It seems I am in a philosophical mood the last days, so I do some
more. On March 29 I linked three (sets of)
articles about philosophers that I liked.
One was about John Searle, in a six part series of
interviews by Harry Kreisler, in a bit I repeat here, mostly:
John Searle (<- Wikipedia) is of the minority of
academic tenured philosophers of the last 50 years who made sense
and wrote clearly. He got most famous for his
Chinese Room
argument (<- Wikipedia), that I dealt with in
my
comments on Leibniz's Monadology and in
On the
question why human beings cannot be computers
(parts 3 and 4).
Searle thinks the answer to the last question is "No",
as I do, but not quite for the same reasons as I, it seems. But
Searle is an interesting and sensible man, and the following six-part
interview by Harry Kreisler is well worth reading if you are
interested in modern analytical philosophy, consciousness, philosophy
of mind, or cognitive science:
Yesterday I translated my
"Body AND mind?" of 1989, that treats some of the problems
Searle spoke of in the above linked interview, and that he wrote
several books and a lot of papers about.
So today I will consider some of Searle's sayings in
that interview, that as I said runs over 6 files, totalling 67 Kb, and
dates back to 1999, that is, the previous millenium and century,
though just, and after the arrival of postmodernism, that Searle also
discussed.
I link the originals I quote, which I quote because I
have to say something about what I quote, indented and blue, and link
them before quoting as follows, with the questions by Harry Kreisler
in another font.
A. Searle-interview 1 of 6 -
Background
B. Searle-interview 2 of 6 - Philosophical Problems
C. Searle-interview 4 of 6 - The Chinese Room Argument
D. Searle-interview 5 of 6 - The University
E. Searle-interview 6 of 6 - Conclusion
F. Afterword
I have no remarks to part 3 of 6 (Being a philosopher)
and do not quote it. I quote from all the other parts, and do so in
the order they appear in the text of the interview. For each part, the
section title is a link to the original of the part from which I
quote. Finally, I have quoted most from "The University" part, for a
reason I explain in my Afterword.
A.
Searle-interview 1
of 6 - Background
- I think a kind of wanting to know how things work
has infected my philosophy, which I got from both of my parents (...)
I think the same holds for me, though this is by the
way. As it was, my parents were
practical philosophers,
and communists, as they also had been in WW-II, in the Dutch communist
resistance. They were moral idealists, and quite intelligent, but
unlike Searle's parents not intellectuals nor highly educated, and
were formed, besides by WW II, by the economical crisis of the
1930ies.
- Now it all comes together for me. I don't see any
distinction between, let's say, mathematics, literature, and
neurobiology. Now I have a big enough scope and a big enough view of
human intellectual enterprise that I don't make the distinction
between these things. And I think my problem, a problem for every
philosopher, is that to do philosophy well you have to know
everything. And I don't know everything. Neither does any other
philosopher. And there's a bad inference from that. That is, it looks
like we've got a built-in problem.
Here Searle is speaking of what made him a philosopher
rather than anything else: wide and varied intellectual interests. The
same holds for me.
Next, Searle is talking about his teens, in the late
1940ies:
- And we were, now that I think about it, for sixteen-year-olds, we
were pretty self-consciously intellectual. That is, we hated American
popular culture. We had nothing to do with the culture of the fifties.
We threw up when we heard Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra. We thought
that was just dreck, we wanted nothing to do with that. And we were
self-consciously intellectual in our interests, and I think that was
healthy.
I think it's healthy, especially when you're young, to feel that
you're different and unique and not just part of a great mass of
people flowing forward. I think it's good to fight against the
current.
Quite so, and it is what makes a genuine intellectual, which is a
human being that tries to understand things as well as he or she can,
and to think and judge as an individual, rather than as a conforming
member of some community, which is the ordinary way of
ordinary
men to belong and be someone
socially.
- I got used to arguing. I do not feel uncomfortable when people
challenge my views. And I don't feel uncomfortable if it turns out I'm
in a minority. That doesn't bother me.
That is also the same for me: My family was a talking and argueing
family, so I learned to do that well from an early age. And since my
parents stood out as non-conformists, it was natural for me to be one,
and not to accept social things because they were
fashionable or
approved by the current authorities.
- Everything interested me, and it still does. I mean this is part
of my problem, everything interests me.
And also for me, and probably what made Searle a philosopher rather
than some other sort of scholar. As it happens, Searle doesn't say
more about it in the interview, but judging from myself, at nearly 61,
I'd say this is considerably rarer than he and I thought in our
youths, for it was my experience that anyone I met of around my age,
from 15 onwards, without any variation, was less interested and less
variously well-read than I am. Most, including most intellectuals and
academics I met, were well-read in their own (sub-)field of study, and
in some class of literature, like Dutch literature, or modern English
literature, but had done little reading in other matters. I've read
systematically in 14 subjects:
Real science.
B.
Searle-interview
2 of 6
This is mostly about philosophy, and especially philosophy of mind
and consciousness:
- We're all conscious and it's real. All you do is pinch yourself
and you know this is real. How can matter be conscious? You know, what
you've got in your skull is about a kilogram and a half, three pounds
of this gook. It's about the texture of English oatmeal -- it's
slimier. And it's gray and white. And now how can this three pounds of
gook in your skull, how can that have all these thoughts and feelings
and anxieties and aspirations? How can all of the variety of our
conscious life be produced by this squishy stuff blasting away at the
synapses? A hundred billion neurons, glial cells, synapses, how does
that produce consciousness? And that's typical of philosophical
problems. On the one had you want to say, well, consciousness couldn't
exist because, you know, how does it fit in with the physical world?
