How worthless is Philosophy?

[vulcanlogician]

For example, plato didn't propose that we be reasonable about god stories - quite the opposite.  He affirmed those superstitions, especially insomuch as they supported whatever he was saying about good governance and moral virtue - identical to him (at least one of the contributors to laozi took this same approach).

There is some truth to this and some untruth to this. Plato did endorse continuing to espouse moralities of his day. But he also said they should undergo copious revisions in sure to make certain they told the best message. ie. Plato thought the gods and heroes should be portrayed and virtuous and principled. Not weak and prone to human emotions. That was an aspect where he resisted the established religious views in ancient Greece.

Ultimately, he became PLATO because some other then nameless functionary he taught went on to teach a then-unremarkable boy who one day conquered much of their known world.

 

He did those things after he wrote the Republic and the Symposium. So what if his successor became some kind of tutor for kids? Plato's work stands on its own, as beautiful writing and important ideas in their own right. His philosophy was not as good in his late period. And he DID get involved in politics again in his mature years. I don't really care about that. His best philosophy was from his early and middle works. Whether speaking of literature or his ability to change politics, Plato failed in his later efforts.

I think we agree on that.

Axial philosophy, in both eastern and western traditions..it seems... was the business of bureaucracy.  The politics of power.

IDK if axial philosophy is all that useful there. If anything, Plato was trying to escape the power of bureaucracies and independently figure out some truth that bureaucracies that bureaucracies (or indeed any institution with power) should be beholden too.

That we made it something more or other than that, the academic hobby of the wealthy intelligentsia, is what I was referring to about mythologizing the times.  

I take that as a personal attack, even though I've done my best to justify myself above, but go ahead.

 Comparing it to trade material is to remind us that what axial philosophers were doing wasn't much different than running a night school for dropouts who want jobs at the licensing bureau.  The formal or more formative education of the intellegentsia and elites of that time would have been in warfare.  It should come as no surprise, then, that both eastern and western axial philosophy can be summarized as the guiding principles of warrior kings and the people they would rely on, and that this would feature heavily in the respective and then-looming empires of each tradition.

I think a big thing you are getting at is that philosophy is some kind of "elitist" pursuit of knowledge these days. It's a good criticism. The shoe fits. But I've always thought that philosophy is an open thing in the marketplace. And even an uneducated fool can sometimes ask better questions than the intelligencia. In fact, if the intellectual riff-raff and their claims aren't eamined, I'd hardly call it philosophy.

Perhaps, if we brought this stuff out of the ivory tower we've constructed for it as a consequence of history, it would have greater overt purchase in our current society.  Look at the success that zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance had.  I've never read it.  I have no thoughts on the rightness or wrongness of the things discussed - but it's the number one selling book on philosophy, of all time, in the us.

You're gonna have some philosophy in the ivory tower. It simply belongs there. But that doesn't mean that most philosophy belongs on the streets. It more so belongs to the neanderthals than the academics.