260
PARTISAN REVIEW
It happened to us all. How hopefully we went to our first philosophy
lecture! And how disillusioned we were when we came out! Nor can
it be otherwise, if philosophy is made a part of a curriculum, a subject
for examinations.
But philosophy has not always been that. When Socrates con–
versed with young men in the streets and squares of Athens, asking
them catchy questions with friendly irony, philosophy was something
very different. It was life. A form of life which clarified itself in
query and cogitation. It was philosophy
in statu nascendi.
It was
not yet omniscient. Socrates provocatively acknowledged that he
knew nothing.
Why was Socrates' influence so inspiring? Because he discussed
questions which affected the conduct of life, and because to him they
were burning questions. He could discuss them at midnight gather–
ings, and
his
hearers hung on his words. Weare inspired to the extent
that the speaker himself is inspired. There must be an exuberance
in
him,
which is imparted to us. Real philosophy is rooted in a
vital enthusiasm. It springs from a new contact with life, an intoxicat–
ing contact. I let Ortega speak: "I regard philosophy as the general
science of love. Within the intellectual cosmos, it represents the
strongest impulse toward a total union." Then he makes a bold
comparison. "Sexual pleasure," he says, "appears to consist in a
sudden discharge of nervous energy.... Similarly, philosophy is a
sudden discharge of intellectual activity." The course of thought is
a progressive illumination. In the thinking of a Plato or a Hegel,
it
can reach a peak in an explosive flash. An intellectual formula
sheds a prodigious light over the far distances of the world. Perhaps
the formula turns out to be untrue. Perhaps all formulas are untrue.
But from their ruins philosophy perpetually rises again as an eternal
impulse of the mind.
That the enthusiasm of living philosophy should be restored
to us by a Spaniard was one of the surprises in which the intellectual
environment of the 1920's was so rich. Spain is a country which,
during its flowering time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
produced beautiful poetry and painting-but no great architecture
and no great philosophy. When the Spanish world empire sank
before the ascendancy of France under Louis XIV, Spain's cultural
creativity was extinguished with it. Spain dropped out of Europe,
