Dear Friend,
I am going to assume, since you are in college, that you arrived there with some genuine curiosity intact. This is not something to be taken for granted. The institution you now inhabit has a long and largely successful history of processing curiosity into credential, of taking young people who wanted to understand things and turning them out four years later wanting only to be employable and approved of. That you are reading this at all suggests you may have some resistance to that fate. I hope so. What follows is my attempt to help you keep it.
Let me begin with something that will be confirmed within your first semester if it has not been already: the people most visibly in love with ideas at a university are very often the people least interested in following them. I mean the professors, the doctoral candidates, the tenure-track philosophers with their office hours and their syllabi and their air of embattled seriousness. Watch them carefully. Not in the seminar, where they perform admirably, but in the hallways afterward, when a student says something that doesn’t fit. The flinch is almost imperceptible. The slight rearrangement of the face. And then the redirect, patient and lethal: That’s an interesting point, though I think what Habermas would say here is… The student’s idea, which may have been genuinely interesting, gets folded back into the existing literature, filed, and neutralized. This happens so smoothly and so often that most students stop noticing it. Many stop having the ideas in the first place.
This is not malice. I want to be precise about that, because unearned cynicism is as lazy as unearned optimism. These are often intelligent people who genuinely love their subject. But they have spent so many years inside a particular structure of thought that they have lost the ability to imagine standing outside it. The structure has become the furniture of their minds, and anyone who questions the furniture is not raising an interesting philosophical point but threatening something closer to home. This is human, and understandable, and you should resist it in yourself with everything you have.
The particular vice I want to warn you about has a seductive quality that makes it difficult to name as a vice at all. It presents itself as erudition. It feels like sophistication. What it actually is, is the substitution of categorization for thinking.
Here is how it works. You read something, or hear an argument, or encounter a position on some question of ethics or politics or epistemology. And instead of asking the only question that actually matters, which is: is this true, and how would I know? You ask instead: what school does this belong to? You locate the idea on the map. You note which tradition it draws from, which prior thinkers it resembles, which camp would claim it. And having done this, you feel that you have understood it. You have not understood it. You have indexed it. These are not the same activity, and confusing them is the beginning of a kind of intellectual death that is especially tragic because it looks, from the outside, exactly like intellectual life.
The label is not the thing. The category is not the argument. Knowing that a position is broadly consequentialist tells you almost nothing about whether it is correct, just as knowing that a man is broadly conservative or broadly progressive tells you almost nothing about whether his specific argument on a specific question deserves your agreement. And yet entire academic careers are built on this kind of labeling, this endless cross-referencing of positions against positions, schools against schools, with the question of actual truth receding further into the background with every passing year.
I am not exaggerating for rhetorical effect, though I am told I occasionally do that. I am describing, with what I hope is precision, the dominant mode of intellectual discourse in the contemporary university. The question is not: is this right? The question is: is this Foucauldian enough? Does this adequately engage with the post-structuralist critique? Has the author demonstrated sufficient awareness of the relevant literature? The literature has become the subject. The world, which the literature was presumably about, has been left outside to wait.
Now, you might reasonably ask: but what is the alternative? Surely I am not suggesting you ignore the tradition entirely, arrive at conclusions through sheer intuition, reinvent every wheel? No. That would be the other failure mode, and it is nearly as common. The person who dismisses philosophy as impractical abstraction, who says he has no time for all that and prefers to deal with the real world, is nearly always someone who has absorbed a great deal of philosophy without knowing it, secondhand and unexamined, through the ambient assumptions of his class and culture and moment. He has a metaphysics. He has an epistemology. He has ethical commitments he would die defending. He simply cannot name them, and therefore cannot examine them, and therefore cannot tell you where they came from or whether they are any good. That is not independence. That is captivity without the dignity of knowing you are a captive.
