Everyone thinks she knows, spontaneously, what philosophy is. Yet philosophy is also supposed to be a mysterious activity that is difficult and beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. How is this contradiction to be explained?
Let us look a little more closely at its two terms.
Everyone thinks she knows, spontaneously, what philosophy is, on the basis of a conviction that all people are, more or less, philosophers, even when they are not aware of it (like Monsieur Jourdain, who uttered prose without being aware of it).
This is the thesis defended by the great Italian Marxist theoretician Gramsci: ‘everyone is a philosopher’. And Gramsci provides interesting details. He observes that, in everyday language, the expression ‘to take things philosophically’ designates an attitude that itself involves a certain conception of philosophy, bound up with the idea of rational necessity. Someone who, confronted with a painful occurrence, ‘takes things philosophically’ is someone who takes a step back, gets the better of her immediate reaction, and conducts herself in a rational way: she understands the event affecting her and acknowledges its necessity.
Of course, says Gramsci, there can be a streak of passivity in this attitude (‘to be a philosopher’ is ‘to cultivate your own garden’ or ‘mind your own business’ or ‘see only what suits you’. In short, ‘to be a philosopher’ is also, most of the time, to resign oneself to necessity and withdraw into this resignation, into one’s private life, one’s inner life, one’s day-to-day affairs, while waiting for ‘the dust to settle’). Gramsci does not deny this. But he insists on the fact that such passivity contains, paradoxically, the acknowledgement of a certain order of things, one that is necessary and comprehensible.
At the same time, however, as Plato already notes, we find another idea of what philosophy is in the popular conception of it, an idea embodied in the stock figure of the philosopher who goes around with his head in the clouds or in abstraction and ‘falls down wells’ (there were no well walls in Greece, as there are today) because he keeps his eyes trained on the heaven of ideas instead of the ground. This caricature, thanks to which the ‘people’ can make fun of philosophers, is itself ambiguous. On the one hand, it represents an ironic criticism of the philosopher: an affectionate or bitter settling of accounts with philosophy. On the other hand, it contains the acknowledgement of a fact of sorts: philosophers practice a discipline that is beyond the ken of ordinary men and women, of common people, while being, as the same time, a discipline involving serious risks.
Gramsci takes the first term of the contradiction into account, but not the second. But it is not good method to chop things in half and keep only what suits us. We have to take every aspect of the popular conception of philosophy into account. When we do, it appears that, in the everyday expression ‘to take things philosophically’, what first meets the eye is resignation to necessity, conceived as something inevitable (one waits ‘for things to settle down’ or for the onset of death: ‘to philosophize is to learn how to die’, says Plato). The acknowledgement that it is a ‘rational necessity’ thus takes a back seat. Indeed, it may be a necessity and nothing else (we may not know the reasons for this necessity, so that it is not rational). That is, it may be a fatality (‘there is no other way’). That is usually the case. This remark is crucial.
It is crucial, first of all, because it puts the accent on the idea that philosophy = resignation. One cannot say that this equation in fact contains, despite itself, as it were, an idea of philosophy that has critical value. Indeed, we shall be showing that the vast majority of philosophies are forms of resignation or, to be more precise, forms of submission to the ‘ideas of the ruling class’ (Marx) and thus to class rule.
It is crucial, secondly, because it does in fact contain a distinction between two altogether different types of philosophy. There is, on the one hand, the passive, resigned ‘philosophy’ of those who ‘take things philosophically’ while ‘cultivating their gardens’ and ‘waiting for the dust to settle’ (we shall call this ‘philosophy’ common-sense philosophy). On the other hand, there is the active philosophy of those who submit to the order of the world because they know it by means of Reason, either in order to know it or in order to change it (we shall call this ‘philosophy’ Philosophy tout court, writing its name with a capital letter). Take, for example, a Stoic philosopher: he is a ‘philosopher’ to the extent that he actively adapts to the order of the world, and this rational order is, for him, rational because he knows it through the exercise of reason. Take, for example, the communist philosopher: she is a ‘philosopher’ to the extent that she militates in order to hasten the advent of socialism, the historical necessity of which she has understood (by means of scientific reason). We shall say that all the adepts of Stoicism and all communist militants are, in this respect, philosophers in the second, strong sense of the word. They ‘take things philosophically’, if you like; in their case, however, this expression has to do with knowledge of the rational necessity of the course of the world or evolution of history. Of course, there is a big difference between the adept of Stoicism and the communist militant, but, for the moment, it does not interest us. We shall discuss it in due course.
