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What is the good of your discipline? Dino Jakusic
Dino Jakusic
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
Oscar Wilde
1. Introduction
Current state of the global economy forced governments worldwide to redistribute the national expenses. This has already been felt on the sector of higher education, especially with subjects such as Philosophy and Humanities in general. The general public and governments do not see the problem with this and ask about the use of Philosophy, Theology, Classics, art... This libel of uselessness is then adopted by younger generations discouraging them from studying these disciplines, what then creates a viscous circle since the reduction of students leaves even less justification for universities to keep running their Humanities departments.
In this text, I will not try to show that there is some hidden use in Philosophy which, when discovered, brings benefits or profits. What I will try to do is to show that it indeed is useless, but that it may not be uselessness of certain things we should be worried about or what we should condemn.
2. Use - usefulness
Mathematics is one of the subjects which seem to be better off during these funding cuts then others. However, what actually is the use of mathematics? Common answers that would be given are: forming the basis of sciences - natural sciences, such as physics rely on it immensely; social sciences, for example economics or psychology, could not function without statistical methods which mathematics develops; without it there is no construction and architecture; finally it is brilliant for developing the mind and it trains intellect.
However, I would disagree with this answer. Is this really the use of mathematics? It definitely is used for all the above but is this what one could definitely call it its use rather than maybe usefulness? Is there a difference between these two? Let us consider the following example to find out.
The use of an axe has always been and continues to be cutting down trees. However, it has also, unfortunately, proved itself useful for splitting in half heads of one's neighbours or, less unfortunately, opening cans of baked beans. Similarly, as Homer gives us a hint in the Odyssey (Homer 2003: 143), in a land far away from sea, which has no lakes or rivers one can sail on, an oar will still keep its original use - it will be a thing for driving boats or ships across the water. However, in the land like that, such a thing will not be very useful.
From the example we can see that when we talk about use we are talking about something connected to the essence of an object, the definition of it. If we take a look at the world from what is called a technical standpoint (Sartre 1989: paragraph 8) we can say that use of an object is fulfilling a purpose, achieving a certain end it was produced for. However, it is important to note that use is not the same as essence (or sum of necessary properties). Stones have essences or necessary properties, but since a stone as such does not have a designer that produced it in order to bring about certain ends we cannot say it has use.
The same therefore applies to every other object which first came into existence independently of humanity: animals, plants, inanimate objects, natural resources and human beings themselves. It also includes certain products of society, such as mathematics. We cannot really say that the 'uses' of mathematics we have listed above actually are uses of it since one can imagine mathematics not being used for any of these things and still remain mathematics. The list we have given is the list of what mathematics is useful for - it is a list of usefulness, not use.
As we have said, use stands in a connection with the essence or purpose of an object, it is 'engraved' in it. Usefulness is simply accidental practicality of an object, disconnected from the original purpose of the object, as we have seen in the axe example. Therefore, we can safely say that mathematics has no use, but very high usefulness since we have showed that it is useful for various things. However, since useless is not a word used only as an opposite of useful, but also to signify that something has no use, we can also validly claim that mathematics is useless.
3. Philosophy and uselessness
Philosophy is useless in the same way mathematics is useless - it has no predetermined use. However, at this point a valid question would be: is this really so? Can you not say that Philosophy has use? After all, the use of ethics is to establish moral norms, of epistemology to tell us about knowledge, etc. There are two reason why answer is no and why Philosophy is useless.
Firstly, observation of Philosophy tells you that there is no practical or external end which Philosophy tries to achieve. Philosophical enquiry is not undertaken in order to use the insights we gain through it for some external ends. It is undertaken for the love of enquiry itself and Philosophy is an effect of this expression of love - this is what it has always stood for: love of wisdom.
Secondly, its name and historic development suggest that, if Sartre will forgive us, the existence of Philosophy precedes its essence. It is not that we invented Philosophy or its sub-disciplines and then started to inquire in a certain way, but rather the certain way of enquiry about knowledge, morality or the world has eventually been named epistemology, ethics and metaphysics. In fact, only sub-discipline of Philosophy which can be said to have use is logic since it has been set up in order to help one's philosophic practice what is the reason why Aristotle called his book on logic Organon or Tools (Kovac 1994, pp. 16).
4. Worthlessness
We have hopefully shown that Philosophy, like Mathematics, indeed is useless. However, how come then that, as we have said, Mathematics is less effected by the current crisis? The answer for this lies in the difference in their usefulness.
