot avoid such questions. Or rather, avoiding them means accepting answers thoughtlessly. We answer the questions in the form our lives take whether we think about them or not. 

    You can’t answer one of these questions without answering the other one, and others besides these two. More precisely, ideas about the limits of what can be real condition our ideas about what we can know (and understand, interpret, judge, feel – the entire intellect), and both relate to ideas of what language is and how it connects to realty; what the human mind or  intellect is; about what human beings are, and more. 

     If you think the only things that can be real are the things that can be known by science, you won’t believe you really love your children, because you will only believe you see the world right when the scientific method justifies your beliefs - and there is no way to find love real within science. At the most expansive science would reduce love of children to something evolutionary that the survival of the species, not a finding someone's existence good and wonderful. 

     If you pursue a career because it affords money and status, as a means to the end of money and status, you have also answered all the questions through that choice. Having make your life choices, your answers if you were asked and wanted to give an answer, would conform with those prior life choices. They would be unreflective justifications of those choices in all likelihood. 

   Philosophy is not about validating your choices, preferences, identity, or religion. It can get uncomfortable because it can undermine the kind of account that justifies a life devoted to things like wealth and status - or to latching on to an identity. The wise person loves to be corrected. Philosophy frees you to think about your life from a higher perspective. It orients you away from the self and toward what is truly good, toward truth.