Desmond asked:

What is philosophy and where does it come from?

What would Kant say to that question?

============

Every introductory text on philosophy starts with some comments on your question. So look it up.

The first general answer is: "Philosophy is about questions." But then science and theology — and
"common sense" and superstition and "mom and dad and your friends" — give answers to questions
too. So what's special with philosophical answers?

The first divide is between philosophy and religion: Religion states for instance: "In the beginning God
created heaven and earth." And then the philosopher unsatisfied asks: "How do the priests and the
Holy Scriptures came to know that — have they been there?" and then "What do they mean by
'God'?" And next he may think them to be liars who try to scare the people to make them well
behaved and obedient to the priests and elders and the king.

The second divide is between philosophy on the one hand and experience and "common sense" on
the other: Where do people get their "knowledge"? That was the concern of Socrates. He said
"Nobody knows anything for sure. I don't know anything too. But at least I know this one thing and I
am not boasting I know anything for sure or going to sell it." Now that is an extreme position from
which the sceptics started. Plato was not that modest and he invented the metaphysical concept of
"ideas". How do we know that some way of acting or thinking is "better" than another way if we had
not some inborn idea of what acting and thinking should be "ideally". Aristotle thought this to be an
unnecessary and unjustified conclusion: By everyday experience we know that all things can be done
in a stupid and clumsy way and in a masterly way. But to know that one doesn't need the concept of
"ideas". So this was one of the first struggles between two first-class philosophers.

But what is "philosophical" about the arguments of Plato and Aristotle in this case? They argue not
over objects but over arguments and their justification. That is one of the greatest themes of
philosophy: How to distinguish a justified and "valid" argument from a "sloppy" and invalid one. This
"critical" approach to philosophy characterized the style of thinking of Descartes, Kant and
Wittgenstein.

Philosophers are arguing as we all do, but the question of the philosopher is: "How can I be sure that
my arguments are valid? Or as Wittgenstein had it: "What are we doing with our words and
sentences, how do we use them in a correct and meaningful way?"

Just as you can build imaginary worlds in dreams and in the movies and in the arts, so you can build
imaginary, fictitious worlds in texts with words and arguments. If you do that in a novel, that's no
problem, since a novel is openly sold and bought as fiction, as a written dream. But if you sell some
political or religious or scientific fiction as truth and reality, then the true and concerned philosopher is
getting nervous. As the late Nelson Goodman once stated: "There may indeed be more things
between heaven and earth than our wisdom dreams of, as Hamlet said, but it is my duty to see to it,
that there are not too much more things dreamt of than do exist between heaven and earth." (That
was the drift of what he said, I cite from memory.) You should read the short and wonderful book
Ways of Worldmakingby Nelson Goodman. It's not about "making" different worlds like a
movie-director or a novel-writer does, but it's about different ways of seeing the world: The Antiquity
"saw" another world than the Middle Ages or the Modern Age. And as Goodman puts it in the
foreword to the book cited: "Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind.
C.I. Lewis exchanged the structure of the mind for the structure of concepts. And that now proceeds
to the exchange of the structure of concepts for the structure of the several symbol systems of the
sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse."

Of course the study of different ways of seeing the world goes back to Vico and Hegel, and the study
of causes for this different ways of seeing the world is indebted to Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud
— to name but some of the most important thinkers on that question.

So philosophy is a really great undertaking of some of the best human minds. An undertaking to
achieve what? To clear our understanding and our arguments concerning the world around us — and
our way of arguing — from false pretensions and false presumptions, from misleading concepts and
misleading lines of thought to get at a true picture of the world we live in.

"A" true picture is not "the" true picture. There are many true pictures of the world as there are many
true pictures of a person or a landscape or of anything else. But there are many false and distorted
and misleading pictures too. There's no contradiction in this.

What did Kant say to that question "what philosophy is all about"? I am no specialist on Kant. There
are some Kant dictionaries and concordances to look up for citations. But then his stance was not too
different from Goodman's.

And then: Where does philosophy come from? It comes from doubt in the knowledge, wisdom and
sincerity of the elders — and of oneself. Doubt comes from contradicting answers and experiences.
The first great philosophers we know of — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, but Confucius and Buddha and
some other great Asian thinkers too — appeared in a time (ca. 600-400 BC) when the first great cities
drew people from all countries, and international trade and colonization built a network of contacts
between cultures as today. Then what was valid and valued in one region was not valid and valued in
another region and people had to think how this had to be explained. That was the birth of
philosophy. Look up Herodotus for this. And: This doubting in the words of the priests was called
"Adams Fall" — the fall from the grace of innocence, of living in "no-doubt". Philosophy set man
against nature, since he became aware of being a thinking animal, a doubting animal, an inquiring
animal, not part of the whole of nature anymore, not able to speak to plants and animals or to share
their world by transformation as in fairy tales.

So philosophy is the great eye-opener of mankind and the great destroyer of trust and naivety. A
famous student of the presocratic philosophers in Greek Antiquity gave his book the title "From
Mythos to Logos" — both words meaning "speech", but in a different sense. The same change took
place in India and China and in some other countries at about the same time in another way. That
was the beginning of philosophy.

Hubertus Fremerey

1