What Is Philosophizing? — Thinking as Lived Practice

Philosophizing means facing a genuine question in thought and staying with it — with your own life as the material, in conversation, without knowing the outcome.

That sounds simple, and it cuts against the picture most people have in mind: philosophy as an unhealthy life in the head, as a subject for professors remote from the world, as thinking too much with no connection to real life. And yet you know the nagging feeling this picture leaves behind. Because you have lived through moments when a question would not let go of you: after a farewell, before a decision that could not be settled by mere weighing of options, in a night when the familiar answers suddenly felt too small. In such moments you were already philosophizing, whether you called it that or not.

The word itself knows more than common opinion suspects. Its etymology goes back to two Greek roots: philos, the friend, and sophia, wisdom. The philosopher is the friend of wisdom — not its owner. Whoever loves does not possess; whoever loves seeks nearness. Philosophizing is therefore not a state of knowing but a movement toward something that remains greater than any single thought about it. The ancient Greeks also knew where this movement begins: in wonder, in thaumazein. In the Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates say that wonder is the beginning of philosophy. It is not knowledge that makes the beginning, but astonishment that things are the way they are: philosophy as “a child of wonder at the cosmos”, as I rendered the ancient Greek dictum in my introduction to the conversation about Heraclitus and Socrates that my father Jochen Kirchhoff and I recorded.

#What Do You Do When You Philosophize?

Philosophizing is first of all a practice of questioning: you ask questions that aim one layer deeper than the questions of everyday life. Everyday life asks: How do I organize this? How do I reach my goal? Philosophizing asks: What is this that I am dealing with here? What is this situation really about? The first line of questioning looks for solutions within a frame. The second examines the frame itself.

Part of this is a distinction rarely drawn in everyday life: the one between dead and living thoughts. There are thoughts that circle in the mind like abstract units: you can recite them, pass them on, forget them. And there are thoughts that work in you: that keep you awake at night, that color your decisions, that make themselves felt in the body long before you can put them into words. Philosophizing begins where you come into contact with the thoughts that are at work. The way in is a thinking empathy — a thinking that feels, and a feeling that thinks. This unity has a lineage in German Idealism: in Schelling — as I read him — genuine thinking is at the same time a feeling. Feeling is the place where it becomes apparent whether a thought is alive.

So philosophizing does not mean knowing as much as possible. It means speaking out the thought that is already working in you, instead of talking about it, and testing it, instead of managing it. In the symposium conversation about children’s questions, my father Jochen Kirchhoff said: philosophy always also proceeds from wonder, and this wonder is always also a wound (in German, Verwunderung and Verwundung); whoever does not want to be wounded by the phenomena at all does not arrive at thinking either. Thinking, he went on, does not fall into one’s lap: it is also activity, in this sense also work, not in a negative sense, but truly a challenge.

How such a question breaks open is something I described in the MANOVA conversation with Elisa Gratias, recalling a moment in the city. I was sitting, out of sorts, on a bench around a tree, with the other trees of the street in front of me and a car bearing the big lettering of some tradesman’s business, so that directly before me were thoughts of the intellect from the human world — and then the question happened in me:

In that moment the ill humour slid off me, and an expansive joy arose. Questions are events, because something opens in them: the perception that something wholly unknown is there connected me with something again.

#How Is Philosophizing Different from Studying Philosophy?

A philosophy degree conveys knowledge about philosophers. You come to know positions, epochs, lines of argument: what Kant meant by judgement, how Hegel answered Kant, how the Stoics differ from the Epicureans. This knowledge has real value: it is the map of the great answers human beings have given to life’s fundamental questions over two and a half millennia. Whoever knows it does not have to walk into every dead end personally.

But the map is not the journey. You can recite every answer the tradition has given and still never have philosophized — just as you can study cartography without ever having climbed a mountain. The degree is about philosophy; philosophizing happens in the first person, with your own life at stake.

One has to know it, Nietzsche adds — from experience. Schelling had already insisted, in his lectures on the method of academic study (1803), that philosophy cannot be learned like a body of knowledge, though it does demand practice. A good eight decades apart, both touch the same point: philosophizing is a practice, and a practice is acquired by carrying it out.

From this follows a consequence that is uncomfortable for everyone who administers philosophy as a discipline. The university preserves the tradition, and that is indispensable work. But the place of philosophizing is life itself: the kitchen-table conversation that no longer stays on the surface, the night before the decision, the silence after a loss.

