Philosophy, as a discipline, aims to form a kind of cognition, value judgment and abstract generalization about the integrity of the world through the rational thinking of people, using concepts, judgments, reasoning and other forms of thinking logic, presenting a theoretical picture and meaning understanding of the complete infinity of the world. The contemporary American philosopher BlandBranshad believes that philosophy is part of an older and broader cause of humanity—the cause of understanding the world—and that philosophical thinking is a process of understanding and interpretation. Wittgenstein pointed out in Philosophical Studies that to explain is to think, to do something. Obviously, philosophical thinking is a kind of "doing philosophy" according to the philosophical way of thinking, not a simple study of the history of academic thought, it is oriented to the practical problems of human existence; philosophical education is fundamentally not about the imparting and learning of philosophical theoretical knowledge in the history of philosophy (of course, this is also important), but the study, cultivation and training of philosophical way of thinking, especially the forging and application of a kind of thinking judgment of people on the overall understanding of world things.
Philosophy itself consists of an appeal to unchanging knowledge
Shift to being a way of thinking
In the Greek period, philosophy and science were basically not distinguished, and both sought to achieve the understanding and grasp of the universality and absoluteness of all things in the world. But the contemporary interpreter Gadamer points out that today's philosophy is in a state of rapid change, and in the face of science, it is beginning to find proof of its legitimacy in ways never before. The task of classical philosophy in knowing the essential knowledge of the things of the world has been replaced by modern science, "the popularity of science, which is the decisive sign of the times, has terminated the classical role of philosophy", and philosophy can no longer be expected to provide the essential knowledge of the things of the world, as science does, and it is no longer reasonable to hold that philosophy should once again perform its old full function and synthesize all our knowledge with a unified picture of the world. Philosophy is no longer strictly treated in terms of its epistemic requirements, in contrast to the totality of interpretations of the world offered by various worldviews. On the contrary, as a manifestation of life, it has similar value to other human cultural creations (such as art, law, religion).
Habermas made a similar observation. In his view, philosophy can no longer function as an epistemological form of traditional philosophy, and philosophy as an interpreter can no longer have the privilege of knowing the essence as far as science, morality, and art are concerned, and possess at most knowledge that may be wrong. Philosophy must abandon its traditional form, that is, doctrine as an intervention in the process of socialization, and retain its pure theory. At the same time, philosophy cannot hierarchicalize the composite totality of different ways of life according to the level of value, and philosophy can only grasp the general structure of the living world. It can be said that after Kant, there can be no ultimate and integrated metaphysical ideas.
In contemporary times, the fate of philosophy itself becomes a problem. The only way for philosophy to continue to exist and play its role is to change the way it exists. In Gadamer's view, contemporary philosophy has undergone two forms of change, namely philosophy moving toward art and philosophy toward the humanities. Philosophy began to prove the authenticity of the existence of art in various ways, and to highlight the significance of philosophy as an understanding of the true nature of art through an understanding of it. In the field of French culture, for example, philosophy is classified as literature, and its literary and artistic works of the 19th and 20th centuries are closer to the old tasks of philosophy, and they are regarded as the preservers of the great heritage of philosophy. The reason why philosophy has come to art is that the greatest advantage of art and beauty is that they have no pure rules of application, and it is impossible for people to find a rule of application in order to achieve the understanding of art and beauty. Art and beauty necessarily bring us to our own judgment. If we find something beautiful, it means that we are making our own judgments. Similarly, unlike the natural sciences, the humanities are not aimed at acquiring and possessing an immutable precision knowledge of the things of the world; on the contrary, man participates in the spiritual sciences of the humanities, understanding and promoting the development of the humanities with uncertainty, which at its core is not a question of objectivity, but a question of self-relevance based on the existence of man.
It can be said that it is in the arts and humanities that people realize and pursue the meaning of things that are infinitely understood and interpreted. There is no fixed and absolute answer to the question of artistic experience and beauty, "beautiful things are those whose value is self-evident", which is completely related to itself, and the question of the truth and goodness of the humanities is also not a question of objectivity and absoluteness, but a question of understanding and interpretation; it is essentially a question of the primitive relationship between man and object. The essence of the change in the mode of action of modern philosophy is that philosophy no longer seeks the cognitive activity and essential knowledge presentation of world things as in the classical period, but is expressed as the preservation, strengthening and application of a unified, abstract and holistic way of thinking about and understanding the world.
Philosophy as a holistic abstract thinking
The way is still not outdated
For man, the philosophical explanation of the rational unity of things is an urgent need, and this need is a never-ending process. In the process, not only is the dialogue between each of us in our thoughts and ourselves, but also the kind of dialogue in which we are all involved and will never cease to be involved. Gadamer's view is that "science has not tried to prevent philosophy from existing in a changed way" and that "philosophy cannot give up exploring its own questions, whether after Kant's critique of 'destroying everything', after 'speculation' was discredited in the 19th century, or even after the promulgation of the verdict that the ideal of 'scientific unity' had overwhelmed all 'metaphysics'".
