This week at work, we had a client arrive off the street as a cold client, wanting us to do his tax return. This chap aged 22, was doing a Law/Economics/Philosophy degree and will more than likely end up as a staffer for the Liberal Party, where the ending of the career path is almost to become a Member of Parliament as if by right.
Maybe to hold it over me as someone whom he guessed was lesser in intelligence or class (because I work in an accountancy firm) he asked me what I thought of various things in philosophy. I think that he was quite surprised when I mentioned Aristotle and his discourse on "telos" in the Nicomachean Ethics, which in a roundabout way speaks of what the end goal, what the point, what the purpose of things like Law and Philosophy were. I would expect that particularly Aristotle and Plato should be superstars of western classical philosophy but I guess that whatever his course was, decided that they were interesting but ultimately to be moved on from. Almost certainly because I work in an accounting office, I very much want to ask the pragmatic questions of telos and ethos, and because I am a person of faith to ask the questions of philos and logos and theos.
I do not know where this puts me in the world of philosophy but due to my continual questions of if something is true and can be proven or not, questioning what and whom a thing helps, and how whatever the thing in question is is supposed to make the world better and/or for whom, but I get the impression that I am probably somewhere on the fringe and asking questions which philosophy students in universities today, simply do not care about. Probably that's a function of the fact that university students want to turn in papers to get the marks and get the degrees so that they can go off into the world and jump onto the treadmill of employment but is that really what university is for? Surely it is actually about scaring people into the very real notion that we don't really know 1% of 1% of anything, and that the kosmos is complex and confusing and scary, and we need to ask questions of it all the time.
Looking in from the outside it seems to me that philosophy is like looking at those warning labels on electrical substations that say "Danger: Keep Out" because once you move past the labels, it gets very scary very quickly. The big questions should alarm people and philosophy should require a critical disposition because even you do nothing, the finiteness and smallness of humans becomes all too apparent.
The biggest statement about humans which should scare everyone practically all the time, is that humans are finite beings, who live on a finite world, with finite resources and who occupy a finite place in space and time. The reason that that should scare people, is that those statements about humans and the world being finite, are immutable and unchangeable.
Sooner or later, every single person must face the fact whether they like it or not, that they will die. Religion makes claims about what happens after death and that definitely changes peoples attitude and perspective but even irreligious people, areligious people, agnostics, and hard atheists must eventually face head on, that they too will die. Human beings are finite and fragile creatures who live in the face of death.
Actually I think that there's something vaguely poetic about the fact that for people born naturally (that is not by Caesarian Section), that humans first entry into the world is between the points where urine and feces enter the world. Make whatever poetic claims you like but apart from a brief flash of pleasure (or not) humans first acts are to cause pain, and then enter the world between urine and feces. The last moment of a human's life may or may not be painful (I do not know) but after having caused paid, it is the lot for humans to ultimately return to being the dinner of worms, where once again the elements which made up a human body are converted back into the things that the Earth is made up of, through the process of urine and feces.
Yet even in the face of death, humans still have rational and even irrational desires. As limited and finite beings we have various animal desires, to eat and drink things, to have sex with things, to move to places where it is warmer or cooler and to be in physical comfort, and to go sleep, but all the while even satisfying animal desires simply isn't enough. Humans also have desires to love and be loved, to know and to be known, and because they are limited in space and time, to leave some kind of mark upon the world which will outlive them when they are gone and return to becoming worm food.
Probably because humans stand in the face of death, they also have rational and even irrational desires to decide what is and isn't true, and to make rational and even irrational decisions to hold on to what they think is true. At some point, everyone either through conscious effort or by falling back to a set of default, either accepts or invents some belief set. People might like to play with semantics here but at some point literally everyone must come up with some belief set, some degree of faith in their belief set (because it is impossible to believe in nothing), and accept or invent some rudimentary religion. Even if it is not formal, if religion is a set of practices based around what one believes and it is impossible to believe in nothing at all, then everyone has their own religion.
Formal religions where belief sets are codified exist, but even people who do not have formal religion in their attempts to hold into certainty in the face of death, still must arrive at something. Anyone who arrives at any kind of conclusion, must eventually ask the question of if that thing is either true or not. Defending what people think is true, is the essence of dogmatism. Likewise it follows that if dogmatism exists, then the questions of worship and idolatry also exist because the things that people are dogmatic about and hold out as being true, are the things that people hold as worthy of praise and worthy of defending.
Perhaps even more worrisome is the amount of power and force that people will wield in order to defend what they think is true. Eventually we have to conclude that anyone who has any kind of power, has to decide who gets to control it and what to do with it. When you have disagreement between different people about what to do with power, who controls power, and how those who have power are held to account, then invariably there are questions of dialogue.
It is those last few questions about power, particularly the control of power and the possibility of domination of everyone else which results from it, which should be of importance to someone doing a Law/Economics/Philosophy degree. Everything that is of economic value in the history of the world is either the resources in, on and under the ground and the people who live on it and the law exists because we want to make some kind of order of the chaos.
It is also those questions of the control of power and the possibility of domination of everyone else which I suspect is the reason why people who assume that by birthright, they have they ability to decide what to do with power and who controls power. Those other questions of how those who have power are held to account and questions of dialogue, are to be ignored, minimised and extinguished. It was curious that this week at least, this person maybe for the first time, found someone else who asked questions. I wonder if he liked them or wanted to dismiss them.
"It takes more courage to examine the corners of your own soul, then it does for a soldier to fight upon the battlefield."
- William Butler Yeats
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