[D66] Why is Philosophy sick?

[Nord]

http://crestondavis.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/1882/

WHY IS PHILOSOPHY SICK?

Posted on August 25, 2013 by crestondavis

Creston Davis is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Humanities 
and Social Sciences, Skopje. He is the coauthor (with John Milbank and 
Slavoj Zizek) of Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the 
Future of Christian Theology; coeditor (with John Milbank and Slavoj 
Zizek) of Theology and the Political: The New Debate; editor of John 
Milbank and Slavoj Zizek The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or 
Dialectic? and author of the forthcoming novel, Ghostly Icons.  He has 
recently co-founded, The Global Center for Advanced Studies.

Creston Davis

What is wrong with philosophy today?  On the face of it, unlike other 
disciplines in the academy, the very nature of philosophy inherently 
resists a foolproof definition.  Of course that’s not to say it hasn’t 
been defined.  From the birth of the academy in both ancient Greece and 
the Middle Ages, philosophy has always been at the heart of any 
education worthy of its name.  For example, when I was an undergraduate 
at Oxford this lesson became eminently clear when I stood in the center 
of the Bodleian library quadrangle (1613-1619) and the Tower of the Five 
Orders from which four of the main exit doors were devoted to the core 
subjects that comprise philosophy: Schola Metaphysicae, Schola Naturalis 
Philosophiae, Schola Moralis Philosophiae, and Schola Logicae.

Philosophy, in other words, was irrefutably foundational to the very 
existence of university education.  When you compare this to the 
contemporary academy that purports to be devoted to the liberal arts 
(i.e., the arts that free us vis-à-vis the servile arts, such as pluming 
and business) you would be lucky to locate a department that does not 
reduce philosophy to little more than business ethics.  This raises the 
question: What’s wrong with philosophy especially if its nature is 
completely unrecognizable within university settings today?

One explanation is that it’s simply outdated, and like modern theology 
will dissolve into the dustbins of history out of sheer irrelevance. 
Philosophy, so this stance believes, is antiquated because it is 
redundant as it only teaches students ancient techniques of logical 
thinking and analyses, which, so administrators argue, can easily be 
acquired in a single humanities course.

The problem with this explanation is that it misconstrues philosophy by 
reducing it to an anemic skill sets all made relevant if and only if 
they enhance a student’s ability to get a job.  So it is not difficult 
to see why philosophy is dying (along with the humanities) because it is 
inversely related to the dogma of corporate culture.  Moreover, this 
trend has the unfortunate consequence of forcing philosophers to create 
courses that are relevant to getting a job.  In short, philosophy 
becomes enslave to corporate culture.

But should philosophy fold so easily to this prosaic corporate 
totalitarianism that has subverted all non-corporate methods of thinking 
and practice?  Think of the two basic functions in which the academy has 
traditionally served a free democratic society: one is negative and the 
other positive.  The negative service provides free and independent 
critiques of the inevitable abuses of power (both political and 
economic) that threatened the security of a democratic society.  And as 
the corporate financial crisis in 2008 proved beyond a shadow of doubt 
unchecked greed threatens the founding truths of democracy: of life, 
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Seen in this way, independent 
journalists and filmmakers also provide this “watch-dog” service 
protecting us from the abuses of barbaric greed mongering.  This is why 
a professor’s tenure was so crucial because they were protected and 
could thus publish their independent and objective research 
recommendations without fear of being fired.

On the positive side, academia once served a free society through its 
independent research that can give genuinely new and creative solutions 
to the rudimentary problems facing our planet such as, among many other 
problems, ecological sustainability, imperialist power, and the waging 
of unjust wars.  For example, an independent professor would recommend 
solutions to obverting ecological catastrophes by inventing new energy, 
economic, and political possibilities in order to avoid totalitarian 
greed from taking hold like the kind that corporate capitalism has 
installed in the United States in the 21st Century.  And this does not 
even touch one the psychological tyranny that the government and 
employers use when they violate our basic privacy rights by monitoring 
our intimate conversations from our mobile phones, to our emails and 
other social networking communications.

This gets us back to the question:  What’s wrong with philosophy today? 
Why is it sick?  Pondering this it becomes clear from the above analysis 
that the problem with philosophy is that it has forgotten it original 
modus operandi namely, the freedom to arrive at solutions to our 
existential situation. This is why philosophy must live into its truth 
so that it can arrive at new possibilities and alternative worlds 
unencumbered by the political and economic tyrannical powers that seek 
to protect their own interests at the cost of enslaving the majority of 
the population to the servile arts (i.e., enslavement to making money). 
  And here I’m not even mentioning governmental and corporate 
surveillance on the populous.  This is why philosophy’s genius is found 
in its infinite procedure, and this is because the ability to think, 
act, and invent is infinite in nature (i.e., free) which is why 
philosophers from Heraclitus to Diogenes, and from Socrates, Plato and 
Aristotle couldn’t draw a hard and fast demarcations between the 
disciplines distilled in the modern academy we see today from economics 
to politics to ethics.  And the reason for this is because the 
disciplines were all grounded in living a life for freedom and justice 
geared toward the search for wisdom and truth, and not, as is the case 
today, where everyone is taught to seek out their own wealth at the cost 
of dissolving social unity.

The illness of philosophy today is all too evident when viewed as a 
discipline that is wholly enslaved to the corporatized academy.  That 
is, the academy has become an extension of the corporate workforce 
precisely because the latter has determined not only what subjects are 
taught but also how those subjects are taught.  In other words, the 
corporate world has literally redefined the learning and discovery 
process thus undermining new and creative ways of thinking and living 
that would provide us with a healthier peaceful future.

Therefore, the days of an independent academy as the watchdog over 
potential totalitarian regimes are over.  This is especially evident 
with the recent publication of a “major report” in the New York Times in 
which professors argue that the humanities are worth saving basically 
because they teach students the skills essential to getting a job in the 
corporate world.  You know it’s over when humanities professors gut and 
sacrifice their subjects to the god of capitalism.

In light of this, it is now time to return to philosophy’s true nature 
devoted to freedom and justice for all.  Perhaps embodying a “Robin Hood 
pedagogical ethic” in educational process might be one means of stealing 
from the rich and giving a life back to the poor.  And what would a 
professor or teacher steal exactly?  It would steal back the possibility 
of freedom that has been hijacked from our youth preventing them from 
exploring alternatives futures other than the greed of capitalism, which 
turns our students into monsters.  It is time to free philosophy and the 
other subjects in the humanities from the chains of the corporate world 
and the administrators and lawyers who peddle them. The fact that 
philosophy remains indefinable to the bane of many gives us hope that 
this revolution is already afoot and that is taking place concretely by 
the opening of a independent graduate and post-graduate school, The 
Global Center for Advanced Studies.