What is Philosophy Today?

Every person carries a philosophy without knowing it, inherited from their culture. I try here to say what it is, for me, to do philosophy today, forging concepts from presence and lived life.

No one escapes philosophy

Every person, whether or not they take an interest in philosophy, lives their life according to a certain conceptualisation of the world. This conceptualisation has been handed down to them without their choosing it, by their family, by their school, by the culture in which they grew up, by the works they engage with, by the music they listen to, by the language they speak, by the stories that have been told around them since childhood. When we act in the world, when we love, when we work, when we decide, when we judge what is good and what is not, we mobilise without knowing it a set of concepts that structure our relation to the real. No one acts outside of concepts, not even people who have never opened a philosophy book. What we call common sense, intuition, self-evidence, popular wisdom, all of this is made of concepts.

This dependence on inherited concepts has a concrete consequence on what we see of the world. We only ever perceive what our concepts allow us to perceive. Two people looking at the same clouds may see very different things, one a face, the other an animal, or the same thing if they share the same images. What lets them see, and what prevents them from seeing, is their prior conceptualisation. When one describes what she sees to the other, sometimes the other accesses it, sometimes not. A new conceptualisation opens a field of perception that did not exist before. What we cannot conceptualise we do not really experience, even if we live alongside it.

The concepts that come to us from our culture eventually come to seem natural, and that is what makes them so hard to see. Romantic jealousy, for example, is experienced by many people as an emotion that would spring spontaneously from the fact of loving. Yet ethnology shows us that other cultures conceptualise love, fidelity, and the couple in ways that do not produce that emotion at all, or that produce it in circumstances very different from ours. What we take to be natural is in fact the effect of an inherited conceptualisation that we then project onto the world, even onto the animals we observe, to whom we spontaneously attribute feelings that match our own, although the springs of their relations are probably very different. Culture consists of concepts incorporated to such a point that we no longer recognise them as such.

This is the sense in which philosophy concerns everyone, without exception. The only question that separates human beings is not whether one does philosophy or not, but whether one wishes to become aware of the philosophy one already carries, and to allow one’s own vision of the world to evolve in contact with others. As for me, I am chiefly nourished by Western philosophies, which oppose one another as much as they dialogue with one another, and I know there are many other philosophies than the Western ones, which I know little and which would deserve to be visited more often. A philosophy is not an intellectual exercise cut off from the rest of life. It governs our mores, our ways of living, what we allow ourselves and what we forbid ourselves, down to the emotions we take to be the most intimately our own.

Philosophy as the creation of concepts

In What is Philosophy? (1991), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari formulate a thesis that I find illuminating for understanding what the philosophical exercise can be. Philosophy is the activity that consists in creating concepts. Not in commenting on them, not in transmitting them, not in arranging them in a hierarchy within a history of ideas that would always culminate in modern Western thought. In creating them, from the experience of an era and a situation, to render thinkable what until then was not.

« Philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts », they write at the very opening, and further on, « the philosopher is the concept’s friend; he is the potentiality of the concept. That is, philosophy is not a simple art of forming, inventing, or fabricating concepts, because concepts are not necessarily forms, discoveries, or products. More rigorously, philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts. »

This definition is clear, and I lean on it, while keeping in mind that it does not say that philosophy is reduced to the fabrication of new concepts. A large part of philosophical work consists in understanding the concepts that others have forged, in setting them in motion, in discussing them, in testing them in situations other than those that brought them into being. It is also a philosophical work to descend into one’s own concepts, those that move us without our knowing it, in order to name them and see what they are worth. Creating and understanding are not two separate activities. To understand a concept made by others is already to begin to reformulate it in one’s own words, and so to partly recreate it. And to create a new concept is necessarily to do so in dialogue with concepts that already exist, which one takes up, displaces, or rejects.

Anyone can do philosophy

If philosophy is everywhere, and if philosophical work consists in bringing into awareness what already runs through us, then it cannot be the preserve of a learned caste that, through its university training, would hold the monopoly on this exercise. Norbert Elias showed this in his analyses of the civilising process: forms of knowledge are constituted socially, by the gradual exclusion of those who do not have the codes. Professional philosophy, as it is taught in French universities, often works this way. It legitimates itself by mastering a set of authors deemed unavoidable, by using a specialised vocabulary, and by being able to situate what one says within a history of positions.

