In the area of philosophy there are many views that act very much like bent or skewed lenses in glasses that philosophers design with their concepts and theories so that we, can look through them and see the world and our reality differently. So differently that many times one must go back to the beginning, or as close to it as possible, to decipher where the concept originated and what, if any, was the originators goal or purpose to twist thought in such a way. In Ancient philosophy there stands out a very prevalent man, a man that wrote and explained many of his very early theories and philosophical concepts. To understand one of life all time greatest of philosophical questions, that is the question of what the meaning of existence is, one must study the work and history of Aristotle's original concepts. Thankfully he wrote down many of them to make this possible, for philosophy is such a gigantic study that one has better luck studying a small philosophical concept then using that to help equate themselves to other, more skewed and altered trains of thought.
For instance, in Aristotle's many works one can pick from at random, I choose to delve in to his work the Categories. In this work Aristotle presents many concepts but one must fully explore each one fully in order to come away with a coherent grasp of his philosophies. The first and initially easiest seeming concept is that of substance, a concept that serves as the foundation for much of his philosophical system. In studying this small but vastly important piece of Aristotle's work one soon learns that nothing is truly a small work in philosophy, and after some pages of effort one usually only succeeds in gaining what was sought only then encountering the next prevalent concept in which the first is used only as a sort of stepping stone toward an always loftier conception which persistently dances in the peripheral vision of complete understanding.