Philosophy — Douglas Adams — Making things easier

When I tried reading philosophy for the first time, I fell asleep.

The next couple of times were the same as well — I’d start reading and I was snoring before the second page would get over. With all due respect to philosophy, it wasn’t that the writers were subpar or the content was boring. The content was interesting. But it wasn’t.

Philosophical texts are dense.

They’re riddled with cross-referencing works of other philosophers and their sentences run for paragraphs with no end. They’re, by no means, poorly written, mind you. When you’re reading a text like that, you can see the amount of effort and the sleepless, drug-addled nights that one must’ve spent on multiple drafts to condense their high-functioning thought of process for every paragraph.

It makes you feel awfully guilty when you fall asleep during reading something of such metaphysical significance.

And then there’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy is one of the most meaningful books one can read, in fact, everyone should read it at least once. You just have to appreciate the sheer effort that Douglas Adams put in to create an entire story, a universe, to try to explain something so simply.

I like it when writers go the extra mile to explain things, when they make things so simple that it’s accessible to everyone, that you can consume it anyway you want, and you’d get it.

This thing does not end with Douglas Adams, though.

Many writers, in their own ways, have worked really hard to make their texts as simple as possible. They’ve diluted philosophy from a condensed cloud of fog to a spring-time breeze that anyone could enjoy.

And I think that’s where the bridge between literature and philosophy becomes self-evident.

Through the medium of stories, what you’re doing is that you’re putting the philosophic thought into a concrete situation; the reactions seeped into characters as per their different personalities, and the progression into the plot itself. You’re taking psychology and the mindsets of different people into account when you put into stories. That way, the text becomes easy for everyone — including the cynic, the hopeless romantic, and the nihilist.

It allows co-existence; it allows room for speculation, procession, and taking the time to make one’s case. And all the time, the writer presents his own doubts, reservations, and inhibitions through different characters.

The issue with philosophy is the scope of its application into the real world. There are some real questions — the biggest questions of life — which philosophers try their best to explore and hopefully answer.

For example, does life have meaning or not? If so, what is it?

There’s another question in my head, how would it change humanity? Would it? Let’s say, that if the answer is in affirmative, would people actually care to work harder and be less nihilistic? Because the questions of soul-searching and introspection are questions that more than half the people in the world don’t even ask, in their entire lives. Their life, highly dictated by poverty and basic survival, is one where to survival is your success. The most fundamental questions to life should be the ones that every human being cares about, right?

Anyhow, the point is that our culture needs to do more with philosophy texts. We know more about ourselves, our brains, and our society than we’ve ever known. That being said, it is up to us evaluate their work again, cross-reference it with the facts we have today, the data we’ve been fortunate enough to collect, and most importantly, get more people interested in philosophy.

To do that, we need to make the study of philosophy easier, more convenient and use the tools at our hand to maximize a young adult’s interest and encourage more people to further the field of philosophy. There’s a lot to be done, and making philosophy accessible is a decent first step to a brighter, more self aware future.