system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How to integrate knowledge from different schools of thought, how to decide what to "keep"?

I've been diving into philosophy for a very short time: just two years. However, in these two years, the amount of compounded knowledge I've observed is baffling; I'm having problems assembling it into something useful.

My question would be along the lines of: "what sort of salad am I supposed to make with Hegel, Beauvoir, Weber and Marx?". 

After reading for a bit you can see multiple brilliant ideas in really extense works, but these ideas don't always fit together and those extense works usually are not made 100% of ideas that work.

For example, Marx's capital is great for understanding production of commodities, but it really won't help you understand post-globalization economics, the services sector (80% of the world's economy) or massive mediatization.

Foucault may have laid the groundwork for analyzing the matrix of power relations in society, but he never wrote about smartphones.

Heidegger may talk about truth in art, but he said very little about propaganda.

In the end, you have massive amounts of information with some clumps of very important knowledge. My salad question is a joke, I'll transpose it into more useful questions:

How do you decide what to "take" and what not to?

How do you translate older knowledge (Kant, Hegel, Socrates, go as far back as you want) to modern times?

How do you decide between opposing ideas (Marx vs. the world)?
gpt
You really shouldn't think of philosophy in terms of "schools" -- this isn't really the way contemporary philosophy is done. A lot of people outside of philosophy seem to get hung up on the categorization, and not as much on the activity of philosophy itself.

The goal isn't to take up wholesale some sort of pre-packaged way of thinking about the world which another person came up with. The point is to learn to think for yourself about these things, not become a disciple. Philosophy isn't here to spare you from having to think, but to spur you on.

This kind of disciple-to-school idea of philosophy is a relic of antiquity. You might hear people nowadays describe themselves as Marxists, or Kantians about X issue, or as Hegelian in their approach to Y, etc. but this doesn't at all mean they accept everything (or even the majority of what) Marx, Kant, or Hegel said.

If Heidegger doesn't say anything interesting about propaganda, then *you* say something interesting about it.