There will always be, and necessarily so, a tension between formal requirement and spontaneity in education.
Formal requirement forces us, against the inertia of comfort and habit, to give a certain investment of time and a modicum of consideration. Of course, for the purposes of securing a grade and marching ever closer to graduation, a masquerade of comprehension will often suffice, but these efforts are little more than rote repetition without the latter: spontaneity, the unstructured reading of a great author or two that allows us to bask in the precision and power of a superior intellect.
It is too often the case that when students are presented with minds of great insight, it is as a snippet, a truism, a curiosity amongst others in a gallery of ephemera. The various modes of thought are categorized and filed into their proper places in the textbook’s chart: consigned to an intellectual Limbo where they begin a steady accumulation of dust. Then what of us, who desiccate our youth’s vitality in such dry pursuits!
In these times, it is customary to place the most fervent faith in facts, but these are little more than lifeless snapshots of a world forever gone by; complete works of bygone ages, on the other hand, retain their potency – in them, we see the magisterial movements of their authors’ minds in response to the world they saw: Einstein, Freud, Kant, Melville, Dostoevsky, these were not mere encyclopedists of bygone eras; they immersed themselves in the intellectual tradition of their times, true, but they synthesized it into something entirely new out of the foundry of their own person.
Higher education familiarizes us with the inherited intellectual insights of the past, but these insights can never be exact description of reality; the circumstances of life are constantly in flux, and what is passed down as a timeworn truth can sometimes be found faulty through later experience. The danger with academic formality is that it tends to institutionalize and ossify past modes of thinking, revering it for its own sake.
Standardization of method, for the purpose of professionalization, has the fatal danger of depriving our academic pursuits of the richness of raw experience. Our model for emulation ought not to be of the entomologist, pinning dead bugs upon parchment, but rather the intrepid explorer, who, through fresh and unmediated action, discovers countless new wonders to experience – reading the complete works of bold innovators will surely inspire this boldness in ourselves.
Many great thinkers and writers of the past lacked formal education: They simply read. The beauty of books is that they can accompany us in life’s adventures as mirrors of our own constantly growing understanding.
One can grow intellectually without making the tremendous leap into a formal program where constantly applied external standards become the motivation for reading and writing – of course, this external rigidity is what many, myself included, need to jump-start the process of education; but it becomes too easy to lose sight of the end of education: to lead a richer life.
The trappings of academia, the strict divisions of disciplines, the hierarchy of the institution – it all contributes to a collective hubris; we fancy ourselves to be scientists of the human project, master schematicians, skilled technicians of the encyclopedic reflex. This kind of thinking can rapidly gain an aura of institutionalized augustness as authors cite one another in an expanding web of schematic interdependence. How lost we are, if we are seduced by such a fatal notion!
Just like any other vocation, academia requires a broad and deep association with the subject matter. But if through pride we lose humility – a brutal honesty about a terminal lack of absolute certainty – we lose the art of the whole affair. A culture’s thinking advances through the bold stabs in the dark; to transcend unfeeling blindness, thinking requires rigor and discipline but with depth of passion and intuition.
The schematizing reflex that I refer to is forever bound to be backward looking. It seeks to itemize by various relations the ideas and events that have already happened. Surely these can give us a context to the present, but only insofar as we actively apply their insights to our own lives. Great works offer us a glimpse into how we can construct such an original, cohesive lens for ourselves, but the exercise will always be purely academic unless we test our lenses on our own raw, unfiltered experience – otherwise, we are like intellectual voyeurs, forever observing but never experiencing: a terrible way to live.
Gavin Beeker is a collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
