What a stupid conceit - imperfect knowledge is useless. Play a game of Spades all the way through and you'll realize just how far imperfect information can be used.
There was always something offputtingly smart boyish about the whole thing-in-itself vs. conceptualization thing. Once you note we all walk through the door and not into the wall, the idea of “good enough” should no longer be a bridge too far.
I was going to say "dismantling" might be a better word, since "deconstruction" is so tied to Derrida... then I find out Derrida did a deconstruction of Kant. Shows how much I know. But then, I never went to college so I never noticed this.
The portrait of Kant... good grief, if you drew a few shaky black lines over that face, it would be one of those internet meme faces.
Proteus and protean - I honestly don't think I ever realized until just now that the blobby shapeshifting character Proty from the Legion Of Super-Heroes likely derived its name from "Proteus" as much as "protoplasm." Good double meaning there, those Silver Age writers were sharp. I believe in this case it was SF writer Edmond Hamilton.
I'm not making a good case for my Noticing abilities here, am I?
"Midwit fluffers" is a perfect and brilliant term. Vox should do a song titled that.
"The intellect as autonomous sovereign subject because a dork in a room said so"... "instead of requiring the idea to be proven on merit, it’s accepted as some sort of writ because “not Christian”." - I'm not sure when I first realized these, but at some point I figured out that at least 80 to 90% of "philosophy" was exactly this. I'm not sure if I would have figured it out sooner or been further enstupidated if I had actually gone to college.
I actually consider myself fortunate that I wasn't able to go to college. Not only was I spared tons of bullshit indoctrination - like Kant - not to mention not racking up debt, but ended up on jobs and in places that taught me a lot of lessons that I probably would not have learned otherwise. Not to mention the physical labor of it kept me in shape for many years, and is probably still helping me somewhat.
Long comments can be a good way to think through reactions. All of my Special Boy College classmates who I’m still in touch with do nothing related to their course work. And the content has only gotten more frivolous since then. It made sense if heart set on a career that needed the chit, but even that is less stable as things collapse. The biggest factors are probably social pressures. I didn’t take it that seriously but was unusual in that I did do all my reading. That was pre-SJW though. I’m not sure if even the curated reading lists are an asset. And most of my own erudition such is autodidactic. Decades of self-directed reading and learning. That only comes from personal interest and desire, which doesn’t need an institutional base. A couple million words of online writing doesn’t hurt.
The protean thing is Interesting. Those SA guys were beneficiaries of school when it was real. And most philosophy is nonsense. Blather about blather. It’s the only way to pump the numbers through. So. Any names like Hegel and Kant are mainly “important” for their contributions to the blather. The legit useful thinkers can be read directly. Or in the case of someone like Derrida, who does have some real value but is mostly obfuscating nonsense, decent summaries exist for someone who wants the useful points without wading through the rest.
What a stupid conceit - imperfect knowledge is useless. Play a game of Spades all the way through and you'll realize just how far imperfect information can be used.
There was always something offputtingly smart boyish about the whole thing-in-itself vs. conceptualization thing. Once you note we all walk through the door and not into the wall, the idea of “good enough” should no longer be a bridge too far.
I was going to say "dismantling" might be a better word, since "deconstruction" is so tied to Derrida... then I find out Derrida did a deconstruction of Kant. Shows how much I know. But then, I never went to college so I never noticed this.
The portrait of Kant... good grief, if you drew a few shaky black lines over that face, it would be one of those internet meme faces.
Proteus and protean - I honestly don't think I ever realized until just now that the blobby shapeshifting character Proty from the Legion Of Super-Heroes likely derived its name from "Proteus" as much as "protoplasm." Good double meaning there, those Silver Age writers were sharp. I believe in this case it was SF writer Edmond Hamilton.
I'm not making a good case for my Noticing abilities here, am I?
"Midwit fluffers" is a perfect and brilliant term. Vox should do a song titled that.
"The intellect as autonomous sovereign subject because a dork in a room said so"... "instead of requiring the idea to be proven on merit, it’s accepted as some sort of writ because “not Christian”." - I'm not sure when I first realized these, but at some point I figured out that at least 80 to 90% of "philosophy" was exactly this. I'm not sure if I would have figured it out sooner or been further enstupidated if I had actually gone to college.
I actually consider myself fortunate that I wasn't able to go to college. Not only was I spared tons of bullshit indoctrination - like Kant - not to mention not racking up debt, but ended up on jobs and in places that taught me a lot of lessons that I probably would not have learned otherwise. Not to mention the physical labor of it kept me in shape for many years, and is probably still helping me somewhat.
Long comment, sorry.
Long comments can be a good way to think through reactions. All of my Special Boy College classmates who I’m still in touch with do nothing related to their course work. And the content has only gotten more frivolous since then. It made sense if heart set on a career that needed the chit, but even that is less stable as things collapse. The biggest factors are probably social pressures. I didn’t take it that seriously but was unusual in that I did do all my reading. That was pre-SJW though. I’m not sure if even the curated reading lists are an asset. And most of my own erudition such is autodidactic. Decades of self-directed reading and learning. That only comes from personal interest and desire, which doesn’t need an institutional base. A couple million words of online writing doesn’t hurt.
The protean thing is Interesting. Those SA guys were beneficiaries of school when it was real. And most philosophy is nonsense. Blather about blather. It’s the only way to pump the numbers through. So. Any names like Hegel and Kant are mainly “important” for their contributions to the blather. The legit useful thinkers can be read directly. Or in the case of someone like Derrida, who does have some real value but is mostly obfuscating nonsense, decent summaries exist for someone who wants the useful points without wading through the rest.