Those who study philosophy will have been asked the question: “What are you going to do with that?” And indeed, it is true: philosophy does not prepare you for a job, except for maybe becoming a teacher of philosophy. In this way, philosophy seems useless. There is no use for philosophy in the labor market. But not even in the labor market is the usefulness of philosophy brought into question. Philosophy as a discipline is under scrutiny. Philosophy is, nowadays, seen by many as the handmaiden of science. Both philosophy and science try to uncover the truth. However, science has made progress, while philosophy has not. Even more so, science has taken many of the questions previously asked by philosophers and tried to solve them. This brought some to believe that philosophy is only good for a repository of questions to which science does not yet have the answers. This would result in the claim of Stephen Hawking, who would claim that philosophy is dead.[1]
The question then arises: How did philosophy come to find itself in this position? One might think from the title that it is the institutionalization of philosophy that is the great contributor to its uselessness. Claiming this would not be entirely correct. It is not the institutionalization that is the problem per se. The problem arises when the institution in which the discipline is embedded goes against the very idea of the discipline itself. The problem originates from the ideological fundament that embeds the university (and the general society) in the current age. Let us look at what this entails.
Depending on what time we live in, when we ask for the use of the university, we get different answers. For a long time since its origin, the university was the place where a person could cultivate himself through the study of numerous subjects which he was free to choose.[2] These subjects were chosen to cultivate the person into a good person. Nowadays, a different picture of the university is presented. Now, the university is one of the institutions where someone learns a certain set of skills to ultimately find a job. The focus is no longer the cultivation of the person, but rather the cultivation of a job function. This means that students will attend the university with this goal in mind. The idea is that the university will teach me a certain subject which will make me capable of performing a certain job. But what with the disciplines that do not get you a job? There are no vacancies for philosophers or fiction writers. One becomes it by partaking in the process of philosophy or writing fiction. Studying the humanities will not teach you a certain job, at least if your aspiration is not to be a teacher in a subject of the humanities.
This would not necessarily be a problem. Some courses would prepare you for a job, others would be done because of interest. This becomes a problem when the money the university gets is based on how profitable the graduate students are. When the idea of profit is dominant in an institution, it is only natural that those areas that are not profitable will cease to exist. Philosophy is not profitable in the way biology or political sciences are. Sure, a philosopher might sell a book, but most of the time this does not mean a lot of added value in the economic sphere. The exact sciences will increase the monetary resources of a university through patents on research they have done. The humanities only cost money, so it only makes sense from an economic perspective that the costs are cut from the humanities.
Some have tried to argue against this uselessness of philosophy, claiming that it provides mental training, analytical reasoning, critical thinking, and all those other general things people present for their discipline. I think this approach inherently fails. Yes, philosophy indeed gives training in all these things, but this is not unique to philosophy. Almost all other disciplines do this. This is not unique to philosophy. And even if it is, this does not legitimate philosophy as an academic discipline, but would rather be an argument of having one or two philosophy courses in all the other graduate programs.
These then are the main contributors to the superficiality of philosophy in the academic sphere. Philosophy does not prepare you for a job, except for being a professor in philosophy. And it does not bring a lot (if any) added value to the economic market. But why do we bring philosophy to these two standards? It could be the dominant neoliberal mentality that pervades even in the universities. Although this can be the case, philosophy itself has been devalued by being, as Bruno Latour calls it, purified.[3] This happened in two ways: (1) the sciences originated from philosophy, strengthening the idea that they could replace philosophy or had outgrown it, and (2) philosophy was seen as just another discipline among the sciences within the university. This ‘purification’ makes philosophy into something it is not: a solely theoretical and abstract discipline. Philosophy has throughout history also had the definition of being a way of life (insert other article).
Some authors have tried to argue for the practicality of academic philosophy as ‘applied philosophy’[4] or through certain ethical theories such as ‘effective altruism’.[5] The problem with these works is that they still conceive philosophy as a discipline rather than a way of life. They do not make the distinction between philosophical discourse and philosophy itself. This distinction is made by Pierre Hadot.[6] Philosophical discourse refers to the teachings, written or unwritten, of philosophers. Philosophy itself, on the other hand, is the ongoing practice of a philosopher.
This post has been an introduction to the problem of philosophy. There is a real threat of philosophy dying out. How can we save philosophy from redundancy? To achieve this goal, we need to investigate the cause of the problem. Only then can we formulate a solution, even though many solutions have been given already. However, none (as far as I know) go to the root of the problem. That is the task for this series: to understand why philosophy is seen as superfluous and how we can make it relevant today. I believe that philosophy is sorely needed today. It would be a shame if we would just let it die, as Stephen Hawking already thought it had.
[1] Hawking, S. W., & Mlodinow, L. (2010). The grand design. Bantam Books.
[2] Marginson, S. (2019) The Kantian University. Australian Universities’ Review, Vol. 61, No. 1
[3] Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[4] Frodeman, R., & Briggle, A. (2016). Socrates tenured: The institutions of twenty-first-century philosophy. Rowman & Littlefield.
[5] Singer, P. (2015). The most good you can do: How effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically. Yale University Press.
[6] Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. (M. Chase, Trans.) Wiley-Blackwell (1981).
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