Aporia, Education, and “Real Life” - Midyear Completion Speech
December 2nd, 2006 by webmasterThe following entry is Andrew Marantz’s (Brown ‘06.5) speech given at Brown University’s Midyear Completion Ceremony. It is published with the permission of the author.
Aporia, Education, and “Real Life”
A widespread feeling of loss pervades the minds of students who often come to universities to learn right from wrong, to distinguish what is true from what is false, but who realize at the end of four years that they have deconstructed their freshman beliefs, values, and ideologies, but have created nothing to replace them.
That’s not really the beginning of my speech. Nor is it a passage from Sylvia Plath’s application to Smith. Actually, it’s from Brown’s course catalogue, from a description of a course called The Shaping of World Views. Let me repeat that last part: students “realize at the end of four years that they have deconstructed their freshman beliefs…but have created nothing to replace them.”
Right away, we can learn a couple things about Brown. First of all, Brown is the kind of university where you can take a course on how to patch up your worldview. No wonder we’re ranked as the happiest college-this course is like group therapy! I can’t imagine a course at Chicago called “No-How Are You Feeling?”
But what I really want to point out about this course description is its implicit claim: namely, that college is a place where bright-eyed, bushy-tailed teenagers go to have their dreams shattered. Is that true? Should we change our motto from “In God We Hope” to “A Widespread Feeling of Loss Pervades”? Is that really what a Brown education does?
Well, in a sense…yes.
See, when the course description talks about a “feeling of loss,” I think it’s referring to aporia. Now, if you’ve never heard that word before, don’t worry, because it’s Greek. (I even wrote it in italics here in my notes, but you’ll just have to take my word for it.) So, what does it mean? An aporia can be defined as an intellectual impasse, or as the confusion that arises from such an impasse. It’s mental gridlock. What Zen masters call a don’t-know mind. Aporia was what Socrates was going for in all those dialogues when, instead of pushing his own opinion, he reveals his opponent’s confusion. For instance, in a dialog called the Meno, Socrates asks a slave boy a simple question about geometry. The boy answers confidently, but he gets it wrong. Then, instead of just telling the slave boy the correct answer, Socrates asks him a bunch of pedantic questions in order to bring him to aporia-to show him that he didn’t actually know what he thought he knew. Socrates then turns to Meno and explains what he’s doing, in the following words: “[The slave boy] did not know at first, and he does not know now…but at first he thought he knew, and answered confidently as if he knew…now, he neither knows nor fancies that he knows.”
Like Socrates, Brown professors seek to show us how much we don’t understand. They revel in complexity. If a Brown professor tells you your paper really “complicated the issue,” she’s giving you a compliment. A lot of the parents in the audience wouldn’t believe me if I told them that “problematize” is a real word-but it is, and, like it or not, it’s what your children have been doing for the last few years.
A lot of aporia at Brown is generated by what philosophers would call “slipping between the horns of a dilemma,” or what Buddhists would call “the middle path,” or what I will call “dissolving dualisms.” I’ll say that one again: “dissolving dualisms.” Or you can use other words, like “collapsing binaries.” No, these are not names of grunge bands. Dissolving dualisms is simply an activity, like smashing pumpkins. Uh-all right, let me explain it this way.
Western thought, as a whole, is built on stark, either-or distinctions: mind or matter, male or female, form or content, self or other. And we might as well add the ones from the Shaping of World Views course description: true or false, right or wrong. Those are dualisms. (I would ask you to shout out a few of your own, but I don’t think it’s that kind of event.) When we dissolve a dualism, or collapse it, or explode it, or whatever metaphor you want, we reject the system of binary logic the dualism is based on. Instead of picking one or the other, we pick neither, or both: or, really, we just refuse the question altogether.
For example, consider Aristotle’s quote, “poetry is a more serious thing than history.” You can agree with that; or you can turn the hierarchy upside-down, like Plato did, and say that history is more worthwhile than poetry. Either way, the dualism between poetry and history still stands. A postmodern critique, on the other hand, would just say something like: “Who ever said poetry and history were two different things?” And this critique is not unique to the humanities. For instance: is light a particle or a wave? It sometimes acts like one and sometimes like the other. So which is it, really? Well, maybe that just isn’t the right question to ask.
So that’s what it means to collapse a dualism-and once you start, it can be habit-forming. Brown professors love to break down dualisms the way Dick Cheney loves to hunt quail. In my Comp. Lit. 121 course it became a sort of class joke: “All right everyone, settle down now, we have a lot of dualisms to explode today.”
