Let us begin: You Are A Philosopher

You were born to be a philosopher. The unique evolutionary output of the human mind is that it is designed to wonder…and philosophy begins in wonder.

What comes up in this episode:

• What is philosophy, anyway?
• There are PHILOSOPHERS and there are philosophers.
• The roles philosophers play.
• Pythagoras gave us more than a theorem…
• Philosophy is inescapable (even if you try really hard).

Referenced or mentioned:

• Pythagorean Harmonics
• Aristotle’s Metaphysics
• Natural Philosophy (kinda) 

A thought to carry with you:
 The self-help industry is essentially “popularized philosophy.”

Credits / Links:

• So, You’re A Philosopher’s homepage: ponderpus.com 
• Leave Chris a voicemail: 469.626.7355

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So you're a philosopher? Hmm. Let's start with a story. A tale about a man whose obsession with numbers continues to enrich the world thousands of years after his time. In a port town on the Ionian coast, a tall man in simple garb stood watching the sweaty, noisy bustle of men applying pitch to hulls, carrying sacks on and off deck, and generally going about the business of a day of work. He watched, but what his eyes saw passed out of mind as quickly as in, for his thoughts were on numbers. Always numbers. A sharp ring of metal on metal shook him out of his fugue. Why did I stop here? he wondered. He often found himself like this, suddenly wondering what brought him to a particular part of town or what got him wading out into the waters. His mind was always chasing patterns before his awareness caught up, but when it did, magic usually followed. The ringing seemed to grow louder as he focused on the present. Ah, he thought. The shipbuilder's blacksmiths are hard at work. He winced as two hammers struck at the same time and the dissonant sound they made grated his ears. But wait. When a different pair rang out, the sound was sweet. Why? Already his feet were taking him closer. The rest of the port scene, as well as the flow of precious numbers he'd been bathing in, all faded away as the musician in him took over. Along the way he fished out coin that he exchanged for bread and figs, and then stopped inside the yard where a handful of men shaped metal with metal. He scanned them at work, and they noticed him watching them, impassive, except for small twitches when certain combinations of hammer song rang out. After a while he noticed the sounds had stopped, and the overseer now stood before him, expectant. The tall man realized he was humming the hammer sounds and stopped. He held out the gifts he'd brought. Pardon, he said, but might I weigh your hammers? This is how I imagine the legend of Pythagorean hammers played out. Because our tall, number obsessed protagonist here is Pythagoras. Obviously. The same fellow who gave us the Pythagorean theorem. You remember that, right? For right angled triangles the square of the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the length of the other two sides. Yeah, I didn't remember that either. And while I'm sure the world is a better place because this theorem exists, I just like saying hypotenuse. But here in our story, he's decades away from becoming the infamous leader of a mathematically obsessed mystical cult. Yes, really. But he is on the verge of discovering Pythagorean harmonics. His curiosity about why some hammer pairs were harmonic and others weren't, led him to weigh the hammers and discover ratio relationships. The legend goes he discovered that a hammer that weighed twice as much as another would produce a sound exactly one octave deeper, leading to the harmonic ratio that two to one equals one octave. And while the hammer and blacksmith part of the story might have been invented ages after he lived, we do know that however he was inspired to investigate, he proved this theory with lengths of string. One string that was twice as long as another, or weighed down with a weight twice as heavy, actually does produce a note when plucked, one octave different. Among the many, many things he was known for, the most significant fact is Pythagoras was a philosopher. And so are you. So you're a philosopher? Let me think. My name is Chris, and I believe you have a philosopher inside you. They may be hiding or have a small voice, but they are there, and I'd like to introduce you. You're a philosopher. You were born to be a philosopher. Human beings are wired for philosophy. You're designed to question, to wonder, to figure stuff out, to attach a meaning to things, pattern recognition. All of these things lead to an existence where you seek meaning and you assign meaning. And that is at the heart of philosophy. So let's define philosophy. I'm gonna guess that when I say you're a philosopher, the first thing you think of is, I'm what? I'm I don't have a degree, I don't study philosophy. I I'm not out here discovering truths about the universe and writing them down and telling a bunch of people about them. But that's