WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
D. R. Khashaba
I
Philosophy has always meant different things to different people. Since the
close of the nineteenth century the term has been applied to studies that
neither Plato nor Aristotle would have found related to what either of them
meant by philosophy.
There is nothing wrong of course with there being numerous diverse fields
of thought with distinct methods and objects and objectives. But things go
wrong when discipline A, misled by a community of name, finds fault with
discipline B because it does not apply A’s methods or adopt its object and
objectives. In science, for instance, it would be wrong for physicists to
think that, because the ultimate constituents of living cells are such as
physics studies, physics tells us all we need to know about living cells.
In the case of the diverse disciplines claiming the title ‘philosophy’ (now
wildly proliferating) this fault is rampant and is highly damaging.
Philosophies modeled on empirical science have actually anathematized as
nonsense. But the diversity of types of philosophical thinking is not a
modern phenomenon.
II
In China and in India, in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, in Persia and among the
Hebrews there was wisdom. But philosophy started in Ionia in the
north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean. Philosophy is first
distinguished by being private; every philosopher thought for himself,
pursuing questions that irked her or him, seeking solely to satisfy her or
his own mind, claiming no authority and demanding no following.
The questions that the earliest philosophers sought answers for were
diverse and varied and hence from the very start there were different types
of philosophical pursuits. The first Milesian thinkers, Thales and
Anaximander and Anaximenes seem to have puzzled about the ultimate
constituents of all things and how the world has come to be as we find it.
Xenophanes debunked the common vulgar notions about the gods. Heraclitus
and Parmenides were interested in questions that have come to be designated
metaphysical. Socrates looked into the ideas, ideals, values, and aims that
govern human life and asked what life is best for a human being to live.
Socrates’ philosophy was thus a philosophy of life and for life.
Plato, profoundly impressed by the character and moral stance of Socrates,
was simultaneously deeply immersed in the questions that had engaged
Heraclitus and Parmenides: What is real? What is ultimate Reality? Fusing
Socrates’ moral interests with his metaphysical questionings, Plato
developed a vision uf the philosophical life as the ideal life for a human
being, involving a vision of ultimate Reality, and implying a distinctive
view of the nature of philosophical thinking. This Platonic philosophy has
sadly been misunderstood and ignored. In particular, learned scholarship
has been guilty of making a travesty of it.
Let us stay a while with these two last-mentioned great thinkers. It is
strictly impossible to draw a clear line between the thought of Socrates
and the thought of Plato, but for the purposes of exposition it is
unavoidable and perhaps not unhelpful to make a conjectural separation.
III
At his trial Socrates declares : “…while I have life and strength I shall
never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy” (Jowett’s
wording). How did he ‘teach philosophy’? By interrogating, questioning,
examining, and cross-examining all he met. It is of vital importance to
grasp the significance of this.
Socrates saw that we owe our distinctive human nature to our life and
actions being governed by ideas, ideals, values, purposes all bred in the
mind and having no being outside the mind. When these ideas, values, and
purposes are confused, muddled, and entangled we go in life fumbling in the
dark, not knowing what we are or what we are doing. This is the insight
that Spinoza, twenty-two centuries later, was to express by saying that
when we act on inadequate ideas we are not free. On the other hand, to be
clear about our ideas, values, and purposes is to enjoy the proper virtue,
the special excellence of a human being. That distinctive excellence, that
proper virtue of a human being, Socrates referred to as that within us
which is benefited by doing what is right and harmed by doing what is
wrong. For short it may be named psuchê (soul) or nous
(mind, reason). Consequently he held that, if life is not worth living with
a diseased body, it is much less so with a diseased soul (Crito,
46b ff.).
Thus Socrates was exclusively concerned with the mind and the things of the
mind. In the Phaedrus when Phaedrus asks him if he believes the
popular legend of Boreas carrying Orithuia away, Socrates says:
“… I have no time for such things; and the reason, my friend, is this. I am
still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it
really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have
understood that. … I look … into my own self: Am I a beast more complicated
and savage than Typhon, or am I a tamer, simpler animal with a share in a
divine and gentle nature?” (229e-230a, tr. Alexander Nehamas and Paul
Woodruff)
Those things of the mind that were Socrates’ sole concern are intelligible
as opposed to the perceptible things reported to us by our senses of the
outer world including our body. In the Phaedo there is a most
important passage of some half-a-dozen pages (95e-102a) that is strangely
overlooked by professional philosophers and learned scholars. Responding to
a difficulty raised by Cebes in the argument, Socrates says, “The whole
question of the cause of generation and corruption will have to be
examined.” He proceeds to give an account of his youthful wrestlinlings
with the question. It turns out that in the end he had to renounce all
search for physical causes which, he found, cannot answer any of the
questions that concerned him as a philosophers. The answers to these and
all the understanding we need for the guidance of human life are to be
found within our own minds, in the ideas engendered in and by our minds.
