What Is Philosophy?

By David Warren Philosophy is a subject by itself, distinct from religion but, more importantly, not subsidiary to one, another, or all of the empirical sciences. It is not "experimental," truth to tell, and thus it fits poorly into our modern schemes of meaning. For philosophy - from the Greek and Latin PHILOSOPHIA - philosophie, filosofia, falsafa; darshana, prachya, zhexue - is founded in the love of wisdom. This is true - however wisdom is approached in foreign languages. It involves "how to live," for instance: the purpose of one's life. This has generally been received as a serious topic. Wisdom is the constant, inescapable theme. There are other things that wisdom loves, which do not themselves love wisdom, and the modern crisis of philosophy can be seen in this wandering away. Wisdom survives in colloquial speech, but not in the academy. There, it has become, more restrictively, "the love of knowledge," so that philosophical history is taught in preference to the thing itself. And it is taught against the spirit of philosophy, which does not get "hung up" upon midterm examinations. Both Plato and Aristotle were naturally interested in the philosophers that came before them. But they studied these with a view to finding the wisdom in them; not, or not usually, to surveying opinions. The medieval and scholastic philosophers, likewise. Thomas Aquinas is not a "disciple" of Aristotle, or of anyone else. He wants to know things that are beyond Aristotle, and studies what Aristotle can tell him, as impressive guide. But a guide to something that differs from the guide himself. Even the approach to philosophical history has changed. We want to know what Schopenhauer taught, in itself. We want to "know" our Heidegger, etc. Part of our task is actually to study what each meant by the word, "philosophy." But we know what the word means. It is the love of wisdom. The follower of philosophy is, moreover, the "lover" of wisdom. The reader must grasp the erotic sense in this. He is not a simple collector, unless he is collecting to a wise purpose. For philosophy has a purpose, as everything else. A cobbler could be a philosopher, said my youthful hero Thomas Ernest Hulme, in echo of the great philosopher, Pascal. They were both lovers, of the philosophical kind. The cobbler's purpose in everyday life might be to fix shoes, and he would find this quite compatible with philosophy. A "professional," however, he would not be. Neither a philosopher nor a maker or mender of shoes was a professional, until recently. As was not the mirror-polisher, in the tradition of Spinoza, or the sword-polisher, in the Japanese, or the pursuer of many other avocations for money over time. Such crafts may provide the mental leisure to think about things, in a conceptual way, together with material analogies to focus upon the real. One must be "a thinking machine" to master a craft; something different from simply becoming a machine in a factory, or rather part of a machine, for it is not the worker but the factory that has a purpose. The old Jewish idea of a rabbi - that he should have a day job - had wonderful consequences for the survival of the Hebrew religion. No matter what, he could work for a living; and this idea is carried into Saint Paul, who says, in 2 Thessalonians, that if you don't work, you don't eat. Indeed, he puts some edge in this. Wisdom, and the leisure in which wisdom is sought, should not be confused with laziness. It is a by-product of work, just as dinner is a by-product of the day's labor, but not, as it were, the final purpose: to become wise. And beyond wisdom, in the Christian dispensation, is to be saved. One becomes wise, at leisure, so to speak. This is true within all philosophical heritages; in "darshana" (Sanskrit) as well as "philosophie" (French). Each requires leisure, and leisure requires work. It could be said that the professors of philosophy, the "professional philosophers" in our university departments, are s...