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"Eros Is Like,
Sooo Cool..."
Pretentious Bastards In College Discussions
by Adam Mathes
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Of course, I expected a class entitled "Freedom and Eros in Philosophy and Art" to be a class in intellectually spanking the monkey. I mean it has the word "Eros" in the title and the course description used the phrase "fundamentally opposed philosophical visions."
It's not that I didn't expect college to be a big racket, even at a "good" $32,200-a-year institution. I'm not complaining about that. I'll take a big waste of time over the real world any day.
And it's not like I pretend to not be an intellectual snob. I mean, of course I am; I'm an over-privileged white guy attending an elite college, but at least I don't take myself seriously.
But I never imagined a required humanities course could be as horrific as it actually is.
Apparently, Plato's work is the ultimate skin mag for young minds in the mood to beat the cerebral meat. Give The Republic to twenty kids with inflated egos and overdeveloped vocabularies, put them in a "discussion section," and you get anything but discussion. The students try so very, very hard to sound intelligent by babbling incoherently without actually knowing or saying a damned thing. Comments like:
"When questioning Plato's attitude towards art in general and abstract art in particular, I think it is important to look at the level of removal from the forms. One of Plato's primary criticisms of art was that not only was it an imitation of the forms, but an imitation of an imitation of the forms...Would he have viewed Picasso's interpretation, as reflected on canvas, as simply a further distortion of the forms by emotion? I don't know..."
and...
"Plato upholds the preeminence of mathematics in his ascent while he denies the place of poetry (and the moderation it inspires) in this same ascent. To Plato, poetry provides for education only insofar as it can mold the spirit. Plato asserts that poetry does not aid reason because it is not involved in the dialectic process of transcendence."
... are not only common, but encouraged and actually required to get a passing grade.
It's the intellectual equivalent of preadolescent boys who have just found a stash of porno mags, and are jerking it like there is no tomorrow.
"What would Socrates say if he were here?" All I know is that if Socrates was here, and tried to have a dialogue with me, it would go something like this:
SOCRATES : Then, if an individual has these same three parts in his soul, we will expect him to be correctly called by the same names as the city if he has the same conditions in them?
ADAM: No. Now SHUT the FUCK UP, you annoying little molester of young boys.
Now, I'm not a violent person, but at this point I would kick him. Hard. Then I would proceed to beat him senseless with any blunt object I could find, all the while asking him, "Do you see the world of forms now, asshole? Do you?"
Even the professor has animosity towards the students. At least once a lecture he discusses a desire to severely beat students in this class as an example to illustrate a concept. "We have an intuitive sense of what is 'good' for us and what is 'bad' for us. If I take a large mallet and beat this student until she is a bloody shell of a human, we intuitively see this as 'bad' for that person." Sure, the first time he used this as an example we all laughed, but by the eighth time, it was a little scary.
He once spent five minutes going into graphic detail about what he wanted to do to those that sleep in the back of the class.
"And I would tighten the vise around the head, their screams of agony and pain only encouraging me to tighten, tighten, tighten. But do these thoughts make me a bad person if I don't actually act on them?"
My other classes are not much better. In my "accelerated" writing class I was forced to peer edit an argumentative piece. After reading three uninspired paragraphs on how Clinton's moral transgressions do not affect his leadership abilities, the next paragraph began with "Wrong!" and then proceeded to discuss why Clinton should be impeached just because he had some intern blow him (sure it talked about obstruction of justice but we all know that's bullshit.) If the piece had presented an interesting reason for impeachment, like Clinton should be impeached for giving Lewinsky Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, maybe I could have overlooked it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for breaking the grammatical rules, if there's some valid reason. However, there is never a valid reason to start a paragraph with "Wrong!" True, it does an excellent job of making sure the piece has voice. However, adding the voice of a braindead, stuck-up, valley girl is not a valid reason to do anything.
My real problem is that college is a mass orgy of mutual mental masturbation, and I'm tired of stroking it. The sad thing is, I haven't even made it through the first quarter yet. (Let's not get into the endurance issue, it's a touchy subject.)
Adam Mathes whines despite his ridiculously privileged life.
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