Original subtitles

Hi everyone, in this video I will tell you the story of human philosophy

encompassing an incredible 2500 years of philosophical history.

By the end of this video, you will know all the basic philosophical ideas

schools approaches as well as some of the most influential philosophers from

around the world. The video has 4 major parts and each with 2-3 sections, just

like chapters in books.

In part 1, I'll answer the most fundamental question, why are humans the

only species that have invented philosophy?

Or where does philosophy really come from? Also, how has philosophy evolved

in the past 2500 years?

and why philosophy has so many branches such as ontology, epistemology,

rationalism, parasitism, humanism, utilitarianism, existentialism,

postmodernism and more.

In part 2, I will look at the origins and differences between eastern

philosophy and western philosophy, why one emphasises spirituality and changing

yourself while the other emphasises rationality and changing the world.

I will look at the Greek giants of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as well as

the three giants of eastern philosophy, the Buddha, Lao Tzu and Confucius. In

part 3, I will look at the philosophy of life in human civilization.

Is the purpose of human civilization to promote equality or competition?

Is the purpose of human life to seek knowledge or happiness?

I will discuss philosophers such as Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Jean

-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon,

Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Bertrand Russell. In part 4, I will

tackle the question of knowledge and human motivation.

How do we know reality?

I'll discuss a school of European rationalism versus British empiricism

and Kant's reconciliation of the two. After Kant, two distinct schools of

philosophy emerged to explain human motivation.

One sociological and one psychological.

Hegel's sociological philosophy argue we are motivated by historical forces.

while Schopenhauer's psychological philosophy argue we are motivated by a

blind subconscious will.

So get yourself a strong cup of coffee and some popcorn and let fiction beats

take you on a journey of how homo sapiens' huge brain terrified their tiny

heart. As a result, they invented all sorts of beasts from gods to demons to

fairies in an attempt to comfort themselves and explain the world.

But also invented philosophy to answer three deep existential questions.

Why am I here? Where have I come from? And where am I going?

To answer your first question, you are here because you are curious about

philosophy. So let's begin.

What is philosophy?

How did we come about it? And why do we need it?

And what has happened to philosophy today?

And what's the future of philosophy?

Today I'll answer all these questions as I discuss the rise and fall of human

philosophy. We humans utilize three massive weapons to navigate the world

around us. And they're all built in inside us.

As a result, we humans are the most sophisticated animal that has ever lived

on earth, which is incredible.

Next time someone complains about the world being unfair, remind them of these

amazing tools that every human has, while other animals don't have all of

them. What are they?

Like all animals, the first and most important tool is instinct, which most

of the time subconsciously shapes our behaviour.

We have three basic instincts.

Food, sex, company.

Our first and most important instinct is survival.

We spend a minimum of eight hours or one third of a day working to earn bread.

Imagine we didn't have this instinct.

How would you motivate yourself to work? Or worse still, how would you motivate

others to work?

Our survival instinct goes beyond food.

We instinctively avoid danger and anything that threatens our life.

Do you think what happened to creatures who didn't have survival instinct?

They needed a self-help book to motivate themselves.

After working 8 hours in the evenings, we spend hours prowling our city centre

bars and restaurants in search of a mate or courting a mate.

This is the instinct to procreate.

Of course, nowadays we chase a mate for recreational purposes.

The sexual urge is so strongly wired in us, especially men, that we do it

despite the fact that most of us have no plan to have children.

The giant panda is going extinct because they have become too lethargic to have

sex, so the Chinese government spends lots of money to make more pandas.

Imagine our ancestors didn't want to procreate. We wouldn't be here.

Our third most basic instinct is seeking the company of other humans.

While men have a stronger sexual urge, women have a stronger urge for company.

Without this instinct, we would all end up alone and perhaps would never have a

civilization. Basically, our instincts tell us what to do most of the time. So

we don't have to really think about it or twist our brain to motivate ourselves

to do these things.

We instinctively seek food, a partner and the company of other people, which

allow our conscious brain to save energy on something else.

The second weapon in how we navigate life is our emotions.

which fluctuates day to day and allows us to understand ourselves and those

around us.

Our emotions give us hints about our environment.

Depending on the time and place, we feel angry, sad, frightened, content, happy

and ecstatic.

If instincts are like climate that remains stable long term, our emotions

are like weather that regulates our daily life.

Our instinctive urges push us to do things to achieve what we want. want.

But our environment says yes or no.

For example, seeking a partner, we want someone, but that person wants someone

else. Here comes our emotions to allow us cope with this failure.

Or worse still, our survival is threatened.

Our emotions allow us to cope.

So emotions allow us to grow, change and adapt to a new place or a person

somewhat quickly. Our emotions are incredibly powerful in motivating us to

do things right away.

Negative or positive emotions help us grow and move on and seek a better

environment. In fact, one of the reasons humans conquered the world is because we

are not happy where we are for a long time.

Apart from seeking food and safety, we are also motivated by boredom. So our

emotions give our conscious mind more free time to do other things.

Instead, our emotions do the job for us in motivating us to move, grow and

change.

Our third and perhaps the most sophisticated weapon we have is reason,

which is the basis of science and technology, which allows civilizations

to flourish.

This makes us different from other animals, our ability to make rational

decisions based on informed knowledge and calculated risk.

Instinct and emotions are hardwired in us from birth, but rationality is mostly

learned through direct experience of our own as well as knowledge passed on from

our parents and ancestors, either orally or in writing.

In fact, our rationality is so powerful that it can regulate our instinct and

emotions. For example, our ability to delay gratification allows us to forgo

our present pleasures for future and long-term pleasure.

Of course, not all humans are born equal when it comes to delayed gratification.

Some want their cake right away, some can wait a bit longer.

But rationality is an incredible tool for us to look long term, not just here

and now. Today we live in a modern world or in the age of rationality. All our

modern technological conveniences are the result of rational science.

To sum up, humans are hardwired with three incredible tools, instincts,

emotions and reason.

But where does philosophy fit in this?

The word philosophy in Greek means the love of wisdom. So the first true human

science was philosophy.

In fact, philosophers were the first rational thinkers who replaced the wise

old men or women. They were career thinkers, meaning they were known for

their thoughts and wisdoms. So philosophy at its core is a structured

rational thinking.

In other words, its foundation is rationality.

Why? We humans developed a more sophisticated brain. Perhaps the

discovery of fire allowed us to cook our food. So we could digest our food much

quicker. As a result, we had more time to think.

When you're busy, you have no time to think. In fact, I do my thinking while

in the toilet because I don't have my smartphone with me.

But this brain, good in many ways, also came with a disadvantage.

It allows us to develop acute consciousness or self-awareness.

The more we understand our environment and our own existence, the more we start

to brood and ask difficult questions.

One reason today we control our brain by keeping ourselves busy or hooked on

something, like work or entertainment or smartphone.

But with this thinking brain came the most devastating awareness of all,

death. Other animals might know death when it comes to them, so they

instinctively avoid danger.

But we human beasts know death from an early age.

As rational animals, we learn from the past to anticipate the future. In other

words, we anticipate death.

Despite trying not to think about it, we have this fear in the back of our mind.

So this brain of ours became powerful enough to ask important questions.

Why are we here?

What is reality and how we know it?

Early humans couldn't explain the world, life, the things around them, especially

the sun, the light, seasons, thunder, fire, etc.

But the most important question was why death?

This is the main theme of the oldest surviving human story, the epic of

Gelgamesh, written 3 or 4 thousand years ago in which the hero is seeking

immortality. But unfortunately he fails. So to console himself, he builds a city

so people could remember him.

Other humans invented gods and religions as security blankets.

In fact the fear of death is so strong in humans that nearly every religion has

extended life to afterlife.

So death couldn't scare us anymore.

You could say that human life is so short that we have to have an afterlife.

However, today most people don't believe in afterlife.

Politically or practically, early human societies were ruled by its strongest

among them, or a group of strong men.

Then through the passage of time, generations later, myths, legends and

stories about these strong people were created.

As time passed, these legends and myths gave these early strong people titanic

godlike roles.

As Italo Calavino once said, folk tales are told and retold so many times that

they become like pebbles, smooth, shiny and perfect.

Of course, the earliest gods were usually non-human phenomena such as the

sun, thunder, light, dark, earth and so forth. But over time, they took a semi

-human form.

Later these ideas became more sophisticated in the form of religion

that told sophisticated stories about the origin of life and also explained

death through afterlife, resurrection or reincarnation. But philosophers tried to

explain without relying on gods and the supernatural.

So they used reason to ask two important questions, which became the two main

pillars of philosophy.

One, what's really out there and two, how we know it. So Ontology asks what's

reality and what things exist or don't exist.

And epistemology asks how we know the world.

So philosophy became a rational tool for humans to understand the world, the

meaning of life and how to navigate the world correctly.

So early philosophers studied all sciences, from stars to frogs and

everything in between.

But if you bold it down, the three main subjects for philosophers were the

physical world, the origin of life and the human mind.

In other words, what is the world and how does it work?

What is life and how it works? And what is human mind and how does it work?

So remember, these three main topics also play philosophy's own downfall. As

time passed, philosophy became too big and too sophisticated so it gave birth

to other disciplines.

In 15th and 16th century Europe, the first baby was born.

For example, Galileo, Copernicus and Newton were the pioneers of physics, so

physicists took over the job of studying the world, the universe, stars, planets

and matter as a whole.

A big load was off the philosophers shoulders and now they focused more on

metaphysics, i.e. the meaning of life and the property of the human mind.

Then in the 18th and 19th century, however, another baby was born. Biology

took over the job of studying life.

philosophers no longer needed to dissect frogs or understand the human body.

An important biologist was Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution by

natural selection revolutionized everything we know about life and its

origin. So philosophers were left only to focus on the human mind.

But unfortunately, they would snatch that away from philosophers too.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, philosophy gave birth to its

last baby.

We call it psychology that took over the job of studying the human mind.

Two big names are Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who both placed importance on the

subconscious, the unconscious mind, as greater motivation in human behaviour.

So philosophers didn't have to diagnose the human mind anymore.

Phew. For centuries, philosophers were doing the jobs of four people. A

physicist, a biologist, a psychologist and a philosopher.

Now they could enjoy a bit more free time and just sit in their comfy chairs

and be philosophers.

After all, everyone has to retire at some point.

But retirement is a tough period in anyone's life.

Without things to do, you either face an existential crisis or become lazy and

rot away.

So today philosophers have become a bit lazy on the whole.

But also they are a bit out of touch because physics, biology and psychology

have become too specialized.

So philosophers don't have the time to rigorously study all three disciplines.

Also they don't want to get their hands dirty dissecting frogs or spending hours

staring at a telescope to study the stars or spend time with mentally ill

patients. So the big question is, what is the purpose of philosophy today?

Should it unify physics, biology and psychology once again? Or should it find

a new path for itself?

Nietzsche, the first to fully diagnose the problem of Western philosophy, took

philosophy back to the cave through his Zoroastrian, who instead of prophesying

for a single god and the divine, tell us about a new type of human, Übermensch,

who instead of following social values, create new ones through their artistic

and philosophical works.

Like the early humans who went to the cave to gain wisdom.

Nietzsche criticised philosophy for being too rational, not passionate

enough. Philosophy is an old man who has produced many amazing kids and now feels

lost for a purpose.

Why? It's very simple.

It lacks passion.

Philosophy started as a rational tool but it was also its downfall. As we saw,

science like physics, biology took over the rational side of philosophy and

psychology took over the irrational side of philosophy, to put it very crudely.

What is left?

Not much.

Is philosophy completely doomed?

Well, not quite. I have an answer.

Earlier I mentioned the three big human weapons, instincts, emotions and reason.

Biology and psychology are taking care of the instinct and the unconscious.

Literature takes care of the human emotions through storytelling.

And science takes care of reason.

So is philosophy without a chair now?

Not quite.

My solution is human intuition.

There you go.

A new philosophy should be based on human intuition.

What is intuition?

In a nutshell, instincts are mostly unconscious, reason is mostly conscious,

and emotions are somewhere in the middle.

Where does intuition fit in? It is somewhere between instinct, the hard

rock foundation, and reason, the hard rock roof over your head. So intuition

is fluid between two solid surfaces.

and also right next to emotions which is very volatile and even more fluid.

Intuition is a layer deeper than rationality and a level above instinct.

So the new philosophy should be based on intuition because it has direct access

to instinct but also reason. So in a way it fits right between the unconscious

psychology and the conscious rational sciences like physics and biology.

Scientists don't utilize intuition so it's a perfect tool for philosophy to

understand and explain the world.

Why intuition?

An intuition-based philosophy can equip us with a better weapon to cope with

suffering. Rationality through sciences provide us with security, physical

utility and comfort through medicine and technology, like a traditional father

would. Science builds your house, produces your food and clothes.

Emotions provide you with love and care like a traditional mother would, which

is literature and stories.

Intuition provides you with the ability to have insights, original ideas,

inventiveness, and the ability to connect dots so you have a goal or

mission in your life, or relevance in society.

Intuition is fast, snappy, and in-the-moment insight, or genius, that

allows societies to move forward.

In fact, most inventions and discoveries can be attributed to intuition, not

rational thinking.

Reason is slow, instinct is too rigid, and emotions cloud your judgment in the

moment. But intuition is hit and miss.

When it hits, it sparks a new light.

So, is there a philosopher who bases his philosophy on intuition?

I'm glad you asked.

Yes there is.

Henri Bergson, a French philosopher argued that intuition can vitalize life

and give us a new spark.

As Nietzsche argued, reason-based philosophy has become too stale. For

Bergson, intuition is the closest thing to a direct experience of something.

For example, if you want to know a city, you can read all the maps and

photographs of the buildings.

But it cannot be as good as if you walk the streets of that city.

For example, you can never fully convey the taste of an apple to someone who has

never eaten an apple.

That intuitive experience is the closest we humans get to experiencing the taste

of an apple.

So intuition takes us back to our nature, while reason is moving us away

from nature.

Of course, Bergson is famous for his philosophy of time, creativity and

humor. He thought intuition and life go together.

We know reason tries to tame our natural instincts and emotions.

Rightly so, but it can also go too far in taming us into a docile animal with

no vitality.

Bergson's philosophy is called vitalism because he wanted to liberate us from

the chain of reason.

So philosophy started as a rational tool to understand the world, life and the

human mind.

Then it gave away those roles to physicists, biologists and

psychologists. Now it's almost become redundant so we need a new intuitive

philosophy. But to really understand philosophy and where it stands today, we

need to know the history of philosophy, its various schools, approaches,

eastern, western, humanists, animalists, rationalists, empiricists, social

philosophy versus individual philosophy.

