Master 240: Why study philosophy?

I interviewed last week to teach as an adjunct at Azusa Pacific University. One of the things we talked about in that interview was the challenge of motivating undergraduates (and people in general) to take the project of philosophy seriously. Particularly since it often seems to engage questions and topics that are so far removed from the exigencies of daily life, how can we help students to appreciate the value of studying and doing philosophy? Philosophy of science? Logic? Epistemology? Theories of truth? Dualism vs. materialism vs. idealism? Why ought a student to study these things or why would it be worthwhile for a student to study these things?

After talking about this a bit in my interview, I happened to glance through the first chapter of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. In that chapter, I think Screwtape does a nice job of clarifying the choice that we (humans) have before us. Of course, he's focusing on keeping Wormwood's patient from Christianity--not keeping undergrads out of philosophy. But I actually think there are strong parallels and connections between the two projects.

So I invite you to read Screwtape's first letter. (The bold-facing is mine. The italics are original.) Then ask yourself whether it might not be important to take at least some time to think about the 'big questions'.

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My dear Wormwood,

I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily 'true' or 'false', but as 'academic' or 'practical', 'outworn' or 'contemporary', 'conventional' or 'ruthless'. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous--that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real'.

Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's!) you don't realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defense by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said 'Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning,' the patent brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added 'Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind,' he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of 'real life' (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all 'that sort of thing' just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about 'that inarticulate sense of actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic'. He is now safe in Our Father's house.

You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable 'real life'. But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he know it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is 'the results of modern investigation'. Do remember you are there fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape

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Of course I'm not suggesting that everybody ought to think about the philosophical or the abstract all the time. I don't even think that most people should think about that stuff most of the time. But I think probably everybody needs to think about the philosophical at some time, especially given our contemporary pluralistic, relativistic culture.

If you have never taken the time to think about the presuppositions that you take for granted and the worldview that informs your way of understanding your life and the world around you, that's probably not because you happened, by accident, to fall into a way of making sense of the world that's consistent, coherent, and sensible. Most people, I suspect (and fear), who have never thought about what they really believe, and whether that body of beliefs makes sense, have probably just unreflectively fallen into patterns of life that echo what the loudest voices around them tell them. And we all know, I hope, that the loudest voice isn't always the right voice.

So, do undergraduates have a vested interest in taking their philosophy classes seriously, even if doing so doesn't have an immediate, 'practical' pay-off? Well, let me put the question in a more 'loaded' way: is better or worse for undergraduates to be the pawns of Wormwood's schemes?

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God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.