One of my first questions with regard to this project was whether I should use my name or remain anonymous.
The problems with anonymity with regard to the internet first came to my mind in 1999 when I heard Hubert Dreyfus deliver his paper Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age. Dreyfus very clearly and accurately outlines the dangers of internet anonymity and does so with the clever backdrop of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymity project of the mid 19th century.
Dreyfus is absolutely correct in seeing a danger in anonymity when it comes to the public exchange of ideas. It is very much like the behavior we see on Halloween owing to the masked anonymity of the evening. With anonymity comes the suspension of rules and the abdication of responsibility. This is generally absolute death for public discourse.
If one has true conviction in his ideas it adds weight to them that he is willing to put himself at risk for those ideas — something which is incredibly powerful and is a catastrophic casualty of the absolutely pathological cancel culture we live in. Further, in our modern culture where authority rather than merit is the benchmark for validity and where the institutions of authority have been hijacked by elements which have corrupted and perverted the noble purpose of scholarship, the preconceived notions, either positive or negative, are disastrous. So my readers will need to read the words and make decisions on their validity divorced from already held prejudices.
One thing that Dreyfus doesn’t consider, and I believe it is only because it wasn’t as prevalent a phenomenon at the time of his paper, are the presuppositions the reader brings to the work when they know the author, his background and his affiliations which can also present a problem in the relationship between author and reader–both in positive and negative ways. In this sense, anonymity results in the protections that tenure was meant to provide yet, in our modern world, so seldom does. Simply put, interaction with the website will require judgement based on material and not, for good or ill, the background of its author.
With regard to affiliations, Dreyfus does not consider the amount of bad faith in academic works owing to the constraints and follies of academic departments, professional organizations, grant givers or even the pressure exerted by the possibility of not finding gainful employment when your name is googled and a potential employer finds you might have said something controversial. Dreyfus didn’t imagine the world becoming an intellectual safe space where the culture at large becomes a Freudian devouring mother who, in the guise of protection from predators becomes, herself, the predator.
The courage of Socrates is long lost. The dangers of having an idea that some might find objectionable are now so considerable that it is absolute suicide to put your name to any controversial ideas. Further, the opposite remains just as true and just as bad — a laudable pedigree will often allow people to agree without any actual thought or engagement with the material. As for drinking the hemlock, today’s academics and their mouselike courage would not risk a single negative piece of feedback, let alone their lives and livelihoods— and not without cause — by going to the edges of their discipline. Academia neutered itself and remains neutered. In today’s world there is no forgiveness, there is no forgetting. There is no room in the modern world for scholarship, only propoganda.
Finally, I believe that much of what passes for scholarship since the 1940s is the result of the demands from funding as the university and, indeed, all intellectual life is now a business rather than the pinnacle of human achievement. That academia and even public discourse can be done without anonymity now that it has been commodified is unlikely. At this point in our history, anonymity may be the only stance from which authenticity remains possible.
With this said, my decision to remain anonymous is not without some hesitations thanks in no small part to the insights of both Kierkegaard and Dreyfus — two men with whom I am loathe to be in conflict with, but who did not have the questionable honor of encountering twenty-first century life.
In my attempt to navigate the issue of anonymity and try and extract the benefits of it while not totally falling into the trap of which Dreyfus warns, I will give you this information. My background is in philosophy, specifically in the presocratic tradition and, oddly enough, in the Classical Modern tradition — two very strange philosophical bedfellows to be sure. My work and my thinking revolve frequently around Immanuel Kant and Heraclitus. My training in philosophical hermeneutics as well as the history of philosophy and theological hermeneutics is extensive. This is the original backdrop of interests and training that brings me to this serial of essays which all converge on the same theme: the shifting epistemic landscape of the west.
With this said, it is my deepest desire that readers bring with them their curiosity and willingness to consider incredibly large scale and often complex ideas and even a little sense of humor. Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that not only the decision to remain anonymous, but much of the early inspiration for this website comes from The Last Psychologist. The site, despite not being updated since 2014, is still live and is a spectacular read which I cannot recommend highly enough.