El libro defiende la idea de que entregarse a una vida intelectual y aprender por el fin mismo de conocer(se) mejor todo lo que nos rodea es una satisfacción y una fuente de felicidad. Hace un repaso de distintos autores que entregaron su vida a esta labor y muchos de ellos lo hicieron en condiciones adversas como cuando estuvieron en prisión o en lugares remotos y empobrecidos en entorno, Se plantea si es un escape o no de la realidad, pero más bien es un encuentro con otros mundos, otras ideas, no es algo parecido a los vicios que buscan el placer fácil interior, sino que requiere un trabajo y una apertura hacia otros horizontes, e incluso personas a través de lo que ellos nos pudieron legar en sus trabajos o libros.
Afirma que el verdadero aprendizaje es un aprendizaje oculto y si se hace por el mero hecho de aprender, es por el efecto que produce en el que aprende no por los resultados de su aprendizaje.
Este libro me ha marcado por algo que no recuerdo haber hecho con otros, y es parar su lectura y buscar las películas, series o libros que ponía de ejemplo. He visto varias como El Erizo, Martin Eden o la serie de 14 capítulos. “Una amiga estupenda”. Ha sido “necesario” porque, aunque explicaba cada caso, la curiosidad aumentaba en cada página cada vez que nombraba cada uno de los personajes y sus situaciones.
Si tuviera que hacer un repaso por los distintos capítulos del libro, además de la introducción y otro que habla de Aprendizaje, Ocio y Felicidad que ya ya he comentado, tiene tres capítulos, un epílogo y un “día a día del intelectual”.
En el primero que titula: “Un refugio del Mundo” habla de las condiciones en las que se da la actividad intelectual, la mayor parte se da en la soledad que produce el retiro, incluso en la privación, una cárcel, una isla desterrado, pero lo fundamental es que en todas esas condiciones se de el “ascetismo”, es decir la poca necesidad de bienes materiales o vivir con escasos recursos consciente e intencionadamente.
Hay una frase de San Agustín que he leído en este libro y me gustó tanto que dice así:
“our ability to love one another depends on our capacity to learn from on”
Y de hecho, precisamente ocurre eso, que cuando descubrimos algo que nos parece interesante o fascinante, sentimos la necesidad de compartirlo. El deleite de aprender algo fluye en el deleite de enseñarlo.
En el segundo capítulo llamado -Learning lost and found- nos dice cuando ese aprendizaje pierde sentido cuando se trata como medio para otros objetivos como es el económico o alcanzar prestigio social. Afirma que si la riqueza la tomamos como un objetivo y no como un medio, destruye todo lo que hay a su alrededor.
La vida intelectual, afirma, tampoco es un entretenimiento o una forma de placer si realmente no nos transforma.
El tercer capítulo llamado -The Uses of Uselessness” Los usos de la inutilidad describe que si bien es imposible vivir sin una tarea práctica con la que ganarnos la vida, es cierto que existe otras facetas como las artes, pintura, comedia … que no tienen una utilidad manifiesta.
La autora se pregunta si la vida intelectual que exige un cierto retiro, que no busca la riqueza, el estatus social incluso que tampoco su fomento tampoco persigue la justicia, la política. ¿Puede servir y ayudar la propia vida y la de otros?
Pues depende de la persona, cada cual tiene sus aspiraciones. La vida intelectual no es fácil, aprender algo requiere esfuerzo e incluso una cierta violencia al romper nuestros esquemas a los que estamos habituados.
Epílogo: The Everyday Intellectual. “El ser humano es algo más que un instrumento para alcanzar un beneficio personal o público. La vida intelectual es una fuente de dignidad humana más allá de la vida social o política que requiere una práctica ascetica.(...) dejemos libre que juegue con su imaginación en un intento de que su corazón alcance lo que más le importe”. (palabras de la autora).
