I feel that I need to clear something up a little bit.
Back in September, as my PHIL 1010 class was just getting ramped up, I wrote this, more or less as an excuse to post my silly doodle of Descartes' brain in a jar. In the midst of this post, I referred to my philosophy class, taught at MTSU by Dr. Hinz, as "boring." Well, I think I should address that, and then tell you a story.
In the final analysis, it most certainly was not a boring class. For me. I engaged with the reading, did my homework and Dr. Hinz's style of breaking things down grew on me, and ultimately, I found that I was looking forward to my Tuesday/Thursday trips to class. I would have to say, however, that fully 90 % of my classmates were boring, having adopted defeatism and apathy as their methods for getting through what was, to many of them, a twice-a-week, 85 minute slog through stuff they either don't get or don't care about. Buncha bastards.
And at the end, I think Dr. Hinz was fully aware of the slovenly nature of my fellows, as he became fully awesome on our last day of class. Our semester concluded with ethics; Benedict, Rachels, Aristotle, Rand, Kant, Bentham (who has been additionally fascinating to me for years now because of this), Mill & Nietzsche. That meant that by the last actual class day, last Tuesday, we had been offered cultural relativism and virtue ethics, Rand who is mostly refuted by Kant (and common sense notions of not being a fucking dick all the time), Mill's utilitarianism, universal standards for morality, and finally, Captain Mustache up there's slave morality vs. master morality. And right at the end, just before he kicked us out to go study for our final, which was yesterday, Dr. Hinz did this thing, which I will present as a shameless Nietzschian paraphrase, because it happened last week and I have brainfry:
"These are important things to think about, and I would urge all of you to step outside of your boxes and really do philosophy. Many think that they can simply fall back on God for morality, but let me tell you something - getting people to be domesticated and work together requires taming them, and you have to punish them to do that, like when I train my dog not to poo in the house. The right to judge and punish comes from somewhere, so we make up God for that authority. (No one in class challenged this.) But we have to be responsible to be held responsible, so we create 'free will,' and for punishment to mean anything it has to extend beyond this existence, so we invent the eternal soul. But none of you thinks very hard about this, content to be entertained and brainwashed into simply moving through life without questioning. Everyone suffers and dies, there are no exceptions, not even Jesus. If the mark you want to make is your name on a rock when you're dead, then keep going along like you are. Okay - have a nice break!"
It was awesome. I was dumbfounded, surrounded by a sea of hurt, bummed out, confused people. He just torpedoed their days, and if his aim is on, their lives. I thought it was just great, and needed to share it with my readership, both real and imaginary.
