Some info. on my blogging

Below is a bit of information about the topics I favour on this blog. (There is also a general welcome lying around somewhere).

The idea is to say why I find these topics interesting and what I will do with them. If the summaries below are not enough to persuade you of the overwhelming value of any particular topic, try the linked posts in the sub-heading. If they do nothing else, these linked posts (I like to call them "Introductions") will bore you intoagreement.

Travel (as literature; as philosophy)
Writing is not just a way of expressing the world, but also of sensing the world. Travel-writing is easier than creative writing, because it places fewer demands on the imagination. It is easier than philosophy because you don't have to think too much. When I am traveling, this suits me. Frequently when I am not traveling it also suits me.

Metaphor
I would like to think that metaphor is the one true link between the crafts of the intellect and the arts of the imagination, the fibre in the knot that binds the threads of science and poetry. There is a faint possibility that this view is a bit fanciful. But I like metaphors anyway. I also like to collect them - here's a sample. I deny that this hobby makes me in any way odd, obsessive or eccentric.

Education
I would like to say that I am deeply enthusiastic about education. But really I am deeply enthusiastic about the idea of education. I like to say that good education is rich and empowering and full of wit and wisdom, that good education is key to human flourishing, that we should all become school teachers. I probably should think about these claims a little more. I should also admit that I am not really as keen as I might be on the idea of being a school-teacher. I wrote a series of three essays on education; it is called "Education as an Ideal."

Philosophy (and here and here)
In the first of the linked posts I wrote: "I do not have the will or the ability to live a life of philosophy, but I do wish to life a philosophical life." On reflection, this is really just a way of saying that I'm a pretty amateur philosopher. The things I do write on this topic are just as likely to be stimulated by a book or an abstracted idea, as by a real-life event. I am not equipped to say anything really interesting about ethics, education, politics, aesthetics or science; and I am not equipped to say anything at all about logic, metaphysics or semantics. But I like to exercise my mind and I like to reward my curiosity. I aspire to asking interesting questions. Failing that, I hope to make some interesting errors.

Creative
Everyone likes a good yarn. A lot of people also like words. Some people like writing books. Some people like writing poems. Some people like sticking a bunch of words together to see what happens. A poem is a good way of decorating a thought that would otherwise be uninteresting. It is also a good excuse for bad arguments. I like writing poems that rhyme, especially sonnets.

Diablog
There are lots of good-sounding reasons for people to write dialogues. However, it is easier to write about writing dialogues than to write dialogues. Watch this space (intermittently).

Books
Does this need an introduction?
People read books, and then they write about them. I write about them because it enriches the experience of reading. Reviews can be long and ponderous or little more than a quote. Often they are just a way of making one's blog look better by including the prose of people who get published.

Miscellany

Stories About Cows

Historians: Working Towards a Better Past

In two days I go to Canada to study the History and Philosophy of Science (many thanks to Toronto University.) So now is a good time to say something about History.

Below is an excerpt from a History book. The passage was written by a Maori man called Horeta Te Taniwha, and it is about the arrival of the first Europeans on New Zealand soil. (These were not the first Europeans to find the country. Abel Tasman discovered New Zealand about a century earlier. But natives killed three of his men and he went home).

I quote this passage because it illustrates some things I like about historical writing.

There is the overall sense of nostalgia, of looking back on a rich and vital time from the past, a time that might have been more cruel and uncertain than our own, but which was at least as interesting as anything else we know. Historians are good at picking out the juicy bits from the past, and there are a lot of very juicy bits. Some people say that Historians make History. Mostly they are wrong. But Historians are witnesses to the making of History, and it’s a fine thing to witness.

There is the sense also of getting only a partial account of something. So much from the past is lost. But everything that has been found is a gesture towards what has not been found. The importance of the things described starts to raise images into symbols (the kumara, the stick of charcoal). What completes the job is the incompleteness of the account: written History is filled with the meaning of undocumented events, like old photos.

Then there are all the strange meetings. They are strange because they take place between people who come from different worlds. The story below is the story of two bubbles coming together and trembling. Philosophers of History write a lot about the strange things that happen when people from different backgrounds come together. Often they overbalance (usually by emphasising the problems, moral and epistemic, that accompany these meetings). But following passage sets them right: it strikes a wonderful balance between difference and likeness, confusion and understanding, awe and familiarity.

There is the misunderstanding over the European “goblins.” The “knocking together of stones” (which goes unexplained in the end, even to the reader). The “hissing” tongue of Captain Cook, the “eyes in the back of the head.” These details, casting strange shadows on familiar things, are balanced by evidence of commonality between the two groups of people. The implied syllogism (“Goblins do not eat kumara and cockles; these men are eating kumara and cockles; therefore these men are not goblins.”) – this shows how the two peoples, oceans apart, share a common reason. They share an appreciation for food, too; and also a keen instinct for human kindness (note the attitude towards Captain Cook).

Of all the symbols in the passage, the one I like best is that of the two peoples talking to eachother in their two languages, not understanding eachother in the least, but both of them laughing. My next favourite is the final scene, where communication begins.

The passage is from a book called “Two Worlds: The First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans.” Not all History is the meeting of two worlds from the past. But all History is the meeting of two worlds, the world of the past and the world of the historian. And participating in the latter relation is as strange and rewarding as observing the former relation.

On top of the above, there is the method of History. All that tiny detail (dates, the spellings of foreign names); the clutter of a thousand events in a thousand places. The Historian has less reason than the philosopher or the poet or the scientist to feel confident about making sense of all that fractured motion (the philosopher is not concerned about time past, but the timeless; the poet is not obliged to tell it all exactly; and the scientist has her laws.) But this means that the historian has more reason to feel proud when she does make sense of her subject matter.

And in making sense of it, there is as much need for an empathetic, imaginative approach to events as there is for rigorous checking of sources. So I am going to Toronto to witness the making of history, to discover new symbols, to watch civilisations tremble like bubbles, to make sense out of chaos and to make a match out of separate disciplines. What could be better? (Answer: to study philosophy at the same time.)

Now, I give you….

The account of Horeta Te Taniwha (a child when Cook arrived on Endeavour in Whitianga, 1769).

In the days long past, when I was a very little boy, a vessel came to Whitianga (Mercury Bay). Our tribe was living there at that time. We did not live there as our permanent home, but were there according to our custom of living for some time in each of our blocks of land, to keep our claim to each, and that our fire might be kept alight on each block, so that it might not be taken from us by some other tribe.

We lived in Whitianga, and a vessel came there, and when our old men saw the ship they said it was an atua, a god, and the people on board were tupua, strange beings or ‘goblins.’ The ship came to anchor, and the boats pulled on shore. As our old men looked at the manner in which they came on shore, the rowers pulling with their backs to the bows of the boat, the old people said, ‘Yes, it is so: these people are goblins; their eyes at the back of their heads; they pull on shore with their backs to the land to which they are going.’ When these goblins came on shore we (the children and women) took notice of them, but we ran away from them into the forest, and the warriors stayed alone in the presence of these goblins; but, as the goblins stayed some time, and did not do evil to our braves, we came back one by one, and gazed at them, and we stroked their garments with our hands, and we were pleased with the whiteness of their skins and the blue eyes of some of them.

These goblins began to gather oysters, and we gave some kumara, fish, and fern-root to them. These they accepted, and we (the women and children) began to roast cockles for them; and as we saw that these goblins were eating kumara, fish and cockles, we were startled, and said, ‘Perhaps they are not goblins like the Maori goblins.’ These goblins went into the forest, and also climbed up the hill to our pa (fort) at Whitianga (Mercury Bay). They collected grasses from the cliffs, and kept knocking at the stones on the beach, and we said, ‘Why are these acts done by these goblins?’ We and the women gathered stones and grass of all sorts, and gave to these goblins. Some of the stones they liked, and put them into their bags, the rest they threw away; and when we gave them the grass and branches of trees they stood and talked to us, or they uttered words of their language. Perhaps they were asking questions, and, as we did not know their language, we laughed, and these goblins laughed, so we were pleased.

…There was one supreme man on that ship. We knew that he was the lord of the whole by his perfect gentlemanly and noble demeanour. He seldom spoke, but some of the goblins spoke much. But this man did not utter many words: all that he did was to handle our mats and hold our mere, spears, and waha-ika, and touch the hair of our heads. He was a very good man, and came to us-the children, and patted our cheeks, and gently touched our heads. His language was a hissing sound, and the words he spoke were not understood by us in the least. We had not been long on the ship when this lord of the goblins made a speech, and took some charcoal and made some marks on the deck of the ship, and pointed to the shore and looked at our warriors. One of our aged men said to out people, ‘He is asking for an outline of the land,’ and the old man stood up, took the charcoal, and marked the outline of the Ika-a-maui (the North Island of New Zealand).

Originally appeared in: John White, 1887, The Ancient History of the Maori: Tainui, Vol V, Wellington, Government Printer, pp.121-24. Reprinted in: Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642-1772, Viking, 1991.

Education as an Ideal

Over here is a part one of my introduction to my interest in Education. The other two parts were posted over on Philosophy Etcetera, which kindly let me post as a "guest blogger" for a few days. So here are Education as an Ideal Part 2 and Education as an Ideal Part 3.

