What is Phil

When I look back over 50 years of reading philosophy - what to some is a lifetime but is, to me with my slow maturation, a seeming childhood - I find some truths in response to the "unanswerable" question of what is philosophy?

I find that it is about speculation and conclusion. Most philosophers have befuddled it with the idea that it is only the former, see perhaps David Hume; or they have hindered it by the latter, see Rand. What seems to be missing in many (if not in Nietzsche) is that they are forever bound together, these two things.

True philosophy is both speculation and conclusion. It may seem impossible to wait for truth and advance truth simultaneously, yet it seems to be the only viable definition for it. Without this paradox it becomes confusingly skeptical or dangerously dogmatic. It seems to devolve, in this way, into too little and too much confidence.

As to the efficient nature of this paradox - the idea that it must come from somewhere - I cannot answer. I am sure nobody can. Following the line or method from Thomas Reid we might say that it is so basic a truth that it cannot have an answer, it cannot be explained by synonyms more basic than it. The truth is that this combination of seeming opposites, this ironic inevitability, is something that we don't need to explain. It is a place of beginning. There is no explanation for this irony of philosophy than is any more illuminating than the irony itself.

Being lost amidst speculation and at the same time knowing absolutely, is a common experience. It is why a seasoned philosopher, when on this "righteous" path incurs the wrath of those that want more terse, more clear, more linear and more systematic answers. It is also perhaps the reason some of them lose their jobs.

What this philosophy of irony does not do is lose the common man. In particular, it does not lose students. They revel in the freedom provided by a definition that seems, to them, even to their uncritical status, more useful than what they previously heard or expected about philosophy.