Usefulness Of Philosophy
From
Ilya Shambat@21:1/5 to
All on Sat Apr 22 01:05:34 2023
Wayne Allred wrote that, if a young person starts asking philosophical questions, the solution is to have him wipe tables until he snaps out of it.
No, the solution is to have him take a philosophy class. I have been taking a philosophy class, and it has done wonders for my disposition. I have seen that there are many smart people who address issues that matter to me, and that I’m not the only
person in the world who cares about these issues.
So we have people claiming philosophy to be useless. As someone wrote on the Internet, philosophy is failing to deal in reality. What he does not understand is that what he calls reality owes vastly to philosophy. Both science and capitalism come from
philosophy; and without philosophy neither one would exist.
When I was at the university, I did not feel like I had the permission from my family to pursue liberal arts education. But the people who interested me the most in my adult life were arts and philosophy majors. So in my adult life I have been educating
myself about such things so that I can hold my head up to these people.
Ayn Rand was claiming that much of philosophy has been an attempt to steal from the working man. What she did not understand was that the working man was himself a creature of philosophy. The work-based arrangement comes from philosophy. The natural
condition of man is not the work-based arrangement but the hunter-gatherer tribe. And anyone with any knowledge of world history understands that.
I come from Russia, where more attention is paid to philosophy than in America. When I was a teenager I was very angry at the inattention that was paid to philosophy in America. I wanted to introduce it in such a way that people could not ignore it. So
when I was 15 I was going around telling my classmates that they didn’t exist. I didn’t actually believe that. I did it in order to make philosophy unescapable for the people.
I have stopped doing that a long time ago. But I still want to see more people take interest in philosophy. Their whole lifestyle is, ultimately, owed to philosophy. Most of what they have has started as a philosophy. And the more they understand
philosophy, the more informed can be their contributions to their civilization.
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