Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [36]
It’s up to us to maintain our own intellectual integrity. Since we know we will fail from time to time, we should surround ourselves with reliable friends who help keep us straight. For that we have the likes of Socrates and Seuss, as well as all of our fellow collaborators on the quest for truth and wisdom. Following up on “On Bullshit,” Harry Frankfurt says at the end of his 2006 essay, “On Truth”:
To the extent that we learn in greater detail how we are limited, and what the limits of our limitation are, we come thereby to delineate our own boundaries and thus discern our own shape. . . . Thus, our recognition and understanding of our own identity arises out of, and depends integrally on, our appreciation of a reality that is definitively independent of ourselves. . . . How, then, can we fail to take the importance of factuality and of reality seriously? How can we fail to care about truth? We cannot.9
So when it comes to your own intellectual integrity, whether you have a desire to be famous as famous can be or to escape a dull Waiting Place or you have a fear of some scary thing down the road between hither and yon that scares you so much you don’t want to go on, step with care and great tact! And explore the world of ideas with an open mind. After all, “it’s opener there in the wide open air” (Places).
CHAPTER FIVE
Neither Here, nor
There, nor Anywhere?
Randall E. Auxier
Say It Isn’t So!
A “contrarian” is a person who just likes to disagree with everything you say. Most of us have a contrarian in our lives. You’ve probably had an uncle or a brother like that, or a boss or a friend—or if you’re saying “no, I haven’t,” you’re probably the contrarian in your own life . . . and, if now you’re saying “I am not!,” well, I rest my case.
Contrarians can be plenty annoying, but it’s actually good to have one around if you really want to learn something. One of the easiest ways to go wrong is to get all excited about something you think you’ve learned but in reality you haven’t fully understood it, and you haven’t yet discovered the gravity of your own . . . well, let’s call it “innocence.” (“Ignorance” is such an ugly word.) For example, I don’t know about you, but some of the best teachers I ever had were ones I didn’t like right off, and some of them I even dreaded after the first class or two. But by sticking with them for a while I began to recognize qualities that weren’t obvious at first. Maybe I needed a contrarian around to say, “Well, you think you don’t like Mrs. Jones, but you might be wrong.” Of course, sometimes I was right, and I didn’t need a contrarian at all. But how could I have known? And once in a while I meet someone and I’m so sure we will be good friends and I’m stoked about that, but after a while we may realize we don’t have much in common. A good contrarian would say, “You just wait, you’ll see otherwise in a few weeks . . .” You know the type.
Even if contrarians are a bother, they have their uses. That’s because learning is often a process of negating in your imagination what you believed at first, paring down your first impressions and eliminating gratuitous judgments and wild guesses until only the really stable and lasting ideas remain. And learning even more than that may require that you be a stick-in-the-mud, a wet blanket, a killjoy,