Leonard Peikoff considers three arguments against philosophy, each purporting to show that one cannot live by a philosophy and be happy, either because a philosophy places you in opposition to the world around you or leads you to suppress your individuality and self, or because philosophical ideas are essentially useless in an adult’s daily life. Peikoff argues that these attitudes stem from mistaken views about the basic relation between ideas and reality, and that to understand Objectivism, and philosophy more generally, one needs a proper method of keeping abstract philosophical ideas tied to reality.
