Philosophy

The love of wisdom

The word philosophy is built from two Greek roots: philos (φίλος), 'loving' or 'dear', and sophia (σοφία), 'wisdom'. It means, exactly, the love of wisdom — and the love matters as much as the wisdom. Tradition credits Pythagoras with coining it: asked whether he was a wise man, a sophos, he is said to have answered that no, only a god is wise; a man can at most be a philosophos, a lover and seeker of a wisdom he does not possess. Built into the very name, then, is humility — the admission that one is on the way toward wisdom, not in possession of it.

A way of life, not a subject

For the ancients philosophy was never merely a body of theories or an academic specialty. It was a way of life — a chosen manner of living aimed at transforming the one who practices it. Each school, the Platonists no less than the Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics, offered not just doctrines to believe but exercises to perform, a discipline of attention, desire, and judgment meant to reshape the soul. To take up philosophy was to convert one's whole existence, not to enroll in a course.

Preparation for death

Plato gives this conversion its most famous formula. In the Phaedo, with Socrates awaiting execution, he declares that those who practice philosophy aright are practicing nothing other than dying and being dead — that philosophy is a 'rehearsal of death' (meletē thanatou). The meaning is not morbid. Since the philosopher seeks the eternal Forms, which the bodily senses can never reach, the whole work of philosophy is to free the soul from its absorption in the body — to learn, while still alive, the separation that death will complete. To die well one must first have learned to live turned toward what is changeless; Cicero rendered the thought into Latin as 'the whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death'.

Becoming like god

The same ascent has a higher name. In the Theaetetus Plato sets the goal of life as 'becoming like god so far as is possible' (homoiōsis theōi) — a flight from the disorder of the world toward the divine, growing just and holy through understanding. The later Platonists made this the very definition of the end of philosophy, and joined it to the soul's purification and its return to the One. Philosophy thus runs the whole length of the soul's journey: from the cave of the senses, through love of beauty and the contemplation (theōria) of truth, up to assimilation with the divine.

The misuse of a word

Few words have been so worn down by use. Already in Socrates's Athens the Sophists sold a counterfeit — clever argument, the art of making the weaker case appear the stronger, eloquence detached from truth — and called it wisdom; against them Socrates insisted that the unexamined life is not worth living, and paid for the insistence with his own. In later ages 'philosophy' narrowed into a professional, academic discipline, a matter of technical analysis severed from any care for how one actually lives, until at last, in common speech, it shrank to mean little more than a personal opinion or attitude — 'my philosophy is...'. The tradition gathered in this library remembers the older and fuller sense: philosophy as the love and lifelong pursuit of wisdom, a discipline of the soul ordered toward the good, the true, and the divine — and, as Plato taught, a preparation for death that is in truth a preparation for life.