On the other hand we all know it does exist, so you have to find some
way to resolve that. That's a typical philosophical problem.
See my "Body AND mind?" of 1989,
that I translated yesterday for Nederlog, where there also are more
links to relevant texts on my site. Also, Searle wrote two books about
it I can recommend: "Minds, Brains and Science" and "The
rediscovery of mind".
- We've inherited this vocabulary that makes
it look as if mental and physical name different realms.
And it's part of our popular culture, so we sing songs about your body
and your soul or we have saying about how your mind is willing but
your flesh is weak, and sometimes the other way around, the flesh is
willing but the mind is weak. And we have inherited, not only
philosophically but in our religious tradition, we've inherited the
idea that there are two quite distinct realms, a realm of the
spiritual and a realm of the physical. And I'm fighting against that.
I want to say we live in one realm, it's got all of these features,
and once you see that then the philosophical mind-body problem
dissolves. You're still left with a terrible problem in neurobiology,
namely, how does the brain do it, in detail?
Quite so, and more or less what I also think - and I say "more or
less" because both Searle and I could say or write a lot here, and I
take it here he is explaining things to a wide audience.
But indeed: There is no
soul and no
mind other than
as processes
of brains, and
so far the knowledge of the brain and of these processes is only a
very small part of all there is to be known to understand how the
human mind works, and is carried, manifested, spun, experienced by the
activities of the human brain.
This is relevant in two practical ways: It makes the claims of
rather a lot of pseudoscience, such as large parts of modern
psychiatry and psychology, vain and unfounded speculations, that
cannot be relied upon as either capable of explaining or capable of
curing almost anything of human psychological (mis)functioning.
Searle explains what the real problem is and how to go about
solving it, in principle:
- What are the specific neurotransmitters?
What's the neuronal architecture? But I think the philosophical
problem, how is it possible that the mental can be a real part of a
world that's entirely physical, I think that problem I can solve.
And how?
The way I solve it is to get rid of the
traditional categories. Forget about Descartes's categories of
res existence and res cogitance, that is, the extended
reality of the material and the thinking reality of the mental. Once
you get rid of the categories and you ask yourself how it works,
then it seems to me there are two principles which, if properly
understood (it's not all that easy to understand them, but if
properly understood --) provide you with a solution to the
traditional mind-body problem. Those principles are first, all of
our mental processes are caused by lower-level neuronal processes in
the brain. We assume that it's at the level of neurons, but that's
for the specialists to settle in the end. Neurons and synapses --
maybe you've got to go higher, maybe you've got to go lower -- but
some sorts of lower-level processes in the brain, whether it's
clusters of neurons or subneuronal parts or neurons and synapses,
their behavior causes all of your mental life. Everything from
feeling pains and tickles and itches, pick your favorite, to
suffering the angst of post-industrial man under late capitalism,
whatever is your favorite.
Indeed, it's not merely that the "behavior"
of "clusters of neurons or subneuronal parts or
neurons and synapses" "causes all of your
mental life": It is your mental life, as you
experience
it, and besides, the
brain does much more that you don't experience, but that
contributes the parts of its actions you do experience, or that are
your experiences.
- Okay, that's principle number one. Brains
cause minds. All of our mental life is causally explained by the
behavior of neuronal systems.
Or put otherwise: Mental life is part of what living brains
produce, rather like behaviour is what living bodies produce.
Incidentally, it also makes sense to assume that some of whatever
interacting systems and parts of the brain may act as units of their
own, with properties and relations to other units that their
functioning parts, that together form that unit, do not have
severally, but only cooperatively.
The second principle is just as important:
the mental reality which is caused by the neurobiological phenomena
is not a separate substance that's squirted out. It isn't some kind
of juice that's squirted out by the neurons. It's just the state
that the system is in. That is to say, the behavior of the
microelements causes a feature of the entire system at a macro
level, even though the system is made up entirely of those elements
that cause the higher level behavior. Now that's hard for most
people to grasp, that you can accept both that the relation between
the brain and the mind is causal, and that the mind is just a
feature of the brain. But if you think about it, nature is full of
stuff like that.
Searle will explain his last quoted remark in a moment in the next
quote, but here I want to interpose that I do assume there are
units and levels of interacting systems in the brain, that have
their own properties and regularities that their proper parts do not
have. Indeed, Searle now
explains
this rather well:
- Look at this glass of water, for example.
It's liquid. Now, liquidity is a real feature, but the liquidity is
explained by the behavior of the molecules, that is, the liquid
behavior is explained by the behavior of the molecules, even though
the liquidity is just a feature of the whole system of molecules. I
can't find a single molecule and say "This one is liquid, this one
is wet, I'll see if I can find you a dry one." Similarly, I can't
find a single neuron and say "This one is conscious or this one is
unconscious." We're talking about features of whole systems that are
explained by the behavior of the microelements of those systems. So
I think the philosophical problem is resolved. That is, I don't have
any worry about the philosophical mind-body problem. But the
scientific problem -- how exactly does the machinery do it? --
that's still very much up for grabs.
