Practicality of philosophy

By Seo Young-hoon

I truly enjoy philosophy. To exercise and hone my mind to think and develop an idea or perspective in the pursuit of truth is a captivating and intriguing experience. While my school does not offer a course in philosophy, I immerse myself with the thoughts of Plato, Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Nietzsche by reading their works. However, sometimes, I feel as though I was born in the wrong era, as if I was supposed to be born in either ancient Greece or early modern Europe in the company of the aforementioned philosophers. This is because of the erroneous yet ubiquitous misunderstanding in contemporary society that philosophy no longer has value.

A few years ago, Stephen Hawking, an eminent physicist, declared that “philosophy is dead” and that scientists have replaced philosophers in the pursuit of truth. This notion that philosophy is obsolete and does not possess practical utility is not exclusive to Hawking but instead permeates throughout our society. We often render philosophy as meaningless squabbles over semantics and abstracts, and therefore, believe that philosophy has no significant bearing in real-life circumstances.

This is the reason why whenever I tell others that I am planning to pursue philosophy in university, I am often met with confused looks and furrowed brows, along with questions about why I was studying a “useless” subject and how I was planning to get a job in the future. Yet, the recent outbreak of COVID-19 has served as a reminder of why philosophy is still pertinent in the present and why I will not waver in my decision to pursue philosophy.

COVID-19 has swept across the globe, and the number of patients continues to grow exponentially. However, the hospital capacity is limited, as the number of doctors and hospital beds, for example, is fixed. Therefore, the conflict of scarcity arises as the exponential graph of the number of patients exceeds the horizontal line of the hospital capacity, which forces the doctors and society to resolve the ethical dilemma of having to choose what is the “right” thing to do.

All around the world, doctors and medical professionals are working to define what this “right thing” is. By way of illustration, rather than the conventional notion of a “first-come, first-served” basis, a group of doctors proposed to prioritize the younger patients with a higher likelihood of survival, which reflects the utilitarian idea of maximizing the utility by focusing on the number of life-years saved. However, the issue is that all human lives are equally valuable, yet the utilitarian prioritization based on the likelihood of survival leads to discrimination against the elderly and people with disabilities.

Now, I do not have the answers to this ethical dilemma, but I simply wanted to point out the necessity of philosophy in tackling issues such as this.

Without the knowledge of ethics and philosophy, we would not be able to come up with practical solutions to the crucial issues. Only by reading and evaluating the thoughts of our predecessors by studying philosophy, we can equip ourselves with the necessary knowledge to tackle the philosophical problems that exist in all areas of life.

As humanity approaches new dawn along with the advent of technology (e.g., artificial intelligence), philosophy becomes more pertinent than ever, as it is crucial for us to learn from the past in order to prepare for the future.

In this sense, I assert that Stephen Hawking was wrong in saying that philosophy is dead, since I believe that Stephen Hawking himself, to a certain extent, is a philosopher.

Philosophy no longer exists solely within the confines of pondering about abstract concepts, but it lends tremendous practical insights that help humanity tackle real-life problems that exist everywhere. Plato said in “Republic” that his ideal state would be led by a philosopher king; however, in my ideal state, everyone would be a philosopher king, equipped with the philosophical knowledge capable of tackling the philosophical issues that arise in every facet of human life. The world is learning a lot of lessons from the COVID-19 outbreak. I sincerely hope and believe that acceptance of the necessity of philosophy is one of the lessons that we take from these catastrophic times.

Seo Young-hoon (yseo2021@chadwickschool.org

) is a student at Chadwick International School in Incheon.