Egghead Blues: The Life of the Mind in the Land of Things

Many intellectuals suffer from the feeling that what they do does not matter. Some, of course, among them perhaps those who teach at prestigious colleges and universities, can console themselves that they have an excellent job and make a regular income. But if they are in the humanities, they probably feel discouraged that, unlike their colleagues in physics, psychology, even sociology, they lack the potential for effecting social change. The media constantly reinforce the effectuality of non-humanities disciplines, too. For example, recently on National Public Radio, a psychologist explained that research showed how wearing red uniforms enables competitors to win at sports. This was followed by a story about how the kudzu root diminishes problem drinkers' alcohol intake. In the New York Times, there was a story about how yo-yo dieting does not (contrary to folk wisdom) slow the metabolism. And the same newspaper recently ran a series of articles about social class, examining three heart attack victims from different classes and demonstrating the differential medical care they received. All these articles and studies have the potential to make an impact on the way people live their lives, on the choices they make. Does our work in the humanities have a similar potential? Or as Louis Kampf asks nearly half a century ago, in his "The Scandal of Literary Scholarship," "has the academy not alienated us from our work?" (57). Are we frittering away our lives and our talents, making anguishedly narrowed-down academic distinctions and esoteric arguments, when in fact we should be deploying our talents against eco-catastrophe, disease, famine, war—against whatever other unseen horseman are on the horizon, closing in, as we sit?

Two elements, I believe, lie behind most intellectual discour-agement. The first can be simply put: my work is pointless drudgery. I keep doing the same thing over and over, getting nowhere new or fast. Each class I teach offers and encounters the same problems, and with a group of students who have eerily been interchanged with the last. Each reinvention of the university has the same major shortcomings. Each committee goes over the same feuds as the committee before. Teaching at a college constantly forces me to reinvent and re-prove myself with each semester, each new group of students or administrators, with each new intellectual fad. At the same time, it doesn't give back many tangible rewards or very often signal that I'm making significant progress. My work is Sisyphean, one might say.

The second reminder of discouragement rings out from the pages of magazines and journals, at conferences and public lectures: No one listens to me. I'm ignored by society. Important as the work might seem, the wider world isn't especially interested, or at least not unless the intellectual project might be developed into something of practical value. Hence, too often the intellectual feels exiled or even gravely afflicted, like the wounded Greek hero Philoctetes, who, despite having acquired a magical bow that never misses, lives for years shunned and abandoned by his fellows.

Both of these kinds of discouragement, however, function more as surface symptoms than as underlying cause. They naturally grow, perhaps akin to a parasitic ivy vine, from the rich taproot that feeds most intellectual work, namely a curiosity, a sense of wonder about how things operate, a desire to understand the unseen, a vision of some ideal state. The difficulty is that having such a curiosity and wonder, while a positive motivation, makes the intellectual keenly attuned to shortcomings, problems, and the non-ideal that surround us all. Wanting to uncover the "really real"—from Plato's ideal forms through Kant's noumena to Rilke's sense of the world behind the real, his Weltinnenraum—initially might have attracted people to intellectual endeavors. Yet the actuality of the phenomenal world, its obvious distance from the ideal, inevitably disappoints, discourages. I call this "existential" discouragement. Painful and burdensome though such discouragement may be, I want to argue here that it ultimately functions in a productive manner: it reinforces our work as intellectuals...