The greatest joy of reading philosophers is the feeling of having the heavy mental lifting done for me. It’s getting the feeling that, if given an infinite amount of time, I could come to the same conclusions they did. If I went up into the mountains like Zarathustra, I, too, would figure out the answers to the riddle of life like the great thinkers of the past. Like Descartes, I would eventually realize that the one singular thing I can know for sure is that I am a thinking being. Eventually, like Jung, I would peel back the layers of the human psyche and, much later, achieve individuation. Like Rand and Orwell, I could dissect different forms of government and discover the downfalls of each.
I’m not even trying to pat myself on the back, here. I don’t think myself as great a thinker as all those I’ve named, it’s more of an “infinite monkeys typing will eventually produce Shakespeare” sort of affair. If I had infinite time to think endless thoughts, some of those thoughts would eventually be good. We don’t have infinite time, but human thought is an ongoing process and philosophy is a conversation held since the beginning of it.
We don’t have infinite time, but the show must go on. We will always need new thinkers to solve the world’s new problems, but the old thinkers, the philosopher kings, and the thinkers that laid the foundations of thought as a form of art provide a perfect jumping-off point for new thinkers. They shift the starting line farther forward by solving the problems of their day. They have done the heavy mental lifting for us. All we need to do is to continue the good work. This is the kind of philosopher I aspire to be.