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Vasilios Kirkos - Professor of Philosophy at the Universities of Ioannina and Athens, Greece

PHILOSOPHY TODAY

I. The World Philosophical Forum is a nice innovation in the International  philosophical  community,  a commendable venture  and a brilliant  conception; it is for the first time that a number of distinguished thinkers took the initiative, with the UNESCO’s support, in establishing  a Forum of independent  discourse  and utterance of  philosophical  ideas, outside the conventional academic  congresses’ domain. Thinkers and philosophers from all over the world are offered a yearly opportunity to gather in Greece and put forward their views and suggestions as well as converse with their Forum mates on issues of world philosophical interest. This enterprise needs the help and support of all pondering people, not least that of the Greek state.

Philosophy has unfailingly been the main vehicle as well as target in the History of Ideas in as much as all people have always been seeking to be enlightened by Philosophy , not only in order to resolve the age-old issues of what lies beyond the surface of reality, but most importantly in order to learn how to reason and to develop as well as exercise judgment; it is precisely in this respect that Philosophy offers its help, first and foremost, to a human being: it helps them to set their thoughts in a harmonious sequence and constitute arguments through sound reasoning with their own rational faculties so as to render themselves capable of reaching reasonable decisions. This is the role of Philosophy par’ excellence; whereas science researches reality and amasses as much knowledge of it as possible , Philosophy judges, collates, distinguishes and assesses, in other words it has a supervising role, it oversees with a surveying eye and eventually arrives at a judgment; this is why Plato considered the all-surveying/inspecting faculties of a philosopher of paramount importance (cf “εποπτικός<εποπτεία= full knowledge of an object of study deriving from its close and careful inspection).

No sound education is feasible without the aid of Philosophy. Each and every effort to render the philosophical word accessible to everyday people is laudable and it needs to be supported, since philosophical knowledge far from breeding bigotry, it actually battles it as well as all forms of fanaticism and obsessive ideas; Philosophy is, by nature, an anti-dogmatic and non-prejudiced word and conception and it is on these grounds that it constitutes an unrivalled education asset for all people.

II. Philosophy and philosophical education are in the throes of being harshly tested in current times; they had also faced a relevant  predicament during the second half of the 19^th cent, as it is known, owing to their social role and cognition object being questioned as a result of the applied sciences sky-rocketing at that time; it is also of course known that religions at large, particularly the Christian religion with its dogmatic status quo and its firmly metaphysical outlook had always been Philosophy's traditional adversaries; Christian religion did offer, pre-eminently, a clear and solid footing to the human beings’ age-old as well as agonizing struggle to overcome the fear of death, thereby getting the upper hand in the exceedingly demanding challenge of mankind to conquer this oppressing fear which has always plagued human existence and vindicates Plato’s thesis that Philosophy is a Study of Death (Faedo, 81a).

Philosophy has, in modern times, to fight the heavy odds posed by two new powerful adversaries: economy and technology. These two new scientific powers, having come in the wake of rapid scientific progress, lay a strong claim to redefining the human entity and tend to shape a new world model and envisagement.

Economy has assumed an instrumental role in everyday life and in shaping people’s attitude to their fellow men, having moulded new norms for class discrimination and co-existence; it of course always played an important role in human life, exerting a strong influence on human relations, yet it had in no period of History assumed the attributes of an all-commanding factor and of a supreme rank in human issues; there had always been room in human soul left for other tendencies outside the domain of economic influence, such as that for satisfying the metaphysical “hunger and thirst” inherent in human existence; people had managed to build their everyday life with, and gear it to, “reason and vision”, without despising what had been necessary and even, on occasions, simply desirable, in order to create and promote culture as well as enjoy the aesthetic delights life had been lavishing on them; as much as these delights had certainly not been the prerogatives of all members of societies alike, most people had nevertheless managed to attain to a state of temperance and self-consciousness.

