two things keep me from adopting the mantle for myself: one is the compulsory academic distancing that "philosophy" implies. it doesn't always invite people to reach over the velvet ropes and handle the artifacts. i've taken to using the term "applied metaphysics" and "metaphysician" for the more participatory (magical, prayerful, entangled) modalities.
the second is the realization that 99% of Western philosophy—despite its advertised claims—is *not* actually laying down the tracks for some brilliant, progressive, utopian future; rather, when it's functioning well, it's attempting to unfuck some of the catastrophic cognitive mistakes we made by erasing ""animism"" as a form of normative consciousness.
it's like an ontological Houdini act, in which we've chained ourselves in a straitjacket and dumped ourselves into the harbor, and are now furiously struggling to free ourselves before we drown. vitally important effort in terms of survival—but nothing to be celebrated as either practical or heroic, from the perspective of indigenous philosophers who have known better all along.
that's me though. the work itself is still vitally important. and, like you, i can't keep away from it, no matter how i describe what i do. always nice to find a kindred spirit.
Thank you very, very much for the solidarity. Can't tell you how much I appreciate it and need it. I like metaphysician and applied metaphysics as alternative terms. I'm just barely cracking Francois Laruelle but his 'non-philosophy' (which is actually 'non-standard philosophy') seems like it might make openings for genuine philosophical work to be done in other fields.
Unfucking the erasure of animism is definitely key here. A lot of 'new materialism' or 'material ecocriticism' or 'the nonhuman turn' in the humanities, at their best, seem to be recovering this in genuine partnership, even deference, to indigenous cultures. (Albeit, often circumspectly within the more Eurocentric parameters of academia - though not always entirely.)
While I'm wary of utopia, I am deeply sympathetic to leftward projects for genuine social flourishing at systems levels. I don't know who yet, among the left philosophers, that I might trust a little more than others, but I do see them being deployed by people on the ground (substackers, podcasters, zine-makers, local communities, etc.) in ways I find genuinely vectoring toward the good and that have been a lifeline to me in my material and spiritual precarity. Just as I hope they'll consider more and more the need for... the otherworldly? the numinous? the magical?... I in turn want to more and more make my own thinking and practice deeply material.
I think we need each other, the starry-eyed and the grounded.
I have also noticed that some philosophy students or those with degrees that I have met, do actually seem to have this view. That they have been iniated into a kind of exclusive priesthood. This is propably to a large extent due to the emphasis on practical and analytic philosophy in universities here in Finland.
This seems to be the case, what you said about animism. Nidesh Lawtoo's The Phantom of the Ego provides an interesting perspective on this.
Interesting about Finland. I was trained strictly in analytic philosophy at the University of Glasgow (Scotland). They expressly called Derrida and other continental philosophers 'bullshit' from the lectern. I remember asking an instructor about Hegel's concept of the universe as spirit and him responding, 'well, first of all, that's codswallop' and then rehearsing, as I seem to recall, some form of reductionism. Luckily I was in Eng Lit at the same time who relied wholly on continental philosophy (with, of course, its own blind spots and pitfalls). The incommensurability between the departments was palpable though. But I don't even feel especially piqued by all that anymore. I think there's solid philosophising in both traditions and outside them. My qualifications on my own work in philosophy are really based in what I take to be authentic in any and all of these approaches.
I share your approach. Ricœur is a great example of using both traditions. I would also put Wittgenstein, who has been massively important for me, between these traditions. He was also a kind of scarecrow but for him, the crows were basically all philosophers with a few exceptions like Kierkegaard and Augustine. He wrote that philosophy should be written like a poem (https://wittgenstein-initiative.com/writing-philosophy-as-poetry-literary-form-in-wittgenstein/) , and I would say that for him, the crow is the unpoetic philosopher. Analytic philosophers however, are not generally crows since they do not usually contaminate the ethical mysteries of life with abstractions but only study the latter in the sterile laboratory of argumentative language, or at least try their best to do so.
