Sundar Sarukkai on how philosophy can be a living tradition in our lives today

Will Durant did not expect his path-breaking book The Story of Philosophy to be so popular, both in his time and for decades after. The book, first published in 1926, can still be found in bookshops as well as in the many pavement booksellers around India. Durant, in the Preface to the Second Edition of his book, justifiably notes the great surprise at the popularity of his book. He wrote, “All in all it was such a success as no author who has known it once can ever hope to know again.”

Durant’s book did something for philosophy that few books after have done. It converted philosophy’s abstract respectability into a concrete text. It made philosophy a little more accessible. One element that contributed to this readability was the rewriting of philosophy in a popular form. Writing a story of philosophy in this manner had its own pitfalls. Durant felt that he had to defend his book. He pointed out that Plato wrote two types of texts, one for the professionals and the other – popular dialogues – for the ordinary reader. We should remember that Durant’s book was published before popular writing in science, philosophy and arts became a flourishing industry.

The chapters in the book were published in the Little Blue Books series, a publishing initiative that was tinged with a socialist fervour. The publisher, Haldeman-Julius, once heard Durant as a young person giving some lectures on philosophy. He asked him whether he had a publisher to which Durant is reported to have said, “I don’t have a publisher. I am a lecturer. I am a teacher.” The publisher asked Durant to send him his lectures and brought out each of them as a Little Blue Book. These chapters were put together and later published as The Story of Philosophy in 1926. Ironically, in this day of easy accessibility to thousands of authors, it is far more important to make many such ideas meaningfully accessible to the public.

The Story of Philosophy gave a readable account of famous philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Spinoza and others. But it was an incomplete book, a failing which Durant was well aware of, as will anybody who attempts to encompass all of philosophy in one book. It was incomplete in the list of philosophers who were discussed in the book but also in another important aspect, one which Durant acknowledged. In the Preface to the Second Edition he wrote about this incompleteness: “The worst sin of all – though the critics do not seem to have noticed it – was the omission of Chinese and Hindu philosophy.” Very rarely does an author point out what his critics have missed out! I mention this because it reflects a prevalent attitude towards philosophy even today. The critics did not notice this absence of other philosophical traditions because they did not believe that there was any other worthwhile school of philosophy other than the Greek/Western. Ironically, Durant’s point is as much about the colonised state of philosophy then as it is now.

Durant visited India once and wrote a book about it called The Case for India, which was published in 1930. In a preface to this short book, Durant notes that he came to India to get material for his work on the story of civilisation. This book is a passionate call for India’s freedom from the British and primarily deals with the social and economic systems of India, Gandhi, and the Revolution. This visit changed his perception of the India of that time and also of its past; but the lack of an account of its rich philosophical past is a noticeable absence. (An interesting aside about this book has to do with T N Shanbhag, the founder of the Strand Book Stall. Shanbhag met Durant in the early 1960s and discovered that Durant had written a book on India. Much later, after he was sent a photocopy of the book, he decided to publish a limited edition of the book.)

Why another story of philosophy?

Much has changed since Durant recognised his omission. During this time, many popular and semi-popular books in philosophy have been published. However, the “sin”, which Durant mentioned, continues to impact the way philosophy is understood today. Nearly a century after this book was published, there is still resistance to incorporating other world philosophies as part of a larger story of philosophy. In particular, the rejection of Indian, Asian and African philosophy as philosophy, a view which has for long been a part of the Orientalist enterprise, continues in various ways even today. Professional philosophy in the world has ghettoised philosophy from the non-West. Those who engage with Indian or Chinese or other non-western philosophies perforce write and publish in specialised niche journals and for niche readers, whereas Western philosophy is assumed to be the standard bearer of philosophy all across the world. Unfortunately, this has had an impact in the way philosophy is understood in Indian academia, which is reflected in the kind of philosophers that Indian students are asked to read. The challenge now is to integrate the available philosophical literature from around the world with a life philosophy that speaks to the experiences of the diverse societies in India. After all, what is seen as Western philosophy is a product of the experiences that defined those societies. Mindlessly using these philosophers to understand every aspect of non-European societies does not contribute to the growth of philosophical thinking in these societies.

