Come on, let's forget about it...
In comments to my last note, I wrote, that my sentences are far away from being professionally well-structured, because of their lenght. Now, I've grown much more cynical ever since that note, and I think the naked truth is, some of the most professional philosophical writings are intentionally very hard to undrestand, not b/c they have long sentences but b/c they are filled with jurgons of terminology.
Prof. Roderick has a nice quote on this: "you can fit all the professors for a philosophy conference within a small boat, and if that boat sinks no body would ever understand what the hell they've been saying."
But why? You may say, well they need new terms to remove possible ambiguities in the language, and that would be right. But to what price? let me read an emotional passage of Kant in one of his most influential books Fundamental principle of the metaphysics of morals:
"...It is not only that this proceeding can never lay clam to the very rare merit of a ture philosophical popularity since there is no art in being intellegible if one renounces all throughness of insight, but also it produces a disgustingly medley of compiled observations and half-reasoned principles. Shallow pates enjoy it b/c it can be used for everyday chat..."
He's emotional, but today, a student (of philosophy at least) must use all sorts of terminologies that leave no room even for the most intelligent of writers to express some sort of attitude, or view outside those bounds. It's all as if, philosophy, very intentionally wants its readers to be a very selected few. So it organizes this complex language. Nietzsche and Hume wrote in the language,that was spoken and understood by people easier. The Greeks too, didn't have new terms for every new concept. Everyone could understand Plato, or Aristotle. Nobody ever thought that philosophy was a waste of time back then, b/c it was out of touch. It's easy for the philosopher to ignore all this though. When accused for being out-of-touch, he'd just say, as I have said to friends before myself: "Philosophy is in fact about the issues that you deal with everyday but are too much of a dam fool to really think about it as deeply as I do." and that's supposed to make you feel like a deep thinker. A lie you would inevitability, and eventually start to believe.
Alas, in this world where ignorance seems to be such an eternal bliss, that even the much anticipated candidate of hypocritical hope, the mr. president-elect has the audacity to ignore sending a blunt message to Israeli air strikes. Alas, if the harvard educated role model is like that, we shall just go and BOGH BEZANIM. (persian idiom meaning crudely that you're just better off doing nothing at all..or that you are condemned to a verdict of complete triviality)
And indeed, I am living in dark times. That's how I like to think about it, sometimes at least. I just like to forget, you see. I choose to ignore. I am unlike, many of my good friends who believe there is system of market capitalism, or a machinery that produces ignorance, or a (now more popular neo-marxist phrase) ministry of truth that defines the truth for us through images. I do think there are images, and alternative truths, but some form of truth is out there too, and you can't just deny that. In the end, we are the ones that decide to be fed with these alter realities or not.
At work, I can read about the air-strikes. I look at the now famous palestinian girl looking into the camera, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/
It's the very same me that chooses to write in harder to swallow vocabulary, that uses philosophical name-droppings for everything, and longer sentences to make everything even harder. All so that I can ignore You, my reader. So that I can feed my vanity, and forget you really existed as my judgmental reader in the first place. So you see, I think I do have a choice, and I don't make it the right way, do YOU?
Prof. Roderick has a nice quote on this: "you can fit all the professors for a philosophy conference within a small boat, and if that boat sinks no body would ever understand what the hell they've been saying."
But why? You may say, well they need new terms to remove possible ambiguities in the language, and that would be right. But to what price? let me read an emotional passage of Kant in one of his most influential books Fundamental principle of the metaphysics of morals:
"...It is not only that this proceeding can never lay clam to the very rare merit of a ture philosophical popularity since there is no art in being intellegible if one renounces all throughness of insight, but also it produces a disgustingly medley of compiled observations and half-reasoned principles. Shallow pates enjoy it b/c it can be used for everyday chat..."
He's emotional, but today, a student (of philosophy at least) must use all sorts of terminologies that leave no room even for the most intelligent of writers to express some sort of attitude, or view outside those bounds. It's all as if, philosophy, very intentionally wants its readers to be a very selected few. So it organizes this complex language. Nietzsche and Hume wrote in the language,that was spoken and understood by people easier. The Greeks too, didn't have new terms for every new concept. Everyone could understand Plato, or Aristotle. Nobody ever thought that philosophy was a waste of time back then, b/c it was out of touch. It's easy for the philosopher to ignore all this though. When accused for being out-of-touch, he'd just say, as I have said to friends before myself: "Philosophy is in fact about the issues that you deal with everyday but are too much of a dam fool to really think about it as deeply as I do." and that's supposed to make you feel like a deep thinker. A lie you would inevitability, and eventually start to believe.
Alas, in this world where ignorance seems to be such an eternal bliss, that even the much anticipated candidate of hypocritical hope, the mr. president-elect has the audacity to ignore sending a blunt message to Israeli air strikes. Alas, if the harvard educated role model is like that, we shall just go and BOGH BEZANIM. (persian idiom meaning crudely that you're just better off doing nothing at all..or that you are condemned to a verdict of complete triviality)
And indeed, I am living in dark times. That's how I like to think about it, sometimes at least. I just like to forget, you see. I choose to ignore. I am unlike, many of my good friends who believe there is system of market capitalism, or a machinery that produces ignorance, or a (now more popular neo-marxist phrase) ministry of truth that defines the truth for us through images. I do think there are images, and alternative truths, but some form of truth is out there too, and you can't just deny that. In the end, we are the ones that decide to be fed with these alter realities or not.
At work, I can read about the air-strikes. I look at the now famous palestinian girl looking into the camera, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/
It's the very same me that chooses to write in harder to swallow vocabulary, that uses philosophical name-droppings for everything, and longer sentences to make everything even harder. All so that I can ignore You, my reader. So that I can feed my vanity, and forget you really existed as my judgmental reader in the first place. So you see, I think I do have a choice, and I don't make it the right way, do YOU?
posted by Siavash | 1:43 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home