Howdy internet friend! If you are checking this out, it is either because you want to read what I think about philosophy, or you just want to peep the latest picture of my dogs. Either way, welcome and thanks for your time!
Note: this is a long essay! If you want to just look at the dog picture, I don't blame you. You have been warned! Also, I wrote this in a web browser without spell check, so please forgive any errors.
In this essay we are thinking about philosophy. More specifically, we are looking for an answer to the question, "what is philosophy?" I suspect if you ask a hundred philosophers to define philosophy you would get a number of different answers and if they were all in the same room, I'd put the odds of an argument erupting at even money. I would go further and say there would also be a non-zero chance of a fight breaking out - philosophers are a contentious bunch!
How I would define philosophy when I was younger and more angry is substantially different from how I define it today. Moreover, what I think is a definition for me (and for this moment in time) is subject to interrogation and change. As a thinker, I don't ever want to get too comfortable and as someone who considers themselves a kind of scientist, I feel compelled by the scientific method to update my thoughts when a better idea comes along it replaces the existing standard. Put a different way, as I get new information, I am willing to change my mind and update my opinion. I would go further and suggest that I want to always be open to changing my mind when presented with a better idea.
Before we consider what philosophy is, let us define what philosophy is not. When I say "philosophy" I am not trying to put together a universal moral system that will work for everyone. More specifically, it is not my aim to convince you that the thinkers who have interesting ideas to me are right, and you should follow their worldview and advice. It's not my goal to convince you of anything, I just want to share with you some stuff I have been thinking about lately. What I am interested in is wisdom. I will mention it again much later, but my goal in this essay is to get you to think deep thoughts and try to ask hard questions of yourself and your experience as a human. I feel that we don't spend enough time thinking, and it is a miscalculation because time spent thinking is time well spent.
When I was studying philosophy at Eastern Washington University, I learned the word philosophy comes from the ancient Greek words philo - meaning lover of and sophia, meaning wisdom. Wikipedia attributes this to Plato, but greetz to Dr. Chris Kirby. I remember learning this in the history of ancient philosophy course I took while I was earning my history MA and finishing the requirements for my philosphy degree at the same time. Thus for this paper, and in life, I define a philosopher as someone who loves wisdom. That's nice dude, you might be thinking to yourself, but what does that mean practically?
Before answering that question, there is a more important one to answer first - what is wisdom? There were a few definitions that I think start to get at an answer to that question. The Cambridge Dictionary defines wisdom as, "the ability to use your knowledge and experience to make good decisions and judgments." That seems like a good start. Dictionary.com defines wisdom as, "the quality or state of being wise; knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action; sagacity, discernment, or insight."
Wisdom thus is a form of knowledge that we acquire through experience. This has some implications, which include a subjective idea of right and wrong. That means that each individual definition of wisdom will vary from person to person and culture to culture. That not withstanding, for the purposes of the rest of this essay, let's consider some definition of wisdom that combines those ideas. Given an idea of what philosophy is, and a working definition of wisdom, let us consider the ways that a love of wisdom could/would manifest in the twenty-first century.
Loving wisdom can take many forms. One way to love wisdom is to think about the most wise way to live. Let me pause to share a personal story that I hope to relate to the larger theme of this essay. All my life I have struggled with depression. During times where I can hyperfocus on things like school, or work, and I don't have downime where my mind doesn't have to focus on getting any number of tasks completed, I have frequently found myself getting depressed. Over the last year I have spent substantial time and money in therapy trying to figure out how to be less depressed. I think part of the issue was that it was a focus on the wrong outcome. Ultimately a study of stoic philosophy was something that helped me get un-stuck when I ceased making progress, and I want to share why.
As I started to hint at above, part of my issue was that I was asking the wrong question. When I was first exposed to philosophy as a teenager, I read thinkers who have been associated with a movement called postmodernism. Specifically, I was very interested in the writing of Michel Foucault. It wasn't until a decade later and I had spent time talking to people smarter than I am and reading many, many other books that I was finally able to come to an understanding of what Foucault thought. Looking back, I do not think that is a good thing at all!
