Learning as Sacred Exploration

Written 2/4/20 for Maeser students but hopefully applies to others.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

— Yeats (1865–1939), Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (1899)

Do Not Run on Light Feet

As you learn you will find ideas you despise, which you cannot fathom feeling any devotion towards. This is inevitable during education; if you are unable to find an idea that repulses you, you have not learned enough. It could be math. Let’s be real — it’s probably math. Perhaps it is existentialism, what some call a tossed-together outfit of unruly meditations on the miserable topic of anxiety that should forgotten as soon as they are realized. Maybe it’s quantum mechanics, with all its strange particles and spooky interactions. It might be a specific thinker: maybe you can’t stand Milton, Buddha, Fitzgerald, Wollstonecraft, Plato, Confucius, Nietzsche, even Shakespeare. Maybe you have strong opinions on Catcher in the Rye: either as a fulgent manifestation of teenage truth on earth, or a reckless muckle of teeming maggot-words with no higher purpose but furnace fuel. Everyone has a set of ideas they do not want to explore. If you think your mind is open to everything, this is not a testament to genuine openness but to either a lack of self-awareness or a lack of exposure to ideas.  

As we search for those few principles, words, and approaches that explain our experience and enable our growth, we encounter some concepts which are polar in almost every way to our structure of thought. We have stacked idea upon idea into a vast building, polished its edges, and refined it until it seems be an adequate system. How can we admit some crass new idea, seeking to enter past the gates of our luxuriant tower, bringing muck onto the lustrous floors? It would be unacceptable to let such an idea in. And it is so much trouble to descend the steps of the tower. 

Why do we despise these novel thoughts? It is in part because they are strangers to the ordinary contents of our mind. But this is not a simple problem that can be solved by such clichés as thinking differently and finding new perspectives. Over the course of our education, we become accustomed to a certain habit of mind. Because this habit was built with the slow and agonizing process of learning, we do not want to forsake it. At the bottom of our fear of new knowledge is a fear of abandonment: the terror that when you leave the comfort of your tower you will be left homeless and abandoned, unable to return home. 

In Sophocles’ Antigone, an unnamed guard reports: “I have not exactly been ‘running on light feet.’ I halted many times along the road so I could think.”^[1] Follow his example: if you are running on light feet, you are moving too fast. The trail we are all following is circuitous, complex, rhizomatic and many-branched, pockmarked with potholes, and illuminated only by dim dusk-light. Move quickly and you will make many falls, but a few accidents are not the real hazard: the true danger is that you will ignore the beauty and intricacy of the world around your route, sprint past crossroads, and miss countless pathways that could restructure your view of existence. 

And if you fail to explore at all, it will not speed up your journey but slow it down. After all, is your purpose just to cover a maximal distance? In life, the scalar value speed does not matter; only the vector value velocity: speed with direction.^[2] Absolute speed is unimportant unless you are traveling in your intended direction. If you have adjusted your velocity well, you will arrive at your destination eventually. But if you are moving in the wrong direction, if your velocity is misaligned, you’ll never achieve your goals regardless of speed. Do not only seek to imitate Usain Bolt. Aspire to be like Magellan, an explorer who had to adjust his trajectory endlessly, navigate based on the stars alone using primitive quadrants and astrolabes, and keep sailing to his intended point over hundreds of days and miles that faded into each other indistinguishably. Remember your direction and not just your speed.

If it appears to you that any aspect of existence is obvious, granted, or transparent and easily decipherable, then you are likely not thinking, learning, or experiencing enough. Many things are simple on the surface. But when you run on light feet, when you do not allow your toes to sink into earth, all surfaces feel the same. Almost nothing is simple once you unwrap its cheap and superficial cardboard packaging. These four seismic lines of Alexander Pope are some of the most impactful words I have ever read: 

A little learning is a dangerous thing; 
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: 
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, 
and drinking largely sobers us again.