one view of being a philosopher. There's the academic side of philosophy. And this is a it's a discipline with a lot of different branches. There's epistemology, there's metaphysics, there's ethics, there's the philosophy of language, philosophy art. There's press digitation. Which not really. I mean, that's magic, which arguably well, we'll do an episode about magic and philosophy in the future. But that's the academic side, or all these different branches under that discipline of philosophy. And then there's natural philosophy. Yeah, hey, this is uh Edward. I'm the editor on the podcast, and I think what Chris meant to say there isn't natural philosophy, but more like intuitive philosophy, or just being philosophical without academic philosophy coming into play. Because like the term natural philosophy actually has a meaning in academic philosophy. It's back, you know, in the day before science was a popular term. It's what everybody called science. Like, you know, Newton's book Principia, that's like the big deal among scientists. The title of that was like, you know, mathematical principles for natural philosophy. So it's basically looking at the physical world as opposed to like philosophy of ethics and that sort of stuff. So that's that's what Chris meant. He just he just meant non-academic philosophy. Alright, thanks. It's it's the thoughtful, reflective attempt to understand yourself and the world around you. And that's where I lean in to philosophy. I think that's the truer definition. My personal definition of philosophy is the attempt to understand yourself, to understand reality, and to understand the way those two things impact each other. I think that the rest, all of academic philosophy, all the schools of philosophy, like Cynicism and Stoicism and Epicureanism and all those things, they're all outputs of the quest to understand things. And they serve to support that quest as well. So obviously there's great value in them and much to learn, but I lead with that natural philosophy. And frankly, you were born to be a philosopher in a way. I think that philosophy is a uniquely human evolutionary output, the way our brains are designed, it's reflected in animals as well, and animals have pattern recognition and and whatnot. But when it comes to, as far as we know, when it comes to seeking meaning and creating narratives and stories to give things meaning, I think that's uniquely human. You might say consciousness isn't a human evolutionary output, but I think that we're discovering, and I think ancient peoples probably already knew that there are multiple kinds of consciousness. Consciousness is up there, yeah. But I think philosophy is that uniquely human thing. The thing that makes us human is the capacity and the drive to philosophize. So when I say you're a philosopher, I think we all have an inner philosopher. And we've talked about how philosophy is natural. We're s we're geared as humans to develop a philosophizing mind and outlook. But to cultivate that, you have to feed your inner philosopher, to know that they're there, encourage them to grow, pay attention, to speak up and share some insights with you. I think that it is part of your daemon, which is a a Greek word that we'll get into in a future episode on eudaimonia, which is essentially the concept of living a full life in step with your true purpose. It's essentially living authentically, according to the Stoics and other ancient philosophers. Speaking of, the term philosophy simply means a love of wisdom. And that was uh created by your boy Pythagoras. He wanted to differentiate himself from people who claimed that they were wise, sophists, wise men, and instead someone who uh was seeking wisdom. The word philosophia is two words. It's phyllo, which is love, or could be defined as the pursuit of something, devotion to and Sophia to wisdom. Sophia could be wisdom, could be uh seeking excellence or understanding. I really dig that because uh there's a couple of different ways you can interpret it. So it's a pursuit of excellence as well as a a love of wisdom, it's a dedication to understanding, which I think that's a fair definition of philosophy. And interestingly, there's um there's a Chinese equivalent to that, which is kung fu. At least I was taught back in my days as a kung fu man that kung fu meant hard work. So, yes, kung fu is a martial art, and it's a whole it's a whole school of martial arts from China, but it also is applied to mean pursuit of excellence. So you could have strong kung fu in mathematics or in art or what have you. I just think that's a cool parallel. So there's philosophers and there's philosophers. Really depends on the context. There's people who have earned that title as a job or from their education or their effort. They've written books and had them published, and they engage in that field that is either strictly academic or or very related to academic philosophy. And then there are your everyday folks who love wisdom and pursue this effort