Ah, thank you so much for all this! Man, I'm getting way more out of having written this post than I could've expected. Glad you reminded me of Ricoeur (just gonna spell it that way, ha). He's been on the list too (and Gadamer for that matter). I didn't realise Ricky was a mixer. Good to know. Yes, and Wittgenstein has been calling also. I had no idea he was into Kierkegaard. A perfect connection. I'd largely avoided Kierkegaard as I just felt I wasn't interested in his leap of faith. I knew he used interesting pseudonyms but I had zero idea how utterly creative and poetic (and drippingly sardonic!) he was until I randomly dusted off a copy of Philosophical Fragments (wish my edition was Crumbs!) and couldn't put it down till I finished it a few days later. Currently halfway through Either/Or. Soren is a total game changer for me. I would read everything he wrote for the sheer prose alone. Among the absolute best I've read, alongside the McCarthys and Joyces and what have you. What doubles down on blowing me away is that he can also do *down and dirty* metaphysics, etc. Proper. Often almost as a playful aside. And of course he weaves some of the knottiest philosophical interrogations into all his main playful passages on decadent intellectual clubs, seducers, parables, and so on. Anyone who sincerely draws on him goes up in my estimation. That's partly my interest in Zizek and others. Indeed, I just finished Badiou's St. Paul and it struck me as not a little Kierkegaardian, though he does not mention him as a source there. I gather he does elsewhere. (Secret: I actually think Kierkegaard's a little darker, more poetic, and more philosophically tenacious and acute than what I've read from Nietzsche so far. And that's saying something. A big surprise too.)
One more thing: as my extended (or probably just wandering) metaphor suggests, I'm not overly worried about the crows. We hang out. They contribute. I'm even part corvid myself no doubt. (Ha, I do go about trying to scare myself away sometimes, tatty bogle and crow in one.) What we're all more concerned with I suspect, is the intellectual Big Farming techniques that ruin the philosophical landscape with too much mastery and extraction, akin to what Timothy Morton calls 'agrilogistics'. How a half-crow scarecrow-clown can make any difference against a monster as big as that, I don't know. Then again, I'm in the belly of some big-ass monsters too, some of them sworn enemies to the more rapacious hyperobjects they intersect. Kaiju battles commence!
Cool to hear that this was helpful! Kierkegaard is a blessing. In Ricœurs Oneself As Another theres deep study of Strawson, Anscombe and Donaldson. You can feel the "analytic" understanding also in other books like The Rule of Metaphor and the Time and Narrative volumes where he engages critically with phenomenology and (post-)structuralism.
I totally agree with you on the crows. The crows are not the problem. They are our friends. And we are all crows ourselves. The problem is precisely this Big Farming which, I would say, is not only akin to agrilogistics but an aspect of it. I did not know of Timothy Morton before this conversation. Thank you. I just watched a video on YouTube, The end of things with the philosophy of Timothy Morton, and I got shivers the whole time.
What can we do? Obviously we can not dismantle this machine. And if we could, would we be prepared to function without it? But even in its midst we can create new forms of life and solidarity. We can create permaculture. We can create philosophy, poetry and music, new communal realities which break through the walls of our atomized existence, breathing life into it. We can also support the emancipatory projects of others rhizomatically. Then, when the machine collapses under its own weight and devastation, there will still be something left.
Thank you for writing. Very interesting story. Whitehead was of course in a situation not entirely different from yours, taking up philosophy late in life, infiltrating it from the outside. I have also been planning such an academic infiltration at some point so this story was inspiring in that regard.
Deleuze was also very much engaged with this scarecrow work. Thats why he wrote so many books about old philosophers. However, as I see it, such work is ipso facto creative, and Deleuze shows this beatifully. Carnival speculations are the best kind, as Bakhtin knew.
Thank you for reading and commenting, Jean-Michel. I actually didn't know that about Whitehead! Very encouraging. Glad you feel inspired in turn. Go for it.
