Why Has Technological Progress Outstripped Philosophical Progress?
Philosopher > Intellectual > Knowledge Worker
Why has philosophical progress failed to keep pace with technological progress?
Plato didn’t have a typewriter. Aristotle didn’t have an iPad. Plotinus didn’t have a smartphone. Descartes didn’t use a note taking app. Heidegger wasn’t on academia.edu. Hannah Arendt wasn’t on Twitter.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation. There is no reason to think that technological changes alone are responsible for a decline in philosophical output. Yet I wonder if a culture that treats thinkers as “knowledge workers” and optimizes for “productivity tools” rather than “discernment tools” ends up leading to an intellectual culture that is superficial and fleeting.
I don’t blame the abysmal academic job market even though Hegel, Schelling, Strauss, and Arendt, were professors. Marx managed to write Das Kapital without tenure. Kant made a living as a tutor. Thales traded options. But I’m fairly certain that if someone attempted to write a book as original as Being and Time today, they’d be laughed out of academia. The ability to write “primary literature” is a privilege granted only to seniors, who, by the time they’re ready to pen their magnum opi have habituated themselves against grandiosity. The senior scholar takes refuge in the critical edition, the scholarly appendix, the “lit review.”
One could argue with my premise in a handful of ways.
1) There is no such thing as “philosophical progress.” Philosophy doesn’t improve; it just deals with the times. Thus, we get the philosophy we deserve. Philosophy is a mirror of culture. Plato isn’t better than Heidegger. Heidegger, Sartre, and Simone Weil, aren’t better than Jordan Peterson, Ibrahim Kendi, Stephen Pinker, Zeynep Tufekci, or Peter Singer.
2) Philosophy has progressed to its end. There is nothing left to do except opine about the end of philosophy. Today’s philosophers have gone into other fields, and that’s not a bad thing. Philosophy has itself led to its own conquest by STEM (if you’re a techno-utopian), by art (if you’re a humanist), by critical theory, power analysis, and cultural studies (if you’re an intersectionalist), or thought leadership (if you’re an HR exec). Perhaps Philosophy should be proud of its exports.
Still, we might ask why, if philosophy was once a country to which the brightest migrated, it is now a field from which so many flee.
The economic argument—that there is little money in pure philosophy—doesn’t hold. For we should still expect great philosophy from the independently wealthy and from those idealists willing to sacrifice for their thought.
Maybe the problem is distribution. Somewhere out there, great philosophers are writing into the void, but there is no audience to notice them because the world is overrun with noise. One could argue that there is no mass “attention market” for philosophy. If you’re the kind of person who wants to write Phenomenology of Spirit in 2021, you might have to make some compromises and start writing shorter journalistic pieces for an audience that wants the summary of Hegel but doesn’t want to read it page for page.
Maybe you’re a utilitarian reading this and thinking, “So what?" Isn’t it better that we focus on scaling food delivery at the click of a button than producing the next Leibniz?” Yet if this is your reaction it’s worth considering the possibility that technological progress isn’t simply value neutral; rather it is part and parcel of a culture that seeks to make the philosopher extinct, a relic of the pre-industrialized and pre-Enlightened past. Philosophy can’t progress because it is inherently regressive. What began as a struggle for truth against the orthodox pieties of the many has finally been shown to be a vanity project. The many have taken their revenge. It wasn’t enough to make Socrates drink Hemlock. He must be resurrected as #2 after Jeff Bezos on the Forbes List of 100 Thinkers every MBA student should know.
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