Three Definitions of Philosophy

I set out here to lay down a proper way of defining what it is that is the discipline of philosophy, in opposition to the wrong definitions thereof that are propagated. I lay out three different definitions; these are in my view compatible in one way or another, or form a single unity or unity-of-unities of contradicting parts, and all are congruent with my general philosophical project– and that of the communist movement.

Before setting out to define and describe philosophy, which is after all a particular set or category or kind of ideas, we must make a philosophical statement on the nature of ideas. Ideas are not perfect and ethereal Platonic forms dwelling in a netherworld of pure ideality; they are qualities of material objects (brains, books, computers) and products of material incidents/interactions between material objects. As such they are, all of them, stamped with the character of their context– which must be a social context, as thinking is a social activity. And so whatever idea is produced by a person, it is marked with the society and political-economic system within which they live, and with the hallmarks of their own class position and outlook in that system. Every political-economic idea is a philosophical idea and every philosophical idea is a political-economic one. Do not be deceived! If a philosopher says their idea or ideology is above political-economy, this only means they are passively taking the dominant view of the class in the ruling position, instead of actively negating it and taking up that of the oppressed class in rebellion. I am not ashamed of being biased in my philosophizing; I am proudly and correctly biased toward the true and correct views that come from taking up the viewpoint of the struggling proletariat and the ideology of their liberation, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, with its philosophical system of Dialectical Materialism.

1. Philosophy is that area of inquiry which seeks to answer, by whatever means, those questions which are intrinsically prompted by the existence of sapient persons.

These questions include: What do we know? How do we know the things we know, and how can we be sure we are right about them? What are our minds, and why are we conscious persons as we feel ourselves to be? How should we behave? We are social creatures, but how should we arrange our societies? Why are they arranged the way they are now, and what other ways could they be? We feel ourselves to exist, but what does it mean for us or for anything to exist? What other things around us might be persons in the same way that we are? What is the nature of ourselves and of the other things we interact with– if other things are not like us, how so not? Et cetera.

Questions of this kind are philosophical questions, and philosophy is the pursuit of answers to philosophical questions. One develops or subscribes to a framework of answers to them or methods of answering them by which one understands the world, and this is an ideology. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, for instance, is a scientific ideology offering largely correct methods for achieving answers to many of these questions. We might say that a dogmatic ideology tends toward flat answers, while a scientific one tends toward methods for achieving answers. Because philosophical questions are questions directly prompted by and immediately relevant to all intelligent life, philosophy is different from other sciences or inquiries in that everyone on some level thinks about and tries to answer philosophical questions, even if they do a bad job. It is factually true that everyone is a philosopher, though some people are very unskilled philosophers{1}– everyone thinks they know things (or don’t), has a concept of reality, has a view of what they should ethically do, etc.; everyone has an ideology. Philosophy is different in this way from something like oncology or geology or physics, which only some people choose to do. We all must do philosophy. Our philosophy-doing is prompted by our experiences of interaction in the world, from which we draw perceptual knowledge; in our rational philosophizing we refine this into more universal theoretical knowledge or thought that helps us to understand our experiences further (see On Practice, Mao Tse Tung, the finest essay I know of on the Dialectical Materialist epistemology/theory of knowledge, and paired nicely with his On Contradiction on its matching ontology/theory of being (for Dialectical Materialism is both)).

2. Philosophy is effort to understand and contextualize facts in conjunction with one another.

If other means and forms and methods of inquiry create facts (units of knowledge about the world), philosophical inquiry renders facts about facts, or systems in which facts can be understood and contextualized in connection with one another to create a weltanschauung of understanding of the [material] world in total. If the senses tell us we find ourselves in a universe, we find what it means for this universe to exist by philosophy (ontology). If the impulses tell us we can act, we find what acts we should and should not do by philosophy (ethics). We are philosophizing when we put facts in an order and try to establish the common facts-about-facts that enable us to understand the whole world and the ways we understand it. Other forms of inquiry tell us what there is and some information about it– geology that there are stones and that they arise in three categories, neurology that there is a brain and its functioning is electrochemical, etc. Philosophical inquiry renders unto this etiologies (answers to where these states of being come from) and teleologies (answers to what purposes or functions objects and incidents are driven towards){2}; philosophy conceives of the “shape” which incidents, or interactions between objects in the world, take (which is of course most accurately described dialectically-materially). Thus it is possible to speak of a “philosophy of x” for all the other sciences– of “philosophy of science”; of “philosophy of history” or of historiography, in drawing up the shape of the material processes of historical progression (the correct theory of which is Historical Materialism, the historiographic application of Dialectical Materialism); of “philosophy of genomics,” on which Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther has given interesting lectures; etc. Some (Hawking is one) may opine that philosophy today is useless or obsolete at this because the various sciences are now capable of giving this kind of order to their own facts– most often, this is said about physics. My reply to this would be to suggest that these scientists, whether they know it or not, are in fact departing from their pure physics and doing philosophy, philosophy inspired by their physics– and they would do it more adroitly if they acknowledged this to be what they are doing. Badiou and Althusser have spoken of philosophy as defined by the drawing of lines of demarcation or delineation in matters of theory. They are perhaps getting at the definition I describe, though their own philosophy is largely a muddle. Philosophy defines and delineates the significance of facts, and does so within frameworks– ideologies. These can be broadly sorted into the categories of either ontological idealism or materialism (the two basic trends in philosophy, as Engels said), and more narrowly described by specific names like structuralism, post-structuralism, Charvaka, Platonism, Stoicism, pragmatism, anti-realism, Speculative Realism, Dialectical Materialism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, etc. Each ideology is the product of the material circumstances of its originators, derived from their experience of interactions and incidents of objects in the material universe. Some are wrong, some correct.

3. Philosophy is axiomatic guidance of action.

Reactionary idealists have tried to separate philosophy from material action– I was once told (really!) by an assistant professor in a university’s philosophy department that “we just think here, we don’t do anything.” Yet we know it must really exist in our material world and not only in Plato’s magic palace of stagnant imaginary forms, for here we are observing it with our material senses and thinking about it with the neurochemical mechanisms of our material brains– so it must do something, must be in some way involved in the sea of incidents/interactions of contradiction and struggle and revolutionary change, of dialectics, between objects and incidents that is the universe.

Indeed, in reality, philosophy arises from the dialectically-described interaction of struggle between ourselves and our environment, and from our forging through further struggle within our mind of theoretical axioms based on knowledge from these experiences, which we then test and refine by applying them to further experience of practice in the material world beyond ourselves (see, again, Mao’s On Practice). While we believe philosophy to be a thing apart from ordinary life, it is impotent and useless. We must understand the use-value of philosophical analysis of our circumstances for every single person, and how it can guide us in improving our lot. Only by understanding philosophy as a material occurrence in the real material universe, which helps us understand and more importantly change our circumstances therein, can we make it really serve humanity, and especially the downtrodden toilers of the world in their quest for liberation. It is exactly as Marx said in his “Theses on Feuerbach,” notes toward the Critique of the German Ideology in which he and Engels exploded idealism forever: “the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it!”