What is essential, for the moment, is to see clearly that the common-sense philosophy to which the everyday expression refers should not be confused with Philosophy in the strong sense, the philosophy ‘elaborated’ by philosophers (Plato … the Stoics and so on, Marx, Lenin), which may or may not disseminate or, rather, be disseminated among the broad mass of the people. When, today, we encounter philosophical elements in the popular conceptions of the masses, we have to take this dissemination into account. Unless we do, we may mistake Philosophical elements in the strong sense that have been ‘inculcated’ (Lenin, Mao) into the masses as a result of the union of Marxist theory and the workers’ movement for spontaneous mass consciousness.
A) Moreover, the popular conception of Philosophy, when it ironically shows us the philosopher with his head ‘in the clouds,’ explicitly recognizes that philosophy can be something altogether different from common sense ‘philosophy’. This irony, which is a settling of accounts, indulgent, sardonic, or severe, with speculative Philosophy, incapable of concerning itself with down-to-earth problems, also contains its ‘grain of truth’ (Lenin): namely, that the true philosopher ‘circulates’ in a ‘world different’ from that of spontaneous popular consciousness. (Let us call it, provisionally, the world of ‘ideas’.) The philosopher ‘knows’ and says certain things that ordinary people do not know; he has to negotiate the difficult roads of abstraction in order to attain this lofty ‘knowledge’, which is not immediately given to everyone. In this sense, one can no longer say that everyone is spontaneously a philosopher, unless one plays on the sense of the word ‘philosopher’, the way Gramsci does – unless one confuses common-sense philosophy with Philosophy (tout court).
This brings us back to our question: What is philosophy? But, at the same time, we can now see that our first question is pregnant with another: What is common-sense philosophy?
To answer this two-part question, we shall be developing a certain number of theses in orderly fashion. We will thus be brought to discover a certain number of realities. Only after we have put these realities in place can we come back to our questions and answer them.
Let us begin with a simple observation: while common-sense philosophy has, it seems, always existed, Philosophy has not.
Everyone knows how Lenin begins his famous book State and Revolution: he points out that the state has not always existed. He adds that the state is observed to exist only in societies in which social classes exist.
We shall make a remark of the same sort, but it will be a little more complicated. We shall say that Philosophy has not always existed. Philosophy is observed to exist in societies in which
1) social classes (and therefore the state) exist;
2) science (or one science) exists.
Let us be more precise. By science, we mean, not a list of empirical findings (connaissances), which can be quite long (thus the Chaldeans and Egyptians were familiar with a considerable number of technical procedures and mathematical results), but an abstract, ideal (or, rather, idea-dependent [idéel]) discipline that proceeds by way of abstractions and demonstrations: for example, the Greek mathematics founded by Thales (or those designated by this no doubt mythical proper name).
To stick with our observation, the facts do indeed appear to show that we are right. We can confirm it in both past and present. It is a fact that Philosophy as we know it begins for us with Plato, in the Greece of the fifth century [before] our era. We can see that Greek society comprised social classes (our first condition) and that the world’s first known science, mathematics, began to exist as a science (our second condition) shortly before the turn of the fifth century. These two realities – social classes and mathematical (demonstrative) science – are registered in Plato’s Philosophy, and combined there. On the pediment of the school in which he taught Philosophy, Plato wrote: ‘Let none enter here who is not a geometer’. And he made use of the ‘geometric proportion’ (which grounded the idea of proportional equality, in other words, inequality) to establish class relations among people that flattered the convictions of the reactionary aristocrat he was. (There are people who are made for work, others who are made to command and, finally, still others who are made to ensure that the dominant class’s order reigns over slaves and tradesmen.)
