The Value of the History of Philosophy

This post was originally written for an assignment under a different name where it was presented in a different format.

It can be easy to accuse philosophers of disregarding the important issues of their day and wasting their efforts debating issues of little to no practical use. I find that people feel pretty ambivalent about philosophers. This critique might be even easier to apply to those who study the history of philosophy. And I can’t really argue that these kinds of criticisms are always necessarily unwarranted. But philosophical thought, even that of the past, is often much more relevant to today’s issues than it may seem. To limit our thoughts to only “useful fields” is to miss useful knowledge. And those who demand that we focus solely on matters they deem important demand that we live less full lives.

The 17^th-century philosophers we studied were engaging meaningfully with contemporary issues. Although not all their views seem plausible today, when we read Robert Boyle, Margret Cavendish, and John Locke disagreeing about the utility of microscopes, for instance, we see them trying to answer practical questions. Without these discussions, we could not know how, why, or even if to use these instruments. We shouldn’t take what seems like common sense today for granted—or for certain. We also saw philosophers dealing with social change. Locke’s Essay was motivated in part by an increase in religious and political conflict. Discussing how to handle intractable disagreements was—and is—deeply important to managing diversity of thought.

By studying how these thinkers thought about the world, we engage with today’s world as well. Some of the ideas we read are more directly applicable to the present than others: The value of self-knowledge is timeless; intractable disagreements don’t seem to be going away any time soon; et cetera. But all the ideas we read influenced ideas in the present including those which seem implausible today. When we understand past thought, we better understand present thought. When we, like those in the past, try to address timely, practical concerns, we are well served to understand how this has been done before and how the ideas created then are influencing the ways in which we think today.

Every time period has had major pressing issues. If people throughout history had focused only on considering those directly, they would have cut themselves off from the knowledge that enabled real progress. The philosophers we read certainly drew from and considered older ideas to address the issues of their times. The truth is, we cannot know where we will find ideas that help us. We have no reason to believe that all useful ideas will be found by engaging with what seem like useful fields. So many of the ideas that created the things we value about today’s world in philosophy, in technology, in medicine emerged from a broader inquiry not limited to only considering that which was pressing at the time.

Those who would broadly criticize anyone who studies the history of philosophy make a timeless error: They forget that people and groups of people can focus on multiple things. It’s possible and also wise for us to take on the issues of our time directly and also study fields that aren’t clearly related to those issues. People aren’t productivity robots. For us, meaning is not limited to constantly taking the set of actions that will materially improve the world at every minute. We can’t all live full lives without engaging with the world more broadly, and that includes engaging with the world’s history. I’m not actively fixing the wider world when I read a novel, when I with friends, when I learn a skill, but I think it’s ridiculous to declare these activities meaningless, and we have reason to think that engaging with philosophy and its history may be an even more useful activity than these.

Sor Filotea demanded that Sor Juana rein in her curiosity and focus on useful matters. For Filotea, those matters were those which served the church as an institution. Sor Juana responds that, among other things, her curiosity allows her to live a full life, in part for her own sake.¹ She could not live well and only ever consider those things that others deemed important. I think many of us are better at identifying what matters are important today. But when we demand that others put an end to their curiosity to solve the problems we identify, even those we identify rightly, we treat others as a means to our ends. We imagine the minds of others as mere resources expended to solve a certain set of tasks. But when we encourage curiosity as well as social action, we encourage people to live full lives for themselves as well as for others. We can criticize those who use philosophical inquiry as a shield to hide from big problems, but to actually solve those problems, to progress, we should think broadly.