I.

We know the secrets of the modern Analytic Philosophers. We are not the first ones to know. Many have found these people out before, and years ago. Like our numerous predecessors, we realize that they have trained themselves to be slightly more proficient at manipulating language than the rest of us – better stated, at manipulating their language – and that with their abilities they have fooled the majority as to the content of their careers. We see that with their linguistic superiority they solve the very small pseudo-problems that their colleagues and philosophical associations have kindly created for them. And even for the current heavyweights – once we can speak as they speak and think as they think, we are able to ascertain that their attempts to define knowledge, or to get a grip on the mind-body problem, or to provide a foundation for morality are going nowhere, are stuck in the past, pathetically reliant upon outmoded ideas and assumptions, for instance the idea that God exists, or that a soul exists, or the assumption that there is such a thing as an objective standpoint from which one has access to TRUTH, or that when we interact with the world we are presented with a “mirror of nature”.  We understand that they penetrate no deeper into reality than those who do not practice their trade, that if anything they tend toward superficiality, and that their inquiries do not yield discoveries or insights: if they claim to possess anything called “wisdom” we will not believe it for a second.

One thing to keep in mind about these men and women, these alchemists in the time of chemistry, is that they are quite limited. They have only that single skill to their names (logic chopping within their linguistic schemas) and as a result they are as unwilling to admit that logic chopping is a dead end road as they are delighted to take you by the hand and lead you down that road, past the abandoned factories and decrepit laboratories, on to the unpopulated terminal point, and to exclaim there: “Do you see the splendor? How wonderful is this view?!”

The view, as all can see, is not wonderful. We should mention that a second equally impotent type admits as much by approaching philosophy with sarcastic irreverence. These people have glimpsed the lies and the futility of their enterprise, and they are a little bit proud of their insight and the slight edge it gives them over their peers, but they are not about to spark a revolution.  They are the pessimistic-yet-content type – pessimistic about their love lives, but not in pursuit of a new mate, pessimistic about their students, though not seeking employment at a different university, and the smallest hint of pessimism regarding their profession will not undo them – actually, reflecting on things, they could be much worse off, they could be professors at a third tier university, they could not be professors at all, heck, they could be unemployed, and they should remind themselves that what they really ought to be feeling, instead of feeling peeved, is lucky.

The third and final group of professional professors, the all-too-common-group, sadly, the majority, do not concern themselves with philosophy’s merits. They have never seen philosophy as a worthy pursuit for its own sake; they do not share the foundational Greek vision of philosophy as essential, meaningful and redemptive. They were excellent and energetic students, but not blessed with a critical intelligence, and when it came time to decide what to do with their lives, staring down career paths in applied mathematics, finance and engineering, it occurred to them that it would be nice to have their summers free, and to have short work hours, and school had always been their thing – so why not go ahead and get a PhD in philosophy?²

II.

You might be surprised by our interest in the lives and motivations of philosophy professors, but it should make sense to you if you understand the road we have traveled. We came into college, not focused on getting a job afterwards, not interested in picking up useful skills or connections, but attached to the hope that we would spend four years studying something that would broaden our perspective and engage with questions we find important. In other words, we came here with pure philosophical aspirations. It is a good and optimistic place we came from, and after our first philosophy class we thought, ok, no big deal, the next one will explore more relevant problems and rest on more tenable assumptions; after the second we said, alright, nobody would do philosophy if every class were like these first two, and we were disappointed, but remained hopeful when we saw appealing titles like “Ethical Theory” and “Knowledge, Mind and Existence” in the course catalogue. Not finding other disciplines particularly fulfilling either, we tried these courses, and they also disappointed us.

These courses, like most philosophy courses, do not stand up to common sense – common intellectual sense, we should say. Even with a limited education and limited experiences, it is quite clear that there is something off about their approach to knowledge and problems. We guess that the average student has this intuition when grappling with a philosophy course, but pushes it aside (and quite understandably) as evidence of his own ignorance and unsuitability for philosophy, since the professors with the sustained educations appear very comfortable, and the senior boys with tortoise shell glasses keep raising intelligent objections. It is best to remain confident and pay attention to these intuitions however: they constitute the only challenge you need in order to write philosophy off, and if you ignore them for too long and do not write philosophy off, surrounded as you will be by alchemists, you may forget about your initial feelings and end up as one.

What do these intuitions look like? In an ethical theory course, you will be given an ethical system, usually either a brand of consequentialism, which holds that the consequences of an action determine the moral validity of that action, or deontology, which is a rule-based approach to ethics, or you will be given an admixture of the two of them.  You are asked to evaluate actions based on these systems – to take individual moral cases and figure out what the system prescribes. You are also, though less regularly, asked to examine critiques of a certain ethical system. You accomplish these things with premises and conclusions. The problem with doing this, which you should sense, is that there is a giant presupposition behind all of your efforts, which is that Analytic ethical philosophy is a valid enterprise. Why proceed on with consequentialism and deontological ethics if you lack evidence that it is justified to evaluate actions according to either system? Why flesh out the consequences of these systems if you have no reason to believe in either? What are you gaining? What we should keep in mind is that these are supposed to be theories on how a human being should live; the proponents of any one of these theories must say (or else what are they doing?) that an individual is compelled to act as his choice theory says a person should act. The first order of business for an ethical philosopher then is not exploring specific cases, or comparing his theory against others, but is making a case for a theory independently of all else. On this view, a course that deals in ethical thought experiments and compares systems against each other, for any person who keeps the goal of ethics in sight, is a waste of time.³

This is what ethical philosophy is, or has become – a waste of time. You can tell because it is not asking you to take it seriously. It is giving you moral scenarios like these: “A train is headed for ten people, and if it hits the ten people they will all be killed. You can pull a lever, and if you do this, you will shift the train onto a separate track. One person will be killed if you pull the lever. What should you do?” It is asking you to evaluate this moral scenario with a certain moral theory in mind, and to comment on the plausibility of the theory based upon what the theory would have you do in the situation. You are essentially asking yourself, “Does this moral theory square with my unconsidered prejudices or not?” And if it does, you find that moral theory “attractive”. Your other task is to compare systems against each other, and to determine which is “more attractive.” It is a cheap trick to compare ethical systems against each other, as opposed to comparing them against no ethical system at all. A true ethical code demands that you follow it. A true ethical code is not attractive because it squares with your intuitions or turns out to be good by comparison, but is mandatory on its own.

