Wordsworth, on the other hand, believed that what he wrote was the spontaneous overflow of strong emotions recollected in tranquility. He would seem to agree with Beauvoir’s critique, that one cannot really experience a moment if it can only exist for one as described: but he would seem to disagree also with her suspicion that to experience life in this reductive way was actually the path of the great writer.

There is something worth thinking and perhaps writing about in this comparison.

The Bad

The Insipid: life depicted continuously and without emphasis. Actually a lie, though some pride themselves on considering it a brutal sort of honesty: for our own experience of life is not so flat and un-illuminated. The insipid is therefore delusional at least in deluding itself that we have no delusions (if that’s all they are).

The Trite: life depicted as cut and dried, life depicted as plot. Happy endings — not in that they are happy, but in that they are endings. The trite treats gradual dissolution as romantic finality. The trite manufactures scenes, floats content on a sea of more or less cleverly disguised cliches.

The Good

The Magic: a shower of sparks seen in the dark window of an empty street. The idea, as Simone Beauvoir put it, that the human race may be a brief flash in the pan of infinite years, but still the most important thing there is: like a fire that blazes fiercely in the dark for a few minutes, and then disappears forever. The repetitions, meaningless but undeniable patterns, that haunt life — not plot, life.

The True: what one definitely means, clearly seen and clearly said. Utterly rooted in the contingency of actuality, and for that precise reason — its uniqueness, its never-to-be-repeatedness — imbued with absolute significance. Truth in the novel is not about the universal, in other words, to put this in Kierkegaardian terms, but about the absolute.

My plan is to embrace the two-semester nature of the course. My goal is to teach philosophizing rather than philosophy — that is, a way of thinking rather than a set of doctrines. (This is probably just as well since the doctrines I would tend to propound [were I to be dogmatic] would run rather contrary to those embraced by the conservative Catholic majority at BC.) I caught this ideal from my own undergraduate professors, but I’m certainly not imitating them in everything. They went about the task of teaching me to philosophize by calculated vagueness and by bracketing the historical and other contexts from our considerations of philosophical texts. Consequently the majority of their students were bored, and of the minority who weren’t bored the majority were mystified. I, instead, propose to trace a theme with which my students will already be familiar — desire. They experience the problem of desire whenever they balance the rules and laws and expectations that structure their lives against the upwelling wrongheadedness of their own individuality. They are trying to organize their desires — to decide what to do with their lives — to pick a few and suppress others. But how many of them have really even asked themselves, “what is desire?” Well, surprise surprise, philosophers have been doing that since philosophy was born in the slippery afterbirth that was Socrates’ execution.

I’m going to begin my class by having my students read the letters of Abelard and Heloise, a philosophical duo whose traumatic and touching story already integrates the problem of desire in its most concrete and potent form (illicit love) and the practice of philosophy in its driest and most seemingly irrelevant form (scholasticism). Then I’m going to go back, to begin with Plato and trace from him through Aristotle, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, all the way back to Abelard (in his role as the author of the Ethics), various perspectives on what desire is and how the problem of desire is to be solved or — sometimes “and” — how it effects other problems, from the problem of religious experience to the problem of moral responsibility to the problem of human nature to the problem of political life. This will take up our first semester, the goal being to present a sort of mini history of philosophy as suspended from the question of desire.

But the goal, recall, is to teach philosophizing, not philosophical doctrines. Nonetheless — and perversely, given that I set up the dichotomy in the first place — I propose to do so in the beginning by holding my students’ noses very close indeed to the minutiae of philosophical doctrines. I believe a genuine awakening to the practice of the philosophical tradition usually occurs when a subject traces in his own soul the movement made by other philosophers. Philosophizing, in other words, is a sort of practical knowledge best learned by imitation: but before there can be imitation, there must be fascinated scrutiny. That’s what I’m going to encourage in the first semester. Even the papers I ask my students to write will be rigorously restricted to “close reading” papers. I don’t want them to go away from the class, home for Christmas break, thinking that philosophy is whatever opinions they happen to have on the doctrinal options for metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. Paradoxically such a mistaken belief usually grows out of the experience of too much independence in one’s introduction to philosophy. I certainly thought that way for a while — was not cured until I was forced to retrace with care every step of certain great philosophical texts. That retracing showed me how incommensurable the majesty of the questioning of philosophy was to the importance of its answers: that was philosophy, the chase for truth and accurate description and explanation, which may issue in doctrines certainly, but which owes its essential greatness to something else.

