On Academia.

 

 

My favourite character from the problematic and difficult outing with Kresten and his friends was Nelly. At one point, as we were arguing about Greed and Money, she looked me in the eye and said, “That’s just your opinion. That’s not a fact.”

I was given pause. I could think of nothing more obvious. Yet why was she bringing to my attention this fairly self-evident fact?

I probed her for answers. Eventually, she seemed to suggest that she knew “facts” because she learned them in college, whereas I only had opinions because I heard them by word-of-mouth.

Undoubtedly, the most well-read of my peers was John the Hitchhiker. He was also the one who had the most time available to dispense in conversation and disinterested* learning. It was his insight that I had made reference to, in the context of a larger argument. As far as I was aware, practically speaking, we might call what he told me (about the three-level theory of the Human Brain) a tentative “fact”, whereas my own applications in the argument were my subjective “opinions”. Just to underscore, however, the tentative nature of the fact, I had prefaced John’s argument with an emphatic “from what I heard”. Apparently, this humble concession was the crux of her entire attack. Yet were the things she “learned” at college not equally what she had “heard”? Why should I value the “authority” of some professor I have never seen over the authority of John? Why should I confine myself to a curriculum when the curriculum encroaches upon the learning that I do naturally in quest of answers and not only answers but deeper questions?

I hear people quite frequently parrot that “everything is subjective”. Yet I did not LEARN that from a curriculum. It took me years of arguing painstakingly with my peers in middle and high school before we arrived at the age when they stopped lording their own “facts” over me as dogmatically. Too sore are the wounds of bullying from someone with no imagination who hated me for challenging his or her dogma, if I approached him in a group, or who scoffed at me within a group and left me to grovel and wonder how it could be that someone could be so CERTAIN of anything. Personal Subjectivity had been something more or less intuitive to my mind, and I deplored the educational system for not introducing it more thoroughly in its education curriculum until high school. Yet now I seem to encounter the phrase “everything is subjective” as though it were something read from a book – yet it is STILL TREATED as an end-point. Most people who make the claim that everything is subjective seem to be relativists. But what lies beyond it?

Nelly said that we cannot make decisions according to opinions, and that we had to make them according to facts. Yet WHAT ARE FACTS? It was merely Kant who drew a line between the Phenomenological and the Objective. Yet not only Nietzsche or Shestov but experience itself seems to lay this abstraction to waste.

The point is not that I was smarter than my peers; that is somewhat of a leap. The point is that something as basic as the relativity and subjectivity of experience was not taught to me within the confines of a classroom. If anything, I only found words for it from books that I had read in my free time, but the mystery of what other’s lives were had always been what cast doubt on any kind of Absolutism.

Of course, if one supplements** a curriculum with one’s own studies, one will sooner or later call the curriculum into question. But even within the CONFINES of the curriculum one must call the institution of Academia into question! Did Nelly not read Hugo, or Salinger, or Emerson, or Thoreau? I might imagine that any serious scholar, unless he or she had a really brilliant argument otherwise, would enter into college with immense tentativeness and humility, and my ideal would be, should I choose to return to school, to ALWAYS keep an eye open for what the Hitch-hikers of the world are doing.

Yet if one has no intrinsic interest in Truth but simply a vested interested in “Education”, then one can entertain the pitifully fossilized notion that one in-group has the Truth and the other does not have it. Yet this is not only unsubstantiated but impractical, because WERE THAT SO, then only individuals within a given system would be of equal intellectual merit as individuals outside of it. This kind of thinking leads to Fascism, typically. How can a learning person possess oneself of such a pretension or prejudice?

Yet of course not all students are scholars; many are simply parrots who employ the educational system in order to gain social status, to climb a social hierarchy, and to put down others on a lower “rung” of the hypothetical ladder. Education is supposed to teach humility – not timidity, but humility. Nietzsche may have written in a vain tone of voice because he was unintimidated by the masses, but was he not intimidated by the Universe? I may write as though I “know everything”. Yet I do not make that claim at all. I know a good deal. The more that I know that I know, the more I know that I do not know, and if I did not make clear what little I do know, even if it is never Certain, I run the risk of forgetting not only the answers I have found but the multitude of questions they imply.

 

*Learning without a vested interest, such as social status or some goal.

** And of course, once the curriculum has become voluntary rather than mandatory, a more appropriate term would be to “supplement one’s own studies with the curriculum”.

 

Dm.A.A.