All we needed was to be left in peace for a few years. Whilst we could play catch up. Whilst we could worked on our languages, ancient and modern. Read the great works. Trace lines of thought through the centuries.
All we needed was our time in the academic sun. What might we become! Our innate brilliance might be revealed at last!
Mightn’t we have things to say? Mightn’t we have hypotheses to explore? Arguments to advance? Mightn’t we make decisive discoveries in texts ancient and modern? Mightn’t we make our name with an original interpretation of this canonical text or that? Might we wow the world with our hot philosophical takes on this or that.
Amazing our peers at conferences. As up and comers. As thinkers of promise. Mountaineers! Ascenders! Young brilliants, with their heads on fire. Lectures with whom all the best postgraduates would want to study.
And Mercia would become the place. The capital of the north for all things European philosophical. They’d talk of the Mercia school, in years to come. Like the Pittsburgh Hegelians. Our ideas cross fertilizing … Cross germinating … We’d become a thought-school. A thought-outpost.
An annual conference in the city. Attracting international attendees. Young lectures wanting to make their name. Post paper conversations giving way to whole evenings of discussion in the pub.
A sense of life and death about thinking. That philosophy was really important. And continental philosophy! Which wasn’t just some outlier madness. Some aberrant growth. Some off the track mutation. That wasn’t just stupidity in the wild.
Even the analytics might see something in us. Might awaken. Might open their analytic eyes. Might mooch around our conference margins knowing that something was up. That things were happening. That a paradigm shift was occurring. That the day of analytic hegemony was done.
We might link up with other sympathetic departments. With genuine European thinkers! Some handy French intellectual might attach himself to our world. Could fly her in. Some stray Italian might find our Mercia conducive to thought. Some departmentally homeless German might lodge themselves in the city. Might move to our provinces.
Surely they’d give us a few years. Surely they’d let us splash around in the academic paddling pool for a while!
Surely we’d have time to bear philosophical fruit. To emerge from our chrysales! To effloresce! To sing our thought songs!
We still think that we might become thinkers.
We hadn’t reached the final cynicism. The endgame of our idealism – of our dreams of genius. We can still sustain our great alibi.
If only they would make way for us. If only they would step aside for a moment. If they’d only let us come forward. Into the light!
If only it could become our turn! Our chance! Our turn in the academic sun!
Work in Progress 