Philosophy Has Forgotten Its Mission

What has philosophy become? The initial mission of philosophy was to answer humanity’s most fundamental questions and guide them in their existence. It was to lighten the load of the human condition by giving us a path to follow. It was to systematically organize our intuitions and explain them. It started well, with Plato and Aristotle trying to help us understand basic but mysterious principles like honor, love, and ethics. It seems that early philosophers had that mission in mind and made us advance toward an approximation of an answer to the fundamental questions. 

Over the years though, it seems to have mutated into something completely different. Have you looked at what modern philosophy provides to the world? Can you name a law that is based on a philosopher’s assessment of good and bad? Can you name the last time someone quoted a philosopher to justify their intuition about something being unethical? No. We refer to the very thing philosophers set out to explain: our intuition. We simply say, “that feels wrong”. Back to square one.  

Here is a quote from Martin Heidegger’s (seen as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century) Being and Time (1927): “This nullity is the basis for the possibility of inauthentic Dasein in its falling; and as falling, every inauthentic Dasein factically is.” Essentially gibberish to anyone unwilling to pursue a career in philosophy or learn a new language to understand what this means. If you think I cherry-picked this quote to prove a point, I unfortunately didn’t. I opened a page and randomly selected a sentence. The point is: when is the last time you implemented lasting change in your life after reading a philosophy book? Philosophy has devolved into two camps: self-help gurus and “masterminds” like Heidegger, who lose their value in their complexity. A likely redeeming thought could be that if you do take the time to understand what Heidegger is saying, perhaps you would discover something deeper about life that no average human has considered before. That, of course, would be offset by the 100 next years of literature dismantling everything he ever wrote. But maybe if you spend every waking moment reading that literature, you’ll finally understand humanity’s purpose. Unlikely. 

We propose a new start to centuries of non-answers and debates between philosophers the conclusions of which matter only to them. Who should philosophers write for? People, right? Who do they actually write for? Other philosophers. To do what? Advance philosophy? For whom? Philosophers. It almost seems like a self-contained discipline. When was the last time you heard of a philosophical advancement? When was the last time you read the headline “Philosopher Discovers X, Which Completely Revolutionizes Y.” Is this because there is nothing left to discover? That would mean we know what the purpose of life is. That would mean we know what the nature of morality is. But we don’t. All this hard work for what? Quotes that make good hooks in essays? Name-dropping to make you feel more sophisticated at a dinner table? Modern philosophy is a failure. 

Psychology is following its mission. Quite clumsily, but it is. It is advancing its research and presenting it to the public in a comprehensive language. It is attempting to give people specific things to change in their life to make it better. This is precisely our mission. The field of philosophy started off with dialogues and thought experiments in the goal of demystifying the mystery of the human condition. We want to diverge from the self-contained gibberish and make it as accessible and as entertaining as possible. But this is impossible without your help. Philosophers were always outcasts whose loneliness gave them too much time to think for their own good. This is partially why they failed. They forgot their mission. They forgot for whom they were doing all this. We won’t. We will carry the torch and evolve practical philosophy. Join us and make your voice heard.