Heart of the matter, anyone?
Sim Kwang YangPublished: Feb 26, 2005 4:49 AM | Updated: Jan 29, 2008 10:21 AM
Writing is a lonely business. You bang on the computer keyboard and imagine an audience to whom you are trying to communicate your ideas. With my problematic mind, I also ponder, as I write, what communication means.
Writing can also be a painful process, if one is serious about it. There is always that deadline, by which I mean the approaching date when you feel pretty dead if you have not found anything to write about. It is a little like feeling pregnant without a foetus inside.
There is joy sometimes, like beating a deadline. Then, it feels like emptying your bowel after having suffered from chronic constipation for a week. The trouble with that is that the mental constipation would soon start again.
Again, you search desperately for a topic to write about. Such is the untold misery of a writer who has to contribute a column every week.
Writing is a lonely business. You bang on the computer keyboard and imagine an audience to whom you are trying to communicate your ideas. With my problematic mind, I also ponder, as I write, what communication means.
Writing can also be a painful process, if one is serious about it. There is always that deadline, by which I mean the approaching date when you feel pretty dead if you have not found anything to write about. It is a little like feeling pregnant without a foetus inside.
There is joy sometimes, like beating a deadline. Then, it feels like emptying your bowel after having suffered from chronic constipation for a week. The trouble with that is that the mental constipation would soon start again.
Again, you search desperately for a topic to write about. Such is the untold misery of a writer who has to contribute a column every week.
There is joy also, when you get the intelligent response that you have least expected. Last week I wrote the tongue-in-cheek (or was it cheek-in-tongue?) article about philosophy. It was meant to entertain, more than to inform or to educate. Surprisingly, I have received some pretty sombre response from some readers through my electronic mail.
Sombre questions call for sombre answers. A sombre question raised by an amazingly mature 19-year old student in KL is: Is philosophy for everyone, including non-philosophers? He does worry that philosophy, if taught in Malaysian universities, would end up like Pendidikan Moral.
His fear is well founded. Was it Victor Hugo who said, "Education is a race against catastrophe"? In my moment of unjustifiable and extreme cynicism, I have this delusion that university education in Malaysia is the catastrophe.
Definition problem
To answer the question as to whether philosophy is for everyone, especially for every university student in any institution worthy of the name "university", we have a problem of defining the term "philosophy". Even academic professional philosophers have a problem defining what their area of expertise is. The answer depends on the school of thought to which they are inclined, and there are as many definitions of philosophy as there are schools of philosophy.
For instance, the analytic or the linguistic philosophers, who ruled the universities in the English speaking world for a great part of the 20th century, define philosophy as the clarification of meanings of language. The Frankfurt School, which has been very influential in Europe and parts of the US, define philosophy as social criticism. According to the phenomenological method of Martin Heidegger, philosophy is phenomenology cum ontology, the study of Being. For Bertrand Russell, philosophy is the history of philosophy.
With so many schools of thought to choose from, no wonder aspiring students are perplexed beyond words. All these different schools of thought claim to have discovered some ultimate criteria of truth and knowledge. But who is to say who is right and who is wrong? No wonder so many young people simply throw up their arms in despair and declare, "Truth is relative; there is no absolute truth." Thenceforth, they hold their relative truth as the absolute truth, for themselves, personally speaking, depending on this and that.
Furthermore, each school would invent their own methodology and their system of technical jargon, until what they write is almost completely unintelligible to the proverbial "common man". Those few idiosyncratic souls who have been bitten by the philosophy bug would have to study long years just to read and interpret the obscure original texts written by allegedly great thinkers, with the help of tons of second-hand materials, commentaries, more interpretation and so on. In that sense, academic philosophy is not for everyone.
Studying philosophy is fine and fun, therefore, if you have a fat bank account, or a rich father to pay for all your bills. Otherwise, it seems so inconsequential. As the 19-year-old reader observes, who really cares whether the universe is made of one or many 'stuff"?
