Philosophy has never been of interest to the masses, nor do people ever understand what it really is. As Cicero said: “Philosophy is content to have but few judges, and flies from the mob deliberately; by the mob itself philosophy is both envied and distrusted. So that if someone wanted to cry down philosophy as a whole, they could do it with the support of the people.” Plato believed that one must not study dialectics till one reaches a mature age of 30 and has learnt all requisite subsidiary sciences, or else the study of dialectics would lead to nihilism.
Despite this philosophy, it has, to a great extent, lost the limited influence and respect it once had. The reason for this is that philosophy, as Hegel points out, has the same content as religion, but while religion seeks to understand its subject matter through representations and images, philosophy has a rational form; it seeks to study this content through pure thought. Philosophy seeks to understand everything by tracing it back to its source in the first principle, which aligns with the religious intuition that the world is grounded in the highest being — God. The decline of religion in general has led to a decline in interest in philosophy. The only respectable vocation left for it is to be either a conceptual analysis or a servant of psychology or sociology, which, in the true sense of the term, is not philosophy at all.
Philosophy as a science has priority over empirical science, and every empirical science is a regional application of philosophy. There is no empirical science without philosophical presuppositions, even though empiricism itself is a philosophy that refuses to acknowledge that it presupposes philosophy. But the current dispensation is that empirical sciences are not grounded in a higher philosophy but are autonomous from it.
Philosophy itself took a turn with Descartes toward a pre-reflective standpoint on the world before metaphysics or physics could begin, and this inaugurated a new problem within philosophy — that of subjectivism. The critical standpoint was that before we can make any pronouncements about reality, we must critically examine the faculties that provide us with access to it. Philosophy was transformed from being a metaphysics to a transcendental philosophy or a phenomenology, which faces the problem of being indistinguishable from psychology.
Generally, if you ask a philosopher today what philosophy is, he is likely to answer that it is nothing. Every science must have a subject matter, and there cannot be a science without one. But the current belief is that every empirical science is something, but philosophy is nothing. Philosophy was the science of the whole, of reality as such. But there is no reality as such, for example, Wittgenstein in his Tractatus says that the world is the totality of facts. But he is not very forthcoming in showing whether this totality is a list or a system. If it is a system, then none of the facts contained within it is intelligible without understanding the system. But again, it is commonplace to say that the knowledge that philosophy seeks is impossible to gain, and we ought to show some humility. This is nevertheless a philosophical presupposition. It is a humility that refuses to serve a higher principle above oneself. It is no longer, for instance, believed in these days that we must know God. In the Bhakti systems in Indian Philosophy of the past, Bhakti as an upaya (means) was distinguished from bhakti proper, which begins only when there is knowledge of God, because we cannot love God if we do not know God. But the humility of today allows human beings full scope for their pretensions while keeping God in reserve.
On the other side, religion too has taken an anti-intellectual turn, and it views philosophy as a hurdle to religion. True religion consists of feelings and a deeper spirituality and has nothing to do with knowledge. Or what knowledge can be gained about religious truths is gained through scriptures and not through reason. But without reason, what religion has is only mythical symbols, which, if taken as the truth, would end up becoming more and more intolerant towards others, and it would miss the kernel for the husk.
In short, the reason for the decline of philosophy in recent times is due to a mistrust of reason, which, on the one hand, takes the form of empiricism that mistakenly regards itself as reason and on the other, a spirituality that believes intellect is its greatest enemy.
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