Gotham Diary:
Life of the Mind
15 April 2013
What, really, does “the life of the mind” mean? Not much, say I.
The phrase is a swirl of connotations and implications. A kind of tranquil thoughtfulness is envisioned. Meditation — that two-faced concept, which can mean either concentrated reflection on a matter of great importance, or the rigorous expulsion of all particular ideas — figures in it somewhere. For some reason, I tend to associate the life of the mind with the quotation of poetry, preferably Goethe: in order to lead the life of the mind, you must stock your mind well with memorized bits and bobs of wisdom, which you may, at leisure, turn over in your (mental) hand like polished stones. The life of the mind is aloof, conducted up there somewhere. It embraces significance and eschews triviality.
There are monks in monasteries who may be leading life along these lines, but of course they would call it the life of prayer. (Prayer is the only mindful thing that I recognize as arguably existing outside the life of the body.) Somehow, I don’t think that “prayer” is what most people who talk of the life of the mind have in mind.
So, who amongst us, living in the everyday world, is really leading the life of the mind — and how can you tell?
I strongly suspect that the life of the mind is a state of grace into which we imagine other people to be capable of entering, whilst we ourselves are fallen, distracted by swarms of vague and inexpressible mental flashes, to dwell on which would lead to madness.
***
In contrast, there is the life of reading and writing. It would be nice to have one word for “reading and writing,” and I hope that somebody comes up with it soon, because reading without writing is vain, and writing without reading is senseless. You really must do both if you are going to do much of either. There is a third element: attentiveness to the life going on around you. This is the current’s ground. The lack of such attentiveness is what powers the life of the pure intellectual, who studies philosophical systems and spins more of same. Lawyers are grounded intellectuals, dealing with abstractions in terms of actual cases. They are not, like pure intellectuals, fantasists.
It is very easy to tell who is reading and writing and paying attention.
***
I wrote the other day that my parents’ way of life was meaningless. I ought to have noted that it was meaningless to me, not to them. I believe that their lives were rich in meaning, and that the center of all meaning, for them, was the large and stable American corporation. (They would have strenuously countered that, as observant Roman Catholics, they believed in higher things. But faith and God were taken for granted, like the contents of a medicine cabinet.) They believed in the power of the corporation, moreover, very much as a married couple. They both found meaning in my father’s career, which my mother fully supported, at the company of which he eventually became chairman. It was like Far From Heaven, but without the sex problems. They believed in “the company” in the same way that French courtiers believed in Louis XIV: as the fount of honor and riches. Like the aristocrats who were invited to Marly, my parents shared an aptitude for this way of life.
It was a life, I now think, divorced from any thought of history. History was over. The two world wars and the intervening Depression had redeemed the (free) world, which could settle down to enjoying affluence. If it ever occurred to my parents that the era of the benign postwar corporation would not continue indefinitely, they did not dwell on it. Like all beneficiaries of a boom, they saw no point to imagining unpleasant sequels, especially as (quite correctly) they did not expect to live to see any.
If I am right about the association of their belief in the corporation with a disbelief in history, then it is easy to see why their lives were meaningless to me. I don’t remember not being aware of living in history. History is the story of how we got to where we are, and we are always rewriting it as we understand ourselves better. Although it appears to be about then, it is always about now. The questions asked about the past are always questions that seem important in the present. That is why, for example, the history of the Reconstruction period that followed the American Civil War is so persistently unsettled.
For my parents, history was what happened. Scholarly research might give us a better picture of what happened, but what happened was what happened. It was itself as immutable as the Bible. The idea that history is forever being rewritten by evolving minds would have struck them as fatuous and perverse. Minds didn’t evolve — not any more, thank you very much! And there was a word for taking an alternative approach to the events of history: propaganda!