I think philosophy should be largely introspective, so my initial answer is wherever you take it…
However, if one is in philosophy for the business of satisfying himself and impressing others, I see two basic ways to go:
Your philosophy becomes your religion.
Philosophy is going nowhere. Questions only raise more questions - answers are only theorized. Philosophy doesn’t necessarily need a direction, just a purpose – just like the mind doesn’t need a direction to wander, just an occasion to do so.
Setting aside what gib said (maybe he is right , though I doubt it), I think a useful philosophy has to be understandable to the majority of people.Something too abstract or complicated just ain’t going to get the followers required to make it viable.
So philosophy ain’t doing just fine…because many/most people can’t understand it.
That probably goes some way to explaining why Mr_Anderson thinks people are stupid for following old beliefs (traditions),though it’s not that they are stupid, it’s simply that only eccentrics can devote their lives to something that only they understand.Normal people just want to believe in something that makes sense and get on with their normal day to day lives, plus get the benefits of a communal belief system .
So where is philosophy going? I think it is busy barking up the wrong tree. Rather than seeking complex answers to our questions, it needs to seek simple ones to appeal to the common sense.That’s my opinion anyway.
I’m not sure that we need more thinking, just less bad thinking. And even though I understand that rebellion is inherent to knowledge, I don’t think we need less following, but better choice in what is followed. Which comes down to the same thing, really.
Philosophy isn’t for the masses. That’s what makes marxism so funny. Philosophers are the few guys who are actually solving those crazy-complicated problems. People on forums are mostly spectators.
The people need to understand the general conclusions, not necessarily the details of the supporting arguments - moreover, they need to like those conclusions for them to have any sway.
As an example, take quantum mechanics (not really philosophy, but the same dynamics of ideas apply). The average person understands nothing of the subject matter, but some of the more bright ones can be heard to express the general idea that perception affects reality - that is, that we as the observers of the world determine the world through observing it (as opposed to being passive observers who play no part in it). This idea is only a crude understanding of quantum mechanics - and just one interpretation among many others (which most people don’t realize) - and most of the time, an original philosophy (or idea generally) will only be understood in a crude way once (or if) the masses come to comprehend it.
But have many/most people ever understood it? This is another point that’s been bruding in my mind since I first read this thread: most people will generally agree (even philosophers themselves) that philosophy ain’t that useful to the progress of society, but I question whether this is anything new or people have carried this sentiment more or less unchanged since philosophy dawned in ancient times.
I’m not so sure that people on forums are just spectators. I think that the forums are just a new way to spread and further ideas that people have about philosophical questions. A spectator is a person who doesn’t actually contribute to the task at hand. I don’t believe that people on this and other forums like it don’t contribute to the conversation. Instead I think that they have just found a new medium through which they can convey their ideas and beliefs. This is just another part of solving the “crazy-complicated problems” that are out there.
Much of the crazy-complicated problems that are out there is a reflection of what is inside one’s self. It seems the personal philosophy is the crowd pleaser. Finding some kind of internal enlightenment is usually the goal of a personal philosophy. The search ends with the realization that there is no such thing as enlightenment. By searching, you want to be free from the self and all its complicated egoistic problems, but whatever you are doing to free yourself from the self is the self. There is no ‘how’. If someone tells you that, it will only add more momentum to that search, strengthen that momentum. That is the question of all questions: “How, how, how?”
The ‘how’ will remain as long as you think that the answers given by others are the answers. “I have found the answer” – they have found the answers for their questions. As long as you depend upon the answers of those people who you think are the ones to give you the answers to your questions, the questions will remain there permanently. They are not the answers; if they were, the questions would not be there. It has to be your answer.
And the answer must be found without any process. Any process takes you away from the question, waters down the question. The question becomes more and more intense in its own way. You don’t want anything except the answer to that question. Nothing else. Nothing interests you any more except the answer for that question. Day in and day out, all the rest of your life, that is the only question for you – “How?”
That ‘how?’ is related to the answers given by others, so you have to reject all those answers. The question has to burn itself out, and the question cannot burn itself out so long as you are waiting for an answer either from within or from without. When the question burns itself out, what is there begins to express itself. It is your answer, not anybody else’s answer. You don’t even have to find the answer, because the answer is already there and will somehow express itself. You don’t have to be a scholar, you don’t have to read books or philosophize, you don’t have to do anything; what is there begins to express itself.
All questions are variations of the same question; they are not different questions. How earnest are you? How serious are you? How badly do you want the answer to that question? A question is born out of the answers that you already know. You want to know what some particular fancy philosophy is and make it part of knowledge, your knowledge, i.e. the tradition; but knowledge must come to an end. Is that not a simple thing to get? Your wanting to know only adds momentum to your knowledge. It is not possible to know what this is, because knowledge is still there and is gathering momentum. The continuity of knowledge is all that interests us.
What sort of problems to these true philosophers solve
Your talking about game theorists and all that uber formal logic stuff…
Sure they solve problems we cannot follow, but the problems they solve get them paid millions and potentially earn billions for the companies in question
Exactly, and if these kids were to put down the Nietzsche and realize that the ubermench is the guy who makes that money and keeps them as part of the working herd then maybe they’d see the value in learning something worthwhile rather than waxing pseudo-philosophical about existential emo nonsense.
Not sure I agree with this. I always understood the ubermench to be man that has overcome the dictatorship of the ‘will’ – by that I mean he is no longer a slave to his desires and is able to see & think clearly without that burden. To me, this implies someone with immense power as an individual, not so much over other individuals. That kind of ‘freedom’ would make material desire and perception of control meaningless; no?
Why would a person with such clarity choose, of all things, to bury himself in corporate culture in the interest of material goals? That would be like eating a shit sandwich for Monopoly money – To engage in something so trite and meaningless only for a reward that means nothing to you.
