Have you ever noticed that all words are defined by other words? There is not a single word in any language whose meaning can be expressed without the deployment of other words that are subject to the very same linguistic limitation. Language, therefore, is a void.
A similar difficulty arises for me when I think about academia. I was inspired to meditate on this insanity as I examined the recent controversies in this editorial space concerning first the religion department and then that of philosophy, and whether they should exist, and whether women can do well at them, and whether God could make a stone so heavy He couldn't lift it (God can, by the way, but the stone must be made of styrofoam, because God is more ironic than even Alanis Morrisette).
I think that when the sapient student takes a good, long, hard look at the debate, he or she will come to understand how frivolous such discussion really is.
The history department offers courses under the label "The Intellectual history of" such-and-such an era or country. These courses will include many of the same thinkers one encounters in either a philosophy or religion course; conversely, within the philosophy and religion departments one finds a number of courses structured in such a way as to resemble "The history of" such-and-such a way of thinking. One discourse is easily located within the context of the other.
Thus philosophy and religion courses could be thought of as history courses, working specifically from an intellectual/spiritual historical perspective.
But we all know that history is merely the study of people, the societies they form, why they form them, who has the power -- sounds like a specific version of anthropology to me.
Anthropology, though, is for all intents and purposes the study of people, what makes them tick, and as we all know these days, people are subject to all sorts of emotional whims and moods and desires, all of which affect those very societies they build, so anthropology, I suppose, is merely an extension of Psychology.
Still, any good psychologist will tell you that all those emotions and moods and desires are really just complex manifestations of the interplay of electrochemical impulses in your brain, or how much water you've had on a certain day -- Psychology is basically just biology.
And biology, while a demanding field of study, really boils down to the various structures created by the reactions of different chemical compounds, amino acids and the like. One could go so far as to label biology the scientific scion of chemistry.
And as a friend of mine once said, chemists spend most of their time working out Schrodinger's Equation these days, which is all merely an outgrowth of physics.
And physics, as we can plainly see, is just the natural laws that spring from the manipulation of mathematics. So it's all really math, you see.
But lest you think I'm advocating the abolition of every department save for that of mathematics, consider the following: mathematicians, purists though they may be, are just as contextualized by the meta-narratives of Psychology or history or religion as any other people; it's not like they are somehow studying math in a vacuum. Many mathematicians are patronized academics, living off their research grants, as are many physicists and psychologists and philosophers, too. Where does the money to fund all this research come from, one might ask, and does it affect the research's outcome? Of course, if one were to ask such questions, one begins to sound disturbingly like a Marxist, once again buying into one meta-narrative at the expense of another.
It goes and goes and goes. You can deconstruct some entity, then deconstruct yourself, then deconstruct the deconstruction, and then, supposedly, you're left with truth, this particular truth being that there is no one set truth, but multiple truths, and what's true to one is false to another, and vice versa, and, well, I guess from that point-of-view just about any behavior we like is justified, though one might question whether justification even exists anymore. Scary and intriguing at the same time.
Those of you who answer these questions satisfyingly for yourselves or continue to consider them without fear must be doing something right.
You can't win, kids. As my crazy uncle Bob once said to me while instructing me on the finer points of bomb construction, "If complexity doesn't get you, paradox will."
