"To some degree, the ancient practice of philosophy in modernity was transformed [from a set of therapeutic practices] into a theoretical discipline intended to clarify the concepts of science and morality. But that’s not the whole story...In the seventeenth century, Descartes sought out a certain foundation for knowledge in large part because the world was crumbling around him. In the twentieth century, Hans Jonas reconceptualized God and evil in large part because his mother had been killed at Auschwitz. When a student of mine, a mother who’d authorized a surgery for her son that led to his death, asked me in tears if Kant was right that the consequences of an action play no role in determining its moral worth, I realized quite clearly that evaluating Kantian ethics was much more than a game to be played in the insularity of the mind or the classroom.
When everyday life is deeply satisfying, philosophy is indeed the leisurely activity that Stanley Fish describes, simply a pleasurable exercise of our native desire to know. But when everyday life is less than fully satisfying, there will always be people who set out on a quest for meaning. All of a sudden that leisurely desire to know be- comes a pressing desire to find the good life. And when the normal course of everyday life offers very little satisfying to our natures, when we regularly feel the dull aches of bad work, empty leisure, and disoriented politics, then philosophy becomes not just the practice of the few but the need of the many." - Scott Samuelson
