Philosophy has always pretended appearances don’t matter. Plato pointed to ideals, Augustine to souls, Kant to pure reason. All air. But life doesn’t work that way. Eyes judge before ears. A philosopher’s body, conduct, and face are inseparable from his words.
Schopenhauer preached compassion. In life he shoved an old seamstress to the ground and paid her a pension until she died.
Heidegger thundered against the crowd, then donned a Nazi uniform when power beckoned.
Sartre praised freedom, yet his freedom left a trail of broken women.
Even Socrates played dress-up: rags and ugliness as a performance, no less theatrical than a crown.
Worst of all: Rousseau. He wrote Émile, urging that children be raised close to nature, their curiosity protected by “negative education.” I admire it and raise my daughter more by it than by modern schooling. But Rousseau abandoned all five of his own children to an orphanage, where most infants died. His philosophy is stained forever by that betrayal.
Some call these ad hominem attacks. They’re not. Philosophy is Haltung—a stance, a posture, a way of being. If you cannot live it, your words rot.
Looks matter. Not vanity—embodiment. Montaigne knew this: his essays were mirrors, not masks. Naked, he showed himself as he was.
The Greeks said: a healthy mind in a healthy body. Not rhetoric, but law. If a doctor looks sick, you doubt his cure. If a priest sneaks to brothels, you doubt his sermon. If a philosopher hides in obscurity, you doubt his wisdom.
When I run or work out, I listen to the Greeks, the Romans, or whatever calls me—philosophy, history, biology, medicine, sociology, psychology. Not to check boxes. Not for spiritual materialism. Just curiosity. Like the body: once in flow, it grows; stop, and it withers.
To found a philosophy is to found a way of appearing. Hair, stance, clothes—each speaks before words do. Deny it, and your silence betrays you.
The inner and the outer are bound together. Forget that, and you end up like Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, or Sartre—not damned for your thinking, but for the fracture between thought and life. To philosophize is not just to write. It is to embody.