A philosophy’s historical worth is its practical effect on society

Evidence

A great deal of research and study on the historical significance of different philosophies is utterly sterile and fanciful because it fails to take account of the fact that many philosophical systems are exclusively, or almost exclusively, individual expressions and that that part of them which can be called historical is often minimal and swamped in a complex of abstractions whose origins are purely and abstractly ratiocinative. One could say that the historical value of a philosophy can be calculated from the “practical” efficacity it has acquired for itself, understanding “practical” in the widest sense. If it is true that every philosophy is the expression of a society, it should react back on that society and produce certain effects, both positive and negative. The extent to which precisely it reacts back is the measure of its historical importance, of its not being individual “elucubration” but “historical fact”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1244

Categorization

• XREF: This reaction-back criterion anticipates the theory of how ideas become material force — relevant to Islamophobia readings on how Orientalist ideology produces policy effects. — connects to: Classical philosophy’s transcendence remained committed to a slave society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 517