“When I finished my dissertation, a professor who had served on the admissions committee six years earlier told me that I was more interesting when I arrived. Philosophical training is something to survive, and this professor wasn’t sure I had made it.”

That’s philosopher Nandi Theunissen (Rice), in a beautiful essay you all should read in the latest issue of The Point.

James Rosenquist, “My Mind Is a Glass of Water“

How does one respond to something like that? Theunissen says “I am able to hear this now as a protective caution—don’t let them get you!—but at the time I felt dismissive. I didn’t care to be interesting; I wanted to be right, or if not right then unassailable.”

She continues:

This, too, I learned in graduate school. One of my teachers [Joseph Raz] was named “philosophy’s gentle giant” in a recent obituary (the adjective may gently raise the eyebrow of generations of students left behind). He was a giant in part because he was able, as John Bayley said of Tolstoy, to see the elephant’s skin up close. He was exacting. He was relentless. But he could see, seemingly, all of life. When we asked him what his secret was, he said, Don’t make mistakes.

Now that is also the secret to filing your taxes, but I have a sense of what he meant. You can’t intend to have vision or set your sights on being sonorous. You either have these talents or, if you lack them, you acquire them indirectly over time. But you can control your inferences. And when you are up in the night worrying about the argument you are putting together, you are not thinking about how it sounds. You want to know if the q’s are following from the p’s. I mean, you don’t follow a general into battle who blunders with elementary miscalculations. Thales would not be remembered for his sagacity had he failed to get the army across the river. Be correct and the rest takes care of itself (or it doesn’t, but that is not something you can affect directly).

The constraints imposed by the discipline provide form for the chaotic deeps. The discipline—think your thoughts, but not like that—is philosophy’s iambic pentameter. The constraints provide a container for something substantial to grow. And when it does, the elements—the hard and the generative—are held together in exquisite tension; it is a sublime art.

But disciplinary norms have a function, and they can fail to serve it. Without counterpoint, an instruction like don’t make mistakes leaves divine intelligence with nothing to move through. It produces a field of petty bureaucrats who huff on their whistles to protest imprecisely formulated claims. It makes a roomful of people take note only of what they believe a speaker gets wrong. It is easy for me to see these deficiencies in others. It is harder to see the perennial creep inside. I tell an anthropologist friend that philosophy has been reckoning with its unsociability for the last ten years. She tells me that I have been reckoning with philosophy’s unsociability for the last ten years. The unsociability of philosophy, she says, is probably constitutive

You can read the whole thing here.

Discussion welcome.

Information about the artwork used in this post, courtesy of Singulart

Related: What Are Some of Your Sayings?