Last week, I wrote about ‘the way of art’, the second post in a series exploring the question ‘what is philosophy’. The series follows a recently published academic article by philosopher Kuzin Vasily*. In case you missed it, I recommend you start with part one and part two before continuing with this post (it will make more sense that way). In this part three of the series, I begin talking about ‘the way of philosophy’. Next week’s post – part 4 – will close the series, so stay tuned.
As a brief reminder, according to Kuzin, philosophy is one of the ways people have developed to deal with life’s difficulties and alleviate suffering – along with religion, science, and art. He groups philosophy and art because, unlike science and religion, which are directed towards the problematic situation, philosophy and art focus their methods and attention inwards, affecting the person and their experience of the situation. While art helps us lessen suffering by shifting our attention from the problematic situation to something imaginatively created (imagination is its ‘way’), philosophy lets us deal with suffering by interpreting and understanding the problematic situation, giving it meaning.
If philosophy’s ‘way’ is understanding, philosophers’ work is searching for, discovering, creating, and interpreting meanings.
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Defining Philosophy: By Objects or Tasks?
The title of Kuzin’s paper is ‘What Is Philosophy’. This calls for a definition, but before defining something, it is helpful to consider how to approach the whole business of defining. Kuzin offers the following distinction: We can define philosophy based on its objects of study or based on its tasks and the results it aims to achieve. He suggests that the more appropriate method of determining philosophy is by focusing on its tasks and results. Interestingly, this approach brings philosophy closer to art than science, with which it is more customarily compared and contrasted. How so?
According to Kuzin, philosophy is not science, and its widespread comparison with science in search of its identity hinders us from understanding that identity. In part one of this series, I wrote about Kuzin’s definition method – ‘understanding by comparison’. Although all four ‘ways’ of alleviating suffering share this common ground and can be compared and understood in relation to each other, some comparisons can be more helpful than others. In particular, Kuzin thinks we are struggling to understand what philosophy is when comparing it to science because this is too narrow. He proposes a broader context of all the four ‘ways’ where philosophy is one of them and can be understood better in relation to the other three.
For Kuzin, science is best defined in terms of its objects of study. We see this when we think about various disciplines of science nowadays and their type of work: for instance, biology is the “study of living things and their vital processes; [it] deals with all the physicochemical aspects of life”; physics is “science that deals with the structure of matter and the interactions between the fundamental constituents of the observable universe”; geography is “the study of the diverse environments, places, and spaces of Earth’s surface and their interactions” (all definitions quoted from Britannica).
All these examples share the quality of focusing on specific objects of study. Each of the sciences gains its unique identity, our understanding of what it is, by means of delineating the field of what it studies. Thus, we know what geography is by looking at what objects of inquiry fall within its scope. By extension, we know what geography is not by recognising what questions or phenomena are outside of its remit. If you agree with this line of thought, you also understand science based on its objects of study. What about philosophy?
To stay with the same source, Britannica offers the following definition: “Philosophy, (from Greek, by way of Latin, philosophia, “love of wisdom”) the rational, abstract, and methodical consideration of reality as a whole or of fundamental dimensions of human existence and experience. Philosophical inquiry is a central element in the intellectual history of many civilisations.” The object of study is a lot less delineated here. In other words, to think of what philosophy is in terms of its objects of study – its scope – does not bring much clarity of understanding if that scope includes “reality as a whole” or “fundamental dimensions of human existence and experience”. Can you think of something that would fall outside this scope as easily as you could say what falls outside the remit of geography? I, for one, cannot.
Some might argue that this shows that philosophy is either too abstract, ill-defined or outdated as a discipline because we now have much better and more usefully defined sciences. A response could be trying to come up with a more precise definition of philosophy or saying that this way of thinking reveals the underlying position that takes science as the universal standard for anything that claims to deal with knowledge, understanding, and truth. This position is questionable not because we should doubt the merits of sciences but precisely because of its uncritical claim to exclusivity and universality in matters of truth. Therefore, an alternative path is to think of philosophy in terms of its tasks and results.
Kuzin provides examples of both approaches to understanding philosophy. For instance, in terms of objects of study, there is the study of the world as a whole (see Britannica’s definition above), the inquiry into the nature of being, and the logical analysis of language. I can add examples from the analytical tradition of philosophy that are structured as ‘philosophy of X’: philosophy of science, mind, religion, etc. Regarding its tasks and results, philosophy is explained as the search for and discovery of the meaning of life, investigation of the first and ultimate causes, acquiring the wisdom of life, etc. Kuzin favours this second approach to understanding what philosophy is because it does not restrict the scope of objects that fall within its remit, and, crucially, it does not limit our thinking only to the standards of science.
A surprising implication of this idea is that science and religion are closer to each other than to art or philosophy because they both are more readily understood in terms of the scope of their objects of exploration. Try a thought experiment to check your current assumptions about philosophy, art, science, and religion. Ask yourself: Would I say there is a question, a phenomenon, or an object of inquiry outside the scope of X, something that X does not and should not deal with (insert science, religion, art, or philosophy in place of X)? If yes, then I tend to think of that ‘way’ in terms of the objects of study that fall within its remit. If not, then my understanding of it may be more in terms of its tasks and the results I expect it to deliver.
For Kuzin, art and philosophy are similar: they can engage with any topic, object, or question. The difference is in the way they engage with them. Next week, I will talk more about the specific ‘way’ of philosophy. Stay tuned.
keep exploring!
P.S. Thank you for visiting me here on the humanfactor.blog! If you enjoyed this post and are interested in more philosophical content, I invite you to explore the blog, leave a comment, like, and subscribe to get notified of new posts.
*Reference and link to the article (original in Russian; abstract translated to English at the end of the paper): Kuzin V. What Is Philosophy?. Idei i idealy = Ideas and Ideals, 2023, vol. 15, iss. 1, pt 1, pp. 11‐34.
Featured image credit: my photo, taken inside the McEwan Hall, the University of Edinburgh, in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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2 thoughts on “What Is Philosophy – Part 3”