1
What Is Philosophy?
Gordon C.F. Bearn
Department of Philosophy
Lehigh University
Bethlehem PA 18017
United States
gordon@lehigh.edu
16 June 2015
file:
Bearn - What is Philosophy - 2015
These thoughts were originally prepared for a talk on 20 May 2015 at Kobe Women's University in Suma, Japan.
Ann CARY and KANO Kyo were my very generous hosts.
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
The question "What is Philosophy?" cannot be answered as easily as the
question "What is Biology?" In the case of biology, an acceptable answer would be
that biology is the study of living things. You could approach "What is
philosophy?" in the same way. But if biology studies living things, what things
does philosophy study? It is not that you can't squeeze out an answer to that
question. You could say that that philosophy studies what there is (ontology) and
what is knowledge (epistemology) and what is good (ethics) and what is beautiful
(aesthetics). It is common enough. All over the United States, professors of
philosophy start courses confidently sauntering up to blackboards to write just
those words. The fancy words will put off some students and excite others. I still
remember the excitement over lunch when I heard that a popular professor of
religion had written "phenomenology" on his board, even in the lunch room, we
were awed. Perhaps we were awed because although we were still mostly
2
ignorant of most things, we thought we knew, in a general way, what there was
to study. Now suddenly there were all these additional things, philosophical
things, to study. I already knew it was possible to study ferns, perhaps I could
study truth. But although there are truths about ferns, truth doesn't seem like a
fern at all, nor goodness, nor beauty. And the suspicion creeps in that philosophy
characterized as the study of truth goodness and beauty is philosophy mischaracterized by aping other fields of study.
The question "What is philosophy?" is in two ways more like the question
"What is art?" than it is like the question "What is biology?" (1) At least in
Europe, especially since about 1850, people have not agreed about what is or is
not art. Some people refer to this as the predicament of the modern, but lets save
that for another day, resting content with the fact that today there are people
who do and people who do not think that a urinal on its back is art (Fountain
1917, by Marcel Duchamp). So the question of the nature of art divides even
those, or especially those, who care about art. If you don't care about art, you
won't care about this question, but if you do, you can't help caring. (2) Perhaps as
a result of judgments about art becoming in this way tentative, anyone who
makes art is not therefore and unproblematically, an artist. An artist is not just
someone who makes art but someone who contributes to the history of the arts
and so it can seem presumptuous to call yourself an artist just because you paint
on the weekends, and even if you are a professor of painting at a university.
Whether you are an artist in this sense is not up to you but up to your work and
its impact on a tradition.
3
In both of these ways, biology is different from the arts, there is no
question about what is a living thing, or rather even where there is, as in the
case of viruses, that question seems merely technical since there is easy
agreement that virology and biology are natural allies. Moreover anyone who
publishes articles on ferns or viruses is a genuine biologist. There are no
professors of biology who think it presumptuous to call themselves biologists.
And in both of these ways philosophy is like the arts, not like biology.
(1) Philosophers, especially since about 1850, do not always agree about
what is philosophy and what is not, and once again lets resist the inclination to
decide if this is another example of the modern predicament. In 1938, Sartre
published Nausea, a novel which I think it is fair to say, is more often taught in
philosophy classes than in literature classes. Not all philosophers are sanguine
about that, and the question of whether or not that novel is philosophy divides
those, especially those, who care about philosophy. If you don't care about
philosophy, you won't care about this question, but if you do, you will. (2) As in
the case of art, it is perhaps a result of a loss of security about what is to count as
a philosophical work, that to call yourself a philosopher is to do more than to say
you write philosophy, it is to say that you are contributing to the historical
tradition of philosophy. Thus to call yourself a philosopher, even if you are a
professor of philosophy, can feel a bit presumptuous. Whether or not those
professors are philosophers isn't up to them, it's up to their work.
I begin this way as a warning that what I am about to say about the
nature of philosophy will not be as obviously true as the statement that biology
is the study of living things. I hope it is more than my own opinion at the last,
4
but that is not up to me. And now, once again, what is the difference between art
and philosophy on one side and biology on the other?