So read. Read seriously and widely and with the deliberate intention of being changed by what you encounter. Read the thinkers who built the frameworks that still organize how educated people think, whether they know it or not. Read Hume, who had the nerve to point out that most of what we take for certain knowledge is actually inference and habit, and then had the additional nerve to suggest this was probably fine. Read Mill, who understood that the case for liberty is not sentimental but empirical: societies that permit dissent and disagreement produce better outcomes, including better ideas, than societies that don’t. Read Marx, not because he was right about everything, because he was demonstrably wrong about a great deal, but because anyone who wants to understand how material conditions shape consciousness and culture and the production of ideas cannot afford to skip him. Read Nietzsche, carefully and without the cultish reverence that makes him useless, and note what he was actually arguing as opposed to what various unpleasant movements have since claimed he was arguing. Read the people your professors are suspicious of. Read the people your professors love, and then read their most serious critics. Read popular magazines and blogs – just because they are new does not mean they are lacking.
And then, having done all of this, reserve to yourself the sovereign right to disagree.
This is the part that nobody at the university will tell you plainly, so I will: the entire apparatus of academic credentialing is designed, however unintentionally, to make disagreement with the established framework feel like incompetence. If you question the dominant approach in your department, you will be told, gently or less gently, that you have not yet fully understood it. That more reading is required. That the objection you are raising was raised before and answered in a paper you clearly haven’t encountered yet. This may occasionally be true. But it is deployed so reflexively, and so conveniently, that you should treat it with some suspicion. The demand for more credentialed deference before you are permitted to hold a view of your own is, in many cases, not an intellectual argument. It is a power arrangement presenting itself as one.
The truly great thinkers, the ones whose ideas outlasted their institutional affiliations and their academic reputations, were almost universally difficult in exactly this way. Keynes told the economists they had it wrong and proceeded to explain in what specific respects, drawing on mathematics and philosophy and direct observation of actual economies, without much evident anxiety about whether this made him a proper economist. Orwell sat down and wrote, in plain declarative English, things that the entire literary and political establishment of his day considered embarrassing, naive, or reactionary, and turned out to be almost entirely correct. Bertrand Russell managed to do serious technical philosophy, popular science writing, political journalism, and moral philosophy simultaneously, and the people who complained that he wasn’t staying in his lane were, almost without exception, less interesting than he was.
What these people shared was not genius alone, though they had that. It was the refusal to let their thinking be administered by someone else. They had internalized the tradition deeply enough to know where it was wrong, and they had the nerve to say so in public.
Let me say something about cynicism, since I have been accused of it and am perhaps demonstrating it here. There is a distinction worth making. Cynicism as a default, as a posture adopted before the evidence is in, as a way of signaling worldliness without doing the work of actually understanding the world, is as much an intellectual failure as credulity. The undergraduate who walks into every lecture with his arms folded, radiating skepticism, performing his refusal to be impressed, is not a critical thinker. He is a bore, and a lazy one.
But there is another kind of cynicism, earned rather than performed, that is simply the refusal to be deceived by things that are designed to deceive you. The university, for all its genuine virtues, contains a great deal that is designed, consciously or not, to make you feel that conforming to its expectations is the same thing as thinking well. The credentialing process, the hierarchy of citation, the performance of theoretical sophistication, the social cost of disagreeing with the person who will eventually sign off on your degree: these are not neutral features of an innocent landscape. They have effects on what gets thought and what gets said, and those effects are not always in the direction of truth.
Noticing this is not paranoia. It is observation. And you are allowed to act on it.
Now I want to say something that requires a different kind of directness, and which your professors will almost certainly never say to you, because it touches on a subject they have collectively decided to regard as an embarrassment. I want to talk about your faith. And I want to do so not in the soft, accommodating language of the campus chaplain, but plainly, because what is coming for it in that building deserves plain speech.
The university, as an institution, has been culturally left-wing for so long that it has largely forgotten this is a description rather than a natural condition. The median academic has held progressive political and social views since at least the middle of the last century, and the distribution has only tightened since. This is not a conspiracy; it is a self-selecting culture, reinforced over generations, in which certain assumptions have calcified into the unexamined furniture of the professional mind. The irony is extraordinary. These are people who will lecture you at length about the dangers of unexamined assumptions, who have made a career of interrogating the hidden premises of every text they encounter, and who have never once seriously interrogated the hidden premises of their own politics or their own contempt for the tradition you were raised in.
