Matters Philosophical

By Okey Ikechukwu

It was a heated debate. Everyone was up in arms. “Take a Look around you”, one person declared. “Today’s world is defined and dominated by scientific invention and material success. It is a world cramped by internet connectivity, microchip-enabled reality, artificial intelligence, digitisation, virtualisation, digital convergence and new breakthroughs in space science and quantum physics. These things confront, or probably even afront, you at every turn. So, how does it make sense for anyone to come here to talk about philosophy and less tangible things, like spiritual matters?

Below is largely my contribution to a controversy about Philodosophy, which came up tangentially as a side discussion during  tea break at a strategy session on education and human capital development.

Today the world is focused only science, technology, entrepreneurship, and sundry knowledge and skills. Most people would rather learn how to fix a car, build an airplane, deliver nuclear warheads and much more, than think about philosophy and other such nebulous subjects of questionable economic value. Can you really make a case for philosophy in a world wherein the likes of John Hopkins had said: “Philosophy is dead”? The cheerful projection of this declaration of Hopkins by disciples of the physical sciences only accentuates a prevailing mood.

Remember William James? The American father of modern pragmatism, who once said: “Truth is what works”. James lived nearly a century before Hopkins, at a time that the demands for immediate material results was on a precipitous rise. The litmus test for the value, relevance and even truth, of anything was its “cash value”, as proclaimed by James. 

So, what is there to say about the cash value of philosophy? Philosophy and spiritual matters are not things you can put on a shelf, like a loaf of bread, and ask someone to pay for it. A world that has gotten used to saying: “You cannot do anything with philosophy” will not suddenly give up the perceived gains of the empirical sciences in search of anything intangible.

Considering that science triumphed over the more subtle disciplines in the last one hundred years, wherein the world was flooded with astonishing discoveries and inventions, the great optimism that greeted the promise of science and technology was unequalled. That optimism galloped away, as inventions tumbled in from all sides. The actual development of science and technology even went beyond the projections, predictions and most fervid fantasies of scientists and science fiction writers.

All of the foregoing sustained and reinforced the smoldering feeling that a purely classical, or a non-scientific, education has the inborne defect of not delivering immediate material benefits. In other words, that a bookish life is unattractive, largely worthless and a sure road to nowhere.

Bringing it Back Home

Many Nigerian university graduates still remember their encounter with the General Studies Course, some lawyers, too, still remember their tango with Jurisprudence, or Philosophy of Law, with a slight shaking of the head. “It was a very difficult and abstract subject”, seems to be the dominant motif in their reactions to tangential encounters with that subject in the university. Do you expect someone who found just the introduction to philosophy very unsettling, and others who went away with a lasting headache after peering at jurisprudence or the philosophy of law, to recommend the real philosophy to anyone?

Many puny academic disciplines, and also acolytes of the purely physical sciences, including those standing on tiptoe because of the newness of their specialties, still manage to summon enough courage to shake an admonishing finger at philosophy. Their argument is that this mother of all disciplines has lost everything to its very boisterous, and possibly more impudent, children. The various disciplines has been taking from philosophy until, as their mother, she became empty-handed. The children grew wings and took flight, making their worsted mother a propertyless refugee, or the guardian of a barren territory.

Is philosophy not reputed to indulge without restraint in the cheerful display of what the less than deep sighted consider pointless queries? Has philosophy’s habit of just walking about, like a forsaken, property-less refugee, in the wild and uncharted deserts and forest of the mysteries of human existence, not brought it into disrepute without anyone’s assistance?

The notion of philosophy as something tiring and tiresome, something boring and largely abstract, is partly due to the unending controversies usually connected with it. The writings, conversations and academic activities loosely grouped under the umbrella-name of philosophy bear this out to a very large extent. Wild speculation, convoluted conjectures, intellectual summersaults, and analytical gymnastics are to be found in it. Thus, over time, many people came to consider themselves justified in doubting the value of philosophy.

But before we prance off to proclaim and celebrate the presumed irrelevance of philosophy, and thus our liberation from all philosophizing, let us listen to the words of Martin Heidegger, the German phenomenological ontologist. He said: “It is right to say that we cannot do anything with philosophy. But might philosophy, if we concern ourselves with it, not do something with us”?

