P in my PhDegree

 
P in my Phdegree
 
Such a conception of philosophy does seem
strange or even quaint in the contemporary
world, where philosophy has become a kind
of specialized, technical profession, one which
does not clearly tend to make its practitioners
practically wiser or better people. (snicker)
          C. Stephan Evans on Kierkegaard
 
See: that snicker—an emergent phenomena
generated at the interface between
incommensurate values—
snicker from one
side, snort
from the
other.
 
Suprasegmental Phonemes, call them:
snicker and snort, cocked  eyebrow,
slight smile  contextualizing an
exchange that says more than
is said.
 
Between Plato and Aristotle, some snickering
going on;  the logical positivist snorts at the
idealist;  Empiricist & Ah Priority and can they
just get along? Deductionist & Inductionist,
materialist & spiritualist. cognitive & humanistic
schools of psychology:  wherever one team is
“privileged,” hegemonic and marginalizing  the
other, listen for a snicker and a snort.
 
It’s an environmental issue..
Mean Girls exclusivity.
Cool rules  & the
glee club can
forgetabout it.
 
IT, I said.
Do I  always got to be spelling
IT out?  (snicker, snort.)
 
Nevermind.
 
Tony Early was (not without affection)
considered  “slack dog” by members of
our English Dept back  in the early 80’s
seeing  as he showed more imagination
than commitment to our institutional
textual  harassment &our received
tradition of literary analysis.  .
 
Some afternoons he’d play tennis with
 my  8^th grader son  and the 2   would 
employ coat hangers as instruments to
snake cold canned drinks from coke
machines in the  girls dormitory.

He wrote-up one of these episodes as
assignment in class. Some roll-yr-own
American literature & local food.
 
Now he’s righter and graduation speaker
and Jonathan  manages a ski resort  in Utah
where it's still snowing, snickersnap snicker-
see, even as I record this. Gondolas and
chairs come round  & round  again to carry
one over heights of  Wasatch and  mountain
top experience.

Practices that  make for wiser and better people.

xxxooo, Sam