Top 0.1%
Out of a few million academics, I'm in the Top 0.1% That’s not half bad. I suspect that, with the changes that are happening, other factors coming into play boosting weighting in favour of those with professional standing and status, I will gradually relinquish top spot. But I've been Top 0.1% for a few years now, and it has been a very good run. I made my name here, such as it is. Here is where most people who 'know me' know me from. Not that I ever meet them, or take up the offers of giving talks. But here is where I was discovered. The Academia site was my public 'here I am.' And I still exchange communications with academics and such like on here.
Here are a couple of links to my work:
There’s an interesting story behind my Academia profile.
The most popular work I have on Academia is Philosophizing Through the Eye of the Mind. I made a point in that work of distinguishing between seeing 'with' the eye and seeing 'through' the eye. The question here in this piece relates to whose eye and whose mind. If you examine the work I have placed on Academia and on the Humanities Commons, I seem to have constructed a world of my own out of an inner world. I have poured that inner world into vast notebooks and texts to create an architectonic, a towering intellectual edifice which establishes a structured, ordered environment. That world could strike others as strange and unfamiliar. It certainly would have done had it really been a world of my own. But it isn’t. It’s my world, certainly, expressing my concerns and interests, but it does very much relate to the world ‘out there.’ I have strengths and weaknesses; and so, too, does the world.
Iris Murdoch once remarked, "It is always a significant question to ask of any philosopher: what is he afraid of?" (Murdoch The Sovereignty of Good 1985: 72). Very few people, I suspect, write out of some pure, disinterested, impersonal motivation; there’s always a reason why, a point, a purpose, a problem or an issue to be resolved, something we want, something we are afraid of, something that bothers us. We nag away at certain problems out of some concern, some issue, some unresolved problem that worries us. The character of a philosopher matters. It's not supposed to, and contradicts the self-image of the philosopher. Character as such matters. I'm interested in the man as well as the ball. Spinoza learned and wrote in Latin to ensure that his argument in the Ethics was as dispassionate and logical as possible, totally effacing or concealing his character. I think that concern on his part revealed his character. He evidently didn’t like conflict and wanted to avoid the endless and ever-contestable yeses and noes of politics by putting politics on ice. His concern was to deliver a world of logical certainty that all contending parties could only say ‘yes’ to. I wrote on Spinoza, Spinoza and the Rule of Reason. I like Spinoza very much. But now, I read and think if reason were enough, and human beings could ever be so rational, then, the Rule of Reason would be possible and desirable. Human beings are indeed rational beings. I will remain with my argument for 'rational freedom.' But they are also more than rational. And non-rational isn’t necessarily irrational, it may just be arational, applying to those many things in life that are beyond reason (but not, it is important to note, beyond the influence of reason. There is an ordering to true ends that can only be described as rational). I guess I should be with Spinoza on this question, and for many years I was. He was one of my ‘rational’ philosophers in doctoral study, and I wrote a decent introduction to his philosophy. But having craved such certainty for so long, and having found it an escape and avoidance, I have come back down to the rough terrain, the world of ambiguity and friction where human beings are able to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and, in their contests, turn things round. I still seek the convergence of diverse elements in concordance and harmony, but have long since appreciated that this comes through diversity, and not through the statement of a unitarian orderly principle defined in terms of pure logic and abstraction. I seek form, order, proportion, and symmetry, but I seek those things not in abstraction, but in the rough ground on which life is lived. They are easily stated in abstraction, and we can easily be resigned to idealisation as compensation, accepting an ice pure surrogate for the real thing.
It makes for interesting, but difficult, work on my part. Difficult because it exposes me to criticisms that my arguments have settled nothing and remain contentious. But I am not seeking to end contention, I am seeking concordance through the expression of diversity. I have no desire at all to put ethics and politics on ice; on the contrary, it's that ambition that is entirely contentious. It doesn't resolve the problem so much as avoid it.
