What does philosophy do, anyway?

Does god exist?

What’s reality?

Do we have free will?

What happens after death?

What’s the best moral system?

The list of basic philosophical questions, answers to which philosophers have failed to give even after two thousand and five hundred years of philosophising since Ancient Greece, is long. Such is philosophy. It has never answered a question, never found a solution to a problem.

Philosophy is pretty useless… entirely useless. But then a great number of other grand things in life are also pointless. Art is purposeless. Music is unavailing.

The very purpose to engage in philosophy is to spend time with the very wisest, most perceptive, and weirdest people to have ever lived among us. Also, it’s immensely comforting to realise that however silly, half-baked, and witless the philosophical questions sound, some genius philosophers have most likely discussed or asked them before.

The School of Athens, representing philosophy, by Raphael

Around two millennia ago, Seneca said that philosophy casts and constructs the soul. It commands our life and monitors our conduct. It sits in the driving seat and directs our bridleway as we dither amid uncertainties. Philosophy reaches where science cannot. It has a license to surmise about everything – from epistemology to metaphysics, and in the process of doing it, philosophy comments on and attempts to interpret some of the deepest existential questions.

Answering questions is not philosophy’s liability. Even if philosophy intends to answer something, it simply cannot be answered because there are questions that lie beyond the ambit of our comprehension. However, in Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism (Oxford University Press, 2017), Daniel Stoljar contends that although we revisits the same philosophical topics again and again, the questions we raise about those subjects alter from one time to another, and are gradually being answered.  

Left Behind

‘There is a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking’, says Mitch Albom, in his celebrated philosophical novel For One More Day. Not all stories have lucid opening, middle, and conclusion. Somehow or other, some narratives happen to begin but have no end in sight. This is a story of an eight-year-old boy, named Wang Fuman, who lives in an impoverished, remote village in Yunnan province of China and walks three miles through streams and mountains to get to his school every day.          

On an icy morning in January this year when ‘Little Wang’ reached his school after venturing the usual 90-minute trek, with his eyebrow, hair, and eyelashes, as well as his insubstantially thick winter jacket covered with frost – making him resemble a walking snowman – he immediately became a subject of amusement for his classmates. His hands were swollen and cheeks sharply red and chapped, however.     

A teacher at the school snapped some pictures of the boy and sent them to a few individuals. The teacher or someone else posted those photographs on social media. Thousands of users of the Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo shared the pictures, whereas they received hundreds of thousands of likes elsewhere on Chinese social media, making the boy an internet sensation within days.

Soon, along with words of sympathy for the hardship of the boy and praise for his fortitude, barrages of donations of warm clothes, heating system, and money to his school and charities poured in. The boy and his family also received cash, toys, books, and clothes. Wang’s father – a migrant worker who worked around 250 miles away and usually visited home twice a year – was offered an employment in his village so he could afford to be with his family.

As many as 95 per cent of school kids at Gaida Primary School in Luodian in Guizhou province of China are left-behind children. (Photo courtesy: People's Daily Online) 

Little Wang is a ‘left-behind child’ – one of more than 60 million children in the countryside of China whose parents, mostly migrant workers, are forced to leave their homes and live in cities to earn livelihood. Wang lives in a dilapidated house with his grandmother and a sister who is two years older than himself. His mother left the family two years ago after growing frustrated with deprived conditions and failing to make ends meet.

While Wang’s internet fame may have comparatively assuaged his family’s difficult socio-economic conditions, his story unfolds the unfortunate situation of tens of millions of left-behind children living not just in China but across the world. A report released by a Chinese NGO in 2017 suggested that around one-third of rural students in China were left-behind children. Even more upsetting, the report anticipated that as many as ten million rural students of the country could have been forsaken by both of their parents.   

The stern circumstances are believed to be causing left-behind children to experience development problems related to mental health, behavior change, and emotional insecurity. Equally pressing to contemplate is that leaving these children behind entails an augmented risk of puncturing the social structure that holds rural communities together. While Wang’s story may have diminutively helped promote social awareness of the poverty scowling at children in poorer, remote, and rural communities, there are millions of other children whose misery finds no voice or representation to put before the world.  