Philosophy: Why I Do It

Here I have put down some thoughts on what sort of philosophical content I will have on this blog. Now it is time to do what I am meant primarily to do in these introductions, which is to answer the very reasonable question of why I bother with all this antisocial and time-consuming literary and mental work, work that many people would find dull, excessively abstract, solipsistic and, at best, a noble-minded folly.

So why do I bother with philosophy? I bother for the same reason that other people bother with Lazy Boys and beachfront scenery: because it is a form of relaxation, a way of soothing the mind. The mechanism is a little different in the philosophy case than the two cases just mentioned, but the result is similar: it gives a sense of calmness and order, or relief from chaos. Some might say that it is an antidote to the frenetic pace of modern life. I do not really want to say that, partly because other people say it and partly because I am not sure that modern life is as frenetic, in relation to earlier kinds of life, as it is sometimes cracked up to be. But I do say that philosophy is an antidote to the mindlessness of modern life.

Being mindful of things, in the way that philosophy is mindful, is soothing, but it is also difficult. I don’t count this as a deterrent, at least not usually. I bother with philosophy, despite its difficulty, for the same reasons that other people bother with poetry and triathlons, despite their difficulty: because difficulty in a pursuit asks for effort from the pursuer, and because effort has two rewards: the reliable but rather thin reward that comes merely from putting a lot of honest work into something; and the less reliable but richer reward that comes from getting closer to some form of excellence. The first of these rewards does not need any further explanation. The second does need further explanation, because one might reasonably ask the question: why pursue the excellence of philosophy over other kinds of excellence? And, perhaps it is not entirely silly to ask the question: why regard the excellence of philosophy as possessing any value at all, never mind an excellence that is so great as to shove most other excellencies out of the way?

One answer is that a quick and insightful mind makes it easier to advance in the world: it gets you a job, and it helps you to do useful practical things such as haggling and persuading others to support your pet projects. I do not think that this is a very good answer. For one thing, it is not especially philosophical to do philosophy in order to secure a high-paying job (though I do think there is something to be said for “active epistemology”, which I have described very roughly somewhere in here). For another thing, philosophy (in my experience) tends to interfere destructively with many practical tasks, rather than give an extra edge to my execution of them. Some time in the sixth or seventh century BC (or thereabouts) Thales fell into a well because he was too busy looking at the stars; and ever since then philosophers have had a reputation for looking to keenly at what seems to be a long way off and too dimly at what is at their feet.

I can give a better answer by trying to describe the things I admire about people who do philosophy well. And I can do that by trying to describe briefly the nature of philosophical learning. Acquiring a facility for philosophy, I think, is like acquiring a fairly powerful microscope. It gives you access to a who new domain of objects and relations and patterns, a domain that has a richness and variety that you could not have imagined existed if you looked at things just with your naked eye.

It is a very seductive toy, this microscope. You want to keep looking further into all those strange rock-like things and those knobbly little green things, and more closely at the eccentric patterns you see just on the edge of your scope. You feel like you could discover some amazing things down there, things people have never known about before. At the same time, however, you can very easily get completely lost, and end up discovering only trivialities or boring details or things that people have already discovered, and which they have discovered by a much less tortuous route than you have. A good philosopher is enticed by the detail without being seduced by it. A good philosopher, I think, is also well aware that all of this detail is not worth observing unless it can be linked up somehow with what you can observe with the naked eye. A bad philosopher will interpret the details carelessly, and end up saying something laughable about the world of the naked eye, and all that microscopic effort will go to waste. A good philosopher keeps one eye on the lens and one eye on the window, and out of both eyes still has a good sense of perspective.

A good philosopher is also admirable for the way he or she presents the results of his or her inquiry. All that tiny detail is so complex, and so foreign to our ordinary objects of vision, that it is easy to get confused when reporting about it, and to confuse readers as well; and so philosophy, like microscopy, calls for an especially clear and careful manner of expression.

I like this manner of expression. I like its honesty and its precision and its lack of tinsel, the firmness of its syntax (all those short sentences, structured according to their logic) and the way in which it refuses to be carried away by sentiment, whether moral or aesthetic. Here, for example, is the start of the introduction to Philosophy As It Is, an anthology of philosophical exemplars.

The best introduction to philosophy is philosophy itself. This is not an original thought, but it is not common for it to be taken as literally and as seriously as we have taken it in bringing together this volume of essays and introductions.

Good philosophy is rigorous, and has been since Socrates and before. The quality of rigorousness is not preserved in dilution. Reflection on philosophy (by which we mean attempts to introduce it or describe it or survey it or explain its nature), as distinct from attempts to do it, may be more or less instructive. Some books on philosophy, as contrasted with books of philosophy, are excellent. At its best, however, this sort of thing still lacks an its essential quality of its subject matter….

This sort of writing is poetry to me. Look at that introductory statement: it is clean as you can get, and uncompromising. Look at the honesty of the first clause in the second sentence, and the nice clarification that follows from it, and look too at those words “seriously” and “literally”, each doing their own job and doing it without fuss. Look at that italicization, true as a well-timed punch. Look too at the next sentence. Just look at that sentence: “The quality of rigorousness is not preserved in dilution.” What economy! What clarity! What a deft little metaphor, weighted precisely so as to express the point but not to strain it! It is comparable, for its expressive qualities, to something like this:

And nothing ‘gainst time’s scythe can make defense,
Save breath to brave him when he takes thee hence.

And then there is the explication in brackets, extending meaning but not excessively so, and the perfectly simple expression, in a neat parallelism, of a distinction that could one could so easily labour over in two or three sentences, and the measured tone of the whole, a tone that is not at all deliberately cultivated, but is a consequence of the main purpose of the prose, which is to present the truth clearly and persuasively. It is informal when it can be (“that sort of thing”), and it is does not tangle itself up with verbose diction; but at important moments in a sentence or a paragraph, when clarity and persuasiveness are most needed, it tightens up its language and fixes meaning in place. I could go on.

In this brief survey of the attractions of philosophy, I should also make mention of two other important qualities of the discipline: its necessity, and its generality. In general, philosophical truths bear more resemblance to the truths of mathematics than the truths of history: the sense in which philosophical truths could have failed to be truths is a very weak sense. Just what is meant by necessity, and what kind of necessity obtains in the case of philosophical truths, is of course a terribly large question, and I do not know much about the question, let alone the answer. All I want to say here is that philosophical truths have a kind of security about them that does not obtain in some other disciplines (like History), and that this security is attractive.

By the generality of philosophy I mean its applicability to a wide range of problems and interests. My metaphor of the microscope tends to obscure this point, suggesting as it does that philosophy is concerned mainly with the minutiae of life, and perhaps that it is only concerned with one or two sub-sections of life. On the contrary, philosophy is one of the broadest intellectual disciplines, and its subject matter stretches right across from aesthetics to mathematics, taking in History and Education and Science and Politics, and of course Ethics, along the way. Just what sort of priority enjoys over the other standard intellectual disciplines is another large question. I may have a go at answering this at some later date; for now it is enough to say that philosophy can make substantive contributions to our understanding of all of the disciplines just mentioned, and that its method is also well-adapted to solving, or at least assuaging, some of the problems of life.

And perhaps this last point is the most important point. What makes philosophy such an attractive pastime is that it is such a natural pastime, one that arises almost inadvertently when one begins trying to ask and answer questions about the world and the people in it. Everyone, I think, feels an urge to ask and answer such questions. And if one is going to do philosophy naturally, one might as well do it properly.

Philosophy: What I Do With It

Over here you can find a pretty oblique answer to the questions: what kind of thing does this blog mean by “philosophy”? and why do I think that it worth blogging about? The linked post is really an essay on Plato, and it is quite long. Hopefully the thoughts on this and the next post give a more direct and readable answer to the questions just stated, and function better as an introduction to the philosophical content of this blog.


I do not have the will or the ability to live a life of philosophy, but I do wish to life a philosophical life. The style, standard, frequency, duration and subject matter of my attempts to write philosophy, are hard for me to describe in advance: indeed, part of my motivation for making these attempts is that they might reveal to me just what that style, standard etc. really is. But the first sentence in this introduction will probably turn out to be a good guide to the nature of that philosophical content of this blog.

By that first sentence I mean that I do not have the time, enthusiasm, or the natural ability to pursue the discipline of philosophy as fully as one does so when one becomes an academic philosopher or a popular philosopher or any other person who makes a living out of writing philosophy. I am full of admiration for the small number of people who do possess the time etc. to make such a living, but I am one of the large number of people who do not. Nevertheless, I am also one of the people (who are also pretty large in number, I suspect) who wish to engage in philosophical reflection for its own sake and who (more characteristically) wish to engage philosophically with the non-philosophical activities that fill up the large part of the life of this group. Voting, writing, enjoying literature, working, socialising, and (to some extent) falling in love: all of these activities can, I think, be informed and enriched by philosophy, and I am one of those people who would like the activities of everyday life to be magnified in this way by reasoned contemplation.

