Love Like Nietzsche and Be Wise Like Seneca - Yun Ji-won

Notes

Reading Reflection

The Moment Philosophy Comes Into View

A way to see the world from multiple angles

There are moments when my thoughts begin to multiply.

When I come into conflict with someone, when my situation does not go the way I want it to. When I feel as if something in life is getting tangled.

Maybe because I am the kind of person who thinks a lot, when moments like these come, I find myself thinking deeply without even realizing it.

Deep thought sometimes leads to answers, but it can also narrow the way I see the world, and more often than not, it leads to bias and negative thoughts.

Whenever I read philosophy books, I have a hard time remembering who is who, and the ideas each person argued for do not stay with me very well.

Even so, I keep reading because, in moments when my vision narrows, I can look at the problems I am going through from a perspective different from my own and think about how other people have approached them.

A Brief Note About the Book

As is often the case with books of this kind, this book also presents a certain problem situation and introduces the thoughts and ideas of a particular philosopher in response to it.

Then it talks about how we might think about that problem.

I am not sure about the phrase on the cover: “All the answers in life are found in philosophy.”

I do not relate to everything philosophers have said, and there are many things that make me tilt my head in doubt.

But if what the cover or the book is saying is not that the correct answers lie in the words of philosophers.

If it means that the act of thinking for myself is philosophy, and that the answer lies within that, then maybe it is right.

While reading the book, I was able to think about some of the problems I am facing in directions I normally would not have considered, so I want to write briefly about that.

A Few Thoughts of My Own

Lately, I have been doing mentoring sessions and coffee chats quite often.

How did you get a job? How did you grow so quickly?

These are the questions I always hear when I do mentoring.

Looking back on the days I have lived through, I think I have lived by the following principles.

1. Thinking consumes more energy than acting. That is why I act first.

When I thought too much, it often ended up working against me in one way or another. Sometimes I felt, just by thinking, “I have already accomplished everything!” At other times, I felt the opposite: “This is not going to work...” Sometimes it felt like an enormous wall. So I decided to act before thinking, and I think that decision helped me shine in decisive moments.

2. Break work into small pieces. Then do the smallest task on autopilot.

I often start many different things at the same time. If I look at them one by one, each is something I can solve, but the moment they come together, they become a problem. When I thought about why, I realized that they start to feel like a giant wall, and because they feel like too much, I become overwhelmed by their weight.

When that happens, it is easy to mess things up.

So I started breaking work down into small pieces and approaching them one by one, as if clearing quests.

3. I tried, somehow or other, to achieve the ideal I had in mind.

In life, moments like that come from time to time.

Huh...? I think this could work if I do it like this...?

And in the end, these things are battles of timing. If the timing lines up well enough, they generally succeed.

A representative example would be the things that exist in the gaps between changes, even as people say everything is rapidly changing in the age of AI.

~~Even if you build an automation tool, by tomorrow Anthropic, GPT, or some other company may release a new tool. That is why things like this are elements that shine only for a moment, and in order for them to create impact, there are times when you need a strategy of releasing them before someone else releases something similar, and then letting them go once something similar appears.

In this way, I feel that most of the ideas that seem impactful to me these days are ultimately about timing.

Thoughts Expanded Through the Book

I came to read this book with those thoughts in mind.

The inexplicable feeling I have been experiencing lately, as if something is getting tangled. Helplessness. Boredom.

I thought I might be able to find some clue to resolving them. And unexpectedly, I was able to arrive at a few thoughts.

William of Ockham’s Razor of Thought

Life is not complex. We are the complex ones. Life is simple. And what is simple is right.

I usually think a lot. And recently, that tendency has become especially strong, so I think I spent my time unable to do certain things, only thinking about them.

There are moments when the thoughts I mentioned earlier in 1, 2, and 3 no longer apply, and I think this was one of those situations.

Then, I came across the section on William of Ockham. It was called the razor of thought, and it meant dismantling unnecessary assumptions and carrying forward the principle of economy.

When I thought about it, it made sense, so I came to keep a razor inside myself.

Wittgenstein and Language

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

It was a sentence that summed up why I read books.

The thoughts I see and the things I have experienced are limited. I started reading books to gain a broader perspective, to see things from multiple angles, and I think the sentence above explains that.

In the end, I read books to expand my own limits, my own vessel. I thought that might be the right way to look at it.

Frankl’s Logotherapy

Instead of asking whether life has meaning, it is we ourselves who give meaning to each moment.

Here, the book tells the story of Jews in Auschwitz. Jews who tried somehow to survive in Auschwitz. On the other hand, Jews who lost the will to live. And through that, it asked how we should face adversity.

The phrase “the meaning of life is not something we make, but something we discover” resonated with me quite deeply.

In the end, even when looking at the same event, if we try to discover meaning within it, we will be able to find something. Otherwise, it is merely something that passes us by.

In the process I have gone through as well, I tried to discover meaning while somehow continuing forward. And as a result, I have come this far.

It was fascinating that such thoughts could be expressed in the way above, and through it, I was able to observe myself again from a distance.

Other Thoughts

Recently, while reading various things related to philosophy, I have been feeling that what I take in is different every time.

My situation in each moment probably plays a role, and mental growth probably has an influence too.

While writing this, I realized that my recent concern must have been my own growth. Goals. Purpose. And thoughts about how to carry things out within them.

If I read this book again, the phrases that resonate with me will probably be very different. This is also a book I should read again once or twice more.