Philosophy was supposed to be different from other disciplines, or so I thought some forty-five years ago, when I was hooked. Philosophers were supposed to be, like Socrates, the fearlessly critical ones. The ones who stood back and said, look, don’t uncritically buy into the values of your society. Reflect. Question. Are these values truly those of a good life? Now too many philosophers have decided to set old Socrates aside, embracing the productivity principle.

Mitchell Aboulafia, Jacobin.

Why was philosophy supposed to be any different? Why would it escape the radical transformations––or deformations––of the modern research university? Over the course of the nineteenth century, philosophy became a discipline just like history, philology, or physiology did; it became a highly specialized and institutional way of knowing. And some folks refuse to come to terms with this.

The elegy for a philosophia perennis, a wisdom that tells us how to live, courses through early modern and modern European intellectual history. From Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s humanist syncretism and Kant’s metaphysics-to-come to Max Weber’s critics in the 1920s and Habermas’s life-world, the desire for a single, unifying source of concepts and norms never abates. It’s an eschatological dream of reason overcoming its temporal divisions and realizing an ethical totality.

One of the most salient and consistent criticisms of Weber’s “Scholarship as Vocation” (1917) was that the German sociologist had demoted philosophy to a mere Fachdisziplin––a specialized form of university-based knowledge. But he was right. German universities had turned philosophy into just another discipline; they produced philosophical knowledge by means of a division of labor just as they produced chemical or philological knowledge. These were all forms of alienated labor and, thus, the kinds of knowledge they produced had no relation to, in the ubiquitous term of the day, Leben.

And this just was, as Albert Dietrich put it in 1922, the “permanent crisis of philosophy” [Dauerkrisis der Philosophie]. Like many post-war German intellectuals, Dietrich dated that crisis to Hegel’s death, when real philosophy––as in a full-throated idealism––gave way to “mere” epistemology. Weber had provided the right diagnosis of the situation around 1917 but he had offered no possible therapy. Dietrich, like so many intellectuals in the decades to come (and even now it seems), longed for a recovery of true philosophy, what Kant called “a total unity” [eine absolute Einheit], a philosophy thought would integrate life and knowledge, the fragmented disciplines, the human. Only a philosophia perennis can save us.