The sad irony for ethical philosophers is that the sorts of questions that must be asked of any ethical system worthy of the name are precisely the questions that they are least fit to answer. The questions: “Why should I practice this form of ethics? What, under your system, compels me to be ethical? Why am I obligated to be moral in this way? Why be moral at all?” Placed in the shoes of an ethical philosopher, what could you say? It seems like the only sound grounds for ethical compulsion is the existence of God, for then heaven and hell are at stake, or then there would be a respect in which an action is right in a meaningful way, because omnipotent God has declared that it is right. But ethical philosophers want to make secular arguments. What could you say? There is moral realism, which holds that moral facts exist, but moral realism is a dubious proposition, and even if there were moral facts out there, if say it were a fact that stealing is wrong in the same way that it is a fact that a certain person has brown hair, does it follow that a person should act ethically? The answers become even less convincing for the philosophers who do not take the leap and subscribe to moral realism. What could you say, and whom could you convince? Would you stop a man who is headed off to cheat on his wife, and implore him, “Wait, sir, please wait, before you take another step out that door, I want you to listen to someone speak, there is a lecture tonight at the local university, it’s a professor proposing a modified deontological argument. He includes a contractarian aspect that answers Nozick’s worry concerning personal autonomy. Please, just go and listen – before you do anything rash!”? Whom could your arguments convince? 

This leads to the second intuition that matters (with the first being that foundations are the central component of ethics), which we think most people have and ignore: it is an odd enterprise to argue for a moral system based on strictly rational premises. It is a strange thing to make one’s way, proposition by proposition, to a decision about the morality of actions, about how one should live. And so the onus is on the ethical philosopher to defend the enterprise somehow. The ethical philosopher must provide a reason to be moral. Plato, who we recognize as the founder of this tradition in  Analytic philosophy, provides us with persuasive reasons to pursue an ethical life, more to his point, to pursue a life that will culminate in understanding of justice; he goes as far as to imply that a prolonged ecstatic state will meet he who understands the ethical. However, we know too much to believe that years of training in the art of dialectical reasoning will lead us to the higher plane of being where we are in communion with the Form of the Good. Kant heroically argued that being moral, as a product of pure rationality, represents the ultimate in freedom for the individual. However, we are told (even by ethical philosophers) that there are a few holes in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Kant was unsuccessful in establishing a foundation for morality on rational grounds.  Though they failed according to modern judgments, Plato and Kant gave us a reason to cherish the moral life.  What is yours, modern ethical philosopher? Your blends of consequentialism and deontology, your endorsements of a prior theory but with one small revision, which itself was just a prior theory but with one small revision, your pages and pages of refutations and counter-refutations, they fail to convince us. And the more you write, the more you nuance, the less convincing you become. A clear order without justification from a figure of authority, a simple and loud “You must”, is more compelling to us, far stronger. Kant and Plato encountered the same difficulty of arguing for morality from rationality, but at least they saw the challenge, at least they were persuasive. In the same way that it is perhaps correct to say that St. Thomas Aquinas, the moment he set quill to paper to argue for the existence of God, was arguing for a doomed cause, but at least we can respect him, whereas we cannot respect the man proposing arguments for the existence of God today, we can say that perhaps Plato and Kant were dead in the water from the get-go, and you ethical philosophers share that with Plato and Kant, but you, unlike them, are laughable.  Why haven’t colleges gotten rid of you?

We have decided that we will direct our anger toward you, moral philosophers. Here is why: We can criticize the methods of our courses, and say, “Ethics should not be this way. It should focus on the foundations, and only the foundations.” But of course it cannot focus on the foundations, because there are none. So the discipline must be this way, must direct attention elsewhere, if it is to continue to exist. And the next step is to say, well, without foundations, there should be no discipline. And then we blame the people who keep it going: we blame the ethical philosophers. We blame in addition the colleges that continue to have departments that practice ethical philosophy. But then we temper ourselves and say, “Well, these colleges are not pure institutions here for the sake of pure learning; they are the higher education system of the United States, and there are only certain things that can really be said and done and thought at such institutions.” National character is part of the equation, and there is something about the U.S., in comparison to the European countries that share somewhat its style of thought, that is naïve, childlike. It has not dealt with so much conflict and cruelty. It has not dealt with bombs dropped on its cities by foreign countries, or militarized occupations. It has not dealt with the Holocaust, or anything so bad. Its moral certainty has not been challenged as often or as cruelly as Europe’s has; it is ethically naïve after all, and an ethically naïve country deserves and requires an ethically naïve moral philosophy. The U.S. does not possess the strength or maturity to confront a Nietzsche or a Foucault head-on; it hasn’t been through enough to recognize their truths and drop its secularized religious outlook – better to surreptitiously throw them into the English and History departments.  The unavoidable thought then is that there may be no getting around teaching philosophy as we do, for it is all Americans can handle. But still, still, even after these considerations, even when it looks like our very impoverished and very wrong moral philosophy is unavoidable, we can continue to find fault with, because it is within their power to know, the people who teach it; we can in good conscience maintain that it is unethical to disseminate false doctrines to the young. This we should say without reservation – and without a word of argumentation.

….

