Resistance

I resist many things in my life.

It was an undercurrent for many years. I was so habituated to favoring what wasn't that I lost touch with what is. My mind drifted more easily in the was and could.

I've become more acquainted with the present. I like it here quite a lot.

I'm far more conscious of resistance now. When the moment demands a mood, when the bus won't get me somewhere on time, when my mind or body won't cooperate with me. Yet my resistance still surprises me.

I am currently resistant towards writing. Even these keystrokes bring me a bit of pain. That last sentence made my brow furrow and my left eye compress into an awkward painful wink.

Writing has always involved a 'towards which'. I have always written with a future in mind. A future in which I am an academic, a professor, a lauded and accepted thinker among a community of thinkers. Writing was previously a means to an end, the end being graduate school and a scholarly profession.

But the idea that one can be a 'professional philosopher' is of recent origin and seems less and less viable to me. One can be a professional teacher. One cannot be a professional philosopher. My best friends have told me so. Bloom clearly asserts that philosophy is an individual task. Collingwood is adamant that the life of a professor is not the best life for a thinker who hopes to write books.

This is such an obvious fact that it often escapes my gaze.

I wanted philosophy to provide my primary access to the world, I wanted it to supply my community. But it won't. I suspect the American universities are bankrupt, another casualty of the new American oligarchy.

Many other issues are presenting themselves to me as relevant. I continue to reflect and I have no intentions of stopping.

But do I intend to stop writing? Why do I find it so difficult to write in the present? I've so often written in the future. I've done this work with the idea of it leading me to somewhere else, some place that I am not, somewhere with people that I don't know.

But I love where I am, and I love the people I know.

I'm not sorry I didn't get into graduate school.

I'm sorry that thinking and philosophical living has been so impoverished by its confinement to the university. I'm sorry that it has been rendered so politically and socially impotent. I'm sorry that we have a shitty institutional structure that only provides pseudo-engagement with the world of politics and philosophy.

I'm sorry that people read Clausewitz so poorly.

I won't resist my thinking. I don't want to resist my thinking.

But it isn't 'taking me anywhere', it won't be a career for me, and that causes me pain. It is the death of a dream, the death of a fantasy.

I think this is for the best. I don't want the poverty and desperation that comes from the university life.

I see how it could very easily lead to sloppy thinking. In that world one must publish or perish, not think clearly and honestly.

I still find my heart and my mind so full. The world is richer than it's ever been for me, and I don't need any person or institution to ground me.

Although, I wouldn't mind a person.