What is the Origin of Philosophy?
Aristotle says philosophy begins in wonder (or awe). Abraham Joshua Heschel preserves the same sentiment when describing the innate human disposition to spiritual seeking.
But what is the origin of wonder? Is it just the self-evidence of the sublime? Why do we move from a sense of awe to a drive towards enquiry? Isn’t explanation a killjoy? Or at the least a move from the visceral to the cerebral? Aristotle also writes that “all men by nature desire to know.” How does this law of human nature link up with the fact that most people are not philosophers?
Heidegger says philosophy begins when the world fails us in some way. The origin of enquiry is crisis. Necessity is the mother of invention and necessity appears when things fall apart.
Freud maintains the crisis narrative, but locates it in the drama of the family. Philosophy is or can be a kind of defense mechanism, a holding pattern born from trauma. The truth-content of a philosophy is how the thinker uses it—like a dream—to cope with unresolved stuff. Non-Freudian psychologists might simply observe that philosophers tend to be “disagreeable”; they tend to be people comfortable with their oddness; people who spend time in their interiority (perhaps to avoid the burdens and disappointments of the external and social world).
Can sociology explain the origin of philosophy in any way, or is such a vantage point external to real thought? A sociologist might note that modern philosophers tend to be nerdy types. Even Nietzsche, who idealized “philosophizing with a hammer” and romanticized about the wisdom of the strong was a sickly scholar. Olympic athletes do not typically read Husserl. Is this casual observation worth anything?
One could also say that philosophy begins with curiosity and that curiosity begins—as Adam Phillips writes—with boredom. And the origin of boredom? Self-loathing?
Is the origin of philosophy we can ever know? Or is purely speculative? And supposing we could know it would it matter? Would it change our understanding of and appreciation for philosophy?
Montaigne compares tradition to a river that begin as a dinky puddle. Don’t try to find the origins of a tradition, he cautions, because you’ll just be disappointed. What matter is not how something started, but how it continued, and where it’s going.
But as the mystics say, “the end of the action is contained in the beginning of the thought.” Where philosophy is going and how it started may be one and the same.
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