to understand with uh deliberation. And I think that when you think of someone as a philosopher, it really just depends on the context and what you mean by that, which is a deliberately philosophical way to think about it. There's a lot of different roles that philosophers play in society. The classic perspective is that a philosopher is someone who clarifies the good life. They steer society towards wisdom and virtue. Oftentimes a philosopher will clarify concepts, help people understand themselves, interpret the social world. There's a lot of ways that someone who is exploring what the world is and has insight can share it with society and help society as a whole move forward. And I think that your inner philosopher has a role to play in your society, the society of you. I was explaining this podcast idea to a new friend. And when I was talking about everyone being a philosopher, she said, you know, I I took a a course in college. It was uh it was a required course on philosophy, but outside of that, I've never studied philosophy. And I asked her if she was into personal development at all. And she said, Yeah. And we talked about a couple of the popular leaders in personal development. We talked about Mel Robbins and how she had read her popular book, and I pointed out that personal development, the self- whole entire self-help industry, is essentially popularized philosophy. It's it's taking philosophy and psychology and that sort of thing and and putting it into practical boxes and toolkits for people to use. And so in that way, she actually was studying philosophy. And we'll, in future episodes, get into all the different human lenses that are offshoots of philosophy, the sciences and psychology and religion and myth and that sort of thing. When you're studying those things, you are, in a real sense, studying philosophy, even though it may not be directly in that category. You may not have gotten that book from the philosophy section of Barnes and Noble or your library, but it it doesn't mean that that's not connected to philosophy. And I want to go back to philosophy meaning love of wisdom. So then a philosopher is a lover of wisdom, someone who loves wisdom. That's an active phrase, right? That's something you decide to do, is to love wisdom. So being a philosopher is a decision. It's an act of will. I'm sure you, like me, are often thinking to yourself, I'm no Pythagoras. I haven't been entranced by ringing hammers and puzzled out universal laws of mathematics. But I certainly have experienced wonder. When I was around 13 years old, I had an older cousin I was trying to get interested in some book of fantasy that I had just finished. She was more interested in educational things, but she agreed to give it a go if I would read the book on psychology that she just finished. So we swapped. She said, after she finished reading it, that it was fine, but just not for her. I, on the other hand, experienced a pivotal moment in my life. I don't remember the name of the book or the specifics. I remember it talked about the brain, something about neuroplasticity, maybe something about personality types and things that motivate humans. But while I don't remember the specifics, I do remember the room I was in when I read it very clearly. I can think back and remember the look and feel and smell of the book, how enraptured I was. How I struggled to understand the science and concepts, but how that struggle expanded my understanding of just how big the world could be. Like Pythagoras, I had encountered something novel, and it piqued my curiosity. I recognized a pattern here or there in the concepts, just enough to hook me and keep me there. I wondered and read, and my understanding of what life could be and was stretched and grew. Now I want to go way back, old school, and read something to you from Aristotle. Aristotle was a student of Plato. He was a tutor of Alexander the Great, a Titan of philosophy, and this is a passage, it's two passages, from his book Metaphysics. So let me read this to you. The first part goes, For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize. They wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little, and stated difficulties about greater matters, about the phenomena of the moon, and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And then later he says, And a man who is puzzled in wonders thinks himself ignorant, whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders. Therefore, since they philosophized order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end. Essentially, he's saying they were pursuing knowledge just to know, for the sake of understanding. To summarize, and this is the final thought I want to leave you with philosophy begins in wonder. The next time you find your curiosity piqued, and you feel drawn to lean in a little closer, to begin to wonder, do me a favor, say hi to your inner philosopher for me. So you're a philosopher? Yes. I think very deeply. That should be my theme song.