Philosophy grad student piping in (sorry this is a bit long):
I’ve been watching this thread for a few days and trying to think about what would be worthwhile to say. I could explain what I think philosophy is and why I think that it is tremendously important and worth studying; but it’s important not to give the impression that philosophers as a group are agreed about those questions. For philosophers themselves do not agree about what philosophy itself is or why it is worth studying. Nonetheless, they can talk to each other and learn from one another, even though each of them has a slightly different idea about what philosophy should be. This is like how all the drivers in a city can cooperate to let each other get where they are going, even though not everyone is going to the same place. And if you want to really know what the famous philosophy written down in books is good for, you’ve got to have somewhere you want to go for your own sake, something you yourself have a kind of hunger to understand, and not because you want to impress other people with your learning or get some nice feeling of accomplishment out of it. (Contrary to what some people seem here to think, the philosophers worth reading are never motivated, fundamentally, by a desire to impress other people; they are motivated by an urge to understand things.) You can’t get anywhere unless you get on the road.
What I myself have a hunger to answer is the question “How I can live a worthwhile life?” and that’s why I’ve ended up studying philosophy. Maybe some of you think that this is not a difficult question, and that the way to avoid wasting one’s life is to do something useful, like building bridges or writing helpful software. But if you think for a moment about the concept of usefulness, you’ll see instantly that the things that are useful for something else are not the most worthwhile things there are, for the value of useful things derives from the value of the activities that they are useful for. A bridge is valuable because it helps people travel; a piece of software is valuable because it helps people advance their projects somehow, so these other activities are more valuable than the bridge-building or software-writing that enable them. And so if one wants to live the best possible life, one should attend to the activities that other activities are useful for, and not just to the activities that are useful for something else. This is why it makes me very impatient when people ask what philosophy is useful for. It is not useful for anything else at all; other things are useful for it. (So I think.)
In any case, the main thing I want to say is that philosophy should be studied, if at all, out of a genuine hunger you feel in yourself to understand something, and not out of a kind of passive interest in intellectual history. Say (this is just an example) you believe that there is a perfectly good and benevolent God and are therefore puzzled by the fact that there is evil in the world. This can make you really worry, because something of yourself–your own belief in God, which I assume for the sake of the example you identify with very strongly–is on the line. Now, you shouldn’t just shrug these questions off; that implies a shortage of respect for yourself, as if you don’t care about ensuring that what you identify with is worth identifying with. And you shouldn’t just accept any old answers to these questions, because you want the truth, the real truth, so you should check every answer that comes along carefully to see if it really makes sense. Then and only then will it matter a lot to you what other people who have grappled with the same or related problems have had to say, not because they are authorities but because they are like good friends who are worrying with you and trying to figure it out with you. Then you’ll get past the fact that many (not all) of the deepest thinkers have been very bad writers, because you’re eager to know the truth, which is what matters most of all. And by the way, the big philosophers are not only revered because they are often right, but because thinking about their views continues to provoke insight in us even when they are wrong, like the conversation of a good, honest and intelligent friend. This is how I myself feel about the philosophers I most admire (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Anscombe)–they are like intelligent and sincere friends of mine whose opinions I respect but feel the right to disagree with if they occasionally seem wrong to me, as long as I think I could explain to them why. And just as you cannot have a very strong friendship with someone with whom you have no common interest, where you always find yourself wondering “what’s in it for me?” when you talk to them, you cannot have a strong relationship with a great philosopher unless you yourself have something you want to understand that they too were trying to understand. In short: if you really want to see what is worthwhile about philosophy and why it is important, you have to identify the things that really puzzle you yourself and you have to be trying to solve those puzzles. Any other way of studying philosophy is just sightseeing.
I hope this post is helpful. I mean no disrespect to anyone.
Best,
Edgar