All this is useful, and I make use of it like everyone else, because it is interesting to have read, to have references, to be able to situate what one says within a tradition. Yet that is not enough to make philosophy. Philosophy is also, and perhaps above all, what happens when someone, from their practice of the world, brings to consciousness the concepts in which they live, discusses them with others, and sometimes forges a new concept that illuminates what they live. Philosophy cafés, philosophy workshops in popular settings, the reflections of practitioners thinking about their own work, are just as philosophical as scholarly conferences, on condition that there be a real bringing-into-consciousness and a real discussion, and not mere recitation. Discovering a concept that already inhabits us without having been named is a philosophical act just as profound as forging an unprecedented one.

This position is not anti-intellectual. On the contrary, it demands a rigour all the greater for not being able to rely on institutional authority to legitimate what one says. For me, doing philosophy consists precisely in confronting one’s own thinking with the thinking of others, who necessarily have a philosophy different from one’s own, with points in common and points of divergence. In a real philosophical discussion it is very interesting to name what we agree on, and why we agree on it, and what we do not agree on, and why we do not. It is through this rigorous confrontation, which does not pit one authority against another but sets concepts to work together, that philosophy advances.

A concept is the child of a historical experience

When Spinoza forges the concept of conatus in the seventeenth century, in his Ethics (1677), he names the effort by which every being tends to persevere in its existence and to develop its power to act. This concept allows him to think an experience that is his own and that of his time: that of a Marrano Jew expelled from his community, who seeks to ground a living ethics outside the religious authorities, in a Dutch society that is already opening something like modernity. When Hannah Arendt forges the concept of the banality of evil in 1963, she thinks something that could not have been thought in that way before the Shoah and the totalitarian bureaucracy of the twentieth century. When Bernard Stiegler forges the concept of proletarianisation in its enlarged sense, he thinks what is at stake in the industrial capture of attention by digital media. Each concept is the child of a historical experience.

Our time is crossed by a major anthropological upheaval, whose technological dimension is not a minor detail. This transformation began two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, which already reconfigured what it is to work, what it is to dwell, what it is to belong to a collective. The train then radically modified the human relation to space, by making distances traversable that were not, and by imposing synchronised national schedules that replaced local times. The automobile continued this movement at an individual scale, by opening up the possibility of organising one’s life around personal mobility, with profound effects on family and professional life. The telegraph and then the telephone made instantaneous communication possible for the first time in human history, between human beings separated by great distances. Radio and television broadcast public speech at the scale of nations. The Internet modified our relation to knowledge, to value, to the circulation of ideas. The mobile phone modified our relation to private space, to available time, to the availability of others. Dating apps have changed the way millions of people constitute their affective life. Generative artificial intelligences are modifying today the way we think, the way we learn, the way we write. Each of these stages is not a simple change of tools. It displaces what it is to live, to think, to love, to be in relation, and also what it is to work, to create, to believe, to transmit. At each stage, concepts that seemed stable have had to be rethought, and some have never regained the same solidity.

Yet most of the philosophy published in French today thinks these transformations through concepts forged before them. We read Heidegger on technology, Lacan on desire, Foucault on power. These thoughts are precious, and it is worth visiting them, on condition that we keep in mind that none was elaborated in the world we live in. Mobilised without precaution, they risk illuminating beside what they claim to illuminate. Several contemporary philosophers are working to close this gap, and it is worth naming them because they open the ground on which I try to think myself. Mark Alizart, in Informatique céleste (2017), wrote before the arrival of large language models that « computing has embarrassed philosophy since it was born », and proposed to rethink the relation between nature, mind, and computation. Anne Alombert, in Schizophrénie numérique (2023) and then in De la bêtise artificielle (2025), extends Stiegler’s thought by working on cognitive proletarianisation in the age of generative artificial intelligence. Yuk Hui, in On the Existence of Digital Objects (English original 2016, French translation 2024), takes up Simondon to think the status of objects proper to the digital. These authors do not agree among themselves, and that is precisely what makes the conversation fertile.

