a taste for desert landscapes

The etymology of the word ‘philosophy’ tells us that a philosopher is a “lover of wisdom”. There are at least two reasons why ‘lover of wisdom’ is a fairly good guiding description of what a genuine philosopher does.

Briefly, a philosopher is a lover of wisdom as opposed to a purveyor of knowledge.

I’ll try to explain by first considering the difference between wisdom versus knowledge, and then the difference between restlessly pursuing something as a goal versus claiming to have already achieved the goal, claiming ownership of the valued object, perhaps offering it for sale for a fee. A pursuer is a lover; an owner-seller is a gigolo.

Knowledge consists of facts (or descriptions of facts) and skills. But wisdom is much more fluid sort of thing with a wider scope. To illustrate, a car mechanic has knowledge of cars. He has learned many facts about cars and has various skills that he uses to do things with cars. But “wisdom about cars” is a matter of higher-level judgment about the use of cars, particularly one’s own use of cars. (A person who has wisdom about cars might conceivably shun cars altogether and use a bicycle.) It might be a matter of more basic principle as well.

In my opinion, someone like Jeremy Clarkson has wisdom about cars. He probably has quite a lot of knowledge about cars as well, but his car-knowledge is different from his car-wisdom.

There is no canonical body of knowledge or set of skills to be learned in philosophy. As Wittgenstein said, “The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher.”

I drew another distinction above between owning something (or claiming ownership or achievement of it) and pursuing it as a goal. To illustrate, a rich person who inherits a lot of money owns that money, but he might not love money — he might possibly give it away, or fritter it away. By contrast, consider a person whose life revolves around money, who is preoccupied with money, who pursues money at every opportunity, who changes his “business strategy” whenever new ideas about how to make money occur to him: that would be someone who genuinely loves money. But he might be poor.

In the present context, a “lover” is like a fish swimming upstream, whose constant movement and expenditure of energy in pursuit of his goal is what counts, rather than his reaching the goal, or even getting nearer to it. The downstream current may exceed his swimming speed, so that he is in fact getting further away from his goal: it doesn’t matter, as long as his thoughts and efforts are dedicated to the pursuit of that goal.

Although the love of wisdom and the love of money are very different, because wisdom and money are very different, a philosopher is a lover-pursuer of wisdom rather than someone who already “has wisdom”, still less someone who claims that they have already achieved it. To claim that one has already achieved wisdom is the surest sign that one’s hasn’t.

Thus people who claim to have a special expertise in morals (such as Euthyphro in Plato’s dialogue of the same name) are disqualified from being philosophers on two counts: first, they do not grasp the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and second, they are “purveyors” rather than genuine “lovers”.