Perhaps I should take this point about the universe seriously. Today, we take the scientific concept of the material universe for granted, as a sort of self-evident truth, more or less.
Thanks to the Greeks
But it was the questioning, and the attempt to explain natural phenomena with natural causes by the ancient Greek philosophers before the time of Socrates that laid the foundation of modern science today. In short, Western science that is now enveloping the world has its ontological and metaphysical sources in ancient Greek philosophy.
Without those old Greeks making enquiries about the most fundamental principle and the most basic constituent 'stuff' of the universe, there would be no science as we know it to-day. That would explain crudely why science developed in the West, and not among many of the other glorious ancient civilisations in other parts of the world, which had only technology, and no science. A history of science ought to begin with the Pre-socratic philosophers, culminating in Plato and Aristotle.
In that sense, questions about the basic "stuff" of the universe do have epoch-making consequences.
Then the reader may ask: so what? Why is there any need to study where science comes from? Scientists do their research quite well, without having ever read Parmenides, Heracleitus, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Pythagoras, and Democritus et al. It is far more important for them to keep abreast of the latest research in their respective field. They can win Nobel Prizes without any help from philosophers.
That may be so. But for the whole human race, we all too often wax lyrical about the wonderful power of science and technology, and we tend to accept scientific knowledge as the paragon of human knowledge, against which knowledge in all other fields are measured. Is this pre-eminence given to scientific knowledge justified?
Just another myth
Only philosophers will continue to question the pre-suppositions of all scientific knowledge, including the question of what constitutes knowledge. Frankly, we think we know about time, space, matter, numbers, and laws of nature. Do we really? As the Harvard philosopher WVO Quine has pointed out, the body of knowledge known as science is just another myth, no different from other myths. The only reason why he prefers science over other conceptual schemes in explaining natural phenomena is a pragmatic one: it works for him.
Pragmatism has this problem: it identifies the true with the useful, leaving unexplored the purpose for which anything is useful. We have a powerful tool in science and technology. The philosophical question is: for what good purpose should these powerful tools be used?
When tools become an instrument of enslavement rather than one of liberation, when tools dehumanise human beings rather than drawing forth his potential for greatness, then there is a need to reflect upon man's knowledge of his tools, his relationship with them, and his relationship with the world at large through the use of these tools. This may require tracing the development of the scientific conceptual scheme, to examine how mere theories have assumed the status of near absolute truth, and shape our perception of our world.
Philosophy of science is only one area. There are many other branches in philosophy. There is always metaphysics, which Aristotle hailed as the "Queen of all Sciences". There is ontology that ponders on questions of Being and Nothingness, questions that have also perplexed and pre-occupied philosophers in Eastern civilisations for millennia.
There is logic that studies the laws of human thought. There is a philosophy in fact, for most of the more important domains of human endeavour, such as religion, ethics, politics, art, history, education, law, and social sciences. Through reflective and scholarly examination of the spoken and unspoken axioms and assumptions of these disciplines, students are trained to be both critical of the arbitrary authority of others, and of their own pretensions to authoritativeness.
That is why I think philosophy should be made into a compulsory subject for all university students. That is also why my proposal will never be adopted, because independent critical thinking can be, and often is, quite subversive to those people who rely on political authoritarianism for their bread and butter.
Again, is philosophy for everyone including non-philosophers?
Lovers of wisdom
According to the ancient Greeks, philosophy meant merely "love of wisdom". Philosophers are then "lovers of wisdom". Wisdom without knowledge may be sterile, but knowledge without wisdom would be dangerously blind. The crisis of our post-modern age may be precisely this: all men crave and pursue knowledge with frenzy, while ignoring the value of wisdom.
Alternatively, philosophy is thinking about thinking. All human beings think. In a sense, there are no non-philosophers, only philosophers who have not taken the trouble to think properly. Since thinking is the sort of thing we do in all our waking hours, philosophy ought to be for everyone.
