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Article Excerpt
The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.
--Simone Weil, "Human Personality"
A GENERATION AGO, THE SUBJECT WAS KNOWLEDGE AND POWER; TODAY, the subject is knowledge and pain. Ultimately, they may turn out to be the same subject, because nothing secures, augments, or confirms power like the free assumption of pain. But for the purposes of this essay, and in keeping with its argument, I will focus on pain, although it would be more pleasant to talk about power. In doing so, I will confine myself to rigorous inferences based on disinterested observation, bracketing my personal prejudices, biases, or desires. My conclusions will follow directly from the evidence. In undertaking this essay, I agree to sit very still for many hours of reading, meditation, and composition, during which time I will forego all immediate pleasures, including excessive food and drink. In the service of truth, the volume on the television will be turned down to the very point of inaudibility, until the last two minutes of the game.
Already, I feel the pain. It is an old and familiar pain, one I am so intimate with that I have come to desire it, partly because it recalls to me the days of my youth, when I was instructed by a series of mostly elderly men on the customary practices of the guild to which I desired admittance. I was told, at an age when the world shone bright before me and a seemingly infinite future of possibility beckoned me onward, that a scholar would, over the course of a working life, spend hundreds of thousands of hours all by himself (definitely himself: I never had a female teacher after ninth grade), staring at small print, thinking, puzzling, struggling, forgetting and relearning, assembling an ever vaster quantity of information. One would, I was told, engage in constant struggle with words, both those written by others and the ones one was trying to write oneself. I was informed that unlike those other "creative" writers whose words I would be studying, I would have to "support" everything I said by citing a previous text. If I felt absolutely compelled to voice an opinion, it would be best if I disguised it by merely implying assent to the opinion of someone else with whom I happened to agree. In some cases, I might present the opinions of others as facts. These people felt this way, I might note, and their opinions are a matter of record. Even better, I might rehearse the arguments that had persuaded others, note that they had been persuaded, and imply that I, too, found these arguments persuasive. Such procedures were permitted. Out of "fairness," I should consider and treat with maximal respect every possibility that I might be wrong. Such deliberate self-exposure "strengthened" the argument. And when all counterarguments had been vanquished--not by brute force but by the unforced force of the better argument, the accumulation of evidence--I must not gloat, but must express only a cold satisfaction that the truth has prevailed. On rare occasion I might, through a figure of speech or a fleeting comment, suggest something like a personality, but such moments must be confined, and nonessential to the argument. Passive verbs were good things, suggesting seriousness.
At the end of a very long process of tutelage in the rigors of the discipline, I was told that the rule of the guild was "publish or perish." My eyes glistening, my cheeks bright with the flush of youth, desire surging through my veins, I permitted myself a momentary pause--and then, instead of asking, "What's the difference?" I asked, "Where do I sign?"
But enough about me. The hypothesis to be explored in this essay is that the tradition of scholarship that we in the West have inherited includes as part of its self-understanding an implied bargain: an exchange of pain for knowledge. In this tradition, pain authenticates, verifies, and dignifies: in the West, we hold it to be a truth universally acknowledged that the truth obtained through pain is superior to that which can be obtained by pain-free means. Self-denial--the negation or extinction of bodily desire and the quest for pleasure--is the condition of truth; scholarship is distant kin to martyrdom. In the tradition we have inherited and to which we continue to contribute, pain is thought to disclose to us a truth beyond the imprisoning circle of our subjectivity. It sets us free from our merely personal or organic desires and liberates us from the cage of self-ends that otherwise encloses us. In our tradition, individual bodily identity, with its insistent desires, distractions, and inconstancies, can only interfere with the project of knowledge.
For some reason, others--non-"Westerners"--do not seem to feel the same way about truth and pain. For folkloric or anthropological reasons only they can comprehend through their indigenous ways of knowing-feeling, some people do not share our conviction that pain is the condition of knowledge. It is to be hoped that in the fullness of time, they will achieve the cultural maturity of the West. We should certainly try to assist them with all the means at our disposal--without, of course, patronizing or condescending to them. We should in fact study them to learn what we can about their curious ways. But if we were to write up the results of our study, we would, of course, have to follow the protocols described above, so our knowledge can be communicated to those who would most benefit from it--people like ourselves, who have developed culture-neutral ways of determining and telling the truth. Ultimately, despite our deep respect for the other, we do not accept the proposition that truth is culture-specific or culturally determined, and do not believe that the fact that this understanding of truth is peculiar to the West compromises its validity.
Since it is well known that the number three has magical properties, I would like to explore this hypothesis by considering three moments where key points in this agreement--pain suffered yields knowledge gained--have been negotiated. And now, if you'll excuse me.
THE RISE OF THE SCHOLAR AS HOLY MAN
As he grew and became a boy, and was advancing in years, he could not bear to learn letters, wishing also to stand apart from friendship with other children.
--Athanasius, The Life of Antony
The young man who eventually became Saint Antony of Egypt exhibited early promise. Even before he was old enough to undertake the more advanced forms of deprivation that would characterize his maturity, he withdrew from the company of other children, and from the world contained in books. Later, as his biographer Athanasius (later Saint Athanasius) records, Antony retreated to increasingly remote and less habitable locations, subjecting himself to ever severer circumstances, chastening and mortifying every instinct, appetite, and desire in an attempt to conquer his mortal condition and become godlike. In Athanasius's account, this project was the sole activity and entire point of his life, a life that was incongruously influential. By withdrawing from human society in the way he did, Antony founded the monastic way of life that spread rapidly from Egypt to the rest of the Middle East and came to define the Christian form of asceticism. The Life of Antony itself was influential, as the first "saint's life" and therefore as one of the foundational texts in the history of narrative that eventuated in the modern novel. An illiterate, friendless hermit whose immense fame rests on the particular style he (and his biographer) gave to his desolation, Antony stands at the bursting fountainhead of rich and deep traditions in religion, spirituality, art, narrative, and--it will be argued--epistemology. In his so-called life, we can see, as if in primary colors, the exchange of pain for knowledge being negotiated.
Given Antony's voluntary and almost instinctive illiteracy, it is remarkable that so...
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