Phet and Philosophy

Sunday, 6th June 2010, 12:00 P.M.



I woke up at four thirty today because my alarm clock was screaming and so was my sister. I dragged myself blearily out of bed and out of the room and walked into a world that was black and blue. Beaten black and blue by Mr. Phet to whom Karachi had apparently been the unwillingly hospitable host since three in the night. You could hear the reptilian sounds of dripping water in the distance. I felt like I was standing in an underground cave. And as I scaled the stairs in the darkness with my guttering candle flinging shadows on the wall I felt like a character in one of those Victorian 'penny dreadfuls'. I picked up the first book my hands found in the dark and went out onto the terrace. The place was flooded, ice cold water sloshing around gently, threateningly with a trace pattern of mud. I pulled my feet up on the wicker armchair and, in the vague blue light from the clouds, began to read the book I'd picked up.

Prejudice, that's the word. I'd always been prejudiced against philosophy. I guess it was because my grandmother used to say that if you start thinking about how there's you in your house, your house in a town, your town in a city, your city in a... well you get my drift, then you'll go berserk thinking about the planets in the universe and the universe in the nothingness. And you'll drive yourself mad wondering where it all ends. And who is at the end of it. But then with 'Sophie's World' (yes that's the book I'd picked up), I dove into philosophy and realized that it was really not that convoluted. Socrates (or Plato, or Democritus) must have found himself standing on a metaphorical terrace watching a hypothetical storm rage in the sky turning the weather into perfect misty cold and showering raindrops on the the unfurling blossoms of the trees and he must have realized that there had to be someone directing this whole act. And since nobody could tell him who that was and he was certain that it wasn't Mr. Zeus, Mr. I-want-to-have-sex-with-anybodybutHera coordinating this marvelous scene he had to do the thinking himself. And that's all philosophy is. A sequence of logical deduction to get to the answer of a question.

And that made me realize what our problem is. It's like when you're sitting in the dark and somebody turns on the light and you contentedly resume your work, unaware of where the light came from because you never had to wonder. But if you had been Thomas Edison sitting in the dark you might have racked your brains to invent the light bulb, or if you were Aristotle you might have taken out your telescope and ransacked the skies to find out where the sun is and what it does. Our problem is that somebody else turned on the light for us. It's like we are blind because we never felt the need to see since somebody else was planting the pictures of everything around us in our minds. And we can never be sure if those pictures are the truth because we didn't bother to train ourselves to see. I've noticed that people who convert to a religion are always more attuned to it than people who've been born in a religion. I guess that's because the former consciously discovered what they wanted to believe in. So even though I think my grandmother was right in saying that there are some things that the human intellect cannot comprehend, I think we should still, occasionally, wonder why things are the way they are, even if they're questions we can't answer. Because if we don't we'll never be the Socrates of our generation, we'll be the mob that fed him hemlock.