A Vice Chancellor was grumbling about the amount of money spent by the Science Faculty. "These science guys eat up millions just to buy research equipment. Why can't they be like the Maths Department? They just need pencils, paper, and a large waste-paper basket. Better still, take after the Philosophy Department; they just need pencils and paper."

Philosophers and people who study philosophy are easy to laugh at. Take Thales for instance. He was the first bona fide philosopher of the ancient Greek world, flourishing around 7th century BC. One day, walking with his eyes gazing at the stars in the heavens, he fell into a well, drawing giggles from a pretty maid near by.

Since then, it has been the fate of philosophers to gaze at stars and fall into all kinds of pitfalls under their feet, drawing laughter and ridicule from onlookers.

Jokes about these idiosyncratic philosophers abound of course. Rene Descartes was having a few drinks in his favourite bar. At the end of the evening, the bar-tender asked him if he wanted one for the road. He replied, "I don't think so." In an instant, he disappeared like a puff of wind.

That is an inside joke. To appreciate it, you have to know that Rene Descartes, otherwise known as the Father of Modern Philosophy, was the one who invented the famous saying: "I think, therefore I exist." In the process, he separated the human body from the human mind beyond any hope of reunification of the whole person.

Philosophy students inclined towards arrogant elitism like Descartes' cogito ergo sum. By that line of reckoning, most people in the world do not think like the philosophers do, and so they do not really exist. No wonder people like to laugh at philosophers!

Short-lived venture

A few years ago, I told the Chinese towkay of my favourite coffee shop in Kuching, that I was going to teach philosophy in a private college in Kuala Lumpur. He looked puzzled and asked with some hesitation," What is philosophy used for?" "For running coffee shops, for one thing," I replied, without batting an eye lid. My wit brought down the whole house.

My venture into the world of pedagogy proved to be short-lived. Except for the 10% or so at the top of the class, the students were more interested in getting easy grades than the historical materialist dialectic of Marx, the ontology and metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, or Kant's attempt to establish the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge. The odd ones would be curious about the existentialists and we discussed the idea of suicide briefly.

This episode often reminds me of Jacque Derrida, the French philosopher most famous for establishing his school of thought known as "deconstructionist". (Of course it has to be a long word ending with ism!" He deconstructed himself a few months ago by dying.

Like many other great thinkers before him, Jacque Derrida suffered the painful fate of being cited often, without having been read and understood. To the uninitiated, his writing reads like gibberish. Try the following lines for size:

"Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally. Finally, but why? To learn to live; a strange watchword. Who would learn? To teach to live, but to whom? Will we ever learn how to live and first of all, what 'to learn to live' means? And why 'finally'?"

"By itself, out of context but a context, always remain open, thus fallible and insufficient the watchword forms an almost unintelligible syntagm. Just how far can its idiom be translated moreover?"

More disoriented

The question sounds enigmatic; after all, most people would be puzzled about life and how to live it, once in a while. But Derrida's explication is so opaque that, having struggled through a page or two of this unintelligible stuff, the average Malaysian reader is all too ready to cast the book aside. Those genuinely interested in learning philosophy would probably fling the book against the wall in sheer exasperation. .

If a contemporary philosopher like Derrida proves to be inaccessible, think of how hard it can be to study the original classics written by great philosophers of the past centuries. Hegel, Marx, Kant, and even the ever-popular Nietzsche are the kind of philosophical heavy-weights who have sent many a philosophy student to the infirmary with request for an ample supply of Panadol and anti-depressant.

As a result, most people just stay away from philosophy. After all, you can get through life quite well without knowing any philosophical mumbo-jumbo. If fact, there is no shortage of those odd souls who dabble in philosophy in their spare time, and turn out more disoriented and more confused than ever.

In any case, on those odd occasions when the meaning of life becomes more than an irritation, there is always the counsellor, the psychiatrist, the motivational speaker, or the charismatic preacher. When one is confused, one needs concrete workable tangible answers. Philosophy as the above quotation from Derrida shows - raises more questions than answers them.

But I am reminded of Derrida for one reason. He was a professional philosopher; he wrote and taught philosophy all his life. But he also came from a long French tradition, beginning probably with Emile Zola, and saw the role of a thinker also as an engaged public intellectual actively involved in political issues on the fringes far from the centre of political power.

One of his achievements was to mobilise and organise teachers and parents to lobby for the continuation of teaching philosophy in French high schools!

No philosophy department

It is hard for us to imagine philosophy being taught to secondary students. In France though, philosophy has always been a part of their secondary curriculum. When that status was threatened, Derrida and his friends succeeded in building enough pressure to reinstate the teaching of this seemingly useless subject.

Such a thing will never happen in Malaysia. In fact, as far as I know, in the many universities and colleges in Malaysia, not a single institution of higher learning has a philosophy department, although separate introductory courses are offered.

If I were to become the Minister of Education, I will order that every university in Malaysia must have a full-fledged philosophy department, and that Philosophy 101 shall become a compulsory subject for a first degree in all disciplines, including that of hair-styling and flower arrangement.

Fortunately for parents and students alike, Malaysians who have studied philosophy academically number less than the fingers of one hand. That kind of numbers makes for a weak lobby, so my proposition would probably die an early painless death.

Besides, I am unlikely to become the Minister of Education ever, because I am classified as a Chinese, albeit without my consent. In Malaysia, the unwritten rules of who is qualified to become which Cabinet Minister is more powerful than any written provisions of our sacred constitutions mouthing useless platitude about equality before the law. So there you are, rest assured that your children will never have to fling thick volumes of philosophical classics against the wall.

It is just as well that I shall be spared the excruciating task of answering inane questions like "What is philosophy for?" Or "What is philosophy?" Socrates tried that in Athens in 5th century BC. The fine citizens of that democracy voted to sentence him to death for "misleading the youths and preaching false gods". It is better to be misunderstood and laughed at than having to drink hemlock.

Why should we, why should we?

I can just imagine Socrates in modern day Kuala Lumpur. There he is, trying to gather an audience by the roadside in Pudu Bazaar, or the Sungei Wang Plaza, shooting off his big mouth about an unexamined life being not worth living and so on.

Some Malays will probably threaten to stone him for insulting Islam. Some Chinese will take a look at his tattered clothes and give him a wide berth. Some Indians will probably argue with him endlessly about everything. The police or the enforcement officers from DBKL will probably ask him for coffee money, or arrest him for not possessing some kind of permit or license. The old gadfly will not last a day in Bolehland.

I read an article written by a Malaysian lady-writer once, wondering about philosophy and philosophers. Her conclusion took the form of a rhetorical question: "Why should we read books written by dead white males?"

Why indeed! As long as we have our loaded rhetorical questions, our cute one-liners, our nightly TV pronunciation of self-evident truths from our political Big Brothers speaking ex-cathedra, and our prejudices disguised as conventional Asian wisdom, why should we torture ourselves with the unsavoury business of pursuing Truth, Beauty and the Good?

Anyway, what is the use of Truth, Beauty and the Good?

Philosophy, anyone?