Philosophy in the Age of Post-Truth: Servant of the King or Clown in the Agora

Abstract

This article touches on two main themes of popular debate in the community of philosophers and the international information space. On the one hand, it deals with the emergence of the age of “Post-truth,” and related value, worldview and sociopolitical transformations. On the other hand, the article looks into the crisis of philosophy as a scholarly field and discipline, as well as debates around the prospects of philosophy’s survival in the current age, whatever it may be called (Post-industrial, Information, Post-truth, etc.). The main thesis lies in the fact that it is precisely in the age of Post-Truth that philosophy gains enormous relevance; however this new sociocultural situation demands that philosophy regain certainty of its role and position in society. Two typical roles and positions, two forms of philosophers’ communications with society thus emerge. Aphoristically they may be expressed as the Servant of the King (thus, a servile attitude to power, whether secular or ecclesiastical) or the Clown in the Agora (or the market of educational and intellectual services, governed by “market laws,” familiar to Sophists of the Ancient world). The author presumes that our age is in many fundamental respects similar to the age of the Sophists, especially in how higher education becomes reoriented towards market demand and mass preferences. The author describes the dialectics of freedom of philosophical thinking between outside compulsion and the needs of funding, and shows that the problem is far from being resolved.