I have just come back from a morning bike ride listening to a philosopher with an execrable accent.  If you remember the “Shake and Bake” little southern girls who squeal, “Ah heped with the shaike and bike”, you get an idea of how he sounded. He did, however, make some interesting observations about our society.  Actually, his course name is “The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century”. He is Rick Roderick of the National University in Los Angeles.

The “self” is in trouble in the 20^th Century.  Of course, this is the 21^st Century but I think we can extrapolate the observations of Mr. Roderick safely into our times.  His argument proceeds from a distinction between knowledge and information.  He did not want to talk about knowledge for that is unquantifiable.  He says, and I think quite reasonably, that our information has become not only unmanageable because of its amount multiplied by our technology, but its size is simply too much for the self to handle.  We have problems as humans in placing ourselves in the context of our current civilization and ask: who are we?  People throughout time looked to idealized societies as the answer to the difficulties encountered by irrational and commonly dysfunctional styles of living.  Not only is there a crushing amount of information that we have to handle, but its complexity defeats any attempt to rationalize that “self”.

Descartes’ famous statement about doubt has always tickled the young who study philosophy.  If we but think clearly and distinctly, this should be sufficient to erase doubt.  And, how can we doubt – especially our own existence, our own self - for we must be here to doubt?  Since Descartes, we have had the Marxian and Freudian analyses of our social order.  They demolished the Cartesian simplicity by showing the hidden forces that thinking freely disclosed.  An unseen war between classes and unseen forces within our own heads further confused us.  There were more arguments than these but the main thrust of trying to disclose the self was to show how it was buried in a modern, Twentieth Century”, inimical to sane, meaningful living.

Getting past Professor Roderick’s accent was no problem, after all.  I was delighted by his simplification of many of the problems that beset me when I try to explain by THINKING ALLOWED, issues and ideas and rationalize my reflections on the times.  Philosophy simplified is what simple minds need and I thank the good Professor for showing that it is hard to think, even when allowed, when submerged in a morass of information that keeps multiplying upon itself and defies understanding.