So in the following episodes, I will go through human philosophy to give you an

overview of the entire 2500 years of human philosophy.

Next, I will explain some of the common philosophical terms like what is the

difference between ontology and epistemology, physics and metaphysics.

rationalism vs empiricism, humanism vs utilitarianism, existentialism vs

postmodernism and more. Stay tuned.

Thank you for watching.

Previously I discussed that philosophy at its core deals with two fundamental

questions. What is and how we know it. Those two questions in turn lead to

other questions like how we should live our lives.

So in this segment, I'll look at some important philosophical terms, questions

and various branches of philosophy.

For example, what are the differences between ontology and epistemology?

Or between reason and logic? Or between humanism and utilitarianism? Or between

existence existentialism and postmodernism? What is metaphysics?

What is the difference between rationalism and empiricism?

And what is phenomenology? And most importantly, why we grapple with the

biggest question today between egalitarianism and elitism.

Ontology versus epistemology.

Early philosophy was based on two main questions.

What is reality, which became ontology, and how we know it, which is

epistemology. So ontology asks what is and what is not.

And epistemology asks how we know the thing that exists or does not exist.

For example, according to ontological philosophy, humans are either animals or

not animals.

If not animals, therefore humans are sacred and fundamentally valuable.

It is accepted as a foundation based on your beliefs, so murdering a human being

is one of the most serious crimes.

So, thou shalt not kill is based on ontological notion that human life is

sacred. So ontological philosophy gave birth to sciences in order to understand

the world, nature and human poise. ideology.

Aristotle is usually considered the father of modern sciences.

Epistemology on the other hand is about how we gather knowledge.

A good example is how we know what we know.

Immanuel Kant said we can never know reality as it is, but we only know

things on a limited level.

Why? Because everything has to funnel through the human mind which is

structured in a way that categorises things in a certain way. In other words,

we humans put a structure onto the world based on how the human mind works.

And the world in itself is unknowable to us because we cannot get out of our

human mind.

We can never know the thing in itself.

Michel Foucault went a step further, saying that knowledge is power, meaning

those in possession of science and technology have immense power over

others. He said there is no impartial or power-free science.

Knowledge is a tool in the hands of the powerful.

I'll discuss these more later. So to sum up, ontology is the philosophy of

existence, while epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge of that

existence.

Metaphysics versus physics.

Physics was part of philosophical studies until a few centuries ago,

before it became a separate discipline.

Physics mainly studies matter, from the smallest particles to the biggest stars.

Metaphysics however is the study of what is beyond the physical world, like

ideas, forms and soul.

which is closer to the religious idea of God and the spirits.

A scientist might say human consciousness is rooted in matter and

would not exist without brain cells.

A metaphysician on the other hand might say consciousness is independent of

matter, either comes from a higher power or the universe itself is conscious.

So, physics is the study of physical matter while metaphysics is the study of

non-physical entities.

Reason versus logic.

Logic has its origins in mathematics.

For example, 2 plus 2 equals 4 is logical because it follows a very rigid

rule that gives you one answer.

But logic is also used as a language of philosophy in order to communicate

philosophical ideas.

So logic is like a foundation on which philosophical debates take place.

Without logic, it is very hard to talk to other people because in order for a

discussion to take place, there has to be some ground basic rules on which all

philosophers agree.

So logic is a method of communication for philosophical arguments.

A good example is Ludwig Wittgenstein who wanted to make communication as

precise as possible.

Also, Bertrand Russell applied mathematics to philosophy.

Reason and logic often go hand in hand. Since logic is very rigid, it, like a

computer or a game of chess, some argue it limits human ability to express

things that go beyond logic, like human emotions and passion.

So reason or rationality is somewhat more subjective and less scientifically

rigorous like logic. So reason is often used to persuade people while logic's

outcome is independent.

In other words, if someone uses logic, the outcome might not benefit the

argument while reason is a bit more selective.

so people use reason to support their argument.

We often use rationalisation as a negative form of reason used to persuade

people. Logic is more mathematical while reason is more linguistic.

Rationalism vs Empiricism Rationalism is a school of philosophy that believes we

understand the world based on our prior ability to reason.

It places human beings as a special creature with the ability to know the

world, so it has its roots in religion that places human beings as an exception

to the animal kingdom.

In other words, we are pre-assembled with reason as a tool.

A good example of a rationalist is René Descartes who famously said, I think

therefore I am. In other words, the ability to rationally think was enough

to know our existence.

Leibniz was another famous rationalist.

Empiricism on the other hand believes that we know the world through

experience. Our thoughts come as a result of experience.

We know the property of fire because we experience the heat.

Babies have no fear of fire inside them from birth. We experience the pain and

therefore we associate fire with pain.

Empiricism is more British, while rationalism is more continental

European, mainly French and German. Famous empiricists were John Locke and

David Hume.

Empiricism is also close to pragmatism, most associated with northern European

cold climates, which make you become more practical.

Immanuel Kant combined rationalism and empiricism in his philosophy, saying

that experience is not enough to know the world, our own mental structure

poses categories to the world. In other words, we are not passive, just

receiving knowledge through experiences, but we actively give the world a

structure. He said we cannot know the world as it is, but we know it as our

mind is a structure. But our knowledge of the world is limited to the limit of

the human mental structure.

Kant's philosophy also gave rise to a phenomenology that studies an object

relative to our own experience, not the object in of itself.

Kant made a distinction between phenomena, which is how we experience

the world, and noumena, which is the world in itself, which we can never

know. I'll discuss this later.

So, for rationalists, we know the world because we know, while for empiricists,

we know the world because we experience things.

Political philosophy versus ethics.

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with morality, justice, and the

legal system.

Ethics is more practical and pragmatic while political philosophy deals with

how societies decide what is right and what is wrong, and how to live

peacefully in a society and how we punish those who break rules.

As a society evolves, so does its morality.

So ethics change.

Something that might be morally acceptable a few centuries ago is not

acceptable today.

It also depends on culture.

Some actions are morally right in one culture but not in another.

Political philosophy is the study of ethics and how it changes.

Egalitarianism versus elitism. One of the most fundamental questions

philosophy has grappled over centuries is the idea of equality versus quality.

Egalitarian philosophy has its roots in religions such as Christianity that all

humans have equal dignity and are equally sacred. But egalitarianism as a

philosophy became prominent in Europe during the Enlightenment period of 18th

and 19th centuries.

Karl Marx is perhaps the most famous egalitarian philosopher who believed in

a communist society where all the resources were shared equally among

people. Elitism on the other hand believes that we should run society

based on meritocracy. meaning not everyone gets a trophy.

Some people deserve certain rights and privileges because they earn those

things. Elitism has its roots in nature because the animal kingdom runs on a

hierarchy, which is part of the evolutionary process.

The most famous elitist philosopher was Friedrich Nietzsche, who incidentally

lived around the same time as Marx.

For Nietzsche, great artists and philosophers are not the same as

ordinary people, therefore should not be treated so.

Today the biggest debate in the west is these two schools of thought, equality

for all or privileges for those who earn them. So egalitarian philosophy believes

in equality for all while elitist philosophy believes in merits.

Humanism vs Utilitarianism Humanism was born in Europe during the enlightenment

of 18th century, which replaced God with humans.

Instead of the divine being in charge of this planet, we rational humans assumed

the ownership.

of this planet.

Humanists believe in an egalitarian world where all humans are equal, which

is rooted in religions and belief that humans are created equal.

But in reality that is not true. Not all humans are equal.

Some are more equal than others, as George Orwell famously said in Animal

Farm. So in philosophy, the big question is this.

Which humans should determine our social, political and moral values?

Here comes utilitarianism, a branch of humanism that believes in moral values

that benefit the greatest number of people. Not all humans, but the largest

majority of humans.

The word utility focuses on how something benefits someone.

pre-enlightenment world was dominated by kings and aristocrats while the majority

worked to benefit the minority.

With its roots in Machiavelli's philosophy of end justifies the means,

utilitarianism turned it on its head. Instead of the minority, it focused on

the majority.

All actions should be judged by the results that bring the greatest

happiness for the greatest number of people.

Utilitarianism was big in England and the most famous one was Jeremy Bentham

and later Stuart Stuart Mill.

Today's democracy is a little like utilitarian majority rule, at least on

paper. Humanism also gave birth to other isms such as socialism that divides the

world based on class, feminism that divides the world based on gender, and

nationalism that divides the world based on nationality or ethnicity or language.

So humanism puts humans in charge of the planet and utilitarianism saves the

majority of humans.

Postmodernism vs Existentialism Existentialism popularised after the

philosophy of Nietzsche argues that everything starts with our existence,

not God or some divine essence.

There is no divine spark, but we just develop a sense of self during our life.

Nothing is given to us prior to our birth.

A famous existentialist philosopher was Jean-Paul Sartre.

who said that since we have no essence, we are responsible to make something of

ourselves. He famously said that we are condemned to be free.

While existentialism is concerned with the individual, postmodernism

popularised in France is more concerned with communities or cultural groups.

Just like existentialism, it is also rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche,

specifically in his criticisms of a single truth within the Western

philosophical tradition.

While existentialism focuses on the condition of the modern existence,

postmodernism focuses on the idea of truth and social values.

Western philosophy believed in a single truth, like the idea of a single god.

So postmodernism questioned European modernity as a project to unify the

whole world around European values of individualism.

freedom and materialism. According to postmodernists, all cultures are as

valid as European culture.

Therefore, the world doesn't have to become like Europe to be considered

civilised. Postmodernism is a reaction to modernity which includes the

Enlightenment humanism on the one hand, but colonialism on the other.

Postmodernists put emphasis on power relations, how the weak are forcefully

pushed to one side.

A famous postmodernist Michel Foucault analysed how the modern state developed

effective tools to control people, through the prison system, surveillance,

mass education and more.

He argued that even sexuality is a power dynamics, men oppressing women, which

had a huge influence on the third wave feminism that some argue has become anti

-men, anti-masculinity.

Foucault even said all knowledge is tied to power, so there is no independent

science, therefore science and technology are tools for the powerful to

control the weak.

So to sum up, the core philosophy includes ontology of existence and

epistemology of knowledge and everything else is a branch of these two.

Physics and metaphysics are part of ontology. Physics deals with matter

while metaphysics deals with non-material phenomena such as ideas,

consciousness. Reason and logic, rationalism and empiricism are part of

epistemology. Reason is a tool to persuade others, therefore more

subjective, while logic is mathematical and impartial.

Rationalism says knowledge comes from within, while empiricism says knowledge

only comes from experience or outside.

So outside ontology and epistemology is the philosophy of how to live. Political

philosophy studies morality of good and bad, equality or meritocracy, majority

mass or minority elite.

This is also tied to the meaning of life.

existentialism puts emphasis on the individual, while postmodernism put

emphasis on the group identity.

Next I'll look at the differences between eastern and western

philosophies, why one focuses on physical science while the other on

mental well-being. Which should we prioritise, building rockets to conquer

space or do yoga for a more peaceful mind on earth?

In the 1930s, there was an interesting conversation between the greatest Indian

poet and philosopher Tagore and the greatest German scientist Einstein.

The conversation centered on the idea of reality, truth and beauty.

Einstein believed in an objective reality outside the human, while Tagore

insisted on the subjective interpretation of reality.

To boil it down, Einstein believed in the old theory of physics, solid matter

existing with or without humans, while Tagore was alluding to the mysterious

theory of quantum physics, that our perception or observation of matter is

never really objective.

The conversation illustrated the differences in Eastern and Western ways

of thinking about reality, one more pragmatic while the other more

spiritual. Now let's look at the typical hero in the East and West.

A Western hero wants to change the world to make it better for himself and those

around him while an eastern hero wants to change himself.

Western superheroes fight evil to restore justice, peace, correct the

incorrect while Asian heroes either accept their fate or retreat to a forest

for some contemplation. Jesus, perhaps the greatest Western hero, confronted

injustice and paid for it with his own life. A sacrifice you can see manifested

in Harry Potter as well.

The Buddha, the founder of Buddhism however, went to the forest to change

himself. Lao-Tse, the founder of Taoism, retreated to the mountains.

In other words, Western philosophy is about change while Eastern philosophy is

more about accepting your fate.

A great example of this in literature can be seen in the novels of the

Japanese British Nobel Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro.

His characters obey their fate and rarely question their somewhat unfair

circumstances. However, a typical hero in the West would rebel against their

circumstance to change the world.

Accepting one's fate or putting up with an unfavourable environment is seen as a

sign of weakness in the West, while those same traits are seen as a sign of

strength in the East. By the East, my focus is mainly old India, China and

Japan. So a western hero wants to change the world while an eastern hero wants to

change himself to adapt.

In today's world, east and west have come together a lot because western mode

of production, i.e. capitalism has taken over the world.

But if you look closer and a bit deeper, you see a clear philosophical

distinction. And if you go back in time, the distinction appears more clear.

Why has eastern philosophy's main focus been on mental well-being, happiness and

spirituality and community While Western philosophy's main focus has been

physical well-being, rational science, technology, materialism and

individualism. Of course, this is a broad generalization as there are so

many philosophers on either side who are exceptions to the rule. But generally

speaking, the main distinction is spiritualism versus materialism,

community versus individualism. So in this video, I'll look at some of the

answers but also give more detail about the differences between Eastern and

Western philosophy. Does the climate, terrain and the soil have anything to do

with it? Are merchants more concerned with materialism and farmers more with

spirituality?

Western philosophy as we know has its roots in ancient Greece and later in

Rome. The Greeks and Romans were influenced by other civilisations such

as the Egyptians and the Babylonians. But there are very little or no written

records of an organised philosophy prior to the Greeks.

Eastern philosophy has its roots in Indian civilisation and the Chinese

civilisation. If you look at their geographies, Greece is made up of some

islands, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. So large bodies of

water sandwiching the land areas.

So if you want to move around, all you need is a boat and you could hop from

island to island.

This allows much smoother way to move things around.

There is less friction on water than land. The ancient Greeks heavily relied

on imported food due to its soil not being very fertile.

As a result, the Greeks relied on trades which brought goods from Egypt,

Mesopotamia, Central Europe and more.

But with this commodity trade also came ideas and knowledge, so the region was a

hub of cultural, scientific and technological exchange.

This promoted a more rational discourse which allowed the Greeks to develop a

more sophisticated science.

For example, Euclid's Elements is the oldest science book.

which I'm sure was influenced by the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the

Phoenicians. Pythagoras developed his mathematics.

