Current mood:	sleepy
Current music:	INXS, "Suicide Blonde"

To Have and To Hold
phi-los-o-phy [fi-los-uh-fee] –noun, plural -phies.

1. the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct.


2. any of the three branches, namely natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysical philosophy, that are accepted as composing this study.


3. a system of philosophical doctrine: the philosophy of Spinoza.


4. the critical study of the basic principles and concepts of a particular branch of knowledge, esp. with a view to improving or reconstituting them: the philosophy of science.


5. a system of principles for guidance in practical affairs.


6. a philosophical attitude, as one of composure and calm in the presence of troubles or annoyances.

Who knows what dreadfully clever internet denizen first came up with it, but there's a saying that goes around, summing up the 'commonsense' idea of what philosophy (and, for that matter, religion) is: "Philosophy is questions that can't be answered; Religion is answers that can't be questioned." This is, in fact, often the pre-understanding of philosophy my students have when they enter my intro classes as well: Philosophy is about asking a lot of questions, most of which can't be answered. Leaving aside, for the moment, the way this caricature of philosophy works to make the discipline seem so irrelevant, let's instead notice something odd about the other way the word "philosophy" gets used in common parlance: "My philosophy about this is..." "What's your business philosophy?" "I have a philosophy about cooking I'd like to share with you..." Etc. From Suite101.com:

Philosophy is the foundation to preventing mediocrity. Most people consider philosophy useful only in the realm of morals. Is an action right or wrong and how will it affect my eternal soul? The dictionary definition of philosophy is a set of beliefs, principles, or aims, underlying somebody's practice or conduct. A philosophy can be a guide to growing your business. By defining what you consider important, you can decide what projects to tackle and which to leave to others.

Notice how the word "philosophy" is used here to indicate, not a set of questions (answerable or no), but a set of answers. Furthermore, though both 'accepted' definitions of the word "philosophy," these two uses have no relation to each other in common parlance; nobody talks about "doing" business philosophy, any more than they talk about "philosophical answers" to questions. Philosophy as a process is dismissed as irrelevant (questions that can't be answered); philosophy as a result is a dogmatic basis for decision making. Once you have the latter, all the more need to dismiss the former!

This in itself is an interesting topic for discussion...but today I'm actually interested in the above as an example of an even more prevalent tendancy: the crystallization of dynamic processes into fixed objects or results. Terry Eagleton has already noted this same phenomenon with respect to "-ologies":

There is a peculiar feature about words that end in 'ology'; '-ology' means the science or study of some phenomenon; but by a curious process of inversion 'ology' words often end up meaning the phenomenon studied rather than the systematic knowledge of it. Thus 'methodology' means the study of method, but is commonly used nowadays to mean method itself. To say you are examining Max Weber's methodology probably means you are considering the methods he uses, rather than his ideas about them. To say that human biology is not adapted to large doses of carbon monoxide means that our bodies are not so adapted, not the study of them. 'The geology of Peru' can refer to the physical features of that country as much as to the scientific examinations of them. And the American tourist who remarked to a friend of mine on the 'wonderful ecology' of the West of Ireland just meant that the scenery was beautiful. (63)

Furthermore, etymology is helpful here in at least allowing us to see that this is a process of transformation, and not simply a bunch of words that happen to simultaneously mean more than one thing; -ology is from the Greek logos, which--as Eagleton mentions--refers to a study, discourse, or organization of something; hence the process, the discipline of study, is the primary meaning, with the sedimented "object" meaning following sometime after. Similarly, the word philosophy comes from the Greek words philein and sofia, literally meaning "the love or pursuit of wisdom"; philosophy as a pursuit is the primary meaning, to which philosophy as an already-attained 'wisdom' is an appended definition.

This process, at least so far as I can tell, has not been conscious or deliberate; it has happened "behind our backs," so to speak. But why does it happen, and what does it mean? There are, at least so far as I have seen, two major approaches to this topic:

1. The Heideggerian Approach

For Heidegger, the way our meanings have a tendency to crystallize is but one consequence of the general trend of the forgetting of Being, which itself constitutes the history of metaphysics. The reduction of a dynamic process to a finished product stems from a larger bias that Heideggerians--like Derrida--call the "primacy of presence." Heidegger takes up this issue as one of his central concerns from his earliest works on, and it's at least partially what's at stake with his...unconventional use of language in works like Being and Time. Notice Heidegger's tendency to "verb-ize" his nouns: "the world worlds," man is "being-there," language is "saying and talking" (ah, the primacy of speech over writing, Derriday will say!), and saying and talking, of course, is "the letting-lie-together-before of everything which, laid in unconcealment, comes to presence." This is the habit Cambridge philosophers were poking fun at when they used to toss around their "Heideggerian" phrase, "Nothing noths"...

The Heideggerian approach obviously owes a lot to the Husserlian analysis of sedimentation and reactivation, which similarly addresses the crystallization of meaning in ontological terms. And so I might more properly call this the "phenomenological approach," though the Heideggerian version of this approach has been the most widely used.

2. The Marxist Approach

In the Marxist tradition, meanwhile, going back at least as far as Lukacs, the process through which thought processes crystallize as fixed objects of meaning is called "reification." It is usually seen as a side-effect of a more pervasive ideology, through which answers become fixed and eternal, generally undermining our ability to critically reassess things like social hierarchies and economic organization. We 'spontaneously' experience reality as naturally given, often even in eternally-set patterns, rather than as contingent products of social construction.

These are both helpful ways of thinking about the issue, though each of them leave a lot to be explored and accounted for. It's interesting, though, that both versions set this strange tendency within language into a larger framework of history, sociality, and--in some cases--even ontology. At any rate, having just today come across yet another insipid example of the phrase "business philosophy" used to mean "statement of purpose," I couldn't help but throw the question down here.