CIC - Mandaue

Philo 01: Introduction to Philosophy of the Human Person

Second Semester
A. Y. 2022 - 2023

MODULE 1
DOING PHILOSOPHY

I. What will you learn from this module?

After studying this module, you will be able to:
a) distinguish a holistic perspective from a partial point of
view;
b) realize the value of doing philosophy in obtaining a broad
perspective in life; and
c) do a philosophical reflection on a concrete situation from a
holistic perspective.

II. Let’s Check What You Already Know

The folktale of "The Blind Men and Elephant" teaches intercultural awareness by
illustrating how different perspectives lead to distinct points of view.

ACTIVITY:

Take a close look at the illustration above and analyze how it could be related to
philosophy. Answer the following questions briefly. Follow the numbered format for your
answers.

Questions:

1. What do the people see?

2. Why do you think they see differently even if they are touching the same animal?
3. What does the elephant stand for?
4. How do you relate the picture with life in general?
5. Can you relate the message of the picture with philosophy? How?
6. What kind of perspective should we develop in order to be able to see the truth?
7. How do you differentiate holistic perspective and partial point of view?

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III. Let’s Explore

A. Introduction
1. To introduce philosophy by means of asking the question: what
is philosophy? It acknowledges how difficult it is to provide a definite
answer to the said question above, but at least the question is being
presented. The cat is already out of the bag or the elephant is now
being discussed in the room so to speak. Clearly, there is a problem
or a crisis in defining what philosophy is.

2. There is a need to clarify the term “philosophy”. As recorded in

“The Lives of Philosophers” by the Greek historian Diogenes
Laertius, philosophy was first used (coined) by Pythagoras to mean
literally “love of wisdom” because etymologically philosophy comes
from two Attic Greek words “philia” (love) and “sophia” (wisdom).

3. Philosophy is (immediately) a performance, and, thus, the title

“Doing Philosophy”. This makes its practitioner – the one who does
philosophy – a ‘philosopher’. The philosopher does not claim to be
wise, but a lover of wisdom, who is, first of all, a human being.
Philosophy as performance is certainly a “way of life”. (Not in the
textbook: Immanuel Kant said, “Science is organized knowledge;
wisdom is organized life.”
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QUESTIONS TO PONDER:
1. What is the aim of “Doing Philosophy”?
2. What is the importance of the Greek historian Diogenes Laertius to the
origin of philosophy or its history?
3. According to recorded history, who was the first person credited to have
coined the term “philosophy”?
4. How did the French philosopher Pierre Hadot describe ‘philosophy”?
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B. Different Kinds of Knowledge

4. Wisdom (sophia) is a different kind of knowledge distinguishable
from opinion (doxa), technical knowledge (techne), and scientific
knowledge (episteme).

- Opinion (doxa) is the lowest kind of knowledge that lacks any proof
or grounding or proper justification.

5. Technical knowledge (techne) is the knowledge of the means-end

of objects. This is the kind of knowledge of how things are made or
done. This is the knowledge inherent in skills to produce something.

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 - Scientific knowledge (episteme) is the kind of knowledge that has
grounded or justified assertions. This is the knowledge of the
principles that govern things. This is the knowledge that founds the
different scientific domains ranging from physics to geology,
psychology to economics, etc.

6. Wisdom (sophia) is the highest of all knowledge as it is the “most

finished of the forms of knowledge” (Aristotle). It is the knowledge of
first principles.
6.1. Wisdom is the knowledge and encounter of the Nothing.
6.2. Wisdom is a kind of knowledge that thinks about itself as its
object of thought or self-knowledge.

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QUESTIONS TO PONDER:
1. What makes wisdom the highest of all these forms of knowledge?
2. Why is wisdom the knowledge and encounter of the Nothing?
3. Why is wisdom a kind of knowledge that thinks about itself as its object of
thought or self-knowledge?
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C. Wisdom
7. Wisdom is the knowledge and the encounter of the Nothing as
highlighted in Plato’s work the “Apology”, the dialogue that narrates
Socrates’ trial and defense.

8. In the “Apology” Socrates explained that envy is the reason why

he is accused of impiety and the corruption of the youth of Athens.
This was how his “enemies” – who regarded themselves as wise or
knowledgeable or authority figures of Athens – got back at him when
they were not able to provide at least satisfactory answers to the
questions Socrates threw at them. This started when Socrates
decided to disprove the Oracle at Delphi by looking for a person who
was wiser than him.

9. By finding none, he was baffled because he knew that he knew

nothing.
Socrates is the wisest of all as declared by the Oracle at Delphi
because he knows that he knows nothing. Here, wisdom starts in
wonder.

10 - 11. The claim of knowing nothing can only be done by self-

examination. Socrates explained to his accusers and to the assembly
that he had done no crime and what he did was a righteous act he
was willing to die for. The examination of one’s life is the “greatest
good”. Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living;
the unexamined thought is not worth having.”

