"We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy"

The line points to a reversal of priorities: the pursuit of power and short-term advantage has crowded out the pursuit of wisdom about how to live together. Philosophy asks what is true, just, and good; politics, as practiced today, too often asks what is effective, popular, and advantageous. When the latter replaces the former, public life becomes a competition of tactics without a compass.

The symptoms are familiar. Policies are crafted around polling and messaging rather than principled reasoning. Citizens are treated as market segments to be mobilized, not as moral agents to be persuaded. Media rewards outrage and brevity, so complex questions are flattened into slogans. Algorithms amplify tribal identity, and party loyalty becomes a proxy for ethical conviction. Even technocratic fixes, while sometimes useful, reduce human goods to metrics, efficiency without a telos.

The consequence is a thinning of our moral language. Rights become bargaining chips, justice is reframed as victory, and law is interpreted as a tool of faction rather than an expression of shared standards. Without a common effort to examine reasons, disagreement hardens into cynicism and contempt. We forget that the point of argument is not to dominate opponents but to discover what we owe one another.

The remedy is not to abandon politics, it is necessary and often urgent, but to subordinate it to deeper reflection. That means recovering first principles in civic education; cultivating habits of intellectual humility, charitable listening, and steelmanning; building institutions that slow decision-making long enough for reasons to be weighed; and empowering public philosophers and ethicists in policy deliberation, not as ornaments but as participants with real influence. It means asking, before strategy, the questions politics cannot answer by itself: What is the human good? What does justice demand here? What do we refuse to trade for convenience?

When philosophy leads and politics follows, power serves purposes larger than itself. When the order is reversed, we mistake movement for direction and victory for truth.