Academia is for the most part either cosmopolitan and directionless (viz. Continental philosophy, which is literary criticism plus sociology), or provincial and trite (Analytic philosophy, which is scientific-reductionist). Synthesis, unity, and historical survey are outmoded and unacceptable ways to proceed in contemporary philosophy. What the grand institution of contemporary philosophy wants is not the reduction in the number of problems, but a great multiplication of them. The problems of philosophy, which for me are at the foundations of our thinking even today, are passed over in favour of trendy discussions within the framework of a vast number of philosophical ‘old boy networks’, discussions which do little more than name-drop the latest developments in culture, science and technology in the most dilettantish fashion, adding nothing to our genuinely-shared experience of the world. Surely we are witnessing the dawn of a Western mysticism in which even the desire to see the world in a charitably realistic fashion is rejected in favour of the demand for cultic initiations into esoteric interpretations of the world, interpretations whose main virtue in the eyes of an increasingly jaded public is precisely to invigorate the self-isolating initiate through obfuscating and complexifying what in reality should be simple and sociable.
I seek a montage understanding of man and the world.
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