Philosophy
Aristotle
Philosophy is often misunderstood as an abstract discipline, remote from the concerns of everyday life. In fact, it is one of the oldest and most sustained attempts to address precisely the questions that trouble us most: How should I live? What does it mean to flourish as a human being? To live a good life?
These are by no means exclusively modern questions. Plato and Aristotle were already asking them 2400 years ago, and their answers remain remarkably useful, much more than some contemporary approaches.
For Aristotle, for example, human life should be organized in terms of eudaimonia, a word often translated as flourishing or living well. This was not a private, inner state but an active condition: a life lived in accordance with one's capacities, engaged in the world with others, and pursuing what was considered genuinely valuable.
Crucially, Aristotle understood that this kind of life involves all dimensions of the human being: reason, emotions, habits, and character, working together rather than in opposition.
Kant continued this long line of practical philosophical inquiry by focusing on what it means to act freely, i.e., with genuine integrity. His insight was that a truly human life is not one that merely responds to impulse or social pressure, but one in which a person becomes, in some meaningful sense, the author of their own choices. To live well, for Kant, is to live from a place of inner freedom and moral seriousness, which can be summarized into two broad life principles: we must perfect ourselves, both physically and morally, and we must help others in their pursuit of happiness. Kant arguably introduced the most important turning point in western philosophy and completely revolutionized the way we think.
Immanuel Kant
Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger
Husserl and Heidegger, following Kant's footsteps, brought philosophy closer to lived experience by developing and further expanding respectively what is known as phenomenology, a theoretical framework that builds on Kant's philosophical innovations. Husserl insisted on returning to things as they are actually experienced in consciousness, before theory and habit obscure them and hide their true being.
Heidegger went further, contending that the study of being (how things truly are) first required an analysis of the being to which truth is revealed, namely, us human beings or Dasein. This means that in order to understand what things are, even how we are, we need to confront the full weight of our own life conditions, such as its finitude, its possibilities, our projects, its irreducibly personal character. For Heidegger, most of us spend much of our lives in a kind of drift, absorbed in what everyone else does and thinks, rarely stopping to ask what we ourselves actually are, how we understand ourselves and being. Philosophical phenomenology had a huge impact on the development of psychological theories, and most of today's approaches rely on these sometimes-misunderstood philosophies
What unites these thinkers and other great philosophers across their many differences is the conviction that philosophical reflection is not a luxury but a necessity for living a truly good life. As Socrates famously stated, "an unexamined life is not worth living", and the past 2500 years of western philosophy have been in great part an effort to examine life and make it worth living.
My practice draws on this long tradition. Philosophy, understood in this way, is not a set of abstract problems used to appear smart and win meaningless after-dinner debates: it is a discipline of honest questioning and working, one that has been refining its tools for over two thousand years, where no stone of human life has been left unturned. Many tools are already at our disposal; what matters is being able to use them for our own sake, and that is an important part of my job.
