Note, in the above post - there are ways to strategize about using your mind well. Sleeping well, moderating diet, being cautious to how caffeine intake gives you that big lack of energy if you drink too much, being careful what kinds of music you listen to and the quality of environment around you - finding out quiet places, or thinking places, not distracting your mind too much with lots of images and movies all the time...
That sounds suspiciously like the ascetic life.
Yet, surprisingly (?) it does not seem any graduate students follow the above advice for keeping one's brain healthy. As a general rule, grad students don't sleep enough, and overload on caffeine, or illegally obtain prescription drugs to concentrate longer (especially in high pressure schools), get drunk on the weekends (I know of someone who insists he writes best hungover), eat junk food, don't exercise, listen to what we feel like, although some music is just too distracting, study in noisy coffee shops (which, granted, are also good thinking places - I wonder why?), and as a general rule, although we may think about the short term effects of our actions on our mind, we rarely think of the long-term ones.
But the Greeks did, and not with a simple utilitarian desire to maximize their brainpower:
"In his masterful study of ancient philosophy, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot has called our attention to the intensely practical character of philosophy in the Greco-Roman world. Far from being a merely academic, intellectual exercise of asserting and demonstrating "cognitive claims," all the schools of philosophy in the ancient world were forms of training—of askêsis—that sought to reshape the student's basic sensibilities and attitudes so that he or she could not only come to know the highest truths but could also actually live in light of them. Conceived in this way, ancient philosophy can be seen to have concentrated on what Hadot calls "spiritual exercises" which had as their purpose cultivating the student not simply as a "knower" but in his or her total existence: "We can perhaps get a better idea of this spiritual exercise if we understand it as an attempt to liberate ourselves from a partial, passionate point of view— linked to the senses and the body—so as to rise to the universal, normative viewpoint of thought, submitting ourselves to the demands of the Logos and the norm of the Good. Training for death is training to die to one's individuality and passions, in order to look at things from the perspective of universality and objectivity." (94-95) [-a description from an article by Ligne]
[RIP, Pierre Hadot - February 21, 1922 – April 24, 2010]
So, asceticism seems profoundly linked to seeking and trying to live the truth.
Philosophy today is not about truth. It is about either what other people have said, or whether their arguments were valid (as in, sound, not true), and maybe their applications to political issues sometimes. I have spoken to several philosophy graduate students here who switched from English to philosophy... because the tools for arguing were much more refined. Not because they wanted to get to something after their arguments.
Why we are in the place we are today is a long story, and involves names like Duns Scotus, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre. The list could go on. Perhaps that will come in a different post, perhaps not.
My interest here is simply to point out that there seems inherently a friendship between philosophy and asceticism, which bridges right into the question of the medieval debates about the theologian, and whether his proper identity should be a scholastic (Abelard, Aquinas, etc) or a monk (Bernard). Tied up in this question is prayer. What is the relation between philosophy, asceticism, and prayer?
To be continued: Evagrius and Plotinus.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
The Life of the Mind, Part I
Graduate school is a very interesting thing.
I have come to realize first, that it's not just about learning things. That's an undergraduate's job: absorb, learn, expand, wonder at the beautiful and marvelous world we live in! But real scholars do not simply listen - they speak and produce. That is for PhD students to worry about, mostly - producing journal articles and dissertations and conference papers.
At the MA level, you are caught in between. You must be open and listening, to get a broad base, and yet you must start to turn towards production. But in order to do so, there are many new frameworks one must take in; it is not just theology I am learning.
There is the framework of my discipline - theology is subdivided into fields, and these fields all have their own ways of speaking and thinking. I cannot speak like a systematician in a historical class; I must be sensitive to the approach and the questions that are being asked. (more on this for another post) So what kinds of questions must I be asking, what kinds of answers will people find helpful within the context of this field?