For me, and perhaps for others, this approach to philosophy has two main consequences for the philosophy thus generated. Firstly, the subject matter of that philosophy is unlikely to coincide with that of standard philosophy (by which I mean the work done in orthodox Western philosophy departments). Unless the urge to do philosophy for its own sake is especially strong, then one is likely to miss out some of the more abstract and technical topics; hence this blog is unlikely to contain any thoughts on high-level metaphysics or on formal logic. And I will make unusual additions to the standard philosophical subject matter, as well as unusual exclusions. For example, over here I have placed under the label of “philosophy” a piece of writing that deals mainly with travel. As far as I know, this is a pioneering effort in the philosophy of travel; I doubt, however, that any professors of philosophy would, upon reading a piece like that one, make excited moves to add their own contributions to this ground-breaking field of study. Travel is just not the sort of thing that you worry about as a philosopher. As a person who lives, however, you are likely to travel at some point or another, and if you are going to worry about it you might as well do so philosophically. Of course, I do not want to include just anything under the label of philosophy. I do not want to disgrace the label on my blog, or render it meaningless through inappropriate use. But I do want to apply the philosophical method to a wider range of topics than is usual.

The second major feature of my approach to philosophy is that it will probably lead to a greater than usual amount of reflection upon the nature of the relationship between philosophy and non-philosophical activities such as work, writing, etc. It is an orthodox philosophical urge, I think, this urge to reflect upon one’s own forms of reflection; because my forms of reflection are unorthodox, however, my reflections upon those forms are likely to be unorthodox as well, in their subject matter and also in their methods of inquiry and presentation. So, for example, the piece on travel here is an attempt to illuminate the relationship between philosophy and travel. And probably I will write one or two more pieces in the same spirit: the spirit of questioning and clarifying the connection between philosophical reflection and everything else, where “everything else” means practical activities like work and play, but also non-philosophical forms of reflection, such as literature. Worse, I will probably include under the “philosophy” label even those bits of writing that have only a thematic, and not a methodological, connection with standard philosophy: on this blog, a poem about philosophy counts as “philosophy.” This may seem like a failure to take philosophy seriously. However, I prefer to think of it as something quite different, as a consequence of a serious desire to work out what philosophy amounts to, and hence a desire to deploy any medium I can in the attempt.

My peculiar approach to philosophy, and also some interests that are independent of philosophy, lead me to take a particular interest in two branches of the discipline: philosophy of literature, and philosophy of education. I enjoy writing creatively, and I have aspirations to teach, and these interests would exist even if I did not know philosophy from scatology. But my approach to these branches of philosophy will probably be guided by my approach to philosophy as a whole. So, firstly, I am especially interested in the relation between literature and philosophy; if pressed to give details, I would say that I am interested in the extent to which literature, novels in particular, can be a legitimate source of ethical insight. Another aspect of the philosophy of literature that I might pursue is that of metaphor; but that aspect does not have quite so intimate a connexion with my desire to study the relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy, as the ethical-epistemic aspect.

In the field of education, I am interested in questions surrounding how philosophy might be incoorporated into school education. One such question is what sort of philosophy should be taught in schools, if philosophy does find its way into that domain. One answer, which I favour, is that it should be that kind of philosophy that enables students to live a philosophical life, though not necessarily a life of philosophy. Hopefully my peculiar approach to philosophy on this blog will help me to clarify this notion of a “philosophical life,” and to discover how it might be compared and contrasted with a “life of philosophy.”

That, then, is a rough account of what I expect to post in the way of philosophy. It is a rough account because I do not really know what will be the standard, style, frequency, duration and subject matter of my attempts to do philosophy on this blog. The only certain thing is that, with time, I will know.

Travel and Literature

Here you can find a long, loping discussion of the relationship between travel and philosophy, and in that discussion you can also find some thoughts about why I think travel is a worthwhile thing to do. In this post I want to go for a short sprint through some thoughts about travel and literature. My hope is that this post will be more readable than my previous one, and convey the spirit of my travel writings more clearly; though I can’t promise that this one will be as detailed or as earnest as the former.

For a person who wants to write descriptively about people and the world, in plays or in novels or in poems, travel looks like a very worthwhile thing indeed. What writers thrive upon, one might think, are new and interesting forms of life: people who are peculiar enough and vivid enough to be turned into characters; events that are dramatic and instructive enough to be turned into stories; objects and actions that have the bulk and breadth to make it as symbols; cultures and landscapes that are rich enough, full enough with the strange and the engaging, to function as settings. And one consequence of travel, one might think, is that a person is brought into contact with all these new and interesting forms of life. Hence travel looks to be just the sort of thing that a writer would want to do.

The subjunctive padding in the last paragraph is placed there to protect me from people who will immediately point out that a number of great writers have written great books about their own town or their own city, apparently without doing any travelling at all. Look at Dickens, with his London masterpieces; at Jane Austen, with her beautifully turned engravings of a highly localised culture; if you are a New Zealander, look at Frank Sargeson sitting in his shack on Takapuna beach, almost as well-hidden as Descartes in his oven. And looking at these books and these writers, what can one do with the theory outlined in the above paragraph, except paint it purple and call it a turnip?

Well, I think one can do a bit more than that. To be sure, the theory is defective. But it also has its merits, and even its defects can shed a little bit of light on the nature of travel and of writing. I will leave the merits to last. In the meantime, let me do what the previous paragraph invites me to do, and explain why the theory is defective, which means identifying its faulty assumptions. It assumes, firstly, that new and interesting forms of life can only be found through travelling. This is false, since they can be found in the mind as well, in the perpetual adventure of the imagination. Imagination does not render travel redundant, but it does make it less urgently necessary. The theory assumes, secondly, that the key to good novels, and the key to good novel-writing, is to uncover new and interesting forms of life. This is false with regards to good novels, since we often value novels for their ability to uncover something that is new and interesting about our ordinary, local forms of life. And it is false with regards to good novel-writing, since this uncovering of the new in the familiar requires a certain kind of sensitivity to the world; and this sensitivity is best cultivated, one might think, not by making it easy for oneself and letting oneself be assaulted by exotic species of nature and of humankind, but by making it hard for oneself, and looking with care and discipline for signs of the exotic in the quiet habits of ordinary life.

Now I see that this subjunctive buffer has again crept in between my prose and my beliefs. But I think that, in the final sentence of the previous paragraph, the buffer is justified. For I do not think that it is quite correct to say that, in order to cultivate the required sensitivity, it is best to make things hard for oneself. When we start to cultivate an ear for French, we make things easier for ourselves. We get people to speak slowly, so we can learn to catch the rhythms and the patterns in their speech that we must catch in their normal, skittering conversation, if we are to understand them properly. Likewise, we start writing by describing things that present their distinctive characteristics very clearly to the ear and eye and touch: we write about wonderfully high mountains and exotic plants and eccentric people. And, once we have caught the rhythm of the world in this way, when it is played very loudly to us, we can more easily catch that rhythm when it is played more softly; and when we have followed it into the soft sounds of ordinary life, so soft that they are inaudible to most people, then we can say that we have understood properly the language of the world.

Furthermore, this way of proceeding, from the easy to the hard, is likely to stimulate the will just as well as it stimulates the other faculties. We are less likely to become disheartened by a discipline if we do not find things horribly difficult at first; and we are more likely to be excited by a discipline if it brings us into contact with things that are, on the surface at least, much more new and interesting than our ordinary life.

And, to finish things off, I should observe that a knowledge of the local cannot be very easily attained without some knowledge of the foreign. For, a knowledge of the local does not really deserve that name unless it involves some knowledge of how the local is distinctive from everything else; and that knowledge is surely easier to come by when one has some knowledge of everything else. I cannot say that I know myself if I know only that I have ten fingers and toes, one heart, and any other attribute of body or mind that applies equally well to all other human beings as it does to myself; and a good way to extend my knowledge beyond this anonymous state, is to learn something more about other people. And as with knowledge of self, so with knowledge of country and of town and of family.

This point about self-knowledge is less apt to my travel writings than are the points about starting easy and about getting excited. Most of my travel writings are cluttered, excited, and somewhat lavish descriptions of the places and people that I come across as I go along my way. At least, this is how my travel writings have gone up to this point, and that seems like a good reason to assume that they will carry on in the same fashion. I could go on to discuss my reasons for choosing to report on my travels at all, and my reasons for choosing the written word as my medium of reportage (rather than photography, say) but this time I will spare the reader any more ponderousness, and invite them, if they are suitably inclined, to read the things I write about my travels.

Travel and Philosophy

A philosophy of pure thought is for an existing individual a chimera, if the truth that is sought is something to exist in. To exist under the guidance of pure thought is like travelling in Denmark with the help of a small map of Europe, on which Denmark shows no larger than a steel pen-point - Aye, it is still more impossible. --Kirkegaard.

PHAEDRUS: …you don't go away from the city out over the border, and it seems to me you don't go outside the walls at all.

