Philosophy as Traditional

Philosophy as Traditional

From a broader view, then, our reflection and discussion points throughout and our exercises in later chapters constitute a performance of philosophy in its most traditional sense.

That is, let us again recall Plato, who writes to us about his teacher, Socrates, who bids us to: Know thyself, and, suggests that An unexamined life is not worth living. In this way, the exercises herein employ a relatively new and qualified post-modern theory, for the age-old project of self-examination. You combine theory with your own intimate experience of yourself and personally discover, know, and appreciate your own spontaneous and deeply held love of knowledge (desire to know) as a central motivation behind all human existence including your own (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000, Chaps. X-XIII).[1]

Further, Plato has Socrates ask the questions that aim at theoretical explanation; however, he does so while remaining within the dialogue form, and while keeping Socrates as a correspondent with other characters in the text. In this way, Plato draws the reader into the text as a mental participant in the dialogue with Socrates and his correspondents. On the other hand, Plato’s student and then-colleague Aristotle steps out of the dialogue form and into writing full-fledged theoretical treatises.

Even so, both philosophers continue to identify the theoretical with the personal—Plato implicitly through his dialogical form, and Aristotle explicitly in his theoretical treatises. For instance, Aristotle maintains in his Ethics a full connection of the theory with personal virtue by identifying the person’s actions with being “on the way to becoming good:”


Thus our assertion that a man becomes just by performing just acts and self-controlled by performing acts of self-control is correct: without performing them, nobody could even be on the way to becoming good. (1972, Book Two, SN 1105b, 9-11)


In this way Aristotle maintains a distinction, but also a unity between a theory of ethics and concrete human living that both he and Plato considered essential to “doing philosophy,” to living a contemplative but fully engaged life, and to living in an authentic way.

Thus, from its ancient origins in the West with the pre-Christian Greeks, philosophy has been understood as a personal adventure with theoretical dimensions rather than, as is often the case today, as a theoretical venture with little or no connection to the real world or to the good of that world, or to the human mind in history from which it emerges. The term abstraction, then, comes to mean desiccation--divorced-from rather than enrichment-of, knowledge as intimate with our concrete human living.

Further, your participation here will include at least a beginning development of your own theoretical consciousness—not an easy differentiation of mind to fully acquire, but wholly necessary in today’s climate, and for the project enfolded in these pages. You will also gain critical and guided use of a well-defined theory of knowledge and cognitional theory named transcendental (or general empirical) method.