Costică Brădăţan

My project explores the philosophical significance and cultural function of dissent. It makes the argument that dissent is fundamental for the health of a community’s civic, intellectual, and cultural life. It’s crucial that there is always someone who goes against the stream to point to the possibility of other perspectives and ways of doing things. The dissenter’s job may be unpleasant, yet her political and cultural functions are vital. Just like Diogenes the Cynic trying to get into the theater while everybody else was getting out, in any society some will have to go against the stream of pious lies, conventions, and received ideas, if that society is not to lose its bearings at a more fundamental level. Inspired by Diogenes, and based on the examples of some modern dissenters (Thoreau, Nietzsche, Santayana, Benjamin, Arendt), I will articulate a critique of today’s institutionalized philosophy – and the humanities more generally – as crippled by conformity, mimetism, and a compulsion to stick to disciplinary orthodoxies.