Philosophy’s Use

Philosophy is, by its etymology, the love of wisdom. However, that isn’t necessarily what it’s used for, and can more accurately be defined in practice as “generalized understanding“.

What It Is

Every discipline is configured to address a specific portion of living:

Though those roles seem dramatically different, they have many components in common with one another. As someone develops a craft, they start straddling into neighboring specializations, and masters of a craft often become highly skilled at multiple disciplines to accomplish their purposes.

As we keep creating, we naturally form abstract values. These values compile into broad-scoping things that run farther than what we presently understand.

We subconsciously, automatically abstract things because it’s easier in the long term. It’s far easier to keep triggers and symbols in our conscious instead of the step-by-step procedure or mental framework. Professionals in any career do it naturally, and you can usually tell how by the arrangement of their ideas around their trade-specific language.

These abstractions are far more useful than just that line of work. Those values can apply to many, many elements across many disciplines. That is, in effect, what philosophy is:

These things are all matter of what is good, true, and beautiful.

Abstracted

We assembled many of our values automatically for specific purposes, but philosophers frequently go much farther than that and will try to dig deeper into the abstractions.

At the bottom of the abstractions, we have universally applicable things that are so broad and so vague that we have very little to practically apply them to. These “impracticals” are usually the realm of most philosophy books.

Impracticals take tremendous work to drag them back down to daily life. Most philosophy fans imply that it’s a necessary “soft skill” for living the good life, but that’s only proportional to the reader’s genetic and trained intelligence.

These impracticals are only valuable as long as they’re theoretically useful somewhere. If practical understanding refutes an impractical later (e.g., a categorization doesn’t conform with scientific discoveries 100 years later), then it wasn’t a particularly reliable belief.

People who attain the good life will naturally discover the impracticals in the course of living well. If someone isn’t particularly intelligent, the last thing they need is to deluge their mind with a vague understanding of difficult concepts that have limited use, especially if they don’t enjoy it.

Eras

To consider the scope of philosophers’ writings, most Western philosophy can broadly classify into four distinct “eras”.

I. Classical

Most of the philosophers of antiquity (e.g., Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) were Greek. They logically broke apart the components of reality to ask what things are.

At the time, this was a relatively new idea, at least in its scope. They were asking meaningful questions that forced anyone from any discipline to stop and more wholly consider who they were and what they were doing. They also tried expressing the experience as a lifestyle that extended out of their thinking and understanding.

The lifestyle of a philosopher was often treated as an important basis for their understanding, and some philosophy students were never taught philosophy until age 30. This value has a bit of upper-class privilege, but has merit by avoiding youthful arguing.

In effect, they created many “building blocks” to describe what reality is. Everyone should read some ancient Greek philosophy at least once.

II. Religious (Medieval Era)

Starting with the formation of the Catholic Church, philosophers like St. Augustine, St. Anselm, and St. Thomas Aquinas asked questions designed to expand our understanding of our relationship with God.

This exploration used the building blocks toward each individual’s religious experience and the development of the soul, so it maintained its lifestyle components but localized them toward a more specific purpose.

But, it has limited use because not everyone cares to develop their relationship with the unknown. Anyone who is a Christian, however, should really read them, but it’s only marginally useful to the rest of the world.

III. Practical (Age of Reason)

During the Protestant Reformation and transition into a secularized society, philosophers like Locke, Voltaire, and Hobbes went back to the building blocks of antiquity. This time, they asked how to live well individually, but expanded the question to broadly include how we should live in groups.

These explorations diverge from daily life and ask how we can build society into a better place to live. The idea wasn’t as a passive exploration of what existed, but as an attempt to command reality. They’ve somewhat succeeded in creating non-religious government, though that’s very debatable depending on who you ask.

Political theory serves very little benefit for private individuals, but it provides plenty of value for anyone in leadership.

The major downside of their approach, though is that they were obsessed with using things for their utility, which meant they undermined senses and experience in the pursuit of results.

IV. Deconstruction (Post-Modern)

At some point, philosophers had broadly explored almost everything about how to live and be, but many of them weren’t finding the purpose they were seeking. Most of the modern philosophers like Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard were seeking absolute understanding without any foundation based on things we’re unable to know.

In the process of trying to find something that requires zero uncertainty to know, post-modern philosophers dismantled the building blocks of antiquity. They separated perception from reality, morality from perception, and morality from reality.

To the casual reader, this will make little sense since they spent lots of time telling us how to not live, but they give very little guidance on how to live. Some philosophers (e.g., Nietzsche, Mill) imply we must find purpose in a purposeless philosophical void, but they don’t give practical reasons why that’s even a good idea.

Whether it was through finding happiness irrespective of anything in our environment, or valuing self-power over anything else, anyone reading it with an intuition for the rest of reality will wonder why it’s even worth understanding in the first place.

The trouble with this thinking, though, is that it only deconstructs. In postmodern thought, anything absolute, no matter how good or right, will be dismantled into vagueness and nothingness. Its natural consequence will always lead to an absence of meaning.

