Douglas Anele
25 May 2008
Lagos — FOR a long time in this country, there has been bias against the arts or humanities by successive administrations and by Nigerians in general. This bias manifests in various ways.
For example, many parents insist that their children should study the so-called professional courses like law, medicine, engineering, accountancy, banking and finance etc rather than subjects such as history, philosophy, the different Nigerian languages, and so on.
One of the reasons for this ignorant attitude to higher education is that some parents think it is prestigious to answer mama doctor, nna lawyer or papa engineer to boost their egos in the neighbourhood.
Also, the level of unemployment in the country today tends to force students to select courses which they feel give them greater opportunity for employment.
Nevertheless, in many instances, children are compelled to study courses for which they have little or no aptitude whatsoever. The result of this situation is that such students do not perform well in those courses, thereby creating
problems for themselves and their lecturers.
I know instances where third year students of either engineering or business administration earnestly beg for change of course to philosophy, perhaps because they could not cope with the level of numeracy required in those courses.
Secondly, the policy on education which stipulates that sixty present of admission into universities should be reserved for the sciences and science-based courses whereas the remaining forty percent should be for arts suggests that arts subjects are not as important as the sciences for the development of the individual and the society.
It is clear that the policy has failed to promote scientific development in Nigeria. Perhaps, some people think that scientific development can be achieved just by having more students enroll in science subjects and engineering. However, detailed studies of the history of the various sciences indicate that the route to scientific breakthrough is extraordinarily arduous.
It requires a combination of complex factors such as the right intellectual and cultural environment, institutional framework for the promotion and organization of science, adequate funding and availability of sufficient number of individuals devoted to seeking knowledge of objective reality for its own sake.
The last factor is the most elusive and yet the most important, because no one can guarantee that at any point in time in a society there would be sufficient number of men and women that have what Albert Einstein called "intellectual love of phenomena." Several scholars have presented convincing arguments demonstrating the essential connection between the liberal arts and sciences. Discussing those arguments would considerably lengthen this essay.
Rather what I will do is to present and defend the view that the subject called philosophy is extremely important for the optimum development of the sciences, the human person and the society in general.
Now, since the evolution of human societies, mankind has faced two broad interrelated problems. The first problem concerns the mastery of natural forces, that is, the problem of acquiring knowledge and skill required for the production of tools and weapons. It also involves finding out ways of encouraging nature to produce useful plants and animals for human use.
Francis Bacon was the first philosopher who saw clearly the practical import of scientific technique as a mode of conquering nature by obeying it. Increasingly, this problem is dealt with by the various scientific and engineering disciplines.
To handle it effectively, it is absolutely necessary to train a significant number of experts in narrow scientific subjects. The second problem is about how humans can best utilize their knowledge of natural forces and phenomena.
A cluster of issues about the organization of society politically and economically rear up at this point. In most cases, the second problem is not completely amenable to the exactitude and experimental protocols of science.
According to Bertrand Russell, whose illuminating analysis forms the fulcrum of our discussion, the type of knowledge most suitable for handling the second class of problems can only be derived from a panoramic survey of human life, both past and present, and an appreciation of the source of misery or contentment as vouchsafed by history.
From history, we learn that improvement in skill and knowledge alone has never produced any increase in human happiness and well-being. Examples to prove this are legion.
When our remote ancestors invented agriculture, they used the knowledge to institute a brutal cult of human sacrifice. In our own epoch, scientific and technological creativity has led to the production of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and unheard of environmental degradation.
To deal with the second type of problem, then, something other than technical skill is needed, something which, loosely, might be called wisdom. Science, on its own, cannot give us wisdom. But humanity requires wisdom now more than ever before, because the accelerated growth of science and technology has rendered ancient habits of thought and action more unsatisfactory at this time than at any other time.
Etymologically, philosophy means "love of wisdom" and the genuine lover of wisdom is called a philosopher. It is philosophy in this sense that human beings world-wide should acquire if the increased power and control we have over nature would not lead to disaster. The philosophy we have in mind here is not the one that interests only specialists in philosophy, but one that has cultural value which can be incorporated as part of general education.
Most members of the public conflate the abstruse and abstract nature of philosophical discussion by specialists with aspects of philosophy that can contribute meaningfully to enlightenment and enrichment of culture.
Although in Nigeria, the National Universities Commission has stipulated courses in philosophy for all fresh undergraduates, the course content and general mode of teaching these courses in some universities, including the University of Lagos where I teach, leave much to be desired. I will discuss later what philosophy should, as part of general education offer those that study it.
However, it should be noted that philosophy, from its inception in remote antiquity, aimed both at a theoretical understanding of the universe and at proposing ethical paradigms for the good life. Philosophers such as Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, C.S. Momoh, J.I Omoregbe, Evelyn Fox Keller, Odera Oruka etc practiced philosophy this way. Thus, philosophy has been closely associated with science and religion. In its relation to science, philosophy has served as a touch-bearer or pathfinder.
The theories of planetary motion, evolution, and atoms etc. were first postulated by philosophers as speculative attempts to explain reality. But when these theories were verified empirically, they ceased to be philosophy and become parts of the corpus of scientific knowledge.
Therefore, as an adventure of the human mind per excellence, philosophy charts the uncharted domains of reality which are filled in later by scientists with verifiable and verified entities of all sorts.
There are two widespread dangerous attitudes which philosophy helps to curb. On the one hand, there are those who dogmatically believe in the omnipotence of science, to the extent that they forget the huge ignorance existing even in the face of our best scientific efforts to cognize reality.
On the other hand, there are a large number of people who uncritically downplay the achievements of science. Individuals in the first group tend to become overconfident and complacent, and visit with opprobrium attention to problems lacking the exactitude necessary for scientific solution.
People in the second group usually revert to some antiquated harmful mumbo-jumbo or superstition, and refuse to accept the incredible possibilities for human happiness which exist as a result of wise application of technology in handling human problems. Philosophy saves us from these intellectual maladies by encouraging us to critically examine the scope, power and limitations of scientific knowledge.
On the ethical side, philosophy, argues Russell, is premised on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known makes people uncomfortable. A person with philosophical temperament would love to know, and truly dislikes error. She or he would want to have ideas, theories and opinions that are as verisimilar as possible.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Vanguard. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