Alexander Pope (Essay on Criticism)^[3]

The Pierian Spring is the source of knowledge and inspiration in Greek myth, where upon drinking “Inspiration will then force a vent / And rush in a flood from a heart that is loved by the muse” (Petronius). Taking a brief sip from the Pierian Spring is equivalent to running on light feet.

Socrates (through Plato’s voice) constantly emphasized that wisdom does not come from quantity of information (acquired by sprinting through your studies on light feet), but a humble awareness of the limits of your knowledge and a driving curiosity to expand these borders. As Confucius described in the Analects, “The master said: To know when you know; and when you do not know; that is wisdom.” Part of Maeser’s mission is integrating the Socratic model of humility and questioning into every class. So hopefully this will not be your first taste of Plato:

“And isn’t it one lasting precaution not to let them taste arguments while they’re young? I don’t suppose that it has escaped your notice that, when young people get their first taste of arguments, they misuse it by treating it as a kind of game of contradiction. They imitate those who’ve refuted them by refuting others themselves, and, like puppies, they enjoy dragging and tearing those around them with their arguments. Then, when they’ve refuted many and been refuted by them in turn, they forcefully and quickly fall into disbelieving what they believed before. And, as a result, they themselves and the whole of philosophy are discredited in the eyes of others.”

— Plato, Republic 539b-c.

When you first take a casual sip from the Pierian spring you may find yourself becoming the person Plato describes above. I’ve seen this in many places, but especially in competitive debate, undergraduate philosophy, politics, and other forums with a strong emphasis on argument. Once you learn to toddle you want to walk, and then you want to run, and then to dance on glass, and then to sprint on light feet everywhere. Resist this urge to focus only on increasing speed. Critical thinking is essential, but it does not necessitate relentless criticism of every idea and person you find, applying your full effort to refute everything you can. As José Ortega y Gasset wisely wrote, “Every good beginner is a skeptic, but every skeptic is only a beginner.”

Another key hazard of running on light feet is that this sprinting makes it effortless to trod on quicksand. Paradoxically, running on light feet will lead to stable, slow stagnation. It is almost inevitable: agile leaping from idea to idea, never giving pause to investigate, taking many small sips but never quaffing your thirst, your light feet will touch down on the solid-seeming surface of quicksand. At first it is exciting: your need for speed has stopped you from sinking into any other idea, so when you sink into quicksand it feels new and refreshing. You do not realize you are drowning and will soon be unable to escape. 

To make the metaphor explicit: the quicksand is the all-enveloping power of the shallow and mundane, the mechanical tasks of the everyday, the wake-up-you-need-to-make-money, the running on light feet, the quick sips, the life so full of speed you never feel a need for direction. As Lin Yutang wrote, “Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise.” Being swallowed up by mundanity is easy. Unless you watch closely, the ordinary will consume you and numb you. Unless you pay attention, your purpose will disappear into quicksand. Smooth and natural. With barely any sign you can suspect. You walk on it easily, and once you notice it’s too late. Your mind will be left flailing in a mire of repeated consensus. And once your head is immersed in the quicksand, your thirst will be quenched, and you will have no more need to seek the Pierian spring. Life will become obvious, and you will have a convenient bromide or banal platitude to silence any inquisitive thought. 

Classics and Creative Reading

Many books at Maeser are assigned. You do not have complete freedom to choose your content and your curriculum. Your path has been blazed already. Rather you must explore in practice, to choose the way you read. “Reading is a creative act. Unlike almost everything we are encouraged to consider entertainment, it is an active pursuit. Without this process of interpretation we cannot know ourselves” (Curcio). In other words: reading cannot just be absorption, filling and clogging the mind with more information. If a book is to change you in any meaningful way — and isn’t that the purpose of a book? — you must create through reading, using the printed words as a medium to create novel ideas just as a painter uses a canvas. Classics are marked by the way they inspire and almost necessitate this creative interpretation.

However, most books we tend to call classics are merely conventions. They are christened classics by the impersonal processes of tradition, repetition, and public opinion. As they are cemented into the cultural psyche, they eventually come to be called time-tested. At this point, they are sacred, and the individual has no choice in the matter – they must call the book a classic to avoid being savaged by the collective roasting of the literary horde. The canon of classics are determined merely by consulting the ‘people who matter.’

