The Silliness of Academe

Okay, these thoughts are about how silly it is to pay attention to academe, or to value any degrees from the academic world.  My tack here is to take some arguments from a book called something about Noble Animals, the author is David Salter, and the book is his doctoral dissertation, published in 2001. Now Dr. Salter, I am in no way insulting your research, and I am confident you will do fine in the academic world. Merely I am using one of your arguments to illustrate a point about the way EVERYBPDY's mind works, and if you by any chance come across my comments, to reassure you, I will state right now that I only read a few pages of your book, and so you can argue I have not given you a fair chance. Insulting anyone is not my intent here, and could it be proved that I did, I would certainly have failed in my purpose.

 

And that is (my purpose) to examine an argument and point out how this argument from a typical academic, quite misses the intent of the literature he discussed. The literature here is a kind of Aesops fable:  there was a story common in the medieval world called "The Lion and the Man." I need to tell the story first: so a lion and man were talking about who was stronger and the man proved his point by showing the lion a drawing of a man putting an ax into a lion.  The climax of  the storyis that the lion responded, "Who painted the lion?"  In other words had the lion been telling the story the ending would have been different.  The author of the book above, the exact title of which I still do not have to hand, says the point of this fable, is that depending on what part of society your are in, your insights will change. 

 

My own take on this story is that "The Lion and the Man," was mainly about this: the rational intellect is incapable of coming up with objective truth.  Because my take may sound abstruse to someone who has not looked at my blog before, does not mean that Chaucer, and/or Aesop were not capable of the mental delicacy my argument assumes.