05/07/2019 What Makes A Philosopher? | Issue 128 | Philosophy Now https://philosophynow.org/issues/128/What_Makes_A_Philosopher 1/4 Philosophy Now – Issue 128 https://philosophynow.org/issues/128/What_Makes_A_Philosopher What Makes A Philosopher? Siobhan Lyons hunts down a philosopher’s essential ingredients. Just what makes a philosopher? It’s ostensibly such a basic question, but the answer is more complex than it may at first seem. So what makes someone a philosopher? And how does one become a philosopher? Since the word ‘philosophy’ comes from the Greek for ‘love of wisdom’, we could just say that anyone who has a love of wisdom is a philosopher, and leave it at that. But if we look at those who have been granted the title of ‘philosopher’ down the ages, what distinguishes them from the ‘everyday’ lover of wisdom? The first Western philosopher of whom we have any record was Thales of Miletus (c.624-545 BC). The story goes that Thales was staring so intently at the stars as he was walking along that he fell into a well. (Ironically, Thales’ philosophy revolves around water.) This fable was first chronicled in Plato’s Theaetetus (c.369 BC), and has since become a popular anecdote about philosophy, not only in indicating the value of ideas over the material world, but in terms of worldly foolishness, as in the fable Thales’ rescuer mockingly proclaims that one ought to keep one’s eyes on the earth and not on the skies. Other critics have made similar jibes, such as a reviewer of Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage, who said its central character, Philip Carey, was “so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet.” This criticism inspired the title of a later novel by Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence. So the philosopher is, at heart, an idealist. Where there is wisdom, there is foolishness. But without apparent foolishness, there can be no wisdom. Time & Being (a Bad Conscience) Simon Critchley makes an astute observation regarding the essential difference between philosophers and lawyers. In contrast to the lawyer, he says, “who has no time, or for whom time is money”, there is the philosopher, “who takes time.” “The freedom of the philosopher,” Critchley argues, “consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity” (‘What is a Philosopher?’, The New York Times, 2010). So the philosopher is one who has time: not only time to think, but time to observe. This might explain why a vast number of philosophers were outcasts; in their isolation they had time to commit themselves to pursuits beyond social gatherings. In addition to having time, the philosopher is often legitimately at odds with the time in which they live. I say ‘legitimately’, because there are also those who are provocative for the sake of being provocative; purposefully belligerent simply out of a desire to be seen as different. Yet as Friedrich Nietzsche notes, a genuine philosopher is “a person of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow… his enemy has always been the ideal of today” (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, p.106). For Nietzsche, the philosopher’s task lies in “being the bad conscience of their age.” This would include Spinoza, Marx, and Nietzsche himself, while discounting someone like Jordan Peterson, who is beloved by many and deliberately courts controversy for its own sake. As Richard Gilmore similarly notes (in Doing Philosophy at the Movies, 2005, p.26), “The philosopher is one who necessarily stands outside of society, but he or she does so for the sake of society.” He goes on to say that “The philosopher must stand outside of society in order to understand the forces that impinge upon us as members of a society, of a community. From inside we do not see: we conform and abide. It is only by