Grenades, Socrates and Lapdogs

   Phi·los·o·phy:   

fəˈläsəfē/ from the Greek: philo ("love") and sophia ("wisdom").noun: 

" Philosophy is the most fundamental inquiry into the nature of knowledge, reality, truth, goodness and beauty." 
              --- Mark McIntire

"Rather the goal—especially at the undergraduate level—should be to help students recognize that philosophy matters. Not just because it will improve their LSAT scores (which it will), but because philosophy has the potential to change the very fabric of who they are as human beings."
--- Lee McIntyre

     

Philosophers have been rolling eidetic incendiaries into citadels since Socrates drank hemlock. He did so freely, by the way. If Plato is to be believed, his jailer left the door to his cell wide open. Guess his judges took pause over his final words at trial; " If you think that by killing men you can prevent some one from censuring your evil lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honorable; the easiest and the noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves. This is the prophecy which I utter before my departure to the judges who have condemned me."

So why did he drink the poison? 

He was seeking Truth. Not this truth or that truth. He was seeking Truth itself. Until recently, philosophers have always played the role of gadfly, provocateur, instigator, revolutionary, and all around pain in the ass to institutional authority types. And it was not just the guys. Women are natural born philosophers in this regard. Hypatia of Alexandria is but one example:

“ On her way home from delivering her daily lectures at the university, Hypatia was attacked by a mob of Christian monks, dragged from her chariot down the street into a church, and was there stripped naked, beaten to death, and burned. The primary sources, even those Christian writers who were hostile to her and claimed she was a witch, portray her as a woman who was widely known for her generosity, love of learning, and expertise in teaching in the subjects of Neo-Platonism, mathematics, science, and philosophy in general.” ---Ancient History Encyclopedia, at http://www.ancient.eu/Hypatia_of_Alexandria/ photo credit: Hypatia by Charles William Mitchell(1854-1903)first exhibited in 1885 and inspired by the Charles Kingsley novel Hypatia. Presently on display at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne, England.

Philosophy, once the ‘Queen of the Sciences’, and now their lapdog, had two traditional functions and did them well for over two millennia: 1. Philosophy examined the underlying assumptions of every other mental discipline for their validity and cogency leading to new knowledge in a given area of study. This was the very meaning of conferring the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree. 2. Philosophy alone examined the four basic questions every human being needs to answer in order to become a meaningful person:

   What is Real? 

   What is True?

   What is Good?

   What is Beautiful?  

In today’s academy, these functions are only honored in the breach. In most cases, contemporary students learn their ‘love of wisdom’ from those who teach in order to earn their daily bread. Usually, they have never succeeded in any pursuit outside academe. When philosophy becomes a means to earn one’s bread, it cannot but degenerate into sophistry. Philosophy is done for its own sake. It has no whore-master. It is not a catamite. So, there is a world of difference between pedants who teach philosophy, and actual philosophers. 

Philosophy became institutionalized only recently in the 20^th century. By 1970, over 10,000 professional philosophers populated the Academe in America alone. No one knows that exact day or time that philosophy ceased to have these two functions and evolved into an institutionalized puppy petted in the modern academy. However, it’s safe to use the early 1970’s to mark when it was gutted from the liberal arts curriculum. This was the decade of rebellion, war protesting (Vietnam), affirmative action (just for blacks), birth control, abortion, (sex, drugs and rock-and-roll). Rebellion against all authority was fueled post-WW 2 secular thinkers and writers; Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Sartre, and Nietzsche. Paperback books glorifying their revolutionary ideas jutted out of student backpacks on every college campus. Anything old was rejected. Anyone old was held suspect of evil.  Sounds like today, eh?

For all their postmodern relativism, otherwise secular people still parade around in commencement ceremonies wearing medieval regalia that would make a medieval French Cardinal blush. Nevertheless, educational ‘relevance’ became the metric to measure the ‘liberal arts core’ that grew out of the ancient courseware Trivium (Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy). It gave new meaning to Tennyson’s “The old order changeth, giving place to the new. And God fulfills Himself in many ways.” Alfred Tennyson, 1809-1892 - "Morte D'Arthur"   But this time it was happening without God. God died in 1967. It was on the cover of Time Magazine. Cause of death?  Seems it was complications of a sudden “broken-heart” compounded by irreversible rejection pathology according to the secular coroner’s report.  

There was no service. In lieu of flowers, mourners were asked to support ‘liberation theology’ inspired by another group of twentieth-century thinkers and writers including, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Bath, and Martin Buber. Sometimes called ‘contextual theology’ liberation theology attempts to harmonize Marxism and Christianity through mainly Catholic activists like Peruvian Dominican friar, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Spanish Jesuit priest, Jon Sobrino. Neither are exactly pin-up-boys around the Vatican these days. In 2007, the future Pope Benedict XVI ‘notified’ Sobrino that his ‘Church Of The Poor' doctrine was “erroneous or dangerous and may cause harm to the faithful.”  As noted here in the previous blog, Pope Zig-Zag, Francis is quite sympathetic to ‘liberation theology’ as it promotes his general style accenting mercy rather than the dogmatism of his predecessor, Benedict XVI.

