To carry forward your inquiries I ask you to write journals. Now while reading perhaps you underline portions of the text with a pencil (I hope not a pen or yellower). Or perhaps you write in the margins or make notes on a separate sheet of paper. Or maybe you only resolve to do these things, next time, next term. You can do better, enjoy the benefits of writing, and others through you. “Reading maketh a full man, conversation maketh a ready man, and writing maketh an exact man,” advises Lord Bacon. So instead of giving casual, inconstant, even distracted attention to what you read, give your mind to it wholly. Write about it. Seek the coherence that is the word (logos).
Yet while journals are longer than notes, and must be intelligible to others, they need not be finished or perfected. They are not papers. Journals are for exploring, inquiring, and questioning. A journal is a stroll. Strolling is, however, not an aimless wandering. An aim-full wandering must be guided by something, by a purpose, by a desire, and by questions.
Two that guide all studies are: What is being said here? And: is it true? Although, the questions, what does the text say? and Is it true? are distinct they are not separable or beneficially separable. So, your journals should stroll between these two questions. Sometimes it will be all of your endeavor to make out what the text says (always as you do, silently ask: Is it true?). And at other times, all your endeavor will be to examine the truth of what you read. (Always as you do so, silently ask: Have I yet understood what is being said?)
However, in the beginning we do not always ask these questions. As beginners, we read before we interpret, we love before we know, and we wonder before we examine. Later after we know, we can think, after think, examine, and after examine doubt. We are on the hunt for something, eager to find it, expectant that it will appear, desirous of every sign of its approach, and exceedingly happy to be hunting. As such happy hunters, we regard truth as something to be discovered, something that will disclose itself, if we are worthy, only later confirmed by validation and tested by doubt. We tend then to trust the author and the book. And we go from good book to good book trusting each and feeling that they all must fit together. Only later, as a consequence of learning that the great books disagree, do we begin to see the necessity of asking each “Is it true?” Still later, as a consequence of writing ourselves, and coming to see how poorly we write (which is the same as how poorly we think), do we begin to ask, “What is the author really saying?”
It is characteristic of genius ever to be stimulating the faint sparks of genius of other men. (And with the great, because they are great, we can never trace the path of stimulation. Perhaps Shakespeare’s journal on Montaigne is Hamlet.) And great works stir deeply. Sometimes, then, in the course of your reading you may recollect something close to you that the text brings to sight again. Something terrifying or afflicting. Or wondrous and elating. Perhaps you will say to yourself as you read, I had not known that about myself until now. Yes, this author knows me better than I know myself. (All the great authors do.) This too is something for your journal. (And thus very occasionally you may ask me not to share what you were stirred to write with the class.) And yet at all times as you read you will do well to think what you are reading prefaced by this remark: “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking.”[1]
There is no better preparation for discussion with others than writing before class, which is why I ask you to write them well before each class. The habit of journals should soon mean that you are up to your teacher’s request, at the beginning of any class, that you “take us all into the very heart of the matter this great book discloses.” Your leading of us might be the beginning of an account, it might be a single insight, and it might very well be a fine question.
It is, of course, possible to ask the question of truth without reading any book, without consulting the views of others. I suppose thinking might sometimes benefits from such ignorance. Bertrand Russell astonished an audience of doctorate-adoring Americans by observing that all important advances in non-Euclidean geometry were made in ignorance of the previous fifty years’ work and — he added — because of that ignorance (The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872-1914 (Boston: Bantam, 1968), p. 170). Nevertheless that is an impish exaggerated of the exception into the rule; Reiman and Lobachevsky both knew Euclid very well when they departed from him. It will suffice if, as we open a great book, we pause and ask ourselves: what do I know? What would I myself write on this matter? How would I answer this question? Write it, then read, and compare.
The reason we do not dispense with the works of others is that we ourselves are not among the best minds that have ever been; probably we have never lived in close proximity to one such mind. It seems likely that most of the best minds are dead. They are only available to us through their writing, so we must become very good readers if we wish to listen to what they have to say. Yet the task of reading, of listening to what they have to say, is not easy. For one thing, we cannot forget that the best minds do not agree with each other, and so we cannot easily accept the views of any one of them without hearing the others.
If you wish to know more about journals (and what they might be), I heartily recommend to you Montaigne’s “Of Experience” (in the third volume of his Essais, 1588) and Nietzsche’s Use and Abuse of History (1874). And a book that instructs comprehensively because it understands the intellectual life as a spiritual calling is A. D. Sertillanges, O. P. The Intellectual Life. From such authors you will learn that the writing of journals is really a way of life. The life of the mind is peculiarly promoted by friendship; yet friends are not always easy to find. Journals would seem to be a way of awaiting them as well as a way of being a friend to oneself.
Dr. Michael Platt, Friends of the Republic
[1] “Ich möchte nicht mit meiner Schrift Andern das Denken ersparen,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, concluding the “Vorwort” to his Philosphische Untersuchungen, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. x
Friends Of The Republic 