Part 1: An analysis of the question "What is Philosophy?"
The question "what is philosophy?" is a question that is not as easily answerable as the question "what is biology?" or other fields. This is so because the answer is defined by the person who describes it to you, generating an impression of his worldview. Indeed, asking a biologist what philosophy is compared to a physicist will tell you more about the speaker than the field. The wider sense of the word found in the context "what is your philosophy?" sparks a similar response to the question "what is philosophy"? Whether it's "I don't take any advice from no one!", "Yolo" or "life is suffering", you indeed are given an example of philosophy rather than a definition. Indeed, our western oldest instant of philosophy puts this example on a pedestal: when Socrates is speaking with Euthyphro regarding the nature of piety, Euthyphro tends to only give examples such as doing whatever the gods are doing. And so can this be applied to our current predicament: "what is philosophy?": "White dudes in their armchairs and ivory towers", "a never ending field of asking why?", or "people with no jobs". Ironically, philosophy as professed by many philosophers, are acutely aware of the problem with defining their field.
The most vague and catch-all definition for philosophy is that philosophy is the "love of wisdom" which is really just a translation of the Greek terms: philo- love, sophia- wisdom. Saying this standard definition of philosophy doesn't really say much other than (again) revealing something about the person.
Is the question "what is philosophy?" then, merely a litmus test to find alike minded people or to find people to persuade? Another inadequate definition that's popular is "learning to ask the right questions", which slightly probes deeper into the question. However, that would mean all the experts competent in their field would become full-fledged philosophers by the snap of a finger. These language games don't help, detracting us away from knowing more about philosophy itself.
After a few rounds of giving one's definition of philosophy then subsequently finding it inadequate, frustration settles in. And perhaps by proxy, relativism would start sneaking in: "philosophy is just everyone's opinions that aren't better than any other really, it's all just relative". In the face of relativism, I take a step back from cranking the wheel for ideas of what philosophy is.
When do we feel the need to ask the question "what is philosophy?". What kind of situations and contexts arise to reflect on a field that is hard to define but easy to cite examples of? I imagine many would tend to reflect on "the thinker" statue. What philosophers do is "think". But what does it mean to think? If anything, shouldn't philosophy be the resilience to stop at dubious propositions and confusions, consider further the notions we take for granted? Is this thinking?
The question "what is philosophy?" itself points to philosophy is without having to go towards a definition or cite examples of philosophy. This ends up with the conclusion that the answer to "what is philosophy" ends up being what is philosophy?
Part II: Lessons from the 20th century
The answer posed to the question "what is philosophy?" with "what is philosophy?" will likely cause several negative responses; ones of anger, confusion and impressions of empty pretentious BS. And all those are so, even I had cringed at my own response. But on reflection, I stuck with it for a reason. And if a person does the same, will get to walk along with my journey through this puzzling tautology.
I drew inspiration for this kind of response from the 2 greatest thinkers of the 20th century: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger.
The philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein in his early career is centered in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a treatise of philosophical logic, ultimately arguing for anti-philosophy— being against the enterprise of philosophy itself. Here Wittgenstein makes the bold statement: "whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent", alluding a polemic against philosophy. The treatise is a work of philosophical logic that was intended to "solve" philosophy. Here, Wittgenstein takes logic as an idealized "language" to see how it interacts (if at all) with the world. Throughout the argument, we come to realize that a lot of the philosophical statements of the past may merely amount to linguistic confusion. What interests me most about this treatise is that he shows the limits of language (and hence the limits of philosophy) by describing the world of facts not through explanation, but primarily through showing or pointing.
So the confusing tautology: "what is philosophy? what is philosophy?" can be traced back to Wittgenstein's priority of showing or demonstrating rather than try to categorize a concept, especially something like "philosophy".
The philosophy of Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, inspired me in terms of his later works on the nature of language. For Heidegger, "language is the house of being", a place where man and being connect with one another. But Heidegger would stress that they are not separate entities. Rather, man discloses being— "man is the Shepard of being". With all these profound statements, Heidegger focuses less on polemics and brute force philosophy idealized by Wittgenstein, but rather puts a different spin on the idea of "showing" what something is for what it is. That is, leaving behind our preconceived notions of "philosophy" and instead, let the encounter with the sentence "what is philosophy?" expand our horizon of being. While this is arguably harder to grasp, Heidegger's approach allows us to approach the question of "what is philosophy?" less as a question to be answered but rather a question to be explored.
Heidegger's early works also deal with expressing some sentiments of anti-philosophy, but mostly aimed at the branch of philosophy called "metaphysics". This field of inquiry primarily deals with the big questions philosophy is stereo-typically satirized for (as well as glorified by our hipsters): what is everything made of? Where do we come from? What is reality?. For Heidegger, the Western field of philosophy has overplayed their alleged "progress" from their rather antiquarian notion of "being". From Plato onward, the established dogma of how to define being was related to the idea of forms. This was taken up by the Christians later on and has culminated in the notion of being as "creature" or a "subject" of God. This kind of approach to being from an essence related to its ideal form to a creature of God was called by Heidegger as "ontotheology" (onto-being, theo-god). For Heidegger, since Plato, ontotheologic confusion was the reason for the stagnation of explorations into the question of being.
These sources of inspiration provide lessons from the 20th century on the question "what is philosophy?" by their engagement with trying to define what philosophy was and shouldn't be. But we don't come to understand their arguments by simply reading it. Rather, Wittgenstein and Heidegger demonstrate and show what philosophy is for what it is, in their own ways.
Part III: What is philosophy?
Insights from thinkers that we've come to label as "philosophers" are all well and good but doesn't it fail to truly solve the problem of the question "what is philosophy?" Aren't I simply just showing you different ways to approach the question? At the end of the day both approaches: trying to define what philosophy is through definition or examples; and the 20th century philosophy-inspired "showing" and "encountering" the question; end up in the same opinionated conclusion. But when you think about it, philosophy really does express opinions. The enterprise of philosophy, as I said previously, is the irony that it is aware of the fact that it expresses opinions, some even going so far as to claim that all fields express opinions. Opinions are grounded on different assumptions that give rise to different worlds that we as human beings can incorporate. Our mere ability to posit the question "what is philosophy?" is symptomatic of our philosophical nature as human beings. Upon introducing the question "what is philosophy?" one already has taken an opinion on what philosophy is. Asking the question aloud merely allows us to connect our notions of philosophy with others who themselves, when asked the question, ask it to themselves, and thus taking another stance on what philosophy is. Thus, I still believe that the best answer to the question "what is philosophy?" is the tautologous "what is philosophy?"; whether or not someone actually takes the smart-alec route and says it aloud as a response or lets it resonate within himself and encounter the question on its own terms is all the same journey but on different paths.
I end with a quote by the philosopher David Lewis:
"One comes to philosophy already endowed with a stock of opinions. It is not the business of philosophy either to undermine or to justify these preexisting opinions, to any great extent, but only try to discover ways of expanding them into an orderly system" (Lewis, 1972)
