What is "philosophy"?

How to do philosophy? The forms I know are all played out. Nothing alive in them, no connection to the life that once generated them. We’re working out concerns, lines of thought, methods of learning, that were once vital but are now simply dead. I couldn’t tell you right now why and how they’re dead. But I trust my instincts and my instincts tell me without any hesitation that deadness is where we are at.

Where does philosophy begin? What human need does it address? That’s the life-spring, isn’t it? That’s the source we have to return to if we want to renew philosophy.

Well, what? Philosophy begins in wonder, that’s a famous quote. Does it? Wonder about what? Existence? The world? Ourselves?

Where and why did I begin? In the instinct of the child we can possibly find the beginnings of a path.

I read philosophy with a confused idea of the prestige of the field. I was proud of reading Rousseau, Plato, Aristotle.

I once tried to write the constitution of an ideal state.

Will Durant’s history, that made it exciting.

Bertrand Russell was exciting.

Ayn Rand was exciting.

Break through the comfortable shibboleths. “I want to know how to live.” Well, do I? Or do I just want to live?

I want to see God. An experience of reality. A direct looking, face-to-face. Whatever it is. I want to see it.

Is that philosophy? Religion? Art?

Maybe that’s part of the problem. We now ask: “is that philosophy?” Well, who knows? Who cares? Plato didn’t, I’m guessing, ask whether he was doing philosophy. He just asked questions, and tackled them in the way that he thought best. In the way that he found necessary to tackle them. Like Tolstoy: “It is not not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed.”

Fuck “philosophy”, then?

Plato again - he had myths, stories, arguments, conversations. All thrown in, arranged according to his art. Why? Presumably because he found each form necessary for his purposes.

Maybe it’s sterile to ask what philosophy is and how it should be renewed. Maybe the necessary renewal - the revitalisation - comes when we abandon that question and that method of renewal. Maybe the question is: what do I want to know? What do I want to express? What needs to be known, or at least looked for, and how does it need to be expressed?

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

That’s what I want to do.

To be able to see the world. To see what it is.

That’s what “philosophy” means to me. Not just that. To see the world, and to live it.

You can’t do that only with arguments.