Invitation to philosophy

Edward Hopper, Morning Sun (1952)

Anyone who doesn’t take love as a starting point will never understand the nature of philosophy. — Alain Badiou, quoting Plato

One of the first things told to philosophy students is that philosophy is philos-sophia, a love of wisdom. This is usually moved past quite quickly, and love continues to be something that is supposed to remain outside of the classroom. But I wonder if, actually, we ought not to forget that philosophy has always had a close relation to love. That the question ‘what is philosophy?’ occurs to philosophers so often—maybe more so than the equivalent question is asked in other fields—is, I would suggest, evidence of love's place in philosophy.

Love—just like friendship, care, but also envy, hatred, obsession—is not only a relationship to an other, but also to oneself. Love involves reflexivity. To love and care for someone else can be a form of loving and caring for oneself (or, indeed, hating and harming oneself). The reason I bring this up is that, in my experience, philosophy is always born out of a feeling. We can come up with clever reasoning post hoc to justify our philosophising (we are like conceptual plumbers or engineers; we are representing class struggle in theory; we are comprehending our historical moment in thought), but—if we are honest with ourselves—didn’t almost all of us start philosophy because it felt right to think about philosophical things?

What is this feeling?

To begin with, something must be wrong. Philosophy starts when something is out of joint: that is, when things don’t fit together, when something is missing, and so on. Any world in which philosophy can take place is a world which is knotted, cracked, and uneven. Someone who engages in philosophy, I think, is someone who feels the effect of this knot upon themselves. Often, it will feel as if it is part of their inborn nature: a kind of depression or melancholy, perhaps, or the result of ‘a lack of common sense’. But I want to suggest that the urge to engage in philosophy is not a trait one can be born with, but the consequence of a transformative moment (or series of moments), too fast and subtle to be consciously perceptible, wherein the inconsistency and inadequacy of the world starts to weigh on someone as a real problem.¹ I don’t think that such moments can be brought about intentionally, either by oneself or a teacher, and I think that they are incredibly difficult to reverse once their effects have ossified in the mind. In this way, philosophy—like love—is a condition that one falls in.

I’m disinclined to believe in an ‘end of history’ in the global context and—short of death—in the personal context too. The ‘wrong’ that motivates philosophy will never vanish, but it will change in shape and strength. The disquietude in the world is the motivation for kindness and poetry, and it does not always have to take the form of suffering.

As permanent as it might be, however, I think that as creatures who take comfort in stability and regularity, we are driven to try and deal with the knots of reality. (At least partly—I don’t doubt that we ourselves can be the source of the problems.) It is always possible to deal with reality by covering over the gaps in the world and in ourselves, or to deny them outright. It is in this kind of response that philosophy gets its perennial enemy: Socrates’ sophism, Sartre’s bad faith, Althusser’s ideology. A philosopher is someone who, afflicted by the transformative moments I described above, becomes unable to practise such denial. Think of the trope in old cartoons where a character floats above an abyss until, at the precise moment they decide to look down, they fall. We fall into philosophy when some impetus pushes us to confront the gaps and nonsense in our world, and to philosophise—as to love—is to continue falling, willingly.

If I were to summarise my conception of philosophy—which, as I have tried to make clear, is not something I have theoretically deduced but is more like something I’ve experienced—I would agree with Kierkegaard insofar as he writes about both love and philosophy in terms of striving. Philosophy takes the wind of confusion into the sails of thinking. That is, philosophy occupies a strange position insofar as it neither wants to totally eradicate confusion (through denial or a flattening of the world) nor to remain totally swallowed up by it. How exactly one is supposed to do this is something I want to write about later. Here I just wanted to try and depict the experience—which is not a thought, not an argument, not a belief—which invites us into philosophy.

1. This idea of a fleeting moment which, when attended to, has transformative effects, is very important to me. I find versions of it in other philosophers: for instance, in Badiou’s ethics and politics of the event, and in Benjamin’s concept of ‘pictures’ or constellations.