I agree mostly, except for my repeated remark about levels, for
which also see my
On
Philosophical Assumptions and yesterday's
Body AND mind?
- Philosophy is, in part, the name for a
whole lot of subject matters that we really don't know how to settle
the issues in, where we don't have established methods for resolving
questions. Now for me that's part of the fun, it's wide open. You're
not hemmed in, you're not trapped in a narrow little research
program. But a lot of people find that uncomfortable, that you can't
fall back on an established body of philosophical truths.
Yes, I mostly agree: When problems get fundamentally clarified,
they turn into the subject of some empirical science, or into
mathematics or logic.
C.
Searle-interview
4 of 6
I do not quote from Searle-interview 3 of 6, but this was the link.
Section 4 is about the
Chinese Room
Argument (<- Wikipedia) in Searle's own words, as follows:
- Now if somebody tells you, "Well, really
your mind is just a computer program, so when you understand
something, you're just running the steps in the program," try it
out. Take some area which you don't understand and imagine you carry
out the steps in the computer program. Now, I don't understand
Chinese. I'm hopeless at it. I can't even tell Chinese writing from
Japanese writing. So I imagine that I'm locked in a room with a lot
of Chinese symbols (that's the database) and I've got a rule book
for shuffling the symbols (that's the program) and I get Chinese
symbols put in the room through a slit, and those are questions put
to me in Chinese. And then I look up in the rule book what I'm
supposed to do with these symbols and then I give them back symbols
and unknown to me, the stuff that comes in are questions and the
stuff I give back are answers.
Note that this is all clear and commonsensical enough, as is this
conclusion:
- All the same, I don't understand a word
of Chinese. And the bottom line is, if I don't understand Chinese on
the basis of implementing the computer program for understanding
Chinese, then neither does any other digital computer on that basis,
because no computer's got anything that I don't have. That's the
power of the computer, it just shuffles symbols. It just manipulates
symbols. So I am a computer for understanding Chinese, but I don't
understand a word of Chinese.
And that is the Chinese Room argument, that shows computers donot
understand anything about the translations they may make quite
successfully, as judged by humans who know the languages translated
from and to.
I do have one minor niggle: A computer does not "just
shuffle symbols" - it does and can even less, for it doesn't
understand symbols
either: It shuffles electrical pulses - on and off states of bits and
bytes in its chips. What it all
means, or is
supposed to mean, and why it happens, in the end is due to someone who
programmed
it to shuffle in those ways.
But here is what the Chinese Room Argument's conclusion amounts to:
- In English I am a human being who
understands English; in Chinese I'm just a computer. Computers,
therefore -- and this really is the decisive point -- just in virtue
of implementing a program, the computer is not guaranteed
understanding. It might have understanding for some other reason but
just going through the steps of in the formal program is not
sufficient for the mind.
In brief other terms: A computer knows and understands as much or
as little of what it is doing as a mechanical cash register
understands of mathematics, even if both embody human understanding of
mathematics and physics to work as they do.
D.
Searle-interview
5 of 6
- I am not basically a very political
person. Given a choice between intellectual life and political life,
I'd take intellectual life any time. It's more fun. In the long run
it's more satisfying.
Quite so, and that's what I always felt once I understood what
science is about:
Rational understanding and explanation of anything whatsoever.
Incidentally, this is inkeeping with Plato's and Aristotle's kinds of
men: There are philosopher/scientists, whose life is dedicated to the
search for knowledge; politicians/managers, whose life is dedicated to
the search for power or money; and artisans/workers, whose life is
made by exercising some art or craft involving physical labour, and
who form in fact the majority of those who do the work that's
necessary to produce the goods and amenities of a society (if there
are no slaves).
Next, we arrive in the interview at the
Free
Speech Movement (<- Wikipedia) aka FSM, that started the student
radicalism and revolts in the USA in the 1960ies, in which Searle was
rather prominently involved, in its very beginning. Growing up in a
leftist environment in Amsterdam, I did know some about it as it
happened.
- The Free Speech Movement, within its own
initial objectives, was successful.
(...)
However, two other things happened that really we couldn't have
predicted and they were not so fortunate. One is, we created a whole
lot of radical expectations. This is characteristic of revolutionary
movements; people involved get a sense of enormous possibility. "All
kinds of exciting things are going to happen, we can create a new
kind of a university. We can create a new kind of a society. It's
all going to start right here in Berkeley." That's one thing that
happened: we created unreasonable expectations about what could be
achieved by a student movement of this sort. And a lot of people
wanted to keep going after the FSM because we had this marvelous
student movement here, we've got all this energy and idealism. It's
very hard after you've had the heady and exhilarating triumph of
overthrowing the university administration to then go back to your
classes and start doing homework, taking notes, and writing term
papers. A lot of people found that very hard.
This is also more or less what happened in Europe a little later,
where there also were studentprotests, that also were tied in with
protests against the Vietnam War, and "against the establishment".