The problem is not that these books are not ‘actually classics.’ Rather, a fixed and established canon of classics can give the reader the impression that they have no role in the matter: the classics are merely passed onto me, and my job is simply to read and accept them. Furthermore, routine and convention breed the most formidable enemy of growth: comfort. A pleasant consensus silently forbids certain thoughts from ever being expressed. As Bradbury wrote, “the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority” (104). Why is the impersonal, objective set of big-C Classics important to the individual? Even if we found standards to test a classic by that we all could agree upon, the individual must make each classic meaningful through a intensely subjective relationship with the book. What we should be looking for is not a greater definition or a more complete set of criteria, but more powerful personal encounter with the texts.

Only the spark of a personal relationship to a book can ignite a fire worth stoking. In Fahrenheit 451, a woman refuses to give up her books to the firemen, and so she is burned alive in the inferno of paper. After this, Montag reflects that “There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing” (Bradbury, 58). This is what makes a classic. My classics will contain those intensely personal things that I am willing to set myself ablaze for. I could never burn for mere Truth, the kind that can be announced from impersonal loudspeakers using the customary metaphors. Classics encourage subjective appropriation, not mere objective acceptance. This is why, as Clifton Fadiman puts it, “When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.” Classics are ever-growing, as their meaning for you expands every time you encounter the text again.

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

Italo Calvino

After all, could you die for ‘the canon’? Could you live based on facts alone? Could you live your life according to a sophisticated model, an elaborate system of the Truth? As Kierkegaard wrote:

“The obliging, immediate, wholly unreflective subject is naïvely convinced that if only the objective truth stands fast, the subject will be ready and willing to attach himself to it.”

Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pg. 37

This “unreflective subject” is wrong. Just knowing the ‘objective truth’ is not enough to create personal change, not enough to bring the idea into yourself. First, there will always be objective uncertainty. No thesis is fully, unquestionably established. Second, an idea is dead if it is purely abstract, if you can only conceive it without action. An idea is living if you can live it, if you can act upon it irrevocably. Mere theses, universal principles, are not enough to be living.

At the end of Plato’s dialogue on education, the Lysis, he declares that he and his companions have “made fools of ourselves”: we have spent hours discussing friendship, but “what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out” (223b). However, Plato and his interlocuters walk away from the dialogue as friends. “friendship,” they understand what friendship is, and they can recognize that they are friends. They have become friends in the process of identifying what constitutes true friendship. Even though they don’t have a coherent set of necessary & sufficient conditions for what constitutes friendship, they can recognize that they are friends. Or as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I know it when I see it” (Lattman). In the same way, we don’t need a rigorous, objective, and universal standard for Classics to recognize a classic. We identify classics not by their age, but by their compelling personal qualities.

“Ancient works are classic not because they are old, but because they are powerful, fresh, and healthy.”

Goethe

Mapping Truth

One of Maeser’s three axioms is Truth. What does this word mean? It can seem very obvious: truth is just the reality, whatever “is the case,” the Absolute, the always-capitalized, sacred word. But here you should be cautious; do not run on light feet. For if something seems obvious it usually means our model is such a simplification that the complexity of the reality is forgotten. The map has subsumed the territory. When we are immersed in a model, we cannot get our head above water to see anything else: we become the fish who asks “what the hell is water?” (Wallace) It is not obvious or a given that truth is just correspondence to reality. Perhaps truth is not just a conceptual relationship between words and reality, but something more living, vivid, breathing:

“What is truth but to live for an idea? When all is said and done, everything is based on a postulate; but not until it no longer stands outside him, not until he lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate for him.” 

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, pg. 363.

We often assume that if only we could discover reality, if only our mental map would mirror the structure of the universe, if only we could access the Absolute – then we could live and die for this kind of truth. First, the obvious response is that us mortals cannot access this type of truth. As Korzybski wrote: “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness” (58). In other words, our models are not equivalent to reality: we are mere mapmakers. Our words and mental structures are attempts to package ineffable and esoteric experiences into shippable cardboard boxes.

