What is Philosophy?
Deleuze was wrong when he said that philosophy was Greek in it’s origin, in the co-written book with Guattari. The same way that Deleuze & Guattari was wrong about Hegel (according to Žižek) and right about Nietzsche (according to Bard & Söderqvist). Philosophy is nothing but the artform of thinking and contemplating. It’s not bound to a medium such as the written book or printed paradigm’s of radio and television. It can occur in a YouTube channel or at a Substack newsletter which both are interactive language.
As such Deleuze was right, that philosophy isn’t academic in it’s disposition. Because academia is just one mode of doing philosophy in. And history of ideas are in itself not philosophy, it’s history of ideas. One way communication is thus what academia have become learning the past is not the same as creating or co-creating the future. My own experience going through academia, this is what you learn, you learn the history of ideas as an undergraduate, you don’t learn how the world works, because there is no consensus on that.
Philosophy as it turns out, is the Greek word of an older Avestan word, Mazdayasna, which is both means friendly devotion to wisdom. The bridge between Persia and Greece can be found in Heraclitus and his fragments of thinking which inspired Hegel and Whitehead among others. But then Mazdayasna itself is Persian in origin. And it’s poetic invocation and and service to the community which we can read 3700 years after the likely composers death, Zoroaster.
With Zoroaster as our exemplar archetype of what an philosopher is, we learn that, philosophers try to be long-term, way beyond there own death. The origin of philosophy thus have two ideals wholeness (to live a complete life) and transcedence (to leave a legacy to your community that suvives you).
There is three ways thus to contribute as a philosopher: construction, reconstruction and deconstruction.
Construction: Comming up with genuently novel ideas.
Reconstruction: Novel combinations, assamblages of ideas you’ve never heard before.
Deconstruction: Killing a lot of shitty ideas out there.
And then we see clearly that Zoroaster is the bridge between east and west. With hinduisms’s oscillation (prānta) prior to and buddha’s negation (śūnyatā) after the Zoroasterian Event. And thus we speak of the Silk Road religions as being the origin of many other novel ideas in history.