I've never been one to hide my political leanings.
I'm an anarchist, but a pragmatic one.
I voted for Kamala Harris because I think Trump is terrible for everyone right now.
But I'm also a mystic and know that just because something is terrible right now doesn't mean it's the worst thing for the future, so I accept what is and dig into what I can do with my particular skills and interests to maybe make it a little less terrible for the present.
My personal analysis of why tyranny keeps winning is a lack of critical thinking - a direct result of Republican attacks on education. We know how to educate people. We know how to teach critical thinking. But doing so is a threat to power structures that stubbornly refuse to die, and that have taken all we've learned about human nature in the modern age to work really hard at preventing left-wing revolutions while allowing right-wing ones to happen right in their faces.
The day after the election, I went to ChatGPT, lamented about that lack of critical thinking, chatted with it about that for a bit, then started brainstorming a new content series - one that will also serve as a portfolio of philosophical research and writings for when I apply to grad school in a couple years.
I'm going to be pairing liberatory philosophers with conservative philosophers. Digging into their biographies and personal histories to understand the context which produced their thinking - because every thinker is a distillation of their circumstances, even though so far in my undergrad classes in philosophy, we don't really get into those backgrounds much at all.
There's a strict focus on their writing, which is necessary for the sort of training that a philosophy degree does, but not so great for actually doing philosophy.
Getting into that background context is part of what I'll be doing in this series.
With each pairing, I'll be exploring their thinking, comparing and contrasting it, and seeing what sparks from the clash.
Sometimes, this takes the form of having to do a whole bunch of journaling to unpack paternalism - the ways that I am paternalistic and the ways that I defer to paternalism. I'd only gotten a few pages into Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed before I had to dig into that aspect of my psyche.
Which is what good philosophy does.
Yes, these are big ideas that are applicable to society and how we interact with others, but they can also be applied directly to our own lives and self-transformation.
I'm starting with Paulo Freire - the father of critical education - and Edmund Burke - the father of modern conservatism. Paulo Freire's work is all about bringing people to critical consciousness through education. Edmund Burke's work is all about the reasons he thought we should preserve traditions and not engineer radical change in society.
I'll be using AI tools to generate study guides and reflection questions. NotebookLM is great for this. You can upload up to 50 sources to a notebook, ask it any questions, and even generate a "podcast" discussion of the material. I use ChatGPT for brainstorming and planning - I tell it what I want to do, have it create the plan, then I follow - and adjust the plan - to do the thing.
I'll be using Zotero to organize my references and Obsidian to organize all my notes, publishing my notes daily - Welcome to Curious Dialogues is my hub for this project.
I don't yet have a firm publishing schedule. I'm in school full-time and also trying to revive my business after a six-month recovery from a broken leg.
I'm aiming for at least one essay per pairing of philosophers, more if I feel like it. I'm also aiming for one podcast a month, since my aim is to spend about a month on each pairing because I can't just sit down and read all their stuff and do it all in one day because I've got school and other projects to work on, too.
Essays will get published here on Paragraph and on Substack - I'll be setting up optional subscriptions in both places for those who can to support the series and ongoing independent philosophical (and other) research going forward. Here on Paragraph, you can also mint the essays.
The podcast will go on YouTube, probably on Spotify, and a few other podcast places. Those will be a combo of me chatting about what I've learned with the current pairing, along with the AI-generated "podcasts" from NotebookLM. Those are great for getting a nice overview of a text before reading it - getting the framework in your head to make it easier to understand, especially when you're reading early modern and Victorian philosophers who liked to use SO MANY WORDS. I love words... a lot. But oof... Mill is WORDY.
At first, they probably won't be great.
Oh, I'm a great writer.
And I'm great at being able to intuitively understand and translate philosophical ideas.
But this is about building my deeper and more conscious analytical skills, exploring topics that interest me, and creating interesting content out of it.
This series is probably going to be ongoing for several months - I've got 10 pairs planned so far and aiming at one per month.
Of course, political and social philosophy are far from my only areas of interest, it's just where my curiosity is at the moment. As the series evolves, and the various themes and questions lead me in winding directions, we never know where we'll end up!
Gwynne