Most thinkers have some aphorism for the inadequacy of words, the limits of systems, and the need for intellectual humility. Schopenhauer’s aphorism was “Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.” Nietzsche’s was “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” And Plato said “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” Khalil Gibran also crafted a brilliant poem to communicate the insufficiency of mental models and brute words: 

Give to me the reed and sing thou! 
Forget hence what both have stated;
Words are but the motes in rainbow, 
Tell me now of joys you’ve tasted.

— Khalil Gibran, The Procession, “The Summing of the Youth”

The Absolute Truth is perhaps unachievable and almost certainly ineffable: to describe it in mere words is always dishonest. 

But second and more importantly, you must first learn to know yourself before anything else. Without an inward transformation, yeastless and objective truth is irrelevant, and you will not be able to muster the passion to burn for it. Kierkegaard gives this example: “This is what is lacking, and this is why I am like a man who has collected furniture, rented an apartment, but as yet has not found the beloved to share life’s ups and downs with him” (35). Even if you could discover objectivity, it is just an unfurnished apartment until you become personally intertwined with this truth. In this sense, Truth is a chimera: just finding it will not change your life in any meaningful sense. Rather, our aim when we read and learn should be akin to Kierkegaard’s: 

“The crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die…this was what I needed, to lead a completely human life and not merely one of knowledge, so that I could base the development of my thought not on – yes, not on something called objective – something that in any case is not my own, but upon something that is bound up with the deepest roots of my existence, through which I am grafted into the divine, to which I cling fast even though the whole world may collapse. This is what I needed, and this is what I strive for.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, The Essential Kierkegaard, pg. 14.

All this elegant language simplifies into an unavoidable reality: it doesn’t matter if it is true if it is not your own. This is why the woman who burns with her books retorts to the firemen that “You can’t ever have my books” (Bradbury, 39). She didn’t just mean this in the physical sense, as in, ‘I will burn with my books before I let you burn them.’ She also meant that the books had become so intensely personal that no one else could possess them or understand them in the same way that she did. This is why the hero of books in Fahrenheit 451 is not Beady, who knows about the ancient books and can quote them while keeping them at arm’s length from his soul. Rather, it is the woman who martyrs herself for a book. It is the people who undergo the agonizing process of transplanting books into their minds and hearts. 

Books gain their transformative power when we make them part of ourselves, a constant fixture of our internal dialogue. Italo Calvino emphasized the liveness of a classic text or idea: “your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him” (132). What distinguishes live and dead ideas? As William James wrote, “deadness and liveness are measured by a thinker’s willingness to act” (15). To oversimplify: an idea is live to the extent you can live for the idea. The bold pursuit for a book worth dying for — and more importantly living for — is an adventure worth caring about. Our feeble attempt to discover truth in books is a mere eternal side-quest. And I use the word “book” only as a proxy to much more: books are convenient packages for ideas, which should become actions and ways of living. Otherwise books are just the corpses of trees. 

Buying Education

My thoughts on the commodification of learning, achievement orientation, and Socrates’ model of meaningful education have been moved to this post: Buying Education.

Conclusion

As these types of essays typically do, I will simplify my injunctions to just three ideas:

1. Do not run on light feet. Practice intellectual humility as Socrates: “I only know that I know nothing.” To acquire this humility, you must escape your tower, leave the beaten trail, and explore. Recognize the complexity of existence and know that if you wish to study existence at all, you must chug: do not take shallow sips. Drink deep from the Pierian spring. And remember the insufficiencies of the tools you use to investigate reality: the flaws of words and the inaccurate mapmaking we all must practice. 
2. Develop an almost-sacred personal relationship with truth, books, and ideas, rather than treating them as distant abstractions. Remember that an idea is living to the extent you are willing to act upon it. Try to bring to life every idea you encounter. Resurrect the countless dead ideas stored in the mausoleums, sepulchers, and cadaver-closets of your memory. “Words are but the motes in rainbow,” so don’t just look for concepts you can recite without qualms. Search for ideas you can live and die for. 
3. Remember the value of education beyond just utility. Your value extends infinitely beyond just your ‘achievements’ or the products of your labor. In the same sense education is not just its products. It is a fundamental and transformative activity, an end in of itself rather than just a means to an end. Do not commodify yourself or your ideas. Books are not mere ore deposits to be mined or resource-rich mountains to be hollowed out, the ideas within carted out to be sold to the highest bidder. 