Perhaps it is a matter of industrialization. Biology can be industrialized,
but can poetry be industrialized, can painting, can philosophy? Of course you can
industrialize poetry. Industrialized poetry is greeting card poetry, but is that
poetry. Well, yes, it is poetry. But can the soul of poetry survive
industrialization? Suppose it cannot, what should we say about philosophy.
Would industrialization destroy the soul of philosophy? What is the soul of
philosophy?
And we are back again: what is philosophy?
Luckily this time we may have a clue in the idea that, as with poetry,
there may be a distance between philosophy and industrialization. Suppose
philosophy cannot survive industrialization, then you could say that
philosophical thinking is thinking that cannot be industrialized. In contrast to
philosophy, learning to calculate the solution to a mathematical equation is not
opposed to industrialization. Quite the opposite, that is precisely what we hope is
taught in math class: industrialized techniques of calculation.
You can perhaps hear this as the distinction between genuine thinking
and mere calculating. Most of what is taught in universities is merely
calculating, good students will learn how most efficiently to work out the
answers to problems. And it is not just mathematics, learning how to diagnose
diabetes is just the same. Industrialization presupposes a received
representation of a given field, and the key to industrializing the production of
knowledge nuggets is to discover an efficient way to move around that plane of
5
representation. Of course sometimes, for example with Lavoisier or Mendel or
Cantor, the received representation is shaken, and then with luck calculation
gives way to thinking, but always with the hope of industrializing movement on
a new plane of representation. Thinking in service of calculation. With
philosophy it can feel just the reverse. In philosophy, where there is calculation
it is in service of thinking, or anyway it should be. The thought I am now
following is that efficiency and industrialization are friends of calculation but
that in an atmosphere of industrial efficiency philosophy suffocates, also poetry
and painting. Also life.
But once again: what is philosophy?
If philosophy is no friend of efficiency or assembly line industrialization,
then what is it? Well then it will not be efficient - so it will be unhurried - and it
will not conform to the quality control engineers industrializing the production of
knowledge nuggets - so it will be non-conformist. If philosophy cannot survive in
an atmosphere of industrial efficiency then perhaps philosophy is the unhurried
consideration of whether or not to conform to opinion. It is slow-moving and
inclined to non-conformism.
Perhaps this will explain the distinctive role of Greece in the origin of
philosophy. The textbooks all recite that philosophy was born in Greece around
450BCE. At that time there were ideas and habits flowing to Greece from
outposts of the Athenian empire extending to the Crimean shores of the Black
Sea and from as far away as Persia then warring against a coalition of Greek
cities. Seas connect their shores in all directions, even the internet is a great big
sea. The Adriatic, the Black, and the Mediterranean Seas brought many
6
different civilizations into contact, perhaps most significantly the enormously
ancient Egyptian civilization into contact with all the others.
This mixing of various cultural habits happens all the time, but mostly
what happens is that after contact, the different civilizations fight to a
conquering or to a withdrawal. What was special in Greece was that there was a
place in their cities, especially in the democracy Athens, for conversation or
discussion as between friends. Such conversation, within limits, made possible
slow moving consideration of alternatives to conforming to the opinions of the
public, all opinions: religious, political, practical, metaphysical. In such an
atmosphere philosophy can breathe, even if, ironically, two of its first results
were Socrates' execution in 399BCE and Plato's criticism of democracy a decade
or so later.
I don't mean to lean on the exceptional position of ancient Greece, I mean
only to insist that wherever philosophy grows, one of the conditions of its
growing will be the mixing of diverse cultural habits in a context open to
consideration of alternatives to familiar opinion. Within the strict constraints of
slavery, class, and patriarchy, these conditions were realized in ancient Athens.
But I think that whenever and wherever it flourishes philosophy depends upon a
space for slow moving consideration of alternatives to conforming to the opinions
of the public. In that atmosphere philosophy can breathe. It cannot flourish when
hurried and when held to the standards of rulers or of the marketplace of
opinion.
What were those early Europeans thinking about? They were thinking
about metaphysics and existence. They were thinking about change, about
7
becoming. It sounds like a mouthful but its really pretty straightforward. (1)
Existentially: your pets die, your parents die, your friends die, and your favorite
bowl shatters to pieces on the floor. (2) Metaphysically: because everything is
changing there can be no consistent characterization of any thing. Alice in
wonderland eats cake and grows taller, but at this moment, she is neither one
meter tall nor not one meter tall: she is growing, so she has no definite height.