Thinking the world from presence

When I say that philosophy thinks the world, I do not say that it understands it or that it describes it as it is. On the ultimate nature of the real, we have only perceptions, conditionings, projections. Phenomenology, since Husserl, has established this clearly: everything we grasp of the world passes through our situated consciousness, through our body, through our language, through our culture. No absolute knowledge is possible.

This holds even for what seems to give us the most assured access to an objective real, namely scientific knowledge. When the same methodologies produce the same objects, whether steel, microprocessors, or medicines, in India, Brazil, or Norway, we have the impression of having grasped something that exceeds us, something obeying purely objective laws, exterior to any culture. The epistemology of the sciences, that is, the discipline that asks about the conditions of production of scientific knowledge, has shown since Bachelard and Kuhn that this impression is misleading. If the same manipulations produce the same results, it is also because we share the same conceptualisations of the world and grasp it through comparable frameworks. With other concepts, starting from the same objects, one would discover something else. This is precisely what the arrival of the electron microscope brought in the twentieth century: it made appear in matter properties that did not exist for the previous gaze. These new properties did not invalidate the prior manipulations, which remained regular and useful, but they opened a dimension of the real until then invisible, which allowed us to make things that no one could have imagined before. Science is therefore not external to philosophy. It is one of its regions, the one in which the conceptualisation of the world is worked through repeatable experiments.

Albert Einstein wrote this explicitly, in 1938, with Leopold Infeld, in The Evolution of Physics, « physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world ». His own revolution illustrated it. Before the railways, time was not lived as a uniform datum, because it could not be. Each village lived to the rhythm of its bells, and local times differed slightly from one region to another, without troubling anyone. It is the generalisation of train timetables in England in the nineteenth century that imposed a synchronised national time, then a global time coordinated by meridians, and the idea took hold that time was a uniform datum independent of observers. Einstein then made an additional conceptual step by showing that time is not independent of speed and gravitation either. At each stage, what changes is not time in itself, it is the conceptualisation of time that circulates and that makes certain experiences thinkable or unthinkable. More broadly, questions such as what is time, what is truth, what is the good, what is justice, are philosophical questions par excellence, because they do not bear on objects of the world but on the concepts by which we make it thinkable. Science participates fully in this conceptual work, even when it presents itself as purely objective.

Thinking the world, in the sense in which I mean it, is therefore not accessing a truth of the world. It is forging the concepts that allow us to orient ourselves in our experience of the world, to formulate it, to share it, to transform it. The concept functions as an instrument of thought that makes the real thinkable, without claiming to be its mirror. And when human experience changes, as it is changing today, new instruments must be forged. Those we have inherited no longer suffice.

What makes this exercise possible, in my view, is what I call presence. I have been working on this concept for several years now as the principal axis of my philosophical propositions, and it serves me here as a point of support because it says something essential about what doing philosophy is. As I recalled at the outset, we are all bathed in an inherited conceptualisation of the world that we did not choose. To do philosophy is to perform the meta-exercise of bringing this conceptualisation into awareness, of taking a distance from what governs us, of recognising what exceeds us and choosing whether or not to play it out again. This exercise of becoming aware cannot be done in dispersion, under the effect of fear, or by letting oneself be carried along by the flow of things. It demands a presence to oneself, that is, a capacity to stand at one’s own height, to hear what one really thinks, to bear being alone with what one has not yet resolved. With it, one can think for oneself, that is, take up a position from a point that is one’s own, knowing that it is situated and partial.

This is why presence is not just one concept among others in what I propose. It is intrinsic to the very idea of doing philosophy. To do philosophy is to be present. To be absent is to live without doing philosophy, and one can very well live like that, including by accomplishing considerable things. People absent from themselves build families, run businesses, raise edifices, traverse sometimes very intense emotions, and yet never open the mental space in which doing philosophy becomes possible. Absence from oneself does not prevent acting in the world, and that is what makes the thing so hard to see. It only prevents becoming aware of the concepts that govern us, and choosing whether to continue living according to them or not. Donna Haraway has shown, through her concept of situated knowledges, that thinking from nowhere is a fiction that almost always serves to dissimulate a particular position under the appearance of a neutral universality. The philosophy that interests me assumes on the contrary that the one who speaks is a being of flesh, situated in a body, in a history, in a place, and that it is this situation that gives them their reach.