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______________________________________________________________________________
QUESTIONS TO PONDER:
1. How can Socrates, who knows nothing, be the wisest of all?
2. What is the righteous act that Socrates claimed he has done and willing to
die for?
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D. An Encounter With Nothing And Self-Knowledge

12. The “Apology”
- Knowing that I do not know; and,
- The unexamined life is not worth living.

Wisdom as knowing that that I do not know breaks us from the

mechanistic procedures or the usual manner in which we think and do
things. This experience in one way manifests itself when something
breaks down or stops working correctly. (The example of the breaking
down of a pen during an exam.)

13. When things break down from their usual movement we are able
to, even in a short time, think about our relationship with that thing.
We are able to reflect about our relation to things and to the world. In
doing this, we are, at the moment, seeing everything away from us as
we gauged them (things and the world) and think how they are related
to us; at that moment, we stand away from them and see only
possibilities of our engagements to them, viz., what we can do to them
and what we can do with them. We see how they are meaningful to us,
and why they are not. At that moment, when things are away from us,
we encounter the Nothing. (Imagine: you are about to answer an online
exam, and your Windows laptop starts to reboot for an update.)

14. The cause for Socrates’ encounter with the Nothing is the Oracle’s
declaration that he is the wisest of all. This is an experience, for
Socrates, of wonder, what the ancient Greeks call as Thaumazein. This
term is used when describing a moment that strips us of our familiarity
of things or pointing to situations that disturb or haunt us and make
us wonder. This is the wonder that Socrates experienced that left him
motionless and blank, left him at that moment with the Nothing. This
experience of both wonder and suspension leaves us to grapple with
Nothing. Like Socrates, what is familiar to us, and what makes sense,
all of a sudden, becomes strange and senseless.

15. For the philosopher Hannah Arendt, this experience of wonder is a

traumatic experience (i.e., the breaking down of things). She writes:
“The wonder which man endures or which befalls him cannot be related
in words because it is too general for words. Plato must have first
encountered it in those frequently reported traumatic states in which
Socrates would suddenly, as though seized by a rapture, fall into

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 complete motionlessness, just staring without seeing or hearing
anything.”
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QUESTIONS TO PONDER:
1. What are the two moments that concern us (to understand sophia) from the
reading of Plato’s work “Apology”?
2. Why is the breaking down of things a gateway to the Nothing?
3. Is the experience of wonder a traumatic experience?
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E. Crisis and Decision

16. The experience of wonder or trauma is only the initial point of
encountering wisdom. This experience of the Nothing is still to be
endured until a decision is made (from this experience) because an
experience of trauma is rightly an encounter of a crisis. As explained
by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “krisis” is inseparable from
the connection to a determinate moment of time in executing a
judgment or decision, especially in life-or-death situations.

17. A crisis is a moment of decision, a judgment. One needs to decide

whether he or she continues to endure this experience or to abandon
this experience. When one decides to endure the Nothing, he or she
endures it through language.

18. One needs to speak about the trauma, to say the experience of what
does not make sense in order to make sense of it through language.
This traumatic experience is cried out, shrieked out, screamed out.
(Notice how the German word schrieben (to write) has for its root the
word shrie (shriek, wail) or the French word Ecrit (writing) hasd for its
root the word Cri (cry).)

19. When animals (brutes) experience pain, they cry. Although human
beings cry when they experience pain, the most profound experience of
pain is passed on through language, through poems and stories, and
our ‘wails’ or ’whys’ live on in the annals of history. Brutes only cry but
do not speak. The being that speaks, what in ancient Greek is called as
the zoon logon echon (the animal that possesses the speech or reason)
which the Scholastics of the Middle Ages interpret as the animal
rationale, the rational animal, is the human being. (Imagine a young
wife whose husband is dying in her arms. Imagine her sobs, her wails,
begging for sense in such a senseless reality.)

20. Language is the endurance of this traumatic encounter with the

Nothing. It can gradually turn the Nothing into something through the
relation between question and answer (dialectics) as we make sense of
our (senseless) experience(s). We examine ourselves by asking
questions, and when we ask questions, we use language.

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 21. We are able to seek for sense in the senseless to find meaning in
the meaningless or the lucidity in absurdity (Albert Camus). It is
through language (dialectics) that we examine ourselves and in doing
so see our relation to things and to the world.

22. Gottfried Leibniz asks: “Why is there something rather than

Nothing?” This is a mark of wisdom. This is precisely what a
philosophical question is like. Unlike techne, doxa and episteme,
sophia has for its object of thinking, its ownself, i.e., thought itself. It
is self-knowledge, and it is the highest form of knowledge because when
all other forms of thinking and knowing breaks down to become
senseless in the encounter with the Nothing, it is sophia or wisdom that
attempts to make sense of all of it through language. (Cf. Martin
Heidegger’s version)
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QUESTIONS TO PONDER:
1. What is zoon logon echon?
2. (What do you call a facility, usually in urban areas, where living, typically
wild animals are kept, especially for public exhibition?)
3. What is our relation to things and to the world?
4. Do we really have an answer to Leibniz’s question: Why is there something
rather than Nothing? (Try to translate this question to your native tongue
and see if it becomes more profound. Now, try to recall a traumatic
experience and ask the said question using your very own native tongue.)
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F. Friendship
23. Love, in the English language, does not have any identical
translation in Attic Greek. What ‘love” is in English is nuanced into
different categories. Three of these categories are agape, eros, and
philia.
- Agape is unconditional love (e.g. the love of parents to their children).
- Eros is sexual love (e.g. husband and wife).
- Philia is neither agape nor eros, but is closely translated as
‘friendship’.

