>philosophy is useless!
While true, philosophy does deal with many "useless" things as far as the average and even above average person is concerned, how come people don't realize that philosophy is a natural, inevitable product of cultural health at its peak?
It doesn't matter that it's useless, when a culture is at its healthiest peak in history and courageous and ripe enough for serious contemplation, philosophy always happens naturally. Useless or not, it is a sign of the highest health.
A culture and even an individual that never engaged in philosophy never reached that peak of health and natural born strength like the Greeks did.
PROOF? EVIDENCE?
>>821620
But that's using an arbitrary definition of health that you yourself have decided upon. It's circular logic, isn't it?
>>821710
>But that's using an arbitrary definition of health that you yourself have decided upon.
Can you verify that?
>Philosophy is useless
>I haven't bothered to actually study the field outside of a pair of Google searches
>philosophy is useless!
>While true
No, it's not true that philosophy is useless.
Philosophy works as a first principle creating a lot of thought. Without philosophy we would not have modern logic, abstract mathematics, modern computers, Marxism, feminism etc., all very useful things. I could go on to mention a lot of different sciences but you get the idea.
>philosophy does deal with many "useless" things as far as the average and even above average person is concerned
Do you suggest that you yourself, since you deal with philosophy, are above above average? This is why no one likes pretentious wannabe philosophers.
>natural, inevitable product of cultural health at its peak?
This isn't true. A lot of eastern cultures don't have philosophy as we label it philosophy. It is rather a different kind of thought altogether which is most similar to what we would call philosophy. You're factually wrong on this one.
>sign of the highest health.
>healthiest peak in history and courageous and ripe enough for serious contemplation
A lot of healthy civilisations may not need philosophy. I would say it comes about by people who are bored and not necessarily courageous at all.
>philosophy never reached that peak of health and natural born strength like the Greeks did.
Again, just a statement without any actual consideration.
There is no topic to discuss and this is basically just a pretentious tumblr post, please leave /his/.
>>821783
>No, it's not true that philosophy is useless.
At the higher level, to regular people? In many instances yes. It still contributes, of course, but people can survive without it directly present in their daily lives, and most do.
>Do you suggest that you yourself, since you deal with philosophy, are above above average?
No, don't be so sensitive. I meant as in the common person.
>This isn't true. A lot of eastern cultures don't have philosophy as we label it philosophy.
They aren't fitting enough then. A peak of cultural health is needed, but also a proper foundation for it, from which stems natural born courage, strength, and desire for all values in life, like the Greeks did (which also led to their rich mythology and pure polytheism). When these elements mix, which altogether make up a culture of the healthiest and strongest nature, philosophy naturally appears... just like it did in Greece.
>I would say it comes about by people who are bored and not necessarily courageous at all.
Idleness, but not boredom. Courage is absolutely an essential prerequisite for it. A person encumbered by fear does not engage with philosophy, and it even harms him when he encounters it, because philosophy, as the Greeks knew and established it as, is an output of hardened, relentless, creative types. One only properly and truly engages with philosophy when he comes from a position of courageous daring.
>Again, just a statement without any actual consideration.
So you would like to think.
>>821729
You're the one who's made the claim that a philosophical culture is a healthy culture. In order to make that claim, you must first define the term "healthy", and then prove that the only societies that meet that definition are philosophical ones.
>>821803
>people can survive without it directly present in their daily lives
Then all sciences are useless.
>I meant as in the common person.
So you are above the common person?
>They aren't fitting enough then.
Not true Scotsman.
There are a lot of advanced eastern cultures without what we call philosophy.
>One only properly and truly engages with philosophy when he comes from a position of courageous daring.
I study philosophy and I am not courageous nor daring. They literally have nothing in common and you state it as a fact without any basis nor argument for it.
Why would one have to be
>hardened, relentless?
Most of the people who studies philosophy today would run away from a fight. They are soft balls of fur compared with the "commoners".
>So you would like to think.
Have you studied any other philosophers except bad interpretations of like Nietzsche and Aurelius?
There is nothing necessarily great about philosophy. Having a virtuous personality and studying philosophy has nothing in common.
Please, just stop. You sound like an elitist pseudo-intellectual.
>>821783
B T F O
But what's the philosophical foundation of mathematics?
>>821620
To even argue that philosophy is useless is an act of philosophy in and of itself.
