Doomgoing

Our teaching has to be part of the catastrophe. It has to embody the disaster. Don’t you see?

Disaster pedagogy: that’s what our students are paying for – and paying through the nose for. They want to be discouraged. They want their morale destroyed. They want to be plunged into the darkness. They want to dive down in their philosophical bathysphere to see the darkest, murkiest things.

 

We have to treat this as if it were the last year of our teaching. The last chance to impart what we know. We have to live this academic year as though the uni were going to be closed imminently. As though we weren’t going to live another year. This is the culmination of our teaching, or its bottoming out. We’re not sure which …

 

Philosophers are an endangered species – don’t forget that. This is a last chance. This last wave of students need to be told everything. We’ll have to give them what we can. Our diagnosis of it all! Our last wisdom! All we have to say!

 

We have to teach this way before we get found out! Before the organisational managers get on to us! Before we have to teach their students, too!

 

Our doom pedagogy. Our ashes pedagogy. We have to lead the students into the darkness. And through the darkness. To the light? Towards their light, perhaps, not ours. Towards their dawn, perhaps. Like Moses, we have to die in the desert before we reach the promised land, which is their promised land.

We’re the downgoing, the doomgoing. We’re leading the descent. So that they, in the end, can ascend. We’re following the negative path! So that they can take, when the time comes, the positive one!

 

We have only our failure to show them. We have only our stupidity.

But there's something’s given to us in failure! Something’s been vouchsafed in our stupidity!

We’re philosophical fools, if nothing else. We’re philosophical idiots. And there’s a place for idiots in philosophy.

 

There is such a thing as transcendental idiocy. That’s what we have to reach.

 

Philosophy can attain itself, become most purely philosophy, only in the final hour. Only now, when its threatened on all sides.

Philosophy’s coming into its own under the condition of its disappearance! It’s annihilation! In a sense, we needed the end of philosophy for philosophy to be philosophy. To emerge as philosophy.

And we ourselves, will we emerge as true philosophers, in the final hour? Will we become what we are, at last, in the final moments? At the moment of the greatest humiliation of philosophy?

 

The Organisational Management move.

We have to teach philosophy, but not as they know it.

They think philosophy’s only about applied ethics, nothing else. When really … it’s about the unapplied, the inapplicable. When really it’s about the unethical. The dis-ethical. The nothing-to-do-with-ethical.

 

The Organisational Management move.

We’re like dissidents in Stalin’s Russia! Undercover! Working in secret! Noble in our aims! Everything samizdat! Everything spoken with more than one voice!

Sure, someone will report us. There’ll be double agents among the students. Organisational managers in philosophers’ clothing. Turncoats!

 

Ascent: that’s what we’re about. We’re rising up, freedom against necessity, like tragic heroes. This is our protest! We’re attaining something! Reaching something! We will not be what we were! We’ll be changed! Under pressure, immense pressure! A sea change! We’ll be renewed! Raised up!

 

Philosophy in Organisational Management exile. Philosophy in the Organisational Management dungeon. Philosophy trapped – but hasn’t philosophy always been trapped? Hasn’t the point always been to realise it was trapped? Hemmed in! Surrounded on all sides! Embattled! Half-infiltrated! And isn’t that the condition for philosophy discovering itself, like Kung Fu Panda, or whatever? Of rising to its vocation?

 

We’ll speak words we’ll never understand! We’ll be Delphic pythia! We’ll be mantic maniacs! We’ll speak in philosophical tongues! We’ll be mediums! We’ll be conduits! We’ll have something to say! At last! Only we won’t understand what we’ll say. Only we’ll be clueless about what we say.

 

Glorious last words from philosophy. Glorious last testament. Last words, before philosophy’s led to the scaffold, like everyone else. We’ll sing on the scaffold! We’ll sing philosophical songs on our scaffold! We’ll sing and we’ll dance a philosophical dance on the scaffold! Is that possible? Are there philosophical dances? We’ll caper, at any rate. We’ll ape about …