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WhatCanWeDoWithThisIdea 4 - 06 Feb 2009 - Main.MolissaFarber
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-- MichaelDignan - 05 Feb 2009 | | |
- I understand and share your frustration, Michael. It seems to me that part of the reason why people may be having trouble with this is that Prof. Moglen and many of the writers we have read are frequently declaring their conclusions. We often hear from Prof. Moglen that X or Y is "wrong," "stupid" or "foolish." Sometimes in class he does not simply "do violence with" ideas so much as he hacks them to pieces and victory-dances over their bloody corpses. The writers we read tend to have an antagonistic approach as well, a desire to illustrate the wrongness of a common misconception. Holmes, Arnold and Cohen start off by declaring that a commonly held attitude or idea of their contemporaries is wrong. They do not say, "well, this is what people think; what can we do with this idea?" They say "this is wrong and stupid, and here is why." Now, perhaps all of these people initially approached their respective questions with an attitude of "what can we do with this idea?" And perhaps their decisive conclusions are merely the endpoint of what initially began as a more relaxed and creative inquiry. But we do not see that. We see their conclusions, and we take our cues in the classroom in large part from the tone set by the professor and the readings.
- This is not meant as a criticism of Prof. Moglen or Holmes or Arnold, incidentally, since I share your attitude to drawing conclusions. Part of my perspective may stem from the fact that, for me, "this is wrong" does not always mean "this can be proven false by logic or by pointing to empirical facts." Sometimes by "this is wrong" I mean "there's not much that can be done with this idea that is good or interesting." And if an idea's relationship to logic or empirical reality is flawed, then I think you can only do very limited things with it. So I don't see as much of a separation between drawing conclusions and playing with ideas as Prof. Moglen seems to. I also don't think that finding flaws in an argument or conclusion has to end up in the sterile back-and-forth of debate. When I draw a conclusion about the flaws in an idea, I often find myself trying to "fix" it by extracting the useful part of it, and maybe combining it with another idea and trying to see how they fit together. I think this is interesting and avoids the problem of treating conversations about ideas like battlegrounds. (Side note: this doesn't have a reply function and I wasn't sure if it was appropriate for me to respond by editing. I hope it's not a problem. I'm sorry if it is.)
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