There is also, let us be honest about the economics, something almost comically convenient about radical politics on a tenured salary. The professor who spends a semester explaining why capitalism is a system of organized oppression does so from the security of a contract that the most devoted capitalist would envy: guaranteed employment, sabbaticals, a pension, the inability of the market to reach him in his office. He has, in the memorable formulation that applies here, an overpowered mind and an underpowered income, and the gap between them is filled with theory. The revolutionary fervor of the permanently comfortable is one of the more durable features of academic life, and you should keep it clearly in view when someone in a faculty position begins explaining to you why the values you were raised with are naive, provincial, or embarrassing.
Which brings me to your faith directly.
If you come from a Christian background, and hold to it sincerely, you should expect the university to work on it. Not always frontally. Rarely with declared hostility, since declared hostility would be too easy to recognize and resist. What you will encounter is something more patient and more effective: the slow, lateral erosion of the assumption that your faith is a serious intellectual position worthy of your continued respect. It will be treated, in seminar after seminar, as a historical artifact, a sociological phenomenon, a psychological comfort mechanism, or at best a private matter that one keeps politely out of public discourse. The idea that it might be simply true, that the texts it draws from might contain genuine wisdom that secular philosophy has consistently underestimated, will not be raised. You will have to raise it yourself, if at all, and you will do so against a current.
The Apostle Paul, writing to the church at Colossae, offered a warning that has not aged badly: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.” That letter is two thousand years old. The phenomenon it describes is considerably older, and shows no sign of retirement. The pressure to substitute fashionable framework for genuine rootedness is not a modern invention. It is simply, in the modern university, unusually well-funded and impressively credentialed.
This does not mean you should refuse to engage. Quite the opposite. The Christian intellectual tradition is one of the richest in the history of human thought, and the person who retreats from the seminar rather than engaging it is squandering something precious. Augustine wrestled with the best philosophy available to him and came out the other side with his faith deepened, not diminished. Aquinas read Aristotle, then considered by the Church to be a dangerously secular influence, and produced the Summa. C.S. Lewis, who knew the skeptical arguments as well as anyone, found them insufficient. The tradition has faced serious intellectual opposition before. It did not collapse. The fact that your professor finds it gauche is not, I would suggest, the strongest argument ever mounted against it.
What you must guard against is the softer surrender: the gradual, almost imperceptible process by which you stop defending your convictions not because they have been refuted but because defending them has become socially costly. This is how most faith is lost in universities. Not through dramatic confrontation. Through a slow accumulation of small concessions, each one feeling reasonable in isolation, until you look up one day and discover you have traded the thing itself for the approval of people who would not have respected you regardless.
Paul again, writing to the Romans, and putting it with a clarity that no subsequent commentary has improved upon: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The renewing of the mind is the goal. But renewal is not the same as replacement. A mind renewed in genuine understanding of the tradition it came from is a formidable thing. A mind emptied of that tradition and filled with whatever the department currently requires is simply a more expensive kind of vacancy.
The virtues your faith asks of you, honesty, humility, the willingness to be wrong, the commitment to something beyond your own advancement, are not obstacles to serious intellectual life. They are, if anything, better preparation for it than the ambient careerism that passes for intellectual seriousness in most graduate programs. The person who genuinely believes they are accountable to something beyond the approval of their dissertation committee thinks differently, and often more clearly, than the person for whom the committee is the highest court of appeal.
Hold to what you know. Test it rigorously, because it deserves testing and because faith that has not been tested is worth rather less than faith that has. But do not let the social pressure of an institution mistake its own parochialism for universal sophistication. The secular academy’s confidence in its own enlightenment is, when examined closely, one of the more remarkable acts of collective self-flattery in the history of organized thought.
Here, then, is what I would ask of you, concretely.
