What is Philosophy After All?

Introduction

“What is philosophy?” is already a philosophical question. However, what is a philosophical question? And what does this have to do with how I might live my life? In the following Part 1 of this miniseries of philosophy 101, I will introduce what philosophy is. I start to unpack this pursuit of wisdom in a demystified manner.

What is philosophy?

What is philosophy? One might first unpack this question by looking at the word itself – “philo-” roughly translates to “to love” and “-sophia” roughly translates to wisdom. The word “philosophia” thus means to love wisdom – but what does this even mean, to live wisdom? Let us look at it from another angle. Philosophy as philosophia is a discussion. A discussion with who? For argument’s sake, let us say this discussion is with Plato himself – an ancient Greek philosopher. A contemporary philosophy by the name Alfred North Whitehead made the bold claim that:

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”

Without going into depth of who Plato is, does this help us understand what philosophy or philosophia is? Not really, unless one knows a little philosophy and Greek history.

So, let us take a step backwards and see what we have up until now:

“Philosophia is a 2500-year-old discussion.”

Now we might ask: “About what is this discussion?” We might make a statement: this discussion is about the pursuit of wisdom. The love of wisdom takes the form of a discussion which is a pursuit for wisdom. The answer seems to be circular at the moment. However, let us ask how do we get to pursue wisdom? One possible answer is to ask questions. Imagine the small child constantly asking his or her parents “Why?”. This persistent questioning is the start of philosophia or our pursuit of wisdom.

What we have at this moment is that philosophia is the act of “persistent questioning”. This is, however, only one type of question we might ask. This type of question will not bring as far though. Firstly, it might annoy the person we persistently bombard with “why” questions. And, secondly, we merely shift the burden of finding wisdom onto our interlocutor. In other words, our interlocuter we bombard with “why” does all the thinking and might be further on the line to find wisdom. “Why” questions might initially help us, but in the long run, this will not bring us closer to understanding anything. What other types of questions are there that might lead us to pursue wisdom in a more productive way? Can we ask the “right” type of questions?

We might ask “philosophical questions”, but this takes us back to the start, what is philosophy? There is, unfortunately, no easy answer. Philosophical questions can be about anything. Imagine the following: what is art? Our contemporary understanding of art is that it can basically be anything. Once you define art, you already and necessarily exclude certain things which can be classified as art. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Defining something like art and I want to add philosophy can be a “creationary” thing. In other words, by saying what something is it excludes some things and these excluded things can then, in turn, be classified as the thing which excluded it. We can thus adapt our new definition to include what has been excluded. This leads to a new statement: We can look at other pieces of art to help us understand art. In the same way, we can look at philosophers and see what type of questions they ask to help us formulate what philosophical questions are. Take a look at the following questions:

• What is matter?

• Does life have an inherent meaning?

• What ought I do in a certain situation?

• What is 2 plus 2?

The last question we can say with confidence is four, but also that it is not a philosophical question. Here we might have something more tangible about what a philosophical question is: It is a question with no immediate answer. The question 2 plus 2 immediately leads us to answer it with four. But the question “does life have inherent meaning?” strikes one with a feeling of “at-loss-for-an-answer”.

So, what is philosophy? Let us formulate a preliminary answer to this question with what we have stated thus far:

“Philosophy as philosophia – the love of wisdom – leads us to ask questions with no immediate or clear answers on a pursuit towards wisdom.”

How might I live?

The question of “How might I live?” might strike one as an odd question to ask. It is not a question everyone asks often. However, this is an important question to ask. Another ancient Greek philosopher we will cover later on states that the unexamined life is not worth living. Going about things without questioning what we are doing and for what reasons, is not a life one wants to live. So, I conclude part 1 with the following. Philosophy leads us to ask questions with no clear and immediate answer. One such question is “How might I live?”. It seems to have a clear answer when one does not ponder it; we cannot not live life. However, once you stand still in front of this question the answer does not seem to be clear and immediate. The course will constantly ponder this question and with every new bit of wisdom, we will tackle this question.