Estranged from One's Species Being

A humanist writes:

The Weblog: Single Post View: Meanwhile, the problem of, for instance, 'How much do you forgive?' becomes, at best, a scholarly issue of how to bring together what is said by Derrida, Arendt, etc., in a sufficiently unique way that publishing the results will be at least minimally justifiable.

When I started reading these texts, the passion initially came... from a feeling that these people were going to teach me how to live. Kierkegaard, for instance -- I thought he knew something I didn't, or could in some way lead me to see life differently.... Now, I'm trying to figure out some way to squeeze out a paper on Zizek's use of Kierkegaard, so that I can send it off and people will publish it, so that I can write down on a piece of paper that it has been published.

I have the game of academia down, in its basic points; at this point, it's a matter of building up a sufficient resume that people will believe I am good at it. I have no doubt whatsoever that I could make a career out of it.... But -- for example -- how much do you forgive? I don't know. I really don't even know what it would look like to forgive....

And dissecting yet another text in order to produce a text of my own that will conform with the canons of professionality within certain circles of 'philosophical' and 'theological' discourse doesn't seem like any kind of answer -- it doesn't seem like it would help anything, anything at all, even a little bit. Not when I'm trying to figure out some way to walk down the street, to be with people, to do right by them, to experience some kind of peace.

I met a student after that lecture, obviously a very bright guy, who had hit the jackpot and been accepted to DePaul. We got to talking about various things, and I think that in essence, he treated me like shit. He had to have his little pissing match with the kid from Nowhere Theological Seminary, who came to the lecture with his overeager undergrad friends. I wonder how much different I would really be, even if I had gotten into a program that would make it so that I won't have to worry for a few years -- maybe part of the reason it's so grating is that this gnawing sense of insufficiency keeps getting grilled into me, such that even when I'd 'arrived,' I would still feel like I constantly need to prove myself, just like him. Because I wouldn't feel like I deserve it, because there is no deserving -- there is no available way to determine deserving. And so, prove yourself -- for nothing, to no one, to no end...

Sounds like our humanist is undergoing one of those dark cloudy midafternoons of the soul that happens when you keep your nose to the grindstone. So let me be an annoying Dutch uncle, and tell him what he already knows: step back. You see, when you think of what you are doing as "dissecting yet another text in order to produce a text of my own that will conform with the canons of professionality within certain circles of 'philosophical' and 'theological' discourse," you have fallen victim to the letter that killeth, while the spirit giveth life.

Let me pull the first four "texts" off my nearest bookshelf: Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes (an incredibly dense, incredibly thoughtful book that I badly need to reread, for whenever I have read it I have thought that wonderful insights are eluding me); Laurence Meyer, A Term at the Fed (his memoirs of his days as a Federal Reserve Governor; we chose him for the job as someone who could be a bridge between the High Policymakers and the forecasters and model-builders; I think--and the book says--that he did this job very well); Liza Featherstone's excellent Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart; and Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner's Innovation and Its Discontents (I can't believe I still haven't read this! I really need to!).

As long as I think of these as "texts," they are dry and boring. But there is a key to making them exciting: to remember that they are not texts: they are people--people urgently trying to talk to me, to tell me something very important that they think I desperately need to know. Liza Featherstone thinks that I very much need to know about Wal-Mart's battling to keep its workers down--and their resistance--if I am going to be a good economist, a good citizen. She grabs me and lectures me at length, with excited and animated gestures. Never mind that I have never met her (I do know her husband, Doug Henwood, slightly). She is there, in front of me on the page, and it would be rude to cut her off--not to turn to the next one.

Niccolo Machiavelli, I think, put it best. Let me quote from his letter to his friend and hoped-for patron Francesco Vettori, written in the days when he was rusticating in rural exile outside Florence.

I am living on my farm.... I get up in the morning with the sun and go into a grove I am having cut down, where I remain two hours to look over the work of the past day and kill some time with the cutters.... Leaving the grove, I go to a spring, and thence to my aviary. I have a book in my pocket, either Dante or Petrarch, or one of the lesser poets, such as Tibullus, Ovid, and the like. I read of their tender passions and their loves, remember mine, enjoy myself a while in that sort of dreaming. Then I move along the road to the inn; I speak with those who pass, ask news of their villages, learn various things, and note the various tastes and different fancies of men. In the course of these things comes the hour for dinner, where with my family I eat such food as this poor farm of mine and my tiny property allow. Having eaten, I go back to the inn.... I sink into vulgarity for the whole day, playing at cricca and at trich-trach.... So, involved in these trifles, I keep my brain from growing mouldy, and satisfy the malice of this fate of mine, being glad to have her drive me along this road, to see if she will be ashamed of it.

