The Dangers of Romanticizing The Liberal Arts - Problems with Dark Academia and Aesthetics

Today's video will be for all of you who may be studying

liberal

arts

right now in universities or for all of you who may be in high school and want to study something like linguistics, philosophy or literature in college because you find this. inherently fascinating discipline or if you are attracted to certain aspects of the discipline, whatever your reason, but today I simply want to address this very important question of why it is dangerous to romanticize these activities, why it is dangerous to bring up these ridiculous expectations when you When you head into the field, why is there a danger of buying too much into the mainstream representations of these disciplines?

For example, you see a lot of representation of the

liberal

arts

or studying literature, philosophy or history in universities. You see a lot of these. curated posts and feeds about the literary experience, you know, I'm a philosophy student here, I'm having a cup of coffee, you know, including my own content, uh, it's my aesthetic, uh, to seduce you into studying some of these fields and which ones is the danger of that seduction, what is the danger of

romanticizing

these disciplines too much? That's the topic of this video essay, so before we dive into that whole train of thought or argument, I want to tell you a little about this French philosopher. name of jacques derrida, so jacques derek was basically responsible for founding the philosophical movement called deconstruction, so it's a very very simple explanation of deconstruction, so deconstruction is basically a philosophical movement that separates the inherent meanings of the texts, so when we read a piece of literature or when we read a poem or text or a scientific treatise there is a sense that we are looking for something inherently solid behind the text, we are looking for that objective meaning, we are looking for something that you already know through of signifiers we are trying to discover objectively you know what it is so the sign means true, we are trying to find some interpretation inherent to literary works we are trying to find some inherent interpretation of the cornerstones of Western philosophy We are trying to find some objective interpretation of something or within paintings with an art, so this is what Dereda is basically trying to deconstruct and he basically went through this whole study of many of the key literary texts within Western intellectual traditions and systematically dissolved these readings inherent meanings systematically went through a very rigorous process of philosophical reasoning and went ahead and deconstructed these very inherent meanings within these tests and that is a huge oversimplification.

If you want to read more about darada, I will link some articles below. You can, um, you can basically, you know, complete your understanding of dereda, um, but in a sense, here's the danger of popularizing something as complicated as deconstruction, so in 2002, an American journalist asked Daredevil if the Deconstruction as a philosophical method was a parallel to television. sitcom seinfeld because if you've seen seinfeld it's basically like this ironic portrayal of these guys and then these ironic forms of storytelling and these very fractured ways of presenting a narrative that journalists basically asked darida, you know. Is there a parallel between deconstruction and how Seinfeld was shot?

Know? Is there a parallel between these two fractured ways of considering the meaning of texts about storytelling and Derodal basically chuckled and basically told journalists that they know deconstruction like I know they don't? produce sitcoms and for those people who believe that seinfeld is what construction is, I would advise them to just turn off their televisions and sit down and do their homework and read, so those are basically the

dangers

of representation in mainstream culture , those are the

dangers

of uh the Popular media seduces you into thinking that something is a specific way, but in reality it is not like that and when applied to academic concepts, academic activities and liberal arts as a discipline, it could cause us a lot of

problems

, so recently I had Towards the end of my semester I had a lot of gaps in my schedule and I had a conversation with a first-year literature student, so during a study break we had a cup of coffee and started talking to my literature student , I started to speak. about what I wanted to do in graduate school and she talked about what she wanted to do with literature, but at the end of the coffee session she basically told me that she was ready to quit school and I basically stood there and said: but this is just your first year of studying, you know, this is just your first year of getting involved with the discipline, you know what made you want to drop out and she said to me, well, I think classes are making me sleep, I think college It's not the best way to get into literature and I just don't inherently believe that this method is going to make me appreciate literature, so it was that moment in time when I realized that there is a gap between how literature is portrayed in these under these buzzwords like

dark

academia

light academy cabin core the modern romantic under these buzzwords these representations are inherently uh they are inherently erroneous, inherently they are not the real thing that you will address when you engage in these activities in universities now okay a pf Strawson sastrasana is a British linguist philosopher who developed many surprising theories or surprising responses to some of the pragmatic theories of language where he basically wrote in this incredible essay called white philosophy, he basically said that the reasonably diligent study of the liberal arts during a Un period of years under the guidance of an experienced tutor will develop in you a critical and skeptical habit of mind that will be useful to you in evaluating everything you hear or read, so the key word here is rigorous and a key word there is something like systematic process under the guidance of an experienced tutor or teacher to guide you through this process of citation research, of spending endless hours in a library researching, tracking down every little thing you have referenced and more or less through that process of rigorously engaging with a discipline with respect to rigorous texts or rigorously reading a historical account and somehow extracting a lot of meaning behind it, that's the process of exercising your brain, that's the process of exercising a sense of integrity academic and that is the process of, in a In the sense that you develop your brain into an intelligent machine, you are developing your brain into a brain that could accept any information that is presented to it and make coherent sense of it.