My way of practising philosophy seeks to avoid two pitfalls to which I myself can be tempted when I write, and which I note as self-vigilance rather than as criticism addressed to others. The first would be to slip into a philosophical dogmatism that speaks from a position of supposed overhang valid for everyone, whether one supports this claim by science, by morality, or by history. I myself can fall into this trap when I feel too sure of what I am putting forward, and it is precisely this possibility that I would like to watch in myself. The second would be to slip into a cynical relativism that concludes from the impossibility of an absolute truth that no discourse is worth more than another, that there are only narratives, and that wanting to think seriously is a naivety. This stance may seem lucid when in reality it dispenses with the effort of thinking and of engaging a word. Between these two temptations, the way I seek is that of a situated speech that takes on its partiality without giving up rigour.

A philosophy rooted in lived life

For me, philosophy is anchored in anthropology and in ethnology, that is, in the fine description of how human beings actually live their lives. This is one of the reasons I often refer to the British anthropologist Tim Ingold, who has shown in books such as The Perception of the Environment (2000) or Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013) that thinking and making are not separate, that knowledge is formed in situated practice, in gesture, in the perceptual relation to the environment. Before Ingold, the French prehistorian and anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan had opened the way by working, in Gesture and Speech (1964-1965), on the constitutive link between the hand, the tool, and language. Other authors go in this direction, from John Dewey to Vinciane Despret, by way of Bruno Latour.

This orientation has an important consequence for what I mean by philosophy. One cannot separate thought from lived life. The question is not only to think the world in a certain way, it is to live one’s life consistently with the way one thinks. Thought is entirely tied to acting, to making, and this is something that is too rarely spoken of in philosophy as it is usually presented. This idea is not trivial, because one still frequently encounters, in working methods as in teaching programs, the idea that there would be on one side a conceptual thought and on the other a practical thought, as if these were two distinct orders. I do not believe this at all. All thought is tied to an experience of the world, and there are a multitude of experiences of the world, each carrying its own conceptual work. I live this for example when I run workshops on filmmaking or photography. The experience of creating images is a full experience, but the experience of receiving images, and of receiving those that others have created, is another full experience, one that may even be more intense than the experience of creation. One might believe that one is active when one makes and passive when one looks. That is not true. These are two different experiences, each of which mobilises its own inner work, and which are not organised in a hierarchy between active and passive. It is anthropology, more than speculative philosophy, that has taught us to see this.

The concepts I am speaking of are embodied, lived concepts. For me, philosophy is not theoretical. These concepts are real because they constitute our way of being to ourselves, to others, and to the world, because they structure an experience that seems objective to us when in fact it is conceptually organised, because they shape our gestures and the consequences of our acts, because they modify our neural connections and our physiology itself, as contemporary neuroscience has begun to establish. And they are never purely individual. As I was saying at the outset, the concepts that structure us are massively collective, transmitted by culture, by education, by works, by the stories a community tells itself about itself. To work on a concept is never a private operation. It is to intervene in a shared conceptual fabric that precedes me, and that I either replay, modify, or enrich according to what I am capable of thinking. When I work on a concept and integrate it, my mode of being is transformed by it, and there is something holistic here that lies at the heart of my philosophical approach. Philosophy is a way of being in the world, built in a practical coherence between what I think, what I say, and what I do.

This demand for coherence between what one thinks and what one does can be called ethics. I sometimes name it alignment, even though I know the term may seem simplistic to a professional philosopher. It does, however, say something essential. To think the world is not to think it for oneself only. It is to give oneself the means to act in the world consistently with what one thinks, and to do so while recognising the legitimacy of other ways of thinking. A philosophy that would claim a superior truth and refuse this recognition would lose its ethics at the very moment it believed itself to be the most rigorous.

Thinking from what I have lived

My philosophical propositions are written from a particular situation. I am a white European man, born in 1970, who makes films, works in education and social work, conducts research, runs workshops, gives lectures. I have been facilitating collective intelligence in very diverse contexts for thirty-five years, and I have been working for just as long on cultural democracy, on cultural rights, on respect for the dignity of persons, particularly those whom institutions and societies are accustomed to keep at a distance or to look down upon.

