When I broached the concept of the Existentialist Book Club to a friend of mine from grad school, she was very excited. Victoria really knows the lay of the land here, and she’s picked the books. Also, she’s held me to my commitments to do the readings, and that hasn’t been easy because I’ve been overcommitted to a fault, here lately.
I’m really looking forward to seeing what Victoria decides to write. We went to school together for awhile, and we’ve talked about doing projects such as this one in the past, but she’s actually right up in the midst of existentialism as a practice. I would say I’m there too, to some extent, but her work at the moment involves using these ideas to directly improve people’s ability to cope with difficult situations in life. I respect that, and I await her writings with great anticipation as a result. I’m happy to announce that our first book is Existentialism is a Humanism, by Jean-Paul Sartre. It’s a short book that has an essay and a lecture by Sartre, and it dates back to the tail end of the Second World War.
For me, my plan from here will involve two essays from myself about this short and profound book and some early impressions I have of the existentialist movement, which is so familiar to me it is almost difficult to read about — this essay is the story of that relationship.
How I Came To Be A Philosopher
I grew up in Lubbock, Texas during a major drought and faced what essentially consisted of a major cultural drought that pushed me to look outside of my immediate community for a way to fit in as myself. It was the age of Napster, so I was able to download a bunch of songs — and later buy albums, which I still have mostly — from bands all over the place, deciding what I liked for myself and sharing it with my friends afterward.
I did the same sort of thing with books, with games — chess was a favorite of mine and still is — and with hobbies, including racing, which was actually a great way to make friends with people from all over. So I sort of started off as a citizen of the world in some important ways, and I’ve enjoyed maintaining that online life over the years.
I didn’t read a lot of primary source philosophy until I did my undergraduate degree at Southwestern University, but as I listened to bands like Rancid and Leftover Crack and got into punk rock for the music, I was exposed to politics in a new way. I’d never been much of a conservative or a Christian, but I had also never seen some of the radical ideas that I was being exposed to through this music.
The concept of authenticity stood out to me immediately — the entire point of punk is that it’s okay to be you. You never have to concede your identity. I went around one summer with blue hair because it pissed people off and, more importantly, because it showed me that things were fine. If someone had a problem with me, they’d give voice to that with reference to my hair and I fairly quickly realized that it didn’t matter to me what they thought.
As I grew older and checked off various degrees, I was exposed to basically all sorts of philosophy. The ancients, the Germans, the Americans. The Enlightenment, and responses to it. The line of thought I’m most familiar with, or perhaps you could say that I prefer, runs from Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus through Kant, Mill, Nietzsche and perhaps Pierre Hadot. You’ll notice there are a lot of names that aren’t on that list — names I’ve written about, in fact. That’s okay because there are just a handful of the most important thinkers who shaped my own thought. This book club is, for me, as well as for many who will be readers, an opportunity to expand into new territory and grow.
I always identified as an existentialist, but in almost a trivial way. In what you might call a pragmatic way, perhaps. It has always been important for me to speak my mind, and it has always been difficult to do so. I’ve lost various opportunities in life due to my need for independence, and I’ve struggled to find a way to fit into an anti-intellectual society when so much of what makes me myself is the exercise of intellectualism. Solving puzzles, reading books, teaching philosophy courses, and of course, argument itself — these are passions of mine which are difficult for others to relate to on at least some occasions.
The only reason I managed to put off these books for so long was that I felt I understood their concepts and perhaps was better off searching further from home for new ideas. In fact, the title of my first book was Further From Home and the general concept that animated the stories in it was in fact this same idea; that new ideas could lead to the most growth. That said, I’m already into this Existentialist Book Club project a bit — you’ll see me writing about Sartre by the end of the week, and perhaps Philosophy Now will be running a piece I wrote about Camus’ great work, The Plague, soon, and I am deeply enjoying this.
Why The World Needs Serious Philosophy And The Existentialist Book Club
I would say, here before we begin the conversation as such, that my main reason for being here is that it feels right to me. I believe Serious Philosophy can become a movement, and I believe it should be the case that writing great philosophy pays well. You could probably think of this project as a continuation of something like what the Partially Examined Life podcast does; i.e., to make philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Our goal is to do this in writing, and in long-form essay to take people a bit deeper than it’s really possible to do in a spoken form, although we do have plans for a podcast in the works.
