Do You Even Philosophy?
There is a line from Derrida that’s been ringing in my ears while reflecting on the current state of the world. It’s not one you might immediately think. Derrida writes, “One shouldn’t complicate things for the pleasure of complicating, but one should also never simplify or pretend to be sure of such simplicity where there is none. If things were simple, word would have gotten round.”
It is a quietly devastating thing to say, because it cuts in both directions at once. Against the kind of academic complicating that mistakes difficulty for depth, and against the kind of confident plain-speaking that mistakes accessibility for truth and simplicity of narrative. Philosophy lives in that gap. Not complexity for its own sake, but honesty about the complexity that is already there whether you acknowledge it or not.
Socrates was like the OG grand-pappy of philosophy and the Socratic method, which is the oldest version of this, is really just the refusal to let apparently simple words off the hook. What is love. What is justice. What is a society. These seem like questions with obvious answers right up until you try to actually answer them, at which point they become surprisingly resistant. Philosophy begins, as Borges put it, when we subject the present to what are essentially “age-old perplexities.” It unsettles and destabilises. It takes the thing you thought you knew and holds it up to the light until you see how strange it actually is.
Take memory. It feels like one of the simplest and most personal things there is. You remember something. It happened to you, of course. Memories feel like they belong to us. But now think of the German word for memory, Er-innerung, which literally means the process of internalising something, taking it inside yourself, making it part of who you are. To truly remember is to embody what was lost. Whereas to commemorate, Ge-denken, is to externalise it, to hold it at a distance, to mark it without quite carrying it. It’s the same event with two completely different relationships to it. Suddenly memory and forgetting are not opposites. They are two different strategies for managing the same unbearable thing.
This is what Adorno was getting at with his infamous line that after Auschwitz the writing of poetry had become barbaric. It is a statement that almost everyone misreads as a prohibition, as if Adorno is saying stop writing. But what he means is closer to the opposite. Poetry is not commemoration. It is not putting a wreath down and walking away with a clear conscience. Genuine art, what the Greeks called poiesis, the creative act that brings something new into existence that was not there before, is a form of reckoning that goes all the way down. It demands that you actually carry the thing rather than mark it from a safe distance. After the unthinkable, we are forced to think new ways of creating. The impossibility of the task is precisely what makes the task necessary.
Hegel declared the death of philosophy and meant it as a rebirth. Wisdom, he was saying, is no longer the preserve of the Gods or the sages or the ones who have arrived somewhere the rest of us have not reached. It becomes human, which means it becomes something we do rather than something we possess. The search for clarity implies the questioning of things that seemed self-evident. We become philosophers not by finding answers but by entering into the tradition of the questioning itself.
Which means philosophy is not confined to academic journals or lecture halls. It happens in film, in literature, in poetry, in the conversations you have at two in the morning when someone asks you something you cannot quite answer. All of these are, as someone once put it, lies that tell the truth. Cinema lies constantly, so do books, and yet both can get to something that a straightforward factual account cannot reach. The creative act and the philosophical act are closer to each other than either discipline usually admits.
Alexandre Kojève, in his final interview, put it this way: wisdom was once the preserve of the Gods, who could afford to be fainéants, idlers, people with nothing left to prove. But times have changed, and we can all be fainéants now, the kind who enjoy playing games. That is what philosophy is at its best. Not a system or a set of answers. A game that takes itself seriously enough to keep playing even when it knows it cannot win.
The invitation is open. You do not need a degree or a reading list or the right vocabulary. You need only the willingness to hold a question longer than feels comfortable, and to resist the temptation to settle for an answer that is simpler than the thing actually is. Word would have gotten round by now if things were simple. They are not and so we keep going.