I have a great respect for academia and a great part of me wants to be a part of that hallowed institution. Among many things though, there is one increasingly common aspect of academia that disappoints me a little, and that is the amount of time that goes into debating what someone said rather than simply drawing inspiration from them. By way of illustration, I refer you to the myriad debates in Nietzsche scholarship. So often they are bogged down in what I would consider petty bickering regarding what Nietzsche said or meant, rather than simply saying “here is an interesting idea that I found in Nietzsche, and here is what I have done with it”. For example, a supervisor of mine, who I have a great deal of respect and admiration for mind you, wrote her doctoral dissertation, in part, as a critique of Nehamas’ thesis on Nietzsche (from Life as Literature), arguing that Nehamas’ thesis is incorrectly focused on literature when Nietzsche was much more caught up in drama, tragedy, music, the opera and the theatre (specifically Wagner and the Greeks). I fail to see how this kind of argument about what Nietzsche meant helps us get any closer to a good, new idea. If we seek the truth, then I really feel like we need to keep going forward, rather than endlessly debating elements of accuracy. At the moment we are not arguing whether or not 1+1 = 2 or 11, but whether or not some ancient mathematician did not in fact mean I + I = XI, rather than 1+1 = window. Am I making myself clear? We are engaged, often, not in argument about the idea itself, but about the intent behind it. What would be much more beneficial and productive, not to mention altogether more engrossing, stimulating and interesting, is discussing our new, original ideas, and referencing our sources of inspiration for those ideas. This is what Deleuze tends to do, when, for example, he philosophizes about the eternal recurrence of difference when talking about Nietzsche (who of course wrote about the eternal recurrence of the same). Deleuze posits a new idea – his idea – and merely uses a discussion of Nietzsche to set the boundaries and lay the foundations of his presentation of that idea.
This debate bleeds into an interesting idea an undergraduate friend of mine brought to my attention, which is the enormous amounts of time wasted interpreting rather than evaluating. His impression was that we spend too much time interpreting bad ideas and trying to save them or more effectively reconcile them with other parts of author’s oeuvre’s rather than simply evaluating their correctness/usefulness. We could easily save an idea without needing to save an author’s entire work, or even locate that idea within the author’s work. Furthermore, in giving preference to an evaluative rather than an interpretive approach, we would save a great deal of time. Rather than spending pages discussing whether Sartre was influenced by Cartesian tropes absent from German existentialists, and whether or not this confirms that he did or did not in fact believe in objective morals, we could simply debate whether objective morals is a strong idea given what Sartre has posited. We could also argue whether they are a bad idea, given what he has posited. We begin to debate the idea rather than the history of the idea, or its formulation, or the intention of its author etc.
I am not suggesting that we do not invest time in better understanding an author’s work, which will often require us to investigate issues other than the fundamental idea in question. I am simply suggesting that we do not lose track of the fact that it is ideas – new, original, unique, powerful ideas – that are the driving force of intellectuality and our vehicle to the truth, so let’s not get bogged down in frivolous academic debates that benefit nobody. All I’m saying, is that we would perhaps be better served by discussing whether or not the idea of writing one’s life like a narrative is a good one, rather than whether or not that was what Nietzsche had in mind originally.
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