I came to my gestational ideas out of an engagement with Marxism which began in my undergraduate days. I found many aspects of Marxism quite compelling, others lacking. I began thinking about alternate approaches that could either replace or be combined with Marxism to compensate for its deficiencies, including Critical Theory, poststructuralism, and analytic thought of various kinds.
It was to learn about these sorts of ideas that I committed to a graduate program in philosophy in the Fall of 2008. Unfortunately, I found the small taste I got of these alternative approaches not entirely satisfying. Even more unfortunately, partly because of the stress of a collapsing relationship, I became extremely nervous and overly defensive of Marxism.
Being excessively argumentative in my first semester of graduate school did not endear me to certain faculty members, who not-so-politely suggested I explore other career paths. (I am, as a matter of fact, contemplating Law, Journalism, and civil service, among other things.) I still want to finish the degree, in part because I feel it will help open doors in these other fields, in part because I simply want it. For all the hardships I experienced in grad school, I'm still interested in ideas. Silly me.
It wasn't all hardship, I suppose. I toned it down a bit my second semester, and developed a new interest in some old ideas. I took a class on Aristotle, and loved it so much I made the classics professor my advisor. Aristotelian realism, I now believe, is a perfect complement and corrective to Marxist materialism.
I took the next year off, decided to return to Korea. I had taught English there in 2005, and decided it might be nice to see some old friends again. Unfortunately, I found the country as corrupt, conservative, and chauvinistic as I had left it. No, not fair. There had actually been a significant amount of progress in some ways, more development, slightly softening attitudes on women and gays and foreigners.
Unfortunately, the English academy (hagwon) system is still a frightful mess, only in the earliest stages of being cleaned up. Basically, these McSchools charge wayyyy too much money to parents frightened for their children's future in a society competitive enough to rival the ecosystem of the Amazon basin for Darwinian savagery. They skimp on essential costs, use substandard texts and supplies, overwork students, rearrange classes every time a parent or adult student complains, and oh yes, horribly mistreat their workers (Korean and foreign both). In general, the academies are the worst possible way to do education.
Koreans know this. They've actually known it for a while, but a newly developed country with a democracy less than 20 years old, locked in a perpetual state of war with its collectivist northern alter-ego, and bitch-slapped by the most recent economic crisis just as it was finally recovering from the one in 1998 can only do so much.
Long story short, I got monumentally screwed over -- again. Fool me twice, shame on me, I suppose. I figured, this time around, I know the ins and outs. I'll work for a reputable company, YBM, and teach grown-ups. Sounded good on paper, but YBM, while not especially corrupt, by Korean standards, proved to be extremely disorganized and poorly managed, at least by typical American standards.
After three months of doing my best to follow my boss' instructions, I got tired of getting blamed for managerial snafus, as well as of consistently negative feedback from students that often went suspiciously unsubstantiated. For instance, I requested several times to see student evaluations. Even if they had been in Korean, I could easily have had a friend translate them. The evaluations were never produced. My manager refused to provide any details, and actually identified as a source of criticism a class that I hadn't even taught!
I believe that my articles for the Korea Times, mentioned in my first post (http://smugpansy-cynicscorner.blogspot.com/2010/04/smug-pansy.html), may have played a role in souring my relationship with my employer, but I can't be sure. Me and my big, fat, um, word processor?
I tried to move on to another job, but Immigration (which is as full of racist a******* in Korea as it is in America) put the kibosh on it. So I returned to America, penniless. A warning for anyone thinking about teaching English abroad.
Again, I suppose it wasn't all hardship. I got to see some old friends and make some new ones. Koreans, even middle-class Koreans, are used to a somewhat greater level of hardship than are Americans. My friend kadual (handle, not real name, of course), for example, ended up homeless and sleeping on the street for a while when he toured Australia. Didn't even complain about it, said the weather was nice. Yeesh.
So, now I am thinking about completing my degree, applying for jobs, and of course, blogging. I'd say the 21st century's off to a roaring start.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Let's Get Metaphysical
A word of warning: what follows is very long, theoretical, and for many people, quite boring. If theory is not your cup of tea, please feel free to skip it. Most of my writing won't be this abstract; in fact, my next entry will be entirely personal. I just wanted to get it out of the way.
Allow me to elaborate on the 'formal materialism' I mentioned in my previous post. Again, purely speculative at this point. While I cannot say that I think seven contradictory ideas before breakfast, the labels I use and the exact parameters of what I think are still somewhat malleable. Brisket with a side of Weltanschauung, known to stick to the ribs. Mylanta, please.
Basically, I wish to follow in the vein of such thinkers as Santayana, Alain Badiou, and even to an extent the neo-Thomists (from whom I purloined the term), among others, in attempting a synthesis between the classical realism of Plato and Aristotle and contemporary materialism. Or, to put it more simply, I think that some human concepts can be provisionally taken to describe real attributes of things in the physical universe.
