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Passive-Aggressive Ecology
I found what initially seemed to be a quite detailed and quite complete glossary of ecological terms, A Glossary of Ecological Terms. I was about to send the link to a correspondent, when I ran across this “definition”:
Mind-Body Problem: a sterile philosophical dilemma given its first modern expression by mathematician and swordsman Rene Descartes. Its basic question: how do the mind and the body relate to one another? Which implies that the two are as separate as self and world were thought to be (another Cartesian gem).
Below this there is this additional remark:
A more profound philosopher spoke to this centuries before Descartes and his coordinate-plane approach:
When you wrack your brain trying to unify things without knowing that they are already one, it is called “three in the morning.” What do I mean by “three in the morning?” A man who kept monkeys said to them, “You get three acorns in the morning and four in the evening.” This made them all very angry. So he said, “How about four in the morning and three in the evening?”— and the monkeys were happy. — Chuang Tzu
Of course I realize that this is supposed to be funny. The author, Craig Chalquist, PhD, has included this disclaimer at the top of the page:
Although designed for technical correctness and clarity, this glossary follows the practice in the Jung and Freud glossaries at this site of letting in a bit of humor here and there: for levity, for anecdote, and for an occasional thumb in the puritanical eye that closes itself to any information not dressed up in stiff, Latinized nomenclature (see the entry for English, Latinized).
So what it comes down to is that if you object to his “humor” you are going to be found lacking in levity and probably humorless. Well, I don’t find it funny, and not because I’m humorless. I don’t find it funny because it perfectly exemplifies the Fashionable Anti-Philosophy and Further Fashionable Anti-Philosophy that I have written about recently, though in formulating his anti-philosophy as a “joke” Dr. Chalquist gets to keep his cake and eat it to, since any response will be written off to one’s lacking a sense of humor.
Imagine if a philosopher were to make up a detailed glossary with “joke” definitions of scientific terms, intended to ridicule rather than to enlighten: do you suppose an ecologist would find this funny?
Of course, philosophers criticize science almost as much as they criticize philosophy, but usually with a sense of respect, and the idea that what one is criticizing is important — in fact, the very reason that a philosopher chooses to criticize something is the belief that this criticized idea represents something important that needs to be gotten right.
Eunapius, in his Lives of the Sophists, recalled an earlier joke at the expense of a philosopher:
“… no one of all the Athenians, even though they were a democracy, would have ventured on that accusation and indictment of one whom all the Athenians regarded as a walking image of wisdom, had it not been that in the drunkenness, insanity, and license of the Dionysia and the night festival, when light laughter and careless and dangerous emotions are discovered among men, Aristophanes first introduced ridicule into their corrupted minds, and by setting dances upon the stage won over the audience to his views …” (Philostratus and Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists, Cambridge and London: Harvard, 1921, p. 381)
Recall that Diogenes said:
“Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance the shimmy, and you’ve got an audience.”
No doubt Eunapius had read Diogenes.
What light laughter and dancing will contemporary anti-philosophers set upon the stage in order to win over the mass audience of the mass media to their views? Dr. Chalquist gives us one example.
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