Ah, yes, I should mention that I eventually bit the bullet and gave up journalism, so goodbye to all that. I finally finished the dissertation, got the graduate degree, and became an eager young, tenure-track intellectual out to battle the demons of smug fuzzy-headedness.
I already knew which arguments could be sustained and which could be knocked down. As Kant put it, no metaphysical axiom can be proven to be necessary. Meaning, by its very nature, implies a metaphysical and teleological structure that is rooted in assumptions beyond mere matter. That is to say, from the beginning it was very easily poke holes in the trickle of text that I managed to pour into the gaping maw of the peer-reviewed journals, by definition. It wouldn't have been meaning if it were logically unassailable.
The only unassailable arguments these days are materialism and pure philosophical agnosticism. If you are dealing with someone who believes that the material world exists, you can win every argument by having the position that all that exists are atoms and molecules bouncing randomly around and that there is no moral or philosophical principle that can be proven to be true.
To my surprise, in contrast to my naïve expectation that academia would turn out to be a constant round of debate and discovery and personal intellectual growth, life quickly became completely pointless on a philosophical level. I wanted to shout this at my tenure committee at the time. If only I’d had the nerve to confront them.
They said: The tenure supplicant’s research is highly influenced by an intense academic concern with race, gender and social class, together with the dogmas that go under the name of post-modernism. Post is such a petty prefix.
I should have told them that if they wanted to continue filling their bellies just for the sheer bloody-mindedness of it, to recall that Copernicus had displaced humanity from the centre of the cosmos, Descartes and Kant had alienated us from the physical world, Darwin
Now if you have someone who is more clever than they were, and knows to argue that the material world may not exist, then there are not only no moral or philosophical principles that can be proven to exist, but moreover, there are no scientific principles that can be proven to exist either. You have sunken into solipsism, which of course can't be proven either, leaving you with no provable statements whatsoever.
As before of course, if they had taken this route in their argument I would have liked to have told them that if they wished to continue filling their non-existent bellies... and so on. But I didn't. But I should have.
The so-called theory wars of the 1990s actually tore whole academic departments apart at universities all over the world, in debates organized around the narcissism of increasingly mundane difference, intensified by funding cut-backs and re-allocations. Students formed factions supporting one side or the other. Deans took sides too and departmental budgets became weapons.
The so-called theory wars of the 1990s actually tore whole academic departments apart at universities all over the world, in debates organized around the narcissism of increasingly mundane difference, intensified by funding cut-backs and re-allocations. Students formed factions supporting one side or the other. Deans took sides too and departmental budgets became weapons.
The losing side invariably had their careers ruined or ended up in obscure colleges in Vermont or Arkansas or China or Saskatchewan
I stuck it out for a while, then I quit.
And still the number of angels that can be accommodated on the head of a pin remains unfathomable.
