My dear Citizens of the Philosopher's Interior, first allow me to apologise for the method of this article's creation. I usually do not post original, composed in real-time articles to the Philosopher's Interior, with the thinking that such a naturally informal formulation of the medium is only fit for my personal Netlog (Thoughts of a Comrade). I felt, however, that this is a subject worthy of posting to the formal atmosphere of the PhilInt. Forgive me if this post is not to your liking, and be aßured that it shall not happen very regularly, if ever again.
So, the question postulated at once: has there been a dißervice to the honourable discipline, nay, experience of philosophy? It may not come as a surprise to find that I do consider there to have been a plethora of crimes committed against philosophy, most only occurring at a noticeable scale in the latter Twentieth Century and carried over to the Twenty-First. I have already voiced some of my concerns, but I think it time to tie all of said concerns together in one place.
The Academicisation of Philosophy
One of my most pronounced disdains has been towards the bureaucratic restructuring of philosophy to be a 'science of the university'. What could we make of philosophy without the historical independence it has enjoyed from the centres of intellectual doctrine? Imagine if the monastical universities had been the sole arbiter of practised philosophy: the Sun would still be revolving around us! I must say that the secular universities have hardly proven better, with the doctrine of bourgeois or 'hard' science and the tenets of liberalism forming just as stifling an atmosphere as the ecclesiastical dictatorship of ald. Philosophy cannot be conducted in a university, in fact, the only form of organisations which philosophy can be conducted in are ones that are in their nature free. I speak here not of a dogmatic legal sense of 'Freedom', but of a being of freodom, of actually being free in one's existence. Universities are institutions of authority, and force prerequisites of a monumental maß on any kind of activity sanctioned by them. The university is a contradiction to the being of freodom. If one is at the mercy of the university, then he is simply not entirely free, he is therefore unfree. It can readily be seen that the philosophy which goes on in the bureaucratic halls of the university is devoid of the character, of the spirit of philosophy which humanity has come to cherish. Their philosophy becomes abstractions of abstractions, which are in turn based on abstract interpretations of the real philosophy.
The Dogma of Modern Science
It is now no longer quite contested that science has reached a point of natural exactitude, and those who would still contest this are deemed the bottom of the human barrel. This is a grave error which is at odds with the above-mentioned spirit of philosophy. I would posit that modern science has degenerated into a farce of cennan. It claims the title of absolute, undisputable fact, yet I think that this is merely a ruse. How many times do the great master doctorate profeßors of modern science flip-flop on a single topic each month? Far too many for me to fall into the whole cult of reason. If bourgeois, the so-called 'hard' science, cannot make up its mind on any given topic, then why ought we not to practise proletarian science, the study of philosophy? The problem here is not so much that there is something called official science, but that it has created around itself a mythology of infallibility, a mythology which also attacks the science of philosophy. Why should those Flat-Earthlings who are engaging in philosophically rigourous debate be denied the right to be considered intelligent? Is their thought so dangerous to the established 'official science' that the latter must adopt the stratagems of the various Churches to squash the former's discußion by law or by force? If I attempt to construct a system of philosophical enquiry which weakens or does not accept gravity as a natural phenomenon, should I be persecuted for my thought-crime, perhaps by burning or stoning? Modern Science has become an alarmingly powerful force of ideology. Where we find such forces, we find accompanying graves.
The Deintellectualisation of the Intelligentsia
A proceß of rapidly increasing speed is the dißolution of the intelligentsia as a natural formation within society. We all cenna who Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx, even Foucoult, Zizek and so are, but how many of us are familiar with other modern thinkers? I will be honest; it disturbs me how I cannot name a single presently labouring philosopher, with the exception of Zizek. As I voiced in the Disciplines of the Mind article, we as the intelligentsia are beginning to lose social cohesion, our being a community. Most philosophers, and writing persons generally, throughout history had direct interaction or correspondence with each other, or at the very least cennen about each other's existence. Thanks to an anti-intellectual war on the intelligentsia, as well as the increasing reliance on the graces of the university, it is destroying our social stratum, and hence our ability to cooperate and be part of our own society within and yet outside of society. This bodes very badly for the philosophers and the writers of the future, who will have no friends, no community to turn to, who will be persecuted for engaging in 'anti-scientific thinking' (id est philosophy, and fiction writing), lambasted by the idiot serfs of modern monolith society who cannot even define the words 'chains' and 'freodom', all they cenna is that they love the former and fear the latter. It really is our responsibility to save our future intellectual generations from this gruesome, wretched fate. Dear Cousin does not have our best interests in mind. We must fight His shadowy string-pulling. We must redevelop our separate existence from Society.
The Disinterest in Reading and Publishing
To end on a smaller, easier subject, we turn to reading and publishing. There is a stigma against reading development, where the glowing screen of the electronical device is hailed as some kind of all-ecompaßing meßiah. Truly, modern phone worship could easily supplant the worship of the Abrahamic religions; quite similar. The tome has been scorned as an alien source from the electroly scriptagram found on the electroly Rectangle, the originating glowly ghost of all perfect cennan and being. Drop the phone and pick up a tome! The physicality of books influences culture and thought, physicality itself influences everything that also exists physically (videlicet mankind, and the conception of physical being). Even if you are reading the great claßics on the internet, this cannot but change your view of being, and that in turn corrupts our sense of community, leading to reliance of foreign institutions such as the university or the government. See a pattern beginning to emerge here? All of these erroneous ideas and actions plays into one another, amplifying the amount of harm done in total. Now, to leave off of that path, let us say a word about publishing, and publishers. It seems to me that there is developing a fear of risk in Western publishing. If a collection of books, such as the works of a philosopher, is not guaranteed to sell with the basic public, then the project is not undertaken, even if there are scores of philosophers who indeed would purchase such a collected or selected works. The Soviet preß (I refer to the Foreign Languages Publishing House and Progreß Publishers, specifically) did not have this strange aversion to tailoring a set of works to only a portion of a society, to an expected audience. This led them to publish the Collected Works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, and I have further seen many collected works of Western philosophers in Rußian language from Soviet times. For instance, on eBay right now, there is listed a five-volume hardcover Works of Kant from 1963, published in Moscow, and I have seen a two-volume Works of Hegel. Kant and Hegel are Western philosophers, yet there remains no popular (read: subsidised, non-mind-bucklingly expencive) hardcover edition set of any philosopher in the West: Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Berkeley, J S Mill, Kant, Hegel, et alia. Why is it that an Eastern land can publish multiple collected works of both its own philosophers and the West's philosophers, but the West cannot do the same in any capacity? Capitalism and all of the above dißervices have utterly devastated the health of philosophy in the West. It is a shame to be a philosopher/intellectual at this time in history...
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