I think the words of Giannis Antetokounmpo after the early and unexpected elimination of the Milwaukee Bucks will not be easily forgotten.

When asked by a journalist whether he considers such a development to be a failure, Giannis defended the opinion that there are no failures in sports. But what about the rest of the fields? During the past few years of teaching philosophy at the School of Fine Arts, I have often wondered how the feeling of failure can be separated from the experience of contact with the object of philosophy.

And at the same time, how to understand that philosophy is not an activity that automatically makes something “philosophical”, and does not necessarily imply greater depth or authenticity. I know it’s fashionable in France to call oneself a philosopher, using a somewhat complex vocabulary and, ideally, an eccentric appearance.

In Greece, fortunately, things are not quite like that. But even if this were so, would it be a failure of philosophy itself? Of course, there are definitions of what philosophy is, and definitions are very useful tools. But what’s the point? To give answers or to maintain interest, to love what is philosophy? One necessarily feeds the other. And love here would be love for the object that is best suited to solving questions that do not necessarily lend themselves to a specific answer. But how do you convince your audience that it’s worth asking questions that don’t always have a concrete answer when there are so many other questions in their daily lives that urgently need to be answered? The irresponsibility that philosophy so frankly takes for itself is perhaps its greatest and happiest paradox. Imagine, for example, if a philosopher had a definite answer to questions that are par excellence philosophy. The success of philosophy would be its real failure.

Obviously, we don’t all mean the same thing when we talk about philosophy. In every field there is a paradoxical conflict, a conflict of homonyms, and philosophy cannot be an exception. Because even in philosophy there is such a conflict between the one who says philosophy and the one who again says philosophy, but they mean something completely different. Many times this conflict has become a pretext for taking positions that gravitate toward radical relativism. It is within this trend that some refer with reflexive ease to postmodernity, semantic dispersion, language play, fluidity. Within this trend, it is always shown that the only available measure for ameter is the ameter itself.

The irresponsibility that philosophy so frankly takes for itself is perhaps its greatest and happiest paradox.

I think it’s important to understand two things at this stage. First, that philosophy itself has problematized these questions and made them the subject of reflection almost of necessity, while at the same time providing a theory for the practice of discussing such questions. Secondly, even ideas and concepts do not have the abstraction or coherence that they nevertheless would like to have. They move and shape, as they also become objects of speech and circulation, influenced by factors such as prejudices, interests, power relations, and specific intellectual, institutional, and more general cultural climates. It simply means that in addition to the rhetorical dimension, there is also a topological one, and by that I mean the complex and subtle place of the formation, development and use of concepts in practice. In this respect, philosophy is purely political as an activity, but also, paradoxically for many, also purely aesthetic. It is an activity that from time to time brings to the fore some voices, some images, in other words, it is basically a sensory activity, where the conflict between the one who speaks philosophy and the one who speaks philosophy is essentially , conflict of two different feelings. apparently for the same thing. Failure in this case will be the inability or even unwillingness to understand the importance of processing different meanings of the same thing, processing common fabrics of visibility and understanding this difference. So there are no failures in philosophy either. It has only work and love for its paradoxical completeness.

Mr. Thomas Simeonidis is a writer teaching aesthetics and philosophy at the School of Fine Arts.