Ironically, the modern philosophers were utterly dismayed at their discovery of the meaningless. They were seeking truth, but without considering whether something was good or beautiful.

The only way out of it is to accept Lewis’ Tao: that universals non-negotiably exist, no matter how much we say they don’t.

Hubris

Understanding philosophy is difficult enough, but the groups that sprung up around it (especially after the 18th century) created even more difficulty by mincing ever-smaller domains. Philosophy students will write endless papers that create new definitions of thought, revise meanings of words, and build hard-to-decipher concepts.

Most average readers can’t really tell why they don’t understand or find an interest in modern philosophy, but it comes from one of the following:

  1. The reader isn’t educated enough to understand the philosopher’s brilliant flow of thought.
  2. The philosopher failed to put their idea into meaningful words, and the reader must decipher its mystery.
  3. The philosopher was just making stuff up but used elaborate language to hide it.

When anyone can more easily understand 2,000-year-old Greek philosophers translated to English than most modern philosophical works, the modern philosophers didn’t understand their ideas as much as the Greek philosophers.

One of the reasons for this change is the lack of any “philosophical common sense”. This type of common sense can best be defined as “the sense one acquires over the course of living well via self-evident things that don’t need mental manipulation to discover”. Modern philosophy doesn’t concern itself with adding value to any presumption of “well”, and instead deconstructs every component of every aspect of living, and the reader is left worse off than when they started.

Philosophy’s culture has become a trended-out creative domain that has run its course, a bit like the silent film or poetry. Poetry’s original purpose included performance and music, so the best modern poet is disguised as a “rock star”, a vastly different culture than how poetry enthusiasts imply poetry to be. Philosophy’s original purpose was to understand reality, so a gifted modern philosopher tends to work in math, law, or computer science.

The philosophy educators never kept up with the change in trends, though, so they spend more time creating useless documents to build new thoughts than legitimately answering questions everyone keeps asking. Part of why is because they praise others who say they’re seeking truth, but condemn most people who say they’ve found it.

Power

Philosophy is raw power, like money or understanding about the stock market. Like any other power, it’s only useful if it builds toward something that ultimately isn’t another version of more power.

Most non-philosophers have an intuition to see the power of philosophy, and it scares them. Many cultures sidestep gigantic questions like “what is a relationship?” and “why do we want money?” because it could create enormous and unexpected changes if anyone stopped to ask.

However, philosophical understanding makes many other aspects of life easier:

  • More ability to distinguish between facts and opinions.
  • Easier to detect patterns across unrelated elements.
  • After some practice, broadly applied ideas are much easier to learn and (more importantly) unlearn.
  • To stay precise to the truth, learning things requires far less mental rework later.
  • Decisions are easier to make with absolute conviction, even with limited information.

Some philosophy is absolutely necessary for the good life, but only as needed. Very often, people call philosophy by other names like “common sense”, “critical thinking”, and “sensibility”.

Be careful who you read, though. Philosophers have three possible motivational beliefs, driven by the culture they’re surrounded by and expressed as statements:

  1. If perfect living could be understood and communicated precisely enough, society can be made perfect.
  2. Transforming society is an uphill battle, begun by understanding and applying perfect living.
  3. The ideal is unattainable, so understanding helps us survive this life or live perfectly in the next.

In that sense, all philosophers are idealists (or bitter idealists), which is why most practical people find them insufferable.

However, while a massive portion of philosophers are devising mental explorations for fun, quite a few (myself included) work to know the ideal way to behave, think, and act.

Application

Philosophy is very useful, in its time and place. But, it’s like any other form of power, and can corrupt or destroy when misused. People can lose their minds upon discovering a particularly dense piece of information, so it’s best when diluted by a good story or a few years of life experience.

Most philosophers have lots of wisdom, but not much common sense, especially about knowing the time and place to discuss philosophy.

A philosopher will annoy people (especially leaders and traditionally minded people) because they ask uncomfortable questions that may threaten the power of those leaders and change the way things have always been done.

The time and place for philosophy is when it builds into the good life. It’s often a response to a real problem, not merely for the sole purpose of understanding.

Everyone should read a little philosophy, maybe some Socrates or Plato. But, the average person should have a broader purpose for that philosophy, such as enjoyment or understanding, or they’re wasting their time.

To find out if a philosophy actually works to live a good life, observe that philosopher’s personal life, which is relatively easy to do across the lens of history.

Any philosopher who says we can’t know anything, then continues to assert themselves without explaining how knowing that gives any meaning, has logically invalidated themselves and isn’t worth listening to. This also broadly applies to people in many domains (e.g., science, economics) who believe in statistics but claim that correlation doesn’t connect with causation.

Don’t pay too much attention to the pretensions around philosophy. It’ll ruin your experience of consuming the philosophers worth your time.

Philosophy has gotten a bad reputation because of educators who fail to see how the average person is not seeing its use. However, average people will naturally build philosophies through living their lives.

Most philosophy (as well as theology) educators teach about philosophy, but fail to teach with philosophy or how to use philosophy.