Name: How to Think Like a Philosopher
Rating: 4.2 (203 reviews)
Author: Peter Cave

What’s in it for me? Discover the poets, sages, and provocateurs who engaged with life’s biggest questions.

At its core, philosophy has always been about the big questions in life. Like, Why is there something instead of nothing? Or, How can I know what is true? While our modern lives are vastly different from, say, the life of Socrates in ancient Greece, in some ways the questions humans face about the universe and our place in it haven’t changed much for thousands of years.

But that doesn’t mean the answers to those questions haven't changed radically across time and cultures. Philosophy has never been the stuff of dusty old books – it’s an ever-evolving, eternally challenging conversation about the nature of reality. Not everyone who philosophizes calls themselves a philosopher, either. Poets, mathematicians, novelists, economists, psychologists, and historians have all engaged in thinking about thinking – and discovered profound truths along the way.

From ancient China to postwar Paris, the art of pondering life has influenced music and art, forced painful questions, and galvanized revolutions. Even more, it has inspired countless people to live with more purpose, awareness, and intention.

This Blink will ditch the dry treatises and dive into some of the ideas and personalities that have shaped civilizations – and a few that sent shock waves through them, too. You’ll also learn to think like these philosophers, and to bring the richness of their perspectives into your life.

Thinking in contradiction: Lao Tsu and Spinoza

Imagine starting a book by saying that you can’t possibly speak about its subject. Pretty strange, right? But that’s precisely how the Tao te Ching of Lao Tsu begins – it declares that words can’t express the full meaning of Tao, loosely translated to mean the way.

Since its emergence in China in the sixth century BCE, this enigmatic and poetic text has confused many with its contradictions and puzzles. It declares that Tao, or true reality, is unknowable and beyond description. So when humans try to grasp it, it slips through their fingers.

Its author, too, slips through our fingers if we try to grasp for a historical person. Lao Tsu translates simply to old master, and was likely not a single author. Like Tao, the author is unknowable and unnamed, but that doesn’t lessen their impact.

This ancient text uses enigmas and strange metaphors as a way to point at things beyond understanding. It’s full of strange comparisons – like saying that governing a large country is like cooking a small fish, in that it’s easy to overdo things. Or that the Tao is like water, because it flows into the deepest crevices and nourishes everything equally.

These cryptic verses point to a particular way of being, one where nature is the true window into reality. A certain quietness of mind and spirit is needed to truly observe, though. Freeing yourself from desire, like in Buddhism, is necessary to observe the mysteries of reality. Because of its focus on the way, the book has often been viewed as a religious text – despite it noting that religion only arises when humans lose sight of Tao.

If the true nature of reality is so ungraspable and unknowable, then philosophy is bound to run into religion in more places than just ancient China. Let’s consider the experience of seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch, or Bento, Spinoza.

Born in Amsterdam in 1632 to Jewish immigrants from Portugal, Spinoza’s philosophy was radically different from that of his family and the Jewish community. He believed that any idea of God couldn’t be separate from the natural world. Like Lao Tsu long before him, nature and the universe itself were true reality for Spinoza – and he paid a steep price for it.

Excommunicated from the Jewish faith at the age of just 23 after his publication of Deus sive Natura, or God or Nature, he became a total outcast. His Jewish heritage already excluded him from Dutch society, and his excommunication from Judaism left him without any community.

Spinoza’s response in the face of this suffering was to become kind. His personal experience of suffering grew his compassion for others. His outcast status helped further his philosophical work in some ways. Freed from outside influences, he developed a view of reality that was almost pantheistic – everything around him was a part of God, even those who rejected him.

For this, he was vehemently declared both a godless atheist and a religious zealot. He anonymously published a treatise in 1670, called Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, but everyone who read it immediately knew it was Spinoza. In it, he argued for things like freedom of speech and a secular society. It was then that he was labeled blasphemous – quite an accomplishment for an author formally rejected from religion!

So how can you think like Lao Tsu or Spinoza? Open your eyes to nature and the world around you with wonder, and quiet your mind so you can take it all in.

Earthy thoughts, from Aristotle and Epicurus

Ancient Greek philosophy is probably some of the best known around the world, with names like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle still inscribed in stone above universities and centers of learning more than two thousand years after their deaths. While we might think of their philosophy as belonging high in the ivory tower, some actually wanted to be much more grounded down here on earth.

Take Aristotle. A devoted student of Plato, he spent his early years at Plato’s Academy learning from the master who had presented the work of Socrates to the world. With such an august lineage, it’s not surprising that Aristotle’s writings are vast and cover topics as broad as medicine, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and much more.

Thoughts on alienation, with Marx and Nietzsche

If philosophy often looked to an examination of the natural world for answers, other more modern souls looked to the workings of human society to grasp the true nature of reality. They analyzed systems like mathematics and language, or turned to history for the meaning of life.

For Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, it was industrial capitalism that represented the true reality of modern life. While his writings were largely classified as economics, Karl Marx had a profound impact on modern philosophy – and his ideas were co-opted by countless revolutions around the globe, from which Marx himself would be quick to distance himself.

Thinking about love and sex, with Sappho and de Beauvoir

While the Greek poet Sappho might not spring to mind when you think of philosophers, her poetry demonstrates a fine philosophical mind. She was praised by Socrates and Plato as the “Tenth Muse,” so fine was her writing. Her descriptions of desire, full of finely painted imagery, imbue notions of love and beauty into philosophy with powerful presence.

Sappho uses terms like bittersweet to describe feelings of attraction and desire. Her poetic references to fluttering in her breast, subtle fire running over her skin, or her ears buzzing when seeing her beloved connect readers across the centuries with a deeply personal account of the felt experience of love. If love and beauty were aspects of the gods, their nature was an important part of true reality.

Key ideas in How to Think Like a Philosopher