Sapere aude! Have the courage to reason for yourself!

Luther Hammers His 95 Theses to the Door,” Ferdinand Pauwels, Photo Credit: (courtesy of UChicago Magazine and Wikipedia Commons)

When Immanuel Kant penned those words at the end of the 18th century, Europe was ostensibly emerging from a dogmatic, intellectual slumber in which well-intentioned heterodox reasoning demanded great courage. That being said, perhaps my most sobering observation regarding academic life at Columbia over the past four years is that immense courage must still precede honest, independent reason. This is not a phenomenon that is restricted to the classroom. It pervades almost all areas of our academic and extra-academic life, whether it be supervised research endeavors, talks with friends on the way to class, or the context of club organizations putatively dedicated to true ideas and their pursuit.

Rather than nostalgically opining about the fictitious ideal of a bygone age in which independent academic reasoning was universally welcomed, we ought to come to grips with the descriptive reality that academic settings have always been rather antipathetic to intellectual dissent, and plausibly always will be. The Pythagorean Hippasus was “mysteriously lost” at sea following his geometric proof of the existence of irrational numbers, the ‘Southern Chan’ Buddhist monk Huineng was (allegedly) driven away from his rightfully-inherited patriarchal seat due to his ‘proper’ exposition of Buddha Nature, Johann Bernoulli was heavily chastised for suggesting that infinitesimals had theological significance in the early differential calculus, and Ludwig Wittgenstein reportedly threatened Karl Popper with a hot poker at Cambridge for asserting that not all philosophical problems are mere terminological disagreements.

The ramifications of intellectual dissent at Columbia are clearly not as drastic as all that, and yet we would be dishonest to maintain that we cannot feel their pressure. I constantly hear reports from friends of various philosophical, religious, scientific and political views that they avoid expressing their honest, well-reasoned conclusions in papers, discussion, research, or class for fear of social ostracization or academic punishment. I hear from my professorial friends that certain lines of inquiry ought to be patently avoided, since no academic journals would publish papers with conclusions of a certain type. I observe dissenters become the objects of ungrounded, irrelevant diatribes on the basis of their on-campus publications.

Given the recalcitrant pervasiveness of this kind of conformist pressure, we realistically ought to encourage courageous independent reasoning at Columbia, rather than attempt to make Columbia an environment in which courage is not required for independent reasoning at all. This is not to say that we should encourage any reasoning that would induce backlash. Courage is an irreducibly normative notion – it refers to a certain Classical virtue of habituated fortitude in the midst of great difficulty for the sake of remaining true to a worthy end. We must therefore make the case that the end of publicly reasoning well is a worthy end.

We’ve all heard the “free speech” consequentialist argument countless times – that a “free marketplace” of ideas is our best means of intellectual and civilizational advancement. I am not very interested in this line of thinking here. I think we ought to have the courage to reason for far more fundamental reasons than that.

The act of reasoning well, like truth, is an end a se – it is an end in itself. There is no further end that justifies it as an end worth pursuing, including coming to know any particular truth as a result of engaging in such reasoning. Anyone who has reflectively engaged in it – whether it be reflection on the nature of humanity and suffering in Crime and Punishment, a eureka moment in grappling with the sublime peculiarities of quantum field theory, or a careful exposition of one’s first principles of political justice – can tell you this with certainty. It is a mysteriously fulfilling practice of ours, and even more so in the context of collective reasoning. But poor collective reasoning is far less fulfilling than an independent practice of reasoning well. As philosophers throughout history have recognized, the habitual act of reasoning well constitutes the paradigm of human self-actualization, and it is accessible to all of us qua human. It is thus, when done well, perhaps the most universal ground for a truly unifying practice. Through it, we are ipso facto unified with others both cross-spatially and cross-temporally – we engage in the same lines of reasoning as those who have gone before us, those contemporaneous with us, and those who will follow after us. When we reason well, we find unity with individuals of arbitrarily different backgrounds and contexts across time and space who are worthy of admiration and emulation.

To be a healthy academic institution, we must have the courage to reason independently whenever necessary. My encouragement and hope are for you, as Columbia students, to be willing to pursue lines of inquiry incongruent with the views of your research supervisor, if that is what the truth demands. It is for you to courageously reflect on the underlying dogmas of your discipline, even if that very process solidifies your acceptance of them. It is for you to reason unashamedly and courageously, wherever the truth might lead – for our ability to be deeply fulfilled in just that is fundamental to and constitutive of our very humanity.

 

This entry was posted in Archives, Coursework, Life, The Core, The Humanities, Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.