Science and Friendship
Friday 26 April 2024
The most valuable thing for a scholar is not his alma mater or his library or his list of publications, but a friend. Having someone who can be critical and yet appreciative of your ideas is a rare thing. My experience is that rare friends come and go through life, and while their presence is a boon, it can’t be counted on. On the contrary, one can count on the fact that even a good friend will not last long in one’s life. An intellectual friend has a distinctive role — it’s not necessarily the same person with whom you shoot pool, though it could be that also — and so particular qualities are required to fill that distinctive role. They must be one of the most intelligent people you’ve ever known, so that they can offer intelligent criticism, but they must also be sympathetic, and not merely or exclusively critical. They must know something about your area of research, enough to intelligently engage with any of the ideas you use, and they must know enough about you have some sense of what you are trying to accomplish and where you are trying to go, intellectually speaking. To find all these qualities together in one person is a rare thing. It has been my experience that such individuals are only rarely within one’s sphere of acquaintances.
What I particularly have in mind when I talk about a friend being the most valuable thing a scholar can have is the earliest development of an idea or ideas. When a new idea appears to you, and especially an idea that seems to have great potential, it is difficult to be objective about it. If the idea is exciting and seems like the kind of thing you’d like to devote the rest of your life to developing, you stand in need of friendly and constructive criticism. This is where an intelligent friend comes into play. You can bounce ideas off anyone, but just anyone won’t know about your intellectual background or what you’re trying to do. And someone who is knowledgeable about the field to which the idea in question is related is not necessarily going to be sympathetic either to you or to your idea. Both sympathies are key to having a good conversation about a developing idea.
I’m sure that this was always the case with analog society, but it has been made particularly obvious in digital society — and here I am talking about social media — that many people enjoy being awful, and many people who enjoy being awful derive a sadistic joy from denigrating others and their ideas. If you throw an idea out onto social media it will probably be ignored (unless you are famous), but, if it isn’t ignored, it will probably be savaged. Having a new idea savaged can kill it, or kill your enthusiasm for it. Killing your enthusiasm for an idea is as good as killing the idea itself, since, as Hegel said, nothing great is accomplished without passion. Hence my above specification that a friendly critic needs to be sympathetic both to you and to your idea.
An idea is eternal, and it remains what it is whether or not any human being pays attention to it. But an idea needs a human mind to bring it into human history, to show its relevance, to interpret it within the present social framework, and to bring it to life. No idea, however great it may be, enters into history without someone who can be the vehicle of that idea. When a great idea is channeled through a great mind, it can change the direction of history. All of this requires that at least one human being sees the potential in an idea, and devotes himself to its exposition. This requires enthusiasm, or something like enthusiasm, for the idea. A friendly critic will understand all of this intuitively, and he will help you gain some insight both into yourself and into the idea. And if he is a true friend, he will warn you away from an idea that is a blind alley, no matter your enthusiasm for it. Our time in this world is short, and we can only engage with so many ideas in a lifetime. We must choose well, or we waste our lives. A friendly critic will help us to choose well.
When an idea is young, it is as tender and as delicate as a green shoot that pokes its way out of the dirt underfoot. If anyone steps on it, it may well be killed. But if it is tended, it can grow into some mature plant. For an idea to be properly tended, it requires a certain kind of stimulus. Criticism is necessary, but it must be criticism based on love, not hostile, angry, or destructive criticism. Some of the most helpful advice I have ever received was difficult for me to accept, and it felt cruel to hear it, but it was never unkind, even when it was expressed forcefully. Sometimes criticism needs to be forceful, but it never needs to be malicious. Again, the friendly critic will understand all of this intuitively, and will offer a mixture of criticism and support that will make it possible for an idea to grow and mature. We often call this process “bouncing ideas off someone,” and this is as good of a metaphor as any other (as good as the metaphor of an idea as a tender, young shoot). We know, however, that we can’t bounce ideas off just anyone. We need the right surface for our ideas to bounce back to us in an orderly and productive way. This is what the friendly critic does for us.
Much of what I am writing here is reflective of my own experience, and what I am missing also reflects my own experiences. Many people go through higher education precisely to find mentors who will help them to make the difficult choices of where to invest their scholarly energies, guiding them to the fruitful questions and warning them away from the dead ends. And even after one’s apprenticeship, one has the ongoing fellowship of colleagues who can be the kind of friendly critic I have described. No doubt all of this is true, but since it’s not part of my experience I can’t speak to it. And I have heard a few stories from those within institutionalized scholarship to know that there are people within institutions who are just as eager to be awful as people on social media.
My mom used to use the evocative expression, “never met a stranger,” to describe individuals who are naturally sociable and have a manner than endears them to others. Such an individual often makes a great friend, but I don’t think that many intellectuals are like this. A lot of intellectuals are painfully introverted and have difficulty socializing. It comes with the territory; being engaged with ideas usually means being inward-looking, while being engaged with other people and with events and occurrences in the world usually means being outward-looking (in other words, I’m talking about introverts and extroverts — one need not be dogmatic about the distinction to observe that it is often roughly accurate). Again, I’m speaking from my own experience, and your mileage may vary. What doesn’t vary is that the optimal development of an idea occurs in a context in which many distinct minds each bring their own perspective to it, each bringing out what the other misses, and this requires a community of individuals with a shared interest in the idea in question.
Ideally, science is like a circle of friends. I have often referenced Imre Lakatos’ conception of a scientific research program, as this is a crucial part of scientific research that received little or no attention prior to the work of Lakatos. It is the existence of a scientific research program (among other things) that distinguishes contemporary science from ancient science: large numbers of people over a large geographical area and over a long period of time work cooperatively on a related cluster of ideas, which advances a field of research in a way that not even the most prolific individual can match.
In my recent video on Arnold Toynbee I quoted from MacNeill’s biography of Toynbee such that, “Had he been able to create a Cambridge school of world historians… his influence might have been greater in the long run.” (p. 209) This problem is felt with particular urgency in history and the study of civilization, and Toynbee represented both. Because he established no school, i.e., no scientific research program, he remained and remains a lone figure. In France at about the same time, the Annales school was established and it has had a highly influential career, still today, after many changes, influencing the way history is written. Of course, a few people still read Toynbee (I read Toynbee), but it’s not the same as a group of scholars working together on an interrelated set of concepts. A writer with devoted readers in every generation is a kind of thread running through history, but a writer around which a research program forms is a community, and a community is a living and evolving entity. It is this living and evolving nature of a research community that keeps an idea alive without stagnating. A stagnant idea will soon be forgotten; a living idea will grow into a social role that will shape minds over generations.
A human mind, I wrote above, brings an idea to life; a community of minds brings an idea into a social milieu, i.e., it brings an idea into communal life. It is no longer merely lit up by a single consciousness like a bare bulb hanging in an empty room, it is now under a battery of floodlights. This kind of scrutiny would destroy a trivial idea — some ideas are meant to haunt only single mind, as idiosyncratically personal as the peculiar pattern of floaters that one sees in one’s field of vision. Such idiosyncratic ideas — we could call them the floaters of the mind’s eye — are fine, but strictly limited in scope. But a fundamental idea, an idea of fundamental importance, which possesses great potential for development, will not wilt or wither under scrutiny; rather, it will be stimulated to greater growth, only realizing its full potential when so scrutinized.