'Redness', for example, can be taken to represent a real existing quality of red things. The various instances of red that we observe can be supposed to be linked by unchanging causal principles, as well as emergent natural laws. Every instance of red is red for the same reason, has the same cause. They're not just suggestions, they're natural laws. :) Or at any rate, we infer the existence and nature of such laws to the best of our fallible knowledge.
Individual people and societies also have certain 'laws', though certainly not in the sense of positivist social science, or even of Marxist social science for that matter. The laws in question are institutions, organizations of people in accordance with fixed normative principles (as opposed to the causal principles mentioned just previously). Ethics, values, political theories, these are human creations for human purposes. To put it bluntly, morality is table manners.
It is in this sense that my current line of thinking is still a form of social materialism, and not moral realism in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense. Whereas Plato or Aristotle would have held that moral laws have a kind of real existence in a way identical to, or at least similar to, causal laws, a materialist still insists on a kind of fact-value distinction. Norm and cause are horses of very different colors.
Unlike a relativist, however, a materialist does not make an absolute fact-value distinction. Normative principles may be conventions, but they are, in a sense, necessary conventions. We need values so we can cooperate in order to survive and prosper. (It should be noted that I take a more expansive definition of "need" and "prosperity" than is usually meant by these words; more on that later. There is also an intriguing question of why, if morality is so good for us, does it so often seem such a burden? Karl Marx and others supplied some interesting ingredients for an answer to that question; more on that later as well.)
By the same token, we don't entirely choose our values. They are a legacy of the past. We have the values that we have because of the way our society evolved over history to meet our needs. Conceiving of the fact-value distinction in this way, making normative universals immanent properties of human institutions, allows us to reintroduce metaphysics to politics.
Our precise conception of what matter is and how it evolves over time will have important ethical and political ramifications. Metaphysical speculation of this sort has the potential to answer pressing questions about determinism and free will, mind and matter. It can inform discussions of how societies develop and how political decisions should be made.
More on all this later!
Allow me to elaborate on the 'formal materialism' I mentioned in my previous post. Again, purely speculative at this point. While I cannot say that I think seven contradictory ideas before breakfast, the labels I use and the exact parameters of what I think are still somewhat malleable. Brisket with a side of Weltanschauung, known to stick to the ribs. Mylanta, please.
Basically, I wish to follow in the vein of such thinkers as Santayana, Alain Badiou, and even to an extent the neo-Thomists (from whom I purloined the term), among others, in attempting a synthesis between the classical realism of Plato and Aristotle and contemporary materialism. Or, to put it more simply, I think that some human concepts can be provisionally taken to describe real attributes of things in the physical universe.
'Redness', for example, can be taken to represent a real existing quality of red things. The various instances of red that we observe can be supposed to be linked by unchanging causal principles, as well as emergent natural laws. Every instance of red is red for the same reason, has the same cause. They're not just suggestions, they're natural laws. :) Or at any rate, we infer the existence and nature of such laws to the best of our fallible knowledge.
Individual people and societies also have certain 'laws', though certainly not in the sense of positivist social science, or even of Marxist social science for that matter. The laws in question are institutions, organizations of people in accordance with fixed normative principles (as opposed to the causal principles mentioned just previously). Ethics, values, political theories, these are human creations for human purposes. To put it bluntly, morality is table manners.
It is in this sense that my current line of thinking is still a form of social materialism, and not moral realism in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense. Whereas Plato or Aristotle would have held that moral laws have a kind of real existence in a way identical to, or at least similar to, causal laws, a materialist still insists on a kind of fact-value distinction. Norm and cause are horses of very different colors.
Unlike a relativist, however, a materialist does not make an absolute fact-value distinction. Normative principles may be conventions, but they are, in a sense, necessary conventions. We need values so we can cooperate in order to survive and prosper. (It should be noted that I take a more expansive definition of "need" and "prosperity" than is usually meant by these words; more on that later. There is also an intriguing question of why, if morality is so good for us, does it so often seem such a burden? Karl Marx and others supplied some interesting ingredients for an answer to that question; more on that later as well.)
By the same token, we don't entirely choose our values. They are a legacy of the past. We have the values that we have because of the way our society evolved over history to meet our needs. Conceiving of the fact-value distinction in this way, making normative universals immanent properties of human institutions, allows us to reintroduce metaphysics to politics.
Our precise conception of what matter is and how it evolves over time will have important ethical and political ramifications. Metaphysical speculation of this sort has the potential to answer pressing questions about determinism and free will, mind and matter. It can inform discussions of how societies develop and how political decisions should be made.
More on all this later!
Monday, April 5, 2010
A Spoonful of Cynicism
I hate blogs. Hate them. Why am I writing one, then? Mostly to vent, like Lear shaking his fist at the heavens; partly to show the world that yes, Virginia, you can have correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation on the Internet.
