On the Inadequacy of Philosophy
The title makes it sound like I'm presenting a graduate dissertation, when in fact this is little more than a shower thought.
I wasted money and veteran's benefits on an undergraduate degree in philosophy. I've spent countless hours reading, studying, reflecting, and discussing, all in an attempt to grasp capital-T Truth. It occurred to me that such an endeavour was doomed from the start.
Sure, there are plenty of soft skills that can be developed from studying philosophy, but the same can be said of business or basket weaving. Philosophy is the "systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its own methods and assumptions." But what's a question without an answer?
Philosophy doesn't actually answer any of the questions it poses. It simply isn't in its nature to do so. When partnered with science, certain things might be demonstrated, but that's limited to the material. Highfalutin discourse about metaphysics does little except confuse the layman and inflate the ego of the intellectual. It simply doesn't answer most of the important questions that plague our existence - questions of life, death, and purpose.
Rather, I think it does something similar to poetry and art. When approaching the ineffable, philosophy points in a general direction, hinting at the directionless. It provides a more comfortable, rational framework in which to ask the unanswerable.
As I get older, I find that poetry comes closest to hitting its mark. Good poetry has a very zen-like way of breaking the conceptual, offering a glimpse of reality as it is. Those glimpses never seem to last. They fade quicker than dreams. You question if you ever saw anything at all.
But for now and always, I guess, it's just "chop wood and carry water."