Modern day philosophy

Do you ever wonder who our philosophers are today? Do we have any? Who is commenting on life and our culture in a way that will last? We have political pundits, but I wouldn't call them philosophers. And we have spiritual leaders like the Dalai Lama, who is more a philosopher than, say, Billy Graham. Wikipedia defines philosophy like this:

The term philosophy comes from the Greek word "Φιλοσοφία" (philo-sophia), which means "love of wisdom" or less commonly "friend of wisdom". . . . The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy defines it as the study of "the most fundamental and general concepts and principles involved in thought, action, and reality". The Penguin Encyclopedia says that philosophy differs from science in that philosophy's questions cannot be answered empirically, and from religion in that philosophy allows no place for faith or revelation. However, these points are called into question by the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, which states: "the late 20th-century... prefers to see philosophical reflection as continuous with the best practice of any field of intellectual enquiry." Indeed, many of the speculations of early philosophers in the field of natural philosophy eventually formed the basis for modern scientific explanations on a variety of subjects.

So wouldn't that suggest that philosophers have no agenda? And wouldn't it be nice to become acquainted with a quest for wisdom solely for the sake of hearing that wisdom? Wisdom for wisdom's sake--what a concept!

I have a related question about education, about what it is and why we seek it and how we seek it. Even when I was in college in the early 80s, I saw a trend toward college as tradeschool: You could test out of English, not be required to study the Humanities, and instead could focus all of your time, attention, and tuition on, say, computer programming or electrical engineering or medicine. I have nothing against these disciplines; my point is about education--what it is and what it means.

When I was a TA in grad school (and later after I graduated), I taught English Composition to incoming freshmen (or to seniors who put it off until the last semester), and we would have discussions about the nature of knowledge, for example. One year, there were two sisters in my class who sat in the back of the room and whispered to each other and often sat through class discussions with arms folded, eyes glaring. At the end of the semester, they stopped at my desk before leaving class and told me they were going to complain about me to the chair of the department. "We signed up for a writing class, and you focused way too much on thinking." What I thought was, "Nothing in, nothing out." What I said was, "Yes, please complain to the chair."

I heard from students that getting an education was a way to make money, to "get ahead in life" (whatever that meant, and I believe it was quite different for me than it was for the people who used that term). Teachers, of course, are notoriously, shamefully, shamelessly underpaid. As a teacher, and as a teacher of English, part of my job was to teach my students to think, to teach them how to learn, to teach them how to use their own brains to work out what they thought and to engage in discourse through writing. Do you know how hard that is to work into a resume for a job that pays enough to live on? But now, more than 25 years later, I still believe that true education teaches us how to learn. Whatever we train for straight out of college may be obsolete by the time we're 30; whatever working world we go into at 25 may be one that makes us crazy by the time we're 35. And if our "education" has been focused on a very specific, very limited skill, where does that leave us when we're 40 and desperate to find work that has some meaning?

I majored in English Lit with an emphasis on Renaissance poetry and prose as well as contemporary women poets. From John Donne to Adrienne Rich without getting the bends. Amazing! When I graduated, because of a series of circumstances I won't go into here, I had to find work outside of the university, so I landed in a Cube and pretty much stayed there for 25 years, and I surprised myself by finding that I enjoyed the work and was fairly successful at it. Here's what I found: that while I didn't--and still don't--think that computers have made our world a better place, I had fun learning about them; that while I never really understood the technology, I did see where my skills could translate a complex technology into language for the layperson; that my background in the Humanities gave me insight into human relationships and an understanding of difference that I may not have otherwise had, and that understanding was part of what allowed me to thrive in a mostly sterile intellectual world.

Maybe today's philosophers are the people who can see the bigger picture, the spirituality behind the software code, the ethics (or lack of) in marketing and sales that require us to push our understanding of life beyond consumerism and our sense of happiness beyond the value of "things." Maybe the philosophers are you and me and any small group of people around a lunch table in a corporate cafeteria, starting with a discussion about movies and ending with a discussion about global warming. I ran into these Cube philosophers in every corporation I worked in, and especially in the last one, where our message reached only a small cluster of curious folks. Now I'm finding them in this thing called a "blogosphere," where the audience could be international.

It isn't so much what we think about as how we think about it, how we explore our thoughts with others, how we open our minds to learn and accept and change our own philosophies. In doing so, we have nothing to lose--and a whole new world of ideas to gain.

Comments

[Kit McChesney]

Verna--

Having taught college students on and off for about 20 years now, I can identify with your story about the students who felt your class fell short because you focused too much on "thinking," instead of writing. Alas, what is writing but a brilliant form of thought?

I remember a wonderful quote I read on the outside of a professor's door (someone who was about to chastise me for giving students grades that were higher than the department's artificially deflated average) about education, a quote that has never left me. The quote came from a speech delivered by the now-emerita president of Bryn Mawr, Mary Patterson McPherson. This is what she said:

"One purpose of a liberal arts education is to make your head a more interesting place to live inside for the rest of your life."

Kit