'The more man is guided by reason, the more he is free,' wrote Spinoza. You will find the same idea running through the work of the great philosophers. Take Plato’s tripartite ordering of the soul. But Plato was wise and knew that human beings do not live by reason alone. In fact, human beings may not live mainly by reason, either. When we over-think and over-analyze the things we do, we stumble and fall. There is a paralysis through analysis, a stalling and falling when we attempt to substitute an external conscious reason for things we ought to have internalized and be capable of reproducing spontaneously. That’s what people who struggle with spontaneous connection and communication do. Even though I have a formidable memory, I could never function in the academic world without a mass of written notes in front of me to refer to before speaking. Even though I knew the point I needed to make, I would check my notes and read and read again just to make sure. Then I would get so tongue tied and hesitant, becoming so bookish and monotone in delivery, that it would sound like I didn’t know what I was saying at all. So I’d make sure and talk endlessly, with one simple point branching out into a whole series of related points. I would become a talking book. People learned not to interrupt me. Or just plain nodded off. The spontaneity and interaction in the group would be lost. There would be nothing more to say, I’d covered it all, and anything contentious was not contended, for fear of setting me off again. Move that approach out of academia and into society, and you have the basis for communication breakdown and for serious disconnection.
This offers an example of an over-developed rational mind coming to supplant spontaneous and innate instincts and organic reflexes, a conscious intelligence hardening in place of what are often dismissed as dumb, often errant feelings but which denote, in fact, a sophisticated emotional intelligence which is capable of guiding reason to better ends. I love the work of Martha Nussbaum, the philosopher of feelings.
Anyone who reads my work to any degree will soon note a number of recurring themes – community, connection, communication, communion with others, order, stability, familiarity, routine, social proximity and practice, emotional intelligence, virtues as qualities for successful living. These are all things I value most highly. Maybe most people do, but I do so with an intensity that is unusual. I have learned to appreciate their importance through lack, their lack in wider society but, most of all, through my own lack; through personal struggles on my part through deficiency in all these areas. Their absence or deficiency in my life heightens their importance for me. In deprivation, I see their qualities all the more. In answer to Iris Murdoch’s question I reply that I am afraid of the absence of community, connection, communication, communion with others, order, stability, familiarity, routine, social proximity and practice, emotional intelligence, virtues as qualities for successful living.
I affirm the wisdom of Plato, the philosopher who knew that reason does not rule alone. Plato affirmed the unity of the true, the good, and the beautiful – he put fact, logic, ethics, and aesthetics together. When we attempt to rule by conscious intelligence alone, we falter, stumble, and fall. With every step we take we check neurotically as to whether we are heading in the right direction. Instead of walking forwards, one step at a time, mind and body in unison, we use the conscious mind to tell us to put one foot before the other. In the process, we slow down, stall, and may even fall. We become frozen and inert through performance anxiety. We cease to function as social beings, and the more that this happens, the more society as a whole ceases to function as a human organism. If the unexamined life is not worth living, the over-examined life is unliveable. If we ask for reasons for everything we do, then in time we will cease to do anything without instruction. And following instruction is not the same thing as doing what should come naturally.
Our reason will frequently tell us that the facts of life are against us, yet we carry on living into mystery anyway.
Reason often has told man he was defeated: why should the prisoner, the slave, the corrupted and the deformed and the ailing all go on with so few exceptions to their dismal end?
Mumford 1952: 30-31
We carry on for reasons other than those given to us by the facts of our stumbling lives.
I have written a vast body of work, an edifice exhibiting an architectonic. Presented in a sketch like this, that work of four million plus words could strike people as something very unfamiliar. Without examining further, a person would be entitled to conclude that I have constructed a world entirely of my own, containing materials and arguments that are very unfamiliar. Except that the work strikes those who have read it, and who are continuing to read it, as very familiar. I may have created a world of my own, in which I have centred my existence, but it does actually relate and reach out to the world of others, and others do actually see parts of what I see and respond accordingly. They may not have read the whole. I’m not sure anyone could read the whole, without putting a few years to one side. I've never read it, I'm always too busy writing. I see the whole, and it unfinished and unfinishable. And it is the whole that is unfamiliar, because it makes leaps and connections that ensure that the argument I present is much more than the sum of the parts. But at least I know that the parts are familiar, on account of the fact that people read and respond. The parts are familiar, the whole is eccentric.
