Sunday, July 1, 2012

Facebook is Making Me Crazy

You have probably heard the quote by Bacon that goes something like, "some exposure in philosophy will lead one's heart away from God; but depth in philosophy will lead one back to God." Often I heard professors of mine lament the novice philosophy student; the one that reads widely but not deeply. One even said at the end of a class, "you now know just enough philosophy to be dangerous."

Now some of this is probably attributable to the simple elitism of the modern university. These intellectuals believe that nobody is keeping up, and that they exist as intellectual parents to the citizenry. This is especially true today in the sciences, where megalomaniacy has grown to full flourishing pedantic adulthood. How strange to have the scientists preaching to us.

But after seeing many posts from various former students lately on Facebook, I'm quite convinced that there is something to the gripes of my former professors.

It strikes me that high school and college afford one the luxury of merely reading and discussing philosophy. In adulthood, one must live one's philosophy, which of course leads to a wholesale abandonment of many of the ideological infatuations of youth. Either one's philosophy is robust enough to ingest life or it isn't. One can experiment with relativism in one's youth, but of course relativism is unlivable in either youth or adulthood. But surely maturation has something to do with developing the self-awareness to reject what one knows he cannot live and the commitment to live in accord with one's best convictions concerning the central questions of life.

I say this because, even though I respect the process for my former students, it is puzzling that so many have to embrace inferior ideas before they find them inferior. Of course I was that way to some extent too. There is nothing more foolish about us than that we think we aren't foolish.