PREFACE, 2019
What follows directly below this Preface is the original Introduction to Against Professional Philosophy, aka APP, from 2013.
It’s pretty much self-explanatory; but because it has now been six years since APP rolled out, I’d also like to add four contemporary follow-up thoughts.
First, I want to highlight APP’s six-year evolution from originally writing and publishing mostly critical and negative metaphilosophy, to nowadays writing and publishing mostly creative, original, and positive post-professional-academic philosophy, both first-order and metaphilosophical.
Indeed, if it weren’t awkward and confusing in various ways to re-name the site at this point, it would have been illuminating to call it Beyond Professional Philosophy henceforth, although we’re not actually going to do that.
Second, I want to reconfirm that since May 2017, APP has been operating as just one sub-project—namely, the blog—of the online mega-project Philosophy Without Borders.
Third, I want to emphasize that The APP Circle is not in and of itself a collective of philosophical and political anarchists—although at least one of us, Z, actually is a philosophical and political anarcho-socialist—but instead a group of free-thinking individuals fully committed to doing a certain highly progressive type of real philosophy we call borderless philosophy.
Fourth and finally, I’d like to give my heartfelt thanks to our guest authors and regular readers for supporting a philosophical project that we think is both profoundly important and very timely.
Sincerely,
Robert Hanna, aka Z, on behalf of the members of The APP Circle: Boethius, Otto Paans, Q, W, X, Y, and Z
INTRODUCTION, 2013
W, X, Y, and Z all share a deep love of real philosophy. By real philosophy, we mean authentic (i.e., wholehearted, and pursued and practiced as a full-time, lifetime calling), serious (i.e., neither job-oriented nor Scholastic and shallow), critical, synoptic, systematic reflection on the individual and collective rational human condition, and on the thoroughly nonideal natural and social world in which rational human animals and other conscious animals live, move, and have their being. Real philosophy fully includes the knowledge yielded by the natural and formal sciences; but, as we see it, real philosophy also goes significantly beneath and beyond the sciences, and non-reductively incorporates aesthetic/artistic, affective/emotional, ethical/moral, social/political, and, more generally, personal and practical insights that cannot be adequately captured or explained by the sciences. In a word, real philosophy is all about the nature, meaning, and value of individual and collective rational human existence in the world, and how it is possible to know the philosophical limits of science, without being anti-science, and indeed while also being resolutely pro-science. Finally, real philosophy is pursued by people working on individual or collective writing projects, or teaching projects, in the context of small, friendly circles of like-minded philosophers. Like-minded but not uncritical! Real philosophers read both intensively and also widely inside philosophy, and also widely outside of philosophy, critically discuss what they’ve read, write, mutually present and talk about their work, re-read, re-discuss, and then re-write, with the primary aim of producing work of originality and of the highest possible quality, given their own individual and collective abilities. They also seek to disseminate and universally freely share their work, through publication, teaching, or public conversation.
In view of this conception of real philosophy, we also share some serious worries about contemporary professional academic philosophy. More bluntly put, we think that professional philosophy is seriously fucked up in various ways that, ironically and even tragically, oppose and undermine the ongoing project of real philosophy.
The twofold purpose of Against Professional Philosophy, then, is, first, to provide a serious critique of contemporary professional philosophy, for the sake of real philosophy–namely, anarcho-philosophy aka borderless philosophy–and second, to prepare the way for the real philosophy of the future by featuring past or present philosophical work that is aggressively cosmopolitan and non-chauvinist, critically challenging and edgy, daringly generalist and original, fully humanly meaningful, slightly weird, and generally deemed “unpublishable” in mainstream venues.
Another, more classical way of stating the purpose of Against Professional Philosophy is that it is essentially the same as Kant’s, in the justly famous opening sentences of “What is Enlightenment?”—
“Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from [their] own self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. This immaturity is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of Enlightenment.”
In other words, we think that it’s up to all of us, as lovers of real philosophy, to dare to think for ourselves against the conventional wisdom of contemporary professional academic philosophy. But that’s only the beginning. We hope to help contemporary philosophers, whether inside or outside the professional academy, to (re)discover their true vocation as rational rebels for humanity—
“When nature has unwrapped, from under this hard shell, the seed for which she cares most tenderly, namely the propensity and calling to think freely, the latter gradually works back upon the mentality of the people (which thereby gradually becomes capable of freedom in acting) and eventually even upon the principles of government, which finds it profitable to itself to treat the human being, who is now more than a machine, in keeping with [their] dignity.”