To add to the exclusivity practised in academic philosophy, the public’s view of philosophy has become quite problematic because of various attempts to reduce philosophy to religion in the public sphere. Philosophy is taught quite extensively as a subject in Christian and Islamic seminaries, as well as in traditional Hindu mutts. Since religious texts have always been accompanied by some core philosophical themes and doctrines, philosophical ideas enter through religious discourses. There are a growing number of interested lay people who study these texts almost as deeply as professional philosophers do. Philosophical themes resound in various art practices and performative traditions in many rural areas. In my teaching experience, ranging from children to students of science, management, arts and architecture, I am always surprised at how many of them, from different backgrounds and professions, are so interested in philosophical ideas and concepts, and want to learn the processes of philosophical thinking. They embody a passion for viewing the world through philosophical categories but find that they are excluded from the academic preoccupations of philosophy or from the unnecessary complexity of these texts.

At the same time, philosophy is present in some form in other subjects such as literature, political science, sociology, and the arts. If mathematics is the queen of the natural sciences, then philosophy can definitely stake a similar claim for the social sciences and humanities. Across the world, new philosophies have been catalysed by radical social movements. Globally, in many universities, the use of philosophy to critically understand domains such as science, technology, society, and the arts is quite popular. Unlike a specialised subject like mathematics or quantum physics, philosophical reflection, by its very nature, is pervasive across many human activities.

How to write a story of philosophy that is inclusive in all the senses mentioned above? What is it to look at philosophy not as stultified ideologies but as a vibrant creative practice that illuminates the human condition today? And can that present the possibility of imagining a more hopeful and humane future?

We are confronted with massive challenges today. Whether it is the continuous violence that now seems to characterise human societies, or the intense alienation of individuals from each other in a highly technological world, or the rapid development of knowledge of various kinds, or increasing inequality between individuals, we are in a position of vulnerability that we have not been in before. The impact of all these on children and young adults is particularly worrying. Can philosophy speak to these concerns? Speak to the young? Can it come out of its historical past and produce ideas for the future?

This is the task of producing other stories of philosophy. This other story of philosophy cannot be reduced to a story of philosophers. To make philosophy a more dynamic enterprise, one that recognises its role in everyday life, it is necessary to tell the story of philosophical thinking, to explain what a philosophical attitude could be. What kind of a story is the story of the philosophical imagination? Why has every culture invested so deeply in producing philosophical thoughts? That is the vision of these other stories of philosophy, where I want to think along with you, the readers, about the most basic acts that characterise philosophy.

This book is not about Indian or Western philosophy. It is not about highlighting and summarising what a few philosophers thought about certain questions. Unlike Durant’s book, which consisted of chapters on famous philosophers, this book attempts to describe important philosophical concepts and show why they are important for all of us to think about. It is an attempt to understand why philosophers ask the questions they do, and why their answers are relevant for us today. In this description, insights from philosophers from Indian and Asian traditions as well as the Greek and Western traditions are invoked. Contributions from contemporary philosophy not only bring together the ancient and the modern but also illustrate how philosophy can be a living tradition in our lives today. These new stories emphasise the importance of engaging with philosophy, not just as professionals but as interested lay people, in the hope that they can promote a critical, reflective and humanistic discourse among the public.

What is philosophy?

The first question that we have to begin with is this: What is philosophy? This question is itself a philosophical question and our thinking about this question will already take us on the path towards philosophical thinking.

Asking this question is to ask for a clarification of the concept “Philosophy”. It is not the same as asking for the meaning of the word philosophy. Ad nauseam, you will read that philosophy, with its presumed roots in ancient Greece, means “love of wisdom”. That is just an etymological meaning of the word. Defining philosophy in this manner gives little insight into what the activity of philosophy might be. For you could then ask, what does love and wisdom mean in the expression “love of wisdom”. Not all languages have to define the act of philosophy as a “love of wisdom”. Western scholars who reject the possibility that other cultures possessed the capacity for philosophical thinking often use the argument that there is no word in other languages that denotes philosophy as ‘love of wisdom’. But this is a spurious argument and is based on a misunderstanding of how concepts attain meaning, as well as the meaning of translation. For example, in the Indian context the standard term for philosophy is Darsana, which can be understood as sight/perception in a broader sense. So, for these traditions one could define philosophy as “deeper perception” or “perception of the truth” or “perceiving beyond appearance”. To claim that other cultures had no philosophy because they did not have a word for “love of wisdom” is as absurd as claiming that what the Greeks produced was not philosophy because their word for it was not directly translatable to Darsana!

Another Story of Philosophy will be published by Westland Books. Sundar Sarukkai’s recent books include Philosophy for Children, The Social Life of Democracy, and the novel Following a Prayer. For more details, see the author’s website.