Academics at War!
By Bert Junrie B. Espina
The recent senate hearing sparked a debate across the country. Such event captured a range of public opinion on war on drugs during the presidency of former President Rodrigo Duterte. Even the leading intelligentsia in this country are getting involved in a “bardargulan” (You can check this exchange between Prof. Maboloc and some of his adversaries on facebook). This is not totally new for academics throwing insults to fellow academics. In fact, here are some few insults written by well-known academics in our history, to quote:
1. “The insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ‘common sense’ of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.” — Karl Marx’s insult to Jeremy Bentham;
2. “Hegel was a charlatan, a common mind, but inflated by a multitude of empty words to such an extent that people imagined it contained something.” — Arthur Schopenhauer against G.F.W. Hegel; and
3. “To be attracted to the Platonic dialogue, this horribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic, one must never have read good French writers — Fontenelle, for example. Plato is boring.” –Friedrich Nietzsche against Plato.
Anyway, let’s press forward and set aside the insults. The point is that — these two factions have disagreement, and the aim of this essay is to trace their stand and examine the dialectic of this discourse. There is even no mistake to attribute that the whole discourse bears resemblance to the famous debate of M. Focault and N. Chomsky that was aired on TV in 1971, where the two discusses about power, justice, and freedom. In the debate, M. Focault claimed, like he was dropping a bomb in the room, that the oppressed just want to take power in order to get revenge on their former oppressors, and further claimed that justice, fairness, equality, etc. are merely subterfuge in the pursuit of power; Chomsky, on the other hand, disagreed and believed that egalitarian principles must be upheld. If you come think of it, there is truth to both sides. It would somehow appear that it becomes more dangerous to fully agree on one side. We cannot deny the reality that there are amoral people who uses moral values to advance their evil machinations, and we cannot also deny the danger when we abandon and stop believing on our pursuit towards freedom and justice.
What’s more, one view holds nothing so different with Machiavelli’s consequentialist principle, that should the greater good is achieved, “the ends will justify the means,” or in relation to a Utilitarian principle that the right action is the one that produces the best overall consequences; the other holds a deontological view, which Immanuel Kant refers to in his 2nd Categorical Imperative, to wit: “Treat other people as ends in themselves, never as means to ends.” From those viewpoints, we can outline the positions of the two sides in this debate. Applying the first principle to this debate, one faction believes that it is justifiable to kill one (1) criminal in order to protect others from the harm he may probably cause; in the latter principle, they believe that the means of summary killing the identified criminals are morally wrong, regardless of whether or not they are found guilty, believing everyone deserves the right to life. The question now is, what’s your pick? But as what Slavoj Zizek is always saying: “I would prefer not to” and “Don’t act, just think.” Not that he avoids taking action, i.e. denying a predicate, but that the action is taken by affirming a non-predicate. It seeks to undermine the choice itself.
Whatever be your stand in this debate, lest it be forgotten that the point of interaction is the improvement of all the people that you are speaking to by the exchanging of thoughts. Hence, when we discuss or argue, we must be committed to the idea that the aim of it must always be for the progress of everyone.
