Been thinking a lot. As always. Come to blog about it. Yep.

Kevin Elliott, a philosophy professor at USC sent me an article today explaining how stupid of an idea it is to go to graduate school in the humanities. Its a good article. It’s stupid to go to graduate school in the humanities. Luckily, my angle doesn’t place me in the normal “humanities”–the people who want to teach/study history, literature, or ancient philosophy. Anyways, I was having an exchange with Nathan and he had a nice rant about graduate school.  I thought this was particularly great:

I think this guy is spot on about the reasons for attending grad school though.  I’m really glad that I didn’t go straight in; the real world is kind of fucking awesome.  The tremendous amount of bad faith that goes into the concept ‘graduate student’ (I once walked into the USC philosophy department and found a skinny, slightly scruffy fellow wearing a fedora, listening to contemporary jazz and slouching) is stupid incredible, and trying to apply academic text in a free and open space changes them completely.  I’ve had no deadlines, no syllabi, no professors and quite the opposite of affirmation from my peers for half a year or so now, and it brings up a lot of really good questions that wouldn’t be confronted couched safely inside that apparently masturbatory culture: do other people give a shit?  No.  Should they?

.. thats complicated.  Probably not.

Nietzsche, of course, says that the creators of values are the most important people in the world, and also the most misunderstood.  But in his day the creation of values was fairly straightforward: write a book.  Things have changed a little bit.  Stephen Colbert has had and will continue to have a greater impact on the American psyche than Robert Nozick, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty put together.  People quote Star Wars, not Goethe, Homer (Simpsons) instead of Homer (Homer).  Maybe philosophers don’t have jobs and don’t get hired because they’re antiquated.

And I really don’t think its that we don’t have anything to say.  We do, and people need it.  But nobody reads philosophy.  And yet the entire concept of professional philosophy seems to be chained down to scuffed tile floors, obnoxious neon lights and overhead projectors, shut away in little buildings for white people with an upper middle class background who get stoned, feel profound and decide to learn some neat words to make their heads feel bigger.  If there is nobody in the field dynamic enough to actually communicate whats so ridiculously important about philosophy to everyday people, why the fuck should they continue to be supported anyway?

Yeah, so this was something I was thinking about today. People don’t read philosophy. They don’t even really read. They watch movies. Surf the internet. Chat with friends. Watch TV. Play video games. Work. Anything but read. My parents have’t picked up a book in ages and when they do its to read some novel (my mom has read Twilight recently and my dad like Koontz). Yet this stuff is important. There is so much nonsense being tossed around its hard to see anything worth seeing for most people. Action, excitement, movement.  We don’t really want to be shaken because we are shaken constantly. Meh, but if I continue in that direction I will make it sound like a bad thing that people don’t read philosophy and I’m not sure I want to do that. I’m just referring to aspects of everyone and the technological world.  Thats all I ever do with this stuff. Every day stuff.  But by the time academe gets through with it, through with me…will it be? Not really. I’m already incomprehensible to so many people. They just look right past me, blow off the words that are coming from my mouth.  Not that I’m that important; I’m only saying that the things I want to talk about…it seems like most people don’t even want to give them a few moments. And its everyday stuff. Its your cellphone in your hand, the car in your driveway, the roof over your head, your entire existence. Can we not talk about that?