Aristotle studied all kinds of things, including animals.

In fact, the first Greek philosopher, Thales, was an olive merchant himself,

who based his philosophy on water being the most important thing in the world.

He famously predicted that good weather, i.e. lots of rain, produced lots of

olives, so he got very rich. So the Greeks relied on trade, which allowed

exchanges of ideas.

and practical sciences.

Indian and Chinese civilisations however are more centred around rivers and

mountains. In other words, quite different from ancient Greece.

India and China were blessed by its many rivers that brought amazing soil from

the Himalayas, so their agricultural economy could sustain a huge population

in big cities, making China and India mostly self-sufficient.

Trade with other peoples was a plus but not essential.

China's Yellow and Yangtze rivers ancient India's Indus and the Ganges

rivers are all stud in the snowy mountains of Himalayas and traverse

thousands of kilometers which bring the fertile soil.

It's no surprise that both India and China relied on a crop that is

incredibly water thirsty, rice.

It's also no surprise that Sadhguru, the greatest Indian guru in the world today

has a simple message, save the soil.

because soil and farming ran really deep in Eastern philosophy.

So Greece's geographical terrain allowed trade to flourish between various

peoples and cultures, while ancient China and India relied on their rivers

to bring good soil to them. The Greeks had to seek food from somewhere else

while the Chinese and Indians waited for their rivers to bring food to them. As a

result, from a survival point of view, for the Greeks, merchants were the most

important class of people, while in the East, farmers were the most important

class of people. Since merchants are mobile while farmers are stationary

because you cannot carry around your land, these allow the Greeks to be more

open-minded to new ideas, new technology, new sciences.

Merchants are also less attached to their ways, therefore easily follow the

market or commodity.

Today you sell rice, tomorrow potato.

Farmers, however, have a harder time to change and adapt quickly.

So Western philosophy geared more towards pragmatic sciences while Eastern

Western philosophy geared more towards spiritualism. If merchants don't like

something, they change, but if farmers don't get enough water, they wait for

the following season or accept their fate.

It's harder to leave your land than migrate.

So Western philosophy is more change-oriented, while Eastern

philosophy is more fatalistic.

In other words, you change yourself.

Climate also plays a role. India and China tend to be warmer throughout

there, so it makes sense to be in here and now, which Buddhism teaches.

Also, seasons play a predictable pattern every year and people live a more

cyclical life.

Monsoon comes every year. Rivers flooded specific time of the year. In a way, it

was very similar to the Egyptian way of life around the river Nile.

Of course, when you rely on a river, you also experience great famines, but they

come every few years or decade.

The Greeks navigated the seas where you are for the most part in control of

where you are going.

Meanwhile, eastern civilisations were centred around rivers.

On rivers, your course is fixed. The river takes you where the river takes

you. As a result, Eastern philosophy is more fatalistic.

The fate of humans, animals and plants are in the hands of the same rivers.

It meant that they saw all living beings as part of one big family.

So they didn't put humans as being outsiders or special or above everybody

else. In Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, we are not only from nature, we are

nature, just like other living beings.

The Greeks are Greeks, however, experienced colder winters, so they had

to source and accumulate food for colder days.

Since they relied on trade, wars always disrupted trade routes, which meant you

had to source your food from somewhere else.

Merchants relied on peacetime to continue trade, but they also benefited

from wars as certain commodities were more sought after.

It is the old adage, war fuels the economy, as money is moved around faster

than peacetime.

Since things are pretty unpredictable, the Greeks had to think long term.

to prepare not just for the cold winter, but for the future in case of warfare.

Future became the most important time. Not here now, but next month, next year.

You couldn't afford to be here now like a Zen Buddhist.

So this long term or linear perception of time became the dominant way of

looking at the world among the Greeks.

A famous example is Aristotle's teleological philosophy that everything

has a purpose, usually a single destination in the future.

Western philosophy also through an exchange with the Middle Eastern

religions like Judaism, Christianity and later Islam came to understand that

humans were separate from the animal kingdom.

We are kicked out of the Garden of Eden, punished for our mistakes.

As a result, you try to compensate for your past mistakes.

You want to correct the incorrect.

What do you do? You fight for causes.

If you look at literature, heroes are often people who have sinned or made

terrible mistakes.

To redeem themselves, they fight injustice.

One way to fight for injustice is to make other people's lives better, often

materially. You study the world, you invent new technology to make life

easier for others.

Eastern philosophers were not looking for material comfort but more for mental

and spiritual comfort.

Buddha and Laozi left the city and their spiritual quest and went to the

mountains and forests.

Solitude allows you to seek answers inside you, not on the outside.

Even today, most Buddhist temples in India, Japan and China are located in

the mountains and forests, away from the crowd, so people can get away from other

people. The core doctrine of Buddhism is that material comfort doesn't make you

happy in the long run. The Greeks however gathered in the city to debate

and dialogue like Socrates who would walk around on the streets of Athens

asking people questions, while others established schools like Plato's Academy

or Aristotle's Lyceum. Western philosophy relied on dialogue and

exchange, like merchants do, to flourish, learn and improve.

The West built universities, churches and schools in the middle of towns and

villages so everyone could come, not some remote temple that nobody could go

to. In Eastern philosophy you don't force your will on nature to control or

change it, but you try to flow with nature.

Since both Indian and Chinese civilisations were centred around

rivers, often river flow is seen as nature's way, in which you don't resist

or remove obstacles in your way, but move around those obstacles.

In other words, you change yourself, not the outside world.

A good example is Indian traffic moves around an obstacle, be it a cow or an

accident. While in the west, a small accident on the road brings everything

to a halt.

So eastern philosophy tells you to be more fluid, flexible like yoga and less

rigid. But western philosophy relies on manipulating nature through science and

technology to make life easier for humans.

As a result, we live in a very comfortable period in history.

Millions of people couldn't survive to adulthood.

but today, child mortality is its lowest in history.

People live longer, healthier.

But this also has negative consequences for other species on earth as the more

comfortable we are, the harder it becomes for some other species in some

areas.

Asians are on average physically smaller than Europeans, perhaps due to genetic

mutation or sexual selection or possibly due to eating less protein.

as farmers rely on rice which is a staple diet in most of Asia. How to cope

with poor diet?

Martial arts in China and yoga in India are used to strengthen and discipline

the body.

Eastern philosophy is centered on the body as a vehicle to get to a higher

place. And this also means Eastern philosophy is more about avoiding

conflict rather than confronting others.

Taoism and Buddhism and Hinduism promote non-violence.

Vegetarianism, although trendy in the West today, has been practiced in the

East for thousands of years.

Jainism is an Indian religion that promotes strict vegetarian diet.

And Gandhi, a pacifist himself, admired Jainism for that.

Unlike Asians, the Greeks ate a lot of bread, which is four times more protein

-rich than rice.

Since the Greek states were constantly fighting against one another, as well as

the Persians, they developed the Olympic Games which was to train soldiers for

wars. It is no surprise that it was the Greeks who made it all the way to India

through Alexander the Great.

While we have no records of invading armies from India or China going to

Persia or the Middle East, it was the nomadic Mongols who made it to Europe,

not the more sophisticated civilisations like the Chinese and Indians.

In fact the Chinese built walls to shield themselves from the Mongols. And

India was ravaged by a series of invasions by the Greeks, the Persians,

the Muslims, the Mongols and even the British.

Why? Eastern philosophy is less centred on conquering the world but conquering

yourself. For example, Buddhism is centred on the inner conflict of

fighting or resisting your own desires.

If you focus on your inner conflict, you are less likely to engage in an external

physical conflict such as tribal or ideological.

In Hindu yogi teaching, your soul is the real you while your physical body is

acquired through food you put in your mouth.

Not just that, you also acquire your ego or the sense of self through impressions

and experiences with others.

So your soul is permanent and your body and ego are temporary, fleeting and

acquired. Now Einstein versus Tagore conversation on the nature of reality

makes sense.

Einstein sees an external world while Tagore sees everything internal.

In other words, yogi philosophy is based on the pursuit of becoming one with the

universe. Quantum physics has a similar theory that as soon as you observe serve

something, you change it. In other words, we are not separate from the

world or universe, we are with the universe.

The world is not outside us, but we are the universe.

It's inside us.

So yoga is one way to tap into or get closer to your universal soul by taming

your body and ego and desires.

The idea is to let your soul control you, not your body control your soul.

Eastern philosophy is based on negation of self, while Western philosophy is

firmly rooted in the idea of of individual self. As a result of this,

the East tends to be more communitarian, where the individual is less important

than the community or the universe, while the West tends to be more

individualistic. Buddhism's core philosophy is to remove the self to ease

suffering. Wanting or desiring is seen as negative because you are feeding the

ego. The Greeks are more of a merchant's mentality to grow more profit and become

wealthier and wealthier.

Merchants are more focused on material success and less concerned with the

spiritual side of life. As a result, it was the Greeks who developed a more

rational scientific method to understand the material world. This scientific

method allowed objectivity which meant that Greek scholars could disagree with

their mentors.

Even thinkers like Plato openly disagreed with his teacher Socrates, and

Aristotle questioned Plato.

In the East, however, openly questioning your teacher was and still is a form of

disrespect. Instead of finding flaws in those older than you, you are supposed

to respect them. This is especially important in Confucianism. Sensei is

someone you do not challenge.

Western philosophy makes a distinction between good and evil as almost separate

entities and separate individuals or even groups.

Often in warfare, the enemy is seen as evil to motivate your soldiers to die in

defence of good.

This is true on both sides.

So once you assign goodness with one way of seeing the world, the opposite of

that is naturally bad or even evil.

This battle of good against evil allows progress.

Those victorious can claim goodness.

And these however both good and bad are seen as more psychological and less

ideological. So good and bad are one or two sides of the same coin.

yin yang and taoism means every person has dark and light, good and evil built

in them. Good and evil coexist so no matter how much society progresses, it

doesn't change the core yin yang existence.

We as humans are neither good nor bad but a bit of both.

Our job is to understand this so we keep a good balance between the two forces.

I think the most fundamental difference between eastern and western philosophy

is the idea of linear progress in the west versus a cyclical notion in the

east, especially in Indian philosophy. The Greeks believed in progress.

Socrates developed his questioning method of getting to the objective

truth. Plato introduced the idea of perfection.

And Aristotle came up with telos for purpose.

So getting to Socratic truth, Platonic perfection and Aristotelian telos or

purpose gave birth to a Western progressive philosophy and science.

So instead of focusing too much on the spiritual side of life, the West focused

on making the physical life easier by employing a scientific method to

understand the world and invent technologies that made life easier.

As a result, most people today live a comfortable life thanks to western

civilization. People live longer thanks to western medicine and technology.

When survival is no longer an issue, people seek meaning and purpose.

So eastern philosophy plays a major role in bringing inner peace for millions of

people in the east as well as in the west who seek meaning beyond material

comfort. So to sum up, climate, terrain and food impacted how the east and west

prioritised philosophical

standing of the world.

The Greeks relied on merchants and trades so the priority went to practical

sciences and rationality, while in the East farming allowed big cities to

flourish and people live longer.

As a result philosophers were seeking happiness not physical comfort.

Life expectancy also grew in the East which allowed more reflection in old

age. When young people seek success but in old age people search for meaning.

Next I'll discuss the Greek trio of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle by looking

at their similarities and

In 399 BC, the Greek democracy condemned one of the greatest philosophers to

death for spreading bad ideas among the youth.

Today he is considered the father of Western philosophy and possibly the

father of Western civilization.

His tragic death sparked a new human philosophy that was based on rational

thinking, not religious dogma. Who was this man?

It was of course Mr. Socrates.

Well, he lost his life, but rationality triumphed. He paid the price with his

own life.

It's no surprise or exaggeration to tell you that Western philosophy originated

in Greece, mainly in the city of Athens.

Previously I talked about the differences between Eastern and Western

philosophies due to different terrains, food production, cultural exchanges and

so on, that gave rise to spiritualism in the East while rationalism in the West.

Eastern philosophy centred on farming and rivers became fatalistic while the

Greek centred on trade and the seas became rationalistic.

So here I'll talk about the three of the most famous forefathers of western

rational philosophy, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

Before I talk about the big three, let me mention a few who came before.

The first known Greek philosopher was Thales of Miletus who said that

everything is made of water.

Today we know that 60% of human body and 70% of our brain are made of water so he

was right.

He also used reason to predict how the weather affected olive harvest and made

a lot of money as a result.

People at the time believed a good or bad harvest was in the hands of gods.

So Thales understood that it had nothing to do with it, but just good weather.

So western philosophy from the very earliest time emphasised rationality to

understand and manipulate nature to benefit humans.

And he was a businessman.

Another notable philosopher was Pythagoras, famous for his theorem a

squared b squared equals c squared. He argued that the world is run by

mathematical rules which can be understood through numbers.

Even musical harmony is ruled by geometrical rules.

So Pythagoras based his ideas on mathematical logic which is a step

deeper and more rigid than rationality. Another logical philosopher is

Parmenides who also used logical thinking and reasoning to prove that

human experience gives us false perception of the world. Often

contradicts with logical thinking. So early Greek philosophers paved the way

for rationality to become the method of thinking.

Socrates. If you have to name one person as the founder of Western philosophy,

one name stands tall above everybody else.

It is of course Mr. Socrates, not the football legend from Brazil, but an

ancient Greek dude who lived between 469 and 399 BCE.

He was the true father of Western philosophy because he developed a robust

philosophical method to understand the meaning of life and to expose dogmas.

Unlike everyone else, he did not accept things at face value.

His questioning or dialectical method of examining everything through a series of

questions to get to the bottom of things or finding the truth became the basis of

modern scientific method.

To understand something, you have to go through a series of questions like what,

where, when, why and how.

Once you go through all these questions, the answer you get tends to be the best

answer out there. Today's science does the same thing.

Scientific theories are tested through a series of experiments.

Socrates also questioned the purpose of life itself.

For him, the purpose of life was to be virtuous.

How can you be virtuous?

Again, you have to examine your life critically.

You cannot sit in your comfortable chair and live in ignorance.

Uncomfortable truths are better than comforting lies.

He famously said, the unexamined life is not worth living.

In other words, ignorance wasn't bliss, just stupid and unworthy.

This had a massive psychological shift in how people saw the world and

themselves. You couldn't just rely on gods or even the priests. You had the

ability to rationally question things and get to the truth for yourself.

The Athenian democracy saw him as a threat, awakening the youth, so they

forced him to sip hemlock poison which killed him in 399 BC, making him a true

martyr of philosophy.

