#flux.r saves my eyes again

[some-murmurings]

Essay!!

edit after 1000+ words: I'm so sorry oh my fucking god. I didn't realize how many thoughts I had. I had so many. So fucking many. This got so long. You don't need to read it all. Jesus Christ. Thank you for asking. I had fun.

I'm glad you asked, I nearly wrote my 20+ page senior seminar paper on this topic so, while I have none of the sources together or any super strong body paragraphs, an overview should be ezpz laimon shqueez-ee.

Brief personal context: I finished 2/3 of my undergrad in the Philosophy program at a small liberal arts college, then switched to Creative writing for reasons that will become apparent. I was raised by intellectual dickheads who rely heavily on clever rhetoric to "win" conversations (yes, even with literal toddlers), so I have an unyielding spite for Academia in general. It will come through so judge my bias accordingly.

This video by a really solid video essaying, "Knowing Better" explores a common cultural narrative he calls "The Standard American History Myth"

Think "Abraham Lincoln ended Slavery" and "Martin Luther King Jr. ended Racism" and "Obama ended Racism AGAIN" all of which are extremely common implications (and frequently explicit claims) made in most US public schools. No I do not have a study to back that up. Yes it's probably hyperbolic.

Basically, because the bureaucracies in charge of lesson plans in our public schools (assuming you're from the US, sorry if wrong) all share super similar incentive structures (good test scores, don't encourage gang violence, actively destroy children's creative spirit), huge swaths of misinformation get proliferated into the public consciousness. The already-euphemistic "Trail of Tears" being understood as "merely aggressive relocation of indigenous folk" becomes commonplace, it becomes impolite to suggest that the genocide was, in fact, a genocide. A phenomena we're seeing right now with Gaza and have been seeing with our colonial regime over the Imperial Periphery for actual centuries.

I argue that Academic Philosophy suffers a similar sickness.

In my courses, I took class after class after class talking about the same 20 or so European guys who were overwhelmingly framed as "Important figures with Important thoughts about Important things" with little to no acknowledgement of their particular cultural context.

Very pointedly, with little to no acknowledgement of their particular cultural context... when it made them look bad.

I did not learn Aristotle was staunchly pro-slavery (notably using nearly identical arguments to the US Confederacy) until nearly 2 years into my degree, and by then I was surrounded by white cishet guys insisting that "He's the Father of Philosophy, [deadname]" (I wasn't out to these jamokes, naturally).

Sidebar: is Aristotle or Socrates the father of philosophy? Plato isn't, too broad, but I've seen both A & S called the patriarch and I've long since gotten lost. Petition to change it to Hegel, cement our collective deathwish.

I googled Heidegger and actually did a spit take. My main man was wavery on a whole bunch of stuff he really did not need to be. Nazi stuff. Heidegger was a Nazi.

Now, a frequent rebuttal I got from my professors was that, in effect, I'm grandstanding! My critiques are sweeping, performative. What, do I want us to *gasp*... burn their books?!

Plainly, no. Kant being so pro-colonialism he made nose-charts (note: can't source this :( I distinctly remember a professor showing us them) on some nasal phrenology shit isn't just an opportunity for easy dunking (altho it is that too), it's a huge, foundational problem with his perspective on ethics. Like really, really, really big issue.

In fact, once you start digging through the lives and cultural contexts of ANY big name thinker, you realize several extremely funny things:

Irregularly bigoted in at least one (1) direction. Usually more.

A guy

A guy we'd probably call "white" nowadays*

A guy we'd probably call "white" nowadays who had the money and free time to write a lot

A guy we'd probably call "white" nowadays who happens to position himself ways provocative to recent political movements

Fun game: see how many of the "big names" (and even more niche favs) of yours last to the end of this list. Most of em? Yeah.

This is because "Academic Philosophy" is lowkey an oxymoron. Not that study of philosophical texts itself is useless; Ursula K LeGuin's "Those who walk away from Omelas" taught me more in sidebar summary than any full text Plato ever wrote.

The issue is that our cultural definition of "philosophy" has been MASSIVELY narrowed to a very specific range of weird abstractions or artistic movements. No, not even Existentialism is safe. I love you Wittgenstein, you were right. The Tractatus does suck balls and ass (not to yuck a yum) but you didn't escape the event horizon of Philosophy.

Taking a given class, I frequently bounced thousands of years in between these poorly introduced dickheads. You do a week on Kant then a week on Aristotle then a week on your professor's work then a week on a cyberpunk author. You'll jump from Augustine to Hume like these two were riding the train to work next to Foucault. Insanity.

It's fine to juxtapose ideas you like in a class, obviously, but that's just it: these teachers aren't. Not really, they're slapdashedly throwing lesson plans together and using syllabi they got off the internet because they haven't slept in a month. No explanation of the differences, no time to explore the faults in their perspectives, just dead-eyed stares at flickering overhead fluorescence.

There's a huge pressure to teach names that admin can recognize, to focus on "Real, Published Thinkers" as if academic publication does not VERY aggressively select against uncomfortable truths. Y'know. Basically the primary goal of philosophy. Loving wisdom despite its burden.

This got disorganized. I'm too tired to reorganize or even edit it. Apogolies for typos, I hope they're not too major. And, if you did read this, I hope it made some sort of sense. I love Philosophy (outside of college) a LOT, it's just so painful to see it get bastardized so badly.

Anything is philosophy, to me, any single damn thing. Some more than others, I bet, but really anything. If you tried to make it true and tried to teach me something about anything, that's philosophy.

Not like truth lives in a book anyways, right?

*strictly speaking, e.g. ancient Athenians did not have "whiteness" in the modern sense. They did, however, have a rigid class system with an ethnically diverse slave-class, so one can reasonably extrapolate many "Citizens" enjoyed privileges based on their ethnicity & class. White Supremacy may be a modern stupidity but its constituent parts are not.

THE GOOD PLACE (2016 - 2020) I 2.12 - Somewhere Else