About the Colombo School of Philosophy

Taken from an extremely rough, practical point of view, what is meant by learning philosophy can be summarized as follows. To learn philosophy is to learn the history of philosophy. To learn the history of philosophy is to learn the various philosophical doctrines that make it up. To learn philosophical doctrines is to confront the thinking of the thinkers who produced them. To confront the thinking of those thinkers is to study the books in which that thinking is written.

In that sense, the most important labor in learning philosophy is the study of the very books in which philosophical doctrines are written. This is why, in learning philosophy, reading “primary texts” takes priority. “Primary texts” are the books composed by the very thinkers who built a given philosophical doctrine, introducing that doctrine themselves. “Secondary texts,” accordingly, are books written by later interpreters introducing those same doctrines. Primary texts take priority over secondary texts because through them, the “thinking” of the thinker who first put forward that particular doctrine confronts us in its original form. It is here that the utmost beauty of that thinking is found.

It is at this very point that our desire “to think” is born. To practice philosophy is an unending struggle to build such a thinking. Through it, we are compelled to answer the question of what existence is. But faced with existence as thus understood, we are confronted with the question of what we, as human beings, can do — alone and collectively. This is why philosophy begins in ontology and ends in ethics. This is the true meaning of answering the question of what existence is. Through it, we can determine what we, as human beings, are able to do. We can consider what the good is. And so it offers us guidance toward a good life.

This is why Socrates says that an unexamined life is not worth living. Philosophy directs us to constantly examine our own lives. And that is precisely why it compels us to question the dominant ideas of society. It is here that the philosophical labor of studying books bears fruit. This is also why philosophy is an ideological struggle that changes society from the ground up.

From savoring the beauty of a thought to social transformation — the Colombo School of Philosophy is a Sri Lankan workshop devoted to this.

Our journey began in 2012 as an informal, small study circle at the University of Colombo. Its aim was to introduce to our country a new philosophical thinking that moved beyond the doctrines that had become dominant in the 1990s. In place of thinkers like Derrida and Foucault, who had come to dominate the postmodern era, our goal was to bring into our country's discourse the new materialisms and realisms that had entered global conversation in the twenty-first century.

About a year later, this became somewhat more formal when it was reorganized under the Digital Film Academy, then housed at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute. As a result, philosophical readings on cinema were also added to our studies. It was from this point that “art” became a central theme of our conversation.

It was also here that we began a close reading of both René Descartes's Meditations and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. This gave us room to develop a new format for reading such works in Sinhala. Since we felt that translating the original text directly into Sinhala would produce a work that was difficult to read, we instead tried to prepare a secondary text that explained every sentence of the original. Although this was clearly an interpretation, it became clear that it produced a text that was both closer to the original and easier to read. Since then, our studies have proceeded using this new format.

From the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute, our next home was the Theertha School of Arts. It was here, after finishing Heidegger's work, that we began that same kind of close reading for Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Alongside Kant, we have also carried out various studies here on Derrida, Žižek, Badiou, and others.

After the “Zoomification” of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were finally officially organized as the Colombo School of Philosophy in 2024. Our effort to bring philosophy into life as a practice is now moving forward more formally than before. On one hand, we are trying to show the limits of the ideas of the anti-philosophers who came to dominate at the end of the twentieth century. On the other, we are trying to show the need for a new philosophical thinking. But more than all of this, what we are trying to show is the utmost joy of uncovering a philosophical thought. An examined life brings happiness. This is the most fundamental message of philosophy.

What follows is a translation of an excerpt from an interview Quentin Meillassoux gave to the journal Paletten. This matters to us because it clarifies the historical experience behind our motto, “Beyond the 90s.” Our basic proposition is that beneath the differences among many of this country’s intellectuals who opposed one another during the 1990s, and in some cases clashed bitterly — Rohan Perera, Deepthi Kumara Gunaratne, Nalin de Silva, Arjuna Parakrama, Sunil Wijesiriwardena, Sasanka Perera, Nalin Swaris, among others — there runs a shared underlying agreement. It begins from the very position that a final liberation such as “communism” cannot be attained by human beings. At the very least, no one at the time thought that such a liberation could be grasped through knowledge. This is why the “politics of justice” of that era becomes an extremely problematic one. We could call it a liberationism of the defeated. Here, Meillassoux clarifies for us several of the important underlying features of the common thinking of that era.

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Sinziana Ravini: I’m going to ask you a few questions. We can take the conversation freely from there. My first question relates to a feeling I have about you. I feel that you are, in a way, a metaphysical detective. This detective tries to solve unresolved investigations within Western philosophy. As I understand it, you are trying to construct a metaphysics of the future, of the world yet to come. Tell me something about your philosophical discoveries.

Quentin Meillassoux: My aim was to escape a certain well-established logic that prevailed while I was a student. What that logic did was reject all kinds of systems and metaphysics. They were recognized as biased things, and therefore as violent things. Projects of thought that stood up for any kind of truth were recognized as crimes. All truths became violent things. If I may exaggerate a little, all the great crimes of the twentieth century were recognized as the result of taking the view that the questions raised by metaphysics, philosophy, history, and human existence could be answered. Anti-totalizing postmodernist thought recognized metaphysical truths as the inspiration for turning technology and politics into a system that brings death. It was thought that this attempted to spread domination over the environment and human beings.

Ravini: Isn’t this an idea that emerged from Adorno’s inspiration? The idea that modernity inevitably travels toward a system that brings death?

Meillassoux: Actually, this is a widely spread idea. It is represented across various schools. It was the common substance of that era. It isn’t easy to grasp precisely. But we can grasp it through certain officially sanctioned words. By pronouncing ideas like these, you gain common acceptance in the public sphere. Among these, the idea I found hardest to bear is the one that says “philosophy does not answer, but instead correctly poses the question.” This still-widespread “cult of the problem,” or “cult of the question,” is something I object to. The simple reason for this is that answers are more attractive than problems — because answers create new problems for us. You only get a problem after you’ve given a positive answer to a question.

Let me give one example. Descartes discovered the cogito — “I think, therefore I am” — which, for Descartes, is a truth that cannot be subjected to doubt in an absolute sense. Because of this, a host of new problems arose for him. How does the cogito become a truth compared to other truths that I think cannot be doubted? Why is this less doubtful than truths like “two plus two is four” or “I am certain that an external world exists”? To resolve this, what Descartes does is construct a hypothetical doubt. Only the cogito survives that doubt. For this, Descartes constructs an extremely powerful doubt. It is this doubt that allows the uniqueness of the cogito to be revealed. Accordingly, the cogito is the solution to the problem concerning a truth that is not subject to doubt. Thus, a system of doubting is built because of the need to know what the response is responding to. The cogito is a foundational affirmation. But what does an affirmation respond to? Anyone who wants to understand what a response is responding to has to construct a problematic truth-regime that allows one to eventually arrive at that response.