SOCRATES: Forgive me, my dear friend. You see, I am fond of learning. Now the country places and the trees won't teach me anything, and the people in the city do. But you seem to have found the charm to bring me out. For as people lead hungry animals by shaking in front of them a branch of leaves or some fruit, just so, I think, you, by holding before me discourses in books, will lead me all over Attica and wherever else you please. --Phaedrus

I’m not sure that travel broadens the mind. But it does underline the narrowness of experience. -–Joe Bennett

To a philosopher, travel is unnecessary. To a philosopher, travel is also insufficient; and it may also be undesirable. Nevertheless, there is practice (I will it “active philosophy”) which resembles philosophy, and which is considerably advanced by the practice of travel. In the following I will discuss the relationship between philosophy and travel, and between standard philosophy and “active philosophy”, and in doing so I hope to shed a bit of light on all of those practices, and especially upon my reasons for doing a bit a travel here and there. Unfortunately, I will also find it necessary to rush across great areas of philosophical interest with a very hasty and weak sort of light. Hopefully, however, the overall effect is that I do more to illuminate these topics than to darken them.

The independence of philosophy and travel, as described in the first two sentences of this essay, seems to me to be true historically. My small knowledge of the history of philosophy suggests to me that philosophers qua philosophers feel no great need to stick their thumb out, so to speak, and wait to be driven over the horizon. One thinks of Plato, who seems disinclined to leave the city, at least in the above quote, unless he is tempted out of there by learned discourses. One thinks of Kant, shut up in Konigsberg; and of Descartes, huddled in his oven to write his Meditations. All of them embody a view of the philosopher as above or outside the world of travellers, or otherwise detached from it.

Descartes does offer a counterpoint to the general rule, because he seems to have benefited philosophically from his journeyings through Europe. But this is a weak counterpoint, because Descartes benefited from observing the thinking habits of other people, which is only one part of what travellers usually do; because Descartes observations on his travels surely played only a small part in his writings, acting as an initial stimulus to those writings rather than a thorough-going determinant of their nature; and because in the present-day world the travels of Descartes’ kind are redundant, since the kind of thoughts that Descartes found instructive to observe on his travels can probably be found today in any well-stocked library or well-stocked philosophy department.

Wittgenstein offers another weak counterpoint. He found it useful to travel to Norway and Ireland to produce some of his work. But one would not want to say that these movements through space had much effect on his current of thought. Those movements probably ensured that the current ran as swiftly and smoothly as possible, but I doubt that they had any effect on the direction in which it ran. I expect they were less like the movements of an archeologist, who goes to Africa to study the rocks there; and more like the movements of a mathematician, who goes from one room to another because he is sickened or distracted by the noise in the first room. So philosophers do travel for their philosophy, but they do so to find more stimulating colleagues or a more salubrious environment, and not much more.

Of course, one can make the same point without hiking through the pages of history. What can we learn about the nature of Substance, or the status of the a priori, by spending a week in Southern France? What can we learn about the is-ought gap in the Himalayas, that we cannot learn at a desk? What does the scenery of New Zealand have to tell us about Gettier cases and the corroboration of scientific theories? Very little, except in the sense of offering us a comfortable setting in which to think (and perhaps not even that). Just why this is the case is of course a matter for philosophical discussion, and an empiricist is likely to give a different answer than a Platonist, and both of those answers will probably differ from this one. Here it is enough to note that it is the case: philosophers don’t need to travel, and even if they did need to it would not be much help.

It may even be a hindrance. That is, a philosopher might regard travel as undesirable, especially if she is a Platonist. In that case she would ask: what would Plato have thought of the modern traveller, leaving home for the sake of spectacle and sensual enrichment, for craggy peaks and clear lakes and lying-back-in-the-sun-drinking-cocktails: passive, fat, delighting in pseudo-indigenous pageantry, travelling by pamphlet, facing the world through shaded glass. And she would answer in the obvious way. In answering that way she would probably point me towards one of the problems with talking generally about the activity of travel. For of course not all travellers resemble the person just described, and the more well-informed or adventurous or long-term traveller probably has a different relation with philosophy than all the other sorts of travellers. To save time, however, I won’t bother differentiating different kinds of travellers, and just use “traveller” to refer to someone who sits in between the tiki-tourist and the earnest cultural adventurer.

Despite all of the above, there is of course considerable value in travel, and I do think that some of that value is of a roughly philosophical kind. By this I mean that there is an activity, a domain of thought and action, that is similar but not identical to philosophy, and which is advanced by travel, and is perhaps advanced to its fullest extent only through travel of some kind or another. For want of a better label, I will call this domain “active philosophy.” By contrast, “standard philosophy” is my label for the academic philosophy practiced in orthodox Western university departments). I propose that for each of the main branches of standard philosophy, there is a corresponding branch of active philosophy; and that although the correspondence is pretty rough, it would be misleading to ignore it.

One main branch of philosophy is epistemology. As mentioned above, for an epistemologist there is not much to gain by travelling the world. But for a person who is interested in acquiring knowledge of a practical kind quickly and independently and reliably, it is surely quite a good idea to spend a few months making one’s way about the world, especially about the more challenging parts of the world. Planning, haggling, negotiating, deciding here and now what to do here and now: all of these activities call forth the thinking faculty, and all of them are called forth by travel. Travel cultivates the faculty of practical awareness, of being alert to things in the immediate vicinity, of being alive to the world. This faculty has little to do with epistemology as usually practiced, in subject matter or in method, and a person who is competent at active epistemology is unlikely, by virtue of that competence, to be good at real epistemology. Nevertheless, epistemology is reflection upon knowledge; and one who has mastered this the practical faculty just described, has mastered one kind of knowledge. (Even this is a pretty weak connection. Fortunately, however, it is the weakest of the three that I will discuss)

And what about metaphysics? Do travellers gain a kind of awareness that corresponds to the kind of awareness that a metaphysician is looking for? I think they do gain such an awareness, though again the correspondence with scholarly metaphysics is loose. Scholarly metaphysics, I am told, is the study of the “fundamental nature of reality.” And although the “reality” to the traveller investigates is a bit different to that which the metaphysician investigates, I do think that the former, by virtue of their travel, achieves a kind of ontological insight. It is a less grand sort of insight than that phrase suggests, but it is insight nonetheless. It is insight concerning what human lives basically consists in. One stays at home, and becomes preoccupied by a particular set of problems and interests, whether they are personal or financial or philosophical. One goes abroad, and discovers that a lot of other people are preoccupied by problems and concerns of a completely different kind. One already knows this when one is at home, in a vague and impersonal sort of way: one only needs to look at a good atlas to see, say, that 57% or the world work in factories and the rest do not; or that 54% of the worlds population practices a religion. But one knows this sort of thing in a different way, a more intense and personal way, when one goes abroad. I won’t try to say what this different kind of “knowing” consists in, and how it differs from ordinary knowing; I’ll just say that, in my current opinion, it is an advance upon the good-atlas way of knowing about the basic constituents of human life.

The insight I have just mentioned can come in two forms, I think: the objective and the subjective. Objectively, one discovers something about what the majority of people do in their lives. Objectively, one also get a more precise awareness of how diverse the world is, how much those different ways of living vary; often, I suspect, the traveler, having gotten this more precise awareness, places the emphasis upon the difference. “I was reminded that the world is wide and full of difference,” writes Joe Bennett of one of his hitch-hiking experiences. And in being so reminded, he has gained renewed awareness of a state of affairs that may, without too much strain, be regarded as “fundamental” to the reality of the human world.

Subjectively, the traveler discovers something about which way of living is best suited to himself. One could think of this as an ontological discovery, since it concerns fundamentals: it concerns the basic units of one’s life around which the rest will be organized, whether the basic units are Work and Family, or Writing, or Other People. But probably it is better to think of it as an ethical discovery, since it concerns what one values most highly. And as an ethical discovery, it belongs in the next paragraph.

Ethics is concerned with evaluating competing courses of action. Travel both causes a person to discover courses of action that were previously hidden from him, and to discover new reasons for favoring courses of action that were previously unappealing to him. One discovers new ways of living, as mentioned above; one also discovers new manners of being, new ways of holding oneself or behaving oneself or new ways of interacting with others. One discovers personality types that had never occurred to one as possibilities (not that one would have denied their possibility, if someone had asked about them; just that one did not have the experience or the imagination to conceive of them, and to ask the question of oneself). Perhaps one has always tended to favour introverts, not having known any appealing extroverts; and then one travels, and begins to see how certain shades of extroversion, which were previously clouded in one’s mind by the unattractive shades of this characteristic, are actually attractive. Perhaps one has always thought of religious people as rather foolish and confused, and their claims to spiritual superiority as just so much folly and confusion; and then one travels, and discovers that certain people do possess a kind of calmness, an honest, well-grounded, desirable sort of calm, that seems to be a result of their religious sort of life. Discoveries of this kind are certainly aided by travel. They may also be aided by detached philosophical reflection, but I do not think that they can be fully discovered solely in that abstract manner, since they have a large empirical component to them: to know them, we need to know something about our responses to certain kinds of person or activity. These discoveries are beyond abstract thought in a way that resembles the way in which our attitude towards vanilla icecream is beyond abstract thought.

