"the" life of the mind
"the" life of the mind
tl:dr it's not one thing available in one place
While I was working on my recent talk about academic and trade press publishing, I was working on a section on popular writing and the life of the mind. This is one of those terms that is so familiar, we rarely think about it. We all kind of know what “the life of the mind” means: a sensibility about the importance of intellectual inquiry, a love of the pursuit of ideas for their own sake, a belief that it requires distancing yourself a bit from the everyday world and its concerns and pressures. You don’t do it for money, but for the chance to engage with serious ideas and like-minded people.
But as I was working on this section, I was struck by the use of the word the in “the life of the mind.”
The singular makes it sound like there’s only one life of the mind. (It performs an even neater trick: it introduction the assumption in a way that leads us to unconsciously accept it without question.) It turns the life of the mind into a Platonic ideal against which real lives and institutions can be measured. And it reinforces the idea that academia is the only place it can be found or practiced. A professor at an Ivy or Oxbridge is closer to the life than a community college instructor; a mid-level manager at a Fortune 500 company or reality show contestant is very far away.
Most of the time this is not formally articulated, except in asides or jokes; but it was still a lesson I absorbed in graduate school, and it was one of the things that made it hard to imagine giving up the academic job market search. It was a surprise that the business world offers plenty of opportunities to do work that’s intellectually challenging and rewarding (though they’re closer to the surface in some places, and you need to learn how to find what’s interesting in some jobs, just as you may need to find what’s meaningful).
The point is, there’s not one life of the mind to which we should aspire and strive. It’s a state of mind and a way of thinking about the world, not a prize to be won through a competition, or a promised land into which you gain admission.
There are many lives of the mind, whose strength depends as much on your own internal resources— your own motivation, interests, and willingness to sustain it— as on external resources (though of course they can help). Getting a Ph.D. doesn’t mean that you can only pursue this life in one place; it means you have the tools necessary to build that life anywhere.
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