Imo, any philosophy that can’t be understood by a great many people is just a waste of time, though I agree that we don’t need to necessarily understand complex underlying ideas.It’s like many people have problems understanding the Catholic idea of God, but as long as they know He stands for simple principles all’s ok.
I’ve never read Nietzsche, but I have a good idea of what he stands for, enough that I choose to ignore his rants.Let’s face it though,cleverly argued philosophy is unbelievably powerful, look at the devastation Nietzsche unleashed.
Why would it be a waste of time? I agree that it would be a waste of time trying to get the common person to understand, but there is still some use in figuring these things out among experts. It’s not all the time that the conclusions experts reach will have some practical application, but the beauty of philosophy is that you never know when it will. It’s not the understanding of why these applications work that the common person needs, it’s just the understanding that it can be applied. It’s like the way computers work. Hardly anyone understands the inner workings of computers, but they hardly need this understanding in order to use them.
The danger lies in how the common man will use the ideas coming from the mouths of the so-called experts. My favorite example of this is the maxim “survival of the fittest”. Most people don’t understand the correct meaning of ‘fittest’ in this maxim - they believe it refers to brute strength or aggression - beating up the weak, so to speak - when really it means simply the ability of a subject to adapt and fit into his environment in such a way that his survival is assured (which sometimes entails being a wimp - i.e. running away). So the general population was handed down this idea - survival of the fittest - from the hands of evolutionists (Darwin in particular), but misunderstood the real meaning behind it. The consequence is less than positive - people begin to adopt the attitude that in order to survive, you have to beat up (figuratively) your competitors.
So given that ideas (whether philosophical or otherwise) do affect the masses quite profoundly (though not necessarily immediately or directly), there is for me no question that philosophers (or thinkers generally) bear a great responsibility. However, the catch is that this responsibility may not, after all, be the dissemination of the truth as he sees it, but whatever ideas so happen to be needed and are positive/healthy for the particular society during the particular time it is promulgated.
Well, it’s not necessarily the case that someone who considers existentialism sophomoric has to buy into corporate greed, I suppose that was just an example. What about the logicians who are behind the mathematics which give us insights into things like physiology and give rise to real solutions to the problems that the typical teenage existentialist phenotype moans about? I mean, to see a brilliant mind wasted on self loathing or on the proliferation of the same-old same-old philosophy 101 problems of society and emotions and what have you is to see a real tragedy.
I also guess that if you were to achieve a state where you were no longer a slave to your desires, (naturally of course as a matter of some degree), you’d have to admit that people who were still trying to get there would look somewhat silly and confused.
You forget that philosophy isn’t restricted to having to only apply to everyone - although too many philosophers have aspired to that. Is it not loving of wisdom to realise some philosophy may be more applicable to certain people and not others? Or alternatively that some people will benefit from certain philosophies where others wouldn’t?
That’s pretty classic: write something off so you never have to bother + properly form your own opinion. Nietzsche didn’t unleash any devastation.
I think you have existentialism mixed up with only Sartre. Nietzsche is practically his opposite. And even Sartre is profoundly refreshing in his acknowledgement of ‘negative’ emotions, in a world that’ll have u believe that if u try harder u’ll never have to feel bad again (a lot of what physiology aspires to? Regardless of the fact that suffering has motivated the greatest of human achievements by conjuring up a more intensely introverted physiological urgency towards problem solving). Devoting your life to being a tool that researches making people’s lives longer may be one way of using ur mind. Self-reflection and analysing existence can be anything from a stimulating hobby to an evaluation of factors that logicians, mathematicians and physiologists take for granted, which their respective professions would never reveal to them. A closer introspection into how you feel opens up ideas that physiologists need, and it highlights factors that influence how you feel - which can be extended all the way into politics and factors that effect the viability for physiological research to advance/continue at all!
Believe me, there’s a lot more emos out there who aren’t philosophers. The ones who are are probably just looking harder for an excuse…
The reason I use this forum is primarily to test out different ways of communicating to people. There’s no point in having ideas that relate beyond yourself if you’re unable to communicate them to the people you want to address. It says something about you if the end point of your philosophising is to post it on here, to win an argument against people on here, or to just vent your frustrations. Seeing as these kinds of things are common on here, it’s no wonder when posters get disillusioned about philosophy - but it’s just because of the scewed representation of it here.
I’m just mainly saying that by the time you really start saying you know something about philosophy that you should probably have been done w/ Nietzsche a long time ago.
Funny, for me, having covered so much other philosophy it was only once I understood Nietzsche that I felt like I properly knew anything about it. I wonder why we have such different attitudes towards him? Have you read much of him?
Also:
Marxism is for intellectuals who want to lead the masses into a state where they are no longer restricted by antagonisms with a parasitic self-cannibalising ‘elite’. This actually worked and increased productivity as well as well-being - sounds like actually solving crazy-complicated problems to me - it was only outside factors that messed it up. Why do I get the feeling you’ve not even read his brief manifesto?
A true philosophy is true for everyone, a false one false for everyone.
You can’t see how the following quote would appeal to Nazis?
“The strong men, the masters, regain the pure conscience of a beast of prey; monsters filled with joy, they can return from a fearful succession of murder, arson, rape, and torture with the same joy in their hearts, the same contentment in their souls as if they had indulged in some student’s rag… When a man is capable of commanding, when he is by nature a “Master,” when he is violent in act and gesture, of what importance are treaties to him?.. To judge morality properly, it must be replaced by two concepts borrowed from zoology: the taming of a beast and the breeding of a specific species.”
I think you mean an o, Tab, as in Phil[o]sophy. 
Also transposing the le as in ours[el]ves.