If there is a "project" for this blog it is the question of whether an ordinary person with a mediocre education can still legitimately educate herself not just eclectically, but philosophically.
There is no doubt an ordinary literate person can learn all sorts of things in any given field, but education implies something more -- a formation, a training in a method. I am not entirely sure if you can self-educate in this respect.
Here is a mixed bag from Cardinal Newman:
Few indeed there are who can dispense with the stimulus and support of instructors, or will do any thing at all, if left to themselves. And fewer still (though such great minds are to be found), who will not, from such unassisted attempts, contract a self-reliance and a self-esteem, which are not only moral evils, but serious hindrances to the attainment of truth. And next to none, perhaps, or none, who will not be reminded from time to time of the disadvantage under which they lie, by their imperfect grounding, by the breaks, deficiencies, and irregularities of their knowledge, by the eccentricity of opinion and the confusion of principle which they exhibit. They will be too often ignorant of what every one knows and takes for granted, of that multitude of small truths which fall upon the {149} mind like dust, impalpable and ever accumulating; they may be unable to converse, they may argue perversely, they may pride themselves on their worst paradoxes or their grossest truisms, they may be full of their own mode of viewing things, unwilling to be put out of their way, slow to enter into the minds of others;—
If you go on and read the whole thing, you see that all this being said, he far prefers the auto-didactic path with all its dangers to the standard utilitarian education path:
Nay, self-education in any shape, in the most restricted sense, is preferable to a system of teaching which, professing so much, really does so little for the mind. Shut your College gates against the votary of knowledge, throw him back upon the searchings and the efforts of his own mind; he will gain by being spared an entrance into your Babel.....
but, with these and whatever other liabilities upon (the self-educated) heads, they are likely to have more thought, more mind, more philosophy, more true enlargement, than those earnest but ill-used persons, who are forced to load their minds with a score of subjects against an examination, who have too much on their hands to indulge themselves in thinking or investigation, who devour premiss and conclusion together with indiscriminate greediness, who hold whole sciences on faith, and commit demonstrations to memory, and who too often, as might be expected, when their period of education is passed, throw up all they have learned in disgust, having gained nothing really by their anxious labours, except perhaps the habit of application.
I did not start out to write about Newman, but I think he has actually sketched out a prospectus for me, of what to avoid and what to strive for.
I definitely feel the way he describes about the breaks, irregularities, and confusion of principles to which the auto-didact is subject. My father received an excellent prep school education (through a need/merit scholarship) back in the days when that still included training in Greek and Latin. He went on to Ivy Leagues and took care to give himself a mixed liberal and professional education (he was a physician, but his undergrad degree was in German literature). He spent his whole life in continuing learning -- teaching himself several languages, reading voraciously.
Even so his education was secular and that I think was a defect in his philosophical grounding. In that sense he shared in my auto-didact dilemma. Still, I have no doubt that his endeavors formed him into a way better person than he would have been had he just settled for watching TV and golfing and drinking at the club after work, not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with any of those things.
Mortimer Adler was another auto-didact with a true paucity of education -- he left school at age 15. Quite a guy. He came close to giving himself a true philosophical formation; perhaps he did achieve it altogether. One factor in this was his association with other thinkers, both living and dead; the value of company is self-education is something I will probably be reflecting on in the future.
And on the other hand, many excellently educated people have been very wrong about very fundamental things. They might be able to reason more rigorously, but sometimes they are no wiser than anyone else in choosing their premises from which to reason.
Another founding question for this blog is whether an ordinary person can justify time and brain power spent in non-utilitarian study. I have a quote on this but I am going to save it for another time. It is now almost 7 am and if I am going to take my walk before all the tourists and their dogs start appearing on my trail, I had better go now!
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