In September 1966, Martin Heidegger gave an interview to the German magazine Das Spiegel. At the end of the interview, he said,
"But the greatest need of thought consists in this, that today, as far as I can see, there is still no thinker speaking who is "great" enough to bring thought immediately and in clearly defined form, before the heart of the matter, and thereby set it on its way. For us today, the greatness of what is to be thought is too great."
"Heart of the matter", anyone?
Writing can also be a painful process, if one is serious about it. There is always that deadline, by which I mean the approaching date when you feel pretty dead if you have not found anything to write about. It is a little like feeling pregnant without a foetus inside.
There is joy sometimes, like beating a deadline. Then, it feels like emptying your bowel after having suffered from chronic constipation for a week. The trouble with that is that the mental constipation would soon start again.
Again, you search desperately for a topic to write about. Such is the untold misery of a writer who has to contribute a column every week.
There is joy also, when you get the intelligent response that you have least expected. Last week I wrote the tongue-in-cheek (or was it cheek-in-tongue?) article about philosophy. It was meant to entertain, more than to inform or to educate. Surprisingly, I have received some pretty sombre response from some readers through my electronic mail.
Sombre questions call for sombre answers. A sombre question raised by an amazingly mature 19-year old student in KL is: Is philosophy for everyone, including non-philosophers? He does worry that philosophy, if taught in Malaysian universities, would end up like Pendidikan Moral.
His fear is well founded. Was it Victor Hugo who said, "Education is a race against catastrophe"? In my moment of unjustifiable and extreme cynicism, I have this delusion that university education in Malaysia is the catastrophe.
Definition problem
To answer the question as to whether philosophy is for everyone, especially for every university student in any institution worthy of the name "university", we have a problem of defining the term "philosophy". Even academic professional philosophers have a problem defining what their area of expertise is. The answer depends on the school of thought to which they are inclined, and there are as many definitions of philosophy as there are schools of philosophy.
For instance, the analytic or the linguistic philosophers, who ruled the universities in the English speaking world for a great part of the 20th century, define philosophy as the clarification of meanings of language. The Frankfurt School, which has been very influential in Europe and parts of the US, define philosophy as social criticism. According to the phenomenological method of Martin Heidegger, philosophy is phenomenology cum ontology, the study of Being. For Bertrand Russell, philosophy is the history of philosophy.
With so many schools of thought to choose from, no wonder aspiring students are perplexed beyond words. All these different schools of thought claim to have discovered some ultimate criteria of truth and knowledge. But who is to say who is right and who is wrong? No wonder so many young people simply throw up their arms in despair and declare, "Truth is relative; there is no absolute truth." Thenceforth, they hold their relative truth as the absolute truth, for themselves, personally speaking, depending on this and that.
Furthermore, each school would invent their own methodology and their system of technical jargon, until what they write is almost completely unintelligible to the proverbial "common man". Those few idiosyncratic souls who have been bitten by the philosophy bug would have to study long years just to read and interpret the obscure original texts written by allegedly great thinkers, with the help of tons of second-hand materials, commentaries, more interpretation and so on. In that sense, academic philosophy is not for everyone.
Studying philosophy is fine and fun, therefore, if you have a fat bank account, or a rich father to pay for all your bills. Otherwise, it seems so inconsequential. As the 19-year-old reader observes, who really cares whether the universe is made of one or many 'stuff"?
Perhaps I should take this point about the universe seriously. Today, we take the scientific concept of the material universe for granted, as a sort of self-evident truth, more or less.
Thanks to the Greeks
But it was the questioning, and the attempt to explain natural phenomena with natural causes by the ancient Greek philosophers before the time of Socrates that laid the foundation of modern science today. In short, Western science that is now enveloping the world has its ontological and metaphysical sources in ancient Greek philosophy.