Here is more by Searle:
- The second thing that happened was an
issue came up that really made it impossible to carry on a normal
civil life in the United States, and that was the Vietnam War. By
the late sixties, from '66 afterwards, it became progressively more
difficult to run the university in the face of the amount of protest
that went on against the Vietnam War. So the FSM, by providing an
example of successful student protest, created imitators all over
the United States, and it was possible for a lot of people to have
the illusion that, well, we have created a national student
movement, and this national student movement is going to have an
enormous change, an enormous effect on the process of change in
American life, beginning with the Vietnam War.
Yes, and this in part created and in part was meshed up in "the
counterculture
of The Sixties". The
last links are to the Wikipedia on the subjects, that comprises much
more than student demonstrations and changes in the universities.(As
often, especially in the first of these two, Wikipedia is too
postmodern for my tastes.) To quote from the beginnning of
The Sixties Wikipedia
article:
The 1960s term also refers to an era more often called The
Sixties, denoting the complex of inter-related cultural and
political trends across the globe. This "cultural decade" is a bit
later than the actual decade, beginning around 1963 and ending
around 1973, and in particular the years 1965-73 are sometimes
referred as the "High Sixties".[2]
In the United States, "the Sixties", as they are known in popular
culture, is a term used by historians, journalists, and other
objective academics; in some cases nostalgically to describe the
counterculture
and social
revolution near the end of the decade; and pejoratively to
describe the era as one of irresponsible excess and flamboyance. The
decade was also labeled the
Swinging Sixties because of the fall or relaxation of some
social taboos especially relating to sexism and racism that occurred
during this time.
The 1960s have become
synonymous with all the new, exciting, radical, and subversive
events and trends of the period, which continued to develop in the
1970s, 1980s, 1990s and beyond.
One reason to link and quote this is Searle's:
- I mentioned two things; actually there
was a third thing that happened, and that is the set of totally
dreadful vulgarizations of culture that occurred under the general
name of "the sixties." In the sixties, people had a whole lot of
really quite stupid theories about life. They thought, you get
immediate gratification through drugs, and indeed if you can't get
immediate gratification through drugs then you get it through some
other equally instantaneous form of gratification. The idea that
satisfactions in life normally take a lot of work, you have to do
years of preparation to do anything worthwhile, in the sixties it
was very hard to convince people of that.
There was more to it than that, but this too, and indeed one fairly
adequate comprehensive statement about what Searle calls "totally
dreadful vulgarizations of culture", is that the baby-boom
generation (those born between 1945 and 1955, in the wake of WW II)
questioned and discarded many of the values and practices of the
previous generations, but did not succeed in replacing it by new ideas
and values to replace the old ones. Instead, what came about was a
sort of combination of
relativism
of all standards, values and knowledge and a levelling
(*) of all. Neither was completely successful, but
that was what it intellectually came down to, for most.
To continue with Searle, and a question by the interviewer:
- And you, in your analysis of that
period, you do believe that in many ways the major institutions,
especially in the university, were unresponsive.
Yes, well, for a number of reasons. In part
because they'd never seen anything like this. They were themselves
creatures of the twenties, thirties, forties and fifties, and there
hadn't been anything like the student protest movement of the
sixties. Now you might say, well what about the thirties? Didn't you
have a lot of student activism in the thirties? There was a
fundamental difference between the student protests of the sixties
and earlier generations. And that you can state in one sentence. The
student protesters of the sixties identified the university itself,
as an institution, with the forces of evil that they thought of
themselves as fighting against. So in the thirties, students who
were militating against fascism or trying to overthrow capitalism
didn't think of the university as their enemy. But in the sixties,
people who thought we are fighting for the liberation of the blacks,
or we are fighting against the war in Vietnam saw the university as
the enemy. And the university was a much more vulnerable target
than, let's say, the Pentagon. So whereas in a traditional student
movement if you had a national issue like foreign policy or the
economic system, you didn't think of the university as the
institution you should attack. And in the sixties it was the
institution that was attacked.
That seems quite correct to me and a relevant difference between
the thirties and the sixties. It should also be remarked that a
relevant difference between European and US universities is that the
former were much more tied in with state funding than the latter,
while as social institutions this made it in fact easier to break
European universities than the US ones.
Then something else was due to the baby-boom generation (and the
one before it, that could't come up with good replies, neither in
practice nor in theory) that I called relativization and
levelling above, and that Searle, with considerable justification,
called vulgarization:
- What happened after the FSM, though, was
not that there was a general decline in the IQ, but somehow or
another this became, so to speak, an undergraduate career option.
That is, it became something you could "do" as a student. And the
role models had already been created, so all kinds of people who
really hadn't paid their dues fighting southern sheriffs and so on,
as the original leaders of the FSM had, could then become prominent
student radical leaders. (..) But there was a kind of opportunism
and a sort of, I don't want to use the word careerism exactly,
because it's not a normal career, but a model of opportunity was
created by the FSM that didn't exist before and it attracted all
sorts of mediocre people.
Quite so, and the main reasons or enablers were economical and
demographical: The baby-boom generation caused a large influx into the
universities, where standards were lowered to satisfy the demand for
degrees. The complimentary cause was that the baby-boomers themselves
were much in favour of levelling, that they did in the names of
"equality" and "democratization", and also strongly tended to
relativism from the beginning, since they questioned all, while such
answers as they offered were mostly rehashed radical alternatives from
the past, indeed of all kinds: vegetarianism, alternative medicine,
meditation, food fads, spiritualism, alternative philosophies,
enlightenment by psychotropic drugs, eastern philosophies, marxism,
anarchism, environmentalism a.s.o. all quite suddenly flourished
on the waves of radicalism that moved through the sixties.