How is it that books such as Ronald Beiner’s Dangerous Minds (which I explain my opposition to more thoroughly in my recent book, Bring Back Satire) are selling copies and being touted by people who work for university philosophy departments in places like Princeton while I write serious works like Formal Dialectics and make next to no money and am even unable to find decent work in a consistent adjunct position somewhere below the poverty line? I’m afraid the answer has more to do with politics than philosophy. And many of my most intellectually-inclined friends around the internet have had similar experiences.
The discipline of philosophy has been all but destroyed in the United States. Funding cuts have annihilated any semblance of a reasonably lucid discussion of anything resembling an open problematic. I’ve sat through faculty meetings and heard the ludicrously weak works Ph.D faculty members presented. The grad students were better! And yet, being old and dull appears to pay well, while being young and sharp and willing to dig in and do the work will make you a controversy and get you ejected from your department.
Why Medium.com Is The Right Place For Us
The technology is here to flip the script. With the innovative approach of Medium, all a quality journal really needs to do is to draw enough attention to start the conversation. With enough eyes and a few relatable columns, even serious works of things such as analytic philosophy should be able to make some amount of money for their authors.
If you’re a reader and you want to support the work we’re doing here, there are only two steps: the first is to become a Medium premium member (just $5/mo), and the second is to read articles and engage with them. You can write, too, if you’re inclined that way — either responses, or whole full-blown articles.
With four books under my belt and a position on the Editorial Board for Philosophy at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, it could be argued that I have had a greater impact on the world of philosophy than anyone else to come through the Texas State University program yet — but my zeal is for quality writing and problem-solving, not necessarily the classroom, though I do love teaching as well.
For years, I’ve been writing and working and making friends with various interested parties online. I feel excited to be launching this project because it strikes me that, in this way, we can build back up to the point where we have something like the open and free discussion they had in France in the time of Camus and Sartre. It’s not that the dragons have all been slain, it’s that the people in charge of philosophy departments are terrified of losing funding and have suspended dragon hunts as a result.
I’m here to encourage dragon hunts, and to work with writers who can deliver. Why on earth shouldn’t we be able to do philosophy for a job? It’s the most robust skillset in the history of humankind. A philosopher of any worth should be able to find a foothold in science, medicine, law, or the trades. The ability to find the right question and answer it is second to none in terms of importance.
Where We’ll Start
Jean Paul Sartre was a French philosopher of the school of existentialism. Sartre’s 1945 lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” was an instant hit among his audience and is touted as the Bible of Existentialism as a result of the influence it has had upon the movement. This lecture is a perfect place to start our efforts in this Existentialist Book Club because it succinctly and accurately delivers the nuts and bolts of the new philosophy in an approachable, if technical, way.
Victoria will be writing here as well. Her practice is doing well and she is adapting successfully to the telemedicine approach, so perhaps her time is a bit limited compared to my own, but her expertise has already created a wonderful list of ten books which we are already moving through with some alacrity.
As a rule, with these articles, what we end up getting paid for as writers is the time that subscribers spend reading our work.
I aim to facilitate quality discussions here at Serious Philosophy and a big part of doing that is finding the right people to work with. For this reason, I will not be posting a calendar, a schedule, or a list of books for people to read. Victoria will orchestrate that so that she ends up getting paid for the excellent work she has already done in outlining our curriculum for this book club.
As writers begin to request the ability to work with us here at Serious Philosophy, I will ensure that they are set up with the proper guidelines to produce quality that will be timed appropriately and audience-friendly. I’m generally quick to respond to emails and/or messages, but I also plan to put some time into working with writers to help get their work up to snuff. You have to be very good to make it on Medium and we’ll want to explore the, as it were, medium we’ve got here (ba dum tiss!) to find the sweet spots with respect to length, verbiage, and all of the little details that have to come together to make success happen.
I’m very excited about what we’ve got planned, and I hope you are too. Let’s see if we can build a successful philosophy magazine on the open internet using the principles of long-form discussion by which so many of the greatest thinkers from the past communicated with each other. After all, long Facebook posts aren’t particularly accessible or relevant with respect to anything aside from the immediate conversation, and while somewhat valuable nonetheless, we can hold ourselves to a higher standard and get more from the experience. It will be interesting to see how the public nature of the discourse shapes the trajectory of the writings that you’ll find here in Serious Philosophy.