24. For philosophical treatises on friendship, we go to Aristotle’s

“Nicomachean Ethics” and Agamben’s essay “The Friend”.

G. Friendship as “Other Self”

25. From Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” regarding friendship:
- “...and if who sees is conscious that he sees, one who hears that he
hears, one who walks that he walks, and similarly for all the other
human activities there is a faculty that is conscious of their exercise,
so that whenever we perceive, we are conscious that we perceive, and
whenever we think, we are conscious that we think, and to be conscious
that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious that we exist for
existence, as we saw, is sense-perception or thought and if to be

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conscious one is alive is a pleasant thing in itself for life is a thing
essentially good, and to be conscious that one possesses a good thing
is pleasant; and if life is desirable, and especially so for good men,
because existence is good for them, and so pleasant because they are
pleased by the perception of what is intrinsically good; and if the
virtuous man feels towards his friend in the same way as he feels
towards himself for his friend is a second self – then, just as a man’s
own existence is desirable for him, so, or nearly so, is his friend’s
existence also desirable. But, as we saw, it is the consciousness of
oneself as good that makes existence desirable, and such
consciousness is pleasant in itself. Therefore a man ought also to share
his friend’s consciousness of his existence, and this is attained by their
living together and by conversing and communicating their thoughts to
each other; for this is the meaning of living together as applied to
human beings, it does not mean merely feeding in the same place, as it
does when applied to cattle.”

26. To be conscious of something pleasant is to be conscious of

something good.

27. To be conscious of something pleasant and good and to be

conscious of being alive also allows one to be conscious of a desirable
life, a good existence, or a good life. To seek for the good is desirable.
To sense, to be conscious of this sensation, of existence, of something
pleasant, of something good, and a good life is a personal experience.
Each one experiences this subjectively, or each one experiences this as
his own experience. To know these experiences and this being
conscious of the good life, which is a personal experience, implies that
one is conscious of one’s experience; hence, one is self-conscious. To
be self-conscious entails one is able to know oneself: an examined life.

28. Self-consciousness from sensation to the good life, when bridged to

another being that is self-conscious, explains how friendship is
possible. A friend, according to Aristotle, is your “Other Self” (heteros
gar autosho philos estin). A friend is the other self-conscious being that
shares the same experience that one experienced. (sharing or or having
a common experience among friends that binds them together is a
profound relation that is founded on a consenting, on a shared “state
of being”. The friend sees his friend as himself or herself, seeks for
himself the pleasant and good life, and at the same time seeks for his
friends the same experience.)

29. Whatever the self experiences as good and pleasant or even the
trauma of the encounter with the nothing is shared with an other self,
a friend, who must have also experienced in his own solitude the same
experience. What bridges them together, what is common, this shared
“state of being”, is made possible only through language: they speak to
each other, they tell their stories to each other; and they share their
lives together. (Cf. Roberto Esposito’s etymology of the word ‘gift’.)

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 30. The enduring encounter of the nothing is possible only in the
sharing and exchanging of the same “state of being’ because the
enduring of the encounter with the Nothing through language requires
always an other self, that when one who speaks, there is one who
listens; when one writes, there is one who reads; when one asks
questions, there is one who attempts to answer. The latter is a friend.
The bridge that allows one to share to the other this same “state of
being”, this consenting, is language.

31. The dialectics of Socrates and Plato becomes possible with the
introduction of the friend as the other self. Here, we see the connection
between wisdom and friendship, sophia and philia.

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QUESTIONS TO PONDER:
What has these experiences – consciousness of existence and the examined
life – have to do with friendship?
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H. Conclusion: What Is Philosophy?

32. Philosophy comes from two Greek words, philia and sophia,
respectively friendship and wisdom. Sophia or wisdom in philosophy is
the encounter with the Nothing and the decision to endure one’s
traumatic experience by asking fundamental questions through
language. Philia or friendship in philosophy is the sharing or
consenting of the same “state of being” with an other self.

33. Philosophy, as friendship of wisdom, is a “way of life”. It is a

constant struggle with the Nothing, i.e., a constant struggle in making
sense or giving meaning to one’s relation to things and the world
together with those who share the same “state of being”, together with
those whom we call friends.
Philosophy is not merely academic or speculative. It is also concrete
because it is a kind of life, a peculiar life that asks about life itself
together with friends – a life that we call the truly human life. This is
philosophy. To do philosophy is to be human, and to be human is to do
philosophy.

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QUESTIONS TO PONDER:
1. What is the role of language in philosophizing?
2. What is philosophy?
3. How is philosophy misconceived?
4. Do you agree that to do philosophy is to be human, and to be human is to
do philosophy?
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