How worthless is Philosophy?

[The Grand Nudger]

If we're looking at things like laozi or republic we're looking at what were most likely composite works aimed at a mid level bureaucrat or the ruler of a small state. We've since mythologized the characters and the times and that gives us a poor intuitive impression of the nature and use of the ideas contained therein. The people who would have been familiar with these works closer to their origins would have been semi literate and semi noble. There would be no systemic education programs in place and the breadth and depth of their knowledge from what amounted to private instruction would have been comparable to contemporary grade schoolers at best. Short version of a long story is that it's entirely likely that both works were trade school material.

That they seem irrelevant to many people today wouldn't be surprising. They were irrelevant to most of the people living then as well. Neither of us are in a position to use the trade school material because we are not in the trade. That philosophy -or philosophy as it was practiced and came to be perceived- was elevated to some other status had less to do with the nature of the subject than the user demographics. They...were elevated, and so their stuff was the most cultivated stuff. To bring it back to Borus examples - ag sci would have been the lot of peasants, sanitation was shit ditch diggers work, medicine was the domain of the con artist.

We could draw another example, even older, from babylonian treatises - and the strange (to us) labor and hiring practices that they appear to have included. Where a scribe would not necessarily know how to read or write - and would pay..or better yet be related... someone who did because what they knew was what they should be hearing and what they should say in response to whatever they heard. Where most of the people who could do math could not read..or write. Where "history" was what happened at work yesterday. If we continue to add examples one thing becomes clear as day. The reason that philosophy in the west became a subject of interest for the church - and the subsequent perception in contemporary society that philosophy is for the affluent - was that the church was engaged in the same business as those bodies that had used it before. They're useful for creating the administrative apparatus of an empire, a set of SOPs so that a diverse and geographically isolated group of agents could act in unison (or close enough for government work) without explicit pre existing orders.