!!Dialogue between a Student of Science and St Albertus Magnus

STUDENT: Now that I hold it in my hand I wonder where all the suffering has gone. It hardly seems the work of six years. If I had spent them counting grains of sand I would have amassed something greater. And less to my disliking. This first paragraph barely scans. I need twice as much data to make these points, and in my arguments I have driven the same three analogies past the reader so many times I could be filming a Western. Half of the work, by weight, is in citations and references, all of which I have mangled and hamstrung into supporting my own specious reasoning. They give my thoughts no life. It is a great wonder to me that any group of four sane people could ever be induced to read past the first page, much less sign it. And it is a great mystery to me why signing anything should make someone a Doctor.

ALBERT: You sound like a student I once had.

STUDENT: That comparison gives me little comfort. If Thomas died believing his works to be rags, how can I expect any better? Not in a hundred lifetimes will I reach that man’s learning. Have I told you my title? Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity of Visual Receptive Fields. How minute! How frivolous and technical! See how many qualifiers are in it, how every noun has been divided and divided again? The patch of earth on which I have toiled is mine because no one else can find it. There is some consolation, however.

ALBERT: What is that?

STUDENT: I have made an angel dance on the head of a pin.

ALBERT: You would have to be rather small to observe that, wouldn’t you?

STUDENT: Yes. I made myself small. I sat and read until I was bent over and shrivelled, and my eyes went dim.

ALBERT: Being able to be small is no small thing. But perhaps that is why you are only looking at the smallest part of your doctorate. You had to leave something behind to become what you are. The end of an apprenticeship is not the journeyman-piece, but the journeyman.

STUDENT: Am I only a journeyman, then? I thought I had already become a Master.

ALBERT: What, if you don’t mind telling me, are you going to become a Doctor of?

STUDENT: Neuroscience.

ALBERT: No, not your field of study. What is your degree?

STUDENT: Doctor of Philosophy. Indeed, that is an additional consolation. If I were a doctor of medicine I would fear for my patients’ lives, but philosophy I imagine to be immune to my mistakes.

ALBERT: I wish that were the case. But tell me, since as a scientist you must have some notion of Latin, from what verb does Doctor stem?

STUDENT: I fear that you have mistaken me for one of the scientists of the previous century. Their notions of biological structure were based on types rather than mechanisms, and they used Latin taxonomies to enforce a normative description of those types. With a greater understanding of the physical mechanisms that give rise to those types, neither taxonomy nor Latin are much in use.

ALBERT: Notitia linguarum est prima porta sapientiae would have no meaning for you, then, alas. But bear with me. Doctor is from docere, which means to teach. But so is docile. Men and women will put themselves in your care.

STUDENT: But I have nothing to offer them.

ALBERT: Then why are you here?

STUDENT: I desire knowledge.

ALBERT: What have you learned about knowledge, then, since you have spent so much time seeking it? Or do you think that you can seek for something without learning the nature of what you seek? Are you only a specialist? A technician? What kind of artist knows nothing about his materials? Is there any bookseller who could remain ignorant of how to care for books?

STUDENT: I have learned that knowledge is endless. And I have learned that knowledge is suffering. I have read now until my eyes are dim and the mere thought of a book is tiresome to me. No one has followed me into all these mazes. The friends of my youth no longer know me, for I have abandoned them. But I have not read nearly enough. I have only scraped at the glass. I am a sort of miser. I must be mad.

ALBERT: There are some who indeed become addicts—Latin for given over, you know—of knowledge, just as some become addicts of money or power or lust. But all such madnesses arise from a desire for something good, which has become confused with a desire for the thing that conveys it. What is it that lies behind knowledge?

STUDENT: Truth.

ALBERT: Then you are wiser than you think, and wisdom is the opposite of madness. Wisdom is the ability to perceive truth. You desire to have that ability, so you are philosophical. Has it occurred to you that other people may desire to perceive truth as well?

STUDENT: I suppose they must, though I have often been made to feel ridiculous.

ALBERT: Only because the truth makes most of us feel ridiculous. But you loved her anyway, and now you are a Doctor of Philosophy. Do you know what that means now?

STUDENT: This all seems rather prideful. Who am I to claim that I have truth? Where have I studied it? I have grubbed over the earth in search of knowledge, that is true. I followed the swallow; I pried into the minds of small things. I accumulated billions of numbers. There is a beauty there, but I did not comprehend it. I am a cretin, in possession of details. That is what a Doctor is. I saw many Doctors as an acolyte, and that is what they are. I do not mean that is what they are as people. Many of them were kind and had light and joyous minds, but that was not what made them Doctors, and, if anything it was the kindest and brightest who were the less successful. The great and powerful Doctors were possessed by details. They worked like madmen to accumulate details, which they packaged up and disseminated in papers and books and conferences. And that is what they trained me to do.

ALBERT: Is that what you are?

STUDENT: No. At least I hope not. But I will not misrepresent myself. Shall I claim to be a carpenter when I have only felled trees? I am a cretin with details, and if someone wishes to call me by some medieval name in order to give me a patent to sell my details, that is fine by me. Though I wish the pay were better.

ALBERT: Indeed, the pay is low, by some measures.

STUDENT: It is supposed to make up for the fact that we gain so much self-importance from thinking we are doing something good for the world.

ALBERT: By what do you measure the good you do?

STUDENT: I am well aware of how most men measure it: by sentiment and cant. By what they are able to tell themselves that they find believable. By the sensation of moral superiority.

ALBERT: We can only pray to be released from pride.

STUDENT: It is prideful to pray for that. It is self-interest.

ALBERT: Yes, exactly. But what else would you do, if there is no good in selling knowledge?

STUDENT: If I knew, I would do it. But I have never been able to tell the good in anything people do. I mean in the thing. I have often seen great goodness in people, but it rarely had anything to do with what they were doing.

ALBERT: It seems strange that a good person would do something that was ultimately worthless.

STUDENT: Or rather, it would seem strange if it seemed so. But it never does. I mean it never seems worthless, what a good person is doing.

ALBERT: Yet you claim to be unable to tell the good in anything. Is it all an act, then? Is the power of saints in shamming life to be better than it is?

STUDENT: I do not think that anyone could make good appear in something if there were no such thing as good. I mean, of course it’s possible to call something good that isn’t, but only by concealing it. When a good person does something, nothing is hidden. If anything, it becomes revealed. It becomes what it is.

ALBERT: And what is truth?

STUDENT: I never said I was a good man.

ALBERT: And no one ever said philosophy was wisdom. It’s good that they don’t, because most things that claim to be wise are precisely the opposite. But you see yourself well enough to know what you love. And because you have searched yourself in this way you can see when others desire wisdom, too. You will almost never have the right thing to give them, except your own desire.

STUDENT: Now I fear I have not enough of that, either.

ALBERT: That is why we pray for mercy.