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I’d say I’ve had a more than normal amount of exchanges in various social media that have been rather unproductive, for a reason that I think goes beyond social media. It’s in fact something that I’ve seen throughout my academic career. And I think it betokens a certain lack of or not using an important skill that I try to foster in my own students and clients when I’m working with them, when it comes to engaging in philosophical discussion.
But it’s something that I would say is a much wider application, because it helps to prevent misunderstandings and talking past each other, which is a rather unproductive use of our linguistic and communicative and even intellectual capacities. We human beings, as for example the Stoics, among many others, tell us are not just rational creatures, but that also means creatures that exist in communities, social creatures, creatures that can have an understanding with each other. And so when understanding is blocked, that’s kind of a problem.
So let me tell you what I’m talking about first, and I’m going to keep it rather generic. I know that it happened in Substack and Twitter, and it also happens occasionally in LinkedIn or Facebook, or even when I’m posting things in YouTube. Typically what’s going on is I am reposting what somebody else has said, and then I am using it as a sort of platform to say the things that I want to say.
I’ll give you just one example of this. I saw somebody who is making some sweeping generalizations about philosophy inside academia and philosophy outside academia. And they were very concerned about the sorts of things that people who are lauding philosophy outside academia say about philosophy inside academia. They thought they were being a bit unfair.
And I was staking out a different position, which is there is no such thing really as philosophy inside academia or philosophy outside academia, because there are indeed people doing philosophy inside and outside both. But the experiences, the situations, what counts as academia, what counts as being outside of it, it’s incredibly varied.
So any sort of generalization that a person wants to make is probably going to not only be wrong in some sense, you know, admit of exceptions, it’s just not going to be all that applicable. And it’ll typically be very reflective of the frame of reference that the person who’s writing it has. Nobody has enough of a frame of reference to be able to generalize in that way in the present day. Really probably, even in the past, one might make those sorts of generalizations because we certainly can indulge in them, but they wouldn’t be very accurate. And I think a lot of people just didn’t know that.
So I weighed in saying that, and then the person was assuming that because I reposted their thing, I’m directly responding to them, which is kind of a bad assumption, because if I was directly responding to them, it would have been a reply statement. to their original post rather than quoting them and then saying, see, here’s part of the problem. Maybe we need to rethink this.
I’ve had other things like this coming up as well. People jump into conversations and think that they’re contributing to the conversation, but they’re really not responding to me as such. They’re responding to the original post which I was not endorsing or saying had gotten things basically right. And then they do respond in a comment to me.
So I had another one piggybacking off of that who did precisely that, and they thought they were contributing to the conversation. They actually used those words. And my response to them was you’re not actually contributing to the conversation. You want to talk to the person who originally posted that, to which I was kind of responding by quoting their post, but actually saying a whole bunch of other things, which you haven’t bothered to engage at all. As a matter of fact, you’re still engaging in that kind of sweeping generalization that I was criticizing.
So this is just one instance out of many. I don’t want to get too hung up on the details of this, but what is the broader problem that shows a kind of carelessness, thoughtlessness, lack of paying attention to things, which could in fact be looked at as a sort of deficit, of a skill or capacity that has to be developed.
It’s something that comes up over and over again when, for example, I teach Platonic dialogues, and I have students who don’t seem to grasp the difference between Socrates repeating what somebody else has said, not because he endorses it, but because he’s actually questioning it and probably saying, thinks that it’s wrong and is about to do his famous Socratic refutation, the elenchus that we see attributed to him as, for better or for worse, one of his key characteristics of
They’re not able to properly differentiate between saying something about somebody else’s ideas and positively affirming those ideas. And that’s a real problem because if you can’t do that, a dialogue effectively becomes a monologue or it just turns into everybody agreeing and you do have different characters, but they’re all saying the same thing. And that definitely isn’t what’s happening in a platonic dialogue. If you think that is what’s happening, you have gone wrong somehow in your reading of it.
And we could say this about all sorts of other things. It doesn’t have to be a dialogue as such. When Aristotle is bringing up somebody else’s point of view, and then shortly after that, he’s going to criticize that point of view, he is not endorsing that point of view, although he might say, well, they’ve got a little bit of correctness to what they’re saying. He’s very good about that sort of thing. So it’s not just when we have different characters speaking. It can also be within the body of a text.
I actually ran into something like this the very first semester that I was student teaching with my mentor who had me and the other TA each give two lectures. And it’s, I don’t remember exactly what book it was. It was something, some article about the Holocaust and God that I was supposed to present. And I was presenting not my point of view, but the author’s point of view. And the author was actually citing somebody else who he disagreed with, who was attributing the guilt for the Holocaust of the Jewish people to Christians, if I remember right.
So I had a woman who came up to me after class, very angry. And she was very upset with me for saying that somehow God was responsible for the Holocaust. I said, I’m not saying anything. This author is saying that another author is saying that. And she could just not get that through her head because she was so upset. She actually went to the chair and complained to him and he took me aside and gave me some advice about how to handle students like that.
But it shows you that there’s a lot of people who just don’t distinguish either because they don’t, simply can’t, in which case this is going to be a really big problem for them in life, or they don’t have much experience in distinguishing, or they haven’t built up those mental muscles, or they’re being careless or kind of lazy, or they’re being tendentious and they’re trying to take offense when no offense is actually intended
In any case, it’s not a very useful way to approach things. And if we want to have good communication about complex and oftentimes tricky and, you know, polemical topics, we really have to be clear about who is saying what and for what reason and responding to who.
And so the fact that it’s other people who claim to be quite interested in philosophy, including a post-grad in philosophy, who are doing it, shows me that this is definitely something we need to concentrate on more. And maybe we need some sort of skill building curriculum to work on that. That might be something that I actually do some writing about later on down the line.
But I think this is a good place to end this. These are some reflections from those recent engagements. But you can see that this is a really perennial human problem that probably isn’t going to go away. But I think we can make some headway into if we’re deliberate and thoughtful ourselves about it and figure out how people wind up going wrong in these ways.
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