With children accounting for around half of the extreme poor of the world (forty-seven per cent, to be precise, according to UNICEF), more – substantively more – should be done to ensure that they are protected from vulnerabilities and have adequate access to social care and services they need.

Language and Identity: Catalan Case

Language functions as a carrier for culture. The very concept of a culture is rooted in its language. On language, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the most prominent poets and philosophers of the Romantic period, said that it is the armoury of the human mind that contains the trophies of the past and the weapon of its future conquests. Language is the mold that surrounds our cultural identity. The culture is carved in our language – the primary method of identity.

      

John E Joseph, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, in his book ‘Language and Identity’ (2004) defines linguistic identities as ‘double-edged swords’. While acting in a constructive manner to give individuals a sense of belonging by representing an ‘us’ opposed to a ‘them’, it also becomes easy for linguistic identities to demonise themselves. A language’s cultural allegiance also gives rises to regionalism, which often converts itself into a political ideology, and, on occasions, separatism.

      

Catalan case  

On one day towards the end of the summer of 2012, an unwonted development occurred in Catalonia, an autonomous region of Spain. Under the slogan ‘Catalunya, nou estat d'Europa’ (‘Catalonia, new state in Europe’), up to 2m Catalans gathered in central areas of Barcelona, bringing the city centre to a standstill for hours.

The rally – the largest ever organised in Catalonia since La Transición (the Spanish transition to democracy) following the death of the Spain’s military dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 – marked the culmination of a series of protests called ‘Marxa cap a la Independència’ (‘March towards Independence’) that had begun in June that year to demand independence of the region from Spain.

This was not the first time Catalans poured into the streets en masse as part of their independence movement. The political movement started in nineteen-twenties, though the movement in modern days had its seeds sown in 2010 when the Constitutional Court, Spain’s highest judicial body, annulled parts of constitutional regulations granting Catalonia powers of self-rule. The move has since prompted protests on various occasions over these years.

The issue significantly escalated in the second half of 2017, with unprecedented events such as independence referendum held in October and the Constitutional Court declaring it illegal, the imposition of Spain’s direct rule on Catalonia, arrests of several regional government officials, and regional elections in December in which pro-independence parties won a majority.                            

Catalan separatist flag outside the regional government headquarters in Barcelona (pic courtesy: Reuters/Juan Medina)

The separatist sentiment in Catalonia has long been fuelled partly due to the perception that Spain threatens Catalan linguistic identity by attempting to ‘hispanicise’ the region. Catalan language was banned for around forty years during the dictatorship of General Franco, who came into power following the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The tyranny of military rule not only impacted Catalonia politically but culturally as well. As democracy returned in Spain in the nineteen-seventies, Catalans have contributed by letting flow their time and money into safeguarding the centuries-old language.  

Death of linguistic identities and cultures occur in severe cases of marginalisation. Fortuitously, it is not the case with Catalonia. Catalan ideologies about their identity can be viewed in two ways: language-and-identity and language-and-territory, with the former sharing more an emotional link with language and the other implying that Catalan language should be the one practiced as the main language in public settings. Catalonian’s law mandates the use of Catalan language at schools, hospitals and public sector offices.

In comparison with majority of socio-political and cultural movements that are based on race and ethnicity, language has played a crucial role in firmly determining a Catalan identity. Conversely, a pivotal part of the Catalan identity is not only the local language, but the fact that Catalans are amicably bilingual in both Spanish and Catalan. The Catalan Institute for Statistics suggests that more than fifty percent of Catalans adjudge Spanish to be their native language despite the fact that over eighty percent of the regional population can speak Catalan.

Amid an unceasing, heated pro-independence movement and nationalist parties coming back in power in regional parliament, the time may be ripe for Catalans to realise that secessionism is bad not just for Catalonia but also Spain, as well as Europe. There are constructive social elements such as pluralism and integration that Catalans ought to hold in high regard rather than embracing separatist groups. Multiculturalism and multilingualism can not only aggrandise socio-economic opportunities but also counter marginalisation and culture decay of the region.