From the Concept of Travel to the Idea of the Practical Nature of Philosophy

Abstract

Starting with consideration of the directions in which the comprehension of travel as a human activity, practice, act is moving, the author demonstrates the “compliance” of the mind, which is able to represent as a travel not only moving around one’s own room or pocket, but also sit­ting in an armchair, the complete absence of movement. The basis for this is the reliance on the concepts of motive, intention, result, personality, soul, divorced from the act of action itself, i.e. break with the Aristotelian understanding of the act as a self-sufficient and actual re­ality. The author emphasizes the similarity of this line of thought with a variety of philosophi­cal ideas that camouflage the givenness and make it possible to present murder as non-murder. This helpfulness, servility of the reason is opposed by the self-sufficiency of thinking, that does not serve anything, that is, philosophy as such or thinking as an act and a space of absolute givenness, in which a person does not think about an act, does not think an act, butacts. Philosophy understood in this way, capable of thinking everything, is practical not as an instrumental or cognitive service to various human practices, but as an act of thinking – that is, self-sufficient and personal thinking. It is practical not because of the usefulness of a product alienated from it in the form of ideas, concepts, ways of thought (being an act (act) of self-suf­ficient thinking, it does not have an external result, poiesis), but being self-sufficient, it carries a gesture indicating a given – something, not mediated by ideas, norms, discredited reason: the philosopher is faced with the need to see (think) something, the thought of which is not mediated by the ideological richness of the history of thought. The less something is mediated by ideas, the more it is practical, and the more absolute. Philosophy, which understands that no most sophisticated thinking can cancel the fact of deprivation of life of another or one’s own deprivation of life – and that is a truly practical philosophy.