Michael D. Platt College English
What you are about to read are remarks and directions I address to students in my classes. It is from these remarks that you are most likely to gather what I mean by a journal. Later I will mention some of the reasons I ask students to write these journals.
To carry forward your inquiries in this course I ask you to write journals. Now while reading perhaps you underline portions of the text with a pencil, pen, or yellower. Perhaps you write in the margins of your text or make notes on a separate sheet of paper. Or perhaps you only resolve to do these things, next time, next term. Journals are but an extension and perfection of the casual, inconstant, and distracted responses that you may now give to the things you read. Yet while they are longer and more intelligible than notes, journals are not necessarily finished or perfected. In a journal you have the leisure to explore, inquire, question, and wander. By wandering I do not mean aimless wandering. The aim-full wandering that I recommend to you is guided by purposes and therefore, in the beginning, by questions.
All studious reading seems to be guided by two questions: What is being said here? And is it true? Your journals should wander between these two questions. Sometimes it will be all of your endeavor to make out what the author is saying (always as you do, silently ask: Is it true?). 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?) The questions, What does the text say? and, Is it true? are distinct, but I doubt they are separable, or beneficially separable. Can it be desirable to ask the first without the second in mind? Is it even possible to read carefully without asking: Is it true?
True, in the beginning of our thinking lives, we do not ask these questions. As beginners, we thirst before we query and interpret, and seek before we scrutinize or doubt. We are on a hunt for something, eager to find it, all eyes for its traces, expectant that it will appear, ardent for its approach, and glad to be hunting. As such happy hunters, we regard truth as something to be discovered or something that will disclose itself, not or not as yet something to be established by validation and tested by doubt. We tend then to trust the author and the book. And we go from book to book trusting each and feeling that they all must fit together. Only later, as a consequence of learning that these books disagree, do we begin to see the necessity of asking each, “Is it true?” Still later, perhaps as a consequence of writing ourselves, we begin to ask “What is the author really saying?” (And sometimes we may even wonder whether we want to know; perhaps, dear student, there is no game worth hunting that is not also hunting you at the same time.)
From time to time then, your journal may take a direction only distantly related to the text, for it is the characteristic of genius ever to be stimulating the genius of other men. (Perhaps Shakespeare’s journal on Montaigne is Hamlet.) Sometimes in the course of your reading you may recollect something close to you, swimming out of the past, or piercing you from the present, which the text has suddenly made you aware of. Perhaps you will say to yourself as you read, I had not known that about myself until now. This too is something for your journal. At all times as you read you will do well to believe that what you are reading is prefaced by this remark: “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking.” (“Ich möchte nicht mit meiner Schrift Andern das Denken ersparen,” Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Vorwort “ to his Philosphische Untersuchungen, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. x.)
It is, of course, possible to ask the question of truth without reading any book, without consulting the views of others. Indeed, thinking 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]) The sole reason we do not dispense with the works of others is the likelihood 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. Most of the best minds are always dead. They are only available to us through their writing, so we must become readers if we wish to listen to what they have to say. Yet the task of reading or 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” (from the third volume of his Essais, 1588) and Nietzsche’s Use and Abuse of History (1874). A book that instructs us because it understands the intellectual life as a spiritual calling is A. D. Sertillanges, O. P., The Intellectual Life (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1987). 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.
What you have just read are remarks and directions which I address to students in all my classes. What follows are some of the reasons I ask them to write journals, reasons I do not disclose to them so that they may discover them for themselves.
By asking students to write before each class I am asking them to prepare for class the way I do. Not until I began to teach did I make what I now think to be an adequate preparation for classes. When I began to teach I found that the best way to prepare for class is to compose for the hour before. If a class fills me with afterthoughts, I return to the typewriter after its close. Soon I reasoned that what prepared me would prepare my students.
As a consequence of writing journals for each class, students are much better prepared for discussion. Nearly always what I later read in their journals has been said in the class. But when it has not, then I am able to tell whether the silence of a particular student was a thoughtless or a thoughtful silence, and the thoughtful but hesitant one I can encourage to speak up sooner than after mid-term. Moreover, after students have been doing journals for a while I find I may start a class by asking any student to begin discussion.[1]
I ask students in all my classes to write journals, not only those in freshman composition, because writing does not seem to me less important in one course than in another. In addition to writing journals I ask my students to write papers. I know that journals are sometimes accepted as the whole of the writing requirement for a course, and I believe I understand the reasons. The breathless haste of modern American academic life, felt by both teachers and students, makes one yearn for a more leisured mode of discourse, one more steeped in the solitude of Montaigne’s tower, or leisured like his genial conversations, with time for delicious digressions, or one approaching the tender adagio both praised and exhibited by Nietzsche in his gaily knowing Fröhliche Wissenschaft (Frolicsome Science). I do want my students to enjoy chasing truth, hounds yapping and horse leaping, filled with excitement, with the flashes of lightning, thunder on the horizon, and impending summer storms which Nietzsche discharges. Yet I also want my students to catch at least one little red fox. Lessing said that between loving the truth and possessing it, he’d prefer loving, but if you love the truth that means you really want to possess it, and would not want to choose between the two. To be forever entertaining possibilities is shallow. After strolling among bright thoughts, one ought to reach some destination, whether café or fastness. Yes, one should listen to disputing opinions, but then one should make some determination, even if a provisional one. Precisely because I want these things, I ask my students to write papers as well as journals. Ardor is quickened and made daily by the distant knowledge that one will later perfect some part of the inquiries one now undertakes in journals. Most students do not begin to write until they must, often not until a paper is due the next morning. For them, writing is neither a daily nor a daylight thing. Exultantly or wearily, they speak of “pulling an all-nighter.” They are writers and students intermittently, upon occasion and emergency. The actuality of their habits is hardly touched by the usual manner of teaching writing and the usual written assignments, but journals do touch their habits. They may even alter them. By writing journals the student may discover that it is somewhat less painful and very much more rewarding to write habitually and copiously than it is to write anxiously and all night. To enjoy what Montaigne enjoyed or what Nietzsche enjoyed one must write daily. Also, one must do more than write daily. It takes will to write each day and it takes a prolonged will to rewrite, to be never quite finished with what one writes.