Socrates exemplifies the difference between physical ‘explanation’ and
philosophic explanation: he is seated on his prison bed; the scientist will
account for his posture by giving an account of his bones and muscles and
sinews; the philosopher will say that he is there because his principles
dictate that he remain in prison and sustain execution rather than escape
as his friends urged him to do (98b-99b). This is the whole difference
between scientific and philosophic investigation. The former always tells
us how things are or come to be but never what or why things are. Ignorance
of this radical distinction is responsible for all the needless wrangling
between scientists and philosophers.
Socrates explains another profound aspect of philosophic understanding. He
says that he had previously thought “it was obvious to anybody that men
grew through eating and drinking, for food adds flesh to flesh and bones to
bones” and so on (96c-d, tr. G.M.A. Grube) but he was no longer satisfied
with that kind of explanation. He now thought that only the idea of Growth
gives us understanding of growth. Our philosophers and erudite scholars
find this hard to grasp but it is essential for understanding of the whole
Socratic-Platonic position. Let us imagine Adam in the Garden of Eden.
There are trees everywhere; these are accepted as they are without
difficulty. But a young shoot draws his attention. The next day he looks at
it and it seems not to have changed. But in a few days there is something
puzzling about it; it is the same and yet not the same. Then it flashes in
his minf: it has grown; this is growth.
Socrates elucidates further. He will no longer allow himself “to say that
where one is added to one either the one to which it is added or the one
that is added becomes two” (95e-97a, tr. G.M.A. Grube) but will only hold
that the two is two or becomes two by the idea Two. The human mind created
the number series and only then did things become numbered. The savage may
have the idea One and the idea Two but not the idea Three: To her or him
three, seven, twenty are all equally just ‘many’.
This is the gist of what has come to be known as the Platonic Forms. The
world presents us through our senses with impressions that in themselves
mean nothing. It is only when the mind clothes the impression in a Form
that the dumb impression becomes a meaningful sensation for us. Kant was to
re-discover this: It is the gist of his Copernican revolution.
Socrates sums up the outcome of his search for causes. When he found that
he could not find answers to his philosophical questions by investigating
outer things, he gave up all such investigations and turned to seeking
understanding by examining the ideas in the mind (99d-100a). This is the
crucial separation of objective (scientific) investigation and subjective
(philosophical) speculation that Socrates insisted on and that both
scientists and philosophers have failed to heed with damaging consequences.
IV
The Socratic separation of the intelligible and the perceptible was the
foundation of Plato’s theoretical thinking. In the Phaedo (which
may be seen as the epitome of Plato’s philosophical position) ‘Socrates’
introduces the idea that a philosopher lives not for the things of the body
but for the things of the mind or soul, such as the ideals of justice and
temperance and beauty. Such ideas, the idea of justice for instance, is the ousia of whose being philosophers give account in discourse (78d).
He then simply suggests that we posit two kinds of being, the one visible,
the other invisible (79a). This is the cornerstone of the whole of Plato’s
epistemology, ontology, and axiology.
At his trial Socrates says that “it is the greatest good for a human being
daily to converse of virtue” and that “the unexamined life is not a life
for a human being” (Apology, 38a). That indeed sums up the
Socratic-Platonic conception of the philosophic life. We read in the Phaedo:
“When the soul (mind) all by itself reflects, it moves into that which is
pure, always is, deathless, and constant, and being of a like nature to
that, remains with that always, whenever it is possible for it to be by
itself, and then it rests from wandering, and in the company of that, is
constant, being in communion with such; and it is this state that is called
intelligence (phronêsis)” (79d).
Philosophy, purely and simply, is the act of philosophizing, of examining
one’s mind or another’s mind. Philosophical insight is the luminescence of
this active creative self-examination, not any result thereof. The
philosophical life is the constant exercise of creative intelligence.
In the Republic, in the seminal central part (472a-541b) that
scholars see as a mere digression, we read that “the philosopher reaches
out for the whole and the all, aspires to behold all time and all
being” (486a). But this must not be misunderstood. The whole of
the philosophic endeavour is summed up by Plato in a prophetic passage that
I have quoted many times before and will quote again:
“ … a true philosophical nature aspires to what IS, does not tarry by the
many particulars that are supposed to be, but goes forth with no blunting
and no slackening of her desire, until she grasps the essence of all
reality by that in her soul to which it is becoming to grasp that (that is,
what is akin), approaching and mingling with what has true being, gives
birth to reason and reality; enjoys knowledge and true life and is
nourished, and then has relief of her birth pangs …” (490a-b).
This is oracular and is to be understood as an oracle is to be understood:
The whole of the philosophical journey begins and ends in the mind in the
same way as the ascent to the Form of absolute Beauty described in the Symposium, and the reality attained, the reality the philosopher
communes with, is the reality of the philosopher’s own mind, and just as in
the Symposium the lover attaining the vision of Beauty will give
birth not to images but to true virtue (212a) so here the philosopher
communing with her or his inner reality gives birth to reason and reality.
