Nov. 29, 1955

We began the discussion of religion and philosophy, and the first thing I discussed last time was the difficulty in giving a definition of what philosophy is, because this is usually the expression of a special philosophy, and every philosopher who has a special vision of reality gives a different definition, when it comes to an exact definition. But instead of that, I gave a more general description, pointing to the fact that philosophy deals not with any special realm of being, but with the universal structure of being itself.

Now on this basis, the problem has to be continued in different directions. The one is a somehow personal one. Who is a philosopher? What does that word originally mean? What should it mean? What is the basic character of philosophers in the history of mankind, and especially of the Western civilization? We can say that philosophers always were people who were driven by the eros toward sophia, meaning wisdom (sapientia), or as the medieval philosophers defined it, the knowledge of principles. And “principle” meant the structures of being and of the good.

Now this general meaning presupposes a type of human being who is driven, on the one hand, by an ultimate passion—called “eros” by Plato. That for which they were struggling and for which they often became martyrs was a matter of ultimate concern for them. In this sense, they were religious—if religion is “being ultimately concerned.” On the other hand, they wanted to fulfill this eros towards the really real, towards true being, in terms of clear and detached observation and description. They tried to go into the discussion of the structure of reality