About Against Procrustes
Conforming the Mind to Reality, Not Reality to the Mind.
Who's Procrustes?
The theme of our mission comes from the ancient Greek myth of Procrustes. Procrustes was a blacksmith who would invite travelers into his inn and force them to lie in an iron bed. If the poor traveler was not big enough to fit the bed, Procrustes would stretch them. If their legs were hanging over, Procrustes would simply lop off the parts of them that didn't fit. For our purposes, this serves as a metaphor for human cognition. In general, people do not decide what to think by performing a rigorous investigation of reality and weighing their findings to arrive at a coherent explanation. Rather, people arrive at their perspectives by finding a worldview that fits nicely their sensibilities and emotions and then set about attempting to rationalize their experience of the world through that lens; lopping off the parts that don't fit—and stretching to the breaking point that evidence which is insufficient to support their conclusions. Philosophers have discussed this tendency for a while, a famous example being Joseph Shieber's "Nietzche Thesis", which borrows from the later writings of Friedrich Nietzsche to posit that humans generally believe what is safe and advancing for them, rather than what appears to be true. For our sake, we find the metaphor of Procrustes to reference a deeper truth about the human person. Additionally, however, it allows us to narratively combine all these tedencies we seek to resist into a single character. Namely, Procrustes.
Our Mission
If Procrustes represents the urge to mutilate reality to fit a theory, our mission is the exact inverse: to stretch our minds until they are wide enough to contain the real. We are a journal of Metaphysical Realism. We operate under the conviction that Truth is not merely a construct we create for the sake of our safety or convenience, but (to borrow from Plato) really real reality. When we encounter a fact—whether it be the undeniable reality of suffering, or the difficulties in our own worldview—that does not fit our current perspective, we do not chop it off. We widen our view. We seek to delve deeply and accurately into the human experience. We explore philosophy, theology, and culture with an eye to the real, and an ear that seeks our own correction. We invite you to leave the cramped bed of ideology and step into the expanse of the world not as you would have it, but as it truly is.