I totally forgot to mention Deleuze, but I've getting into him too and yes, he's a key inspiration for the creative approach to philosophy (and now Francois Laruelle as well, as he hoves into my ken). Carnival speculations all the way!
solidarity, comrade.
two things keep me from adopting the mantle for myself: one is the compulsory academic distancing that "philosophy" implies. it doesn't always invite people to reach over the velvet ropes and handle the artifacts. i've taken to using the term "applied metaphysics" and "metaphysician" for the more participatory (magical, prayerful, entangled) modalities.
the second is the realization that 99% of Western philosophy—despite its advertised claims—is *not* actually laying down the tracks for some brilliant, progressive, utopian future; rather, when it's functioning well, it's attempting to unfuck some of the catastrophic cognitive mistakes we made by erasing ""animism"" as a form of normative consciousness.
it's like an ontological Houdini act, in which we've chained ourselves in a straitjacket and dumped ourselves into the harbor, and are now furiously struggling to free ourselves before we drown. vitally important effort in terms of survival—but nothing to be celebrated as either practical or heroic, from the perspective of indigenous philosophers who have known better all along.
that's me though. the work itself is still vitally important. and, like you, i can't keep away from it, no matter how i describe what i do. always nice to find a kindred spirit.
Thank you very, very much for the solidarity. Can't tell you how much I appreciate it and need it. I like metaphysician and applied metaphysics as alternative terms. I'm just barely cracking Francois Laruelle but his 'non-philosophy' (which is actually 'non-standard philosophy') seems like it might make openings for genuine philosophical work to be done in other fields.
Unfucking the erasure of animism is definitely key here. A lot of 'new materialism' or 'material ecocriticism' or 'the nonhuman turn' in the humanities, at their best, seem to be recovering this in genuine partnership, even deference, to indigenous cultures. (Albeit, often circumspectly within the more Eurocentric parameters of academia - though not always entirely.)
While I'm wary of utopia, I am deeply sympathetic to leftward projects for genuine social flourishing at systems levels. I don't know who yet, among the left philosophers, that I might trust a little more than others, but I do see them being deployed by people on the ground (substackers, podcasters, zine-makers, local communities, etc.) in ways I find genuinely vectoring toward the good and that have been a lifeline to me in my material and spiritual precarity. Just as I hope they'll consider more and more the need for... the otherworldly? the numinous? the magical?... I in turn want to more and more make my own thinking and practice deeply material.
I think we need each other, the starry-eyed and the grounded.
I have also noticed that some philosophy students or those with degrees that I have met, do actually seem to have this view. That they have been iniated into a kind of exclusive priesthood. This is propably to a large extent due to the emphasis on practical and analytic philosophy in universities here in Finland.
This seems to be the case, what you said about animism. Nidesh Lawtoo's The Phantom of the Ego provides an interesting perspective on this.
Interesting about Finland. I was trained strictly in analytic philosophy at the University of Glasgow (Scotland). They expressly called Derrida and other continental philosophers 'bullshit' from the lectern. I remember asking an instructor about Hegel's concept of the universe as spirit and him responding, 'well, first of all, that's codswallop' and then rehearsing, as I seem to recall, some form of reductionism. Luckily I was in Eng Lit at the same time who relied wholly on continental philosophy (with, of course, its own blind spots and pitfalls). The incommensurability between the departments was palpable though. But I don't even feel especially piqued by all that anymore. I think there's solid philosophising in both traditions and outside them. My qualifications on my own work in philosophy are really based in what I take to be authentic in any and all of these approaches.
I share your approach. Ricœur is a great example of using both traditions. I would also put Wittgenstein, who has been massively important for me, between these traditions. He was also a kind of scarecrow but for him, the crows were basically all philosophers with a few exceptions like Kierkegaard and Augustine. He wrote that philosophy should be written like a poem (https://wittgenstein-initiative.com/writing-philosophy-as-poetry-literary-form-in-wittgenstein/) , and I would say that for him, the crow is the unpoetic philosopher. Analytic philosophers however, are not generally crows since they do not usually contaminate the ethical mysteries of life with abstractions but only study the latter in the sterile laboratory of argumentative language, or at least try their best to do so.