To conclude: education is merely a necessary evil for many people. It in itself has no value – only its products. To those who think this way, we begin to live after our education is over. But what does ‘life’ mean? The process of changing, failing, striving. In a word: education. Thus life is education, and education is life itself. This is the only constant in the dynamic of existence. Stasis is death, equilibrium is decay, stagnation is suicide. Only growth is vitality; to live is to grow. Maeser is one of the few places in your life — and perhaps the only place — that will recognize and fully emphasize this intrinsic value of education. Maeser may be the only place you ever encounter where education is viewed as valuable in of itself rather than a mere instrumental value, a mere means to ends like career progression or academic achievement. Of course, no institution can live up to its own ideals. Maeser is far from complete. But recognize the value of this place. 

And when you find yourself saying “I don’t have time for philosophy, I have bills to pay,” or some other phrase that expresses the same meaning, remember that this is not philosophy. This is life. You don’t have enough time to not think about it. With every day, you should consider the fundamental, the deep, the sacred, the truth beyond the mundane. Otherwise, why wake up? You cannot live for the mundane, for the mechanical: turning door knobs, moving steering wheels, lifting food to mouth.

Learning is not just the process of acquiring ideas and skills to more effectively complete mundane tasks. Ideas are not just a way to pad a resume or expand a salary. Treating an idea as just a means to an end objectifies that idea. But if you allow them to, ideas can become living. An idea can become imperative as breath. A book can be as hallowed as an altar to the sublime. A school could become as sacrosanct as a monastery.

Five works that should be assigned @Maeser:

1. The Apology — Plato. (and other dialogues of Plato if possible)
2. Schopenhauer as Educator — Nietzsche. (concise essay)
3. The Prophet and The Procession — Khalil Gibran. (short poems)
4. Essay on Criticism — Alexander Pope. (poem)
5. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning — Mark A. McDaniel. (most pragmatic/useful book I’ve ever read)

Works Cited

Pope, Alexander. Essay on Criticism. 1711. Print. Lines 215 – 232.

Petronius, Arbiter, and J M. Mitchell. Petronius: The Satyricon. London: G. Routledge, 1923. Print. Vol 1.

Confucius. The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999. Print.

Y. Gasset, José Ortega. What is Philosophy? Translated From the Spanish by Mildred Adams. Norton: New York, New York, 1960. Print.

Plato. The Complete Works of Plato: The Republic Book VII. Trans. John Cooper. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997. Print. 539b-c (pg 1154)

Lin, Yutang. The Importance of Living. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1938. Print.

Curcio, James. Brian Castro’s fiction: the seductive play of language. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008. Print. Page 153.

Wallace, David Foster. “This is water by David Foster Wallace (Full transcript and audio).” Farnam Street (2005).

Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Schuchardt Read: New York, New York 1933. Print. Page 58.

Calvino, Italo. Why Read the Classics? New York: Pantheon Books, 1999. Print. Page 132.

James, William and Cahn, Steven (ed). The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896. Page 15.

Boyles, Deron. “Sophistry, Dialectic, and Teacher Education: A Reinterpretation of Plato’s Meno.” George State University Press: Philosophy of Education Archive. N.d. Web. 6 Feb 2018.

Rowe, C.J. “Plato on the Sophists as Teachers of Virtue.” History of Political Thought, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Winter 1983), pp. 409-427. N.d. Web. 6 Feb 2018.