What is Philosophy? – new

By Rongqing Dai

Abstract

Philosophy has been labeled by some scholars as a subject to answer big questions, such as “Who are we?”, “Where are we from?”, “Can we know anything?”, and more. But this becomes problematic because of lacking a consensus. Different people have different options for the essential big questions, but none would agree that any random question could be a big question. Therefore, the use of big questions is obviously not a satisfactory solution to answer the question of “what is philosophy?” As a matter of fact, this question has become so intimidating as more and more of the multifaceted nature of philosophy is being unveiled (by the development of philosophy and science) that many philosophers even don’t bother to answer this question. One nowadays expedience for this dilemma is to define philosophy as the quest for the answers to a wide range of questions, plus the history of philosophical development. Accordingly, the love of wisdom in the discipline of philosophy has been primarily replaced by the contentedness of presenting historical stories and providing answers to various issues with an array of existing names, fields, isms, schools, and all kinds of seemingly helpful knowledge that would bring the aura of “being knowledgeable” to the supposedly problem solvers.

Nevertheless, the mainstream philosophical development in history has often been derailed off the right track by the wrong answers from prominent philosophers to the question of “what is philosophy?” In response to this, an analysis on the nature of philosophy is provided in this article by looking into the logic behind the knowledge.

Key Words: Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Philosophy, Wisdom, Logical Domain, Objectivity and Subjectivity, Emotion

 

Introduction

What is philosophy? Despite its apparent simplicity that has attracted youngsters to ponder on the possible answers, this ultimate metaphilosophical question has become so daunting to the academic community of philosophy that many professional philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, have quit the efforts of giving a direct answer to it (Murphy 2018).

In fact, ancient Greeks have correctly established the concept of philosophy as “the love of wisdom”; however, when used as the definition of philosophy, that succinct expression seems to be too abstract to satisfy the scholars in the academic philosophy, and thus they have been trying to find a more instructive answer to “what is philosophy?”, especially in the past a few centuries, but have come out with more confusions than a final solution.

When Kant (1785) said “Ancient Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: physics, ethics, and logic. This division is perfectly suitable to the nature of the thing; and the only improvement that can be made in it is to add the principle on which it is based, so that we may both satisfy ourselves of its completeness, and also be able to determine correctly the necessary subdivisions”, he narrowed the scope of philosophy not only because of his limited knowledge in sciences at that time, but also because he ignored that all existences should be covered by the subject matter of philosophy.

When Hegel (1816) made philosophy equal to his new logical system that was comprised of metaphysics and logic together with their common dialectics, he was quite close to the whole picture of philosophy since his system includes the Idea and Notion, which could account for everything as he pointed out. However, his philosophy has been greatly narrowed by others into the so-called dialectic logic because of his own limited vocabulary that was outpaced by his new thoughts, as well as the misunderstandings of his vision by the world because of his failure of expressing his vision in a better way.

When the existentialists (e.g. Heidegger 1926, 1969; Sartre 1943, 1946) extended Kierkegaard’s theory (e.g. 1843a, 1843b, 1844) about existence in his theological framework into the general social background, obviously they narrowed the scope of philosophy way too much off what it really is.

When Whitehead (1927) claimed that philosophy was to provide a self-content logical framework for empirical knowledge, he was only partially right. When Russell (1945) said philosophy was something between theology and science, he was also missing a great deal about philosophy. And when Wittgenstein (1958) claimed that philosophy was about the interpretation of the language used in the knowledge created in all fields, as his teacher Russell noticed, he also greatly narrowed the scope of philosophy, although that emphasis on language interpretation helped our civilization to make a great progress at that time.

When the dialectic materialists claimed that philosophy was the methodology and the world-view, they also severely underestimated the power of philosophy in human civilization, since their definition not only missed logic and metaphysics (which was targeted as the adversary of dialectics by the dialectic materialists), but also missed the life-view (it was mistakenly assumed to be part of the world-view), aesthetic view, and so on. Besides, the use of the term “methodology” is quite misleading. When they introduced the concept of methodology, they would say it was about the theoretical analysis of the methods applied to a field of study, but when they taught the content of their particular theory of methodology, they would talk about the general set of their materialist dialectic methodology. The great deviation of the latter from the former could easily lead the learners to adopt the typical sophistry way of thinking. Nonetheless, the dialectic materialists have actually also proposed another definition of philosophy, closely related to the above definition but much trickier and more confusing, which was “philosophy is the love of truth instead of love of wisdom.” (Spirkin 1988) The tricky part is that “the love of truth” might sound more comprehensible than “the love of wisdom” to most people, while there are actually no globally accepted criteria about what are the truths, and they wanted others to believe Marxism or communism to be the truth as they did.

