Philosophy is not for everyone

Earlier in my first post I commented that anyone could do philosophy, based on Jostein Gaarder in Sophies Welt's book. Philosophers like Bertrand Russell and even Socrates himself thought that anyone by using reason and asking the right questions could be a philosopher. And they were right, anyone can be a philosopher, but this is not to say that philosophy can be for everyone.

You will find this statement somewhat arrogant and self-centered and you might be thinking right now that I am an elitist who believes that knowledge can only be discovered by those who belong to a selective bourgeoisie that has the privilege to study and can attend expensive universities, and so.

When I claim that philosophy is not for everyone I am referring to that generalization that is used to make a mass success so little personal that it does not demand any kind of prior knowledge or complex cognitive ability. The simple mass man who thinks he knows everything when he doesn't really know anything. When one speaks of knowledge and once one begins to understand its universality we become philosophers, only by recognizing your own ignorance about in front of the greatness of the world you truly understand what is the philosophy about. A philosopher is the one that understands that it is impossible for him to know everything even if he wants to venture to understand and give explanations of the functioning of a Universe full of infinite knowledge.

There is a limit to the basic simplification and reductionism of mass belief in the epistemology of knowledge. Our society today is immersed in an absurd simplification of knowledge, youtube videos explaining theorems of over a thousand pages or opinion articles summarizing and simplifying any scientific research in terms of losing the own value of the material. This is what we have come to a society where consuming knowledge is not a priority because the priority is to condense knowledge without even fully understanding it. By condensing the knowledge, the essence of what was previously proposed is lost.

 

It is desirable that knowledge and philosophy reach as many people as possible but it must be understood that philosophy requires a degree of complexity that goes beyond simple summaries and explanations for "Dummies". When we talk about the complexity of ideas, we talk about thought systems that cannot be reduced to a simple page. Nowadays any kind of content is trivialized in order to make it much more 'digestible' for people. To move from the academic to the absurd, to the point of banal entertainment.

A clear example of this is the postmodern tendency is to analyze Nietzsche's Übermesch or worse still when the example is the famous phrase Gott ist tot - god is death. This phrase is a clear example that philosophy is not understood by everyone, this phrase has become popular in the masses without having read it before, just follow any philosophy page on Facebook or any pseudo-erudite in youtube to see the wrong use of the phrase, and those guys simply use it because it sounds forceful against the fundamentalist and religious discourses. And my dear reader, you will think that this is not a problem, however, the meaning and context of Nietzsche's definitions are not spread everytime someone misunderstood the phrase and popularizes it and use it to look cool.

The phrases and aphorisms of philosophy cannot be reduced to mere slogans or memes. It is like adapting a great cinematographic work such as "Pi, the order of chaos" or "Clockwork Orange" to a child audience by doing this we would be losing the meaning and credibility that are expressed in these great works. Instead of children, this is done with an adult public that is increasingly ignorant due to the unbridled consumerism of our society. A merely postmodernist society. Much of the blame lies with the mass media and the superaccessibility of programs that are dedicated to hindering and brutalizing our society, as well as the Internet, which, although it is a useful resource, the lack of teaching of critical thinking in schools submerges the individual in banality and simplicity.

Philosophy demands to be read and requires to be written as it was stated otherwise the central thesis of it will be lost. Philosophy in itself leads to development and produces changes in the different systems of thought, id est which succeeds in generating development and change in what is already established and predetermined in society, philosophy is rebellion against what is set up in the society, the established order already old and obsolete submerged in its ignorance against change due to its conservative roots.

Philosophy is all about the complexity of the ideas embodied by the author, and the words he uses. In philosophy, understanding every idea and every word counts and this is why philosophers are usually polyglots because they dedicate their lives to understanding knowledge as it was expressed by its authors, in this way they do not lose the meaning that is lost in translations.

There are too many words that lack equivalents in other languages, now imagine those abstract concepts that require a complex and profound level of thought, which requires a process of reflection painstaking for long amounts of time, very contrary to the simplified contents. Today in our society everyone calls themselves self-knowing by the mere fact of watching a 5-minute video on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or Marx's class struggle theory (Many will not even understand my purpose in using a phrase with these two authors). In philosophy, the more you delve deeper into it, the more one moves away from the ordinary, the ordinary, the universe widens and a million possibilities open up in a chest in front of you.

In short, in the most abstract moments of any video where ideas are easily presented, they would fall into the same problems that quantum physics has had, its misinterpretation and misuse to justify any absurd action.

With all this I do not want to simplify in this simple essay what I think, with all this, I want to make you see how the original and real meaning is reduced, of which not everyone is aware. And it is precisely this lack of awareness that makes philosophy an exclusive matter of'some' and not of 'everyone'.

Only those who are aware of their own ignorance will be able to access this scale of knowledge and all the epistemological branches to find it. Only the one who can question, the one who can affirm, the one who can argue, philosophy is not for the one who can say that God has died in a tweet, philosophy is for the one who makes philosophy. And philosophy is not exactly for those who write philosophy books, sometimes doing philosophy goes beyond that, philosophy is to question, to reach conclusions and solutions, to dedicate your life to knowledge and never to stop searching for the truth.

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