Finding Your Voice, and Philosophy From the Outside

Playing Heidegger

There is a need to develop my own voice and style of speaking and writing. I have gained much from reading Heidegger, and Nietzsche before him. It is hard to write in my own authentic way when, after reading Heidegger, I cannot help but to channel him and embody his literary style, mannerisms, and prose. The same can be said of Nietzsche: one cannot simply read him without his firebrand and conviction seeping into one's own words. These two thinkers paradigmatically, in their mastery of language and thought, uncannily seem to possess one writing under their inspiration. But only Heidegger can authentically be Heidegger. Nietzsche can only be Nietzsche. I am neither of them.

With Heidegger's voice sounding through my own, in the way I present and discuss something the exact way he did, the subject becomes lessened through imitation. I have thought to myself many times, "I'm just merely and only playing Heidegger." Performing him. But he has already written Being and Time and developed a turn of thought on it, and decided his own task of thinking. But I am not Heidegger and I in no way measure up to the man. What is my task and how must I articulate it?

Philosophy From the Outside

What I am doing and what I am concerned with is, of course, philosophy, but not academically. Certain life affairs and disability prevent me from entering university. But academia these days seems to be a business and a scam, if not a highly competitive enterprise, which I lack the energy and motivation for anyway.

What can one do in academia anyhow? By luck or miracle become a tenured professor and then teach? Bless teachers, but I am here to do work and develop—into fundamental problems that are not academic but endemic: to the soul and existence of the human being who lives in a human society, with a culture and way of being by which everything is understood. This is, namely, a reinterpretation of the meaning of politics and diagnosis of the technological, capitalist age. For what is academia anymore other than a business of publishing papers concerning...—and that is the question: what does it publish?

One must evidently publish a great deal in order to keep going in academia. But what does this concern? What great questions and ideas are coming out of academia today?

As far as I can tell: if not niche and small developments of this and that, then the corpse of metaphysics: the origin and possibility of consciousness—the apparent hardest problem. Meanwhile, pressing and (un)timely questions are not developed or posed.

We have consciousness and are conscious but are we of a conscience? If we lack a conscience, are we indicted anymore in our default? How must we arrest our souls so as to be able to pay up what is due? What is due is the balance. As overdue, we say things are out of balance. Being out of balance and outstanding, does anything stand out to us as unbalanced? Theory of mind asks what a mind is and assumes people have a mind, but are we of a mind?

Soulfulness, consciousness, mindfulness: are these of the essence of the human being? Or is the opposite what is essential? The mystery of consciousness, but what of the mystery of being? What of the being of mystery and of holding out mystery? Or has mystery transformed into fear? What of the terror of being? Perhaps one of the most frightening is of being of a mind and of a self. The terror of the consciousness of being a self.

But these things are taken up from the outside of academia. In its mindless peddling, does academia have anything that concerns us? Metaphysics is dead and its corpse is drudged around in academia as if it were still alive: from transformation of transcendental idealism to the hard problem of consciousness. All things which concern the mind and consciousness but can't become concerned with the plight of unconsciousness: mindlessness in the most soulless age of atrocity.

Like metaphysics, academia is dead, and we are outside watching the smoldering ruin. Essential matters now are and concern outsider philosophy, if we can still call it philosophy. Certainly not a philosophy of mind or consciousness, but a fundamental thinking of the plight of reclaiming soulfulness, selfhood, and mindfulness in the most soulless age of destitution, war, and disappropriation.

What must we destroy in order to rebuild civilization for the first time as civilization?