The Origin of Philosophy

This week, I cried reading a philosophy book.

I can’t remember the last time that happened.

In The Origin of Philosophy, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset lays out a compelling vision of philosophy’s place in the history (and possible future!) of thought.

On his view, making progress isn’t just something nice philosophy might hope to achieve, but something internal to thinking itself.

Let me explain.

Imagine looking at an orange.

Here, I’ll help you get started.

Your visual impression—a bright, shiny roundness—doesn’t exhaust everything the orange is or has to offer. And you would immediately notice this if you began walking around the orange to see it from more angles.

I’m gonna let José do most of the talking because every quote here’s a jewel:

At each step, the appearance of the orange is different, but connected to its predecessor, which has already disappeared; with the result that we never see the orange all at once, but must be content with successive views. In this instance, the thing so vehemently demands to be seen in its entirety that we are impelled and literally forced to revolve around it.

Look how active the orange is here to insist on our attention!

But we don’t always have to get up and move around. Here’s a riveting passage on staring at a wall:

The object, in this instance, remained still; it is our eye that has moved… However, even if our eye had not wandered, the same thing would have happened, because the wall, too, makes our attention wander. In the first moment, we would have focused upon certain components, in the second upon others; and each time we focused anew, the wall would have responded with another countenance. This is at times a compelling phenomenon of paradigmatic value…

Our interrogation of the orange or the wall never really ends; there’s always more for it to offer and reveal to us, more for us to experience and take in.

…If one takes a little leaf from a tree and gazes at it persistently, at first one sees only its general outline and then the leaf itself; the leaf attracts one’s gazes, propelling it, sketching one’s itinerary over the surface, guiding the eyes so as to reveal the marvelous structure and the incredible geometrical, architectural grace formed by the countless tiny nerves… I must, however, add here that I have never concluded looking at a leaf.

It’s a great place to shed a tear.

This, Ortega y Gasset thinks, is how we always experience the world. We aren’t the only ones driving the action! The world continually acts upon us, provoking us to react.

In fact, our characteristic intervention is to slow things down long enough to consider what we’ve already taken in:

the function of intellect is to pause, and therefore to detain the reality that confronts man

But we can’t hold things still forever. Old thoughts have their own direction and momentum, and new experiences just keep on crashing in on us, wave after wave. There’s not some endpoint where you’ve finally exhausted every possible thought or experience relating to the orange, let alone every possible thing!

Behold, I am inexhaustible.

So thinking condemns us to keep going.

And then tires us out into giving up.

And then provokes us again to keep going…

Man genuinely has no recourse but to “continue thinking,” for he always discovers that he has not thought anything out completely… But other pressures in life, illness, or simply differing capacities to pursue undeviatingly and lucidly a lengthy chain of ideas account for our violent interruption of the dialectic series. We cut it short, but it continues to bleed within us.

What this means is that our thinking is always incomplete, could always be improved upon.

But our thinking is also always getting something right.

After all, every thought is provoked by something, so it’s at least responsive to reality at that level…

all thought represents thought against, whether so indicated verbally or not. Our creative thought is always shaped in opposition to some other thought, which we believe erroneous, fallacious, and needful of correction.

And that previous thought must have been getting at something worthwhile, too! After all, it had to be convincing enough to someone at some point to seem true to them for your little back-and-forth to get started.

But disagreement already involves a ton of background agreement on what’s true.

After all, to be disagreeing and not just talking past one another, you and I have to be talking about the same thing!

despite the existence of many divergent opinions, all are opinions on the same thing. This invites us to try to detect amid the multitude of philosophies some unity, and even a oneness in philosophy; to discover what the diverse doctrines have in common.

Maybe you can see how a shared conversation, a joint inquiry is beginning to form, and it’s being forged through this continual conflict between ideas.

Surprisingly, our starting points matter a lot less than we might think. Even if you and I begin our inquiries from very different places, we can both encounter some truth, and then try to extend and strengthen our grasp on it. Our seemingly disparate inquiries may end up being much more intimately connected than expected:

It is impossible for any aspect of reality, if scrupulously analyzed, not to convey some truth—a truth that is not only true but one that must be taken into account, and which will acquire its full meaning at perhaps a much later juncture in our progressive thinking.

If you’ve done even a little philosophy, you’ve probably noticed that familiar patterns of questions and answers and mistakes and corrections are always lurking just beneath the surface. The same kinds of moves recur again and again even in (seemingly) very different contexts.

