The View from the Bridge: Aspects of Culture. Simon Ley’s 1996 lectures on Learning, Reading, Writing and Going Abroad and Staying Home
In 1996, Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys)
presented the ABC Boyer Lectures. Subsequently published under the title The
View from the Bridge the lectures were serialised in China
Heritage Quarterly
with the permission of the author. The first lecture, Learning is presented below. The second lecture, Reading, can be found here; the third, Writing, can be read here. The final lecture Going Abroad and Staying Home opens thus: 'Dictators and
toddlers share a curious characteristic: an inability to use the first person
pronoun. They refer to them-selves by their own names, in the third person...'
Learning
A true university is (and has always been) anchored in values. Deprived of this holding ground, it can only drift at the caprice of all the winds and currents of fashion, and, in the end, is doomed to founder in the shallows of farce and incoherence. In a private letter (posthumously published), Hannah Arendt provided a striking insight on the relation between truth and thought that could provide an illumina-ting paradigm for the dependence of any scholarly investigation upon a pre-existing concept of values. Arendt wrote: "The chief fallacy is to believe that Truth is a result which comes at the end of a thought process. Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought... Thinking starts after an experience of Truth has struck home, so to speak. The difference between philosophers and other people is that the former refuse to let go, but not that they are the only receptacles of Truth... Truth, in other words, is not in thought, but... it is the condition for the possibility of thinking. It is both beginning and a priori...."........................
He who believes in
nothing, sees nothing. The trap of 'seeing through' things was best
exposed by C.S. Lewis, at the conclusion of his memorable essay in defense of
values, The Abolition of Man:
"The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through
it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or
garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too. It is no use
trying 'to see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then
everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.
To see through all things is the same as not to see.."
Introduction
The other day I paid a
visit to an old friend, who is a philosopher. I found him in his garden,
pruning his roses. I could not resist making the observation that this seemed a
most befitting occupation for a philosopher, but my remark made him laugh. He
was quick to remind me that a number of famous philosophers had in fact shown a
strong allergy to such earthy hobbies. In our own time, for instance, think of
Jean-Paul Sartre: the protagonist of his most representative novel Nausea,
has a sudden intuition of the fundamental absurdity of existence while crossing
a public garden; the very sight of an old tree-root grotesquely twisted over
the ground triggers this dreadful awareness in his mind, and the experience is
of such intensity, that it makes him literally vomit—hence the title of the
book. (By the same token, one might even wonder if modern existentialist
philosophers would not need to take sea-sickness pills before undertaking any
gardening.)
Still, I do believe
that my naive observation did, in a way, hit upon a deeper truth. It was not
meant to be a facile reference to Voltaire's well-known precept (as you will
remember, at the end of his philosophical tale Candide after
countless horrific tribulations, Candide and his companions, having experienced
all the trials, disasters, miseries and anguish that generally characterize
man's predicament, at last find shelter and rest, and discover the ultimate
secret of wisdom - which is to cultivate one's own garden). No, what
I had in mind, was something even more basic. It was simply the instinctive and
universal awareness that the quest of the philosopher is as ancient and as
essential to the human endeavour as the primeval occupation of the peasant. The
magnificent statement on spiritual development, which John Henry Newman came to
use almost as a proverb - 'Growth is the only evidence of life' - might as well
have been issued by an old farmer.
Since the dawn of civilization - actually,
since neolithic times when prehistoric man first began to settle down, to sow,
to plant and to harvest - culture has sustained and defined us, and
it is not by chance that we use the same word when we speak both of cultivating our
gardens, and of cultivating
our minds. Indeed, culture is the
true and unique signature of man. A prehistoric cave that presents material
evidence of ancient occupation, may have been inhabited by pithecanthropes or
other ape-like creatures, infinitely remote from us. Yet one single picture engraved
or painted on its wall, however sketchy, rough, faint and faded, at once tells
us a different story: a long time ago, Man was here-our ancestor, our brother.
His individual presence is as immediate, unmistakable and overwhelming as that
of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel.
In these pages, I wish
simply to draw from my own personal experience: I was a teacher, I am a
writer - and I shall therefore offer some reflections on a series of topics,
which I would call respectively, Learning • Reading • Writing • Going Abroad
and Staying Home... read more:
http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/tien-hsia.php?searchterm=027_bridge.inc&issue=027- An Educated Man is not a Pot, an interview with Pierre
Ryckmans
- An Interview with Pierre Ryckmans
- In Quest of the Authentic COnfucius, by John Makeham
