Introduction
A few months ago, I was rewatching Good Will Hunting with my wife. While I just meant to relax for a few hours before going to bed, I couldn’t help but notice the picture this movie paints of philosophy. During the famous bar scene, Will dismantles a philosophy grad student who’s repeating, word for word, takes he stole from some book. From what I can tell, we’re supposed to walk away from this feeling like Will is just a super genius, but my takeaway was different. Why is it that formal philosophy has this annoying reputation of being snobby and counterfeit? The grad student represents what philosophy is for most men, especially modern philosophy.
He’s weak, not just physically, but weak in ways that matter. He’s incapable of action. He’s useless to the people around him. He’s just a consumer and regurgitator of ideas.
If you’re anything like me (a traditional Christian man), that character captures your idea of modern philosophy perfectly. The stereotypical philosopher is short, weak, soft, grumpy, and a snob. He doesn’t contribute to his family or community, doesn’t inspire trust and safety, and he’s annoying.
We accept this as normal. We imagine philosophers as people who talk about virtue while the rest of us get on with the work of living. We imagine them tucked away in libraries, debating abstractions, while real men build, fight, lead, and provide.
My goal over the course of this essay is to convince you that this image of the philosopher isn’t just inaccurate, it’s the opposite of what philosophy was meant to produce. Philosophy, when done right and practically, becomes the bedrock of an active, masculine life. In other words, every man must be a philosopher.
The Roots of Philosophy
Our story begins in a far away place. Sun-bleached stone, salt in the air, and the murmur of an open market where fishmongers haggle in the shadow of marble temples. The first man most people would call a philosopher is standing in the dust of the public square, speaking to anyone who will listen. Thales of Miletus was a merchant, a traveler, a man who made and lost money, and a man who predicted an olive harvest so accurately he cornered the local olive oil press market and walked away rich (now that’s practical philosophy!).
We don’t have any of his writings, but based on our best guesses, Thales lived around the middle of the 7th to 6th century BC. He’s generally considered the first western philosopher, because he sought out natural explanations for the world instead of myth. Later greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, credit him as being the first man to ask the question “What is the underlying substance of everything?” and attempt a rational answer.
His philosophy itself isn’t interesting for us here, but his approach to the task of philosophy is. Not only did Thales use the philosophical method of logical inquiry to achieve desired outcomes (like cornering the olive press market), but he sets the stage for later thinkers who got to what we can earnestly consider the core of philosophy: wisdom for practical application.
It’s important to understand that in the ancient world philosophy (philos- love and sophia- wisdom) meant something closer to “mastery of the art of living” than “fancy thoughts about abstract things.” A philosopher might think about the nature of the cosmos in the morning, advise the city on military strategy in the afternoon, and host friends for wine that evening. There wasn’t an artificial wall between thinking and doing. If your philosophy didn’t make you more effective in the public square, the workshop, or on the battlefield, it wasn’t worth having.
Now Thales was just the beginning. He taught Anaximander who taught Anaximenes, three men who were from the same small Ionian city, each asking in his own way what the world was made of and how it held together. They were traders and travelers as much as thinkers, arguing in port towns and market stalls.
Those same port towns had sailors, and those sailors would carry the questions to other Greek cities. Pythagoras eventually heard them and chased after a hidden order in numbers and harmony (and started his own bizarre cult of the triangle). Heraclitus in Ephesus claimed that everything was in motion, that you never step into the same river twice. Parmenides in Elea fired back, saying that change was an illusion, that reality was fixed and eternal.
Opposing claims like this created and grew the Greek taste for debate. The conversation shifted from Miletus’ harbors to cities across the Aegean. By the time Anaxagoras brought philosophy to Athens, the questions had expanded, less about What is the world made of? but What force orders it? Anaxagoras called that force Nous (Mind) and taught a man named Archelaus.
Archelaus taught a young Athenian named Socrates, and with Socrates, things got interesting. The old questions about the elements and the heavens faded into the background. Socrates asked instead: How should a man live? If Thales meant to pull philosophy down from the gods into the realm of nature. Socrates cared about the state of a man’s own soul. For our purposes, Socrates took the philosophical method developed by Thales and consistently used it for what philosophy is truly good for. In other words, Socrates made philosophy practical.
What is Practical Philosophy?
But what exactly makes philosophy, or anything at all, practical? Looking at the word itself, we find that the english practical comes from the greek praktikos, meaning “fit for action, fit for business; business-like” from praktos, meaning “done; to be done”. In order for something to be practical, it has to have some bearing on action or doing. Going forward I’ll be distinguishing between what I call practical philosophy and theoretical philosophy.
The latter of these, theoretical philosophy, is what we generally think of when we think of philosophy. To be clear, while I’m a strong proponent of practical philosophy, I’m not saying that questions of abstract concepts are useless. Man needs answers to the ultimate questions of ontology (“What is true?”), epistemology (“How can I know anything?”), and ethics (“What is good?”), and those three are generally considered the three domains of philosophy, but for a Christian man, these answers are already given in theology. The Truth is not an abstract proposition, He is a Person, revealed in Jesus Christ. Knowledge is grounded in the authority of His Church. Goodness is defined by His proclamation that “there is none good but One, that is, God” (Mark 10:18).
That doesn’t make theoretical philosophy unnecessary. It means philosophy has to serve theology, and it can’t stop at speculation. Theory without practice collapses into sophistry, which is clever argumentation that feels true, but is false or pointless. Theoretical philosophy’s task is to take the principles given by God and drive them into life through practical philosophy. It’s the link between theology and daily action. To quote Teddy Roosevelt, “the credit goes to the man in the arena.”
Practical philosophy is different. We’ve already determined that for anything to be practical, it has to have an impact on your actions. Like Socrates, we as men have to use our rational minds to answer the questions of what and how. The why we can mostly leave to the theologians. We know why we are supposed to be capable men, why physical strength, financial stewardship, self control, long-suffering, leadership, and all of the other great masculine qualities are needed, but how we develop them and what specifically they look like, are questions only practical philosophy can answer.
Ancient Practical Philosophy
So, as men, we all owe at least some debt to Socrates, because he asked questions that are central to any man’s life. He’d stop a stranger in the street, and using his famously annoying socratic method would ask whether he was a just man, and how he knew for sure.
For Socrates, knowledge was worthless unless it shaped your life. He believed virtue could be examined, tested, and improved, like a skill. A man could become more just, more temperate, more courageous, if he trained himself as deliberately in the virtues as an athlete trains his body. The examined life, he thought, was the only life worth living.
In this view, philosophy becomes a way of training the character. To be a philosopher in Socrates’ Athens wasn’t to be a spectator of life. It was to submit yourself to the discipline of becoming a good man, but that realization is just the beginning of practical philosophy. Socrates’ students took his method in different directions, futher entrenching the theoretical vs. practical philosophy chasm.
Plato preserved the ethical urgency but shifted his focus upward. For him, the virtues Socrates drilled into his listeners were shadows of something higher. These unchanging Forms, he believed, were the perfect ideals of Justice, Courage, and the Good. The practical question, How should I live?, became intertwined with the abstract question, What is the ultimate nature of Goodness itself?
Plato contributed some foundational ideas and concepts to western thought, and some of his terms are central in Orthodox Christian theology (Logos, for example), but it risked man searching for answers he just can’t find without God Himself revealing them. In the Orthodox Church, we honor the ancient truth-seekers, but we know that without the incarnation of God in the flesh, there was only so much they could find.
Aristotle, Plato’s student, brought philosophy back down to earth. He agreed that the Good exists, but insisted that a man couldn’t chase it in the clouds. Instead, he had to practice it in the dirt and sweat of his own life. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defined the good life as eudaimonia (human flourishing) achieved through the cultivation of virtue. Virtue, to him, was a habit of right action formed through repetition, guided by phronesis, practical wisdom.
Aristotle was fully convinced that philosophy should be a manual for building character. It’s not enough to know what courage is, you have to act courageously until it becomes second nature. It’s not enough to admire justice, you have to deal fairly in business, in family, in politics. The philosopher is precisely not a talker, he’s a man whose thinking makes him capable and effective.
This is the type of philosophy we have to practice, the type that measures truth by the kind of men it produces.
