Disciplines, Judgements, and the Questions We're Compelled to Ask

Some thoughts on the way proper study shapes us

Aug 27, 2024

The Young Schoolmistress - Jean-Siméon Chardin. (National Portrait Gallery, London.)

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending a lecture in Cambridge by

, on the topic of Virginia Woolf and her nephew, Julian Bell. I knew next to nothing about Virginia Woolf and nothing at all about Julian Bell, so I wasn’t sure what to expect at the lecture. Would this be about the nature of their works? A literary critique of a book I hadn’t read? Perhaps a post-modern interpretation of 20^th century culture? Since I knew next to nothing, would I be able to understand the argument being made?

I needn’t have worried. Ann simply shared with her audience the story (or at least, part of it) of the literary aunt and nephew. I enjoyed learning a bit about both of their personal lives, their personalities, and the relationship between the two in the context of their larger family dynamic.

When I write that, it strikes me that I’ve made it sound like a simple ‘story hour’ – but it wasn’t. It was well-researched, and left room for good questions.

And it was actually the nature of the Q&A that got me thinking.

Disciplines

My biggest concern in attending was that I wouldn’t be able to follow the argument, for lack of knowledge about its premise(s). More than anything else, I think that concern reflects my experience in my particular discipline: theology.

A “discipline” in academia is more than just a subject area. It’s tied to a way of thinking, a way of approaching how to learn, how to sort through information, how to weigh up different elements we encounter. A discipline disciplines the mind of the disciple.

In my case, the discipline of theology (as I was formed in it) was concerned with eternal truths.1 That was the driving question behind everything we read: is this true? What does it tell us about God? Then—only secondarily—what might it tell us about creation, including ourselves?

Through many years of formation, I was trained (generally) to consider human factors as secondary: who said it, what was going on in their lives, did they have ulterior motives, etc. It wasn’t that these questions were never asked, it was just that they fell by the wayside until the primary question was dealt with: is this eternally true?

This way of thinking tends to inform the way I approach other things, too, including literature. I detest reading ‘introductions’ to classic works, or essays about a work, until I’ve read the work itself. I believe firmly in having, as much as possible, an unmediated encounter with the text, and only then turning to see what other people want to say about it.

But then I married a man whose discipline was history, and boy, did we disagree! He was all about secondary literature, because he was trained to see it as a way of gaining a more 360 view of the text. And of course, this makes sense in history. If you want to understand why Henry VIII went through a tragically wild succession of wives, it’s crucial to know about his understanding of royal duty, the divine right of kings, and even what hierarchy was thought to be at that time.

In the early years of our marriage, I was constantly struck by my husband’s ability to make observations about things, while neither agreeing nor disagreeing with them. “But don’t you think Henry was wrong?” I would say, to which he would often reply something like: “that’s just what someone of his day believed about it.”2

When we boiled it down, it would turn out that (happily) my husband and I didn’t actually disagree on most things, but the questions we were concerned with were different questions. The discipline of history had trained him to ask what happened, what people thought, what the context was. The discipline of theology had trained me to ask if a thing was true, regardless of what happened or what people thought or what the context was.

Relation vs. Interpretation

And this brings me back to the Woolf-Bell lecture. I attended (as I do all lectures) as a theologian, expecting an argument about truth: which was of course terribly silly! Instead, I was treated to a historical account of the lives of some very interesting writers. Ann is deft at telling a story without judgement.

She struck me as an excellent teacher of history: she did not tell us how to think about the often strained relationship between Woolf and her nephew. Rather, she just told us their story, sharing snippets of letters.

In the Q&A, however, there were some who found it necessary to tell us just what to think of Woolf. They shared their interpretation of the events in a way that left no room for disagreement. (Perhaps this approach works in the settings they’re used to?) But their definitiveness troubled me and served to highlight the difference between laying out the events and interpreting them with a modern lens.

I really respected Ann’s approach because it was so measured. At one point, she shared a quote (I think from Woolf, or her sister) criticizing women for being overweight. Of course, Ann noted, today we would find that shocking, but that’s simply what they said.

