Random Thoughts

Since I have yet to watch the BBC version of “A Doll’s House” that’s been assigned, I thought I’d just post a collection of random thoughts in response to the Macintyre and Readings articles.

Reading mentions that, in universities, “the drive to push out Ph.D.s within four years continues unabated, despite the fact that there are no jobs for them to occupy, either in the university or elsewhere” (479). We’ve touched on this fact several times in our own discussions, and the tone suggests a tension between an acknowledgment that we don’t expect graduate school to supply us with jobs and indignation that we won’t be employable. In my view this points to a broader tension in the University around money, beginning with the awareness that jobs = money = livelihood and yet discomfort with the idea that we earn money at all, since money is in the service of capitalism and therefore enforces certain kinds of value. Then there is the belief, held within the university institution, that society as a whole should monetarily support universities (because ultimately everyone benefits when some members of society are critically aware) combined with an unwillingness to accept that other people’s ideas of money – exchanging value for value – will be attached to the money which supports the institution. Clearly there are two different discourses operating around the same referent. What this means for the university as a whole I don’t know; I see the problem but I don’t have an alternative to offer. But I do think it’s worth investigating the different levels on which these assumptions operate, because how else can we see another side to the contradiction?

I’m also very curious about the role computers / information technologies play in entrenching the idea of accounting as accountability. Computers run on numbers; they run on quantitative renditions of ideas. While complex systems can be built that allow human interpretation of bigger ideas, information must always be massaged in certain ways in order to integrate it with computer systems. While computer systems of ‘thought’ are getting more and more sophisticated, aren’t they also responsible for promoting ‘interoperability’ and ‘accounting’ so we’re all always on the same page? While this is usually taken for granted as a being good thing, doesn’t it also mask many essential subtleties? As the university becomes more and more engaged with and dependent upon technology, are there ways we can stay critically aware of the flattening effects of technology?

Macintyre, in discussing the position of ethics discussion in the medical sciences etc., writes that “in this realm what is in fact inconclusive intellectual debate nonetheless issues in the practical resolution of problems, a resolution the arbitrariness of which it is the function of both philosophical and professional rhetoric to conceal” (227). For myself, I wonder: what is the point of the philosophizing in the first place if we can’t offer some practical application? Also, isn’t the discussion of ethics an ongoing one? What stands today may not stand tomorrow, even if the decision is arbitrary rather than the best practical decision available at the time given all the factors at play. Isn’t this similar to the process of philosophical debate itself. I wonder whether Readings isn’t more approachable on this topic (even though his argument of ‘dwelling in the tension of the question rather than searching for a single answer’ is similar) in that he seems not to resent the constant forming and re-forming that takes place through the philosophical process. Is philosophy, or critical inquiry, really about a process we value because it can produce new ways of thinking, or ‘results’? Is this too simple an explanation? If it isn’t, why is this such a hard sell?