But you know what? That isn’t just true in philosophy.

It’s true in any disciplined inquiry where we spend time trying to formulate and articulate our thoughts carefully.

It’s true in chess (“This pattern’s called a skewer.”)

and math (“Once again: a proof by contradiction.”)

and music (“Diminished chords seek resolution.”)

and screenwriting (“The protagonist should want something.”)

But your theorizing generalizes. So your answer to one question ends up committing you to answers to other questions elsewhere, whether or not you realize that yet. And that generalizability is how we’re able to find all these points of contention with one another to keep things going.

So even ‘bad’ ideas are never outright failures!

They have enough good raw material within them to lead us past themselves to a higher level of understanding:

It is impossible for a philosophy to be an absolute error. The error must contain some element of truth. Moreover, it was proven an error as the result of detection, since at the outset it was believed to be a truth. This makes it evident that it contained no small measure of truth if it was able to substitute for it so well… In the final analysis it is revealed to be an error not because it was untrue, but because it was not true enough.

Our thinking is never totally wrong and never totally right. But thinking does, by its own momentum, impel us to keep going chasing improvement.

And as we improve our thinking by filling in more and more of what’s missing, we continually find that our inquiries are all connected and unified, because they’re all inquiries into the same world.

That means philosophy’s unity is derived from the unity of truth itself.

And that unity pierces all the way through every philosophical theory and school:

Since the problems of philosophy are radical [to-the-root] problems, there is no philosophy that does not contain them all.

We’re all proposing answers to the same problems in a shared conversation that stretches back millenia.

So returning to Ortega y Gasset’s title, what is The Origin of Philosophy?

He gives a very interesting historical reconstruction where he claims to determine philosophy’s first, authentic(?!) name: aletheia, which means disclosure or unveiling. There’s a really fun discussion where he locates the emergence of (Western) Philosophy not in Athens but, right alongside science(!?), in the colonial peripheries of the Greek world at the height of its expansion. Because these ‘disclosers’ were outsiders, they had to go undercover as ‘philosophers’ (lovers of wisdom), a much more vague and boring name.

But personally, I’m most interested in Ortega y Gasset’s occasional snippets on how philosophy itself may simply be one stage in a larger history of thought, the caterpillar for some future butterfly.

In an early footnote:

Before philosophy began, what analogous profession existed among men? If philosophy is, in its turn, merely one step taken by thought upon the heels of another, which would not be philosophy, this means that all of philosophy, from its onset to the present, would appear as merely one member of a “dialectical” series of much greater breadth than it is.

Oh my God.

“What discipline might philosophy be gestating that could eventually rise up and eat it?” is an amazing question.

I’m definitely interested in what came before philosophy.

• Religious doctrines?

• Spiritual practices?

• Animistic urges to personify the natural world?

But I’m really fascinated by this question of what might come after philosophy and transcend it. Beyond some jokes that his students continually accuse him of writing mere literature, we have the suggestion that philosophy might have already been quietly replaced without our realizing it!

I merely wish to suggest the possibility that what we are now beginning to engage in under the traditional aegis of philosophy is not another philosophy but something new and different from all philosophy.

His suggestions on this point are rather nebulous and sketchy, as they’d have to be. It’s hard to name any historical moment while you’re living through it.

But in his sketch of philosophy’s origins, Ortega y Gasset takes pains to emphasize just how odd it was for a new profession to come into being—the thinker, engaged in this unrecognizably new discipline of unveiling truths. Skepticism and mistrust abounded for many reasons, not the least of which were well-founded fears of what might lie within Pandora’s Box of unasked questions and un-unveiled truths.

So what would come after philosophy?

And how much more dangerous and unsettling might it be?

What an amazing book. And this is one of his minor works, a Wikipedia redlink written over the course of a decade starting in 1943.

It’s hard for me to recommend this book if you haven’t had enough contact with philosophy to care about a story where the history of philosophy is something other than an unmitigated series of disastrous shipwrecks by celebrated navigators. (Even Ortega y Gasset marvels at the baroque style of this lovely turn of phrase from Bossuet.)

What if we could tell a story about the history of philosophy as a shared form of life so dedicated to unifying and advancing inquiry that it might even transform itself into something else entirely?

Since I obviously love the way this guy writes—even in translation!—let me leave you with the opening line of his fourth dialectical moment of the philosophical past:

The philosopher who lived for twenty-five hundred years can be said to exist; he is the present-day philosopher.

Okay, now you probably know whether you wanna read it or not.