I’ve come a long way since high school, but it is surprising to me how often I return to some of the most basic principles of best practices around critical thinking, research, and communication that I learned there. I was a public school kid, but I was lucky enough to be able to take advanced classes in language arts and research presentation (ALARP, as we called it) from freshman year on, and jumped at any opportunity to take an AP History class. The critical principles of the humanities, of grammar, logic, rhetoric (the so-called classical trivium) and the power of history, literature, philosophy, and, yes, religious studies and theology (disciplines I started reading formal work in my sophomore year) convinced me then, and continue to convince me now, of their power to guide us towards greater appreciation of the mysteries of existence, our own quests for personal meaning, and our ethical agency in a pluralistic, diverse world. College and two rounds of graduate school only reinforced for me the necessity of a strong education in the humanities for personal and societal improvement, because the humanities afford the encounter with the fundamental questions of life and name the unavoidable antinomies that we all experience in a way that the sciences do not.
To be clear, I love science. Science’s power to describe the natural world, to discern possibilities for upholding, improving, and expanding human life and opportunity, and even for improving our understanding of various topics in the humanities—including the ones I list above—is enchanting. I am not against the large barrels of money that public and private institutions pour into STEAM programs, nor am I against encouraging young people in high school and college to invest in STEAM disciplines when they have the faculties and interest to do so. My concern is not to take away from STEAM, but to support the humanities: not to have less science, but more humane science, science in the service of the human being rather than the other way around.
I am finding more and more, though, that while college education alone guarantees nothing about someone’s power to think, read, write, and speak critically and well, many otherwise intelligent and morally motivated people that I know struggle to cultivate open minds, understand the wide variety of data that modern life asks them to investigate (not to mention the Himalayan piles of data that one has to know to specialize in pretty much any contemporary academic discipline or trade), and communicate themselves effectively by way of complete use of every rhetorical appeal. Above all, I notice that many people seem unaware of the moral purpose of language to tell the truth, and that this is in various ways bad for the state of our public discourse and life. A public that does not know is one thing; a public that does not know how to know, and does not know enough to know what it does not know, is quite another, and far more susceptible to manipulation by the various autocratic and imperialist forces active in our global society today. Moreover, life is richer—even if sometimes sadder—with strong rational faculties to think, good principles guiding one’s learning and knowledge of how to learn, and access to the best possible sources for learning. To that end, what I have today are some fundamental tools of the trade in the life of the mind: things I live by, things I teach, and things I have simply come to conclude many people, intergenerationally, never learn in an explicit, articulate way. February, I think, will be dedicated to some more articles on method and discipline like this one, and at some point, I hope to offer something meaningful for Black History Month (though the most important thing I can really do there is to point everyone back to listen to my friend, Nii Addo Abrahams).
The first and most important rule is the one that Plato’s Socrates clarified when he stood trial before the Athenian boule1 on charges of “corrupting the youth and not believing the gods” for his ministry of incessant, annoying questioning of the various people of Athens: namely, “I seem therefore to be wiser than this man [read: anyone] in just this little thing, that the things which I do not know I do not think I know” (ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι; Plato, Apology 21d).
True wisdom therefore begins with awareness of our ignorance, which is really self-awareness concerning our own epistemic limits and the limits of our own expertise: I do not know most things; I do not even know most of the things that I do not know; the things that I do know, in addition to constituting a very small portion of the overall possible knowledge that there could be, are known by the proxy of my own senses, intellection, and that of other mediators; and despite what expertise I have in them, I do not even know everything there is to know about them.
Plato thought that learning was really remembering (ἀναμνήσις; Plato, Meno 86b); Aristotle, by contrast, thinks that knowledge acquisition is a process of abstraction (ἀφαίρεσις) from sense data to universals (e.g., De Anima III.4; Metaphysica I.1; Physica I.1); while Plato may well be right at the level of the intelligible world, Aristotle is obviously right at the level of our ordinary experience, which is why I must come to terms with the mediated, signified character of the intelligible and the potentially unreliable character of the senses at the root of all my attempts to know anything.
Therefore, I must acknowledge that while some knowledge may be remembered from beyond the horizon of my own life, in a spiritual and nostalgic way, most knowledge is obtained through the painstaking task of the investigative and scientific methods: observation, questioning, hypothesis, testing, and abstraction; that the knowledge obtained in this way is always subject to revision in light of new and better observation, questioning, and so forth; that the senses themselves perceive only part of material reality; that the total picture constructed from the senses is one constructed and that in various respects is either limited or illusory; that a complete epistemic picture of the world is therefore impossible by means of the investigative and scientific methods; that some degree of skepticism about what can be known and what is known is healthy.2
However, this skepticism itself must not be fully trusted, since it can become its own form of claiming to know that which we do not and to be wise concerning that about which we are ignorant; especially, we should begin from the premise that the sense data (τὸ αἰσθήτικον) available to us is the best possible data from which to investigate and seek to know what is intelligible about that data (τὸ νοήτικον) those who have studied, trained, and are experienced in a field, a trade, a discipline, an epistemic endeavor of some kind, with legitimate credibility (ethos), are more likely to know the truth of their subject than we are, even if some of the conceptual scaffolding of their own expertise is beyond them; that while it is possible for authorities and majorities (οἱ πολλοί) to be incorrect or deceitful, maverick and minority positions are not intrinsically more likely to be true because they are maverick or minority; that we should therefore not err too far in the direction of skepticism just as we should not err to far in the direction of credulousness or fideism.