Moral philosophy is in a bad state, and so it has changed the questions it asks, become, in fact, something new and something lesser. We know this for several reasons, but one is that it would be assertive if it were true. We would hear in public from moral philosophers if they had something they thought they needed to communicate, and we do not hear from them.

Taken as a share of all spiritual-intellectual-aesthetic doctrines in the United States, and measured by its truthfulness, moral philosophy has appropriate cultural cachet (very little). Taken as a share of doctrines in the university system, moral philosophy’s piece of the pie is much too large. Given this country’s hostility toward intellectualism, however, the second fact is not surprising, and actually rather fitting: it is part of the plan that our university departments are spinning their wheels, and especially that philosophy is doing so.      

….

On to the other family of courses, epistemology classes, which concern themselves with establishing foundations for knowledge, for telling us what we can trust as knowledge and what we cannot. For your benefit we will cover epistemology in less detail…Briefly, the intuition you should be having in an epistemology class: these philosophers are claiming that we are capable of more than is humanly possible.  There is an assumption that underlies epistemology, which can be seen everywhere when reading epistemology papers, that humans can access things-in-themselves; that they can arrive at a true and mind-independent representation of reality, a more real reality in other words, through philosophical reflection. From this reality, the story goes, we access the foundations of knowledge. The story is invalid – incompatible with an up-to-date picture of human beings. We construct the world out of our evolved perceptual faculties and have no external authority to cross-reference; with only the human-constructed reality as a point of reference, where can we look to determine what true reality is? Why would we expect to uncover the mind-independent and unassailable foundational knowledge that epistemologists pursue?

Now, there are various bones to be picked with this line of thought as it applies to epistemology: for one, the discipline has been complicated and has absorbed to a degree the prior intuition; certain philosophers have made it naturalized, a study of the processes by which we reason rather than being an attempt to create foundations for knowledge, which we would say makes epistemology a branch of psychology, and again proves what a sorry state Analytic Philosophy finds itself in… but although this for our purposes is in some sense the point, it is also somewhat beside it. The point is that we can see and you can see, based on what our classes are like, that the philosophy we are taught is a false and artificial enterprise. There are brilliant people within the profession who have written books on the matter saying as much point-by-point, Richard Rorty⁴  notably, but we should not expend our energy worrying about how they accomplished the dismantling of epistemology. We should view them as unfortunate – lured into becoming alchemists, and they did what they could once they found out the truth: they took the pseudo-science down from the inside. It is preferable to avoid this situation – to steer clear of alchemy’s bad logic entirely rather than laboring to prove its mythology inconsistent. We should judge Rorty and company positively, invoking the principle that the best thing to do with a fallacious intellectual system is to ignore it, and the second best option, if you cannot ignore it, is to focus on how it has impacted you, and address the misconceptions with which it has saddled you. According to this principle, the philosophy professors from the above class of men have acted honorably in writing books attacking epistemology. The principle also places a demand upon us: we are compelled to study philosophy, though in a nontraditional way. Because philosophy has exerted a tremendous influence on Western thought and Western culture, on us in other words, we must, as aspiring Western intellectuals, engage with it. We must, because we are smart enough and know enough, assume that the standard philosophical approach is misguided, and focus on fleshing out its errors as best we can. We must see how these errors have impacted our worldview, and finally inquire as to what can be done. This is the task of a philosophy student, who, until a vital tradition replaces the current desiccated one, must be a history of philosophy student first and foremost.

There are severe consequences if we stick with the current game plan: if we philosophy students remain tied down with Analytic Philosophy, we are on the fast track to anti-intellectualism. We will extrapolate from our experiences, and surmise that we are better off relying upon our intuitions than embarking upon a rigorous course of study. When people ask us that annoying question in that semi-mocking voice, “So what is your philosophy degree going to do for you?” we will have to admit that they have a point. With Analytic philosophy as our guide, we will continue to turn our backs on academia and what we have good reason to suppose are the rest of its mythologies, until it is out of sight entirely.

….

We started off this section with the intention of explaining how, before we knew it, we became disenchanted majors in no position to wriggle away from Analytic Philosophy. The short of it is that we are upset that no one ever sat us down and explained philosophy’s falsity to us, for we are certain now that our professors have deceived us, or themselves, most likely both parties. For your own good you should trust us when we say that there is nothing that lies beyond in Analytic Philosophy. With assurance we say: It is tedious arguments of insidious intent all the way down.

…

We don’t want you to become resentful like us, for we are a sorry case. Now, you see, each time we read Analytic Philosophy for class, our indignation at the violation of our innocence – that crime perpetrated against us back when we were first told that what we were studying was real – is renewed. Our insight has made us some combination of apathetic and angry, and we half-wish that we could just erase the insight and be less knowledgeable, oblivious once more, able again to care about our professors’ opinions, and trust in their assessments. The distressing thing is that when we lost respect for the alchemists, no force of fairness intervened to reduce the authority of the local branch; to our dismay, no just god swooped down and snatched their grade books away. Their judgments of us remain connected with our chances of attaining our future goals (the revised emphasis, by the way, of our academic experience), and we are loath to allow them to injure us doubly. But when our professors have us read twenty pages dissecting for instance a Neo-Kantian ethical position, we know going in what we are being subjected to, and we have a difficult time of it. Told to turn in an essay on the paper by 6:00 pm on Thursday – and 6:01 will be counted as late! 6:01 is one letter grade off! – we are hard-pressed to summon the energy and respect necessary to do our duties. Working makes us nauseous, and we have to step away from the computer every now and again to remain balanced. Drinking helps too, and late at night when all is said and done we turn out something satisfactory. Tell us though: should we take receiving an A as consolatory? And isn’t a B-plus a slap in the face?

“It looks as if you have misunderstood the author’s task in section 4, paragraph 3” we are too-frequently coached in the margin, when we are certain that our real mistake is that we have understood too well – too well and too quickly. Do not let our example escape your attention!