On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.

When evening comes Niccolo Machiavelli enters his personal library. There he talks to his friends--his books, or rather those who wrote the books in his library, or rather those components of their minds that are instantiated in the hardware-and-software combinations of linen, ink, and symbols of Gutenberg Information Technology. They are 'ancient men' who receive him 'with affection,' and for four hours he 'ask[s] them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and... I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death...'

Remember: Machiavelli lives only two generations after Gutenberg. He is thus one of the very first people in the world to have had a personal library. Before printing, libraries were the exclusive possession of kings, sovereign princes, abbots, masters of the Roman Empire (like Caesar and Cicero). The idea that a mere mortal--a disgraced ex-Assistant for Confidential Affairs to the Republic of Florence--might have a personal library would have been absurd even half a century earlier. To him, therefore, his personal library is not something he takes for granted, but something new, something he has that his predecessors did not. And so he can see clearly--more clearly than we can--what his personal library does for him, what his books are.

In disgraced semi-exile--when many he would talk to are afraid to be seen in his company, and where he is afraid to be seen in the company of almost all the rest--the ability to read and reread his personal copies of Publius Ovidius Naso, Petrarch, Dante Alighieri, Titus Livius, Plutarch, and the rest makes them his friends: people who will receive him with affection, and honestly answer his questions about politics and history. It is important to have such friends, and to pay them proper respect. Hence Machiavelli will not go to them in his clothes-of-the-day--those in which he had managed his farm, haggled over the price of firewood, gambled, and on which he had spilled beer. He will, instead, enter his library only in 'garments regal and courtly.'

Moreover, people's rough edges are filed off in their books. Adam Smith found Jean-Jacques Rousseau impossible in person, but that chunk of Rousseau's mind that is instantiated in the hardware-and-software combination of Gutenberg Information Technology is very pleasant company. Nobody outside his family (save Friedrich Engels) could ever stand Karl Marx for any length of time. But that part of Marx's mind that is instantiated in his books doesn't fly into irrational rages, doesn't accuse one of being a police spy, doesn't beg for money, doesn't demand that one accept that he is very much the smartest one in the room. Marx-in-the-book speaks passionately of his hopes and fears for the future--hope coming from the progressive destiny of humanity and the extraordinary progress of technology, and fear coming from our constant tendency to f*** up our social engineering problems--and (save when he starts raving Hegelian gibberish, or when you see that huge, huge chunks of his argument fall away because he has confused the physical capital-output ratio with the value capital-output ratio) can be good company.

And then there are those whom one really wishes one could know in person. For who would not like to be good friends with (if one were quick and witty enough to avoid becoming one of his targets) John Maynard Keynes, or David Hume, or John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith? I know Larry Meyer--but it is an extra gift to have a piece of him on my bookshelf that I can talk to anytime, in the form of A Term at the Fed. (It would be better to be able to call him up to appear to talk at will, but A Term at the Fed is a pretty close substitute). I wish I knew Garry Wills in person, but you can't have everything, and pieces of his literary persona haunt at least four rooms in our house plus my office. I'm going to try to meet and talk to Liza Featherstone the next time I'm in New York with time to spare, but meanwhile I have her book. And Adam Jaffe is (justifiably) angry with me for an episode of writer's block which meant that I failed to revise a paper he was editing--but his book isn't angry at me.

So I think that as long as a humanist views himself as turning the crank on a machine ("squeeze out a paper on Zizek's use of Kierkegaard, so that I can send it off and people will publish it, so that I can write down on a piece of paper that it has been published") he is doomed. But when he shifts his mental frames, and remember what is really going on--that Kierkegaard is desperately trying to communicate something difficult and important that he only half-grasps, and that Zizek is mulling this over and answering back--he may yet be saved. It's when the moment comes when Adam gets so excited by watching Zizek argue with Kierkegaard that he thinks, "I have something to add to this; I have something important to say too"--then is the moment to write down what you have to say, not in order to build your c.v. but because you have something to say. In fact, the only effective way to build your c.v. is to let it happen as a byproduct of your having something to say.

I remember... it must have been 1984, some evening, when I was sitting in one of the cushy chairs in the middle of the NBER's third-floor offices. Larry Summers was coming in while Paul Krugman was going out. And they stopped each other.

"Paul," said Larry.

"Yes?" said Paul.