The above paragraph is concerned with ethics insofar as ethics is a matter of deciding between competing courses of action. But ethics might also be a matter of acting in accordance with those decisions. I say “might” because success in ethics, in the scholarly version of that discipline, is by-and-large independent of a persons success in acting ethically; and I avoid saying “is not” because it is plausible to think that this independence of thought and action represents a failure to be properly philosophical. That debate is irrelevant to the claim I want to make here, however, which is that active ethics (by which I mean the practice of acting in accordance with ethically sound beliefs) is a practice which is, firstly, closely related to scholarly ethics, and secondly, that is advanced by travel. I take it that the first claim is obvious (though precisely what is the nature of close relation between ethics and active ethics, is not so obvious. I will discuss that relation a bit later on). The second claim is supported by the fact that travel can furnish us with practical skills that enable us to act ethically. One such practical skill is intellectual, and has already been discussed (under the label of active epistemology). Other practical skills are social. Through travel we learn to communicate with other people, tolerate their eccentricities, appreciate their virtues, and generally to be agreeable to them; and without these skills, our chances of living a fully moral life are lessened. (Though I am not sure just what sort of moral negligence would be involved, if someone failed to cultivate these skills. Are we morally obliged to be charismatic? I think I’ll discuss that kind of question in another post.) And practical skills, of the kind that are developed through travel, can influence our ability to live well in other ways. If we want to devote our lives to some sort grand, ethically driven program of reform, whether in politics or in education or in science, usually we will need a greater amount than usual of eloquence and charm and facility with people; and surely travel can help to cultivate these qualities as well.

At this point I should acknowledge that nothing I have said here is new or surprising. Indeed, the practices that I have grouped under the label of “active philosophy” are so well-known as to be easily summarized by cliches. What I mean by a facility in “active epistemology” is really just what people mean when they talk about being able to “think on one’s feet” and “keep your wits about you.” And what I mean by a facility for “active metaphysics” is really just what people mean by “having a sense of perspective,” or a “strong sense of identity.” Perhaps “active ethics” is less easily summarised in commonplace terms. But even there one does not have to grope around for too long to find an everyday approximation to my newly-invented term: being an active ethicist is more-or-less the same as being a good bloke. Nevertheless, I think there is some genuine value in doing what I have just done: there is value, that is, in trying to clarify and re-describe concepts that we usually treat, lighthandedly, as cliches.

There is also value in trying to describe the relationship between standard philosophy and the main elements, just described, of active philosophy. One could interpret Kirkegaard as trying, in the quote given at the start of this post, to give such a description. This might be a faulty interpretation: it may be wrong, for example, to think that Kirkegaard’s “philosophy to exist in” is my “active philosophy.” My purposes here are not to accurately describe the thoughts of a past philosopher, however, so any misreading of Kirkegaard I commit is beside the point. The point of presenting Kirkegaard’s metaphor is to suggest one way of describing the relation between active philosophy and standard philosophy. The suggestion is that standard philosophy is useless when it comes to succeeding at active philosophy; and the reason for this is the coarseness of the information that standard philosophy gives us about the best way to think and to behave in the world. Standard philosophy is good for certain kinds of large-scale navigation, perhaps, but it is useless in any practical situation.

It would be nice if I could now go on to give a detailed, reasoned account of my attitude towards this view. However, I cannot do that. For one thing, the question of how active philosophy stands in relation to standard philosophy is complicated by the vagueness with which both of those relata are defined, and the fact that the relation may vary over the different branches of each. For another thing, the question about the relation between these two kinds of activity is one version of the question: what is the relation between philosophy and life? And that is the sort of question that you answer over a lifetime, not over a few paragraphs.

The best I can do here is to say that I disagree with Kirkegaard’s view, and to discuss very briefly what thoughts motivate this disagreement. For what it is worth, I propose that Kirkegaard’s metaphor can be improved by just a little tweaking: by replacing the map of Europe with a large-scale map of Denmark; and adding in a particular sort of map to represent the kind of guidance that is given by active philosophy: that particular sort of map is, I think, a map of the natural terrain of Denmark, a topological map perhaps. This is an improvement on Kirkegaard’s view because it does justice to the guiding role that standard philosophy can play for active philosophy; and because it recognizes that the two kinds of philosophy really are of different kinds. I will discuss these points a bit more in the paragraphs below.

The first point that standard philosophy can play a “guiding role” in active philosophy. By “guiding role” I mean the role of giving course-grained but widely applicable recommendations about how a person should pursue their active philosophy. Standard philosophy can play such a guiding role, I think, at least in relation to some of the branches of active philosophy. In ethics, for example, our actions can be guided in an obvious way by our philosophizing: by philosophizing, we reach conclusion about how to act, and then act in accordance with those conclusions. And this guiding influence is not just present in this or that region of active philosophy. Rather, it is present in all regions: we are guided by our philosophising (at least potentially) in our long-term projects, our short-term projects, our social actions, out political and our intellectual actions. This is not to say, of course, that standard philosophy is omniscient, that it leaves no room for “play,” no extra work for active philosophy to do. Its influence is general, but it is also course-grained: our philosophising may give us the concepts of “introversion” and “extraversion”, and it may help us to recognize and evaluate the lessons that active philosophy puts forward for us; but it is not in the power of philosophising to encounter those lessons, to come across the attractive extrovert or to live for a while with the inspiring devotee of religion (it may be in the power of the imagination to come across these things; but that is another story).

My second point is that the content of active philosophy differs from that of standard philosophy. The former is made up primarily of a set of clearly articulated beliefs and inferences. Although it refers to the world of action and of things, the procedures of standard philosophy take place entirely in the minds of the philosopher, in such a way, ideally, that its products can be entirely represented in words. Active philosophy, on the other hand, is made up primarily of a set of practical skills: the procedures by which active philosophers pursue their discipline, and the products that come out at the end of those procedures, are actions and sensations rather than thoughts and sentences. One becomes a good active epistemologist mainly by getting practice at “thinking on the spot”; and one shows that one is a good active epistemologist by putting this practice to use in real situations. Similarly with the practical skills that are the domain of the active ethicist. Even active metaphysics, as mentioned above, produces a kind of knowledge that is (in some way that I have not clarified) “different” from ordinary philosophical knowledge. This difference in kind, between active philosophy and standard philosophy, invites us to tweak Kirkegaard’s image in the way I have suggested above: to imagine standard philosophy as a large-scale map of Denmark’s roads, and active philosophy as a map of the country’s natural landscape. The former is one kind of thing, a system of objects whose natures and interconnections can be clearly delineated; and the latter is another kind of thing, a less orderly but more detailed kind of thing than the former. And if we want to go widely and safely through the terrain of life, we need maps of both kinds.

In summary, I have described an activity called “active philosophy.” This activity can be described in correspondence with the activity referred to here as “standard philosophy”; and I have outlined the correspondence as it applies to the three main branches of philosophy. My main purpose here was to say that the orthodox philosopher cannot gain any real benefit from travel; but that the active philosopher can do so. My secondary purpose was to try to say something sensible (though of course not comprehensive) the relation between active and standard philosophy, and I used Kirkegaard’s metaphor to help me in this attempt.

Now, these two purposes have taken up far more time and far more space than I intended them to take up, and as a result my overarching purpose may have been lost: that is, I may not have given a very clear account of my interest in travel, and my reasons for writing about it. (For one thing, I have not given an exhaustive account of my reasons for travelling: I have only given an account of why a philosophically inclined person might have reasons to travel). I have three excuses for my wobbliness of subject-matter and long-windedness of expression. First, there’s some value discussing the relation between travel and philosophy, and about active philosophy, even if this discussion leads one into one or two sidetracks. Second, I do intend to write a shorter and more palatable post about my travels, which I hope will fill in the gaps that are left by this one. (For example, it will give an account of why a literature-inclined person might have reasons to travel.) Thirdly, I did not force you to read this (but thank-you very much if you have, and I wait enthusiastically for your comments, however minor they might be).

Philosophy: The Examined Life is Worth Writing About

How does one write an introduction to the topic of Philosophy? It is not too hard to do the same thing for travel, or for creative writing or for metaphor, because those topics are both narrower than Philosophy, and occur at a lower level. By the first of those properties I mean that they are smaller in scope than Philosophy, that they take in less of the world, in much the same way that the topic of “tennis” takes in less than the topic of “sport.” By the second of those properties I mean something that is a little harder to describe. Perhaps I can get at this hard-to-describe thing by saying that Philosophy not only has something to say about the content of those other topics, but also about the form in which that content must appear. It is three-quarters plausible to say that, if we wish to say anything seriously true or interesting about travel or metaphor, and even (perhaps) about creative writing, we not only must say something that adds to Philosophical knowledge; we also must arrive at the things we say in a Philosophical manner, using the methods of Philosophy.

It is a commonplace that Philosophy is not really a collection of doctrines, but a collection of methods; or perhaps a collection of doctrines about methods. I do not just want to repeat that commonplace here (though I think I am in danger of doing so). I want to add to this commonplace the thought that the methods peculiar to Philosophy are not really peculiar to Philosophy: though Philosophy gives them greater emphasis than they are given by other fields of interest, these methods are present in any field of study that is worthy of the name. It is not too hard to elucidate and justify the activity of metaphor, or the activity of travel or of History. But how should we go about elucidating and justifying the activity of Philosophy, when Philosophy is the thing that is meant to disclose what it means to elucidate or justify something? One could just apply Philosophy to Philosophy, I suppose, but that means that the account turns in on itself in a wholly unsatisfying fashion. In elucidating and justifying an activity, one wants to get back from it somehow, to get a good outside view.

