This post takes its inspiration from Robert Pippin's recent essay in the NY Times. Pippin calls for a renewed focus on the intellectual pleasures of reading, research, and writing beyond the many kinds of THEORY that the knowledge factory churns out regularly. He calls these pleasures "naive," ostensibly because they are innocent of theoretical pretensions. But they are, if you reflect for a moment, rather sophisticated. In a way, everything we learned in kindergarten is still relevant for us today: the joy of learning new things after protracted struggles; discovering new ideas that challenge our inherited conceptions of the world; experiencing the aesthetic pleasures of reading; creating our own forms of intellectual and artistic expression; basking in our realization of the inexorable complexity of our lives and our world, and thus discovering the limits of our mortality. I find little, if anything, that is naive here.
My teaching experience this semester reminds me unambiguously of the joys of intellectual cultivation, even in an age of social networking sites, PlayStation, and IPhones. It helps that I teach political philosophy to thirty-five bright kids at a leading US university. We read a pretty standard canonical selection of political philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. Some might find it odd and complain that I have succumbed to academic conservatism. Indeed, from a certain position in the "cultural wars" of the past, this is correct. But I think we are smarter now. The canonical writers, we appreciate, speak to us in different voices rather than offer us a coherent sermon, and it is for us to pose challenging questions to them and find our own answers. This is anything but easy. Political philosophers are distant historically and culturally, and difficult to read and comprehend. Only in our minds, however, can the texts and their authors come alive and speak to our deepest concerns and anxieties. This, however, involves the time-honored virtues of close reading, critical thinking, analytical writing, and intelligent discourse/debate.
The idea is not to simply accept what an author or professor says, but to question, to think, and grapple with the texts as much as our own inchoate notions about politics and society. Consider Plato. Everyone sympathizes with Socrates on their first reading of the Apology. That's what Plato intended. And he was a bloody good writer! But there is something more to it. Socrates wishes to lead only the examined life or perish. Yet his pursuit of the examined life is seen by many of his fellow Athenians as impious and corrupting. The innocent reader is led to believe Socrates' defense in the trial. The Delphic Oracle told him to question others and think for himself, so he can't be impious, he says. How could one man, he asks further, corrupt his fellow citizens in a democracy? The innocent are persuaded again by Socrates' personification of the Laws of Athens in the Crito. Surely, one might conclude, Socrates regards himself to be a good citizen, albeit one who stood for free speech and other civil liberties before his time. "He'd be fine today" is the verdict of many first-time readers. But if this is so, there's no point reading Plato except as a historical curiosity from an illiberal era. Let's read instead, some might say, the classics of postmodern thought in our day and satisfy ourselves with the extreme skepticism, uncertainty, and despondence that characterizes so-called late modernity.
However commonplace these views might be in certain academic circles, especially in many humanistic disciplines, it is ultimately nihilistic. That's a problem not for some deep philosophical reason but because it denies the intrinsic, non-instrumental value of reading canonical texts and reflecting on them and one's own political dilemmas. It won't lead to a job, more money, a higher IQ, or sometimes even a higher grade. But Plato still has something valuable to teach us. That teaching lies in Socrates' evasive defense at his public trial and his ironic speech as the Laws. What we find here is exactly the opposite of free speech and other contemporary liberal values: a certain kind of evasiveness or deception alongside a defiant defense of self-knowledge as the highest good. Thinking for oneself and questioning what we are told by others, Plato wishes to tell us, are dangerous activities, especially for the young, ambitious people whom Socrates often encountered as his critics as well as disciples. The truth is that Socrates did indeed reject the authority of the gods of Athens and did corrupt the youth with his irreverent philosophy of life. And he was entirely aware of his "guilt." In this sense, Plato offers a fairly radical critique of the inexorable tension between the self-examining individual and society at large. This is, of course, not a critique lost upon college students, who realize that immersing themselves in textual or empirical studies radically alters their worldview and estranges them from their friends and family.
Is this the only possible interpretation of Plato's portrayal of Socrates? Certainly not. But it is nonetheless an interpretation worth considering alongside many others. Indeed, reading texts with multiple interpretations in mind -- yours and your peers' -- is a valuable intellectual goal in itself. This fits well with what some call the "surplus meaning" of texts. Reading collectively with multiple interpretations in mind, we can learn to discriminate between better and worse interpretations, and to confirm that even the best interpretations might not explain everything. Not everyone will agree, but that simply affirms another basic intellectual truth, the difficulty of agreeing on what is good. Conservatives do not appreciate these finer points. For them, it's merely a matter of studying the so-called classics of Western civilization. That's odd not only on account of Gandhi's statement that "Western civilization would be a good idea," but also because supposedly Western canonical philosophers such as Aristotle were lost for over a millennium and only return to European soil with the great Islamic thinkers of the Middle Ages. And what is so "Western" anyway about the polytheistic Greeks and Romans anyway? Whichever way you look at it, if you want to engage seriously with canonical texts, social conservatism is not an option. The texts are inherently radical insofar as they explode our lazy assumptions about ourselves and our world; they excite and shape our intellectual faculties; and, they predispose us towards not just political ideas but political action. If you had any doubt, consider Socrates' martyrdom, Machiavelli's call to liberate Italy from the oppression of secular and ecclesiastical rulers, or Tocqueville's insistence that social equality rather than political liberty makes for a genuinely democratic age.
My purpose here is twofold: firstly, an emphasis on teaching and studying competing theories cannot accomplish what "naive" reading can; secondly, these "naive" pleasures are actually rather sophisticated. When we focus on different theories of textual criticism or social science, we merely reproduce stale structures of thought, and therefore, unleash tedium and thoughtlessness rather than vibrant intellectual energy and passion. If you ever have doubts on this point, compare the graduate students of your university with the undergraduates. You'll know the difference because college kids don't do literature reviews day in and day out. Likewise, if you reflect on what I've said so far, you might find that "naive" intellectual pleasures are what caused at least some of us to take up the life of the mind as a vocation. But you don't have to be an academic to understand my point here. If you're into business or art or soccer, you might actually understand better what I mean. The pleasures of the self-examined life are remarkably democratic: I have learned my most valuable lessons outside classrooms, from the poorest and most marginalized members of my society, who lack the luxuries of time and luck to read closely and write critically as part of their intellectual training. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) their rigorous daily labors and numerous social constraints, they speak "naively" but enthusiastically of new modes of intellectual discovery and political expression in a hostile world. Socrates, who never read closely or wrote critically, would have understood, even if most of our university professors cannot.