III.

You must not misinterpret us: we want to do philosophy. We are not students of history, not students of English, not students of the natural sciences. We are philosophy students, and for the present at least, we remain hopeful about philosophy in the truest sense of the word: we stick to the belief that there is something out there that should be called philosophy, and that this field should be the pinnacle of thought: it should be a sweeping, perspective-endowing field, and should be treated with the highest seriousness. We see it as being naturally justified in this way. Our professors have a different vision for their different version. These conflicting visions are perhaps the root of our most deeply rooted disagreement with them. When we ask, “Why philosophy?” we receive from our professors the justification that philosophy is about arguments, a fun premise and conclusion game for students to master. If we are being taught to argue, we cannot help but ask: what does it matter what we are arguing about? Why not a premise and conclusion game with politics as its subject, or economics, or football? Why not make it really simple and choose the topic we were first taught to argue about when we were taught that shouting wouldn’t fly? Why not make it really simple and argue about, say, recess?

Point being, philosophy cannot justify its existence in an academic setting on the grounds that it instructs students how to argue. Argumentation is a tool of philosophy, not its goal. A discipline that studies argumentation is the discipline of Argumentation. It is not Philosophy. (Here, if you are interested, is the shortcut evidence that Analytic Philosophy is on its deathbed: its practitioners justify it as an exercise in argumentation.)

There is, of course, more to the philosophy curriculum than the justification that our professors offer for it. There are certain things that count as philosophy, and other things that do not. We have alluded to the topics our Pomona-style Analytic Philosophy deals with earlier. Its questions are something like, “What is knowledge?” “What are the types of things that exist?” “What is a moral action?” “What is free will and do we possess it?” – questions like these.  We have also alluded to the fact that we can no longer answer these kinds of questions in good faith, as many of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophers who had a go at them were able to. We are now obligated to view knowledge as power- and discourse-dependent and far too complicated to approach in any sort of straightforward logically argumentative manner. Morality is looking more and more like an anthropological as opposed to a philosophical phenomenon. The problem of free will is – how to put it? – artificial; it depends what you mean, and you could mean a variety of things. So, to repeat the refrain: this is the philosophy curriculum, and it is outdated. These are the kinds of arguments we analyze, and they too are outdated.

IV.

To repeat another refrain: Don’t take us as saying that the philosophers and ideas we study are useless. The philosophers have been hugely influential in the creation and direction of Western culture, and among our modern ideas and prejudices we can usually locate, in attenuated or (often enough) unaltered form, their ideas. It can be argued that there is no study more worthwhile than this – a study that would seek to understand the conditions that gave rise to their ideas, the impact their ideas have had throughout history, and how they are manifest today. This is interesting; there is work to be done here.

You know what we will say next, in our repetitive rant: philosophy undergraduates and professors do precisely the opposite. We de-contextualize thought. When we are studying the history of philosophy, we block out the fact that the people we are studying are a product of their times.  We ignore that the French Revolution inspired Kant. Locke and Hume philosophized in order to address the scientific and political problems of the 1600s and 1700s, but no one mentions this. We are not asked to make reference either to their historical epoch or to our own. When approaching these dead men, we are instead asked to act as if both the philosophers and we were ripped clean out of time, escaping this universe and landing safely in an atemporal land, equipped only with the pure reasoning faculties in our minds and the philosophers’ works in our hands. We are told to adopt their schemes and pretend to possess their knowledge: “Just assume that the mind is nonmaterial as Descartes did”; “Work with Leibniz’s definition of substance”. This readies us for the meat of the class – analysis of their arguments. The professors stand at the front and defend philosophers’ arguments, or evaluate their validity for us, and they are always impartial to them; they are not supposed to proffer opinions. Our paper prompts lay out the same task for us: “Summarize Plato’s view on why the Guardians of his ideal city would rule the city. Give a compelling objection. Does the objection invalidate Plato’s argument?” “What is Kant’s conclusion regarding the possibility of metaphysics? Provide a compelling refutation to his argument. Does the refutation call into question Kant’s thesis?” And as a result we never get to understand the philosophers, but merely their surfaces – just their arguments, and we never really know what they are talking about, which problems of their age they are addressing (this receives a quick gloss), which social and political universes they inhabit (little to no attention paid), and so we never comprehend the urgency of their task and the passion with which they meet it. The best we get is a history of philosophy from the standpoint of ideas (“Kant synthesized the Rationalists and Empiricists”), but never a history that includes adequately the soil out of which their ideas grew. The interesting and invigorating questions (How could, and why would, a philosopher think that way, approach from that angle?) are neglected, primarily, we would guess, in order to present Analytic Philosophy as a still-valid way to spend one’s time. What happens is that Hume, Kant, Plato, Spinoza, whoever – they never catch our attention as they deserve to. They are great minds, but out of ours forever once the semester ends⁵.

When dealing with the living, a more mediocre bunch, we are bid to forget that their conceptions of truth, knowledge and reason are illusions, and are made to sort through their lengthy arguments and specialized vocabularies.⁶   Our stock joys are the joys of the student of a foreign language: “I think I know what that means!” Our rarefied pleasures come in the classroom, when we offer for the professor’s enjoyment an articulate translation, paired with a probing and potentially argument-undermining question. Reflecting on the classroom environment, we can’t help but feel disrespected, like grade schoolers, ultra-competent grade schoolers admittedly, but do we feel different sensations than grade schoolers feel, with our not-too-different classroom model, and our similar pleasures? The noteworthy difference is that we are less free than they are – that we are circumscribed grade schoolers, without a class clown, without opportunities for flirtation, devoid of rowdiness.  We experience, however, the same boredom (just look around at the faces in the classroom), the fading in and out, with complete attention paid only when talking or thinking about talking, and happiness achieved only when we are recognized for what we have said.

