Monday, July 13, 2009

Windows Rather Than Mirrors


I must confess: I am not a philosopher. Neither am I a literary theorist. But a couple months ago I was reading this review of a collection of essays by and about Umberto Eco. I admit, the review was not easy for me to follow, but I plodded through it, reading sentences two and three times if needed. Near the end, this passage really jumped out at me:

If anything marks the personality and writing of Umberto Eco, it is an insatiable curiosity, love, and sense of wonder about the world. He’s having a good time, to be sure, but good times aren’t the point. It’s rather that the world itself — in all its intractable, intricate, deliciously ambiguous, quotidian reality — is to Eco so astonishingly rich. It’s there on every page: this man is mad to know about things, not as a projection of his needs or wants, but as having their own intrinsic interest, indeed dignity. Kant was like that, come to think of it, and Aristotle too.

In contrast, the [Richard] Rorty I find as model author of this text, taking his random walk through life, tossed this way and that depending on the books he’s most recently come across, seems such a tepid character. He position is consummately worked out, but it seems so boringly inward-directed, with every book a mirror, instead of a window.

As a PhD student, I have spent the last nineteen years of my life in school. (Twenty if you want to count that half-day kindergarten class.) In spite of that, I am afraid that I spend most of my time with a pre-arranged plan plan for my studies, lining up the evidence to fit my personal predilections. It is a rare day when I approach the evidence with a genuine desire to follow where it leads me.

I think it was in my very first class at UD that I was told about the philosophic cast of mind. More than a discipline, philosophy is a way of thinking, and it requires three things: (1) withdrawal from the distractions of everyday life, (2) a sense of wonder about the world, in all its forms, and (3) a firm commitment to inquiry over whatever system one has constructed. I usually possess genuine wonder about the topic on which I am working, but too often I ignore neighboring topics of potentially great value. I am withdrawn from the world in the sense of being in the ivory tower of academia, but that is itself a very hustle-bustle kind of world. And it is a rare day when I am willing to overturn my whole system of thought if further inquiry proves it inadequate.

Thus, the piece about Eco was quite refreshing, for the simple reason that I had to struggle to follow it. Once I was in it, I was driven by the simple desire to understand the ideas being communicated, not to put them in one of my pre-labeled boxes. I really should pick up philosophy more often...

3 comments:

Stephen said...

Nice post, Aaron, and a good word of caution for us all. It is of course a very human temptation for us all to treat the outside world as a mirror in which we can gaze upon ourselves, and academics are not immune. Indeed, academics might be more likely to succumb to this temptation because they tell themselves that they are preoccupied with great ideas, but do not realize (or hide from themselves) that they are not really interested in those things outside themselves for their own sake.

Sean said...

Eco is often accused of succumbing to postmodern academic myopia. I think, however, that the sheer joy he finds in the world--particularly the medieval world--argues against this stance.

Consider this excerpt by Eco from a letter to his publisher:

"However you choose to look at it, I arrived at scholarship by crossing symbolic forests inhabited by unicorns and gryphons, and by comparing the pinnacled and squared construction of cathedrals to the barbs of exegetic malice concealed in the tetragonal formulas of the Summulae, wandering between the "Vico de la Strami" and Cisterician naves, engaging in affable colloquy with the cultivated and sumptuous Clunaic monks, under the surveillance of a plump and rationalistic Aquinas, tempted by Honorius Augustoduniensis, by his fantastic geographies, which explained simultaneously quare in pueritia coitus non contingat and how to reach the Lost Island, or how to capture a basilisk when you are armed only with a pocket mirror and unshakable faith in the Bestiary."

(Recounted in "Postscript to the Name of the Rose". Eco. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984, p. 17)

Margaret E. Perry said...

I love this quote about Ech--and it is totally true, as evidenced by the title of his best known essay:

"How To Travel With A Salmon"