Socrates was a street philosopher who walked around the streets of Athens to

question people and have a dialogue about life and philosophy.

He was like a modern day provocateur or a whistleblower.

The authorities didn't like it.

Socrates' philosophical legacy was to make truth the most important aim of

philosophy. Philosophy wasn't to tell you comforting lies, but it was to

challenge you into discomfort.

In Western philosophy, Socrates narrowed its scope into one single truth, which

is the basis of modern science today, searching for the ultimate theory that

explains everything.

There is only one good knowledge, one evil ignorance.

This single truth became the cornerstone of Western philosophy for almost 2500

years until the German Nietzsche questioned it paving the way for

postmodernism that believed in multiple truths.

Socrates didn't leave any written records because he was busy on the

streets challenging strangers about their truths.

I wonder if he was around today, how he would challenge people about my truth,

your truth.

First, people would think he is crazy. Second, he would go mad with everyone

having their own truths.

Plato. After the death of Socrates, the torch was passed on to one of his

students who also wrote his teacher's philosophical ideas down.

Plato, who lived between 427 and 347 BCE, having witnessed his teacher

executed by the democratic mobs, was an idealist, arguing that we all have a

perfect idea of something.

But in reality, this does not exist.

It only exists in our mind as a perfect form of that thing.

There are chairs we see inside a room, but those are just models of a perfect

chair that only exists in our mind.

In other words, the chairs that humans make are modeled on a perfect chair

inside the human mind. We see a mere shadow of what reality is on the

outside. His famous thought experiment, Allegory of the Cave, illustrates that

if you face away from the light source and see your own shadow inside a cave,

that's how we perceive reality.

Not what it is, but its shadow through our senses.

So for Plato, humans can preassemble with all knowledge.

In other words, we don't learn through our experiences or senses, but it's all

inside. It only comes out when we experience it.

What we call learning is only a process of recollection.

This makes Plato's philosophy somewhat counterintuitive.

We think what's on the outside is the real thing and what we have on the

inside in our mind is a mere representation of that real object.

Plato thinks the opposite.

What we see on the outside is the shadow of what's in our mind.

We have an innate knowledge of the world from birth and what we learn is just re

-remembering or recalling those things that are already stored inside us.

This is very similar to how the rationalists saw knowledge, which I will

discuss later on.

Plato's idea of knowledge coming from inside us can also be interpreted in

terms of the subconscious, or Jungian collective subconscious, deeply embedded

in us from our evolutionary past.

For instance, the fear of a snake in us is not because we experienced snake

bites in our own life, but because our ancestors experienced it in savannah, in

the trees or jungle or in the cave. Despite us living in beautiful safe

houses, we still have the inner experience of being in the dark cave.

Another example is horror movies.

Our desire to see horror movies is simply because we still want to

experience the fear from time to time. Because that fear is inside us. And

horror movies simply stimulate that fear.

Sigmund Freud's dream interpretation is another way to understand Plato.

In other words, dreams are our little window into the subconscious world

inside us.

Fiction writers, artists and musicians often experience a trance-like state

when they are immersed in their art, tapping into their subconscious to bring

out an art that is appreciated by many people simply because they reach a

deeper well inside to drink from the collective subconscious knowledge.

Despite being the art artistic uncle, Plato also had strong opinions about

politics.

Plato was a republican and saw democracy akin to a mob rule as it killed his

teacher Socrates. So he argued that philosophers were better suited to rule

a society as a republic.

Just like Nietzsche, he had a low opinion of general public as unsuitable

to rule a society, while philosophers were better equipped to rule a society.

So he set up his academy where he wanted to cultivate the best minds of a

generation, the elites of society.

Today's university is very much modelled on Plato's academy where the

intellectuals lock horns to discuss ideas.

And one of those people was Aristotle who graduated from his academy.

Plato is called the idealist philosopher, however his student

Aristotle went a different route towards practical knowledge.

So to sum up, Plato's teacher Mr Socrates questioned things to find the

truth. Plato said truth or perfection only exists in the soul, in the mind or

in the world of ideas or forms, and only their shadows are perceived through our

senses. So Socrates gave philosophy a method of finding the truth, while Plato

offered a perfectionist vision of the truth inside the mind.

Now these two come together in Aristotle to provide a basis for modern Western

philosophy, a progressive perfectionist vision of truth seeking, a single truth.

Aristotle. While Plato sat inside a cave saying that to find the truth, reasoning

was superior to real world observation.

His student Aristotle however reversed this by getting his hands dirty and

dissecting the frogs and gazing at stars to understand the real world.

Aristotle who lived between 384 and 322 BCE argued that truth is not inside

us but on the outside in the real world.

Truth, in other words, is in the world around us. His method was evidence-based

research, akin to modern science.

He actually went to the fields to study animals and see creatures.

He questions Plato's ideal form, saying that if a man is the model of an ideal

form, who is the ideal form model of?

It's the same argument, if God created us, who created God and who created the

God that created God, which goes to infinity.

Aristotle put human senses to work and argued that our observation of things is

the best way to find the truth.

He said everything in the world can be categorised by their substance,

quantity, place, time and so forth.

Today modern science classifies animals into species, earth into continents and

oceans, rocks and minerals.

This categorisation helps humans to gain knowledge much faster and more

effectively. He famously said humans are rational animals.

Aristotle also said that everything has a purpose or a telos or an end goal.

The purpose of this video is to educate people about philosophy.

As a result, Aristotle's telos has become a branch of philosophy called

teleology, that looks at things through their purpose, not their essence.

So when we look at a chair, we don't think of the wood and trees and forest,

but we think of sitting on it. A chair is to be sat on, not considered a piece

of tree.

So Aristotle's telos put purpose before essence.

As a result, Western philosophy is a very purpose-driven way of thinking,

which emphasizes something's utility or use before its essence.

As a result, Western cultures value solutions to problems, efficiency and

pragmatism that make things better.

Today, modern science develops useful technology, so it's heavily utility

-based. We like useful things.

The purpose of science is to develop technology to make life easier. What is

the purpose of human civilization?

To reach perfection.

which is a kind of Aristotelian teleology.

So Aristotle's telos coincided with the Christian view that we are heading

towards an apocalypse or heaven, a perfectionist utopia where you are happy

and blissful. In science, we are heading towards a perfect understanding of the

universe and life.

So telos allows us to make plans, have goals and strive towards something.

Without an end goal, it is hard to motivate ourselves to do things.

Just like Plato, he also set up a school called Lyceum where he gathered all the

best minds of his generations to study.

One of his most famous students prior to the Lyceum was a man who took his

teleological teaching to conquer the world.

It was of course Alexander the Great who made it all the way to India in his

attempt to conquer the world.

I should point out an important Greek philosopher who lived outside the

rationality dominated school.

It was Epicurus whose philosophy centred on happiness, not rationality or truth.

So instead of an academy or school, he set up a hippie style garden where he

gathered his friends to talk philosophy while enjoying life in peace and

tranquility. Epicurus understood that the biggest enemy of happiness is also

the main reason humans invented philosophy.

What is it? The fear of death.

The entire foundation of human philosophy rests on this mystery.

Epicurus had a very clever answer.

He said the fear of death is irrational.

It makes no sense.

Why? For the simple reason that we do not know death.

Not only that, we cannot know death.

Because nobody has returned from death to tell us what it is.

Death is just one way street.

Now that we know the fact that we do not and cannot know death, why fear it?

We are afraid of lions because we know they can eat us. We are afraid of fire

because we know the pain.

But we cannot and will not know death. It's totally irrational to be afraid of

it. Instead of worrying about death, we should make the most of this life by

living in and spreading peace and happiness among others.

Later his philosophy was adapted into utilitarianism to maximize happiness for

the majority of people. But despite his philosophy of happiness, Epicurus

remains an outsider in Western philosophy.

So to sum up, Socrates questioned people on the streets of Athens to critically

examine things in life.

Plato sat inside a cave, not literally though, and asked himself about the

ideal form that may have come from God or the human mind.

While Aristotle went to the field and got his hands dirty to understand the

natural world.

Socrates placed virtue and knowledge in rational truth, while rejecting passion,

emotions or faith as dogmatic.

This was Nietzsche's biggest problem with Western philosophy which he

squarely blamed on Socrates.

Too much rationality ignores human passion and heavily relies on reason

which is rigid, inflexible, that turns us into machines.

Plato however retreated to himself and argued that perfectionist doesn't exist

on the outside but only on the inside, in our head.

The world is a terrible place precisely because it's a skewed model of a perfect

form that only exists in our mind.

Plato's ideas were closer to the religious idea of God, so later

Christians and Muslims interpreted Plato's perfect form as God.

God is perfect while humans and the world are imperfect images of God.

Aristotle said forget about the imperfect world, someone has to go to

the field to study the bloody nature through observations and dissections, so

his method was empirical science, which became the basis of medieval Islamic

science and later 16th century European science.

Next, I'll talk about the three horses of Eastern philosophy, the Buddha, Lao

Tzu and Confucius.

Previously, I discussed the Greek trio of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle who

influenced Western philosophy.

The three most famous Eastern philosophers were Lao Tzu, the founder

of Taoism, the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, and Confucius, the founder of

Confucianism. I'll mainly focus on their philosophies and less on their religious

practices, which are quite different in different countries.

Eastern philosophical tradition is very rich and complex, so these three

philosophers can help us shed light on Eastern spirituality.

Lao Tzu Lao Tzu or Laozi lived in 6th century BCE in China is said to be the

author of the Tao Te Ching or Tao Te Ching which is the foundational text of

Taoism, a philosophy that traces its origin to shamanism and hermeticism.

Taoism which is also sometimes called Taoism literally means the way or the

enlightened path or nature's way which is spontaneous,

eternal, unnameable and undefinable.

Quote, nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

It is simply the flow of the universe, such as gravity allowing rivers to flow

downward without an effort.

The core idea of Taoism is the doctrine of Wu Wei which can be translated as non

-resistance or action through inaction. Wei means purposeful and intentional

while Wu means there is no or lacking.

So literally it means there is no purposeful act. A good metaphor for

humans to live their lives by is river which the Chinese civilisations relied

on. Rivers flow downward.

If hindered by a rock, instead of moving the rock, they flow around it. This

means we should live our lives in alignment or harmoniously with nature,

not against nature.

Another important idea of Taoism is yin and yang, or good and evil, which live

together inside everyone, as we all have the dark and light. You cannot separate

the two.

I think this fundamentally differs from a western religion, so good and evil are

thought to be separate entities.

However, according to Taoism, there are two sides of the same coin. Everything

is neither completely negative nor positive, but a bit of both.

In other words, a saint has his sins and a sinner has his redeeming qualities.

In Taoism, humans are one manifestation of the Tao or the way. You could say

just one species among millions of other species.

Lao Tzu emphasised not to follow one's desires, goals or ambitions, but rather

find your natural flow.

Ziyan, which literally means naturally, is a Taoist value which emphasises

natural creativity and spontaneity. As a result, Taoism is seen as the religion

of the artists who live a more intuitive and spontaneous life that mimics

nature's flow.

You could even make a connection between Carl Jung's psychology of the collective

subconscious, deeply embedded memories of our species or those species before

that artists tap into by finding the flow of nature.

This artistic flow is much more elaborated in another book titled

Zhuangzi, supposedly authored by another important figure in Taoism, a man called

Zhuangzi. The book has many humorous stories, allegories and anecdotes, with

the most famous one being the butterfly dream, in which Zhuangzi wakes up one

morning from a dream in which he turned into a butterfly.

Now he is perplexed and asks this mind-blowing question.

Was he dreaming of a butterfly?

or a butterfly dreaming Zhuang Zhu.

The answer is not important here but the question itself is the main point.

We humans seek clear answers and clarity but nature doesn't care about separate

entities or separation of different species.

Nature is one big perpetual flow.

From nature's perspective a human and butterfly are simply two different

manifestations of the same thing.

Even the state of being awake and dreaming are false distinctions or

dichotomy because they are one and the same thing.

For example, artists, novelists, musicians often dream or daydream their

best works because they find the flow of nature's collective subconsciousness.

Laozi is said to have lived during the Zhou Dynasty, whose capital was close to

the Yellow River, therefore the river is often used as a metaphor for Taoism.

Later in life, Laozi is said to have travelled west where he rode Daodejing

and some remote mountains and then vanished into thin air. Also a great

metaphor and how to flow life like a wind and river.

Today Laozi's ideas are extremely important but also deeply embedded into

the cultures of China, Korea and Japan.

To give you an example, people in Japan tend to be less confrontational, tend to

avoid conflict, which fits in with the Taoist idea of non-resistance.

So to sum up, Laozi or Taoism philosophy centres on the idea of not going against

the natural flow but flowing with it. Not resisting nature's way but going

with it.

Siddhartha Gautama or the Buddha lived a luxurious life in a rich northern Indian

family between 563 and 483 BCE.

But he wasn't happy. He learned that suffering was universal among the poor,

rich, young and old men and women. But why do we suffer?

The reason we suffer is because of our desires for pleasure.

The more we get, the more we want.

If we have a big house, next time it will not be fulfilled if we don't get an

even bigger house.

Bigger cars, more partners, more wealth, friends, subscribers, followers.

At no point in our life we can satisfactorily say it is enough.

A good example is addiction.

If a small dose makes you high today, but you need a larger dose to give you

the same high a month later or a year later. In other words, as you experience

more, your desires also grow bigger. So life is just an endless cycle of desire,

fulfillment of that desire and more desires.

How do you solve this problem?

To ease suffering, according to Buddhism, we should nip our wants in the

bud by detaching ourselves from our desires for worldly positions.

Don't chase things and be happy in the moment.

But it's easier said than done.

Everyone says it's a good idea to be content with what you have right now.

But curbing your desire is not an easy job. Why is it so hard?

Here's when Buddhism gets really interesting and profoundly deep. We all

think we are who we are. We have a sense of the self we call me and you. We think

it's a somewhat solid entity.

In Western religions, this self is imparted to us from God. It's real.

This individual self is genuine and for the most part, unchangeable. According

to Buddhism however, you are wrong.

Why? The self or ego is not real.

It's just an illusion or a mirage or a temporary imposter attached to your

body. You could say like a parasite it lives on you. What does it do inside us?

This imposter self fuels our desires, ambitions and goals.

In other words, it uses us to go out in the world and achieve things, but at the

end of the day we still don't feel fulfilled.

Especially when we achieve everything and death hits us.

