I think the situation you described has already been happening in nature since the world existed. What you have described doesn’t apply to philosophy only, it applies to everything in nature. The natural selection of living beings happens exactly this way. We can take some general thoughts from what we can observe both in nature and in philosophy.
One thing that happens is that nature, including the world of philosophers, doesn’t care about immense wasting of resources, ideas, possibilities, anything. I think I don’t need to find detailed evidence to say that, if an extraordinary animal (or a philosopher) has just the bad luck of being born in an unfavourable environment, it doesn’t matter how marvellous it was. Nature doesn’t care about destroying whatever is not favoured, either by their own characteristics or by their bad luck about the environment where they were born. The world famous violinist Salvatore Accardo said in an interview that he had some chances of having very good talented pupils, but they had just the misfortune of being born in a family that didn’t favour at all their talent. The history of science is full of examples of brilliant minds who struggled before being appreciated as geniuses.
Another thing, that we can notice as a general consequence, is that almost everything is based, to a great extent, on power. Power can be considered another way of expressing the luck I have described. If you don’t have enough power, either in yourself or provided by your environment, you will die. This is what happens not only to living beings in nature, but to ideas as well. This means that a lot of ideas that we follow today because we think they are true, or better, actually they have survived just because for some reason they have got power. Certain religions, including their heritage of concepts and mentalities, have been successful because, to a great extent, they have been imposed thanks to political power. This means that today, when we think, for example, that philosophy should follow this or that method, we are, to a great extent, just passively reflecting the mechanisms of power that have shaped the history of ideas of the centuries before us and still shape our minds. In other world, an idea is not true because it is true, but because some kind of power has been able to impose it. We can think in these terms even about scientific evidence; even all the Maths and Geometry theorems, that we are able to prove in so clever and irresistible ways, can be considered just another way how power is able to impose itself as the fundamental law, fundamental rule, in nature, in ideas, in everything.
existing ideas have to be understood first in order to overcome them — simplyG
This is undoubtedly a good method, the best method, but history of culture shows that a lot of brilliant ideas have been discovered by ignorant people, probably because, thanks to their ignorance, they were less conditioned by traditional mentalities. This does not mean, of course, that ignorance is the best method for progress. It just happens sometimes, in all fields, and even in nature: some discoveries, or even important changes in the evolution of living beings in nature, have happened thanks to mistakes, wrong solutions, distortions, that in theory should just have been unproductive failures.
Philosophy is a special field in all of this situation, because it tries to be aware of it at the highest and deepest level. Now a crucial question arises: isn’t a lot of philosophical research aimed at gaining more and more control and power on what we do, what we think? Isn’t the search for awareness and knowledge equivalent to a search for power, at least to a great extent? Shouldn’t philosophy expose to criticism all of these things? How?
That’s why I think that today’s philosophy, like analytical philosophy, is a failure to a great extent: because it looks for power, hidden behind the mask of wanting to understand, wanting to know, so just still following passively the power mechanisms of nature.
That’s why I appreciate postmodern philosophy: because it tries to go against the inertia of nature based on power. I love, together with postmodern philosophy, the “weak thought”, elaborated by the great philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who died just a few days ago, on the 19th of September, ended up not very much appreciated, even almost unknown, as far as I perceive, if compared to the greatness of his philosophy, in my opinion.
This is also the revolutionary concept contained in the idea of Jesus as a God who ends up dying on a cross, that is, in a total failure; a revolutionary concept unfortunately ruined by the overimposed idea of the triumphant resurrection, at least if we consider the way it was developed in classical theology, not to mention all the betrayals made by Christianity after him.