From Richard Rorty, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," Athenaeum Library of Philosophy, 1992.
There is, in short, not much reason to hope for the sort of single vision that I went to college hoping to get.
Rorty's talking about the impossibility of all-encompassing philosophy that transcends postulates (he calls them "hypotheses" but I'm feeling saucy), but that sentence capturesss a larger disillusionment I felt when I left school.
College consists mainly in being buffeted (and sometimes, scarily, buffet-ed) by a bunch of older people who certainly are smart but whose main interest at best is to impress upon young minds a specific world view, one at which they've arrived through a series of missteps and scholarly omissions, be they glaring or obscured by the the prejudices of the era. Helpful as they might intend to be, their main purpose is to shut down intellectual avenues in hopes of producing more people who think like them, or at least more people who approach thought in a similar way.
For some people who aim to inhabit an extant intellectual structure (aspiring doctors, lawyers, (ghasp) journalists) this is fine. But for those who thought they would be attacking thought from new and exciting angles, college disappoints. Grad school, I imagine, only makes things worse.
Maybe this is just a resurgent "Fuck You Heroes" now that I'm largely outside the tower, but darned if I don't wonder that worse than Good Will Hunting-style "We don't love them schools," I'm reaching a point of "I hate them schools. They are a racket."
Just my thoughts.
Just what I'm feelin at the time.
2 comments:
I think the older people start out with higher interests and ambitions than you imply, but the passion is sucked out of them by the general sense of purposelessness that pervades the place. In the absence of any particular vision of what education is supposed to do, other than the usual vague platitudes and pieties that achieve nothing but rationalizing the existent, students fall back on treating their experience as one big "signal" to future employers, while professors retreat into various trivialities and petty squabbles. Too bad; it could be an exciting and fun place where you learn some ideas! But it only is that occasionally, and largely by accident, at least today.
also: richard rorty, rest in PIECES!!!
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