Philosophy - how is it relevant?

“Philosophers aren’t in the real world. They don’t get on with it.” – Beverly Moss

“Ignorance is everywhere. How much more relevant could philosophy be?” – J.A. Licon.

Quite often, I have been asked by a member of the public, “What is the point of philosophy?” Usually, I give an answer which states that philosophy is about the love of wisdom, and how practising philosophy assists one in the rational investigation of truth in the universe. However, I am then told, “But you can’t make much money from philosophy, can you?”

At this point, I feel inclined to tell them that Ricky Gervais is exceptionally rich, and that he studied philosophy. Furthermore, I could tell them that the UK’s current Prime Minister, David Cameron, studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Oxford University. However, anyone who knows anything about philosophy knows history is abundant with philosophers who were fettered to debt; Marx is a notable example. We can also go further. There are philosophers who have rejected their wealth: Wittgenstein, born to one of the richest families in Vienna, gave away his entire inheritance.

Socrates, the profound Greek interrogator, sacrificed his very life for his philosophy. This is quite extreme, but he refused to bow to religious censorship. Although this isn’t the same as giving away one’s wealth, the fact he died for a non-religious cause in favour of philosophical logic and reason should motivate people to reflect about the relevance of philosophy.

Whilst it would be unfair to claim all philosophers were as frugal as St Francis of Assisi, or as self-sacrificing as Socrates, it can be suggested that many philosophers do not view their lives within the narrow paradigm of accumulating coins and paper. As such, when asked whether you can make money from philosophy, you can reply, “Yes, but would that add any value to my life?”

If philosophy isn’t incredibly crucial to human economic potential, what is the point of studying it? After all, we live in a capitalist system. Capitalism requires its citizens to become skilled so that they can perpetuate its existence. Philosophy, it seems, is something of an anomaly. It is almost as if humans can live their lives in a more holistic way (holistic meaning that we should look at life as a whole, not in narrow compartmentalised boxes such as work, family, friends and the like). Who would have thought that so many people could dedicate their lives towards studying a subject with no assured economic dividends? It is simply fascinating.

One obvious answer is that philosophy is damned entertaining. It is intellectual popcorn, isn’t it? Philosophy challenges you – yes, the very you reading this – to think. Let’s go through a few big questions, shall we?

- What is truth? Do we have the ability to grasp it?

- Is God relevant? Can his existence be proven?

- What is a thought? Does everyone think?

- What is the meaning of life? Is there one?

- What does it mean to be human? Are we just animals?

These questions are provocative. Humans think about such things every day. I, for one, am attacked by my brain with such questions at the most inconvenient of times. Philosophy is relevant, because humans make it so. Many people think of such things, without considering themselves philosophers, when in fact they are. Many of the best philosophers never call themselves so; many of the worst always do.

However, I will add a caveat. I don’t think that philosophy is as relevant as religion – yet. The Catholic Church outnumbers the members of philosophical societies, and humanity is much the worse for it. The Catholic Church has 1.2 billion members, and a chequered history, to say the least. On Facebook, the Philosophy page has 293'207 likes: type the word “Catholic” in, and one million likes are registered, (whilst “Jesus Loves you”, has 5'764'625 members). Though far from scientific, I think you get the point of the supporting evidence to my claim.

No one is baptised into a particular philosophy, but it would be most antithetical to philosophy if this were allowed to happen. However, the reason I don’t think philosophy to be as relevant as religion is due to people labelling themselves through religion. No-one states, “I am a Nietzschean, so I can’t marry a Hypatian.” People don’t label, or define, themselves in philosophical terms in the same way they would do if they were religious.

It is arguable that there is an overlap between philosophy and religion. I, for one, would not deny it. However, theology and philosophy are two distinct disciplines. Theology, after all, focuses purely on the study of God, God’s attributes and his relation to the universe. Philosophy is – in my opinion -- broader than this.

