Philosophy, as a fundamental capacity of the human mind — before it ever becomes, as a discipline, a captive of academicism — establishes itself in relation to freedom of thought. First the pre-Socratics shake the mythological structure of the world by questioning its actual origin; with the arrival of Socrates, philosophy places itself at the center of the relation between freedom of thought and the structure of socio-political power in all its concealed dimensions. In our own time, when beneath the common notion of freedom there hides an anemic servitude, masked under the guise of a false liberty of choice, philosophy becomes the only true form of thoroughgoing resistance against the premises of digital feudalism and against the decay of spirit that shows itself as emotionally and intellectually impoverished attention. Only such resistance is the precondition for questioning the conditionedness of our age. And yet every resistance — the resistance of thought included — demands the daring of a transitional uncertainty (aporia).

Good for Nothing, Yet Essential When It Counts

As Kant showed plainly in his essay The Conflict of the Faculties, philosophy has no practical purpose; in no respect is it subject to the utilitarian principles of human welfare. Philosophy is the consummation of the individual’s emancipation in the field of universal freedom — that is, in the transcending of the apparent individual freedom of choice within the frame of a politically predetermined reality. At bottom it resists the ease of the norm and refuses to accept the self-evidence of exclusionary categories — in other words: in the eyes of hegemony, whether overt or perfidious, it corrupts the youth. And it has done so from its very beginning, when Socrates, for insisting on the necessity of testing the foundations of concepts through the maieutic method, had to pay for his love of truth with his life.

The political atmosphere of our age — defined by the brutal economic (over)power of assorted elites, who can dictate the dynamics of legislation and shape the everyday habits of ordinary people more or less unhindered — strongly recalls ancient Athens, which, exhausted by the Peloponnesian War, fell to the tyranny of the oligarchs. The erosion of democratic principles and institutions culminated in the dissolution of the assembly (gr. ekklēsia) and in a rampant terror directed against those who thought differently. Public affairs could suddenly be decided by the wealthy alone. And yet it was not tyrannical power that destroyed Socrates. On the contrary, he was destroyed by a newly restored democratic regime, and by the rules of the law then in force. Not for breaking the law but on the moral charge of corrupting the youth, the court — by the tradition of Diogenes Laertius, with 280 votes for and 221 against — decided that Socrates, whose name marks the beginning of philosophy in the West, must be put to death.

Endless Attempts to Execute What Always Survives

To grasp the full significance of Socrates’ personal fate within the general relation between philosophy and whatever power happens to hold sway — regardless of its particular type — one must ask again and again what philosophy actually is, and why the maieutic method of questioning that Socrates established and encouraged poses an existential threat to those in power. To name the fundamental capacity for knowing the world, the Greeks chose the verb phileîn, which denotes a wide range of emotional and intellectual affinities: to be fond of, to befriend, even to love. In the case of philosophy, the object of that relation is what the Greek noun sophia denotes, which — like phileîn — covers the broadest spectrum of the spirit’s capacities: skill, learning, acumen, mastery, and not least wisdom. The love of wisdom is indeed one of the most common translations of the Greek phileîn tḕn sophían, even though this choice of words loses the very heart of the emancipatory potential of philosophy’s relation to the world. Stripping away the erotic connotation that the translation “love” presupposes, and descending epistemologically from wisdom — which presupposes a conglomerate actualization of the relation among tradition, experience, and cognition — to mere knowledge: these two moves capture more adequately the whole liberating danger of philosophy. Philosophy as curiosity — or as love of truth, if we are unwilling to give up “love” altogether — is an active capacity of the spirit that in its essence includes resistance to a passively receptive ease bought at the price of political compliance. In its essence philosophy is not merely the most accomplished cognitive disposition but a path of resistance that places truth above life itself. To know the truth, one must first resist whatever persists as unquestionable, indubitable, or self-evidently meaningful. Curiosity, when it is genuine and free, carries within it that daring which resounds in the Enlightenment’s call to leave immaturity behind: Sapere aude — dare to know.

