The World of Changes

Theme: "Philosophy does not make bread"

           When I read about the theme of our monthly article my mind was totally blank, I do not know what will I write in my article. But I do not lose hope that I can think of a better article, days after when I read the theme, I read a book about the introduction to Philosophy while I’m reading it, I based on my environment and to myself of what had the book said. After that, I went to the library to read more books in order to gain more information or ideas for my article.

            Can Philosophy really make bread? At first, what is in my mind is that Philosophy cannot make bread, why, because if you study the philosophy and learned different aspects of it, its terminologies and whatsoever and stock it only in your mind you cannot be productive. I mean that if you do not apply what you have learned in studying the Philosophy, you can’t do anything or know the essence of something. It seems that you only study the Philosophy for you to be called a Philosopher from the people who are only average or for the sake of having a finished course. Even if you are an intelligent person who can learn things easily but do not apply what you have learned, it is useless. To become a philosopher, it is not only to take simply the course of Philosophy. Everything continues to seem a bit unreasonable – bewildering and even enigmatic. [1]

            Later on, I’d changed my mind. I haven’t gone half way yet in approaching the deep meaning of the theme. Now, I say that Philosophy does make bread, because we are always thinking, we keep on asking unending questions about what is going on around us, why the world exists or how the world was created and much more. Those philosophical questions won’t let us be contented on sitting down and think about of those questions but we have to make some speculations. So that we can find the answers to our questions and we will be productive in a way that you’ll share it to others for them to be informed. In that way, you helped others to open a path of thinking deeply to find the answers to why these things are exist, happen or etc., you became productive to others and because of you the Philosophy can now make bread for others because you helped them to expand their knowledge, to distinguish from what is real to unreal and many more. For example, you bought a brand new motorcycle but you do not know how to drive yet, so you’ll need to go to a driving school in order to learn how to drive a motorcycle. So, the school in our example is the Philosophy, as the fundamental definition of it as a body of related data that are systematic, complete, evidenced and certain. The school will teach you how to drive safely and step-by-step and teach you how to shoot troublemakers. One inevitable reality about this world is that everything “changes”. For example, the computer before is now different compare in today’s computer. Everything has its own evolution, the computer before were having slow performances in terms of computation and other tasks. But today’s computers are more accurate and precise to its given data. Computers are like Philosophers. Like in the case of Plato and Aristotle who were partly agreed and partly disagreed to each other’s thinking followed one of Plato’s theory that was disagreed by Aristotle, is that ideas were more real than all the phenomena of nature.[2] But to Aristotle, the idea of a being was simply a concept that we human had formed after seeing a certain number of being.[3] All of the philosophical works of the late great philosophers were evolving from the world of ideas by Plato to Aristotle’s things that are in the human soul were purely reflections of natural objects.[4] Computers had its evolution also and all the modern computers get its concept from the early computers just like the Modern philosophy got its concept from the Ancient philosophy. A significant portion of Philosophy especially in a historical context is and has been extremely valuable and eminently practical. Early philosophy was really the precursor of a lot of modern science and logic. It studied and promoted the kind of disciplined and structured thought that is needed for virtually all modern disciplined. Every modern discipline and social system is a borrowed concepts, methods and techniques and it is also based on the concept of early philosophy. Without the works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Locke and many more brilliant philosophers, we would not have much of what we call modern in the modern world. The simple fact is that all modern disciplines absorbed concepts from Philosophy over the centuries so effectively that the concepts are considered part of those disciplines rather being owned by the “discipline’ called Philosophy.

            A very practical issue is that a lot of different questions are not clearly phrased that it simply is not practical to even begin to answer the questions in a practical and workable manner until a broad philosophical analysis can tell us what the questions are really all about. Answering inappropriate interpretations of questions can certainly lead to answers that do not meet the original needs that the questions may have been intended to address. Modern philosophy has gotten so esoteric and so apparently disjoint from the apparent reality that most people see philosophy as being completely disconnected from reality. Granted that a lot of philosophy does appear disconnected from reality, it is simply because philosophy can run well ahead of time. For example, the politicians, they may be not ready to pass reasonable and workable laws permitting the doctors to “pull the plug on granny” or define precisely how privacy and trust should function in online computer networks but a philosopher and leading edge experts in all disciplines can and do spend serious time discussing this kind of issues seriously. They are being philosophical and that is philosophy in action and that is how philosophy makes bread. It may not be the bread that the people eat today, but it is the bread that the people will be taken for granted somewhere down the road in the coming years. Philosophy is less concerned with what to do in life, but more about how to think values and to process idea that can be applied in new and novel ways to solve problems in a more innovative manner than were readily available for us in the past.

            Philosophers do not directly make bread or tell the people how to make a bread but offer new and novel ways in dealing with the new approaches of making bread, leading ahead and thinking about meeting biological and social needs which was intended to address in the first place. Philosophers can certainly be lost in the clouds because that is where some of the hardest problems facing humanity lie. Many of us so lost in the mundane concerns of daily life and the route details of our disciplines that we continue to stumble in life for we do not have the vantage point from the clouds that would enable us to distinguish the forest from the trees.

[1] Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (1995), p. 16

[2] Ibid., p. 90

[3] Ibid., p. 90

[4] Ibid., p. 91