On Philosophy

I realise that I haven't quite said much about philosophy on this blog; though there are countless of references and allusions to theology, its estranged, embattled, and embittered sister, on the posts here. I shall not try here to define philosophy in any closed fashion, for since the very attempt to achieve such a definition is a philosophical task, there can be no non-circular manner of circumscribing the permissible limits of philosophical investigation.

I shall simply state the way I see the philosophical mode of being in the world : philosophy is a critical enquiry into and a disciplined engagement with lived experience.

Some brief comments on these words.

First, 'lived experience'. Philosophy does not spring out of thin air; it requires the tangible corporeal and visceral realities of our existence to feed on. It lives in (and, quite often, also on!) the flesh and the blood, and the bone and the marrow of human beings who have sought to answer, in the midst of the gamut of experiences that they go through in the course of their lives, perplexing and annoying questions such as, 'How should I live?', 'Does it all mean anything?', 'Can I make any difference to the ways things are today in the world?', 'Is there any point to morality?', 'How can I find out whether what I believe in most deeply is true?','Why should I try to be good towards others?', 'How should I respond to my misfortune?', and 'Is there anything that I can hope for in a world where everything is slipping away from my hands?'.

The reason why I emphasise the word 'lived' here is to indicate that a philosophical approach starts when one is not simply being buffetted by thousands of winds blowing from multifarious directions, but when one struggles to find some point, however unstable and shifting this may be, from which to reflect on these winds, their origins, their causes, and their (alleged) destinations. Or, in other words, mere experience is not enough; one must also live through them, and one does so when one begins to interrogate, challenge, and question them.

Second, 'critical enquiry', for one of the central aspects of a philosophical training is learning how to be critical. A very common misunderstanding of the term 'criticise' would have it that when you are critical of a person's views and practices, the endeavour is to prove that she is a nitwit or an imbecile. A philosophical conception of criticism, on the other hand, revolves not around establishing someone's 'wisdom' or 'stupidity' (which themselves are highly contentious notions that must first be subjected to a patient philosophical enquiry!) but demonstrating the (often latent or disguised) presuppositions from which her arguments are emerging, investigating whether or not her beliefs form a more or less coherent pattern, and enquiring how many multi-dimensional levels of our complex human experiences this pattern is able to encompass.

Third, and finally, 'disciplined engagement'. A person who lives in and interacts with 'the world' in the philosophical mode delineated above never returns from these ongoing 'encounters' as the same person, for just as she seeks to work in the world from the within pointing out to it its manifest and implicit contradictions, she is herself transformed by this disciplined engagement. This engagement is better understood as a confrontation, a collision, or a skirmish which requires that one first go through a regimen of self-discipline so that one develops the moral imaginativeness, the affective skills, and the contextual sensitivity to listen when one should be attentive, and to speak out when one should take a stance. Thus in a philosophical approach to the world, one learns, sometimes painfully, to deal with the radical ambiguities that our lives are filled with, not, of course, by allowing onself to sink into the mires of inactivism but through the disciplined engagement of a constant shifting to and forth between 'oneself' and 'the world'.

An objection, possibly by those who have read through the Orthodox Canon of the Great Philosophers : have I not sacrificed on the requirements of rigour by giving my readers a diluted version of what the philosophical enterprise is? I shall reply that the biographies of many of the influential philosophers of Europe over the last six hundred years actually lend support to my description. To name just a few of them. Descartes, yes, the same man who declared, 'I think, therefore I am', was almost killed in a duel and was praised by his superiors for his bravery during his military career; Leibnitz, who (according to some people) invented calculus, was a high-flying diplomat who was associated with the Hanoverian dynasty; Russell lost his Fellowship in Cambridge because of his political views; Adorno and Marcuse were associated with a movement that actually went by the name Critical Theory; and Dummett, an Oxford professor of Mathematical Logic, took a break from the academy to join the campaign against racism.

One final comment, by way of a possible question, 'But what sort of a training or an education must one have before one can become 'philosophical' in the way that you have described above?' To which I shall reply with one of my deepest convictions concerning philosophy : Philosophy belongs to those who need it.

This, note, is not just a pandering to the ever-changing fancies of 'liberalism', 'political correctness', or 'egalitarianism' (though I am strongly committed to egalitarianism too), but an expression of my belief that there are millions of people 'out there' who 'do' philosophy in the above manner who may not necessarily have gone through an academic course in philosophical enquiry. So, then, why the academic 'discourse' of philosophy? Once again, a brief reply. Every field, technical, academic, or professional, develops a specialised vocabulary for the sake of saving time and effort when conversing with others who speak the same vocabulary. (For example, a doctor might tell you, 'You have a tumour in the brain' and spend the next half an hour explaining to you precisely what that means and what its implications are; whereas she would simply tell her colleague, 'My patient has XYZ of the ABC' and leave it at that.) Academic philosophy too has, over the centuries, spun a intricate web of inter-connected terms and phrases that can easily put-off the unwary incomer, but so long as she holds on to the above description as an Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth of academic philosophy, she can look forward to a delightful exploration into some of the most fascinating products of the human mind and the human heart.