Another Great Battle

How can anyone who speaks a Western tongue, especially those among us who purport to be educated, afford not to study philosophy? I ask you! I implore you! Quo vadis? Whither goest thou without any understanding of whence we have come and who we are? And this is to say nothing of where we hope to go. In the works of Voltaire, we find a reference to a letter from Henry IV, the King of France, to an ill-knighted person by the name of Crillon, who, most unfortunately, arrived after a great battle had been fought. To the tardy Crillon, Henry IV wrote: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there."

We stand today on the edge of another great battle, that between humanistic learning in our nation and in our universities on the one hand, and the shallow, opportunistic, and personally aggrandizing appeal to the bottom-line principle of sheerly economic accountability on the other hand. Unlike Crillon, I plan to be at this battle and I trust that you will do likewise, for to do less is to abandon all that is distinctively human. I tell this to our children and to my students. I ask them to pass the message to their children and to their students. Philistines and purveyors of the shallow are everywhere. They pervade the university as well as the marketplace. It is our task to sustain and celebrate the wisdom of the past on behalf of our obligation to make possible the wisdom of the present. More than seventy years ago, William James said that philosophy bakes no bread. True enough, nor does it build bridges or clone cells. Yet a society that only bakes bread, builds bridges, and clones cells is a society that has failed to realize its deepest mission. The ancients knew well that time will seize us, in time. Our task is to think deeply about the most quixotic of all cosmic events, namely, the utterly transient yet powerful existence of a human life. Three millennia of philosophical speculation have addressed that paradox. And it is to that same ambivalence between power and fragility that we address ourselves once again. Ultimate conclusions are beyond our reach, but the quality of our endeavor is a gauge of the worthiness of our cause. Those of us who have bartered the present for a paradisiacal future, much less a career, have missed the drama of the obvious. Philosophy teaches us that every day, everyone has access to the depth of being human. We should not await salvation while the parade passes by. The nectar of a guaranteed human future is illusory and the height of self-deception. Our death is imminent. Philosophy sanctifies our reflective effort to ask why and, above all, philosophy makes an effort to tell the truth. In our time, what could be a more outlandish and coveted activity?
-John J. McDermott, "The Cultural Immortality of Philosophy"