I specify this situation in order to say from where I speak, and from where I choose to work the philosophical concepts that serve me. If I am keen to do so, it is not to justify myself, it is because it seems to me that the situation from which one speaks is the condition of what one can say that is right. A philosopher who would claim to think from nowhere would forge concepts that would illuminate nothing, because they would be the child of no experience.

This does not mean that my concepts are valid only for me. A good concept illuminates beyond the situation that gave birth to it. I spoke earlier of Spinoza’s conatus, and it is worth returning to it in order to clarify what I mean. Spinoza forges this concept from his situation as a Marrano Jew expelled from his community, in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, while seeking to formulate a living ethics outside the religious authorities that had rejected him. The concept he draws from it speaks far beyond the Marrano Jews of his century, and it continues today to illuminate the way we think about vital power, about resistance to what would diminish us, about the effort by which a being holds onto its existence. Yet this concept could not have been forged by someone who had not lived such a singular situation. Philosophy is always situated, and it is this situation that gives it its reach.

Several experiences have weighed heavily on my way of thinking the world, and therefore on the concepts I work on today.

The first is the period of the Covid crisis (2020-2022), which I lived through and which I continue to think of as a moment of capitalist totalitarianism of which most of the people around me had no awareness, because they were prisoners of an imaginary world fabricated day after day by the media, by governments, and by the capitalist powers that drew considerable profit from it. It is not a matter for me of denying the existence of the epidemic. It is a matter of pointing out the way it was instrumentalised, the way its severity was accelerated and accentuated by political and economic choices serving particular interests, and the way those who did not conform were stigmatised and excluded, sometimes by institutions, sometimes by their own loved ones. It was already established at the time, and is even more so today, that there was virtually no risk of death for people under fifty as long as common-sense preventive measures were respected. It was also already established, and is now public knowledge, that the vaccines did not protect against transmission of the virus. The entire edifice of fear rested on a house of cards that critical thought could dismantle as the facts deposited themselves. I would never have thought I would live this experience in the France where I was born. What struck me was not only the political decision, it was the massive adherence, within the educated and intellectual classes I move among, to a single false explanation, accompanied by a moral stigmatisation of those who asked questions. What Hannah Arendt had named the banality of evil, in order to think the Nazi machinery, helped me to understand what was playing out around me. People who experienced themselves as good, intelligent, well-informed people did to their unvaccinated neighbours what they would have judged unacceptable in any other context, treating them as public dangers, even though no serious scientific data justified this stigmatisation. There occurred a true inversion of values in Nietzsche’s sense, by which to stigmatise and exclude became a sign of morality, and to ask questions became a sign of immorality. This moment is for me a philosophical object in itself, raising precise questions about what presence, fear, belief, and critical thinking are.

The second experience is the loss by suicide of one of my sons, Hippolyte, who was about to turn 23. I have spoken about it in several other articles, and I specify here what it has deposited in my philosophical thinking. Hippolyte had been depressive for several years. During the Covid period, he had been deeply caught up in the fear carefully cultivated by the media and the institutions, even though that fear should not have concerned him at all as a young person without comorbidities. He took his own life at the end of 2022, shortly after the official end of that period. I do not claim to reduce what happened to him to a single cause, and I do not forget the properly personal dimension of his depression, but I cannot dissociate what happened from the anxiety-inducing climate that the Covid years had deposited in him and around him. What this loss did to me, philosophically, was to confront me with living the impossible, with having to inhabit an unthinkable that language itself has not wished to name. The French language has a word for someone who has lost their spouse, veuf or veuve, just as English has widow and widower. It has a word for someone who has lost their parents, orphelin·e, just as English has orphan. For someone who has lost a child, there is no word, neither in French nor in English, and this absence in language signals an unthought that our cultures have not wanted to bring into their conceptual fabric. I do not know exactly what I do with this loss, and it is precisely because I do not know what I do with it that I continue to think, to write, to formulate. The concept of presence works at that very place for me, at the very point where the absence of a word makes the experience unshareable, and where one has to hold one’s presence to oneself in order not to be dissolved by what has no name.

