The tribulations of philosophy
In a conference delivered in 1858, John Henry Cardinal Newman noted that “we have not so much ease in determining what is meant by philosophy.” After more than a century and a half, the situation has not significantly improved. In Philosophia Mirabilis, a monograph published in 1974, the logician Anton Dumitriu highlighted the persistent difficulty regarding the nature and object of philosophy: “What surprises the researcher who wants to know what philosophy is, is the lack—in the specialized literature—of a universally valid definition of this discipline.”
Twenty years later, after he had noticed that “seldom do we reflect upon what philosophy is in itself,” French philosopher and historian of ideas Pierre Hadot began his best-known monograph dedicated to our topic, entitled What is Ancient Philosophy?, by openly admitting that “it is extremely difficult to define it.”
Confronted with the difficulty of defining philosophy, many scholars and authors simply renounce any attempt to sketch a coherent account of this venerable discipline, and opt instead for a relativistic perspective. This is precisely how Vasile Adrian Carabă proceeds in the introduction to his classical study of Byzantine philosophy. After finding “that one of the inherent difficulties of philosophy is precisely the attempt to define it,” he asserts that “every era has its own definitions.” If every epoch has its own definition of philosophy, we can assume that finding a stable definition of philosophy will be futile.
If we were to follow such an attitude of mind, we could add something that is even more confusing: not just every epoch, but almost every philosopher has his own definition of philosophy. This certainly seems true of modern philosophers. I assure you that René Descartes’ philosophy has nothing in common with that of Auguste Comte, or with that of Friedrich Schelling, or—God forbid!—that of Karl Marx.
What about professional teachers of philosophy? Generally, they do not even try to define philosophy univocally, and they confuse their listeners by going over an interminable sequence of philosophers who, each separately, reinvent their discipline. Consequently, both teachers and students think that we can only talk about ‘philosophies’—but we are unable to discover what ‘philosophy’ is per se.
Paradoxically, despite the situation described, every time I had the opportunity to discuss the topic with my students or readers, I was surprised to see how clear was their unclear conception of what philosophy is. Almost without exception, for them, ‘doing philosophy’ was an activity that involves a language which is unintelligible to common people. Eventually, some of my interlocutors mentioned names like Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or (less frequently) Sartre. What was certain to all of them was that philosophers invariably used language that was impenetrable. This is how ‘philosophers’ appear in the eyes of the common public: sophisticated speakers of strange idioms invented by them for themselves. And in no way did they possess a unified language like those used by mathematicians, physicists, chemists, or lawyers.
Moreover, some people believe that philosophers are inventors of concepts. “What concept have you created?” a daring student asked me one day, making me blush with embarrassment at my own lack of inventiveness in the field. Language, though, is always what appears as an impenetrable wall. If one mentions that the most ‘profound’ Kantian problem is probably the one about the possibility of “synthetic judgments a priori,” we should not be surprised if speculative modern philosophy seems unfriendly (to say the least) even for a cultivated public. After all, modern philosophers deserve their fate. How many of them have followed the wise counsel of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who tells us in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”? If you have read his little book, you will have noticed that not even its author listened to his own advice.
Finding themselves in such a difficult situation, unable to explain what philosophy is, some scholars in recent decades have adopted a strategy that has proved fruitful. By re-reading the oldest Greek and Latin sources of Western speculative thought, they have clarified what ‘philosophy’ meant to those thinkers who invented the term still used by us today after over two millennia. Why was this strategy fruitful? Because for the classical thinkers, philosophy was not a chaotic collection of obscure concepts, conveyed in an unintelligible jargon by those who, rather than explaining the mysteries of our existence, only further complicate things. One scholar who succeeded in unveiling the nature of classical philosophy is the already mentioned Pierre Hadot.
Pierre Hadot and philosophy as a ‘way of life’
Based on an extensive knowledge of Classical Greek and Latin authors, Hadot successfully proved that, besides its conceptual and discursive side, philosophy has a ‘practical’ dimension. All his studies point to a crucial fact, expressed as follows in his own words:
We will not be concerned with opposing and separating philosophy as a way of life, on the one hand, and, on the other, a philosophical discourse that is somehow external to philosophy. On the contrary: we wish to show that philosophical discourse is a part of this way of life.
We can already understand why Hadot’s research, originally published in French in 1995, achieved incredible success among the general public. All those who had come to think that philosophy was merely a sophisticated (or rather, sophistical) discipline accessible only and exclusively to an academic elite, joyfully discovered that there is a practically-rooted ‘way of life’ associated with philosophy. That way of life was based on what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises.” This phrase encompasses a range of ‘psychagogical’ practices—a term borrowed from the Greeks which signifies the art of guiding a soul to the full realization of being—give particular meaning to the philosophical experience. Here is a detailed explanation provided by Hadot:
By this term, I mean practices which could be physical, as in dietary regimes, or discursive, as in dialogue and meditation, or intuitive, as in contemplation, but which were all intended to effect a modification and a transformation in the subject who practiced them. The philosophy teacher’s discourse could also assume the form of a spiritual exercise, if the discourse were presented in such a way that the disciple, as auditor, reader, or interlocutor, could make spiritual progress and transform himself within.
