Introduction
Every day as humans we see new people, we develop new cognitive faculties, understand things better and others less, but all of it links to asking ourselves questions.
We always wonder why things around us are the way they are. If things could be better or if others could be worse. How the world would be if the things that already happened didn’t happen exactly how they did. If something we thought was wrong for a long time was actually right or vice-versa.
There are multitudes of types of questions that we all, consciously or unconsciously, ask ourselves every day. It’s logic that we want to always know more than we already do, because sometimes it helps us clear a doubt we’ve had for a long time, sometimes it helps us understand the world more in detail and analyze it better, sometimes we’re just so passionate about something that we just want to know more and more and why exactly it exists or it happens. But asking questions is the basis of everything concerning knowledge. We’ll see how it helped the school system develop in chapter 8, or how religion slowed down this development of knowledge by prohibiting questions with dogma in chapter 9. Questions are everything in the society of today and they’re the main factor of change and progression.
There is one type of question that bothers everyone, though, and it is the philosophical one. Philosophy is a concept built directly from zetetic, from the Greek work “zetetos”, meaning proceeding from inquiry, rising from a question or a will to know something and building up the truth from concepts that we already know.
And the reason why philosophy is so different than any other type of question is that it is the basis of analysis and criticism. Philosophical questions go farther than any type of questions because they talk about topics like our existence, the creation of our world, and many other topics that are often unanswerable. They are the basis of every progress, literally the basis of modern science. If we hadn’t had people like Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, Democritus, and many more, the concept of modern science would have very probably been created much later than it has.
When it comes to our existence, an interesting sub-type of question is existential ones. From my perception, there are 3 main factors of existential questions:
There’s basically no answer to the question other than calling upon one God or many gods.
The tendency of the results are often counter-intuitive.
It makes absolutely no sense.
Finally, if philosophy did not exist, we wouldn’t have a basis of deep analysis to be able to criticize people or society. We need it to analyze the world around us and to change it. The older generation needs to be contested by the newer one, the world needs to see how the older generations failed to make the world an even better place.
So the reason I am writing this book is to try to extract the true meaning of these questions and their answers based on research and mostly my own perception of them. Sometimes these answers can be obvious, but sometimes they can be very difficult to answer.
Before you leave this introduction, I have some questions for you, that you can try to reflect on:
Why exactly are we here today?
Who are YOU exactly? Are you a version of yourself or of the others?
I hope you’ll find out while reading this book and in regards of you understanding more about the world, maybe even than me.
-daquack, November 30th, 2023.