En su web: https://zenahitz.net/ Podréis encontrar entrevistas, podcas y ensayos muy interesantes
Videografía:
NOTAS
Introducción
-
My life as a professional intellectual had its roots in my childhood. From my earliest memory I lived with books of all kinds. There were stacks on my bedroom floor and they lined the dusty walls of our Victorian house. My older brother taught me to read and infected me with an appetite for reading; my parents were both lovers of books, words, and ideas without professional training or support, amateurs in the original and best sense.
(...)
But the disenchantment with academic life lasted quite a bit longer. I sensed that I belonged to a broader community of human beings than the community of scholars.
(...)
rather casually decided that I should have a religion,
(...)
rewarded for my intellectual work with money, status, and privileges.
(...)
The tension contracted between these long-established pleasures and my attraction to the hidden world of suffering.
(...)
The teaching that formed the central activity of my professional life seemed nothing like the lively and collaborative pursuit of ideas that had enchanted me as a student. I still lived the life of the mind, but it tumbled along quietly in the smallish corner of
(...)
from my job. I sold my car, gave away my furniture, put my books in storage, and said goodbye to my friends, I thought, perhaps, for good. On the one hand, once it was all done, I was more relaxed and happier than I had been in years. During the three years I spent in the Canadian
(...)
It is perhaps a cliché to say that our humanity is displayed best and enjoyed most when faced with serious limitations, but it is true for all that. Without distractions, we notice what is around us. Without rewards, living closely with others, we see how our activities and actions meet or fail to meet real human needs. We become more able to focus on what matters.
(...)
I tried to envision what authentic intellectual work might be,
(...)
I would be happiest teaching at my old liberal arts college, passing on to young people the habits and passions of leisured reflection that I had received myself.
(...)
it begins in hiding: in the inward thoughts of children and adults, in the quiet life of bookworms, in the secret glances at the morning sky on the way to work, or the casual study of birds from the deck chair. The hidden life of learning is its core, what matters about it.
(...)
Intellectual activity nurtures an inner life, a human core that is a refuge from suffering as much as it is a resource for reflection for its own sake.
(...)
that real learning is hidden learning,
(...)
It is evident that our human core—our inner resources for thought, reflection, and contemplation—cannot be nurtured by mass education, whether that be online learning or large lecture halls. It must be nurtured person to person or it will largely disappear from ordinary human experience, surviving only in disfigured and marginal ways.
(...)
If human beings flourish from their inner core rather than in the realm of impact and results, then the inner work of learning is fundamental to human happiness, as far from pointless wheel spinning as are the forms of tenderness we owe our children or grandchildren. Intellectual work is a form of loving service at least as important as cooking, cleaning, or raising children; as essential as the provision of shelter,
-
Introduction: Learning, Leisure, and Happiness
-
What does it mean to pursue learning for its own sake? It´s because of its effect on the learner rather than because of its outward results?
(...)
Questions about what is valuable in itself for human beings have to do with what a human being is and what our ultimate value is.
(...)
The Razor’s Edge. The Razor’s Edge is a book about a quest for knowledge. Universal, final, unquestionable knowledge.
(...)
we do not believe that we have a single basic orientation, it is very difficult to understand common stories about how our lives change.
(...)
Leisure In our pursuit of the basic forms and deviations of intellectual life, we have distinguished instrumental pursuits—things we do as means to ends—from ends, or pursuits worthy in themselves.
(...)
What would happen if we tried to organize our lives around merely instrumental pursuits, such as earning money or promoting justice?
(...)
Leisure is not merely recreation, which we might undertake for the sake of work—to relax or rest before beginning to labor anew. Rather, leisure is an inward space whose use could count as the culmination of all our endeavors. For Aristotle, only contemplation—the activity of seeing and understanding and savoring the world as it is—could be the ultimately satisfying use of leisure.
(...)
Indeed, leisure can emerge for contemplation even in the worst circumstances imaginable. The psychologist Victor Frankl wrote of what he called “the intensification of inner life” as a prisoner in Auschwitz. He meant in part his feelings for loved ones and remembered images of a life with dignity. He describes how vivid the beauty of trees and sunsets became to the prisoners, of the choices prisoners had to make to resist the overwhelming
(...)
