“Philo-sophia”: Is philosophy as a ‘Kind of Writing’ still a ‘Love of Wisdom’? (2024)

In this essay, I will argue that a critical view of philosophy as a love of wisdom is still axiomatic even in the postmodern world where it appears to be subverted. First, I will examine the etymological definition of philosophy as a love of wisdom, which will require an abstraction to the definition of these constitutive terms, through an examination of the paradigmatic philosopher, Socrates. The general definition of philosophy I will thereafter utilise, determined by what I will suggest love and wisdom mean independently, will be the acceptance, and subsequent desire for, one’s perennial ignorance.[1] This proposition of philosophy as love of wisdom will then be critically assessed against Jacques Derrida’s notion of philosophy as a “kind of writing”, as determined in Richard Rorty’s essay.[2] From this assessment I will argue even in the reversal of the Platonic formulation of philosophy in the deconstructive project, or anti-project, of Derrida, there remains fidelity to our aforementioned conception of wisdom. In fact, this paper will interpret Rorty’s reading of Derrida’s project as a direct corollary of Socrates’. Thus, the Ancient Greek determination of philosophy as a love of wisdom is, even in the reversal of philosophy in Derrida’s work, still applicable to this reversal. Philosophy remains at always a love of wisdom.

From the Greek “philo” meaning love and “sophia” meaning wisdom, modern English’s ancestral phrase “philosophy” etymologically means the love of wisdom. The argument for this formulation of the discipline comes most famously in Plato’s work The Apology. In his testament to the Athenian jury Socrates recounts his attempt to make sense of the Delphic Oracle’s proclamation that there was no wiser man than he. His argument runs as follow; men reputed for their wisdom believed ‘that [t]he[y] kn[ew] something which [they] d[id] not know, whereas [Socrates was] quite conscious of [his] ignorance’[3]. This notion of being aware that there is much knowledge beyond his limits that he is ignorant of is what Socrates calls ‘human wisdom’[4]. In an attack against the sophists, such as those who brought the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth against him, Socrates states ‘presumably the[se] geniuses […] are wise in a wisdom that is more than human’[5].

So, we are given here two distinct conceptions of wisdom. The former is possible for man, and it requires a thinker must ‘not think that [they] know what [they] do not know’[6]. While the latter kind is wisdom is only ‘the property of God’[7], or super-human wisdom. Socrates gives three archetypes of those who believe they possess the latter kind. First, someone who ‘claim[s] a perfect understanding of every […] subject’[8] when they only have a deep understanding of a specific topic; e.g. artisans who espouse a general understanding of life through metaphor of their chosen trade, professional athletes turning life coaches or contemporary academics who study a very particular field their whole life and believe their knowledge of this field is universally applicable to other fields. Second, there are those who ‘deliver […] sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean’[9]; e.g. artists with an aesthetic eye and sharp hand, composers with musical intuition or in some sense contemporary academics with grand declarations about the order of things. Third, there are those with ‘the greatest reputations’ for wisdom and yet ‘others [… are] much better qualified in practical intelligence’;[10] e.g. politicians and sophists who rise to power on deception, rhetoric, or nepotism, and even in some sense contemporary academics who speak of the world with less experience of it than those who live outside the confines of pen and paper. No one possesses the latter kind of wisdom, this super-human wisdom; because, as the name connotes, it is beyond their capacities as human subjects. Furthermore, what is evident from our claim that the kind of wisdom attainable to man is a humility of the limits of this wisdom, then those who purport themselves to have wisdom beyond this are in fact mutually excluding themselves from the only wisdom they could exhibit.

