by Richard Farr
I’m sixteen and a serious intellectual wannabe. Any lunch break, you can find me in the school corridors discoursing at length on a well-thumbed Hermann Hesse novel, or sharing with some lucky classmate the insights I’ve gleaned from half a dozen pages of Sartre. I’ve also acquired a taste for Gauloises Disque Bleu, wear my scarves just so, and plan to read Being and Nothingness one day. Though in truth I prefer Camus to Sartre — so much more dashing, so much more chic. It’s him I dream of being mistaken for as soon as I can get the right overcoat.
Economics is taught by Mr. W, an eccentric man it’s easy to make fun of and one of the best teachers I’ll ever have. He has assigned an essay on the “Mishan-Beckerman debate.” (Beckerman thinks unrestrained economic growth is good because it creates stuff; Mishan thinks it’s bad because it destroys stuff.) Because I’m an incipient leftie — inevitably, given my plan to study philosophy while living in a garret on the Rive Gauche — I think it obvious that there is really no debate to be had. A cursory reading shows that Mishan is merely articulating conclusions sensible people like me have already come to; Beckerman doesn’t know his arse from his elbow.
Generally speaking I’m a not-bad student, accustomed to getting an A or an A- even from Mr. W, who is a notoriously hard grader. He’s also notorious for his habit of handing our essays back, with quiet but acid commentary, in front of the whole class: “Cooper: messy as always — your handwriting looks like something produced at high speed on horseback — but intellectually acceptable. Collins: messy in every way; I do recommend having a stab at answering the question at some point during the exercise. Davis: the first three pages are pointless blather that should have been omitted, but bravo for arriving in roughly the right neighborhood during the last couple of paragraphs. Dixon: ah, what a breath of fresh air; simplicity and clarity and excellence; well done. Farr: a lackadaisical effort but I confess grudgingly that most of the essentials are correct. Fisher, oh Fisher: …” (dramatic pause; paper held up with thumb and forefinger like a dead mouse; an almost imperceptible shake of the head as it is dropped onto the offending author’s desk) “no.”
But he returns the Mishan-Beckermann essay privately — perhaps, I think afterwards, entirely to save my blushes. There is a table at the back of the classroom with a distracting view of the games fields. We sit on opposite sides and he slides my oeuvre across to me. A large red F sits in a circle in the top right hand corner near the title. His expression is intense, hawkish: irritation, or pity?
“Some knowledge is so well established that the only thing is to learn it,” he says. “If I set you a question about demand elasticity, or inflation and the money supply, I’m probably trying to assess whether you have grasped, and can articulate, what is by general consensus the right answer. But I set this topic because it’s a debate between two working economists. It wears on its face the fact that there is no answer in the back of the textbook, that we are dealing with a problem not yet congealed into knowledge. Now I want you to think carefully about something that should be obvious: I know, and you know, that I cannot look to you for much enlightenment on which of these gentlemen is correct, because I know, and you know, that you don’t know which of them is correct. Alas, in your desperation to sound clever you have forgotten this.”
(Pause. Looks out at the wind playing in the elms. Giving time for the words to sink in.)
“What to do? You could have summarized Mishan’s case, then summarized Beckermann’s, and concluded by saying that it’s all jolly interesting. A common strategy. A safe, dull, strategy, B+ maybe, probably B-, all depending on the accuracy. Or you could have done the summary of both and then tried to outline a couple of reasons for being more persuaded by one than the other. That puts you in A/A- territory. But that’s not what you did, is it? You found both the summarising and the reasoning too much bother, so instead you postured a bit and sneered a bit and in the process didn’t even get Mishan right. Have I said anything unfair so far?”
I probably shake my head. Not sure.
“I want you to imagine that I’m moderating a televised debate on this topic. BBC, prestige programme, nine o’clock. Three comfy armchairs under the lights, and I have invited you as Beckermann’s opposition. What happens?”
He waits for me to answer. I look out at the trees, hoping for assistance.
“It wouldn’t really even be a debate that you lost, would it? Just a public exposure of the fact that it could not even be a debate, because he knows what he’s talking about and you absolutely do not.”
He won’t take his eyes off me, but I get the impression that his expression has softened slightly. Mainly not irritation, then? Mainly pity? Is that perhaps worse?
“What does this thought experiment tell us? Not that you owe him your agreement. But surely at least that you owe him your respect? Your job is to work out how to disagree with him — or anyway raise doubts about what he says — without pretending you know more than you do. Combining intelligent scepticism with humility is not an easy skill to master. But you must master it. If you read widely, which I hope you will because life is better that way, you are going to encounter many clever, thoughtful, well-informed people who say apparently ridiculous things. The problem is, many of those things really are ridiculous but some of them are what you ought to abandon your existing prejudices and believe instead.”
He pushes back his chair and gets up.
“Cheer up. The case is by no means entirely hopeless. You write well enough when you’re not distracted from the work by trying to impress yourself. Do it again. Leave your ego out of it this time and give your intelligence some elbow room. I’ll have the new draft by tomorrow afternoon, if that’s not too much trouble.”