This happens because we (all of us, not just the disaffected) are neutral with regard to the class content. It does not interest us. The material does not resonate, and so class becomes about asserting one’s intelligence and about nothing else; it becomes about who can demonstrate mastery and nothing else. We don’t like it when we hear other people talk. When others speak, it is annoying to us, unless the person communicates embarrassment or a discreet apology for having opened his or her mouth in the first place. We always return to our dorms complaining about the student we find annoying, but really he is just the student we find most annoying. We listen to others in order to find an in to speak ourselves. Or else wouldn’t the conversation continue outside the classroom more often? Wouldn’t people ever wish to extend class to permit for a few more questions? The philosophy classroom is a sickeningly egotistical zone, which would not be a huge deal if there were outside-of-class compensatory zones, but judging by the startled looks professors give us when we walk into their offices seeking to discuss anything besides the paper due next week, there are no such regions. It is not our fault of course. We are given an antiquated discipline, a restrictive social setting, a group of students half of whom are completely unfamiliar with philosophy (does it bother you any that philosophy courses do not have prerequisites?), and a script (does it detract from your experience any that professors have heard your objections already – the year before, or if you’re clever, maybe three years ago?). Why should we expect engaging classes? Why should we expect to be challenged?

We don’t see how, given the current academic situation, a student can leave Pomona College passionate about philosophy. The most common philosophy student must be the type of student who has an instrumental relationship with philosophy – the student who uses philosophy to train himself to reason like a lawyer or, even more worryingly, the student who studies philosophy because law schools like to admit philosophy majors. We should see this as a problem – for if there existed any major insulated from a pre-professional mentality, one would think it would be philosophy. We don’t see how the professors can be content with the education they are imparting. We think it bad that Analytic Philosophy professors deal with issues of no concern to anyone but the professors involved, worse still that their dialogues and articles rest on foundations destroyed long ago, and unforgivable that they subject students to their empty discipline.

The Dissent acknowledges the very sane reason that causes the madness: if philosophy were given a context and were clear about its assumptions, students would quickly lose faith in it and give up on it. It would be over and done with. We are not shocked anymore that we are told lies. The Old Regime dies hard, and it often displays the most ingenuity on its way out; in this case its last-ditch effort comes in the form of modal logic, jargon, and involved arguments, which to our unclouded eyes are nothing but sophisticated rationalizations for bad behavior.

…

A Closing Argument:

Premise One: Analytic philosophy does not suit students.

Premise Two: Students should not study what does not suit them.

Conclusion: Either reform philosophy at Pomona, or abolish it.

Footnotes:

¹ None of the criticisms you see here apply to Professor Erickson. We highly recommend his classes. Plus, he teaches Continental Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy’s more literary counterpart.

…

You train us to excel, Pomona. By the end of four years, we have learned the art of academic excellence. We know what to say and how to say it to you, what to write and how to write it for you, which would be fantastic if academic excellence was an end in itself. It is not, of course; to sound trite, academic excellence is of course the means to the end of an education, which is the means to the end of ends – a good life. There are people who have figured out what their version of the good life is at age eighteen. There are people who have figured out that they want to be doctors, or lawyers, or businessmen. Good for them, and all the best to them in their classes. We are different from them; our relationship with you is different than theirs is. They are more likely to base their judgments of you on your career-advancing characteristics: it will be grades, connections, and career placement that define their lasting assessment. We are harder to please, though we have the potential for a closer bond. We are liberal arts students, the quintessential ones. (Our numbers are depleted each year, though this is no excuse for you not to cater to us, for you are still a liberal arts college. You have not yet sold your soul, like Claremont McKenna.) We are looking to understand things like the self, how our society works, this country’s place in the world, and what the examined life holds. Most of all we are hoping for an understanding of what is possible for us; you are useful to us insofar as you help us to achieve this understanding. We have found you utterly useless, worse than useless – you have been an impediment to our studies.

You have asked us to hand over our individuality and insight-producing equipment at the door – to use your preferred methods of argumentation whether we have a self-devised approach or not, to use your conventions whether they confine us or not, to follow you around suburbia when we have knowledge of unexplored expanses of wilderness. You have distracted us from learning and prevented us from attaining a critical perspective from which to view our reality. You have made academic life here about grades, and then you have gone ahead and made receiving good grades, not the reflection of a superior intelligence or thorough work or even intellectual labor, but about resigning yourself to formalized procedures. You have made receiving good grades about endurance. Who is willing to conform to your well-delineated procedures? Who is willing to bring his first draft in to office hours? Who is willing to write an introduction-quotation-analysis-quotation-analyis-quotation-analysis-quotation-analysis-quotation-analysis-conclusion essay? Who is willing to be conservative – to renounce ambition, to renounce his own ideas, to renounce his freedom, and to paraphrase the words of others, with just the right amount of originality, the unoriginal amount of originality: who is willing to respect the five ideas of experts to one of your own ratio? Well, who wants an A? We came to you for fresh surroundings, Pomona. We came to you for a place where we would be encouraged to reflect critically upon “the system”. Why are you a part of it? Why are you it? In whose arms have we sought refuge?

Don’t be taken aback by our hostility. It is justified. We are hostile because you have lied to us about yourself, and your lies have held us back. You see, here you have told us that you are this wonderful Liberal Arts paradise, when in all reality the Liberal Arts education is in a state of crisis and the Liberal Arts promise is empty. For the longest time, we have been shocked by the lack of vitality in your Humanities departments, as dead as Claremont air in the summertime; we have waited patiently for improvement, and we were genuinely puzzled as to how things could be this way when we did not see it. For the longest time, we searched for the reasons why you would want us to learn how we learn here, why you would not bat an eye at the apathy and grade mongering and mindlessness and overall lack of progress in us: what could you be thinking? Don’t you notice? It was a revelation when we faced the fact that we had the wrong focus all along. We are under a new directive. We are assuming that you do not care. We have hardened ourselves. We now coach ourselves not to wonder: how does the system benefit us? and to instead ask: how does the system perpetuate itself? It is the sort of cynical question that we wish we didn’t have to ask; we had always thought it applied to less prestigious institutions in less privileged places. It is, however, the sole question that has yielded insight. We must pursue it.

