What is Philosophy?

Quentin Lauer

1) The very title we give to an inquiry such as the present one carries with it the
temptation to begin with a definition of philosophy. What is philosophy? Or perhaps
better still, what do we mean when we use the term philosophy? In the pedagogy of the
physical sciences, after all, it has become in modern times relatively easy to define, prior
to the scientific investigation proper, the particular science with which one is concerned
or to which one wants to introduce students or readers> How does this involve the sort of
arbitrariness which attaches to the meaning an individual chooses to give to the terms he
or she uses in a very particular universe or discourse. Within the scientific community
there is, for the most part, general agreement as to what we are to mean by physics,
chemistry, biology, or any one of the mathematical sciences, e.g., geophysics, bio-
chemistry, micro-biology, or solid geometry.

2) The question, then, is whether the same is true with regard to philosophy. Can
it be defined in such a way that we can know ahead of time what it is then go about doing
it? I can still remember September 9, 1954, the first day of my teaching philosophy in
Fordham College, when I threw what turned out to be a bombshell in my class. In those
days, the study of philosophy did not begin at Fordham until Junior year, which meant
that each student had to accumulate in two years at least 24 credits in philosophy. I
reminded the students that in Freshman and Sophomore years thy had been given a
number of definitions of what they were going to e studying of poetry, rhetoric, drama,
mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology- but that I would not give them a definition of
philosophy, simply because it could not be done. The kind of reflection required for
defining philosophy is itself philosophical while the reflection needed for defining other
disciplines is not part and parcel of the discipline in question. We cannot define what
philosophy is before doing it; we can come to know what philosophy is only in doing it.
A child can learn to walk by walking or to swim by swimming, not by being told what
walking or swimming is. So too, we humans can learn to philosophize by philosophizing;
not by being told what philosophizing is. To say what is in itself a philosophical task, and
so is understanding what it is. Thus, to say antecedently what philosophy is runs the risk
of not being understood. Needless to say I did not get my point across on that very first
day. I took the students a good deal of time to come to grips with what I was trying to say.
Only gradually did thy come to the realization that only in philosophizing could they
learn what philosophizing is; to define philosophy is to do it, to find out what is it in that
doing.

3) Only gradually did they come to the realization that only in philosophizing
could they learn what philosophizing is; to define philosophy is to do it, to find out what
it is in that doing.
 4) Perhaps what we really should be saying is that to define philosophy is to do it
harm, the sort of harm that is not done to other disciplines when they are defined.
Philosophy is an essentially dynamic process, and to attempt to define it is to stop the
process, to suck the life out of it. To paraphrase a proverb we might speak of a definition
which kills vs. the spirit which vivifies. This, in turn, raises another problem which may
make our project even more difficult: we are, so to speak, at the beginning of a process,
and the process itself is not complete. Perhaps we have to simply make an act of faith and
move on.

5) We might illustrate the deadliness of definition by repeating a fanciful story

which Bergson relates about two marine biologists walking along a sandy beach. In the
course of their walk a small crab scampered across their path. The scientist said to the
other, There is a fine example of a marine crustacean of the section Brachyura within the
order of Decapoda, characterized by a hard carapace, having the small abdomen
concealed beneath it and having five pairs of legs. At this point, the crab stopped and
reared up on one of those pairs of legs. I am not, he said, Im me! The story is
fanciful but the point is not: there has to be limit to abstract classification.

6) If one were to give a strictly biological definition of the species human, one
would be saying practically nothing about what it is to be authentically human. It is for
this reason that the history of philosophy is so important in a way that is not true of other
disciplines. It may be that what physicists did in the past ; in this sense there is a history
of physics, too. It is not clear, however, that what they do today is dependent on their
knowing what physicists did in the past, although they might be more scientific if they did
know. For philosophers, on the other hand, it is imperative that they know what
philosophers did (said) in the past; what they did is still with us in what they said, and to
fail to know what they said in the past is to be cut off from the living reality which is
philosophy, whose coming to be is part and parcel of its being; the latter is inseparable
from the former. There is a living line of philosophers in the West alone, stretching back
two and a half millennia, who still speak to us a language we can understand, because
that language belongs to our history.

