"Kant and Marx!, Kant and Marx!, Kant and Marx!". The only memory I have of the selectivity exam is that of an appallingly Soviet classroom in the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the UB (now renamed as Economics and Business, I suppose because this science thing is a tremendous bore and it's much cooler to train entrepreneurs) flooded with students shouting with a mixture of joy and despair the names of these two most illustrious Germans, just as the professor handed out the papers to the front rows. Twenty years ago, in the times of BUP and COU, the subject of philosophy consisted of studying a dozen undisputed authors of the Western canon; in the sele a couple of them came up, so most people practiced playing roulette, crammed at most half of the syllabus (trafficking with little summaries about the thinkers), and prayed for chance to do the rest.
I chose Kant. Marx was the sensible option, because his schemes were much easier to memorize and most of the correcting teachers were still affected by the horrifying disease of communism. As for Marx, I discovered his genius some time later, thanks to my posh professors in New York. But in those days I was already starting to like this 18th century thing more and, perhaps because of my somewhat routine character, I was enthusiastic about the figure of that little man who had revolutionized planetary metaphysics and the synchronization of his neighbors' clocks. I often return to Kant, because his literary intuitions still move me: "two things fill my mind with admiration and respect; the starry sky above me and the moral law within me". How I would like to chat with him, especially to remind him that acting according to duty, unfortunately, has nothing to do with a happy life.
In filo I got an eight and in the global exam little more than a pass. I didn't make much of an effort, because Laia had left me a few months before and I was still depressed (on the other hand, in humanities degrees you could end up getting in if you were able to write your own name without mistakes). Once at university, I learned to have a passion for philosophy while I healed my lovesickness, and that dreadful dialectic between thought and women has accompanied me to this day. At the facu I practiced the only thing that brings me close to happiness and that I know how to do properly: study philosophy. If you have passed the sele and you are interested in dedicating yourself to thinking, I recommend that you stick to the good teachers and read the great philosophers of the past until your eyes burn. As things stand, if you finish the degree knowing how to write, talk, and with fifteen venerable texts well read, you will be a real gem.
Things haven't gone too badly for me. I was lucky enough to study thought before Steve Jobs invented the gadgets that have sent the culture of paper and reading concentration to hell. No fotem, I also waste a lot of time on absurd Youtube videos or admiring how Catalan poets argue via Twitter, but I am lucky to retain the ability to read a minimally long paragraph and remember the first sentence. Today I was reviewing this year's philosophy exam. Things haven't changed much and my colleagues are still making kids swallow works by thinkers who wrote in a cultural present that has nothing to do with their lives (as I have told them a thousand times, it would be much more useful to teach them philosophy from the present and go backwards, but it's a lost battle) and that, once the exam is over, they will never read again.
It's a shame because both fragments of this exam are caviar. In fact, for an eighteen-year-old it must be quite a trip to read how Descartes talks about the unity of the spirit and the atomization of the body in the Meditations now that, for most kids in the world, the soul is something fucking scattered and the only truly spiritual thing we've left them is precisely their skin. They must also freak out, my poor little ones, when they read one of our most ancient masterpieces, book VII of The Republic, and Plato tells them that the city is an almost literal translation of the fire and temperament of our soul (I would say that, when it comes to self-governance, we've only allowed young people to know the sparks of impotence, which is a bad advisor). But well, they'll discover all this in time, because understanding these paragraphs has cost us many centuries.
No fotem, I also waste a lot of time on absurd Youtube videos or admiring how Catalan poets argue via Twitter, but I'm lucky enough to retain the ability to read a minimally long paragraph and remember the first sentenceTo me, the whole selectividad thing still seems like a bad idea, not only because of these outrageous amounts of content with which we stuff the children, but because leading young people to the slaughterhouse of competition for an average grade still seems like a savagery to me.Who knows if we could do as in certain civilized countries of the world, where universities promote particular selection processes in each career; or even, you see, update educational programs like philosophy with the healthy intention that someone, even by mistake, ends up studying them at university. To all the reckless people who dedicate themselves to such a task, I remind them that it requires a lot of effort, but that, over time, the satisfaction is limitless. The shit is that philosophy requires finding a job to continue studying. Articles are not a bad option, but I recommend some task that fills more plates of rice.
If this thing about the national team and future plans went wrong for you, don't suffer, because of what happens next... the best is what you hadn't foreseen. And if you dedicate yourself to what I do, prepare to be very alone. Like Kant and Marx, despite all the revolutions they gave to the masses.