There is a moment in which you loosen things up, look at them from all angles, examine each concept, and itemize the flaws from a given perspective, which you then problematize and then return to the cycle of questioning each assumption and concept there. And then recognizing that this too is a standpoint, you cut that ground out from under your own feet, while taking a step back from that abyss. Eventually this questioning of each standpoint, from some other, becomes a infinite spiral or regress. You call that aporia. My question is, in the name of what is this game performed? And where, when faced with obvious political and economic injustice and chicanery, where do you plant your back foot? In the name of what do you rally others to do what is right and decent, recognizing, of course, that we could evade the issue and sink back into analysis, querying quite nimbly the concepts of decency, courage, action, and sacrifice? Where and in the name of what do you stop the vertiginous theoretical game, go outside the walls of the unversity, take a stand? To continue the game requires justification too. As does the smirk that accompanies it. Academics are now spectators, not players. The ludic lightness is exactly right, given their inconsequence. But as citizens they could well do more.

I should be more temperate, about Zizek in whom the old Hegelian/Marxist praxis still clanks along. But take that as a case in point. Will your fellow Americans, the voters, the tv viewers, the bulk of the reading public find in Hegel and Marx ideals that resonate? We have been so eager to show that we are cosmopolitan, not bourgois, that in academics we (they) have become a strange people apart, talking a strange language, caught up in problems incomprehensible to the average person, while shared ideals like Freedom are perverted daily for want to philosophical critique. I am not suggesting propaganda, but communication, paedia. Philosophy back into the streets like Socrates and Diogenes risking life and limb to debunk Thrasymachus or Leo Strauss. Begin the conversation where you find it, not with Hegel and Marx, or Heidegger and Derrida (read in translation like an intellectual tourist), but with the public discourse from Heritage, Liberty Fund, Cato, American Enterprise, Bradley Foundation. Get in the game beyond the gates.

Tutor:

Glad to see you in these parts again, and that your convictions are as strong as ever.

I can't speak to the theme of aporia, as it's not my area of expertise. And whether or not the academy is broken is a question I can't judge.

You ask, "In the name of what?" and I think it is a worthy question to be asked. It is a question I ask myself everyday (though I ask it in the form of "Toward what?"), and I find little or no solace in the writings of academic thinkers. But are those writings necessarily useless, or counterproductive, simply because they don't strive to answer that question? Pythagoras wasn't striving to tell anyone what to fight for when he wrote the equation relating the lengths of the sides of a triangle. Was he guilty of aporia?

The insight I wanted to communicate was that there is value in speech that doesn't aim at any particular course of action, that does not try to tell us what is right. Isn't that the nature of your Sokrates? To ask questions and to poke through the veil of prejudice? Like yourself, he is my hero, not Derrida, or Hegel.

Maybe the question can be answered succinctly, after all: In the name of what? In the name of discovery, in the name of thinking up what you do not already know, or want to know.

As citizens and as humans, we make moral choices, and we should make them morally, however you conceive that (I consider this a descriptive statement, not a normative one). I'm not trying to give anyone an excuse for being an asshole, by calling their behavior "ironic" or "ludic". The public-policy debate, and democracy in general, require a conversation rooted in values--but does the philosopher need to be so rooted? Or can't (s)he think outside the box?

I think so, and that's why I think that "Good, thoughtful essays don't have to give normative direction." If you figure it out, _you_ save humanity.

Good blog! I like your posting style, so your wording. It's good that people are so different and everyone has his own story.

Good blog! I like your posting style, so your wording. It's good that people are so different and everyone has his own story.

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