7) This brings us another question which we can answer only with difficulty. How
much are we influenced in our thinking by the thinking of others parents, teachers,
authors, friends, peer groups, celebrities without our being aware of it? Even our
philosophical thinking is not entirely our own, which is one reason for insisting on the
temporal dimensions of patterns of thought. It is not without significance, after all, that
ancient thinkers- and artists- still speak to us intelligibly. Philosophy is constantly on the
move, and what is, is inseparable from its movement. There is an intrinsic growth of the
very idea of philosophy and yet there is always a temptation for some to look upon
philosophy as a specialized method - under the control, at present, of those who have
secured a doctoral degree, preferably at a prestigious Anglo-Saxon or an Ivy League
university. Method in this sense is so universalized that no matter what one I
investigating philosophically, be it morality, religion, law, science, art, the cosmos, being,
suffering, or death, the method will be one and the same, allowing its aficionados to
say with certainty whether those who do not use it are engaged in philosophical inquiry,
and at the same time allowing them to claim that they engage in a great variety of
philosophical pursuits. When we speak, as some of us do, of the desirability of such
particularism.

8) There are, of course, those who take a very cavalier attitude toward
philosophers of the past, treating them as though they were beyond the pale, like the
young graduate student in a prestigious American university who boasted that he had
never read a word of A.N. Whitehead, or the logician who speaks of Aristotle as
preanalytic and therefore prephilosophical. There does seem to be a human tendency
in many walks of life, to form an arbitrary establishment, which arrogates to itself the
right to look upon those who do not agree with them as simply not belonging. These, it
would seem, have succumbed to the temptation to define philosophy in such a way as to
be quite certain what is and what is not to be included in the ranks. In reality, however, if
philosophy has a history it is only because there have been philosophers who stand, as it
were, as milestones along the path of human thought, revealing not only the distance that
thought has traveled but also the direction in which it is traveling.

9) It should be noted, however, that, although the name philosophy has been
reserved for that which is pre-eminently a rational discipline, and although history has
accorded the title philosopher only to those who have contributed to the rational
elaboration of human experience, it is also true that the greatness of the great
philosophers who make philosophys history does not rest solely on the inner
consistency or on the convincing power of such rational elaborations. Rather their
greatness consists (as does that of the great artist or great religious o scientific genius) in
the quality of their experience along with its interpretation i.e., what their experience
tells them about what they experience, in the capacity of this experience to reveal in a
new way the possibilities of human experience, and to communicate this. There should be
no doubt in anyones mind that the philosophical genius of Aristotle far exceeds that of
those who charge him with being pre-philosophical. The philosophers formulations of
that experience, then, are precisely the provisional in his or her contribution, even though
those formulations do serve to point up the significance of the experience which the
philosopher has elaborated and through which he or she leaves a mark on the experience
of those who come later. The formulations which the philosophers have bequeathed to us
do provide the avenue of access to their thought. Although we cannot minimize our
admiration for the rational structures they have bequeathed to us do provide the avenue of
access to their thought. Although we cannot minimize our admiration for the rational
structures that they have bequeathed to us, the influence of a Plato or an Aristotle, a Kant
or a Hegel, even of a Whitehead or a Dewey, is the result not of the perfection of these
structures but of the profundity of an experience which is a combination of philosophical
genius and hard work has made possible and which lucidity and power of their
elaboration have enabled them to communicate. The great philosophers experience, in its
turn, is not significant simply because it is experience as though experience infallibly
delivered insight into the real but because it is the experience of genius, a sort of
witness to the capacity of human experience at its best.

