I love this quote by [Lacanian](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacan) philosopher [Slavoj Žižek](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek), taken from an interview between him and Astra Taylor during Taylor’s film, [*Žižek!*](http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/film.php?directoryname=zizek):
What is philosophy? Philosophy is not what some people think. Some crazy exercise in absolute truth and then you can adopt this kind of skeptical attitude. Where some, the scientists, are dealing with actual, measurable solvable problems, whereas philosophers just ask stupid metaphysical questions and so on and play with absolute truth, which we all know is inaccessible.
No. I think philosophy is a very modest discipline. Philosophy, the true philosophy, asks a different question. For instance, how does the philosopher approach the problem of freedom? It’s not: **are we free or not?** It’s not: **is there God or not?** It asks a simpler question, which would be called a hermeneutic question: **What does it mean to be free?** So this is what philosophy basically does.
It just asks: when we use certain notions, when we do certain acts and so on and so on, what is the **implicit horizon of understanding**? It doesn’t ask these stupid ideal questions, is there truth?. No! The question is: **What do you mean when you say this is true?**
So you can see, it’s a very modest thing, this philosophy. Philosophers are not the madmen who search for eternal truth and so on and so on.
Check out the entire interview segment here: Zizek on Philosophy
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