Anti-Education by Nietzsche, and why mainstream culture does our best thinking
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Later though, when you hit the frontier, and start thinking things no one ever thought about, stylized dry writing is easer to evaluate for correctness. You don't want an emotional investment, you want an objective view so it can be picked apart based on its own merits. If that stands up, seems correct, or at least worth more investigation, then it can be dressed up in the easy to communicate way.
Perhaps some ideas can't be evaluated without investing in their emotional content. That's a tough place to find truth.
Perhaps this is true in primary school, but I think in secondary school and definitely in university, education can be engaging while remaining completely intellectually honest and devoid of outright appeals to emotion.
When education becomes about how to think and not what to think, it is inherently more interesting. I remember taking my first moral philosophy class in university, and much to my surprise, it was one of the most engaging classes I ever took precisely because it challenged everything I thought I knew. The professor could have spent the time teaching us what to think (e.g. just what the major moral philosophy theories are) but instead she used the socratic method and challenged each of us about what we already believed and how those philosophers like Kant came to their theories.
Indeed, intellectual and moral relativism is dangerous because it does the same thing religion does, it is a method of coming to knowledge/truth (an epistemology) that no one else has access to and/or that relies on subjective evidence (i.e. emotions/feelings).
We're just animals. we've got a million subtle biases. I agree with you, we should challenge what we know and believe. That ain't easy.
This is why I think promoting reason, promoting awareness of cognitive biases (as a result of our evolutionary past), and ridding ourselves of this notion that "standing up for what you believe" (regardless of its validity) is somehow a virtue, is among the most important (and difficult) projects of our time.
I couldn't agree more.
IMO, the problem is communication. If you read academic writing (especially in the humanities) it can seem like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and the person writing it is not really trying to communicate anything intelligent, but is just trying to sound impressive. I believe this is mostly not true. Rather, the problem is the same with technical documentation that is high in rigor and detail, but low in learnability; the problem is that it is difficult to communicate. The person writing will usually (IMO) have something in them they are sincerely trying to express.
The goal of entertainment is to entertain, but it also has to appeal at least somewhat to the passions of the creators and the intellects of the viewers. So thinking finds its way through that medium and can reach a mass audience. It is not that academia has no potential to do the same, it is just that there is not a dynamic set up which brings it out very well.
Nietzsche never would have uncritically claimed mainstream culture does our best thinking any more than he would have given such an honor to academia. So it's bizarre to see his thought appropriated to that end. He was, in fact, extremely concerned with the difference between culture that is merely popular and a genuine, healthy, thriving culture. He saw academics and journalists as frequent accomplices in the destruction of a thriving, healthy culture by their appeals to popular taste and public opinion. By their spinning rigorous sounding tales that merely served to comfort (or discomfort) individuals and reinforce their existing opinions no matter how deleterious or suspect such opinions were (eg. about morality, the nobility of the common man, the goodness/badness of state institutions, etc). Additionally, he was just as concerned about the influence exerted by nation states on thought as he was about the similar influence exerted by public opinion, common sense, and mainstream culture.
To simplify the formula down to "mainstream culture" vs. "the state influenced academics" is to be overly reductionist and to overlook the part every segment of society plays in producing uncritical thought.
For more clarity here I would read Nietzsche's "Untimely Meditation" on 'cultural philistinism' - "David Strauss: the confessor and the writer", and "Beyond Good and Evil" namely the section "Peoples and Fatherlands" for an idea of his approach to critique of mainstream culture in his time.
While I'm not a Holocaust denier, I do believe everything can in principle be questioned, including our most sacred beliefs, or especially those - and perpetually reaffirmed. To expunge critical inquiry from any topic, as long as it's not disguised propaganda, means to live on a flat Earth where everything was revealed and there is nothing more to know. And to do that in Academia - by definition a space shielded from popular pressure exactly to give it the freedom it needs in pursuit of knowledge and truth - is a cultural crime Amazon just can't fix.
Though I think what you're saying is actually that everything should be questioned, as your sentence appears to change its meaning halfway through. ("While I'm not a Holocaust denier, I do believe everything can in principle be questioned, including our most sacred beliefs, or especially those - and perpetually reaffirmed.")
Holocaust denial is not a "fundamentally new idea," it's a fundamentally false idea. You don't need to question and perpetually reaffirm facts. It's simply not a matter of opinion whether or not the holocaust occurred.
Not that it actually occured, no. However, I think this is obligatory, if a bit obvious:
> "If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?"
You know who :) George also wrote this ( http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-explains-in... )
> Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.