But it’s important to remember that dissolutions are not solutions. Like the course description said, they only deconstruct ideologies, but leave nothing to replace them. Dissolving a dualism brings us to aporia-we come to understand how little we understand-but then what? OK, light is neither a particle nor a wave-but that doesn’t tell us what light is. We’ve made things more confusing, not less. So why do we do it?
I think we do it because that confusion, that aporia, is edifying in itself. It’s sort of like necessity giving birth to invention: in that moment of utter ignorance, real creativity can happen. It makes me think of a novel called The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in which the main character lowers himself into a well, voluntarily, for no particular reason-and sits there. He doesn’t curse himself, or scramble for a way out; he just sits there. That’s aporia. You might think the bottom of the well would be a dead end, but that’s when things in the novel really get going.
You might have heard the platitude that education is all about endless curiosity. Well, I have a slightly different platitude to offer you now: that what matters is not the questioning-and not the answering, either-but the moment after the questioning: the impasse, when you’ve questioned yourself into the bottom of a well and you have to figure out what the heck you’re going to do next.
So, here’s what I’ve said so far: aporia is good; Brown inspires aporia in its students; and the way Brown inspires aporia in its students is by breaking down dualisms. My fellow graduates and I have studied different things in college, but most of us are now experts in non-duality. When we came to Brown as first-years, our thinking was based on clear distinctions: right vs. wrong, male vs. female, all that stuff. Now, we know that gender is a spectrum, light is a wavicle, poetry is the same thing as history-and, since there’s no such thing as “absolute morality,” we can feel free to beat up little kids and take their bikes.
Um, just in case Bill O’Reilly has someone taping this: I’m only kidding.
But of all the dualisms we have learned to destabilize in the last few years, probably the most applicable one-especially right now-is the one between college and “real life.” Sure, the dualism has some merit. The looming prospects of getting a full-time job and going bald and fending off telemarketers are indeed very real; and, frankly, they scare the crap out of me. And yes, like most elite universities, Brown is a bubble, and a lot of things about life in a bubble are very unreal. But, when you really test it, the college vs. real-life dichotomy breaks down. Ultimately, whether you’re a student or a townie or a professional or whatever, you’re still a person. And, once that binary collapses, what are we left with? Say it with me: a-po-ri-a.
Like many other people in the room, I took a semester off from Brown. I left for all the cliché reasons: to “figure stuff out,” to “find myself,” to rebuild all those freshman beliefs I had “deconstructed.” Of course, during that time off, I never had an epiphany when I said, “Phew! All right, glad I’m done with that. I’m going to go play video games.” We all know that moment doesn’t exist. In the end, I never really built new ideologies to replace the old ones. And yet those few months I spent living in aporia, in confusion, were crucial. If you’ve ever voluntarily put yourself at the bottom of a well, you’ll understand what I mean.
When I left school, some people didn’t understand why I would “waste” a semester instead of going straight through. I reasoned with those people-by which I mean I deconstructed their worldview until it lined up with mine-and what I argued to them is that their concern only makes sense if you think of college and real life as two distinct entities. If you’ve dissolved that dualism, you can see that “wasting time” is something anyone can do at any time. What matters isn’t whether or not you’re in school, but whether or not you’re fully alive, wherever you are.
Everyone in the class of ‘06.5 took an unorthodox path through Brown, so I don’t have to tell you that the boundary between college and real life is permeable. But, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we’re done. Dispensing with that dualism is a good first step, but it does not lead to a simple answer. It leads, as we know, only to aporia, to the bottom of the well. And that’s where the challenge begins.
And that challenge is: you’re alive. You’re alive. What are you going to do with it? This moment, every moment, information is reaching your brain, through every sense. You’ve been given the great gift-or else happened upon the great accident-of existing. That is the simple, terrifying, non-dual truth. That’s it, and it has nothing to do with whether you’re in college or not. Whether you’re living in a bubble or living in the “real world,” you’re alive. You’re no more or less alive than the old lady at the DMV, or the Queen of Denmark, or the guy playing the saxophone outside Store 24. Your life is no more or less “real” than theirs.
So after we finish this ceremony, not much will change (That will become very clear to us next week, when we “college graduates” are cramming for our final exams.) Sure, life might be a little different after we graduate. Today we sit in this venerable hall, while in a month we’ll be wearing our Brown sweatpants in our parents’ basement and watching Grey’s Anatomy. But our most important occupation, the occupation of being alive, will be the same in thirty years as it is right now. At times, the so-called “real world” might seem confusing, or overwhelmingly complex. But, if we really paid attention at Brown, we’ll remember that complexity is an opportunity, not a dead end.
Thank you.