if i had one wish for academia, it would be that the interactions there would be more fully human, that more people - professors, students, administrators, staff, all - could be and show more fully who they really are, what they have been or are going through, what they want. i think that people there in general do not fully connect with one another, or show themselves; they are hedged about by conventions and rules and norms and constraints designed to preclude that. i think this misunderstands and harms learning.
i've often experienced the whole thing as an artificial pseudo-environment, like a pseudo-happy virtual reality written by programmers, a zone insulated in imagination even from the human things that are being researched or theorized. any outbreak of the personal or the urgent seems impertinent or transgressive. i sort of don't see how people live or think like that.
you know, professors or more are less just like factory workers or whatever it may be. they fall in love and split up; they struggle with addictions or obsessions or depressions; people they love die or are otherwise lost; they've got problems with their kids or their parents; they're badly in debt, and so on. you'd never know this at all, most days, unless a crisis breaks out, and i think among the auto mechanics or maids or something, people are more into facing the realities of human life and have the language to express them.
and then, while i'm hoping, i hope the writing that emerges becomes more fully human in all these dimensions, that it comes to more frankly acknowledge its human origins and human audience, that it comes to more fully express the real thoughts, real emotions, real experiences, real suffering and real joy, of the people who make it, and finds those things more fully in the people who read it. the people i love to read the most - montaigne, for example, or emerson, or pascal, or kierkegaard - really did that, each in his own way. we still can if we resolve to. and particularly in philosophy: if the reality of human life and the life of the author or teacher aren't connected to what is expressed, our subject-matter has been lost.
the place often seems unreal to me, and that is what makes it untrue. there are many models; what if you heard a professor say something like this?
i just wish we talked more like humans living in this world: to students, to one another, at the watercooler or in our books. i don't see why we shouldn't.
