Ph.D and the Drama

                Having a Ph.D before was very enticing because it was one way to have progress economically. Investing money to have a title that creates all the more class distinctions among humans and moreso, in terms of salary and fluidity in promotions has led a slight derogatory remark on the word itself philosophy.(If I got it right, sophistry is the accurate word for it) The case is different to those who will pursue a doctorate degree which is purely philosophy because in this educational system, we have become irrelevant to the demand of the times, especially that the world needs someone to cut steel, assemble pipes and spice up pork chops. We have become totally irrelevant in a technologically oriented world. The queen of all sciences is pushed into a corner where the industry needs us as a number in a TOR. As a queen, we sit flat on our bottoms while the world pleases us, but monarchy now appears as passe and we shall be dethroned soon. Our expertise (as how our title defines it, but in fact we do not even claim absolutely that we are) in Being, Time, Phenomena, Noumenon, Geisteswissenschaften and many others are but insignificant in handling a client with credit problems or generating a computer program. The common person cannot appreciate the beauty of Kant's Introduction, Hegel's preface nor even Lao Tzu's Tao because no jobs are offered for those who study these people. Maybe, we can just say that our Ph.D will be a mark that tells us that we have reached this far in our quest for knowledge and we want more. Impractical as it sounds once we say that we only finished it for knowledge sake, but that is how we are fulfilled. Maybe we are not meant to be useful at all inside the machinery. Although the heart and the brain are different, but maybe philosophy is a brain having a heart and a heat having a brain and that ours in not a struggle to just be finding ways inside an economically driven world but it is a struggle to finally junk struggle itself so that we can free ourselves from this world that does not need us. Maybe we are just lavishing still the very joy of the first homo sapien, the very first time that a beautiful thought dawned on the first man and trying our best to be rigorous and at the same time a little bit mystical in a way so that we can manage to feel what was forgotten. As the world is moving on, here we are stuck, finding the very first AHA moment. Ph.D is one step, futile to the machine because we were not a part of one before. Our philosophizing is a continuous remembrance of the day we became enlightened, and soon, once knowledge becomes readymade and technological, it will be an age of blindness. Knowledge will become a call to order, a standing reserve, not any more thought of, but grabbed and copy pasted. However, we who commemorate it will never forget the time when we saw how beautiful our thoughts are and we shall remember that day always every time we philosophize.