Of What Is Immaturity the Name?

Immaturity, as Kant defines it in his essay An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, denotes a state of the human spirit that, having suspended its own cognitive powers — chiefly out of laziness and cowardice — is incapable of realizing its own freedom. Surrounded by the unconsidered safety of presupposed rules, the immature mind persists anemically in the comfort of its own passivity. It prefers rules laid down by others to freedom. It does not question these rules; with the consistency of its own uncriticalness, it follows them dutifully. In just this respect the spirit of our age, crowned with rampant technological progress, is markedly immature. The appetite for knowledge is sated by unverified opinions delivered in 280 characters — opinions that curtail the love of truth much as those 280 votes for the conviction of Socrates once did. The public use of reason, which for Kant is the foundation of individual freedom, is thus generally reduced to opinion (gr. dóxa). It is worth underlining that opinion — a judgment proper to the subject, lacking the status of objectivity — amounts, in terms of classical epistemology, to a pre-cognitive act. Today all these opinions parade and circulate, their status beyond question, as the very condensate of truth. Attentive consciousness dissolves into contents that last no longer than thirty seconds. The attention economy invents, at every moment, some new way to subjugate the individual and his gaze. Impoverished attention, dulled compassion — two principal norms of voluntary submission to the laws of the modern community. A multitude of equals, equal not in their capacities but in their limitations. Every aspect of the human is instrumentalized, intimacy itself included. The dogmatism of the classical religions has been replaced by instant recipes for a long life. Ideology is no longer reflected only within the rigid apparatuses of the state; it permeates the space of the everyday. Countless dietary regimes, each with its own fundamental truth. In place of logical, legal, political, scientific judgment — the statistically most probable combinations of words. Why be intelligent at all, if we can simply rely on LLMs?

In trying to understand modern immaturity and the spontaneous resistance to leaving it behind, the central allegory of Plato’s Republic offers itself unbidden. Captivity within the epistemologically corrosive currents of a digitalized modernity strongly recalls that cave in which prisoners are chained from birth, their gaze fixed on the wall. The uniformity of gaze, which excludes any difference of perspective, is the first key to understanding this radical epistemological captivity. The second key is the impossibility of perceiving objects directly: they are available to the prisoners only in the form of shadows traced upon the walls. The prisoner of modern digital devices, too, readily exchanges direct experience of the world for the possibility of documenting it. The relation between direct and mediated perception is, whatever the medium, exactly the same in both cases. More perfidious still is the loop in how the status of reality is perceived. The prisoners of the cave believe that the appearances they watch on the walls are the true state of things, when these are merely projections. In the same way, within the immature multitude of modernity, the subjugation of spirit and consciousness is taken for a freedom worth fighting for. This is not freedom of spirit but the exclusive lightness of indolent comfort. A servitude of this kind cannot easily be overcome by argument. Whoever doubts that this captivity is truly freedom — or, like Plato’s prisoner, climbs out of the cave to attain, in the light of the true origin of things, enlightenment — meets, upon his descent, the fate of Socrates. In other words, whoever today dares to question the indubitability of the foundations of our socio-political present corrupts the pliant uniformity of a majority subjected to technological currents.

The Audacity of Liberation

Every emancipation presupposes an audacity that, amid monotonous comfort, sets in motion a movement in the shape of uncertainty (aporia). The more fragmented attention becomes, the more static the consciousness that sees nothing but sense in everything and denies all contradiction its existence. And yet, on the path to the liberation of reason, something else must today be overcome as well: the torpor that gathers on the horizon of a depersonalized digital reality. Once again the youth must be corrupted, so that it might manage the exodus from the captivity of indolent pleasure and trade the uniformity of self-identification for the contradiction of an unpredictable future. True thinking involves contradiction, everything else makes sense.