Restoration of Academic Identity: On Truth and Responsibility
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Restoration of Academic Identity: On Truth and Responsibility Micah Sadigh
Accepted: 1 September 2020 # The National Association of Scholars 2020
“I know the cause . . . of your sickness. You have forgotten what you are.” —Boethius
Alethea. Human life can be sustained either in the darkness of ignorance, which will cripple the mind, or in the light of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, which will promote creativity and intellectual and social growth. Those arts that are meant to free the mind are called the liberal (liberating) arts, among which are the art of communication, the art of reasoning, the art of acting, behaving, and serving for the good of others (ethics), the art of creating—all of which play a decisive role in mastering the challenges of life for the betterment of humanity as well as its communities. Such arts will open us to a better understanding of who we are in the midst of the chaos of life by nurturing the capacity to reason. “In this way the darkness of ever treacherous passions may be dispelled, and [one] will be able to see the resplendent light of truth.” 1 Charting our journey through life as social beings solely based on what we apprehend through our senses may seem expedient; yet our shortsightedness and self-centeredness can have devastating personal as well as societal implications.
1
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (NY: Penguin, 1999), 20.
Micah Sadigh is Professor of Psychology at Cedar Crest College in Allentown Penn.; [email protected]. His work last appeared in these pages with “Rediscovering the Noölogical Dimension of Higher Education: Guidance from the Pages of Philosophy” in the spring 2019 issue.
Sadigh
“Because of the weakness of our senses,” Anaxagoras reminds us, “we are not able to judge the truth.” 2 With the arrival of the age of information and the seeming realization that all we need to know sits at our fingertips, we may erroneously arrive at a conclusion with pernicious possibilities, that information is truth; and that quick fixes borrowed from here and there and pasted together are sufficient to soothe our struggles and offer lasting reprieve from what ails us, our society, our civilization. The plague of confusing opinions with truth may result in either hubris or premature, faulty conclusions, sinking us deeper into the ocean of ignorance. Everyone is informed but no one understands, as the tools necessary for proper understanding of any phenomenon are scarcely put to use. This is indeed a nightmare of our time, when every single day we are exposed to that which pretends to be “the fact” of the happenings of life, opinions holding our attention in bondage, directing us in every which way, not of our own volition; in helplessness, we seek remedies to dull our attention. “Commit your boat to the winds,” Boethius teaches us, “and you must sail whichever they blow, not just where you want.” 3 Yet, an adroit pilot who understands the behavior of the wind is able to use the force of the wind to reach the charted destination and not the unknown
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