So instead of waffling on in this semi-comprehensible way about the difficult nature of describing the nature of Philosophy, I am going to do what any human blogger is bound to do every now and then do, and post an old essay of mine. The essay is a response to the question: If, as Socrates declared, the unexamined life is not worth living, what are the implications for the modern day? Strictly speaking, this essay does not really follow the method of inquiry that Philosophers, or at least one large group of the current species, would probably not regard as real Philosophy. There is just too little sustained and detailed argument here, and too many cute metaphors. This is the sort of essay that you submit for competitions that are put out collaboratively by the English and Philosophy departments; not the sort of essay you would use as the basis for a talk at the annual Philosophy conference. Nevertheless, I am confident that it captures something of the Philosophical spirit (with a bit of History thrown in as well), even if it does not give a very exact imitation of its method.

No worthwhile activity generates freedoms without admitting constraints of some kind, and the most worthwhile activities make use of their constraints to give their freedoms their most rich and liberating form. These ideas are easy to state, but they are hard to fully understand. Socrates, as he appears in the works of Plato, presents one way of understanding them, one system of thought and action that applies its constraints to the advantage of its freedoms, and his understanding is in most respects as relevant to modern times as it was to his own. Socrates advises us to recognise that freedoms and constraints will always pull and push upon eachother; it is not worth trying to escape this interplay, and to have one without the other, but there is great worth in trying to bring this interplay into a more satisfactory form, to let it proceed less in the manner of two fighters, who drag eachother out in a series of fierce and increasingly reluctant attacks, and more in the manner of two dancers, who each achieve, through their contact with one another, a lasting harmony and energy that they could not achieve on their own.

To say, as Socrates said, that “an unexamined life is not worth living,” is to recommend a particular system of freedoms and constraints. Socrates articulated that system in his action and conversation, and through it he recommended a number of qualities, such as humility, honesty, courage, mildness of manner, clarity of speech, a measured scepticism, and a sense of humour. These are all important Socratic virtues, and a full account of the “examined life” would consider all of them, but here it will suffice to consider just three of the defining qualities of the Socratic life: universality, independence, and unity. This account is rendered incomplete by the absence of those minor qualities listed above; and it is also slightly warped, as any account of Socrates is bound to be, by the brilliant heat of Plato. But these effects should not be too misleading, and an account of the three qualities just mentioned is enough to bring into the current century the ideals of a man who lived four hundred years before Christ. This is a long way to move a collection of ideals, and some of them have worn out on the way, or become unrecognisable. But they are a very carefully crafted set of ideals, designed to endure long journeys and changes of climate. Most of them can be easily applied to modern life, both as warnings and as sources of inspiration, and where some of their parts have worn away it is easy to find new parts to fit into the old place. And Socrates gives us every chance of making whatever repairs are needed: the central part of this collection of ideas, the most carefully crafted part, is the part that tells us how to craft our own, and how to do it carefully and well.

To begin with, Socrates tells us that in order to craft ideas with any success, it is necessary to achieve some measure of universality. Although Socrates was a distinctively practical philosopher, a man of the court and the party and the marketplace, he was also a distinctively abstracted philosopher, one who wished in some sense to get above the world of particulars, of courts and parties and marketplaces, and contemplate the world at a level of greater generality. For Plato, and for most philosophers who have come after him, this means not only that he spent his time working with highly general concepts, like justice, knowledge and beauty, but also that he wished to have an awareness of those concepts that was universally valid, an awareness that was free from the peculiar illusions and contingencies of his own condition, or of anyone else’s condition.

The idea that such universality is possible, and that it can be achieved through rational inquiry, has of course been challenged. Those who are fond of discovering portentous correspondences between science and culture will note that one of the most famous scientific theories of our century was called the “Theory of Relativity”, suggestive of the “alterity” present in the modern world, the “decline of centres”, the “eclipse of the grand narratives”, and other ideas that are associated with “postmodernism.” And it is hard to deny that the postmodernist thinkers have responded sensitively to real features of the world (even if they deny that such a thing exists). That is, it is hard to deny that the world is larger, more diverse, and (justifiably) less willing to prostrate itself before the shrine of Western rationality, than some people once thought. Truth, moral legitimacy, correct modes of reasoning: all of these can seem, by virtue of our new sensitivity to this largeness and diverseness, to be relative to each person’s and each culture’s peculiar “way of seeing things.” But it does not follow from our current inability to discern any constancy in the flux, that no such constancy exists. Perhaps it just means that we are currently a little confused about things, or that our theory needs to take more things into account. Socrates would remind us that Einstein’s preferred name for his theory was the “Theory of Invariance”, and that if this theory has something to say to the modern world, it is this: the fact of variety and fragmentation is no good reason to abandon the search from some new constant that can draw the fragments together.

It is easy to feel that this search for universality is just a kind of abstract game, one that satisfies a narrow intellectual need rather than anything more moral or humane. Some might even sympathise with those who claim that the outside world is just our invention, and that the “rationality” of those people who strain towards universals is just one more invention, one more “discourse.” Hence there is no truth, falsity, or even any clear meaning, in the statement “I am wearing a white shirt”, nor in the statement “three hundred people died in a massacre yesterday.” The first statement, however, suggests that the theory is bizarre. The second statement suggests not only that the theory is bizarre but also that it is inhuman and immoral, because it shows how the theory turns the most brutal crimes into trivialities. The theorist has no reason to do anything about the place where three hundred people were atrociously killed, because noone was really atrociously killed: they were murdered in our discourse, and nothing more. Extreme relativism lends great support to universal apathy, and to seek out those constraints on belief and action which are universally compelling is not only to satisfy an intellectual desire, but also to satisfy a human need.

This is not to deny that the search for universality can be harmful if it is carried out in the wrong way. Indeed, one lesson that our times teach those people who hope to fit everyone into the same framework, is that there is a danger of crushing a lot of people in the process. Hence, for example, the New Zealand historian Margaret Orbell writes about the mistake that Western observers make of trying to explain Maori myths in Western terms, and especially of those who try to match Maori myths up to historical fact, and who in doing so ignore some of the richer and more relevant meanings of those myths. Orbell understands those myths in what we would call a more “tolerant” or “sympathetic” or “culturally sensitive” manner, and in doing so she avoids what she calls a “rationalisation”[1] of those myths. Orbell’s understanding of the myths seems correct, but it is misleading to call hers an “unrational” understanding, as long as that suggests that there is something futile and misguided at trying to fit these mythical creations into Western patterns of thought. Orbell’s new understanding is not achieved by abandoning rational thought, but by applying it with greater rigour and sensitivity, and it is just the reasonableness of her thought that convinces the reader that her account of Maori myths is better than the former, narrowminded account. There is no harm in trying to find a fit between our conceptual framework and others, provided we are rational and reasonable enough to fit our framework around them.

Socrates also saw that it was difficult to craft anything of universal value unless one achieved some sort of independence, a critical detachment from the things that everyone else does and believes. This attitude gains a very clear expression in the Crito, a dialogue in which Socrates considers whether it is better for him to escape from jail, or to stay there and accept his death sentence. Eventually he decides upon the latter course, and in doing so it is necessary for him to distance himself from the pleadings of his friends and from his knowledge that any normal person would probably choose to escape. He wishes to constrain his actions to his understanding of what is really right, and in order to do so he must free himself from the constraints of instinct and expectation.

The Crito is of course the ultimate expression of Socrates’ devotion to the philosophical ideal: he was willing to die in order to live an examined life. It is not necessary for modern people to go quite so far; but there is just as much reason now, as there was in ancient times, for people to get outside the jails of common practices and commonly held beliefs. This does not mean adopting an attitude of complete scepticism, or of responding to all forms of authority in a spirit of mindless rebellion. Complete scepticism is little better than complete relativism, and mindless rebellion is adopted so often that it is itself a convention, and one to be challenged as much as any other. What it does mean is that one should be sceptical insofar as scepticism is justified by good reasons, and that one should rebel against anything that is mindless, as one should rebel against anything that is brutal, petty or inhuman.

This advice is not very original, perhaps no more original than mindlessness and brutality are original. To give it more force, it is worth considering one element of modern life that is not only distinctive of our times, but which may also be regarded as a modern equivalent of elements of ancient Greek life that Plato wished to challenge. There were no billboards in ancient Greece, but there were advertisements and advertisers, and they came in the form of rhetoric and rhetoricians, two features of his times that Socrates set himself squarely against. The rhetorician was successful largely because he appealed to the unexamined instincts of the people. In terms of the metaphor that Socrates carries right through the dialogue Gorgias, the rhetorician fed the people on rich and charming foods, foods that caress the palate and disable the brain. Modern advertisers do much the same thing. For example, one current television advertisement exhorts viewers to “Make the most of now”, advice that is sumptuously preceded by a sparkling story of sunsets and mayflies and set to an appropriately languid soundtrack, all of which is meant to invite people into some brand or other of cellular paradise. This colourful rhetoric also invites some interesting questions. Where is this “now” that is so seductive to mayflies? Is it this one, or this one, or some other one that I have not reached yet? And what about all the other “nows”: surely I should make something of them as well? And why should I believe that humans are the same as mayflies? Perhaps some people are inclined to think like mayflies, but am I obliged to do the same? These questions, of course, are beside the point: the point is to dull the mind by ravishing the senses. Hence to live an examined life is not just to set oneself apart from the instinctive beliefs and activities of the day, but also to set oneself apart from one’s own instinctive beliefs and activities, to become freer from the constraints of self as from the constraints of society. This does not mean becoming free from all constraints; it means making oneself free to recognise, and act upon, the constraints that are imposed by reason.

