Why philosophy is practical
Credit to Author: The Manila Times| Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 16:37:07 +0000
TIME was when no college student could reasonably hope to graduate who did not complete at least three subjects in philosophy, among which was the obligatory freshman course, Logic. But thanks to all the illuminati who have laid their hands on the collegiate and university curricula, the misshapen course of study on the tertiary level has no more room for philosophy. Anything in the nature of speculative thought has been expunged like some academic detritus, avoided like the plague by the architects of a program of collegiate education who are unapologetic votaries of some crude form of pragmatism!
Take the subject “The Philosophy of the Human Person.” Even its descriptive title has morphed according to the idiosyncrasies of the age. Earlier, under the influence of Scholasticism that distinguished what we understood “natural lumine” (by the natural light of reason) and what we were privileged to know “de revelatione” (from the supernatural light of revelation), the subject was called “Rational Psychology” — a title that left students suspecting that there was some “irrational psychology” to be encountered elsewhere. Then, in our college days, it was called “Philosophy of Man,” but we all know now that “man” is politically incorrect — it is rude, misogynist, sexist, chauvinist. So, with much kowtowing to the guardians of the inclusive, we called the subject “Philosophical Anthropology,” until it was renamed “Philosophy of the Human Person.” The subject, where it is kept, is relegated to some corner of the senior high school curriculum often taught by those who think that philosophy started with Pilosopong Tasyo! And yet whether in economics, politics or the empirical sciences, we confidently set our sights on “human progress.” When we feel offended or violated by the thoughtlessness, criminality or rudeness of others, we invoke our “human rights.” Is it not obvious how vacuous these concepts are, how empty the claims are that we shriek about hysterically unless we are clear about what it is to be human? And so when our economists assure us that our economic fundamentals remain sound, no matter that we may be alarmed about the dizzying fluctuation in the prices of commodities and the underpayment of services, because these fundamentals are guarantees to bring about “progress,” exactly what is meant by that?
And when young Filipinos — men, women or however they may wish to be classed (because this too, in today’s reckoning, is malleable) — are faced with the eminently practical question about whether what they are poised to do, asked to do, induced to do is “good” or “bad,” how shall they make such decisions? By collecting the opinions of others? Floating a questionnaire? Consulting some babaylan? Or calling on the spirit of the glass? Whether it be a question of what to do with an expensive smartphone that one has found lying around, or the more recondite issue of organ donation and transplant, where do you get the answers to ethical questions, unless you have given some very serious, disciplined thought to ethics? It is human, Ricoeur tells us, to be able to attribute actions to ourselves and to others, and to be able to characterize ourselves and others as a result of actions as “good” or “bad.” What happens to this dimension of being human when we have shorn our curricula of ethics or moral philosophy, leaving our students rudderless and clueless about such irreducible concepts as “good” and “bad”?
We whine about Filipinos being strangers to the Asian soul because of the seemingly fatal allure of the decadent West. But what would be more practical and helpful in this respect than giving college students a good dose of Indian and Chinese philosophy, as once was the case? How better to immerize the university student in Asian and its spirit then to get them reading the Lun Yu — the Confucian Analects, the Tao Te Ching, Buddhist Sutras, the Upanishads or even the Milinda Panho? If all of these venerable writings seem Greek to us, it is because we are more Greek then Asian — and the emaciated curriculum that has been foisted on our hapless students and equally hapless professors that has left us all under some withering tree, waiting for Godot.
I recall that during the oral argument on the constitutionality of the Reproductive Health Law before the Supreme Court, many of the justices agreed that the question about when human life began was a question best resolved by physicians and medical experts. That is of course silly. That is like asking a mathematician for advice on to be a good lover! A physician will tell you when fertilization occurs. She will tell you whether or not nidation has taken place. He will reckon the days for mitotic division before differentiation takes place and meiotic division follows. But when the assemblage of cells is “human”? That is a matter that calls for applying the predicate “human” correctly. And you can apply a predicate only if you understand it. Clearly, the problem is philosophical.
It is no different with the scientist. Recently, the Cagayan State University that I serve as a designated vice president, was co-host to an international event on “medical pluralism” — which is a charming, post-modern way of admitting that besides the medicine that is taught in our faculties of medicine, the Chinese, the Indians, the native Americans and the indigenous Filipinos (including the hilots and herbolarios) have had rather plenty of success at coping with illness, pain and malady. That of course raises the important question: Where does one draw the line between science and non-science? If one wishes to shun the ways of ethnocentrism (such as maintaining that only what Galen and his progeny have considered “medicine” counts as science), then one will have to confront the question in all its philosophical earnestness: When is a venture scientific? That is not a scientific question — because it puts in question the very workings of science, the very threshold that science must cross to be itself.
There are, to be sure, different philosophical strands. One needs only to remember that what philosophers do on the European continent is different from what British philosophers have busied themselves with. But to raise philosophical questions, and to attempt at answers to the questions one thoughtfully raises by sitting at the feet of the masters, or walking the grooves through which they trod, picking snatches of their dialogues, interjecting with own’s own questions, wandering through the often meandering ways of philosophical speculation — this should be worth plenty of time, not merely miserly and grudging morsels of the curriculum. And these can be meaningfully raised and engaged in with requisite depth and academic maturity only at the level of the university where, propped up by the intellectual formation of basic education and formed to be affectively mature so as to be challenged by questions of the philosophical kind, a student is ready to take his place in that long tradition of thoughtful human persons who have examined life and asked whether it was worth living.
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@outlook.com
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