Philosophical Phoundations

So. I was thinking about it a little bit the other day during my Spanish Culture class when we were learning about Dalí, a famous Spanish surrealist. In the handout that we received, the professor said that Dalí “discovered” some artistic school of thought or style. I thought it was funny wording, but then I got to thinking about what this implied. This means that everything is already in the world and that we just have to discover it, which means that nothing can be our own. There is nothing in the world that we can claim we created or invented. It was there the whole time for all of us to see, and you just so happen to be the one to stumble upon it and reveal it to the rest of the world. It therefore seems that nothing can be created in the world. Interesting.

I have no idea how I got to the next topic, but then I started thinking about how everything seems to have some philosophy. Literally everything. Philosophy permeates to the core of our world. I really got to thinking and stretching this idea a lot, and I came to some interesting points of discussion. So long as you accept my idea that philosophy underlies all of our existence, the question is is there anything before philosophy?

I suppose first I should back up and provide a rough definition of what I am meaning here by philosophy. What philosophy and philosophical ideas and language gives us is a vocabulary through which we can express what we experience. Philosophy is a certain way of talking about the world. So when you say that killing is morally wrong, there is some philosophical foundation to this claim. The case is the same for virtually anything we say about anything. So if we accept the idea that philosophy's job in the world is to help us explain the world and ultimately understand it, then everything is philosophical. As I am writing this, it seems that this idea is really obvious and I should probably not be spending my afternoon writing about it, but maybe it is not as obvious as I think it is.

It seems that in the modern world we tend to think that philosophy is a useless enterprise and generally toss it to the side, saying that there are more important things than philosophy. Already we have a general conception of what philosophy is and we have deemed it to be useless, or at least not as useful as other enterprises in life. Maybe it will help to think about this in terms of academic majors or studies. We have separate departments in schools (English, Spanish, History, Sociology, Art, Music, and Philosophy) which means we think that they are fundamentally different areas of study. When someone studies English, they are not studying philosophy, and if they want to study philosophy, they ought to go to that department.

So we have separated and divorced all academic pursuits from others, which blinds us from the fact that philosophy serves as a basis for everything. In some areas it is relatively easy to see. For example, there are philosophical traditions (and the traditions that they come from) that serve as their own foundation. Similarly, religion is pretty philosophically based as well, even if you think otherwise. There is no doubt that philosophy has a lot of influence in religion, especially in ethics, cosmologies, cosmogonies, and metaphysics.

After I thought about these two areas, I thought about what other academic areas could be philosophical. Since I started this with art, I can talk about how art is philosophical as well, which is an area that is perhaps not as overtly philosophical as the other areas. Whenever someone paints something, they generally are considered to be part of a school of thinking within the discipline of art. There are some of these areas that clearly have a philosophy when they paint. Impressionism, for example, has general characteristics that they adhere to when they paint. Cubism has some rules as well, as they try to depict the world in terms of cubes and geometric shapes. Even Dalí and surrealism has some rules, though rules that seem to have lots of inherent difficulties and inconsistencies. Surrealism says that there should be no rules, that they should break the rules of classical art and paint what they want, without there needing to be some reason or meaning to the piece. However, each and every artist is painting with a specific set of rules or guidelines in mind.

Something that one would say is far from philosophy is mathematics or any of the sciences. Typically people like to think of these as entirely distinct from philosophy, perhaps even transcending it. However, I would like to argue that even mathematics is philosophical. There are certain assumptions about the world that one must accept if one wishes to engage in mathematics. One must accept the concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. You might argue that concepts are difficult to argue against since they can be demonstrated and proved so easily. This is definitely much tougher to get over, but it is not insurmountable, but we will hurdle over that later. First, sciences. I think the same could be said about science, that there are certain principles that must be accepted before doing science. One of these, which mathematics also adheres to, is empiricism. Who says that empiricism is the best and most accurate method? There are a lot of strong arguments, most which I tend to agree with, that state that empiricism is the closest thing we have to getting in touch with how things really are, but there are a lot of philosophical assumptions embedded in empiricism and science/mathematics.

This lead me to think about what, if anything, is prior to philosophy. I briefly considered language. I thought that language was totally unphilosophical and therefore was something that did not have a philosophical foundation. However, upon further reflection, I thought about how words try to convey reality to the rest of us. That is to say, that every word is philosophically charged. Every utterance, even onomatopoeias, are representative of the world and therefore they tell us something about how we view the world. If we first consider onomatopoeias, such as “boom,” “crash,” “clack,” “pow,” “quack,” “woof,” etc, we find that even though they are representative of sounds and are not words with a linguistic history they still tell us how we experience the world. They tell us that when we hear a dog bark it phonetically sounds like “woof.” When we say a word that has more linguistic history, such as the word auditorium, it tells us something about the function of that word. It comes from the Latin word “audire” which means to hear, and so what do you do in an auditorium? Hear. Or the word benevolent, which comes from two different Latin words: “bene,” meaning well, and “volent,” meaning they may be wished. What does benevolent mean? Well-wishing. Incredible, huh?

However, language is something that is philosophical in and of it self, as when we say auditorium we are labeling a certain thing that we associate with a certain experience. Maybe this does not make sense, and this post is getting incredibly long, so I will cut it short here and get to the point of all of this. First, I think that it is incredible to consider everything as being philosophically charged and nothing can divorce itself from philosophy no matter how much it wants to do that. Secondly, it is my own conviction that the world would not exist without us. We give meaning to the world and so therefore, if there were no human beings, there is no world. Similarly, if we as an individual did not exist, the world therefore does not exist. Wow, right? It takes a lot to accept this premise, but I really think it is the truth.