Economy has by now, armed with the power and the equipment of technology, penetrated very deeply into the modern man’s psychism and shapes, along with other factors, his being, his overall existence; Philosophy is the only force that can oppose it. Religion has ceded a major part of its spiritual authority and influence to economic activities as a consequence of its social mission being interfaced, perhaps more undisguisedly than ever, with its economic leverage, as well as of its spiritual impact range being affected by the Church’s economic endurance. This situation has left only Philosophy as the only force capable of fighting against human soul’s moral degradation by the unrelenting influence of Economy. The second major rival of Philosophy nowadays is the contemporary Technology. Man in our times has virtually been fettered by Technology;  never before had Technological achievements made so many inroads on human soul’s and mind’s domains, eventually dominating a major part of either, and in such a violent and telling manner, as they have done in recent years; all technological advances and accomplishments, on many occasions conducive to human progress, can of course constitute what we term Technology, as has been the case throughout man’s Historical evolution; what, however is witnessed with regard to Technology nowadays has no historical precedence; Technical and Technological applications in the fields of Informatics and communications have fractured and virtually annihilated the very concept of time

Informatics’ digital support has unsettled the essence of time as it had been conceived and  spiritually experienced by man in the course of History; man is a time-geared being , having shaped his life and culture by transforming time into conceivably tangible and convenient scales formats for the measurement, monitoring and even assessment of theoretical and practical norms and patterns of mental, emotional and physical activity; he has structured his Existence with regard to, and in connection with, time (cf. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, 1926); it is therefore impossible to conceive human entity and individuality apart from the sense and impression  of time and of the stroke of a moment; yet we’ve witnessed the sudden inrush of modern technical science – technology in the anglosaxonic terminology- that shrank the essence of  moment almost to the point of annihilation of time: no time impression in the form of the stroke of moment(s) impact intervenes in the process of communicating something, a piece of information, a message, a greeting; human beings  lose their footing, feel as if floating in the air, experiencing an-out-of-time feeling, their existence is suspended between the “now” and the “forever”, the ephemeral and the permanent; they are not aware of their bearings as time-geared entities and cannot structure their lives according to the time pace which is inherent in worldly existence; this is exactly what the mind-baffling rates of technological advances have ruined: the essence and feeling of the very pace and tempo of worldly living by which man has developed his earthly existence and evolved his very being’s attributes and potential; man has been lost in this lack of conceivable time-measure which is incident to his living, he has been denied the sense and feeling of life’s cadence and of time which is the very essence of this cadence.

III.  Man has of course not yet become aware of this alteration and the impending, perhaps already accomplished, restructuring of his life; people do not suspect how much modern Technology influence their psychism, to what extent and how rapidly and forcibly it  changes, virtually modifies, their inner being and the sense they have of the world, which has been comprehended and experienced as inherently related to time up to now; a certain number of signs marking this irreversible age-technology man’s modification taking already its toll can perhaps be se seen as much in the patterns of behaviour and communication  being developed in everyday human relations as in formats of wording his own experiences in speaking and writing. However, the actual results and eventual consequences of those vast transformations on human psychism will take a long time to take their eventual shape.

Philosophy, it follows, will now have to square up to these new powerful challenges, to the monstrosities, that is, of human inventiveness; both economy and technology always existed as important human activities, yet they were only subject to man’s will and control, serving him in his age-old bid to manage and satisfy his practical needs and occupations; they now however tend to become, if they have not already done so, forces that oppress human beings and threaten to reduce them to a state of bondage; man is now a prisoner  of his own Technology and a pawn to the world economic models-and their complexities-  he himself has created (homo technicus-homo economicus). What kind of answer then can and must Philosophy word and direct against these omnipotent challenges? This is Philosophy’s domain of responsibility today and the task lying ahead for it: to convince for the necessity of philosophical word, above all for its effectiveness to “salvage, sustain and redeem the corruption-prone world of things in appearances”.