If what makes a man wise is his ability to recognize that he knows nothing, and that a wise man is a philosopher, then does the practice of philosophy not fall into a deep scepticism whereby knowledge becomes unattainable? I believe the definition of love that lies beneath Socrates’ apology illuminates an answer to the problem of perpetual dubiety. Loving, according to Nina Belmonte in her work on the intellectual eroticism of Plato, is ‘the fundamental constitution of eros [as] lack — ‘desire for that which is missing’’[11]. What this statement inherently suggests is that the object of our love ‘is present as absence’.[12] We cannot want what we already have in our possession. This notion of love emancipates Socrates’ understanding of wisdom from the impotence of scepticism as it suggests that the awareness, and subsequent love of, our ignorance is what drives us toward knowledge. Thus, as Plato reminds us in The Republic, the philosopher is one who ‘approaches learning with delight, and is insatiable’[13]; in other words, the true lover of wisdom is one who reminds himself that there are things he does not know, so that he can go in search of attaining them. What would happen to philosophy if its nature was not one of unattainability? Twentieth Century absurdist novelist Franz Kafka uses the analogy of the philosopher as s/he ‘who runs breathlessly after children’s spinning tops’[14] hoping to grasp the essence of their motion, and in doing so, the essence of everything. But he fails, because this motion, as soon as it is attempted to be grasped, ceases. Yet, the philosopher is content for he is a ‘desirer of wisdom’[15], and as has been displayed, desire is only possible when the desired is not attained. A love of wisdom is a love of one’s ignorance because it reminds us that philosophy is the pursuit for a path to overcome this ignorance. In short, wisdom is not a love of the known, but the unknown and without the unknown philosophy would cease to matter.

If then, philosophy is a desire to recognize and attain what is unknown, a love of wisdom that is an acknowledgement of ignorance, does Derrida fall under the category of philosophy? I choose Derrida in this essay to evaluate through the schema of philosophy as Socratic wisdom because he was a thinker at the opposite end of the history of the Western tradition, and he denounced the manner in which philosophy had been practiced in this tradition. What evolved from Socrates’ belief of the importance of enjoying one’s ignorance was a chronology of system-building, beginning first with Plato’s theory of Forms, Aristotle’s substance ontology down to Descartes’ cogito, Hume’s empiricism, Kant’s proof of apriori reasoning, Hegel’s idealism and even Heidegger’s univocity of Being. Derrida argues that ‘there is nothing outside of the text[s]’[16] where we find these arguments, all these theoretical projects are related only to themselves as texts and to other texts in the corpus known as Western philosophy. In order to remain faithful to this proclamation that philosophy exists only as the sort of writing done by a handful of people, predominantly white and male, in Europe over the previous two millennia, Derrida’s philosophy is not a philosophy at all; it is an anti-philosophy.

Derrida brings forth the notion of deconstruction as a conceptual tool designed to interrogate the systems of previous philosophers and falsify these systems on the logical grounds of the system itself. So, when Rorty presents Derrida as having ‘no interest in bringing “his philosophy” into accord with common sense. [That h]e is not writing a philosophy’[17] at all. What he means here is that Derrida doesn’t wish to announce or proclaim any truth, only to discuss the ignorance of those who have attempted to do so before. This analysis of the Derridean project is one that does not deny truth, but instead makes aware the inconsistencies in the systems of truth that his predecessors postulated. Thus, the history of philosophy as a kind of writing, and Derrida’s philosophy as a tool for coming to terms with the impotence of this kind of writing renders Derrida’s philosophy a literary concept.

Can Socrates’ dialogic and Derrida’s deconstruction be reconciled within one unified definition of philosophy? As the phrasing of my forthwith analysis of Derrida’s account suggests, these two seemingly bipolar philosophers are near equivocal in their conception of philosophy. What Socrates achieved through the dialectic of adduction, the determination of a term through the examination of different instances of that term, Derrida does so through the various techniques of deconstruction. It is beyond the scope of this essay to determine whether there are logico-analytic parallels between the methodology of these philosophers. However, it is clear that the principle goals of their argumentative tactics, and the outcomes these tactics produce, are indicative of a singular endeavour. This endeavour being, a search for truth from a love of wisdom. Whether or not this doctrine of philosophy renders those aforementioned prominent philosophical figures unphilosophical for attempting to portray totalizing final maxims, I am not at liberty to interrogate given the confines of this essay. However, what can be disseminated now is the direct establishment of the Derridean as a love of wisdom.

Rorty argues that what is precisely beneficial in Derrida’s works, is its essential negativity. However, he does believe that in his later thought Derrida became sentimental and ‘nostalgic’ for a constructivist metaphysics, for ‘philosophical system-building’[18]. This is Derrida falling back into the delusion of believing one knows what one does not know, that one has the capacity to undoubtedly express a timeless truth. Rorty surmises;

‘[T]he luminous, constructive bad side of Derrida’s work,

as opposed to the shadowy, deconstructive, good side.’[19]

Derrida becomes constructive in establishing a lexicon for explaining the machinations of his argumentative tool, deconstruction. In such phrases as ‘Trace’ and ‘Différance’,[20] he seems to be teetering on the edge of inadvertently postulating notions of intelligibility that can be applied to the world. However, as Derrida himself reflexively warns, these notions are only applicable within the text and are always ‘just the self-consciousness of the play of a certain kind of writing’[21]. The juxtaposition between this side of Derrida and the portrait painted earlier of Socrates is only in the medium of which they believe proper philosophy should be conducted. What transcends this medium, the written form for Derrida and the spoken form for Socrates, is their insistence on persistent interrogation and an adverse reaction to affirmation.