But let us not proceed too quickly. For we can observe another fact as well. Other class societies existed well before fifth-century Greece; yet they did not possess the idea of demonstrative science and, plainly, they did not have the idea of Philosophy. Examples: Greece itself prior to the fifth century, the great Near Eastern kingdoms, Egypt, and so on. It would clearly seem that, in order for Philosophy to exist, the two conditions that we have mentioned most obtain: the necessary condition (the existence of classes) and the sufficient condition (the existence of a science).
It will be objected that there were men who called themselves ‘philosophers’ before Plato, such as the Seven Sages, the ‘Ionian philosophers’, and so on. We shall reply to this objection a little later.
Let us return to the conditions that we have defined and pursue our observations. The unprecedented discipline of Philosophy, founded by Plato, did not disappear with his death. It survived him as a discipline and there have always been people to practice it. It is as if it were necessary that Philosophy exist – and not just that it exist, but that it perpetuate itself in singular fashion, as if it were repeating something essential in its very transformations.
Why did it continue and why was it transformed even as it was perpetuated?
Let us note that it was continued and developed in what we call the ‘Western world’ (which was relatively isolated from the rest of the world until the advent of capitalism): a world in which classes and the state have continued to exist and in which the sciences have seen great developments, but in which the class struggle has also seen great transformations.
As for Philosophy, what has happened to it? We may observe the following.
We note that Philosophy, too, has seen major transformations. Aristotle is something other than Plato, Stoicism something other than Aristotle, Descartes something other than St Thomas Aquinas, Kant something other than Descartes, and so on. Did these transformations occur for no reason other than that these great authors we inspired? Or, to put the question another way, why were these authors great authors, whereas a throng of other philosophers, who wrote a host of books, have remained, so to speak, in the shadows, without playing any historical role?
Here, too, we can note certain things. We observe, perhaps to our surprise, that all great transformations in philosophy intervene at moments in history either when noteworthy modifications occur in class relations and the state or when major events occur in the history of the sciences: with the additional stipulation that the noteworthy modifications in the class struggle and the major events in the history of the sciences appear, most of the time, to reinforce each other in their encounter in order to produce prominent effects in Philosophy.
Let us give a few examples. In view of the rudimentary facts we have provided so far, we have to present them in extremely schematic form. We shall modify it later, when we have other analytical principles in hand.
As far as most of the great ‘authors’ of Philosophy are concerned, we can indeed observe, in the conjuncture in which they thought and wrote, a conjunction of political and scientific events representing important modifications of the previous conjuncture.
| Political events | Scientific events | Authors |
| Creation of the Macedonian Empire (end of the city-state) | Idea of a biological science1 | Aristotle |
| Creation of the slave-holding Roman Empire; Roman Law | Idea of a new physics | The Stoics |
| Feudalism + the first signs of a revival of Roman Law | Prepagation of the Arabs’ scientific discoveries | St Thomas Aquinas |
| Development of legal mercantile relations under the Absolute Monarchy | Foundation of mathematical physics by Galileo | Descartes |
| Rise of the bourgeoisie; French Revolution | New foundation of physics by Newton | Kant |
| Contradictions of the French Revolution (threat of the ‘Fourth Estate’ eliminated by Thermidor and Napoleon: Civil Law Code) | First approaches to a theory of history | Hegel |
| Emergence, growth and first struggles, failures and victory of the workers’ movement | Science of history founded by Marx | Marx-Lenin (dialectical materialism) |
| Imperialism (rise of the ‘petty bourgeoisie’) | Axiomatization of mathematics, mathematical Logic | Husserl |
| Crisis of imperialism | Developments in technology | Heidegger |
| And so on … |
We shall leave it to our readers to ‘breathe life into’ the elements of this schematic table. We shall restrict ourselves to putting them on the right track with a few simple remarks that are themselves extremely schematic. We shall take just one example, Descartes.
