Speaking of Uselessness (Part the First)
Crcata said:
Anyways, that topic is Philosophy. What purpose does it serve? From my perspective philosophy is being used by otherwise uneducated people to claim themselves to be educated or, "intellectuals" or "deep thinkers" and in many cases to parade that around as truth. Philosophy to me does what common sense does so much better.
We might similarly suggest that economics is being used by otherwise uneducated people to claim themselves educated while attempting to justify theft and other injustice. In this context, philosophy is an easy target precisely because people believe it does nothing, or serves no purpose. But much like psychology, pretty much everyone philosohizes regardless of whether or not they accept, appreciate, or believe in philosophy.
In its most basic functions, philosophy describes perception and knowledge according to more or less formalized schema. Once upon a time, this was fairly easy to see; later iterations are more occulted. In Greece philosophy lent to the identification of logic and mathematics. Those who suggest philosophy does nothing other than ask questions we already know the answer to are, in fact, exactly incorrect; many of the answers we might assert, say, in relation to right and wrong, or good and bad, are derived philosophically. Indeed, many of the "truths" people accept in such a fashion we might describe as "taking for granted" are purely philosophical; this part is important, as any time one might make a political argument, one engages in philosophy.
Consider the concept of
us/them; history often seems a recording of detritus in the wake of a perpetual human struggle with the dualism. In the fiction of Steven Brust, this concept becomes very nearly a running gag between two species (
H. sapiens and, unofficially,
H. elvin) that both use the word "human" to describe themselves; it is strange to reflect how easily one can become accustomed to this, and not simply in the dialogue but also, in later stories, maintaining context through diverse narrators. At the core of the joke, of course, is the long-observed separation of
us and
them.
Many learn along the way that the word "barbarian" comes from "barbaros", which in turn means approximately, "people who sound funny", or, perhaps slightly more accurately, referred once upon a time to those who did not speak Greek. Functionally speaking, there was the "us" that speaks a common language―a superficial identifier of common cause―and "them", the "barbarians".
There are many ways in which human beings do this. Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, cynically but, in function, seemingly correctly, asserted that there are two kinds of people in the world, human beings and women, and when women try to be human beings they are accused of trying to act like men. Some really disdain perceived implications, but even in the twenty-first century it seems rather quite obvious. In American society, for instance, we have a weird circumstance afoot in which people functionally and implicitly―and, in many cases, if given the opportunity,
explicitly―refuse to acknowledge that women are human beings. And in picking out justifications, these arguments inevitably spill into weird comparisons that dehumanize women. Consider the American anti-abortion crowd, at no time are people to acknowledge the humanity and human rights of women; doing so makes it much harder to tamper with philosophy in order to achieve what these people want. We do the same thing discussing health care in general; "women's health" is often reserved not as part of her human condition, but, rather, as a comparison to "health care", which in function means "men's health".
Which leads to a very interesting exploitation of philosophy:
Legislation, functionally, is derived in part from ontology; some would, therefore, legislate ontology in order to derive legislation therefrom.
And the whole point of that stunt is to evade the humanity and human rights of women.
But the underlying sleight, the exclusion of women from humanity, persists throughout the human endeavor, taking many forms more or less obvious, and more or less destructive, but at their root they are all destructive. Uttar Pradesh, Alaska, Ireland; all three experience visible conflicts in their regard for the humanity of women. Uttar Pradesh is a raping field; while we in the U.S. often congratulate ourselves on our civility, we have a persistent human rights crisis in our society and Alaska is in its own way―having a rape rate
tenfold the rest of the U.S.―is emblematic of certain aspects; and though Ireland has gone out of its way in the past to constitutionally protect motherhood, and elected female heads of state well before we Americans could properly imagine doing such a thing, their society is occasionally wracked by guilt and self-loathing when the toll, another innocent woman dead because doctors were expected to subordinate her life to that of a fetus they couldn't save, is witnessed, yet when they stage their opportunities to untie that particular knot in their society they repeatedly refuse. We Americans, of course, have actually topped our Irish friends, because we have an argument afoot in this country about whether a woman is allowed to die without societal permission. Of course, that's Texas, which itself is emblematic by its own aspects of misogyny and, more generally, the us/them dualism. Somewhat obscure, it involves a bill stalled in the legislature and a county-level Republican chairman preparing to purge his corner of the party in such a manner that would, by no particularly surprising coincidence, help advance the bill, a "religious-freedom" construct ostensibly targeting gays, but including provisions allowing state employees to deliberately withhold medical access from sexually abused minor females as a matter of personal conscience.
The United States are also a nation that dehumanizes dark skin; we kicked off the Republic that way, with the infamous Three-Fifths Rule specifically counting dark skin as three-fifths of a person, in order to protect the rights of white male taxpayers. Yes, that's what American political centrism wins us, and we only had to fight a war to undo it.
In the modern era we might look to Guantanamo, one of our truly Great Mistakes. The legal rationale has always been tenuous, and has specifically sought ways to exclude these prisoners from humanity. Aspects of this creep into mundane American society as well. With Guantanamo, the object was to keep the suspects out of the States where they would be covered by the Equal Protection Clause of Amendment Fourteen; while we didn't have an officially declared war, though, we used the excuse of being at war to suspend Due Process under Amendment V.
It is easy enough to denounce "otherwise uneducated people to claim themselves to be educated or, 'intellectuals' or 'deep thinkers' and in many cases to parade that around as truth", but we should not allow them to define philosophy. To wit, there is a notion of philosophy in the abstract, and also a particular question of how philosophy is applied. While in nature, male derives from female, many myths often declared and accepted as truth turn this formulation on its head. There is the Book of Genesis, for instance, in which woman is literally manufactured from a man's sacrifice of part of his body; Jomo Kenyatta, in
Facing Mt. Kenya, recorded a tribal belief that women were once stewards endowed by the gods, but fell from grace for their own decadence, and that, in turn, is why men are and should be in charge. These little twists emerge in myth all through the human endeavor, and thus become philosophical presuppositions.
―End Part I―