What Rainbows Can Teach Us About Philosophy
By: Steven Gambardella
Tags: Philosophy, Culture, Psychology, Self Improvement, Science

Rainbows are a consequence of real things happening in the world, but they are not quite real themselves. You can see them, but you can’t touch them.

A rainbow is caused by a chance combination of light, a downpour, and being in the right place to see it — with your back turned to the light.

Human beings see different coloured bands in the rainbow but in reality the rainbow is a seamless spectrum of colour. The coloured bands are a product of human “colour vision” — the way we as a species see colour. The hardware of our eyes and brain makes sense of the world in a particular way and the bands of the rainbow show that.

We can all see a rainbow when one appears but no one person sees the same rainbow. This is because what you see is an optical illusion that exists in relation to where you are looking from. Rainbows look different to every eye beholding them.

Concepts are the same. What do I mean by concepts? Freedom, love, happiness, wisdom, gender and ethics — these are all concepts.

They exist only in so much that we speak about them. If we didn’t speak or write about these things they wouldn’t exist. And I would wager that if every single person in the world were asked to write an essay about love, they would have a different idea about what love is.

That’s why concepts are just like rainbows. They are not real, but caused by real things happening. You can speak about them, but you can’t touch them. They exist differently to every beholder, yet we also have a shared sense for them in the same way we see rainbows in that distinctly-human colour band way.

A dog would have no understanding of love in the way we do. Sure, a dog can show affection, form relationships and rear puppies and such like, but “love” is a human idea that we understand only on our own terms.

One of the biggest misconceptions about philosophy is that it’s a body of knowledge, that you have to study for years to understand it. People think you have to learn about philosophers: those long-dead pale males who wrote sleep-inducing texts with long words.

But you don’t. Philosophy is in fact an activity. It’s something everybody does, even if they don’t know it.

We spend most of our lives thinking directly about our lives and the world. We think about relationships, work, politics and a whole assortment of our experiences directly. We think about people we love, we think about our tax bills, work, death and jealousy.

Think about all the concepts that make emotions well-up inside you. Happiness, love, evil, duty, justice and honour. These are complicated concepts that cause us sleepless nights because they are concepts that imbue the thoughts that occupy us.

But sometimes we level up our thinking, we ask ourselves questions like, what really is “love”? Or — are we really “free” if we need to work to survive? Or — is paying tax a moral obligation? Or — why don’t I feel “happy” when all the signs say I should be?

We suddenly consider these things we think about in our everyday lives from a conceptual standpoint. That is what philosophy is. It’s thinking about thinking.

Philosophy is the craft of concepts — it is our means of making and moulding concepts. Philosophical contemplation is higher level thinking. We all do it, but more rarely than we ought to.

It allows us to better understand all these confusing concepts that cause us sleepless nights.

If we do it, and we talk (and write) about it, we start to better shape the world we live in. We can compare the way we understand these concepts. We can make sense of it a little more together.

We can chase rainbows together.

In doing so, we can be more empathetic, since we know more about each other. We can also feel less aggravated by our own limited understanding of the concepts that weigh so heavily on our lives, yet only exist in our minds.

Have a great Christmas.