*
I’m nineteen, it’s early in my second year as an undergraduate, and I may not have learned Mr. W’s lesson but at least I now have the overcoat. It’s Navy surplus, with big buttons and a collar that stands up in exactly the right way judging from my reflection in shop windows. Not long after I buy it — perhaps there’s a connection — Dr. D invites me to afternoon tea at a nice hotel because he wants to discuss my work and intellectual prospects. (No, no, really: as it turns out, he wants to discuss my work and intellectual prospects.)
A tray arrives, loaded with china and sandwiches. “Shall I be mother?” he asks, raising the pot. The grin has two facets: this cliché of the four o’clock English ritual is a joke because he’s male, but it’s also a joke about a joke because he’s not English. When our cups have been sampled he makes small talk briefly and then dips into his briefcase to return my essay on Descartes’ Discourse on Method. He watches me as I survey the red ink. There’s a lot of red ink.
“This is bad,” he says. “Really remarkably bad, though in an interesting way. Tell me, do you take notes during lectures?”
“Of course — some anyway. I don’t try to take everything down.”
“That’s a step in the right direction. It would probably be better if you didn’t take notes at all.”
“That seems extreme.”
“I’ll get more extreme in a minute. Have a sandwich.”
“Thank you.”
“The highest aspiration of most undergraduates is to regurgitate accurately whatever the instructor has said. So they scribble furiously, hoping not to miss anything. This makes it impossible to spend any time thinking. When the time comes to regurgitate, some do it accurately, some less so. And that’s all there is to it.”
He shrugs and takes a sip of tea. “Good students don’t regurgitate. They see that they have been asked a question and that the question precedes the material in the lectures, causes the lectures in fact. If they have the capacity to find the question independently interesting, they spend their effort and attention on trying to join the conversation by saying something interesting in turn.”
I pick up the essay. “And this?”
“It’s a weird mixture. Some inaccurate regurgitation. A lot of irrelevance, as if you’re trying to fill up the page count and any words will do. But there are some good parts too, little flecks of blue poking through the clouds, little suggestions that you might one day develop the capacity to think for yourself about what someone else has already thought. You have the same handicap as nearly all students: you don’t know anything about anything, and you also lack a vantage point from which to gauge the vast extent of your ignorance. But I sense that some part of you is actually engaged, curious, puzzled …”
I’m nodding furiously. It’s true! Philosophy is a revelation — so much more intrinsically interesting than all the crap we studied in school.
“… and that’s great. But you need to commit much more seriously to the idea of learning, and learning how to write about what you are learning. Two years left. It’s going to fly. This isn’t serious work, and you need to get serious before it’s too late.”
“What should I do?”
“A good first step would be to stop coming to lectures.”
“Excuse me?”
“Let me ask you a historical question. Why do we have lectures? I mean, why does the cultural habit of giving them, and showing up to them, and paying people like me to give them, exist in our universities?”
“Because it’s a good way of conveying some of that knowledge I don’t have?”
“No it isn’t. It’s a terrible way of conveying knowledge, even if you’re blessed with lecturers as handsome and brilliant and charismatic as me. For one thing, I speak not even a fraction as fast as you could read the same words. For another, when you are reading a book or a journal article the words have been far more carefully considered than the ones that fall from the podium. Lectures exist for one reason only, which is that paper was expensive during the Middle Ages.”
This was thrilling — wrong, as anyone knows who’se been to even one excellent lecture, but thrilling. Most of the lectures I attended were indeed narcotic, his included. Was I really being offered a permanent hall pass?
“I…”
“What you ought to be doing is reading more books, writing more about them, and trying to write more like them. If you want to get by, oh sure, keep coming to lectures, keep scribbling notes, and regurgitate. If on the other hand you want to spend your years here doing philosophy — which is supposed to be the point I believe — then stop coming to lectures, get advice on good things to read (I’ll give you a nice fat list) and get stuck into the almost impossible task of trying to write something that improves on what you’ve read.”
“What about this? Should I rewrite it?”
“Definitely not. Read my comments. Think about why they are fair criticism — which they are, especially the harshest ones. Then throw it away and move on.”
*
I took part of Dr. D’s advice without delay: I stopped going to lectures almost entirely. Suddenly I had much more free time, and it was great. I spent it hiking, hanging out with my girlfriend, hanging out in pubs, and sleeping soundly in the library with my head on Spinoza’s Ethics.
Back then, English universities were set up for this. You could do whatever you wanted, including nothing, for most of the three years. There was no assessment, no requirement to show your face. How much you engaged with what was on offer was up to you; only the dreaded Finals — two solid weeks of written exams, right at the end — made any difference. It was a much-criticized system that I always defended on the grounds that it rewarded the best students and punished the most feckless. But my own fecklessness went largely unpunished, because aside from having a marvellous time I discovered that I’d developed a facility — mentioned by Descartes as stereotypical of philosophers — for writing with a certain vague plausibility even when I had no idea what I was talking about. Finals went OK.
I didn’t destroy the offending Descartes essay for a long time. I felt superstitious about it: a memento sophomori that I needed to keep close. But we don’t like to confront how ridiculous we can sound and at some point I committed an act of cowardly spring cleaning.
Camus would not have approved. He was a brave, independent thinker with a steely self-awareness — facts that probably mattered even more in the end than the cigarette and the overcoat. Mr. W. and Dr. D. had only been trying to nudge me in his direction.