And it is not just Alice. Since everything is changing there can be no consistent
conceptual characterization of anything, and so it can seem that we must
therefore be wrong about absolutely everything.
These are the motivating problems equally of religion and of philosophy.
Religion and philosophy are motivated by the same issues: time and existence.
Philosophy is often opposed to religion but at the level of these motivating
problems, metaphysical and existential, they are one. They are like two different
people who, while in good health, appear more or less the same, but who respond
very differently to disease agents, one may become asthmatic the other may
contract cancer. I have more experience with diseased philosophy, so I am happy
enough to risk the thought that the most common disease contracted by
philosophy is an obsession with proof, with reasons, justifications, a refusal to
consider the possibility that there are limits to the value of reasons. I have less
experience with religion so I am less confident I know the disease most common
in religion, but from my partial philosophical perspective, the most common
disease of religion appears to be an obsession with traditional practice - a refusal
to consider the possibility that there are limits to the value of tradition. In their
8
healthy state, philosophy and religion give each other mutual comfort in their
struggle with time and existence, only in sickness do they fall to fighting.
However, even when in health, philosophers themselves divide over
matters of metaphysics and existence. You can think of it as division between
those who like it here and those who don't. In the face of death and in the face of
the impossibility of conceptually characterizing anything, some philosophers
clutch the possibility that what is really real is no longer exposed to becoming, to
change. Others, somehow or other manage to find a way to enjoy change. Though
I know it less well, I suspect it is a divide equally within religion in health as
within philosophy in health and the minority position in each domain has always
been to enjoy plunging into the seas of change. But that is my position, I enjoy
the plunge, and so for these final paragraphs I will be speaking for myself even
more than I have been from the very beginning.
Everything in this world of becoming is what Gertrude Stein would call an
irregular commonplace. Every stick is a stick, true enough, but there is so much
more to every stick than what it takes for it to be a stick, that the concept stick
fits any singular stick like a baggy sweater. This is a problem if you are
committed to skin tight concepts, but it is not a problem if you have found a way
to enjoy the boundlessness of each thing, the exuberance of every splash of paint.
It may actually be a blessing.
If you think think about the things that make life seem wonderful, they
are sometimes conceptually black and white, like getting a college degree: before
you didn't have it, now you do. It is like having the biggest house in the
neighborhood: before you didn't own it, now you do. But the thing about glorious
9
successes like these is that they don't last, soon enough someone else will get a
bigger house. And after you graduate, then what? What do you do after you climb
Mt Everest or sail across the Pacific?
You think all those victories are what matters, but they don't. What will
your fat bank account mean when you find yourself all alone, dying in fouled
sheets. But now think about how you woke up one morning and saw the sunlight
splash bright on the corner of the window by the door. You had thought it was
just a window, but suddenly, there in the morning light, it was so much more
than a window, what had you been thinking, where had you been, such bloom
and magic. What gives our lives energy is precisely these unhurried sensual
enjoyments of what exceeds conceptual characterization. What exceeds
conformist classification. In the words of Okakura Tenshin, "We classify too
much and enjoy too little." But how are we to bring this into our lives?
Drop And Draw.
Drop your goals, purposes, aims, hopes, dreams, and let yourself be drawn
by the things around you, give the lead to things. Experiencing a crisis in poetry,
Mallarmé once encouraged us to yield the initiative to words. I am simply
extending that beyond words to all things, not only to ink but to every inkling
thing.
Here is an assignment. Something that may help you to experience the joy
of becoming. I take it from Guy Debord one of the Situationists in Paris in the
years leading up to the student revolts of 1968. The Situationists invented
something they called drifting. Here is how: head out into a city with 2 or 3
people (not alone), and let yourselves be drawn by the buildings, the light, the
10
sounds, the smells inkling you on. Drop your intention to catch the bus, let
yourself be drawn by the sounds and smells, the shimmering heat on the road.
Talk to each other about what is drawing you on, and follow.
Simpler even than that. The next time you walk somewhere, down the hall
or across the street, take an indirect route, walk to the left before turning right,
perhaps even zigzag. Your lips will curl.