“most overrated philosopher of all time”

The phrase is placed in quotation marks because I just saw this as a discussion topic on Amazon. I didn’t open the thread, fearing that I might be annoyed by the answers people give, and it’s never good to start a day annoyed. (It’s just short of 6 A.M. in Cairo.)

In this post I won’t pretend to give a definitive personal answer as to the most overrated philosopher of all time. But I think it’s possible to set some ground rules as to how the answer would be obtained.

1. The most overrated philosopher is probably fairly recent. One can imagine all sorts of opinionated answers along the lines of “Aristotle is the most overrated” or “Hegel is the most overrated.” But these judgments of “overrated” would largely boil down to disagreements. There is a fairly large class of intelligent people who regularly confuse their judgments of correct and incorrect with those of high and low quality. These people tend toward the opinionated and the dogmatic, are easily impressed by those who agree with them, and generally unfair to those whose views they dislike.

So, if you find yourself tempted to say something like “Aristotle is the most overrated philosopher of all time,” then chances are high that you’re giving your own personal dislike of his ideas too much weight in comparison with the many centuries of tremendous influence that he has had. This is not to say that the judgments of the past are always correct, just that the people of the past were not idiots. If some major figure repeatedly has decisive influence on intellects as mighty as those of Aquinas and Leibniz, then if you see nothing of value in Aristotle, perhaps the problem is yours.

The same holds, perhaps to a lesser degree, for any of the major thinkers who have gained a foothold in the pantheon of Western philosophy. Chances are high that if they have stood the test of time for multiple centuries, then something is probably there.

It’s quite different with thinkers of the 20th and 21st century. Here the chances are relatively high that a thinker might just be a “pseudo-event” who happens to address the Zeitgeist in clever fashion without striking deep roots.

Ironically, these very reasons suggest that the most underrated philosopher in history is also probably a recent figure. It is somewhat unlikely that a thousand-year-old author would languish on the margins for that long before being fully appreciated.

Time itself does much work in sifting the important from the unimportant. It is often much more difficult to assign accurate relative weights to things that have happened to the world (or to us personally) in the recent past.

2. The most overrated philosopher must be rated by many as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. This sounds like a tautology, but is worth noting. There’s little point saying something dumb like “Richard Rorty is the most overrated philosopher of all time,” because despite his wide influence, only rarely does anyone call him one of the five most important philosophers of the century, and I don’t think anyone has called him one of the most important ever.

So, what we’re probably looking for is a 20th century thinker viewed by many as one of the most important philosophers of all time.

3. As a corollary, the most overrated philosopher of all time is probably not completely worthless.

Anyone who is viewed by large segments of the educated populace as one of the greatest philosophers of all time surely can’t be third rate. There must be some virtue there of some sort. But if they are the most overrated philosopher of all time, then by definition they are second rate rather than first rate.

So, we’re looking for someone subtly second rate who seems first rate, not someone laughably third rate, because only a few people would be likely to fall for that.

To sum up: the currently most overrated philosopher of all time is probably a 20th century thinker, viewed by many as one of the greatest philosophers of all time, and one who is somehow subtly second rate rather than absurdly third rate. It won’t be a bad philosopher, then. It will be a pretty good philosopher who happens to be inflated by admirers into something much bigger than the reality.

I have an idea who it is. But it’s not anyone I’ve regularly criticized on this blog, so don’t assume you know who I mean. I’ll keep it to myself for now, because I’m considering writing a provocative essay on this topic.

But you can do this exercise yourself… Make up a list of all the 20th century philosophers who are often classed, by one group or another, among the greatest philosophers of all time. And then try to ask yourself which ones might plausibly be as respected 800 years from now as Aquinas is today. In a few cases, I think you won’t be able to keep a straight face. And those will be your finalists for the Most Overrated Philosopher award.