We lose our shit, because we went through so much trouble acquiring our

wealth, fame, power and now death is snatching all away from us.

It's a bad deal.

So what is the solution Mr Buddha?

His answer might shock you. According to Buddhism, to be truly enlightened and

blissful you have to achieve the nirvana stage, which means we must kill the

imposter self.

This thing we call the self or ego is the source of all our desires.

To not desire anything we must remove the self.

According to Buddhism our soul is the real thing and also very much universal

while the self is a kind of picture we put in our head every time we are born

and our various reincarnations.

One way to understand this is perhaps through Mr Plato who also said that the

idea of things is the perfect form and the real things on the outside is a mere

shadow of the real thing. In Buddhism your soul is genuine, eternal and

universal while your body or ego are temporary and fleeting. We are not

separate from the universe but a tiny part of a big whole.

To become happy and one with the universe, you must detach yourself from

your desires and kill the self through meditation, solitude, and rigorous

physical and mental discipline.

A disciplined mind brings happiness.

This is very similar to Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy of the blind

universal will, which is a force beyond our control, yet it rules most of what

we do in life.

There is a disagreement whether Schopenhauer reached the same conclusion

independent of Buddhism or Hinduism or he was influenced by these Indian

philosophies. I'll discuss Schopenhauer's philosophy in more detail

later on. So according to Buddhism, to be truly enlightened is to not see

yourself as a separate self but part of a bigger whole, part of conscious

universe. So true inner peace comes not from outside, for example by achieving

your goals, but from inside once you become enlightened.

Buddha's teachings through various forms of Buddhism are incredibly important in

most of East Asia.

Buddhism has also become one of the most philosophies in the west too as it

emphasizes individual inner journey rather than collective prayers in a

church. So to sum up, Buddha was a rich powerful prince but wasn't fulfilled in

life and realized that all humans suffer because of our desires.

To ease suffering we should detach ourselves from our desires and to be

truly blissful we should eliminate the self or ego through meditation and

mental discipline.

Confucius. While both Laozi and the Buddha escaped society for some solitude

and inner peace, Confucius, who lived between 551 and 479 BCE, however, tried

to solve the practical socio-political questions like how we can live

politically and socially together in peace and harmony, or how to organise

society in a way that is peaceful. So his philosophy is less individualistic

but more concerned about the collective existence, especially in big cities and

countries. countries.

To find a great solution for socio-political coexistence, Confucius

looked at how nature organizes things, especially in the animal kingdom.

One of the biggest problems and the main source of wars and violence in human

society is when there is confusion as to who stands where, who gets what, who

owns what, who is responsible for what. He understood that the best method was

the natural hierarchy or a pyramid social system. Without an established

system of hierarchy or authority, there is chaos and confusion.

And hierarchy allows everyone to know their place, so there is no confusion or

conflict as to which chair belongs to who.

Removing social confusion was Confucius' main task.

Pun intended.

Now not only everyone knows their own place, they also know other people's

places too.

So instead of a police watching everyone or patrolling the whole society, now

everyone can watch each other. If someone sits in the wrong chair, other

people can tell him it is not his seat.

So if everyone knows their place, everyone can watch everyone so nobody

dares to disrupt the social harmony. So kings at the top of the pyramid and

everyone else take their place based on their ranks and age, just like a game of

chess. Perhaps the most logical game humans have invented.

Confucius also realized that everything starts in the family, because it's the

first line of defense against chaos.

A solid family structure means a solid foundation for society.

Inside the family, the man is at the top, then wife, then sons, and then

daughters. One of the most common criticisms against Confucius is the

possibility of tyranny. Those in positions of power can abuse it.

Confucius also emphasized responsibility and duty.

Those at the top are responsible to protect those below them. A king is

responsible to keep people safe and a man in the family is responsible to

protect and provide for his wife and children.

Those below in return are loyal and follow their superiors and do as asked.

To understand Confucianism, you should look things not just from an individual

point of view, but from a collective perspective.

For example, if your body parts didn't function in alignment with the rest of

your body, you are sick and needs treatment.

Society is the same. If one or few members push things in the opposite

direction, there is violence, which is a social illness.

You might think it's pretty outdated, but you would be surprised that this

Confucian hierarchy is pretty efficient system which is at work in modern

companies. Because we hear this cliche that no work is done by a committee,

which is true in most situations.

Most corporate structures follow a strict and rigid hierarchy and a chain

of command.

In the animal kingdom, a hierarchy is often achieved through violence.

But Confucius says since it's natural, we might as well adopt it to reduce

violence. Of course, in the modern age, revolutions are a common occurrence.

Those at the bottom rebel against the establishment.

That's why Confucius emphasised duty and responsibility.

When a ruler becomes tyrannical, he fails his duty.

It all comes down to respecting your role in society.

quote, without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

Today China, Korea and Japan have adopted these Confucian methods in

sorting out social situations where seniority and juniority plays a major

role in schools, universities and companies.

Loyalty and respect are significant in Confucianism but also meritocracy.

As a result, traditionally China had a strict civil service examination for

centuries and only the very bright and intelligent were recruited for high

military and government jobs.

In the 20th century, however, Mao Zedong, the egalitarian socialist, tried

to dismantle the Confucian class hierarchy through the Cultural

Revolution. That caused great pain for a lot of people. But of course, the

Chinese Communist Party replaced the old class-based Confucian hierarchy with a

political hierarchy.

Many economists attribute China's rapid economic development to this efficient

hierarchical system, as China was run like a company.

the president being the CEO of China.

Things get done quickly but of course it also comes at a cost of many voices

being suppressed.

Traditionally the Chinese Communist Party used to distance itself from the

archaic Confucius philosophy.

because it contradicts the egalitarian philosophy of socialism in which

everyone is equal and there is no hierarchy, at least on paper.

But in reality, every human society has been hierarchical. Even today, China is

slowly moving towards a more Confucian philosophy.

As China is developing, not only it is utilising a Confucian hierarchy for its

efficiency, but it is also cultivating a more robust culture of meritocracy and

traditional masculinity which were centred on Confucian philosophy.

To sum up, Laozi's teaching is not to resist or destroy or go against nature

but to flow with nature.

As a result, he says we should be more intuitive and spontaneous.

In other words, humans are of nature so it's time we forget our humanness and

live in the flow of nature.

The Buddha taught that suffering is universal because of our goals, desires

and ambitions.

To find true peace is to look inside, not outside material success.

And to be truly happy is to kill your ego or the self that has ambition and

desires.

Confucius tackled the socio-political question of how to live a peaceful

coexistence through a hierarchical system in which everyone knows their

place and position in society.

While the Greeks were questioning truth, authority, poking holes at the natural

world to understand its property, those in the East were seeking a harmonious

life with nature, not only with other humans but with all creatures on earth.

The Greeks disagreed with each other while the Asians tried to find

agreement, consensus, not only among humans but also between humans and the

natural world. The fact these three figures founded a religion of their own,

while the three Greeks did not, show the fundamental difference between eastern

and western philosophy.

In the east, societies are generally more group-centered, while in the west,

it's more individual-centered.

But if you really think about it, the philosophies of these three eastern

thinkers is highly individualized. They put the emphasis on the individual to

take charge of themselves.

Don't change the world, change yourself.

So while Eastern social fabric is communitarian, the philosophies are

individualistic as they put demand on the individual to take responsibility

for changing themselves, so they adapt to the society they live in. Don't

change others, but yourself.

Don't change nature, but yourself.

The Greeks however focused on how to change nature as quickly, efficiently as

possible. So in the west, individuality is static, god-given or born, while

social fabric is dynamic.

In other words, in western philosophy, the individual is solid and the society

and nature malleable and changeable. In the east however, nature as well as

society's fabrics are static, while the individual is changeable. In other

words, do not attempt to change others or nature because it's easier to change

yourself. If you cannot fit in with others, take a good look at yourself and

find what's wrong with you.

People in the East are less likely to complain about the world, instead try to

adapt to the world. Before you complain that I'm generalizing too much, sit back

and relax and look at yourself in the mirror.

Don't worry I'm kidding.

Next I'll discuss two distinct approaches to philosophy.

Animalism that sees humans as animals therefore needed to be herded to bring

order and humanism that sees all humans as equal to one another.

In other words elitism versus egalitarianism or carnivorous versus

herbivorous philosophies.

Previously I discussed Eastern philosophy versus Western philosophy and

how one employed rationality to tame nature while the other employed

spirituality to tame the individual.

Today I'll look at two core philosophical schools, humanism versus

animalism. Humanism is a belief that humans are somewhat special, either

created by God or not, therefore the purpose of any society is to protect all

humans equally.

Humanism is also called egalitarianism. with a few babies of its own like

socialism, feminism, liberalism and postmodernism.

Elitism or animalism on the other hand is a belief that some humans are more

equal than others, especially the rulers, kings, elite class of people or

the talented people as in meritocracy. This is because hierarchy is very much

part of the animal kingdom.

the strongest wins the race.

But as human civilization has progressed and we have become more efficient in

taming nature, the historical trend is moving towards a more egalitarian human

society. So here is the most important question.

Was Karl Marx right that the future is communism?

But first let me explain the history of these two divergent philosophical

approaches. And introduce some of the most important philosophers on each

side. Humanism has its roots in religions. In the west, Christianity and

Judaism at its core believed that all human beings were equal in the eye of

God. Augustine of Hippo believed all humans have free will to choose between

good and evil. He also said that one should love everyone equally.

The measure of love is to love without measure.

Thomas Aquinas, another Christian philosopher argued that God created the

world and all humans were equal, especially in freedom.

Quote, by nature all men are equal in liberty, but not in other endowments.

Outside the religious tradition, the first true humanist might be Mosey, who

lived in the 4th century BC in China.

He advocated a kind of universal humanism. At the time, Confucianism was

the dominant philosophy in China, in which society was divided based on ranks

and hierarchies. So Mosey believed in universal reciprocation.

Quote, universal love is really the way of the sage kings.

It is what gives peace to the rulers and sustenance to the people.

This is an early form of humanism. Another early figure was a 6th century

Persian philosopher, Mazdat, who promoted economic equality among all

people. He even protested against the rich having many wives while the poor

having no wife.

His idea became quite influential in the Persian empire but soon fizzled out.

On the opposite of humanism, we have the school of elitist philosophy which we

can term as realism as called in politics.

The basic idea of realism is that humans are chaotic and erratic animals that

need to be tamed and controlled and ruled, not through honesty or fairness,

but through deception or brute force.

One of the earliest realist philosophers was Sun Tzu, who lived in China between

544 and 496 BCE.

In his famous book The Art of War, he employs nature's tactics such as

camouflage, deception, and even submission to survive or dominate

others, especially in wars.

His philosophy was to win at all costs, so to speak.

For him, life is not about fairness or equality, it was about winning, which is

at the heart of evolutionary biology.

You only survive or thrive if you win nature's battle and overcome hurdles.

Some of his strategies in the art of war are socially counterintuitive like this.

Like he says, you must appear small when you're big and appear big when you're

small in order to deceive your enemy.

In Sun Tzu's art of war, honesty is the worst policy.

When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil.

When full, starve them. When settled, make them move.

In other words, stand tall when you are small and sit small when you are tall.

These are some basic survival tactics in the wild, for example in the battle

between the carnivores and herbivores.

A gazelle jumps higher to show its health so that cheetahs don't bother

chasing them. Some of the tactics are also to throw off your enemy, like when

negotiating, ask for less when you want more, which is still in use in corporate

capitalism. The art of war's basic rules are to know yourself, your enemy, and

your environment, time you attack and truce, while at the same time make sure

your enemy knows nothing truthful about you. Be a peacock when small and be a

mouse when big.

So this is the earliest form of political deception in order to prolong

your rule over others.

The winners are those who lie the best.

So Sun Tzu borrowed his philosophy from the animal kingdom where there is no

morality, only winners.

Machiavelli, who lived between 1469 and 1527, was an Italian thinker who is

famous for his book The Prince.

in which he advises the rulers to use any methods available to them to achieve

their goal of maximizing their power and domination over other humans.

In other words, the famous line that the end justifies the means, which goes

contrary to the humanist and religious morality of protecting life.

Quote, it's better to be fear than love if you cannot be both.

He argued that a ruler must be like a savage lion when needed and a cunning

fox when needed. So brute force combined with cunning deceptions are needed in

order to rule over society.

Why? Because humans are savages and they are waiting for your weakest moment to

strike and take away your power like Hamlet's uncle in Shakespeare's play

Hamlet. Machiavelli lived a few centuries before Darwin's theory of

evolution by natural selection, but he still understood the savage nature of

human politics.

In other words, morality is for the weak and power and deception are for the

strong. Quote, he who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.

In order to prevent a rebellion, a ruler must show terror and fear for its

subject to behave well.

Those at the top of society have the most to lose so they can use any means

available to them to make sure they keep their power and wealth. They use the

police, the legal system and whatever else so nobody can take those things

away from them. So just like Sansu, Machiavelli based his philosophy on the

animal kingdom.

It's not about equality or fairness, it's about winning and conquering.

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher who lived between 1588 and 1679.

In his book, Leviathan, he argued that humans are savages and only a civilized

state can protect humans from each other. In other words, humans have

established states to escape the brutality of nature.

According to him, humans are physical machines and nature, but when entering

society, they give up their savage tendencies and power to live peacefully.

quote, life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and

short. The fear of violence is always there. To escape it, humans have made a

contract with their governing rulers.

In return for their obedience and freedom, the state provides them with

peace, justice, protection for them and their property.

Just like Machiavelli, Hobbes believed in the use of force to tame people.

Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation.

Despite his argument for a civilised state, he understood that humans were in

essence savage animals.

So Sun Tzu drew on the animal kingdom saying deception was better than

honesty. Machiavelli went even further saying that deception combined with

brute force are justified to tame humans.

Hobbes argued a civilised state has every right to tame the unruly humans.

Now let's look at a few philosophers who opposed this animalistic philosophy

based on the natural world. These philosophers first saw human life as

somewhat sacred.

Voltaire, who lived between 1694 and 1777, was a French philosopher who

believed in a kind of universal individual liberty, not tyranny as

Machiavelli suggested.

Unlike Machiavelli's iron rule, he believed in open skepticism and freedom

of expression for all, so anyone could criticize and even rebel against the

dominant traditions and dogmas.

Quote, men are equal, it's not birth, but virtue that makes the difference.

In other words, he didn't support the idea that the rulers and kings had a

birthright authority over truth or liberty.

The church or the state should not hold absolute power.

Instead, everyone, despite their socioeconomic status, deserves the right

to have an education and access to knowledge.