The decline in philosophy then was first noticed ironically at American Catholic Universities such as Notre Dame, Marquette, Georgetown, and The Catholic University itself. Today, not one of these institutions is without self-described atheists teaching philosophy and/or religious studies. Why?

 It’s only recently that philosophy is being done, if at all, by college and university professors, not experts in other disciplines.  Leisure time to reflect, refine thought and write in response to criticism is a necessary condition of being a philosopher. We don’t find too many make-up clerks at Nordstrom pushing the frontiers of philosophy.

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor, Spinoza was a lens grinder. Descartes, largely responsible for the philosophical train wreck that followed him, was a mathematician. Leibnitz was a polymath. Isaac Newton was an astrophysicist, scientist, and mathematician. Wittgenstein became a primary school teacher and monk’s gardener. Gandi was a lawyer, Christ a carpenter. Yeah, these last two certainly were bomb-chucking philosophers that changed what it means to be a 'person'.

Many influential modern thinkers are break-away philosophers. Psychiatrist and historian of philosophy, Karl Jaspers, recalled the cynicism he witnessed in Europe against institutional philosophy in the 1950’s:

"What is the task of philosophy today? We hear this answer: It has none, for it lacks reality, constituting merely the out-of-the-way occupation of a group of specialists. Incumbents of chairs of philosophy, the origin of which dates back to the Middle Ages, meet in vain in conventions which represent the modern method of seeking recognition. A comprehensive literature testifies to their monologues, seldom read and rarely purchased, except in a few faddist periodicals for snobs. True, the press, as the organ of public opinion, takes some notice of these publications gathering dust on library shelves; but it does so without genuine interest. In short, philosophy might be considered superfluous, a petrified relic of time gone by, awaiting dissolution; it no longer has a task to fulfill." (Philosopher in Defense of Philosophy; Karl Jaspers in This is my Philosophy, (ed.) Whit Burnett, George Allen and Unwin, London 1958)

 

It has no reality! It has nothing to do, literally. It has no ‘practical’ method or goal. It’s not uncommon to be stopped on campus by a colleague in another discipline asking you, in all seriousness, “What exactly do you do over there in the philosophy department?”  The lack of a credible answer explains, in part, the readiness of colleges and universities to close down entire departments of philosophy altogether, folding the dying tenured professors into the ‘social sciences’ of all places. The hope is, perhaps they’ll find something useful to do over there. The University of Los Vegas just pink slipped their non-tenured philosophy faculty, all of them! Meanwhile, every respectable university offering graduate philosophy degrees plaster their websites with links to “Non-academic jobs” for their graduates. Law schools are chock full of philosophy degreed students these days.

At a recent commencement ceremony, I sat robed in my medieval splendor next to a young lady about to receive her Ph.D. hoodie in child psychology. During the speaker’s drone, I asked her if she ever took a course in philosophy. “No, never. I always wanted to but never found the time.” was her answer. "Logic?", I inquired? A blank stare was her only response. Those poor children!

So, PhD’s are awarded to people who never studied philosophy, philosophy of religion is conducted by many atheists even in Catholic universities, philosophy departments internationally are shutting their doors since there are dwindling academic job prospects for their students, and this is all driven by institutional stagnation in philosophy itself. Thanks to the fraudulent exploiters of Descartes, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein, et al, philosophy has been contemplating its naval in the single-minded pursuit of supplying a solid foundation for ‘objectivity’ in their theories of knowledge.  The rest of the world has moved on with a simple observation similar to the one given to me by James Candy, chief scientist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, “Yeah, there is objective knowledge. If we want to put something the size of a microwave oven on an asteroid, we know how to do that, reliably and objectively.”

Is it all a bit more nuanced and complex than this? Sure. But that leads to another modern philosophical error; no philosophy is acceptable these days unless it is nuanced out of all meaning about reality, truth, goodness, and beauty. Thanks to the near universal and uncritical acceptance of postmodern cultural relativism, this is the last bit of mental suicide rendering institutionalized philosophers lapdogs of social science. Please pet them gently when you see them. It will be their sole consolation. Flannery O’Connor once said, you can’t be any poorer than dead. Perhaps she couldn't envision being a philosopher, being alive and being irrelevant.

Philosophy is not dead, however. It thrives in some of the young philosophers that are living philosophy rather than further institutionalizing it. These young men and women philosophers are neither political incendiaries nor institutional lapdogs. They are enchanters. They want to bring people together through philosophy. They are the future of philosophy outside academe.  One such is Matthew Bixby. "I'm here to make peace," he told me recently. His research specialty is finding the roots of modern moral and cultural relativism to get beyond it. He blogs at WhyThink.net. Give him a read if you are a lover of wisdom. And you are.

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 Critical Thinking About Anything 

by Mark McIntire 

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