RE: The importance of philosophy

27 Mar, 2026

This is a response to Absurd Pirate's post on the importance of philosophy, in which he tries to argue against reading self help books.

I absolutely agree, but I don’t think that listing and describing fields of study can serve as an argument for the "importance of philosophy." If philosophy is to be distinguished from "self-help", it cannot be defined by its content. One of the classic questions of philosophy is that of the good life which is precisely the subject of every single “self-help” book. Apart from that, the diversity of philosophy speaks against defining it by its content (limiting it to four areas excludes much of what is taught in philosophy departments today) and literature – that is, certain forms of narratives about the world – is also described as philosophical.

2,500 years of philosophy have produced a large number of texts, and if one wishes to speak of "philosophy", one might refer to these, that then are important because they are fundamental to understanding Western culture. But that is eurocentric (although the same could be said of other philosophies—which are then however, other philosophies), and it overestimates the significance of philosophy today (and perhaps also yesterday).

It may be less presumptuous to simply call philosophy a genre of texts. The question then becomes, however, what defines this genre. It cannot be certain content, not only because we want to exclude "self-help", but also because much of what used to be philosophy has migrated to other disciplines as the sciences have differentiated.

There remains, then, the possibility of seeking philosophy in the "how" of these texts, and I believe that this "how" enables not only a good (because inclusive, but not diffractive¹) definition, but also explains the significance of philosophy.

Philosophical texts are characterized by the fact that they pay particular attention not only to what is said, but also to how it is said. Eugen Fink writes that every text operates with schemata that are not fixed. There are terms that are not explained, but simply used and used up. Fink calls these terms a "shadow", and philosophical texts are characterized by their attempt to leap over this shadow. With Kant, one could speak of a priori principles or the presuppositions a text makes and attempts to catch up with, and with Niklas Luhmann, one could say that philosophical texts observe themselves.

The ultimate goal of this paying attention to how one does what one does is, of course, that the "what" and the "how" correspond and are coherent. The philosophers' imperative would then be to do what they say and to say what they do. Which is an ethos by which everyone else can – and should – be guided as well.

#english