Takes His Thoughts Wherever They Go
One event this weekend:
Memetic Mediation Campfire w/ Jason Snyder and Peter Limberg. Every Sunday @ 3:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
No Stoic Breathe this Sunday or Monday. Steve will be returning on Wednesday.
Newly posted event:
Taking His Thoughts Wherever They Go W/ Derrick Jensen. September 21st @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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September 4, 2020
Derrick Jensen is visiting The Stoa later in the month. In a video where Derrick talks about how he cannot be neatly placed in the left-right spectrum, he mentions one reviewer saying this about his work: “at some point in his career, everybody who loves Derrick Jensen's work is going to hate him, because he refuses to follow any ideological lines, and takes his thoughts wherever they go.”
Yes! Let us take our thoughts wherever they go.
I am excited about Derrick Jensen’s visit because his book A Language Older Than Words was one of the books that changed my life. I read it when I was a first-year University student, and it was really the first serious book I read outside of any class syllabus.
In the book he wrote about the abuse he experienced when he was a child, and connects this to the abuse the planet is experiencing. The book really shook me out of my sheltered bubble and showed me how messed-up things are.
On his Wikipedia page it says Derrick is an “ecophilosopher, radical environmentalist, and anti-civilization advocate.” While these are things I am not, I do feel a deep kinship with Derrick because of his proclivity to take his thoughts wherever they go, which is what I am attempting here.
I like the thought of emancipating philosophy from the walls of academia, and putting it where it properly belongs: everywhere. Airbnb and Uber disrupted the hospitality and taxi industries, could digital campfires like The Stoa do the same for philosophy?
This is a dangerous game of course, but philosophizing is a dangerous game. I would like more conversational sessions at The Stoa to occur, like Arielle Friedman’s The Dangerous Space, which is one of The Stoa sessions I am really liking.
It would be great to eventually have courses available at The Stoa that can provide some basic training in reasoning, and maybe some argument mapping tool where people can record the propositions that shape their worldview, so they can keep track of their thoughts, wherever they go.
These things, intelligently coupled with intersubjectivity practices like Collective Presencing and Circling, might unlock dialogos, which is what John Vervaeke refers to as a type of dialogue that engenders a flow state, one that unlocks profound insights and deeply immersive interpersonal relating.
There is a lot of work to do at The Stoa, and there are a lot of interesting things I could do here. It is somewhat overwhelming, but trying to emancipate philosophy and unlock dialogos definitely beats applying to normie jobs.
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