The longer I study and practice philosophy, the more value I find in a wide variety of wisdom traditions. When I first became interested in philosophy at the age of 12, it was exclusively in the form of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. About this philosophy I was, at least throughout my teenage years, thoroughly dogmatic: all the other philosophies were riddled with error - not even worth considering - and Rand's philosophy simply was philosophy as far as I was concerned. (To be clear, the fault was not Rand's but my own - I could have been just as dogmatic about Stoicism or existentialism.)
Ironically, it was by taking a course on the history of philosophy with a confirmed Objectivist that I experienced the first inklings of doubt. Delving into Aristotle in college opened my eyes further, but I would be lying if I said that I quickly realized the error of my ways. In fact, it took me years - decades - to see that philosophy is more of a verb than a noun, more of an activity than an established body of doctrine. To my mind, this implies that the point of philosophy is not to identify with or adhere to a particular school of thought, but to approach the deepest philosophical questions in a spirit of wonder and to independently discover the wisest answers wherever you may find them.
Dogmatists might derisively call this eclecticism. Yet, to strike at the root (as Thoreau once put it), in ancient Greek eklektikos meant being selective, exercising discernment, using your critical faculties, coming to first-hand judgments about the truth of things. To come full circle, this is entirely consistent with the very best of Rand's conception of reason, which she said is founded in "the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth."
It stands to reason that no one school of philosophy can do justice to the manifest complexities of human life, for we need multiple different perspectives to make sense of it all. At the same time, the different schools often see the same truths but assign them different emphases or express them in different terms, and part of the fun of philosophy as a way of life is seeing those deep connections across schools and thinkers.
To go even further, whatever chosen wisdom I achieve cannot be exactly the same as yours, because my activity of sense-making is not exactly the same as yours (that's the way minds work). This doesn't mean that all truth is utterly relative - for there are human universals like language, sociality, and autonomy - but it does mean that dialogue is fundamental to the love and practice of wisdom. Which is precisely what Socrates recognized 2500 years ago when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living, because we examine life both on our own and together in the everyday activities of work, love, family, friendship, and community. Anything less is less than fully human.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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