I have been reading on Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher of genius who does very much seem to have had AS. In his biography on Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk doesn’t raise the question of Wittgenstein’s autism, and takes no position at all as to whether Wittgenstein was autistic. He doesn’t address it, doesn’t even indicate that he is even aware of the question. The book was written in 1990, long before the condition started to have the coverage it has today. Which makes Monk’s book a superbly reliable document on this, because without an agenda and without an issue. Monk presents the facts of Wittgenstein’s life and, in doing so, shows Wittgenstein’s autism in every chapter of his life.
I have also been reading Alan Griswold’s Autistic Symphony, the chapter entitled 'The World as Wittgenstein Found It.' Here, Griswold examined Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a Model of Autistic Cognition. I like the title Autistic Symphony. I am currently trying to finish a book entitled Dante’s Sweet Symphony of Paradise. It’s a work which seeks concordance and harmony through the convergence of different elements within a Unitarian orderly end. Instead of the brutal cacophony in Inferno, we find peace and tranquillity in the polyphony of Paradise – diverse voices joining to make sweet harmony. Now if that doesn’t define the ‘Autistic Symphony’ I don’t know what does. But maybe I am now seeking connections and imposing interpretations of my own, rather than let the music play on.
'The World as Wittgenstein Found It' could be employed as the title of my own body of work. I found Griswold’s conclusion pertinent:
Despite deep respect for the Tractatus, I would remain hesitant to recommend it as reading to most people—I think the majority would still find it more bewildering than enlightening. No one need feel too bad about this, it is after all an unusual and challenging read.
But for those who, like me and not just a few others, have found the book at one time or another to be irresistibly fascinating without being able to quite say why, I might offer this essay as an alternative approach to its pages, one that places the reader more squarely behind Wittgenstein’s own eyes—the eyes of an autistic. Viewed from this perspective, one can almost hear Wittgenstein’s inner voice—in his rooms at Cambridge, in the Norwegian isolation, and amidst the insanity at the Eastern Front—demanding into his notebooks, here I am, myself as my constructed, structured world, no matter how strange that may seem. His is a vision that in one sense is exceedingly unfamiliar, and in another is as common as the accumulated knowledge of all mankind. Autistic cognition is an open window onto a very expansive world, and thus serves, along with the Tractatus, as a source of light for all humanity.
Griswold 2007
I find those words quite beautiful, I have to say. It is impossible to say exactly whether those words speak for Wittgenstein himself. I’m willing to bet that Wittgenstein would quibble and nit-pick here and there. If there is a hair-to-split, then a philosopher will be found only too willing to split it, and Wittgenstein was a philosopher of genius. But those words, with a little quibbling here and qualification there, certainly resonate with me with respect to ‘The World as Peter Critchley Found/Saw It.’
I have only been on the Internet since 2011. Before that, I was happy to be read by a tiny handful of academics. Good folk, people who knew their stuff and didn't make me have to keep explaining terms and concepts (only interesting arguments out on the fringes). But they were few in number. And with odd exceptions they read pieces and parts, in accordance with their expertise. I’ll make a point of stating clearly that they were impressed by my work, lest the less expert looking in from the outside conclude I have constructed a fantasy world. The work is quality and relates to realities. It’s not a world of escape or of subjectivist delusion.