What is the difference between a relaxing activity and the form of leisure that constitutes the end of one’s life? The difference is simply that we would not judge a cookout or the beach holiday or card playing to be the pinnacle of life. These activities are lovely, human, and necessary, but they do not draw on our highest capacities.
(...)
You may think that happiness must consist in more than one good.
(...)
But I do think it ought to be clear by the end of this book that contemplation in the form of learning is a robust human good, valuable for its own sake and worthy of time and resources. Its degree of centrality in a given human life I leave up in the air. I try to leave it so, at any rate.
(...)
The love of learning is general among human beings and pursued in a variety of ways and degrees. Unlike the love of the outdoors, however, we do not always recognize it. We miss it in its lowlier forms, and misidentify it in its higher ones. We do so because we have various desires and goals, in various invisible hierarchies. We have ultimate ends that may or may not be transparent to us.
(...)
But I hope also that this book will fall into the hands of nonprofessionals with intellectual interests, and that they will recognize themselves in
-
Chapter 1: A Refuge from the World
-
the human being in its dignity and splendor, we need to look in the other direction, the mysterious object of learning for its own sake.
(...)
Malcolm’s inner life, cultivated in prison, seems inseparable from his determined focus on the most important things, his effort to reach out for and stay in touch with reality.
(...)
Intellectual life turns out to be a sort of asceticism, a turning away from things within ourselves. Our desires for truth, for understanding, for insight are in constant conflict with other desires: our desires for social acceptance or an easy life, a particular personal goal or a desirable political outcome.
(...)
John concludes that detachment, rather than deprivation, is the goal of spiritual discipline:
(...)
One could reject one’s surroundings
(...)
the intellect reaches past whatever is given in immediate experience.
(...)
the intellect does not provide an escape from “the world” so much as it involves an escape from oneself,
(...)
smuggled out of prison to be published in the West. She said in an interview some years after her release: “In a way, it’s lucky to have a turbulent life. When everything is too easy, sometimes people lose their love of life, they lose enthusiasm.”60
(...)
I’ve already suggested that asceticism—sacrifice and suffering for the sake of some good—is fundamental to our dignity. We have many desires, impulses, and concerns. Not all of them are as good or as wholesome as any other. Moreover, the less good, the selfish, the banal, the superficial, and even the cruel are the easier goals to follow.
(...)
To be driven by a desire to understand, to see, to learn, to wonder takes determination and work,
(...)
The fact is that anyone can take the insights of others into their own mind and make them their own, without a special capacity of discovery. Imagining, reflecting, pondering the fact of one’s own susceptibility to illness and death can be a part of the most ordinary life.
(...)
They suggest that the authentic exercise of the love of learning either is discovered inadvertently, when we are isolated, or alienates us from our fellow human beings, even to the point of a martyrdom like Yves Simon’s or that of Socrates.
(...)
Because the dignity revealed by intellectual life is shared with others, because it is a way of connecting with human beings in other times and places, it preserves the individual by marking one out as a member of a broader human community.
(...)
Committed to a goal (Truth) beyond what mere social life might offer,
(...)
So intellectual life nurtures genuine forms of community, as is hinted by the “heart for humanity” and the “kinship with the whole human race”
(...)
Books, ideas, ordinary reflection on life—these are all ways to think about what we have in common as human beings. They can be ways for us to think about ourselves and our way of being in the world; about human strengths and weaknesses; about the nature of love or the nature of knowledge; about family, community, and authority; about the point (if there is one) of human existence. We ourselves become the objects of our study, and expertise becomes beside the point or even an obstacle. When the mind at leisure turns to our common pursuit of self-understanding as human beings, through novels or film, history or philosophy, or by the careful study of the people we know, it opens up our common humanity, with all of the fundamental questions and principles of human life. In this way humanistic learning has the power to form unusual or extraordinary kinds of human connection, a power beyond that of ordinary forms of common work or shared appreciation of a common goal.
