[Serious] Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?

[Belacqua]

And, yes, sometimes people use too damn many words. 

I was once described in the newspaper as "verbose," so I just have to own it. However the only person who's being judgmental here is brewer, who looks down on verbose people. I was born that way, man.

working people can't properly philosophize.

There's no doubt that Aristotle was elitist, by today's standards. He thinks that some people are just better than others, and honesty requires that we rate them accurately. This is before all those nasty Christians started the whole "God loves even the least of them" crap, so he doesn't try to hide his snobbishness. 

One thing that's certainly different: Aristotle thought that because of an essential human nature, all people should be aiming for the same sort of goal in life -- abstract thought. When I've read the Ethics with a group this is one of the things people are least willing to accept. No doubt more of us today would say that some people are good at one thing and some at another, and the world needs all types. Just because I go on and on about one or two subjects doesn't mean I'm insulting other things. 

I think when I was verbosely going on about this before I mentioned Blake, and how he became a great thinker with zero formal education, and working all day at his trade. (As an apprentice before child labor laws, he was obligated to work like 12 hours a day 6 days a week.) It's clearly possible. How much this shows us that Aristotle was wrong, and how much we can attribute it to changing conditions I'm not sure. Like today we have the advantage of the printing press and public libraries, not to mention illegally downloaded pirate pdf files. 

And despite the fact that I am an elite snob who hates the working man, I suspect it's best for all thinkers (like all humans) to be grounded in something concrete. Literally, cultivate your own garden, or something like that. 

Many many schools around Japan have a copy of this sculpture, which shows a guy from the Tokugawa period who became a famous intellectual by studying while he was working on the farm. He's held up as a role model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninomiya_S...aSta_2.jpg

This concludes the name-dropping portion of this post. 

You know, nobody here is going to be a famous ground-breaking philosopher. We do the best we can because we like it (and because we have a glimpse of our father Plenty up above, giving us something to aim for).

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I struggle to be concise. There's a real tension between making an incomplete argument and saying too much.

I assume that nobody's going to read me very carefully anyway, so I might as well just enjoy myself.