I had walked away from the academic world around 2004. I had hours on the “Marx, Weber, and Durkheim” module at Liverpool John Moores, but looked closely at what it was I was supposed to be doing, and didn’t like it at all. I looked at having to entertain the students rather than get into the concepts. I was told it would frighten the students away. Which was probably true the way I do it. It was a big mistake to think my hardcore learning style could be a model for others. I was told of the horrors of moving from institution to institution piecing hours together in order to make something that looked like a proper job, and decided that I had spent years of my life getting qualified to do something that wasn’t worth doing even if, as seemed unlikely, I was ever going to get the chance to do it. I didn’t like classes and addressing faces anyway and never did. It was not the environment for me. So I walked away. I was on the MA Urban Renaissance at Liverpool Hope University, but found I couldn’t face doing it all again. I hated presentations with a vengeance by now and physically recoiled. I just wrote lots on the city in history and completely ignored course modules. When it came to presentations I didn’t turn up, and in the end just bailed out. I didn’t need certificates and letters. I didn’t need to be a student again. It was the same at the Liverpool Business School on the Library and Information Management masters. More than anything, though, I found the courses boring. I stood with course-book list in hand in the library, searching for books, and thought, I’ve done this many times before, beginning many years ago, and I’m not doing it again. I didn’t like it then, and I loathe it now. So, after a thesis on the future of public libraries – the library as community information intermediary – I walked away again (thesis has yet to be typed up and finalised, but it’s here in handwritten form).
In the meantime I trained in business technology. I passed the exams easily. Actually using the technology in work situations – being hit with orders and demands from the talking heads all around you - was anything but easy. In fact I was working in environments that had my nervous system in meltdown. Working databases was fine, so long as it was just me and data, but working them with people and telephone systems, with lights and sounds that never stopped, had me thinking I was in Dante’s Inferno, wondering terrible sin I must have committed to have been punished in such a manner – knowing Dante’s ‘contrapasso,’ (punishing by a process resembling by way of complete contrast with the sin itself), I think it would be punishment for not engaging with others, not talking to others, pulling away: for being an introvert in a world that never stops talking.
So by 2009/2010 I was thinking of returning to academia, again, even though I had long concluded, correctly, that it was no place for me. I had a place on the MA Learning and Teaching at Liverpool Hope University. I just needed teaching hours to be able to finalize the degree. Just as hours were being cut everywhere. I contacted my old tutors and lecturers. They were full of praise, so I know I must have been pretty good to go. Martyn Nightingale notes that I was trying to get in as others, such as he, were getting out. He wished me well. Ron Noon gave me a strong recommendation. There were warnings, though – students are more instrumental now than in my day (made me feel ancient), they are ‘paying customers,’ they are results-driven (weren’t we always?). And so on. What they were really saying was that someone like me, driven by the love of the subject, may well find the business model distasteful.
I never did get the hours, meaning I could never could finalize the Learning and Teaching MA. And I never got used to taking classes, talking in public, relating information to others, answering questions. Which is something of a drawback when it comes to teaching.
So I walked away from it all. I discovered the Academia site and decided to just put everything I had on there and then go away and do something else. This was also an immense effort, mind. I was still working on one of those old Amstrad computers. All my work was stored on those old floppy disks. I couldn’t convert to digital form (still can’t, I know they have devices, but these disks are not compatible). So I had to scan everything page by page. The print was fine on many pages and didn’t scan well, leaving me having to re-write and correct errors. I don’t know how many million words we are talking about. I think I calculated it at four million words. It was an immense effort to scan, re-write, put into readable form, and then upload on Academia. But I managed it and prepared to walk away into a new life. To my complete surprise I found that people actually started to read my work. Students and academics contacted me. I started to get invites to give talks. I made my excuses as to why I couldn’t do it, but was flattered. Then I found that lots of people were reading me. They still are.
Here’s the interesting thing about that. I have a theory that I have been writing out of personal lack, deficiency, and requirements and then seeing the same thing in the world. I’m told by top-flight academics that this is not the case, and I’m happy to trust their judgment (not least because it means the work stands on its own intellectual merits). But let’s run with the idea for a wee while. Order, community, connection, right relationships, virtues as qualities for successful living. In everyday living, I reconstruct the world around me to be able to live in it. At the same time, I see the world as lacking and deficient in many ways. I’m not quite alone in a world of my own in this. Other people agree. In fact, the very many positive responses I get from people, including people with expertise in these areas, suggests I am in the very least onto something. I’m making the connections.
