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Common and Proper: An Attempt to Answer the Question ‘What is Philosophy?’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Georges Faraklas
Georges Faraklas*
Affiliation:
Panteion University of Social and Political Science, Athens
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There is even a paradox in the name of philosophy. Philosophy would rather love wisdom than have it. This is what exasperates those who interrogate it for answers and not questions. But this love must not be unhappy: being satisfied with unsatisfied love means loving love and at bottom feeling contempt for its object. It changes the object, the beloved wisdom is not what one thought one had. Those who say they have wisdom do not doubt, what they have is dogma, but those who doubt whether they have it may gain another wisdom, knowledge. Wisdom seems to change according to its place: it is false wisdom at the beginning of the cognitive process, but may be true in one or other of its relative terms. Knowledge is a wisdom that one works towards and to gain it one must deny having it, know that one does not know. Thus, in order to grasp what philosophy is, we must ask what a knowledge of not-knowing can be - a Socratic question - and what kind of cognitive process it is that can start with what is false to reach what is true; and this is a question to which the answers might be Platonic or Aristotelian. From Plato to Aristotle the ousia, what truly is, which is translated as essence in Plato, and as substance in Aristotle, changes places in this process. And if every philosophy decides to see true being as the thought essence of things or else as their particular substance, it would be a good idea to formalize the difference - gnoseological, ontological, political - between the two philosophers. It is a tricky project because it will have to contravene the rules of interpretation to produce this formal reconstruction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 48 , Issue 192 , December 2000 , pp. 41 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2000

References

Notes

1. The question discussed here owes much to the unpublished lectures given by Pierre Osmo at the Univer sity of Paris X-Nanterre between 1980 and 1984 on ‘Proper, property, appropriation’.

2. See the poem Eleusis, in Hegel (1969), Werke in 20 Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), vol. 2, pp. 231-2: ‘in vain / the seeker's curiosity looks for more than love / of wisdom (it is love the seekers have and / you they hold in contempt)….'

3. See E. Durkheim (1937), Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris: PUF), p. 31.

4. See Hegel, Glauben und Wissen, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 432.

5. See my book (2001), Auto to pragma (Athens: Nisos), chap. 9.

6. Serres makes this connection between the structuralist idea and that of Leibniz's monadology. See, among others, M. Serres (1968), Le système de Leibniz (Paris: PUF).

7. See my article, ‘Donation mutuelle de sens et raisonnement par l'absurde', in F. Dagognet and P. Osmo (2000), Autour de Hegel. Hommage à B. Bourgeois (Paris: Vrin).

8. See Critique of Pure Reason, A 81, B 107; A 313, B 370.

9. Critique de la philosophie de Hegel, Oeuvres III (Paris: Gallimard, 1982) p. 878.

10. On the subject of this family-mythic trope in Plato, see E. des Places (1964), La parenté de l'homme avec Dieu d'Homère à la Patristique (Paris: Klincksieck), pp. 63-128. See also pp. 71 et seq. on the Phaedo.

11. ‘It was based on experience that Aristotle built up the logical framework of oppositions, and that he later corrected it, to the detriment of abstract accuracy, in order to adapt its distinctions to the requirements of reality'; L. Robin (1923, 1973), La pensée grecque (Paris: Albin Michel), p. 289.

12. The idion is divided into definition and idion in the narrow sense of the term, Top. 101 b 20.

13. ‘The sounds produced by the voice are symbols of states of mind': pathèmata, Herm. 16 a 3.

14. ‘All animals … have an innate ability to discriminate (kritikèn) that we call sense perception (aisthèsin)', and those that retain a trace of it in their memory form notions based on what they sense (Anal. post. 99 b).

15. ‘It is clear that man is more of a political animal than any bee and any social animal … alone among the animals man has a language (logon). It is true that the voice expresses pain and pleasure and this is also found among animals … but language exists to make clear what is beneficial and harmful, and consequently what is just and unjust as well. Indeed there is only one thing that is peculiar to humans compared with the other animals: the fact that they alone are able to perceive good, evil, just, unjust, and other [notions of this kind]. And having such [notions] in common (hè toutôn koinônia) is what makes a family and a city (oikian kai polin)' (Pol. 1253 a 7, from the French translation by P. Pellegrin (1990), Paris: Garnier-Flammarion).

16. B. Parain (1942), Recherches sur la nature et les fonctions du langage (Paris: Gallimard), Idées, p. 64.

17. Plato, Soph. 254, and Aristotle, Met. 1003. b, state that ‘non-being is'.

18. All quotations whose source is not indicated are taken from this chapter.

19. M. Serres (1968), La communication (Paris: Minuit), pp. 41 et seq., 96.

20. L. Robin, op. cit., p. 287.

21. J.-P. Dumont (1986), Introduction à la méthode d'Aristote (Paris: Vrin), pp. 37-8.

22. Marx, op. cit., p. 886.

23. Hegel (1969), Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke in 20 Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), vol. 7, p. 24; French translation (1972), Principes de la philosophie du droit (Paris: Vrin), pp. 54-5; and §124, Rem. Further more the ‘distinctive nature' of the ‘idea' as he conceives it contains this new principle: dissolution of all fixed oppositions. In my view this ‘distinctive nature' corresponds to the ‘idea' as it is defined in the Parmenides and not in the Republic (cf. Donation mutuelle de sens …, op. cit. and Hegel's Theory of Know ledge and Method [in Greek] (Athens: Hestia, 2000), chap. 3. For this reason I think the French translator R. Derathé is wrong to supply ‘his idea (of the state)' (pp. 54-5).

24. E.R. Dodds (1959), The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press), chap. VII; French translation (1965, 2nd ed. 1977), Les Grecs et l'irrationnel (Paris, Flammarion), p. 207.

25. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, Werke, op. cit., vol. 6, p. 296; French translation (1981), Science de la logique (Paris: Aubier), p. 92. Grundlinien, op. cit., §§ 7-12.

26. On this point see M. Henry (1987), Marx (Paris: Gallimard); B. Bourgeois (1990), Philosophie et droits de l'homme (Paris: PUF), chap. 5; and earlier G. Simmel (1892), Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, French trans lation (1984), Problèmes de la philosophie de l'histoire (Paris: PUF), pp. 130-1.

27. Dodds, loc. cit.