Hardly any of these movements and points of views got a firm hold,
at least apart from some sects of various kinds and in some
universities or departments of universities, but all together strongly
supported a climate of intellectual and moral relativism ("freedom",
"anti-authoritarianism") and levelling ("democratization",
"equality"), both of which were in part phony and pretentious, but
both of which got a wide following and quick rather general social
acceptation, because it so easily fit the prejudices and interests of
the majority: Nobody can be better than you, for all are equal, and
nobody is right, for everything is relative, so you may do and say as
you please.
One of the many things this carried along socially, e.g. in
Holland, was an enormous levelling of education, in both the
preparatory schools and the universities: By 1984, the average IQ of
the students at the UvA was 115:
Mandarins with an IQ of
115 - which I wrote in 1989 with this concluding part:
For in fact
everywhere those who have the highest education do get the
highest jobs, that is: the functions in society in which
individuals have most power or most influence over their fellow
human beings; that have the highest status; and that are paid
best - doctors, lawyers, engineers and scientists of all kinds.
Such as
M.A.-degreed psychologists, for example, capable of deciding
matters of life and wellbeing of people with problems. With the
insight, the knowledge, the thinking power, the intellectual
talent of a shopkeeper or clerk. On average 115 miserable
IQ-points and the total absence of a bright intellect that is
implied thereby.
Frightening, as
I said.
The result will
be what can be seen now, after some 25 years of postmodern
levelling education:
[4]
Moronic academics; complete, half and threequarter charlatans as
Masters of Art in psychology or sociology; academically titled
pseudo-intellectuals who hardly know foreign languages and claim
to be "too busy" to read; who cannot write, and do not speak
good Dutch (of the kind of honourable Members of Parliament - an
asylum filled with selfenamoured yahoos that unfortunately has
room for only a few hundred minibrains); semi-scientific but
heavily subsidized research that never yields anything but above
average incomes for "scientists" of very average grocerly
brains, and unreadable research reports in awful bureaucratic
cant "to help the feminist movement, the trade union movement,
and the environmental movement" (as the central aims of the
University of Amsterdam were for many years) - in brief, The
Netherlands will be governed by corrupt mandarins with an
average IQ of 115. And the usual hypocritical impostures and
backhanded greed, that is to say "in the name of our exemplary
Dutch dumbocray, sorry: democracy".
Nothing new?
Real science will become even rarer than it is, in an atmosphere
filled with tenthousands, possinly hundreds of thousands Masters
of Art of minimal brainsize and maximal greed - for an average
IQ of 115 does not precisely exclude greed, ambition, intrigue
and that delicious species-searches-species trade unionist
mentality).
The cultural
level of societies will sink until public mediawhores on the
dreambox can move the population to any form of unreason. Public
gangsters, frauds, parasites and eagerly upcoming dictators will
be left free to do as they please - and the only social group
that could have opposed them with rational arguments based on
real knowledge and understanding of human civilization, will
have been reduced to a set of stammering know-nothings,
precisely of the level of people's parlementarians there is
already.
Nothing new, I
ask again? No, indeed: Virtually the only thing we do not have
yet is a populist would-be dictator that abuses the opportunity.
For we have had already 25 years of postmodern education. And we
live in moronified society, that moronifies further
incessantly.
Thanks to the
present so called academic elite, that has let it happen while
they parasited upon it: The present generation of university
professors and lecturers. Après vous le déluge, quoi?
In the 21 years since then, this did happen, and the Dutch
educational system can be regarded as ruined for generations - that
may not agree, for they all got miseducated, got undereducated, got
"educated" by propaganda and bullshit in most studies that provide
career- prospects in society, but believed what they received, i.e.
believed that "everybody is equal" (and no one better than you) and so
universities should be open to all, as should be academic titles, and
believed that "everything is relative", so the only norms that count
are conformism sauced by public shows of "respect" to anyone around,
for anything whatsoever.
- One of the things that struck me in all
of this period was how resilient the university was. We just went on
with the sheer glacial force of academia, with its budgets and its
committees and its procedures for promotions and tenure. So at one
level, the university proved itself remarkably strong in fighting
this stuff off. In this respect American universities were better
than European universities, because we had a kind of self-confidence
in the traditional institutional structures and we just kept
marching on.
Well... it's not so much "self-confidence in
the traditional institutional structures", it would seem to me,
as the differences in funding and legal status of the US universities,
that made them stand farther away from state and municipal
bureaucracies compared with Europe: It was easier for universities to
set out their own courses than it was in Europe.
- All of the basic apparatus remained
unchanged. However, there were forces at work in the larger society
that combined with the radicalism of the sixties, that, I think,
made serious long-term damage to the university.
Well... yes and no: Formally "the basic
apparatus remained unchanged" - but in the universities since
the 1970ies, at least in Holland, the ends had changed, the standards
crumbled, the students levelled, the courses moronified, and in effect
the universities changed into something like colleges, a few
departments were real talent and hard work still counted, such as
physics and mathematics, excepted.
