This column was adapted from a graduation speech. Its author humbly requests the class of '06.5 refrain from reading.
"A widespread feeling of loss pervades the minds of students who come to universities to learn right from wrong, to distinguish what is true from what is false, but who realize at the end of four years that they have deconstructed their freshman beliefs, values, and ideologies, but have created nothing to replace them."
That is not an excerpt from Sylvia Plath's application to Smith College. It comes from Brown's course catalogue, from a description of a course called "The Shaping of World Views."
Is college really a place where bright-eyed, bushy-tailed teenagers go to have their dreams shattered? Should we change our motto from "In God We Hope" to "A Widespread Feeling of Loss Pervades?" Is this really what a Brown education does?
Well, in a sense, yes.
When the course description talks about a "feeling of loss," I think it's referring to aporia. Aporia is a Greek word for an intellectual impasse, or for the confusion that arises from such an impasse. It was what Socrates was going for in all those elenchic dialogues. Instead of pushing his own opinion, he undermines his opponents' views in order to unmask their confusion. For instance, in a dialogue called the Meno, Socrates asks a slave boy a simple question about geometry. The boy answers confidently, but gets it wrong. Then, instead of just telling the slave boy the correct answer, Socrates asks him a bunch of pedantic questions in order to bring him to aporia - to show him that he didn't actually know what he thought he knew. Then, Socrates explains to Meno: "(The boy) did not know at first, and he does not know now ... but then he thought he knew, and answered confidently as if he knew ... now, he neither knows nor fancies that he knows."
Like Socrates, Brown professors want you to understand how much you don't understand. They revel in complexity. If a Brown professor tells you your paper really "complicated the issue," she's giving you a compliment. Before I came to Brown, I never would have dreamed that "problematize" could be a real word, or that it would be something anyone would want to do.
A lot of aporia at Brown comes from what philosophers would call "slipping between the horns of a dilemma," or what Buddhists would call "the middle path," or what I will call "dissolving dualisms." Western thought, as a whole, is built on stark, either-or distinctions: mind or matter, male or female, self or other, true or false. These are dualisms. When we dissolve a dualism, or collapse it, or explode it, or whatever, we reject the system of binary logic the dualism is based on. Instead of picking one or the other, we pick neither, or both; or, really, we just refuse the question.
For example, consider Aristotle's quote, "poetry is a more serious thing than history." You can agree with that, or you can turn the hierarchy upside-down, like Plato did and say that history is more worthwhile than poetry. Either way, the dualism between poetry and history still stands. A postmodern critique, on the other hand, would say something like,"Who ever said poetry and history were two different things?"
And dualism-toppling is not unique to the humanities. For instance: is light a particle or a wave? Well, it sometimes behaves like one and sometimes like the other. So which is it? Well, it's both, sort of. Or neither, sort of. Or maybe that just isn't the right question to ask.
So that's what it means to collapse a dualism - and it's habit-forming. You start doing it in one course, then in another, and before you know it you're even doing it at home. I remember watching a documentary with some friends about the contemporary philosopher Derrida, and playing a drinking game: "All right, every time he collapses a dualism, we chug a beer!" (I sort of wish that weren't a true story, but it is.)
But it's important to remember that a dissolution is not a solution. Dissolving dualisms makes things more confusing, not less. So why do we do it?
I think we do it because aporia is edifying in itself. You might have heard the platitude that education is all about eternal curiosity. Well, my platitude - no less trite, just slightly different - is that what matters is not the questioning but the moment after the questioning: the impasse, when you've questioned yourself into a hole and have to figure out what the hell you're going to do next. It makes me think of a novel called "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Murakami Haruki, in which the main character lowers himself into a well, of his own volition, for no particular reason. He doesn't curse himself, or scramble for a way out. He just sits there. That's aporia.
Of all the dualisms that Brown has helped me destabilize, the most important one - especially as I graduate - is the one between college and "real life." Sure, there is some merit to it. Yes, the impending prospects of getting a full-time job and a mortgage and going bald and fending off telemarketers are indeed very real; and, frankly, they scare the crap out of me. And yes, like most elite universities, Brown is a bubble, and a lot of things about life in a bubble are unreal. But even if you're alive in a bubble, you're still alive. You're no more or less alive than the old lady at the DMV, or the Queen of Denmark, or the guy playing the saxophone outside Store 24. Your life is no more or less "real" than theirs.
Dispensing with the college vs. "real life" dualism is a good first step, but it isn't even half the challenge. And the challenge is: you're alive. What are you going to do about it? You've been given the great gift, or else happened upon the great accident, of existing. That's the simple, terrifying, non-dual truth. That really is it, and it has nothing to do with whether you're in college or not.
Andrew Marantz '06.5 is both a particle and a wave.
