Against the Academics

This blog post tells the story of my intellectual development from an indeterminate point shortly before my memory cutoff around 2018 until today.

Saint Augustine wrote a dialogue whose title can be literally rendered “Against the Academics” (Contra academicos), but since this can be misleading, it is also often rendered into English as “Against the Academicians”. Augustine’s title was targeting the philosophers of the late Academy, which had begun as a Platonist school of philosophy founded by Plato himself, but had by Cicero’s time become a haven for philosophical sceptics, which is to say, people who denied the possibility of certain knowledge. With his work, Augustine intends to target the “Academic scepticism”, as it was called, and criticize it so as to refute it.

In editions of Augustine’s work in Brazil, the title in Portuguese is only ever translated “Contra os acadêmicos”, i.e., the exact same as “against the academics”. The equivalent of “Academicians” might have been “Academicianos” but this sounds odd and stilted, and I have never seen it. No matter. My intellectual development began with a Facebook page named after this work, “Contra os Acadêmicos” (CoA), at some unclear point in time shortly before 2018. The page often clarified that they had nothing against academics, but they were also against the sceptical philosophy of the late Academy, and similarly against whatever philosophies they saw as its modern descendants, such as relativism and postmodernism, etc. This is the common conservative narrative bemoaning contemporary relativism and postmodernism as the root of social ills.

The group running CoA was vaguely conservative-leaning, but they saw themselves as “anti-ideological” and were huge fans of Eric Voegelin; they often criticized right-wing “ideologues” as well as left-wing. The page mostly posted quotes by philosophers and sometimes shared relevant videos by Olavo de Carvalho or Clóvis de Barros Filho or whoever. (The most famous video by the latter, of course, is the video about “brio”, which is very applicable to CoA’s mission. Just today, the day when this post was written, Clóvis posted a reaction video to his own years-old video. More on the former in the next paragraph.) Their most popular posts were memes that they sometimes made to make fun of some philosophical opinions that they disliked. These were infrequent enough; they didn’t want to be a meme page, but they appreciated the increased reach that they got from the memes.

CoA was obviously downstream of Olavo de Carvalho, who, as I have mentioned before, single-handedly began the entire Brazilian right wing. They had clearly been students of Olavo to an unclear extent and appreciated the old man’s teachings and advice, but they weren’t dogmatic “olavistas” in any way and did not emphasize him much. They respected him and shared relevant clips from his lectures (e.g. clips of him giving study tips or summarizing some body of literature) at some points, moreso in the group that was associated with the page than in the page itself. The group was for discussion, I don’t recall many details of it.

CoA also posted reading lists. The biggest fan favorite was their general reading list about philosophy, which was roughly “in order of difficulty”, beginning with easier texts and moving on to more difficult ones. This list was first published as an image, then as an expanded image, and eventually, when they had a website, the very long latest revised version was published on their website. The website also hosted blog posts and various other reading lists on various subjects, as well as “ordered reading lists” about particular authors they recommended, because they often got the question “which book by this author should I read first?”, so they decided to set up a path through each author. Often they simply recommended reading everything by the author in chronological order, but there were exceptions.

Obviously I loved all these resources, and was earnestly edified by the philosopher quotes and study tips and videos that they shared. But the picture of what they provided to me is incomplete without the general vibe, or climate, of talking to them, which was the motivation that they implicitly gave for an intellectual life. It was the idea of getting serious about culture war. You may have heard the conservative concern about how left-wingers control academia, and which is sometimes used to defend “DEI for conservatives”. Well, not for them. They wanted to inspire the conservative movement to study harder than the left-wingers, to become more knowledgeable than their opponents, to expose their charlatanry, and take academia back by the force of their merits. That was the vibe that I got from them, anyway. And in some way I wanted to be part of that, too, although I never became an academic.

In this sense, they really were “Against the Academics”, although they didn’t say it in so many words. They were defined by their desire to be better than the academics who opposed their views, although of course, they had nothing against academics as such, and many were studying to become academics themselves. They wanted their constellation of online study groups to be an academia unto itself, and take back academia from the academics. This was certainly a cause that Olavo de Carvalho supported, indeed it was plausibly the main goal of his entire teaching career, and he praised CoA at some points (although I don’t care to find the Facebook posts where he did this).

I began to read serious books with much help from CoA’s lists, but also from my own curiosity, attempting also to follow some “Great Books” lists I found (see Greater Books). Eventually, what I followed in my readings was roughly an historical order (first the ancient philosophers, then the medievals, then the early moderns, etc.), but the introductory books that they recommended got me to wet my feet. During this time, in which I was still first learning about intellectual topics, I never got much into Olavo de Carvalho beyond what is called The Minimum, which is a collection of newspaper columns written by Olavo. My curiosity about Olavo intensified only years later, leading to the page on my blog about him.

Eventually CoA became much less active for whatever reason, although thankfully, their website is still up. I began to follow various English-speaking philosophy meme pages on Facebook, and became friends with some meme page admins. During this time, which was still 2018–2019, I had just converted to Catholicism due to some of my readings and some encouragement that I had found in religion discussion Discord servers, and some of my Facebook philosophy meme page friends were Catholic philosophy nerds who also encouraged me. I was still relatively early into getting into intellectual topics, and I did much of my discussion in a now-defunct Facebook group that was run by two of these meme page admins, who have since fallen out, hence I am not giving names and details about them so as to avoid stoking the drama again. But discussions among these people who I found through Facebook were also very formative to my intellectual development.

Eventually, let’s say by late 2022 at the latest, I fell mostly out of touch with the people I met through Facebook. I also became less conservative and more libertarian. Elaborating properly on this would require elaborating, for contrast, on the people whose personal details I omitted, but let’s say the main thrust of this development is something I underwent entirely on my own, through the development of my own ideas, which I systematized by writing this very blog (hence its unusual structure, with an ordered table of contents and a glossary, although much of the content is not fully up to my current quality standards).

Much later than that, in the latter half of 2023, I started using (although my account was created much earlier) Twitter, which got renamed to X, which is where I made an entirely different set of friends, which encouraged the interest in analytic philosophy that I had already developed on my own. Hence, today I am very interested in analytic philosophy, which is what informs my newer blog posts, whereas my older blog posts about philosophy were informed only by ancient and medieval writings, or Kant at the latest. I have finally caught up to the contemporary era, so to speak. But I still have much to learn.

Due to my current libertarian political beliefs, I advocate policies that would result in the destruction of academia as we know it, since that is largely state-funded. Hence, I should also like to undermine trust in academics and their theories and publications, so that people don’t feel very many qualms about nuking all of their institutions. And my sense of pride, and of wanting to know my enemy, still leads me to want to study academic theories in detail, and be an academia unto myself, so as to oppose their theories with proper rigor, indeed more rigor than those who I oppose. In this way, today, I am “against the academics”, in much the same sense as CoA were, but much more intensely than they ever were, and not particularly for culture-war reasons (since I am culturally progressive myself). In terms of general attitude and motivation for intellectual development, I am back somewhere near where I started.