There is also the framework of my own mind. Many jobs are about simply doing things, and perhaps finding small ways to streamline your tasks to the ultimate goal, but the things you are modifying are tasks, protocols, stages, actions. To understand the process of graduate study is to come to know what this instrument is, this mind of mine, and how I can use it, and how I can't use it. There is first of all finding out how I think - in theology it is astonishingly easy to find one's sub-discipline simply by examining the nature of one's mental tools - what kinds of questions do you ask? If you want to know what culture this idea came from, be a historian - I want to know what it means and what we can take from it, and how it connects to everything else - I am a sytematician, and of a very philosophical variety. Yet how must I balance the analytic tools with the intuitive sensibilities, considering the view that I have on the nature of truth? This is a question that I must constantly attune myself to, so that I can be making the most of these tools I have, keeping the blades sharp, and perhaps shaping new tools for myself if possible.
But there is also the framework of pragmatic use - one's mind does not function at its best at all moments. This involves a whole new set of questions: when I can use it - what times of day, where I can use it, how to make it carry on when it wants to shut down, and when to give up and relax for a time before trying again. Little things can become critically important - fasting days in Lent by necessity turn into days of fasting from work as the day goes on, for as my body does not receive its proper nourishment my mind turns to water. Sleep is enormously important for keeping a sharp edge to my thought, to swim with the current instead of being buried under ideas. Diet probably is important too - but ask Lisa about that, that's not my expertise. To be at my peak requires discipline in the activities I do - I know that starting the day with a passive entertainment form like a TV show will ruin my concentration for perhaps the whole day; I know that dawdling on the internet divorces me from this deeper mode of thought and concentration - a certain quality in the environment that is the deepest wellspring of thoughts. Of course, this place of deepest thought involves a steady pace and a concentration unhindered by what needs are being pressed upon me from the outside - this is often unhelpful for times when I need to be writing papers, for I must adapt myself to the needs of the day, not simply what I wish to think about.
I use myself almost as a third person, but in a way graduate studies can make of it a commodity, a detached objectification of your being - it is not only me, but my livelihood. But you see my point - the MA level is in part to get a preliminary understanding of the subject of theology, but it is largely to learn about yourself, whether you are capable and willing to move on to a doctoral program and devote the rest of your life to studies, to brave the risk of failing and having to start your life completely over if you find you can't be hired. This is a very real possibility that graduate students must face in this market. Graduate school is a real challenge to one's very self - we find how sharp our mind is, how far we can push ourselves, how much discouragement we must weather, and what kind of reward at the end is necessary to keep us going - if it is something outside of the joy that comes through learning and discovering both inside and outside of class, it probably is not enough to get us through. We're all asking ourselves, "Do I have what it takes to make it?" We all look up at our famous professors with a mix of awe and envy at times, hear success stories and hope that ours will some day sound the same. It can almost become a slavery - to ideas, to work, to this box that we are expected to fit inside.
It is a system we must understand and cooperate with, and yet keep ourselves detached and untamed by its easy categorizations. For, like all human structures, it bears the deep wounds of the fall, and can become a force antithetical to the dignity of the human person - ourselves, our peers, or those "outside."
"It's all in the balance," they say - find that balance. We must learn to be excellent teachers, excellent researchers, excellent writers, and excellent networkers. We must have an excellent grasp of the generals, and a solid specialization in particulars. We must work hard, but keep our sanity. We must work with the system, but never let it dominate us. I cannot help wondering if "balance" means to them "absolute perfection in everything we do" - but this is only another balance - to resist the vain pull of the spectral scholar-you-wish-you-were against the under- or overrated scholar-you-are-now, to find the scholar you may truly hope become -- and yet to not be too attached to this notion either.
Above all else, there is one aspect, one balance of this system in particular that greatly concerns me, especially in the field of theology or philosophy. But I will have to save this for another post. My paper is calling.
I have come to realize first, that it's not just about learning things. That's an undergraduate's job: absorb, learn, expand, wonder at the beautiful and marvelous world we live in! But real scholars do not simply listen - they speak and produce. That is for PhD students to worry about, mostly - producing journal articles and dissertations and conference papers.
At the MA level, you are caught in between. You must be open and listening, to get a broad base, and yet you must start to turn towards production. But in order to do so, there are many new frameworks one must take in; it is not just theology I am learning.
