What is Philosophy?

Every day for the next 30 days I will be writing a blog post about what I am learning as I go through a month long philosophy module as part of my participation in Praxis. To find out more about Praxis, visit their website.

“A journey of a 600 word blog post, begins with a single search for memes” – Lao Tzu

My first blog post about philosophy is about what philosophy is. Yes, very meta. Philosophizing about philosophy. So naturally I began by searching for memes. And I found one that summed up my initial exposure to philosophy.

Homeless looking man walks into classroom, students assume it is a professor. Four months later final papers are written and I don’t remember a thing.

It was an ethics class, something that should be deeply applicable to everyday life. But instead of talking about how you apply living ethically to your day to day life, or even thinking through some hard hypotheticals, we are simply told to memorize things that people thought before us. There is really no space for original thinking. Like most subjects in university, it is a more an exercise in memorization, than an exercise in education.

Learning about philosophy in university is like learning how to play mine sweeper with the difficulty turned all the way up. You have your one square and you are terribly afraid to move. Almost every possible move has a risk of a mine underneath it.

You need to have sources before you can know anything, but god help you if you plagiarize.

So many mines. So little space to move, to learn, to play with new ideas, to think through problems and come to answers that people have already had before you.

Academia combines the two most harmful deterrents education, an adoration of authority, and a tremendous fear of plagiarism.

Back to philosophy.

When you start learning about something, people often start by trying to define what the thing that you learning is. And the trick with philosophy, to figure out what philosophy is, is to catch yourself at the moment you begin to look down the rabbit hole, to stop at that moment and not get lost by plunging right it.

Philosophy is what you do when you set out to answer the question, “What is philosophy?”

So when someone asks you, “What is philosophy?” You must catch yourself, in the moment before you are tempted to try and explain it. You catch yourself, and then you repeat the question back to them.

You ask them, “What is philosophy?”, and in the moment they pause and start thinking, you say, “There! Right there. That is philosophy.”

That’s the definition I like at least.

That philosophy is the process of developing a coherent system of thought for yourself. Learning philosophy, to me, is not about finding answers to big questions. But learning how to look for answers.

It is the process of extracting the tangled, confused, and inconsistent beliefs and ideas out of your head. Becoming aware of them, and trying the untangle them. To end up at a place where your have consistency in what you believe, and then you can apply those consistent beliefs to how you act.

That is what I think, but of course, I am not a philosopher. I don’t have the words to speak the language of philosophy. I don’t know the who said what’s of philosophy. I don’t know how to play the game of being philosophical.

I don’t really know what metaphysics is, or what epistemology is. I don’t really know what Socrates thought. I’ve felt this lack of confidence about entering the world of philosophy because of this language problem. Not knowing how to speak the language.

When you start learning about philosophy in school you kind of learn it as “Who thought what”. You have to memorize the historical figures who thought these different things. You have to write papers about these people and what they thought. Success is being able to properly attribute ideas to figures from the past. Failure is thinking for yourself and coming to a solution, and then finding out that that is what Aristotle thought.

Most people who call themselves philosophers nowadays are simply tenured intellectual actors. They’ve learned the words and the dance to be called intellectuals, what they haven’t learned is how to solve problems, or how to find answers that improve people’s lives.

In my mind, the modern incarnation of philosophy is not to be found in the people calling themselves philosophers, but instead in the self-help section of the bookstore. The people who are thinking through ideas and ways to help people lead better lives. The author who are creating real value for people who are willing to pay for their books.

These authors might be recycling old ideas, but they are doing it in some small way that makes it their own. They are not focused on philosophizing. On spending their days lost down in rabbit holes, they are focused on teaching people philosophy. How to approach the big question of life, How do I live the good life?