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 it is put in 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. Thinking here is an activity, not contemplation from a safe distance. It costs something. The wonder from which it arises is akin to a vulnerability: whoever refuses to be touched by the phenomena will never arrive at thinking either.

#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.

#Can Everyone Philosophize?

Yes — and the reason is older than any university. Children philosophize before anyone teaches them to. “Where was I before I was born?” “Why do people have to die?” “How do I know I’m not dreaming?” These are philosophical questions in their purest form, asked out of the unguarded wonder that is innate to every human being. 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. Socrates — Plato has him tell in the Theaetetus that he was the son of the midwife Phaenarete — called 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).
• Nietzsche, F. (1886). Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Leipzig: C.G. Naumann. Cited §213.
• Platon (ca. 369 BC). Theaitetos. Cited after 155d (wonder as the beginning of philosophy).
• Schelling, F. W. J. (1803). Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums. Tübingen: Cotta.