I remember being questioned on the range of philosophers I studied – Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Habermas. I was asked about others, from Aquinas to Rawls, as to whether they fitted my theme of ‘rational freedom.’ Leibniz? Yes. Spinoza? Yes. And I remember my Director turning to one of the others and joking: “This b**t**d is going to rewrite the entire history of Western Philosophy!” I smiled most because I knew how true that statement was. Wittgenstein has the advantage on me in being much smarter. He advised people to stop reading the books, to throw them away, and philosophize. My problem is that I read the books and then want to write on them.
So, with that vast output of seventy five books, I offer an insight from behind the lines. My most popular book has been Philosophizing Through the Eye of the Mind. You can, if you so wish, see philosophy through the very unique eye of my mind. I haven’t ‘rewritten’ the history of Western philosophy, but I have inhabited the work of others to validate what I consider true, worthy, and significant. The themes are consistent even as the names and schools of thought changes. I seek a well-tempered order in which connection replaces disconnection; I seek community, cooperation and collaboration; I seek the happy habitus in which the virtues, defined as qualities for successful living, can be known, learned and acquired, exercised; I seek right relationships at all levels with all things ordered in accordance with a scale of values denoting true ends. I see different elements converging to a concord, a unity in peace and reconciliation. Balance, proportion, symmetry, attunement. I want to see these things in politics and society, and I write at length on them. It's exceptional work, even if I say so myself. (others qualified to say so do too, so I am not alone)
My acute awareness of my own limitations heightens my awareness of the importance of these things in the world, so I feel their lack, deficiency, or distortion all the more. Viewed from this angle, as I address the world with my writing voice, I reconstruct and reorder the world to see it as it is – which is to say that it is an act of disclosure rather than imposure. The only recent photograph I had of myself for the Academia page until 2014 was my passport photo (for a passport I had never used). You won’t see me, you won’t hear me, not unless you have been among the lucky few. I address the world in my writing voice. And I ask you to listen in the attempt to hear the inner voice of life’s awkward squad. It’s coming straight from my room. ‘My study’ as I have called it over the years. It has walls lined with books, it is true. And CD’s of classical music. And my bird tapestry and Elvis tapestry. And I have my full Elvis collection behind me as I write sat on my bed. It may sound like a cruel isolation, but I opt for it as a refuge amidst the insanity unfolding in the world around me. Philosophy does its best work in the gap between the ideal and the real. But be careful not to make your own world so ideal as to become ever further removed from its means of realisation. I know my written work strikes a chord with real people in the real world, though. I have a backlog of messages to respond to. People get it, if only in parts. The body of work I have published and made available in free access can indeed be taken individually, each work standing alone and being considered on its own merits. That’s how people do read it. The responses I get make for interesting reading, depending on what respondents have read. In the imaginations of others, it seems I am all identities. And it is perfectly possible to read me in part: Plato here, Aristotle there, Spinoza, Aquinas, Marx, ecology, ethics etc. But if you want to know my complete philosophical view, know me and understand my motivations, then you have to take me whole. And I encompass multiplicities. I have written some four million words. Actually, it must be more than that now, nearer to six million. I have at least two million words in texts yet to see light of day.
So here is where I declare my existence and announce to the world, ‘here I am,’ the philosopher who is not a philosopher. And here is my world that isn’t a world, just my tiny little room, from where I have built a towering edifice containing a properly ordered, structured world, the world as it ought to be, the world I crave to the depth of my being because I feel its absence as painful deprivation. The vision of ‘rational freedom’ I set out consistently throughout my works is one that may appear strange and eccentric, certainly in its relentless density and repetition, but at the same time is as familiar as the accumulated knowledge of the ages, as written in books, and re-written with a twist for the times. Here is an open window to see into, if not with and through, the eye of autistic cognition, affording a glimpse of an expansive world of recreative inflation, thereby shedding light on the intellectual journey of humanity.
“There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original.”
