How to read Philosophy?

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I have started reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is not an easy read, and fairly speaking philosophy cannot be. Especially when we want to learn everything about the universe in minimum words. I am reminded of the writings of Aurobindo, where pages would go flipped one after the other without a full stop in sight. Reading those lines felt taxing. In those moments I had felt there was a need to ease philosophy, let it breathe, or let the reader of philosophy be able to breathe.

I have been talking with a cousin who thinks if we can't explain a thing in one or a maximum of two lines, it means we only have vague information about it. This has been my motto too only to be shied away when the same action was to be applied to explain philosophy also. I was a student of philosophy for a long time, and have gathered a bit of knowledge about a few philosophers. And, comprehending philosophy would usually come to loggerheads with my fetish for logic. I used to waste my time trying to find logic in things happening around me so that the trail of occurrences, for any event, would come logically and organically to me whenever I would want to remind myself of them. It is always much more fun than rote learning. So, when philosophy as a subject came into my life, the fact that anyone can assume anything, anyone can have any thought or opinion and lay it like a man-made piece of knowledge established since eternity, the subject didn't sit right with me for a substantial number of days. 

It is the confidence in the words of these philosophers that makes you rethink your thoughts, that forces you to give a chance at least to hear them out, a slight gap which they effectively utilize to turn the tables on the readers and take them in the grips. I don’t mean to sound negative about philosophy as a subject, it is great. One has to get into the grooves till one finds the realization that each philosophy has to be seen as a helping guide, a guide to jumpstart their thinking process. The various philosophers can give you ideas, to start from. Is it okay to imagine? What can you imagine? What can you imagine even when it is never thought of before, almost surely would be bumped off by the moulds of society, when it is amoral, or immoral, or when it pesters you so much you have to give it a form of expression without hurting any. Virtually, you can view the universe as nearly anything. 

Plato viewed it as ideas, Leibnitz as monads, and Wittgenstein had linguistic atoms. What do these mean in the regular world where we live, breathe, and perform different actions? ‘Ideas’ may be a tad known, but ‘monads’, and ‘linguistic atoms’ were specially created by these philosophers to put across what got borne in their minds. These are the values, the ideas (notions) of these philosophers, who are the inventors of these ideas. And, since they have these ideas flowing like streams of energy inside their heads, I guess they come out as complex lines. Since these lines have to stay pristine because these were borne out of their sire, any interpretation or re-interpretation would have to come after. The understanding of something so elegant coming out as a result of an elaborate thought process is difficult and needs explanation and enunciation so they can be primed for mass consumption. 

Every line of what these philosophers have said can be expanded into complete literature with allegories, illustrations, examples, fables, and whatnot. If one line of any philosophy is capable of generating a full text, it is justified because philosophy is a projection of the mind of one philosopher about how they perceive the infinite universe. Just imagine the spread of the universe and any philosopher’s mind trying to make sense of it! It is an exceptional feat. But, the justification for the complexity of the philosophers also comes with the responsibility imposed upon the philosopher to let the masses understand what he understood about the universe. Because what he understood was something new, unthought of before. Many philosophers have posited that is possible only under the tutelage of a Guru. If nothing, the idea could be propagated deeper into the density of the population and the masses can have an idea about the possibility of the universe which is different from the prevalent lifestyle of the present civilization, and at best, there can be as many critiques, as many counters to further bolster it into a finer-tuned philosophy. 

It is difficult if the philosophy is not explained by its propagator. The fact "People read their own Bible" puts a damper in the process because intentionally or unintentionally when someone tries to explain what another person has said, the inherent bias, conceptions, and ideations, morph the words along the way. This is inadvertently a windfall gain in the development of the field of philosophy for it leads to the branching of philosophy. Every bit of modification or reform per se in philosophy is a new philosophy. It is evident in the philosophies of Plato-Aristotle, and the various branches of Vedanta philosophy. 

For the welfare of society, it is always better when the philosophy is consumed broadly. The chances of the idea getting lost are significantly reduced. Just have patience! Pay attention to every sentence, and think. All a philosophy expects from you is the ability to be heard and comprehended. 

I don’t know how I arrived at this when I wanted to discuss the romanticism of the idea of ‘soulmates’ by Plato.

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