The Limit

Setting the menu aside and getting to those meat & potatoes.

While I pursued an undergraduate degree in university, I didn't choose to go on.  I have no masters, no doctorate to my credit; I've never written a thesis or a dissertation, and had it picked apart by the gatekeepers of knowledge.  I have much respect for those who have — therefore please understand that it's not my purpose here to disparage higher education or the choices that we make in deciding our fate.

I enjoy the Why Is This Happening? podcasts with Chris Hayes of MSNBC.  The guests tend to be highly educated and experienced; they tend to be persons at the forefront of their professions or civil servants whose past put them in a distinct position giving them tremendous insight.  Best of all, the subjects are varied and unexpected, as the guests come from all walks of life.

A recent one featured Natalie Wynn, of the youtube channel Contrapoints.  Once upon a time I was a follower, but as Wynn became less and less substantive, in favour of boosting her ratings by pursuing the dramatic, I ceased to listen.  I've heard her give interviews before; off the cuff, I find her wearisome.  Judging from her earlier work, there's a mind there, but it's one that needs preparation to be interesting.

This post is not about her, or her background — nor is it about her politics, which I won't deconstruct.  Rather, it is about a random inoculous thing she says about eight minutes in; I quote it.

Chris Hayes: So you decided that philosophy was not for you; but what did you like about it?

Natalie Wynn:  I really liked being a philosophy major when I was an undergraduate.  I think philosophy’s more fun to study at the kind of 101, 201, maybe even 301 level.  It’s fun to get this grand tour of intellectual history when you’re reading Plato one week and the feminist philosophers the next week – and then post-modernism.  It’s very exciting to go through all this for the first time, and you feel the kind of thrill of your mind expanding.  But by the time you’re considering writing a dissertation, and it’s like, “Okay, which three paragraphs of Heidegger am I gonna spend the rest of my 20s writing about — oh, that’s, um, that’s a different situation.

Hayes: Totally.

I find this very funny.  It's not meant to be.  Wynn is entirely earnest about her reasons and there's no doubt this is exactly the experience that thousands of doctorate-students have about their field, especially in their 20s.

Only, there's a discontinuity that slaps me right in the face.  Do you see it?  There's an intrinsic flaw in the university system, right there, bold as a neon sign.

Understand ... universities and other post-secondary institutions are there to teach people.  The process of obtaining a doctorate is a specialized learning exercise, in which students demonstrate through various means their ability to understand the material, defend it, and thus meaningfully provide it for others, most probably students, upon request.  In non-STEM fields, particularly, the probable usefulness of a doctorate of the humanities or social sciences is to be a professor ... therefore it stands to reason that other professors should be the gatekeepers on whether anyone should be a part of that cabal.

Being an expert on Heidegger, and specifically upon an important turning point in Heidegger's work — or anyone's, really — is critical if you're going to make some other person understand why and how those three paragraphs are fundamental to philosophy.

Only, do you know who did not spend his 20s focused on three paragraphs of Heidegger?  Martin Heidegger, who wrote all the paragraphs — and thus spent his life advancing the field of philosophy by writing on everything that interested him, and not just how to explain other people.

The creation of any Heidegger is not the goal of higher learning.  This is brilliantly demonstrated in the obscure 1970 film, Getting Straight, in which the main character is working to defend his master's thesis in English Literature amidst a series of university protests against Vietnam, ending with the campus being put under martial law.  The final critical scene occurs when the main character Harry is interviewed by a tableful of professors, who quibble over Fitzgerald's work, The Great Gatsby — specifically, if you can believe it, the significance of Carraway's attraction to the character Jordan Baker in the novel.

This was a classic "three paragraph" fetish among literalists in the 1960s; I'm tempted not to go into it, since if there is an English scholar in the crowd today there's sure to be the sound of "Oh, that bullshit"  in the room.  Simply put, the old saw that Carraway was queer for Gatsby.

I have no idea what the hell they teach now on that.  I don't know if this is still embraced by scholars or if the world has come to its senses ... or if it's still a final exam question.  I saw the movie when I was very young, definitely before being old enough to enter university.  I'd read Gatsby by then; and I knew all about the violence that took place on school campuses in the late 1960s.  Harry, the main character, spends the movie breaking himself against the anvil of preparing himself for the cross-examination he's going to face, while everyone else he knows is breaking themselves against the political reality of free speech versus military force.  It's absurdist (which is why Wikipedia calls it a "comedy").  Harry walks past armed soldiers, to meet with old men to discuss fictional characters, and ultimately whether or not one fictional character was, in fact, gay.  Harry doesn't believe it; but then he's faced with one professor who argues Carraway's queerness to hysterical levels — because obviously it proves Fitzgerald was gay.  It becomes painfully obvious that if Harry wants his ticket, he will have to sacrifice his beliefs ... and worse, the mountains of research he's done regarding Fitzgerald — which he has to pretend he doesn't know.  And he tries.  He tries really hard.

And then ... he just loses it.

There is a kind of insanity in what people believe ... and what they think they have to believe, especially about things that'll never be known.  The process of deconstruction has its limits.  Nitpicking about any three paragraphs, for any length of time, isn't much of a life.  We do better if we attempt to write as Fitzgerald or Heidegger did, than concern ourselves overmuch with what either meant.  It's well enough if we come away from such things understanding what the mean to us ... and help others understand what it might mean to them.  But if we think it matters what it means absolutely, well ...

That way madness lies.