Ah, thank you so much for all this! Man, I'm getting way more out of having written this post than I could've expected. Glad you reminded me of Ricoeur (just gonna spell it that way, ha). He's been on the list too (and Gadamer for that matter). I didn't realise Ricky was a mixer. Good to know. Yes, and Wittgenstein has been calling also. I had no idea he was into Kierkegaard. A perfect connection. I'd largely avoided Kierkegaard as I just felt I wasn't interested in his leap of faith. I knew he used interesting pseudonyms but I had zero idea how utterly creative and poetic (and drippingly sardonic!) he was until I randomly dusted off a copy of Philosophical Fragments (wish my edition was Crumbs!) and couldn't put it down till I finished it a few days later. Currently halfway through Either/Or. Soren is a total game changer for me. I would read everything he wrote for the sheer prose alone. Among the absolute best I've read, alongside the McCarthys and Joyces and what have you. What doubles down on blowing me away is that he can also do *down and dirty* metaphysics, etc. Proper. Often almost as a playful aside. And of course he weaves some of the knottiest philosophical interrogations into all his main playful passages on decadent intellectual clubs, seducers, parables, and so on. Anyone who sincerely draws on him goes up in my estimation. That's partly my interest in Zizek and others. Indeed, I just finished Badiou's St. Paul and it struck me as not a little Kierkegaardian, though he does not mention him as a source there. I gather he does elsewhere. (Secret: I actually think Kierkegaard's a little darker, more poetic, and more philosophically tenacious and acute than what I've read from Nietzsche so far. And that's saying something. A big surprise too.)
One more thing: as my extended (or probably just wandering) metaphor suggests, I'm not overly worried about the crows. We hang out. They contribute. I'm even part corvid myself no doubt. (Ha, I do go about trying to scare myself away sometimes, tatty bogle and crow in one.) What we're all more concerned with I suspect, is the intellectual Big Farming techniques that ruin the philosophical landscape with too much mastery and extraction, akin to what Timothy Morton calls 'agrilogistics'. How a half-crow scarecrow-clown can make any difference against a monster as big as that, I don't know. Then again, I'm in the belly of some big-ass monsters too, some of them sworn enemies to the more rapacious hyperobjects they intersect. Kaiju battles commence!
Cool to hear that this was helpful! Kierkegaard is a blessing. In Ricœurs Oneself As Another theres deep study of Strawson, Anscombe and Donaldson. You can feel the "analytic" understanding also in other books like The Rule of Metaphor and the Time and Narrative volumes where he engages critically with phenomenology and (post-)structuralism.
I totally agree with you on the crows. The crows are not the problem. They are our friends. And we are all crows ourselves. The problem is precisely this Big Farming which, I would say, is not only akin to agrilogistics but an aspect of it. I did not know of Timothy Morton before this conversation. Thank you. I just watched a video on YouTube, The end of things with the philosophy of Timothy Morton, and I got shivers the whole time.
What can we do? Obviously we can not dismantle this machine. And if we could, would we be prepared to function without it? But even in its midst we can create new forms of life and solidarity. We can create permaculture. We can create philosophy, poetry and music, new communal realities which break through the walls of our atomized existence, breathing life into it. We can also support the emancipatory projects of others rhizomatically. Then, when the machine collapses under its own weight and devastation, there will still be something left.
excellent, thank you very much for the recommendation, i'll definitely check that out.
Thank you for writing. Very interesting story. Whitehead was of course in a situation not entirely different from yours, taking up philosophy late in life, infiltrating it from the outside. I have also been planning such an academic infiltration at some point so this story was inspiring in that regard.
Deleuze was also very much engaged with this scarecrow work. Thats why he wrote so many books about old philosophers. However, as I see it, such work is ipso facto creative, and Deleuze shows this beatifully. Carnival speculations are the best kind, as Bakhtin knew.
Thank you for reading and commenting, Jean-Michel. I actually didn't know that about Whitehead! Very encouraging. Glad you feel inspired in turn. Go for it.
I totally forgot to mention Deleuze, but I've getting into him too and yes, he's a key inspiration for the creative approach to philosophy (and now Francois Laruelle as well, as he hoves into my ken). Carnival speculations all the way!