If you write in a way that it takes someone a decade to figure out what you are trying to share, you aren't doing an effective job of sharing! Inaccessibility was something I thought was cool at the time, but now I realize that doesn't make something cool at all. In fact, it is the opposite. If I write something and the reader has no idea what I was saying, or the point I was trying to make, the reader shouldn't think I am some cool intellectual - they should be burned that I wasted their time! You shouldn't need to read a bunch of other stuff and talk to people before you can come back to my work and go, "yeah, I dig what the dude was trying to do there." Also I can't think of much difference between gatekeeping and being intellectually inaccessible, and with few exceptions, gatekeeping is not cool. Some people are terrible and should be kept out of spaces - I won't name names because I don't want to get in trouble, but that's what I mean by I think that there are some exceptions for gatekeeping. Racists shouldn't be allowed in your spaces, and neither should Nazis or transphobes. See the paradox of tolerance for further examples.
Now look, I am not interested in telling you how to feel, and I realize that one could read this essay thus far as a rant, and I do not think that would be a misreading. My overarching point is that if you are doing something that not everyone can understand, I don't think it is really all that great. When people are critical of academia for being exclusionary - and I am specifically talking about the critique of ivory tower intellectualism - I think postmodernism is a great example of that problem. Am I trying to convey that I don't think there is value in postmodernism? No, I think there is tremendous value in interrogating truth and power. I think that the idea of truth being subjective is really important - what is true for me may not be true for you, yet we can both hold static conceptions of truth and each find our own value from it, despite there being tension between them. That having been written, I can also understand why educators (more often than not) will wait until graduate school to really start diving deep on these thinkers. I gave greetz to Dr. Kirby earlier, but there was no love for postmodernism in courses I took with him.
Alright, that was a bunch of words and I feel like I got a bit off topic. Let us turn back to the discussion at hand, and the topic of this post - what is philosophy? If we can agree (at least for the sake of moving forward) that a philosopher is someone who loves wisdom, what does that mean practically? How do we live a life that demonstrates we love of wisdom? Take a moment and think about this for yourself. In fact, I am asking you to stop reading this essay and go take a walk and think about that question. If you have dogs, bring them with you and think about what a life looks like that demonstrates a love of wisdom. "If I wanted to live a life that was all about loving wisdom, what would that look like?" Think about whether this could be a part-time job, like on nights and weekends, or if you should focus all your effort on it all the time. It might also be worth considering whether this is a healthy and worthwhile pursuit at all!
Back from your walk? I took one too so I could think about it. I came back to this essay a few times, in fact. I wanted to read it a few times and make changes over the course of the day, and to also make sure I didn't miss anything (although I bet I did) and to ensure I fleshed out all the points I was hoping to make. Let's dive back in!
Socrates famously said,
For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living - that you are still less likely to believe.
If you don't know who Socrates was, I will fill you in. He was a philosopher in ancient Greece who didn't believe in writing. I don't mean that he did not believe that writing existed, just that he thought philosophy didn't happen over written words but instead happened through asking and answering questions (what we now refer to as the Socratic Method). Most of what we know about Socrates comes from his (arguably) most famous student, Plato, who wrote down different interactions Socrates had with different people. What was quoted above was from, "The Apology" - where Plato was writing about Socrates trial.
Wait, if you said that Socrates was a great philosopher, why was he on trial? Socrates loved to upset people, and the official charges were, "impiety and corrupting the youth." Socrates would describe himself as being like a gadfly that wanted to pester and annoy people with his questions. Socrates (with the possible exception of Diogenes) was the poster child for questioning authority. (Quick note, I would highly recommend checking out Diogenes if you don't know about him. I linked to the Wikipedia page above, which is a good starting point.) This would be the thing that would cost Socrates his life, but the dude died the way he lived.
I mentioned this before, but when I was younger I didn't care much, or really at all, for ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. I took a course when I was 19 where we learned about ancience Greek philosophers arguing about "the arche" or the stuff that fundamentally made up the Earth and the universe. Some dudes thought the universe was made from fire, others thought from air, some from this thing they called aether. Who cares? A few months ago I was listening to a podcast that discussed stocisim and from that I found a copy of The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor who was on the throne from 161 to 180 of the Common Era. This started to change my opinion on ancient thinkers from that region of the world. Aurelius is famous for being a Stoic philosopher, a school of thought that traces its origins to Zeno of Citium. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has this to say about stoic philosophy, "The Stoics defined the goal in life as living in agreement with nature." It also offers the following, "The Stoics believed that the person who has achieved perfect consistency in the operation of his rational faculties, the “wise man,” (sic) is extremely rare, yet serves as a prescriptive ideal for all. The Stoics believed that progress toward this noble goal is both possible and vitally urgent."
