Socrates
Walking west along Cathedral Street beside the campus of Strathclyde University, I pass the John Smith University Bookshop. I decide to pop in, if only to gain some respite from the freezing cold outside. As always, when in a bookshop I look for the most interesting section - Philosophy. All the categories are there, the Sciences, Education, Mathematics, English, Law (4 shelves!), but no Philosophy, or anything remotely like it. I ask the chap in the corner, at the desk called Information.
'Philosophy?'
'Ah no. The university doesn't do philosophy', he says.
'Sorry?' I enquire.
'We don't have any philosophy courses at the university so we don't have a philosophy section here,' he says matter of factly.
'I should've thought that philosophy as the basis of thinking would be necessary for the study of any subject,' I say.
He is temporarily rendered speechless while he searches his brain for a suitable reply, but as you and I well know, there isn't one. I return back into the freezing cold...
This insight (oh what insights can be garnered from a simple walk about town!) reminded me of an incident once upon a time in the Borders Bookshop in Buchanan Street where the philosophy section, out of all the four light and airy floors, had been relegated to the furthest corner of the basement, something of a dank and unbecoming dungeon adjacent as it was to the toilets. In terms of real estate, it was undoubtedly the cheapest and nastiest part of the building. Meanwhile, up above, occupying the penthouses was the chick-lit, the law books, the fantasy and science-bloody-fiction. The philosophy section was now a token slot in an otherwise 'bestseller bazaar'.
In one of the benighted philosophy books down in that boggy dungeon corner, there is an epigram that reads:
It is philosophy that makes man understandable to man, explains human nobility and shows man the proper road. The first defect appearing in any nation that is headed toward decline is in the philosophic spirit. After that deficiencies spread into the other sciences, arts, and associations.Jamal al-Din al-Afghani
Such is the lack of philosophy in the West that current literature seems little more than a mere reflection of the current miasma afflicting us. Art has become nonsense and culture has become clutter. Quantity takes precedence over quality at every turn.
With the inundation of stress through careering your soul into jobs that simply do not nourish (so that you might convene to a debilitating status quo), the soul has nowhere to go but into fiction and fantasy... and nonsense. Devoid of its essential processes, the brain has been left to rot, at the cost of the mystery of existence, now manhandled and shrink-wrapped into seven volumes of Harry Potter.
Is it any wonder people struggle to find meaning in life? E.F. Schumacher was well aware of this when, in Small is Beautiful, he wrote:
The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic.
In his essay What Has India Contributed? Ananda K. Cooraswamy writes:
Philosophy is the key to the map of life, by which are set forth the meaning of life and the means of attaining its goal [...] The Western sociologist is apt to say: 'The teachings of religion and philosophy may or may not be true, but in any case they have no significance for the practical reformer.' The Brahmans, on the contrary, considered all activity no directed in accordance with a consistent theory of the meaning and purpose of life as supremely unpractical.It is no coincidence that in certain cultures (eastern more than western) the practice of philosophy is equated with the study of clarity.
The irony this cold winter afternoon on Cathedral Street is that Philosophy herself is a cathedral.... the seat of learning from which all else springs... without her we are but empty plastic bags being tossed hither and thither by the wind.
With her, on the other hand, we are the wind.
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