"In our basic model, the U.S. is running a trade deficit because demand is greater than production, and especially because demand for non-tradeables is high, and so workers are pulled out of jobs making tradeables into jobs making non-tradeables, and so domestic production of tradeables is insufficient to satisfy demand, and so we import," said Larry.

"So?" said Paul.

"Why, then, are workers in tradeable-goods industries in the Midwest experiencing this not as being pulled into higher-wage jobs in the non-tradeables sector, but as being pushed by foreign competition into lower-wage jobs in the non-tradeables sector?" said Larry.

And they were off. For a good half hour or so they argued the issues back and forth. More graduate students gathered to watch what was a fascinating pickup debate and discussion about just why there were so many losers from the trade deficits of the 1980s, when the first-cut full-employment model suggested that it should have been win-win.

You have to be in the right place at the right time to get the peak intellectual experience of watching two minds of such extraordinary caliber together wrestle with each other and with important problems. Actually, you don't. You just have to pick up the right book.

Comments

[John Emersonj]

Well, my opinion is that Adam was specifically talking about the humanities side of the liberal arts, which has tried to attain a kind of scientificity by imposing paradigms.

Even thought these are not exactly scientific paradigms.

But I am a known malcontent.

[Ottnott]

You need to ask yourself, what is the potato trying to bring you to understand?
http://www.truckandbarter.com/2003_05_01_truckandbarter_archive.html#94466520

[Jonathan King]

>
> You have to be in the right place at the right time to get the peak intellectual
> experience of watching two minds of such extraordinary caliber together
> wrestle with each other and with important problems. Actually, you don't. You
> just have to pick up the right book.

I see your point, but I kind of disagree. I think there are things that are essential and likely more stimulating about hearing the dialog (or being in the dialog) in vivo than in libro. The first point is that you *can* be in the dialog. The second point is that you are more likely to hear a full range of ideas come up because you never can get all the grad students to maintain some reverential silence just because two really famously smart people are talking. And the third point is that most of what does turn out to be interesting and new in a field comes up completely by accident. It's either at the water cooler, or at the hotel bar, or in front of the poster you suddenly realize is directly relevant to something you know or need to know. Most great ideas are first written down on napkins and envelopes.

Actually, I think you are somewhat fooled by Macchiavelli's claim to find his greatest enlightenment in his private library. There's no doubt that's fun, and enlightening. But what did he always do before he got there? Yup, he yakked with the wood cutters, talked up strangers on the road and found his friends in the tavern.

And then ask yourself again where most of the good new stuff is on the internet. Is it on the electronic equivalent of dead trees, or in the electronic equivalent of the hotel bar? Which reminds me: thanks again for the 'blog.

[bob mcmanus]

"Is it on the electronic equivalent of dead trees, or in the electronic equivalent of the hotel bar?"

Go to Kotsko and scroll down to the post where he thanks God for commenters.

I'll thank Brad. This was personal and moving.

[grishaxxx]

I saw Adam's post earlier today and thought, "O man, this guy is on the edge of burnout." There must have been love for the field (and the texts, and the voices in the texts) for him to commit to graduate study, but if it's come to cranking out the articles, it's not loving him back enough. I also imagine that this is affecting his scholarly product.
Jonathan has a point that getting out and rubbing shoulders and, well, as Machiavelli put it, "...sink{ing] into vulgarity for the whole day..," can energize study, once you return to it. Isn't that what the sabbatical was for, formally? Adam may just need one a bit early to refresh and reflect. I certainly hope he finds a remedy, and something more than a palliative.
------
And, yeah, isn't "Nixon Agonistes" a terrific, haunting book? I can only pretend from having read him, but I think Garry Wills would be wonderful company - the range of things that engage him, solemnly and with delight, is enormous.

[Nick Kaufman]

That was a great post. Great post. This is great advice for any career path.

My own personal failing is my feeling of awe and inadequacy when reading all these great thinkers. More importantly, I often feel lost in a sea of information; even if I feel I have a valid point, I fear that I will soon discover that someone else has already said it.

[washerdreyer]

That was great piece to read as the exams at the end of my 1L year move rapidly into sight.

[ogged]

A wonderful post, but missing Adam's point, no? He knows very well what he's supposed to be feeling and finding, and he's lamenting the academic system that makes feeling and finding those things impossible. With all due respect Brad, "Aren't book and ideas wonderful!" isn't much of a response to someone saying "I'm doing this because I think books and ideas are wonderful, but academia is sucking the life out of me." Adam's is a trenchant critique of (at least some disciplines in) the academy, he doesn't need to be told to get his mind right.