Remember, you don't have to convince everybody. You have to convince (or force, or brainwash by force) a few million people, and then you simply need weapons and robots to slaughter all the rest. We have no serious safeguards against this, it would require everybody to be able to think critically, to be able to choose their jobs freely, and other things we don't have (not for everybody). I'd wager we have more than few million people who'd be up for it, given half a chance and one order, and given current trends, I'm fully expecting a big purge "at some point" (even in 500 years it would be like it happening tomorrow, compared to the near-infinite empire that might follow it) that might make Stalin and Hitler look like choir boys. Pessimistic, sure, paranoid, we'll see, and I guess off-topic for sure. But alas, it's the one fear in my heart. We tend to take the best people in their brightest moments as the standard, instead of thinking of it like security: it's the weakest links that really matter. Being right didn't help the people killed by brownshirts for being right. Also see this bit from "Mortals and Others" by Bertrand Russel: http://russell-j.com/0583TS.HTM
But how can the Sokal affair[1] be explained then? There clearly no-one understood it but it was still published.
I suspect Sturgeon's law[2] applies to the humanities, as well as to a lot of other things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
That being said, I don't think just anything can make it into a philosophy journal either. He was clearly trying very hard to make a point, and when smart people work hard on things, the result is very rarely worthless. I'm sure that came through in reading his writing, which is why it was published. Continental philosophy is largely subjective, (which isn't to say it doesn't very in quality) and as such it can't be gauged like analytical philosophy or physics can be.
The greater intellectual fraud is extrapolating this example of a minor journal focused on postmodernism publishing an article written in bad faith to a rejection of postmodernism wholesale. There's a lot of valuable insight to be gained from studying it, which I encourage anyone skeptical of postmodernism to do.
An "intelligent" person might see an existential moral conflict portrayed brilliantly in something like Breaking Bad, others see a story about Drugs, Tough guys, cool Misfortunes, funny incidents, black humour and they don't notice or derive any moral teachings from it. (I might misrepresent Breaking Bad here to some degree, I have not seen it completely. Could have also named examples like Spirited Away, Watership Down, ... simple cartoons to some, but they are missing the bigger picture.)
That's why shows which rate high among TV Critics and get a lot of viewers, normally appeal to both, those who see the big picture, and those who are appealed to the "superficial" version of it.
Academia does not have to entertain in the same way, but academia will also change radically when it comes to getting a point across. Technology will help incredibly with bringing abstract information to people outside of a specific scientific field.
We humans are not good at Maths, not at all. We humans are good at touching, smelling, visualizing things.
Albert Einstein was one of the most influential physicists in the 20th century, and even though his ideas (at that time) must have seemed incredibly counter-intuitive, it was through thought experiments with a large amount of visualization, that helped him form his theories.
Visuals are so important. And they'll become better and better, and we will be able to do them more effectively and in a whole new way as technology progresses. Think about proper 3D-Virtual Environments, 3D Position Tracking in a room with a VR-Headset. The possibilities we have there.
I remember very clearly when we talked about Retrograde Motion of planets in school. By the time we were finishing sketching it out everybody understood it[1]. In order to understand it, not everybody has to be able to reach the conclusion themselves. Why do planets seem to move backwards / stop and turn around? 30 Seconds of video will explain it to the layman, enough so that he is satisfied with the answer and actually gets it.
Education may progress particularly slowly, but eventually we will reach a completely different form of education and will have incredibly clever ways of getting information across. Academia does not have to primarily entertain, but it should also be able to quickly get the point across, we will get there.
It also feels like the separation between education institutions and "mainstream" culture is a false dichotomy. Especially when 40%+ of the US population now holds a degree from one of these institutions. While in Nietzsche's day university was a rare privilege today it is not. Claiming that something as prolific is separate from mainstream seems wrong.
Sure, there are pressures on the university that push its members away from independent and critical thought. But independent and critical thought has threatened institutions with volatility for a long time. I don't think the wilderness of pop culture is the best place to go looking for it.
Amen to that. If only that were the case, we'd be so much better off.
As for the rest, I found the article concerning. Maybe it's more about the humanities than the hard sciences, but it seems clear to me that academia is doing a good job pushing the boundaries of what is known. As for 'culture', no I don't think academia ever really had the ability or intention to define it - it seeks, perhaps, to describe it. It's true that modern philosophers have little effect on real culture, and that's perhaps for the best.
I haven't read any of those authors nor Nietzsche, and I have no idea whatsoever about the political correctness that goes on in the USA so I'm not trying to make any kind of point.
I just find it funny that conservatives have a certain pop idea of Nietzsche as some kind of more serious Ayn Rand, while actual Nietzsche scholars have actualized his ideas in all kinds of directions.
That being said, your complaint about conservatives is a bit of a straw man.
I don't think any conservatives think of Nietzsche as a more serious Ayn Rand, rather they think of Ayn Rand as serious herself. Reading Nietzsche (or any philosopher really) without the proper context these days he appears just genuinely weird. I think non-intellectual people on the left read Derrida and Foucault and it eventually turned into trigger warnings and safe spaces. Non-intellectual people on the right read Nietzsche and it eventually turned into books called things like "Atlas Shrugged" and polemics about "makers and takers".
It's completely reasonable to not want your race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. attacked around your home (safe spaces), or to not have violent acts you've experienced joked about (trigger warnings).
These things are different than being against free speech; that's the strawman here.