I won’t try to hide it: I love a good scandal. That’s why I’ve been so disappointed with the website Juicy Campus. All I see is “This person is a slut” or “That sorority sucks.” I’ve got all kinds of questions that could make these little tidbits more fascinating: Who is this slutty person? What is the evidence of his or her sluttiness? What is the accuser’s relationship to the accused? Sadly, Juicy Campus provides no answers. But I’m not one to complain without wondering why I’m disappointed, and why scandalous revelations interest me in the first place.

So here’s my scandalous opinion: I think that the dissection of a good scandal, one with lots of layers and interesting new evidence, can be a deeply philosophical activity. I know – shocking, isn’t it? But I have my reasons. A scandal reveals the tension between appearance and essence. We’re shocked because things are revealed to be different from the way they appear, and the truth about the subject at hand is more fully exposed.

The philosophical community is marked by its abundance of this kind of scandal. When a new philosopher appears on the scene with a different take on metaphysics or a new solution to an apparent paradox, one can’t help but be scandalized. When old ideas are challenged, overthrown or integrated into more complex systems, you have to take a moment to say to yourself, “Oh no, he did not just say that!” The shock of the scandal is part of the pleasure of philosophic thinking; it’s what makes new ideas exciting.

The scientific community is very similar in this respect. Imagine that great community of thinkers between 1900 and 1930, which included Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger and Planck. At a time of such extraordinary scientific discovery, one gets the feeling that these men must have gossiped like nobody’s business. When experiment upon experiment provided evidence that energy was transmitted in quanta rather than continuously, how could any good scientist avoid feeling scandalized? And what do we make of those shocking revelations about the composition of the atom and the constancy of the speed of light? Ideas don’t get more scandalous than that.

But don’t think I mean to disparage these ideas when I call them scandalous. A good thinker must take pleasure in being scandalized. The shock of the scandal is exciting because it brings new truths to light, and the honest intellect will delight in seeing its previous assumptions overturned and distorted.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with the run-of-the-mill scandals of daily campus life. You may think the kinds of scandals I’ve described are much too lofty and substantially different from the ones you’ll find on the average website devoted to college gossip.

You might be right. But I’d like to debunk the pretentious idea that good conversation can only arise from the most obscure reasoning about abstract concepts. A resourceful thinker can find profound ideas in any setting. Deep questions about human character, about how people think and perceive and act, can certainly arise from the average campus scandal. Our acquaintances who engage in some scandalous activity reveal something new about themselves, and an active mind cannot help but dissect the situation and wonder at the reasons behind it.

Of course, I won’t encourage the kind of malicious gossip that provides no new insights and only seeks to harm other people. But I will say that it seems self-righteous to decry the discussion of scandal without wondering what makes the scandal fascinating. We’re humans – we’re constantly thinking about and analyzing one another. Shouldn’t we be honest about that behavior, and explore whether this kind of thinking has some value?

Susan Holcomb is a physics major. She can be reached at holcombdbk@gmail.com.