Since when is philosophy a branch of the self-help industry? | Aeon Essays
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The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialised disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl’s pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, ‘the forgetting of being’. ⤴️
While many sought to separate philosophy from other creative styles and pursuits, notably poetry and literature, Mary Midgley insisted that ‘poetry exists to express [our] visions directly, in concentrated form.’ Even Martin Heidegger, whose writing was far less poetic than Nietzsche’s, called for ‘a poet in a destitute time’, and saw poets as those who reach directly into the abyss during the ‘world’s night’. ⤴️
How differentis it to distinct existence withpoetryo or philosophy? are those two fundamentally different tasks?
Corporatisation – the most egregious mutation of neoliberal capitalism – has had a devastating impact on philosophy, to the extent that ideas and creativity are embraced only insofar as they are marketable and profitable. ⤴️
as Jenny Odell puts it in How to Do Nothing (2019), art, philosophy and poetry struggle to survive ‘in a system that only values the bottom line’; such pursuits ‘cannot be tolerated because they cannot be used or appropriated, and provide no deliverables.’ ⤴️
as Jenny Odell puts it in How to Do Nothing (2019), art, philosophy and poetry struggle to survive ‘in a system that only values the bottom line’; such pursuits ‘cannot be tolerated because they cannot be used or appropriated, and provide no deliverables.’ ⤴️
How much poetry and creativity, how much art exists not in the public feeds, in the shared spaces, but in our private journals and collections? And indeed how does our private, unshared art affect us? Should we be compelled to present it somewhere as an end in itself?
issues. Titles such as How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) and How to Think More About Sex (2012) share nothing with the great works of philosophy, while promoting the harmful notion that, if philosophy is to have any value now and beyond, it must base its worth on its practical use-value as an antidote to society’s psychological sickness. ⤴️
Nietzsche himself recognised that philosophy can be an unsettling endeavour. In his final book, Ecce Homo, he claimed that philosophy is ‘a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain-peaks – the seeking-out of everything strange and questionable in existence.’ He wrote: ‘One must be built for it, otherwise the chances are that it will chill him.’ ⤴️