Philosophy - The Meaning of Life and The Meaning of Philosophy

My initial, superficial reaction Pranay Sanklecha's Philosophy was once alive would be to point out that the problem he points to lies in analytical philosophy. As a philosophical school, pragmatism is geared toward the questions of real life.

Except there is the tendency in any discipline to become mired in navel-gazing by its initiates.

Philosophy was once alive too, almost terrifyingly so. Why else would a man called Socrates choose to cheerfully go to his death rather than betray it? Can we make it alive again by going back to a vision of how the Greeks did philosophy?

No. Philosophy was alive for the ancients because it was the form – which they needed to invent – that authentically expressed some very deep and constant human needs. The way to reanimate philosophy, to fill it again with life and vitality and urgency, is not to copy an old form. For philosophy to become a living thing, for a form to be invented that speaks to human beings today, it needs to go back to the needs that the form once contained and satisfyingly expressed.

That call for action applies across all schools of philosophy, and the humanities in general. We have abandoned ethics because they seem to have no connection with our reality. Religion is supposed to supply us with ethics; only it degenerates into a certainty that its proponents are infallibly righteous. 

Yes, we all need to approach life and its problems with an intellectual integrity that philosophy once provided.

But do our education systems promote such an integrity? I fear not. I think Socrates would still be drinking the hemlock in 21st-century America. Giving power to the MAGA conservatives makes me upgrade a possibility to a certainty.

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