Philosophy has many definitions. Yes, as we all know, it can be defined as the love of wisdom. To me, that definition is stale. I think that it is best defined as the rational investigation of truth(s). This is opposed to an irrational investigation of truth, in which such investigations are predicated upon Abrahamic fairy tales – or any other fairy tales, for that matter.

The beautiful thing about philosophy, however, is that unlike religion, no one is compelled to agree with each other. This leads to some excellent arguments. Wittgenstein infamously wielded a hot poker at Karl Popper; his mentor, Bertrand Russell had to intervene to calm him. It was the only time the three great men were in the same room as each other.

I digress, I digress. I hate to tell people, but most people are philosophers, whether they like it or not. Every one of us has internal conflicts regarding certain values we have – what meaning our lives will have, how we define love; the list is almost endless. We have a world of philosophers who are asleep to the truth: if they looked inside of themselves, they may see a robed ancient Greek with beard asleep. I’ll leave you, the philosopher, to work out that not so subtle metaphor.

Samuel Mack-Poole

Stewed - A poem

You never saw the inequality, or the folly of chasing a rainbow,

woe,

while you were eating bread and cheese and lusting after mammon

the fat cats in their white maybachs

were chewing on lean gammon, topped with creme la more

and the more you chased, the less time they wasted on you,

boo

how do you feel when you've been down at heel, and they're wearing shoes by choo, skin cared for by la roche,

did you ever feel that posh?

Well it's just a waste of feckin time, I'll only ever get what's mine by kicking down the built up shells wherein the rich man sits and dwells while counting out his ill got gains,

and me,poor me wrapped in the chains of misery and have not got,

I'd have all rich men shot,

but who would take their place

who'd be poor in my master race? not I

but then I'd die as well

I'd be locked inside the shell counting gelt

opening one more notch upon my belt, I'd be fat, a cat, another rich man, rat man, take what the man can

I can imagine it

drowning in shit and surrounded by money.

Ain't life funny when you've got it all, you've got sod all and in some big hall,you hold small balls

and that ain't a laughing matter.

John E. Smallshaw

HUMANITY WITHOUT HOPE - By Patrick Ainley

HUMANITY WITHOUT HOPE

Most people would say that it is impossible to live without hope. And yet this is just what most people are expected to do nowadays.

This is not just because of recession. There is a vague hope that recession will end and eventually there will be economic upturn – ‘something will turn up’, so meanwhile we can sit it out.

Perhaps it will turn up sooner if different policies are followed to ‘kick start’ the economy so ‘normal’ growth will resume. Except growth under capitalism is as normal as bust. It was only an illusion that deregulation and privatization in the 1980s to allow banks and big corporations to speculate freely would end this inevitable cycle.

In any case, endless growth to produce more and more commodities, while it may help some people to secure the necessities of life, does not make those who already have more than enough any happier or less insecure. Worse, growth is unsustainable; on the 23^rd August it was calculated that humanity began to take from the earth more than nature produced in 2012. For the rest of the year we live in debt to the planet and every year this day moves forward as we take even more from the earth than it can give back.

Again, as the hopes for our species’ survival diminish, we hope that something will turn up. ‘It’s happened before,’ we say, hoping for technical solutions so that humanity can invent its way out of impending climate and other catastrophe. But each of these temporary fixes have perverse consequences that threaten disaster in their turn; the worst of which would probably be the attempts at geo-engineering that are now being talked about as ways to slow global warming.

More far-sighted Utopians used to insist that social change was necessary instead of trying to patch things up technically so that we could go on as we were. This revolutionary transformation would happen more or less gradually and democratically but if necessarily violently to bring about a rational ordering of human affairs in the interest of the vast majority.

