Philosophy Portal Year in Review 2022
... and looking forward to 2023
Reflecting on the Past and Future of Philosophy Portal:
This past year has been, for me, dominated by the creation of Philosophy Portal. The formal birth of Philosophy Portal occurred in November 2021 with the launch of the Phenomenology of Spirit course. However, in order to really understand the emergence of Philosophy Portal, its foundations, and its potential future, I have to take you back a few years.
I finished my doctorate in 2019 in an interdisciplinary philosophy department with the thesis Global Brain Singularity. This thesis was the culmination of about 10 years of rumination about the evolutionary and developmental relationship between humans and technology, and ultimately the relation between the theory of technological singularity and the human condition. The idea of the technological singularity had absolutely fascinated my young mind, and opened me to the potentials of speculative cognition within a scientific frame of reference. In short, if the human world in the 2030s, 2040s, and 2050s was going to be qualitatively different as a consequence of immanent advances in information processing capacities, then what would this mean for the the human condition and experience of reality?
The more I explored this question, and especially throughout the actual writing of my dissertation, the more I realised that a very deep dive into philosophy was absolutely necessary. Throughout my studies, the work of Slavoj Žižek, and specifically his work in Less Than Nothing, became central for me. To me, Žižek was the philosopher who was asking the necessary fundamental questions of the relation between epistemology (knowing) and ontology (being). In short, he challenged the implicit metaphysics of what I perceived to be a core assumption of many sciences: that our knowing had no implication for the fundamental nature of being. This implicit assumption prevented deep engagement with the idea of the technological singularity, since it was clear to me that, the nature of the technological singularity involved a phenomenon where our knowing (specifically our technical capacities) was leading to a transformation of fundamental being (specifically transformations of intelligence, genetics and even physics).
However, I have to admit, becoming interested in Žižekian philosophy did not necessarily lend itself to institutional career advancement. In fact, I perceived the opposite to be true, the more I followed this path, the lower my chances to moving forward with a philosophical career in an institutional setting. Perhaps it was simply that my work had become so complex, that there was no more the potential to easily categorise what I was doing. In any case, during the final years of my doctorate, many of my papers not only reflected an interest in Žižekian philosophy, but an active engagement with it. Some of these papers include:
Global Commons in the Global Brain (2017)
Cosmic Evolutionary Philosophy and a Dialectical Approach to Technological Singularity (2018)
A Reflective Note for Dialectical Thinkers (2018)
Since this time, there have been more publications, and you can find them all here.
At the same time, considering my connection with institutional academia was dissolving, I was starting to experiment with how to keep my intellectual career alive in a more independent direction. To be specific, I started to experiment with online education, and teaching the foundation of the ideas that I found to be most important in this medium. My first attempts at this included a course titled Exploring the Self (which is unfortunately no longer available) and a course titled The Freudian Unconscious (which I have managed to transfer and update to the Philosophy Portal website). These efforts were both attempted in 2019, and helped me balance a transition out of my doctoral program, while also balancing a few other bridge opportunities.
As much as I loved teaching these courses, the marketing dimension of teaching online courses really disturbed me, and also juggling many different hats involving in starting a business, simply wore me down, and threatened my capacity to stay true to my intellectual drive. I took a break from teaching online courses.
But my intellectual drive never stopped. Maybe I cannot stop it. Eppur Si Muove. The space from teaching was anyway necessary for me to collect my thoughts, and rethink the direction I wanted to take my online presence. When I felt ready, I decided to give it another shot, with perhaps more wisdom about how to both teach at a high level, market courses, and not burn myself out. I reflected on what I wanted to teach and how. I knew that my core fall was into Žižekian philosophy, and I knew that the core of Žižekian philosophy was derived from a combination of Hegelian phenomenology and logic. I thought there was no better way to improve my understanding of Hegelian phenomenology and logic than to approach teaching it myself. Here the course on the Phenomenology of Spirit was born.
Teaching this course structured the first half of my 2022. I taught it in sections which reflect the structure of the chapters, where Hegel takes us (ordinary consciousness) on a series of journeys and transformations, from Consciousness to Absolute Knowing. The underlying point of the Phenomenology of Spirit is to attempt to demonstrate how a philosophical cognition “comes-to-be.” In other words, before Hegel, philosophy reflected on the nature of the true ideas (perhaps culminating in figures like Plato and Aristotle), but didn’t derive for consciousness how that very reflective activity comes-to-be. For Hegel, the modern world, our historical condition, requires introducing the fundamental distinction between substance (true ideas) and subject (reflective cognition). Here we get Hegel’s infamous axiom that the “Absolute is Substance, but Also Subject.”