(...)
The Hedgehog paints a picture of an alternative form of social life, one based not on economic class but on the bonds formed by common reflection on common humanity.
(...)
What good is intellectual life? It is a refuge from distress; a reminder of one’s dignity; a source of insight and understanding; a garden in which human aspiration is cultivated; a hollow of a wall to which one can temporarily withdraw from the current controversies to gain a broader perspective, to remind oneself of one’s universal human heritage. All this makes clear at the least that it is an essential good for human beings,
(...)
Augustine says that our ability to love one another depends on our capacity to learn from one another.
(...)
Understanding, like the sight of something beautiful or fascinating, calls out to be shared.
(...)
Delight in learning flows naturally into delight in teaching.
-
Chapter 2: Learning Lost and Found
-
Our vision of the love of learning is distorted by notions of economic and civic usefulness.
(...)
So we lie to ourselves that what we really care about is the realm of the intellect, when in reality we would sacrifice it in a second to our idols—comfort, wealth, and status.
(...)
We too seek education for material ends, ends that have been shaped by the wealth
(...)
The sun, sky, and clouds are everywhere, and the splendor of the outdoors is not hard to find, but we will spare no expense to travel to exotic mountaintops and wild deserts for the sake of fabulous photographs, publicly displayed.
(...)
Wealth is a tool, a means; it cannot stand on its own as an ultimate goal of a human life, not without destroying the other things we care about.
(...)
But if there is nothing else to intellectual life, if it is only a sophisticated pleasure held in place by whatever supports a high-status lifestyle, then it cannot change us. It remains a form of entertainment rather than a means of self-examination or personal transformation.
(...)
one takes to reading or study as an escape from difficult surroundings, finds in academic life a path out of one’s original environment,
(...)
Even within the love of learning itself there seems to be a desire for superiority as such, a drive to belong to an exclusive elite.
(...)
Contempt for the unenlightened
(...)
If the love of learning is easily confused or fused with desires for wealth and status, how can we escape ourselves and attain our fuller humanity?
(...)
The thundering inscription over the oracle at Delphi—“Know thyself!”—does not seem to mean “Know what you personally enjoy most at breakfast.” It seems rather to mean “Be aware that you are a limited human being and that you lack godlike powers.”
(...)
Philosophical discipline has prepared him for the grace that frees him from the delusions and compulsions of a life directed to wealth, comfort, and status.
(...)
he describes curiositas as a disordered love of knowledge, the love of learning degenerated to “the lust of the eyes.”20
(...)
unpleasant falsehood to an agreeable truth.”22
(...)
The thought that the love of learning seeks something beyond the senses, while the love of spectacle is enticed by the senses themselves,
(...)
The love of learning always wants more; the love of spectacle is satisfied at the surface, like someone scratching an itch rather than trying to heal a wound.28
(...)
Just as the love of spectacle seeks experience or sensation for its own sake, to do something just because it is possible,
(...)
Yet we do something like this when we remain trapped in our endlessly busy, workaholic selves. We work for the sake of money, which supports our continued work. We work even harder, for even more money, which we have even less time to spend on anything but supporting our work. Work for the sake of work is pointless;
(...)
We confuse our means to ends with the ends themselves when we are trapped at the surfaces of things. Work is for the sake of a happy life, not work itself;
(...)
But while spectacles are useful for raising questions, for opening up forms of inquiry, or for resting in awe at something beyond oneself, they are not ends in themselves.
(...)
past grief over a loss to gratitude
(...)
Whereas the lover of spectacle skims over the surfaces of things and is satisfied with mere images and feelings, the serious person looks for depth, reaches for more, longs for reality.
(...)
To be serious is not to sense the weight of the world on one’s shoulders at every living minute. It is simply to be oriented by the important things, to keep one’s mind in a general way on what really matters.
(...)
Our successful pursuit of happiness requires a desire for truth, but especially a desire for the truth about life,
(...)