Phronesis
So the purpose of practical philosophy is really the acquisition of phronesis (from the root phroneō = to think, to have understanding, to be wise, to have practical intelligence). Aristotle made a point to distinguish several types of wisdom, which perfectly aligns with our idea of several types of philosophy. To quote from Wikipedia (please forgive me):
phronesis refers to the type of wisdom or intelligence concerned with practical action. It implies good judgment and excellence of character and habits. In Aristotelian ethics, the concept is distinguished from other words for wisdom and intellectual virtues (such as episteme and sophia).
In Aristotle’s framework, episteme (from which we get epistemology) is factual, scientific knowledge (this is what Thales was mostly after). It pertains to demonstrable, universal truths that can be taught. Sophia, on the other hand, is theoretical wisdom, the highest form for Aristotle, combining episteme and nous (intuitive reason) to contemplate ultimate, unchanging truths.
It’s important to realize that in the broad sense, these are all philosophy. Science is a relatively new term for natural philosophy, and you’d be hard pressed to find any great mind in the ancient world who wasn’t a polymath investigating anything from medicine and botany, to astronomy and economics. But the crux is that for any of these fields, metaphysics, ethics, anthropology, physiology, there is theory, and then there is practice, and you cannot have one without the other.
It’s worth stressing that Aristotle considering sophia the highest form of wisdom, and he was right. In fact Sophia (Wisdom) is the Logos of Plato, the Word of God, and the second Person of the Holy Trinity, but as I mentioned earlier, the study of Wisdom without revelation is ultimately a dead end, and even the most philosophically dense saints used philosophical inquiry only for the further understanding of theology.
Regarding these two types of philosophy, the labels matter less than the distinction itself. One seeks theoretical wisdom; the other seeks practical wisdom. If we wanted to be precise, we might call the first philosophy in the traditional sense, love of theoretical wisdom, and the second philophronesis, love of practical wisdom.
We can now start to see how these two relate to each other. If theoretical philosophy (philosophia) is concerned with abstract questions and practical philosophy (philophronesis) with concrete knowledge for the tangible improvement of your character or circumstances, it’s obvious that philosophy leads to philophronesis. Philosophy is necessary but not sufficient. A man has to love wisdom, but if it ends at speculation, you don’t have philosophy, you’re back to sophistry.
In short:
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theology establishes the foundations of human knowledge, existence, and purpose
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philosophy explores ultimate questions in light of theology
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philophronesis applies philosophical wisdom to concrete concerns
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methodos formalizes the systems we use to operationalize practical wisdom (we’ll get to this later)
All philosophy either matures into philophronesis or degenerates into sophistry.In other words, we can say that philophronesis is philosophy’s test. Every philosophical question or endeavor has to be judged by this question:
“Does this love of wisdom lead me to live more wisely?”
If not, it’s pointless.
The Death of Philosophy
The lure of sophistry isn’t new. Even in Aristotle’s own time, there was a temptation to treat virtue as an intellectual puzzle rather than a lived reality. Later schools kept his vocabulary but lost the urgency inherent to it. For example, the stoics centered their philosophy around aligning life with virtue, but as Rome grew more decadent, stoicism just became a refuge for private resignation rather than public action. The Epicureans took this even further, hiding in the corners of a collapsing empire, debating pointless things.
By late antiquity, the intellectual climate shifted. Christianity was on the rise, and for the first time in history, the ultimate answers to ethics, ontology, and epistemology weren’t just claimed but revealed. God Himself came to earth and explained how to be good, showed what is real, and gave us certainty in what we can know. Theology was fulfilled (Matthew 5:17).
Of course that meant that philosophy was now second to theology. In some cases it took on a servant’s role by helping to clarify doctrine. In others, it wandered off into ever finer points of metaphysics, logic, and commentary.
I hope you can see the tragedy in this, that the triumph of theology over philosophy had this outcome. It’s obvious that the resolution of the ultimate questions by theology freed the philosopher to focus on other topics. While metaphysics is essentially solved, domains like medicine, athletics, leadership, economics, etc. warrants endless exploration.
