A major source of men’s earned guilt in regard to philosophy—as well as in
regard to their own minds and lives—is failure of introspection. Specifically,
it is the failure to identify the nature and causes of their emotions.
An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that
something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to
introspection—to the conceptual identification of your inner states—you will
not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling
is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or
a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception. The men who scorn or
dread introspection take their inner states for granted, as an irreducible and
irresistible primary, and let their emotions determine their actions. This
means that they choose to act without knowing the context (reality), the causes
(motives), and the consequences (goals) of their actions.
The field of extrospection is based on two cardinal questions: “What do I
know?” and “How do I know it?” In the field of introspection, the two guiding
questions are: “What do I feel?” and “Why do I feel it?”