Is philosophy “impractical”?

For a monk who practices renunciation of worldly goods, talk about the latest fashions in designer clothing is impractical. This isn’t because such talk can’t in principle be put into practice. It's because the monk has no desire to put it into practice.

In the present age, our idea of what constitutes disciplined intellectual activity is inescapably linked with commerce. When someone raises a topic that demands disciplined intellectual activity, my mind automatically shifts into “office mode,” where rationality is defined in terms of profit and loss. The same discipline I apply in the office is therefore applied to our conversation. Any topic that isn’t directly related to profit I greet with impatience. I look on idle philosophical talk with the same haughty disdain the monk shows toward idle conversation about fashion.

Philosophy is a waste of time in commercial society because the questions it asks have already been adequately answered. “What is the good?” Obviously, wealth. “What is truth?” Truth is what sells. This way of thinking has woven a dense fabric of concepts in my mind. When the philosophers insist on pulling on the threads, I see them, at best, as an annoyance, at worst, as a threat to my sanity.

Philosophy is “impractical” in commercial society because it exhorts us to a practice very different from that of commercial society. It demands we seek wisdom rather than wealth, contemplation rather than consumption, virtue rather than profit. In fact, we might say philosophy is “anti-practical”—it stands directly opposed to the practices of our age. Two examples, Diogenes and Aristotle, will show what I mean.

Diogenes lived in a tub in the center of Athens. His kynic philosophy doesn’t scorn the pleasures of nature. But to obtain expensive pleasures we must assent to be ruled by rich men rather than virtuous men. Only by curbing the desire for expensive pleasures, he says, can we have any hope of freedom.

Aristotle grapples with the accusation that philosophy is impractical in his Politics, asserting that the mode of life philosophy demands is, in fact, the best practice:

Practical life is not necessarily directed toward other people, as some think; and it is not the case that practical thoughts are only those which result from action for the sake of what ensues. On the contrary, much more practical are those mental activities and reflections which have their goal in themselves and take place for their own sake.

We often draw a distinction between theory and practice. But Aristotle refuses this separation. For him, a life devoted to theory is the best practice.

When was practicality redefined so as to exclude the contemplative life? One candidate for the turning point is Francis Bacon’s 1603 essay Of the Interpretation of Nature, which heaps contempt on the classical conception of contemplation as an end in itself. “Knowledge that tendeth but to satisfaction,” says Bacon, “is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation.” Bacon demands that we stop using satisfaction as our criterion of truth and instead assess truth based on “operation.” He takes for granted that fruit and generation—in contemporary terms we might say productivity and profit, comfort and convenience, entertainment and pleasure—are the goals of the correct practice, the correct way for human beings to operate.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates introduces an elaborate political order ruled by philosopher kings. We might interpret this as a blueprint for society, but at one point Socrates makes a mysterious statement that calls this interpretation into question:

Perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it and seeing it, to found one in himself. But whether it exists anywhere or ever exists is no matter; for this is the only commonwealth in whose politics he can ever take part.

This passage raises the possibility that the entire political structure described in the Republic is no more than a metaphor for the structure of the mind. When Socrates speaks about the “smallest part and element” that rules a city, is he perhaps speaking metaphorically of the element that rules a mind? The ideal structure, Socrates tells us, is the one where “the entire soul follows without rebellion the part which loves wisdom.”

In evaluating various alternative political orders, Socrates comes down particularly hard on democracy, sarcastically calling it “a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequaled alike.” The analogous charming form of intellectual existence is the one where a mind allows itself to be ruled by the profusion of desires for sensory pleasure rather than the smallest element which loves truth and wisdom.

If we were to adopt Plato’s technique of metaphorically representing politics of the mind by politics of the world, and apply it to contemporary developments of thought, we might say Freud’s attempt to liberate sensual desire from oppression in the psyche is analogous to Robespierre’s liberation of peasants. We seem to be living now in the Reign of Terror, where one sacred idea after another is immolated by commercial society in its quest to obliterate all aspects of intellectual life incompatible with the infinite multiplication of desires. In the utopia of commerce, Paul Mazur explains in a 1927 article in the Harvard Business Review, “people must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed.” Every advertisement teaches us that fulfilling desires is good and right. It can hardly surprise us if the faint voice of philosophy, asking us to challenge the tyranny of desire, is drowned out in the charming cacophony.