Thread by @ZoharAtkins

"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."

whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/why-has-tech…

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.

The ability to write “primary literature” is a privilege granted 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.”

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.

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?”

What began as a struggle for truth against the 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.