Bio of the Philosopher
I was standing by the roadside, waiting for my family members to finish their errands, when another person, on the other side of the road, caught my attention. He was shirtless, seemed to not have showered for a while, and perhaps not even have a home to go back to. He sang and chatted with himself, prompting other pedestrians to dubiously stare at him and avoid him as he passed them. A sight of an unfortunate human driven into lunacy. Does he know that he is out of touch with reality? I imagined him picturing himself as a king, clad in a fancy robe, singing happily to his spectators. It was then that a second* but a major existential crisis hit the oh-too-innocent-15-year-old May: But how can he know what is real?
How can *we* know what is real?
How do I know that I am not imagining all this?
What if I am actually also shirtless, even though I think I am wearing a pretty cool t-shirt today? What if I am actually pressing mushrooms on a rock when I thought I was pressing on my laptop’s keyboard?
When I arrived home, I asked Google whatever questions that were multiplying in my head from that encounter. Several keywords came up including ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’, ‘René Descartes’, ‘Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream’, and, of course, ‘philosophy.’
I was stunned by the results of my Google search. People do think about these questions after all. However, I quickly realized that not all people care about these questions. For a while, I kept looking for somebody who would be impressed by my discovery of Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream** and who would discuss its significance. It was not a very successful quest. Nevertheless, more questions were added to the pile. What makes us different from animals and non-living things? Is it because we apparently have a soul and consciousness? But what do we mean by ‘soul’ and ‘consciousness’ and where do they come from? Interestingly, it was also through philosophy and not from my science class that I first heard about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (even though it was admittedly too much for my young brain). What is time? What is space?
My head was about to burst from these questions and not really knowing anyone to ask was tough. But it took only one listener to get me going, who was a professor / mentor / friend that I later met when I moved to a boarding school. I talked to him about my questions, without any high hopes really. Later that afternoon, I received a recommendation from him of an episode of the BBC’s In Our Time podcast, titled “Consciousness.” More importantly, his message that accompanied the recommendation was particularly moving:
For Wee Soo May, whose dream is to answer the question, “What is consciousness?”
That was the first to many more philosophy-related recommendations from him, which provided tentative answers to some of my questions, at the same time complicated some of my other questions, and opened my eyes to many more philosophical dilemmas as well as reassured me that there are people who think, talk, write and dream about these puzzles.
However, another challenge came up. Malaysia does not offer a Bachelor’s degree in pure philosophy. Moreover, in Malaysia, a double-degree was not an option, even though I have always been interested in not just philosophy but also science. I had (and still have) a lofty goal to combine both physics and philosophy to understand the world and our place in it.
Luckily, I received a scholarship to study in the States, an opportunity that brings my intellectual inquiry to a higher and more formal level than ever before. In my first philosophy class in college, I found myself struggling to suppress a broad smile amidst my seriously thinking classmates when the professor posed the Euthyphro dilemma: “Is the holy holy because it is loved by the gods, or do they love it because it is holy?”
My first response to the question was: I am home. I was excited to finally get the chance to answer all the big questions in life.
After finishing that class and many more philosophy classes, I have come to the conclusion that my questions can never be totally answered. Instead, they grow in number and complexity. It is a rare occasion to be absolutely sure about something and I had to reconsider many, many ideas and values that I thought were definitely true. Why? Let me give you a glimpse of the typical life of a philosophy student.
Usually, a philosophy class starts with a central question (e.g. How do we know? What is a right?) and explores the different answers that philosophers offer.
Then you will be asked to say what you think is right or wrong, in the form of a comment during a discussion or in a form of a term paper. The hard part of this task, at least for me, is that completely opposite answers can be very, very convincing that it becomes difficult to even know what you believe in anymore. Sometimes, the question itself is absolutely absurd. Is time real or ideal (i.e. exists only in our minds)? I thought, How am I supposed to know what the answer really is?? Needless to say, sinking into an existential crisis becomes second nature.
Then, what good can philosophy ever be if all it seems to do is to shatter your sense of confidence and send you into the dark abyss? The answer, I believe, lies in what is causing these phenomena.
The variety of contradictory yet persuasive perspectives from different thinkers, including from me and you, allows one to really ponder: what is the assumption or set of assumptions that motivates our faith in our perspectives?
Some people think that it is easy to disprove ‘faulty’ perspectives or claims with the help of logic. For example, if somebody says that a rainy day will wet the floor and if one finds the floor wet, it is definitely because it has rained earlier. However, we know that is not necessarily true. It could be that somebody spilled water on the floor. In philosophy, not all statements and perspectives can be easily refuted with logic.
For example, David Hume believes that we know things mainly through senses and experiences. We can never imagine colours without ever seeing them with our own eyes. We (or Isaac Newton, really) formulated the law of gravity because every time we throw something, it always drops back to the ground. But if we have never had this experience, we could never have thought that it is impossible for things to remain up in the air long after we tossed them upwards.
However, René Descartes thinks that we know and understand things not through the senses but through our power of reason. He thinks that if we take a solid wax and heat it till it melts, we still have the understanding that it is the same object, despite the fact that all its properties ―smell, shape, texture―have changed. If we know the world only through our senses, we would have thought that solid wax and liquid wax are two different things. Immanuel Kant later came with an answer (i.e. transcendentalism) that seemed to combine the opposite views but that view does not come without more headache-inducing problems.
Yet something, even a little part of the argument, has to be wrong or at least questionable (or perhaps we can have two contradictory yet right answers?). And that is what philosophy professors expect when they ask for your answers to bizarre questions. They do not care so much about whether you think that time is real or whether you think that Hume is right. What matters is why you think so. Every claim you make has to be backed by sound (i.e. logical and true) arguments and assumptions. In many cases, you are also expected to come up with a strong counterargument that can challenge your overall argument.
Long story short, the good thing about philosophy is that it exposes us to many distinct perspectives and forces us to contemplate our statements really hard. At the same time, it compels us to understand the diverse thoughts out there that people have.
If you ask me if philosophy has any benefit to society, it is that it allows us to be receptive or open to others.
I end this article with a quote from Bertrand Russell, who articulates this sentiment perfectly in his book, ‘The Problems of Philosophy’:
“The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion. It will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole, with the absence of insistence that results from seeing them as infinitesimal fragments in a world of which all the rest is unaffected by any one man’s deeds. The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man’s true freedom, and his liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.“
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
*The first existential crisis occured when I was eleven because my confusion about the sheer multiplicity and irreconcilability of religions had finally come to an irrepressible climax.
**Zhuangzi, a Chinese philosopher (c. 369-286 BC), had a dream that he was a butterfly. He happily flew around, fluttering his wings, only to wake up and find that he was Zhuangzi. He then wondered if he was Zhuangzi dreaming that he was a butterfly or if he was actually a butterfly, dreaming that he was Zhuangzi.