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Studiousness vs. Curiosity

I begin this inquiry into the contrast of studiousness vs. curiosity by quoting from a perspicacious essay of the literary theorist Allen Tate, penned in 1945, titled, “The New Provincialism”.  Tate writes:

The provincial attitude is limited in time but not in space.  When the regional man, in his ignorance, often an intensive and creative ignorance, of the world, extends his own immediate necessities into the world, and assumes that the present moment is unique, he becomes the provincial man.  He cuts himself off from the past, and without benefit of the fund of traditional wisdom approaches the simplest problems of life as if nobody had ever heard of them before.  A society without arts, said Plato, lives by chance.  The provincial man, locked in the present, lives by chance.

Allen Tate, 1945: “The New Provincialism” in Essays of Four Decades, 539.

Perhaps, at first glance, this passage seems only tangentially related to the theme of our inquiry.  What does study, or studiousness, have to do with provincialism?  There are, in fact, many good answers to this question: for provincialism, in essence, consists in the belief that me and mine (whether of a “here” or a “now”) need neither study nor the humility which makes genuine learning possible.

Today our culture suffers a temporal provincialism—“It’s 2023!”; “Your model is outdated”; “What does the latest research say?”—that doubtless pains any person not captured by it.  That is, to approach the works and words of tradition with humility reveals how small our knowledge and weak our understanding.  But the provincialism of the present mangles the wisdom of the past through superficial readings and anachronistic interpretations.

Idle Minds

What imposed this provincialist perspective upon us?  One can, as so often is the case, point fingers at the moderns, the Enlightenment, the adulation of innovation and progress and so on and on.  And one would be correct in doing so.  But we must note that human beings tend toward provincialism regardless of time or place.  The human mind, given license, will slide eagerly towards adopting the easiest of perspectives—that is, whichever requires the least effort to attain the most-immediately pleasant results.

Is it easier to dismiss the Scholastics as backwards-thinking theocratic sophists, or to read the millions of pages of subtle argumentation through which their studies and disputes were crafted?

Should we wrestle with the enigmatic thinking of Martin Heidegger—itself a complex compound of efforts at originality and hidden borrowing from the tradition—or can we just call him a Nazi and be done with it?

Can we bypass close study of Aristotle’s Physics by pointing out that he misunderstood the structure of the cosmos, or that he had no knowledge of quantum physics (as though the average person today understands what it means that bosons have an integer spin while fermions have a half-integer spin)?

The questions are, of course, rhetorical.  Given the choice, most people will ignore or vilify whatever might challenge their beliefs.  This dismissiveness produces a host of vicious qualities: most especially that of acedia—a despair of spiritual good, as Thomas Aquinas says.  Such despair discourages real and meaningful inquiry.  Correlatively, it encourages curiosity: which is the vice opposed to studiousness.

Curiosity

Likely this sounds a bit odd to our modern ears (suffered as they have at that provincialism!).  What is wrong, what could be wrong, with being curious?  While it may incidentally get someone into trouble—finding out some truth that others would rather we not—it seems to designate a search for knowledge.

Historically, however, the term was used to specify an inordinate seeking of knowledge.  In other words, while knowledge is certainly good in its own right, it does not come to us in a vacuum.  Thomas Aquinas distinguishes a multitude of ways, therefore, in which we can be ordered incorrectly to the good of knowledge.

First, he says, we can have some evil annexed to our study: as someone who might wish to learn medicine that he might poison more effectively, or—far more commonly—that someone might take pride in being educated.  (I think here of every social media post that begins, “As a PhD/sociologist/philosopher/super smart person”.)  In such cases, the growth in knowledge and therefore goodness is not the end of one’s inquiries, but, rather, some malicious purpose.  Second, he goes on, the desire to learn the truth itself can be inordinate, even if knowledge is the end of one’s study.  This disordered pursuit happens in four ways:

  1. By being drawn from a better study (which is an obligation or true good) into a lesser pursuit: as the student who, rather than study, watches interesting documentaries on YouTube.
  2. Through superstition, when one wishes to learn by illegitimate and supernatural forces (divination, astrology, seances, etc.).
  3. Without a due order of that knowledge: that is, if we wish to catalogue the facts of the world without recognition of the order to which they belong (and thus the ultimate truths and goods which they reveal).
  4. Finally, when we seek to know things above our own capacity and thereby fall into error.

The first and the last, I think, are the most difficult today for us to understand.  But why?  Why are we so easily drawn to lesser things?  How do we err by trying to know things “above our own capacity”?  Are things truly “above our capacity” to know?

Studiousness

By contrast, the virtue of studiousness is, as Aquinas defines it, “vigorous application of the mind in relation to something.”  But this virtue, despite its vigor, belongs as Aquinas says to the cardinal virtue of temperance.  Despite being concerned with discovery and understanding of the truth, that is, studiousness is not an intellectual but rather a moral virtue, for it concerns our appetite for knowledge.  But all goods may be inordinately desired—as in the above instances of curiosity.  Thus, our appetite for knowledge needs to be rightly disposed, not only with respect to the things we experience in sensation (where there are many particulars we should not seek) but also with regard to intellectual knowledge.

