Words, Words, Words - Issue #3: “Philosophy”
Part Three of an Exercise in Amateur Etymology for Practical Use
“Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decline from the words of my mouth.
Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee: love her, and she shall keep thee.
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.
Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: she shall bring thee to honour, when thou dost embrace her.
She shall give to thine head an ornament of grace: a crown of glory shall she deliver to thee.” -Proverbs 4:5-9
“HORATIO:
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.
HAMLET:
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” - Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5
“‘Be not too hasty,’ said Imlac, ‘to trust, or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.’” Samuel Johnson - The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia'
The obviously imperfect and intentionally contrarian, yet unfairly maligned, Ayn Rand wrote a book bearing the title “Philosophy: Who Needs It”. I surmise that she meant this title to be prescriptive. She intends to tell you who it’s for. If you are allergic to her on principle as many moderns are (sometimes rightly but often not), I’ll save you the trouble and tell you that her answer is “everyone”. I agree. Yet, I think for the average person today, the prevailing sentiment appends a question mark to the end of the title. And said sentiment is rhetorical. The implied answer is “nobody”. I again agree, sort of, mostly, kind of, provisionally. These provisions come down to our operative definition of “philosophy”. I perceive in common usage an almost dual meaning to the word in question. As you know, this series is about the exploration, and potentially reclamation, of the meaning of our common words and how we can apply that meaning in our lives. So let’s see what we can excavate regarding this term by going back to that font of civilization and language, Ancient Greece.
You may know already (and forgive me if this is remedial, I never intend condescension) that the Greek goddess of wisdom was named Sophia. The root “philo-” in Greek is typically translated as “love”. Without digging too deeply into the myriad of Greek terms we somewhat lazily translate into “love” (a years-long study if there ever was one), the word “philosophy” directly translates into “love of wisdom” in English. That’s the simple definition. To practice philosophy is to lovingly pursue wisdom. To raise an obvious question, is that what people are doing or what they think of when the word is used? By and large, I think not.
Here is what I think people generally mean when they use the word, broken down into what seems a fairly clear binary. On one hand people are referring to the academic discipline, which is more or less the systematic study and explication of first principles leading to prescriptions for action and analysis of the results, as well as building new systems to organize this ongoing dialogue with the collective and historical human mind. As to this meaning, here’s where I sort of agree with the rhetorical question version of Rand’s book title. Who needs this? Not most people. I’ll lob a massive caveat at you and say that most people would benefit from being able to think logically about philosophical issues, even if they are not immersed in the academic jargon. This part of our educational paradigm has been disastrously neglected. Like most things, the problems crop up with hyper-specialization. Wisdom is an orientation toward life (more on this shortly), and keeping it pinned under an intellectual microscope often requires that it be, in fact, dead. I am given to thinking that too much academic study of philosophy is a strange and unseemly infatuation with Sophia’s corpse. I hope you’ll pardon that bit of macabre.
On the other hand, people use the word “philosophy” to refer to the way they see the world and how they intend to live in it, or at least their ideal of what that is. A good synonym is “worldview”, as in, “that’s my philosophy of life”. If you want a fancy word to trot out at parties, wherein you’re trying to alienate potential new social relations and have them think you’re a stuck-up weirdo, the German and jargon-y academic term is Weltanschauung. Which, you’ll notice is just a literal translation of “worldview”. Borrowing words from other languages is a time-honored technique for attempting to look very, very smart™. This ironic digression isn’t entirely fair to the German term which does carry some nuance in the academic field. The intent of this paragraph is mostly to make sure we can still laugh at ourselves and bring a little levity along as we explore some deep stuff.
As to our rhetorical question, who needs this second type of “philosophy”? I say here with Rand, “everyone”. Actually, it is impossible not to have a worldview. And here is a point I can’t emphasize enough: if you do not formulate this philosophy of living, someone else will do it for you. And if you’re paying even a modicum of attention to history and to life today, you’ll be acutely aware that your self-appointed philosophical imparters are rarely benevolent in their intentions. It is simply not possible to be neutral in the pursuit of this type of “philosophy”. You have it, and if you choose to avoid the subject, you choose to be manipulated by people that understand it better than you do. The only reasonable choice is to “love wisdom” on your own terms and forge an understanding of the world and your place in it. To put it even more starkly, to choose not to, is to choose spiritual slavery.
Philosophy is for Living
But I want to encourage you now. The pursuit of this second type of philosophy is not beyond the reach of any man (or woman)1. In fact, if we trace the etymology of “philosophy” back far enough we find that this second type of pursuit is more what everyone had in mind to begin with and it wasn’t a practice confined to the ivory tower of academe. Wisdom is something for all people. As such, this essay will be a bit of a twofer. Let’s rope in the word “wisdom” itself and carry on.
