The first question of philosophers, and those who wish to learn philosophy, is to ask what the word philosophy means and the areas it deals with. According to Lyotard, however, this question, is itself a philosophical question, because it expects an answer by returning to the beginnings of philosophy and how it was perceived by the early thinkers, since philosophy means love and desire for wisdom. By means of an analysis of the concept of desire, we must realize that at heart philosophy is the search for an absent subject, yet it is present as a desired subject (which is how Lyotard reads Plato's Symposium and the search for lost times—the Albertine disparue of Proust and psychoanalysis). In this fashion, those who desire philosophy have to realize that they desire something unknown, and that philosophy (in its Socratic form) is no more than the quest for wisdom and not its possession.