Category Archives: Philosophy

Sometime I will try to consider why I have a soft spot for philosophy and why had I been a precocious child, when asked that question—what do you want to be when you grow up—I would have said, why a philosopher of course as if that were a worthy and respected occupation like being a fireman or baseball player or financial tycoon or any of the other things that little boys want to be. As it were though, I don’t recall ever having been asked what it was I wanted to be by anyone least of all by my parents.  Perhaps that is what made me philosophical.

But I have read quite a bit of it.  I have even read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit whole and in parts on several occasions.  This book is so incomprehensible that other books have been written about it that are nothing but line by line or paragraph by paragraph exegesis, or retranslations of it into other words.  Unfortunately these books are more incomprehensible than the original.  And while I would never say I understood anything of what this book says, by which I mean I would never dare to claim to say the book says this or that, I did by dint of immersal come to sense the general drift of the argument.  In fact I do believe that this may be one of the most repetitious, in a profound sense, works ever written, the only problem being one is not at all sure of what is being repeated.

In any case, one day while reading Hegel, I began slowly to chuckle and then to laugh deep down into my belly.  I do believe I am one of the few persons alive who has ever laughed at Hegel.  Not that I believe Hegel was capable of telling a joke or if he was capable,  that one would no doubt have walked out from sheer fatigue, midway through it.  No, and I mean no disrespect, but I found myself laughing at his bringing to bear, with all manner of pulleys, hoists, gyros, tubes, levers and cranks, his massive Teutonic apparatus upon the topic of Phrenology and its claim to be a science.

 Nobody today—or at least I hope not—believes that phrenology that claimed one could know the character of a person by reading the lumps, bumps, pits and curves of the skull is a science.  But during Hegel’s day, phrenology had become quite scientific looking what with all manner of charts and graphs.  That’s why I laughed I think to see Hegel all strenuously and seriously bring to bear his gigantic Teutonic apparatus on something as transparently stupid—one now feels—as phrenology.  It was, I strain for an analogy, rather like watching the entire American nuclear force depositing itself on a hapless flea.

 Perhaps as is frequently the case with a laugh, one has to be there, and while the following can in no way supply the full sensation of the movement of his Teutonic apparatus, it may supply at least a glimmering:

 The skull-bone is not an organ of activity, nor even a `speaking’ movement. We neither commit theft, murder, etc. with the skull-bone, nor does it in the least betray such deeds by a change of countenance, so that the skull-bone would become a speaking gesture. Nor has this immediate being the diminish the organ, whether it would make it coarser and thicker or finer. From the fact that it remains undetermined how the cause is constituted, it is equally left undetermined how the effect is produced in the skull, whether it is an enlarging or a narrowing and falling-in of the latter. When this influence is defined, as it were, more imposingly as a ‘stimulation’, it is still undetermined whether this takes place by swelling, like the effect of a cantharides plaster, or by shrivelling, like the effect of vinegar. All views of this kind can be supported by plausible grounds, for the organic relation which just as much plays a part accommodates one view as readily as another, and is indifferent to all this cleverness.

Now if this is not good for a laugh, I don’t know what is.  I mean,  The skull-bone is not an organ of activity, nor even a `speaking’ movement!  What a hoot!

Sometime in the summer of 72, I guess it must have been, I got a call from the State College asking if I wanted to be a Teaching Assistant.  The pay was freaking pathetic.  But who was I to complain.  I was maybe 26 years old and had never had a credit card, though they weren’t around as much back then.  But I didn’t have a checking account either.  I had a savings account.  I would put money in it, and when I needed some I would go to the bank and check out some hard cash.

I would put this money in a Prince Albert can and dole it out to myself.  I got pissed when the bank started charging me for withdrawing cash more than a couple of times a month from my savings account.  So I doubled the amount I took out and stashed the money in the Prince Albert can.

The most money I had made at that point had been working as a brick mason tender.  I got about a 1000 a month for that; only about 650 for being an Assistant Manager at a Newberry’s Department.  They would actually hand me a little pay envelope with cash in it down to the penny.  When I worked the punch press I would go to the bank on Friday and cash the check.  One day I got upset; that was hard work and it didn’t feel like I was getting paid enough.  So I asked the woman at the window if it was maybe possible to get paid in gold.  I wanted something heavy, not this light as air paper stuff.  But she said no that was not possible though she could give me a roll of quarters if I wanted something heavier.  I said no because I didn’t what use I would have for a fucking roll of quarters.

Still, even though the pay was piss poor, being a TA at the State College would give me enough to fill my minimal needs.  While I kicked in some money time to time for food, I wasn’t paying rent for the room in my parents’ basement.  So all I needed was money for some clothes now and then, for gas, for car insurance, for an occasional cup of coffee, a very occasional movie, and cigarettes.  Now I would have to buy books, but I could check most of those out of the library and gas would be less since I would be TA-ing only three days a week.  And to top it off, as long as I was TA-ing, I would get my graduate student fees paid for me. Right before fall quarter I quit my job on the loading docks of the Broadway Department store.

 I figured I should dress up to teach, so I bought a couple of new pairs of jeans and some new blue work shirts that I wore all the time but not tucked in, and a new pair of work boots of the kind I had been wearing for years.  Thankfully, when we had our first meeting, I saw the other TA’s must have been about as broke as I was because I didn’t feel out of place sartorially. 

Our supervisor came in wearing an embroidered blue work shirt, jeans and cowboy boots.  He put his feet up on the table, kicked back, and said mostly, “The students here are politically alienated, intellectually stunted, and emotionally damaged.  Don’t make matters worse.”  That was our orientation to the teaching part.  After that we learned where to get our parking stickers and where our offices were.

I didn’t have exactly what’s called an office.  I didn’t have a desk either but a table located in the kitchen of what had formerly been an aparment building.  I could dig it.

I was reading around on consumerism and came across an article that the neo-marxist were wrong about consumerism and the newer hip guys like Baudrillard were right because desire is mediated.  So individuals seek the sacred now in consumer objects and are able to achieve individuation without rigid hierarchies and maximize personal freedom.

Sure desire is mediated; Hegel said that, and maybe the guy does prove the neo-marxists wrong (or at least his version of it ).  But the whole argument is not just wrong but completely absurd:

 First, one can only be free in his system if one has money to buy sacred consumer objects.

Second, since this is true, consumerism of the kind he describes cannot and will not do away with rigid hierarchies until the class structure is modified.

Three, this consumerism that he promotes threatens to eat up the world’s resources; maybe we will have to impose some rigid hierarchies to restrain over consumption.

A patently absurd argument of this kind is possible only if one steps completely into the so-called world of intertexuality.  It is an argument contextualized by the argument it makes against a position it does not understand and so is nothing but a creation of words with absolutely no reference to any known reality.

It’s this kind of stuff that leads the masses to think, if they think at all, that academics live in the “ivory tower” and are generally out of touch with common sense.  The masses for their part do not see that common sense is not reality, but a socially mediated construction.  The consequence of this is that anybody can easily be caught up in a self-satisfying and narcissistically fulfilling web of words.