With these thoughts in mind and the course coming to an end, I write the students:
You have been writing journals for about ten weeks. Soon you may lapse into your old ways. In any event you will not cease to write papers, supposing that you do not choose to avoid courses which ask for them. Allow me to relate what a former student said to me recently in conversation. After our course together, he wrote journals for a time but gradually he ceased to write them. In his remaining three years of study he never again found it as easy to write papers as he had when he was writing journals. They grew more and more difficult and with each year he turned them in later and later. Perhaps you will find yourself in his situation. In the event you do and in order that you do not, I offer this general advice. To make the writing of papers somewhat easier and more rewarding than it has come to be you will have to work very hard. You once wrote a journal for each class meeting. Now you must do that again. But now you must do it not because your present courses and teachers ask you to but because you ask if of yourself. If you are fortunate they will be willing to read these extra things, but you should not count on it. Instead of waiting for commands you must become someone capable of giving yourself commands.
Now when it comes to writing you are like a poor man counting anxious pennies at the cashier’s desk. If you resume the habit of writing journals you will become like a rich man who the more he squanders the more he has. Then you will perhaps understand Lichtenberg when he says, “The writer who can’t at times throw away a thought about which another would have written dissertations, unworried whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.”
May I add a final thought? You will always be taking several courses at one time. Very likely you will be the only person who knows which courses you are taking. Very certainly you will be the only person to know whether these courses form a unity or a chaos, a string quartet, or four horses quartering you. The modern college declines to say through its curriculum what an education would be. It leaves this question and many others to the student himself. The courses you elect are sure to form a kind of chaos unless you address the question of their aim and their unity. In order to address these questions you may have the friendship of your fellow students; you may have the guidance of some faculty members; always, you do have your journals.
There is another reason for continuing to write journals. One day, after college, you will find yourself in grave trouble. Distracted, miserable, confused, you will turn for help everywhere, to friends, mentors, and various guides; perhaps these will include some of the great minds you have met with in your studies, greater than your own but because they are not alive to speak with you requiring more effort to converse with; to gain the great counsels they have to offer, you have reading and conversation. “Reading maketh a full man, conversation maketh a ready man” says Bacon, but he goes on to say, “writing maketh an exact man.” It is in writing then that you are most able to make up your mind, to decide what to do, and thus to find a way out of your grave troubles. What Rembrandt’s self-portraits were for him, journals may be for you: the means of self-knowledge. Looking at those portraits, one might celebrate as Nietzsche does the greatest journal writer, Montaigne: “The fact that such a man thought has increased the joy of living on this earth.” And if you go and do likewise, someone will thank you, too.
These concluding remarks touch upon another purpose I have in mind when I ask students to write journals. So much is the life of study promoted and advanced by friendship that we exaggerate only slightly if we say that this life cannot be led without friendship. While journals are things of comparative solitude and have sustained those who, lacking friends, nevertheless wished to lead a life of inquiry, journals also prepare those who write them for friendship. So it has seemed to me that students are somewhat more disposed to form friendships based upon their studies while they are writing journals regularly. To further promote such friendships I ask students in the latter part of a course to read each other’s journals and, before they turn journals over to me, to comment upon them. In my own undergraduate education (at Harvard and Oxford), it never happened that I read another student’s work or he mine. No teacher can make his students friends. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it is the responsibility of teachers to devise conditions that will promote friendship. Those friendships which are based upon studies ought especially to be the concern of teachers. Where friendships are struck up in the course of a class the inquiries begun in class are more likely to be carried beyond the class and beyond the term.[2]
[1] In his memoir, In Plato’s Cave, Al Kernan calls his class on Shakespearean Tragedy the best in his life; it began “At the beginning of each class, I ought to be able to ask any of you to take us into the very heart of the play.” Atque in perpetuum, Doktor-Vater, ave atque vale.
[2] This essay is a revised version of my essay, with the same title, published in College English, XXXVII, No. 4 (December 1975), pp. 408-411. For further remarks on the relation between writing journals and friendship (especially in Montaigne) see my dialogue “Interpretation” in Interpretation: Journal of Political Philosophy, V, 1. pp. 109-130.
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