Empowerment Through Thought

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to live through difficult times. I suppose that isn’t terribly surprising given the state of the world. There is a lot happening right now that asks something of us. There is suffering we are aware of and suffering happening in our own lives. There is political instability, uncertainty about the future, and a seemingly endless supply of things we are supposed to care about. And, of course, we still have our regular lives to live in the middle of all of it.

I think there is a particular difficulty that comes with caring deeply about the world. Caring means allowing ourselves to be affected by what is happening around us. We have responsibilities to other people and to our communities. We want to participate in making the world better. At the same time, we are finite human beings with finite amounts of energy, attention, and control. We have to somehow build lives inside a world that will continue to contain suffering and uncertainty.

These are philosophical problems. Human beings have been wrestling with questions about suffering, responsibility, control, hope, and meaning for thousands of years. What do we owe other people? How should we respond to circumstances we cannot control? How do we participate in community when things are difficult? How do we sustain hope when we have no guarantee that things are going to turn out the way we want them to?

One of the things I have been thinking about a lot as I build this practical philosophy work is what it actually means for philosophy to help us with questions like these. Philosophy is a way of understanding the world. The ideas we encounter in philosophy can give us new frameworks for understanding our experiences, help us notice assumptions we didn’t realize we were making, and give us different ways of thinking through questions that may have felt impossible to untangle on our own.

This is part of what I have been experimenting with through Philosophy Club over the past few months. We have talked about how we build meaning in uncertain times, how we stay human in the age of AI, and most recently, how we participate in community in times of crisis. I have been trying to create spaces where we can take questions that already matter to us and think about them more philosophically. I bring philosophical ideas into the room, but I am much more interested in what happens when people begin using those ideas to develop and deepen their own thinking.

I have loved watching those conversations unfold. Sometimes someone makes a distinction that changes the shape of the question. Sometimes we uncover an assumption that we hadn’t realized was sitting underneath the whole conversation. Sometimes someone says something that makes me go home and keep thinking about it for several days. We don’t always come to agreement, and we certainly don’t solve the enormous questions we take on. But I think there is something deeply valuable in becoming better at wrestling with them.

So I want to spend more time doing that.

This October, I’m launching my first six-week practical philosophy course, How to Live Through Difficult Times. We’re going to spend six weeks thinking together about control and uncertainty, suffering and care, our responsibilities to other people, community in difficult times, hope, and meaning. We’ll draw on philosophers and philosophical traditions that have been wrestling with these questions for a very long time, and we’ll use their ideas to help us think more deeply about our own lives and the world we are actually living in.

I’ve been saying that the goal of the course is to develop and deepen your own thinking using philosophical ideas, and I think that gets very close to what I am trying to build with this whole practical philosophy project. I want philosophy to be something people can use. I want people to become more comfortable examining their assumptions, making careful distinctions, following an idea through to its implications, and staying with difficult questions long enough to see what they might reveal.

Because difficult times give us an awful lot of questions to wrestle with. How much responsibility can one person reasonably carry for the suffering in the world? What does it mean to care for ourselves while also taking seriously our responsibilities to other people? What can we learn to accept, and what should we refuse to accept? What does meaningful participation in a community look like when everyone is tired and overwhelmed? What kind of hope is available to us when we cannot promise ourselves that everything will be okay?

I don’t think we need perfect answers to those questions before we can live our lives. I do think learning to think more deeply about them can change the way we move through the world. That is the possibility I want us to explore together.

How to Live Through Difficult Times will meet for six Thursdays at 6:00 pm from October 1 through November 12, with no meeting October 15, at the Technology Resource Center in South Bend. The full six-week course is $150, limited scholarships are available, and no previous philosophy experience is required.

If you are someone who cares deeply about the world and wants to spend some time thinking seriously about how to live in it, I would love to have you join me.