THE VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY

The Value of Philosophy

Introduction

The term “philosophy” refers to systems of beliefs or ideas about the universe and humankind's place in it. Philosophy as a discipline of thought addresses innumerable questions about the nature of knowledge, understanding, logic, language, reality, and causality. Philosophical thought attempts to formulate beliefs and claims of knowledge about the world and human experience. Through critical, rational thinking, philosophers attempt to develop systematically a theory of existence (metaphysics), a theory of knowledge (epistemology), and a theory of value (ethics) (Nicholas, 2010).

Discussion

Philosophical inquiry begins in wonder (thaumazein) but its desired end-point of sophia is a state of absolute knowledge - knowledge of the Whole, where knowing and being perfectly coincide. In the Platonic tradition, philosophy is 'a bringing to light, an unveiling', a revelation of the absolute source of all value (Levinas, 1998a: 53). In its Platonic formulation, it is thinking (noesis) that pursues a conceptual revealing of what is essential, necessary and universal (from which we can guess that 'essence', 'necessity' and 'universality' would be elevated into the three canonical traits of genuine knowledge). Heidegger would speak of this ancient vocation as the 'thinking of Being' (Raymond, 1991).

But before philosophy is an intellectual pursuit of the truth, it might first be understood as an existential practice and way of life, one of many spiritual exercises (exercitia spiritualia) devised by human beings (Cottingham, 1998; Hadot, 1995). For contemporaries it is difficult, if not impossible, to recover this older sense of praxis and to reinstate philosophical reflection as a primary mode of active reflectiveness rooted in bodily practices and intersubjective forms. Today the ancient idea of philosophia as 'the love of wisdom' (or as some say, of the love of God as the perfect icon of truth) that promises the transformation of everyday life, has been displaced by more secular, technical and instrumental conceptions of philosophy as the examination of conceptual and logical problems, the analysis of verbal ambiguities, the 'making clear' of our thought about any matter under the sun (hence today there are philosophies of religion, society, art, mathematics, science, and so on). In sum, philosophy today forms a logocentric constellation of 'subject disciplines' (Bok, 2001).

If philosophy is viewed as an analytic technique or method, it follows that questions of the Good (and God) are no longer thought to be fundamental - with notable exceptions, the Good is no longer taken to be the ultimate subject of 'First Philosophy'. This, incidentally, also illustrates a long-term semantic shift in the meaning of 'philosophy' itself, and should alert the reader to the wide variety of meanings and social functions that the word has played in the long, meandering course of Western thought - from the love of wisdom in the ancients to conceptual engineering in contemporary academic philosophy. Today the philosopher is a conceptual instrumentalist, an adept in the invention, formation and transformation of concepts. It would seem that if you do not engineer concepts, you cannot be a philosopher (Martin, ...