Why are you interested in learning philosophy and what steps have you given in that direction?
So I figured we should get things running here and I wanted to ask this question to see if I can come up with something for the next post. I hope I can hear from you all soon.
I felt lost and I saw my peers becoming ideologically captured.
Off the top of my head, I can think of Nietzsche and Jung both speaking to the god-shaped hole left in the human spirit (condition) that we seek to fill. I didn't know this before I began studying philosophy, but I'm pretty sure that I was compelled by this feeling exactly. At the time, I knew that I was young enough to still be impressionable and mostly without my own biases yet. So, rather than adopting whatever ideology was most convenient to me, I wanted to observe this phenomenon as an outsider for as long as possible. I still try to-- and think I am-- uncaptured by ideologies, and I think that studying different philosophies is the key to remaining uncaptured.
I see so many other people falling victim to ideologies to fill that hole, and I think that that is dangerous for our society. I firmly believe that one should never align their identities to an ideology, whether that's a political party's ideology, a economic ideology, or even a religious ideology. When one falls into an ideology, they cease to critically analyze that and themselves, and they begin to force-fit everything into to frame that the ideology gives them. They stop examining their own beliefs; and "the unexamined life is not worth living."
In terms of what steps I've taken, I try to read source material when I can: Meditations, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Socrates' Dialogues, Maps of Meaning, Man and His Symbols; but I also watch a lot of YouTube content on these and lectures about other speakers. I love Michael Sugrue's channel, and have watched some of those video multiple times. I just try to get as many different people's interpretations as possible. I am biased towards a Jungian view on truth, and I think he's accurate in saying that we gain understanding of ourselves and a sense of the truth through circumambulation.
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