I do not come from a traditional background, nor have I ever been what we might consider by conventional standards a model student. In school, I often got into trouble for what I later understood as challenging gender biases, asking “why” just a little too much, and, at one point, earning academic probation for my so-called “oppositional spirit.” After high school, I worked various jobs across multiple sectors, and it took me a full seven years to gather the courage to return to the classroom. When I mentioned the idea of going to university, an old boss said to me, “Just don’t do something stupid like philosophy.” Although the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind, the comment struck me as immensely strange. I could sense what they meant—something about utility, an implied fruitlessness to the endeavor—yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that placing the word philosophy next to the adjective stupid was a glaring oxymoron. At the time, I had no idea I would go on to study just that. So, perhaps I should start by sharing how I first encountered philosophy and the ways it has shaped how I approach the world today.
Growing up, my father, a lawyer, was an ardent believer in following one’s vocation. He could quote bits of poetry and aphorisms on a dime, said Michel de Montaigne taught him how to read, that Socrates was his hero, and that anything in life was possible so long as one was willing to “burn the midnight oil.” He would often drive me to school and, for half an hour in traffic, calmly lay out some issue unfolding in the world, politics, law, history, a book, you name it. Then, he would take some stance or another and probe me on what I thought. Often, his positions struck me as deeply problematic, even immoral; to my horror, they could sometimes sound misogynistic. “How could you think that?!” my thirteen-year-old self would shout, scribbling some bogus answers to the math homework I had forgotten was due that morning. But he remained calmly persistent. “But why? Why do you think it’s wrong?” he would ask, sincerely. By the end of the car ride, I was exasperated—especially because, as he pulled up to the school doors, he would often say, “I agree with you entirely. I just wanted to understand where your head was at and how you got there. Have a great day, my love!” At the time, it was absolutely infuriating. Today, it is a field of memories I continuously return to with loving gratitude.
My mother, on the other hand, has always been an expert in the school of life: a survivor, creatively sharp, and a true interventionist at heart. She loved blasting “I’m Like a Bird” by Nelly Furtado while driving as though she were in Formula One, had a very dark sense of humor, taught herself new skills for the sheer pleasure of it, and took me and my siblings to foreign films where I was undoubtedly the only one in a booster seat. She always had the courage to speak and be heard. And when I came home from school with a list of moral dilemmas which my young mind craved neat and simple answers to, she’d say, “You know, I could tell you what to do or what to think—but in the end, only you sleep with yourself at night,” as if it were the most important law of life.
Both my parents fought for their freedom. My father was a stateless citizen, and my mother ran away at thirteen. They escaped persecution in the form of violent antisemitism and came to Canada with next to nothing. They built their lives from the ground up and understood, through lived experience, what the normalization of cruelty did to the human spirit, how quickly people can be swayed by the opinions of the day, and how easily one could forfeit the human capacity to stop and truly think about what one is doing. For them, philosophy was less an academic discipline than a way of life: a practice of curiosity, a mode of engagement with and respect for the world that allowed one to make sense, as Hannah Arendt put it, of “what we do and what we suffer.”
Arendt, who notoriously took issue with philosophy proper, considered intellectuals to be among the most susceptible to the “tyranny of ideological thinking,” prone to becoming “trapped by their own ideas.” Her experiences painfully revealed this tendency and ultimately led her to reject the title of philosopher altogether. Where this tendency prevails, truth is leveled to consistency and severed from its living relation to the world, the unpredictability of events, and the plurality of individuals who bring it into appearance. Yet it was precisely in a moment of cultural crisis that Arendt argued philosophers could also belong among the “true humanists”: those marked by cultivating an attitude of preservation and care for the world and, as such, for the freedom of those within it.
When I decided to return to school, I was terrified. I had built some security, yet I felt idle, robotic, empty—lonely in a way no title or paycheck could remedy. That growing sense of meaninglessness alienated me not so much from others, but from myself. When I began studying the liberal arts, I took one of my first philosophy courses with an exceptional teacher, Professor Rona Cohen. The course centered on the question of death, and while I often didn’t know exactly what I was doing, one thing was unmistakably clear: all I wanted was to understand. For the first time in a very long time, I felt exactly where I needed to be—not because I was closer to meeting some external standard, but because the work itself felt meaningful. It was as though a nostalgic switch of light had been flipped back on, and I privately vowed never to turn it off again.
Today, I work on philosophers one might call unsystematic—those who I believe would belong among what Karl Jaspers once named “the disturbers” or “awakeners.” Yet increasingly, I find myself preferring simpler terms: writers, thinkers, poets—whatever one wishes to call them—who compel me to stop and think not merely with my mind, but always, and without exception, with my heart. They resist neat classification, and it is precisely this quality—in both their lives and their work—that gives rise to questions I refuse to take for granted. I return to these thinkers not for tidy answers, but for the courage to keep asking and to remain open to being changed by the questions themselves. In times such as ours, when the impulse may very well be to retreat into certainty or even silence, philosophy remains for me a refusal to stop wondering.
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1953. “Understanding and Politics.” Partisan Review 20 (4) (July–August): 377–392. Reprinted in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954.
———. 1953. “Understanding and Politics.” Partisan Review 20 (4) (July–August): 377–392. Reprinted in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954.
———. 1983. Men in Dark Times. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
———. 2006. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Penguin Classics. Penguin Books.
———. 2013. Hannah Arendt: And Other Conversations. The Last Interview Series. Melville House.
———. 2018. Thinking without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975. Schocken Books.
Jaspers, Karl. 1995. The Great Philosophers. 4: The Disturbers, Descartes, Pascal, Lessing, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Philosophers in Other Realms, Einstein, Weber, Marx. 1. ed. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book. Harcourt Brace.
Sasha Simon
Sasha Simon is completing her PhD in Philosophy at Western University, London, Canada. Her research spans Feminist Philosophy, History of Philosophy, and Political Phenomenology, with a particular interest in thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Herman Grimm. Her work explores the challenges of political polarization and the role of the humanities in contemporary public life. As part of this research, she investigates themes of resistance and self-flourishing in oppressive contexts, the importance of integrity and independent judgment in movements of collective action, and the role of self-compassion in cultivating self-reliance. Through her scholarship, she seeks not only to understand philosophical ideas but to show how they can meaningfully inform and enrich lived experience.