Today, liberal democracies in the West follow the principles of free speech and

individual autonomy.

ideas that were promoted by Voltaire. So he is often considered the father of

liberal individualism. Because he believed everyone irrespective of their

socioeconomic class deserved to be equally free. So nature works with

hierarchy but Voltaire argued that every human deserves equal freedom to express

themselves.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who lived between 1712 and 1778, was born in Geneva.

Unlike Thomas Hobbes, who said man is born savage but tamed in society,

Rousseau believed that humans are naturally good but they are contaminated

or tainted in society to act terrible. He famously said, man is born free yet

he is everywhere in chains.

This was especially true in big cities where people turned selfish.

He believed in the country people were naturally nicer, friendlier and fairer.

But once people migrated to the cities instead of becoming more civilised,

ironically they turned into selfish animals.

Unlike Hobbes' top-down approach, Rousseau believed in a bottom-up

approach, arguing that the masses should be able to run the state, not some

select individuals like kings and generals.

His famous book The Social Contract is said to have influenced the French

Revolution in 1789, in which the anti-monarchy revolutionaries toppled

the king and France became a republic.

Of course, it didn't last very long, but it sowed the seed of freedom, equality

and brotherhood, which resulted in three major ideologies of socialism,

liberalism and nationalism, which have dominated politics for centuries ever

since. So Rousseau's egalitarian approach had a huge influence in

political history.

So to sum up, the humanists argued that since life is too short, let's all be

more equal, fairer and nicer to each other.

Mosey argued for an equal universal education, Rousseau for equal political

participation, and Voltaire for equal freedom for everyone to express himself.

Political animalists or elitists on the other hand argue that since life is too

short, it's all about winning, conquering and dominating others. So

they don't trust all humans therefore promoted a more robust political regime

that didn't allow people to be free to challenge the ruler or the state.

Sun Tzu used deception, Machiavelli justified repression and Hobbes promoted

state as a tool to control human savages.

Now as a historical trend, we are moving towards an egalitarian humanist future,

at least in principle.

Also, this was Karl Marx's prediction that slowly we are heading towards a

communist utopia.

In reality however, all human societies are highly unequal and hierarchical.

and it's unlikely that this will change for a foreseeable future.

Humanism invented by humans, while elitism or animalism invented by nature

and evolutionary biology. We are all born unequal in beauty, talent,

intellect, and physical strength, which contribute to societies being dominated

by those who are naturally blessed, either with talent or beauty.

But despite nature not being helpful in producing us equally, there is a deep

desire among humans for equality. equality, fairness and justice.

You could say that humankind is called kind for a reason.

As human civilization has improved and the more we have tamed nature, we have

become more confident that a humanist utopia is possible.

So in recent centuries, egalitarian philosophy has become more dominant,

which a few centuries back must have been unthinkable.

Socialist experiments showed the failure of egalitarianism in Russia, but the

idea is still pretty strong in the world. Who knows in the future, humans

might produce human babies in labs who are identical in all attributes to

create a truly egalitarian utopia.

Once you produce baby outside the natural process, equality is a lot

easier to achieve.

Identical babies produce identical adults.

A brave new world kind of world.

But will we be happy?

Next, I'll discuss the battle between pursuing knowledge and pursuing

happiness. In other words, those who pursue knowledge to gain power and those

who pursue happiness and peace to live a simpler life.

Previously I discussed the two philosophical approaches to organizing

society, egalitarian humanism versus hierarchical elitism.

Here I'll discuss a fundamental question about the meaning of life.

Are we here to know the world or be happy? Are we here to seek knowledge or

happiness? So in this segment, I'll look at a few important philosophers.

On the knowledge side, I'll look at the philosophy of Francis Bacon, Martin

Heidegger and Michel Foucault. On the happiness side, I'll look at the

philosophy of Erasmus Michelle Montaigne and Bertrand Russell. As I discussed

earlier, philosophy is concerned mainly with two questions.

Ontology asks what is out there and epistemology asks how we know it.

So knowledge is fundamental to philosophy.

You could say we humans are hardwired to see, understand, analyse and interpret

the world.

In other words, we are curious creatures, so the development of modern

science is just the byproduct of this curiosity, and our thirst for knowledge

drives innovation and social change.

But we are also creatures who seek happiness.

While knowledge can empower us, it doesn't make us happy. While knowledge

can transform our lives, it doesn't guarantee happiness or peace of mind.

As I discussed earlier, the first philosopher to methodically seek the

truth was Socrates, and later Aristotle improved it by giving the approach a

scientific and empirical tinge to it. But it wasn't until centuries later the

scientific approach was perfected in Europe, mainly in the 15th and 16th

centuries through the works of scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo

and Newton.

During this period, the English philosopher and scientist and politician

Francis Bacon, who lived between 1561 and 1626, looked at knowledge from an

empirical point of view. He graduated from Cambridge University and is often

considered the first empiricist, a school of philosophy later developed by

other British philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume. Bacon placed the

source of knowledge and our experience through our senses.

At the time, the church held the view that that knowledge came from God and

science was challenging that. Church relied on people not knowing and not

questioning things.

When nobody knows things, the church could control information and become the

source of knowledge.

Today you could say that big media companies have the same mindset.

But Francis Bacon understood the power of knowledge and wanted to educate

everyone because he believed that through knowledge you could empower the

poor so they could live better lives.

This is an early idea of public education, which today we take from

granted. Bacon understood that humans are on the one hand knowledge seekers

but on the other hand humans also have some blind spots like religious belief,

tribal affiliations and love of many which prevent us from getting to the

truth. Another problem we have as humans is that we project our own limited

experience to the world.

Bacon argued that science however doesn't look at an individual but looks

at the majority to generalise. It's through generalisation that you get

closer to the truth. For instance, if one person experiences something, it's

subjective and unreliable. But if let's say 10, 20, 100 or more people

experience the same thing, then you can generalize and make science out of it.

Understanding generality is an immense power according to Francis Bacon. So

knowledge not only opens the knower's mind, it also empowers them to change

their lives for the better. Of course, Bacon lived at a time when people had

very little.

so education and knowledge could transform a person's life immeasurably.

Desiderius Erasmus, who lived between 1466 and 1536, was a Dutch philosopher

who wrote a very influential book called In Praise of Folly.

Unlike Franz Spakan, Erasmus argued to be happy, naivety and ignorance are far

more important than knowing. For him, the purpose of life is not to gain power

but to be content.

He was writing at a time when Europe was waking up to have a renaissance, a

resurgence in scientific and rational pursuit, which went against the

teachings of the church, to have faith in God.

Erasmus, a Christian himself, while criticizing the corruption in the

Catholic Church, argued that to be happy, a little faith and ignorance were

vitally important.

His philosophy was taken up by fiction writers such as Cervantes, the author of

Don Quixote, and later the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The goal of life is not to know everything, but to lead a simple life.

Knowledge or power doesn't make you happy, but simplicity and folly do.

It's the old adage that ignorance is bliss, which goes completely counter to

the age of enlightenment and rationality. So Erasmus said that being

an idiot was the surest way to be happy.

Michel de Montaigne who lived between 1533 and 1592 was a French philosopher

who had a very curious childhood.

Although born into a wealthy family, he spent his first three years of childhood

in the house of a peasant.

so he could learn the life of the poor.

This must have had a profound influence on him later in life. If Erasmus said

folly was a good medicine for happiness, Montaigne argued that to be happy one

should have a simple life. Instead of seeking the company of many people, one

should try to live a more solitary life, because society can corrupt you, either

morally or intellectually.

In today's social media world of chasing likes and online attention and

validation, his message resonates with a lot of people.

We always try to seek the validation of our peers like some addictive drug to an

extent that we are never satisfied.

Montaigne says to have a peaceful life, don't chase other people's approval or

glory or fame, which makes us pretentious and fake most of the time.

He argued that attention seekers are not original thinkers, but rather suffers

from herd mentality or tribalism, which in the heat of the crowd or moment turns

us into mobs.

We commit horrendous crimes and only later realise how stupid it was.

To prevent becoming a mob, Montaigne argued once you disentangle yourself

from the group, crowd or mobs, you develop a clarity of mind or inner

tranquility. It's not only good for your happiness, but it's also good for your

intellectual and moral integrity, because solitude allows you to to

develop yourself.

To have a lasting name, writers and artists should not be bogged down to

social, political and tribal issues of the day.

Montaigne's idea of solitude also inspired Friedrich Nietzsche, who was

extremely critical of the masses or mobs or tribal thinking.

I'll discuss Nietzsche later on.

As modernity made mass education the norm, and the crowded cities habitat for

the majority of people, life's meaning became even more acute for the modern

man. Knowledge of the world wasn't enough to have a meaningful life.

We needed something else.

Martin Heidegger, who lived between 1889 and 1976, was a German philosopher who

turned the lens onto himself.

Francis Bacon, like Aristotle, was interested in knowing the outside world.

But Heidegger, like Diogenes of Sinope, wanted to know the human being itself.

In his famous book, Being in Time, instead of asking what human being is,

he asked how it is like to be human. What is that experience like?

Why? The simple answer is that we are scientists who happen to be also the

subject of science.

When you study animals, we are outsiders, but when we study human

beings, we are insiders.

Heidegger didn't want to have an abstract answer, instead he wanted to

know to have a concrete answer to the question of being, which is incidentally

the root of the word ontology in Greek.

So what is his answer? Heidegger measured life as a finite phenomena,

starting at birth, end, ending and death. Just a line that has a beginning

and an end. Now unlike other animals we know death.

we even anticipate it. The knowledge of death makes us anxious and fearful so to

cope we tend to not think about it on a daily basis.

It's either a coping mechanism or simply we do not have time to think about it

every day as we are busy with work and life. So we are the being who is aware

of death but we also try not to think about it. That's precisely Heidegger's

answer. Human beings or being in general is to be aware of death.

Instead of making making us anxious or depressed, he thinks it empowers us.

This knowledge of death gives our life authenticity and meaning. So if Bacon

said knowledge of the world empowers us to better our life physically, Heidegger

says the knowledge of death gives our life meaning and empowers us to live

fully and authentically.

Bertrand Russell who lived between 1872 and 1970 was a British philosopher who

was deeply steeped in the logical and mathematical side of philosophy, just

like Ludwig Wittgenstein whom he influenced.

He used a logical and rational approach to argue that to be happy, one should

work less.

You could say he is responding to Marx who argued that workers are exploited by

the rich.

But he is also responding to the northern European work ethics, which

states that work is morally good in itself.

Therefore, this morality, according to some, was responsible for the modern

capitalism. Russell however argued that seeing work as a morally good thing was

not only irrational, but it also made a few people very rich while the majority

very unhappy.

Why? Because not all kinds of work are the same.

Some are good and some are not good. Some are meaningful and some are not. To

bundle all as a good thing is not logical.

He concluded that working less increases human happiness.

So instead of working yourself to death, you should enjoy life more.

Do other activities.

Today a lot of people are so busy working long hours that they lose sight

of their well-being and happiness.

This is especially true for men because we are so drawn to numbers just like

Bertrand Russell was.

We watch growth graphs and become obsessed with it. We work one day and

then extrapolate that to a week, a month and then a year. So if we work this many

days, we will have this much money or as a result we lose sight of the fact that

life is meant to be lived, not worked.

death. So Russell argued that to be happy worked less. He lived to be 90

years old.

Michel Foucault, who lived between 1926 and 1984, was a French philosopher.

Unlike Bacon and Heidegger, he saw knowledge as a cynical tool of

repression. Foucault looked at modernity through the lens of Nietzsche, saying

that modern rationality wasn't liberating humans but creating a more

robust chain to control us.

He famously studied the prison system and how prisons are designed to control

us either directly through imprisonment or indirectly through the fear of it. He

argued that those who have access to science and knowledge use it to

discipline the rest of us.

through the education system as well as the legal system.

Foucault argued that knowledge is a tool, science is a tool, rationality is

a tool, but mostly for the powerful elite because they have access to all of

them, while the majority fast are subjects.

Michel Foucault was also inspired by Immanuel Kahn, whose epistemological

revolution argued that our knowledge of reality is not totally objective, but

rather we see the world the way we see because we impose our own mental

structure on the world. Foucault even argued that man or mankind itself is a

recent invention.

So to sum up, on the knowledge side, Francis Bacon understood that our

knowledge of the world could empower us to better our lives.

Heidegger argued that our knowledge of death can give our life more meaning and

authenticity. Foucault, however, said everything is invented. There is nothing

solid to understand.

Knowledge is just a tool for power to manipulate nature and other humans.

So to sum up, on the happiness side, Erasmus argued that folly, ignorance, or

naivety is a good thing to have to lead a happier life. We have all seen

children. When we grow older, we lose that naivety and become a bit more

miserable. Montaigne argued that don't follow the crowd and seek some solitude

to cultivate your own inner peace.

Don't seek validation from others like a drug addict.

The higher you go, the more you seek to get higher and higher.

no mountain is high enough. So listen to Montaigne because he came down the

mountain to settle in a hut.

Even his name means Montaigne, so climb yourself and your ego, not other

people's validations.

Bertrand Russell argued that work is not morally good or bad thing, so we should

prioritise happiness over work. Work to live or live to work. I should really

listen to this, but I want to have more subscribers.

Montaigne help.

So knowledge can make your physical life better or make you more successful

financially or boost your social standing but it might decrease your

overall happiness.

Knowing things also makes us humans very cynical about the world just like

Foucault said that all knowledge is power and all authorities want to

suppress you.

Naivety on the other hand might make your physical life harder as you don't

have everything figured out but it can also lead you to a more long lasting

happiness as you trust other people and rely on other people which It brings a

level of sincerity in yourself and those around you. So knowledge makes you

successful but it could also make you cynical.

While ignorance hinders your success, it could also lead to a more blissful life.

What do you think?

Next, I'll discuss the battle between rationalists and empiricists, leading to

Immanuel Kant's great breakthrough in philosophical knowledge.

Previously I discussed the question whether our life purpose is to seek

knowledge or seek happiness.

In this segment I'll look at one of the biggest battles in philosophy between

the rationalists, mostly mainland Europeans, who argue that knowledge is

somewhat innate inside us, and the empiricists, mainly British, who argue

that knowledge comes from experience.

Immanuel Kant brought the two together.

If Western philosophy was a two-sided funnel, Kant would be the narrow part.

So everything before him is squeezed through him and after him Hegel and

Schopenhauer moved philosophy in two different directions.

