An anarcho-syndicalist American analytic philosopher and linguistics professor was teaching a class on Bertrand Russell, known logician.
“Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Russell as the most influential philosopher of the 20th century, even more influential than Jacques Derrida or any other continental philosopher!” At this moment, a brave, psycho-analytic, Hegelian Marxist philosopher and cultural theorist, who fully recognized the weaponisation and ideological basis of instrumental rationality, boldly stood up and tugged at his collar. “My god, pure ideology! How can you ignore the work of Lacan and the Frankfurt School and so on and so on, like that?”
The arrogant professor smirked quite arrogantly and smugly replied, “Continental philosophy cloaks trivialities in fancy language and uses the scientific-sounding term ‘theory’ to describe propositions that could never be tested empirically.”
“Wrong. If empiricism is so important, as you would say, then how come you were so empirically wrong on the nature of language, and so on and so on?”
The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He stormed out of the room, crying those unironic empirically verified crocodile tears. There is no doubt that at this point our professor, Noam Chomsky, wished he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and become more than an outdated linguist and blindly analytic philosopher. He wished so much that he had an argument to save himself from embarrassment, but he himself had advocated for truth derived from empirical investigation! The students applauded and all dropped out to transfer into the Ecole Normale Superieure that day and accepted French philosophy as superior to both German Idealism and the Anglosphere’s Analytic traditions. An eagle named “Critical Theory” flew into the room and perched atop a burning American flag and shed a single tear on the dropped chalk. Sections of Lacan’s Seminars were read several times, and the Spirit of Hegel himself showed up and demonstrated the nature of dialectics so vividly that everybody in the room progressed to a trans-physical state, transcending conventional notions of time and space. The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day and was forced to become a panelist on an MSNBC news show to make ends meet. The brave psycho-analytic philosopher’s name? Slavoj Zizek.
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