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.
Summary: Gabriel Marcel is a known French existentialist. His co-Frenchman, Jean-Paul Sartre, distinguished existentialism into two which were coined as atheistic and theistic (Christian) wherein Sartre did mention Marcel as part of the latter in lecture on Existentialism a Humanism . Marcel is a Christian existentialist because he included the divine even amidst the infamous perception of existentialism as godless. Moreover, he is also known for his non-systematic philosophy where he pointed out that the philosophical discipline starts from where one is (referring to the particularity of the situation); therefore, it is not from metaphysical assumptions or already laid down theories. Marcel’s thoughts talk about the importance and the necessity of reflection wherein he divides it into two as a) primary reflection and b) secondary reflection. Reflection for Marcel is “nothing other than attention, i.e. directed towards this sort of small break
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