According to Pythagoras, wisdom is a priori the knowledge of the stellar world and of all that is situated above us; sophia being the wisdom of the gods, and philosophia that of men. For Heraclitus, the philosopher is one who applies himself to the knowledge of the profound nature of things; whereas for Plato, philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas; and for Aristotle, it is the knowledge of first causes and principles, together with the sciences that are derived from them.
In addition, philosophy implies for all of the Ancients moral conformity to wisdom: only he is wise, sophos, who lives wisely. In this particular and precise sense, the wisdom of Solomon is philosophy; it is to live according to the nature of things, on the basis of piety — of the “fear of God” — with a view to that which is essential and liberating.
All this shows that, to say the least, the word “philosopher” in itself has nothing restrictive about it, and that one cannot legitimately impute to this word any of the vexing associations of ideas that it may elicit; usage applies this word to all thinkers, including eminent metaphysicians— some Sufis consider Plato and other Greeks to be prophets — so that one would like to reserve it for sages and simply use the term “rationalists” for profane thinkers. It is nevertheless legitimate to take account of a misuse of language that has become conventional, for unquestionably the terms “philosophy” and “philosopher” have been seriously compromised by ancient and modern reasoners; in fact, the serious inconvenience of these terms is that they conventionally imply that the norm for the mind is reasoning pure and simple,(1) in the absence not only of intellection, but also of indispensable objective data. Admittedly one is neither ignorant nor rationalistic just because one is a logician, but one is both if one is a logician and nothing more.(2)
1. Naturally the most “ advanced” of the modernists seek to demolish the very principles of reasoning, but this is simply fantasy pro domo, for man is condemned to reason as soon as he uses language, unless he wishes to demonstrate nothing at all. In any case, one cannot demonstrate the impossibility of demonstrating anything, if words are still to have any meaning.
2. A German author (H. Turck) has proposed the term “misosopher” —“ enemy of wisdom”— for those thinkers who undermine the very foundations of truth and intelligence. We will add that misosophy—without mentioning some ancient precedents—begins grosso modo with “ criticism” and ends with subjectivisms, relativisms, existentialisms, dynamisms, psychologisms and biologisms of every kind. As for the ancient expression “misology,” it designates above all the hatred of the fideist for the use of reason.
In the opinion of all profane thinkers, philosophy means to think “freely,” as far as possible without presuppositions, which precisely is impossible; on the other hand, gnosis, or philosophy in the proper and primitive sense of the word, is to think in accordance with the immanent Intellect and not by means of reason alone.
What favors confusion is the fact that in both cases the intelligence operates independently of outward prescriptions, although for diametrically opposed reasons: that the rationalist if need be draws his inspiration from a pre-existing system does not prevent him from thinking in a way that he deems to be “free”— falsely, since true freedom coincides with truth—likewise, mutatis mutandis: that the gnostic — in the orthodox sense of the term — bases himself extrinsically on a given sacred Scripture or on some other gnostic cannot prevent him from thinking in an intrinsically free manner by virtue of the freedom proper to the immanent Truth, or proper to the Essence which by delinition escapes formal constraints.
Or again: whether the gnostic “thinks” what he has “seen” with the “eye of the heart,” or whether on the contrary he obtains his “vision” thanks to the intervention — preliminary and provisional and in no wise efficient — of a thought which then takes on the role of occasional cause , is a matter of indifference with regard to the truth, or with regard to its almost supernatural springing forth in the spirit.