What first comes to mind when it comes to philosophy? Abstract thinking? Rigid reasons? The source of knowledge?

Or maybe, to most people, nonsense arguments?

I know that philosophy as a college subject terrifies most people and they would always rather sit on their laptops or phones than engage in lectures. Then, at the end of the day, they deplore college and the American educational system for making them take the class.

I came from a Southeast Asian country where I was first introduced to philosophy in high school and was totally bombarded by Marxism and other seemingly philosophical teachings, which are eventually conformed to Marxism--in my country, textbooks are propaganda and teachers all have to be members of the Communist Party.

I concur that Marxism is a branch of philosophy, namely political philosophy with Communism as the approach, but the way it is indoctrinated as the absolute truth is what I have to disagree with. Since the early dawn of history, we human beings have been naturally inquisitive creatures who tend to wonder, then ask questions, then seek answers through observations and reflection. Such is the foundation for civilization and social structures. We started out as a tabula rasa, a blank tablet, as Empiricists called it, on which experience writes. With our inquisitive minds and capability to reason, we evaluate and reflect on the experience until it becomes ours (as the Rationalists argue).

However, civilization seems to have gone too far: instead of experiencing something, evaluating it and then either adopting or rejecting it, thus leading to a world with diversified values, the world today is becoming more and more homogenous, evidenced by people being indoctrinated with predetermined values and forced to adopt them, without any room for reflection and rebuttal, and thus those attempting to deviate are fiercely ostracized.

These observations are not new; in fact, they were put forward by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an 18th-century political philosopher, in his quote, "Man was born free, yet everywhere he is in chains."

Forcing your ideas on others is wrong, even if the ideas work. However, such has been the case since the beginning of social hierarchy, and it is ironic, considering that the more civilized human beings are, the more backwards their thinking seems to work.

As aforementioned, philosophy is often misinterpreted as the thing only nerdy, unemployable and eccentric people enjoy. However, philosophical thinking is what we all do, either when we're busy dealing with our everyday life ("Is cheating wrong?" "I'm gay, but the Bible says it's wrong, so what should I make of myself?", etc.) or when we're having some free time and our thoughts wander ("What is life all about?" etc.). In fact, "the very first philosophers, in ancient Greece and China, were thinkers who were not satisfied with established explanations provided by religion and custom, and sought answers [for themselves] which had rational justifications." ("The Philosophy Book", DK Publisher). Today people take weather forecasting and the science behind it for granted; at the same time, they deny the necessity of philosophy without realizing that without the efforts of generations of deviant philosophers who argued for science, there would not be any rational grounds for science to develop, and we'd still dictate by religion and tradition that the weather is unfavorable because we haven't worshiped our ancestors enough.

People like to quote philosophers, but they fail to do their homework. Philosophical quotes are often condensed conclusions about a lifetime of reasoning; thus philosophers die happy knowing that they've been through the entire process of finding answers to fundamental questions, and they succeeded in leaving a quote as their answer to all the lifetime efforts. However, those who make use of the quotes mostly have no idea about the process of reasoning and the background of the person who said it, and they use it because it's convenient, or comes from someone well-known, or suits their needs--in other words, they take the quotes out of context and even misappropriate them. That's totally missing the point and intention philosophy in this life.

Another scenario is that students are often forced to remember who said what, or because they lack motivation, they just cram everything the night before the exam. In both cases, all they see are the superficial, super dense and out-of-context tree leaves, but a tree isn't just comprised of the leaves.

Thus, I'd like to end by throwing in a superficial, super dense, and out-of-context quote, by Socrates: "The life which is unexamined is not worth living."

Well, I hope that reading through my writings, you can understand why I throw in the quote there, but I'm happy either with you agreeing or disagreeing with me, because I've accomplished what I set out to write. "Philosophy is not so much about coming up with answers to fundamental questions as it is about the process of trying to find those answers, using reasoning rather than accepting without question conventional views or traditional authority." ("The Philosophy Book", DK Publisher)