10) In the same year 1954 that I mentioned before, when I had returned to
America after five years in France and Germany, where I had been relatively out of touch
with what was going on in American universities, I attended my first meeting of the
Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, held during the Christmas
break at Brown University. By the time I had registered the sessions were about to begin,
and I had to take a quick look at the program to see what might be interesting, I sported a
session entitled, The Meaning of Negative Existential Statements, which tricked me
into thinking that I might find something familial and illuminating in that age of
existentialism. What I did find was a group of grown men and women (mostly men
back then) who spent two solid hours discussing the proposition, There is no Santa
Claus. I had then, and I have now, serious misgivings as to whether I could engage in
such a discussion and think that I was philosophizing, But I cannot dispute the right of
others to do that sort of thing and think they are philosophizing so long as they do not
magisterially tell me that what I do is not philosophy. I later found out that was precisely
what they were telling me. It was, incidentally, curious that the only example of a
negative existential statement they appealed to me There is no Santa Claus, they did
not seem to be interested in, for example, there are no dinosaurs apparently, no
longer did not count as an existential quantifier in the philosophical vocabulary of
these scholars. What was particularly striking about the whole discussion was that no one
seemed interested in whether the statement was true or not only in what kind of
statement it was, nor were they concerned with how the question differed from the one
about the dinosaurs. It is not without significance also that no one took the trouble to
consider what the statement, there is no Santa Claus might possibly mean, i.e., there is
in that statement an important symbol of love and generosity.

11) To get back to the question of what philosophical thinking is all about, we
might take a quasi-historical approach and say that philosophy began when human beings
first sought to explain rationally what had previously been explained by an appeal to
authority, to myth, to tradition, or simply to common opinion. By this criterion, then,
philosophy is not so much a discipline, a method, or a body of knowledge; it is rather an
attitude which human beings bring with them in trying to come to terms with the reality
in the midst of which they live. This attitude we might call a determination to know
reality (as opposed to merely opining or believing), an attitude which is philosophical,
even when, as in the case of skepticism, it results in the conviction that reality cannot be
known if, indeed, anyone has ever consistently held such a position, which logically
contradicts itself (claiming to know that reality cannot be known) and existentially cannot
be lived with, even though there may be no way of proving logically that reason can
come to terms with reality as it is. There is, however, not only a legitimate but even a
necessary skepticism in philosophy, a skepticism which forbids us to think that we have
nailed philosophy down in such a way that we not only inconvertibly what philosophy is
but also what philosophical thinking knows.

12) In this connection it is doubtful whether the term know can have one single
meaning or definition. There are those who take know as confined to what we can
prove with an impeccable logic which yields absolute certainty. This sort of attitude is the
road to non-viable skepticism, which can be made viable if certainties (subjective) are set
over-against each other, so that out of their opposition truth may emerge (the dialogue of
dialectic). Do I know that there is a country named Italy? Yes, I have been there. Do I
know that in Italy there is an ancient town called Bobbio? Strictly speaking no, I believe
what people tell me when they say there is. But I know it is reasonable to believe what
people say especially if they come from Bobbio. The point is that we use the term
know justifiably if it satisfies the demands of the context in which it is used. It is
unfortunate, of course, that the expression you know has so pervaded our speech that
we have deprived it of any meaning whatever. I had always prided myself with being one
who did not surrender to the barbarism of reducing to know to meaninglessness, until
one year my students unbeknownst to me, taped my philosophy course and at the end of
the semester made me a gift of a typewritten copy of the tapes. I was utterly amazed at
the number of times I said you know in that course! I trust that the lesson has struck
with me and that I do not do it any more, but perhaps another tape is in order.

13) When all this has been said and we are still left with a problem. We do use the
terms philosophy and philosopher; to what do these terms refer? Do they have
unified meanings? Are there or have there been people whom we legitimately call
philosophers, and is what they do (did) legitimately called philosophy? We must
remember, of course, that we can and do use the terms metaphorically. There are those
who in the past were called philosophers, like Archimedes or Isaac Newton, who are not
today called that. There are those who like Plato have always been looked upon as
philosophers great philosophers but who could also be called great poets or
dramatists. There is also a sense in which Sophocles or Shakespeare can legitimately be
called philosophers. I myself have recently published a book entitled G. K. Chesterton:
Philosopher without Portfolio. By no stretch of the imagination could call Chesterton a
professional philosopher, and yet his writings are replete with what has to be called
philosophical wisdom.