When you encounter a new idea, resist the urge to file it before you have evaluated it. Ask what it is actually claiming. Ask what evidence or argument is offered in its support. Ask what would have to be true for it to be wrong, and then ask whether those things are true. Do this even with ideas you find immediately congenial, perhaps especially with those, since the ideas that feel most right on first encounter are precisely the ones most likely to be flattering your existing prejudices rather than extending your understanding.
When a professor, or a text, or a fellow student tells you that your view belongs to such-and-such a tradition or school, receive that as a piece of potentially useful historical information and nothing more. It tells you where the idea has been before. It tells you nothing about whether the idea is correct. Do not let the identification of intellectual ancestors substitute for the evaluation of the idea on its own terms.
When you find yourself holding a position, ask yourself whether you hold it because you have followed the argument carefully and found it persuasive, or whether you hold it because holding it makes you a member of a group you want to belong to. These are both reasons people hold positions. Only one of them is intellectually respectable. The other is, and I say this with as much directness as I can manage, a form of cowardice.
Be willing to reach conclusions that nobody in your immediate circle will applaud. The conclusions most worth reaching are frequently unpopular, not because unpopularity is a sign of truth, which it is not, but because the popular conclusions are the ones that have already been arrived at by the path of least resistance. If your thinking never produces a result that surprises or unsettles the people around you, it is worth asking whether you are really thinking or merely producing variations on what you already know they believe.
A word on what this independence costs, because I would be doing you a disservice not to mention it.
It costs belonging, at least some of it. The person who will not be categorized is often experienced by those who want to categorize as hostile or unreliable. You will have views that please the left on some questions and the right on others, that satisfy the religious on some days and the secular on others, that get you called naive by the sophisticated and cynical by the idealistic. You will occasionally find yourself agreeing with people you consider deeply wrong on other matters, and disagreeing with people whose general company you prefer. This is uncomfortable. It is also, I would argue, a reliable sign that you are actually thinking rather than performing.
It costs the security of a ready-made intellectual home. The person who identifies firmly with a school or tradition always has somewhere to go when things get confusing: back to the texts, back to the founding arguments, back to the community of co-believers. The person who refuses that identification has to sit with the confusion longer and work their way through it without a map. This is harder. It is also, in my experience, the only process by which you arrive at views that are actually yours.
And it costs, occasionally, the approval of the institution that is currently responsible for certifying your intelligence. This is a real cost and I will not minimize it. Grades matter, for a while. Recommendations matter. The goodwill of the people with power over your immediate future matters. I am not telling you to be reckless with these things. I am telling you not to let them determine what you think.
You are, if you are the age I imagine, somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two, which means you are at the precise moment in life when the habits of mind you form will be the hardest to break and the most consequential to keep. The university will offer you a great deal that is genuinely valuable: access to serious thinkers, time to read, the company of people who care about ideas, occasional contact with the real thing. Take all of that. Be grateful for it.
But do not hand over your judgment in exchange. Do not agree to think within the boxes because the boxes are comfortable and the people who built them have impressive titles. Do not let the desire for approval, which is a perfectly natural and human desire, determine what conclusions your reasoning is permitted to reach. Do not mistake the map of ideas for the ideas themselves, or the history of a debate for its resolution.
Think. Not in the manner approved by your department, not in the style that will be recognized and credentialed and rewarded, but actually, genuinely, with the full weight of your intelligence applied to the question of what is actually true.
The world has more than enough people who can tell you what Foucault said about power, or what the neo-Kantian response to utilitarianism looks like, or where the current debate in analytic metaphysics stands. It is not desperately short of credentialed expertise in the management of existing frameworks.
What it is short of, perpetually and urgently, is people who can look at a question without first checking which answer their team requires, and then follow the argument wherever it honestly leads.
That is what I am asking you to be. It is harder than it sounds. It is also, I suspect, the only version of intellectual life worth living.
With all sincerity, and a not inconsiderable degree of impatience on your behalf,
A fellow traveler who learned most of this the hard way