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Personal vs social practical philosophies: do we change the world, or just cope with it?
Karl Marx famously wrote that:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” (Theses on Feuerbach 1845, 11)
Well, to be fair, the two goals are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, one could argue that interpreting the world is a necessary prerequisite for changing it. If we don’t understand things and we just mess with them the outcome isn’t likely to be particularly good.
Moreover, Marx should have known better, as philosophers from Plato to Buddha have, in fact, tried to change the world. However, Marxism is in a class of philosophies, which I will refer to as “social,” that takes a very different approach from the one implicit in a second class of philosophies, which I will refer to as “personal,” examples of which are Stoicism and Buddhism, among several others. The problem, I will argue, is that we need a judicious combination of both.
One way to grasp what I’m trying to get at is that social philosophies are about changing the world from the top down, so to speak, meaning through political reforms. Personal philosophies, by contrast, focus on changing things from the bottom up, one person at a time, if you will.