A curious question, wouldn’t you say? In his 1951 essay, ‘What is Called Thinking’ Heidegger said: “Science does not think”. He described science as the mindless accumulation of ‘facts’, or results. He pointed out that the achievements of science create a world that manifests indifference [to the sense of community in the universe] rather than interest (in, and movement towards, a unified and sustainable ecosystem). Given the above submissions from Heidegger, let us recalibrate our thoughts and discussion; going forward.

You can get a lot of information about many things, and yet be devoid of true knowledge. To gather data from the world around us is not the same thing as making sense of what you have gathered. A person who gathers several car parts, from different types of cars, cannot derive any meaning or ‘purpose’ from that. He cannot say what he has before him, if he does not know what a car is.

But assuming you tell him what he has before him, have you, thereby, told him anything that would help him live his life as a responsible adult? Will the information he is given about the objects around him, and even his ability to control and use them, also tell him how to be a responsible father, or why he should not kill someone in order to take what the person has on him?

So, let us calmly admit that the ability to solve everyday problems, or fix things and introduce innovations, is not the same thing as understanding the meaning of life, understanding the values of right and wrong, etc. Let us also admit that the training of the mind and the personality is different from the acquisition of information and the fixing of a car. The ability to give a well-rounded, informed and somewhat impersonal outlook, which constitutes true knowledge, refinement and personal culture in the best sense of these terms, does not come from what we may (for now) call a purely scientific training.

In this sense then, what is sometimes called a “literary” education is superior. But the inferiority of science in this regard is not the fault of science itself as a human endeavour. It is, instead, the fault of the attitude and assumptions with which science is now being pursued and taught. By presenting science as empiricism, and showcasing the Scientific Method as the only path to knowledge and truth, we deny ourselves the fuller picture of what we can know, what constitutes our world; and what our place in it is.

It is true that we have all the gadgets we need to live easy and relatively comfortable, and even lazy, lives today. But surely, material comfort cannot be the purpose of our existence. Science gives us a lot of facts and, despite the advertised achievements, we are still finding it more and more difficult to understand ourselves and our world. Science, technology and the gains of academic learning and intellectual knowledge gives us a world that is fundamentally incomplete.

Such a world can only be dominated by partial truths, errors of understanding, and misapplication of the true purpose of science itself. It is, perhaps, the misunderstandings and misapplications that are derailing science today; especially with regards to the concepts of knowledge and human development.

Can science and technology give us personal dignity and character, or help us answer the following questions in real terms: (1) What is the ultimate purpose of human existence? (2) What is the foundation and basis of values? (3) Why is it that prophets always bring new knowledge that is above the level of the most learned peoples of their times? (4) What is the ultimate foundation of morality; (5) Should right and wrong depend on personal, or group, opinion? (6) Why is there is no agreement among “experts” on the existing answers to the above questions” And (7) Can we really speak of experts on any subject, when the very experts themselves do not agree on a single issue?

Contemporary science sees knowledge in terms of what we can experience through the physical senses of sight, touch, smell, etc. But is our ability to know, as human beings, limited to what we can see, touch and physically interact with? Something must be fundamentally wrong with some aspects of the popularly accepted Scientific Method; with its eternal emphasis on empiricism and materiality – and nothing else.

Scientific insights into the nature of Elementary Particles, for instance, puts old science to shame. Advances in atomic/nuclear physics and nano technology have made nonsense of the knowledge and scientific imagination of the average, plodding scientist of today. Much of what is being taught as science in many of our schools, worldwide, today is scientifically out of date. The traditional empirical world of science that many who worship science today are desperately projecting and praising does not exist anymore.

But, should we then turn to academic philosophy? Can we say yes to the above question with some air of finality? I don’t think so. Remember Will Durant’s statement in his book, The Story of Philosophy: “Philosophy itself, which had once summoned all the sciences to its aid in making a coherent image of the world…found its task of co-ordination too stupendous and ran away…and hid itself in recondite and narrow lanes, timidly secure from the issues and responsibilities of life”.

You cannot project science as the ultimate solution. You also cannot project academic philosophy as the solution. The original philosophers were seekers after the truth. Is this true of academic philosophers?