The table should be read as follows: Descartes’ Philosophy, which marks a crucial moment in the history of Philosophy, since it inaugurates what we may call ‘Modern Philosophy’, came into existence with the conjunction of important modifications in class relations and the state on the one hand and the history of the sciences on the other.
In class relations: we are referring to the development of bourgeois law, which sanctioned, in its turn, the development of commodity relations in the manufacturing period under the absolute monarchy. The absolute monarchy was a new form of state representing a form of transitional state between the feudal and capitalist state.
In the history of the sciences: Galileo’s foundation of the science of physics, which represents the great scientific event of the modern period, comparable in importance to only two other great discoveries known to us: the discovery that led to the foundation of mathematics in the fifth century and the discovery, due to Marx, that laid the foundations for a science of history in the mid-nineteenth century.
Let there be no mistake: we are not claiming that Descartes’ philosophy can be deduced from the conjunction of these two decisive events, political-economic and scientific. We contend only that the conjuncture in which Descartes thought was dominated by this conjunction, which radically distinguishes it from the preceding conjuncture, the one in which, for example, Italian Renaissance Philosophers had to think.
For the moment, we shall content ourselves with bringing Descartes’ Philosophy into relation with this conjuncture (and this conjunction). What interests us in this conjuncture is this conjunction, which would seem to confirm the validity of the twofold condition that we stated in order to begin to account for what Philosophy might be. We shall leave it at that for the moment.2
Reading the other examples in our table this way, we observe that the transformations of Philosophy seem to stand in relation with a complex (but unmistakable) interplay [jeu] between transformations in class relations and their effects, on the one hand, and major events in the history of the sciences on the other. We ask the reader to grant us no more than that the conditions of existence of Philosophy that we have defined are plausible.
So much for the past. What about the present?
We invoke the present in order to make our definition even more plausible. For we are referring not just to the present of societies in which Philosophy exists, but also to that of societies without Philosophy.
For, in our world, there still do exist societies or groupings of people in which Philosophy as we know it has never managed to arise. For instance, the so-called ‘primitive’ societies, traces of which still subsist. These societies have neither social classes nor science: they know nothing of Philosophy. For instance, great societies in which we cannot yet isolate what has been brought into them from outside in order to consider, so to speak, what they were before this importation (of the sciences and Philosophy). We might take the example of nineteenth-century India or China in order to ask ourselves whether these societies which had social classes (even if they were disguised in the form of castes, as in India) but not science (as far as we know, but we may be mistaken) had what we call philosophies in the strict sense.
People readily speak of Hindu philosophy and Chinese philosophy. In question here, however, may be theoretical disciplines that have only the external appearances of Philosophy, so that it would doubtless be preferable to give them another name. After all, we, too, have a theoretical discipline, theology, which, while plainly theoretical, is not, in principle, a Philosophy. Provisionally, we can hypothesize that the question of the nature of so-called Hindu or Chinese philosophy is of the same order as the question of the pre-Platonic Greek ‘philosophies’. Later, we shall attempt to answer this question.
Here, to sum up, is what we have ‘found’ so far, setting out from the simple observation that Philosophy has not always existed: we have found (empirically) that the existence and transformations of Philosophy seem to bear a close relation to the conjunction of important events in class relations and the state, on the one hand, and the history of the sciences on the other.
Let there be no confusion about what we have said and what we have not. So far, we have merely observed that there is a relation between these conditions and Philosophy. We do not yet know anything about the nature of that relation. To arrive at a clear understanding of it, we shall have to put forward new theses, making a very long detour in the process. As I have indicated, this detour passes by way of an exposé of the scientific results of historical materialism that we need if we are to produce a scientific definition of Philosophy. To begin with, it leads us to the question: what is a ‘society’?
1 Once one science (mathematics) exists, we may say that the idea of science taken from it can serve to authorize theoretical constructions, not yet scientific, that are brought to bear on empirical facts. Hence the ‘idea’ of a biological ‘science’ that Aristotle’s Philosophy takes as its authorization.
2 We shall go much further in due course, at the end of our study.