Philosophy is When You Fight with Yourself and Lose

Aristotle sits at a table in a Paris café, wearing headphones and looking at his cell phone. At another table, Sartre converses with four other philosophers. Through the window, the Eiffel Tower is visible, and Horace, along with Botox, observes the interior of the café.

The first time I read Nietzsche, I spent two days unsure if I really existed or if I was just pretending very competently. It was like receiving a metaphysical slap in the face. I had that typical teenage arrogance: I wanted to study philosophy to win arguments, leave people speechless, humiliate them at the bar with Greek quotes like someone throwing poisoned darts. Well, yes. Little did I know that, in the end, I would be the one left without answers.

The Search for Truth is a Trap

I thought that by delving into the pre-Socratics, I would emerge from any conversation with an indestructible argument, a kind of intellectual Excalibur. How wrong I was. Instead of certainties, I found more doubts than hairs on my head. And I even developed an unbearable habit of distrusting everything: the price of bread, the morality of pigeons, and the very existence of God.

I vividly remember my first existential crisis. I was 17 years old and had just read a paragraph of Schopenhauer. A single paragraph! I closed the book and thought: "Maybe I'm just a blind will to keep deceiving myself." I went to the mirror, stared at myself with ridiculous intensity, hated what I saw and, like every amateur philosopher defeated by life, went to have coffee. The coffee, at least, was real. Or I hope it was.

You Will Lose, and That’s the Point

Philosophy is a suicidal art of ideas. You start by wanting to know "what truth is" and end up doubting whether the ground is really ground or just a particularly well-written metaphor. The pre-Socratics tried to reduce the world to water, fire, air, or chaos; the moderns declared, "I think, therefore I am," as if that phrase solved anything, as if thinking were already proof of some sanity.

Then came the existentialists, full of tragic elegance, to remind us: “You do exist. And the responsibility is yours.” Good luck with that.

In the end, philosophy isn't about winning debates, it's about dispelling illusions. It doesn't deliver answers, it delivers better questions. When very rarely it does answer, it does so with such subtlety that you don't even realize you've just been insulted.

Today I see people saying that philosophy is useless. I agree. It's useless like love, like art, like silence. Those things that change your whole life without asking permission. If you haven't yet fought with yourself, be careful. Don't risk accepting everything too easily. And when you do fight, remember:

You will lose. But you will come out wiser from this beating.

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