“Philosophy is the mother of art, literature, poetry and aesthetics. Its survival as a mainstream subject is indeed essential for human growth, collective evolution and universal wisdom.”
Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, who himself was a world-renowned thinker, philosopher and Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University
It’s indeed painful to find that nowadays comparatively fewer students opt for philosophy as a subject, even at premier universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne, Bologna, Berkeley, California or Harvard in the Western world. The scenario in India is even worse.
Many varsities in India have dispensed with philosophy. Only at Calcutta and Madras Universities, and to some extent at Shantiniketan in West Bengal, one still finds students studying philosophy.
In Poona, once a cultural hub of western India, hardly a couple of colleges offer philosophy as a subject at the graduation level. Barely anyone pursues it at the master’s level and a doctorate in philosophy is as rare as Halley’s Comet! This is rather sad.
Why is philosophy no longer loved today? Once the strongest men were willing to die for it: Socrates chose to be its martyr rather than live in flight before its enemies; Plato risked himself twice to win a kingdom for it; Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius loved her (philosophy) more passionately than his throne; and Bruno burnt at the stake for loyalty to her.
Once thrones and papacies feared philosophy and imprisoned its votaries lest dynasties should fall. Athens exiled Protagoras, and Alexandria trembled before Hypatia; a great pope courted timidly the friendship of Erasmus; regents and kings hounded Voltaire from their lands and fretted in jealousy when, at last, all the civilised world bowed before the sceptre of his pen.
Dionysius and Dionysius’ son offered Plato the mastery of Syracuse; Alexander’s royal aid made Aristotle the most learned man in history; a scholar-king lifted Francis Bacon almost to the leadership of England and protected him from his enemies; and the great Frederick, at midnight when all his pompous generals had gone to sleep, held high revelry with poets and philosophers, envious of their boundless realms and their timeless sway.
Philosophy supplied rather recondite and abstruse material to find out answers to (uncommon) questions. The right answers became science, but the unanswered ones provided issues to study. That’s why physics is so diametrically opposite to metaphysics! Now, perhaps there are no more questions that used to nag and niggle mankind.
In fact, even physics doesn’t have any more basic questions, and maybe the Nobel prizes will get discontinued in the foreseeable future. Now the only challenge is how to manage the planet.
Philosophy is not loved today because it has lost the spirit of adventure. The sudden uprising of the sciences has stolen from it, one by one, its ancient spacious realms. Nothing remains to it except the cold peaks of metaphysics, the childish puzzles of epistemology, and the academic disputes of an ethics that has lost all influence on mankind.
Even these wastes will be taken from it; new sciences will rise and enter these territories with compass and microscope and rule; and perhaps the world will forget that philosophy ever existed or even moved the hearts and guided the minds of men. At the same time, we’ve also become too superficial to delve into the depths of philosophy.
Quite literally, the term “philosophy” means “love of wisdom.” In a broad sense, philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand fundamental truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationships to the world and to each other. As an academic discipline, philosophy is much the same.
Those who study philosophy are perpetually engaged in asking, answering, and arguing for their answers to life’s most basic questions. To make such a pursuit more systematic, academic philosophy is traditionally divided into major areas of study: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic and the history of philosophy.
But in these philistine times, who has time for such profound and trifling utopian subjects? Who asks? Who questions and who argues in a cogent and civilised manner any longer? Our decent discussions and discourses often degenerate into diatribes and defamations. Philosophy requires deep thinking, cogitating and reading.
Today, even thinking is outsourced, and reading has become a has-been. Truth is the biggest casualty of our age. Truth and philosophy are Siamese or conjoined twins. They’re symbiotic. So, when either of the two dies, the other one also cannot survive.
Lastly, one has to consider the ‘earning a livelihood’ problem, and options for that are greatly narrowed if philosophy is the path one opts for in these times of AI and pseudo-scientific ‘advancement.’ The word ‘pseudo’ is being used because there’s a widespread dearth of scientific and rational temperament.
Philosophy thrives on rationality. When people collectively bid adieu to rationality, how can we expect philosophy to survive, let alone thrive? However, to dismiss philosophy as a relic of the past would be an error. Philosophy still provides critical tools for reasoning, ethical deliberation, and addressing questions that lie beyond empirical verification.
Philosophy is still important because it helps people understand the world, think critically, develop problem-solving skills, improve communication skills, learn how to learn, develop leadership skills, broaden understanding, develop self-knowledge, develop critical thinking skills, develop research skills, and understand others’ perspectives, and that’s the greatest contribution of philosophy.
To sum it up, philosophy is perceived as a “dying” subject because of a societal shift towards valuing more practical and scientific fields like STEM, where tangible results are prioritised over abstract philosophical questions, leading to fewer students choosing philosophy majors and a perception that it lacks “real-world” applications compared to other disciplines; additionally, some criticise contemporary philosophy for becoming too complex or disconnected from everyday concerns, making it less accessible to the wider public. It’s now more of an ornamental subject than a practical one. This indeed saddens those having aesthetic sensibilities.
Sumit Paul is a regular contributor to the world’s premier publications and portals in several languages.