Obviously, all the above answers have shared one commonality: partially reducing the territory of philosophy to a very narrow sub domain of philosophy. In this article, I will first venture to find an answer to the question of “what is philosophy?” by looking into the logical position in human civilization which fits the common conception of what is called as philosophy; and then would further look into the nature of philosophy from different angles to help better understand and identify the territory of philosophy.

Philosophy as a Logical Domain

We know that all areas in human civilization, from the nature of language (e.g. linguistic laws, etc) to the nature of human interactions, from the patterns of learning to the patterns of acting, from the laws of music to the laws of the cosmos, from the art of cuisine to the art of investment, and so on, are seamlessly connected by the same core logic. This fact tells that there is an independent abstract logical domain in our civilization, which exists and functions no matter how we name it, and it affects every single aspect of our life. On the other hand, a better knowledge about this logical domain could help us to better express ourselves and better understand others as well as the whole universe.

Although the scholars of philosophy have been having a difficult time to find a satisfactory answer to the question “what is philosophy?” so far, in practice people usually would not have any trouble to recognize what could be called philosophy. A very basic truth about philosophy is that we have a philosophy for every cultural subject in life. For example, we have the philosophy of eating, we have the philosophy of basketball playing, and we have the philosophy of book reading, and so on. Furthermore, any of the abovementioned philosophy could be naturally connected with any other one with a consistent logic. Therefore, we might find that the term philosophy is actually the best fit for the logical domain that I discussed in last paragraph. That is to say, philosophy in general corresponds to a logical domain that functions independently of our will, which is part of the nature of the essential universe that we are living in.

The Tie That Binds All Things Together

Philosophy, sciences, math, and all other cultural domains are bound together by a single common tie, which is logic. Logic binds all domains together in two basic aspects: 1) logic is the common language of all cultural domains, or we might even say all cultural domains think in logic; 2) cultural domains all have their own unique logical positions in the civilization, in the sense that all domains differentiate from and interact with each other across their logical boundaries.

For example, math has its own special logical forms, but still follows the common basic logic that is shared among all cultural domains (e.g. a statement cannot be both right and wrong in a definite sense); on the other hand, we might identify the mathematical relationship in any particular case of any cultural domain even though all mathematical relations are hiding behind various dazzling forms of behavior in the particular domain, which tells that math and other fields belong to very different logical domains in the sense that we cannot logically replace all other cultural contents with math, and vice versa.

The fact that physicists can reason out what happened during the so-called Big Bang event tells us that even before the universe and its various laws existed, the same logic was already the universal language.

Like all other cultural domains, philosophy has its own logical position among others, and like math, philosophy suffuses all cultural domains as well. But unlike math, which is only interested in the numerically meaningful relationships, philosophy specializes in the logical nature present in all cultural domains, including math and philosophy itself. Accordingly, philosophy is the only cultural domain that could be considered as completely open.

However, philosophy lacks a hard criterion to judge the core value of its works due to its ultimate lack of any hard criterion (or even pseudo hard criterion as in the arts) for its core value, which is wisdom. Logic is the hardest criterion in the domain since illogical statements in philosophy, like in any other cultural domain, would be taken as valueless; however, logic could only help to identify mistakes in a theory, in addition to help the readers to delve into the exposition of the theory, but cannot, by itself alone, help with the appreciation of wisdom in any theory.

This unique nature of philosophy would create a potential challenge for determining the assignment of power and the allocation of resources within the professional community of philosophy based on its supposed core value.

The Idiosyncratic Logical Continuation within Philosophy

Strands of internal logical continuation are the most important marks to identify the legitimate body of any independent and self-coherent knowledge system. No matter the knowledge is passed down through the form of personal teachers and students (or masters and apprentices, or mentors and mentees) or through the relationship of authors and readers or any other forms, the common pattern of the development of a independent and self-coherent knowledge system is to create new works along the clear logical lines started in earlier works.

However, in general, the above-described common way of logical continuation within the body of a self-coherently independent knowledge system does not exist in the subject of philosophy. We could not find a common pattern of the strict logical derivation or continuation from old theories to new theories within the subject of philosophy as in other subjects, let alone that a complete refutation of a previous philosophical system by later philosophers is a common thing in the field of academic philosophy. Moreover, the coexistence of multiple different schools of philosophy or conflicting philosophical ways of thinking is not only the norm of a modern open society, but also a basic reality in the professional circle of philosophy since ancient times.

