# Why Children Are Better Philosophers ## Metadata - Author: [[R.C. Waldun]] - Full Title: Why Children Are Better Philosophers - Category: #source/articles - URL: https://medium.com/@rcwaldun/why-children-are-better-philosophers-98a600265b44 ## Highlights - When we engage with philosophical texts, more often than not we’re confronted with the fact that most of these books are at their best, difficult to understand, and at their worst: completely unintelligible. For me, this rude awakening shattered my idea of philosophy being a gradual road towards understanding reality with greater clarity. Instead of a linear build-up of knowledge, philosophy likes to shatter everything we’ve known and throw us into the pits of confusion. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gnfhdzskggd6z7kzqp1qmhjn)) - Note: Heh, I fight feeling dumb every day! Thanks for making that feel acceptable :) - We expect reading and learning to be easy, while completely disregarding what we’re really doing when sitting down to read a book. If the book is right, then it’s doing the job of challenging our world views. And sometimes, those books will shatter the very things that we’ve spent our entire lives trying to defend: our identities and opinions. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gnfhm5k92jxapzfcnpt3dgpq)) - When a moment like this happens, it usually looks like staring at a page of a book for hours, struggling to make any sense of it. It could also drive us to close the book forever and swear never to bother with thinking too deeply about life ever again. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gnfhnrfahf0qvz96ny2y2sm3)) - When we trust that we can handle the silence and take that leap, that’s when we enter a state of not-knowing and true open-mindedness, and courage here serves as the force that would mold a new understanding out of chaos. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gnfhpzz6vbf3cnac8jcq5r7p)) - all the philosophy books I tried to read are just like riddles. Children love riddles and asking questions about life because they held nothing as sacred or certain. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gnfhqk6jgwtn14m51jmds624)) - Hence, to grow and train ourselves into better thinkers, we have to learn to be children again. The need to land on a correct solution is pulling us away from the joy of thinking. And the joy of reading philosophy, therefore, can only be savored when we decide to treat confusion as our bread and butter. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gnfhrddx7tfd85v1ebkxwvxz))