Cyberlife would be a human life without depth, a life at the surfaces, a life in which we may as well revive the gladiator shows and devote ourselves to the thrill of watching them—especially
(...)
Certainly it seems that the cost of truth holds us back. I once asked one of my students why, at gatherings, students would sooner look at their phones than talk to one another. “Oh,” he said, “it’s so much easier not to engage!” Encounter involves a risk. It provides inevitable, constant pain as the price for its real satisfactions.
(...)
Elena Ferrante’s broad and deep Neapolitan novels consist partly of a meditation on the relation between intellectual life and ambition, the love of learning on the one hand and the striving for social advancement on the other.
Subrayado (amarillo) - Posición 2204
-
Chapter 3: The Uses of Uselessness
-
The learning for its own sake that formed a key part of anglophone intellectual culture in the twentieth century, which shaped and expressed its egalitarian ideals, has gradually been traded for learning for social utility, for the sake of “making a difference.”
(...)
No one lives a life without any practical tasks, and some will find their lives more satisfying if the leisure of intellectual
(...)
Sullivan finds that comedy is one of the little human things, totally useless and yet completely essential for anything we would recognize as human flourishing.
(...)
How can intellectual life help us to serve others?
(...)
their assumption of the responsibility of being transformed by what they learn, their treatment of learning as a part of getting down into the depths of life.
(...)
a reader or thinker driven by the desire for the weightier and the better—what I have called the virtue of seriousness—will find the human core even in books with a partial view. It is the virtue of seriousness that permits our thinking and learning to shape our moral lives and our lives with others.
(...)
Ought every use of the intellect for a social purpose be thought of as delusive and shallow?
(...)
is obvious and widely noticed that literature provides a broadening of our perspective: we sympathize in our imaginations with human beings different from us—people of different races, genders, religions, times, and places.
(...)
When I say that intellectual life cultivates our aspirations, I do not mean that it expands career choices, although of course it may do that. We may discover a desire to be a firefighter or a forest ranger through exercising the love of learning.
(...)
human aspiration is deeper in range and broader in scope than our outward life. We aspire to ways of being: to be wise, or kind; to be vast in understanding, steadfast in truth, humble in success, witty in adversity.
(...)
The exercise of the love of learning is a form of the inner life; it requires withdrawal from the pursuit of wealth and status, from politics and the pursuit of justice.
(...)
The civil exchange of opinions can create a veneer of tolerance, but it requires no serious thinking. Opinions rarely change. Nor, when they do, is their change necessarily the sign of any intellectual engagement. Opinions are fixed in place by a network of socially directed impulses of fear and ambition. We change our minds when we change our clique, our social circle.
(...)
Our social world is our intellectual comfort zone. To break its bonds, so as to actually learn something, requires a sort of intellectual violence:
(...)
The love of learning faces competition with many other human elements, our desires for the surfaces. Accordingly, to cultivate it requires rules of discipline, so that the difficult things are made easier and easy things more difficult.
(...)
Education begins from the assumption that students are capable of taking responsibility for their own learning and that they are naturally motivated, even driven from within to pursue fundamental questions.
(...)
That practice is called teaching, and it consists in the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind that underlie all serious thinking, reflection, and discovery. Good teaching is manifest to those who receive it, and it thus inspires a sometimes absurd gratitude; so too, its value is abundantly evident to those who practice it.
(...)
But elite professors, small though they be in number, have a great deal of power that they choose daily not to use. They choose to be content providers in anonymous classrooms, and they choose not to fight to preserve or to restore the quality of the education that they themselves received as students.
-
Epilogue: The Everyday Intellectual
-
a human being is more than an instrument of personal or public benefit. Intellectual life is a source of human dignity exactly because it is something beyond politics and social life. But withdrawal from the world is also necessary because intellectual life is, as I have said, an ascetic practice.
(...)
Let us give free play to the human intellect and the human imagination, in an attempt to ground all that is in our hearts in what matters most.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario