seeing dimly as in old age,
who could believe that the feelings
of the senses and the imagination
were but impressions on the mind from bodies without them,
just as the old custom was to impress
with swift-running pens
letters upon the surface of a waxen tablet
which bore no marks before.
But if the mind with its own force
can bring forth nothing by its own exertions;
if it does but lie passive and subject to the marks of other bodies;
if it reflects, as does, forsooth, a mirror,
the vain reflections of other things;
whence thrives there in the soul
an all-seeing power of knowledge?
What is the force that sees the single parts,
or which distinguishes the facts it knows?
What is the force that gathers up the parts it has distinguished,
that takes its course in order due,
now rises to mingle with the things on high,
and now sinks down among the things below,
and then to itself brings back itself,
and, so examining, refutes the false with truth?
This is a cause of greater power,
of more effective force by far
than that which only receives the impressions of material bodies.
Yet does the passive reception come first,
rousing and stirring all the strength of the mind in the living body
When the eyes are smitten with a light,
or the ears are struck with a voice's sound,
then is the spirit's energy aroused,
and, thus moved, calls upon like forms,
such as it holds within itself, fits them to signs without
and mingles the forms of its imagination
with those which it has stored within.
—from Book 5, Poem 4
Two ancient Greek concepts provide the context for this poem, and they offer us a further opportunity to consider what it really means to “know” something: Stoic apprehension and Platonic recollection.
First, the Athenian Stoics spoke of perception with the analogy of an imprint, as if the senses and the imagination received a sort of stamp through experience. Other schools, from varied traditions, will use the very same image, where a likeness of an object is impressed into awareness.
But is this enough to describe what it means to be conscious? Yes, I most certainly take the form of something else into my own form when I perceive, but the problem is that this alone would reduce all knowledge to a merely passive state. A piece of hot wax also is impressed by the shape of the signet ring, but I will never claim that the piece of wax knows anything at all.
For all the years I have struggled with teaching, and often felt that it was a wasted effort, nothing has discouraged me as much as the prevalent idea that learning is just a matter of absorption.
Expose them to it enough, and they will understand. Repeat the same pattern, over and over again, and they will follow it. Give them no other option, and they will gladly conform.
The highest paying job I was ever given seemed like a godsend at first. Somehow, I managed to land myself a gig at an incredibly prestigious prep school, and all I had to do for the rest of my life was play the part of an eccentric intellectual, complete with tweed jacket, amusing students in blue blazers, and flattering rich trustees at cocktail parties.
Even my own father, a man of principle, told me I was made for this job, and that I needed to get this one right. I resigned from adjunct teaching work at a state college to now hopefully become someone new.
And within six months I had what can only be called a complete nervous breakdown. What went wrong? I went wrong of course, because I lacked a sense of who I needed to be, but the circumstance that so deeply discouraged me was the reduction of people to sponges.
Classes were supposed to be based upon the dialectic, and yet everything revolved around preparing students for standardized tests. I could do whatever I wanted, as long as they passed those tests with acceptable scores. The tests were all multiple choice, without exception, prepared for the teachers far in advance.
I still have nightmares about a veteran teacher at that academy, who loved to say, “This is what the kids need to know!” I was given lists of need-to-know facts about the Ottoman Empire, or Mughal India, or Buddhist meditation. There were formulae, and never any reflection. There were clearly set patterns for correctness, and never once the option to think for oneself.
It was training young people like puppies, to become the big dogs of the future, and to never giving them any choice, or any creativity, or any chance to form a conscience for themselves. The answers were like soundbites, useful for the shallow speeches they would eventually have to give when they ran the profitable businesses they inherited from their parents, or when they ultimately ran for political office.
“Dude, you screwed that one up! All that money? If you’d played it right, you could have been the Dean before you retired. What were you thinking, breaking down like that?”
I was thinking. That was precisely my problem. Need-to-know! Need-to-know! Need-to-know!
Second, the Platonists spoke of learning like a process of remembering. It isn’t enough to say that a mind is acted upon; a mind is a mind precisely because it is able to act for itself. Yes, we soak up experiences, but we are not epistemological sponges. What am I to do with the data? What will transform the facts into understanding?
I see one thing now, and another thing then, and beyond the seeing is the comparing and contrasting. How are they different? How are they the same? No standardized test can teach the power of judgment, and yet we have based decades of merit on tests that treat a man like a monkey.
If you give me the pieces of something, only my own intelligence can find a way to put them together in an orderly way. A piece of wax can’t do it, since it is just wax. Even a machine can’t do it, unless it is given instructions by a mind.
Mind is activity, not passivity. Mind is the power to make connections between things, not being put in the situation of being connected. Awareness moves, and it is not merely moved.
“I was told everything I ever needed to know!” If you think that, you are sorely mistaken. You may have been told many wonderful things, but they meant nothing if you didn’t learn them for yourself.
There is a power within us, a force to abstract a universal idea from many instances, to join those ideas together in judgments, and to combine those judgments into demonstrations, the very means by which we increase our knowledge. To deny that I have it is ridiculous, since I employ it all the time, even if I employ it poorly.
Plato attributed this power to the fact that our souls had once known the fullness of truth, the totality of the forms, but had somehow forgotten all of it. Learning is therefore remembering, where the impression of the particular revives the awareness of the universal.
I can’t speak to that, since I don’t remember any past states of my existence, but I can describe what happens to me when I proceed from ignorance to wisdom. What wasn’t there before is now suddenly there.
What was given to me in experience becomes something more, by means of some other agency, and so I see many things as one, where once they seemed as diverse. I see many things as connected, where once they seemed as separated. I see many things as purposeful, where once they seemed as random.
Even as most all aspects of my daily life, from sleeping it off in the gutter to a fancy teaching job, suggest that I am determined by what happens to me, a tickle in my soul tells me that I am not a product of anything except myself. It is mind that makes me myself, and my mind is my own.
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