The problem that philosophy has not given up on is that "only philosophy questions the whole." However, this whole is not like any other defined whole, but only a whole that encompasses all its parts. The whole of philosophical inquiry is an idea that transcends the limited possibilities of knowledge. Therefore, it is not something that we can know in a scientific way. Although the popularity of science, which was the decisive sign of the times, terminated the classical role of philosophy, the need for the unity of reason can only be satisfied by philosophy. Philosophy, as a rational natural judgment and a way of thinking about wholeness, will never become obsolete, "the need of reason for unity and unity of knowledge still exists", "the urgent demand of reason for unity is still persistent... The legacy of our philosophical tradition of thought belongs equally important to this intellectual imperative", which refers not only to a question of the theoretical construction of the existence of the world, but more importantly to the reflection on the existence of the person behind the theory and the full meaning of life.
In the Greek period, there was an ancient controversy over youth education, which erupted around rhetoric and philosophy. When Socrates gave Logos the central meaning of entering into truth, this realization brought about a great turn in ancient Greek philosophy: the unity of the thinking of language and the logic of thinking. This became especially clear when Aristotle fixed logos in his logic as a function, i.e., as a conceptual proposition, an "apophansis." In order to distinguish and highlight the statement of the theory from other possible statements, this expression introduced by Aristotle was reused many times afterwards. It was "what Aristotle based on the logic of judgment, the logic of reasoning, and the logic of concepts that henceforth prescribed what we call philosophy in Europe."
Philosophy, as a special thinking ability of human beings, expresses a holistic thinking judgment about the things of the world. According to Gadamer, philosophy is not only an enlightenment, but also an enlightenment against its own authoritarianism, "to have reason lies in one's own awareness of the limits, which are set by making science unable to reflect its own premises and consequences." It's also an insight." Philosophy is not fundamentally a kind of "natural science" science that seeks absolute knowledge of the world; on the contrary, it is a theoretical reflection that requires the maintenance of a distance from oneself at all times, the transcendence of all that exists in mankind.
The essence of philosophical education is to cultivate one
Rational Science Sound Thought Judgment
Plato's theory of ideas holds that the world of ideas is the real world, and the existence of ideas is the most fundamental existence. People must know ideas, only by using their own intellectual thinking, thinking to philosophy is like a microscope to biology, only by knowing how to use thinking, cultivating and forming a philosophical way of thinking, can they carry out true philosophical thinking.
Kant also emphasized the importance of philosophy as a training of rational ability for people to think about problems. Philosophy is fundamentally not a study and mastery of theoretical knowledge, but an exercise and cultivation of critical ability. This is because philosophy is a pure idea of a possible science, which cannot be given concretely anywhere, but one can approach it in various ways. "Where is philosophy?" Who owns philosophy? And how can philosophy be known? We can only learn to do philosophical research, that is, to exercise the talents of reason according to the universal principles of reason by virtue of certain ongoing attempts, but always reserve the right of reason to investigate, approve, and resist those principles themselves in their origins. Here, Kant's meaning is clear: philosophy is never ready-made knowledge, philosophy is unteachable, but can only be taught in how philosophy is done.
Hegel once spoke highly of Thales's proposition that "water is the foundation of all things", believing that this proposition constituted the first proposition in the history of Western philosophy, and its core significance was that this proposition expressed an abstract reflective judgment of human understanding of the world. Marx also said that there are three ways for people to understand and understand the world: art, religion and philosophy, philosophy is different from artistic intuition and religious belief, but is based on people's abstract rational thinking, the way of cognition and understanding of the world, showing a rational system of thought about the wholeness of the world. Engels also said in anti-Dühring that the only doctrines that still exist independently of all previous philosophies are doctrines of thought and its laws—formal logic and dialectics. In his view, "theoretical thinking is merely a natural ability." This ability must be developed and exercised, and in order to carry it out there is no other means until now than the study of the philosophy of the past."
What is rational thinking? It is the ability of reason to analyze, synthesize, and reason according to the rules of logical thinking, and it is the ability to know the truth. Philosophical thinking is an abstract rational thinking, which is essentially the formation and application of human rational judgment. According to Gadamer, the activity of judgment is the subordination of something special into something general. Since it is logically unprovable to recognize something as an instance of a certain rule, it needs to know the rules of the application of judgment, and in order to follow these rules it needs another judgment, which is the dilemma of judgment. Kant distinguished man's rational judgment into prescriptive judgment and reflective judgment, the former refers to the ability to classify diverse things to a certain universal category, to think and know in the rules, the use of this judgment requires a prior rational a priori form, the need to formulate a priori conditions for the use of judgment; at the same time, this judgment needs to be pointed to and related to specific existential things through "perceptual intuition", thus forming the empirical content of thinking judgment. What can connect the intellectual, rational and empirical content is the "graph" that has both a priori categorical factors and empirical characteristics, which is the "synthesis of judgment". In addition, the use of "prescriptive judgment" relies on reflective judgment on the rules themselves, that is, the ability to abstract general and universal provisions from the diversity and difference of things and use them in turn to recognize and understand specific things.
In Gadamer's view, judgment is man's ability to judge and understand the wholeness of the world's things, the essential expression of philosophy as a way of thinking, "The word judgment refers to the production from life experience of what is considered sound and rational. This kind of judgment also affects political and social judgment." Judgment is not so much an ability as it is a requirement for all to manifest a "common intention" (Gemeinsinn) in order to prevent the kind of "mere empirical results ... Practical rational empiricism to define the practical concept of good and evil". Judgment is generally unlearned, it can only be trained in concrete things, because there is no conceptual explanation that can guide the application of rules. Therefore, the judgment of philosophical thinking does not lie in how much specific knowledge is given to people, nor in how many specific problems are solved, but its fundamental role is to provide people with a rational mode of thinking that recognizes and understands the world, and cultivates and exercises people's ability to think critically. Philosophical thinking has four important characteristics: abstract, critical, reflective and comprehensible: abstraction refers to the metaphysical judgment and thinking that can form a whole and infinite nature of the world; criticality refers to the fact that philosophical thinking as a rational thinking always needs to be critically treated with reason, and no precondition principle and conclusion are unquestionable; reflectiveness refers to the need to reflect on the object of knowledge and external behavior, and also to maintain a "reflective consciousness" on the human mind itself. Comprehension refers to the need for philosophical thinking to involve people in it, and to make the meaning of things themselves occur and reveal through the activity of understanding. Comprehension determines that philosophical thinking is not a judgment of the relationship between empirical phenomena or not, but an understanding understanding in the sense of existentialism, with the characteristics of participation, history, situation, and uncertainty.
The universal, infinite meaning of the existence of the world is linked to the concrete existential experience of man's "here and now", and the understanding of the meaning of the world as a whole is fundamentally a self-understanding related to the self. It is through the limited historical self-existence and concrete hermeneutic context that the overall meaning of the world occurs and emerges to people in understanding and interpretation. To be philosophical is to use philosophical thinking to think about problems, the existence of things is a matter of fact, and philosophy has to ask why it is so. Where is its basis and rational basis? The essence of philosophical questions is not to give specific answers to the questions, but to make the existence and meaning of things themselves unfold and manifest to us through the questions, and to learn how to ask or how to think, which actually indicates a certain understanding that we may get. The essence of the philosophical question is openness, it is the openness to all possibilities, it is the opening up of all possibilities, and the most crucial thing is to ask questions about the problem itself. In this regard, philosophical thinking is the application of a critical ability that constantly breaks through the boundaries of man's existing knowledge system and ideological framework.
Wittgenstein said: "Without philosophy, ideas are blurred." The task of philosophy is to make thought logically clear and to give it a clear boundary. Hegel also believed that the history of a discipline must be intimately connected with our conception of it. This means that philosophical research is fundamentally about arguing a point or deducing a certain conclusion by logically thinking on the basis of a clear conceptual meaning. To think logically is to think rationally, and to think rationally is most likely to lead us to the truth. The primary task of contemporary philosophical education is to cultivate people to form a critical, abstract, reflective and comprehensible thinking through the professional training of philosophy, to be able to use philosophical thinking to think about problems, and to conduct a universal and integral essential thinking about problems, that is, to cultivate people's ability to "do philosophy". Doing philosophy is different from learning philosophy, the latter refers to the study and mastery of philosophers' ideological theories and philosophical history, is an activity of learning, understanding and interpreting text objects; doing philosophy is different, it is a kind of self-thinking on the essential problems of things and the world according to philosophical thinking methods, is a problem-oriented philosophical practice, philosophical operation, philosophical activities, showing a philosophical thinking and debate process, whether there is philosophical theory and knowledge of the history of philosophy is not very important. Contemporary philosophical education must change the practice of simply imparting the theories and knowledge of the history of philosophy, truly return to the essential understanding of philosophy as a way of thinking, through education to enable people to train in philosophical thinking, in philosophical thinking, with the freedom of spiritual judgment to return thought to the original experience of their own life, to propose and show creative new thinking and new understanding about real life.
(The author is Dean and Professor, School of Philosophy, Anhui University)
Editor: Chen Xuanyu
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