I am coming to terms with some decidedly unpleasant truths about the profession I’m sliding into. Academic philosophy has nearly nothing to do with wisdom, truth, or thinking, and lots to do with, in the technical Harry Frankfurt sense, bullshit, technicality, and basic workmanship. We (they?) are meant to push existent conceptual chunks around without an even over-the-shoulder acknowledgement or explanation of why pushing verbal/conceptual pieces around matters. I came to graduate level philosophy motivated by a why, in search of an atmosphere conducive to an attitude of fervent why-ness, and have met only people who know how to ask how and, at best on rare days, show how. This is the most succinct and accurate assessment of training for professional philosophizing that I can come up with—at its best it can show you clearly how to critique existent words by means of other words, none of which matter to you in any earnest, prickly, intensely human sense. At its worst (i.e. most of the time) it foggily plows through concept-clusters which are nearly impossible to care about even when they’re being explicated clearly.
It took some time, but I am now more or less at peace with the fact that being visibly put off by smug contentment with bullshit is impolitic in graduate seminar rooms. Still, it would be nice to have the truth of the situation frankly laid out at the beginning of semesters—i.e., we are transmitting a lexicon to you pre-professionals which should matter about as much as graphs matter to economists, which, if you’re exceedingly lucky, you will eventually have the privilege of shoving towards waves of initially receptive and enthusiastic and then rapidly frustrated and finally apathetic students.
Again, I realize all of this now and accept it—I realize that the difference between college philosophy and, say, microeconomics is one of degree and not of kind. There is as little truth involved in the former as in the latter.
This would be easier to accept if the philosophers would a) not be called philosophers and b) admit it up front. Actually, admitting anything suggestive of a plan, a compass, an expected port of call, would be comforting—but it would also imply and presuppose deep reflection and a level of comfort with publicly displaying one’s strict attachment to one’s intellectual conscience, in a Nietzschean sense, which of course prohibits one from either tolerating the profession or flourishing in it.
An atmosphere of decreased hostility toward truth in college philosophy spaces would be interesting because there is almost nowhere in American life where truth can breathe, let alone flourish. I get the sense, just from reading people’s faces and reading between the lines of what oozes out of their mouths, that people are ready to be preached to and, insofar as they are conscious enough to want anything that corporate America cannot cram into them, I think want to be preached to by a righteous person.
Of course, the concept of righteousness still existing as anything beyond one doing one’s mechanical bourgeois duty or beyond some irrelevant religiosity is either laughable or incomprehensible to nearly all. This is at the root of nihilism, I think. Once God died, the concept of righteousness steadily lost its meaning, ending up finally in its present condition as a set of letters signifying either nothing or some antiquated ontotheological novelty. Can human beings live in this condition of estrangement from righteousness? Yes. Can they live good lives? Only if the concept of good is stripped of all of its qualities except hedonistic ones, meaning stripped of most of the things that have been attached to ‘the good’ for most of the period of recorded Western history (i.e., reflectiveness, passion, profundity…).
Perhaps I am misguided in my analysis of the academic situation, but the simultaneous lack of righteousness and crushing boredom and disillusionment seem to be causally connected. Should people really have to pretend that education is important? Is it crazy to suggest that professors (gulp) profess things well enough that boredom doesn’t hang in lecture halls like an unhappy cloud? People go through the motions in secondary school, at their jobs, and in most of their social interactions with peers, friends, even their main squeezes—should they do the same in their extravagantly expensive philosophy courses?
It’s unavoidable, I think, because, given how dutifully untruthful life is everywhere outside philosophy classrooms, it would be foolish to expect the proceedings inside of philosophy classrooms to be much different.
This is not a new development. Since Socrates, power structures and the truth have been at odds. Being executed was the ultimate affirmation of the truth and righteousness of Socrates’ way of life and of his eponymous Method (which is hardly ever used by professional philosophers, by the way). As Kierkegaard wrote—the crowd is untruth. But what today for us isn’t crowd? Young people, on some level at least, want to engage with something that isn’t the crowd. This is probably why most of them enroll in philosophy courses (aside from their being required, of course). Now, insofar as writing down complex webs of vaguely related conceptual slogans requires sustained mental exertion, in a limitedly mimetic (i.e. unthoughtful) sense, what happens in philosophy classes is not crowd, if only because people usually don’t sit down and take erratic notes in crowds (it would be awkward and cumbersome).
One cannot be righteous without truth, and one cannot be very truthful and get a job. Hostility to truth goes hand in hand with our utter estrangement from the notion of righteousness playing a motivational role in life. One need only read one of John Taylor Gatto’s books or listen to one of his interviews to see how American society, taking its cues from 19th century Prussian social organization, has been designed to eradicate both truthfulness and imagination, to make us optimally easy to control. And really, who has ever been easier to control than the contemporary American citizen? Johan Fichte, Kant’s successor as chair of the philosophy department of the University of Berlin, and Hegel’s predecessor, wrote about the necessity of instituting regimented public school systems to squelch true independence and imagination in the Prussian youth. Isaiah Berlin cites Fichte as one of the major intellectual sources of modern authoritarianism for a reason. This innovative form of social control compensated for Prussia’s lack of natural resources to make it the most feared military power in Europe, responsible for some of the most destructive wars in history.
Now, we in America of course are far removed from such unappealing things, aren’t we? Actually, not really, considering that a) we have perfected, starting with kindergarten, Prussia’s signature form of mandatory, intentionally boring schooling, which is only somewhat attenuated in college classrooms and b) having the most powerful, expensive, and reckless military force in history. In late September of 2010, an American Predator drone killed four Pakistani militants, and hardly anyone noticed, despite the fact that a) we’ve declared no war on Pakistan, so that military action there is even less legal than that in Iraq and Afghanistan and b) America is officially using robots to kill people, no small step in the history of the human enterprise.
In this context Nietzsche’s true importance emerges—both as a critic of the dictatorship of what he called ‘pale atheism,’ which means a postmodern secularism utterly devoid of righteousness, and the kind of systematic and institutionalized boredom, seriousness, and unrighteous gravity of the Prussia of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, which so overwhelmingly dominates educational discourse in America that when their bitter critic Nietzsche, who appeals so strongly to whatever love of liberty still exists in American youth that he is granted a token and ambiguous place in curricula, he is reduced to concepts and, evil of evils, ‘themes.’
The profound irony of a revolutionary thinker like Nietzsche being incorporated into a thoroughgoingly Prussian educational power structure, if one modestly leavened by flickering strands of American libertarianism, is just one of many frustrating realities hiding just beneath the surface of institutional efficiency, waiting for those Nietzscheans who have imagination enough, despite years of schooling, to think with their hearts as well as their minds, and to have the gall, as Nietzsche did, to be as un-German as possible.
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