My Intellectual Journey
How did I come to think the way I do? How did I come to see the world as I do? I often reflect on these questions, and my reflection takes me back to roots of my intellectual journey in my childhood. Both of my parents went to graduate school and both of them love to read and talk about what they read. My intellectual roots are surely found in my introduction to books at an early age. I’d love to be read to as a young child, yet actually learning how to read was significantly less pleasurable. I struggled mightily through about 3rd grade. I was easily frustrated as I yearned for everything to come easily. Once I had finally yearned how to read I still saw myself as stupid. I can remember in 5th grade being the “snack time monitor”. Every day at 10:15 I’d announce to the class that it was snack time. I enjoyed this role, this identity, yet whenever I tried to contribute to any group projects (such as a stock market project we had over a two month period) I was denied a voice. I was told time and time again by my classmates to leave the real work to them and just worry about letting everyone know when it was snack time. The funny thing is after 5th grade came middle school and in middle school we got letter grades for the first time. It was then that I began to see that many of those same kids who had called me stupid were actually getting much worse grades than myself. I began to see that just because I didn’t have the loudest voice didn’t mean that I didn’t have things to say, things that both my teachers and my classmates might actually want to hear. I certainly have more confidence in my intellect today, yet I firmly believe that at least subconsciously this fear of being seen as stupid festers beneath my skin. What really ticks me off is the way so many people, including myself internalize these notions of stupidity and fall into a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby they fail because they feel destined to fail. In most cases I’d say people who call other people stupid are doing so not with any objectively truthful analysis but simply out of their own insecurities. My pushing someone down and standing on their head one feels taller, stronger and better for it. So sad yet so true, no matter how conscious I may be of it I’d be lying if I said I was exempt from this practice. I don’t think anyone’s exempt but to be aware of it is the first step in changing any such behavior. More than anything else the empathy I garnered through my elementary school experience has inspired me to speak out for others in such a position. No one, in my opinion, is ever born stupid.
Despite my newly realized intellectual abilities in middle school I continued to experience a huge degree of the same frustration I once had learning how to read in math. Math still pisses me off to this day because it’s so black or white, right or wrong, with no wiggle room in between. I think that’s what has drawn me to philosophy. It’s a trade off you see. While I am never absolutely wrong, I can never settle. I can never rest because there’s always more work to be done. Only in the last year or so have a realized that philosophy is not ( at least to me) about finding Plato’s forms or knowing the world a priori. It is ironic because my attraction to philosophy was motivated both by my frustration with the true-false duality of mathematics and by my desire to know the truth (as if such Truth) was just, as Baylor Johnson might say, hiding under some rock waiting to be found. I saw power in philosophy, in the ability to comprehend what others deemed incomprehensible. It allowed me to prove once and for all that yes I am smarter than you. Thus, my own intellectual insecurity had a lot to do with my decision to major in philosophy. I think I’ve matured a lot since my initial positions at college. I’ve come to understand that no matter how much truth I may find in philosophy, philosophy is not foundational and that other academic disciplines potentially have just as much to over as philosophy. I can’t know the Truth, because there is no truth. As Nietzsche would say there are only interpretations. This realization is most liberating. The problem persists nonetheless as most people continue to cling to this notion of objective truth. Thus the way I feel forced to present myself and my philosophy is in such a way as to stress the imperatives that what I am saying is the Truth and if you disagree then you are wrong. It’s all about arguing. It’s all about power, and what I’m really struggling (this is not to say that I don’t appreciate and at times even enjoy the struggle) with is finding a way to get inside the system in order to change it. To do so requires that I work with and through the rhetoric of binary logic. As an English teacher once told me in high school, to break the rules you have to first know the rules. What really inspires me is the possibility of revolutionizing my own language in order to find a dialectic between absolutism and relativism. Much of what I am saying now is inspired by the philosophy Gianni Vattimo who illuminates the fact that while many contemporary philosophers reject absolutism in theory but in their own philosophical writing they continue to argue with binary logic. My mission, my question is how to simultaneously change my own self-presentation and discourse and change the way the world discourses with itself.
So let’s get back to the story, that is, the story of how I became philosophical. I was always a day dreamer. I had my head in the clouds throughout middle school, and struggled to focus on the class material. By my last year and a half of high school I was beginning to discover an outlet for all my mind’s seemingly aimless meanderings. I found the golden ticket in books introduced to me by a few wonderful English teachers. I am so grateful to them in hindsight as they showed me that it was ok to learn what I wanted to learn. Of course I still had to be academic about it, but the humanities offered me an opportunity to really pursue my own intellectual development on my own terms. Once I got to college I found that I still needed some intellectual structure but that the freedom of choosing what I wanted to study and when was most liberating and really allowed me to do what I do today. I really crack myself up sometimes. I rebel for the sake of rebelling. For instance, my parents always make me do the dishes at home, but at school I do them completely voluntarily. Not only do I get more done when it’s my own decision to work but it’s just much more enjoyable knowing that you somehow willed yourself to do what you do rather than having to be prodded by some external authority or institution for necessary motivation. Yet I also know that I need structure and that different people learn differently and thus need different degrees of such externally induced structure. What I really like doing now is choosing to be structured, that is, putting myself in a position where I am held accountable both by myself but also by some externality that pushes me like I could never push myself.
My first really liberating and inspiring philosophical experience came during my February break of my junior year in high school when my teacher gave us all an assignment to attempt some nature writing. We were studying the transcendentalists at the time so in the spirit of Thoreau and Emerson we were instructed to go into a forest or even just our back yards, to be in nature, and to simply write what ever comes to mind. I loved my first taste of feeling completely separated, free from the bonds of societal expectations as I wrote under a tree in the woods behind my house. It was my escape. It made me feel one with the world but at the same time somewhat self-alienated from society. I found that most people in my class really detested the assignment and I felt the complete opposite sentiment. This event really symbolizes what has been my philosophy. Escaping into the ivory tower I want to see from above so I can be from above. Yet I’ve come to realize that reality can not really be transcended, but I can transcend myself but only by going through myself. I have to be honest with my self. I have to be self-critical. And as I direct my focus inwards I find that I am also projecting this honest and constructive criticism outwards onto my parents, close friends, and most especially society at large. This can and in many cases has been problematic, but I won’t stop trying. As Plato once showed us, once one sees the light there is no turning back. One must go through insanity in order to find saneness. So as I introspect I nag myself to remember that I’m not doing it just for myself, but for the world, because I have to live in the world. There is no escaping it. Thus, I could not live with myself if I avoided this confrontation with myself, because I cannot escape myself, but I can change myself and change the world at the same time. It is not a matter of choosing one or the other but of consciously integrating both into action.
No comments:
Post a Comment