14) Is there some sort of unity to the concept philosophy which justifies using
the term without engaging in a nominalistic endeavor to put thinkers and their thought
under one blanket shading? Can it be that philosophy is just a label or some sort of at
least common denominator? If the unity in question is that of a universal class of which
particular philosophies are instantiations, then a definition is needed, as is the case with
any class concept, as is, perhaps, the case in many histories of philosophy. Or, perhaps,
the unity is that of a convention, what we agree to call philosophy, in which case no
definition is needed, only a description of the agreement. Better still, perhaps, we can
refer to the unity of philosophy as that of an ongoing process, in which particular
philosophies are moments, which is to say dynamically interrelated parts, constituting a
whole which is ever progressing.

15) Of philosophy is this sense no definition is possible, because so understood

philosophy is constantly in the process of becoming what it is to be. One is reminded of
Platos promise to compose three dialogues presenting three types of thinkers, The
Sophist, The Statesman, The philosopher. Why did he never get around to actually
composing the third dialogue? Did he find it impossible? Did he find that having
composed The Statesman he no longer had to describe the philosopher? Or did he,
perhaps, realize that everything he wrote could be put together and called The
Philosopher? In this connection it is interesting to note that Plato asks far more questions
than he gives answers to, precisely because genuinely philosophical questions do not
have definitive answers; they continue to need to be asked, and philosophy is perennial
because it keeps asking the questions, thus throwing light on both the questions and the
varying answers to them. It is, perhaps, for this reason that A.N. Whitehead can call the
history of philosophy a series of footnotes to Plato.

15) One has to wonder how it can be that there exists a whole school of Plato
interpretation whose members spend a great deal of their time pointing out how faulty
Platos logic is, due presumably to their conviction that there is only one logic, i.e., the
logic of empirical science which must also be the logic of philosophy or, perhaps, that
this logic is to be looked upon as the whole of philosophy, i.e., all previous endeavors
have been merely prephilosophical. There is always the danger that a logic which is
valid for only a part of reality will be taken to be adequate to the whole of reality or,
perhaps, that what is only a part of reality, i.e., its physical part, will be taken to be the
only reality there is.

16) It is not without significance, incidentally, that there is among historians of

philosophy substantial agreement not only as to what thinkers are to be included among
those we are willing to call philosophical. There are, of course, those who think that
neither of these issues makes any difference, but the likelihood that the opinions of those
who think this way will make much of a splash is minimal.

17) If we were to pinpoint what is the issue we might say very simply that
philosophy is what philosophers have been doing for to and a half millennia, a statement
that might well raise more questions than it answers, but it would have at least the
advantage of distinguishing what philosophers do from what scientists, artists,
mathematicians, logicians, or even historians do. Philosophy is, so to speak, what is left
over when all the other thinkers have done what they have to do; it is a dimension which
they as specialists simply do not reach nor need to reach, although it could well be that
they are obligated as responsible human beings to reach out for this further dimension.
We can, after all, readily see the differences in the contributions of a Plato, a Sophocles,
an Archimedes, of Aquinas, Dante, or Copernicus, of Hegel, Goethe, or Einstein and we
might, while we are at it, see that all these contributions complement each other, without
being confused with each other, as spiritual human activities.

18) It may be, of course, that we are all in some sense philosophers, but it is not
likely to be rude that we all ask these questions explicitly or in a disciplined way nor do
we all give rationally thought-out answers to the questions asked. I am reminded of a
recent radio broadcast in which Charles Osgood speaks of an Englishman he did not
give his name who, having secured a doctorate in philosophy, was unable to secure a
teaching position. To support himself, he took a job as the barroom philosopher in a
pub, where he proceeded to fascinate his customers with his philosophical discussions.
He became increasingly popular and has drawn great crowds in a pub.

