What I did on my summer vacation
This is something a little bit different: a report on what I did this summer.
So, it’s a new academic year.1 The chutzpah involved in asserting that a year—which by nature and convention is drawing to a close—should begin as the days shorten and the leaves start to turn, is considerable. The flip side of this insight, I suppose, is this: think about the institutions that have inspired or created calendars: the Roman Empire, the Church, Corporations, the MOON (Julian, Liturgical, Gregorian, Fiscal, Lunar) and then we can begin to see the achievement of the academy in building a world. I have always sort of understood why people get so exercised about what goes on in universities: education is important, what we do in “the academy” is, however goofy and self-important academics might be, serious, or gesturing towards seriousness.
I’ve been a student or a teacher for my entire adult life. There’s no need to dwell too much on what this has done to me, but while I am indeed accustomed to thinking of September as a time of beginnings and opportunities, the peak of summer has always left me somewhat listless. The end of the academic year—i.e. Spring—isn’t as hard as its beginning. As both a dad and a prof, there’s too much to do, and usually plenty to celebrate, too. In fact, it takes me those four months away to reckon with the loss of graduating students, and indeed, with how my kids are growing up. For whatever reason, these new beginnings make the character of the endings clearer to me. What I’m struggling with is the constant churn of my relation to those in my care—how to devote myself to the work of helping people precisely so that they will no longer need that help.
It was, however, a very good summer. In May my colleague Andrew and I took thirty of Great Books students to Greece. It was my first time visiting Greece, despite having spent the last twenty years of my life there imaginatively. The danger of a trip like this—well, the existential one—was that the real thing would fail to live up to the images I had summoned by reading Homer, Plato, Thucydides for so long. It was also embarrassing to have endowed so much imaginative significance to a real place, to have populated a world entirely through an ancient—and small—canon of literature, when real people live there, still. It was to be confronted with the fact that my private significance might be completely out of step with reality. Was I also worried that my relationship to Greece—a literary, theoretical and thus imaginative one—would run afoul of the facts as they exist? Perhaps. I suppose I had thought about it in terms of Nietzsche’s distinction between monumental history and critical history. These texts have served my life, helped me live, but there is the enduring possibility that one is living a lie.
To say that I am unaware of the problem of how images or ideals relate to the real thing would be simply untrue. But you can know a thing to death without knowing it, and I think I was afraid that my imaginary Athens couldn’t compare to the real thing, which is in ruins.
But when I visited the Parthenon, I found that my imaginary, literary Athens, was in a surprising way true to the one in front of me. I noticed the scaffolding being used in the restorations revealed that these twenty-five hundred year old columns were noticeably slanted.
Was this the result of two millennia of earthquakes, or a sign of decay? I asked our indefatigable guide, Stavros, and he explained that columns are tilted, and taper and swell so as to appear perfectly straight and symmetrical to the human eye. An abstractly, theoretically straight and regular Parthenon would appear to “sag” to human eyes. And so the beauty and completeness of the monument is achieved through “imperfection:” the Parthenon, through “optical refinement” is made for human beings, not according to abstract principle. This reminded me of a distinction Aristotle makes in several of his works between things which are “first simply” or “first for us” and what is best and what is best for human beings. The pursuit of the first simply, or the unqualified good might distort what is good for human beings. Reading this insight very deeply into Aristotle leads to some surprising conclusions about which scholars, to understate things somewhat, do not agree. But the Parthenon seemed to be close to living proof (as it were) that I’ve been on the right track.
Between Greece and my second European trip of the summer—a stint as a guest scholar at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen, more on that in a minute—I did some Serious Dadding. My wife, Vivien, finished up her Education degree, graduated, and got a job teaching school. I enjoy spending time with my kids who are, on balance, charming, talented, and amusing. But I cannot believe how difficult it is to think when I am responsible for their care. I am becoming a sort of parody of my type, an air-headed, absent-minded professor; nevertheless, it feels impossible to attend to the thousand small details required to keep four children healthy and happy, while also thinking and writing. I think that being a dad is ultimately good for thinking, but the daily work feels increasingly incompatible. This is one of the reasons why I like camping with my kids—being outside with the kids allows me to focus on that one thing, even though every domestic task is, in a sense, more difficult. At any rate, we had some nice camping trips in the months between Athens and Copenhagen, and I’m looking forward to next summer which will be, I suspect, the last one where all four will gladly join us on our traditional outdoor excursions.
I spent the end of July and most of August in Copenhagen. I was lucky enough to have a flat in Christianshavn—of The Bear season 2 fame—and the entire stay worked out better than I could have hoped. I had a good mix of time alone to work, punctuated by visits from one of my best friends and my wife.
Copenhagen the best place I’ve been, and maybe the first major city I’ve visited where I could imagine a life for my family. I know “North American lib visits Scandinavia, likes it” is not exactly a shocking headline, but Copenhagen—the food, the university, the people, the climate, getting around—resonated in a way I’ve never felt before.
The irony of feeling so pleasantly at home in a place while studying Kierkegaard was not lost on me. And while the resources at the Centre were great, the main advantage of this stay was the opportunity to fully immerse myself in thinking and writing. Kierkegaard maintained a completely bonkers schedule—cutting a figure at magazines and coffee shops all day, and writing with feverish intensity all night—but my schedule in Copenhagen was extremely pleasant: work all day, dinner somewhere excellent, work some more into the evening. I have struggled to make progress on my scholarly book for the last while, but while I was in Copenhagen, it felt like a dam broke—I wrote many more words than I intended to, and even started to believe that the book will be finished soon. I’m looking forward to sharing some of what I’ve realized about Kierkegaard and Socrates with the wider world very soon.
One of the main questions I considered while I was there, was whether a criticism of historicism can spare Christianity. There is, after all, little question that Christianity changes our understanding of time in the direction of the historical. For Kierkegaard, addressing the legacy of a full-blown historical turn in German Idealism, means reckoning with what it might mean if historicism, in general, can’t be affirmed. It is interesting, in this regard, that he turns to Lessing. Writing before Hegel, Lessing leaves us to ask whether the "fruits" of Christianity's relating history to reason through the incarnation have not been somewhat rotten. Kierkegaard’s Climacus seizes on this to show why there can be a critique of Hegel that spares both pre-Christian (Socratic) philosophy and Christianity. The formulation I've landed on is something like this: each historical moment is an ambivalent basis for an eternal happiness except the moment, which, as the meeting of time and eternity, is only ambivalently historical. The paradoxical character of the way a historical moment becomes meaningful in Christianity (through the, humanly speaking, paradoxical claim that time and eternity meet in the moment when God touches time) means that we remain within an essentially Socratic understanding of reason. In Fragments, Climacus shows this distinction to be available to human reason, but his account of reason forces us to then ask: how? the two options are philosophy (broadly: "recollection") or faith (revelation: "the moment"). Kierkegaard, the great partisan of faith, and the absurd, is then a defender of the possibility of non-historicist reason in the postmodern world. The implications of this for political theory are that we must, as Kierkegaard repeatedly says and as everyone chooses to ignore, “calmly stick to Socrates.” What this means is, of course, another question, and questionable besides—but that’s what will make it a good book, I hope.
Although I discovered, belatedly, that today is not the first day of classes at St. Thomas.