Philosophy as a discipline is often criticized for being purely speculative, totally abstract and without practical application. The philosopher is one who simply thinks, while contributing nothing of any practical value to society.
This is obviously a misconception, and herein, I wish to explore why, by looking at philosophy both as science and art.
Philosophy as Art
Art is a broad subject. It spans eons, cultures, and formats and has few defined boundaries. Admittedly, I know very little about art. I would argue, however, that one of the central tenants of the discipline is meaning.
It is hard to picture an object of art being considered art if it were not endowed with some meaning or significance. Le Penseur, or “The Thinker,” for instance, can be seen as depicting man’s mental struggle in the search for truth; it has the capacity to produce certain ideas to which the observer can relate. This is both the artist’s skill in crafting a work with this capacity, as well as the observer’s ability to find meaning in what would otherwise be a chiseled slab.
What makes art great, perhaps, is its level of significance to observers. If I take a snapshot of my front yard, it has a small amount of significance for me: it is my yard, after all. To anyone else, though, it’s merely a picture of an unkempt lawn, which carries little meaning. The observer also finds it difficult to find his own meaning in such a snapshot. What gives rise to this capacity for significance, I’m not sure, but it’s clear that it relates in some way to what makes art important.
Philosophy, in the broadest sense, is the search for truth. While philosophical works lack the capacity for interpretation that is inherent in works of art, the discipline is the epitome of the search for meaning. Philosophy is the organized search for meaning and truth, and the expression and distillation of that meaning in the purest form possible. Perhaps philosophy then stands at the pinnacle of artistic pursuits; philosophy is the crystallization of artistic expression.
Philosophy as Science
Science, on the other hand, is concerned with the material world, and with the systematic discovery of certainty within that world. This might seem to be the complete opposite of philosophy, which tends towards the abstract, reasoned evaluation of things, rather than empirical data.
However, philosophy seems to me to be science taken to new levels. All branches of science take it as self-evident that our senses don’t deceive us in their representation of an outside world. Given this premise, science seeks to explain phenomena that the senses present. We see, for example, that things fall to the ground when we drop them. Science asks, why? Philosophy, then, is the next level of inquiry; it asks, for instance, how do we know that things fall to the ground when dropped? Can we be sure of the existence of objects, or of the ground? What sort of thing is a physical object?
The same rigor that’s present in science, of testing and retesting hypotheses, is also present in philosophy. Various theories are debated. The unsatisfactory ones are discarded, and the more secure ones are retained. Over time, we can indeed see that progress has been made.
Philosophy’s not simply abstract theoretical speculation. It’s just as rigorous as science, just as meaningful as art, and a decidedly important discipline.