There is the framework of my discipline - theology is subdivided into fields, and these fields all have their own ways of speaking and thinking. I cannot speak like a systematician in a historical class; I must be sensitive to the approach and the questions that are being asked. (more on this for another post) So what kinds of questions must I be asking, what kinds of answers will people find helpful within the context of this field?
There is also the framework of my own mind. Many jobs are about simply doing things, and perhaps finding small ways to streamline your tasks to the ultimate goal, but the things you are modifying are tasks, protocols, stages, actions. To understand the process of graduate study is to come to know what this instrument is, this mind of mine, and how I can use it, and how I can't use it. There is first of all finding out how I think - in theology it is astonishingly easy to find one's sub-discipline simply by examining the nature of one's mental tools - what kinds of questions do you ask? If you want to know what culture this idea came from, be a historian - I want to know what it means and what we can take from it, and how it connects to everything else - I am a sytematician, and of a very philosophical variety. Yet how must I balance the analytic tools with the intuitive sensibilities, considering the view that I have on the nature of truth? This is a question that I must constantly attune myself to, so that I can be making the most of these tools I have, keeping the blades sharp, and perhaps shaping new tools for myself if possible.
But there is also the framework of pragmatic use - one's mind does not function at its best at all moments. This involves a whole new set of questions: when I can use it - what times of day, where I can use it, how to make it carry on when it wants to shut down, and when to give up and relax for a time before trying again. Little things can become critically important - fasting days in Lent by necessity turn into days of fasting from work as the day goes on, for as my body does not receive its proper nourishment my mind turns to water. Sleep is enormously important for keeping a sharp edge to my thought, to swim with the current instead of being buried under ideas. Diet probably is important too - but ask Lisa about that, that's not my expertise. To be at my peak requires discipline in the activities I do - I know that starting the day with a passive entertainment form like a TV show will ruin my concentration for perhaps the whole day; I know that dawdling on the internet divorces me from this deeper mode of thought and concentration - a certain quality in the environment that is the deepest wellspring of thoughts. Of course, this place of deepest thought involves a steady pace and a concentration unhindered by what needs are being pressed upon me from the outside - this is often unhelpful for times when I need to be writing papers, for I must adapt myself to the needs of the day, not simply what I wish to think about.
I use myself almost as a third person, but in a way graduate studies can make of it a commodity, a detached objectification of your being - it is not only me, but my livelihood. But you see my point - the MA level is in part to get a preliminary understanding of the subject of theology, but it is largely to learn about yourself, whether you are capable and willing to move on to a doctoral program and devote the rest of your life to studies, to brave the risk of failing and having to start your life completely over if you find you can't be hired. This is a very real possibility that graduate students must face in this market. Graduate school is a real challenge to one's very self - we find how sharp our mind is, how far we can push ourselves, how much discouragement we must weather, and what kind of reward at the end is necessary to keep us going - if it is something outside of the joy that comes through learning and discovering both inside and outside of class, it probably is not enough to get us through. We're all asking ourselves, "Do I have what it takes to make it?" We all look up at our famous professors with a mix of awe and envy at times, hear success stories and hope that ours will some day sound the same. It can almost become a slavery - to ideas, to work, to this box that we are expected to fit inside.
It is a system we must understand and cooperate with, and yet keep ourselves detached and untamed by its easy categorizations. For, like all human structures, it bears the deep wounds of the fall, and can become a force antithetical to the dignity of the human person - ourselves, our peers, or those "outside."
"It's all in the balance," they say - find that balance. We must learn to be excellent teachers, excellent researchers, excellent writers, and excellent networkers. We must have an excellent grasp of the generals, and a solid specialization in particulars. We must work hard, but keep our sanity. We must work with the system, but never let it dominate us. I cannot help wondering if "balance" means to them "absolute perfection in everything we do" - but this is only another balance - to resist the vain pull of the spectral scholar-you-wish-you-were against the under- or overrated scholar-you-are-now, to find the scholar you may truly hope become -- and yet to not be too attached to this notion either.
Above all else, there is one aspect, one balance of this system in particular that greatly concerns me, especially in the field of theology or philosophy. But I will have to save this for another post. My paper is calling.
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