I think it was Karl Jaspers who said that the apparent obscurity of philosophy is due to the fact that if the answers to life's questions were obvious they would have been figured out long ago. It's easy for the layman to sneer at the verbal hairsplitting of modern philosophy, but there are no shortcuts to knowledge. Fine distinctions have to be made to clarify thought and prevent procedural errors in logic to creep in.

             The problem with philosophy is the same one that psychology has: it's impossible to be scientific about the subject, because it's man studying man. Nearly all the most meaningful elements of human consciousness are virtually impossible to quantify, delimit, or define with any precision at all. Therefore the scientific method, which depends on precision of measurement and experimentation, and applies only to physical phenomena, is useless as a means of attaining certain knowledge in these areas of inquiry, although it is not without conditional, limited value in some psychological studies. .

             Epistemology, or the search for certainty in knowledge, has been an enduring preoccupation of philosophers since the Greek Pre-Socratics. The rationalism of the Enlightenment held that rigorous chains of irrefutable logic were unerringly capable of finding truth. Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, each criticized their forerunners and contemporaries in ever more refined distinctions about the self, ethics, mathematics, history, and nearly every other area of human existence.

             With Nietzsche, Schopenhower, and Kierkegaard there comes an increasing realization that perhaps logic alone is inadequate to fully grasp the deepest levels of meaning, and that spirituality in form of the exalted intuitions of religion and art might have a central role to play in defining man to himself, since the modern age has proved beyond a doubt that progress is a concept which can only be applied to technology and material culture.