Is philosophy a form of life? Or, according to an expression closer to Aristotle than to Wittgenstein, does philosophy give form to life? This question immediately receives two opposite responses. Yes, according to one doxa or a widespread feeling that philosophy should give meaning and strengthen a conduct regulated by this meaning. No, responds the opposite sentiment, which sees philosophy as the practice of a discourse of meaning or truth, but by right or in fact deprived of any mobilizing energy.
Both of these postulations are to be found among philosophers. Descartes holds that one should philosophize very little, but with the goal of firmly ascertaining the reasons for acting in the world, in life, by way of medicine, mechanics, and morality. Heidegger, by contrast, declares, even as he speaks of putting existence into play, that one should not believe that this putting into play will be effective in the book that speaks about it.
In one case, one supposes that the order of reasons generates energy, and in the other, one affirms that the effectivity of this energy is of an order different from the order of reasons. One thus poses the problem of the passage from one order to the other.
There are periods and figures of philosophy in which the indication of a form of life is quite vivid: in Stoicism and Epicureanism, for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and for others in whose work this indication loses visibility, as though veiled by concepts, analysis, and theory. “The concept or life”—this seems to be the alternative, about which it has been very common, in fact, to hear complaints made to the philosophers, who themselves sometimes add to the complaint and the anxiety about it.
We must note, rather, that this tension is internal to philosophy. No philosopher can ignore or disdain the form of life. But no philosopher—no one deserving the name philosopher—can assume that such a form is an idea, a schema that can be taken out of the drawer or the book and be applied on the street.
But this is not a matter of difficulties of application or mobilization. It concerns the fact that a philosopher immediately disqualifies the notions of both “form” and “life” understood as frame and content or even as signification and experience.
Neither of these notions is given at the beginning, nor for that matter, at the end. Philosophy consists precisely in working within a space where there is neither a configuration of meaning, nor a felt immediacy—nor, consequently, the possibility of mediating one through the other. In other words, neither the authority of religion nor that of “lived experience.”
Between religion and lived experience—in a space, let us note, where one also finds politics, science, and art—philosophy has the task, if I may say so, of spacing as such. Neither form, nor life, nor concept, nor intuition, but from one to the other, or rather, from one within the other, through the other, but also one against the other, a tension without resolution. It is not a question of relieving this tension, for it delights in itself as much as it suffers from itself. Neither a modeling of life nor a pathos of the immediate. It is not a happy medium, it is the exacting sharp edge of the philosophical decision, that is, of an entire civilization.
But in confronting this, the philosopher understands that it is precisely life that is put into play and that may thus lose its way without any of the assurances provided by what is revealed or felt (or by some mixture of the two). It is a living being that philosophizes, and if life consists in being affected by itself, then in the act of philosophizing, it is affected by its own vacancy of sense. It takes, therefore, a certain form, and with it a certain force: the form and the force of holding oneself before this necessity—namely, that its meaning is never given to it, and that this is precisely what dictates its truth to it. A truth, consequently, that is never simply available but is always caught up in its own practice.
Transcribing the final proposition of Spinoza’s Ethics, however roughly, we can therefore say that “sense is not the reward of philosophy, but its very practice.” Thus philosophy is less a “form of life” than life forming itself, that is to say, thinking itself, in accordance with its excess over every given form or signification. Which also means, of course, this life thinking itself even in its death.
I recall that, one day when I was being transported in an ambulance, the driver asked me what my profession was. He then had this to say: “Philosophy—that should be of help to you in your present situation.” At once I thought, almost in spite of myself, that basically he wasn’t wrong. And I still think that in fact he was right, even if I don’t know how to unravel this reasoning. But I also think at the same time that in this statement, my ambulance driver proved that he also is a philosopher. His confidence in philosophy, which one might well consider naive, contained an act of thought by which his life took form, transformed its ordinary form, just as it transformed my life at that same moment. The proof of this transformation is that I have not forgotten it.