Good philosophy is an exploration of the inner depths of reality.
Reflecting upon the totality of existence is to employ the rational disposition to its widest and densest reaches. It is to enter philosophical inquiry. Though humans are physically weak compared with several brute animals, it is the intellect that sets men and women apart from the known animal kingdom. Reason is truly essential for human beings and has allowed us to rise far above “animal-like” existence.
Contentious though it may be, philosophy tries to go beyond any ordinary investigation of the specialized sciences. It often tries to get at the “root” of things concerning what it means to exist at all, what knowledge exactly is, what is morally right or wrong, and much else besides.
Physics may want to study how existing atoms behave, but metaphysics considers what it means for anything to exist and behave at all. Literary criticism may try to interpret Shakespeare, but epistemology wants to know what it means to be correct or true in general. A young man might now face a predicament and desires to know what the noble course of action is, but ethics wants to know what exactly nobility of character is.
Metaphysics
Philosophy deals with reality as an “integrated” whole. It’s not concerned with particular data points, or discovering particular data points, but rather takes them as a given to find what unites them or what’s universal among them.
Metaphysics (or ontology) is at the core of philosophy since it searches most deeply to see what’s common to all that exists. That is, it deals with being qua being. It deals with the “innermost ground,” in addition to its “vision of the whole,” by finding what all being qua being is like.
Metaphysics deals with issues like modality, essence, identity, persistence, causation, substance, etc. Since all that exists is a being, ontology is broader than and deeper than any of the empirical sciences. Philosophy is thus both antecedent to and presupposed by empirical sciences such as physics, chemistry, or biology.
Philosophy is not some intellectual chess game. Engaging in philosophy should be a spiritual and intellectual quest. As a layman (or amateur!), my goal is to seek what’s true, good, and beautiful. A sense of wonder, I believe, is required for learning, contemplating, and appreciating things.
According to Josef Pieper (1904 – 1997), real philosophy is about looking a reality purely receptively. It has no purpose beyond itself in this sense. Pieper argued that this opposes Francis Bacon’s idea that “knowledge is power.” Philosophy then becomes a matter of utility. Good philosophy, however, is an end to itself.
Even so, philosophy can help us live a better life.
Is not the unexamined life not worth living?
Remember, the ancient aphorism “know thyself”?
Richard Weaver (1910 – 1963) in “Education and the Individual” wrote: “Man has an irresistible desire to relate himself somehow to the totality, to ask what is the meaning of his presence here amid the great empirical fact of the universe.”
Great Books of the Western World series originally developed by Mortimer J. Adler, with the help of Robert Hutchins, at the University of Chicago in the 1950s attempted to put together the best of what the Western tradition has to offer.
It’s far more than philosophy.
But it’s a truly humane education.
Mortimer Adler (1902 – 2001) has been called the “philosopher for everyman.” He’s a great way to enter into studying philosophy. His most famous book must be How to Read a Book. Other important books written for a general audience include Ten Philosophical Mistakes, Aristotle for Everybody, and Six Great Ideas.