How refreshing! I think this approach shows respect to the listener, allowing them to form their own judgements, rather than doing the work on their behalf.3

Judgement

We live in a culture that has a strange relationship towards judgement, which we talk about in exclusively moral terms. We’re told that we’re not allowed to pass judgement on others—unless of course we’re following one of the culturally accepted judgements, like being shocked and appalled at someone for not using the correct recycling bin.4 We also tend to apply moral categories to non-moral things. Something like frequent exercise or eating organic is often considered a morally superior way to live, but making any claim about ‘traditional’ moral issues, a la the Ten Commandments, is seen as backwards or perhaps even downright bigoted.

But I think that’s a very limited and unhelpful view of what judgement is and where it belongs.

Thomas Aquinas describes three modes of knowledge: apprehension, judgement, and reasoning. These apply to knowing anything, not just moral things. In layman’s terms,5 our minds first apprehend something: we observe it and know the “whatness” of it: that’s a white fluffy thing. Then, we make a judgement about it – we affirm or deny something about it: that white fluffy thing is cute. It’s hopping around in my garden and eating my cabbages like it doesn’t care that I worked hard to plant them. Finally, in reasoning, we build on apprehension and judgement to synthesize and coordinate our knowledge: My neighbour told me about a cute while fluffy rabbit destroying his garden, so maybe I’d better shoo it away and build a better fence.

I think these three modes of knowledge are helpful because they tend to describe how most of us approach the world: put simply, we observe something, we analyze it, and then we draw conclusions about it. Our conclusions are often a judgement of sorts: this coffee shop has better coffee than that one, or: using my phone too much is making me feel crazy on the inside.

On the one hand, it's good to be able to make a judgement. Imagine if the whole of our lives just consisted of observations, or even analysis. It would be like living in a perpetual cliffhanger! We’d have no resolution about anything. That would be unsettling. There would be no rule of law, no contracts, none of the things that make a society function. There would also be no justice or satisfaction or value in forgiveness, because no one would know what was morally right or wrong. If someone stole your savings, you’d just have to wonder forever if maybe it was ok, despite that strong gut sense that it most definitely was not. The thief couldn’t ask for your forgiveness, because maybe he doesn’t need it.

On the other hand, there may be some of us, who through nature or nurture, tend to skip over apprehension. We are (often rightly) concerned to know what’s true (if it is a question of true-untrue), or at least to analyse the thing thoroughly. We spend the least amount of time on observation, on just stopping to see the world around us. We can tell you what we think about a thing, but if you asked us to just close our eyes and relate what’s there, we’d have trouble remembering because observation isn’t our strong suit.

Now, I’m very grateful for my training in the discipline of theology, and how it has shaped my mind. But I’m also grateful to be married to someone who was formed in a different discipline, and who has helped my powers of observation. I’m grateful to Ann and others in history who can say simply: this is what happened. It’s seems to me a form of humility to be able to (as best we can) step back from something and try to let the writings or people speak for themselves, and the listeners and readers think for themselves.6 This is an underrated skill and one that some of us [raises hand] would do well to develop.

I’ve found the catchphrase from one of my favourite games shows (aptly called Catchphrase) to be helpful in this regard. Contestants are shown a cartoon depicting a popular phrase, and asked to guess what it is: for instance, a man hopping in between two lines on the floor and opening his book, then hopping out of the lines and closing his book. The catchphrase is “read between the lines.” Sometimes contestants have trouble, though, and then the host exhorts them: “just say what you see!”

Just say what you see: it’s harder than it sounds. (The artists and poets know this.) Can you close your eyes and tell me what’s outside your window right now? Observation takes practice. It requires attention. And as Simone Weil says, “unmixed attention is prayer.”7

So maybe I’m back to theology, after all.

I’d like to hear from you: what discipline has disciplined your mind, either through formal or informal study? What questions are you compelled to ask about things? What are you most curious about when introduced to a new subject or idea? Have you ever butted heads with someone only to realise you were both asking different questions?

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