I have conjectured, in my treatment of Socrates, the assumption that those doctrines we attribute predominantly to Plato, found in the later works of his corpus, are in fact the theories of Plato himself. Once again, it is not in the scope of this essay to engage with the longstanding debate surrounding this assumption. Whether this is a legitimate limitation of the validity of the argument portrayed I cannot be certain. The Apology, generally esteemed by philosophical historians as Plato’s most faithful account of his teacher,[22] is quintessential of the Socratic ability to deconstruct the prejudices of others without proposing any alternative. This is exactly what Derrida is likewise capable of.

In his novel Emile Rousseau alludes to Plato’s Republic. In trying to describe how the constitution of a philosophical life can be found even in the ordinary man, Rousseau claims Emile;

‘attains a wisdom or “true philosophy” that consists in […] viewing the world without prejudice and respecting the limits of the human condition.’[23]

Philosophy is thus to train the conscience never to fixate itself on the belief that it possesses certain knowledge. Philosophy is not inherently sceptical for this reason, instead this reason gives philosophy the grounds always to escape the sceptical. It does not state that knowledge is impossible, only that we should be mindful of the limits of our capacities to attain such knowledge, and never to build high systems around us that block other possible explanations, theories and ideas. Philosophy is thus the love of wisdom, and the love of wisdom a modest acceptance of the possibility of our perennial ignorance.

[1] As interpreted from two Platonic works: Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. High Tredennick, ed. Betty Radice & Robert Baldick, (London: Penguin Classics, 1954) & Plato, The Republic of Plato: Second Edition, trans. Allan Bloom, (United States: Basic Books, 1991).

[2] This essay being: Richard Rorty, (Winter 2008), “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” New Literary History, 39(1).

[3] Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, 50.

[4] Ibid, 49.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid, 50.

[7] Ibid, 52.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 51.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Nina Belmonte, (Spring/ Summer, 2017), “Erosophia. Or: the Love/Lack of Wisdom,” PhœnEx, 12(1), 3.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Plato, The Republic of Plato: Second Edition, trans. Allan Bloom, (United States:

Basic Books, 1991), 155.

[14] Belmonte, “Erosophia…,” 1.

[15] Plato, The Republic of Plato, 155.

[16] Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” 96.

[17] Ibid, 97.

[18] Ibid, 99.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid, 101–103.

[21] Ibid, 103.

[22] Argued by :Plato, “Introduction,” The Last Days of Socrates.

[23] Laurence D. Cooper, (February 2002), “Human Nature and the Love of Wisdom: Rousseau’s Hidden (and Modified) Platonism,” The Journal of Politics, 64(1), 120.

Belmonte, Nina. (Spring/ Summer 2017). “Erosophia. Or: the Love:/ Lack of Wisdom.” PhœnEx, 12(1). 1–17.

Cicovacki, Predrag. (2017). “Philosophy as the Wisdom of Love.” Ethics & Bioethics (in Central Europe), 7(1–2). 75–84. DOI: 10.1515/ebce-2017–0006.

Cooper, Laurence D. (February 2002). “Human Nature and the Love of Wisdom: Rousseau’s Hidden (and Modified) Platonism.” The Journal of Politics, 64(1). 108–125.

Plato. The Last Days of Socrates. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Edited by Betty Radice and Robert Baldick. London: Penguin Classics, 1954.

Plato. The Republic of Plato: Second Edition. Translated by Allan Bloom. United States: Basic Books, 1991.

Rorty, Richard. (Winter, 2008). “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida.” New Literary History, 39(1). 90–109.

Tarasiewicz, Pawel. (January-March 2016). “Recovering Philosophy as The Love of Wisdom: A Contribution of St. John Paul II.” Studia Gilsoniana, 5(1). 269–281. ISSN: 2300–0066.

Tyson, Sarah. “Introduction.” Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016.