I'm talking about pursuing the life of the mind and taking full responsibility for the choices you make. Besides, if I had to bet on either public opinion or expert opinion, I'm rolling with P.O.
Don't take my word for any of this. Check it out for yourself because you certainly won't learn it in school. I'm not hatin' on educators. They've got a work force to train. But while you're learning the "right" answers, don't stop pursuing the wonder-filled questions you had about the world before they tried to turn you into a period. You owe that to the world. And that's word to your GED-gettin', no college degree havin,' self-edge-i-bicated Daddy.
I once thought I would pursue the career of an academic, specifically that most abstruse of academic careers, a professor of philosophy. After two years of course work, and settling on a topic for a dissertation, I decided that being a husband and father took precedence over dissecting the writings of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, so I left. Part of my disenchantment, besides the obvious personal pressure brought about by the arrival of our first child (whose tenth birthday is approaching much too quickly), was the realization that too much of academic philosophy was done for other academic philosophers. This closed circle, small, erudite, occasionally boisterous, is irrelevant to much of our common life. I had no desire, have never had the desire, to be irrelevant to our common life. When I discovered blogger, and how easy this whole thing is - sit down and type! - I decided that my decision a decade ago was correct; it just took time and technology a while to give me the opportunity to do what I wanted the way I wanted to do it.
When I say that contemporary academic philosophy is "irrelevant", I do not mean that the content of philosophical discussion is irrelevant. Far from it. What I mean is that the debates, discussions, disagreements, diatribes, dialogues, duologues, dissensions (with apologies to King Crimson) within the scholarly journals have little real impact on our common life, nor do the academics, for the most part, consider such impact as either important or relevant. Such intellectual mutual masturbation is abhorrent to me; why else would one consider the pursuit of the the life of the mind if it was not for something besides arguing with other members of the fraternity? This is the kind of intellectual elitism I find distasteful, and all too common.
It isn't difficult to figure out what philosophers are talking about. Some philosophers are actually quite easy to read - Plato and Boethius wrote dialogues; Richard Rorty's writing is a model for how philosophy should be done, clear, concise, flowing prose that eschews the phony erudition and penumbral horrors of Germanified academic prose (Kant and Heidegger are the worst culprits here; they seem to think bad writing is the same thing as being profound) - and what they have to say is important. Indeed, I have been re-reading Rorty, for the first time in over 15 years, and am amazed at how closely much of what he has to say parallels my own thinking (the central idea being, as a line from I believe Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity puts it, "The world is not about anything"). In fact, it has been my wrestling with Rorty that has been partly responsible for my own light blogging this week; I have been trying to figure out a way to work up a post on my own reactions (almost all positive) to my current reading.
Let me repeat, with Gonzalvez, that if you don't believe me, go find out for yourself. There's the internet. There are libraries, and bookstores, and Amazon.com. One of the great myths and errors of our society is that "education" is something that is done to you, during regimented periods of your life, to make you a better citizen/consumer/employee. Actually, the root of "education" is the Latin word that means "to draw out" - learning is about drawing one into a larger world, be it philosophy, anthropology, electrical engineering, or whatever. It is something best done on one's own, using one's native resources to travel down strange and interesting byways and pathways that could lead one who knows where. The mystique of the Ph.D. is highly overrated; it just means you know how to jump through certain academic hoops. The information is out there for you to read and digest on your own, at your own pace, and without a professor looking over your shoulder telling you that you are right or wrong.
While the internet is revolutionizing American political discourse, with liberal blogs doing what conservative talk radio did fifteen years ago - getting in on the ground floor of an exciting medium, and starting to set the agenda for our public debate - I think its impact upon intellectual life in general has not yet even begun to be tapped. Like the invention of movable type, which allowed the dissemination of information to an increasingly literate, economically well-off, nascent bourgeoisie five hundred years ago, fueling, among other things, the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, the internet can be a vehicle for a more articulate, informed public, enhancing our civil life and society, if used properly. The only constraints, really, are artificial - accepting the idea that academic discussion should remain a closed shop for elites who really know what is going on.
Throw off the shackles of imposed ignorance, explore all sorts of areas, educate yourself, whether its how to raise tropical fish or rebuild a transmission or the arguments between Kuhn and Popper. It's all good.