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A Summary of some of our Findings:

In general, the Humanities departments are split between concentrating on the subjects they take their names from and focusing upon the academic business their professors conduct; so we can view a sizeable portion of History as the Study of the Work Contemporary Professional Historians do, English as the Study of the Work English Professors do, Philosophy as the same. This explains why the only required course in the English major is Literary Interpretation, which teaches you how to do literary criticism the way professors who submit literary criticism to academic journals do it. When professors write literary criticism, there is a tremendous amount of pressure on them, unless they are brilliant, to focus on minutiae, because their employers and colleagues demand that they produce something new for academic journals, and most of the good topics have been played out already. (What, after all, is the 400th critic to write about Pride and Prejudice going to add?) This is why, when we glance at the journals scattered around Crookshank, we spot articles like Sighing for a Soldier: Jane Austen and Military Pride in Pride and Prejudice; Chance and the Hierarchy of Marriages in Pride and Prejudice; and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Hegel’s “Truth in Art”: Concept, Reference, and History. This is why professors’ comments on student papers are something like: “I’m not sure that your thesis was as controversial as it could have been. Look into the secondary literature to see if you can craft a more unique argument next time.” How should students interpret this advice? Only as a guide to getting your paper accepted by an academic journal. Frustrating, when you want to learn – infuriating when you know the reason… We can explain why certain History classes will throw you Neo-Foucauldian, Post-Colonial academic articles to decipher, without telling you why the method is valid; you are to understand that the approach to history just is, presumably because the approach is popular in academia at present. You should learn how. You can, easily if you know how to write to begin with, and once you nail it down, once you have mastered academic journal writing light, which indicates the completion of your apprenticeship, you are primed and ready for future study, a pre-professional like most of your peers, but of the pre-professorial variety. These departments should not fear of their ranks being replenished: the replacements for the dying and retiring begin their training at a young age.

There are several departments that are, intellectually speaking, stuck. If you went to the mental illness talk held recently at Pomona, you heard the worn-out doctor on the task force charged with defining and diagnosing mental illnesses say, essentially, “Well, our criteria for mental illnesses are a patchwork job. But there is nothing better to be done. We are in need of fresh ideas.” One can infer that psychology, which if it is concerned with anything is concerned with mental illness, is in need of fresh ideas as well. (Doesn’t experience in a psychology classroom bear this out?) A psychology professor will never tell you this, it won’t be in any psychology readings either, because you might be dissuaded from further study upon discovering that the field to which you are dedicating yourself is out of ideas – that the ideas you will be learning are generally considered to not be very useful. This information, the state of your field, which you deserve to know, will be concealed from you if it will harm the field’s position in your eyes or in the academy’s. You will be frustrated in these fields, and ask why concepts are unclear or unimportant or simply commonsensical. The answer is that concepts have to be that way, for the sake of the disciplines’ preservation. The worst departments are those with the most to hide. More on the philosophy department later.

Part of the reason why departments are stuck is because their boundaries are artificial. Their separateness is a historical artifact, not the carving of knowledge at its joints. Take a question that psychology claims, for instance: “What are the stages of child development?” and watch where it leads you. You will need to explore language development, which requires that you know certain things about syntax and speech production, and so you will study linguistics. You will of course be acquainted with Noam Chomsky, the heavy-hitter in the field, whose universal grammar hypothesis views language acquisition as an innate process, and his Nativist thought will lead you to Neuroscience. There is also the matter that child development varies across societies, according to different childrearing practices. Sociology comes into the picture, and anthropology too, since psychology is interested in which elements of a child’s development are immutable, and cross-cultural comparison helps to identify these…We will stop here, and say that it is taken as a matter of course by intellectuals today that no subject can be studied without reference to the others; interdisciplinarity is a must for the serious student. The disciplines need each other to function properly.

Pomona is not very interdisciplinary. It is hard to imagine that many colleges are dynamic enough to be very interdisciplinary. The truth of the matter is that embracing interdisciplinarity would not merely mean increased communication between disciplines; it would also mean that disciplines would be stripped naked, forced to open up about what they do, and some would be exposed as less useful than others, some as expendable. What actually happens when the interdisciplinary question pops up is that departments, when it is apparent that they may be merged or mitigated, erect higher walls in the places where they could come under siege. When necessary, they will shift emphases to avoid volleys from threatening enemies. Philosophy, for instance, in danger of being absorbed by history and by psychology, has fled to the opposite corner of its kingdom: toward pure mathematics.

The departments become territorial about their defining questions and areas of expertise. Departments turn into boys from the same social group who realize they have both been talking to the same pretty blonde girl. Their first act is to stop confiding in one another. If sophisticated, they make efforts to positively separate themselves from one another, until their personalities have become distinct enough that they could no longer maintain a friendship, even if they wanted to. Academic departments at Pomona are incapable of maintaining friendships with each other. Academic departments at Pomona are isolated. Crossover between courses in different departments is minimal, and when it exists it is typically incidental. It is rare to hear a professor recommend a course in another department because professors in different departments do not speak to each other about academic matters. They can’t. They have no basis for conversation.

The end product is an inassimilable mix of ideas and orthodoxies. It is a Herculean task to get your bearings. We suspect no student has. The reality is that there is no thought-out academic program at Pomona College: it is do as you wish in each department, and we’ll put all the departments together in one place and call ourselves one college. Why is there not an outcry against the broken system? Few people care. Few see themselves as affected. It is not professors, who remain unchallenged in their vocations, nor is it administrators, who are more caught up in the U.S. News measurables than they are in difficult-to-quantifies, not the parents, who are fed propaganda and digest with ease, not most students, for whom college is just a way station, but it is the students in search of an honest and comprehensive education who are the losers. Minority groups typically have a tough time of things.

