This is a note on the idea of “perennial” philosophic enquiry.
The term “perennial philosophy” has a technical sense, which is different from how the term was
introduced in class. This note is an attempt to clarify some of the issues and questions raised by the use of
the term.
 This first section is about the technical sense of the term.
 The second section is about the way in which the term was used in class today.
 The third section is about why this issue is brought up here.
 The fourth section is a short introduction to the critique of philosophy from “outside”.
1. An approach to philosophy of religion.
The Perennial Philosophy (often referred to also as perennialism), names an approach to the philosophical
study of religion which proposes that different religious traditions share a single universal truth on which
basis all religious knowledges and doctrines are built. It is a term first used in 1540s but became more
widely used in the 19th century, and very popular in the 20th century when it was used by Aldous Huxley as
the title of a book on religious and mystical experience. This was not the way in which I was using the term,
but this is the predominant way in which the term is used in formal philosophy, especially philosophy of
religion.
2 The term as used in the classroom.
In class I used the term to indicate that there is a sense in which questions of fundamental concerns –
questions about the nature of truth, knowledge, meaning, right actions and values; the purpose, meaning,
and basic orientation of life; how to live a meaningful life, a good life, or a full life – arise perennially within
different cultural contexts outside the formal study of philosophy. (Indeed sometimes this is just what
prompts people to study philosophy, the experience of basic questions arising within the flow of their
everyday lives.)
The sense in which I was using the term draws upon Karl Jaspers (a 20th C. German philosopher) and is
partly informed by his use of the term. In an essay entitled “Philosophical Autobiography” he describes his
intellectual development and indicates how he encountered philosophical thinking, not primarily through
philosophical training in the university, but through his own experience of trying to work out how to live
his life. (Although he later became a very famous philosopher, and a well-known contemporary of such
figures as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Hans-Georg Gadamer.)
In my choice of medicine what was of greatest importance to me was
to learn to know actuality. I strove to achieve this aim by every
means at my disposal. In my studies I was diligent and I enjoyed to
the full the numerous possibilities of acquiring knowl- edge. In my
travels I sought to accomplish whatever was possible in the way of
gaining firsthand acquaintance with various regions, historical
cities, and of works of art.
In all this, however, the basic question, viz., how one ought to
live, remained unsolved. The pursuit of my studies was something
preliminary. It was at the same time useful as a preparation for a
profession. But that is not life itself. Without reading the
philosophers, using all my time to study the concrete subjects of my
field, I was nevertheless continually philosophizing, even though
unsystematically (unmethodically). Philosophy courses in the
University I soon dropped. Against philosophy professors I had an
antipathy because they did not treat what really mattered most to
me. As persons they appeared arrogant and opinionated. As a
personality only Theodor Lipps in Munich made an impression on me.
However, the content of his lectures scarcely interested me …
https://archive.org/stream/philsophyofkarlj033381mbp/philsophyofkarl
j033381mbp_djvu.txt
Here, the philosopher remembers a type of philosophical thinking that is in some way different (but not
“completely” different, only partly so) from the technical discipline of University philosophy (a discipline in
which he later became a key authority.) Jaspers used the term “perennial” in relation to philosophy in part
to indicate this kind of scope of philosophy that moves beyond the formal institution of academic training.
It should be noted however that Jaspers is also using this term in a way connected to the philosophy of
religion approach introduced in section 1 above. In a book entitled “The Perennial Scope of Philosophy” he
wrote “through all the changes in human circumstances and the tasks of practical life, through all the
progress of the sciences, all the development of the categories and methods of thought, it (philosophy) is
forever concerned with apprehending one eternal truth under new conditions.”
This more mystical tendency of perennialism is not of so much interest for the discussion we are trying to
build here. So that’s why I want to make a separation from these ideas of a universal religious truth etc.,
and focus on the distinction between philosophical work within a formal technical sense and the tendency
to philosophical questioning that emerges in some people’s everyday living.
3. Why bother with this distinction?
In making a distinction between the “perennial” and the formal or technical discipline of philosophy, I was
not wishing to suggest that one is authentic and the other false, or one is good and the other bad. The
intention was to indicate that the way questions are framed within the formal setting – like the setting that
we were in for this discussion, a university classroom – can change the way in which the asking of these
questions connects with the decisions to live in particular ways.
One key issue here is identifying that the practice of philosophy is not completely captured by the
institution of philosophy (the university discipline etc.) It also helps to underline something very important
about the way in which the discipline of philosophy is typically taught as a “canon” – a list of texts and of
authors – that we work through: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley,
Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel … This list is not exactly the same list for different schools of thought, however,
certain parts of the list are very common across many different schools – Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and
Kant, for example. This canon or tradition is central to the discipline, providing the basic means of teaching
and so transmitting the discipline from generation to generation.
What Jaspers describes in his development is a questioning that is in some degree outside or before this
reading of the canon. This indicates a way of producing philosophical reflection that is not primarily done
by adding commentaries and responses to different texts within the received canon. Instead, questions are
approached as emerging through lived points of confusion, question or un-clarity. (This is also something
that professional philosophers can do as well.)
Remember, the question we were asking when this discussion came up: “What is (contemporary)
philosophy?” The issue comes up at this point because we want to map some of the different ways in
which this question can be answered.
4. Asking questions of philosophy from “outside” of philosophy?
In a challenge to (professional) philosophy, in his book Pascalian Meditations, the French sociologist and
social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu declared:
If I have opted to ask some questions that I would
rather have left to philosophy, it is because it seemed
to me that philosophy, for all its questioning, did not
ask them; and because, especially with regard to the
social sciences, it never ceased to raise questions that
did not seem to me to be essential – while avoiding
asking itself about the reasons and above all the (often
not very philosophical) causes of its questioning.
(Bourdieu, 2000, p. 1.)
Bourdieu points to a limitation of the discipline of philosophy which (he claims) is not apparent from
within, but emerges form his external questioning from another disciplinary background, that of the social
sciences.
One suggestion made during the class is that philosophers are interested in contemporary art because it
seems to offer a place to make new connections between the questioning work of philosophy and the
world of practices that might lie outside the academy. (Of course art practices also are contained within
institutional settings and have their own limitations as well.)