Tuesday, May 16, 2006
(8:04 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Use of Study
Today, I'll admit it: in Augustine class, my mind wandered. As Prof. Marion discussed the Aristotelian theory of physical motion and its relation to Augustine's thought, I said to myself, "This is all awfully complex. I'd be surprised if most of Augustine's readers caught most of what he was getting at -- even those who knew him personally." The same would be true of Paul -- before Origen, who was perhaps the first mind within Christianity to equal (or perhaps even surpass) Paul himself, there was not much attempt at extended commentary, and the first forceful interpretation of Paul, that of Marcion, was certainly a misunderstanding (albeit an understandable one). And with both of them, here we stand centuries later, still trying to figure out exactly what they're saying.You'd think we would have it figured out by now. And I guess, depending on who you ask, some associate professor at some first-tier school actually does have it figured out, or at least has Paul figured out. (And who can forget the RadOrths, who understand Augustine so fully as to be able to deploy him effortlessly in contemporary philosophical debate!)
I'm of the school that says that texts that are figure-out-able, in some straightforward sense, are not worth reading -- that is, they are disposable. They are worth digesting -- but they are not worth reading, strictly speaking. The transfer of information from one mind to another is valuable, but for a text, it seems like direct transfer is undesirable. I didn't get a lot of "information" out of Augustine's De Trinitate, but I would love to read it again. I just turned in a paper tonight, and I could write another, and another, and another.... It's just that kind of text. Augustine is just that kind of author.
It's not for everyone. I know that. But maybe it is? Maybe it could or should be?
My question, I suppose, is what the initial appeal is. What determines whether a text is going to survive in just that way? Is there something in us that is delighted by not understanding, or at least that can be delighted? That willfully takes on an infinite task, that keeps it from being the spurious infinite? I can think of worse things than spending all of eternity in a library -- worse things than spending my days trying to piece together why it was written in just that way.
I'm hooked on this language-learning thing, for precisely that reason: it opens up a whole new depth to texts that were, after a certain point, closed to me. It's not because I want to talk to people or transact business in other countries -- my native tongue is already the language of the transaction. But it's not the final language of study, because the whole point of study is the multiplicity of languages, their irreducibility one to the other -- and the infinite task of translation.
Could it be that the appeal of Paul's letters was, on some level, an intellectual one? That they were preserved precisely because they were not understood and therefore were not disposable like any other list of temporal points of advice might be. Preserved because they were, precisely, useless? What is study but a refusal of the horizon of use, in the sense of utility? What is the study of a text but the quintessence of the concept of ususfructus, of enjoyment without ownership, freedom to range over what will never be one's own, freedom from one's own?
That's what appeals to me about being an academic: the lack of power, the supreme uselessness -- which does not exclude importance or even helpfulness. The university loses something when it forgets that it grew out of the monastery. Contemptus mundi is the quintessence of all study, and the one who studies should never be surprised that contemptus mundi will have turned out to be a double genitive. We are exiles, even when tenured, even when we trick the state or some private foundation into giving us a guaranteed income -- and we cannot count on being able to pull off that trick forever. The task of study is the rejection of the world and its ways -- the much-lauded "real world" must not be connected-to, except in order to change it, a possibility whose frequency is often exaggerated.
We all know that the professionalization never really "took," that it was all a misunderstanding caused ultimately by some congenital defect in the Prussian national character. We all know that we never will have been "good citizens," least of all "good Americans" -- that at the end of the day, we just want to be left alone by the state, to forget that the state even exists. We (though not only we) are doing what people will do after the Revolution, in our own small and fragmentary way.
In any case, Daniel Green, my new favorite Valve contributor now that Ray Davis has retired, has a wonderful post up on Harold Bloom, which was what made me remember my class-time musings.