While noting the problematic gendered language above, we nonetheless can consider that stoic philosophy offers a framework (or a set of guiding principals) for how we could live our life. Turning back to The Meditations one theme that occurs over and again is the idea that we are in charge of our thoughts. If you start feeling yourself getting depressed, you can continue to think about thoughts that further your depression, or you can stop yourself and say, "no! I am not going to think about that right now."
Let me give you a practical example. I was walking my dogs yesterday and a dark thought crept into my mind. Rather than continuing down that path, I thought, "no! Stop! If you keep thinking about this, you are going to bum yourself out. There is nothing you can do about it right now except make yourself feel worse. Instead, focus on the fact that the sun is out and you are walking your dogs. Look at how beautiful they are, with the desert as a background." Then, instead of thinking about the thing that was bringing me down, I instead heard the song of some beautiful bird. Then a jack rabbit run across the street. Suddenly, instead of staring at my feet and thinking about doom and gloom, I was taken to the moment and able to find beauty instead of despair.
Before I continue, I want to pause and say that I do not think this is easy. I don't want you to think that I can just stop feeling sad and immediately turn it around. Try as I might, there can still be a sinking feeling of dread and woe that exists and persists. I am not trying to tell you that you can have total control over your thoughts and feelings. However, I will suggest that it can be a goal you can work towards, and like any time you work out, with more effort comes greater result. Also like working out, it is hard at first but gets easier with time as you grow stronger.
This idea of being in control of your thoughts is one that repeats itself frequently. In book five of the meditations we are offered the following thought, "[h]ow easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is troublesome or unsuitable, and immediately to be in all tranquility." For someone who has suffered from chronic depression for years, it made me laugh out loud the first time I read this. "Oh yeah, just stop thinking sad thoughts! DUH! Why didn't I think of that sooner? EZPZ" When I was growing up my dad used to attribute the following quote to Abraham Lincoln, "Folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be." There was no evidence directly linking this quote to Lincoln, but this idea is generally how I first felt about the quote from The Meditations.
Sure, I will just choose to be happy! That is not what the stoics were talking about, and moreover I don't think they intend you to be happy all the time, because happiness isn't balanced. In the first book of the meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes about being grateful to the people in his life who have been the most influential. When he describes his father, one of the words he uses is cheerful. This is different than happy. I spent a bunch of time thinking about this, and I suspect it is because it doesn't make sense to be happy all the time, because there has to be sadness for happiness to exist at all. There are also times that are somber but could still be delt with cheerfully. Making a decision to choose to be content or making an effort to be cheerful is different than just being happy.
What is my point in writing all this? That's a great question! I don't have any grand ah-ha moment that I want to pass along to you. Instead, I want to challenge you to think. Use downtime you have to think about really hard questions, even if you cannot figure out the answers. Take a walk and think about the meaning of life. Ask yourself what is your life purpose? How do you want to be remembered? Are you doing things to achieve that goal? If you are waiting for something, are you sure that's a prudent idea? What if disaster happens to you tomorrow, should you put off starting your novel today?
I've been trying to motivate my son to care more about his education, but it is challenging when school doesn't hold his interest. College or graduate school doesn't guarantee an environment where the people in your class care as much as you. Some may care more, many may care less. People are there for different reasons too. Not everyone is interested in gaining knowledge. Today many people think of college as a way to a career that makes more money.
Lately I have been thinking about the question, "what makes someone smart?" Because I want to help my son to be a smart person. In order to provide a framework for becoming smart, I had to think about how I even define smart in the first place? Ultimately, I am leaning towards a definition of smart as someone who is passionate about learning. More specifically, the difference between someone who is smart and someone who is not is their desire to learn. Anyone who wants to learn more about how the world works is a smart person - that's where I draw the line. If you think you know everything and you do not have anything new to learn, by that definition provided you are not a smart person.
I am sure that you could find a way to make some decisions that do not look smart by my criteria, but I think ultimately the question is one of desire. People who are always asking questions with the goal of learning are going to have a better chance of getting it right than someone who thinks they know everything. There is a great story about Socrates that I love about him going to visit the Oracle at Delphi and the way I remember the story goes as follows.
When Socrates goes to the Oracle, he is told that he is the wisest man in Athens. Socrates doesn't think this is possible because there is so much stuff he doesn't know. So he goes to the master craftsman and asks to learn what he has to teach. That dude is a blowhard who thinks he knows everything. Socrates thinks, "wow, this person isn't very humble. Kinda thinks he knows everything." Socrates then goes to another expert and asks what he can teach, and this dude also thinks he knows everything. Then another, and another. Socrates doesn't talk to a single person who is willing to admit there are things they don't know, and that is when Socrates realizes that what makes him the most wise is his willingness to admit he knows nothing.
