All right. I did say I was done. And I usually don’t feel the need to comment on current events, given that all the other blogs in the universe do that. But just out of curiosity, how did you perceive the Imus issue? This is another complex litmus test of the social construct. Did you see his remark as anti-black, anti-women, or quite specifically as anti-black women? Which view you take reflects which area of critical theory you are viewing from. His comment is both racist and sexist, but which bothers you more? And do you concentrate on one or the other when you think of what an asshat the man is, or do you go for the unique area combining the two? There’s no right or wrong answer, since there’s enough theory to go around for any angle you want to take. Which angle you take does, however, become something of a defining characteristic of you, if not him. I point this out because it does demonstrate some of the complexity of critical theory. There’s a certain Uncertainty Principle that applies: the material is perceived pursuant to your method of perceiving it. And it is this aleatoric (I love that word), subjective aspect of theory that underlies much of my reaction against it for debate purposes. If the world is indeed randomly subjective, the theorist would claim, then there’s no point in trying to establish universal ethical claims because they’re intrinsically unachievable. This argument would apply to all ethics, and therefore pretty much all LD resolutions: one case fits all! Since the world’s woes cannot be solved, it says, arguing them is pointless, and the person who points out the pointlessness of arguing them wins any argument before it begins. Yeah, that’s real competitive, and a great way to address the problems of the world. It offers nothing other than a way of abducting the critical theorists in order to avoid the problems of the world (which is, in fact, a regular knock against the CTs outside of LD).
I keep coming back to the purpose of philosophy, and in many respects the uselessness of some philosophers (and here I don’t just mean CTs). Philosophy, when it is purely academic, seems rather jejune, to say the least. The problem with philosophy is how much of it is inaccessible except at an elevated academic level. Now, you could say that this is true of many disciplines—how many nuclear scientists do you know who are self-taught hobbyists—but that’s not a reason to accept it. And besides, how many other disciplines revel in their inaccessibility as much as philosophy seems to? Scientists are always trying to explain what they’re doing to lay people in non-technical languages, and lay people seem to have a general interest in science (as witnessed, for instance, by the weekly Science section in the New York Times) but philosophers seem to be trying to confuse even scholars with their hyper-technical language, and the general public accepts this with an unstifled yawn (there is no weekly Philosophy section). Sure, there are a few texts out there attempting to explain things to the common yabbo, but why are the primary texts all so difficult? At some point we have to accept that ALL PHILOSOPHY IS MADE-UP STUFF!!! It is an attempt to understand life/thought in an explanatory, exegetic fashion, entirely pulled out of the imaginations of its practitioners. Plato made all his stuff up. Kant made all his stuff up. Hegel. Nietzsche. Wittgenstein. All of them. They made it up. They may have built on each other, but that was simply borrowing already made-up stuff and making up more stuff about it. Isn’t their stuff, insofar as any of it is true, and therefore relevant in explaining the meaning of existence, of interest to everyone? All right, maybe not every person on the street is all that crazy about the purpose of life and the best way to live, but certainly there must be a handful of non-academics out there with such concerns.
So shouldn’t our goal (referring to ourselves as educators, in this case) be to take as much of this gobbledygook as we can and, when there’s good stuff in there, and make it as accessible as possible so that non-academics (high school students) can understand it and use it to further their understanding of life and the universe and everything? One of the things I like about a lot of modern writing in the social sciences (like how I put that?) is that there is some nicely readable material. For instance, I find reading the old Baudleroo quite entertaining, but what I fault is not his lack of meaningful application of his, shall we say, theories, but the vapid attempts by others to find meaning in his amusing yet rambling work. It’s bad enough that the old-line philosophers were hard to understand, but at least they wrote from a position of logical presentation, and the straightforward tools of logic could (in theory) be used to understand the material. Nowadays it is up to the reader to apply his or her own ad-hoc, subjective logic to find out what exactly is being said in the material. Think Derrida, for instance. For that matter, think Nietzsche, whom I’m perfectly willing to categorize as an early modern rather than a late classical. This puts us back, as interpreters, into Uncertainty Principle text-readings. Should this be the sort of material we are training high school students in? Even if they are brilliant scholars, wouldn’t we be better off sticking to material that, at the very least, has its own generally acceptable (if obtuse) entryway? And, of course, there is also the idea that one should start with the basics before moving on to the advanced; you can’t understand Nietzsche if you don’t know what he’s criticizing, in other words. But why would anyone want to learn scales if they can sit down and immediately play Beethoven’s Pathetique? Why, indeed?
Oh, well. These are just random thoughts as I shut down the Sailors for the year. The season is not quite dead, but it is breathing its last gasps. There are merely States and CatNats between us and blessed vacational peace. And an orchestra concert—the bane of forensics, the one activity all forensicians are a part of, with their flugelhorns and piccolos and glockenspiels and zambonis. Bah!
I’ll report on more mundane things than Critical Race Theory, Nietzsche’s insanity and unnecessary obfuscation on the morrow.
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