Why People Hate Philosophy

This is the Project.

What you think of as philosophy is not philosophy. It is and was a naïve scientism from the 18th Century. It was called Empiricism. The stark loss of interest in deeper ideas today has changed us from intellectual animals to solipsists. This means we only exist in our own thoughts. The shift of expectation over time that great ideas come from social interaction, to the idea that one thinker alone in an armchair decides, has driven people from philosophy. Recovering the interred remains from the Columbarium of philosophical Realism (naturalism, virtue ethics, irony) is a difficult project to sell. What is visible of our discipline today is decadent Idealism (solipsism, atomism, literalism) from the 18th Century that became the "critical philosophy" of the 19th. Most normal people despise critical philosophy to such an extent today that they deny how it has defined their thinking lives.

When man engages with Idealism, with the now-universal notion that mind precedes reality (I can alter truth by thinking,) his subconscious rebels with pure stagnation. Man feels guilty, perhaps, for his own secret loathing of common ideas, he has been asked to admire his conversion from a philosophical mind to a scientific one. In this his mental energy atrophies. Science has its place and it is not the expectations intrinsic to philosophical speculation. We cannot expect a scientific answer to a philosophical question.

How to recover a stoic, Socratic social method that reverses this entrenched psychological condition? This question is where we begin. We don't start by yelling Randian slogans about objective reality. We start simply by asking this precise, context-relevant question.

This is where I begin. This is the Project.