What is Philosophy: A Brief Note

Literally meaning, “the love of wisdom”, most of (western) philosophy started out as an eminently practical activity in Ancient Greece⇁it was axiomatic for much Socratic philosophy that it must enquire into, and teach what it might mean to live a good human life which was also assumed to be a happy one. With the arrival of modern philosophy, however, it became more theoretical in nature, starting with the likes of Descartes. 

But, there were two of the most popular philosophers during the peak of the modern era (the Industrial Revolution) who came to reject much of the mainstream approach of both ancient and modern philosophy⇁Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. With not diving much into Nietzsche, I believe Marx outline quite perfectly what philosophy must do, in the final thesis of his short work, Theses on Feuerbach:
“The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world (whether it be the physical or the social, human world), the point is to change it.”

It was clear from his radical approach that Marx was no ordinary philosopher, and, alongwith Nietzsche (and Sigmund Freud) became a key precursor to most of the continental philosophers and critical theorists of the 20th and 21st century. The common feature to the thought of Marx, Nietzsche and most continental philosophers was breaking the divide between the “theoretical” and the “practical”, and causing a discomfort to the reader by exposing the true state of society, human existence, and the world around it, instead of giving advice on how to become happier like the Ancient Greeks.

Now, if we have agreed upon the fact that philosophy must act as a tool for changing the state of the world, what is philosophy itself?⇁that question still remains. We can look into the works of one of the most imaginative, unconventional and almost avant-garde philosophers from the French post-structuralist (a sub-division in continental philosophy), Gilles Deleuze. In his 1991 work, What is Philosophy?, which was also his last collaborative work with the post-psychoanalyst, Felix Guattari, he attempts to define what philosophy is, as the title suggests. Philosophy is not contemplation, reflection or communication, it is a necessarily disruptive act that challenges the status quo, creativity is synonymous with disruption, therefore, philosophy is also a creative act, according to Deleuze and Guattari. But what is the outcome of this creation, what is being created, one may ask. The outcome is the “concept”⇁philosophy is the creation of concepts. It is important to note that the definition of “concept” in Deleuze’s thought is a bit different than what one generally thinks of as a concept. It is a difficult task to lay out the Deleuzian definition of the concept in such a short essay as he uses his popular idea of “the plane of immanence”, something which is worthy of its own essay, to define “concept”. But, simply put, a concept is something which necessarily co-exists and refers to other concepts, and also has its own internal components. Each concept has components taken from other concepts of other thinkers, and is in a continual state of becoming instead of just existing. 

To summarize, philosophy is a creative act of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts, with the aim of changing the world (disrupting the status quo).