Purposiveness

Dear Reader,

You don't exist yet, and as it happens, neither do I...well...at least not as the author of this yet-to-be-written blog. As is the way of these things, I will have to write myself into existence (and before you anti-constructivists start screaming blue bloody murder...I don't mean 'make-myself-up-out-of-thin-air-using-a-bunch-of-words' but something more along the lines of 'engage-in-the-process-of-making-myself-into-something-that-I-won't-ever-become-unless-I get-off-the-damn-sofa-and-start-typing.' (The fact that I don't actually have a sofa is (in this case) quite beside the point, we all have sofas-on-the-inside, and they manifest themselves in a bunch of ways...what they share is being the place that we go to hide from the business of becoming what we want to be))

So. Why I am here? In addition to my mindfulness about my aforementioned materialization, I am here to get stuck into practicing something which (in all silly and not-so-sillyness) we call 'betweenitude' around these parts. What this might mean, and why we might give a monkeys, will hopefully become clearer as things go along, but for starters lets begin with...


Between philosophy and the 'real' world - So, to fess-up, I am an academic philosopher...but this is not a straightforward academic philosophy blog...As a sub-species, it would be true to say we have something of an image problem...and are generally suspected of spending our time disappearing into our internal organs while contemplating the stars and/or our navels, probably while other people are out making the wheels of what-have-you go round. Like most things, this characterization is both right and wrong. What I will say is that I do the work that I do - as do most of my colleagues and contemporaries - because I am worried about the world (and thinking long and hard about quite how and why we make such a hash of it much of the time also happens to fall under my skill-set). No one can tell you definitively where philosophy begins (and if you meet a man on the road who says that he can, kill him), but one of the places it certainly starts is, as a French philosopher I'm not particularly fond of observed, 'in the revulsion of the mind against the world.' That is, philosophy starts when we look at the world and notice that something is wrong with it, and, instead of simply shrugging, accepting, or turning away, decide instead that it cannot be tolerated and that we must ask why it is like that, and how it might be different. It is in this sense that philosophy is often accused of being a flight from the 'real world,' where the 'real world' is taken to be the place populated by people who have chosen (through necessity, or prudence, or self-interest) to accept the imperfection and injustice of the given and get on with it, rather than absenting themselves in dreaming (and probably lavishly furnished) spires. By positioning this blog between philosophy and the 'real world' there are several things I want to suggest...

a) Philosophy, if it is to be worth its name, must be about the real world...that is, it must be concerned with problems as they arise, and have impact on, the world as it is...

b) That the response to these observed problems should not simply be passive acceptance is based on the rejection of the distinction between philosophy as idealistic fantasy vs. hard-nosed realism.
Firstly, the world is not just given, it is made, by us, on the basis of certain ideas and material practices, and on the basis of the concealment of certain ideas and material practices...these ideas and practices can be uncovered, they can be interrogated, they can be rejected, they can be replaced...and thus, within a certain range of limits, the world can be thought and practiced otherwise.
Secondly, the thing currently posing as the 'real world' is operating under the assumption that we live in a zone of limitless resource which can support limitless growth...i.e. it is the 'real world,' not critical practice, which is currently operating under a mass delusion. Moreover, it is not fantasy to say that if we do not subject this allegedly 'real world' to interrogation, particularly insofar as it refuses to respect the psychomaterial (i.e. real) limits of its resources (human, animal, vegetable, mineral) and the conditions of possibility of sustaining life (human, animal, vegetable, mineral)..then, there really is going to be some really real trouble for all of us (more even than there already is for a great many of us (human, animal, vegetable, mineral))...

c) As well as attempting to hash out (or thrash about in) the thematic and practical space between philosophy and the world, the aim here is to try and speak across this gap...that is, my hope for this blog is to find a way to get philosophy to speak to our current predicaments, and to communicate with those thinking people who do their thinking outside of the echo-chamber of academia, and with whom I would love to engage...

So, over the next few weeks hopefully I'll start trying to explain why I think philosophy, and in particular, metaphysics (of all the crazy, way out, totally off the planet nonsense) has to offer the real world. But before that, I'll probably begin by complaining about the government....