Who/Who studies
To study —
- From classical Latin, studēre—to strive after, to concentrate on, to support, favor, to apply oneself, to give attention, be eager, be zealous, take pains, be diligent, be busy with, be devoted to. . . .
Sometimes I feel amazed, working to create A Place to Study. To study! Who would have thought?
Study— the word, entered my vocabulary in elementary school, maybe yours too. Remember how around 4th or 5th grade, you stopped staying in one room with one teacher and started going to different rooms with different teachers for different subjects. Some days there'd be a gap, with a study period covering it up. There we learned to sit quietly, cloaking our idleness with the appearance of attending intently to some make-work assignment. And on through the system, study as make-work continued. It falls far short of the Classical expectation.
To grasp the actualities of study, let's think back to before we experienced systematized instruction and its collateral damages. We have all shared richer experiences of studying in a full, authentic sense, albeit without the name, as we wended through the perplexities and play of childhood. Those began for each of us as "the baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion"[1]. Study begins at infancy, an urge to make sense of all the confusion.
It's extraordinary to watch how many moves, and sounds, and sightings, and textures catch an infant's attention as she draws herself into her growing sphere of perception and actions, as she cracks the codes of speech, studying how to coordinate lungs, larynx, tongue, and lips over many months to shape gurgles, howls, and babble into intelligible talk. Each of us began to discriminate and associate, to disaggregate the confusion into glimmers of coherence, meaningful order, a world in which to grow, play, create, and interact with others. The human condition requires each to make sense of the world, for we spring to life, inchoate and ignorant, encompassed by its vast, glorious puzzle within which we must maintain ourselves — that's the heroic epic that life uniquely constitutes for each and every person.
From the start, study is a vital function. Every living entity lives as a self-maintaining process, sustaining itself with and against circumstances — the pressure of dead forces and vital actions pressing in on it. Most things are not alive, not living entities; they just exist, buffeted by the external forces playing upon them. Living creatures do more than exist; they live, they interact with external forces, improvising capacities to act vis-à-vis exigencies in an effort to form themselves as active influences shaping their world. Human beings, over a long succession of generations, have improvised complex cultural powers with and among which we have augmented our physical capacities to cope contingently with all that impinges upon us. Each person partakes in that cultural self-empowerment, but must do so starting from primal ignorance: at birth, each is inchoate physically and entirely unformed culturally.
Our primal ignorance does not consist only in our not knowing how to do what we want and need to do, more radically, we do not know what we possibly can do. We are ignorant about our capabilities. We come to life, to the activities of self-maintenance, without our powers or purpose laid out for us, knowing neither what we can do, nor how we can do it. And whatever the what and the how, we must do it the where, in this time and place where we find ourselves having to act in that ever-moving now. We must try, invent, improvise, create it as we go along, uncover and disclose it. We have no checklist of possibilities given to us, clear and evident, pointing out the path. Study becomes the engine of self-formation as we chart our path through our primal ignorance, working out what we can and should do to maintain ourselves as self-maintaining, living persons.
- ↑ William James, The Principles of Psychology, I, 462.