This old Utopianism has been trumped by the new Utopianism of free-market capitalism, to which all the mainstream political parties, dominant media and, of course, the global corporations and banks that profit from it are committed. If only the wealth-creating entrepreneurs are given the freedom to invest their capital to gain as much profit as possible for themselves and their shareholders, we will all benefit – so they all say. But this is the deregulated free-market capitalism whose boom ended in bust in the first place.

So, it is not surprising that many people place their hopes in dreams of wealth – winning a lottery, becoming a celebrity, or marrying one! Or they strive to live fully in the moment: ‘driven from distraction by distraction’, looking for the next high to become a legend. Hopes of such instant gratifications are easily manipulated by the advertisers of fashion. They are not so different from physically addictive behaviors and as easily controlled.

There are myriad other ways to adjust to an insupportable reality – from therapy to meditation, but religions offer the most desperate hopes of all. Their elaborate visions of other worlds that render lived experience illusory are tributes to the power of the human imagination, even if the reassuring feeling of being looked after by a benevolent deity derives from infant psychology, just as it is understandable that hopes of an afterlife comfort the dying and the bereaved.

Most people of course keep their heads down and don’t think about such things. We fill our lives with family and friends, following football or other sports and enjoying moments of relaxation from routine work. But even these modest hopes of a good life are removed from the younger generations by prospects of employment to sustain independent living that have become increasingly remote.

We are encouraged therefore to invest our hopes in education which has been substituted for employment and which is so tediously and interminably discussed instead of it. Conservatives typically advance the notion that education amounts to the preservation of culture – handing down unchanged the best that was ever thought and achieved. And of course, we have to learn from the past accumulated experience of humanity that constitutes culture but we have to learn critically to apply that knowledge to nurture new hopes of changing the self-destructive behavior of society in the present.

Instead, academic cramming on the one hand and vocational training for jobs that no longer exist on the other, only serves as an induction into the existing social divisions of knowledge and labour. These are changing with the relentless applications of new technology to deskill and outsource production, requiring a ‘flexible workforce’ to move from one mindless, short-term, low-paid and often part-time contract to another – if you’re lucky enough to find work.

Professional and managerial jobs are also being reduced in number and towards the conditions of waged labour, ending the hopes of a career entertained by so many overqualified but underemployed graduates. Hopes of escape through education leading to upward social mobility are dashed as the only mobility nowadays is down.

Philosophy – the love of knowledge – enables us ‘to confront with sober senses the real conditions of our existence’. So, as another Jewish philosopher wrote, ‘Do not laugh, do not cry but understand’. If the situation really is hopeless, we will then at least know how it happened that we threw away the heritage of humanity and we will still struggle to bring about the vast changes in our lives and in our societies that are needed so we ‘Do not’ – as a Welsh poet said – ‘go gently into that good night’ [but] ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

By Patrick Ainley with thanks in the last paragraph to Karl Marx, Baruch Spinoza and Dylan Thomas; T.S.Eliot in the middle – for we stand on the shoulders of giants, so let’s not crap on their heads!

 

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 30

Animals cannot be capitalist, but can they be socialist? - By Martin Prior

Animals cannot be capitalist, but can they be socialist?

 

 

Before starting up this discussion, I must say that my factual awareness about animal behaviour is strictly limited.  We know about Washoe, the chimpanzee that learnt American Sign Language: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/my-life-as-a-turkey/joe-hutto-answers-your-questions/7389/, and about Joe Hutto, who learnt wild turkey language: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/my-life-as-a-turkey/joe-hutto-answers-your-questions/7389/ .

Once, when I was visiting a friend in a country which was then in the Soviet bloc, we saw some ants, and I said that ants were communist, but had solved the supply problem.

 

But if we consider socialism to be about ownership and property, then we might say that territorial animals are not socialist.  But what about cats?  Their instinct tells them that if you are their ‘master’ (though probably vice versa), part of their instinct tells them to share their mouse with you.  So that in terms of their immobile property they are capitalist, but in terms of mobile property they are socialist.

 

Or perhaps among some animals, the leader of the pack effectively owns the females: a form of state capitalism?

