When I was a grad student and a nihilist, I perceived that my closest professors also held nihilist assumptions, but they didn’t draw nihilist conclusions.  Of course this is still going on.

They too believed that judgments of good and evil have no rational foundation, but went about their daily life as though this made no difference.  They married, raised families, gossiped and argued as though these things actually made sense.

In a certain sense, so did I.  I took care of my children; I didn’t take up with other men’s wives.  But it bothered me that on my assumptions the central concerns of my life were mere preferences -- and it didn’t seem to bother them that on their assumptions the same thing was true of all of theirs.

My supervising professor found my attitude amusing.  Existential anxiety is so old fashioned.  Why all the anguish?  We’re not nihilists, we’re liberals.  Since judgments of good and evil have no rational foundation, why, then, we’ll all just get along.

This was expressed with many references to non-judgmentalism, moral neutrality, purely procedural democracy, John Rawls, and the virtue of doubting everything, which my supervisor called negative capacity.

But if judgments of good and evil have no rational foundation, I wondered, then why is getting along any better than cutting each other’s throats, and why is being doubtful about it better than being certain?  I saw my professors as smart but weak-nerved thinkers who couldn’t face the implications of their nihilism.  I resolved that my nerves would be stronger.

In aftertime (no longer a nihilist), I came to think I was mistaken.  There are no nihilists; there are only pretended nihilists.

The soft sort of nihilist certainly draws some of the conclusions of his premises:  Duties can’t be shirked, but preferences are infinitely fluid.  So if there are no duties, but only preferences, nihilism gives him a pre-arranged excuse for – why, anything he might need one for.  Of course the only reason one needs to prepare excuses is that one does know one’s duties.  So he isn’t really a nihilist after all.

But I was pretending too.  I thought I could accept my duties; what I couldn’t accept was that I had not made them myself.  I would rather have had Nothing than submit.  But then – even if not for the reason my supervisor gave – his mockery was right.  For why all the anguish?

After all, I had got what I wanted.

If you are a person of faith seeking admission to grad school, more power to you!  But be sure that the persons whom you ask to write letters of recommendation for you exercise caution.

I once received a note from an acquaintance at a highly ranked religious university, who was flabbergasted that the student he had recommended for graduate studies – probably the best he had ever taught -- hadn’t been admitted.  He wondered whether I might have any idea why he wasn’t.

The young man was intelligent, strongly motivated, and had good character.  He had done excellent undergraduate papers, and both his grade point average and his GRE scores were stellar.  His personal statement was very good, and all of his recommenders praised him to the skies.  By every conceivable measure, he was superior.

But.

One of the applicant’s professors had naïvely devoted a few sentences of his letter of recommendation to what a wonderful Christian the young man was.

Apparently the writer didn’t know that at many secular universities (and even at some nominally religious ones), that is the kiss of death.  He might as well have remarked that the student wore a codpiece, spoke only in Klingon, or was an expert in the application of thumbscrews.

Perhaps that wasn’t the reason for the student's rejection.  But the chances are good that it was.

So if you are applying to a secular graduate school, and if any of your recommenders are persons of faith, make sure they know that the members of admissions committees probably aren’t.

It’s fine for your letter writers to describe your intellectual strengths and weaknesses.  Are you intelligent, imaginative, and logically rigorous?  Do you possess initiative?  Are you willing to follow evidence wherever it may lead?  Are you collegial, and open to hearing new points of view, whether in class or conversation?  Do you take constructive criticism in good spirit?  When you disagree with others, do you speak with respect?  Do you have good reasons for wanting to enter grad school?  Is your interest in teaching and research strong, serious, and persistent?  All that is grist for the mill.

But these souls should be as silent about your religious beliefs as though they were proposing you for a quiet civil service job under Nero or Domitian.

Don’t explain this to your recommenders yourself.  You don’t want to be the sort of person who tries to teach his teachers.  But it wouldn’t be presumptuous to share this post with them.

Maybe they don't need it.  But they might.

Surely the soul of Friedrich Nietzsche is pierced with lances whenever a page of his work is touched by an interpreter.  He has forever lost the chance to make himself clear.  He has been praised as a great thinker, dismissed as a mediocre poet, derided as a fountain of lunacy; his thought has been classified under every heading from existentialism, to fascism, to far worse.  Perhaps it is all true – or all false – but there is reason to believe that the real Friedrich Nietzsche remains lost to us in darkness.

This was a night he brought upon himself, for he claimed that thought is only a relation among our psychological drives, that rationality is only a kind of thought we cannot get free of, that conscious intentions are only a kind of symptomology, and that we are living at our best when we are in some sense unconscious.

Some, supposing one of the fates of the damned to be idiocy, would be content to leave the matter there.  But deciding who is damned and who is not is not a proper work for humans, and it is fair to ask whether a man who makes assertions like Nietzsche’s can be understood at all.  Just a few should try.

Yet there is an undeniable streak of diabolism in Nietzsche.  Those who are temperamentally immune to his spell may take this as a mere metaphor if they like – but he has the power to possess, as he himself was possessed.  He spoke of himself as a new pen that something was trying out.  Shouldn’t he be left alone?  Why risk infection?

I regard this as a cogent argument, and I would never expose young minds to him.  But the day is long past for quarantine:  The infection is already abroad, and walking nihilism is far more prevalent than walking pneumonia.  We should analyze a thinker like Nietzsche for the same reason that we culture diphtheria or dissect hookworms:  To study cures.

In my own case, three decades past, there was another reason, for mine was one of those young minds which should never have been exposed to him.  When finally, by sheer mercy, I was set loose from what the old rite called the glamour of evil, I found for a time a continuing infirmity in the powers that had been touched by it.  The close proximity of his books affected me as you might be affected by the close proximity of a caged but snarling wolf, or as the smell of almonds might affect someone who had once suffered cyanide poisoning.

This was the moment of my discovery of penance.  Although the Protestantism in which I had been raised had no penitential tradition, in my naïve way I had read enough to know what it was.  In the spirit of accepting a penance, I forced myself to submit to the medicinal pain of writing once more about Nietzsche, this time as a diagnostician and epidemiologist, for the benefit of others.

As doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient, so perhaps a penitent who assigns himself his penance.  But the balm was applied by the divine physician who was really in charge, and the treatment was successful.  I have no words for the relief:  Only certain passages of music, which even now breathe the scent of the fields of heaven.

Question:

I just wanted to write to say thank you for “The Future of the Life of the Mind,” and for your references to the Sertillanges book in other blog posts.  Encouragement in the “traditional” intellectual life is rare.

I’m also encouraged by your observation that intellectual organizations these days are "all an experiment and adventure.”  Currently I am in an MSIS program (that’s Master of Science in Information Sciences), and we hear the same thing about the careers we’re going into in libraries and archives and who knows what else.  It can be too easy to assume that everything is decaying, the culture is collapsing, etc. etc., and voices like yours are invaluable to remind us that no, it’s not all horrible.

Relatedly, could you give a few examples of those "few beautiful successes” that you refer to?  Or advice on how to organize communities of serious thought?

Reply:

I can’t tell you how to organize them, because I don’t have an organizational gene.  (There is another notch on my chromosome where the sports gene ought to be, but that’s another story).  Still, I think can tell you a little more about their varieties.

Probably very few communities of serious thought develop because someone says, “Say, let’s develop a community of serious thought.”  At present, most such communities organize in the hope of doing some part of the work that universities ought to be doing but aren’t.

Consider for example Thomas Aquinas College, in Santa Paula, California, which aims at providing a unified liberal arts education.  Students have very few electives, but they acquire the intellectual virtues; they are taught how to think.  By contrast, the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, in Arlington, Virginia, aims at providing graduate-level professional training in a single discipline, the healing of the mind, but from a consistently Catholic understanding of the nature of the human person.  Considering the depth of the Catholic philosophical tradition, you might think that this would be one of the perspectives on display in a public university, but you would be wrong.

A third example is the religious orders which practice scholarship in the service of their spiritual vocations.  Included here are those lay members called tertiaries, who live in the world.  Although religious orders may seem very unlike the former two examples, they are alike in that their work too is part of a broader work.  In the case of the Dominicans, for instance, that broader work is preaching, teaching, and using the intellect to combat deadly moral, intellectual, and spiritual fallacies.

You may think I shouldn’t include religious orders in this list of “new” forms of community, since they have been around for many centuries.  But there are always new orders with new charisms, as well as old ones whose charisms are renewed.  I think many of the orders that practice scholarship may be doing things differently as universities continue to forget what universities once tried to be.

For now, perhaps the most important dimension of variation among the new communities of scholars is just what relationship they have to establishment universities.

Some come into being to compete with them.  This task is challenging for many reasons, not least of them the fact that accreditation organizations are often dominated by persons who are hostile to their aims.

Others exist as parts of establishment universities, for example as Western Civilization honors programs, right in the belly of the beast.  A few organize in the ambitious hope of encouraging the renewal of their host institutions, but most begin with the more modest goal of providing enclaves of sanity.

Surprisingly, officials in the host institutions sometimes welcome such organizations, if only for a while, just to placate donors and other parties who are looking over their shoulders.  On the other hand, since such organizations cannot be truly independent of their hosts, they risk what is called “capture” by hostile forces in the host institutions, and then their mission is corrupted.

Still other scholarly communities exist alongside establishment universities, offering resources, encouragement, and comradeship for the dwindling number of sane scholars who continue to work in those schools.  The more successful of such para-university organizations cultivate collaboration between scholars in the university and in the para-university, while maintaining financial and organizational independence.  But they cannot exist in isolation from the surrounding community.  Because they need to disseminate what they learn, and also because they need to attract donors, their success depends largely on community outreach.

Too much success can be dangerous, because it makes such organizations targets for another kind of “capture”; over time they may drift from their missions in the same way most institutions do.  The smartest ones try to set up safeguards, if not to prevent drift – that may be impossible – then at least to slow it down.

The last sort of scholarly community lives more or less apart from universities.  Such forms of association are neither competitors with universities, parts of them, nor deliberately crafted to exist alongside them.  I say “more or less” because at least for now, it would be virtually impossible for them to live just as though universities did not exist.

For example, scholars who are members of religious orders may have been recruited as university students, and may have received their scholarly training in universities.  For obvious reasons, though, as the universities continue to go crazy, such patterns become problematic.  If change is not already under discussion, I expect that it will be.

In the meantime, big and little tremors are taking place in scholarly and professional associations, as the old ones succumb to institutional sclerosis, ideological mania, or both, and as new kinds of networks are emerging.  Thank God, frivolities like Twitter are not the only results of the new technologies.  Scholars can now communicate, associate, and even publish in all sorts of new ways.  Here too, not all new developments are good.  But some of them are very good, and some may become better than they are.

Despite the rigidity of the establishment universities, the world of scholarship is increasingly fluid.  Twenty years from now, much of what I have just written will have to be revised.

In the meantime, don’t assume that if you don’t see anything, then nothing is happening.  That is like thinking that the mother isn’t pregnant, just because you can’t see the baby in the womb.  The first movements may be like the fluttering of a moth, but in time you can feel the child kick.

There are moments when I could imagine being a lexicographer.  One of the most interesting stories of the last few centuries must be how rapturous intensity of feeling came to be regarded as a good thing rather than a bad one, and the terms we use to describe it became words of praise.

This is especially true of the word “passion”:  “I just love your passion for your work.”  “The applicant is passionately committed to his studies.”  “Senator Fogbound has the rare ability to arouse the passion of his followers.”

Contrast that last line with the view of the American Founders, who thought of passion as the great danger of republics.  Among their chief goals was to make legislation so slow that any passion which does arise will have ample time to dissipate.

Understand me:  Emotions aren’t bad in themselves, as the Stoics morbidly thought.  But to be good, they have to be regulated.  Until very recently in history, almost all wise men agreed that such feelings as fear, confidence, appetite, anger, pity, pleasure, and pain may be felt both too much and too little.  What if I am so fearful that I cannot face danger, or so fearless that I cannot learn caution?

Unfortunately, when we praise someone for being passionate, we don’t mean that he feels his emotions at the right times, toward the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way.  We merely mean that he feels them intensely – that he is always either in the grip of an excitement, revving up to an excitement, or coming down from an excitement which we happen to find attractive ourselves.

Even science museums and children’s indoor play centers strive for sensory overload.  Love lyrics sound as though they were written by sociopaths and stalkers; they are so often about losing one’s mind, or losing control.  The unforgivable sin in politics isn’t to be wicked, but to be boring.

There is a lot of cultural blame to go around.  The day the poet Shelley rhymed “madness” with “gladness,” he committed a fatal error.  But the philosopher Hume was just as mad when he described reason as the “slave” of the passions.  If that were the case with his own reasoning, then why should anyone suppose that his views could have merit?

I have been promising my readers to try to end on upnotes, and I can.  The one good thing about frenzy is that it takes far too much energy to maintain.  If we can keep ourselves and our loved ones from succumbing, this too will pass.