I have been working on a couple of particularly challenging projects recently. They really required some lateral thinking to a number of complex issues to ensure their preservation. Whilst I did do some research online to see if others had any great ideas, it did occur to me that on this occasion (and perhaps a lot more often), it really was something that I needed to turn MY attention to.
From a young age, we’re taught to expect that the truly important ideas must lie outside of us, usually very far outside of us in time and place. Someone else – cleverer, wiser and more prestigious than we – will already have hatched the crucial thoughts and it is our task to pay homage to their intelligence, to learn what they had to say, to be as faithful as possible to their words and to align our perspective with theirs.
As part of this process, we will need to read a lot of books, listen to teachers and write untold numbers of essays about pre-existing intellectual authorities. We will find that the best way to convince anyone of anything we might be saying is to do our utmost to hide that we may have formulated the idea ourselves and instead to add copious footnotes to show that we got it all from someone else, preferably someone with a prestigious name and a long publishing record.
One of the most foolhardy answers to give to any enquiry as to where a thought originated is to remark that it simply popped into our very own heads. Our heads are not understood to be where anything especially valuable might lie. This readiness to submit to outside expertise has its evident merits: a society in which everyone refused to listen to those who had come before them would squander a lot of time, would be needlessly presumptuous and would have to keep reinventing wheels.
Not all good ideas have yet been had – and our minds are as good a place as any in which they might one day hatch. We need to develop a greater loyalty to what is going on in these minds: we have met hundreds of people, experienced a great many places, entertained a vast variety of sensations and perceptions. Our minds are stocked. We have read more than Socrates, we have had as many – if not more – experiences than Plato. We don’t have to go back to university to do yet another degree. We already have the raw material with which to produce valuable insights. We are simply lacking confidence.
One thinker who was especially irked by this tendency to underrate our own minds was the sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. He took particularly objection to the habit (already prevalent in his day) of manically footnoting and quoting other people in academic works: “Whenever I ask an acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of scab and arse.” This kind of reluctance to put trust in our own experiences might not be problematic if other minds could be relied upon faithfully to express everything we had thought and felt; if, as it were, they knew all our arses and all our scabs. But, as Montaigne recognised, other people, even very clever ones, will be silent on a great many important themes that circulate in our minds. If we allow existing thinkers to define the boundaries of our curiosity, we will needlessly hold back the development of our minds. Montaigne was criticising the impulse to think that the truth must always lie far from us, in another climate, in an ancient library, in the books of people who lived long ago.
It is a question of whether access to genuinely valuable things must be structurally limited to a handful of geniuses born between the construction of the Parthenon in Athens and the sack of Rome, or whether as Montaigne daringly proposed, they may be open to you and me as well. He wanted to point us to an unexpected source of wisdom and insight: our own craniums. If we attend properly to our ideas and learn to consider ourselves plausible candidates for a thinking life, it is, implied Montaigne, open to all of us to arrive in the coming days at insights no less profound than those in the great ancient books.
The thought is not easy. We are educated to associate virtue with submission to authorities, rather than with an exploration of the volumes daily transcribed within ourselves by our perceptual mechanisms. Montaigne tried to return us to ourselves. “We know how to say, ‘This is what Cicero said’; ‘This is morality for Plato’; ‘These are the ipsissima verba of Aristotle.’ But what have we got to say? What judgements do we make? What are we doing? A parrot could talk as well as we do.”
Italian artist, Michelangelo, defined his own attitude to his work as a sculptor: the statue is already in the stone, my work is to liberate it. Just like Michelangelo’s stones, there are already all kinds of great thoughts in our heads: it is merely that we need to liberate them from the dense block of our own hesitancy. We suffer from excessive respect. We are taught to admire the minds of infinite, baffling but astonishing figures like Michelangelo, Aristotle, Plato, Montaigne. We are invited to stand in awe at the achievements of these geniuses but also – somewhere along the way – we are made to feel that their thought processes must be quasi-magical and that it is ultimately simply mysterious how they were ever able to come up with the ideas they have had.
The reason why we disavow so much of what passes through our minds is under-confidence. We kill off our most promising thoughts for fear of seeming strange to ourselves and others (which explains why small children are, in their own way, so much more interesting than the average adult: they have not yet become experts in what not to say or think). But when we censor and close down, when we take fright and try not to think, is exactly the moment when the so-called genius starts to take note of what is happening within them. We operate with a false picture of intelligence when we identify it too strongly with what is exotic and utterly beyond us. It is something far more provocative than this. Clever is what we all can be when we pay careful attention to what is truly passing through consciousness. We all have very similar and very able minds; where geniuses differ is in their more robust inclinations to study them properly.
And yes, with persistence, these obstacles to preserving these wonderful pieces of furniture were overcome.
