Why Philosophy is as Unpopular as Real Spirituality
The intellectual counterculture and its modern impostors in academic philosophy and the neoliberal fads
If we were to ask some average folks in the developed world what they think of philosophy, I suspect that four out of five would say philosophy’s irrelevant, pretentious bullshit.
These folks would likely be dismissing, however, not philosophy itself but its professional form in academic institutions. With stunning clarity, the ancient Greeks — especially Plato — established the Western philosophical project. Yet nonphilosophers seldom appreciate that classic function — and that’s just as well because if that were rectified, if most people better understood what philosophy is for, they’d still dismiss the discipline, but for very different reasons.
Western philosophy is the love of wisdom. After Plato, the Greeks distinguished sharply between phronesis and sophia, between practical, technical know-how and sound judgment about universal, more abstract matters. As a more idealistic or rarefied way of thinking, then, philosophy became a rival not just of popular religion, but of all dubious social conventions that were propped up by ignorance, delusion, fear, and the like.