Also, unlike before, when mostly the professors decided what the
universities taught and required, the power in the universities
shifted radically, first to the students and their elected bodies, and
in Holland for 25 years to the university-parliaments, in which
students, staff and ordinary personnel could get elected every year on
a "one man, one vote" basis, which worked out so that in effect key
members of the Dutch socialist, communist and green parties had the
power in the universities from 1971 to 1995, and then, already in the
eighties, the power fell in the hands of the bureaucracies, that was
in Holland, and still is in Amsterdam and most cities with
universities, bureaucrats from the Dutch Labour Party, who got the say
so about virtually all bureaucratic and staff appointments, and
effectively own the university as members of the nobility owed a lien
of land in the Middle Ages.
Another effect, in Holland at least, is that very soon in the
seventies and eighties of the 20th C, the PC language was very widely
adopted, again because of its levelling and relativistic appeal:
Suddenly, even children of 5 were said to "study" and "sit for
examinations" in terms that until then had been reserved to students
of universities: Suddenly everyone "studied", and "sat for
examinations", even though in the same years the schools ceased to
teach arithmetic for the most part, and ceased to teach foreign
languages mostly, at least as part of the curriculum.
But then the "democratic" "advantages" were obvious to all:
Suddenly at least 50% of the population of the right age was
"entitled" to "university education", and could fairly expect, even
with an IQ of 110, to be a doctor of philosophy or master of arts in
one or several of the very many new "university studies" that were
created for just that purpose: One could and can get degrees in
"European Studies", "Pop Music", "Freedom Theology", "Sports Studies"
etc. - and once being "a doctor" or "professor" in that one had
arrived at the place that formerly were in the hands of persons who
had least had good intellect, whatever their personal merits, and one
was regarded by "laymen" - effectively, everyone not having a degree
in that "science" - as "an academic" and "an intellectual", worthy of
respect and high remuneration.
Back to Searle, and the damages done to the university, who did see
most of what I just sketched in 1999:
- And what was that damage?
Well, again, it's very hard to summarize
but I would say the university became less self-confident in its
elitism. By definition a university has to strive for the best. If
you're not striving for the best you're not the best university,
you're not doing all that you can. But the best means that some
things are better than others. Some professors are better than other
professors, some books are better than other books. Some ideas are
intelligent, other ideas are stupid. And a university has to be
committed to quality. It's nothing mysterious, it's like the San
Francisco '49ers. They try to get the best coaches and the best
players and make them do the best they can. Well we're supposedly
trying to get the very best professors and the very best students,
and that means intellectually the best -- the intellectual elite of
the country as the professors, and the intellectual elite of the
state and people from out of state as the students -- and make them
perform at the highest possible level. Well, we're still committed
to that but we're more bashful about saying it in public. And there
is a sort of an undercurrent that, well, maybe that's all a really
kind of disguised power structure and maybe it's all a sort of
disguised oppression and colonialism, and we've got to get out of
this idea that some books are really superior to others, and some
students are superior to others, and some professors are better than
others. And that's bad. I mean, if you don't believe in quality, and
you don't believe that the ultimate criterion of success in this
game is what's better and what's worse, what has the quality and
what lacks the quality, then you've given up on the ideal of
academic life.
And that is what has happened, in Holland certainly, and as far as
I can see also in Western Europe and the US, the last with some
qualifications, because in the US universities are more independent
from the state: The universities have "given up
on the ideal of academic life" - and in Holland this happened
already in the 1970ies, and with a sense of great pride and moral
urgency in the battle for "democratization", "equality",
"equivalence", and "social relevance", against the powers of "fascism"
and "elitism", for everybody who was not with the postmodern rot, for
that is what it was, was accused of being "a fascist" and an "elitist"
- even though all could see and appreciate that in sports elitism is
what they all wanted, just as in illness all wanted the very best of
medical doctors. The problems was only that the democratic majorities
agreed that it was very unfair, quite elitist, and very fascistic, if
they, with their IQs of 105 or so, were excluded from "the right" of
getting a university degree, which the democratic majorities agreed
they all wanted, for the chances and pay an academic degree offered,
and not because they were, for the most part, in any way interested in
real science, in civilization, or even in the history of ideas: They
considered it their "democratic right" to get an M.A. or Ph.D. because
that would help them make more money, so anyone who excluded them from
those chances, clearly must be a "fascist elitist".
And that is also why I was thrown from the University of
Amsterdam's philosophy department, briefly before taking my M.A.
there, because I said these things in public, therefore opposed the
career prospects of the democratic majority of local morons, and
therefore, by inescapable political propaganda logic, must be "a
fascist elitist" fit for removal from the university, and fit for
denying an M.A. degree in philosophy:
39 Questions (public speech, May 1988).
Back to Searle and a question by the interviewer Kreisler, for
another very unfortunate consequence of egalitarian leveling, for
which also see my
Yahooism and
Democracy, written not long after the 39 Questions, and my
satirical take on what I had seen and experienced in the University of
Amsterdam.
You've written that "Traditionally, one
of the aims of humanistic education was to get the student to
overcome the accidents of his or her background. You are invited to
redefine yourself as an individual in light of a universal human
civilization and cultural tradition." And then you go on to say,
"Emphasis was on the individual within the universal. Now you derive
your identity not from individual efforts at self-definition, but
rather from the group to which you belong."
