For a long time. And too bad but also ironically funny that being dead, it cannot understand or even become aware of the simple fact that it is dead.
Knowing itself would require philosophizing, which is not happening. Yet it still bears the name ‘philosophy’ and believes that is what it is doing.
Why did it die? I don’t care enough to get into it. You wouldn’t understand anyway since you don’t even realize it is dead.
With the death of philosophy has come the death of most other things, including religion, culture, social coherence and an image of the future, real growth and progress including in innovation and wealth, value-adding new capital, any hope for a future… sanity, stability, non-psychotic relating. Well we still have some of that hanging around, which is nice to know the death of philosophy proper hasn’t actually killed off the unknowing philosopher in the hearts of many average everyday people.
Then again look at the kind of things they profess to believe today, the sickening herd mentality, the utter mental laziness and slavish obedience to authority. The panicky hatred and reactive meme-induced neuroses. The addiction to social media and corporate-state “news”. Even the average decent person whose inner unconscious philosopher hasn’t entirely died, is still experiencing something like being trapped inside a cage of pure reality-annihilation with little hope of ever breaking down the bars of their mental prison cell. By wishing away a good healthy dose of cognitive dissonance they fix their fate more or less permanently within the confines of an already-known madness.
Can we save philosophy? I can, and I have been doing so for many years. It stands to reason or at least see little reason to doubt that the revival of philosophy would come from one person or several people doing the real work. What is needed are minds. You know, those things that don’t much exist anymore. Minds that not only would exist but primed up in an active state of truth-investigation, loving truth (reality, existence) passionately and at all costs. Sometimes I wonder if the current frauds believe themselves to be operating from such a place of inspiration, being too ignorant and insane to realize they are precisely not coming from such a place. But even I am skeptical when it comes to that level of self-deception, at least as would manifest in the average person. Exceptions of course – some of which are found here at ILP – are certainly capable of demonstrating such a radical and self-annihilating ignorance and madness as would be required to fake something like that, even if only to themselves.
If you want to help save philosophy, let me know. We can do some collaborative work together. Ever since the former partners working on real philosophy either left, dropped off the map or decided to give up the work it has been only me. As far as I know, anyway. So feel free to join if you have it in you. You can post your thoughts or works in progress regarding philosophical reawakening here in this topic.