On Fine Lines
On pedantry and the ideal neighbourhood
Surely, there are those ‘debunkers’ who enjoy little or no delight in their learning unless they find someone’s ignorance to trip up. Their knowledge is a dark burden they must endure until they find a palatable canvas on whom they can unload all their enlightenment. Thus, for them, poking holes is the more delightful activity; learning is only the drudgerous task that prepares them for this delight. The look of a fool on their interlocutor’s face is the prize. Everything else only being a price, cost, and a preamble. It was not so with Socrates. For this is painful pedantry.
Yet, with Socrates, one feels as if he is ever sardonic. That his plea of ignorance and wanting to know only ever serves to taunt his interlocutor. Chasing down Euthyphro, asking to become his disciple so that he might learn what piety is, and seeing Euthyphro flee from his pedantry, one laughs. It feels like a practical joke; to hound the other person. Nonetheless, Socrates’ sincerity shines through. You also get the sense, alongside his unintended but ever-present irony, that he delights in learning and not in tripping up everyone else. This is delightful pedantry.
The former type is Socrates’ students. Who eventually, albeit unintendedly, facilitated Socrates’ charge and execution. By approaching people, not with the aim to know like Socrates, but with the object of sharp pedantry to poke at people’s chests and prove their ignorance, these stupid young men set up their teacher for his end. They may have employed their teacher’s methods. But they lacked his intentions. This makes all the difference.
Once I said that I do not wish to live in a city planned and ordered by introverts. By this, I meant —using introverts as metaphor—that it will terrify me to live in a city ordered and planned by those with a quirky anti-social angst that marches to snuff out all the whiffs of neighbourliness in the name of “maintaining boundaries.”
What this does not mean, however, is that I desire to live in a noisy environment void of the still and quiet required to live a contemplative life. I want to know my neighbours and have them know me, while not wanting a surrounding mixed with intrusive sounds and noises which make thinking impossible. It seems to me as if I ask a hard thing; a thing that survives on what we call fine lines.
So, now, we must think of fine lines. What are they and where might they be found? For the difference between painful pedantry and its delightful counterpart; the differences between a cemetery, a blacksmith’s forge, and just the right neighbourhood all rest on fine lines.
For fine lines are thin, and are so-called fine because they are thin. Like a faint stroke of a straight line on paper which requires the greatest attention to see. Yet, our entire human world rests on fine lines. All ethics, even with its deontic boasts builds its structures on fine lines. Fine lines which, when you stand on them, you only need a slight breeze to push you on either side. No wonder so many people find fine lines, especially in matters ethical so uncomfortable. It takes much balance to walk a tightrope; a balance which one must sustain at one’s body core. Where “core” is chest and virtue. Seeing this task, some have tried, with absolutely little success, to plot ethics on some graph; to map out the coordinates so that by mastering all the inches and units of the graph, they may know what to do beforehand and not sweat their moral instruction. Moral instruction laughs in their face. Frustrated, realising ethics can’t be done Euclid style, prefer to throw it out altogether — “for it is not some exact science.”
But it is the thing with ethics: it has never purported to be a science; it claims to be human habit that is primarily lived before it is cerebrally learnt. You do before you learn. For the demands of the fine line is that you live on it. Thus we see how ethical issues make those addicted to pure geometry anxious.
Yet quite, it is not only ethics which starts with a fine line. Everything human begins there. Man starts as a woman just until he differentiates and becomes a man. A fine line separates love and hate; both are quite passionate. Where is madness and what side is genius? What is the dogged love of detail and which is pompous pedantry? What is beauty and what is kitsch? What pure emotion, what impure sentimentality? Is that poem good or does poetry rest in the mind of the beholder? What is fantasy and where art thou, imagination? Is this interesting or is this interestingly degrading? What is the right neighbourhood and which should I avoid? Socrates or his student: which are you?
Two pedants may look the same. Emphasizing tittles and pronunciations. Butting into dialogue with an “actually…”, very ready to narrate the history of a word, why the originator (or author) uses the word, why the author was born when he was, and how his mother’s aptitude at swatting bees contributed to the author’s vocabulary. And then we look at the “Actually” pedant and say, “Dude, this is a party and we were talking about tissue paper.” He can’t help himself. Two fellows can be this way, yet, we could receive them differently because of their very fine differences which we cannot define because it appears as if it isn’t there.
Nevertheless, we can tell the difference between one who stings to display superiority and the one who attaches “an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits,” Hazlitt writes, “in which his whole attention and faculties are engaged.” Hazlitt concludes this “is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature.” In fact, Hazlitt takes an extreme stance: “He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man.”
Therefore we see that happiness in Socrates, who the rumours say he glows while he thinks. The same man does not needlessly interrupt; he listens. He is interested in what you are saying. He waits on the muses for inspiration. Most importantly, Socrates once concluded a dialogue with prayer. Such delightful pedant, as true learning ought to be. For pedantry and learning used to be peas in a pod. For ‘pedant’ originally meant headmaster or teacher before it meant the one who engages in trifling detail. Once more, some trifles are tremendous. In fact, only the trifles are truly important; they are the limbs on which everything else hangs.
And the trifle on which pedantic trifle hangs; the fine line that delineates Socrates from those young men who enjoyed seeing people questioned is stated by Hazlitt: “attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits, in which our whole attention and faculties are engaged.” The painful pedant differs from the delightful pedant in that the painful pedant treats his knowledge as a prosthetic limb for pranks and tricks. The delightful pedant is instead an oracle for the muses of his knowledge; caught under the hysterical potent of sweet truth, he cannot disobey the commands from Parnassus to set things right. He would avoid it if he could choose.
The painful pedant seeks his entertainment artificially. The delightful one has his entirety absorbed in his subject and glows in the dark with his pedantry. This is crass enjoyment standing apart from sublime feeling. This also shows the fine difference between one who wields his mind like a sledgehammer and his counterpart who realises that the mind is delicate and has a life of its own which must be nurtured like every other living thing. One lusts for advantage through knowledge, and the other orients his soul towards wisdom. Close as they may seem, they are not the same.
And this cry — “they are not the same” —is the heralding cry of fine lines. Now the reader must ponder and judge: what type of city allows for neighbourliness without truncating contemplation? Think about these things.