{"id":18578,"date":"2014-05-15T16:56:08","date_gmt":"2014-05-15T20:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=18578"},"modified":"2014-05-17T18:16:07","modified_gmt":"2014-05-17T22:16:07","slug":"science-dads-corrupting-the-youth-an-apology-for-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/05\/15\/science-dads-corrupting-the-youth-an-apology-for-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"Science Dads & Corrupting the Youth: an apology for philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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So-krates, corrupted by the youth?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Earlier this week David <\/a>wrote about science dads and their dadsplaining: \u201cScience Guys ask us to question everything and everyone but them. Or, more precisely, they are but mere men (almost always men) delivering a message that they see as self-evident,\u201d he writes. Science Guys often don\u2019t have a lot of respect for philosophy, because they think, as Neil Degrasse Tyson (in)famously said in his interview with Nerdist<\/a>, philosophy is too question-y and not \u2018splainy enough. Philosophy \u201ccan really mess you up,\u201d as Tyson said, because there\u2019s \u201ctoo much question-asking\u201d and not enough, well, solutions or action, I guess. In Tyson\u2019s view, philosophy messes you up because \u201cyou are distracted by your questions so that you cannot move forward\u201d and be a \u201cproductive contributor\u201d to society or knowledge. [1]<\/p>\n

As it has been institutionalized in both the Western canon and the academy, philosophy is just another Dad dadsplaining. As many philosophers will argue, philosophy, unlike the other namby-pamby humanities disciplines, is a lot like science; we\u2019re not stuck with our heads in \u201cthe text,\u201d we really know things about the world! (I really like this<\/a> takedown of that view of philosophy.) \u00a0But in the same way science dads betray the practice of science, philosophical dadsplaining betrays the practice of philosophy. Read in a certain way, Plato’s portrayal of Socrates shows us that philosophy is the opposite of dads: it’s about corrupting the youth (which is what Socrates is charged of in the Apology) and getting distracted so you can\u2019t move forward, or so you take the oblique path. [2]<\/p>\n

In the Apology (here, apology means defense), Socrates defends himself against several accusations, which include corrupting the youth. How might Socrates corrupt the youth? Well, he asks a lot of questions. And he never really arrives at many firm answers. The early Platonic dialogues, which portray Socrates in conversation with one or more other men (or, in the case of the Meno, boys), never manage to find a sufficient, conclusive answer for the question(s) they investigate. For example, Euthyphro never really tells us what piety is, though we know some things it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s telling, perhaps, that Socrates employs just this form (called elenchus), in addressing the specific accusation that he corrupts the youth; he leads Meletus through a series of questions about \u201cimproving the youth.\u201d Read in this way, Socrates corrupts the youth because he messes them up with too many questions and not enough answers.<\/p>\n

Philosophy, as Socrates practices it, also prevents him from moving forward…literally. In Plato\u2019s Symposuim, Socrates and Aristodemus (the narrator\u2019s friend) are on their way to a party when \u201cSocrates, becoming absorbed in his own thoughts by the way, fell behind him as they went; and when my friend began to wait for him he bade him go on ahead\u201d (174d). Socrates stopped in his tracks so he could work through an idea that struck him as he and Aristodemus were walking to Agathon\u2019s party. And he staid there until he was finished thinking. Practicing philosophy prevented Socrates from moving forward, from reaching his destination, from joining others in their sociality.<\/p>\n

Philosophy can really mess you up and prevent you from being a \u201cproductive contributor\u201d to society…and that\u2019s what\u2019s great about it. It makes you stop and think, which can prevent you from following the paths and\/or scripts (of thinking, of behaving) that best serve, say, the neoliberal university, capitalism, white supremacy, and so on. I mean, who wants to contribute to those things? If those are the paths we\u2019re supposed to follow forward, stalled and oblique trajectories seem like much better options.<\/p>\n

Let me give one brief example of how getting \u201cmessed up\u201d in questions that don\u2019t move obviously forward is absolutely urgent and necessary. So, Tyson and his interviewers think philosophy messes us up because it devolves into a quibble about the definitions of words. Yeah, sure, some academic philosophy is like that. And most of the time that sort of philosophical work is very boring to non-specialists (and, uh, to specialists too\u2026) But when we\u2019re discussing, say, the use of the singular \u201cthey,\u201d this isn\u2019t just some quibble over language; it\u2019s about a tool trans* and genderqueer people need to prevent violence of all sorts–linguistic, legal, psychological, and physical. Pronouns can be a matter of life and death, of violence and justice. (Jules Hamara<\/a> gave a superb paper on this at the DePaul Philosophy Graduate Conference this past February.) So in debating whether and how \u201cthey,\u201d a traditionally singular word, can be plural, we might be quibbling about words, but those words really, really matter.<\/p>\n

Now, this quibble about words doesn\u2019t necessarily move us forward in the ways that the academy wants–it\u2019s not going to bring in huge grants or donations, for example. It might even be seen as a waste of resources–who needs such humanistic inquiry when STEM will save us because jobs! But this so-called waste or deviation from the profitable, \u2018productive\u2019 path forward, this might be what it means to corrupt the youth these days. Corrupting the youth might mean something like failing to produce profitable, exploitable workers\/human capital. It might mean helping students develop other ways of knowing, as David advocates for at the end of his Science Dads piece.<\/p>\n

In the end what I\u2019m arguing is that philosophy can, at its best (which it often isn\u2019t, but that\u2019s another matter), mess us up and keep us from moving forward. That is, it can interrupt the instrumentalization of knowledge for violent institutions. It can, to use Sara Ahmed\u2019s term, be a practice of \u201cwillfulness<\/a>\u201d–of standing in the way, of being a problem (as Du Bois would put it). Perhaps the only solutions to a society as messed up as ours will be found in apparently messed up ideas or paths that don\u2019t seem to move directly forward. And philosophy might be just the thing to help mess us up and stop us in our tracks.<\/p>\n

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.<\/em><\/p>\n

[1] I know Tyson has backed down from and qualified his statements in this interview. But I want to take the strongest, most overstated form of these claims and argue that yeah, philosophy is precisely those things, and that\u2019s why it matters.<\/p>\n

[2] Socrates and his dadsplainer student Plato certainly had their flaws. I\u2019m not endorsing Socratic and\/or Platonic thought as a whole. I\u2019m only using these two moments in Plato\u2019s description of Socrates as examples or ideals of what philosophy can be, but actually often isn\u2019t, especially in Plato.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week David wrote about science dads and their dadsplaining: \u201cScience Guys ask us to question everything and everyone but them. Or, more precisely, they are but mere men (almost always men) delivering a message that they see as self-evident,\u201d he writes. Science Guys often don\u2019t have a lot of respect for philosophy, because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18578"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18584,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18578\/revisions\/18584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}