Philosophy: Questions that Concern us All

It is an embarrassing situation, when being asked about his/her profession, the answer to be given is "philosopher" or even "lecturer of Philosophy." The problem does not so much reside in the fact that the interlocutor will not know in which section of knowledge or technology to categorize such an answer, but in the fact that, probably, the philosopher himself/herself does not know either. A philosopher is, of course, a person whose task is to think, but this is also a characteristic of Ramón y Cajal, Einstein, Gauss..., people who nobody (at least to begin with) qualifies as "philosophers." The embarrassment of the philosophy professional will be further accentuated by the suspicion of what, confronted with this answer, the interlocutor will begin to conjecture. Well, if there was a poll in the streets about the subject, the great majority of the interviewees would elaborate an opinion such as: "Philosophers are people who talk about matters that only are only of interest to them, and in a jargon that only they (in the best of cases) understand."

It is difficult for the philosopher to convince (both the other and himself/herself) that this view is a crude caricature and that, in reality, a philosopher is exclusively he/she who speaks of matters that concern everyone and he/she does it in terms that are, for starters, elementary and that only reach their inevitable complexity by respecting that absolute requirement of transparency that comes emblematically associated with the name Descartes.

To say that a philosopher speaks exclusively of matters that concern everyone, to say that if some matter does not comply with this requirement, it cannot be philosophical, is to bring closer the philosophical query to those elementary questions that the human being raises as a mere corollary of a sort of innate tendency. A tendency that, of course, we observe in children and that counts among its ingredients with which a contemporary thinker has called ‘language instinct.' Language reaches maturity by exploring different paths, naturally that questioning path is one of them, and the designative word for the situation of stupor that leads to question is precisely philosophy.

Translated by Susana Badiola

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