The Importance of Philosophy Today 

With this boring, yet somewhat pretentious title, I do not want to imply that people have forgotten about philosophy, for this is impossible by the very nature of who we are as human beings. And I do not mean to suggest that Descartes was correct in subjecting ontology to epistemology with his (in)famous words, “I think, therefore I am”, by alluding to the supremacy of thought in defining human life. Thought is not important in itself for the human being any more than rocks are. What matters is what one does with these thoughts and how does one come about them. To think correctly is not simply to think but to learn how and what to believe and how and what to question. Mere intellectual curiosity is not sufficient. Indeed, it is detrimental if not properly educated and directed towards truth. An honest pursuit of the truth is the task of philosophy, and this honesty as well as the path(s) on which this pursuit follows are both the result of right thinking.

To question everything is as fatal as to believe everything. The former leads to misanthropy and desolation, while the latter leads to a loss of dignity and a denial of responsibility. Aristotle, as well as Plato, and after them a host of Christian philosophers and mystics emphasised the “golden mean” as the right path in life, especially (but not exclusively) when it comes to the inner existence of man, which includes thinking, as well as feeling, imagining, and believing. 

In order words, man must question some things but not everything, and he must believe other things but not all. But which must he question and which must be believe? And how much should one question or believe? What is to question and what is to believe? What is man that he can do so? Where does man come from and where does he go? Love, life, death - why are they so? How did it all begin? God — where are you? Without philosophy, the honest pursuit of truth, these questions not only remain in total darkness but weigh on man heavier than all the stars of heaven: he cannot prevent himself from asking these questions. So, man asks them — bizarrely at first sight — with a confidence that there is an answer, and even if he may never find it entirely or at all man starts in its pursuit. This fact, paradoxically perhaps, can be seen with a strange clarity in the gloomy existentialism of recent decades, which engages with a courage, which is either of a madman or of a saint, the terrifyingly big ideas of being and nothingness: man is confronted by these questions as he walks between the abyss of existence and the even greater abyss of the source of all existence.

Some, on this journey, begin to look within, while others seek the answer without. Philosophy however is not only a journey within man as it is not just a gaze without from man, but a process of taking reality as a whole and understanding it as a whole. Man is not alone in the world for his thought to be directed at himself only, neither is he assimilated by nature and society for his thought to ignore his own, personal existence all together. There is a right order — and I say “right” because man has the freedom and capability to effect his own order, which may or may not reflect that which is right. For example, much of our lives today are in disorder. I need not spend much on backing up this allegation for evidence is so ample that it can fill up thousands of pages, and indeed it does so in the many books published on the many crises facing the human being nowadays. Suffice here to enumerate the three deadly rates that have been going up for decades in many parts of the world — divorce, suicide, and abortion — and to remind ourselves of the invasive (and aggressive) consumerism that underpins what we call today “culture” but which is, unfortunately, the byproduct of a utilitarian worldview that kills precisely that which culture needs in order to exist: the transcendental.

However, and thankfully, there are remedies, and they belong to that order that is right, which man must accept and act in accordance with. Discovering this right order is the most important part in “doing” philosophy, or, at least, in studying it. For this reason, a sound understanding of the history of ideas, which would require one to engage with philosophical notions in order of their development, so that one can see the change — sometimes towards improvement, other times towards deterioration — in man’s intellectual search for truth. We can therefore say that the value of philosophy, today, as well as thousands of years ago, is the same: to discover truth as much as the mind of man can which means, when put into practice, to embrace virtue. This is, in broad terms, what Cardinal Newman argued in his collection of essays called "The Idea of a University." 

But philosophy can only allow us to discover that there is truth, and that, consequently, there is virtue — defined as living according to truth. It cannot show us truth in its fullness, nor can it instil in us that noble quality of the heart and that unique illumination of the mind which compels us to say “yes” to virtue; due to the very reason that without what is called grace, man cannot understand what is beyond his understanding, and the fullness of truth is beyond man’s understand, even if he can grasp the existence of truth on his own. It is an easy demonstration to see this, although not one that takes little time for it simply requires one to read, at leisure, through the most revered ancient philosophers, and see the pitiable inability of man’s mind to grasp this one word, a word that points to the only thing that matters - and that can ever matter - to that treasure for which thousands, millions even, happily would sacrifice everything, even their lives, to that state of true happiness that remains, in the absence of help from outside the human heart, alien to man, but which man seeks above all, to that which alone is the fullness of truth: love.

Philosophy leads us to the silver banks of thought where man is compelled to acknowledge the existence of love, but its essence — so simple and universal, yet so terrifying and personal — escapes the grasp of the mind, flying away like a fairy that leaves behind her glittery dust, vanishing into that fog that covers the banks of metaphysical rivers, a fog which is the breath of life. However, here we are heading towards theological inquiry, theology being the prayerful exploration of revealed truth, that is, of truth given to man by God rather than discovered by him through his own intellectual efforts. 

