Fruit Pie the Logician

When I was an undergraduate at MSU, I had an atypically short period of being "undecided" in terms of my major. Most other misdirected undergraduates languish for a good 2 years until finally being forced to declare one major or another - me, I went right for the throat after one semester and dedicated myself to earning a degree in Philosophy.

He's in the phone book under "Socrates"

Of course, anyone who has read more than 3 posts in this blog knows that that didn't work out particularly well.  I changed my major to English not 4 months after declaring for Philosophy, and it's a good thing too, because philosophy ain't what it used to be.  

In high school, I was lulled in by reading Socrates - well actually I read Plato, but Plato said he was just writing down what Socrates said, so let's not waste too much time on that - and a randomized sample of other philosophers hand-picked to appeal to high school students - Plato, DesCartes, Nietzche,  Sartre - generally forward thinkers with revolutionary concepts or exciting narrative presentations.  

Naturally, what I actually fell in love with were the words, the style, and the notion of metonymy, but at the time you could not have told me that I was not destined to be a philosopher.  

Also, Roadhouse kept coming on TV, and I think I rented it a couple times, and I thought Patrick Swayze's Dalton had a pretty good thing going. Of course, he held a BA in Philosophy from NYU and he spent his time chucking people out of bars, so that should tell you something of the career prospects for a Philosophy major. 

Oiled up like the greasy boy lover of a Greek logician

When I got to college, I discovered that the game had changed.  It was widely conceded that the great unknowable questions were in fact pretty unknowable ("why" being the quintessential reducto-ad-mortem example), and that the best any Philosopher could really contend with were issues of logic.  

The problem for me is that I am not a particularly logical person.  Although I respect facts and evidence, I am not easily persuaded by reason. I am one of those people that religious pundits point to when they're saying that people "take science on faith" because I'm no scientist but I trust in scientific results.  I'm much more affected by personal experience and emotional appeals than I am by matters of black-and-white truth.  In other words, I'm a lot more McCoy than Spock. 

Exactly

My first Semester of Philosophy was spent reading the pre-Socratics - Diogenes, Democritus, Anaxagoras, and so on - very ancient, very dead men who went around postulating that the earth was a piece of wood floating on water, that life was the conflict between the animate and the inanimate, and that ducks weighed more than witches.  Good fun for the whole family!  

After that, I blew off a long and tedious DesCartes class (which I nearly failed) and anxiously awaited the opportunity to sign up for classes that taught the really cool modern stuff - the stuff that Philosophy studies should be: dressing in black slacks and berets, growing a soul patch, and smoking exotically flavored cigarettes while drinking absinthe. 

 Your professor and lover

But first I had to get through logic, and that was the straw that broke this camel's back.  Again, I'm just not very logical.  In Vegas, I play roulette tables that "feel" right.  I navigate a car by intuition. I majored in English, for god's sake.  

So when I got to the logic class and we started talking about syllogisms, I was all like "Oh man, awesome, 'cause like, if Socrates is a man, and man is mortal, then Socrates is mortal man - I can dig it, man."  To which my professor replied, "yes, but also:  If A and B then C, so if B but not A then not C, and if C then B then A, and if B but not C then not A, and if C and B the A, and I before E except after C and in sounds of A as in neighbor and weigh."

As this diagram clearly proves, you're not only wrong, but also gay

So I gave up on a brilliant Philosophy career in order to go have a stunning and meteoric flight in Arts and Letters.  Now, in my unemployment, I'm free to sit at coffee shops or dark taverns with the unemployed philosophy majors and discuss heady white-tower things that don't concern the unemployed auto workers at the other end of the bar who would just as soon beat our privileged asses than to listen to us spout our asinine academic rhetoric.

The strange thing for me is that I expect others to bear the burden of proof while I tend to work in a murky sort of empathetic gestalt.  I remember decrying the Iraq war because there was no proof of WMD's while at the same time George Bush went on about his own gut reaction to the business, and I ground my teeth over thousands that were going to die on someone's (completely wrong) hunch.  At the same time, I couldn't really counter the arguments without having first-hand experience in the matter myself except to say with equal ambiguity that the whole thing felt wrong and contrived. I happened to be right, but all that means is that I guessed correctly - there was very little method to my madness.

 I am driven with a mission from God, who sounds a lot like Dick Cheney on a PA

However, I'm glad for my time spent studying philosophy - as much as I just feel my way through situations, I did learn a little bit about the value of evidence and the weight of reason.  I managed to pick up a little self control and a lot of objectivity, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.  At the end of the day though, I realized that you can't fit a square peg in a round hole, and so changing my major and abandoning the study of logic and reason was probably the most rational and logical thing I've ever done.

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