As of writing this, I have been posting essays to my blog for almost four years. Thinking about why has led me down a personal rabbit hole of dreams, fears, hopes, and motivations. Why I write this blog has as much to do with my nature as a human being as it does with my idiosyncrasies. Not just thinking about life, but thinking about thinking is such a human trait, yet I also feel very different to many other people I interact with. In this essay, I want to reflect on and explain my reasons for loving philosophy and writing this blog. Through doing so, I hope to tell you a little about myself and this blog while also trying to grasp the fundamental nature and aim of human experience and life – at least, as I see them.
Much like other middle-class children in South Africa, I was raised in a household with money for clothing, food, shelter, and school. I had both my parents and a whole bunch of friends. All-in-all, I had everything I needed to survive. So, from an early age, my struggles were not hardship and fear but fitting in, making my parents proud, and finding things I enjoy. I was raised protestant Christian, and I was, for an average kid, perfectly at home in the church.
I say all of this because I was, in general, a perfectly average child with a perfectly average childhood. For me, the real stressors and challenges came about as I got older and wanted to understand and talk about things. Much like any teenager, I was obstinate, arrogant, and rebellious. Unlike your average teenager, I was angry and struggled to relate to those in positions of authority. Of course, part of growing up and learning to live your life involves rejecting what others tell you you must do and forging your own path. But I was genuinely angry at the people who tried to raise and teach me. Thinking back, a part of me still wants to be angry and tell myself I was justified. After all, for the most part, I was told what to think and how to behave. The caregivers in my life were not keen on explaining themselves or answering my questions. But another part of me, a part I like to think of as being more mature, recognises the role I played, the people I hurt, and the false entitlement I experienced.
I do not want to go into too much of my personal psychology. I am, after all, not that interesting or important. But my past does have a bearing on where I am now. I went through many different phases of wanting to be this or that. But ultimately, perhaps through fate, or maybe just happenstance, I gravitated toward psychology and philosophy. Both fields were a breath of fresh air compared to the circumstances of my childhood. Psychology seemed to want to understand people and our behaviour in ways no one else in my life wanted to. But even psychology is nothing compared to philosophy. For the first time ever, I felt like I found a people and a discipline that was made for me. All of my questions, my sceptical nature, my proneness to wanting to probe and break down, and my seeming need for reasons and justification – all of these were embodied by the history and ideas of philosophy.
So that, then, is the first piece of the puzzle. Partly my own nature, partly my past circumstances, I found philosophy because it provided me with an outlet for my questions and a haven for my ideas. Perhaps it is particularly significant to me, but the fact is that philosophy provides all humans with something we need: a space to lay out, evaluate, and explore the conceptual landscape before us. A part of being human is thought, and in a beautiful meta sort of way, thought can be turned on itself, giving birth to one of the most human aspects of ourselves: wisdom and the pursuit of it. This blog serves as the expression of that part of myself.
The other piece of the puzzle is my deeply held belief that philosophy is an overall good to those who practice it and the fact that I feel the responsibility not just to live my life well but to do so in communion with other people. Understanding the first is pretty simple. A slogan of philosophers for centuries has been that the unexamined life is not worth living. Perhaps I won’t endorse this slogan to the extreme. But a moderate understanding seems obviously true. One of the primary things we humans do, thought and reflection, is a part of living well as a human. When we think too little, we fail to make use of one of our most defining and useful faculties. But this is merely a basic understanding of the “examined life”. More substantial and relevant here, life is complicated, varied, and full of potential. It is far too easy for us human beings to be mistaken about what is important or be led astray when deciding how to act. By not examining your life, your beliefs, and your values, you risk completely missing out on all the good you can achieve. Furthermore, thanks to modern studies and science, we know human beings are prone to making mistakes or acting out of bias. We are, to a large extent, rash and irrational creatures. It is by taking a moment to reflect that we adopt a “firm and watchful stance against any unexpected onset” that life throws our way, as Marcus Aurelius put it. (Meditations, 7.61)
So, philosophy – understood here as the examined life or the life in pursuit of wisdom – at least the little of it I have done, has been a tremendous benefit to my life, not just for the personal reasons mentioned above but also by affecting the way that I think. Sitting here, reflecting on the things I used to believe and the ways I drew my conclusions, I certainly think I’m in a better place now. But as I see it, philosophy is not only an individual journey. We are better off when we pursue wisdom with the help of other people. The very fact that I think philosophy has been a help to me is a good reason to want to explain it to other people. This is a very important reason for my blog. I write and make it available to the public because I want people to engage with me. So far, it has not gone as I would like, but certainly not unexpectedly. Writing a small blog as a nobody does not usually lead to a lot of attention. But nonetheless, if I don’t try, I’ll never get people to engage with my work more generally or get to share what I have learned. I was, therefore, drawn to writing a blog because I was drawn to philosophy in general – a practice or discipline I see as deeply social and worth sharing.
Another constant driving factor for the blog is my advocacy for several positions I wish to express. The world is a diverse place, yet even so, what usually ends up happening is the dominant narrative gets repeated and normalized. In contrast, all others are sidelined or rejected as wrong or weird. I happen to find myself believing in a number of these sorts of positions, and I hope I am able to show that they can be reasonable. I want to expose people to more varied and alien ideas that I think are worth defending. So, if you plan on reading the essays on this blog, get ready for discussions in favour of animal ethics, general agnosticism, weak-naturalism, nuanced takes on science, an unconventional understanding of free will and moral responsibility, and an overly specific theory of virtue ethics. I do not plan on keeping quiet, and I love arguing with people over minute details. The Casual Philosophy blog will not be an exception. You will find out my opinions if you read my work.
Finally, the blog is an outlet for me without restrictions. I am currently a PhD candidate working on my thesis. I hope to teach at universities someday. I am also mostly a social, casual kind of philosopher. I am slow to publish anything in academic journals, do not attend many conferences, and am not actively in the academic world (seeing as I also have a full-time job as a Business Analyst). The blog gives me a space to just write without having to pass peer review or come up with some novel idea. I get to talk about the stuff I’m passionate about in the way I want, at the pace that I want. My favourite ways to do philosophy are either teaching or dialectical. A blog seemed like a great way to start doing that on my own terms.
To me, philosophy is just something we humans do. We want to live a life worth living where we can say we live with wisdom. I happened to find the academic discipline interesting enough to give it a try. Doing so showed me that we are generally pretty bad at living good lives when we try to do so without considering the wisdom and advice of other people. I also learned that a lot of people find wisdom in the wrong places and that much of what passes for wisdom and truth is nothing more than sophistry and post-hoc rationalisations. Thanks to my experiences and the pursuit of a good life, I want to write about my ideas and share them with other people. I’m not so arrogant or bold as to assume that I can give you the wisdom you need. My only hope is that I can be a part of the greater conversation and maybe, just maybe, share a thought or explain an idea in a way that makes a difference.
Casual Philosophy 
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