I have a severe case of bad timing, here and now. I’m sitting in Philosophy 230, a class regarding moral theory and practice. I’m almost halfway through the class and I am extremely bored.
I’m pretending to be a landscape architect instead of a philosopher, sketching a scene of a plaza between two buildings. My design has a fountain and curved ramps and steps made out of concrete. And room for hotdog stands, those are important. A friend and I once were discussing architects, and he told me how Lou Kahn made concrete beautiful and this other architect whose name I forget made concrete sexy. I don’t know what I’m trying to do with concrete, which makes my design flawed at the basest of levels. And that’s why I’m pretending.
The man next to me is sacrificing his note space for giant block of black ink that occupies the majority of his notebook page. As he continues to fill it in with his bic pen, he looks absolutely ecstatic, like a child playing with gravity for the first time. He draws all class, never looks up, and the block grows and grows in size.
The guy to my left, yea he just keeps writing FML on his page over and over.
I enjoy the teacher for the class. She keeps the class simple and uses life examples often to prove her point. So far today she has referenced people stranded on a rock, ice cream, and dead babies. She really liked her ice cream metaphor; she was taking about her favorite flavor of ice cream, but she looked like she had won fifty dollars instead. Her favorite flavor is chocolate. Mine is mint chocolate chip.
This class is no simple lecture, it relies on eager classmates to fuel class debates for almost the entire class period. Our teacher is a mediator, and as much as she may like chocolate ice cream metaphors and knows her concepts, she doesn’t have the ability to see when class discussions go wrong and stale. Because of this, often someone would say something along the lines of these:
“Nazi Germany was full of Communists, we just disagreed with them and did what we thought was right.”
Or:
“You better be clear I’d be after that son-of-a-bitch if he raped and murdered my wife. I’d kill that motherfucker!”
Or:
“I mean, this is a difficult concept. Okay, so like, really. If we look at both sides, like, I don’t know.”
Or:
“I agree.”
And those are the only people in class that speak. Now here it is, here’s my real problem- it’s not that I don’t care about what we discuss, it’s that I don’t have the time to structure a good argument, and neither do my classmates. I’m sure they’re smart enough, but when they get four seconds to piece together complex philosophical thought, it comes out wrong almost always. And when I’m lazy and tired, which is more and more often lately, I skip the step of defending their arguments against myself, and just think of them as stupid arguments. I don’t want to be that guy, I tell myself, the guy who thinks other people’s arguments are stupid. Because the next step is to think the people are stupid. I never want to be that guy.
Oh, and the bad timing thing. There was a time and place where I would enjoy debating and stretching my mind around grey-area concepts. Unfortunately, that time was about two years ago. I never thought I would have as little disregard for philosophy as I do now. Is it because I’m not learning it on my own? Is it the classmates? Is it the puppy-dog-esque teacher? I think that’s it, the teacher. But I don’t know, really.