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Back to addressing you directly, Pomona. Your practices leave us lost and confused. Thirty-two classes accumulated and we are just beginning to pull ourselves up onto higher ground. Thirty-two classes accumulated and – “Goodbye! Congratulations on all of the A’s you have received here!” On our way out, you present us with a few clear-cut options: We can go out into the world, which has become harder for us to see, and enter into a profession in which it is maybe best to have blurred vision anyway; we can delay facing the world by attending pre-professional graduate school; or we can grab a petri dish of our own (though not of our own choosing) and place it under a microscope for six years of intensive study, until we too are masters of the small and removed.

Who, if anyone, has a chance at taking the world on? Of questioning it? Of changing it? Who has the desire? One would guess the dropouts.

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It appears, Pomona, as if you do not believe there is anything we absolutely must learn while here, or else why do you not have required courses? You have your area requirements, but with one of 100-odd choices for area one, and more for area two, and the numbers remaining high down the list, you are basically telling us, “Go! Take what you want.” You are basically telling us that there are no requirements. Some might find this liberating; we consider it undermining. You should be telling us that there is knowledge that we must have; it is your responsibility as knowledge’s representative and advocate. If you subscribe to a hands-off philosophy, fine, but not even a guide to the attractions? You are appointed to design a school field trip at a good museum: how should you handle it? Three basic plans come to mind: you could lead a structured tour, select an expert to take the kids around in one big group start to finish, a strategy there are arguments for, but which you might fear will bore the children and not respect their individuality. If this is your conclusion, you could opt for a shorter tour, hitting the high spots, followed by a free choice for each child of how to spend his remaining time. Sounds good – if you trust that they are curious. You certainly would not choose the last option: inexperienced as kids are in museums, you certainly would not simply set them free. You know what would happen: one or two would look at paintings and benefit from the trip (of course you would not expect them to understand deeply what they saw, or expect that they would locate the gallery that interests them most), and the rest you would collect horsing around in the gift shop.

Have you noticed that there is not an intellectual community here? Does it give you pause? Does it make you doubt that you are accomplishing anything? It should. Does it bother you that if you put all student conversations about books together, throughout the whole year, and compared their number to conversations about Taylor Swift over a two-day span, there would be no comparison? It should. It should make you want to pick up a new model, or at least poke around the engine.

Or maybe you have well-founded reasons for an open curriculum, and you will just take the hit with the lack of community. What could they be? Are you just very conscientious regarding the pitfalls of prescribing? Are you just very conscious of the state of knowledge in the modern epoch? If you are skeptical about the possibility of knowledge, or the necessity of any particular piece of it, if you feel as if you have nothing definite to impart, at least achieve second best – at least help us find joy in learning. How to determine if we are liking learning? Read our publications, listen to our conversations, snoop on our Facebook profiles, crouch behind bushes outside of a converted parking garage on a Saturday night – the evidence is everywhere. The evidence is nowhere, rather. Pay attention! Please, just pay attention!

Leave the classroom behind every once in awhile. Drop the idealized story: “Pomona students are the kind to work hard during the week, and it’s understandable that they need to blow off some steam on the weekends. They are smart, and fun; that’s what is so great about Pomona students!” What a pathetic story! It is your job to find the real one, the story with particulars rather than your brochure material, and to respond to what you find. Change us once you think we need to be changed, but not before then! Seduce us! Be aggressive if you need to be. To truly seduce you must first understand, and you do not understand us automatically; you do not understand us at the moment, even if you think you do: We will tell what you want to hear if it gets us what we want, and it is always astonishing how capable the cleverest of us are at describing paintings we have not seen. (A tip for dealing with future crops: it is not helping your cause to gift them a pamphlet entitled, How to talk about paintings you haven’t seen.)

Pay attention! Note that we feel worn down by academics (it hasn’t changed much throughout our lives), and try to reinvigorate us. Note our intellectual defensiveness and competitiveness, how we pretend as freshmen that we know everything anyone would ever want to know about the world, and tell us how silly we are to act like that. Notice that as seniors we have come to accept tediousness as an inescapable condition of life, and show us our freedom. It starts with asking us questions. Find out about us: our friendships, our “hook-ups,” our tastes, our prejudices, our anxieties, our opinions and interests, and modify your lessons accordingly; adjust them so that you are speaking to us. If we disappoint you, it is better than if you had never inquired. You will finally know how to teach. When you do, be honest. You might just capture our hearts.

Under what conditions should we expect this stagnant and restrictive climate? Under what conditions is it logical? Speaking abstractly, in a truly liberal society, we should find it logical, or approaching logical, in times of fear, in situations when people are at risk of being harmed, i.e. when there is an important reason to sacrifice freedoms. For instance, the Supreme Court has ruled that suppression of free speech is justified when someone’s speech causes “a clear and present danger” for the public. Tranquil Pomona is insulated from real dangers; if there is any hope for free exchange of ideas in the U.S., it is on tucked-away campuses like ours.

So why doesn’t it happen? For a host of reasons, most of them bigger than us. The terms and conditions of our campus discourse have traveled down the cultural-political river to us; Locke and Jefferson were dumped in nearest to the mouth, and Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement complicate matters closer to us, with an infinitude of other elements we do not understand tossed in alongside and between and subsequent to these players we have chosen to mention. In other words, we are too feeble to give you a good answer. What we can do is focus on what we see here, where the waters have stilled.