Hegel went historical and rational while Schopenhauer went psychological and

subconscious. I'll discuss these two philosophical approaches later on.

Rationalism is a school of philosophy that relies on human reason to

understand the world. Reason itself is an innate human property.

In other words, we are born with the ability to reason, and early

rationalists saw reason as God-given gift.

The father of rationalism is René Descartes, who lived between 1596 and

1650. He was a French philosopher and a scientist who famously did his thought

experiment. He sat down in his armchair and asked the simple question, what if

everything we know is just a dream?

Nothing exists in reality.

In other words, to prove that he existed, he did the opposite.

He doubted his own existence.

Then he said, if everything was a dream, the dreamer has to be real, otherwise

there will be no dreaming without a dreamer, or doubt without a doubter. So

he said the most famous line in philosophy, I think, therefore I am.

Even if you doubt your own existence, this doubt is real.

According to Descartes, we get knowledge or ideas in three different ways.

Some come from our experience, some derive from reason, and some ideas are

innate inside us, presumably from God.

So rationalists like René Descartes argue that we have an innate knowledge

of the world and as we grow, we simply unfold that knowledge to see things more

clearly. In a way rationalists are like Plato in saying that our knowledge of

the world inside us and learning is just recollection of that innate knowledge.

So the seed is inside us, not outside.

The other famous rationalist was Gottfried Leibniz who lived between 1646

and 1716.

Today we know him more because of the famous argument he had with Isaac Newton

over the invention of calculus.

Leibniz however was a great philosopher who made a distinction between rational

truth and factual truth. In other words, our knowledge of the world relies on our

innate reason but also on human experience.

The things we experience on the outside builds on and solidifies our inner

knowledge. For Leibniz, the human mind is a small representation of the entire

universe. In other words, the human mind contains everything in the universe.

If the universe is rational, then the human mind is a representation of that

rationality. However, he conceded that human rationality is not always adequate

to understand the world, so we need human experience to complement our

rational faculties.

One of the biggest problems for Leibniz was his belief in God, so he attempted

to reconcile scientific empiricism with the idea of God who knows it all.

In doing so, Leibniz argued for two different forms of truth.

The empirical truths we get through experiences add to our rational truths

which we innately have or got given.

So to sum up, rationalists argue that humans are naturally equipped to utilize

reason to understand the world, with or without the need of observation or

animal senses.

In other words, we don't need experiences to know the world, we simply

know it because for the most part, God has imparted us with innate knowledge or

ability of reasoning.

Empiricists however disagreed, saying that we understand the world not

innately but through experience and empirical data we gather from the world

through our human senses.

Our mind is a blank slate without experience.

John Locke who lived between 1632 and 1704 argued Around the same time as

Leibniz was a pioneer of empiricism who said that everything we know about the

world has come to us from our experience.

He gave the example of newborn babies to show that we humans have not a single

idea from birth. We simply learn by observing and experiencing things.

If we attentively consider newborn children, we shall have little reason to

think that they bring many ideas into the world with them.

Locke understood that while we may not have innate ideas from birth, we do have

the ability to learn a language, which may be innate.

This was later developed by Noam Chomsky and his famous theory of universal

grammar that humans are a hard wire to learn a language and its structure. So

John Locke concluded that all knowledge we gain, we gain through experience.

David Hume who lived between 1711 and 1776 built on John Locke's idea of

empirical experience as a source of knowledge and further argued that not

only we understand the world through observation experiences but we are also

able to categorize things as a kind of customary habit which guides us through

life. Hume argues that if you see a tree then another then another, at some point

you see a pattern or category.

This you call trees.

We have no notion of trees from birth.

We are like blank slates as babies and only through encounters with the outside

world, we begin to form knowledge of the outside world.

The same with night and day. As you see the cycle being repeated, you begin to

expect it as a kind of custom that night turns into day and day turns into night

and the cycle becomes a customary knowledge.

This over time becomes ideas and beliefs.

Over time they turn into what rationalists call innate knowledge.

Hume says they are nothing but old impressions or perceptions over time.

As knowledge is passed on from generation to generation, it may seem

innate which is nothing but someone's experience.

So David Hume added custom as a kind of repeated experience or common knowledge

and argued that we learn things from experience, it is not innate.

So the rationalists believe we humans are equipped with some innate knowledge

of the world at birth, while the empiricists argue that we are blank

slates and only through our experiences we gain knowledge of the world.

In other words, rationalists see knowledge flow from inside out, like a

torch shedding light on the outside, while the empiricists see knowledge flow

from outside like a window lighting a room.

Here comes the German giant Immanuel Kant who lived between 1724 and 1804.

Kant took up the challenge of reconciling these two divergent schools

of philosophy.

To solve the problem between the rationalists and the empiricists, Kant

devised a new theory that divided the world into two, phenomena and noumena.

Phenomena is the world of experiences, how we understand the world through our

bodily senses.

Things we see, hear, touch and smell and observe and study.

Noumena on the other hand is the world in itself, which we can never truly

know. For example, we can touch and study a rock, but we cannot truly

understand what it feels to be a rock. As a result, our knowledge of the rock

is not complete, it's limited and partial.

Kant argued that when we are receiving information through experience, however,

we are not passive receivers.

Instead, we humans also impose our own structures to the world.

We categorize things into rocks, trees, animals and whatnot.

The world we see is a reflection of a mental structure we put out to the

world. Rocks and trees may not have any notion of being such, but humans have

imposed such categories onto them.

In other words, we are not passive knowledge receivers but actively

imposing our own structure on things.

Now Kant brings the rationalists and empiricists together.

Rationalists argue everything is inside us while empiricists say everything is

outside us. And Kant says we are sort of on the threshold of outside and inside.

Like a kind of window glass in the middle of inside and outside.

Our inner mental structure shapes how we experience the world.

For example, a good analogy would be fishing.

To catch a fish, a fisherman throws the net.

If the holes in the net are too large, the fish escape.

And if the net has no hole, it catches more water than fish.

So the fish is the outside world while the net we throw is our mental structure

we put out to capture the experience as knowledge.

We humans probe the world through our innate mental structure which catches

the outside experience based knowledge.

So for Kant reason and experience go hand in hand in understanding the world.

Without the net you cannot catch.

You need both reason and experience to understand the world.

These he called his Copernican revolution.

Why? Because in the middle ages people believed the sun was orbiting the earth

and Copernicus said the earth is orbiting the sun.

Kant did the same.

In per se, knowledge comes from outside and Kant says yes, but not only we

actively seek the outside knowledge but it also goes through us so our mental

structure determines reality on the outside.

In other words, our human method puts a structure to the world that would not

exist without humans.

And this structure makes it easy for us to understand and manipulate the world.

Imagine we are not human, we might have a very different understanding of the

world. So to sum up, the rationalist think reason is more important than

experience in our pursuit of knowledge.

Our reason is like a torch that allows us to see things.

The empiricists however counter argue that experience is primary and reason is

secondary. Our senses act like a window that lets light in so we understand

things. Kant says we human are both a torch and a window.

because our mental structure allows us to experience and understand the world

better, faster and more effectively.

Without a good method or an effective tool in structure, our experiences are

all over the place.

The debate is still not over though.

Despite Kant uniting the two epistemological approaches in

philosophy, there are still people who think one way or another.

Our modern science is leaning more to the empiricist camp while most

psychologists lean more towards not the rationalist but the irrational

subconscious or the unconscious in determining how we understand the world.

So the debate has shifted from reason to passion in some cases to intuition.

It is not rationality but intuition that allows us to understand the world.

Next, I'll discuss what motivates human action by looking at two of Kant's

famous successors, who went in different directions.

Schopenhauer went psychologically towards Eastern philosophy while Hegel

built his philosophy on history.

On the one hand, we have Hegel, Marx, Sartre and others who explain human

motivation through history and rationality. While on the other hand,

Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche relied on individual psyche and human

passion to explain human motivation.

Previously I discussed how Immanuel Kant breached the two philosophical

approaches to epistemology, rationalism and empiricism.

So in western philosophy, Kant is like a funnel.

He influenced another two branches of philosophy that came after him which

tried to answer some fundamental questions like what makes us who we are?

What motivates our actions?

Hegel's answer was history and rationality while his arch rival

Schopenhauer's answer was the subconscious will.

Hegel's philosophy went the sociological route basing human action on history and

rationality while Schopenhauer's philosophy went the psychological route

basing human motivation on the subconscious blind will.

or human passion.

In this segment, I'll look at sociology and rationality by discussing

philosophers including Hegel, Marx, Sartre and Zizek, who argued that we are

the product of history.

But they didn't stop there.

Since history makes us who we are, it's also our job to make history. So we are

not only moulded and shaped by the historical era in which we live in, but

also through our own life choices.

So social philosophy is built on the philosophy of progressive egalitarianism

stating that we are heading towards a perfectionist utopia on the one hand and

materialism stating that the most important aspect of human life is

immaterial success on the other.

Of course, not all of them agreed on this.

It's important to note that philosophers who came after Kant were in a sense

responding to Kant because his breakthrough in bringing the

rationalists and empiricists together was a huge moment in philosophy.

George Hegel who lived between 1770 and 1831 too responded to Kant.

Hegel had two problems with Kant.

First, Kant argued that we humans only understand the phenomena but we have no

access to the noumena or the thing itself.

We can touch a rock but we cannot fully understand it. For Hegel, this noumena

world which we can never fully know looked like an empty abstraction, pure

speculation based on Kant's own assumption.

In other words, he just made it up by claiming that such a thing existed in

the first place.

Hegel's second problem with Kant was that he argued that our innate structure

or categorization by which we interpret the world is fixed.

In other words, we use a fishnet or a framework by which we catch a fish or

experience but the net or the framework is always fixed and nobody can change

it. For the history buff Hegel, everything including human consciousness

was subject to change through time.

History has shown us that humans evolved, so do our tools including the

fishnet, or our ability to reason.

In other words, everything has a history, even rock has a history, it

changes through time. And humans are very much a product of a historical era.

How do we change? Hegel says through dialectic processes.

When two opposites collide, it makes a third thing that has a bit of both the

original things, but it also has slightly different characters.

Hegel says every phenomena or idea or thesis as he called it contains a

contradiction within itself, which he called antithesis, and this conflict

which is resolved and synthesis, or a new idea which is an improvement or

different from the thesis and antithesis.

Like a child has a characteristic of both parents but also different from

both. This historical process continues in generating new thesis and antithesis

which lead to further synthesis and history continues.

So according to Hegel Kant was wrong in saying that human mental structure or

reason does not change.

For Hegel, everything is subject to change.

It's important to note that Kant was a lot firmer in his religious belief than

Hegel, which explains that Kant sees reason as static while Hegel sees it as

malleable and changeable through time.

Another reason was of course the French revolution as well as the rise of

Napoleon which for the very first time in human history ordinary people took

power from the king and anyone could become Napoleon.

So nothing was fixed.

Kant being a much older man was fiercely against any kind of revolution that

could destabilise the status quo.

For Hegel, the world has a history and we are for the most part the product of

historical era.

In other words, reality is a historical process, not constant.

However, since we are the product of history, we can also affect the course

of history through ideas that capture the spirit of an age.

For example, Napoleon managed to influence history as he captured the

spirit of 19th century Europe.

People didn't believe in the absolute power of kings so demanded change.

Hegel can be characterised as a perfectionist rationalist, believing

that history is moving towards perfection.

Now Hegel only interpreted history.

His student wanted to change history.

Karl Marx who lived between 1818 and 1883 learned a great deal from Hegel. He

came to the conclusion that if we are the product of history, our history must

be the product of those who came before us.

Marx had a problem.

Hegel was good at interpreting history even at recognizing the people who were

capable of changing but Marx was more concerned about changing things for the

good, especially for the disadvantaged majority who were the real force behind

economic production.

i.e. the working class.

Marx said the history of our existence has been nothing but a continuous class

struggle between the haves and have-nots, the powerful and the

powerless, with the powerful enjoying it all and the powerless having a tough

time of it.

So Marx developed a philosophy of rational materialism arguing that

material inequality was the root of all evils.

He argued that humans are fundamentally motivated by material objects, so we are

rational because we want material things.

To solve this inequality, he adopted egalitarianism. For Marx, the

perfectionist future utopia was an egalitarian society where you only

worked for the hours that provided you enough subsistence and the rest of the

time you could relax on the beach.

You can also see traces of Christianity in Marxism, the fight between good and

evil, culminating in the weak overthrowing the powerful and turning

the world into a utopian communist heaven, where everyone lives equally and

happily ever after.

But Marx was not religious so he based his philosophy on rational materialism,

in which all workers unite to overthrow the exploitative class and everyone

lives in harmony and peace, and nobody starves.

For Marx, not only communism was desirable, it was also historically

inevitable because for him history was moving towards perfection, through

incremental improvement or dialectical change as Hegel said.

For example, feudalism was an improvement on hunter-gatherer

societies. capitalism was an improvement on feudalism, socialism an improvement

on capitalism, and finally communism an improvement on socialism.

And for Marx, communism was the final phase of human history.

You couldn't make it any better. Just like heaven, you cannot create a heaven

that is better than another heaven.

Or maybe you could, but generally heavens tend to mean perfection.

If they do exist, of course.

Marx's class-based analysis had deep communitarian roots, or group-based. As

a result, it failed in a highly individualized Europe, despite many

attempts. For example, in 1870s, Paris had a socialist revolution, but it

didn't stick.

Marxism found fertile soil in countries with strong communitarian bond like

Russia and China.

So the 20th century witnessed many Marxist revolutions to move history in

the right direction.

These attempts had partial success but ultimately failed to create a communist

utopia. So Hegel talked about history in motion.

Marx talked about how to speed up that historical motion.

Both Hegel and Marx saw things from a society's perspective.

Now I'll discuss how this history-based philosophy applies to a person's own

individual history, from birth to death.

If a society has a history, so does an individual.

Jean-Paul Sartre, who lived between 1905 and 1980, was a French existentialist

philosopher. He was not a Marxist, but was hugely influenced by Marx and other

Marxists, especially the Maoist movement in France.

Hegel and Marx both agreed that humans are not only the product of history, we

humans also serve the purpose of history.

Hegel explained reality through a god-like spirit or idea, and Marx

explained through historical materialism and class struggle.

In other words, both argued that we individuals are there to serve the

grander mission or purpose, be it god or history or class struggle or general

society.

But what's the purpose of an individual human life?

Sartre's existentialist philosophy argued that human life has no purpose

because we are made neither by God nor by a blind force of history as Marx and

Hegel outlined.