#Why Philosophize?

The most sober answer: because you think anyway — only with unexamined premises, if you do not philosophize. Every human being carries assumptions they never chose: what counts as a successful life, what illness means, what death is, what a feeling is worth. These assumptions come from the reigning thought-forms of an era, and they work most powerfully as long as they remain invisible. Whoever does not philosophize thinks all the same — they merely think what everyone thinks. Philosophizing makes the invisible premises visible, shows where they come from, and opens alternatives that were previously, quite literally, unthinkable.

The second answer lies in what emerges from it: mental clarity about what is actually at stake. From this clarity grows judgement — the ability to form a well-grounded assessment in a confusing situation where before there were only opinions. And a relationship to wisdom emerges: that living, order-giving instance which orients not only action but also non-action. Whoever philosophizes sometimes recognizes that the wisest step is not to act yet.

The task of wisdom was never to impress an academic committee. It was always to be there for concrete people with their concrete problems — for what is actually pressing and immediately relevant to a life. That is the measure of philosophizing: not its conceptual precision alone, but whether it arrives in life.

#Are the Minds That Fill Me with Awe My Prophet-God or My Friends?

The minds that fill me with awe are noble friends to me, not my prophet-god. That is how I put it in my conversation with Elisa Gratias, which TransitionTV published in September 2026, right after I had spoken of a direct, personal relation to the cosmos, one that is unmediated, “mediated by no one”.

Elisa Gratias had asked how it fits together that religious texts, in Christianity as in Islam, say on the one hand that one should fear God and on the other that God is merciful. She offered a reading of her own: after what I had just described, she said, it was meant not in the sense of fear but in the sense of awe; whoever loses respect ends up harming themselves, as happened to Odysseus. My answer began with the point that divine necessity, in Greek the Ananke, applies to everyone, relentlessly and without exception. Later I spoke of what is formalized: any oligarch can evade a written law or make use of it, and even someone who does wrong can appeal to the formalized love of Christianity, love of one’s enemies, for instance, or the commandment to forgive, and so turn a great deal to their own use. That means, I said, first of all stepping out of formalizations and regaining this unmediated relation to the cosmos.

Right after that I spoke of minds “that fill me with awe”, “whom I regard as good friends, as noble friends”; in Buddhism one speaks of the noble friend. I listen to these friends, and they are “nevertheless not my prophet-god, but they are my friends and remain my friends”. They are together in this cosmos and, facing this cosmos, equally immediate. By this I did not mean to flatten the greatness of their fates and of their achievements into sameness with everything I do: what matters first of all is that one’s own heart, one’s own belly, the forehead, however we understand it, is equally immediate to the whole of the world. “And we need nothing in between, nothing interposed.”

At first I said we had lost this immediacy; then I corrected myself: we have not lost it, we do not look at it. “The thoughts we think are mostly institutionalized thoughts of some kind, normalized thoughts.” In politics, too, everything is normalized anyway. “The normal is the normalized.” That, I said, is “not really all that individual” and also “not really human at all”, and I spoke of the situation we are in now.

#Why Are Children’s Questions Genuine Questions?

Children’s questions are questions truly of one’s own, which start from the phenomena, from how things look or appear to a person; my father Jochen Kirchhoff called them genuine questions. In the symposium conversation “Kinderfragen: Wie erkennen wir die Welt?” (“Children’s Questions: How Do We Know the World?”, 2024) with my father Jochen Kirchhoff, I described the first questions a child asks at all as, in principle, the foundation of philosophy: through these simple children’s questions, thinking is, in principle, set in motion.

As ordinary educated citizens, I said there, we first of all face science as mere recipients, accept how things are presented on science-journalism pages and delegate it to the experts. “But in every human being’s life there is a period when you still asked questions of your own”: early on, in children’s questions. Perhaps, I added, many of us asked ourselves as children the simple question “Why doesn’t the moon actually fall down?”, then forgot it again and never gave ourselves over to this wonder.

How such a question arises I described in the same conversation: at first a child simply accepts the world, and then the first question appears, typically a why-question about causal connections; such questions come very early, even in small children.

Jochen Kirchhoff called, for instance, the children’s question “Why am I actually me, why am I not you?” unfathomable. In his decades of lectures and public discussions, he said, he had observed again and again that people settle down too quickly with an explanation they have read somewhere.

