An interesting question: is philosophy useless in this modern (or postmodern) day and age? Once, while I was at the supermarket, I ran into an old friend from high school and his girlfriend. When I told them I was studying philosophy, she responded: “That’s the easy way out.” 

Is it? True, I may not make the same sort of contributions to society that, say, an electrical engineer might–but then again philosophy has never tried to. Philosophy impacts us in a very different, much more subtle way. Real philosophy is not confined to the ivory towers of academia. In fact, the notion of ‘professional philosophy’ is a bit overblown, and seems almost like an attempt to grant legitimacy to a discipline that society views with a raised eyebrow. 

So then, what is the over-arching goal of philosophy? What is the point? If today’s drive-through, super-sized society feels no inclination toward introspection or contemplative thought, then what can philosophy do but be shelved in the archives among other intellectual relics? Does philosophy have nothing to offer us? After all, we now have things like sociology and psychology–and we haven’t yet lost our patience with those. What need do we have for philosophy? 

But perhaps we are looking for meaning and purpose in the wrong place. Philosophy rarely achieves immediately notable results, and philosophers often remain unknown to the outside world until decades or centuries after their deaths–if they ever become widely known at all. And it’s in this obscurity that philosophy makes its mark on the world–by subtly pervading and influencing all popular thought and opinion. Don’t believe me? Consider:

Philosophy underlies our most basic assumptions. We believe in things like ‘inherent’ human rights, and our access to ‘objectivity’ and the world ‘as it really is.’ We, as Westerners, are ‘correct’ and ‘right’ in a very real sense, while everyone else in the world has things ‘wrong’ or ‘backwards.’ These ideas seem so apparent and intuitive to us, and lie so deeply imbedded within our cultural conditioning that we see anyone who disagrees with them as being unreasonable or even barbaric. But these ideas, believe it or not, find their roots in real philosophy. Here are a few philosophers who have deeply impacted American and Western thought:

 

• Immanuel Kant: Do you believe that every human in the world has inherent rights? If you do, then you owe that gem of a thought to Immanuel Kant. He was among the first Enlightenment philosophers to propose, among many other things, that there are such things as ‘intrinsic human rights.’ In philosophical jargon, his work is known as the ‘emancipation of the individual.’ 
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: We owe a great debt to him for many of our most basic Western suppositions of government, access to the ‘objective’ world, and other things. 
• Plato: Everyone knows the name, but did you know that Plato’s thoughts have greatly influenced Western Christianity, and as a consequence Western thought, tradition, and  spirituality? Some people even claim that Christianity as it is practiced in the West has been ‘hijacked’ by Plato. It’s largely from his works that we form our conception of what a ‘soul’ is, believe it or not. 
• Aristotle: As a society, we owe more to Aristotle than I could list here. 
• René Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes, though his ideas are now widely regarded as obsolete, continues to influence popular Western thought on a broad scale. 
• Nietzsche: If you disagree with Descartes, Kant, Rousseau, and Plato, then you have Nietzsche (among a great many others) to thank. 
• Hegel: Do you believe that man’s highest calling (very simply put) is to live the Ethical life? If so, then odds are that in one way or another, you owe an intellectual debt to Hegel. 
• Marx: If you are unhappy with rampant class stratification and unfair treatment of the working class, Marx is your man. 

There are many others, and this list obviously does not cover them all. A complete list would include (to name a few) such publicly obscure names as Derrida, Rorty, Wittgenstein, Leibniz, Hume, Locke, Frege, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Augustine, Russell, Quine, and Spinoza. 

In all, the most basic aspects of our assumptions, traditions, nature, cultural constructs and trends all rest upon the ideas of what the world calls philosophers. So before you write off philosophy as something irrelevant or pointless, remember that your ability to reflect upon the point of philosophy is itself a philosophical idea. 

And, even if the above notions are slowly going out of style (i.e. that the Western tradition is right while everyone else is wrong), then to who do we owe this intellectual shift? You guessed it: philosophy. 

The point of all this: while you’re contemplating the ‘uselessness’ of philosophy, thank an Enlightenment philosopher for endowing you with a little thing we call “Western thought.”