Feature
Looking for Jacobs
Some Trivial Thoughts on the Study of Philosophy
by Graeme Hunter
Descartes says there are five sources of wisdom. Conversation and history are two of them, and they will be my subjects because, like philosophy, they depend on words.
Being social animals, we need interaction with other people. If we are going to be wise, we must file the rough edges of our thinking, not in order to smooth and soften them, but to make them strong and sharp. Conversation is the file society provides for this purpose. It is the best remedy for flaccid wits. Almost any conversation is good, but not all of it makes us wise. Wisdom improves fastest through conversation with people who are already wise. They needn't be credentialed, but to be useful for our mental development, they must be people who easily catch the drift of whatever you propose and just as easily detect its weaknesses. Wise people are seldom eager to converse with youngsters, unless they detect in them some dialectical promise.
"Trivial" Necessities
To teach and learn from one another, interlocutors must share a language that is grammatically sound, delicate with nuance, and deeply loved. The inferential structure of language, normally called logic, must also be second nature to both interlocutors, and respected by both. Finally, each must appreciate, and occasionally reveal, a degree of linguistic playfulness and finesse. A hundred years ago these "trivial" matters were the subjects of primary school: They were called the "trivium" and consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. They were the elementary skills that had to be acquired before you could graduate to thought. They led to what the poet Paul Valéry called un début dans la vie humaine (beginning a human life).
Avid young people who want to make it in philosophy strive to cultivate such a say, and are always on the lookout for conversational challenge. Like Jacob, they are prepared to wrestle with the angel of the Lord. To translate loosely the German poet, Rilke,
If you are conquered by that angel,
Who so seldom deigns to fight,
you go forth graceful and upright—Not to struggle for the victor's seat—
But search, anew, for ever more significant defeat.
If you are young and serious about that kind of conversation, then you're a seeker after wisdom. But you are also an anomaly. Where could you have come from in an age where grammar, logic, and rhetoric are not taught in the schools or prized in the world? Where poetry is not memorized or read aloud at home or at school, where ideas are not avidly discussed in public gatherings? Where linguistic attainments are scoffed at by low-browed louts?
There are few young Jacobs to be found, even, or perhaps particularly, in universities. A Nobel-Prize-winning author describes his students as "post-Christian, post-historical, post-literate." And adds, "they might as well have been hatched from eggs yesterday" (J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p. 32). Their post-literate condition I have already acknowledged. But how are they post-historical?
Reading Skills
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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