Excellent and so thoughtful. It is so interesting that while asking and exploring the question on the nature of philosophy, you compare it to dance. This comparison is striking to me.
I am a dancer, I dance a lot in many styles and observe people dancing in various cultural and social contexts, including very ancient traditions. And yet, if we ask the same question about dance (what is dance?) we don’t know. We don’t really know what dance is, and why people dance - why, across cultures and continents, the act of dancing, always connected to music, remains ubiquitous, natural and intuitive.
Yet, there are some clues. Maybe, just maybe, our language is like thin egg shell, able to describe the thin surface but not the vast depth of the reality in which we live. Maybe the reality is much deeper than we think. Maybe we, the humans strive to touch, experience and express this vast depth of reality, and approach its abbyss, which we can never do with words, so we turn to things like art, music and dance. Maybe philosophy is just another attempt to reach those vast hidden dimensions. Yes, we are all philosophers, dancers, travelers - truth seekers.
I’m always drawn to the line that Plato attributes to Socrates: “Wonder is the beginning of all philosophy,” and I think this applies to science, too. After all, until recently, science (or “natural philosophy”) was a branch of philosophy.
But in the classic sense, this sense of wonder leads to questions, which makes philosophy into an inquiry.
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately:
The “philosophy as a way of life” approach often involves following rules and precepts that others arrived at in the past. (For example, most people who follow Stoicism today don’t make original contributions to philosophy. They are following a system arrived at in the past.)
So is there a minimal qualification that doing philosophy requires besides being human? Does it require inquiry? At the least, I suppose a real philosophy of life at least requires self reflection?
Paul, there’s honestly so much I’d like to express here. I hope we can find the time to do this dialogically as I believe it’ll be a much richer experience for both of us.
Something that might be worth highlighting is the work of Schwitzgebel et al. that sought to better understand the relationship between ‘moral knowledge’ and ‘moral conduct’. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this work, which will be surprising to some and entirely unsurprising to others, is that it really does not seem that professional moral philosophers act more morally in everyday life.
This of course gets us into the intent-action gap, the limits of over-relying on proportional knowledge etc. but it rather beautifully highlights the deeper truth that living philosophically is far more complex and nuances than simply studying philosophy.
Now, as an applied ethicist / action philosopher, I am very interested in whether there might be a different in real-word moral conduct between philosophical ethicists and those doing real-world applied / practical ethics. My suspicion is that there may be. My hope is that there would be / is.
I know, speaking only from my first-person perspective here, that my ‘truly living philosophically’ did not begin when I started learning about philosophy. It came many years after, was triggered (if you will) by various extremely challenging life events / circumstance, and became possible thanks to a rather transformative re-orientation.
Looking forward to dialogue-ing through this some time soon.
P.S. thanks for doing the work and publishing this perspective.
Excellent and so thoughtful. It is so interesting that while asking and exploring the question on the nature of philosophy, you compare it to dance. This comparison is striking to me.
I am a dancer, I dance a lot in many styles and observe people dancing in various cultural and social contexts, including very ancient traditions. And yet, if we ask the same question about dance (what is dance?) we don’t know. We don’t really know what dance is, and why people dance - why, across cultures and continents, the act of dancing, always connected to music, remains ubiquitous, natural and intuitive.
Yet, there are some clues. Maybe, just maybe, our language is like thin egg shell, able to describe the thin surface but not the vast depth of the reality in which we live. Maybe the reality is much deeper than we think. Maybe we, the humans strive to touch, experience and express this vast depth of reality, and approach its abbyss, which we can never do with words, so we turn to things like art, music and dance. Maybe philosophy is just another attempt to reach those vast hidden dimensions. Yes, we are all philosophers, dancers, travelers - truth seekers.
Thank you, Paul Musso.
An enjoyable essay, Paul.
I’m always drawn to the line that Plato attributes to Socrates: “Wonder is the beginning of all philosophy,” and I think this applies to science, too. After all, until recently, science (or “natural philosophy”) was a branch of philosophy.
But in the classic sense, this sense of wonder leads to questions, which makes philosophy into an inquiry.
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately:
The “philosophy as a way of life” approach often involves following rules and precepts that others arrived at in the past. (For example, most people who follow Stoicism today don’t make original contributions to philosophy. They are following a system arrived at in the past.)
So is there a minimal qualification that doing philosophy requires besides being human? Does it require inquiry? At the least, I suppose a real philosophy of life at least requires self reflection?
Paul, there’s honestly so much I’d like to express here. I hope we can find the time to do this dialogically as I believe it’ll be a much richer experience for both of us.
Something that might be worth highlighting is the work of Schwitzgebel et al. that sought to better understand the relationship between ‘moral knowledge’ and ‘moral conduct’. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this work, which will be surprising to some and entirely unsurprising to others, is that it really does not seem that professional moral philosophers act more morally in everyday life.
This of course gets us into the intent-action gap, the limits of over-relying on proportional knowledge etc. but it rather beautifully highlights the deeper truth that living philosophically is far more complex and nuances than simply studying philosophy.
Now, as an applied ethicist / action philosopher, I am very interested in whether there might be a different in real-word moral conduct between philosophical ethicists and those doing real-world applied / practical ethics. My suspicion is that there may be. My hope is that there would be / is.
I know, speaking only from my first-person perspective here, that my ‘truly living philosophically’ did not begin when I started learning about philosophy. It came many years after, was triggered (if you will) by various extremely challenging life events / circumstance, and became possible thanks to a rather transformative re-orientation.
Looking forward to dialogue-ing through this some time soon.
P.S. thanks for doing the work and publishing this perspective.