This lecture warns that as a contemporary academic discipline, philosophy is at risk of losing its Way. Many philosophers constrict their field to being a Wissenschaft performed by detached observers who gather and analyze facts about reality. That deviates from the philosopher’s original mission of engaging the world and each other in the transformative pursuit of loving wisdom, knowing oneself, and adding value to the world. Both the ancient Greek schools of philosophia and the Asian traditions of the Way (michi, dao, marga) shared that common purpose of engagement. Yet, by replacing engagement with detachment, philosophy may become disembodied, ahistorical, and acultural. Even worse, the act of philosophizing (a koto 事) may become reified into a fixed thing (a mono 物) for philosophers to study. Then it will lose its sense of being a paradigm embodied and transmitted by masters to inspire the innovations and insights of apprentice philosophers. In the academic curriculum, philosophy can even become what students and scholars study instead of how they learn to philosophize. 

 

This lecture reviews how philosophy’s evolution as a discipline in the modern university—both western and Japanese—has put it at risk of losing its Way and speculates on how it might recapture some of its lost elements: philosophizing as paradigmatic praxis learned by emulating masters; the symbiosis of bodymind or affective intellect through imagination; the use of language to open us to reality rather than pin it down for our scrutiny and use. By drawing on ideas from both traditional Japanese and western philosophy, the hope is that we can reconstrue philosophizing again as a visionary and transformative praxis that engages reality and works within it instead of apart from it. The philosopher’s product could then more resemble  an artistic masterwork that enhances the world instead of a denatured description of what already is. Perhaps then philosophy can more directly engage today’s global challenges in relation to ecology, education, economic justice, and human flourishing.