Practical Reading and Writing

I was speaking the other day with an older friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and he asked me what I was reading lately. I mentioned this and that, and then asked him the same question. He said he was getting interested in philosophy—not the kind of thing professors in the universities talk about, he said, but practical philosophy. I took the point: time is of the essence, and increasingly so for both him and me. But still I wondered, practical for what?

To be sure, my friend wasn’t talking about what used to be called (though sounding odd today) the servile arts, useful skills such as cooking and building and trading which help us keep life and maintain it more comfortably. But where is the point between the practicalities of life at the one end and academic irrelevancies at the other? If we set our course on the belief that only the material counts, then the answer is clear and quick: practicalities and more of them, please. But if we start to suspect that our thoughts and feelings amount to more than neural activity alone, then we’re left to find just where that difference is between the intellectualism my friend was uninterested in and a real life of the intellect.

The British mathematician P. E. B. Jourdain retells the story that Plato took great exception when he learned that some of his contemporaries were using “mechanical instruments for solving certain geometrical problems.” “Manual labour, “Jourdain writes, “was looked down upon by the Greeks, and a sharp distinction was drawn between the slaves, who performed bodily work…and the leisured upper classes who speculated” (The Nature of Mathematics). To speculate, however, did not mean to the classical world what it means to us today. We will speculate on something to guess at or approximate its meaning, the same risky opinionating we often undertake in business and real estate dealings. But to Plato and the traditionally metaphysical world behind him, to speculate (or in the Greek equivalent of that Latin verb, to theorize) meant just the opposite: to perceive ideal realities with the light of the intellect was to know with certainty the constituting truth of the natural and human worlds alike.

Knowing such philosophic truth for Plato and his kind was, then, the most practical thing one could learn. And because the intellect—which meant not abstract conceptualizing, but interior vision—could alone find the source and principle of things, there was, and remains, that “sharp distinction” not only between applied knowledge and immaterial truth, but also between merely playing with words and awakening to the truth of ideas. These same confusions show up still today when we lose patience with what we think are the niceties of language, believing that to worry over points of grammar and usage—such as the difference between less and fewer, or preferring concrete over abstract nouns, or any of the myriad other such distinctions a careful writer makes—is to be preoccupied with irrelevant academic frippery. But when we remember that language, in its classical estimation at least, is meant to line out a path to truth, then the condition in which we keep that royal road is singularly important to the practicality of finding stable meaning.

In the end, we’re left with deciding for ourselves what, if any, relationship is possible with permanent realities, whether we conceive them as static entities or moving patterns. That he believed such things and such a possibility in fact existed was the reason Plato became alarmed over restricting geometrical truths to their practical applications, where, indisputably, their discovery had originated. Those truths, like all truths, were to be seen in their material operations, not identified with them, for to do that would be tantamount to reducing truth to facticity, justice to power, and beauty to mere excitation. Ideas would then no longer be real images of that which, after long searching, one finally became aware, but simply cerebral sparks—brilliant, indeed, but signifying nothing. Which of those we suspect is true will decide in the end what and how we read and write.

***