Categories: uncategorized
Date: 03 October 2007 12:13:52
I've been a student of aetiology for about 9 years now, but probably for longer without realising, it comes from being a natural born sceptic and reading too much Nietzsche. Aetiology, for those of you yet to stumble upon this fine area of philosophical enquiry, is the study of causes, across all disciplines, from medicine to politics to business to metaphysics to...well, you get the idea. One of the areas where aetiology interests me is human psychology and how we construct our identities from interpretations of past events and their causes. I'm interested in this because us humans seem to have an almost infinite ability to interpret pretty much anything apart from the real cause as the cause for a later event. An example: many years ago at a certain educational institution I was on a committee designed to bring student grievances to the staff of the department, and much fun it was too. One day one of the student representatives on the committee, obviously in an inflamed state of anger and bitterness vented forth with bile and spleen that she and many other students were disillusioned because a particularly excellent and popular lecturer was leaving to take up a post elsewhere and this was causing many (which in reality probably meant 2 or 3) students to seriously consider transferring to other universities to finish their degrees. This is where I find critical aetiological faculties so much fun! Of course it wasn't the fact of the impending leaving of the lecturer in question which was causing the anger amongst a tiny minority of students. The real cause of their annoyance was that they had failed to take responsibility for their own studies and instead were relying on a talented lecturer for their educational satisfaction. If you take this little tale as a model of self-deception then you start to see it everywhere from football managers blaming the linesman's interpretation of the offside rule to politicians telling lies to protect themselves to patients blaming medics for not being able to prevent an illness caused by no exercise and eating too many pork pies to people blaming the ex-wife/husband for their depression to...oh, you get the idea. Anyway, the point of this post is that once you become aetiologically adept life becomes so much more fun as you spend half your time laughing at how incapable so many people seem to be at taking responsibility for their lives. It is this ineptitude which causes them to invent ridiculous self-deceptions which provide so much hilarity to the aetiologically aware observer. Thus, the study of aetiology is also the study of unintended humour.