My undergraduate 'experience'

Partially because I procrastinate like a mofo, partially because I'm not the most analytical person I know, partially because 'post-modern' thought in my philosophy program was basically extended to oh I dunno Hegel or Heidegger, partially because I usually worked no less then 2 jobs - one being my "10 hour/week" student union jobs . . . I equate my undergraduate experience in 'learning' with my first 2 hour trip to the Museum of Civilization.


The analogy goes as follows:

At the very beginning I walked around with my two friends looking at exhibits in detail, striking up conversations with them about the significance of them, what might be overlooked from them etc.

Then as time constraints started to become more pressing, I found myself almost running through the exhibits almost saying "um, okay, aboriginals in western Canada, gotcha, moving on. . . oh okay not so much on colonialism, whatever, onwards . . . oh yes, okay the Acadian deportation. . . uh huh. . . next" . . .

So in essence, I have a degree that could have been attained through the same efforts (arguably more) that it takes to read say, oh I dunno "Philosophy for Dummies". And with graduate school it continues. I often wonder if I ever fully committed myself to studies (or was able to - oh the wonders of student financial aid!) if I'd be more fully appropriated by the ivory tower and start being wilfully obscure and ridiculously inaccessible in my language... or generally more thoughtful/dorky.

Signs seem to point to yes, when I got a big laugh out of this in Nussbaum's critique of Judith Butler:

“Last year Butler won the first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature, for the following sentence:

‘The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.’

Now, Butler might have written: ‘Marxist accounts, focusing on capital as the central force structuring social relations, depicted the operations of that force as everywhere uniform. By contrast, Althusserian accounts, focusing on power, see the operations of that force as variegated and as shifting over time.’ Instead, she prefers a verbosity that causes the reader to expend so much effort in deciphering her prose that little energy is left for assessing the truth of the claims. Announcing the award, the journal's editor remarked that "it's possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as `probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet.'" (Such bad writing, incidentally, is by no means ubiquitous in the "queer theory" group of theorists with which Butler is associated. David Halperin, for example, writes about the relationship between Foucault and Kant, and about Greek homosexuality, with philosophical clarity and historical precision.)

Butler gains prestige in the literary world by being a philosopher; many admirers associate her manner of writing with philosophical profundity. But one should ask whether it belongs to the philosophical tradition at all, rather than to the closely related but adversarial traditions of sophistry and rhetoric. Ever since Socrates distinguished philosophy from what the sophists and the rhetoricians were doing, it has been a discourse of equals who trade arguments and counter-arguments without any obscurantist sleight-of-hand. In that way, he claimed, philosophy showed respect for the soul, while the others' manipulative methods showed only disrespect. One afternoon, fatigued by Butler on a long plane trip, I turned to a draft of a student's dissertation on Hume's views of personal identity. I quickly felt my spirits reviving. Doesn't she write clearly, I thought with pleasure, and a tiny bit of pride. And Hume, what a fine, what a gracious spirit: how kindly he respects the reader's intelligence, even at the cost of exposing his own uncertainty."


Thankfully (?), all the above partial truths are still 'true' today. . . so we'll never know!