What we have noticed is the blanket of tolerance we indiscriminately throw over discourse at Pomona, which suffocates genuine ideas and prevents Pomona from being what we need it to be. Administrators, whose job it is to ensure that everybody is comfortable, stand on one edge of the campus and lay the blanket in place; students eager to participate and help the Pomona community flatten the rest of it out, until it fits nice and snug. These students are the tolerance censors. In academics, on essays and in the classroom, the students of Pomona have been schooled in phrase-mastery, rather than thought-mastery, and so it is right up the alley of our self-appointed tolerance censors to conduct a veritable Microsoft Word “Find search” on potentially intolerant speech and writing.  Did you use the word “superior”? “Social hierarchy”? Did you say “black”? “Race”? “Feminism”? Did you use incendiary language like “wrong”? “Stupid”? “Absurd”? Any one of these words is sufficient for you to be subject to a thorough review by the Campus Thought Police. For the trial phase: Did you group people by gender and then follow the grouping with one of the touchy criticism-phrases? Did you for instance say “a group of girls” and later in the paragraph write, “misguided”? We will have to shut you down. Did you employ combinations that have been red-flagged as anti-tolerance for the updated software? Did we catch that you uttered the words “equal rights protest” and “overblown” in the same sentence? Know that we respect you and your opinion, but by no means can you or your opinion be heard. 

The tolerance censors, whether they are newspaper editors or organizers of panel discussions or Saturday night partiers without an official position in the community, are the type who passively conduct their duties and stick by their unexamined clichés, and, like the customs agents who do not express personal interest in the tourist’s visit, they will each assure you that they themselves are never offended by what you say – they can stand controversial ideas just fine – but it is their job to protect others from offense. Secretly, they relish that they have tangible evidence that they are more tolerant, more upstanding, and more moral than whoever was caught in the act of thinking. They set precedent; if you do not notice them, if you have not seen them operate, or feel as if you are not personally restricted by them, this does not mean they have not had their impact on you. They are responsible for the standards that we all adhere to in public discourse – the standards we are conscious of and debate about, and the standards that have slid past us unnoticed and safely into the realm of the default. Their effect is far-reaching: no argument is free from being measured against the stringent criterion of superficial tolerance; it is not tolerance, but its caricature that we are subjected to.² Negativity, of all sorts, often falls under the “intolerance” umbrella, and so, no matter how true your words are, you will have a hard time voicing them if they are not sunny. Reality is not always sunny, and so large chunks of reality remain beneath the surface as well.

…

The discourse we end up with is highly ideological and very flat. It reminds us of the national political discourse, and we do not like the national political discourse. Political rhetoric is dishonest, for one. What do political candidates want to do? What do Romney and Obama aim for in the debates? The same thing they aim for always: they are looking to get the most votes, by whatever means necessary. They consequently seek to balance their comments between not offending and finding agreement and position their statements within the preexisting discursive frameworks. Sometimes their calculations will instruct them to alienate a few in order to win the impassioned favor of others (Obama on taxes for the rich), but more often they will offer safe and uncontroversial self-testimonials or promises (“I have always been strong on terrorism.” “There is nothing I am more concerned about than fixing the unemployment problem in America.”) The most unsettling thing they do, and least dignified, is to juvenilely attempt to expose the inconsistent statements other candidates have made (“You said this last week, and now you’re saying the opposite. Liar! I caught you, liar!” And the satisfied smile afterwards? What are we watching?) We know why they act as they do – no use harping on it; we know they are talking not to us but to Median Voter Bob, who responds to those tactics. We think we can agree that we feel disappointed and unnourished after watching the debates. There is a manner in which Obama and Romney could speak (we hope) that would be meaningful for us, complex and not sound-bite-bitten, and these debates are not that. Mainstream political discourse is not that.

Our discourse should rise above the level of political discourse. The test is whether it fits into the same boxes, if it is similarly either directed at special interests or uncontroversial to the point of being superfluous, or whether, in contrast, it incites you to think – pushes you, as the cliché goes, to consider your opinions more closely.  We guess that there are more people out there who laugh at the placards placed on Frary tables than who say: “Hmm, interesting,” and that the articles in The Student Life are most regularly pegged as Onion-grade rather than as real news. We guess that people are not changing their opinions on the hook-up culture when the Women’s Union gives a talk on it; we are fairly certain that the feminist mission on campus is lost on the majority of non-feminists; that Workers for Justice, for all their tents and pickets, will not transcend their status as a fringe group; that the articles discussing rape on college campuses, though coming from a good place, are not turning heads; that people sense that the back-and-forths in the newspaper are mostly about which of the two writers is smarter; and that the sustainability zealots are not inspiring the masses. It is like when we hear Obama and Romney debate: we are stuck somewhere between, “Well, yeah, ok, I agree, but who doesn’t?” and “That’s someone else’s concern. Why should I care?”

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If the first problem with discourse at Pomona College is our silly tolerance addiction, what, then, is the second? Based on what we have described, it must be apathy. Problem one pales in comparison to this, for apathetic discourse betrays a deeper apathy, does it not? And is it too harsh to call our generation apathetic? Is it not apt to say that a troublingly ironic attitude toward public discourse belongs to a generation with a troublingly ironic attitude toward themselves? This, to us, is the bigger issue, the elephant in the room. Is it unreasonable to think that public discourse will be the key out of the claustrophobic room? Probably. Can a problem of the soul be set right with improved words? Perhaps not.

At any rate, some sort of maneuver must be attempted, and when devising it we might as well pay attention to what we have found to be wrong. It must be true that the discourse at Pomona is stuck in the mud, has been for some time now, and that people do not have the inclination to get behind it and push, or the faith that if they do, they’ll move it. We know that there are people, people we once laughed next to, who are content to stand on an overlooking hill and snicker at the pathetic ones in the vehicle. We are sick of laughing; we can only bear the same joke so many times. We are trying to help now. On the ground and exposed, we have given you all we could manage: a first shove.