(Is that too harsh? I really like this post, but it's not fair to frame it as a response to Adam.)

[Well, it is a response to Adam, or at least I see it as such: it's a call to self-hypnosis: that only by getting really excited about it and getting into the middle of the debate that Zizek is having with Kierkegaard and forgetting about resume-building is it actually possible to... build the resume.]

[clew]

Well, nitpick, Euripides famously had a library, and although he was well-off in (mostly) Athens he wasn't a 'master of Empire'.

[shah8]

I don't know...

I have alot of trouble with really rigorous books because my mind drifts so much, and I'm too lazy to put it to discipline...

However, I have never been especially touched by human voice communication with another person's rationality or intellect. I have rarely ever achieved a state of empathy with a writer. I have alway allowed the words to tell me what they want to tell me, not the person on the other end. It is as if my intellect and my imagination are seperate parts of my mind, and rarely are both engaged at the same time.

It's really weird...I tend to read my movies and watch my books...

Just my usual ramblin' going to say that maaaaan, Professor Delong gets quite a bit different thing out of his books than I do out of mine...

and now I understand a bit more why he says somethings that I vehemently disagree with and can't understand why he'd say that...

[jeff]

Excellent post.

[Andrew Price]

An extraordinary and uplifting post. In a time when we are often exhorted simply to believe, rather than to think, I revel in all exercises of true mind.

Consider: books are time travel and telepathy all rolled into one.

Andy

[Jon Koppenhoefer]

You just have to pick up the right book...

So where can I find the book in which Krugman and Summers have their discussion?

[No Preference]

I second egged's point. That was an inspiring post in a way, but it did not squarely address Kotsko's main complaint.

[john c. halasz]

A professor of neo-classical economics professes warm-hearted humanism and cites Machiavelli. Can I charge it on my MasterCard? (Opps! I don't have a MasterCard.)

[kharris]

I, too, am with Ogged, not so much about Brad not following Adam, but about what Addam faces. Going discursive is not sin, when the results are good, and it is Brad's joint, after all.

As to Addam's situation, well, the thinking profession hasn't turned out to be what he expected. He seems midway through shedding his expectations and fitting into reality. I don't know that everybody goes through this, but surely many do and it isn't always pleasant. In the chunky world of undergrad-grad-semester-at-a-time, this may not be the best time for him to be having doubts, but if we step back just a bit and think about it, better to get this over with sooner rather than later. Maybe he needs to change schools, maybe he needs to change aspirations. He probably has a pretty good grasp of what he needs to do - chunk out texts fast enough to draw some attention to himself. He may not find that effort compatible with settling down to enjoy the company of his inky-and-vellum friends. Maybe he should earn his living as a poet, and read Arendt for comfort.

[john c. halasz]

I don't think one should read Arendt for comfort. The thought of reading Derrida for comfort escapes me.

[Adam Kotsko]

Insofar as this post was a misreading of my post, it was a productive one. It is, as they say, forgiveable.

[SZ]

I think there is something else that should be said - this is not an unusual phenomena among academic philosophers (I should know, I almost became one!). Part me wants to throw Wittgenstein at him and say "the best philosophy is that which enables you to quit mucking around and do something". The whole profession is populated by people talking themselves into confusion - and not in the least because there are few places in which it does have an empirical tether. Thus, most books about Kierkegaard are at least two ply away from the situation of a worker at Wal-Mart.

I cannot understate how important this is for understanding both why academic philosophers are routinely ignored by the outside world, and why economists (or biologists etc.) tend to be featured. When I was working at the World Bank, Peter Singer was invited to address the Bank on the ethics of development. He went into a rambling and confusing argument and ended up concluding that "countries have a duty to direct between 3 and 5 percent of their GDP to foreign aid". The whole room shifted around their chairs uncomfortably wondering how he could say such nonsense. (Which is it Mr. Singer, 3 or 5 percent? It makes a hell of a lot of difference! Who would manage this? The WB can barely adequately manage its 15 billion or so a year and you want to throw at us 3 percent of global GDP?)

The point is that having a strong connection to an empirical element in a profession ensures that people examine the details. And often it is in examining those details that real understanding and knowledge emerge.

I've had a major and well-known academic philosopher tell me over dinner that she was capable of doing any job in the world, and she would only need two weeks to read about it before she could do it. The arrogance and absurdity of that statement is indicative of the problems Adam is facing. His profession values intellectual arrogance and dismisses empirical detail as something less important - something for lesser minds to grapple with (like how to spend 3 percent of global GDP, channel it into useful projects, control corruption, measure success, etc.). And, unfortunately, if you believe that these “details” are important, you probably will begin to experience serious alienation. You will begin to wonder whether or not you were learning anything real, or just feeding the journal machine.

