All men by nature desire to know.
—Aristotle
This book evolved out of years of engagement with key texts and philosophers in academic journals, conferences, conversations, and classrooms—both as a student and as a professor. At times, the book captures the voice of a student or an interlocutor, and at times—though less often—a professor. In all cases the following pages are the result of close readings or, more concretely, the result of a certain kind of reading—one that emphasizes performance and effect and considers these important vehicles for the philosophical message.
The book’s main concern is expressed in its title: LoveKnowledge. This, of course, is a distortion of the accepted translation of philo-sophia as the “love of knowledge.” I should confess at the beginning that the book doesn’t offer a rigid, conclusive definition. Instead, the term becomes the question that drives each chapter and is reshaped with each new section. For this is how I myself experienced it. Through long and involved readings, I discovered that my thinking comes back to this fundamental question over and over again, from different perspectives: what is the love that turns into knowledge and how is the knowledge we seek already a form of love? I cannot answer this question, and I cannot explain it away. At best, I follow its different formations in a number of texts, which I consider among the best and most interesting of the philosophical offerings. It is the oldest question of them all; this question gave birth to philosophy two and a half millennia ago and this book does not dare an answer but rather attempts to bring it to life for us today.
Each chapter is a reading of a single book. The texts are idiosyncratic, most of them published after each author’s death, and they include reflections on the kind of life philosophy offers, the life of the mind—a term that includes a whole spectrum of activities, from doubting to imagining and desiring. My own reading follows the movement of their thinking, the passion that drives the ideas, and the results. The interpretations I provide are at times informed by other writers, and when this is so I mention it clearly in the body of the text rather than in a note. The goal is not to argue directly with other interpretations or to establish a different systematic interpretation. The interest lies elsewhere—in discovering what laces different philosophers together, what motivates them, what they achieve, and why it is important for us today. I do not wish to claim that the readings I present here are complete; at best they provide a glimpse of a philosopher’s thought. But the idiosyncratic perspective can also be beneficial. For the professional, it suggests a fresh way to encounter classical texts and form connections between them. For the novice it serves as an opening into the field of philosophy as a form of life, a practice, or an art of existence.
Though this may sound odd in the context of academic philosophy today, the book should also be entertaining. It often renounces didactic explanations and chooses instead to make the richness and ambiguity of each text come to life. It trusts the impressions of the reader and her ability to navigate a philosophical landscape without an outline or map but with a sense of orientation and know-how. Philosophy is, after all, a practice, and to learn it one must be ready to jump in.