This idiosyncrasy of philosophy by itself is not a good thing or a bad thing. It is just part of the nature of philosophy, which qualifies philosophy to be the foundation of the whole civilization, and also the very reason for the traditional philosophy to have conceived many particular sciences that have later split from philosophy. Nonetheless, this peculiar nature of the subject of philosophy has spawned a variety of behaviors of the discipline, and due to various practical needs, sometimes they could be very negative, which needs our particular attention. We might better appreciate the peculiar way of the theoretical development of philosophy from some of its major consequences as follows:

1) A popular modern way of teaching in the class of philosophy is to present different views from different authors about the same issues without giving the official opinions about the final conclusions;

2) Driven by various utilitarian needs, including the need of facilitating the assignment of power and the allocation of resources within the mainstream community of philosophy, professionals in that community have worked hard to remodel the discipline by compiling the supposedly wisdom-and-logic-based collection of theories into an array of labels such as various isms and names of schools, and so on, with artificially tagged nominally-philosophical interpretations.

3) As a direct consequence of the artificial remodeling of the theoretical body of philosophy, we could often see in the literature that those nominal philosophical labels, instead of real issues or ideas, become the elements of logical discussions by philosophical writers.

4) Philosophical writers have been often reasoning or arguing based on commonly assumed logical relations between some theories without making the effort of really delving into the original theories.

5) Accordingly, there have been surprisingly many misinterpretations of past classics over the history.

6) Nowadays philosophical professionals often seem to confuse philosophy with the historical knowledge of philosophy, which has been further confusing the general public about what philosophy is really about..

Objectivity and Subjectivity

Philosophy as a notion is a duality of objectivity and subjectivity because of its intimacy with logical relations of all beings (or existences not in the existentialist sense) and its direct connection with how people think as well as how thinking is possible.

Subjectively, people often do not have the liberty to choose their own philosophy as they might have thought. Most people are normally overwhelmed by the popular philosophical impacts of the society and often get confused by the complexity of logic in life. Many factors would affect how people subject themselves to the influences of external philosophies, and the trickiest one is the fact that the truth is usually put into an equation with many other factors such as power, fame, money, temptation, needs, costs, emotions, etc, which often causes those of political or economic power to attempt manipulating the philosophy of the society for many reasons. Furthermore, human subjective philosophy could lead to wrong conclusions simply because of the involvement of wishful thinking and personal bias or lacking reliable data.

These shortcomings of philosophical subjectivity substantiate the need to continuously advance the mainstream philosophy as the civilization moves on, in addition to the need of the objective attitude towards philosophical thinking. It is like in a market, although you are not obligated to buy any specific product, if you don’t have options, then you might obligate yourself to buy the only thing available. This leads to the need of people who specialize in philosophy to continually supply advanced philosophy and to expose the tricky logic to the public, but so far this need has never been very well satisfied although this world has not lacked false philosophies.

The objectivity of philosophy is indeed deeply correlated with the subjectivity of philosophy. When some people who claim to be Objectivists attempt to completely exclude subjectivity from their philosophical works by ignoring the subjective nature of philosophy, they have already become very subjective themselves. It does not make a person objective by uttering the word “objective” or denying the word “subjective”. A person can be called objective only by respecting the true reality, and the subjectivity itself is part of the philosophical reality.

Even the most powerful objective means of philosophy bears the subjective mark, which is logic. On the other hand, although revealing the truth is undoubtedly important for philosophy, we do not have the materialized means as in many other sciences to objectively support the philosophical truth findings.

Nonetheless, the logically strict and thorough philosophizing is a powerful tool that all other sciences could borrow for their objective judgment, and its effectiveness and objectiveness exist in the validity of two premises: 1) correct logical judgment is an innate ability of any normal person, even though the capacity of logical thinking might be greater or lesser; 2) as the universal language, the subjective manifestation of logic matches the objective certainty of logic. Because of these two universally valid preconditions, we might find that logically strict and thorough philosophizing could often help us to reach objectively error-free conclusions.

Philosophy and Emotion

The relationship between philosophy and emotion might sound a bit awkward. On one hand, it seems to have always been a common perception that philosophy and emotion are like water and fire since philosophy is reputed for its unemotional cool logic and emotion is an illogical fervor and thus usually not philosophical. On the other hand, philosophy and emotion are very intimately related to each other. At least, we might say that the nature of emotion is supposed to be one part of the subject matter of philosophy, and their relationship actually goes much beyond that academic interest of study.

