Philosophy is to philosophize.

Heidegger with an introduction to philosophy

I am reading volume 27 of Martin Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, Einleitung in die Philosophie — Introduction to Philosophy. The lectures were delivered in Freiburg during the winter semester of 1928–1929, shortly after the publication of Being and Time. Early in the lectures Heidegger raises a question that appears simple but reaches into the very nature of philosophy itself:

Is philosophy a science?

His answer is unequivocal.

Philosophy is not science.

At first glance, this may sound like a dismissal. Within modern cultures of knowledge, science represents our most systematic form of justified knowledge. Science investigates, compares, analyzes, tests hypotheses, and seeks methodologically defensible explanations.

If philosophy is not science, then what is it?

Heidegger’s answer is interesting precisely because he does not attempt to legitimize philosophy by making it more scientific. Instead, he insists that philosophy has a different and more fundamental task.

The sciences investigate particular regions of beings. Biology investigates living organisms, physics physical processes, history historical events, and the social sciences human beings, actions, and institutions. Every science therefore presupposes an initial delimitation of its field of inquiry.

Before an investigation can begin, something must already have been understood as a possible object of investigation.

Philosophy asks its question at a more fundamental level. It asks not merely what something is or how it functions, but what it means for something to be at all. It asks about our understanding of Being, of world, and of the human being as the being capable of encountering beings as beings (Heidegger, 1996).

Philosophy therefore does not stand beside the sciences as simply one more scientific discipline. Rather, it reflects upon the fundamental conditions within which scientific inquiry itself already operates.

This does not mean that philosophy stands above science. It does not compete with the physicist about physics or with the social scientist about social science.

It asks differently.

Already here I recognize something that later became important to my own understanding of practical philosophy. Practical philosophy may not primarily be philosophy applied to life from the outside. It may begin within life itself, at the moment when something previously taken for granted becomes a question.

This distinction between philosophy and science once became very concrete for me.

When I taught beginning social work students, one of the topics was social work as a multiparadigmatic scientific discipline. Social work cannot easily be gathered under a single theory of the human being, one philosophy of science, or one form of knowledge. Natural-scientific, social-scientific, humanistic, and normative perspectives meet within the same field.

In this teaching, I used my own Norwegian translation of Martin Heidegger’s Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit. The text forms part of volume 9 of the Gesamtausgabe, Wegmarken. My Norwegian translation, Platons sannhetslære, was published by Forlaget Epos in Sandefjord in 2000 following written approval from Hermann Heidegger.

The translation took me approximately a year to complete.

It was not simply a matter of translating German into Norwegian. Heidegger’s text is itself an interpretation of Plato’s Greek text, which meant that the Norwegian translation continually had to be tested against two linguistic and philosophical levels at once: Heidegger’s German terminology and Plato’s ancient Greek original.

The task was not merely to produce Norwegian prose that read well. It was to preserve, as far as possible, the relation between all three languages without smoothing away the philosophical differences between them. In this work, I received assistance from the Norwegian philosopher Egil A. Wyller, who helped ensure that the translation remained faithful to the Greek text and its philosophical context.

This made the work slow.

But the slowness was part of the understanding.

One quickly discovers that philosophical concepts cannot simply be transferred from one language to another. A word may be translated correctly and still lose something of the world to which it belongs. Translation therefore becomes interpretation.

Perhaps this was already an experience of something Heidegger later helped me understand more explicitly: philosophy is not merely something one acquires as content. It happens in the work of questioning.

It was therefore not accidental that I later used this particular text in my teaching.

Heidegger takes as his point of departure Plato’s allegory of the cave in Book VII of the Republic. Human beings are bound in a cave, watching shadows on a wall. What they take to be reality is limited by the position from which they see. Liberation therefore does not merely mean gaining access to additional information. It requires a turning — a periagōgē — of the whole person (Plato, 1992).

It was this movement that interested me.

I used the allegory of the cave as an image of understanding: learning is not necessarily a simple movement from ignorance to knowledge. Understanding may involve resistance, effort, and reorientation. It may be painful to discover that something previously regarded as self-evident can no longer be sustained.

In Heidegger’s interpretation, this dimension of the cave allegory becomes particularly significant. What changes is not merely what the human being sees, but the manner in which the human being stands in relation to what is disclosed. The question of truth therefore also becomes a question of transformation and of our relation to what comes into unconcealment (Heidegger, 2000).

For me, this was a fruitful image in teaching future social workers. The students were not merely expected to acquire theories, methods, and research-based knowledge. They were also encountering different ways of understanding human beings and might discover that some of their own assumptions required renewed examination.

Not everyone agreed with this way of teaching.

