Existentialist philosophers claim
that philosophy defies any definition since it doesn’t refer to any system of
thought but the process of thought itself. It is a mental activity and one of its
distinctive aspects is reflection. Yet, there is a common agreement among
philosophers that philosophy, or this so-called “reflective mental activity,”
is characterized by the following: critical dialogue, vision of the whole of
reality, and rationality. In this
article, let me elaborate these three characteristics of philosophy.
Critical
Dialogue
Philosophers
are critical. They ask questions because
some answers do not satisfy their queries.
In the classical philosophical tradition, a student can freely ask
questions to his/her master. The master,
on the other hand, does not impose his/her authority to stiff the wild
imagination of his/her student. There is
no room for censorship. The
master-student relationship inculcates the value of open dialogue –yet a sort
of dialogue which is critical.
Vision
of the whole
Philosophical
questioning is also characterized by having the vision of the whole reality
–that is, in the end of questioning, one is able to see a wider and deeper perspective in life and of things pertinent to
life. On the one hand, scientific
discipline tends to compartmentalize knowledge.
Philosophical discipline, on the other, tends to gain a synthetic view
of things one is at present investigating with.
Philosophy is a discipline that teaches to see not the individual
trees in the forest but the whole of the forest. This is something positive in
philosophizing. Yet it has a tendency to
be highly speculative. In most cases, a
philosophy espoused by one thinker ends up very metaphysical, in the sense that
it talks of something beyond our
human senses can see, like the theory of “ideal forms” of Plato that can only
be found in the World of Ideas.
Rationality
Lastly,
philosophizing is marked with rationality.
As mentioned above, it’s a mental activity, specifically reflection. Basically, its root and ground is in man’s claim that he is rational. Philosophical explanation, then, is devoid of
myths and religious beliefs, or is not based on a generally accepted knowledge
nor based on authority. Richard Rorty,
an American philosopher, rejects the idea of truth as “mirroring” of what is
believed as external objective reality.
With this idea of truth as “mirroring,” the act of philosophizing is
deadened since one has to follow the generally accepted definition of truth.