 

But perhaps socialism, when expressed in terms of property, is not a final definition.  Perhaps property can be used in a socialistic way.  My own view of socialism is that of “sharing equally the burdens imposed by the limitations of the natural environment”, illustrated in the diagram shown below on the left.  Then ownership comes in when it is a means by which the rich get richer and the poor poorer.

But then I have argued in these issues that this process of creating equality must be broken down, part integrated with custom, and part by processes of investigation that transcend custom.  This is illustrated on the right, from an article I wrote for Issue 22. Skills become critical here.

 

 

“share equally the burdens imposed by the limitations of the natural environment”

(i.e. equal wind pressure on each square inch of sail)

processes in equality

The two areas of maroon represent the effects of customs and culture, but the intervening pink represents skills and ideas which may actively evolve.  Now this active intervention is something we might find difficult to identify in animals, where for non-creationists at least, the evolution is not directed..
 

I once heard that experiments on rats in overcrowded conditions were viable provided the space was shared fairly.   From a brief google I find the work of John B. Calhoun (1917-95), who found that up to a point the rats would organise themselves into packs of around twelve, but then serious behavioural problems occurred when crowding was further intensified, leading to diminished birth-rates which could lead to the extinction of the community even when numbers were sufficiently reduced.

So rats and probably other species cannot be explicitly socialist: nor do they invent the concept for themselves.  But if capitalism leads to a kind of cancer which gets out of control, then it cannot necessarily be repaired of its own accord.                                       

By Martin Prior

 
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Animals' Issue 27

Notes on Art, Capitalism, Imperialism and Socialism Or Art about Art - By Martin Prior

Notes on Art, Capitalism, Imperialism and Socialism

Or

Art about Art

When texting the good editor of this publication yesterday, I was hoping to submit an article on whether or not there can be a ‘good capitalism’ and discuss further my recent blog, where I argued that there cannot be a good capitalism if it has imperialism or neo-colonialism as its highest stage.

But I am afraid that now I must think up an article on art at just over 24 hours’ notice.   :,[

So instead I shall make some brief notes, discussing the role of culture in an exploitative society, for example a capitalist society such as ours, with neo-colonialism as its highest stage.

This picture, which originated as a kind of doodle, says that in an exploitative society, there are two cultures, that of the exploiters and that of the exploited.  These are represented respectively by the inner maroon-coloured diamond and the outer maroon-coloured frame.  The coloured items in between are less important, but the grey represents the fear and mis-information directed at the exploited classes to make them feel ‘as well as can be expected’: for many Rupert Murdoch’s Sun (and now the ‘Sun on Sunday’) plays that role within our own society.

The culture of the exploited is all about survival, and that of the exploiting classes is all about how you conform.  For the exploiting classes to survive, the exploited classes must also survive, so the former are in fact dependent indirectly on the culture of the latter.

Marxists, such as Gramsci, attach great importance to culture and the economic system: to my mind there is a critical path of exploitation.  City workers and LSE professors are closer to that critical path, whereas perhaps school teachers are less so.  If you hold down a job in the City, and in some way you do not conform, people will raise their eyebrows and ask if you are pulling your weight in the survival of the exploitative class, though they wouldn’t put it quite that way.

So now homing in to the more specific, if by art we mean the ‘fine arts’, how do we judge a picture?  By what the critics say about its technique (eg. ‘vertical symmetry’)?   Its function (in my case a picture about pictures)?   Or purely and simply, is any analysis of art relevant, except for how much can you auction it off for? 

Additional note... the blue on the picture stands for the greedy economic liberals and the like making full [ab]use of their superior power and the pink the technology and skills underpinning this... art and music alike celebrate both power and technology ...

By Martin Prior

Notes and links:

Own blog:

Can there be a good capitalism?

http://martinse.livejournal.com/3122.html

Gramsci (wiki)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci