Why Philosophy

A couple weeks ago, I was asked a simple question: why philosophy? Why should it be studied, what does it offer to the philosopher, and what import does it have on a larger scale? I like questions like these. After all, it's a philosophical one, meta-philosophy, if you will. Philosophy is a central and irrevocable part of my life and my thinking. For me, why philosophy has been easy. Philosophy is beautiful; to me, it's the art of ideas and argument. I believe there is a fundamental value of studying beauty for beauty's sake; we admire great paintings and sculptures, listen to moving symphonies and operas, read the classics of literature simply for their own sake. In the same way, ideas move me, and philosophy, the study of those ideas and questions too basic to have a home in any other discipline, fascinates me.

We gather our ideas in some haphazard manner as we meander through life; some are inherited through family and culture, some are molded from personality, some are forged through experience and hardship, some are learned from others. Whether we are selfish or selfless, believe in fate or self-determination, trust in God, have a soul, abide by the law or break it in peaceful protest or flout it in singular defiance, these traits are an accumulation of random event and experience. Whether we believe in democracy or communism, capitalism or socialism, creationism or evolution, science as cure or curse seems to depend on who has influenced us.

To me, philosophy is the great equalizer. Descartes, often considered the father of modern philosophy, called upon us to discard all our beliefs and rebuild them rationally. It is fine to be an anarchist or nihilist or skeptic or utilitarian as long as those beliefs are supported by logic and rational argument rather than whims of parents, teachers, experience, or fate. Philosophy forces us to face our frames of reference head-on, and the beauty of it to me is that secure philosophical argumentation can change people. Many of my beliefs ranging from the existence of God to the limits of science to the nature of language to the importance of free will have been entirely governed by rational argument and the study of premises, logical steps, and conclusions.

My experience of philosophy has been a distinctly personal one; philosophy is not done in smoke-filled whiskey-laden bars, but rather the company of oneself. So what does it offer to society as a whole? This is a harder question for me to answer, and perhaps one in which I must take refuge in the popular perception of philosophy. Perhaps by having people ask and answer these questions, we add greater depth and meaning to our human experience. Certainly, we could go through our lives simply meeting those basic requirements of living: eating, sleeping, working, reproducing, but perhaps one of the qualities that makes us as humans different than animals is that ability to introspect, reflect, ponder, and question.

Image shown above is Jacques-Louis David's "The Death of Socrates," oil on canvas, shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, taken from Wikipedia, in the public domain.