19) There are a great many things in life that we simply take for granted; strictly
speaking a philosopher should take nothing for granted. By this standard, then,
philosophy is not a discipline, a method, or a body of knowledge. It is more like a way of
life, an attitude that human beings bring with them in approaching reality both the
reality they themselves are and the reality in the midst of which hey live. It is not, then, a
set of answers to a set of questions; rather it is a habit of responsible thinking in the
situations life presents, not an antecedent analysis of a list of hypothetical situations
except, perhaps, in ethics, where the hypothetical can serve to illustrate the derivation of
moral principles or their application to moral problems. We can, after all, speak of moral
obligations even where no one violates them.

20) What perhaps needs to be said is that philosophy is not to be looked on as one
academic discipline to be included among other disciplines in a university if indeed
there are not universities where some academicians are convinced that philosophy need
not be included at all. For the authentic philosopher the true humanist philosophy is
a genuine human commitment to which every energy of the philosopher is dedicated, a
commitment to seeking a comprehension of what it is to be human and to holding up
before other human beings the image thus comprehended so that they might discover
whether they find themselves mirrored there. Nor is there any doubt that the
philosophers task is not that of speaking or writing about philosophy however
important it may be to comprehend philosophys history philosophys task an only be to
think philosophically, which may well demand a knowledge of how others have thought.
This cannot mean that we are to agree with every philosopher even the great this is
impossible because they disagree with each other. We do not even need to agree wholly
with any one philosopher philosophy as dedicated quest for truth must continue to
grow, and grow it will if diverse interpretations confront each other harmoniously.

21) Here it is that something should be said about the relation of thought and
experience. Our first contact with what we call reality whether it be the reality of
ourselves or the reality of what is other than ourselves is made available to us in sense
experience, but neither thought nor knowledge nor reality are limited to a content which
is initially presented in sense experience. Thinking itself is a form of experience which
cannot be reduced to the sensible, even though it may be triggered by sense experience
which cannot have as its object the non-sensible. To take but some obvious examples: we
can think of historical events and know what their causes were without ever having had
direct experience of these events, which occurred before we even existed, let alone were
capable of experiencing; we can know the reasonableness of the scientific explanation fo
what we experience, even though the explanation is not contained in the experience
alone; we can know the conditions in space, time, and causality for the very possibility
of experience, even though possibility is not itself an object of experience; we can
know the significance of actual experience (e.g., values) even though significance carries
us beyond what is actually experienced.

22) Even these very few examples indicate that there is a relationship between
experience and the thought that interprets it which takes us well beyond the limits of what
we experience unless it may be that we should expand the very concept of experience
to go far beyond what our senses make available to us. I am thinking here of what we can
reasonably call radical empiricism, where ideas are part and parcel of experience and
reasoning is seen as a form of experience. Seeing experience in this way is based on the
conviction that human knowing, willing, valuing, appreciating, creating, responding, are
all related to experiencing, are spiritual activities revealing the true nature of the human
which, to sue the language of Hegel, is incarnate spirit, the finite image of infinite Spirit.
There is, it would seem, no room for doubt that s subject which engages in an activity
which is spiritual is itself a spiritual subject.

