2025-05-03

Taking a break from philosophy was one of the main things I did during my brief hiatus. Apart from being in an unfavorable position of absorbing Hegel's ideas, I felt that my dialectic turn highlighted every human interaction, every event that surrounds my life, wedding plans, work-related tasks, to be in some sort of teleological outcome. Every little thing begins to somehow insist themselves to be pregnant with meaning. What I mean is that since I have started to actually take Hegel seriously, even just when I was making actual effort in understanding his philosophy through secondary, introductory texts, I felt a profound shift in my perception of the world that made me feel overwhelmed in just being. However, it also gave me a sense of confidence in looking at familiar things in a different way. This happened during conversations with family members whom I have already classified as people who had solidified their personality.

You see, I believed that we only have a limited time in trying to craft a personality for ourselves. To me, that personality is a viscous liquid that become hardened the less activity or changes happen, which are influenced by external and internal faculties of your being. These activities revolve around exploring other ideas, questioning your firmly held beliefs, examining your biases, and deep diving into your own impulses. The less these things happen, the viscous liquid of personality becomes harder, turning into an insoluble solid of personhood that resists change. And to some of my family members, the older they are, the more I apply this judgement to them. Which is what I realized was completely wrong.

The conversations I've had with people made me realized that this judgement is something I impose and is not inherently true to people. Even if I still think that personality is a viscous liquid that requires constant stirring, my perception of other people is also dependent on my own perspective, and what I want to think of them. I can have a framework of understanding but it is false to say that it is a universal thing. This is a mark of hubris.

I talked to my mother and my uncle in separate occasions, where I had to persevere through communication and keep the looming feeling of frustration at bay for the purpose of trying to understand their position. In usual cases, I start a conversation with an intention in mind, let's say to convince a person, which is what I realized to be wholly counterproductive. This approach would always set me up to fail in understanding who they are and what they want to say. I cannot always apply a logical if/else questioning tree to every conversation because what I learned was more of the mental and emotional states that my mother and uncle were in those separate scenarios. I sat, listened, and followed through their thought processes, while also insisting some of my point of views in an attempt to balance the discussion through a denial and affirmation of their ideas, resulting into a more productive conversation that unravels their own beliefs.

Perhaps, it was a revelation that also made me take a step back from my rigorous philosophical readings. Hegel's idealism somehow begin to make sense but it also made my understanding of the world rigid and unhuman. Slowing down may be what I must do but I think I must keep this critical perspective of myself always on because something is always being revealed to me and I cannot pay attention if I would always intentionally keep myself preoccupied to what I want to do and plan to do.