As investment in real higher education declines, it matches a flagging interest in philosophy.  It is not, however, that philosophy itself is intrinsically less interesting.  There are outstanding philosophical issues that remain unresolved, which means there is a lot of life left in them.  It is just that modern people of the Twenty-First Century are so shallow, distracted, anxious and unhappy that it does not occur to them that philosophical issues are missing from their life.  It is not important to them that they are blowing their chance to do genuine, original thinking.  Out of arrogance and ignorance, they imagine they do not need serious inquiry into life and being.

 

What is to be done?  We cannot undertake a Heideggeresque teasing of people for claiming “interest” in philosophy like the German people who subsequently produced Hitler and the Holocaust.  That was the early Twentieth Century.  In this early Twenty-First Century, people claim no interest in philosophy at all, but they have produced the Neo-Nazi Neo-Conservatives in America and New Labour in Britain.  The new Holocaust will probably be an attempted genocide of Muslims, coupled with self-righteous military control of dwindling Mideast Oil reserves.  In one-hundred years, the Western world has gone from pseudo-intellectualism to anti-intellectualism.  To be utterly thoughtless is now a prerequisite for accepted membership in everyday normal society.

 

If you are at all seriously thoughtful, inquiring and philosophically inclined, you are a member of a dying breed.  The natural network of real thinkers is a battered and tattered club of dwindling numbers.  Even chess clubs have shrinking memberships as fewer and fewer young, bright people can enjoy overly analyzed openings and unbeatable computers.  The average I.Q. is going down in America, Britain and Europe.  This entire sociological catastrophe is thus itself an anti-Hegelian wave of history.  A new dark age is on the horizon.  Progress stopped with Bush and Blair.  All this is perhaps an issue of Philosophy of History.  But it is also Existential.  The “they-self” of Heidegger is ever more massive and seamless, while the “authentic and resolute” individual self is ever more rare.

 

Post-modernism, having dissolved silly socially constructed “reality”, has sunk beneath the quicksand of cynical sophistry and technological atheism as punishment for its sins of omission of valid metaphysical inquiry.  The postmodernists and robo-scientists have rightly broken down rigid metaphysical answers, but wrongly suffocated and humiliated flexible metaphysical questions.

 

Modern scientific eliminative materialism says man is a robot without a transcendental soul or spirit witnessing the mechanical cognitions and activities; ancient Samkhya says man is a robot with a transcendental witness, a Purusha who watches his mechanical cognitions and activities take place within the grand mechanism of nature, Prakrti.  Of course, the egocentric scientists who proudly look down upon all of us “folk psychologists” or “believers in Qualia”, almost fancy themselves as elite-core “purushas” as hyper-robots of detached intelligence worthy to comment on our folksy “mechanisms”.  They hint that they are “objective witnesses” who can see clearly our digital selves imagining we “have” supersensible souls.  From the standpoint of Samkhya, their contradictory egocentric position of philosophical superiority is itself a mechanism of Prakrti below the level of the true detached witness, Purusha.

 

The free-will issue is alive and kicking.  According to ancient Samkhya philosophy, there is no “free-will” on the three levels of Prakrti, which are our physical body, subtle body and reincarnating causal body.  Only the transcendental spirit, Purusha, has “free-will”.  As long as we are not functioning superconsciously on that level and from that level, we are ignorant mechanisms, mere causal puppets of karmic destiny, which includes both mechanical believers and mechanical disbelievers.  So Free Will is indeed worth having, but we can only have it on a level of existence where it can be had.

 

Genuine philosophy goes beyond trying to persuade the weak-minded to believe or disbelieve.  Such persuasions are sociological behaviour, not philosophical inquiry.  Renewal of philosophy requires this understanding.