In a sense, it is the ability to distinguish nonsense from the principles on which it lies. I have a sense of this incredible ability to think critically, which I think is such an underrated skill nowadays, so I'm currently at the end of my bachelor's degree and one of the main takeaways I had was that I still pretty much know absolutely nothing about myself. discipline, so I know practically nothing about the French major I'm in, I practically know nothing about literature and knowledge work does that to you after you've trained yourself to think in a specific way, it will just open your brain to all of them. these possibilities that you've never considered before and the process of searching for those new possibilities becomes the task of research becomes the task of doing, you know, graduate studies, of doing these very attractive ways with these very rigorous ways. of academic disciplines and the next problem of

romanticizing

the liberal arts after we've addressed the problem of this, you know, this huge gap between expectations and reality because these expectations, these representations don't include any aspect of rigor that they don't include.

Whatever aspect of it, students aren't exactly expecting rigor or boredom or having to learn all these academic principles or all these research skills when they don't expect that and they have all these representations that they've harvested from social media. and when they bring that into their studies, in a sense, it discourages them from the beginning, so after that, the second problem here is that the influencers on the Internet, these representations of the liberal arts on the Internet, regardless of what you've read In Internet. internet uh comments on philosophical works on the internet or any educational videos that you have seen on the internet, including my own videos, influencers are not teachers, let me repeat that influencers are not teachers, so if we confuse the two, if we confuse them both.

If we confuse the popularization of ideas with, you know, the inherent, the essence of the idea or the inherent understanding of the idea, then we run into the problem of what Gustav Labelle coined as received ideas, which is why Flabel had a book really beautiful. He called it a dictionary of received ideas, so he basically criticized it at the time, it was the newspaper, now we have all forms of social media, the newspaper in a sense simplified it or, in a sense, weaponized the stupidity and gave it authority fools through this process. to infiltrate the popular consciousness and feel like they are stealing these partial readings of real ideas within a popular consciousness and have instilled these very limited readings of these otherwise really complicated concepts in a very short and succinct way and that It's what's happening to circulate around the discourse that's going to circulate around the social media sphere, so the whole process of circulation is, in a sense, the danger that we'll just take ideas by running them without thinking too much about it. and we are in danger. of never getting anywhere intelligently with these ideas and we run the danger of, um, misinterpretations and what's really interesting here is that the misinterpretations of a book were the misinterpretations of a specific philosophical idea or of a historical period, misinterpretations of, for example, a passing literature, although they are erroneous interpretations from an academic point of view, could actually take on truth values ​​when we put them in a social media context because in social media at the moment there is a shift away from the content of the presentation to the personality of the presenter there is a shift from the value of the ideas to how the idea is portrayed in the media, so there is a big shift from where the idea came from, where the source is from the idea, towards the

aesthetics

, the personality of the presenter and the type of charms that the presenter projects so if you are watching this video right now I want to do a very quick exercise here I am presenting things to you right now, but these opinions or these rumors that I am giving you right now these opinions that I am expressing to you, given the color scheme of this video, the way I am dressed, the way I present these ideas and my background, that will create an illusion of authority.

What I'm presenting here is based on you know some of those things that I've read, some of the educated guesses that I'm making and that I'm presenting to you, but understand that this whole exercise is still me presenting my kind of um my understanding of the problem with romanticizing the liberal arts, in a sense it's just me presenting it as an influencer as a person um who's who I don't have much authority in

academia

because I'm still a third-year literature student I don't have much um I don't have records of posts so whatever I'm presenting here are just rumors, they're here for entertainment values, I'm not presenting it to you because I want you to.

Take them very seriously, it's just me articulating what I'm thinking and presenting it in video form and all these elements around me, the little light in the background, uh, the sports jacket and the dog, and kind of the shape. in which I present this content, all of that is a mere construction. You know, this is an illusion of your academic integrity, whereas, in fact, if you really want to read some of the ideas that I'm talking about, if you really want to. Immerse yourself in the discipline, you have to realize that you still have to go back to the original source, so one day after class I asked um daradus, so Peter Salmon is a brilliant biographer.