Every philosophically inclined man has a deep desire to solve problems with his mind. This need, like the feeling of hunger or the sexual urge, is given to man by God to make the pursuit of goodness compelling, but like the latter two examples, problem solving can be perverted and abused. And it has been, leading to detachment and cold armchair philosophizing.
In the medieval universities, this detachment deepened. The scholastics did brilliant work, but the focus was often on disputation for its own sake: if you could articulate, defend, and refute a position, it was considered a victory, even if nothing in your life changed. The unity of thought and action that defined early philosophy fractured, and even the possibility of philosophy’s use to sharpen theology was abused, giving us legalism where we should have mysticism.
This is the fundamental problem with theoretical philosophy for its own sake. To live in the mind only and ignore the enfleshed world, the tangible, material creation serves neither the mind nor the world. A mind retreating into itself is just another version of gnosticism and any conclusion you come to from the mind alone is bound to be incomplete at best, and a perversion of truth at worst. Sadly, this is exactly where we ended up with the modern academy.
Philosophy became a career path, with its value measured in publications and conference papers. The questions it asks are self-contained, designed to be solved within the bubble of the faculty lounge or seminar room. You can earn a PhD in ethics without anyone asking whether you’re an ethical man. The idea that philosophy should train the man for life has been replaced with the idea that philosophy should train the mind to play clever games.
What began in the agora as a means of shaping the whole man has, in many places, become a sport for intellectual bragging rights.
So now virtue is a brand. Men curate the appearance of morality online, quoting Seneca between binge-watching shows, re-posting C.S. Lewis quotes before rolling back into the same indulgent habits. We’ve traded the discipline of living for the performance of thinking.
Skills atrophy without use. You can memorize Proverbs and still lose your temper. You can recite Epictetus and still fold under peer pressure. Wisdom that isn’t lived decays into trivia, and trivia doesn’t make a man strong.
The result is a generation of intellectual men who have been trained to think like philosophers but live like consumers.
The State of Modern Philosophy
And this is where we are today. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an intellectual (or casual, for that matter) man who’s read popular philosophy without having been corrupted by its snobby, unproven frameworks of fancy terms like existential authenticity,_ dialectical materialism_, or deconstruction of meaning. These all sound impressive but collapse under the first sign of scrutiny, because they “explain” everything while explaining nothing. They create sophists, leading to two distinct problems in our society.
First, these academics shape the culture, and second, their pedantic hair-splitting turns men off from real philosophy. In the 21st century, the pressure to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend a higher education institution is so strong that virtually no young, malleable mind can escape our atheist/nihilist indoctrination program, and the best any young mind can hope for is to be spared exposure to these prophets of insanity by studying something objective like mathematics or computer science.
These pseudo-philosophers have studied the writings of the most deranged and evil minds in the history of mankind, and they have made it their career to infect others with these ideas. Through their sophistry, they have convinced entire generations of people that “God is dead”, “Hell is other people”, or “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
The problem here is that this bastardization of rational thought has no metaphysical bedrock to rest on and has convinced most men to throw out the philosophical baby with the sophistic bath water. It’s no accident that the great minds of periods as recent as early modernity (17th century) grounded all of their philosophical inquiries in the bedrock of theologia, and while I don’t agree with the almost entirely theoretical pursuits of Isaac Newton or Decartes, it’s telling that even these men firmly placed God at the center of their thought.
The Return to Philosophy
But there is still hope. While the turning gears of the intellectual apparatus are seemingly unstoppable, there is no reason why men at the grassroots level can’t revive practical philosophy in their daily lives. This is ultimately the point. Even this essay (forgive me for getting meta) is meant to serve a practical purpose. Talking about theoretical philosophy being useless without practical philosophy is itself useless, unless we take this realization and do something with it. For that reason, here’s the framework I’ve been alluding to this entire time in its entirety:
The first building block, the corner stone, if you will, is theologia. You cannot be a man without ordering your entire existence towards your creator. All created things are made for a reason. They have a telos (ends, aim, trajectory) and are only ever actualized when pursuing that telos. I have neither the skills nor the authority to talk at length about Orthodox theology here, but suffice it to say that cleaving to the Incarnate God-Man is the first step to living an active life of wisdom. The sources for theology are holy scripture, the Church fathers, the mysteries, hagiographies, prayer, etc.
