How worthless is Philosophy?

[Belacqua]

Should this discipline be required in college? 

It looks as though you may have wandered off again, and I certainly wouldn’t blame you for doing so. I thought I’d type a response to your OP, though, based on a good old philosophy text.

I know you’ve worked on Plato’s Phaedrus in the past, as I recall you mentioning it here before. It seems to me that parts of that dialogue are relevant to the issue at hand.

As you remember, the dialogue begins as a discussion of relations between an older man and his adolescent boyfriend. Such relationships are taken for granted, so what they’re discussing here is exactly what type of emotion and benefit should be involved.

Phaedrus has a copy of a speech by Lysias, in which the latter argues that it’s better if the two partners are not in love with one another. Or rather, it’s assumed that the adolescent won’t be in love with the older man, but the older might feel passion for the younger.

Lysias thinks of the relationship as entirely transactional. The older man gets sex and the company of a beautiful boy, and the younger one gets the practical benefits of increased status and guidance into the political life of the city. The more elite one’s mentor is, the more one will benefit, which means that the more beautiful a boy is the more he will have his choice of mentors.

Both Lysias and Socrates, in his first speech, argue that love can only interfere with this transaction, because love, as is well known, tends to make people irrational. A passionate mentor may behave in an embarrassing way in public, which would work against the gain in status that the boy wants. He also might become jealous, or ruin himself financially trying to please his boyfriend. So a cool, transactional, useful relationship is best, they argue.

Plato doesn’t make this explicit, but many commentators over the years have seen this as a description of transactional relationships in general, not only those between boyfriends. A life which is supposed to be utilitarian, commercial, and practical can only be disrupted by non-practical erotic passions.

Then remember Socrates’ second speech, in which he dialectically goes beyond what he just said before. He does not deny that erotic passion can make a person irrational, but he says that some kinds of irrationality are good. And here you have to remember what Plato means by the full weight of the term Erotic. It isn’t only sex. It is also a necessary drive toward the highest forms of understanding. So Socrates concludes that a transactional, passionless relation will be useful in a practical life, but that a philosopher must surpass this. He needs non-transactional, passionate attraction to what is best and highest. 

Socrates also makes it clear that such passion will have negative effects in a practical sense. Most people will consider this philosopher to be crazy. He will not fit well into the smooth-running utilitarian life of the city. 

So I think we can answer your OP question from Plato’s perspective. Whether philosophy is worthless or not depends on what you want. If you want to fit smoothly into the flow of society, it will not be helpful. If you take a philosophy class with a transactional goal in mind, you will not benefit. Saying “I will commit to three credit hours of Intro to Philosophy, and in return I expect to receive X benefit,” won’t work. A lot of people seem to think that taking philosophy in college will help a person to think more clearly or to be more rational. Judging by the conversations of people who have taken some philosophy in college, this certainly doesn’t seem to be the case. There might be philosophy classes in this world which have that benefit, but it’s clear that most of them don’t. 

Learning philosophy (maybe in a class, maybe not) may have great benefits, but they are not of the transactional, practical type. Expecting to get that sort of thing from a college class is not reasonable. The kind of benefits that one actually might get are not the kind of thing that practical societies tend to value.