This prescription does not sound very appetising. It is easier to digest when one has read Plato’s writings, because he shows his independence not only in his ability to detach himself from instinct and expectation, but also in the courage and eloquence and passion with which articulates a new ideal. To be sure, it is hard to imagine Socrates lending his eloquence to an ideal that was not fully supported by sound reasoning; but it is also hard to imagine the writings of Plato without recalling the eloquence of the Symposium and the Phaedrus, and the halo of shining imagery that surrounds his arguments. There is rhetoric in these writings, but it is not the rhetoric of the sophist or the political orator: it is the kind that springs not from a base or fleeting desire to impose oneself on others, or from some unreflective passion, but from a deep and sincere feeling for the worth of his peculiar enthusiasms, a feeling that has been constrained as far as possible by the results of rational inquiry. This suggests a lesson, one which Socrates might not entirely approve of, but which makes his ideas easier to swallow: it is well worth letting one’s actions be guided by rational inquiry, but rational inquiry can only guide us so far towards illuminating the activities that make individual lives most rich and fulfilling; to take us further we sometimes need to fall back on other guides, such as the sincere feeling that comes from long and meaningful devotion to an art or a cause or a mental or physical discipline. It is tempting to say, in response to Socrates, that the unlived life is not worth examining. This is too strong, but it does point towards an important truth: the question of what is worthwhile is most fully answered by living a life out, and not merely by thinking it through.

Another enthusiasm that comes out in Plato’s writings, and in the actions of Socrates, is his desire to achieve unity. He tries, firstly, to bring unity to belief. At the most elementary level, this means bringing into view the beliefs of his interlocutors that are incompatible with eachother, and suggesting (sometimes) a way of removing the incompatibility. On a higher level, it means that Socrates tries to draw together all the diverse and unruly elements of human thought and action, and set them down into a clear and simple pattern. Even if we do not agree with his results, we can admire the grandeur of his ambition and the value of the project. And we can value it all the more, and share his ambitions, when we contemplate (or read other people’s contemplations of) the narrowness and specialisation of the modern career, the proliferation of books that are filled with disconnected trivia of the snappiest and least satisfying sort[2], and the admirable but ultimately depressing books that try to discover profound correspondences between ancient Vedic texts and quantum physics. The kind of unity that Socrates sought needs to be rationally warranted to have any worth. It also needs to be something more than a bland homogenisation, a commitment to reducing everything to the confusion of a single idea, to saying that “all is discourse”, or “all is power” or “everything is metaphor”; and it would need to be more than a commitment to “blurring the boundaries” between as many things as possible, a commitment to “fusion”, whether it be of food or music or intellectual pursuits. It would unite different elements not by conflating them but by connecting them, by placing them in clear relations to one another.

Perhaps this ambition is too grand to ever be reached. Nevertheless, it is always possible to make more modest advances in the direction of that ambition, and one way in which such an advance could benefit the modern world, is if it helped to connect technological brilliance more closely with ethical reflection. If those two qualities are not set into a proper relation, there is always a danger that any new scientific triumph will be turned by some passing idiocy into an instrument of vice or brutality. Hence the internet is not only a vast and intricate product of scientific and mathematical craftsmanship, but a heaven for pornographers; the machinery of war, a splendid tribute to the skill of many good people, is a hell for many others. A cellphone, whose speed and sophistication is unfathomable to most of its users, can just as easily be used as a purveyor of threats or unsavoury images, or as rather feeble medium for a generic, impersonal sort of information delivery, as it can be used for speeding up and smoothing out the services that make real improvements in peoples’ lives. The Republic reminds us that mere quickness of mind is not enough to guarantee wisdom: the people who dwell in the cave are very quick and clever in their apprehension of the shadows. Scientific expertise offers the modern world many advantages, many powers of prediction and organisation, but these can easily become disadvantages if they are not constrained by the advice that is given out by other kinds of reflection.

Socrates also tried to unite thought and action, to bring the products of intellection to the problems of everyday life. For Socrates, to think was to act, because his thinking took the form of conversations, sincere concrete engagements with other human beings that arose naturally in the course of his day, springing up vividly at the party, the courthouse, the prison, the river on a summers day, the marketplace. It is easy to feel that the modern world is hostile to this sort of unity, encouraging people as it does to devote their mental energies to problems of a technical and specialised kind, and leave free their parties and summer days for more palatable amusements. It is also easy to press the current state of universities to the service of this point, and in particular to mention the creeping transformation of some universities, from places in which to contemplate the more human parts of human affairs, into training centres for technical disciplines such as accounting and engineering: and surely it is not too fanciful to see this condition as the institutional expression of a disunity that exists in the lives of individuals. But the actuality of this condition does not make it necessary, any more than the condition of Athens made it necessary for Socrates to live a confined and ordinary life, and to resign himself to the indifference or obstinacy of his interlocutors.

Plato’s most elementary effect is to set in the reader’s mind the image of a great upwards sweep, a climbing arc. At the bottom there is dirt and confusion and darkness, and at the top there is light and order. The way up is slow and difficult, and perhaps one never gets to the top at all; but any progress towards the apex is an improvement, and brings its rewards. It is a simple image, and by now it is perhaps a little trite. It is also simple, and a little trite, to talk about universality, independence and unity. But Plato’s images are saved from triteness and from simple-mindedness by the consistency of his vision, and his abstractions are saved from the same fate by the skill and eagerness and honesty with which he makes them concrete. The most concrete expression of those values is Socrates, and Plato uses the concreteness of Socrates to show the worth, the pressing, human worth, of finding something universal among particulars, of being independent of others and of oneself, and of looking for unity, even if the only available unity is the blending of thought and action. Living an examined life in Socrates’ day meant putting reason to the service of these pursuits. In the modern day it means much the same thing, with a nod towards cultural diversity and a wince towards advertising, self-help books, Jacques Derrida, narrow specialisation, and blind science. It means moving away from easy freedoms and towards better ones, and making a more liberating choice of constraints. It means doing as Socrates asks, which is not that we accept his beliefs without question and then live them out, but that we examine them carefully and act on the results.

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[1] Margaret Orbell, Hawaiki: A New Approach to Maori Tradition, Christchurch: University of Canterbury Press, 1991
[2] J. Peder Zane, www.newsobserver.com/1051/story/470380.html

All references to Plato's works are drawn from:
Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (ed.), Princeton, 1989

Creative Writing: Wild Air, No Spine

Why do I write creative stuff? Self-expression, I guess, order and beauty and aesthetic bliss. Specifically, a delight in words, their sounds and their inexhaustible novelty. Boredom, solitude. The honour of being part of a tradition, and also the pleasure of being part of a present-day community. Habit, laziness, intimacy. An interest in preserving experience, but also in enriching experience, enriching the future and the present as well as the past. A tendency to occasionally become disenchanted with reason and real-life, and to look for enchantment elsewhere, specifically in the wild air of the imagination, the strange air. An interest in people and the way they talk. An interest in discovering just what experience amounts to.

Creative writing has its drawbacks. All that wild air, it’s so wild and so airy, and at times I would rather go and do something more solid, something like making dinner or going for a run, than flutter about in all that empty space. And there is something nauseating about poetry. Perhaps it is just that I have read some bad poems, or perhaps it is that I have read good poems in the wrong way, but there is an earnestness and self-absorption, and a kind of weak yearning, about some poetry I have experienced, that makes them very unattractive.

And any story seems to lack an essential solidity, probably because they do not have any real demonstrative force. This makes them all seem pretty boneless, even if they are good fun. Sure, so-and-so wrote a novel in which the weak and unfortunate could draw hope from the bottomless reservoir of their good-will and humanity; but another so-and-so could just as easily write a novel in which the opposite is true. A story is an invention, and is detached from the world in the same way that a painting is detached from the real world: there is as much reason to regard a story as true as it is to regard a painting as true, when the painting is just something that some guy with brushes has slapped down in an inspired moment. Sure, both the story and the painting may be demonstrably accurate in their representation of the world. But the demonstration does not come from the story or the painting, but from a reasoned account of the story, the painting, and the world. And how can a novel or painting have any spine if it has no demonstrative force? I think that artists can put up a sound defence of these charges, but in some moods I have no sympathy for them, and call Art a failure because it fails to be Philosophy.

Fortunately, those moods are infrequent enough for me to write something creative every now and then, and so I’ll slap those things down here if they’re not too personal or too crap. I think I have a pretty good idea of what is personal and what is not, but I’m not so sure about crap. So if I write anything that is offensively crap, then any visitors are welcome to say so, and I will be secretly dismayed and write a fiery response arguing that it is not crap at all, but something much more edible. And if it is still too crap (and even if it is not), readers are heartily invited to go along to Defect Perfection, a blog attached to the literary anthology of the same name (which is released by Canterbury University about once a year). You can view the writing on the blog, but you can also contribute a piece of your own, by emailing us. More details on the blog.

