philosophers, KINDLY READ!

I am reposting a repost of a repost.
This is from the 26 May 2008 issue of the Manila Standard Today.

- i have a couple of comments on the side, and most of them are affirmative. it would require another blog post.

- credits to Ilaw my apo and Jun Arvie my stage-brother for sharing. =)

THE ECLIPSE OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY CURRICULUM

By Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino

In a few weeks, that which many students dread will happen—the opening of the new school year. Despite spiraling costs of tertiary education, many will flock to our universities and colleges with differing degrees of enthusiasm and aptitude and, so the common thinking goes, after four years or so, they will be qualified for employment. Courses used to be simple and the choices few. They are now as many and as diverse as the imaginativeness of curriculum planners.

Recently, I had for a guest Dr. Julius Mendoza of UP Baguio, a friend from seminary days, and his lovely wife, also a UP professor. Julius and I have philosophy in common, besides of course Maryhurst Seminary. Besides, we had both been to Louvain University. He attended Louvain for his doctorate; I was there as a research fellow. We talked about how hard times had fallen on philosophy and how it was gradually being eased out of the curriculum. In the standard college course, logic is no longer required, and ethics takes the form of professional ethics subjects—that dreary subject consisting of a pseudo-academic treatment of the customs and traditions of a profession or disappears altogether. Philosophy as a separate program will now be found mostly in seminaries only, and in those institutions where it remains, it is often diluted to the point of insipidity: Philosophy and human resource development, philosophy and social analysis—perhaps even philosophy and culinary arts!

In many cases, Julius and I agreed that it was the philosophy instructors themselves who had given philosophy a bad name and hastened its demise. When a philosophy class becomes a pointless introduction to a procession of strange names and strange theories, then there is hardly any point to it. When you ask a student what knowledge is, and all he can give you for four years work of philosophy is that Descartes said and Hume said and Locke said and Kant said and the phenomenologists said and Rorty said, there is hardly any sense in that. One has earned a degree as a purveyor of oddities! In many cases, philosophy instructors passed on to the students what they themselves failed to grasp properly, leaving in their wake students confused, befuddled and utterly turned off with this introduction to philosophy. And so it is that the glorious heritage that has enriched humankind from Mohenjo Daro, Harappa and Greece to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Habermas and Rorty of our days has gone the way of obsolescence in large measure because of its supposed votaries.

These days, it is frequently said, people are practical. But of course they are, and people have always been practical. But we are human precisely because the practical is the fruit as well as the catalyst of reflection, and philosophy is, in its fundamentals, reflection on human experience. It is what lends depth and breadth, coherence and sublimity to being human. And ever so often, we are taught the precious lesson that in matters of greatest importance, what proves to be most practical is a good theory, and good theories cannot come from those who have never indulged in the habit of theorizing! What preoccupies the cow is the patch of grass before him, offering a next bite, a next meal! What preoccupies the human person is what all this means, including eating, loving, studying and dying. Are these not the questions that humanize us, the questions that make human history what it is? If you do not want to call it philosophy (either because you were traumatized by your philosophy instructor or have difficulty spelling the word) call it by some other name, but it will still be philosophy. Lonergan once so insightfully wrote: When a dog has nothing to do, it falls asleep; when a person has nothing to do, he asks questions. And certainly, among the questions he asks are questions of philosophy. He can of course dismiss these questions as impertinent—and that in effect is what a university curriculum does when it evicts philosophy from its premises—but they will persist and they will stubbornly rear their heads because they are the questions by which we mark ourselves as human. We can develop the habit of smothering all philosophical inclination, but that will not make us any more successful at technology and science. If anything at all, it can only enervate the soul and impoverish the human spirit.

The philosopher provokes questions. The survey of philosophers and their philosophies is not the main thing; it is at most only ancillary. It is hoped that by attending to what thinkers wrote and said, each might be able to fashion some coherent answer to these perennial questions. And so it should be a most interesting study. Is it not worth everyone’s while to know what we live for, or should we dismiss that as an idle concern and just go on with the business of living? Leaving it unanswered condemns us to a daily grind without sense of purpose or worth. Ever so often, we invoke grand concepts—justice, democracy, freedom, human dignity. But these are all philosophically laden. So, why dismiss the serious and systematic inquiry into the very concepts in which we seek refuge? When a rally is broken up by law enforcers, we cry “freedom.” If we disdain philosophy, we should refrain from crying “freedom” because we have no right to use that which we cannot be clear about.

The fact is that we do philosophy—in varying degrees of satisfactoriness. Is it not common to shrug of moral precepts today with the ubiquitous refrain: “Times have changed.” That of course is a philosophical posture, and one of doubtful validity. When we convince ourselves that we can be anything, we choose to be provided, we work hard at getting to it, are we not in fact taking a very bold, if not unwarranted, philosophical position? Philosophy is taught poorly because there are not enough properly trained philosophy professors—and that is a matter of institutional and societal attitude. But whether we acknowledge it or not, we philosophize! And now for the pesky—but quotidian concern about “life after graduation.” In the first place, taking an “employable” course is no guarantee of employment. I know engineers who have become nurses! But the philosophy graduate is an eminently “trainable” person precisely because philosophy has prepared him for an understanding of himself, of others and of his world that gives him the aptitude for whatever it might be that he has to do.