Hip Hip Hooray! It's World Philosophy Day!

If you've noticed a little spring in your step this morning, well then you too have the World Philosophy Day spirit. Started in 2002 under the auspices of UNESCO, the day aims to,

"Encourage people to share their philosophical heritage, to open up their sphere of daily thinking to new ideas and to foster a public debate amongst thinkers and civil society on the challenges facing societies today... Reflection on the unsolved problems and unanswered questions of contemporary society has always been at the heart of philosophical analysis and thinking. As such, it is a discipline that contributes to fostering the conditions in which peaceful co-existence may flourish."

More generally, the goal is to bring philosophy down from its notoriously exclusionary tower, to muck about in the blood, sweat and earth of the real world. As the mission statement for this year's program states, World Philosophy Day has "the constant objective of making philosophy accessible to all." This is a sentiment which I agree with completely but I remain a little doubtful about its potential for success. Philosophy builds habits of questioning which encourage a deeper engagement with the world, but unfortunately, this makes philosophy among the least commodified and easily consumable of book-requisite learning. For most of us, cultivating a philosophical perspective takes time; hours, days, months and years of confused head scratching interspersed with occasional eureka moments of clarity. And even when you do achieve an understanding on some topic, new or overlooked considerations find a way of creeping into the cracks of your hopeful and illusory certainty.

How does the event propose to improve philosophy's accessibility and prestige? If the program of this years conference in Palermo, Italy is anything to go by, our would-be philosophic ambassadors do what all other scholarly philosophers do: organize conferences where few outside the field would be interested to, let alone dare, go. This year's theme is "Rights and Power" and the talks planned are though slightly less obscure, filled with just the sort of jargon that makes philosophy marginal in the first place. Try, "The inter-subjective dynamics of power: recognition, prestige and authority," or "Philosophy, chaos and law." While it is obviously supremely unphilosophical to judge a talk by its title, these examples reflect ways of framing philosophical problems in pretty standard ways. My point isn't to criticize their approach, but rather to emphasize the inherently difficult and therefore exclusionary nature of patient critical thinking; there's simply no way to dumb this stuff down.

The point is to make patient critical thinking valuable. What's the good of a philosophical perspective? At present, there are apparently innumerable ways of being human which don't seem to require such thinking in order to be successful. Selfishness, greed, cold-heartedness and many other odious characteristics can in many instances contribute to a person's appearing successful in their community. Speaking of the English-speaking world, intellectuals have their certain circles, whether in universities or the media, which are almost unanimous in their opinion that in general western culture is in a state of decline. How to combat such trends? Mostly by writing grim forecasts of the coming dark age brought about through television, computers and celebrity worship. All this is probably true and also why those "Philosophy and... name your show" books are increasingly clogging the meager philosophy shelf at the local bigbox bookstore.

My own suggestion for how to make philosophy relevant and interesting to those outside the devoted herd is to make it "cool," for lack of a better word. The smartness of philosophy needs to be dressed in a Cohen brothers film starring Johnny Depp. The same old, "philosophy as thought experiment" tact gets us nowhere but likely serves to confirm the prejudices of those who already dislike and doubt the purposes of philosophy. Jumping into the canned "what ifs" of this approach tells people that, just as they had thought, philosophy is far removed from reality, abstract and impotent, a waste of time. Philosophy needs to reclaim the passionate engagement with the world which characterized so much of its history up to modern times.

All the best to the philosophers in Palermo. Take your discussions out of the seminar rooms and into the piazzas!