In real life, it is almost impossible to separate the emotional process from the philosophically rational process mainly for two reasons: 1) different philosophical ways of thinking could nurture different temperaments and thus might affect a person’s emotion in different ways; 2) although philosophy is the business of revealing the logical relations in nature and society, philosophical ideas always function through the human intelligent actions while human beings are definitely emotional creatures, and thus the role of philosophy in human civilization will be inevitably affected by emotion.

In general, emotion could not only affect what a person would like to consciously hear or agree with, but also affect how a person is subconsciously influenced by the message from outside. Therefore, emotion would play a great role in affecting how philosophies influence the public. Accordingly, politicians, social activists and thinkers, literary writers, movie makers, as well as some authors of popular philosophies often play on the emotional nature of the public or their audience to impose certain kind of philosophies that they want the public to adopt as the ways of thinking, and it often works very well when they do the play. Since the advocated philosophies and the advocators could be either positive or negative, that play itself is not always a bad thing. This fits into a grander pattern as mentioned earlier that the truth is generally put into the equation with many other factors including emotions. Besides, the philosophical view of a person could also be impacted by his culture-and-interest-based emotional stance, and vice versa. Furthermore, emotion would help to uphold various philosophical views, positive or negative, in the society, no matter for the general public or for those who promote certain philosophies.

Emotion also plays an important role in the creation of philosophical theories. One important source of social philosophy is the creative literary writings which are not composed in the lengthy strict ways of exposition, typical of the theoretical philosophy as written by Kant, Russell, and many others. The significance of emotion in the process of the literary creation has been a common knowledge because of many legendary stories about how fiction or nonfiction writers were inspired in some kind of extreme emotional mood. Even for the logical elaboration of a cold lengthy philosophical thesis, the emotional state of the author could not only help to arouse the excitement for the writing but also help to uphold the passion for the particular topic during the whole period of the writing, no matter one day or one year.

Emotion, along with some other things, is a very important practical factor that would determine how philosophy would be promoted, adopted, and developed in the real world. Nonetheless, due to the lack of this awareness, theoretical philosophers often tend to show their disapproval of the emotional element in practical expressions of philosophical ideas for it might smear the ideal image of the rigorousness of the academic philosophy; however, this sentiment could sometimes cause the disconnection between those who create philosophical theories and the real world needs of philosophy.

How Different Is Philosophy from Science?

Fundamentally, philosophy is wisdom oriented and science is knowledge oriented, which makes them very different from each other, although it does not mean that science does not need wisdom or philosophy does not possess knowledge. Consequently, as their first natures, philosophy offers principles while science provides knowledge and practical methods.

However, scientific knowledge also creates principles of life and principles for philosophical theories, and philosophy is practically viewed as knowledge as well. The former happens when scientific knowledge turns into part of people’s life-philosophy in the forms of either common senses or special knowledge, and the latter is true because the following items would become the so-called philosophical knowledge: 1) the contents of philosophical principles and the conclusions of philosophical speculations; 2) the expositions and applications, including all materials and logical reasoning involved in the expositions and applications, of philosophical principles and thoughts; 3) the logical relations exposed by philosophizing; 4) various philosophical commentaries as well as stories happened in the history of philosophical development.

Although philosophical thinking could also provide very specific practical instructions (generally not deemed as scientific though) in many cases and many ways, unlike scientific knowledge, philosophical knowledge in general mainly adds to the wisdom of the learners instead of being good for specific instructions of action. The application of philosophical knowledge often requires relatively high level of wisdom; or in other words, mastering a piece of the so-called philosophical knowledge differs from learning a piece of scientific knowledge because for most of the time the former might not be helpful at all if not be used with wisdom while the latter would often be labeled as so-called foolproof. In fact, if a piece of philosophical knowledge becomes practically handy and still stays in the cultural domain of philosophy, then most probably the only reason is because people have not found a specific science to include it.

Accordingly, due to the difference of the utilitarian expectations towards philosophy and science, human attitudes towards the philosophical development and the scientific development are very different, which will be typically reflected in the fact that the sense of urgency about the scientific development is usually much greater than about the philosophical development.

