Leaving, Entering, Skipping Around the Ivory Tower

This afternoon I had slept in and didn't attend any lectures.

It was not entirely unanticipated because I spent a large chunk of time and effort on foraging through the Free University's, Humboldt University's, and on Papa's recommendation several Max-Planck-Institutes' and the Fraunhofer foundation's websites in pursuit of classes or events I'd want to attend, yesterday. There were many, surprisingly; I was rather bowled over by the proliferation of things, and by the logistical difficulties of shuttling back and forth.

PARTLY, the point of exmatriculating myself from university in July was to allow myself to learn to read up on subjects in a level of depth and detail that isn't usually practical in the frame of the institution.

It might not be everyone's cup of tea, and if one's career is riding on academic transcripts, a truly high level of rigour can be prejudicial in the long run. Besides it must take energy to chase after the lethargic minds of all the students.

SO I decided to read up on political theory to compensate for missing the lecture on that subject. Because of the 1960s Greece course I audited last semester, and my questions to Papa regarding the 1960s in general, I've had Herbert Marcuse's Ideen zu einer kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft lying around my room for a few months.

AS AN ignoramus freshly hatched from the egg, I decided to read the Wikipedia article first. This led me to YouTube. So I spent a very agreeable time listening to interviews with Marcuse: an American interview in the late eighties and a much frostier German one in the mid-seventies.

I have wanted to tear out my hair whenever philosophical rhetoric has garlanded the least-liked readings from university, so it was lovely to hear a straightforward language; and given the kind of debate I read about American politics and the articles I waded through in Political Science, it was lovely, too, to hear a modest and humane discussion that interweaves political reality as well as ideological or philosophical aspirations. In a way it was stuff of ordinary, common sense, and perhaps underlined the assertion of Marcuse himself that he happened to chime with the Zeitgeist when he became hugely popular during the 60s uprisings, and not that he was the inventor of the ideas.

It also fit a thing that I like about North America: a professor generally wields the same level of grammatical and lexical complexity, in his daily life, as any individual.


I also thought it was impressive that Marcuse discussed Marxism without any trace of sensationalism, in the USA, during the Cold War era.

Regarding Martin Heidegger, I thought it was refreshing that Marcuse refused to believe that his philosophy was contaminated altogether, even if the stuff Heidegger wrote politically was embarrassing. Much as I feel outrage, too, and sadness that anyone would truck with a government that treated fellow beings so brutally, I dislike vicarious public stoning of one's own potential or real sins, and the pretense of any mass denunciators that "All piety consists therein in them, in other men all sin...".*

Lastly, the German-language interview also delved into the implications of modern technology. Marcuse had written about it in the early half of the 20th century, too, but he mentioned that computer technology had great potential, but also for a reality which would be worse by far than anything George Orwell envisioned. This has the NSA debate written all over it.

* (They "Compound for sins they are inclin'd to, by damning those they have no mind to," as Samuel Butler put it, too.)

BEFORE today, I turned to MIT's YouTube account for the sake of its scientific lectures. I'm on the second installment of a Digital Communications class that fortunately ties into the information technology tutorial that I attended because my sister was the teaching assistant. Besides it wasn't any hardship to research the history of the Morse code and of sub-Atlantic cables, in a little more detail.

In preparation for tomorrow I've read a little about linguistics in Rwanda, the chansons de geste from the 12th century crusades which Elisabeth of Lothringia adapted from the French in the 14th century or thereabouts, and the geological field of sedimentology.

Besides, I've been leafing through the US Supreme Court's latest significant rulings: 1. Prado Navarette v. California, where the police were informed by an anonymous 911 caller that a possible drunk driver was headed their way; they held up the car and found marijuana in it; was that constitutional? and 2. Schuette v. BAMN, where the Court had to decide if the state of Michigan may outlaw affirmative action after its referendum.