Unfortunately, I don't really have an answer or solution to this problem.

SZ, who today has, once again, realized how much of a relief it is to be outside confines of academic philosopher and doing work that requires a firm belief in rational empiricism.

[Timothy Burke]

I'd agree with those who would say this is a misreading of the original post--but a very inspiring post in its own right, so no harm no foul. One of the points that Adam is raising, I think, is the same kind of thing that many of us on the humanities side of academia have talked about--the hollowness of the collective enterprise, its distance from the joyful, exploratory, passionate underpinnings of our personal drive to read and write. I don't say this to endorse the right-wing critique of the academic humanities--I don't think this is a political point. It's a point about the consequences of an overcompetitive, overroutinized atmosphere in the humanities. Not only that sense of dull compulsion to produce that Adam describes, but also the petty hierarchies and status-games that he mentions.

[david]

SZ, you should read Singer's book.

[Darren]

I'm also with Ogged. Machiavelli (sp?) was *playing* with his inky friends, just hanging out and shooting the breeze, and that's always a pleasure. Adam has to *work* with them.... he is not free to do as he pleases with his friends... the swords of "obligation" and "standards" and "external expectations" hang over the encounter. Adam isn't just hanging out with his friends, he's expected to *use* them.

For Adam to be dissatisfied with a field he never expected to be satisfied with is one thing. But for him to be in his *dream job* and feel the spark go out... that's awful. I just had the experience of cranking out a paper that I didn't particularly want to write, and I related to Adam's post much more easily than Brad's. We should all be so lucky as Brad: never forced to do something at work that you don't want to do anyway.

[Darren]

Timothy: "... dull compulsion to produce."

A very apt and evocative expression.

[David W.]

There are earnest and compelling books, and then there are books that are boorish and stupifying. See Donald Luskin and Regenery for examples of the latter type of prime recycling material.

[AP]

Adam needs to find a new job. If he isn't finding important (in his mind) enlightment from his books and isn't promoting any important (in his mind) enlightenment of his own then he needs to go do something else.

Yes, it's possible to be a professional academic and just crap out bylines. Either suck it up and grudge through like a manual laborer, do better work, or quit.

[Jonathan Goldberg]

I found an interesting (if old) point about reading in:

"Laurence Meyer, A Term at the Fed (his memoirs of his days as a Federal Reserve Governor; we chose him for the job as someone who could be a bridge between the High Policymakers and the forecasters and model-builders; I think--and the book says--that he did this job very well);"

I have read the text of this book. I didn't know that he was supposed to be such a bridge, and can't recall that it says so. Prof. deLong benefits from his knowledge of context.

I found the book intensely political, in the sense of tiptoeing around anything that might offend certain people in a world which Meyer has in no way left.

In particular, I had a chance (at a talk he gave) to ask Dr. Meyer a question about Alan Greenspan. The question was based mostly on things in "A Term" and on things I read here. The words in Meyer's answer avoided the question.

The point about reading, of course, is that one must often know something about the context in which the text was written to correctly understand it. Machiavelli's writing is a famous example. I personally have vivid memories of ramming my head into that wall during my failed attempt to read the Federalist Papers. I could eventually battered through the wall, at least to a point, but there was not enough effort available.

S.Z.
Concerning:

"I've had a major and well-known academic philosopher tell me over dinner that she was capable of doing any job in the world, and she would only need two weeks to read about it before she could do it."

Brain Surgery for Dummies. You have, of course, considered the possibility that she was pulling your chain...

[AP]

Ok, too harsh. I apologize.

But if Adam isn't inspired by Kierkegaard, isn't inspired by Zizek's commentary, and doesn't see this as dues-paying so he can do stuff he's excited about later, then it sounds like he needs to find his inspiration elsewhere.

[anne]

There was a time when my department was battling, I can not recall why but they battled. I can remember walking the halls and finding "Do Not Knock" signs on doors and being terribly sad, for I wished to knock and bother and talk and listen and talk. There are times when friendly ideas are harder to come by than we would wish, and these are lonely times and loneliness is hard for us to bear or even to admit to. A wonderful psychiatrist would say that loneliness was the most difficult of problems for people for they can seldom even admit to it. Then, again, there is friendship.