23) In this context, then, philosophy becomes an overarching rational reflection

on experience, progressively revealing more and more of what experience implies,
growing itself as experience grows, expands as thinking affects the very way we
experience. Experience is, after all, a process of learning how to experience, guiding the
experience itself. Thinking not only interprets experience; it gradually teaches us how to
experience, and learning how to experience is a complex process. How do we, after all,
experience events, documents, fossils? How are we helped by experts to interpret our
own experiences? I am reminded here of an event which happened to a colleague of mine
in the philosophy department at Fordham. She is a superb teacher and scholar and she
also shares with her husband a fascinating hobby of local archaeology in the Upper
Delaware Valley in New York State. Among other things, they have been able to identify
artifacts found in this region which date back to 4300 B.C. About four years ago they ere
engaged in a dig under a barn which had collapsed. In the course of their digging they
uncovered a few bones which they were unable to identify. In high hopes of having made
a significant finding they carefully packed the bones in cotton and brought them to the
Museum of Natural History in New York City to learn if the bones could be identified
and dated. Three weeks later they received a letter saying that the bones were those of a
female donkey which had died in approximately 1860. It was still worth the effort! It
might, of course, be difficult to show how this experience could possibly claim to be
philosophical, but there seems, at least, to be no doubt that it could be and was an
occasion o philosophical reflection on, for example, the fallibility of human expectations,
on the very human temptation to want something to be true, even when the grounds for
thinking that it is are inadequate.

24) The same could be said of any number of experiences had by specialists in
one field or another. When, for example, is an event conceived of as historical? Who is to
say? Suppose, let us say, Chancellor Bismarck had a breakfast of bacon and eggs on
September 29, 1869. Suppose, in addition, that both I and an historian know this fact. No
amount of reflection on my part can turn this one breakfast into an historical event. If, on
the other hand, the historian knows also that the bacon was rancid and that Bismarck
became so nauseous that he was unable to sign a peace treaty with France, and that a
subsequent event caused him to refuse to sign, could we not then say that Bismarcks
breakfast of rancid Bacon was an historical event, one which influenced all subsequent
history in Western Europe? This historian, of course, does not have to be a philosopher,
but there is little doubt in my mind that, in reflecting the way he does, he can make a
contribution to philosophical inquiry into the meaning of experience.

25) From this point of view, then, we can say that all of us in one way or another
reflect philosophically on our experiences, thus engaging in a search for the meaning of
those experiences. Those whom we designate as philosophers or, perhaps, great
philosophers are those who, down through the ages, effect the progressive synthesis of
human thought and experience, thus contributing to the total fund of both thought and
experience which is our heritage, and which we in turn can enrich both appropriating it
(making it our own property) and carrying it further along its way which is a collective
voyage of discovery, which collective voyage of discovery is an ideal antidote to arrogant
individualism. The experience, then, of truly philosophizing is not some least common
denominator on which one puts the common tag experience; it is a very special and
very serious fullness of life, a profound experience of what in this fullness of life is in
question, involving the seriousness of plumbing conceptually the depths of experience.

26) Experience, it should be pointed out, is inseparable from the decision as to

how one experiences and from the system of relevances within which experience takes on
meaning. Neither is completely free, in the sense of being arbitrary; neither is completely
determined, in the sense of being inscribed in a past over which one has no control; both
are historical, in the sense that they can be understood only in the framework o significant
and coherent antecedents. It is true that not only each individual grows with experience in
such a way that the individual experiences in a certain way today as a result of having
experienced yesterday but also the whole human community grows along with the
growing experience for its members. This is not to say, of course, that all share equally in
this growing experience, but there is a very important sense in which the experience of
each is the experience of all, and the experience of all is the experience of each. It is
doubtful whether, apart from history in the fullest sense on the macrocosmic scale the
discussion of experience can get beyond a kind of generalizing of what is peculiar to the
one experiencing, which may to some extent be justified but can run the risk of being
arbitrary.

27) In all of this what is in question is not the acquisition of knowledge but rather
learning to use that acquired knowledge in the service of life. It is for this reason that
Plato saw as the most significant of all ideas the idea of the Good and as the most
important of human virtues the Sophia (wisdom) of which philosophy is the love a love
which is inseparable from the love of the Good, or of goodness, in ourselves and in
others. This last insight has to make us wonder if our experience or way of experiencing
can be the same before and after profound philosophical reflection and, above all, after
having been exposed to and having pondered profoundly on the great philosophers whose
greatness, as we have seen, is due not only to the profundity of their articulation and
formulation of their experience but also, and even more, to the profundity of their
experience itself. I mentioned before that school of Plato interpretation which survives by
taking potshots at Platos logic and, in so doing, completely misses Platos extraordinary
vision of reality. One has to wonder if those who thus miss the true greatness of Plato can
themselves grow as a result of reading Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel,
Husserl, Whitehead or do they care?

