The same is true of philosophy. Philosophy has as its object the true nature of the cosmos and of being. It studies the world in order to better understand it and, thus, uncover its true meaning. As a tool of reflection and search, it analyzes and hypothesizes about the world, the gods, the relationship between man and God, the place of nature in this system, etc. Now, it is clear that philosophy is not the mere delusioned fruit of minds too fertile. Rather, it is a way to apprehend the world as it exists by positing, through observation and logic, certain concepts about the world. As grammar defines and rationalizes the pre-existing codes of language, philosophy rationalizes the world, visible and invisible, to comprehend it and grasp its true nature. This rationalization is one of the great discoveries of the Greek mind, and one that distinguishes Greek thought, and with it the whole Western mind, from others (1).
Now, as grammar is the rationalization of something that already exists, and that people use unconsciously, philosophy is the rationalization of a certain tacit conception of the world, a conception of which we are often unaware, that is hidden to our minds, but that nonetheless informs our perceptions, behaviors, and, ultimately, culture. This unaware, unconscious background we could call the “pre-philosophical background.”
To understand what is meant by “pre-philosophical background,” we may introduce an example. In pre-Christian Greece, in fact since before Homer and Hesiod, the gods were thought to enjoy immortality, while men were on the other hand mortals; yet, immortality here means that even the gods were essentially present in the world, subjects to its cycles and to fate. The gods, for the archaic Greeks, were of the same nature as human beings, their only distinction being that they did not die. This is manifest in Homer and Hesiod, for example. They could and did intervene in human affairs, and one of the goals of sacrificing and praying was to ask something from them for our own benefit.