He used to live in Melbourne and now he is teaching a winter course. about derrida and so, after the first class, i basically asked peter salmon, do you know what your opinions are? Do you know how I approach Dardevil without losing my mind? Because, as we know, steroids are notoriously difficult to read, how do we approach his ideas without, you know, losing track of his complicated arguments and Peter Simon basically said well, I would recommend that you engage directly with the source text. I would recommend you read darada directly because most of the critics of daredevil most of the quotes surrounding darada as a thinker ofthe reviews and then most of the academic articles, you know, a quick introduction to dereta, in a sense they are blatant misinterpretations of dereda, you know, there's a he basically told me that there's a lot of rubbish from critics who, actually , I had never bothered to read them because it is too difficult to read, so keep this in mind that influencers are not teachers and if you really want to get to the root of these ideas, that is why I love listing recommended readings for you, I don't want them to do it.

Take me, take my words as they are and I don't want you to run around with popular conceptions of ideas or misinterpretations of ideas and think that you really have it. To download this video and read some of the readings listed if you really want to understand some of the concepts that I'm talking about, that is in a sense the second problem. Influencers are not teachers and all this construction here is making you think. that in some ways we have authority on these topics, but although we don't really have it well, in fact we are only presenting rumors and opinions and the line between opinions and rumors should not be blurred, the line between the representation of these disciplines is in fact very different from the reality of these disciplines and you should be careful when interacting with content related to the liberal arts on the Internet because the Internet is one of the most democratized places in terms of digital information in terms of education in terms of knowledge, so in a certain way sense, ideally you want to cross-reference my videos with something you've read in the online philosophy encyclopedia.

You want to cross reference these sources and you can point out my errors. You can point out something that I don't entirely agree with, source and reference other YouTubers with other articles and through this process of referencing them through this process of carefully checking their biases, that's how you really get a deeper understanding. depth of this whole subject of the liberal arts, to conclude. here, the real work of engaging with the liberal arts, the real essence is many hours of unglamorous work, so to find a video like this, you probably spend many hours trawling quotes, trawling quotes, trying to make a big impact . in my arguments, that's, you know, hours of just locking myself in the library, it's hours of being alone, it's hours of just reading books and not going outside, um, it's hours of laboriously working with impenetrable texts when I was writing articles last semester, it's hours of nothing glamorous. with your story among your tastes, raising a professor because you don't understand something is all that liberal arts ball that is not represented on social networks that is not talked about but in my personal opinion that for me is the meat of the discipline that for me it's what you have to learn to enjoy if you really want to get involved with these ideas with these theories and with these um otherwise life transforms uh books that can save you um that can save you some decades of life experience, you know it's that process prosthetics which you need to learn to enjoy, so accept the rigor, you know, accept the loneliness, accept all these things that a lot of people are afraid to accept because at the end of the day that's what will make you an intelligent thinker. if you learn this cross referencing process if you learn to think critically and I will make more videos on how to think critically in the future if you go through this whole process what will happen is your reality will never be the same Again, after you have studied To a philosophical thinker, your way of interpreting reality will never be the same, but first of all you have to go through this period where you feel like you are banging your head against the wall. like nothing makes sense when you feel like you're really losing control of reality, you have to go through that whole laborious process, you have to go through academic bureaucracies if you're studying literature or something else in In college you have to embrace these periods that they're going to suck at coming to a really satisfying conclusion to come up with a really satisfying learning process and you have to put in a lot of years and you have to put in a lot. a lot of time and a lot of hours of solitude, so in a sense my content is just doing the job of seducing you, you know, catching your interest in these topics, but I'm not here to give you the truth, I'm not here.

I'm just telling you the truth, I'm not here trying to offer objective opinions, all my content is rumors and useful considerations, but you should not give any weight to them or my work here as part of my YouTube channel as part of My own article A full medium page is to seduce you, it is to get you interested in these topics, but you, as a liberal arts student, have to do the heavy lifting of sitting down to read the books and do your homework, that's all I have for Today is a very long video, full of information and I hope you enjoyed it and I hope that this video has basically opened you up to new possibilities of what you can do with literature, philosophy and history, and this will probably give you something back trustworthy.

You know, when you're studying liberal arts, so it's not always going to be sunshine and butterflies, it's not always going to be exciting, but it's just my personal experience, it's life-transforming if you enjoyed this video, please go. a comment below leave a like for this video and if you want to support my work I have a link to buy me a coffee so you can buy me a coffee as a kind of way to support this channel and my medium. articles and rc walden here and see you next time