As we have said Mathematics is very useful to sciences (I do not consider Mathematics, or Philosophy, to be sciences due to the fact that they developed much earlier) and sciences themselves are nowadays highly valued for their usefulness and use (which they have since science developed under a renaissance idea of setting up a discipline for mastering the nature, cf. Kalin 2006: 143).
The usefulness of Philosophy generally does not go beyond personal usefulness for a mind of a philosopher or is not recognized as such. The latter is not surprising due to the fact that Philosophy on its own lacks use and therefore does not give clear instructions to a society about how to harvest its usefulness. Since the potential general usefulness of things which are useless in the same way as Philosophy has been harder to spot than not to spot, it is not surprising that various societies considered things such as Philosophy or art as not just useless, but also worthless - suggesting that they have no usefulness whatsoever.
Therefore, Plato talks about philosophers as "useless members of society" (487e) and therefore worthless, but does not blame them for it but the imperfect democratic society which does not need or desire them since they would destroy the corruption upon which it rests (488a-489d). Similar phobia of uselessness has been present in a feudal society which wanted to give use to Philosophy by subjecting it to Theology (Philosophia ancilla Theologiae cf. Ibid: 119). Even in Marxist society it seems that the idea of lack of use would be criticised what can be seen from Communist criticism of Existentialism being a luxurious (and frankly, luxury is useless) and therefore bourgeois Philosophy (Sartre 1989, paragraph 2).
Nowadays, similar situation of identifying uselessness with worthlessness is present, but for different reasons. Capitalist society has made many honourable professions, such as the one of the philosopher, into average wage-workers (Marx & Engels 2003: 127) and since wage-givers are the ruling class which therefore influences the formation of values the idea of moral worthlessness is becoming identified with economic worthlessness - what does not bring material profit is worthless - and creates the viscous circle we have mentioned at the beginning.
5. Defending Philosophy
One reason for taking care of Philosophy and similar disciplines is the fact that the society in which a person can live by doing what they love, by self-actualization, is the one which is more developed and closer to the ideal society than the one which strives towards pure money-making and functionality while ignoring culture. It is not the case that culture has certain usefulness which gets noticed in the long run, but it is the case that great value tends to be ascribed to culture, regardless of its use or usefulness. We do not tend to praise our culture because this will bring us certain benefits, but we seem to treat it as value in itself.
However, should we adopt this during economic instabilities, such as the present time, or should we abandon our socially useless disciplines in order to preserve the society. I believe they should not be abandoned. Although we might have no usefulness or even knowledge of our past philosophers, artists, rhetoricians or playwrights all culture and civilization, everything a society prides itself by, rests on these, useless, disciplines. A French person could proudly quote the Cogito without knowing what it stands for and a German could be proud to be the same nationality as Kant, without ever hearing about Categorical Imperative. The Western society does not consider itself great because of invention and use of atomic bomb, an airplane or DNA, but because of the continuous philosophical, cultural and intellectual thought. We do not admire Greeks for their weaponry, but for their culture and we remember more Athenians over Spartans, although one could say that the citizens of Athens were much more useless than their Spartan contemporaries. Great societies always eventually crumbled, but their culture has brought them one step closer to immortality.
What does this imply? Since current economic system and individual patrons cannot be considered reliable, 'useless things' should be protected by the governments, rather than sanctioned as they seem to become nowadays. It is the purpose of the government to develop and take care of social identity, culture and society since the market cannot do it. This is the use of the state - to preserve the identity of its citizens, which is, we have said, constructed and strengthened by these useless things. After all, the nation without culture is not a nation at all.
Finally, if this is still not enough there is a particular aspect of Philosophy which could prove useful to society - ethics. Due to the growing secularisation more and more authority on discourse about value is given to Philosophy since the only two meaningful sources of this have been ethics and religion. Science, by talking only of facts, excludes itself from possibility to discuss values in any other way except mere descriptions of different moral systems. If our society cannot but give value only to what it can exploit, this is the usefulness of Philosophy they can look for.
6. Conclusion
Hopefully, we have shown that Philosophy and certain other disciplines in fact are useless, but that uselessness does not a priori condemn something to worthlessness or gives sufficient reason to abandon it. Of course, this does not mean that society should fund and support someone who wants to drink coffee all day long and do nothing else. This text does not say that every worthless thing is valuable, but only wants to remind us, at the times when this is being forgotten, that some useless things are essential to something considered very valuable and important, not only by the people committed to them, but also to the society at large, regardless of their use or usefulness.
Bibliography
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This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
