Well, I take your point, but Marx's programme of reuniting philosophy and social transformation..
('As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy', Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)
...was not realised. The discrete intellectual activity of philosophy persists until such a time as philosophy finally discovers its material weapon in the proletariat. Until that time, you have to look at those intellectual developments in their own right. Where there is a real working up of concepts and categories, there is human creativity, which is its own small contribution to the enlargement of human possibilities.
Still, the philistines among us can chuckle at this from the German ideology: "Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love" (though no doubt the metaphor has lost its power since sex educators have taken to talking up the spiritually uplifting benefits of masturbation).