This is a blog for people who hate blogs. At least it is if it becomes a long-term thing. Who knows? I might give up on it when I decide I hate it, which, given the major premise of the work, seems rather on the likely side. We'll see.
Do you know what I miss? Essay writing. Crisp, tight, ad unguem. I miss writing that is formal enough to publish, yet personal enough for the average educated reader to ken. I miss topic paragraphs and allusions and wordplay. I miss writing that has a point.
For example, Paul Krugman is one of the few voices on the New York Times' opinion page who makes an ounce of sense and isn't annoying as hell. (Even if he is a phrenologist.) Still, I read his column, not his blog. I don't need Paul Krugman's opinion every single day of the week. A series of thematically related yet topically selective expatiations is all I ask.
It irritates me that blogs are seen by an alarmingly large segment of the public, of whatever political persuasion, as the wave of the future, a technological force majeure. Blogs, it is said, will eventually supplant the traditional media (be it conceived as liberal, corporate, freemason, or whatever), ushering in a new utopia of chrome and neon and penis enlargement.
The reality is that, to the extent that they have had any impact on human society, blogs have contributed to the erosion of traditional media -- which actually pay reporters to gather information -- while adding nothing but distortion and pontification (typically of the most puerile and uninformed variety).
What you will get from me, to put it plainly, is simply a series of essays or columns or just plain rants. Every so often, I will choose some topic that interests or provokes me, and attempt to analyze it or argue about it.
I will not bore you with excessive details from my personal life, although I may regale you with some or other anecdote that I find amusing, revealing, funny, or just plain weird. By way of introduction, I will say that I am 28 years old, a white male of Jewish extraction, though atheist in belief. I am politically progressive, though in a perhaps surprisingly unconventional way, a gay guy (deal with it, assholes), loyal but often stubborn and irascible.
I emerged from the darkest pits of suburban Long Island, that alienated wasteland of postmodernity, and attended college at Sarah Lawrence in Westchester, New York. I have done some freelance reporting (Here are some links to my work: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/10/117_54131.html, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2010/04/160_55501.html) I am currently finishing up an MA in Philosophy.
Finally, please note that I am theoretical in my orientation. That is, I usually interpret the world by applying some larger idea to particular things, showing how details fit together systemically. If this turns you off, well, don't read it. Right now, I would describe my thinking as a kind of "formal materialism," for want of a better term. What does that mean? A subject for another column.
Be seeing you....
This is a blog for people who hate blogs. At least it is if it becomes a long-term thing. Who knows? I might give up on it when I decide I hate it, which, given the major premise of the work, seems rather on the likely side. We'll see.
Do you know what I miss? Essay writing. Crisp, tight, ad unguem. I miss writing that is formal enough to publish, yet personal enough for the average educated reader to ken. I miss topic paragraphs and allusions and wordplay. I miss writing that has a point.
For example, Paul Krugman is one of the few voices on the New York Times' opinion page who makes an ounce of sense and isn't annoying as hell. (Even if he is a phrenologist.) Still, I read his column, not his blog. I don't need Paul Krugman's opinion every single day of the week. A series of thematically related yet topically selective expatiations is all I ask.
It irritates me that blogs are seen by an alarmingly large segment of the public, of whatever political persuasion, as the wave of the future, a technological force majeure. Blogs, it is said, will eventually supplant the traditional media (be it conceived as liberal, corporate, freemason, or whatever), ushering in a new utopia of chrome and neon and penis enlargement.
The reality is that, to the extent that they have had any impact on human society, blogs have contributed to the erosion of traditional media -- which actually pay reporters to gather information -- while adding nothing but distortion and pontification (typically of the most puerile and uninformed variety).
What you will get from me, to put it plainly, is simply a series of essays or columns or just plain rants. Every so often, I will choose some topic that interests or provokes me, and attempt to analyze it or argue about it.
I will not bore you with excessive details from my personal life, although I may regale you with some or other anecdote that I find amusing, revealing, funny, or just plain weird. By way of introduction, I will say that I am 28 years old, a white male of Jewish extraction, though atheist in belief. I am politically progressive, though in a perhaps surprisingly unconventional way, a gay guy (deal with it, assholes), loyal but often stubborn and irascible.
I emerged from the darkest pits of suburban Long Island, that alienated wasteland of postmodernity, and attended college at Sarah Lawrence in Westchester, New York. I have done some freelance reporting (Here are some links to my work: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/10/117_54131.html, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2010/04/160_55501.html) I am currently finishing up an MA in Philosophy.
Finally, please note that I am theoretical in my orientation. That is, I usually interpret the world by applying some larger idea to particular things, showing how details fit together systemically. If this turns you off, well, don't read it. Right now, I would describe my thinking as a kind of "formal materialism," for want of a better term. What does that mean? A subject for another column.
Be seeing you....
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