the thing that's a "big deal" is control of the world, or lack of it -- from your immediate locality on outwards: what's being ceded, when you accept "everything is still at issue", isn't just your sense of control over your neighbourhood (or deaprtment), it's control over the very language you speak, as well opening up the nature of the courtoom to contest also -- who will even get to be a judge here? what are the rules, the laws, the means of effective persuasion?

i think the attachment to philosophy is an attachment to a belief that some (moral) things are stable and decided: that there are these old folks out there, with beards and togas and everything, who have established structures we can all agree we should stay within

(the "groves of academe" was a little wood outside athens where the eggheads gathered to yatter -- kind of like ilx with olives)

which makes the idea of depth (as regards philosophy) a kind of optical illusion: what's being relied on is that a system of thought or analysis has "stood the test of time", so shoukd be maintained; rather than how revolutionaries think, which is that the problems that immediately face us create their own systems of solution, and too bad what everything that came before