However, I did not just teach this work, but rather wanted to open up the conditions of possibility for others to create and sense-make in relation to this work. In short, I wanted the course to reflect this Hegelian axiom: not only teaching how philosophical consciousness comes to be, but also helping to facilitate the coming to be of philosophical consciousness. This resulted in a meta-paradigmatic dimension of Philosophy Portal: that we should learn the foundational discourses, but we should also creatively contribute to these foundational discourses. From this teaching foundation, the course resulted in a book or anthology: Enter the Alien. Enter the Alien is a collective-communal effort, it is the result of a group of curious minds investigating a core philosophical text, and attempting to sense-make this text in relation to our own personal coming-to-be as philosophers. What really holds together the book, as well as the meaning of the title, is this attempt to courageously confront the unknown, to embody a standpoint of truth, that is not afraid of the alterity of identity. I think that such a standpoint is easily found if one pays close attention to the final chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit: Absolute Knowing.
Now, the second half of my 2022, was structured by teaching a second course, focused on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Teaching Thus Spoke Zarathustra was a real treat, and at first, it may seem like a strange detour for Philosophy Portal. The reason I decided to focus on teaching Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is not only because perhaps there was a need for a break or an intermission between teaching Hegel, but also to open the opportunity to study closely one of philosophies own “post-Hegelian excesses.” In fact, that is the way I taught Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Nietzsche’s philosophy in general, which I think is an under explored avenue or window into his work. Much of 20th century philosophy represents Nietzsche as anti-Hegelian, as an alternative moment and pathway for philosophy, as opposed to a perfect embodied and concrete example of a post-Hegelian potential. To be specific, I taught from the perspective that the mythological character of Zarathustra is a concrete embodiment of Hegelian logic (which I will expand on more below).
I carried forward with the same methodology as for the first course, namely that the students were encouraged to create with this work. However, what opens up when reading Nietzsche is much different than what opens up when reading Hegel. The book is not yet out, or formally named, but invites a different style, invites a multiplicity of perspectives, and invites a more direct personal engagement. The meta-theme for the book is related to “Spiritual Leadership,” because the character of Zarathustra offers such an intriguing window into what it means to be a spiritual leader today, after the “Death of God,” and the collapse of traditional religious belief structures. In Žižekian terms, what in our unconscious “believes for us,” or in Lacanian terms, what is “in me more than me,” that I cannot deconstruct, but rather what represents the indeconstructible drive. Becoming friendly with this indeconstructible drive, learning how to develop a relation with this drive, and concretely cultivating the spirit necessary to lead in the darkness, is what comes up for me anyway, when reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
This brings us me to the end of 2022. I am preparing now to start the second year of Philosophy Portal. The first year has brought to me many challenges, but also much joy and meaning. I have had the chance to host many fantastic conversations, and have had the chance to meet so many enthusiastic bright minds, who are also called into deeper engagement with the core of philosophy. First and foremost, I hope that this can continue to grow into 2023. I plan to start teaching the Science of Logic on January 16th 2023, where our focus shifts form “understanding the coming to be of a philosopher” to “understanding the standpoint of philosophical thought as such.” In short, after Hegel derived the coming-to-be of the subject in relation to the true ideas, we then attempt to think from the standpoint of the truth of the idea, or The Concept. Here we are not thinking of The Idea/Concept as in a separate external realm of being (as Plato did), but rather thinking about The Idea/Concept as the immanent consequence of the unfolding of consciousness. What is thinking from this standpoint?
Some of the questions running through my mind include:
How has Hegel’s logic influenced the modern world?
What separates Hegel’s logic from pre-modern logic (ancient religion, mystical thought)
How can Hegel’s logic improve our approach to science today?
The first question is of course deeply related to the way in which Hegel’s logic influenced Marxism, and also how Hegel’s logic may go beyond Hegel himself in the very concrete embodiment and repetitions of capitalism itself, especially in its 21st century form as a self-revolutionising World Spirit.
The second question seems increasingly important with the emergence of all sorts of ancient religious fundamentalisms (Post-Modern Conservatism and Orthodoxy), as well as esoteric mysticisms (Mystery Cults and experiences). Perhaps here Hegel can offer a different direction to these regressions to a fantastic utopia before the crisis of modernity.
The third question, perhaps closest to my heart given my initial interests in the relation between humans and technology, involves a science that includes the spirit, its development and standpoint of knowing. It seems to me that Hegel’s logic is very much at home in a quantum universe, an evolutionary universe, a universe of a perpetual change and paradox. To me, this opens up so many questions that I anticipate my mind will be very busy in 2023.
On another level, I also hope that the future of Philosophy Portal allows me to keep investigating the meaning of the pathway of becoming a philosopher. Specifically, how do I help cultivate the next generation of philosophers? I think philosophy is more important today than ever. The faster our world changes due to technological accelerationism, the more paradoxes emerge in the relation between humans and fundamental questions of being. Without the hard labour implied in the coming to be of a philosopher, will we have the necessary cognitive capacities to meet these paradoxes of being?
In this sense, I hope to apply the foundation stones of Hegel’s work, the context of the Absolute as substance-subject, as a process of becoming that opens us to post-Hegelian excesses (e.g. Nietzsche/Zarathustra).
I also hope to continue expanding what Philosophy Portal teaches. I will probably seek to expand the courses offered to include Lacan’s Écrits, as well as Žižek’s Less Than Nothing. So if you are interested in this philosophical direction and mission, stay tuned! Philosophy Portal hopes to be around for 2023, and beyond!