Sentences on Para-Philosophical Practice
Sentences on Para-Philosophical Practice
1. Philosophy is about generating new resources for being. This is what is meant by “philosophy is the generation of new concepts.” This is what is meant by “philosophy as an exercise in untimeliness.” Thus, philosophy is always – at some point – political.
2. Philosophy requires faith that doers can be thinkers as well. Otherwise, it has no point of application.
3. Philosophy that does not touch politics is either bad math or bad poetry.
4. Philosophy is not action.
5. When philosophy becomes action we call it revolution.
6. There are two kinds of philosophy. Political philosophy starts from the immediate conditions of oppression. Pure philosophy starts elsewhere.
7. The two kinds of philosophy are both philosophy.
8. The two kinds of philosophy might or might not meet in the middle. If they do not, it is not because either one is deficient to the other, but because the world is a complex and heterogeneous object in which different scales demand different methods of analysis.
9. The old philosophies of pure and timeless universal thought were necessary. Their deaths signal the first great maturation of conceptualization. The old philosophies were anti-philosophies. New philosophy must reject timelessness while avoiding indifference.
10. The current task is to exercise our freedom. Exercise requires the generation of new concepts, but also action. Exercise requires action, but action that rises above bare repetition. Either one in isolation is neurotic masturbation.
11. The current enemy is fear. A quantum leap in being, doing, and thinking is necessary for social existence to deepen.
12. The failure of current philosophy is due to two trends. One, the relentless application of moribund constructs in the anglo-American faction. Two, the failure of Continental philosophers to collectively bridge the gap between action and thought in their own lives. It is not enough to write; life must be lived as well.
13. The failure to live in the Continental tradition generates facetious speech susceptible to mockery. The failure to believe in the anglo-American tradition reinforces the fascism of inertia.
14. Scientists are doers whose deeds are useful. Artists are doers whose deeds are useless. Philosophers are neither.
15. Science and art progress by parallel tracks. It is in the nature of both to undergo paradigm shifts. Science is a practical community united by epistemological dogma. Art is an epistemological community united by practical dogma. Both praise and denigrate heretics before the orthodox. Both progress by killing their gods.
16. Philosophy advances in the worst cases by style. Stylized politics is fascism. Politicized style is consumerism. Style without politics is modern philosophy. Politics without style is the modern Left.
17. Politics is application.
18. The most developed ontologists are the mathematicians, but they remain dependent on counting. The first and last tasks of the philosophical ontologist are to give accounts of counting and to provide concepts for being beyond counting.