On Launching a Journal in the Present Circumstances

An Editorial by D. Seiple

___________________________________________________________________________________

Here is the first issue of the NYC Journal of Philosophy.  This is not a standard philosophy journal, as it contains submissions of a more literary nature as well. This is because there may be more to good philosophy than just logical argument. Literature aims to draw us into a larger scope than just the precise premises of a proof: literature is about our lives. Philosophy can be as well, but then before they begin to write, any writer of either philosophy or literature might need to take a wide look around to see where their own life is situated. Or else they might be just writing sad songs in a hermetic echo chamber.

So where are we? Culturally speaking, we might notice that many successful members of the “Boomer” generation, who witnessed the first influx of the Mamas and the Papas and the flower children, seem to have largely settled back into the cozy lives the American Dream had promised them. In the meantime they may have earnestly taught their own children that you can “go where you wanna go,” and many youngsters took this to heart in their own dreams for the future. 

But apparently it takes more than just “California dreamin’” to get you where you want to be in bleak economic times, as many of the younger generation have discovered. While their elders may smile, wistfully, at their own naivete back then, when John and Yoko were proclaiming all you need is love and touting the power of imagination – now many of their own kids might be wishing for just a bit of that same imagination, now that their own solid future may feel hard to imagine at all. We all know that we’re living in an age of transition, and at such times it’s hard to know exactly where we are or where we may be going.

But what, you may ask, does all this have to do with the launch of a new journal?

Here is where a little history might be helpful. Human history is not linear.  Progress has never been a straight line.  And at those transition points, when everything seems up for grabs and nothing seems solidly predictable, a new age of promise bursts forth only when individuals share (with each other) visions of new understandings. The old ways of looking at things may not always work anymore.  These days this is where the contributors and readers of a journal like this might notice themselves to be.

The early decades of the 19^th century in Europe were an age rather like ours today.  The period between 1776 and 1848 has been called the Age of Revolution, and the first journals (both philosophical and literary) had only recently made their way into the public awareness. Just as Luther’s Reformation in the 16^th century was made possible by the advent of the printing press, so the change in broader consciousness that informed the social transformations of the day was invigorated by published writers – and could not have happened without those journals.

These writers found a home within the pages of journals like Leigh Hunt’s Examiner (1808-1821). Leigh Hunt was a poet and literary critic who introduced the world to the John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson – poets that later generations have since lumped together as “Romantics.”  It might seem remarkable that these writers had common artistic and social concerns that rather suddenly developed and rather dramatically contrasted with what had existed before.  Clearly there was a radical cultural change in this period, one that the eminent historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin called “the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred.”[1] Beforehand, everything was thought to be part of some great unity – even if there was no agreement on what that unity was.  After the Romantics, there were only the competing contentions of irreducible subjectivities. Although the radical upheavals of that era certainly paved the way for this development, it would seem to be a rash reductionism to deny that the shift in consciousness itself played an indispensable part in that story.

Something quite similar may be happening before our very eyes in our own day.  Berlin himself viewed romanticism as the triumph of diversity and pluralism. Perhaps this journal can be a home for those who share this sensibility, and (in just that same spirit) even for those who might not as well.

Further comments are invited!

Citations

[1] Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. by Henry Hardy. Second Edition (Princeton University Press, 2013), Ch 1.

D. Seiple has taught philosophy extensively and presented his work at conferences throughout the New York area and beyond. His publications can be found on PhilPapers.