Instead, we are made by our own history, choices we make in our own life.

In other words, we have no essence or purpose from birth, we simply acquire it

through our life, often through our own free choices and actions.

Since we have no preordained purpose set for us by some other power like God or

society, we are free to make mistakes to find our own purpose.

Sartre even goes further by saying that we are condemned to be free and

condemned to make mistakes, but this freedom comes with, you guessed it, as

Uncle Ben said, it comes with responsibility.

In other words, we are our own makers, we craft our own self-identity,

therefore we have to live with what we make of ourselves.

Unlike Hegel and Marx, Sartre liberates individuals from the constraints of God,

history, traditions, class and even human nature.

So today a new trend among homo sapiens is transgenderism, the idea that you can

define your own gender identity based on your own feelings.

People feel they are in the wrong body and they change their gender in an

attempt to correct the incorrect.

This might have been difficult in a pre-existentialist era but now it's

widely accepted that in most of the developed world, you can decide what

your identity is.

Instead of your biology, society's history, tradition or norms defining

you, you have the full control to make yourself and find your own life's

purpose. As I said, with this freedom comes responsibility.

If you make a mistake, you have to own those mistakes, don't blame others.

In other words, if you build a bridge and it collapses, you are responsible.

In the same way you build your own identity, if something goes wrong, you

cannot blame others for it.

So Jean Paul Sartre's existentialist philosophy gave the individual the full

autonomy to make something of themselves.

For him, it wasn't social history, but your own individual history that makes

you your own free choices.

Slavoj Zizek was born in Slovenia in 1949.

Today he is the most important figure who subscribes to a history-based

philosophy. He identifies himself as Hegelian who argues that Marxism has

failed miserably because most Marxists today live in the past, too attached to

history. Today's Marxists blame history for their failure.

In other words, he says that Marxists today have lost touch with reality and

live in the past like an old man who has failed in his life projects.

This failure is most visible in his own style as he uses comedy to cope with

that failure.

His philosophy is based on philosophical irony.

Marxists believe in history and historical struggle.

The very history that these philosophers based their ideas failed their attempt

to create a truly socialist society.

So history failed the philosophical tradition that based its core philosophy

on history.

Now that's ironic and so on and so on and so on. You get the point.

So to sum up, Hegel said we are the product of history that keeps

progressing and Marx said let's not study history but let's speed it up to

get our final destination, a communist utopia.

Sartre argues, forget about class history, we are the product of our own

individual history in which we also find our purpose.

And finally, Zizek says history has failed us all. We have not progressed

but regressed. So our history is nothing but a history of failed intelligence or

rationality. Next, I'll discuss the other strand of philosophy that came out

of Kant through Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, which

emphasises not rationality or history or society, but passion or will or human

psyche, the mysterious subconscious world of psychological philosophy.

Previously, I discussed a branch of philosophy that put emphasis on

historical and social change as the main motivating factors for human actions.

For example, philosophers like Hegel, Marx and Sartre argued that we are the

product of history, either society's history or our own personal history.

In this segment, I'll focus on the other branch of philosophy that is based on

the individual human psyche or the blind will that drives human actions.

In other words, it's not the history or society but other mysterious forces

inside us like passion or the blind subconscious will.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who lived between 1788 and

1860 was firmly against Hegel's philosophy.

Schopenhauer took Kant's distinction between the knowable world of phenomena

and the unknowable world of noumena to develop his own theory of will and

representation. Schopenhauer argued that there is no distinction between the two.

They are one and the same thing or two sides of the same coin. He said there is

one world which he called will.

But this will is mysterious and hard to understand.

It's built in inside us. In other words, all living beings and even non-living

beings come pre-assembled or pre-installed with this blind will.

Since it's built in inside each being, we cannot fully know.

We can only know how it's represented or manifested to us, but not the will

itself. The will itself is hidden from us. All we see is its mere

representation.

For Schopenhauer, will is the blind driving force in the universe and

representation is our perception of that blind will. In other words, will is the

essence of the universe and we only see or understand its manifestation in us.

He called it will to life or passion for life that we share with all living

beings including animals and plants.

We all have an innate will to continue living.

Since the will itself is blind and universal, we each become its eye

through which it looks out to the world.

Will is like a gigantic iceberg, while our human intellect or human perception

of it is only the tip of that iceberg.

So Schopenhauer really went deeply psychological about human motivation.

Schopenhauer says it's impossible to know the will because as soon as you

observe it, it becomes a representation of that will.

If you do not observe it, then it is the will. It's like in quantum mechanics,

your observation of a particle changes the position of the particle.

In other words, if you don't look, it is there, but as soon as you look, it

changes position.

It's also a kind of catch-22.

To understand Schopenhauer's idea of will is to imagine everything in the

universe as one thing, let's say atoms that oscillates between everything that

exists. It appears to us as something that is not a genuine thing but a mere

representation. To fully understand Schopenhauer's will, it's important to

mention the Buddhist idea of the self as an illusion or a mirage.

For the Buddhists, soul is universal but the self is a mere mirage we acquire in

our lifetime.

In other words, our essence is not the self we call me or I.

Schopenhauer too places the blind will at a much deeper place than we

understand or we can get to.

and will only get a representation of it. He also said that will is the cause

of our human suffering. Therefore, Schopenhauer is often considered the

father of pessimism.

Just like in Buddhism, our ego desires things, and those desires makes us

suffer because we can never satisfy our desires fully.

Schopenhauer says, since we have a body, we have a will that somehow controls us,

and that causes us suffering.

So we are all at the mercy of this blind will that urges us to do things.

The only way to cope with this suffering is through intellect and art which

allows us to move to a state of non-existence like in Buddhist Nirvana.

Artists, while creating art, as well as us while enjoying that art, we all

experience a moment of non-being while in awe of its beauty.

When an art takes our breath away, we truly experience non-existence, a kind

of blissful moment.

Schopenhauer influenced the German composer Richard Wagner, whose music

represents Schopenhauer's philosophy.

For Schopenhauer, music didn't represent the phenomenal world, therefore it was

free from the will and urges, instead it fostered compassion.

Schopenhauer had a massive influence on novelists and musicians of the 19th

century. He also influenced psychoanalysts, especially Sigmund Freud

and Carl Jung.

Schopenhauer also dismissed the idea of God and replaced God with the blind

will, and this had an influence on our next philosopher.

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard lived between 1813 and 1855.

He argued that our anxiety comes from our choices or in other words our belief

and complete freedom to make choices.

In a world where everyone believes in God, where everything is caused by God,

people accept it because there is no other choice.

In other words, God tells you what to do and what not to do. You have no choice

of your own.

But we live in a world where we no longer believe in God so we have the

freedom to choose.

But this freedom comes at a massive psychological cost.

It makes us anxious about our choices and the consequences of our choices.

When we are children, we live a carefree life because our parents take care of

everything. In the same way, a God-fearing society also lives in a kind

of blissful ignorance.

Since God is dead or when parents die, we are responsible to make our own

choices. The psychological toll of making choices is immense on us.

For example, Hamlet agonises over the question of to be or not to be in

Shakespeare's play.

Incidentally, Hamlet was also a Dane like Kierkegaard. In the 19th century,

hysteria was very prevalent, especially among women.

Today, anxiety is more common among both men and women. So absolute freedom makes

us anxious.

Kierkegaard himself never lost faith in God, but he saw freedom as good and bad.

While it makes us anxious and dizzy, it also allows us to make good moral

choices. His problem with Hegel's theory of history was that it gave little room

for individual freedom because we are bound by the historical force.

In fact, we suffer not because of the bigger forces in society, but we suffer

through our own action or choices we make as individuals.

So Schopenhauer said the blind will motivate us while leaving us with

minimum freedom of our own and Kierkegaard said that little freedom

induces anxiety in us.

Now these two philosophers come together in our next philosopher.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche lived between 1844 and 1900.

He was a great admirer of Schopenhauer. He accepted Schopenhauer's idea of the

will, but he had a big problem how passive this will to life was.

Nietzsche argued that this will, blind it may be, can be harnessed and utilized

for great purposes, artistic genius and philosophical flourishing.

He changed the passive will to life into a proactive will to power.

In other words, we are not here just to live, but we are here to grow, conquer

and dominate.

Nature is based on competition, not a state of blissfulness or mere survival.

Nature saw religion, especially its morality, as the biggest obstacle for

individuals to push boundaries in order to achieve greatness.

Morality decides what's good and what's bad, so society promotes certain values

and restricts others.

Nietzsche saw this as a weak-minded way of living that promoted weak or slave

mentality. He instead proposed a more nature-based approach in which no

morality can restrict innovation, probing, artistic creativity and

philosophical ideas.

Nature wants to grow, dominate, while religions suppress and tame people.

Nietzsche proposed the idea of Übermensch, a being who has surpassed

humanity into something else, a free spirit artist or a philosophical genius.

He is no longer bound by social values and norms because he has shed his human

qualities of weakness, enslaved mentality and religious compassion.

He is released from all that into an enormous creative energy and exuberance

for life.

Nietzsche also saw western philosophy championing rationality at the expense

of passion and emotions.

For him, passion was as important as reason.

Reason is just a tool, it provides us with technology that makes life easier

and more comfortable.

But reason cannot motivate us to do things that are daring and courageous.

Instead, rationality makes us risk averse.

This timidness leads us to hedonism in which we only seek pleasure and avoid

pain. This is a kind of nihilistic self-indulgence that makes you lazy and

self-centred.

Human passion on the other hand motivates us to do things, conquer the

world and topple mountains.

So Nietzsche's philosophy was based on human passion or the will to power to

surpass the current humans into great genius.

Nietzsche didn't believe in equality either because only a handful of people

could become great artists and genius philosophers.

Not everyone has original ideas.

So to sum up, Schopenhauer placed human motivation on the blind innate will,

while Kierkegaard said our anxiety comes from the little freedom we experience

and Nietzsche argued we are driven by will to power or passion to push society

forward and innovate.

Today's sociology and psychology have replaced philosophy when it comes to

human motivation.

One of the leading voices of psychology is Jordan Peterson who was born in 1962

and has adopted YouTube as his platform.

Another contemporary voice is the Indian yogi Sadhguru.

Peterson believes in human passion and faith, telling young people to take

individual responsibility.

Unlike Zezek, Peterson doesn't see the world through group identity like class

or gender but through the lens of the individual.

His idea of perception is somewhat similar to Schopenhauer's will and

representation.

Sadhguru, an Indian yogic guru on the other hand, argues that today's world is

shaped by materialism and people have conflated the desire for more with

happiness. Our goal is no longer happiness but to have more.

He argues it's time we reach a higher level of intelligence so we are in

charge of our body, not our bodily desires in charge of our mind.

He argues that modern society, even science, has become a slave to human

bodily desires to make us more comfortable.

As a result, it has blinded us from other possibilities of human

intelligence, or human consciousness to reach higher places.

So to sum up, Schopenhauer said we are driven by a universal will or passion

for which we have no control and this causes us to suffer, and art is our best

cure for suffering.

Kierkegaard argued that our anxiety or suffering is also caused by our freedom

of choices in life, which kind of negates Schopenhauer's blind will.

Nietzsche said this human passion that causes us suffering is also a great tool

to do something, create something and become greater than ourselves.

Peterson says to ease suffering is to take responsibility and make something

of your individual life instead of blaming others.

Sadhguru argues for a new form of human consciousness that goes beyond the

material world.

So, to sum up, human philosophy in the last 2500 years has tried to answer many

different questions.

Early Greeks tried empirical knowledge to explain the world while early eastern

philosophers tried to psychologically cope with the problem of existence.

Then later philosophers tried to explain life's purpose with the humanists

focusing on the equality among humans while the elitists or political realists

emphasised competition to push society forward.

Then Kant brought rationalism and empiricism together and the next

generation of Germans took him in two separate directions.

Hegel went historical, saying we are made by history, while Schopenhauer went

deeper into the human psyche, saying we are made by a blind will.

Perhaps today we are moving towards a new philosophy that is not based on

reason, but human intuition.

To sum up this video, in part one I discussed how humans' knowledge of death

and the rise of rational thinking gave rise to human philosophy in an attempt

to answer some of life's fundamental questions like the meaning of life, the

nature of reality, and the function of the human mind.

Then over time, each of those topics became a discipline of its own and

philosophy gave birth to physics, biology, psychology.

Physics focused on reality, biology on life, and psychology on the human mind.

Later, I looked at the various branches of philosophy such as ontology,

epistemology, rationalism, empiricism, humanism, utilitarianism,

existentialism, and postmodernism. In part 2, I discussed how Eastern

philosophy was based around rivers and agriculture, therefore spirituality and

fatalism. socialism became the dominant philosophical ideas.

Western philosophy on the other hand was based on oceans and trade which focused

more on rational thinking.

The fundamental difference is that Eastern philosophy emphasises changing

oneself, while Western philosophy wants to change the world.

I discussed how the Greek giants of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle questioned

dogma and promoted rational thinking, while the Eastern trio of Buddha, Lao

Tzu and Confucius showed how not to change nature but become one with

nature. by changing yourself.

In part 3, I discussed the purpose of human civilization and human life.

Elitism sees society as a competition ground, while egalitarianism promotes

equality. Philosophers such as Sansou, Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes saw humans

as animals so they offered a hierarchical social system to mimic

nature, where the most adept survive.

Philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire promoted equality

instead. On the question of knowledge or happiness, Erasmus, Montaigne, Bertrand

Russell argued one should prioritize happiness, while philosophers such as

Francis Bacon, Heidegger and Michel Foucault prioritized knowledge to better

one's life and understand the nature of society.

In part 4, I tackle the question of knowledge by discussing rationalism and

empiricism. Rationalists see knowledge as innate inside us, while empiricists

see knowledge only coming from outside experience.

Kant provided a middle ground saying we have innate mental structure that we put

out to the world to give us a more structured understanding of the world.

In other words, we are not passive receivers but active organizers of the

world. I also discussed what shapes us and motivates our action.

Hegel and Marx's history-based philosophy argued we are the product of

history. And Jean-Paul Sartre who said we are the product of our own individual

history. On the psychological side, we saw Schopenhauer who placed human

motivation and the subconscious blind will.

Kierkegaard focused on how freedom creates anxiety.

Nietzsche said we can channel the blind will and use anxiety to create art.

If you have made it to this point, a huge kudos to you. I really appreciate

it. So my question to you, which philosophy or philosopher resonated with

you the most?

Or a more interesting question is, where do you see philosophy heading?

As always, I really appreciate you accompanying me on this long journey.

Thank you.