How The Internet Has Changed Philosophy

The Walls Are Coming Down ...

After spending 15+ years studying and teaching philosophy as an undergraduate, PhD student, and ultimately as a professor, I came to a realization.

There is a huge gap between the study of philosophy and its application to daily life.

Skeptics and critics of philosophy think that this gap is caused by something wrong with philosophy itself – that it is “useless speculation”, “impractical”, or “pseudo-science”.

I believe that this gap has nothing to do with philosophy itself, but everything to do with the way that people teach, present, and approach studying philosophy.

This is especially true of Western philosophy.

For most of its history, Western philosophy has been a creature of the university.

Although it began in the streets of Athens with Socrates, philosophy in the West would eventually become inextricably tied to Christianity.

This led to philosophy primarily being taught, studied, and developed within the context of Christian religious institutions and universities.

For several hundreds of years, it was in fact true that the debates of philosophers had largely became disconnected from regular human life. But this was not simply because the questions and problems that philosophers were interested in didn’t matter to ordinary people, rather it was mostly due to the fact that the barriers erected for participating in philosophical conversation and debate grew as high as the walls of the Gothic universities themselves.

This general trend continued in the West beyond the Middle Ages and into the modern world.

It is still the case today that many of the most exciting ideas, debates, and philosophical conversations are taking place behind the walls of universities.

But things are changing ...

Within academic philosophy, there has been a growing movement to engage the general public.

But what has really changed the situation, in my opinion, is the rise of independent content creators on social media enabled by the power of the internet.

There has never been a time in human history where more people have had access to high quality philosophical instruction, discussion, and community.

I see this trend continuing, as more and more incredible academics, educators, and researchers are becoming disillusioned with academia, and deciding to leave the university in order teach to the general public directly.

It is now possible, thanks to modern technology, to offer the same content and educational experience to more people than ever before, at a fraction of the cost. Ultimately, this benefits the teachers as well as the students.

Although the way that philosophy has been taught for most of its history did in fact create a gap between philosophy of ordinary life, that gap is rapidly shrinking.

~

I began by arguing that the gap between philosophy and ordinary life is not due to philosophy itself, but how it has been taught, presented, and studied.

In other words, it is due to people and what they have done with philosophy, rather than philosophy itself. What I have argued is that people have made philosophy inaccessible for most of its history by gatekeeping it behind the walls of the university.

While this is a big part of the problem, I also think that the gap between philosophy and ordinary life is due to how it is presented, perceived, and studied by those who are interested in it (by the way these are all byproducts of gatekeeping philosophy).

Philosophy is often presented as an incredibly difficult, impenetrable, and intimidating subject with an incredibly long history that must be mastered before one can even begin to develop their own philosophical thoughts.

It is not always presented this way today, but it has been for a long time, and this perception of philosophy exists for a reason – it is not just a simple misunderstanding.

This has had an unfortunate effect on many people who are curious and interested in studying philosophy, and learning about how it can fit into their lives.

It has created the perception that in order for philosophy to be understood, or worth attempting at all, one must meet all sorts of pre-requisites:

You must be an unusually smart, deep, and serious person.

You must master the macro-philosophies of various great thinkers before anything you have to say is even worth consideration.

You must study philosophy in a serious academic setting, or else it would be a waste of time and you won’t really understand anything.

The stupidity of this exclusionary set of assumptions is one of the main reasons I created the concept of a micro-philosophy.

I created the concept of a micro-philosophy to prove that none of these things are necessary in order for people to benefit from philosophical thinking.

It is possible to spend one’s entire life studying the grand theories of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and all the various “significant” or “important” thinkers that “one must know”, but end up never really doing any philosophical thinking for oneself.

I know this because I have spent many years attempting to master the history of philosophy only to realize that, when it came to my actual life, there was a huge gap between the things I was learning and how I was living.

While pursuing my PhD, I was so fully immersed in the academic pursuit of wisdom that I forgot about the fact that I am a real person outside of the university who needs philosophy just as much as anyone else does, in order to help me think for myself about what beliefs to live by, what values fight for, and ultimately what it means for my life to go well.

I firmly believe that everyone needs some amount of philosophy in their lives.

In fact, I would go even further to say that, whether they realize it or not, everyone already has a significant amount of philosophy in their lives.

Everyday people discuss, debate, reflect, write, deliberate, and act on the basis of philosophical ideas, concepts, and theories.

The study of philosophy is the study of something we already naturally do as human beings. It is the study of giving reasons, questioning ourselves and others, and trying to make sense of the world around us through thinking carefully.

I often tell my students that philosophy is like dancing.

It is something all human beings naturally do, and have done, since the earliest human cultures.

Most people do it poorly, everyone wishes they were a little better, and no one thinks that the world would be better off without it.

The primary aim of the Micro-Philosophy Journal is to teach people that they can benefit from philosophy by simply doing philosophy themselves without needing to master anything.

I believe that if you follow this system, you will understand for yourself what I mean by this.

I want to be clear that I am not saying that there is no benefit to studying macro-philosophy, or learning a particular thinker’s system of thought.

I would not have be able to write any of this without having gone through the rigors of pursuing a PhD.

My main point is that it is not an all-or-nothing affair.

Philosophy can be as small or as big as someone needs it to be, and its benefits can come in pill form, or earth-shattering revelation.

I am here to invite you to think philosophically about your life, and to guide you in how to go about doing that in a way that I think will really benefit you.

A little bit of philosophy goes a long way.

I have found that most people simply don’t know how to get started.

This is what the concept of a micro-philosophy and the system I have laid out for building one are supposed to help you do.

~

So how philosophy is presented, how it is perceived, and how this effects the way people study it, all partly explain why this gap exists.

But philosophy need not be inaccessible, abstract, and useless.

The work that I am doing on social media is aimed at helping thousands of people to see the extent to which many problems in their lives are the result of bad philosophies that they did not choose, and how empowering philosophy can be for putting them in a position to choose for themselves what to think and do with their lives moving forward.

I believe that this work is incredibly important and necessary given the direction the world is moving.

Unfortunately, not everyone feels this way.

There is a strange resistance from within certain segments of the philosophical community to anything explicitly aimed at benefitting ordinary people.

There are those who style themselves to be “pure” or “true” philosophers that are very much interested in keeping the gates closed.

Most of these people are academics, but some of them also live in certain corners of the internet.

These “pure” or “true” philosophers are often, in my experience, those who think that they are better than others because they study certain questions for their own sake.

For them, philosophy is a pure love of wisdom for wisdom’s sake, and it becomes corrupted by once it is aimed producing some kind of benefit. I interpret many of these people as simply trying to take themselves to be better and more noble than others in the way they go about things.

Against this, I would argue that even Aristotle himself, arguably one of the most arrogant and “pure” philosophers, said that the purpose of studying subjects like ethics is to live well.

He writes:

“The present inquiry does not aim at theoretical knowledge like the others (for we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use)”

(Nicomachean Ethics, II, ii)

I recognize these critics, because there was some part of my former self that adopted this stance as a way to justify completely losing myself in the pursuit of academic wisdom.

In recent years, however, I have come to appreciate and embrace the usefulness of philosophy.

I hope that my work here on Substack can serve as proof of that.

-Paul