We Need Philosophy . . . Now

In Defense of Philosophy

We live in a time when we doubt the relevance of philosophy in our lives. What is there to do with philosophy? Who needs these abstractions? For me, the reason we need philosophy in today’s world stems exactly from the fact that we doubt its relevance. This discipline has always been central to human thought, etymologically, from ancient Greek, meaning love for wisdom- philos (loving) and sophia (wisdom). Until the scientific revolution, science was referred to as natural philosophy. Natural Science’s foundational book is Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Philosophy laid the foundations of everything which became practical, both scientific and political. The political configuration of our world was first designed in the minds of men contemplating how society ought to be. The institutions to which we are now subject were first abstractions in the minds of people such as John Locke or Montesquieu. Philosophy always gave society direction, it guided development, it has always been foundational. What does this mean for our contemporary society?

Because it became difficult to discern the present purpose of philosophy, it means that we lost contact with reason, we no longer have the ability to go beyond the visible. There is also a rupture. Can a world which doubts philosophy give rise to great philosophers? A world that doubts the purpose of philosophy needs it the most, yet is it possible for it to bring deep thinkers into being? Let’s turn to some of the reasons for why we no longer philosophize and do not see where philosophy fits in today’s society. Humans are suffering from great attention deficit, information is decoupaged, media targets emotions not reason (post-truth society), we are in a constant flow, yet never settle for deep analysis of anything. We do more, while being less. The societal development can be summarized as a story which started with the Bible and which ends with brain rot content. Information has been severely shortened and so has our attention capacity, causing a decline in the ability of critical analysis. Thus, the world of today seems to have no predictable direction. In industrial capitalism, the world was predictable, it was a clockwork society, it was stable in its direction.

Now, with psychopolitical extensions, late neoliberal capitalism instrumentalizes emotions, dopamine, constant flow, with no essence nor meaning, it is a new instance of the absurd. This is seen in contradictory speeches, social bubbles, hyper-realities, parasocial relationships (parasocial is the Cambridge word of the year 2025). This kind of world needs philosophers more than any other kind of world. It needs people who can put a finger on the present and denominate it, dissect its state, verbalize it. We live in an interregnum, where people do not trust elites anymore, but new leaders and forms of political organizations are still yet to come. The cracks of the symbolic order of the world are felt, there is a conceptual and arguably moral vacuum in which our unstructured thoughts and emotions fly and languish, and in our blind state we call this freedom. Philosophy, thus, would bring the necessary alterity required for contemplation and for liberating us from the chains which inhibit our ability to question the reality before our eyes. A society whose only purpose is ever-growing monetary value and filling spots in the supply chain is a society of mindless docile bodies, forever in a cycle of retarded self-referentiality. This condition lays the ground to the world of Orwell’s’ 1984: nothing being questioned, there is no space for alterity, everything is a “same”, where truth and lie dance, until they melt into each other. A world such as ours needs philosophy, it needs foundational ground for it to not be lost in a conceptual vacuum. Today we need philosophers to think modes of existence, otherwise society will not follow reason, but reason will bend according to society until it vanishes.