I hope this post doesn’t leave me coming across as disgruntled about the focus of my undergraduate education, but the bottom line is that I’ve learned more about life from reading the enneagram than I have from studying Heidegger.
This is all to say that while I enjoyed my weekend read about David Foster Wallace’s never-published undergraduate thesis defending the world against Richard Taylor’s theory of “Fatalism,” by the time I put down the NYtimes weekend magazine my mind had already resolved that indeed, I may have been better off completing a crossword puzzle than reading the article. At least the puzzle was both intellectually stimulating and stays the hand of Alzhiemer’s.
It’s not that I have anything against ideas - I love to explore a solid notion more than most - but I enjoy my ideas best when they have a clearly discernible point. Unfortunately, most undergraduate (and all graduate) programs in philosophy take their scholars on a journey into meaningless vortices of knowledge that are ultimately inapplicable to most contexts outside the classroom. Sure, many lawyers were once philosophers, and Wallace wrote some of the greatest works of modern literature, but the performance of philosophical thinking is most often, in my experience, overly complex to the point of incomprehensibility.
To wrap this all up, an idea: require philosophers to take courses on thinking visually, and teach them to approach conceptual systems in a visual manner. This suggestion won’t change the topic matter itself, but if practiced would train philosophers to at least make it easier for others engage in dialogue.
I like the idea of getting philosophers to think visually but they are word addicts and, as you suggest, their word-swarms form dark, impenetrable clouds.
I think we’re going to have to wait for even easier-to-use graphic tools that will enable at least some philosophers to get ‘hands-on’ and show us their thinking visually. That would also serve to get us much deeper into Bill Gibson’s famous ‘consensual hallucination’ (recently redefined in Spook Country as ‘non-consensual’) than all the goofy Second Life stuff.
So hurry up and get us those tools, will ya?
Comment by steve bingham — December 15, 2008 @ 10:56 am
Agreed… it’s particularly perverse with discussions on “accessibility”….
Here’s a collection of quotes on the “would’ve written a shorter letter” theme:
http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=84
Comment by John Dowdell — December 16, 2008 @ 12:50 pm
I disagree that philosophy is all about “meaningless vortices of knowledge that are ultimately inapplicable to most contexts outside the classroom” - studying philosophy in college helped me build the intellectual frameworks that have guided the most important decisions of my life, and I continue to use the tools I acquired to refine those systems. But I agree that academic philosophy does a poor job of helping students to recognize the value of philosophy and apply it to their real lives, which I think was your point.
Teaching philosophers to communicate visually may not solve the problem but it would undoubtedly help. The conundrum is that trying to give them these skills later in life may be less effective than you’re envisioning - as Steve points out they are “word addicts” already. Our (US) education system emphasizes verbal communication skills to the almost complete exclusion of visual communication skills from grade school through graduate school, and this is a problem across all disciplines, not just philosophy.
Comment by Rob Adams — December 17, 2008 @ 11:41 am