Therefore, because we cannot know anything intelligible at all without first accepting the legitimacy of the sensible world, even if our own sense perceptions of the world are sometimes susceptible to deceit, illusion, or misperception, any attempt to know logically implies some degree of trust (πίστις; fides) in the mediated sources of knowledge, be they the perceptible spectra available to our senses, the world of the imagination harmonized from the senses, the conventional language and opinions used to name that world and its particulars, and our own rational capacity to abstract the intelligible from the sensible; and, because this last capacity is necessary to have any knowledge of the world whatsoever, it must be the case that rejecting this principle logically entails rejecting our ability to know anything at all.
Our rational ability to abstract intelligible data from sensible data implies that there is some consonance between the intelligible structure of reality and that of our own minds; that our minds are not reducible to matter, nor our personal experiences of consciousness merely to the epiphenomena of neurology; that the indwelling rational principle of the universe, its mind or consciousness, and our own mind or consciousness are analogically, reciprocally bridged to one another by reason (logos); and therefore, that what is intelligible about the world through its senses will be that which can be described by means of reason, while that which cannot be described by means of reason will evidence either a flaw in our perception or in our powers of abstraction from that perception.
Reason (logos), then, does not so much dictate truth (ἡ ἀληθεία) itself as it does help to ensure that beginning from appropriate premises and data we may arrive at conclusions which logically follow; and therefore, not all that is rational (logikos) internally necessarily possesses consonance with the outside world; and therefore, that the praxis of ensuring logical purity by the avoidance of logical fallacies and cognitive biases is not itself a sufficient condition for truth but is a necessary condition.
Guided by the credibility (ethos) of trustworthy sources of information and following closely the rules of rational analysis (logos) of the data of our experience and that of others to try and arrive at intelligible truths, we find that our quest for the true is often faced by an impasse (ἀπορία), an asymptotic limit to knowledge which returns us in kind to the mystery of faith, that minimally the internal and external rational coherence of the abstractions we are capable of making signify the real truth and maximally that they idealize and verbalize that truth into articulate content; critical thinking done well does not lead us to a position of feeling that we have arrived at a comprehensive knowledge of anything, but that we have left behind false perceptions and acts of intellection behind in the process.
We engage in the process of critical thinking about our sensible experiences, including our imaginative experiences and our experiences of the cultural conventions and opinions (δόξαι) which shape them, including our own emotional lives (pathos) and interior mental phenomena, not for the sake of purely abstract knowledge, but because we think that some good (ἀγαθόν) will accrue from the understanding our investigation may yield, whether that good is epistemic, pragmatic, moral, or something else; and this implies that our aporetic, asymptotic quest for truth (ἡ ἀληθεία) in the pursuit of correct understanding of particular things is really a similar such quest not merely for individual goods but for the Good (τὸ ἀγαθόν) itself, which Plato identifies as the origin of our very epistemic capacity to know anything at all (Plato, Republic 508a-c); which in turn implies that all perceptive and rational activity reflects a desire (eros) for the Good that is, really, a desire for unification with it (e.g., the explanation for the allegorical myth of origins in Plato, Symposium 192e-193a), even if that Truth and Good are not finally nameable, and there is not necessarily anything to finally “do” with them that is practical.
Therefore, the desire for the True is also the desire for the Good, both of which we are drawn to by our perception in the sensible world both of beauty (τὸ κάλον) and its absence; our investigative and scientific methodologies for coming to know the intelligible Beauty of the Good and the True through the sensible beauties which we perceive in the world are, when successful, Plato’s “remembrance,” even as at the level of method they are Aristotle’s abstractions; and they imply that the whole of our quest for knowledge reflects a desire for transcendent understanding and consummation of our human experiences, these being articulated in the fruits of human culture: in the emotional bonds (pathos) of fellowship between families, clans, tribes, nations, and even species; in politics, by which we seek to organize the social bonds of human life on the basis of this affection (ἀγαπή) to best effect for all, however often this is failed or intentionally abused; in the arts which seek to describe, interpret, expand, and deepen our conscious experiences of life in the world and as ourselves; in the sciences, by which we seek to know the world around us in the interest of preserving, conserving, expanding, and enriching human life; in philosophy, by which we seek to organize and understand our epistemic pursuits themselves and what they collectively reveal about the self and the world in which the self exists; and in religion3 and theology, by which we seek to celebrate, participate in, and as far as we can speak about the aporetic mysteries of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty within which self and world seem contained; and therefore, to put it more simply, that we know in order to love.
It is the case then that all human endeavors to know are fundamentally interrelated to one another and contain one another; that the human pursuit of Truth, dialogue about Truth, and transmission of these endeavors across time, space, material change, and culture are the most precious resources of our species; and that, assuming the consonance between the universe’s intelligibility and our own rational faculties argued earlier, these endeavors may even have an apocalyptic significance, of the recapitulation of the universe’s intelligibility in the life and experience of a multihypostatic, collective creature, the human creature (homo) born from the dust (humus) of the earth, but—according to an imaginative ancient etymology—“looks up at what he sees” (ἄνρθωπος; Plato, Cratylus 399c).
Some words and phrases are preserved here in Greek, some in English transliteration; the logic is that I have tried to choose words necessary for the non-Greek reader to know in English and to provide the Greek of more complex terms for those interested.
On the turn of the Platonic Academy towards skepticism in the Hellenistic Era and then to Stoicized Middle Platonism towards its end, see John Sellars, Hellenistic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 20-27, 30.