@Leviathen249,
Leviathen249;136166 wrote:For those of you who remember me, hello again.
A while ago I stumbled onto this forum and had a fun time thinking and talking about the various things that came up. But after a while it kinda amazed/shocked me about what kind of complicated suff was being talked about. And I had no clue what anything was about. I read and read about topics I had no clue about and I realized that these were things I had not given a thought about. And honestly, it kinda scared me. People were talking about things that I could barely read, much less understand. So I left it and forgot about it for a while. That is until recently I had realized I had no one to talk to, intelligently, about these ideas floating inside my head.
Anyway, I'm starting to ramble on. My point is, have you ever been scared of something you had no clue was?
If you don't understand something, it could be for many different reasons. Here are some possibilities:
- The writing is poor, so it is unclearly expressed.
- You don't have enough knowledge to be able to understand the expressions.
- The material you are reading is nonsensical, so no one knows what it means, because it is meaningless. (People may know that it lacks a meaning, but it would be wrong to say that they know what it means, because it does not have a meaning. It would be good to be able to distinguish between sense and nonsense, though many people are extremely bad at this. Typically, this is something to be suspicious about when someone cannot clearly explain what they mean. And see this.)
- You are not intelligent enough to understand it.
There may be other possibilities, in addition to the fact that there may be some combination of the above possibilities (in fact, all four could appear in a single post). If it is 1 or 3, it is not your fault that you do not understand it, and you should not feel bad about it at all. In fact, the author should feel bad about it, but probably does not. If it is 2, you could study the matter more and then you could understand it, though if it is a matter of little importance to you, it may not be worthwhile. If it is 4, then you will never understand it and there is nothing to be done about it.
Overall, I would say that you should probably not be too concerned, but you might want to see if you can figure out which of the above describes the particular situations that you have encountered, if for no other reason than to feel better about yourself when you discover examples of 1 and 3.
If philosophy is a major interest for you, you might want to take a couple of college classes on it, like Introduction to Philosophy and Introduction to Logic (or Critical Thinking), if you have not already done so. There may be a community college nearby that would have such classes for very little money.