Yes, well now this is a particular
manifestation of what I was talking about, and I think, in a way,
it's the worst single manifestation of this. We have abandoned the
idea that the university invites the student to become part of a
universal community of scholars, part of a universal community of
human civilization, where you achieve individual self-definition
through participating in a universal human civilization. Now what we
tell you is, what's your ethnicity? What's your race? What's your
gender? That's who you are. You don't define yourself. You are
defined by race, gender, class, ethnicity, and cultural background.
And that isn't just stupid, that's evil.
Quite so - but I, who said such thing at around the same
time as professor Searle said them, but as a student, was removed
from the university for saying these things, which could happen
because in Holland the vast majority of the scientific staffs of the
universities collaborated with the radical students. See my
Whores of Reason of
1988, in fact little but parts of letters I had written to the Board
of Directors of the University of Amsterdam, including this - and the
doctrines I summarize in quotes were then part and parcel of the
teaching everybody in the UvA received and taught, the last with a
very few exceptions, and mostly by professors who were not Dutch
themselves:
A large part of the education you receive in the UvA has little to do with
science and has everything to do with political superstitions: you are
studying in a faculty that is still dominated by the political folklore from
the 1960's.
This leads to totalitarian education, in which university lecturers
try to convince students of the more blatant nonsense, such as "truth
does not exist", which is highly useful argues for feminists and the
ASVA, but comes straight from the pen of Mao; "science and
rational thought are morally irresponsible", because the mentally
retarded abhor everything that conflicts with their prejudices, and
"all standards are culturally relative", which makes it very easy for
one to do as one damned well pleases without listening to arguments.
Back to Searle's interview:
- The serious professional intellectual
regards it as an accidental fact that he or she was born of a
particular race or a particular gender. You create yourself as an
individual intellect and that's what counts, and we will invite you
into membership into a universal human community of advanced
culture. And within that community you can create yourself as a
serious individual. But now we're telling otherwise innocent
children, "Look, you came from this background, that's who you
really are." And I think to say that is to abandon one of the
fundamental advantages of the university education, namely, before
we told you, yes, okay, you came from this background, you can be
proud of this background, we'll offer you something better. We'll
let you redefine yourself, giving you the resources of the whole of
human history to redefine yourself. Now we've even got this stupid
Ethnic Studies requirement where we make people study American
cultures where the idea is you're supposed to celebrate various
forms of really quite ordinary phenomena. There's nothing
intellectually special about having been born a certain race or a
certain gender.
Again: Quite so. But in Holland now the universities are ruled by
bureaucrats, and occupied by professors, who have an average IQ of 115
at the most, no interest or knowledge whatsoever of real science - see
my:
Real
Science and real psychology = joy - and nearly all possessed of
a membership card of the Dutch Labour Party or Green Party (former
CP).
Here is how it worked out in the US - and for background see my
Scientific Realism versus Postmodernism
and
Morningstar shines a bright light on
postmodernism and also, since Searle speaks of "the
classics" my
Some Favourite Books & Authors:
- There were something called "the
classics," and the idea was that there were a collection of works of
human civilization that, because of their intellectual quality or
their historical importance, or both their intellectual quality and
importance, were regarded as an essential part of education. So
Plato is both important historically and has high intellectual
quality. Marx is certainly important historically; you can have
debates about the intellectual quality of the work. But both of
those are important for people to read. The idea is that we are
conveying to you a human civilization with a number of cultural and
intellectual achievements of quality and importance. And now that's
challenged. Now the idea is, oh well, one book is as good as
another. I debated a guy once at another university who said, "Well,
you know, Bugs Bunny is as good as Shakespeare. I mean these are all
just texts. One text is as much of a text as another text." And
indeed one English department at one university said, "We really
shouldn't call ourselves the Department of English Language and
Literature, we should be called the Department of Textual Studies."
And from the point of view of textual studies, well, a cereal box is
as good as a sonnet by Shakespeare. It's all just some nonsense. You
can always say in French, "C'est la textualité du texte." A certain
kind of textuality is all that counts. So that, I think, is ... that
isn't just stupid, it's self-destructive. Because if you don't
believe that there's a distinction in quality then why on earth
would the taxpayers pay you, why would the students pay you to teach
this stuff, if one opinion is as good as another and one text is as
good as another? That is, I think that the mission that we're
engaged in is predicated on a belief in quality.
Not in Holland anymore, though there will be the pretensions, and I
still might be called "a fascist" or "elitist" in public discussions:
Since decades, the Dutch universities are, on average, completely fit
and easily passable by
yahoos of an average
IQ between 100 and 115, who each and all take great pride in their
academic degrees and qualifications in "Media Studies", "Pop Music",
"European Studies", or "Business Administration", and who get mightily
offended if one as much as suggests to them that they are neither
intellectually nor morally fit to lead or discover or clarify or
explain anything, at least rationally and reasonably.
- And teaching students how to think.
Well absolutely. But there are different
ways of thinking.