A third experience weighs on my thinking, and it is longer than the two preceding ones. It is the one I have accumulated by facilitating, for thirty-five years, very diverse groups, in cinema, education, research, social work, training. What I have consistently observed is that the quality of presence to oneself and to others within a group radically changes what that group is able to produce. When people really listen, when they listen to themselves at the same time as they listen to others, when they engage in real and not simulated cooperation, there is created among them objects, films, words, ideas that could not have existed in the absence to self and to the other. Conversely, when presence is dissolved, less is produced, and what is produced is less strong, less just, less interesting. Presence is therefore not only an inner state, it is a condition of creation, and it is also a collective condition. This practical observation preceded in me the philosophical conceptualisation, and it gives me confidence when I say that presence is an operative concept and not only a speculative one.

From this experience flows an observation about systems of organisation that claim objectivity and rationality. Many of these systems in fact function as devices of absence, set up to reassure ourselves, to organise around us supports that distance us from the risk of really living. To reassure oneself is to absent oneself from connection and from risk, and that is precisely what these systems allow. Today’s evaluation systems, as they are conducted in the worlds of work, education, and culture, are an illustration. They claim to evaluate the effectiveness of an action according to so-called objective criteria, but these criteria miss what could unfold if presence were there. The work of evaluation then ends up evaluating mostly itself, and turns in a void while consuming collective energy. This is where philosophy can help us very concretely to live better, by naming this absence disguised as rationality, and by making possible an organisation that maintains presence rather than dissolving it.

A fourth experience, finally, is my long relationship to technology, from the first machines of my childhood to the generative artificial intelligences of today. I have devoted several recent articles to this, including Machines Already Organic and Presence in Entanglement, which extend what I am trying to think here. Technology is not a neutral tool that humans would use while remaining identical to themselves. It constitutes a deep anthropological transformation, which modifies our way of inhabiting the world and of being in relation. Provided it is thought and invested consciously, it can thicken our presence to ourselves and to others. Without this consciousness, it can on the contrary dissolve it, and leave us to automatisms in which we believe we are acting when in fact we are being acted upon. The most urgent philosophical question of our time is lodged at this point, and it is one of the reasons that generative artificial intelligence seems to me to call for a new conceptualisation that inherited philosophy alone cannot provide.

A plane of immanence to inhabit

To conclude, I would like to return one last time to Deleuze and Guattari, because their book of 1991 is not limited to the definition of philosophy as the creation of concepts. They also propose there a concept I need to gather what I have tried to say, that of the plane of immanence. An isolated concept remains fragile, because it then opposes itself to other concepts on the mode of true against false, and one enters a polemic without ground. For concepts to hold together and allow us to really think the world, they need a common ground that brings them into contact with one another, by neighbourhood, by resonance, by reciprocal contagion. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of immanence. It is neither a thesis, nor a system, nor a grid of analysis. It is rather an image of thought that precedes concepts and allows them to appear together, in a consistency in which each refers to the others without dissolving into them.

The plane of immanence on which my own concepts unfold is that of presence as condition of humanity, in a time when we are entangled with one another, with the works and languages that precede us, and now with machines that speak and that take charge of a part of our cognition. On this plane, presence dialogues with imminence which tends to project us into urgency, with the geography of presence which describes how it varies according to contexts, with the regime of permission which determines what we allow ourselves to think or to say, with the simulacrum of presence which describes the pseudo-objective discourses that dismiss personal engagement, with obsolete mononormativity which questions our inherited affective frameworks, with presence in entanglement which thinks what presence becomes when a machinic third party holds a part of our trace. None of these concepts can be isolated from the others without losing part of what it says. What holds them together is the plane of immanence on which they are laid, and this plane is my own way of answering the question of what philosophy is today.

This answer is not the only one possible. Others build other planes, from other situations, with other concepts, and this plurality of planes is what makes philosophy stay alive rather than reducing itself to an orthodoxy. What I say here is not a definition of what philosophy should be for everyone. It is a description of what it is for me, and an invitation, addressed to anyone who reads me, to bring into awareness the plane of immanence on which their own concepts already unfold, whether they have chosen it or inherited it without knowing.