A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
Thursday, May 21, 2020
A MUST READ
One of the anonymati just reposted this link to a terrific article in the Boston Review by Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, and this time I read it. It is a terrific piece, full of enormously useful informaion and analysis. I recommend it.
Re “A Must Read” and the previous “Quarantine Broodings”:
Raymond Geuss—for those who have not encountered him, a working class in origin American who ended up teaching philosophy at Cambridge University (and who has several series of lectures on Marx, etc. on youtube)—summed up his academic activity as follows:
******* “I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditsble because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative, or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories, and arguments. I thereby help turn outthe pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace that protects it against criticism and change. I take my job to be only mildly discreditable partly because I don’t think that finally this realm of words is in most cases much more than an epiphenomenon secreted by power relations that would otherwise express themselves with even greater and more dramatic directness. Partly, too, because 10 percent of the job is in an open area within which it is possible that some of those young people might become minimally reflective about the world they live in and their place in it; in the best of cases they might come to be able and willing to work for some mitigation of the cruder excesses of the pervading system of oppression under which we live. . .
“So the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic, and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail—the endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications, and quibbles—stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole.” ******* Although I never held classes at anywhere quite so elevated as Cambridge—or UMass Amherst—I’d say my experiences at a small Midwestern liberal arts college rather mirrored Geuss’s. I guess my most satisfying experience was holding a class at Circle campus (as it used to be known) in Chicago where the students were almost all poorly prepared but hungry to learn kids from the south side. I dread to think what the prospects will be for kids like that in the world that’s about to unfold.
Re “A Must Read” and the previous “Quarantine Broodings”:
ReplyDeleteRaymond Geuss—for those who have not encountered him, a working class in origin American who ended up teaching philosophy at Cambridge University (and who has several series of lectures on Marx, etc. on youtube)—summed up his academic activity as follows:
*******
“I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditsble because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative, or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories, and arguments. I thereby help turn outthe pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace that protects it against criticism and change. I take my job to be only mildly discreditable partly because I don’t think that finally this realm of words is in most cases much more than an epiphenomenon secreted by power relations that would otherwise express themselves with even greater and more dramatic directness. Partly, too, because 10 percent of the job is in an open area within which it is possible that some of those young people might become minimally reflective about the world they live in and their place in it; in the best of cases they might come to be able and willing to work for some mitigation of the cruder excesses of the pervading system of oppression under which we live. . .
“So the experience I have of my everyday work environment is of a conformist, claustrophobic, and repressive verbal universe, a penitential domain of reason-mongering in which hyperactivity in detail—the endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications, and quibbles—stands in stark contrast to the immobility and self-referentiality of the structure as a whole.”
*******
Although I never held classes at anywhere quite so elevated as Cambridge—or UMass Amherst—I’d say my experiences at a small Midwestern liberal arts college rather mirrored Geuss’s. I guess my most satisfying experience was holding a class at Circle campus (as it used to be known) in Chicago where the students were almost all poorly prepared but hungry to learn kids from the south side. I dread to think what the prospects will be for kids like that in the world that’s about to unfold.
"A World Without Why?" by Raymond Geuss
ReplyDeletehttps://thepointmag.com/examined-life/a-world-without-why/