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Philosophy
Quite literally philosophy, philosophia, is the love of wisdom. So to understand what philosophy is, you have to understand both something about love and something about wisdom. Wisdom, at least in the ancient Socratic sense, consists in knowing what you know but also knowing what you don’t know. So, there’s always a sense of humility involved in wisdom. To be wise isn’t to know all things. It’s to be able to recognize and concede when in fact you don’t know something or haven’t yet learned or maybe cannot learn something.
I think philosophy is also a way of calling into question what we have learned, making ourselves perhaps a little less arrogant and content with what we have learned. Perhaps we’ve learned some things about gender, perhaps we’ve learned some things about human individuals or the Earth, or maybe we’ve learned some things about the economy that we have to unlearn because it turns out we were given a skewed education. Maybe we were even given a bad education. We have to call into question even some of the things our most treasured teachers have taught us because if we cease to question, then we cease to live or to know and we act as if we know everything. And one of the worst things that humans can do is to decide they know everything already, that they live within a closed dogma, that they are closed off from any new challenges to their way of thinking.
Philosophy as a Practice
I don’t think philosophy should be a rarefied discipline that only the initiated can study. I think philosophy happens all the time in the world. It is already part of ordinary language and should remain so, but most people I talk to have philosophical beliefs without knowing that they have a theory. I think every time we call, it’s a question of prejudice or a presupposition that we have about the world or about other people, we’re acting like a philosopher. We’re going to the root of things. We’re asking whether that habitual response I always have is the right response, and we’re standing back from that habit and asking whether there’s another way to encounter people or another way to think about this relationship.
I think philosophers call presuppositions into question, but they don’t just have a negative task, like tearing things apart. They also seek to understand the ultimate values that we have in this world. If you ask anybody, “What do you live for?” or “What do you think is most important in life?”, you are asking them a philosophical question. If you ask somebody how they justify the actions they take, you’re asking a philosophical question. If you say, “Well, what is justice anyway?” or “What is equality?”, you’re posing questions as a political philosopher.
And if you have a quarrel with somebody about a piece of art and somebody thinks it’s beautiful and the other person doesn’t, and you start trying to figure out why you could have such a difference of opinion, you’re engaged in a philosophical discussion. You’ve entered into the sphere of aesthetics.
So how far are we willing to go to elaborate the concepts that we need in order to make the judgments that we make in the world or in order to think critically about traditional views we’ve accepted or prejudices that we unwittingly reproduce? That’s philosophy. Probably most people are already practicing it without knowing it, but it’s possible to name it, and once you’ve named it, then you might want to read some.