How worthless is Philosophy?

[Belacqua]

If fellow citizens don't have the logical and ethical skills to make the right decision when voting, by the time they're old enough to do so, that can have an adverse impact on both me and the rest of society.

Here I think you are, very correctly, showing that philosophy does have real-world applications. Logic and ethics are essential for good decision making. 

Earlier I mentioned Plato's Phaedrus, so I've been thinking about a part of that book that's maybe relevant here. 

Near the end of the book, Socrates says that he's opposed to the idea of writing philosophy. Written philosophy, he says, is dead (like a painted portrait) and can't defend itself or further explain itself. If someone reads it and gets the completely wrong idea, nobody's around to protest. 

The idea here is that philosophy is never a set of rules or axioms that can simply be committed to memory. It's not like, say, first-year Physics where you spend your time learning what the current best theories consist of. 

Philosophy, for him, is love of wisdom (which is what the word philosophy means, anyway). And wisdom is not something that one learns from lectures or readings. Such things can set you up, but don't go far enough. What's really required is dialogue, in which we say what we think already, and analyze it in the company of friends. A large part of this process consists in unlearning, since by the time we're old enough to discuss anything much we're already full up with opinions and beliefs. This is why Socrates challenges people to define certain important terms, and then shows them how their definitions turn out to be lacking. They unlearn what they thought they knew. 

So this is not much like a lecture class or silent reading of a text. It's far more like Freudian analysis, in which the analysand speaks his thoughts freely. The action of articulating what was only half-formed in the mind before, and holding it up to the light, as it were, is a crucial part of the process. Like the old joke, "How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?" I had a Neo-Freudian as an analyst, and the most powerful, affecting thing he ever said to me was in response to a claim I'd made. He said "really?" 

The second step in the process is probably much more difficult to achieve. This is in the response that one's friends make to what you say. How do they construct their response? Socrates' famous method is just to keep asking questions until the first speaker understands the flaws in what he has said. At times, depending on whom he's speaking to, he will engage in gentle teasing. There's a place in the Symposium where he follows one speaker by saying, in effect, "Gee, your speech was so good! But I see now that I've misunderstood the assignment, because I thought we were supposed to say true things!" So a bit of ribbing. 

I've seen people claim that they use the Socratic method, but on further examination it turns out that they never do.

I think that some of this could be taught. Maybe the crucial steps to be learned would go this way:

1) careful listening. It's very frustrating when you say something and your interlocutor responds as if you've said something completely different.

2) further questioning. Patient drawing out of a half-formed idea can help everybody to see the implications of what's been said. 

3) various forms of push-back. The first two steps are mostly just good manners. This step, I think, gets into the field of psychology. Wrong kinds of feedback will work against any kind of mutual progress in understanding. Harsh mockery, hurtful comments, anything designed to shut down dialogue instead of encouraging it. This is not a contest with a winner. Everybody wins if everybody's thinking is enriched. 

So classroom lessons in Platonic philosophy, I guess, would mostly be practicing certain behaviors. Love of wisdom [philosophy] is not a set of truths but a lifelong habit of forming one's thoughts and then holding them up to the light.