This is bullshit. What does "cultural health" even means? Philosophy is the direct consequence of human curiosity. One ancient day some chimp probably stopped throwing it's shit around, looked at the sky, or at a rock or at another chimp and started wondering, and thus philosophy was born. Now, thousands of years later, here we are discussing on an internet board discussing whether philosophy is useless or not, ignoring that everything good or bad humanity achieved is a product of our own endless curiosity. Also, stop thinking scientists aren't philosophers. They just use a more strict logic in order to achieve more practical goals.
>>821842
Aristotle, Ibn-Sina, Frege, Russell, Cantor, Gödel, Turner.
Set theory/Type theory and so on. A lot of these attempts arose from philosophical attempts to ground mathematics in logic. And such attempts basically led to computers and modern mathematics.
It is of course more complex than that since they had precursors like group theory etc.
>>821850
>Also, stop thinking scientists aren't philosophers
This
t.stem
>>821835
The problem here is that our understanding of philosophy and of "doing philosophy" differs drastically. More importantly, you are mistaking what philosophy in its greatest and fullest form is.
Nietzsche:
>Philosophy is dangerous wherever it does not exist in its fullest right, and it is only the health of a culture-and not every culture at that-which accords it such fullest right. And now let us look around for the highest authority for what we may term cultural health. The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and engaged in it more fully than any other people.
>[...] the Greeks knew precisely how to begin at the proper time, and the lesson of how one must start out in philosophy they demonstrate more plainly than any other people. Not to wait until a period of aflliction (as those who derive philosophy from personal moroseness imagine), but to begin in the midst of good fortune, at the peak of mature manhood, as a pursuit springing from the ardent joyousness of courageous and victorious maturity. At such a period of their culture the Greeks engaged in philosophy, and this teaches us not only what philosophy is and does, but also gives us information about the Greeks themselves. For if they had been the sober and precocious technicians and the cheerful sensates that the learned philistines of our day imagine they were, or if they had floated solely in a self-indulgent fog, reverberating with heavy breathings and deep feelings, as the unscholarly fantasts among us like to assume, the well spring of philosophy should never have seen the light of day in Greece. At most it would have produced a rivulet soon to lose itself in the sands or evaporate in a haze. It never could have become that broad proud stream which we know as Greek philosophy.
cont.
>>822815
>The philosopher's mission when he lives in a genuine culture (which is characterized by unity of style) cannot be properly derived from our own circumstances and experiences, for we have no genuine culture. Only a culture such as the Greeks possessed can answer our question as to the task of the philosopher. and only it, I repeat, can justify philosophy at all. because it alone knows and can demonstrate why and how the philosopher is not a chance random wanderer, exiled to this place Of to that. There is a steely necessity which binds a philosopher to a genuine culture. But what if such a culture does not exist? Then the philosopher is a comet, incalculable and therefore terror-inspiring. When all is well, he shines like a stellar object of the first magnitude in the solar system of culture. That is why the Greeks justify philosophers. Only among them, they are not comets.
>After these reflections I shall presumably be understood if I speak of the pre-Platonic philosophers as of one homogenous company and plan to devote this essay to them alone. With Plato, something entirely new has its beginning. Or it might be said with equal justice, from Plato on there is something essentially amiss with philosophers when one compares them to that "republic of creative minds" from Thales to Socrates.
For Nietzsche, the purest types in philosophy are Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, and Socrates—since Plato, philosophers have been of "philosophic mixed types": no longer were they one-sided and pure about their posterity, but many-sided. He calls these many-sided as the "founders of sects, and that sectarianism with its institutions and counterinstitutions was opposed to Hellenic culture and its previous unity of style."
This is all just in the very beginning of Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.
>>821620
>an individual that never engaged in philosophy never reached that peak of [...] natural born strength like the Greeks did
>natural-born strength
Are you implying some individuals engaged in philosophy in the womb?
>>821783
>Marxism, feminism etc., all very useful things.
>>822916
As in their strength never escalated to the level of the Greeks' strength, which they had naturally.
>>821620
Sauce on the statue?
>>823384
Ludovisi Ares, a Roman statue of Mars.
The Romans were actually a good example of a people who had a healthy culture, but didn't engage much in philosophy. Like Nietzsche said,
>There are good instances, to be sure, of a type of health which can exist altogether without philosophy, or with but a very moderate, almost playful, exercise of it. The Romans during their best period lived without philosophy.
Point being, philosophy is not necessary for a culture, in fact it's almost a superfluous thing altogether. Regardless, the one particular instance in history where a healthy culture engaged in it also lead to the greatest and purest discussion of it, which was in ancient Greece.
