I am dedicated to lived philosophy — philosophy that applies to and matters in everyday life. Now, of course, anyone who has read philosophy will know that a larger part of philosophy has been written as systematic and logical studies of complex and sometimes eternal questions that is stuck inside its inner discourse, with little relevance to lived life.
So, is it just a matter of finding the right texts, and you will learn about what it takes to live well? It is not that simple. Even the most theoretical and difficult discussions can contain — and do contain — ideas that can expand one’s subjective worldview in profound ways.
It is more a question of how you read philosophical texts. I learned an important lesson from a philosophy teacher at the Critical Academy in Helsinki: read a few pages of any text that lands in front of you carefully, and check whether a sentence here or a paragraph there creates a shift in you. If you find that, the text is worth pursuing.
At a philosophical counsellor training, I learned something else valuable: you don’t need to read a full, eye-wateringly dense book by a philosopher to gain useful insight from their texts. You can benefit from focusing on a short segment, a fragment, if you will, and reading it really carefully.
Here is how I do it. I pick up a passage that speaks to me intuitively. It begs me to stop and reflect. I will read the passage several times first. Then I will read it part by part, just a sentence or a thought at a time, and I will formulate it in my own words. I take notes on what I discover. When I have worked through the fragment that way, I will at the end summarise the most useful idea that I learned from it and how it applies to whatever I am engaging with in life or how it sits together with other stuff I’ve learned.
Sometimes I go through a book, look for bits that speak to me, and highlight them. Then, later, I go through the highlighted passages one by one, and what may have been a difficult book to start with can become a cornucopia of practical wisdom.
Of course, this does not yield a systematic review of a philosopher’s thoughts, but it does give you something that you can work with in real life. It gives you lived philosophy.
