Last day of first philosophy semester

Another quaint ‘critique of pure reason’ for my pupils. (I haven’t read that; who am I to talk? Maybe to be so crazy as to want to is enough.)

‘Okay, settle down. I’ll accept the homework tomorrow if you don’t have it; we can talk after class. Now, remember at the beginning of this class I asked, what is philosophy?—rather, what does it mean, what do you think it means? As I said then, I can’t tell you: because I’m still answering that question for myself, and I don’t believe that the answer as I’ve arrived at it so far will be a substitute for you doing the same. But then we shared what we thought, and this is a perfectly legitimate step in answering that question—hearing others’ ideas, articulating your own, debating, compromising or being stubborn—even saying No, there is an answer, just tell us what it is, we’ll find out eventually. I would agree with that up to a point—philosophy is something, for sure, and there are some things it definitely isn’t; it isn’t just whatever we say it is, or else there would be no point in calling it its own thing. There must be some value in calling it its own thing, distinguishing it from games, or cooking, or carpentry, though in some sense they may overlap, particularly if we think of philosophy as a perspective, a way of doing things rather than something done.

But anyway, today I wanted to try to summarize some of the ways we’ve heard our authors talk about philosophy—not in that subtle sense only, as we infer it from the way they go about their writing, but as they explicitly describe philosophy itself. (So Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Lucretius, Augustine, Descartes—statements of theirs are quoted, or however many of them have been read. Certain threads are perhaps brought out—the ascetic, the encyclopedic, the political, the spiritual, the artistic; the stress on knowledge, the ideal, and wisdom, the return to the real.)

My bias is plain, but I won’t try to force it upon anyone. I know its flaws, and my own as far as living up to it. But that’s more than enough for one day. Read those statements over and over again, memorize some of them if you can or care to, think of both the content, what they say, and the style, how they say it—and the context in the philosopher’s times, his surroundings, the rest of his writing and the tradition he draws upon. And then, when you get tired of that, get back to the heart of philosophy. It isn’t memorization, but learning; not reading, but thinking and feeling.

The word itself is another thing I mentioned—do you remember? (love of wisdom.) The two roots of philosophy, they say, are wonder and doubt. Engage yourself in one or both once you’ve read these over, while you read them over. I hope you feel that shiver of understanding, the hairs physically shivering; that is part of what led me to set aside any notion of disembodied, ‘pure’ reason.