Who better to learn one’s philosophical attitude from than Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Aurelius, and Augustine? Between them, they seem to cover all the types of motivation one might have for philosophizing, and all the commitments one might bring with one to the task.

Then, in the second semester, I’m going to vigorously change up the style of the course. I’m going to try to present a truly dizzying constellation of theories about desire, spanning the whole gamut of modern philosophy from Descartes to Deleuze. Rather than whole original texts, I’ll rely largely on carefully selected extracts, and I’ll expect a more critical sort of attention from my students. I hope that by the end of that second semester, they will be able to write the 10 page paper I set them with at least some independent philosophical thoughts finding their way into its pages.

This whole scheme of things evolved for me purely because I had to design a syllabus. I’m grateful for the assignment. Closer to the class in question, perhaps I’ll share it on the blog.

Roland Boer’s hilarious and accurate ongoing typology of scholars has had me thinking frequently about various ways to divide up that particular bestiary. One that struck me yesterday was a typology of scholars entirely in terms of Platonic characters. I don’t have time at the moment to create the full typology that might result, but I do have one entry to share with you: the Meno. Note that while Boer’s typology seems to focus mainly upon professors, mine will focus upon graduate students.

The Meno is essentially a tyrant — as Socrates points out.

… you are forever giving orders in a discussion, as spoiled people do, who behave like tyrants as long as they are young.” (76b)

On one hand the Meno insists that you answer his questions, presenting your opinions about things. In this he appears very earnest. What do you think of x? How do you relate y to z? But there is a catch.

The Meno is never satisfied with your answers unless they boil down to something he’s heard before. You say that you’ve discovered an interesting new thinker who thinks x: he tells you, “that sounds just like y.” “No,” you say, “because z.” “Ah,” he says, “then this new thinkers sounds just like w.” But if you suggest a perspective he can’t peg, then he will simply tell you that it must be wrong. If you ask the Meno what he thinks about something, he will give you a pitch perfect answer — right out of his favorite authorities.

Socrates’ technique for dealing with a Meno is (1. to placate his need to identify your views by giving him readily identifiable answers (e.g., by giving him Empedocles’ definition of color when he won’t accept your own), (2. to problematize whatever views he espouses, not by allowing him to retreat to the authority he has chosen, but by making him defend the views he accepts as his own.

Alternatively, one can shun the Meno when he begins to ask questions.

—So to train to be a novelist, one must train one’s pen for long-distances. That means writing daily. That means learning to balance the need for perfection of sentence and paragraph with the need for energy and drive of chapter. That means negotiating the division of attention between plot and style. That means learning to develop ideas interestingly at length. That means learning consistency of style in a given work — like the efficient stride.

2. A novelist is one who stabilizes vast portions of his experience with judgment, retrieving them as insight into worlds.

—So a novelist in training must develop his memory and his capacity for expressing what he has seen and done and felt. Practice in remembering is not a mistake. A novelist must take note of common experiences in their technical details — he must be able to describe what a man does and thinks as he vacuums his floor, making precise and unexpected observations on that activity, or any other, illuminating the ordinary and repeated by close attention.

3. A novelist is one who excels in the use of words, to draw in a reader, to sustain that reader’s attention, and — not least by any means — to sustain his own attention and therefore whatever degree of truth his writings attain.

—So a novelist must sometimes train his pen for form as well as distance. That means writing contentlessly. That means playing with patterns of word and sound. That means learning the art of holding back the pen long enough to form a whole sentence in the mind, or else writing organically without forethought and then pruning the verbiage into topiary beauty without scaring away the flighty rabbits of organicism. That means occasionally pursuing metaphors beyond the bounds of sense and reason.