The loneliness of thinking

I have a problem. I have painted myself into an intellectual corner. The problem stems from neither needing nor being willing, to ‘sell what sells’. I do not need, nor will I, placate or people please to get money. Nor will I do this to get more academic trinkets. There is a point, a line, and I’ve reached it, and crossed it (almost mixing metaphors), when one cannot un-think what has been thought, and also, sleep.

I’m not suggesting I have figured out a Hegelian or Platonic grand and uniting theory of everything. Nor am I intimating I’m right in where I currently am, meaning everything else must be wrong. I am suggesting that having ‘read’ (mostly listened), debated, thought, written, (and repeat) over many years, I’m in a very different place to most of the popular packages of commercial wisdom, and adrift from mainstream dogma in my academic areas of recognition.

When one takes money, and the protection of reputation built up by previous publications, out of intellectual endeavour, one can end up in a situation of clarity and flexible humility, which is for want of a better word, enlightening. It can also be extremely lonely.

One cannot understand Heraclitus, Platonic Socrates, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Camus, Deleuze and so many more, having been trained in psychology, and not formulate a worldview of one’s own making. Then to discover Byung-Chul Han, as I have recently (but not yet read extensively) and find that one is not ‘alone’. Quite magical. An affirmation that it is right to apply one’s absolutely keenest thought to the biggest and most important of conundrums one feels moved to explore, and expect to find new things, all the time, but not of course in a linear fashion.

Business and the pursuit of money have conditioned ‘people’ (as in, pretty much all of them) to have to be as predictable as possible. Science has allowed itself to become a series of commercially sensitive, static statements and positions. One is what one has said and done, and not what one is thinking, or could think and do in the future. Sides are to be taken, battle lines drawn, and the winner is the one with the most status and wealth at the end. Yes, it’s cynical, however given the acceptance of debt-ridden lives, having to produce progeny (in most cases), and the cult of neo-liberal individualism, that’s how it seems to me.

Academia and commercial life have long since overlapped. Research is strictly controlled, and reputations are not to be tarnished (unless they find themselves politically isolated). Inflated egos are to remain so. Horses are not to be scared. “Evidence-based” is the cry, otherwise known as ar.. covering empirical myopia from where I am now. Of course, it won’t do just to make up plausible-sounding ideas and peddle them as more solid than that but having to capitulate to politico-commercial pseudo-pop, or even well-thought-out ideas and methods, but with which one is at odds, is at best, stultifying.

There are monetary considerations in life, and to pretend otherwise is silly. However, to insist on the rectitude of ideas, procedures, systems, etc. because they make money, preserve ridged reputations, or are popular (and therefore typically simplistic in the extreme), and for this to be not only acceptable but required, is a waste of human capacity. It is fine to be dogmatic as one is learning, a bit like a child’s view of things. We should forgive this. To stop learning and thinking and refuse to consider anything else except so as to argue against it, not. We all get this a bit wrong, I have, but I’m trying not to.

I am trying to think of a better method for enacting debate, than making a statement explaining what I think is the error in statements others make. It is an invitation to start talking, but I can see many people don’t take it up that way. This is a work in progress, but I’m not sure I can quite shake my Socratic tendencies… I do have a leaning toward bringing people up, abruptly. I think that a robust statement is best met with another, and let the fun begin. Hmm… room for a rethink, or is it good to have one’s ground a bit shaken?

I know, from recent events in my life, that duplicity is something I cannot abide, and I know it’s a requirement of business (what happened recently was personal). It is a requirement of employment law in many cases! Unintended consequences… As a therapist, I’m quite honed in noticing duplicity. It always shows up in incongruence if one pays attention and gives one a feeling something is ‘off’. I think I get this sense on a grand scale when I look at the flimsy things which are presented as immutable facts because someone has been taught them. So it has become with this platform, and why I’m in such an odd mood as I write this. Perhaps my own ground, my trust in people, has had a bit of a shake, but I don’t want to completely lose faith in humanity.

I guess, as I try to wring a point out of this piece, I want to say that if you are thinking deeply, and caring about thinking deeply, learning and re-thinking all the time, and you find you’re on increasingly shifting sands, I feel ya! To perceive is to suffer, as Aristotle said, or something like it once we allow for translation. I would add that if you think that perception means your steadfast, solid, commercial, populist list of soundbytes – you’re probably a not insubstantial element of that suffering… (I couldn’t resist it ??).