There is no denying it: we live in a world saturated with stimuli. Opinions, slogans, images and discourses unfold at a dizzying pace and compete for our attention, the most precious commodity of the 21st century. Everything seems urgent and immediate. Yet many of the ideas with which we interpret the world do not originate from this constant clatter. Concepts such as freedom, normality, success or truth have deeper, less visible layers.

This era, at least, was the optimistic view of the Spanish thinker Antonio Escohotado, who stated in an interview for ‘El Faro de Vigo’: “Philosophers influence a great deal, though no one realises it. Humanity is bombarded with stimuli, but philosophers remain, like musicians, the only ones listened to.” The philosophy, which is trending again after decades apart from popular concerns, could be the last bastion of thought in a world of suffocating haste.

Influence Without a Face

Not a few modern thinkers accuse our society of being ‘anti-thought’. The term comes from Santiago Alba Rico, but the same idea underlies the “mental poverty” that José Carlos Ruiz speaks of in The Vaccine Against Foolishness by José Antonio Marina or in the essays of Korean thinker Byung-Chul Han. It is no surprise: to think we need attention, and attention is a scarce and ever-crisis-prone resource in the 21st century.

Nevertheless, Escohotado argued in the aforementioned interview he gave back in 2005 that philosophers can change the world as invisible forces. Nobody notices them, but they exert a great influence, the thinker insisted. “We influence as impersonal forces do—like Law, syntax or markets,” he added, “a great deal.”

Escohotado spoke already in 2005, when he did not yet know the ferocity of TikTok, that humanity was exposed to many stimuli, but philosophers were, like musicians, the only ones listened to. Do his words still hold true in an era of reels, reggaeton and folly?

The Frameworks of Modern Society

As if he foresaw the future, Escohotado noted two decades ago that humanity lives caught in a storm of stimuli. From then until now, the noise has only grown, and the pace has only quickened. Researcher Gloria Mark can help us measure the exact amount of attention we have lost in these two decades.

In 2004, the Institute of The Future of Education recorded the average time we could stay focused on a single screen or digital task before switching to another as two and a half minutes. In 2012, the figure had fallen to seventy-five seconds. In recent years, it sits at forty-seven seconds. That means we have lost around 70 per cent of our attention in under 20 years.

Escohotado quizá no pudo prever, in aquel 2005, la ferocidad con la que las multinacionales competirían por ese bien escaso al que llamamos atención. No obstante, dio en la clave con un concepto: incluso en un mundo acelerado, escuchamos a los músicos, y escuchamos a los filósofos.

The Last Bastion

Thinking is a journey of sustained effort. It requires a slow process, sometimes interrupted by everyday tasks, and other times paced with a stroll. In any case, thinking is not something we can do in 47 seconds. And that is why, certainly, more than half of what we consume on the Internet never sticks in our memory.

In that sense, Escohotado’s idea endures. Stimuli do not necessarily generate influence, though sadly today we call ‘idols’ those people who merely represent the commercial interests of certain multinationals, and not any personal ideal.

However, this peculiar framework of our times (a storm of stimuli with a lack of meaning and real impact on memory or ideas) is giving rise to a counter-movement opposite to what one might expect. While Byung-Chul Han’s fatigue society lolls into sleep, while the ‘anti-thought’ society shuns thinking, and while the distrustful society ceases to see the other, voices from the past demand our attention.

Philosophy is in fashion. We return to speaking of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, but also Kant, Nietzsche, Simone Weil or Hannah Arendt. Human beings, as Jean-Paul Sartre predicted, will always be immersed in a search for meaning, even when everything seems lost, thus vindicating Escohotado.

The Rebellion of Ideas

There is no denying that certain evidences terrify. Some people talk again of flat Earths, music has never seemed so far removed from what it once was, and even art has dissolved into something in which few of us recognise ourselves. But even in all that darkness that grips us, Escohotado’s words retain a sense of lucidity. Philosophers have the capacity to influence the present, and they do so also from the past.

Nietzsche spoke of ‘God is dead’, and we thought that with him the very thing we had called philosophy ended. But in the 21st century, when attention is scarce, a few people choose to direct it toward the bastion of philosophy. And with it, we reclaim the frameworks of morality, ethics, critical thinking and the ability to think, debate and define the world we live in. We reclaim sense, a word fundamental to human existence. We reclaim meaning.

Perhaps it is optimistic to think philosophy can change the world, but it is by no means madness to recognise that, as Escohotado said, philosophers influence, and a great deal. On an individual level we can do little to step off this fast-moving train we call society. But whenever we can, we should seize back our attention to direct it, as the Spanish thinker also stated, to the authentic sources of meaning in life: “sleep without dreams, studying and carnal love.” Three “great blessings” that, Escohotado said, “generally exceed the bounds of a heart as narrow as any individual’s.”