What is philosophy? The question I get on a day-to-day basis after the typical basic run through of ‘get to know you’ questions, which don’t in fact allow any insight into someone’s life. Ah well, what can we do but stumble in the darkness, feeling for similarities?
I chose philosophy as my major after taking a class entitled “The Wicked and The Worthy”, a gloss course on ethics. My professor was fantastic, and brought the mostly dry texts to life in a way I would never have imagined. I understood, while he spoke, why people questioned these things, and what purpose those deep questions could have in my life.
I took another class so I could get that feeling again, that feeling that things mattered, that life was complicated, that hard questions could be answered. That next class was on Post-Structuralism, and it was the class that changed my life. We read Sartre, Foucault, and my beloved Derrida.
He opened my eyes to things I never even imagined thinking about. I was taught to question things in high school, was told to look at everything, to make decisions for myself. However, it was only until I saw others doing just that, that I was able to actually start questioning the world around me.
Take Jacques Derrida, for example. He questioned the authenticity of the author, of the very words he was writing! Imagine actually being able to take a long, hard look at everything that makes up the world in which you live. What of Descartes? The man who was so skeptical, so questioning, that all he could hold onto was the certainty that as he was thinking, that his thoughts must exist.
And with this deep skepticism, this permission to finally truly look at not only the things I can see, but also the way in which I perceive things, the glasses through which my world is colored, I started making baby-steps into the philosophical world.
People often believe that philosophy is all about these age-old questions of morality, and ethics, and what human nature is like. I like to point to the questions that are more pragmatic, the questions we all grapple with in our day-to-day life. Things we hear over and over again: why do bad things happen to good people? is there a god? should we trust science?
When people ask me what philosophy is, I tell them that philosophy happens any time a person asks an abstract question. I tell people that the theory behind all of the fields of human thought is philosophy.
What do you care about? English? Do you ask: what makes a short story? how do we define fiction? what are the boundaries between fiction and memoir? what makes ‘good’ writing, and ‘bad’? These are all philosophical questions.
Everyone is a philosopher, and nearly everything is philosophy. Perhaps the better question would be: what isn’t?