However, this difference of attitude might cause a serious practical setback due to the difference in the required direct social commitment for philosophical and scientific theories to take effect. In general, philosophical theories could be fully functional only if they are extensively known to the general public and mastered by the populace, in contrast to the fact that a few scientists could create miracles in a small laboratory, a team of employees of a factory could supply particular products to the whole world, and a few artists could make a movie for millions to watch. This difference in the required direct social commitment for theories would further induce a difference in the practical latency for philosophical and scientific developments, in the sense that it would take much longer time to see the development of a new philosophy to take effect even after it is accepted by the populace. In other words, when people feel the pressing need of a widespread impact of a new philosophy, they might not get it as they could for a new scientific theory.

In the mean time, as noticed by Plato, the intellectual requirement for advanced philosophical reasoning is much higher than most people would normally assume; accordingly, there have always been very few people in the world since the ancient times that can do serious philosophically bent logical reasoning. But on the other hand, the academic philosophy community has been getting so immense and everybody in that community is indiscriminately assumed to be good at philosophical reasoning. This mismatch between the true capability of advanced philosophical reasoning and the assumed popular possessions of the capability would drive the academic standards in the discipline towards more politically correct instead of more wisdom-based, which would undoubtedly pose a threat to the healthy development of the mainstream philosophy.

This would further lead to another negative consequence: people would often miss the positive impact of an advanced philosophy simply because of their lacking the appreciation of the philosophy when the philosopher is still alive. There have been astonishingly many examples of misinterpreting some classic philosophies for centuries around the world, and the losses caused by the lack of correct understandings of those theories during those centuries are incalculable, since at certain historical points different mainstream philosophies might determine very different directions of social advancement……

Why Do We Need Philosophy?

The most positive impact of telling what philosophers have done in the far and near history is to impress the students or the general audience with the wisdom that has been shining through great historical achievements. This would make it very hard to defame philosophy, even when many professionals lost their faith in this ancient profession after some famous figures in both philosophical and scientific societies have repeatedly announced the death of philosophy. In this respect, we do need to give credits to those who have treated philosophy as the history of philosophy, even though it is a bad move to replace the essence of wisdom with historical knowledge.

However, on the other hand, two most important reasons for us to have a good philosophical system have been often ignored by the world (even) since ancient times: 1) philosophy inevitably causes objective changes in the real world with or without our knowledge of it; 2) philosophical analysis could help to reveal the complicated logical relations hidden behind the dazzling social dynamical phenomena.

It has been often ignored that philosophy plays an unavoidable role in the social cause & effect relationship, because of the ultimate relationship between philosophy and human mental activity, and thus manifests itself as a force. In fact, we might say that philosophy is a type of force with a global distribution and various local components, similar to natural forces (e.g. the force of punching on the face), and we might call it as the philosophical force. Unlike the instant effects of natural forces, the effects of the action of the philosophical force would normally become evident only after some latent period of time. Nonetheless, the philosophical force will shape the general life status anywhere human beings live, even when a person lives alone.

The philosophical force exists and functions, benefiting us or taking all kinds of tolls from us as the result of our actions directed by our philosophical ways of thinking, advanced or primitive, positive or negative, logically meaningful or stupidly nonsense, whether we are clearly aware of its existence or not. This leads to a generally overlooked fact that the well-being of social philosophy directly impacts the well-being of the society, and thus the society might pay a huge price for a backward social philosophy.

On the other hand, although the social philosophy varies from region to region or even from family to family, it always reflects the same logic behind all social and natural reality; accordingly, social processes shaped by various global, local, or individual philosophies all follow the same set of logic. For this reason, philosophical knowledge and skills could help us to reveal not only secrets in nature as scientists have been so successfully doing, but also various patterns in our economic, political, and general cultural systems, especially those seemingly in a monotonic harmony on a small scale of space-time with simple cultural factors, but actually paradoxical on a global scale or in the long run or when more cultural parameters need to be involved, on both macroscopic and microscopic social scales as well as individual level.

Final Remark

The wrong answers to the question of “what is philosophy?” by prominent philosophers in history have derailed the development of philosophy off the right track in different directions at different historical times. For a philosophy of philosophy, what essentially differentiate this writing from all other famous existing theories concerning what philosophy is really about, and thus lies at its core, is the identification of the objectively existing logical domain of philosophy, which is the substantial thingy for wisdom to embrace or reflect on. Once we realize that fundamental logical nature of philosophy, we could be at liberty to gain much more profound understanding of philosophy as an academic subject or a cultural field, as elaborated in this writing to a limited scope. Accordingly, while the past theories normally introduce what philosophy is about by offering knowledge about either what happened with philosophy, including various schools of philosophy, or what philosophy has done for the world in the history, this writing offers a philosophy of philosophy by providing an insight of the logical nature of philosophy and its logical role in our civilization.

References

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