Connecting major philosophical ideas to everyday challenges so you can know yourself better, decide more clearly, and act with intention.
Why this text ?
I am writing this text now that I am in my forties.
More than twenty years ago, when I was a teenager; I did not understand philosophy. Obscure. Complex. Pretentious. Dusty. The teacher, in my final year of high school, liked me, which, in retrospect—now that I find myself writing texts on the subject—suddenly makes sense.
But I clearly remember not understanding much at the time, and only having a vague interest in these intellectual speculations. Or may be it is my memory that has been blurred.
But all that was a long time ago. Two decades since passed, and as you know if you read me elsewhere in that space, I discovered ancient philosophy,
& eastern spiritual traditions.
I remember those moments at my former in-laws’ house. I would stay in the room of my former sister-in-law, whose shelves had been cleared after she had probably left the household some time earlier, to make room for one of the most beautiful private libraries on the human condition that I had ever been given to witness until then.
This is when I dived into the immensity of knowledge about the men and women of this world. And as I read this morning in a text by Cicero 1, without knowing it, when one begins the study (even if one does not yet know it, and even if this very particular kind of reading does not yet resemble it), it marks the starting point of a phase of life devoted to understanding the human being, the beginning of a path that may never end. Why? That is another question.
In any case,
what I want to talk about here with you,
is the link between philosophy and personal development.
I realized it rather late: philosophy is the ancestor of personal development.
And this philosophy—why do we need it? Because let me also share with you a sentence from Cicero that I read this morning: “just as not every gesture suits an actor, nor every movement a dancer, but only certain specific ones, so life must not be conducted in just any manner, but in a determined way—the one we say is fitting and harmonious.”2