[wetzel]

Adam is just having a bad day at the temple of the fetish. The humanities need rebuilding. From the ground up, I mean.

Where's the ground?

Nobody is arguing against the value of literature. The problem is professionalized, academic humanities. How do you hear the voice in the writing when you're required to read 1500 pages by Monday. And how can you talk about greatness. If you don't want your transcripts to be peppered with incompletes, you better give up on that. Greatness doesn't happen on a 16 week schedule.

Imagine being subject to the abbot of a Unitarian monastery. You might come to resent the penance. There just isn't any theology to justify the torment.

It would be a joy to spend life reading and writing, but with the freedom to digest. Just thinking about having pages due, wrestling with Hegel at 4 AM, makes that old sore spot start to hurt again.

[anne]

Reading is an art that we can become ever more adept at. I am always learning how to read. John Rawls, who lived in books, was asked during a seminar how all that was suggested might be read. "There are different ways to read," he answered. "Read for the core, first, and the rest follows easily and may be looked to more thoroughly from time to time."

[Vince Crawford]

Bravo!

[Jennifer]

What a fine comment about learning to read. Oh, I will remember.

[Crab Nebula]

The answers here is to get 'out of your *head*', and the "right books" are not going to be political or philosophical. The route to treating people and yourself better is through the heart. (Ok, don't roll your eyes, I'm no new-ager).

We are social beings, we want belonging and community on some deep level. We need to learn to practice compassion and mindfulness. Everyday, all day. And here is the key - we must try to do this even to those we abhor. It is extremely difficult, given the ingrained socialized materialistic zombie state our culture encourages, but it is our best life's work. When we make some progress here, everything else falls into proper perspective.

We have to try to wake up (at least part of the time) from that obsessed half dreamy state in which most people live nearly their entire lives, carefully tending to their fears and projections.

[cw]

"work that requires a firm belief in rational empiricism"

... assume a can opener. Are you referring to economics, SZ?

[pierre]

Books are very different things when you are surrounded by Krugmans and have always been surrounded by Krugmans than when you are not and have not. Absent living Krugmans the books can almost seem to mock your wretched existence. Shared with Krugmans, of course, the books make you say "oh yeah baby civilization is mine woo hoo".

I suspect that Prof DeLong has always been surrounded by Krugmans and Adam Kotsko has not. In which case both of these genuinely beautiful and moving posts are talking past one another.

[Lee A. Arnold]

Reading to live, is very different than living to think. And writing to monger, is hell on earth.

It sounds to me like this thinker has talent and aspiration that may one day take us all to new places. He should be encouraged to shitcan the academic beanery and become a carpenter, or a tilesetter, or something else that is physically useful. It will be hard at first, and he will get cuts on his hands, a lot of cuts. But he may be surprised to find the high level of thinking and artistic appreciation out there. The best of it is superior to the sludgy gunk he now reburbles. With the exception of the research sciences needing laboratories, some of the best talent doesn't bother to make it through school anyway. It's too dull.

I just talked to a fifty-year-old residential electrician and blues guitarist (never went to college; two kids of his own in high school,) who is reading Paradise Lost for the first time. Now, he doesn't buy the theology, nor does he think that Eve should be second-class to Adam: It's the intellection plus the MUSIC... How many people graduate college without memorizing a single line of Milton? The greatest poet in English? Exactly why are these people worth talking to?

Cutting loose is an act which makes the thinker grow; and every once in a while, you need a precipice. But if you want a job as intellectual foot-masseur to the high and mighty who run this torpid republic, by all means, stay in school.

Although, now that the internet allows you to get your best stuff out there for all to see equally, it's possible that the university as a job-filtering device may lessen in importance. ...You phone it in, anyway!: So make your OWN goddamned institution.

Incidentally, I took a course from Garry Wills thirty years ago, on Jefferson. He encouraged me to read Jefferson's letters to his nephew, Peter Carr. Mr. Wills is an old soul, and a very graceful person.

Also, the answer to "How much do you forgive?" is: the precise quantity necessary to be free.

[Bill Gardner]

The best post I've read this year.

There are other pleasures outside the humanities to bring to Adam's attention:

--> When the floor opens beneath you and you fall into the proof and you grasp why a great theorem is true. You are alone in a place of great purity, but you know that whoever else looks at what you are seeing, human or Andromedan or whatever, will see just this.

--> When the pattern arises out of the data you have gathered. You now have _evidence_, real firepower for your attack on the bullshit.

What science gave me was an escape from just the feeling that plagues Adam, that "there is no deserving -- there is no available way to determine deserving."