Virtues, of course, consist always in the mean.  What, then, is the mean of studiousness—where does it lie between the extremes, between the excess and the deficiency?  What is this vigor—this vehemens—of the virtue? More pertinently, I believe, we may be hindered today by societal ills in our pursuit of this virtue.  Is this hindrance truly the case?  Why?  What can we do about it?

Further Reading

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Philosophical Happy Hour

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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.

What does it mean to be “Rational”?

Common sense. “Practical.” “She has a good head on her shoulders.” “You’re being irrational!” Sayings uttered with frequency—but are they said with understanding? What do we mean by “being rational”? We contrast reason with feeling or emotion. We contrast reason or the rational, also, with the “irrational”. Does this mean that feelings or emotions are irrational? Is the world divided into rational and irrational phenomena or experiences—objects that possess or lack a rational core or rational being?

Rationality and Control

Often, “rationality”, today, is situated in the context of critical and pragmatic control: something is rational, in other words, if subject to the conscious control of human volition. This conscious control, it seems, must be intersubjective—or capable of being successfully communicated—as well. Consider, for instance, the “preliminary specification” for the meaning of rationality provided by Jürgen Habermas:

An expression satisfies the precondition for rationality if and insofar as it embodies fallible knowledge and therewith has a relation to the objective world (that is, a relation to the facts) and is open to objective judgment. A judgment can be objective if it is undertaken on the basis of a transsubjective validity claim that has the same meaning for observers and nonparticipants as it has for the acting subject himself. Truth and efficiency are claims of this kind. Thus assertions and goal-directed actions are the more rational the better the claim (to propositional truth or to efficiency) that is connected with them can be defended against criticism. Correspondingly, we use the expression “rational” as a disposition predicate for persons from whom such expressions can be expected, especially in difficult situations.

Habermas 1981: The Theory of Communicative Action, vol.1, 9-10

To give some concrete examples of what Habermas means, let us consider both a claim to truth and to efficiency. If I say that 5+5=10, this claim has the same meaning for anyone who understands the terms (leaving aside the sophists who would deny such). What I signify in making the claim is the same as what you, the observer, recognize in it. Likewise if I say that 10 of one thing is more than 6 of the same. I can then claim that getting the same results from doing something six times as doing it ten times is more efficient, which will likewise be “transsubjectively observable”.

Reason and Rationality

But is that it? Charles Peirce writes that “…‘rational’ means essentially self-criticizing, self-controlling and self-controlled, and therefore open to incessant question.” He uses the term, as we all typically do (conscious of it or not), to designate an attribute of persons and their actions. Of reason, however, he writes: “The very being of the General, of Reason, consists in its governing individual events. So, then, the essence of Reason is such that its being never can have been completely perfected. It always must be in a state of incipiency, of growth.” Is there, then, a difference between “reason” and “the rational”? A connection? In what would that difference, that connection, consist?

As William Barret writes in his Irrational Man:

To be rational is not the same as to be reasonable. In my time I have heard the most hair-raising and crazy things from very rational men, advanced in a perfectly rational way; no insight or feelings had been used to check the reasoning at any point. Nowadays, we accept in our public and political life the most humanly unreasonable behavior, provided it wears a rational mask and speaks in officialese, which is the rhetoric of rationality itself. Witness the recent announcement that science had been able to perfect a “clean” hydrogen bomb—to be sure, not perfectly “clean” yet, but “95 per cent clean” or even “96 per cent clean.” Of course the quantitative measurement makes the matter sound so scientific and rational that people no longer bother to ask themselves the human meaning of the whole thing. No doubt, they tell themselves, there must be a perfectly rational chain of arguments which, starting from the premise that there must be hydrogen bombs, leads to the conclusion that there must be “clean” hydrogen bombs—otherwise war itself would become impossible!

Barret 1958: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, 270.

Here we see again the contrast: the rational opposed to the emotive. What then, does “the rational” mean? Join us this evening for a robust discussion at our Philosophical Happy Hour!

Philosophical Happy Hour

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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.

Wednesday Happy Hour

Every Wednesday of 2022, the Lyceum Institute hosts an online Philosophical Happy Hour from 5:45-7:15pm ET (or later)—open to the public—where we discuss topics ranging far and wide in conversations civil, thoughtful, and conducted with an effort to understand better not only one another but the truth. Drinks optional: coffee, tea, wine, whiskey, beer, water, or naught at all. Only requirement is that you bring a philosophical attitude! If you are interested in participating, use the form below and an invitation link will be sent to you around 5:45pm. You are free to drop in any time until 7:15pm.

Today (9 February 2022) we’ll be discussing the topic of What does it mean to be human? This will concern not only the definition and defining attributes of being human, but how our humanity ought to shape our actions.