Max is NOW!

A letter to Eric:

Manifesto is right.

First, here is part of an email that I just sent to Amy this morning:

“I’ve got a lot of mixed feeling about the symposium, but I’ll sort it out
eventually. I think it’s funny that the more exposure I get to professional
philosophy and professional philosophers(excluding you, and SOME of the
faculty at CSUF), the less I want to do it and the less I care about it. I
think this has more to do with my anxiety than a lot of other things
actually. This and art anyway. Both things I love dearly, and both I think
are the keys to the mysteries of happiness, good-spiritedness, human
connectivity, and hope; but both things I hate in their activity in our
society. I find myself in love with things I hate. I conceive them as
hopeful, and see them as hopeless. This is my conflict, I suppose.
Sorry for the tangential thoughts, this is what I’ve been trying to figure
out the past couple of weeks. Haha.”

So I think I’m about on the same page as you.
I want to decanonize all of philosophy.
I seek to destroy. I look for collapse.
Perhaps I’m a bit more violent than you however.
I don’t wish to see the academics yield, I wish to see them die.
What does philosophers DO?! Nothing. Not for anyone. Not anymore.
That’s why I like Aristotle, Nietzsche, and some post-mo’s. They are set to frame philosophy about people again. Plato was about people once, but then he got caught in the forms. It’s the same with all of them. They started by being women/men once, and then lost their way. Its the credit I will give Battaly, Shari, and Amy: they wont let go of people. Philosophy is not here to be gawked at, it is not here to be read in a silent corner, it is not here to be the lubrication of our mental masturbations; philosophy is here to illuminate, to articulate, to understand, to undermine, to challenge, to create discourse, to create meaning. Philosophy and art. The same work in different symbols. The work to connect. The work to find ones way. Philosophy is not the only path, but it is A path. A path to eudemonia. A path to life. A path to hope. But we have lost this. We have lost it since the beginning. As Diogenes the cynic said: “Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music.”
So we must not possess virtue only in our mouths. But the virtue here is about wisdom. Wisdom we have learned, wisdom we have gained. Philosophy has wisdom in her mouth, but practices none. This is what must change. All of the books and the essays and the lectures….they are nothing compared to one act of wisdom, to one motion of guidance, to one twinkle of human connection.
We must shed the old and decaying corpses of philosophy. We must hack through the useless limbs, we must look for the new way.

I realize I have gotten a bit caught up here. But I am passionate about this. There is no future for philosophy. Not within the canon. Not within the institutions of old.
Eric, I will think on this more. But my break has given me new hopes. New ways of thinking. We must create meaning, we must capture what was once ours.

-max

-soundtrack-
interpol - no exit

-blog assignment-
cut back the branches, spring is here.