Laurent Bibard, Professor at ESSEC Business School, states that philosophy is a skill that helps solve problems and comments on knowing how to rediscover our skills and asking the right questions about our future priorities
We’re oversaturated with answers and solutions – including solutions to problems that have not even been identified. The economy is focused on providing solutions, because both the economy as a lived experience and the science of economics are focused on satisfying basic needs like eating.
If we humans don’t meet these needs every day, there’s no way around it: we won’t survive long-term. Our basic needs are vital to ensure our survival.
Economic life, sophisticated as it is, never loses touch with this determining factor. It is fundamentally and irrevocably oriented to the short term. It is focused on solutions, effectiveness, spontaneous action, performance, and maximising profits. In short, it’s driven by hunger, thirst, fear of missing out, and urgency.
How we can find meaning in our behaviour and activities
To fight against this short-term perspective, we all need to take a step back and look at the world around us. While it makes sense for the economic world to be focused on effectiveness in the short-term, the “real world” – meaning all that makes us human – is not all about profit and considers how we can find meaning in our behaviour and activities.
Along those lines, if management is the art of finding answers and solutions, philosophy is the art of asking the right questions and asking them clearly – before major problems arise. Philosophy is the choice to be careful and think ahead – to avoid heading for disaster.
The art of asking the right questions can and must be cultivated daily, with rigour, logic, and perspective on the short-term thinking inherent to our everyday needs. By the way, the art of finding the correct answers – or the solutions to our problems – emerges indeed rather spontaneously from the difficulties that we all encounter throughout our lives!
Knowing how to rediscover our skills
A good way of nurturing this essential capacity for problematisation, which characterises us just as much as our short-termism, is knowing how to rediscover our skills: our skills come from past experience, yet strangely enough, they elude us. From birth, we spend our time learning how to make coffee, get dressed, count, speak, write, and do our jobs.
This means that our past experiences, the base of our lives, are like an invisible carpet, since we are sitting on it. Thus, we « forget » these experiences. The philosopher Eric Weil said that we don’t see the ground on which we stand – and he’s right. Our solid foundations are slipping away from us. Not because we don’t need them – quite the contrary! They elude us because they are so close to us – they’re the base on which our lives are founded.
Asking the right questions about our future priorities
By clearly identifying our foundations, we can start asking the right questions about our priorities for the future and the problems we need to address to ensure our future has meaning. In doing so, we can gain perspective and start thinking about what is really important.
This fundamental possibility of asking the right questions is what philosophy is all about. The role of philosophy in business schools comes down to asking oneself if the questions we want to ask, and the problems we want to solve, are the right questions and the right problems. This, of course, includes, but is not limited to, ethical questions.
That’s why philosophy plays a key role in business schools – and why some schools, like ESSEC, have done so for decades!
