I miss philosophy. And God, I am the last person I thought would succumb.
When I entered Philosophy College as a wee nineteen year-old, fresh in the ways of academia, I shunned philosophy as a doctrine and philosophy majors as effete nerds who couldn’t apply what little analytical thinking skills they possessed to any question with import more significant than what perception might mean. Like most of the uninitiated, I assumed that philosophy was a semantic exercise devoid of real content. After spending slightly over a month taking a non-credit course at “regular” college, I’ve begun to realize that all the rest of school is a worthless semantic exercise, and that questions of epistemology are the only questions really worth asking in an academic setting. I miss arguing and talking; and most of all I miss questions, even the bullshit ones.
At the end of the day the lack of questions is the thing that most bothers me about “practical” education. Do I know a bunch of shit about Hume that I will never need and draw a blank when asked to point to Laos on a map? Yes. But if someone told me Laos was a third-world country I would ask them what that meant, exactly, before I filed it away as fact and I can’t help but believe that a mind that thinks back is worth any lack of factual knowledge.
When I first started studying philosophy, I thought it was exceptionally stupid that we were encouraged to ask questions rather than answer them. Asking stupid questions is easy, of course, but the greatest minds of each generation have singly devoted themselves to figuring out the smart ones. In my darker moments I’ve thought of academia as a worthless circle-jerk centuries old that’s wasted talent for just as long. But couldn’t politics be described in precisely the same way?
I have a friend who believes that every human being is born with the same potential for intelligence. Those who rise above the others are the ones who are encouraged to excel in particular areas- all nurture, no nature. This explains why men are better at math then women (as much as I hate it, I’ve seen it pretty much proved in the most equitable college classrooms you could imagine). Men were told as wee little creatures on the playground that boys were good with numbers, and girls were told that they were good at writing or painting or making paper-mache hand casts or whatever, so the boys memorized their multiplication tables early and the girls didn’t.
That seems all well and good, but what about the other, more gender-neutral academic disciplines, like philosophy, political science and literature? Media arts are coming to be heavily populated by women (ceramics and photography in particular), and literature has plenty of published female voices, if not a whole lot of well-respected ones. But why aren’t there any female philosophers or popular sociologists? Is it just that there hasn’t been a precedent set yet? The closest thing I have to a major is philosophy, and I haven’t read a female yet. Jane Austen is the first on our curriculum, and God knows she’s hardly a revolutionary thinker on par with, say, Kant. Noted, my curriculum is chronological. Still, I can’t think of a single popular modern female philosopher, disregarding the ever-present Ayn Rand. Keeping her as the exception, what the hell?
I think women aren’t only disincentivized from being good at math, but expressing themselves intellectually at all. Women’s emotions- their intuition and “feminine mystique”- are the unique thing they have to offer a male-dominated academic and cultural canon, and unless that’s what they want to talk about, they apparently haven’t got much to say. This isn’t the fault of publishers and professors and consumers, though; none of them are even really trying.
I think that’s because the most recent wave of feminism has been about a woman’s happiness, not her objective achievement. Violent Acres has covered some of this, but the fact of the matter is that men have never done what made them happy, and that’s why they’ve come to achieve so much. They either did what they had to do to provide for their family (created financial infrastructure) or did what they thought was for the better rationality and self-awareness of mankind (philosophy). Naturally much of both things was also for self-aggrandizement. So where’s that “virtue” in women? Do we spend so much of our time trying to be the prettiest that being the best or cleverest is something we’ve never even considered?
Putting aside what’s better for humanity or scores more points for women in general, why is our self-interest directed towards doing the things that make us feel good, and not the things that make us feel proud? Men don’t shove chocolate down their throats or take bubble baths because those things don’t contribute anything to long-term goals. Have women grown so conditioned against the possibility of genuinely objective accomplishment that the little pleasures are all we can aspire to?
More on this later, I think.