Let us therefore return to philosophy, today. Why does any of this matter? In the words of a friend, it does not “pay the bills”. This is broadly true: few are blessed to teach philosophy in return for financial remuneration, and fewer still can do philosophy and get paid for their thinking, and almost nobody who pursues philosophical inquiry can do so unconstrained by the chains which come with some financial security, tilting their thought to the right or to the left, dimming this idea and stressing, just a bit more, that idea. Therefore, why not apply one’s intellectual efforts towards something that pays the bills, that allows one with more certainty to move forward in society, and which, in the end, may afford one the means to materially improve the lives of others? The answer to this question is as practical as a banknote, but whether or not one is willing to accept its practicality is purely a matter of personal choice, which, as with anything subjective, does not change that which is objective, but it merely approves or disapproves of it. Philosophy confers upon us a certain freedom by allowing us to see how ideas have developed through history so that we are less likely to be manipulated, scared, taken advantage of, led into situations in which we can make grave mistakes with historical negative consequences for millions of others.

No amount of money can teach us about history’s greatest moments and about the thinking that shaped them and about the lives of those living in their aftermath, even us today. Technology cannot be understood without philosophy, and its use cannot be regulated properly without a deep knowledge of man himself, a knowledge that must include the body and the soul, as well as the mind. Law is random and oppressive without being rooted in just authority and without philosophical awareness one cannot question or accept what authority is just and which is not. Economics and markets are simply mechanical entities that can be oppressive in the absence of a philosophical view of society. Politics and ideology are indistinguishable without philosophical knowledge. Education is confused with indoctrination, abuse with care, friendship with self-interest, beauty with ugliness, happiness with pleasure. Philosophy opens the mind to the larger dimensions of life.

Of course, one can choose not to pay any attention to truth, to live blindly in the dim twilight of superstition and inertia, to squander their life by taking wrong turn after wrong turn, by negatively impacting others with their political decisions inevitably made with prejudices and handicapped by insufficient understanding of what man is and what he needs. This freedom in which choice is rooted and that ability to make the choice, both can be understood only through philosophy and, of course, ultimately through theology.

Is philosophy essential then? Can one live, not a good life — which today as ever means one filled with pleasure and as much as possible devoid of sorrow — but a just life without philosophy? The answer is yes, because philosophy refines the mind, but it does not heal the heart, at least not entirely, as one can see from reading Boethius. Man must thoroughly embrace God and His laws which speak to the human heart directly, if he wants to bypass philosophy entirely; and even then, this is not advisable because we are prone to superstition, prejudice and to many blinding perspectives which have their cure in right thinking. And now we have come full circle to the beginning of this article. Supposing that I have been able to make a sufficiently convincing defence of philosophy, or at least to flesh out its importance for us today, one final question remains: why in the world would you listen to me? What authority, what position, what — dare I say — qualifications do I have to make these bold claims here? To borrow a phrase from the vocabulary of the new (i.e. millennial) Marxists: lived experience. Of course, they appropriated this term, because everyone — ever — has had and will have lived experience, because experience can only be lived in order to be experience at all. Nevertheless, it is because of my experience in this world that I came to value philosophy.

When I started my undergraduate degree in law at the University of Sheffield, the very first utterance after “hello, welcome” that the gentleman who welcomed the class of 2011 said upon that stage in the auditorium was “commercial awareness”. It had nothing to do with the nature of law, or why study law, or why respect law, but with utilising the legal system solely in the service of financial goals. “Commercial awareness” was the mantra that followed me for most of the university years, and the two words I tried to demonstrate that I possessed until I took a module on legal philosophy that focused on the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics of morals. It was the moment when I realised that the initial reason for why I wanted to study law – which was to understand why do we have law and why do I have to obey it — was not an unimportant and impractical question, but a foundational one. While — to my memory — all law firms did not care to put any weight on this understanding, but were only concerned with “commercial awareness”, which I found out later that it meant reading the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal with a sense of veneration for certain corporations and business moguls, this question was going to the very root of their business. Therefore, even if I did my dissertation on banking regulation, and I have been working in finance for the last ten years, the moment I read Kant was the moment I began to realise the importance of philosophy and started reading it. 

At first, it was a haphazard approach, reading thinkers in any order I found them on the bookshelves in Waterstone’s. This is a bad approach, very bad. One needs the proper order of ideas. Eventually, I got around reading the pre-Socratics, then Plato and Aristotle, moving to the Roman philosophers (reading here and there some 19th century thinkers like Nietzsche and 20th century names like Heidegger), until I discovered the infinite glory of Christ and of His Church, and philosophy became, for me, secondary to theology.