July 06, 2007
Moving on
Trevor Pateman has focussed my attention on something I hadn't really thought about before; the importance of unlearning. There's a lot to think about here and I am pretty certain he's on to something significant if mostly neglected. Meanwhile, while I digest this idea here is his take on the role of unlearning in intellectual adventure:
"Though I am quite conventionally admiring of those who manage to remain monogamous for long marital lives, I despair a bit over people who stay with the same ideas, the same theories, the same subjects, throughout their intellectual lives. Often enough, it seems that they are living off what they banked in their academic youth. They are failing to move on and out. But moving on is what the intellectual life is about; it is what makes it an adventure rather than an entrenchment. This is not (though it could be) an apology for diletanntism - for what the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier called the butterfly passion. No more than an artist starts with a style or a writer starts with a voice, but rather they have to achieve these things, so an intellectual life does not start with a vision but rather has to achieve one. And it is achievable only through movement, not through the reiteration of what one read in one's youth. (When, for example, I did know What Marx Said, because I read it fairly conscientiously. Now I have lapsed and I no longer know. That is how it should be)."
Posted by richard at July 6, 2007 01:03 PM