§70 Against academic transparency
Academics are encouraged, ad nauseam, to expose themselves to ‘constructive feedback’ and share their findings as widely and rapidly as possible. These agents of ‘impact’ are frantically busy. Pace this tendency, James Watson, the co-‘discoverer’ of the DNA molecule, once said:
‘…I think …what we’ve lost now in …science today is: leisure.’ (Watson, 2010)
Today natural scientists have ‘become more and more narrow experts and not very broad’. They become ‘technicians’.
The crucial role of leisure he held is that:
‘…it’s certainly in dreams of people… that they [think] something big. Most of the time they keep it secret… (Watson, 2010)’
The link between secrecy and genuine thought has been elaborated on elsewhere for the human ‘sciences’:
‘We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves, — so how are we ever supposed to find our- selves? How right is the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’; our treasure is where the hives of our knowledge are. As born winged-insects and intellectual honey-gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing — to ‘bring something home’. As far as the rest of life is concerned, the so-called ‘experiences’, — who of us ever has enough seriousness for them? or enough time? I fear we have never really been ‘with it’ in such matters: our heart is simply not in it — and not even our ear! On the contrary, like somebody divinely absent-minded and sunk in his own thoughts who, the twelve strokes of midday having just boomed into his ears, wakes with a start and wonders ‘What hour struck?’, sometimes we, too, afterwards rub our ears and ask, astonished, taken aback, ‘What did we actually experience then?’ or even, ‘Who are we, in fact?’ and afterwards, as I said, we count all twelve reverberating strokes of our experience, of our life, of our being — oh! and lose count . . . We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are, the motto ‘everyone is furthest from himself’ applies to us for ever, — we are not ‘knowers’ when it comes to ourselves . . .’ (Nietzsche, 1887, Preface, Section 1, page 3)
Against transparency!
References
Nietzsche, F. (2006) On the Genealogy of Morality [Zur Genealogie Der Moral — Eine Streitschrift, 1887], Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge University Press.
Watson, J.D. (2010) ‘We Are Training Too Many Scientists’, Big Think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q3X69a1YhA
Originally published at anowmedia.com on November 2, 2018.
