On the fear of the intellect

If you can survive that poem, then you can probably survive this blog post.  Probably.

So this post was mostly a product of my reflections upon a rather poorly received and darker post that I published a couple of months ago.  If only the human project's obstacles were limited to not knowing what to do with the intellect.

In a world so dominated by conscientious educative processes, the pervasive fear of the essentially intellectual is perplexing, if not disheartening.  It's one of the greatest paradoxes at the fringes of human understanding.

From primary school play yards to international academic conferences, the fringes of human comprehensive potential tend to mark the beginnings of the antitheses to all things intellectual.

I have no problem admitting that I myself have a bit of an axe to grind regarding this particular historical tendency.  I've been told more than once to make my writing more accessible to my colleagues, particularly when broaching philosophers and philosophy in my academic writings.  Subsequently, I have lost more than a couple hours of sleep contemplating the question of the "Doctor of Philosophy."  Philia sophia isn't something one should limit to business hours for a corporate institution from Monday to Friday, if one's even getting that far.

I for one will probably never wear that honorific, except maybe in the final hour of written applications for a faculty position.  It's Adam.  You can call me soap if you want, or whatever; I give my students the same introduction.  My working class parents named me after A. J. Foyt; I'll put as much care into my name association as my parents did.  (I'll probably be publishing under a pseudonym for most of my more important writing.  A measure of humility and all that; there's gotta be at least one virtue ethicist left.)

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I was on a bit of a Jordan Peterson binge recently, not because I like or agree with the guy, but because I wanted to better understand why he's so maligned, (having been recently maligned myself by individuals with similar political affiliations), in the same way that I read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to better understand why I hate Aristotle.

After a sample of his lectures and reviewing some of his more controversial engagements, I realized that Jordan Peterson has in common that which led to the maligning of Christopher Hitchens, Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Nietzsche, and even Socrates: they all confronted the most sacred irrationalities of their respective epochs with a willing and courageous intellect distinct from their contemporaries.  

It's no coincidence that all of the aforementioned scholars were involved in the project of the academy in one capacity or another, and yet their most defining significance tended to be their willingness and courage to confront their contemporaries' intellectual weaknesses.  It follows that even our academic institutions have the odd tendency to fear the intellect.  The aforementioned scholars likely did not harbor a malicious or sadistic desire to harm their contemporaries (notably, the jury is still out for Peterson); they were all committed to the project of truth, to the honest and open truth of themselves and their interpreted realities.

Thus, even among professional academics, there's a tendency to malign or to reject that which they do not understand, and especially, to mischaracterize phenomena for which their understanding requires overcoming or transcending a certain established personal cognitive dissonance.  E.g., I've witnessed far too few academic freedom defenses in university institutions in the support of furthering the human project.  Instead, I've witnessed graduate students at my own institution using social justice education professors' writings against them for personal and political gain.  (Don't get me started on what's become of the university institution of tenure.)

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Essentially, the fear of the intellect, like most fears, tends to arise from the unknown.  Thought experiment: if you were the most intelligent person in the world, how would you know?  How would you validate this?  You could write a bunch of books, requiring you to synthesize and crystallize your understanding.  But only you would have the knowledge of what it meant for you to know what you thought and think you know.  This same problem is partly why I've been perennially skeptical of the concept of "genius."  How can one know that someone is a genius without they themselves having the "genius" necessary to appreciate this alleged "genius"?  By such logic, ascribing genius can become self-gratifying.  It's a label slapped on seemingly intellectual phenomena for the sake compartmentalization.  It's akin to referring to certain forms of the intellect as "magic."

To have the strongest or most vibrant intellect among your peers is to then also be the most alone.  At best, one could attempt to self- validate their intellect or, as institutionalized in our context, seek a credential among a community of like-intellectuals.  But, the problem remains: at the peak of specialization, you're an island unto yourself.  It's ironic; the beginnings and ends of most academic journeys can be equally plagued by imposter syndrome, plagued by the unknown of the validated and eventually the validity of the unknown.

This follows since, as social animals, our rationality is bound up in our relations. There's a constantly evolving collective rationality among human tribes.  The etymology of that word can be helpful here: its radix, ratio, evokes reckoning/calculating, and in accordance with its more recent mathematical applications, it also bears connotations of "balance."  To say that rationality among human societies is constantly evolving is to imply that these same societies are constantly re-reckoning and re-calculating a balance of their collective believed and practiced interpretation of reality.

Thus, for me, as a teacher, nothing said so far is more alarming than the consequences of this pervasive fear for our students.  It's not too complicated; if one fears the intellect when entrusted with the intellect of others, there're going to be substantial obstacles to the educating potential of those spaces.  E.g., how does one further the project of rationality if they don't appreciate it, or even reject it?  (Why do epistemological historians put so much emphasis on the Enlightenment?)

I've taught classes where I've found myself predisposed to hyper-tentatively introducing cause and effect relationships, as though causality is something essentially dubious.  Like, that's not pro-gression, if we've "already collectively experienced the Enlightenment."  I don't think that this is what Bertrand Russell meant when he disclosed, "I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine."

To conclude, in the earliest days of my writing toward the project of this blog, I wrote about fear (TL;DR death).  The most familiar with death tend to be the most familiar with the aforementioned problem of the intellect, especially with how to overcome this fear.  To face the unknown at the fringes of human understanding is to face one's mortality; I'd quote Tolle here, but it'd be the third (of fourth?) time in this blog.  The so-called philosopher king needs to confront his own mortality, or as Tim Minchin would say, his existence as a "tiny, insignificant, ignorant bit of carbon."