All this talk about the metaphysics of presence made me think of last semester, when I had a few bald patches here and there from tearing my hair out over philosophy. I was an IA for the FYS regarding human nature, and it made me roll my eyes as much then as it does now. Because I love to torture myself, I went back to the text we used (written by Thomas "Salt of the Earth" Wall, I loved that guy) to see what I was supposed to have learned along with my freshmen.
I remember being very specifically annoyed by the discussion on metaphysics. As far as I'm is concerned, it is useless to yammer on about whether reality is only an illusion or whatever it is these guys worry themselves over. I like Descartes and his je ponse, donc je suis business. I suppose it's nice and reductive, which is really my kind of theory. I think about stuff, therefore I have to exist, because if I didn't, I wouldn't. So when we were discussing the idea of "I'm here, so I exist" I couldn't have been happier. Finally, something that is the truth. We won't even get into the logical existence of God chitchat that some of this stuff leads to, I just ate dinner.
So you can imagine, then, the eye-rolling headache I gave myself when Nietzsche popped up. I had this teacher last semester, a vertiable vampire of a guy, who drew a lot of his heavy, supposedly dramatically life altering quotations (spoken in a halting, sincere voice, meant to impact upon us the importance of the words escaping his lips) from Nietzsche. It could just be the melodramatic style surrounding both Professor Goth's love for the man and 'ol Friedrich's theories themselves, but really any mention of the fella makes me want to hire a medium, have her channel him, and explain that he's as full of BS as anyone else who has ever developed a philosophy. Look what it did to Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine.
I keep out of philosophy. Except in I Heart Huckabees...Dustin Hoffman HAS to exist, or else I wouldnt have a favorite actor.
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Alas, poor Yorick and all, but the "I'm here, so I exist" line isn't really true in any demonstrable sense, and not because the evidence of your existence could be faked thanks to some evil demon (which is true enough, I suppose), but because good old Descartes had jack taco to say about language as a medium, which meant he didn't do much to deal with the fundamental flaw of the cogito as a proof:
If "I think" is to be "therefore" anything, I need to know who this "I" is (which is far from certain and knowable, as the "I" tends to be a pretty porous structure), and more importantly, I need to know what and how "thinking" works. And sadly, thinking requires a language - i.e., we think in words. But of course, we didn't invent those words; we didn't invent the language in which are brains coalesce electrical signals into something recognizable (literally re-cognizable). We got all that language from others, which means that when we think, we think only in so much as there are many other others out there who give us the gift of language and make it possible for us to think at all.
And incidentally, while I would hate to embrace any reading of Nietzsche as a systematic philosopher, I think that if you wanted to phone him up on Crossing Over with Jon Edwards and tell him he's full of shit, like all the other philosophers, I think he'd just say: "exactly my point!" and then maybe fade away or mumble something about syphilis.
Incidentally, I read a bit of apocrypha that said he was institutionalized a year to the day after he finished reading Notes From the Underground. So watch out for that one.
The second paragraph is why i keep out of philosophy..but it does make some sense that our capacity to ponder our own existence is limited by those who have already given us the language to think with.
That is the fun (and by fun, i mean endlessly frustrating) aspect of philosophy, it is alternately full of shit and so stubbornly right all the time, that it makes me want to scream. Its all theory, and theory is both wrong and right at the same time.
Thanks for the thought provoking comment, ken.
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