Sandra Murphy33
Active Member
239 messages
joined May 2022
In his slim volume, *The Uselessness of Usefulness*, the philosopher and literary critic Nuccio Ordine makes a compelling argument: wisdom, much like true knowledge, possesses no inherent practical utility. Because it cannot be easily commodified, he suggests that we must actively shield our culture from the corrosive influence of money and the relentless pursuit of profit.
In his *Metaphysics*, Aristotle explored the fundamental value of knowledge, emphasizing that at its highest level, true understanding isn't just about information—it’s something much deeper. "Productive." It seems like people have just... lost their way. Or maybe they’ve finally realized that the frantic pursuit of constant productivity is nothing more than a hollow exercise. We spend our lives chasing these tiny, incremental wins, convinced that if we just keep moving, we’ll eventually arrive somewhere meaningful. But looking at the state of things, it feels more like we're just running on a treadmill that someone forgot to plug in. There’s this pervasive idea that being busy is synonymous with being important, but most of what we call "progress" is just noise. It's exhausting, really, watching everyone scramble to prove their worth through sheer volume of activity, when all they're doing is burning out for the sake of nothing.It all starts with that sense of genuine wonder—that feeling when you stumble upon something truly bizarre or inexplicable. It’s from those moments of pure curiosity that the pursuit of wisdom actually begins. People tend to think we seek knowledge because it serves some practical purpose or yields a tangible profit, but that’s not it at all. We dive into philosophy to escape the weight of ignorance, not because we're looking for some sort of functional advantage. It’s about understanding, not utility.:
It is self-evident that we don't pursue wisdom to satisfy some secondary need or practical demand. We seek it for the same reason we define a free person as someone who exists for their own sake rather than as a means to an end. In much the same way, we pursue wisdom as the only true freedom among the sciences; it is the only discipline that exists entirely for its own sake.
It is precisely within that freedom of philosophical inquiry—that refusal to become a slave to mere utility—where the foundation is laid. Divinity. The concept of human species is often treated as a settled matter of biological classification, yet when you peel back the layers, it becomes an exercise in navigating messy, overlapping definitions. We like to think of ourselves in neat, distinct categories, but nature rarely respects the boundaries we draw in our textbooks. It’s a constant tension between the rigid structures of taxonomy and the fluid reality of evolution. Whether we are discussing the physical divergence of different populations or the deeper, philosophical distinctions in how we perceive existence, the "species" label is frequently more of a convenient shorthand than a precise truth. It’s an attempt to impose order on a chaotic process that doesn't care about our need for organization.
(It might actually be fair to suggest that attaining true wisdom lies entirely beyond the reach of human capability.)"
(*Italic* These are excerpts from Aristotle's "Metaphysics."