28) Having said this much we are here, however, faced with a tremendous
paradox which must be resolved before we can go on. Because conceptual thought can
never be completely adequate to experience in that broader sense which embraces not
only sense experience and consequent rational conceptualization but also emotional and
voluntary response, vision, and resolve, religious and cultural demands, the living of
selfhood, both ones own and that of others no on system of thought is ever adequate to
the elaboration and articulation of experience. We have to retain an awareness of the
complementarity of systems and of the unending search for more and more adequate
formulation. It is true, of course, but only to a limited extent, of science in its search for
adequate formulation of its own findings; it is essential to science that it acknowledge the
corrigibility of its conclusions; its history shows that abundantly.

29) Is philosophical inquiry, perhaps, a never-ending search for more adequate

metaphors to convey rational thought? It may be that demythologization is an
important function of philosophical inquiry, but along with Emil Fackenheim ( an
outstanding contemporary Jewish philosopher, in a distinguished address to the Catholic
Philosophical Society of America) we might say that demythologization inevitably
calls for remythologization. Philosophy, then, is an endless search, and the mileposts
in this search are the great philosophers, without whose help we shall get nowhere. This,
in turn, leads to another question: is philosophical inquiry practical? To this the answer
must be, if the goal of the inquiry is knowing and knowing only, no; if as a result of
philosophical inquiry we become truly more truly human, more truly aware of what the
demands of being human are, the answer is yes witness Socrates.

30) There is an important sense, then, in which we can look upon the life of the
human community as an ongoing unified process, the consciousness of which is
manifested in philosophical thought chiefly that of the great milestones in the process,
those we call the philosophers who make philosophys history, but also in the thought of
those whose thinking is but a reflection of the thinking of the great for example,
commentators, teachers. In this sense, philosophy is time bound, as is the life of the
human spirit. The philosophical thought, then, of a given time in history, will be the
philosophical spirit manifesting itself at that time in history, so much so that we can say
that philosophy which is not timely is not really philosophy; the great philosophers
are timelessly timely! Nor is the judgment about the timeliness of a philosophy simply an
arbitrary one even though, as it must be admitted, the contemporaries of an individual
philosopher have rarely, if ever, been equipped to make the judgment as to the timeliness
(or greatness) of the philosophers philosophizing; a certain temporal distance seems
necessary to making that judgment like making the judgment of timeliness-greatness in
regard to artists and their work. One always has to keep ones fingers crossed as to the
greatness of contemporary philosophers and artists and as to the validity of popular
evaluation of their work.

31)Perhaps here too insight is required, insight into what we might call the
essential development of philosophical reflection. It may be difficult to conceive that
reason in its successive manifestations is all that rational, but it should not be too difficult
to recognize that the history of philosophy is not simply the record of thought (and
writing) of those who have, rightly or wrongly, been classed as philosophers. Even in
the case of those who belong indisputably in the ranks of the great it should be possible
to distinguish the philosophical from the nonphilosophical the timely from the untimely
in their thinking. Philosophers are not authorities in the sense that what they say or
said- is to be accepted uncritically by those ho listen and read. Nothing could be more
unphilosophical than that unless it be the negative criticism of them for not doing what
they did not intend to do or what the historical time did not demand that they do. It
would, for example, be thoroughly unreasonable to demand of Aristotle that he articulate
the law of gravity or discuss the possibility of non-Euclidean geometry. Perhaps what is
required is not so much that we stand off and gaze critically at what they have done as it
is to do what they did and see what happens. If, in fact, we do what they did, it is
inevitable that we will advance beyond what they did and thus, corporately at least, will
contribute to philosophical inquiry.