Education as an Ideal (Part I)

Note: Links to part 2 and 3 of this series can be found over here

INTERVIEWER: Would you advise your students to become schoolteachers?
ANTHONY BURGESS: Only the ones that I dislike.

Let us suppose for a moment that Burgess was telling the truth on this one. If so, he shares a distaste for the art of schoolteaching that seems to me to have fairly wide currency among the general population. I do not mean a distaste for schoolteachers, but for what they do: the general population is on the whole quite pleased to have schoolteachers round to dinner, and if asked the general population would probably say that schoolteachers “do a fine job,” or something like that; but a lot of them privately consider that job to be one of the least appealing around. Since I have not yet had the general population around to dinner, I do not yet have a really accurate idea of its opinion on this matter; but everything I have heard so far seems to confirm what I have just said. If my impression here is correct, this is a bad situation, a really bad situation, and one that should change. If school education is really to perform its functions properly, and if schools are to be not just a kind of early zoo, or a sop to the prevailing ideology, it is not enough for the general population to have a vague idea that it is a healthy-minded occupation; there must be, among at least some people, and ideally among as many people as possible, a sharp sense of both the need for good schoolteaching, and the appeal of the job. We tend to think of teaching as a job, possibly as a profession, maybe as a career, but usually as the enactment of a set of ideas and capacities that are developed through formal training: what we need is for a large group of people to think of it as a vocation, the enactment of an ideal. The following is my first attempt to show why reasonable people can think of schoolteaching in this way. If my impression about the general population is incorrect, then the following thoughts can do no harm.

The following is also, of course, an introduction to a broader subject, namely Education. My interest here is not just in the vocation of schoolteacher; but also in the institutions of school and University; in other, less formal forms of learning; and in the academic study of the nature and purpose of Education, which I will call the Philosophy of Education. The latter is important because some of the repellent features of schoolteaching are, I think, contingent features that are peculiar to our time and our school system; and one cannot erase these features without making some changes to that school system. And Philosophy of Education seems to me the best place to go to get a better idea of just which features of modern schoolteaching are contingent, and what alterations to the system are the best ones to make.

With this in mind, I will start this, the first part of my little polemic, by expanding on my suggestion that the current jobs of schoolteaching really does have some repellent features. Low pay and ill-discipline are two obvious features of this kind. These features are easy to regard as peculiar to our current system, and for this reason I will disregard them for now. Here I will deal with one other feature of current schoolteaching that is less obviously contingent, and which probably puts a lot of people off. It is natural to think that schoolteaching is a regression, a regression partly of a social kind but primarily of an intellectual kind. A schoolteacher is asked to abandon all of the sophistication of adult life, including the sophistication of their own discipline, and work in a place where there is not only a lack of such sophistication but also (in many cases) an unwillingness to embrace it. A maths teacher is asked to stop studying Riemannian geometry, and start teaching adolescents how to find the equation of a straight line; an English teacher abandons the subtleties of James Joyce or Milton for the sake of marking bad essays about Flowers for Algernon. There is something very depressing about this sort of backwardness, is as if all of the work in between was a waste of time: it seems like a collapse into the past, the opposite of human flourishing.

It may be that current schoolteaching encourages this kind of regression, but it does not do so necessarily. In saying this I do not deny that maths teachers are, in some sense, asked to downgrade their mathematics in order to become school teachers: what I deny is that this is a full view of the matter. First I want to make the obvious distinction between the matter that is taught and the matter of teaching. It may be (I will raise some doubts about this in a moment) that the matter which schoolteachers teach is primitive compared to what they have learned. But the matter of teaching, the skills and ideas that are involved in the work of passing on that subject to the student, are not primitive at all. If one concentrates on the taught matter, one sees the teacher as similar to a highly trained surgeon who is asked to hand out plasters at a playground. If one concentrates on the matter of teaching, one sees the teacher (rightly, I think) as similar to the same surgeon who happens to have been asked to operate on children. The teacher’s key function is as an expert in teaching their subject, not in the subject itself, and the former requires just as much sophistication (though often of quite a different sort) than the latter.

Of course, I do not mean that the matter of teaching requires no knowledge of the taught matter. I do not think I would insult too many teachers (and I hope I do not) by saying that their knowledge of a subject is less refined than that of an expert in the subject. On the other hand, I want to stress that the subject-knowledge necessary to teach a subject is greater than one might imagine. To illuminate this point, it is worth making the distinction between the student’s knowledge of a discipline and the teacher’s knowledge of a discipline. By the first I mean the knowledge about a discipline that the student is meant to acquire as a result of teaching; by the second I mean the knowledge that the teacher must have of the discipline before she can teach it effectively. Even if the former were primitive, the latter need not be. Anyone who has tried to teach a subject will know that it is often demanding, and that the demands are placed not only one one’s patience, social skills and other general teaching skills, but also one one’s grasp of the subject at hand. It is one thing to be competent at drawing equations for straight lines; it is quite another thing to be competent enough at this task, and related tasks in mathematics, to convey the basic idea with clarity, brevity, with one eye to relating this problem to others and with another eye to making it all seem very novel and exciting. It is also worth remembering that the teacher is usually hopelessly outnumbered by students, because this allows one to recognise the breadth of subject knowledge that is required of a teacher if she is to satisfy the curiosity of all of the students in a class. As far as I know, a trained expert in Science (for example) is usually only expected to possess highly refined knowledge in, at the most, one of the three main branches of science (Chemistry, Physics, or Biology). A Science teacher, on the other hand, cannot call himself competent unless she has a sound knowledge of all of these branches, plus some knowledge of the History and Philosophy of the subject: a less refined knowledge of each of these than is possessed by an expert, perhaps, but knowledge nevertheless.

Another way in which the teacher’s subject knowledge, and also the student’s subject knowlegd, is less primitive than one might think, is by differentiating between two kinds of primitivity. Teachers are asked to return to the basics of their discipline, and this could mean two things: it could mean a return to trivialities, or it could mean a return to foundations. Knowing how to count is a triviality: but the idea of a number, which is most clearly expressed in the practice of counting, is foundational to mathematics. Likewise, the act of identifying some expression as a literal or metaphorical expression is (at least in most high-school versions of that act) a trivial exercise, something that an English student learns to do right at the start of their education, and which they do very easily after that; but the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical is, I would say, foundational to literature. And a similar point could probably be made about History, Art and Science: the first step towards learning these subjects usually brings a student into contact with concepts or skills that are, in one manifestation, the easiest to grasp; and, in another manifestations, the most essential to the subject, and because of this the most important to grasp. Now, it may be that current practices encourage the teaching of the “basics” as trivialities, not as foundations. But this need not be the case. To be sure, there a limits to how far one can go towards teaching the foundations of number to high-school maths students (and there are probably few professional mathematicians, let alone high-school students, who have trudged through Russell’s Principia, or have read Quine on the subject of the foundations of mathematics), and I suspect that the point generalises: it usually turns out that the foundations of a subject are the most difficult to grasp as well as the most important. But I also suspect that there is enough that is both foundational and accessible about the basic notions of any subject, to make the teaching of those basics less like a return to infancy and more like a return to home, a return to the core of a discipline.

I hope that the above points give some genuine support to my claim that schoolteaching is not a regressive activity; the kind of support, that is, which not only gives the claim rational warrant, but also gives it emotional pull. One further point, and one which I would be especially negligent to ignore, is that schoolteaching is in fact one of the most progressive and forward-looking activities one could possibly achieve, as long as one considers its full consequences for society as well as its consequences for the teacher. As Richard points out over at Philosophy Etc., to equip young people with the general capacity to deal with future problems is to give society a benefit of a second order kind. By becoming a doctor or a politician, a person enables themselves to contribute to the current health of people or of a state; by becoming a teacher, a person enables young people to contribute to the health of the people and the states that they will encounter in their own lifetimes. The difference, as I see it, is not only that the teacher contributes to future gains rather than present gains. It is also that (if her teaching is of the right sort) she contributes to a general ability to solve problems, rather than to this or that particular problem. It is also that she contributes to gains that are currently unimaginable, perhaps because we have not yet discovered the means to make those gains (though future humans will do so, if properly educated), or because we have not yet discovered the need to make those gains (though future humans will do so, if they are properly equipped to identify new problems). School teachers, far from regressing into infancy, are responsible for causing young people to progress into adulthood, and if they make good of this responsibility then they draw the future world into a better state.

So far in this post I have set out to beautify one feature of schoolteaching that is frequently regarded as ugly, or at least that is very easy to see as ugly. What I want to do in the next post is to continue on the same theme, discussing some other features of schoolteaching that should give it a genuine appeal to right-thinking people. These fall into two kinds, namely those features that obtain in schoolteaching at any time, and those that arise out of the peculiar difficulties that current schools find themselves in. Both kinds, I hope, would (if they were widely appreciated) be helpful towards moving the art of schoolteaching, and moving Education in general, from the dull suburbs of the public mind into the central city.