Behold! Philosophy is, according to Pierre Hadot, a practical way of living that includes the speculative discourse without considering it sufficient for what can be considered true philosophy.
Hadot engaged in extensive research on texts by authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, and Iamblichus. His main thesis is as clear as it is significant: for all ancient authors, the practice of “spiritual exercises” was essential. These exercises were intended to effect a profound transformation of the philosopher’s soul. It was these exercises, rather than his speculative discourse, that determined the status of the philosopher in Greek and Latin culture. The absence of such practices was inconceivable for an authentic philosopher. Pierre Hadot, then, considerably contributed to the debate concerning the definition of philosophy through his rediscovery of that dimension of philosophy named the ‘philosophical life’ by the classical Christian historian Eusebius of Caesarea.
Anton Dumitriu and the ‘wondrous philosophy’
Another author who independently rediscovered the same ‘practical’ dimension of philosophy is Anton Dumitriu. His main work, where he presents the results of his research and reflections, is entitled Philosophia Mirabilis (“Wondrous Philosophy,” originally published in Romanian in 1974). Deeply aware of the importance of the issue at stake, the author warns his readers in the introduction that his work “constitutes, by the very nature of its main topic, a simple essay,” and the answers proposed by him are highly unusual. But this pertains to “the wondrous nature of philosophy,” he adds.
The starting point of Dumitriu’s reflections is one of the conferences of Martin Heidegger: Was ist das—die Philosophie? (“What Is Philosophy?”). According to Heidegger, the Greek expression philein to sophon (“to love the wisdom”) indicates ascent to the metaphysical Being. Dumitriu adds that the same phrase can be used to indicate the descending path, from Being to empirical existence, with the former being encountered through the latter “with all the ceremonial, like in a traditional missa solemnis” during the act of philosophizing. Furthermore, where Heidegger argues that the ‘beginning’ or ‘principle’ of philosophy—that is, the “opening of the existent towards Being”—is “wonder,” Dumitriu once again comments that the principle of philosophy “represents not only ‘wonder’ but also ‘miracle.’” Consequently, philosophy is “a lived experience”—a kind of spiritual experience that can be lived by any individual.
Following his own path of thinking, Dumitriu went beyond the excessively abstractionism of Heidegger. Gradually, he revealed forgotten dimensions of philosophy. From Dumitriu, we can learn, for instance, that in ancient Greece, the “love of wisdom”—literally, “philosophy”—was a well-structured hierarchical experience. The first stage, for novices, was the exoteric path of acquiring some basic truths of both the cosmos and human nature. The next stage, accessible only to the initiates, was for those who already belonged to a specific school and had assumed, as Pierre Hadot would say, a certain ‘way of life’ involving specific philosophical ‘training’ in ‘spiritual exercises’—exercises that were meant to purify them from ignorance. The following is one of the best descriptions of a ‘philosophical school’ given by Dumitriu:
A philosophical school in Ancient Greece was, therefore, an organized community with a certain inner order, more or less rigorous, in which philosophy was studied not only for the purpose of acquiring knowledge but especially for the purpose of a communal conquest of truths. This conquest, as the Greek word hairesis suggests, was not only an accumulation of knowledge but also the realization of a certain level of human development, which outwardly manifested as the attainment of a certain wisdom.
The main goal of the Greek philosophers was “the realization of Being,” a purpose grounded in the analogical (i.e., symbolic) relationship between mind and being. This experimental-contemplative type of knowledge, directed towards union with the supreme Being, was connected to an ontological path of knowledge, the path of esse. This is why Dumitriu states that “the knowledge acquired by following this path is a genuine act of settling into Being.” This relationship with the metaphysical Being, however, was only possible through the purification of the intellect—a purification made possible through various paideumatic disciplines such as geometry, music, and dialectic. Ultimately, Dumitriu unveils the most intriguing aspect of classical Greek philosophy: wisdom can only be attained by the one who becomes “like God,” namely the wise person, who “attains one of the levels of Being by himself becoming one of the universals of Being.”
From the descriptions of Greek philosophy found in the research of both Pierre Hadot and Anton Dumitriu, we are confronted with a startling emphasis on the ‘practical,’ that is, the ‘experimental’ dimension of philosophy. The similarity of their findings is noteworthy, especially given the considerable differences between these two thinkers. We may hope, then, that as their work continues to become better known, the all too common view of philosophy as a jargon-entrenched discipline with little connection to real life, may be superseded by the view of philosophical knowledge which, yes, often requires a special language, but is ultimately a ‘way of life’ which gives the philosopher—when practiced properly, like the ancients— a distinct and well defined role in our world.