The word “wisdom” is one of many that finds its root in the Proto-Indo-European morpheme “weid-”, meaning “to see”. But this “see” is in the broad sense. To understand and know. To envision. Heinlein would have called it “grok”. The sense of it is broader than is perhaps possible to state in words. It is no coincidence to my mind that the Catholic conception of being in the presence of God directly is called the Beatific Vision. In the Proverbs passage I quoted above, understanding and wisdom are used synonymously. You can look at a list of words born of “weid-” to get a bigger sense of this. A sampling includes: advice, guide, improvise, providence, view, visage, vision, idea, and so on. Perhaps that mosaic of terms can give a better view of the idea of wisdom (see what I’ve done there?). Now, the interesting thing is that if you go back in Greek before the widespread conception of Sophia as the personification of wisdom, you’ll find the word “sophis”. This term has the connotation of “one’s system for life conduct”, i.e. how to live. And that puts us squarely back in the arena of “worldview”.
“Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?”
What we miss if we think of philosophy as only an academic discipline is the indispensable idea that the bulk of such a thing as wisdom is derived from lived experience. Life is the thing that matters. Our lives, both in ourselves and corporately. To dive briefly back into the jargon, I see the end state of all philosophy as praxis. To put it more plainly, it has to be practical to be of any value. Here we must be careful because practical has largely come to mean economically advantageous. I don’t mean that at all. In fact, what is to our financial benefit might come at the terrible cost of some spiritual quality, the transaction being something no thinking person would call wise. But we have to aggressively disabuse ourselves of the notion that wisdom is something obtained by the rarefied and arcane practices of some class of super intellectuals. You are just as likely (perhaps more likely) to find wisdom in the mouth and character of the half-drunk old fellow at your corner bar than you are in a philosophy journal. I’d say that the state of academic philosophy has degenerated so much as to be an escape from life, rather than a means to its fullest living. On the whole, the “work” being done in universities is of no value in the realm of the Real. I think we are well within our rights to confront a philosophical idea and simply ask: “what does it do?” I won’t recite the body count born of bad philosophy here, but the record of the last century speaks for itself, let alone all of history.
And so, as always, the judge of these matters is Life itself. Again looking at the Proverbs quotation, wisdom is presented as a means to an end. And so in true philosophical fashion we must investigate what those ends are. And we don’t need to be academics to do this. From its inception philosophy has been an inquiry into the so-called “Good Life”. What is Goodness? Who is a Good Person? What is the Good Life? And up until some modern aberrations into cynical power games, the consensus has always been the attainment of virtue obtains to these ends. We’ll leave a word like “virtue” for another piece, but loosely speaking it refers to righteous behavior and the benefits imparted thereby. As I’ve argued before, unless you are terribly deranged, you probably want to be a good person. I’ve given my thoughts and will continue to do so from the context of the Christian faith. But here we need not go into that, since I’m mostly aimed at reclaiming what I’ll call “the philosophical mind” from the stuffy university types.
I mention life and character and behavior so much because you really have to look at what people do, not what they say. This is what the Dr. Johnson quote in the epigraph is about. Modern academic philosophy tries largely to obfuscate this point or rationalize immorality based on a worldview that can’t be reconciled to the lived experience of normal human beings. You can give whatever lofty idea you’d like about the philosophical errors of monogamy, but if your partner cheats on you, I bet anything that jealousy and rage and pain will rear their ugly heads. And perhaps justifiably so. My point is that philosophy is no excuse to avoid Reality. Its real purpose is how to live within the Real world in a better way. And anyone who is willing to examine their own life can do this.
The heading of this section is quotation from the book of Job. Leaving aside the answer given by the Bible (though I think it to be the most important answer), we can say soundly, “in life itself.” Let me give you another definition of wisdom, taken wholesale from Dallas Willard (you’ll continue to see me quote this brilliant man): “Wisdom is the settled disposition of the soul to act in accordance with knowledge.” Though he was a pastor and theologian (one of my favorites), Dr. Willard was also the chair of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He was a deeply learned man with deep roots in the entire Western tradition. Let’s see if we can parse this definition a bit.
Looking back at the origins of wisdom in “weid-”, we can examine the phrase “settled disposition of the soul”. Disposition is a sort of inherent quality we have without having to think about it. It is somewhat malleable, but it’s a type of default reaction to the circumstances of life. It’s a vision, a way of seeing and knowing and doing. Willard’s use of “settled” means that it is subject to our Will, i.e. we can decide it’s direction and practice it, arriving at a set way of being. Soul is a bit more complicated and for now let’s just use it synonymously with our Self, though there is more nuance there. “Knowledge” is something we correctly apprehend as Truth, on the basis of thinking or the confirmation from our lived experience (there’s a crash course in epistemology if you’re a nerd like me). So, to rephrase the definition in terms of what we’ve been discussing, I give the following definition:
Wisdom is a practiced choice, arriving at the state of easily conforming our actions to what we know to be true and right, derived from thought and our lived experience.
That’s a mouthful to be sure. Let’s try something more casual.
The wise person thinks deeply about their life and learns what the right moves are. They go through experiences and eventually make it automatic to do the right thing.