As a classroom practice, philosophizing with children has a history of its own: the Philosophy for Children movement began in the early 1970s with Matthew Lipman’s philosophical novel for children, Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery, and in Philosophy and the Young Child (1980) Gareth Matthews offers a number of illustrations of very young children’s philosophical puzzlement (Pritchard 2022). This section does not describe a teaching method; what questioning can mean for school and education is taken up in the entries on analog education reform and Scandinavian Bildung. The point here is what I added at the end of the conversation, when my father urged us to affirm our own aliveness: to let ourselves first be touched again by the phenomena, as things appear, without immediately looking up the explanation on Wikipedia, with the question “What questions arise out of myself?”, and that this space of questioning, wonder as the origin of philosophy, does not close but stays open. In it, as I said there, also lies the aliveness of the human mind.

#Can Everyone Philosophize?

Yes — and the reason is older than any university. Children philosophize before anyone teaches them to. Gareth Matthews reports that Tim, about six years old, asked while licking a pot how we can be sure that everything is not a dream (Matthews 1980, p. 1, after Pritchard 2022). This is a philosophical question in its purest form, asked out of an unguarded wonder; in every human being’s life, as I said in the symposium conversation about children’s questions, there is a period when you still asked questions of your own. What gets lost later is rarely the capacity — it is the permission to take such questions seriously.

The tradition has an old image for this. In the Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates relate that he was the son of the midwife Phaenarete and call his art of conversation the art of the midwife: maieutics.

The idea behind this image runs deep: insight is not poured in, it is born. The individual knows far more than they know — there is a deep knowledge in the human being that is merely buried and can be awakened. In the form that maieutics takes in philosophical accompaniment, the point is to clear a path for the thought already working in a person — to go along with it, the way a midwife goes along with a birth. It is not about demonstrating to someone that they know nothing; it is about accompanying into the light what they have long known without knowing it.

That is why philosophizing needs conversation. Alone in your head, a question turns in circles; spoken aloud, before a counterpart who listens and asks further, it begins to unfold. What this work looks like today — outside the lecture halls, as philosophical practice in the conversation between two people — is a story of its own. What you need to bring is little: no prior knowledge, no technical vocabulary. Only a question that is genuine, and the willingness to stay with it.

Herein lies the simplest and therefore most difficult answer to the question of what philosophizing is: the decision not to skip over the wonder, and to take your own question more seriously than the ready-made answers. The question that will not let go of you is not a malfunction in your life. It is the point at which your life begins to think.

#Sources

• Kirchhoff, J. / Kirchhoff, G. (2022). Heraklit vs. Sokrates — Die Spaltung der Philosophie. YouTube, Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam (Video-ID 7eHScchqcdo). Introduction by Gwendolin Kirchhoff 00:00–02:19.
• Kirchhoff, G. / Kirchhoff, J. (2024). Kinderfragen: Wie erkennen wir die Welt? – Ein Gespräch mit Jochen Kirchhoff [Video]. SYMPOSIUM, YouTube, Gwendolin Kirchhoff channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ctokDHbSJA (Gwendolin Kirchhoff 01:09–01:49, 13:19–15:08, 17:04–17:31, 52:23–53:00; Jochen Kirchhoff 15:10–17:04, 25:02–26:42 and 51:53–52:23).
• Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Die gefährlichste Form von Intelligenz — MANOVA conversation with Elisa Gratias [Video]. MANOVA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI43E5jdQQw, 34:53.
• Kirchhoff, G. & Gratias, E. (2026). «Das Schicksal ist größer als wir» Gwendolin Walter-Kirchhoff über Christopher Nolan und das Leben (“Fate is greater than we are”: Gwendolin Walter-Kirchhoff on Christopher Nolan and life) [Video]. TransitionTV, YouTube, 18 September 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smlQFizE8Lg (timestamps 42:39–53:41; the Manova version Die Odyssee, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjtervR5tR4, has different timestamps).
• Matthews, G. (1980). Philosophy and the Young Child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Nietzsche, F. (1886). Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Leipzig: C.G. Naumann. Cited §213.
• Platon (ca. 369 BC). Theaitetos. Transl. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1805), in: Platon, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, Berlin [1940]. Cited after 155d (wonder as the beginning of philosophy), 149a (Phaenarete), 150b, 161e and 210b (the midwife’s art).
• Pritchard, M. (2022). Philosophy for Children. In: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 2002, substantive revision 27 May 2022). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/children/
• Schelling, F. W. J. (1803). Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums. Tübingen: Cotta.