I was criticized by colleagues for mixing philosophy and science. Philosophy, they argued, did not belong in scientific education. Philosophy and science were like oil and water.

They could not be combined.

I understood the objection. Science should not be replaced by philosophy. Philosophical reflection cannot be presented as empirical evidence, and neither Plato nor Heidegger can settle a research question that requires empirical data.

But that was not what I was trying to do.

I was attempting to ask a different question: What happens to a human being when learning involves not merely acquiring new information but reconsidering one’s own understanding? What is required when a previous interpretive framework is no longer sufficient?

Such questions can also be investigated scientifically.

But they are simultaneously philosophical.

As I now read Heidegger’s lectures from 1928–1929, I see that old disagreement in a different light.

Perhaps my colleagues were right in one important respect. Philosophy and science are different.

Heidegger himself insists upon the distinction.

But difference does not necessarily imply incompatibility.

Oil and water may therefore be a misleading metaphor. The question is not whether philosophy should dissolve into science or science into philosophy. The question is whether scientific activity also requires spaces in which it can reflect upon its own presuppositions.

What counts as knowledge? What do we constitute as an object of research? What conception of the human being is already implicit in our theories, concepts, and research questions?

This is where philosophy becomes relevant.

Not as a competitor to science, but as critical reflection upon what might otherwise remain self-evident.

This is what makes Heidegger’s formulation particularly significant:

Philosophie ist Philosophieren.

Philosophy is philosophizing.

Philosophy, then, is not merely a noun. It designates an activity.

One can possess extensive knowledge of the history of philosophy without necessarily philosophizing. One may know Plato’s dialogues, Kant’s categories, Kierkegaard’s writings, and Heidegger’s concepts. One may teach the history of philosophy and publish scholarly work on philosophers.

Yet philosophy itself may not have begun.

Philosophy begins in a more fundamental sense when the question also reaches the person who is asking it.

The issue is then no longer merely what Heidegger meant by Being, but what it means for me to be. Not merely what Kierkegaard wrote about despair, but what despair means when it appears within a human life. Not merely the definition of truth, but what happens when something I previously regarded as true can no longer be maintained.

At that point, we find ourselves once again in Plato’s cave.

The liberated prisoner does not move effortlessly into the sunlight. The light blinds him. The familiar darkness may initially be easier to retain than a truth that demands a transformation in the very way the world is understood.

Perhaps this is precisely why the allegory of the cave mattered to me as a teacher.

Not because it provided the students with scientific knowledge, but because it illuminated something about the conditions of understanding.

Science can provide us with new knowledge. Philosophy can ask what that knowledge presupposes and what it does to our understanding of the world, of other human beings, and of ourselves.

They are not the same.

Nor should they be.

Precisely because philosophy is philosophizing, however, it cannot simply harden into a completed system. Heidegger’s distinction between philosophy and Weltanschauung — worldview — therefore extends the same argument.

A worldview can provide coherence, orientation, and security. It can offer a comprehensive picture of the world and of one’s own place within it. Philosophy, too, may be tempted to become such a finished system — a house into which we can move.

But if the fundamental questions have already been answered, philosophizing itself may come to an end.

Philosophy must therefore preserve a distinctive openness. It does not necessarily make the world safer or simpler. On the contrary, it may render the self-evident questionable again and reopen questions that established forms of understanding have closed.

Perhaps this is why philosophy continues to matter to me.

Not because it provides final answers, but because it has taught me to live with questions that need not necessarily be brought to an end: What is a good life? What do we owe other human beings? What does it mean to be who one is?

Such questions are not answered once and for all.

They must also be lived.

Perhaps this is what Heidegger was attempting to do in a lecture hall in Freiburg during the winter of 1928–1929. Not primarily to transmit philosophy as a bounded body of knowledge, but to set philosophizing itself into motion.

That is a significant difference.

And perhaps it also offers a possible definition of practical philosophy:

Not philosophy applied to life.

But life itself, when it begins to question what previously appeared self-evident.

Philosophy is then no longer merely something we read.

It is something we do.

To philosophize.

References

Heidegger, M. (1976). Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit [Plato’s doctrine of truth]. In F.-W. von Herrmann (Ed.), Wegmarken (Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 9, pp. 203–238). Vittorio Klostermann.

Heidegger, M. (1996). Einleitung in die Philosophie [Introduction to philosophy] (O. Saame & I. Saame-Speidel, Eds.). Vittorio Klostermann. (Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 27)

Heidegger, M. (2000). Platons sannhetslære [Plato’s doctrine of truth] (K. T. Pettersen, Trans.). Forlaget Epos. (Original work published 1976)

Plato. (1992). Republic (G. M. A. Grube, Trans.; C. D. C. Reeve, Rev.). Hackett Publishing Company.