Thursday, December 22, 2005

No sentence that starts with "As Carl Jung said..." ever ends well.

When I was in college, I had to take 4 years of philosophy. In the upper level classes, I had the honor and pleasure of listening to the incessant posturing and minutiae quibbling of the pompous philosophy majors and Scholastics who were so fixated on the interpretation of the actual that, to prove to themselves that we do, in fact, exist in corporeal form, they were compelled to screw every girl they could William James into bed. I did gain one invaluable bit of wisdom from my involvement with these individuals, however. Apparently, philosophers don't read novels. None of them, according to the odious twit who had the nerve to look down his nose at "Sir Walter's Concubine," or whatever high minded work of fine fiction my roommates and I were reading aloud at the time that pasty little twerp came over for party. I never did find out who invited him.

Because so many philosophers were also "psychiatrists", like the above-mentioned Jung, my classmates would INEVITABLY end up arguing about the archetypes of man and how their fathers never loved them and does the building next door really exist, or do we just perceive it to exist, and blah blah blah until I wanted to pound my head against the desk and scream.

So, when a guy who HAD to have gone to a Jesuit college came on NPR to express his shock and dismay at the remake of King Kong and his disgust over the imagery of the ape who OBVIOUSLY represents the fear of the white man towards the black man and what was with the aborigines and then actually used the phrase "As Jung said....," I felt my forehead involuntarily strike my desk. The consequent blackout was a welcome release.

2 comments:

AAM said...

These people are quite sad. If you spend so much time analizing life,
you don't have to live it.

Richmond said...

Seriously, how are those discussions any different than "what if the Matrix is real?"