There is no philosophy! (en)

I study philosophy at a university and participate in a course on philosophical practice. Logically you can imagine that I am surrounded by much talk about what philosophy is and how it can taught. And to be honest, the more it is talked about and the more people seem to identify with ‘philosophy’ or their ‘philosophical practice’ the weirder this whole thing appears for me. The absurdity reached a peak in my last two-day training course on how to practice philosophy (e.g. with kids in school). The teacher insisted that philosophy is not just a theoretical endeavor of white, old men at university but can actually be applied to your everyday life and in your classroom (most attendants were teachers) and in your consulting practice, and so on and so forth. You simply have to create the right, ‘safe’ space for it and ask the right questions and you will be practicing philosophy, “yay” (the trainers really made exclamations like that). Maybe you can already imagine what was going on inside of me at this point. If not you will hear it now.

Apart from useless exclamations like ‘yay’, ‘wonderful’, or ‘it is so great that we are all here’ or stuff like this which is hard for me to bear, the whole idea that philosophy is such and such and especially the proposition that “you just have to do this and that and then you are doing philosophy” is to me, to put it mildly, unreflected. Some would say it is straight-on nonsense.

So to say it loud and clear: THERE IS NO PHILOSOPHY.

Now you will probably ask: “But how can there be no philosophy if you are studying it even yourself?”

Well, because if you look really closely, it is a scam. A scam that even most people inside of the philosophical institutions might not see, but that’s what it is. A scam, a trick.

There is no philosophy. Philosophy is not theoretical, and definitely it is not a particular practice that you can learn by asking the right sort of questions.

There is no philosophy because philosophy is just living. It is the expression of a curious, human life in the form of thought and speech and act. Nobody who has ever really embodied philosophy thinks about philosophy. You cannot think about doing philosophy and philosophize at the same time. The people who really do philosophize (e.g. children) might not even know the term for it let alone the proper way to do philosophy, THEY JUST DO IT. They are curious about themselves, about life, about the world so they ask questions, they investigate, they ponder. We might observe this from the outside and put it in the category of “the children are philosophizing” but this label is completely irrelevant to the internal process of the child.

The definition of philosophy is always an external process. On the inside, on the side of the ‘philosopher,’ there is no philosophy. He simply lives out his curiosity, his needs, and his impulses.

Therefore philosophy cannot be practiced. It is neither theory nor practice, it is just an external projection from an observer onto the individual. There are no philosophical questions and there is no way to learn to philosophize. Just as you cannot learn to love somebody by taking a course on “how to love someone”, in the same way, you cannot learn to be curious (aka philosophize) by taking a course on “how to be curious” (aka “how to philosophize”). Love, curiosity, and philosophy (if you want to say so) are your very nature. Loving is not created by behaving ‘lovingly’, not by following an external definition of how to love. Love is what happens to you if you let all this cognitive shit go and just be who you are. Same with curiosity. You cannot learn to be curious because YOU ARE CURIOUS. Trying to learn this is only the symptom of you believing that you have to do something to achieve this (thanks to our crazy culture). But you don’t. And you can’t.

Thus there is no way to learn philosophy and nothing you can do to philosophize. Just forget the whole thing altogether. Who cares about philosophy anyway? If anything, it is just made to seem important through your cultural conditioning, which is the very bullshit we’ll have to get rid of.

If you are curious about something, great! Follow your interests, your needs, and just live. That’s what it is about. That’s what Socrates did. He was simply curious to engage in conversation with people and asked his questions out of sincere interest.

If we try to ‘practice philosophy’ we do nothing other than play theater. Which is fine. But it is playing theater. And that is great if you are aware that you are playing theater. If you think you are doing the great stuff called philosophy but are playing theater actually, you’re fooling yourself.

You don’t need philosophy, the same way no child needs to go to school to be interested in life, to be willing to learn their first language and explore its surroundings. What we are touching upon here might be the biggest lie of our culture and one, if not the key reason, why we are so unhappy:

We are made to believe that that which we are by nature (loving, curious, cooperative, etc.) is not there from the beginning and that instead, it has to be created in us by force, either by external authority or by ourselves. Both are impossible. And because it is impossible we suffer as long as we do not realize this. We fight a battle that cannot be won because the battle itself is an illusion.

So, to come to an end. We see that we cannot learn philosophy. We cannot practice philosophy. Because we are human beings and by virtue of that we are philosophers!