The next layer is philosophia. Once we have metaphysical, ethical, ontological, and epistemological bedrock, we are free to use the axioms provided to reason in detail. This is the love of wisdom expressed as an understanding of order. While we know generally what goodness is through the scriptures, the lives of the saints, and God’s revelation to the human heart, it’s at the philosophy step that we expound on what’s been revealed and try to understand it more fully. There is a symbiotic relationship between theology and philosophy where theology informs our philosophy, and (when done correctly) philosophy helps us better articulate our theology. The sources for theoretical philosophy are human reason illuminated by faith, contemplation ordered by theology, and the writings of philosophical Church fathers (St. Maximos, St. Gregory Palamas, etc.), ancient truth seekers (Aristotle, Plato, etc.) as well as modern Orthodox philosophers (Dr. Jean Claude Larchet, Vladimir Lossky, Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, etc.).
The third step is philophronesis. Like I mentioned previously, this is the test of any theoretical philosophy. Unless it bears fruit at this stage, it is not true philosophy. Practical philosophy is the discipline of translating philosophical and theological truths into frameworks for life. It answers the question of how exactly a man should live, and it’s the first step that’s mutable. Theology and theoretical philosophy are absolute. They can be expounded but never changed. Practical philosophy is person and context specific. I, as a father and husband, will create and use different systems and frameworks than a hieromonk in the Egyptian desert. You can think of practical philosophy as the strategy a man might take. Sources for practical philosophy include logical reflection in light of theology and philosophy, first-principles reasoning, reverse-engineering from telos, observation of nature and tradition, and feedback from lived experimentation. Examples of practical philosophy are The Seven Commitments (see MCX essay #2), the FIRE framework, humoral theory, etc.
It’s worth noting that the lines between all four are not crisp, but blurry. This is especially the case for philosophia and philophronesis. Don’t get too bogged down by categorizing things into these buckets, but let the general model help you determine where thoughts should lead you.
The last step is methodos (meta -> after + hodos -> way = a way pursued towards an end). This is not the same as Aristotle’s praxis which is an activity pursued as an end in itself, like prayer or almsgiving. Method is the systematic pursuit of virtue and capability through disciplined, consistent action. The sources for method include habits and rituals derived from philophronesis, iteration and experimentation, and (don’t hate me) some content that’s generally classified as self-help, like habit research, neuroscience, etc. Some examples of method are the Warrior King Training Protocol, fasting, budgeting, journaling, sun exposure, etc.
To summarize, theology says “Christ is the Logos, and all things have their purpose in Him.” Philosophy says “therefore, the good life is one lived in accord with that Logos: a life of ordered reason, virtue, and hierarchy.” Philophronesis says “here’s how a man in the modern world can structure his life to live by that order: the Seven Commitments of the Warrior King.” Lastly, method says “here are the daily actions that embody those frameworks: the Warrior King training protocol, budgeting techniques, morning rituals, etc.”
Conclusion
Philosophy began, as all good things do, with wonder. A man looking at the world and asking, What is this, and how should I live within it? Somewhere along the way, we traded wonder for cynicism and wisdom for word games, but the answer was never lost. It was just buried under cleverness.
The task before us is not to invent a new philosophy but to return to the old one. The kind that teaches a man to pray before he speaks, to think before he acts, and to act with conviction once he knows. The kind that begins in theology, matures in philosophy, proves itself in philophronesis, and is expressed in method.
To reclaim philosophy, we have to once again measure thought by fruit. Does it strengthen the will? Does it order the passions? Does it make a man more capable of love, more useful to his family, more sure in faith? If not, it’s fake. True wisdom has to be lived or it dies.
The philosopher and the warrior were never meant to be different men. They are two halves of one whole. An intellect guided by revelation and action disciplined by truth. Every man who kneels before God and rises to fight for good is a philosopher in the truest sense.
If we want to rebuild a civilization worthy of the name Christian, it won’t be through more speculation, but through men whose thoughts have become manifest, men who live as if the Logos Himself walks beside them, because He does.
The time for detached thinking has passed. The time for purposeful wisdom has come. Let the man who loves God learn again to love wisdom, and then to live it.