You can't just teach a student how to think
like that. You've got to teach them how to think in a sensitive and
critical fashion about interpreting poetry. You've got to teach him
how to think rigorously in analyzing philosophical arguments. You've
got to teach him to think in the lab about how to conduct a lab
experiment. So the idea that's ... you see, if you just say, well,
our method is teaching people how to think, then it seems like these
courses that consist of just bull sessions are as good as anything
else. People sit around and talk about their upbringing and how they
felt oppressed, and what their community was like and so on. That is
not, in my opinion, a serious form of intellectually rigorous
thinking. That's sort of self-congratulatory introspection.
Quite so - but that - "self-congratulatory
introspection": taking pride, for course points, in being a
woman, a black or a homosexual - is and has been, the last two or
three decades, the standard fare in the largest part of the courses
and subjects taught in the Dutch universities:
Fashionable bullshit tailored to
audiences with an average
IQ of 115 at most, and without any interest whatsoever in
a real academic
education, and mostly also without the capacities for it, for
while the average native intelligence probably hasn't changed much,
the average intelligence of students has fallen a lot, yet it is to
the average that the university cater, and in effect sell degrees to.
So the Dutch universities are dead, as real universities, and
except for those small parts that still do require talent, as
mathematics and physics, or Chinese. Even so, the output of the
universities, namely people with academic degrees, in great majority
no longer consists of real intellectuals, or indeed the best and the
brightest with the best education:
It consists of
pseudo-intellectuals who can't do mathematics and don't speak or
read foreign languages, English to an extent excepted; who are on
average far from bright and mostly proud of that fact;
who studied to have a
social career with good pay, and
not because of any
genuine interest in real science or real philosophy; and
who did not get a real
academic education but a travesty, a mockery, a dumbed down, levelled,
and moronified version of it, made fit to be no problem for the
very average intellects that desire to graduate in them.
E.
Searle-interview
6 of 6
- However, having said all that, I have to say I think the most
important thing that I try to convey, and the most important thing
any professor can convey, is to exemplify a style of thinking and a
mode of sensibility. It's what you provide an example of that is as
important, and in some ways more important, than what you actually
say explicitly. You convey by example what it's like to actually
engage in a process of investigation and research, what it's like to
formulate ideas and have them challenged by other ideas, and then
deal with the conflicts of these ideas.
Well, I had no such teachers, though I met and talked
with more professors in the University of Amsterdam than almost any
student, because I was "a
student leader", started to study when I was 28, and was more
verbally gifted than most, and not afraid to discuss.
As I said, the main result of this was that I found
that most men and women, (at least if Dutch), whatever their political
or moral convictions or pretensions, are born
conformists,
born collaborators, and afraid to say what they think and feel even in
a state of freedom and legal protection that hardly ever existed in
human history, because, it seems to me, at heart most are
totalitarian:
They find their
personal
identities in and through
groups and
groupthinking, much rather than by their own individual efforts,
thoughts and choices.
It's only the most intelligent of the species that are
- more or less - independent individualists, in inclinations and
abilities, and while the most intelligent have had the universities
for some 400 years, namely to do the most demanding research and teach
the best and the brightest in the common interests of all, my
generation and the ones before and after it have managed
to ruin the universities
into colleges of would-be leaders of small intellect and no
intellectual interests.
F. Afterword
As I said, I quoted most and spend most attention on
the part on the universities, and that because I have myself had a lot
to do with the battle
about the universities, which, as I just said, I consider lost by
the intelligentsia, that is, by those with the best intellects: They
led themselves be ousted from the universities by the born managers
and born politicians, who transformed their spoils into colleges for
the hardly gifted of their own kind and class, that "educate" to get
social status and privileges. rather than to help make the most
intelligent make the best of themselves in the interest of all.
Finally, as it happens I found another interesting
piece by Searle on the subject, namely
This was written and published quite briefly after I
wrote and published my
Spiegeloog-columns
and it is far more sensible and rational than anything I read by Dutch
academics or intellectuals then or since, so I may also pay attention
to it in Nederlog, next month. This is also the reason why I quoted
and commented so much from this interview.
Maybe I should conclude by saying that I do not have
any solutions, except as are indicated here:
Mencius on human qualities aka
On a fundamental problem in ethics and morals,
here:
Bureaucracy plan +
Democracy
plan, and here:
On "The
Logic of Moral Discourse", but then I do insist that such
(partial) solutions as I give are neither irrealistic nor utopian, and
indeed they also are not based on a grandiose scheme.
(*) I should maybe say something
about the subject of levelling, especially since, in the
West, almost everybody tends to lie about it:
There is nothing wrong with equality
of all for the law (Dutch text, but much to the
point) but the reason this is a good ideal is that each and all are
not equal: We are all individuals, and all have strengths and
weaknesses. The leveling that happened in the universities, by the
new left, postmodernists, anti-globalists, feminists etc. is
a forced levelling based
on envy and resentment of the few whose intellects are
better than the great majority. It is completely dishonest, for the
very same levellers are against levelling in sports, against
levelling in looks, against levelling their incomes to those of the
poorer than they are, and love to excel others in fields they happen
to be good in themselves. It is also a favourite bloodsport of
vulgar, tiny, envious minds, which is why the democratic masses tend
to love it, when it concerns intellectuals, and hate it when it is
applied to sports' heroes, or their own political or religious
leaders, or favourite "media-personalities".
P.S. Corrections, if any are necessary, have to
be made later.