Take your pick of these definitions but that’s what philosophy is meant to be about. And as to the “philo-“ part, you learn to love working on that process of getting it right. Maybe I’ll give you something even simpler:
Philosophy is learning to love your life and serve others through examining and experimenting with your thoughts and experiences.
Now, I’m the sort of person that does enjoy reading those jargon-laden traditional philosophy texts. But if you don’t want to, a particular dream of mine is to be a popularizer of these ideas. And I hope that what I’ve offered here makes strides toward that goal. I do not think it is necessary for everyone to engage that material and anyone that looks down on people that are not interested in such practices reveals what their philosophy really is, and it is not about Goodness or Wisdom or anything to which a human being should be rightly oriented.
One more excursion before we part ways with the term “philosophy”. This coming short journey has to do with its limits. And limits it has. This is why it must always be held to the standard of Life, and cast aside if it is not the proper tool for the situation at hand.
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Very often when Reality pays you a visit, there isn’t much use for talk. Philosophy in the first sense we discussed is a discipline of words and, often, abstract concepts. And there are many situations in our lives for which words are wholly inadequate. And of course there are things which happen that are simply outside of our comprehension, where the wise move is to remain open to them, as Hamlet advises Horatio, rather than dismiss them out of hand if they do not fit our prefabricated philosophical system. The true philosopher loves wisdom, not his system. “Abstract” literally means “torn away”. Philosophy is dead thing when ripped from the fabric of life.
In Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, which I often joke is “like Candide but actually good” (Voltaire is fine, I just like to be polemical sometimes for no good reason), the titular protagonist meets a Philosopher named Imlac who likes to pontificate on the fruits of the philosophical life and the superiority of a supremely rational mind. Then, his daughter dies. The following passage tells of the Prince Rasselas visiting his companion:
“Be not too hasty,” said Imlac, “to trust, or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.”
Rasselas, who could not conceive how any man could reason so forcibly without feeling the cogency of his own arguments, paid his visit in a few days, and was denied admission. He had now learned the power of money, and made his way by a piece of gold to the inner apartment, where he found the philosopher in a room half darkened, with his eyes misty, and his face pale. "Sir,” said he, “you are come at a time when all human friendship is useless; what I suffer cannot be remedied, what I have lost cannot be supplied. My daughter, my only daughter, from whose tenderness I expected all the comforts of my age, died last night of a fever. My views, my purposes, my hopes are at an end: I am now a lonely being disunited from society.”
“Sir,” said the prince, “mortality is an event by which a wise man can never be surprised; we know that death is always near, and it should therefore always be expected.”
“Young man,” answered the philosopher, “you speak like one that has never felt the pangs of separation.”
“Have you then forgot the precepts,” said Rasselas, “which you so powerfully enforced? Has wisdom no strength to arm the heart against calamity? Consider that external things are naturally variable, but truth and reason are always the same.”
“What comfort,” said the mourner, “cạn truth and reason afford me? Of what effect are they now but to tell me that my daughter will not be restored?”
This is a passage that haunts me more than anything I’ve ever read in a philosophy book. I don’t wish to explain away the utter beauty of it, but I fear I must say something to draw this piece to a close. I think what the two are really talking about is the distance between our ideals and the often harsh Reality of Life. “Has wisdom no strength to arm the heart against calamity?” cries Rasselas. And the answer to this questions hinges very much on the definitions we’ve been pondering. In the detached academic sense, where I believe Rasselas to be arguing from, no it does not. No word, no concept, no feat of stunning intellect will bind up the broken heart of a parent having to bury their child.
To Imlac’s reply, I say that Reason will indeed do naught but confirm and perchance inflame our sorrows. As to Truth? It’s no secret that I am a believing Christian. I believe that the Love of God is stronger than the grave. I believe that is the Truth. And it is a great comfort to me and many through the ages. But, if you do not believe that, at least consider what the quiet, peaceful presence of a friend may do for the grieving soul. Words are not needed. Simply to be with someone in their sorrow is often the best thing we can do. Is this wisdom? Yes. Can we practice it and decide it to be our way of life? Yes. Is it Philosophy? Maybe.
I think we are better to just call it Love.
Can we please just bring back the plural noun “men” for “humankind”? It’s not derogatory to the magnificence of women and it just sounds better. Who doesn’t love a good footnote rant?
I agree that we should accept the use of “man” for “humankind” as an option (and I say this as a woman). I want to write a book called “Nature and Man,” but I know that the title would make it unacceptable by today’s standards.
The place where I want to call you out is the over-generalization about academics. I grew up in an academic family and also became one. The negative stereotyping of academics and their work, which seems to be commonplace these days and accepted as a general truism, is as damaging as any stereotyping.
And now to speak as a Christian, wisdom and knowledge are spiritual gifts, and those who receive those gifts and practice them within the university are trying to fulfill their purpose (no matter how useless it appears to others in this historical time period). Yes, contrary to another stereotype, there are Christians in academia.
Rasselas... is “like Candide but actually good”
My man.