A Forgotten Mandate of Philosophy

发表时间：2026-01-12 09:27

Rongqing Dai

Abstract

Keywords: Philosophy, Metaphysical Abstraction, Troubleshooting, Social Problems, Discipline

1. Introduction

Telling the world about how the world is doing has been a long forgotten duty of the academic philosophy. The reason behind is understandable: our modern world is too complicated to summarize in comparison with the ancient world of a couple thousand years ago; nonetheless, this by no means should be the excuse for the community of philosophy to shirk the responsibility of telling the world about how the world is doing. In fact, asking the community of philosophy to tell the world about how the world is doing is just asking them to exercise a very fundamental skill of a philosopher --- metaphysical abstraction.

2. A Warranted Discipline

As human society gets ever more sophisticated due to cultural development including (but not limited to) the advance of science and technology as well as the emergence of ever more new social professions, the perception of each individual about the world around would keep changing from decade to decade, or even from year to year. But that changed perception about the world could very discrepant from person to person; more importantly, the whole populace does not have a holistic perception about the whole world. Even those who work at the frontiers of the cutting edge science and technology are interested only in the technical perspective of their work, instead of how the grand picture of the whole world changes with their work. This could be a detrimental situation for civilization because it would cause the whole oblivious to issues that might be potentially inimical to the wellbeing or even survival of the human species.

Therefore, we need a cultural sector, or an academic subject, to take the responsibility of overlooking the ongoing evolution of the civilization.

2.1. The basic mandate of the new discipline

To the casual eye, it might look like a very technical task due to the need of knowing the progresses in various scientific and technological areas, as well as the economic and political development around the world, or even the need to have the capacity to monitor the variations of different social indices. Although that is partially true because information collection is certainly important for this unique task, it is more important to understand the significance of the collected information to the wellbeing and the future of the civilization, which would be a very advanced high level philosophical job. The extreme sophistication of our civilization as mentioned earlier indeed makes it far less than enough to have a discipline that would only specialized in data processing, or reading big data reports, or training AI to do technical jobs. In fact, nowadays the governments around the world are very good at collecting all kinds of information, but obviously they are not very good at providing a clear vision to the world about what kind of challenges that we as intelligent species will be facing in the coming future and how we should dealing with them.

2.2. A major task and required skill for the new discipline

In addition to the concern that we need to refresh the global perception of the world as the civilization advances, another important mandate of telling the world how the world is doing is to continuously diagnose the existing problem of the world. Accordingly, here I am not talking about a discipline that can collect information from all cultural sectors to compile reports based on the collected data and issue reports to the public or departments of the government, but rather a new discipline that is not only able to comprehend the situation of the world on the surface, but also able to carry out the task of troubleshooting problems in this world no matter where they are, especially those serious problems that have been either ignored or intentionally covered by the professionals in some specific disciplines as what happened in the past with some foundational areas for the civilization.

Professionals in this new discipline need to be able to satisfactorily comprehend and master the knowledge of any specific discipline at fair ease when it is necessarily needed. Correspondingly, one of the most important qualities for this task would be the capability of perceiving the profound logical connections between different critical elements of our civilization. This would of course require the basic capability of comprehending the general knowledge in various scientific and technological areas as well as the development in different social economic and political sectors, but would also require a qualification that goes much beyond the basic.

2.3. A branch discipline in the discipline of philosophy

Although the nowadays professional philosophers would be more than happy to render this task to any profession other than themselves since they know that they are not academically prepared for such a daunting burden, this task has to belong to the ancient edifice of the professional philosophy. This is because even if we do have a new discipline that is responsible for the task of updating the world with new meanings to the being and becoming of the civilization brought forth by the development of the civilization itself, then we will feel obliged to attribute it to philosophy due to its demanding requirement of the aptitude of philosophical abstraction and reasoning. Accordingly, if anyone can be qualified for this task, even if he does not graduate from the department of philosophy, he will still be a philosopher since he is not proper for any other specific academic subject.

Then it might come back to the question whether it is possible for anyone today to undertake the said task considering the complicatedness of nowadays human knowledge system and social activities. The answer is yes because of the following reasons:

1) We don’t expect the said disciple to function perfectly since none of the academic disciplines, including philosophy, has ever functioned perfectly;

2) In general, the new professionals only need to be good at comprehending the philosophical meaning and significance of those critical advances based on the reports without the need to become experts on details unless necessary for the task;

3) Although the new discipline as a whole is mandated to cover all the specific disciplines in the world, it is not necessary for every professional in the new discipline to cover all the specific disciplines in the world, and there could be division of majors within the new discipline. In this sense, the new discipline resembles the real world division of professions at a higher level;

4) Although it is required of the new discipline to be able to troubleshoot detailed problems in specific disciplines when necessary, normally their main job would be overlook what are significant to the civilization. Due to the basically continuous development of the world, whatever that could be characterized as significant to the civilization would surface above the other information, and thus be reported by the relevant professions so that people who carry on the said task normally do not need to delve into every academic field or every social profession.

3. Final Remark

Why is the diagnosis of social problems a philosophical task? Today diagnosis of social problems might sound like more a problem for specific social sciences or even natural sciences for it involves practices in natural sciences like physics as part of the general social problems, instead of philosophy. But it indeed is an important philosophical task. The reason lies in the logical layers of all the social problems. We might better understand this issue from the social dynamic point of view. From the social dynamic point of view, on the surface layer of any problem, it would be easier for specific sciences to discover some obvious simple defects in the daily operations in their daily practices. However, one of the reasons that some problems have been troubled the human world for millenniums but never been solved or even never been clearly spotted is because social problems are often logically very complicated, and this is not something that could be easily unveiled or solved by specific sciences, but need to be first comprehended through advanced philosophical analysis or philosophizing.

Diagnosis of the problem of the world is a very difficult task that human beings have so far been doing very poorly. It has been supposed to be one of the mandates of philosophy, and many philosophers in history did attempt to work on this issue, but the performance has been very unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, the most important reason why the task of telling the world how the world is doing has been forgotten for the past few centuries is not the complicatedness of the world, but the difficulty to find highly qualified candidates to carry on the task within the academic professional philosophers. This of course should not be an excuse that we as the people in this earth village can accept to let the academic professional philosophers to shirk their responsibility on a task that is of critical importance to our civilization; rather, it just simply demands that we must upgrade our social selection mechanism so that people who are capable of doing the job be given the chance to carry on the mandate no matter they graduate from the department of philosophy or not, and in the meantime, we should also upgrade our educational system to create candidates to meet the challenging requirement.