Being philosophical about philosophy

I’m taking three courses this semester. In one of them, I experienced a harsh epiphany: I saw in my professor, a man about ten years my junior, the philosopher I might have become had I continued to study after college: fluid in argument, supreme in his specialty yet well-versed in all the peripheral arts his interlocutors might bring to bear on his Fortress of Cogitude. I’m sure this was not just counterfactual thinking on my part but wishful counterfactual thinking. (I wouldn’t put it past me. I do have an unreasonably high opinion of myself.) Maybe even with best tutelage and constant practice I couldn’t have gotten as good as this guy. Wishful or not, my reverie gave me cold comfort, because it reminded me that my chance of becoming a virtuoso in philosophy has passed me by. My brain just doesn’t track information or form associations as seamlessly as it used to. (Maybe if I eat more flax.) At least now I understand why people go to graduate school right out of college. Life is really, really short, and it traces a dispiriting arc for all but the most gifted and best prepared.

Mediocrity is the acid test of devotion. I’m going to have to think philosophy worth doing for its own sake if I’m to trudge through a belated career in the trenches, scrounging for scraps of insight. Maybe I’ll leave behind a little formula, like Ohm’s Law, or a thought experiment, or a “result” in logic that will pop up in geekish cocktail-party conversation. Maybe I’ll write a book, or get “anthologized.” Ugh, I’m losing interest in entering into the history of philosophy even as I talk about it. Something else will have to keep me going. The thrill of the hunt minus the kill, I guess—that, and making a career out of a favorite pastime. I no longer think Sidney Morgenbesser was being flip when he answered a layperson’s question about what philosophers do: “You clarify a few concepts. You make a few distinctions. It’s a living.”

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CELLO, world.

Laura’s group CELLO on set filming for the upcoming short “Beyond Words,” directed by Jane Clark, in this promo clip:

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My summer vacation

My last post was nearly 12 weeks ago, before the Summer Greek Institute started. The Institute finished a little over a week ago. It was harder, in its way, than anything I’ve ever had to do. I’m not sure whether to feel relieved or bereft. The funny thing is, I expected all this. But I didn’t feel what I was expecting, so I didn’t think twice about taking the course.

The Institute was so trying, specifically in regard to memorization. I seem to recall being able to memorize meaningless tabular material better when I was in my teens and twenties, e.g. in German or math classes. (Principal parts, verb forms, and declensions are meaningful in Greek, of course, but they’re meaningless when you first memorize them.) But since no course I’ve ever taken has been anywhere near as intense as the Institute, it may just be that I’ve always been a mediocre memorizer. My recall did seem to become better-trained over the course of the 10 weeks, but it still fell far short of what several of my younger classmates seemed to achieve with no loss of sleep or dignity.

I sought explanations for this:

• age (I believe I had close to 20 years on the second-oldest student, that is after two students older than I dropped out of the course in its early weeks)
• lack of “extra” motivation (most of the other students were classicists or seminarians taking the course for credit)
• previous exposure to Latin (although I’ve had some German, which is fairly inflected for a modern European language)
• moral turpitude
• lack of oxygen to the brain

In the end, I relied on my old non-explanatory yet strangely comforting standby: It is what it is.

In return for my very real efforts and frustrations, I joined the other survivors at course’s end, picked up my diploma, and took solace in the fact that I had, despite my limitations, come away with a precious nest egg of Greek.

I’ve continued to study. Anything I don’t know, I can get to the bottom of, for the most part. It just takes a while. I intend to do about 15 minutes a day whenever I can. I’ll gird my loins with Liddell & Scott, with the course textbook (“H & Q,” within the Institute), with Marinone’s Tutti I Verbi Greci, and with internet resources like Perseus and Woodhouse’s English-Greek Dictionary. Since I’ll be reading mostly Plato and Aristotle, I’ll sidestep the agonies of sentence structure in Thucydides and of pre-Attic vocabulary in Homer. Any forays into those “toughies” will be backed by as much glossing and commentary as I can lay my hands on.

Aristotle and Plato are plenty hard, by the way.

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Picking up the pace

The summer Greek Institute course is coming up in two days. For the next 2.5 months, I’ll be off the grid, mentally speaking. I’m expecting the glitz and grime of New York to pass me by in a haze as I stagger to and from school. Class gets out at 4pm, and weekends are free—well, as free as the homework leaves them.

Despite the shocking workload, I’m more nervous about taking courses in the fall. For all its arcanity, the transmission of Attic Greek must be a well-trodden pedagogical path. There’s a chance I’ll wash out of the course—the way they make it sound, people are lucky to survive. My difficulties there will have mostly to do with bandwidth. To some extent my capacity for memorization will be outside my control. Besides, I’m not trying to become a Classics scholar, just an American academic misfit recovering the Classical education denied him in his youth.

Philosophy, on the other hand, is what I’m here to do. I feel it incumbent on me to try extra hard, to think tactically about getting through my coursework and comps so as to fashion a philosopher out of myself. This should be easy, since all I need to do is carve away everything that doesn’t look like a philosopher.

One skill I can hone that might make a big difference to my academic success is my method of study. I believe that I may be what I detest most: a wonk. I may actually be too “detail-oriented” for my own good. It’s not that I can’t see the forest for the trees. In fact, I often see forests where there are no trees, but that’s a different story. My problem is that reading takes too long. I read at an average pace, and I stew over minutiae. There would be nothing wrong with this, if I had unlimited time. Of course, if I had unlimited time it would mean I wasn’t in a philosophy program, and I wouldn’t be nearly as motivated to do the reading in the first place. But this Catch-22 is also another story. The point is that, for now, I need to cover a lot of ground, acquire a broad background, more than I need to perfect my understanding of every paper I pick up. I need to pick my battles.

A flaw in my current method, I think, is that I take copious notes. The main advantage of this approach is that, by posing my own questions and restating the author’s arguments in my own words, I frame the paper and reinforce my understanding of it. I just take way too long to do it.

Another bete noir of mine is Paralysis by Obligation to Read Everything (PORE). I see allusions to literature or concepts I haven’t covered and feel I have to read up on that before I can take another step in the paper. Yesterday, while reading Putnam’s On Properties, I realized I didn’t know much about second-order languages, except that they allow quantification over predicates. There was also reference to Russell’s and Whitehead’s now-antiquated notion of first- and second-order properties, of which I know embarrassingly little. Normally, such lacunae batter me like giant wagging fingers. I put the paper down, finish my coffee, and resolve to educate myself the next chance I get.

This can’t happen anymore. I have to go on reading a paper unless absolutely stymied, then get on to the next, just as soon as I have some sense of what it’s trying to accomplish. Part of my problem is that I’m trying to settle the argument of each paper once and for all. Is that ever going to happen?

So I tried out a compromise on the Putnam paper that seemed to work. I stopped taking notes in lock-step with the structure of the paper. Instead, I read through to the end (it’s not a long paper), trying to have a little faith that the steel sieve of my mind would keep the gist alive in memory for the rest of the session. Before finishing my coffee, I wrote a few gisty paragraphs, noting the sections in the paper that I had found obscure.

I realize that some readings are going to demand that I pick up more background just to have the foggiest notion of what’s being said. Some papers and books, too, are so central to a course that they rate the full wonkish, anal-retentive mastery that only midnight oil will yield. I’ll have to deal with that when it happens. For now, I’m channeling Evelyn Wood.

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