Between 2012 and 2017 I wrote a series of essays for the website Philosophers for Change. I wrote the essays at the invitation of the Singapore-based website editor, Sanjay Perrera. I would like to thank Sanjay for his original invitation and on-going support for my work. The website still exists, but currently only as an archive of the essays that he commissioned. He has not posted original content since 2017.
Last year, I approached a publisher with the idea of re-packaging a selection of those essays as a book. They understandably quieried me as to why they would publish and try to sell material that was already available on line for free. When they passed on the project, I realised that I was being driven more by vanity then good philosophical sense. Books have an allure that websites do not (at least for academics of my generation), but the abiding goal of intellectuals should be to disseminate their ideas, not stroke their ego by adding a line to their CV.
I thus wisely abandoned the book project and decided instead to gather them together and re-post them here. Sanjay has moved on to his own publishing projects and I do not know how long he will want to keep paying to keep the website going. I think that the pieces that I wrote for Philosophers for Change are some of the best political philosophy that I have written. Their tone settles somewhere between the conversational informality I try to achieve with my blog posts and the formality of academic essays. Most address problems of political and economic organization through the lens of events current at the time of their writing, but I do not think that the arguments are stale.
The structural problems that the world faces continue to re-appear in different concrete forms. Philosophy should focus on the underlying forms, not the changing day to day events through which they manifest themselves. There is a need for top quality critical journalism of the mundane, but there is also a need– I would say a preponderant need- for more patient reflective analysis and critique. I tried to satisfy the later need with these essays, but without floating off into complete abstraction from the world.
Looking back, I am surprised at the volume of work that I produced. There are 15 essays– enough for two or three printed volumes. As my interest turn (or return) to the deepest underlying problems of human being– producing meaning in a meaningless universe, finding universal value underlying distinctive cultural practices, finding common goods in the ephemeral experiences of human life– I decided that I would collect and repost the essays here as something of my final word on these problems.
My final word is not the final word, clearly, but I have reached– or am reaching– a point in my career where I want to continue the path I set for myself in Embodiment and the Meaning of Life and leave debates over the practical problems of institutional change to others. In truth, I do not think the problems of the world are so obscure that they require much more philosophical decoding. The basic problems people face all reduce to lack of access to basic natural and social need-satisfiers. What more does philosophy have to say? It is time to mobilise to take back control of natural resources, social wealth, and our own life-times. If we collectively controlled those resources and that wealth, we could satisfy our needs and free ourselves materially to create lives that are individually meaningful and socially valuable and valued.
Moving from here to there is a practical, not a philosophical problem. My philosophical interests now lie in discovering whether there is anything of universal significance to say about the meaning, value, and goodness of life. My new project pursues those questions by tracing the role that sensuous pleasure has played in the justification of mortal, finite life across historical time and cultural space. While I would love nothing more that to sit on my couch and read, walk by the river and reflect, and hunch over my computer in my study and write about those issues, I am sure that the world will pull my attention back to the day to day struggle. The blog will never be indifferent to pressing practical concerns, but I do not foresee me paying sustained philosophical attention to practical-political issues again, at least not in the systematic way that I do in these essays.
I thus offer them to anyone who is interested.
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