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My series of random thoughts continues with part seven!
123. The rise of internet philosophy has raised a deep crisis for our discipline in terms of public relations and teaching, but nobody in the discipline seems to be doing anything to respond to it.
124. Maybe the fact that Nietzsche is so readily taken up by a wide variety of people who all claim he agrees with them (Nazis, fascists, misogynists, liberals, radicals, Marxists, etc.) is mostly Nietzsche’s fault.
125. Writers of fiction often say there are no rules, and then they criticize other writers for breaking the rules.
126. Spending time with young adults makes me appreciate the life skills I've picked up in the last couple decades. Being an adult has a steeper learning curve than most of us oldsters remember.
127. Philosophy is about questioning your own assumptions. Professional philosophy is about questioning other people’s assumptions as long as doing so doesn’t get in the way of doing philosophy in something close to the ways other professional philosophers have been doing it recently.
128. The trick of professional philosophy is to make a point that is novel enough to be interesting, but not so novel as to be threatening or outré.
129. The difficulty of understanding lecture notes that I myself wrote last year kind of puts into perspective the difficulty of making sense of things written by other people hundreds of years ago.
130. I don’t have a fancy Marxist analysis or anything, but one thing I don’t like about capitalism is that it’s an economic system that basically encourages people to be assholes.
131. One of the strangest things about many philosophers (especially Western philosophers since the 17th century) is that they seem to think nobody has any reason to be a good person or care about others until some philosopher has provided an argument to justify being good or caring about others. The belief that immoralism and selfishness are the default settings of humanity says more about these philosophers themselves than it says about their fellow human beings.
132. One of the many things I don’t understand about normal people is the belief that everyone should always eat lunch at precisely noon. But I’m glad people have this belief because I enjoy less crowded eateries later in the afternoon.
133. I think my favorite part about being an adult is that nobody can stop me from eating cereal for dinner if I want to.
134. Things I have given up:
- Discussing Presidential politics on social media.
- Any pretense at being “outdoorsy.”
- Trying to explain ancient skepticism about philosophy to contemporary philosophers.
- Using the categories of contemporary Western academic philosophy as the measure of whether all philosophy is interesting or important.
- Caring about billionaires.
- Trying to be “edgy.”
136. Some of the most annoying people in the world are people who are smart, but not quite as smart as they think they are.
137. Professors, like wizards, are never late. They arrive to their office hours precisely when they mean to.
138. Having conducted an exhaustive review of the internet, I have discovered that there’s no pleasing the people of the internet.
139. The internet is yet more evidence in favor of the First Noble Truth.
140. It’s precisely because human life is difficult and filled with suffering that I think small kindnesses are vital. We’re all in this together, suffering and doomed to die. Why make this any harder on each other than it has to be?
141. I've never really figured out where I belong in the American class system, but I think it's somewhere between "working class" and "feels comfortable at Whole Foods."
142. One reason I have trouble arguing with both philosophers and science fiction fans (especially Star Wars fans) is that I am seldom as passionate about my being right as I am puzzled by their dogmatic attachment to their own views. So, I see myself as trying to deflate their dogmatism while they see me as defending a view that opposes theirs.
143. There are many reasons to argue with people. Proving yourself right is merely one of them, and far from the most interesting.
144. Two groups you can never please: college students filling out course evaluations and Star Wars fans.
145. In the last few years there has been a dramatic uptick is people claiming to have definitive and objective knowledge of what constitutes “bad writing” in TV and movies. I don’t know if this is a good thing, where it comes from, or what it portends for society, but I find it odd.
146. I think I will remember the 2010’s as the decade in which I realized most things were much worse than I thought. But at least we got Baby Yoda.
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