Dan Dennett was a good teacher.
"…Patient, smart, and imaginative, Dennett could explain concepts from every angle, inventing new ones if given the time. And I also hadn't reckoned with the communicativeness of personality—the fullness of an individual, even briefly glimpsed, and what it suggested about what they might know. What is a materialist philosopher—a person who doesn't believe we have souls—supposed to be like? I'd had a picture in my head, something involving coldness, bluntness, harshness, and it was wholly wrong, a caricature waiting to be erased. It wasn't so much that Dennett's personality made me reconsider his ideas, but that his specificity made me consider them more specifically. The more you know a person, the more interesting they become. This can be true not just for who they are but for how they think. And the stakes are higher when you're face to face. It's easy to close a book, and harder to end a conversation…
Some novels, Bakhtin thought, even allow us "to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses," a perspective that is "born at a point of contact" between people. By knitting together those voices, a profile could similarly allow readers to consider the possibility that all the sides of an argument were, together, right…
Dennett persuaded me. By the time I'd finished writing the Profile, I no longer believed in the hard problem—and I no longer felt that denying its existence was a slight against my idea of what it meant to be human. The experience left a high watermark in my intellectual life. Ever since, I've found it difficult to be satisfied with reading or thinking on my own. If someone's ideas fascinate, perplex, or frustrate me, I want to get to know the person. If I don't understand some question, I want to "report it out…""
—Joshua Rothman
An Academic's Journey Toward Reporting
No comments:
Post a Comment