Reflective Passion

The Perennial Pleasures of Philosophy

In §32 of Walter Kaufmann's 1958 book Critique of Religion and Philosophy can be found this magnificent paragraph:

The aspiration for truth and the love of philosophy can represent escapes into remote abstractions or into the study of the thoughts of others about the thoughts of others. In its inception, however, philosophy is a way of life and, as the Greek word suggests, a kind of love and devotion. It is the life of reflective passion - penetrating experience, unimpeded by accepted formulas, thought about. That was what philosophy meant to Socrates, and if we want to bring philosophy down to earth again, it can mean nothing less than that to us.

Although all-too-often this conception of philosophy has been drowned out by various forms of scholasticism, scientism, historicism, et al., it has always resurfaced eventually among thinkers as diverse as Pyrrho, Montaigne, Spinoza, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Jan Patočka, and Kaufmann himself. In my own small way it is an ideal to which I, too, aspire.

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