Blog What is philosophy?

What is philosophy?
by Professor Jonardon Ganeri FBA

9 MAR 2021

When they invented philosophy, our ancestors in the ancient world

were thinking about the ways of the wise and, indeed, of the ways to
become wise. Philosophy was a pathway, a way of life, the way to lead
one’s life if what one wanted – and who does not? – is wisdom, a word
whose meaning is elastic enough to include everything from Stoic
impartial understanding of the workings of the world to Buddhist
enlightened awakening, from Confucian sagacity to Christian
saintliness.
From the 'Illustrated Biography of Hōnen (Shūikotokūden-e)'. The monk Hōnen
(1133–1212) is inscribing a portrait of himself for one of his foremost disciples,
Shinen. Artist Unknown, circa 1310-20. Photo by Heritage Art / Heritage Images via
Getty Images.

Fortunately for those of us who make our living as professional

philosophers, these days the expectations are not quite so high.
Philosophy now means a particular style of inquiry, or better, a
distinctive mode of attention. To do philosophy nowadays is to attend
to the ways things are by attending to the concepts according to
which we understand them. It is to look – closely, carefully, patiently
– at how things hang together by looking at how they are presented in
thought. I have used the word “thing”, which is one of the English
language’s great contributions to world literature, deliberately here,
because philosophy can literally be about anything and everything:
there is philosophy of science, philosophy of literature, philosophy of
mind, of language, of politics and indeed, of philosophy itself. That is
because what makes it the case that one is doing philosophy is not the
topic, the identity of the things one is thinking about (and so
philosophy has no special domain), but the peculiar way in which one
thinks about them. And I have used the word “attend” for this
peculiar way of thinking because philosophy is not only about
argument and analysis, though these are certainly its cardinal tools,
but also about contemplation, the clearing of a place in thought as a
way to gain both clarity and clarification.

To illustrate what I mean let me tell you a story. It’s from an ancient
Sanskrit Buddhist text which was later translated into classical
Chinese. The story tells the tale of a traveller’s unfortunate encounter
with a pair of demons, one of whom is carrying a corpse. As the first
demon tears off one of the man’s arms, the second demon takes an
arm from the corpse and uses it as a transplant, attaching it to the
traveller’s dismembered shoulder. This sport continues until his
whole body has been replaced with the body-parts of the corpse. To
make the story up-to-date, let’s imagine that each of his braincells
also undergoes a similar process of transplantation. The traveller is
given to ask himself, “What has become of me?", his understandable
existential angst being addressed by a group of Buddhist monks, to
whom the traveller recounts his story on his return. The monks
provide one sort of therapy for the man’s angst when they inform him
that what he has discovered is that there is no essential self, the key
discovery in the path to enlightenment.

As a practicing philosopher I am not recommending that you try this

at home, with or without the assistance of any passing demons. The
point about the story is rather that it invites us to attend to what we
think is involved in our personal survival and how we can reconcile
the need for identity with the inescapability of change. What makes
me me? The traveller in our story seems to feel that he has survived,
but his confidence that his identity over time is guaranteed by the
persistence of his body is shaken to the core. So is there something
else that makes him who he is? In contemporary philosophy this is
still a lively and hotly contested issue.

People sometimes indeed find it odd that philosophy has so rarely

come to any definite conclusions, that there are very few, if any,
definitively solved philosophical problems. But in this philosophy is
more akin to other humanities than it is to the sciences, and the
intellectual virtue most strongly associated with philosophy is the
one the poet John Keats describes as negative capability, which is, he
says, when you are “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts”, resisting the temptation too swiftly to reach for cognitive
closure. That doesn’t mean that there is no progress in philosophy,
but that progress, when it comes, is in better seeing how and why
things fit together rather than in solving intellectual puzzles.

Jonardon Ganeri is Bimal K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of

Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a Professorial Research
Associate at SOAS. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in
2015. His most recent book, Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves:
Fernando Pessoa and his Philosophy was published by Oxford
University Press in 2020.

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