[Dubblblind]

This society (and this blog) put a premium on the intellect but one must dig deeper than that to address Adam Kotsko's concerns. The intellect is much better at dissection than connection. It takes our entire being to confront life's issues, including emotionality, intuition, compassion, empathy, sympathy, ethos, pathos, kindness etc. These things are not and can never be reduced to an intellectual understanding or exercise.

[Gene O'Grady]

Two irrelevant comments:

(1) If the people at the starting point of this little essay were seminary students/graduates, "texts" may have a rather different resonance than for those who can more easily assume an author behind their "texts."

(2) I know Machiavelli lived after Gutenburg, but I would guess that at least part of his library consisted of what we would call manuscripts rather than printed editions.

[Ian Welsh]

Fine post Brad, even if, as noted, it perhaps doesn't answer the original.

"You have to be in the right place at the right time to get the peak intellectual experience of watching two minds of such extraordinary caliber together wrestle with each other and with important problems. Actually, you don't. You just have to pick up the right book."

Sadly - not the same thing at all. You should read Randall Collins. There is no substitute for the live conversation.

Also - did they come to a conclusion to that question? Because it's still an important one.

[charles]

What happens to the edifice of American higher education when too many of the 55% of faculty who have full-time jobs (the other 45% are adjuncts) have the "letter that killeth" experience from various department chairs, deans. provosts, and other assorted academic administrators who are consumed with "productive quantity" and paper credentialism and "college rankings" of various sorts, rather than Brad's paean to the llife of the mind? I suggest far too many academics have Kotsko's experience after being called by Brad's vision. It puts the future of American higher education on a sharper knife's edge than I think is generally acknowledged. My experience is that one is not given time to develop worthwhile things to say. One is merely expected to say things, and keep saying them in all the expected venues. The gifted disillusioned leave, the mediocre hang on and grind it out (in every discipline). What is lost is the ability (except in rare cases) to pass on the wonders of the life of the mind through teaching.
Charles

[Bysshe]

As a philosopher turned economics graduate student, I feel like I have some understanding of both points of view. One of the main reasons I abandoned philosophy was the insularity of academic philosophy and the comment on a comment on a comment nature of much of the academic writing. That being said, I think that if you genuinely enjoy philosophical writing, there is no reason to view this process as "just cranking something out" so you can list a publication. All of the philosophical papers I've written are works that I'm quite proud of because I gave my best efforts to say something interesting, even when they were just assignments for a class in which my grade was a forgone conclusion and even when I knew (or believed) that no one else really cared what I had to say. Ultimately, the experience of academic philosophy rests on what you personally make of it.

[Ben Weiss]

A wonderful post, and a wonderful Machiavelli quotation, but I'd like to take a bit of issue with the comment about libraries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries --- and, yes, I know that's really the point of the post.

The general point that libraries were fewer and smaller before the advent of printing than after is basically true. So is the fact that manuscripts were harder to come by and more expensive than printed books, but Brad's comment that "the idea that a mere mortal--a disgraced ex-Assistant for Confidential Affairs to the Republic of Florence--might have a personal library would have been absurd even half a century earlier," is far too stark. In the early Middle Ages libraries really were the province of "kings, sovereign princes, and abbots", but there was a steady increase in both literacy and the number of books in circulation during the later Middle Ages. This was especially true in cities: notably in Northern Italy, but also in France and what would become Germany. By the late fourteenth century, a bureaucrat with literary tastes like Machiavelli would almost certainly have had personal copies of a large number of his favorite books, and, if he were wealthy enough, possibly even a little study (a "studiolo") in which to read them.

Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the book trade underwent a dramatic shift as the primary center of manuscript copying moved from monastic houses to commercial scriptoria, often in university towns. (Richard and Mary Rouse have written a very important, if slightly exhausting, two-volume history of the commercial book trade in Paris: _Manuscripts and their makers: commercial book producers in medieval Paris, 1200-1500_ (Turnhout, 2000).) This was both fostered by and, in turn, fostered an increase in demand for personal copies of university texts. In Paris, as in places like Vienna, Padova, and Krakow, there was an active market in both new and used manuscripts, and, in addition, many scholars (especially in Italy) copied texts out themselves.

But perhaps the most important piece of evidence of the increasing demand for books before Gutenberg is the invention of printing itself. Gutenberg was not just experimenting for the sake of experiment. He was responding to, if not an explicit demand, to a perceived opportunity. It's important to remember that the printing press was not devote to making a new type of object --- early printed books are exactly the same in form and layout to manuscripts --- but to make more of a commodity that already existed.

