I never truly understand anyone who studies philosophy. Based on my philosophy friends, I can only assume it’s meant as a way of taking the intellectual high ground. They like to tell me all of these different narratives and metaphors to explain certain phenomena. One example: imagine there is a wooden boat and you take a plank off the boat every day and put it in a pile and replace it. Now repeat until you have enough wooden planks to create a new boat. After the second boat is built, which boat is the original? This, I believe, is called the Theseus paradox.

Mindfuck right? It’s usually used as a metaphor to explain how us humans are constantly losing cells and replacing them and attempts to answer the question of being. What an interesting thought experiment except…Who cares?

“Am I the person I was yesterday? Perhaps my conscience lives on but my physical form does not?” Jesus, no wonder Comte and Foucault had bouts of insanity when studying philosophy, it’s maddening. It might by good to run these thought experiments but really what’s the point if you’re not planning to apply them in the real world somehow?

This is where philosophy falls short. It merely talks about the theoretical and, while it might be nice to paint an idealistic world that is full of nothing but chocolate, beer and sex, we need to be realistic. This is why Politics is better.

Politics takes these findings and applies them to society, making it a true science. Things are tested, recorded and theorised. We study everything philosophy students do, but in the real world. We apply Plato’s analogy of the cave to ontology and epistemology to determine political behaviour. We take liberal ideas and scrutinise them to see what the ideology truly is like when applied. All of this is lost in the classrooms when you merely stop working at the theoretical.

I don’t understand why philosophy students don’t just take up politics. We cover everything you do and offer more. Want to have a deep debate about society? Tick. Want to read great intellectuals? Tick. Want to be saddened over the fact that our degrees are hard to make careers out of? Tick.

All philosophy students do is go around and around in circles on this quest for ‘wisdom’ that they are going to become enlightened as soon as they graduate. I can probably imagine there will be a tonne of philosophy students proving my point arguing in the comments below stating that without philosophy you don’t have politics. Motherfucker, that’s my argument, we cover all your stuff and more.

So if you’re studying philosophy as a degree I’m sorry but it’s outdated, you’d be better off taking politics.