Further on in the Republic when Socrates is asked about the
highest wisdom he answers that it is the Form of the Good (505). When he is
pressed to give an account of the Form of the Good, Socrates gives an
allegory representing the sun as the offspring of the Good and as the sun
is the source of light and sight but is itself more than light and sight,
so the Good is the source of mind and the intelligible, giving the things
known their reality and giving the knowing mind the power of knowing, but
is itself beyond mind and the intelligible (508e-509a). For Plato no
philosophic insight can be conveyed in a definite formulation of word or
thought. The philosophic insight is an illumination engendered in the
process of philosophizing and can only be represented in myth and parable.
That is the reason why Plato insists that the grounds of any philosophic
statement must regularly be destroyed by dialectic (533c). This also
explains what he tells us emphatically in the Phaedrus:
“He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and
he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and
certain, would be an utterly simple person …” (278c-d, tr. Fowler).
Consistently with this Plato did not write any systematic philosophical
work. He wrote dramatic pieces that have to be read as drama, not to seek
any truth or extract any doctrine from what is said in them, but to engage
in dialogue with the speakers, think along with them, and above all think
for oneself. We read a Platonic dialogue not to learn anything from it but
to philosophize for ourselves. This is how we pay due homage to Plato.
V
Above, particularly in sections III and IV I have tried to delineate one
type of philosophy, the one I have been promoting in all my writings, that
I usually refer to as philosophy proper and have otherwise designated
prophetic or oracular philosophy. In this concluding section let me outline
the special version I have developed for myself.
Following Socrates I hold that philosophy has nothing to do with the actual
outer world. That is the domain of objective science. Science studies, or
rather interprets, the appearances of things. It can neither know the true
nature of things nor why they are there. That is strictly true of all
scientific knowledge: all scientific concepts and theories are creations of
the mind, conceptual patterns in which the mute phenomena acquire meaning
and being.
Philosophy looks into the mind and the ideas in the mind. Following Plato I
say that these ideas are realities as opposed to the flux of external
existents: they are all that we know of reality; more strictly speaking,
our active, creative mind is the one and only reality of which we have
immediate, direct, and indubitable cognizance. In probing our mind we have
insight of our inner reality, That reality, that insight, is strictly
ineffable. It is of the nature of mystic experience and, like all mystic
experience, cannot be given any definitive expressions. Hence philosophers
can only convey their insights in oracular visions and myths. Plato’s
profoundest insights are to be found in the vision of the celestial abode
of the Forms (Phaedrus), in the fable within a fable of Diotima’s
account of the ascent to the Form of Beauty, in the Form of the Good which
cannot be spoken of, in the notion of Procreation in Beauty, in the myth of
Reminiscence, in the ‘likely tale’ of the Timaeus, in innumerable
poetic flights throughout the dialogues.
The philosopher, as Plato says in the Republic, “reaches out for
the whole and the all, aspires to behold all time and all being”. I believe
that every sound human nature experiences this longing to belong to the
All, this yearning that Shelley symbolizes in “The desire of the moth for
the star, / Of the night for the morrow, / The devotion to something afar /
From the sphere of our sorrow” . This longing for the All, breeding the
idea of the All, gives a human being wholeness, integrity. It is the source
and fount of all philosoph9c concepts of ultimate Reality, from
Parmenides’s One to Plato’s Form of the Good to Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura. But we have to acknowledge (1) that it is our
idea, of our own creation; (2) that all representations of it are
necessarily mythical, (It is foolish of philosophers to quarrel about which
representation is ‘true’.)
For a long time I sought a formula to cover all becoming until I saw at
last that Becoming, like Being and like Mind, is an ultimate mystery; that
reality is a perpetual becoming, a constant creativity, that indeed I
cannot conceive of ultimate Reality except as (a) intelligent, (b) whole,
and (c) creative. Hence I say that ultimate Reality is creative
intelligence or intelligent creativity: I prefer this latter designation
since I cannot conceive of ultimate Reality as an existent thing or entity
but as sheer creativity. It is not an intelligent creator but intelligent
creativity; it is the creativity, the act not the acting agent, that is the
reality. I name it Creative Eternity. It is a difficult notion because it
flies in the face of common modes of thought and language. But I feel it is
the notion that mystics have long intimated when they spoke of their
profoundest experience as Nothingness, Dark Night, and the kike.
If the metaphysical idea of Reality as the whole and the ultimate is an
emanation of our mind as our inner reality it also gives us assurance of
and insight into that inner reality of ours.
That is the alpha and omega of all philosophy worthy of the name.
D. R. Khashaba
April 11, 2017
Posted to
https://philosophia937.wordpress.com
and http://khashaba.blogspot.com