Without those old Greeks making enquiries about the most fundamental principle and the most basic constituent 'stuff' of the universe, there would be no science as we know it to-day. That would explain crudely why science developed in the West, and not among many of the other glorious ancient civilisations in other parts of the world, which had only technology, and no science. A history of science ought to begin with the Pre-socratic philosophers, culminating in Plato and Aristotle.
In that sense, questions about the basic "stuff" of the universe do have epoch-making consequences.
Then the reader may ask: so what? Why is there any need to study where science comes from? Scientists do their research quite well, without having ever read Parmenides, Heracleitus, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Pythagoras, and Democritus et al. It is far more important for them to keep abreast of the latest research in their respective field. They can win Nobel Prizes without any help from philosophers.
That may be so. But for the whole human race, we all too often wax lyrical about the wonderful power of science and technology, and we tend to accept scientific knowledge as the paragon of human knowledge, against which knowledge in all other fields are measured. Is this pre-eminence given to scientific knowledge justified?
Just another myth
Only philosophers will continue to question the pre-suppositions of all scientific knowledge, including the question of what constitutes knowledge. Frankly, we think we know about time, space, matter, numbers, and laws of nature. Do we really? As the Harvard philosopher WVO Quine has pointed out, the body of knowledge known as science is just another myth, no different from other myths. The only reason why he prefers science over other conceptual schemes in explaining natural phenomena is a pragmatic one: it works for him.
Pragmatism has this problem: it identifies the true with the useful, leaving unexplored the purpose for which anything is useful. We have a powerful tool in science and technology. The philosophical question is: for what good purpose should these powerful tools be used?
When tools become an instrument of enslavement rather than one of liberation, when tools dehumanise human beings rather than drawing forth his potential for greatness, then there is a need to reflect upon man's knowledge of his tools, his relationship with them, and his relationship with the world at large through the use of these tools. This may require tracing the development of the scientific conceptual scheme, to examine how mere theories have assumed the status of near absolute truth, and shape our perception of our world.
Philosophy of science is only one area. There are many other branches in philosophy. There is always metaphysics, which Aristotle hailed as the "Queen of all Sciences". There is ontology that ponders on questions of Being and Nothingness, questions that have also perplexed and pre-occupied philosophers in Eastern civilisations for millennia.
There is logic that studies the laws of human thought. There is a philosophy in fact, for most of the more important domains of human endeavour, such as religion, ethics, politics, art, history, education, law, and social sciences. Through reflective and scholarly examination of the spoken and unspoken axioms and assumptions of these disciplines, students are trained to be both critical of the arbitrary authority of others, and of their own pretensions to authoritativeness.
That is why I think philosophy should be made into a compulsory subject for all university students. That is also why my proposal will never be adopted, because independent critical thinking can be, and often is, quite subversive to those people who rely on political authoritarianism for their bread and butter.
Again, is philosophy for everyone including non-philosophers?
Lovers of wisdom
According to the ancient Greeks, philosophy meant merely "love of wisdom". Philosophers are then "lovers of wisdom". Wisdom without knowledge may be sterile, but knowledge without wisdom would be dangerously blind. The crisis of our post-modern age may be precisely this: all men crave and pursue knowledge with frenzy, while ignoring the value of wisdom.
Alternatively, philosophy is thinking about thinking. All human beings think. In a sense, there are no non-philosophers, only philosophers who have not taken the trouble to think properly. Since thinking is the sort of thing we do in all our waking hours, philosophy ought to be for everyone.
In September 1966, Martin Heidegger gave an interview to the German magazine Das Spiegel. At the end of the interview, he said,
"But the greatest need of thought consists in this, that today, as far as I can see, there is still no thinker speaking who is "great" enough to bring thought immediately and in clearly defined form, before the heart of the matter, and thereby set it on its way. For us today, the greatness of what is to be thought is too great."
"Heart of the matter", anyone?
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