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Van Aldoos was born in Canada to a Dutch family and has lived about half his life in various parts of that country. He has spent the rest of his time living and working in both West and East Europe. Van Aldoos is a young intellectual of an outrageous sort and has been having problems for years with the conservative forces of academia. Of late he has turned his attention to pure writing and has more or less given up the work of writing academic essays and teaching. Van Aldoos is a pioneer of monist thought and has taken the West's interest in Buddhism, exemplified in writers like Herman Hesse and J.D. Salinger, to the next level and purports to write from the paradise of nirvana. He is often criticized for using drugs to gain this perspective but this cosmopolitan philosopher reacts strongly to such criticism. |
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We here at CWP support him even though his views on drug use tend to be very unconventional and thus controversial. In spite of such criticism his work remains challenging and enlightening and we like to remind his critics that to attack him personally is to engage in the flaw of ad hominem and irrelevant to a discussion of his expressed philosophy. Were there not those who tried to discount the philosophy of Nietzsche on the basis that he was psychotic from time to time? It's a good thing that Van Aldoos can take up residence in his second homeland of Holland where all drug use is tolerated by the authorities. Van Aldoos himself is sure that the situation would be far more dangerous for him in a country like America and these days he spends most of his time in Rotterdam where drug use is, more or less, a legal activity. Van Aldoos did his basic degree in Canada but, under mysterious circumstances, one day he just up and left and never went back. In Holland, where luckily he was also a citizen, he found the drug and socialist paradise of his dreams and has maintained an apartment there ever since. This has not stopped him though from travel to other countries and he often writes about his experience in other lands. An extreme libertarian, Van Aldoos is these days on a mission to change our antiquated views on drug use. He likens the situation of the user to that of the homosexual - stereotyped as untrustworthy, lazy, forced into a secret closet...and in the end a user can even be picked up and put in jail for simply doing what comes naturally. Van Aldoos is an angry young man when he lets himself be and a number of his works can be rightly labeled as subversive. Good that he can now reside in The Netherlands and live in relative peace but even so he claims that Holland goes nowhere near far enough to satisfy him as either libertarian or as drug user. Imagine that! And nowadays he buys his drugs pure and cheap in a controlled environment making the transaction almost legal. Not far enough indeed! Not that drug use is his only subject - far from it. They are only the current focus in his young life. Van Aldoos has made himself into an expert in various movements including Romanticism, Modernism, and art of the absurd all which are subjects he has formally learned and taught. After a number of years of traveling abroad he returned to Canada to study linguistics at the graduate level. Van Aldoos has not only found it necessary but also interesting to learn languages in his travels and he continues to study those that he has picked up along his merry way. Apparently his Latin also comes in useful when he is studying philosophy but I doubt if he has a chance to use it now in modern day Europe. Van Aldoos has spent time in various European capitals including London, Berlin, Prague and Moscow. He lived for a few years in the Czech Brno but returned to Holland when his money ran out. Van Aldoos has made his living in many ways including by teaching and translating and as a writer of philosophy. He has also, if truth be known, made money in the traffic of drugs but he has long since ceased this most dangerous activity. Van Aldoos is an outrageous character and is not afraid to show the world the bizarre picture he is painting of himself even if he does so nowadays in disguise or with his voice altered. His books however hide nothing and once read it is easily understood why this man gives interviews these days behind the anonymity of a curtain. |