Tuesday, March 22, 2005
(8:20 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Universitization of Knowledge, pt. 2
(pt. 1)I think that at least part of the reason that so many people who love the humanities are dead-set on joining the academy, even in the face of overwhelming odds, is that we know deep down that if we were to pursue academic-like behaviors outside the academy, we would basically be cranks. We would be that guy who locks himself in his bedroom every night until 3AM working out his elaborate theory about the philosophical reason that Heidegger was a Nazi, or about his special insight into why liberal democracies can so easily be taken over by evil dictators, or about how the real key to Aristotle is the Poetics, or whatever.
Reading stuff is fine. Enjoying a good Latin American or Continental European novel now and again is perfectly acceptable, and even the occasional philosophy as long as you don't go overboard (Foucault: acceptable; Hegel: Are you sure?). But studying -- that's obsessive. That's weird. That sounds like work, and you're only supposed to do one kind of work, and you're supposed to get paid for it. And when you're not doing that, you're supposed to tinker around in your yard or watch TV or yell at your children -- not undertake some whole other kind of work. A person who does that is pathetic. A person who finds out that someone else has read a lot of Derrida and you can see the hunger in her eye as she talks about it a little too fast -- is pathetic.
So we go to grad school at least partly because we don't want to be pathetic.
