Human cultures are all experiments in trying to find a form that will fit the matter of our immediacy; but it is absolutely not the case that all such experiments are of equal merit or value. Some cultures - and modernity is patently one - have managed to transmute consciousness into the "disease" that Nietzsche called it, the self-affliction of a self-centeredness that has purged itself of all vestiges of wisdom and value.
Kenny SmithOne can hardly appreciate how academia has perverted its highest tasks and "ideals" without pondering long and hard the implications of Jacques Barzun's House of Intellect and its Hegelian/Bergsonian contrast between rigidified "intellect" and always-growing "intelligence." This fundamentally Hegelian distinction, needless to say, cuts to the quick of the contrast between Platonic and Aristotelian forms of philosophy.
Kenny SmithPeople who turn to philosophy expecting to harvest a crop of formulas of wisdom or understanding do not understand-philosophy has such things, but they are merely incidental, not the essence of the matter. Philosophy is about subtilizing and tuning up the coherence and acuity of one's seeing, it is about opening new dimensions for insight, learning to think about what one is doing when one thinks instead of just blundering through the processes of putting thoughts together.
Kenny SmithMyth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of.
Kenny SmithAcademia is alas full of special interests and specialists who presumed it was possible to "leapfrog" over this or that entire line of development. These minds hoped to distance themselves from the pernicious vices of a whole way of thinking, but of course at the same time excluded all of its virtues too. Modern abstractivism in its simplex form (which does not preclude a high degree of articulate facility within the ambit of what is preconceived and accepted).
Kenny Smith