Philosophy should be an attempt to rationalize the experienced, not an attempt to force experiences through reason. The former is the process of critiquing and understanding while the latter is an impossibility and leads to renegade illogical thinking and existential crises.
The human person, is endowed with consciousness, a first person subjective immaterial narrative grafted onto a third person material reality. The I, is the agent which partakes in that first person account, and lives it. Not live in the biological sense, but as a group of experiences, both mental and physical, each the result of one or more fundamental causal principles, succeeding each other in some fashion and creating a ‘ground’ on which the I forms its identity.
That identity, the I’s conscious experience of its own ontological reality, is in flux due to variance of experience it successively partakes in. Some result in more ontological privation while others assist in filling that ontological hole through conforming to the being's natural causality.
Excessive reason without action as belief, only gives way for the inability for the I to find that ground, through an excessive doubt of the causal principles which naturally precede the experiences. Philosophy then becomes a passive act, more of a methodological practice contrary to lived experience. What is experienced, instead of being taken itself as inherently informative and meaningful, must stand the test of hyper-skepticism, which cannot be passed because the I refuses to concede its own limitation.
The result, is the systematic self-fulfilling doubt of everything, stripping all of its essential nature and quality. Reducing everything to consideration, which cannot stand the test of the over-rationalizing I’s need of successive propositional truths.
In other words, the I’s knowledge is limited, so every bit of information, whether empirically derived or rationally discovered can be stripped of its certainty because there’s a limited number of propositions which can be reasoned to in order to defend the original one. Hyper-Skepticism is Infinite Regress in action.
This does not mean that the I can know nothing, it certainty can, but only if it takes certain things as axiomatic. It only means the I’s ability to abstract is limited. That is the point of Philosophy. To describe, understand, and critique based on the axioms. It should not be used to doubt EVERTHING, including the axioms. If even the axioms are doubted, the limitation of successive propositional truths will simply result in a hyper-skeptical thought process beyond reasonability, which always result in acts full of contradictions, such as a man doubting his own existence, something completely self-contradictory.
Point being, these axioms, logical foundations, are lived. They are validated repeatedly through experience. They are in fact constantly experienced. They always precede the abstractions and philosophical considerations which the experiences give rise to. The human person precedes human reasoning. To know something truly, one first must believe it. Only then is it validated intellectually. To try and first validate it intellectually, removed from the experience, is to neglect the property of thing as a lived experience. And if it cannot be experienced, it is ontologically empty to the I and ideas about it are equally empty of knowledge.
Philosophy comes second, Life first. Stop doubting what you know to be true, and validate it by living it.
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