Dear Sophia,
You asked me about what philosophy is, and I struggled a great deal with the question. I’ve thought about philosophy for years, and yet I can only come up with a vague idea. Philosophy is a practice: a practice of critical thinking and reflection to gain wisdom. But such a flippant definition raises more questions than it answers. What kind of wisdom? How do you practice it? What does it mean to “gain” wisdom? Furthermore, such a definition seems too attached to a rationalistic view of philosophy that excludes many non-enlightenment perspectives. So, to try and find a better answer to your question, I started by turning to the Greeks, from whom we get the word “philosophy.”
I began with The Apology, captured by Plato, where Socrates, confronted by an Athenian jury, gives a defense of philosophy as he practiced it. When considering whether he would accept an acquittal on the grounds of never being able to do philosophy again, he said:
Gentlemen of the jury, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to, meet: Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?” (29d-e)
From this passage, we get several critical details. First, he hints that philosophy is concerned with three critical things, wisdom, truth, and the best state of your soul. Furthermore, he contrasts it with the possession of wealth and reputation. Socrates continues with:
Then, if one of you disputes this and says he does care, I shall not let him go at once or leave him, but I shall question him, examine him and test him, and if I do not think he has attained the goodness that he says he has, I shall reproach him because he attaches little importance to the most important things and greater importance to inferior things (29e-30a)
In this second part, Socrates, describes more deeply the practice of philosophy, how it involves an examination and questioning. Specifically, a questioning of beliefs about knowledge and our way of living. There’s a lot to pull from these passages that’s helpful in answering our question. We know that philosophy is a thing to be done; a procedure to follow, and specifically, it’s a procedure concerned with finding the truth about the best way to live.
There’s another part that’s critical here, Socrates says, “I will obey the god rather than you” Socrates’ philosophy is thoroughly grounded in the divine, rather than human. This is also hinted at by his concentration on the state of the soul, which, even for the Greeks, was considered separate from the body. Another philosopher who picked up on this aspect of Greek philosophy was Val Plumwood, who, in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, traces a mode of thinking she calls “dualism” throughout the history of Western philosophy, including in the works of Plato.
Dualism, for Plumwood, is a cultural structure of hyperseparation between two or more things. As one example, it’s the dichotomy between human and nature. But dualism requires more than distinction, it requires: “a certain kind of denied dependency on a subordinated other” (Plumwood 41). In The Apology, Socrates dismisses concerns of the physical world, “wealth,” “reputation,” for spiritual concerns, disregarding his dependency on the world to continue to do his philosophy. As Plumwood says, Plato (and Socrates) “[need] the body to philosophize” (94).
Although both Socrates and Plato have a lot to teach us about what philosophy is, their dualism makes their perspective incomplete. So next I looked to modern philosophers in the American tradition, who take up questioning from an embodied perspective, taking into account each persons situatedness and dependency on the world. One example of this is Leonard Harris, who pioneered his “philosophy born of struggle,” and is deeply rooted in the world as we live in it. In fact, Harris used his philosophy to tackle the titular question; he says that:
When we ask, “What is philosophy?” then we are speaking about philosophy. By asking in this way we are obviously taking a stand above and therefore outside of philosophy. But the aim of our question is to enter into philosophy, to tarry in it, to conduct ourselves in its manner, that is, to ‘philosophize’ (14).
Here, Harris hits at the difficulty in addressing the question. We detach ourselves from the act of doing philosophy, and the material and social conditions related to it. As Harris continues:
Philosophy, defined as the pursuit of wisdom and wisdom defined by knowledge of grand abstractions, is misguided. Universal forms and structures will not tell us what we need to know about sentient beings; there is no derivation manual from knowing the structure of a contradiction to knowing that kale is better than spinach (15).
In Harris’ view, philosophy cannot derive a universal truth; the “grand abstractions” cannot be used to find the singular way to be. It’s a messy, complicated thing that cannot be wrapped up in neat logic or mathematics. As Harris says later in his essay:
If philosophy is no longer a singularity, a well-bounded noun, a search for simultaneity of self and alt-self, the place to find simultaneity of the universal and the particular, philosophy’s boundary would be thereby sufficiently porous and uncharted. Philosophy should provide tools of poetry, imagery, evidential reasoning, inclusion of real people, and norms incommensurable with philosophy as a science. Philosophy is not an algorithm but a walkway.
The last two sentences summarize the hopeful core of Harris’ philosophy of struggle. For him, philosophy is deeply imaginative and constructive. It’s tasked with building the roadways that cultures and people can follow, responsive to history and circumstances. Yet, there’s still one last thing missing before we can assemble a fragment of an answer to the question. Although Harris’ answer is an accurate description of what philosophy is and how it should behave in the world, it doesn’t adequately capture why I do philosophy, and so, despite all their faults, we need to return to the Greeks, specifically, to Aristotle.
In the Metaphysics, Aristotle tries to understand what knowledge, wisdom are. In particular, he’s interested in the difference between practical wisdom, like woodworking, and philosophy. Although, Aristotle would disagree profoundly with Harris and I, because he believes that philosophy is knowledge pursued for its own sake and has no practical use, and I think that philosophy can lead to practical wisdom when it helps us understand and imagine ways of being in our world, Aristotle says this about the origins of philosophy:
For by way of wondering, people both now and at first began to philosophize, wondering first about the strange things near at hand, then going forward little by little in this way and coming to impasses about greater things, such as about the attributes of the moon and things pertaining to the sun and the stars and the coming into being of the whole. But someone who wonders and is at an impasse considers himself to be ignorant (for which reason the lover of myth is in a certain way philosophic, since a myth is composed of wonders) (982b 10).
This is one of my favorite quotes from Aristotle. I think the idea of philosophy coming from looking out at the world and trying to figure it out is both beautiful and true. It also, I believe connects deeply to the idea of tarrying from Harris, where philosophy comes from tarrying in the wonder of the world that we live in.
Sophia, philosophy is not merely an abstract pursuit but a dynamic and embodied practice. From Socratic questioning to Aristotle’s wonder, and Harris’s philosophy of struggle, each perspective offers valuable insights into the nature of philosophical inquiry. Philosophy is a process of embodied questioning to seek wisdom, a lived wisdom from one’s unique perspective; one that comes from walking in the world and wondering about the possibilities. Understanding the way the world is, and how it could be different. I think that’s one of the most powerful things about being human.
References
Aristotle, and Joe Sachs. Metaphysics. Green Lion Press, 2002.
Harris, Leonard, and Lee A. McBride. A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader: Philosophia Nata Ex Conatu. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
Plato, and John M Cooper. Plato : Complete Works. Vancouver, Access And Diversity, Crane Library, University Of British Columbia, 2015.
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis, 2002.