Joseph Haydn
This strikes a chord with me. I didn’t have talking heads around me. I chose not to have them around. It’s fine to report back from the outer limits. It’s a positive menace to be constantly have to check back with people whose understanding is ‘straight.’ I don’t mean basic. Many people are actually very advanced, and they know enough to raise complicated issues. The problem with them is that they are concerned with being clear and accurate, which has me having to translate my own work back into its influences, dissolving all that I have sought to add.
I try not to do talks or present papers. I never enjoyed doing these. I’ve been told that everyone gets nervous and that you get better with them in time. I got more nervous and disheartened; I started off bad and have never remotely got better. In fact, I think I was better in the beginning, when I knew the least. Now I know what’s coming, I resign myself to frustration. I have now quit talks. I hate them, and I always did. I know many people appreciated them. I also know many didn’t, and I really resent having to present myself before such people, inviting their censure or disdain. I’ve been criticised by people who hadn’t the first idea what I was saying and, more to the point, could care less. I hated being in class, too, both when presenting or speaking as a student and when taking a lesson. Apart from the sheer terror of addressing an audience, there is always the clash between expectations and delivery – what people expected of me, and were capable of understanding, was always very different to what I would actually give them. I found it unnerving. When you struggled so badly for so long at school, you never quite develop the confidence in your own knowledge or expertise, even when you know for sure you are right. It’s not the quality of your argument that you doubt, it’s the relation to others. It’s not merely that people don’t understand, but that they seek to understand in terms that are comprehensible to them. They have knowledge and expertise of their own. When you depart from that, and they fail to understand, there is immediately a gap and a conflict. If they still fail to understand and can’t make sense of what you are saying, the presumption is that you have got things wrong. There follows a rearguard action in which you are inevitably drawn further and further back onto the ground which the people you are engaging with are comfortable on. Your intellectual explorations are over, not because you are wrong, but because you can’t carry the people you are with.
I’ll explain the tension this way: there is this book of knowledge that people learn from and constantly refer back to. Try to picture that book as a big square block, straight and self-contained. I have that book and I have learned its lessons. I never quite did things by the book, hence my extensive struggles at school. But, in time, I learned enough of that book to be able to be more confident, and more informed, in my explorations at the margins. I don’t keep referring back to the book. I know it. I don’t need to keep re-stating it. ‘Why don’t you just use the order in your notebooks,’ my history teacher at school kept asking me whenever I deviated and got into trouble. I was running before I could walk. So I learned to walk. And having done so, I now run. In fact, I sprint. I don’t need to keep making the journey back. In my writing and thinking, I deviate from the book: I come away from it at slight angles, inhabiting the thoughts to turn them in other ways, dialoguing with the thinkers to initiate a conversation in my mind. You can find entertaining books written by philosophers in which they have past philosophers in dialogue. I do that all the time around issues that concern me.
That all strikes those who do it by the book as an error on my part, and they raise objections. I should take the opportunity to clarify, of course. But I am sensitive to criticism given my past struggles at school, always feeling stupid. I return to the book, just to prove, for the umpteenth time, that I know all about it contents. Rather than stick to my line of thought, I feel the need to prove I know what I’m talking about and then go back to basics. You will then hear me say things you can hear anyone who has read the book say. To me, it is a pointless waste of time and energy. I lose my flow, lose the connections in my head, and the daemon goes away. And I get irritated. I have snapped more than a few times with people. Nothing personal, folks, but I really don’t need to be talking to you. I don’t do philosophy as entertainment. I do Elvis and Liverpool football club and such things as entertaining chat. I don’t like word games and puzzles. I do hard intellectual stuff for a reason. It’s a serious business for me. “Whoa! That’s got to be wrong!” a smart fellow once shouted at me mid-talk on consciousness, before delivering a lecture on how neurons pack and fire. I hadn’t even mentioned neurons. It was a plain hi-jack which made it clear that science trumps philosophy. If you can find Ray Monk’s article Wittgenstein’s Forgotten Lesson you will see that I was being confronted with a clear case of “scientism.” From that moment on the rest of my talk was pointless. “Neuro-nonsense” reigned supreme, as well as whatever the latest fashion in physics was. There followed a lengthy and unenlightening debate on “nothing buttism,” and I ended up a million miles away from where I wanted to be, in thought and in place. I’d have given anything to have been back on the building sites instead of engaging in pointless intellectualizing. I then went away and wrote a text on neurons. Which wasn’t very enlightening. Just draining. But I did write a fairly devastating repudiation of the modern cult of “scientism.” It just wasn’t – and isn’t – what I needed to be doing.
