Thoughts on Academic Philosophy and Unifying Theories

One of the biggest problems with "doing philosophy," academically is that students go into it thinking that they will study great thinkers and then write original material after they study, and then realize that there are so many thinkers, so many movements, so many revolutions in thought, and so many schools of thought, that they never get to the original stuff.

This problem stems, in part, from the fact that academic philosophy programs insist on endless commentary of old thought. (I mean honestly, how much is there left to say about Plato for god's sake?)  In one of his writings, Karl Rahner, the 20th century Jesuit theologian, discusses the sheer amount of information that is in the world to digest, and how we are never really going to be able to process all of it. Specialization within specialized fields has already developed (inevitable especially in historical studies), but this may be a double-edged sword, so to speak. Rahner agrees with me here (or I agree with Rahner? Yeah, that).  It is fascinating to analyze the various facets of our lives - sociological, biological, psychological, religious, theological, linguistic - but do we lose sight of the whole? I think we do. Rahner here would say we're losing sight of the whole that is our life in God.  I say we're losing sight of the whole as a unified existence.

I don't claim to know enough to even begin to describe some sort of unified theory of everything, but I do think that individual specialization is hindering different groups of specialists from collaborating to  investigate unifying aspects of their work and how they relate to the universe as a whole.

This relates back to just the study of philosophy; in that philosophy, at its inception, was the study of universal education. In India, philosophical discussion sought to explain the universe.  In Greece, philosophical discourse was born out of de-mythologizing the universe. We have deviated from that. Of course this was inevitable, and indeed necessary for the evolution of humanity. But if the existentialist movement has taught us nothing about universal truth, it has taught us to be true to our own nature. And that tendency to unify experience, to unify our lives within the greater universe itself seems (at least to me) to be a part of human nature. (And if Kant has taught us anything about metaphysical truth, it's that even if it's impossible to discern, our minds still desire to brazenly declare that we know it, just based on our own tendency to universalize everything - we jump from experience to metaphysics because that is what we think we should do).

Many people still believe that the mind and body are separate, or that one has more power than the other. Philosophers and theologians and medical doctors all want to have claim over one speciality or another. Theologians claim the soul/mind, doctors claim the body, psychiatrists claim the mind, and neuroscientists claim the brain. My point is that if they each claim difference, humanity will never move forward. Further relating humans to the rest of the universe will be even more difficult, but I think is something that academicians should be working on together, and be accepting new theories, new writings, without worrying about merely commenting and dissecting earlier philosophical writings.

[I'd like to forgo proper grammar and put the following in brackets: My desire for academic philosophy to change its standard operating procedure is not to be confused with academic scientific research's tradition of utilizing established scientific theories for reference. Although I of course think that many breakthroughs in science happen because some dare to break tradition, I understand that in a field such as physics, it would be flat out stupid to just discount the last hundred years of discoveries and just start making crap up.]

All of that said and considered, I understand why philosophers find the need to explicate old thought for new generations and I don't have a problem with that, necessarily. I just think that there is a lack of creativity in academic philosophy programs and that is precisely why some of these programs are being cut from universities - because there are deemed wholly impractical or useless. (While I of course disagree with these conclusions, I still think creativity is desperately needed to save the programs and the art of philosophizing altogether).