It is tempting to see the Strumpet as a classic example of what it means to be anti-education. To see him squeal in the face of the Pope's comments is a delight, like watching a small kid being called out for being the obnoxious brat that he is. The one thing that can't be tolerated in the modern world is judgement:
De gustibus non disputandum est.
~
The mis-education of Europe. The 'Rape of Europe,' as the Polish magazine has it, is worth thinking of in light of the rise (again) of the extreme right throughout Europe. One can't but help feel there's something nasty brewing.
Even in polite, supposedly educated circles it is not uncommon to hear the view that the migrants (Refugees? Huh? Is there a difference?) will be the undoing of European civilisation and culture. The fact that Europeans made soap out of other human beings and were involved in a brutal slave trade..no, that cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the dominant and delusional narrative.
Let there be no discussion of the destruction of culture brought about by industrialization and a mindset that found itself conforming to the machine; no question of the relation between science and culture; and, God forbid, no discussion of how late capitalism with its incessant drive for novelty and disruption, its fixation on eradicating any kind of distinction ("pushpin is as good as poetry" as far as the market is concerned) undermines the very possibility of culture (as understood in the old sense of a transmission of forms that represented a shared symbolic order).
~
The introduction by Reitter and Wellmon to Nietzsche's anti-Education is quite brilliant.
At the heart of it is not simply the question of what the university stands for, or what it ought to. There is the more fundamental question of what the purpose of learning is and if that purpose makes any sense against a background culture which either opposes the importance of learning or, more to the point, refuses to even countenance the possibility that it is a question of any relevance in the first place. Get over it, dude.
What kind of life is the life of the mind? Is a one-sided life a life in any recognizable way? This is not just about the career academic, the prostitute who is on the game, but also, and even more so, about the highly specialized expert who stands separated from worldly concerns with his or her genuine (or cultivated) disdain for ordinary people and ordinary life.
Is it possible that the university, along with the media machine, only aims to cultivate a false individuality, a commodified individual, a talking head that knows a few big phrases, a few mathematical tricks (Roemer calls this 'mathiness' rather than mathematical skills). To what purpose? That is not the question we have been trained to ask!
Morishima: The good and the bad use of mathematics.
The belief (belief!) that formalism, abstraction and detachment offered the only path to truth gets displaced by the more common notion: the model or our way of thinking is internally consistent and sod the truth. The truthfulness of our methods is what counts.
'Culture and knowledge had been uncoupled from values and ethics and subordinated to material gain under a crudely understood earthly happiness.'
The 'drive to knowledge' alone would be just as unhealthy as the hatred of knowledge.
De gustibus non disputandum est.
~
The mis-education of Europe. The 'Rape of Europe,' as the Polish magazine has it, is worth thinking of in light of the rise (again) of the extreme right throughout Europe. One can't but help feel there's something nasty brewing.
Even in polite, supposedly educated circles it is not uncommon to hear the view that the migrants (Refugees? Huh? Is there a difference?) will be the undoing of European civilisation and culture. The fact that Europeans made soap out of other human beings and were involved in a brutal slave trade..no, that cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the dominant and delusional narrative.
Let there be no discussion of the destruction of culture brought about by industrialization and a mindset that found itself conforming to the machine; no question of the relation between science and culture; and, God forbid, no discussion of how late capitalism with its incessant drive for novelty and disruption, its fixation on eradicating any kind of distinction ("pushpin is as good as poetry" as far as the market is concerned) undermines the very possibility of culture (as understood in the old sense of a transmission of forms that represented a shared symbolic order).
~
The introduction by Reitter and Wellmon to Nietzsche's anti-Education is quite brilliant.
At the heart of it is not simply the question of what the university stands for, or what it ought to. There is the more fundamental question of what the purpose of learning is and if that purpose makes any sense against a background culture which either opposes the importance of learning or, more to the point, refuses to even countenance the possibility that it is a question of any relevance in the first place. Get over it, dude.
What kind of life is the life of the mind? Is a one-sided life a life in any recognizable way? This is not just about the career academic, the prostitute who is on the game, but also, and even more so, about the highly specialized expert who stands separated from worldly concerns with his or her genuine (or cultivated) disdain for ordinary people and ordinary life.
Is it possible that the university, along with the media machine, only aims to cultivate a false individuality, a commodified individual, a talking head that knows a few big phrases, a few mathematical tricks (Roemer calls this 'mathiness' rather than mathematical skills). To what purpose? That is not the question we have been trained to ask!
Morishima: The good and the bad use of mathematics.
The belief (belief!) that formalism, abstraction and detachment offered the only path to truth gets displaced by the more common notion: the model or our way of thinking is internally consistent and sod the truth. The truthfulness of our methods is what counts.
'Culture and knowledge had been uncoupled from values and ethics and subordinated to material gain under a crudely understood earthly happiness.'
The 'drive to knowledge' alone would be just as unhealthy as the hatred of knowledge.
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