The humanities, a sprawling, amorphous beast, lumber through the intellectual landscape with all the grace of a mastodon in heat. While STEM, the sleek, metallic titan of academia, marches purposefully towards a quantifiable, deterministic utopia, the humanities flounder amidst a swamp of subjectivity, where meaning is a capricious, shape-shifting entity.
The humanists, bless their cotton-picking souls, have built a labyrinth of mirrors where shadows dance and meaning dissolves into a miasma of self-referential fog. These are realms where logic, the sturdy scaffolding of the STEM-world, is but a quaint relic, a forgotten tool in a workshop of smoke and echoes.
The humanities, a vast, spongy archipelago of thought, drift in a sea of subjective tides, their contours ever shifting, their depths unplumbed. A stark contrast to the austere, linear archipelago of STEM, where islands are numbered, charted, and conquered with a ruthless, quantitative precision.
Consider the plight of the neophyte philosopher, a hapless soul adrift in a sea of ink-stained parchment. Armed with naught but a cursory glance at Nietzsche’s aphoristic fireworks, they venture forth into the labyrinthine realms of post-structuralism, phenomenology, and existentialism. These are territories where logic, that old, stolid bourgeois, is routinely handcuffed and thrown into a dumpster fire of paradox and ambiguity. The hapless wanderer, accustomed to the linear, cause-and-effect narratives of scientific inquiry, is ill-equipped for the dizzying, Möbius strip logic of Derrida or the existential abyss of Sartre.
One stumbles into this intellectual jungle armed only with a Nietzschean machete, hacking away at the undergrowth of post-structuralist vines and phenomenological brambles. It’s a perilous expedition, fraught with the risk of getting lost in the existential swamp, mired in the quicksand of counter-intuitive thought. The problem, you see, is not merely the density of the foliage, but the lack of a sturdy map. A soul adrift in the master-slave dialectic, fixated on the spectral weaponry of the will to power, is scarcely equipped for the topological intricacies of Being-in-the-World. Such a novice is like a flatlander confronted with a Klein bottle, their mind a frantic hamster on a wheel of confusion.
Post-structuralism, phenomenology, and existentialism, these are the siren songs of the intellectual deep, their melodies as enchanting as they are maddening. Logic, that sturdy, oak-beamed tavern of the mind, is here but a ramshackle hut, its roof leaking in the tempest of these ideas. And without a sturdy foundation in the classical, without the bone-deep knowledge of master and slave, of the will to power, one is apt to drown in these metaphysical maelstroms. For without such ballast, the mind is but a cork bobbing aimlessly, subject to the whims of every passing intellectual current.
It is as if one were to parachute into the heart of a Borgesian library, expecting to find a neat Dewey Decimal system and instead discovering a labyrinth of interconnected texts, each a portal to a different reality. No wonder, then, that our intrepid STEM dabler is reduced to mumbling about “master” and “slave” morality, a pathetic echo of Nietzschean thunder, while the true mysteries of Being and Nothingness slip through their grasp like grains of sand.