Whatever that says about me, it doesn’t fit the character profile for an academic career. I get invites, and I keep postponing, waiting for the day when circumstances change. Not that they ever will. I’m always conscious of saying things that don’t quite fit expectations. I should have the same confidence in my arguments in speech as I do in print. You can put it down to always being behind at school, the butt of others’ jokes, with a headmaster who let it be known that any place that would let me in would be just looking to ‘fill up places.’ I think I was miles ahead of them all. (I was certainly miles ahead of this headmaster. I got just two O levels for the five years I spent at his rotten school. I came away with three A levels from the De La Salle/West Park sixth form, which had the good sense to let me and ‘educate the whole person.’ All praise to the Catholic brothers, I say.)
I dialogued with myself via the philosophers and thinkers I engaged in the pages of my books. It was stimulating company, and I found that I could converse this way, put myself in the place of others and anticipate and raise potential objections to the positions I was concerned to take. I was able to develop and sustain a trail of thought, keeping to the line of enquiry that interested me. There was no one around to pull me off that trail, to confuse the issue by pulling me back onto the known and the clear, having me constantly to check my own original ideas and curtail thinking by having to clarify and re-state.
Over the years, academics have told me to seek publication. They tell me the work – edited, of course – could be published. In my mind, it is published. I don’t like people and organisations messing around with my work. I had brief exchanges with publishers on various things. One place wanted my Aristotle to be cut! Outrage. And wanted me to write more on postmodernism, because that’s what the market wants… They had missed the entire point of the Aristotelianism! That was two decades ago. Now Edward Feser has published a book entitled "The Revenge of Aristotle," saying precisely what I had been saying years ago. Then some other place objected to my Habermas stuff, giving me some post-decent thought as an example for me to copy. I find it all most distasteful. I’m still recovering from being advised to read more Foucault. The idiots were so absorbed in their Foucault cult that they hadn’t realized I had been reading him for decades and had embarked on a very different course. I’m staying on it. Some draw comparisons between Foucault and Rousseau. I argued for Rousseau as affirming transcendent standards of 'rational freedom.' A decade later, David Lay Williams did precisely the same with "Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment." I've been on the right lines all along.
As to editing. My poor long suffering Director Jules Townshend, after having tried and failed yet again to get me to cut some words, compared me to a novelist who makes his editor feel like he was asking him to kill his children. I remember the hard work labouring over these texts, I’m loathe to cut anything. I send them out, accepting them exactly as they are, in however form they emerged. Mistakes and all. Mistakes can be fruitful, they can shed light on things that accuracy misses. You have to pour water in to find the holes.
You’ll find explicitly atheist works from me in there, up to around 2010. And you’ll find explicitly theist works. You’ll find socialists in there, Morris and Marx, you’ll find conservatives like Tolkien. There’s the odd liberal like Mill and his stationary state. It’s all family to me. There is a commonality, a kinship, a consistent thread. I don’t go back and change things just because my views may have changed in different ways. I send them out and then, every so often, receive reports from others as they make their own way in the big world. I like updates from others as to their progress in the world. Here’s the odd thing, often the work I laboured most over, with painstaking academic rigour, is the most neglected. Whilst the stuff I wrote most quickly takes off like a rocket. My poor thesis has received about 900 reads, Philosophizing through the Eye of the Mind (written on the hoof as I gave talks on philosophy) has received well over 30,000. Search me.