[Ben Weiss]

Ah, the Freudian typos of a historian:

"and, yes, I know that's really the point of the post." should read "and, yes, I know that's _not_ really the point of the post."

[Dano]

Do I really need concrete reasons why I read DeLong's blog? Not really. But sometimes it's nice.

D

[JR]

If I could have any wish, I would wish to be Garry Wills.

[burritoboy]

Adding to Ben Weiss' post, Machiavelli, though he had been removed from office (and imprisoned and tortured), his previous governmental position was actually quite high. He was the ambassador to several quite major foreign courts. Machiavelli was also responsible for organizing part of Florence's armed forces, for fortifications, elements of espionage and many other things. Machiavelli was one of Florence's top ten most powerful civilian (and non-religious) governmental figures - and may have been even more powerful than that (he was the right-hand man of Florence's most powerful politician for a time). His job titles don't sound very impressive to us, but he was a major political figure indeed.

[Keith M Ellis]

"...the hollowness of the collective enterprise, its distance from the joyful, exploratory, passionate underpinnings of our personal drive to read and write..."

I think there's a lot of truth to that. This can be true on the hard sciences side, too, I've seen it.

Brad's post rubbed me the wrong way and I'd be annoyed if I were Adam. It's rvery patronizing. Adam wouldn't be doing, probably, what he has been doing if he didn't love books. And if he doesn't love books (or had loved books), then exhorting him to (re)learn to love books isn't going to help.

Secondly, Brad sits pretty high in his field, at one of the best schools. That's so rarified that I suspect that his advice is not really helpful to anyone not in similar circumstances.

Finally, it takes something special to be passionate about the intellectual life and *also* be very successful. Most people don't love books and reflection and discourse. And of those who do, most are not high achievers. But it's the high achieving academics in both the humanities and sciences who are the people to be able to define their working life in terms of what they truly love. Most everyone else can only work like hell doing work they're directed to do, navigate treachorous academic political waters, and know that in the end they're not likely to find a job or, if they do, they're likely not to get tenure.

My undergraduate education is all about these books, loving books, engaging with these authors. You don't make it out of there without being passionate about these books as Brad describes. And while a much higher-than-average go on to grad school, and a subset of those are very high achieving, there's a lot of folks that are notorious for, you know, being cab drivers who continue to read these books and engage with others about them. That's a joke to some people, but here's the bottom line: you're either living a life of the mind or you're not. You're loving it, or you're not. For those who love it, there's only a few slots in the academic competition, and usually high-achievers are people that would be high-achievers regardless—they're goal-oriented, success-oriented, they're willing to do a lot of crap to get to some point they never have really questioned as their life goal. That's related to what Brad is writing about, but it's distinct. It's not right for everyone and it's not available for everyone. You don't just need to be talented, you need to be high-achieving for its own sake, you need connections, and you need some luck.

Defining the contemplative life in terms of an academic career is sad, really. Because if that were the only "authentic" contemplative life one could lead (as academics tend to think), most people with the desire, the talent, the passion will be excluded. And the contemplative life should be its own reward.

Adam should continue to do what he's doing if he enjoys it; if he doesn't enjoy it but wants to continue, he should not "play the game" and instead do what he wants and needs to do to enjoy it and not be concerned about the consequences. Or, he could leave academia. Whatever he does, it should be authentic.

[Michael Barnas]

Private libraries may have be somewhat rare at the turn of the fifteeth century, but note this characterization from Geof Chaucer:

A clerk ther was of Oxenford also,
That unto logyk hadde long ygo.
As leene was his hors as is a rake,
And he was not right fat, I undertake,
But looked holwe and therto sobrely.
Ful thedbare was his overeste courtepy,
For he hadde getten hym yet no benefice,
Nor was so worldly for to have office,
For him was levere have at his beddes heed
Twenty bookes, clad in black or reed,
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie.
Canturbry Tales, prologue, 285-296

[anne]

Michael Barnas:

http://www.librarius.com/canttran/genpro/genpro287-310.htm

c. 1390

A CLERK from Oxford was there also,
Who'd studied philosophy, long ago.
As lean was his horse as is a rake,
And he too was not fat, that I take,
But he looked emaciated, moreover, abstemiously.
Very worn off was his overcoat; for he
Had got him yet no churchly benefice,
Nor he was worldly to accept secular office.
For he would rather have at his bed's head
Some twenty books, all bound in black or red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy
Than rich robes, fiddle, or gay psaltery.