So, what is philosophy? What does it mean to love wisdom? What does it mean to be wise? I think the answers to these questions are hinted at above. Ultimately I think it is up for each of us to interrogate these questions and come to our own conclusions. My hope is that this essay made you think about some things, and I further hope you will start to ask some of these hard questions for yourself. I think it is similiar to things like, "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" You can get lead someone close to finding the answer, but they have to cross the threshold themselves.
I wanted to add that this essay has only been discussing one branch of philosophy. There are a number of other schools that are interested in asking much different questions. There is a school of thought called epistemology that is interested in the study of knowledge. I talked about postmodernism that interrogates truth claims and is skeptical of reason. There are religious philosophies that seek to answer questions about the meaning of life and what happens after we die. Additionally, there are moral philosophies that seek to figure out the right and virtous way to live. Moreover, there are schools of thought that deal with government, economic, gender, and environmental issues as well. Then there are schools of thought which combine multiple disciplines above. I am sure that I have missed some as well.
I wish that I had a bow to wrap up this essay, but instead I want to close by sharing my hopes with you. As an academically trained historian, most of what I was prepared to do was reading stuff and writing about it in a meaningful way. To convey that information, to boil down hundreds of pages into five or ten, and pick out the stuff that is worth sharing, then put it in words anyone can understand - that is the task of a historian. Academic training in philosophy is similiar, though the discussions in class about the readings are frequently more interesting. Also a larger number of people are planning on using that philosophy degree to go to law school than the history degree. You can also get away with writing stuff in philosophy that is much harder to understand, and we covered that above. I have spent time thinking about why historians got more slack for skimming, and I suspect it's because historians have to read more and are thus in a position where skimming is required. I once had to read a book that spent over a hundred pages talking about barbed wire. It was a book that was over 300 pages and I had a week to read it. Frequently in graduate school I was expected to read two or three books a week, on top of being a TA (and all the work that goes with that) and completing a thesis. No philosopher was so dry that they invested a hundred pages on barbed wire! You also can't skim over the work of a philosopher and have a meaningful discussion afterwards. You must be critical in the examination of the text, and making sure that if you don't understand something, to make a note to bring it up in class later. That's because if you don't understand, there is probably at least one other person who also doesn't understand, but is too embarassed to ask. You might make a new friend just by having the courage to ask a question!
Perhaps one of my points in this essay is that the tools required to study philosophy are at your fingertips. If you are reading this essay, you have access to the internet. There are resources like this one from MIT that has over 400 works of classical literature by 59 authors. There are other resources as well. If you have an internet connection, you can read these works and start to think about them. Read some stuff from Plato or Aristotle. There are lots of great options on that website, and some other rad ones are The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu,The Doctrine of the Mean by Confucius, or The Art Of War by Sun Tzu. There are heaps of other resources to find writings online as well, and I will leave finding more topics as an exercise for the reader.
As I mentioned earlier in this essay, there are a number of different schools of thought, and this essay was just an introduction. There are many of different branches of philosophy, and I focused in this essay on western thought, but right above this are links to some thinkers from the east who are frequently left out of philosophical discourses (which is fancy way of saying discussions). Much of the training in western philosophy is stolen from eastern thought, without giving any credit - explicit or otherwise! There are some ideas that are either borrowed or outright stolen from those thinkers, but since the average person of that era did not have access to the internet and couldn't find this out on a lazy Sunday afternoon, philosophers "repurpose" those ideas and claim them for their own.
I have been thinking about the question, "what is philosophy" for some time now, and this essay was a way to begin to answer that question. I hope to revisit this post in the future to see how my thinking has changed. I plan on going back through some old stuff I wrote in college/graduate school and posting them along with replies. I know there was an essay I wrote that was harshly critical of marriage and since I am married now, I am planning on going back, finding it, and posting it with a reply essay. I enjoyed taking some time to write this essay, and I plan on doing more like this in the future.
It is my hope that you found some benefit from this work. Either you found it interesting, or it provoked some thoughts in you, or it inspired you to invest time thinking about deeper thoughts than you have thought in a while. Even if the reaction was just being annoyed with how I only focused on thinkers from ancient Greece and Rome until the end, if I have written in a way that made you feel something, I will consider this essay a success!
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you found some value to it, and that you enjoy this picture of my beautiful dogs. Cheers, internet friend!