Sophomores: The 'Wise Fools'

To the Seniors:

In coming days and weeks you will hear much wisdom from your elders about the meaning of life, the future of humanity, and the nobility of working for less money than the market will bear. Much of this advice will be based on the temporary fiction that you learned nothing over the past four years, and that the kernel of knowledge that eluded you for so long can all be summarized in a seven minute speech. Enjoy!

It's my own considered view that you did learn something while you were here, and therein lies the problem. You all know too much. Each of you has been granted a degree in a specific "discipline" (notice the word, signifying control and restraint). You have been molded to speak and think in the idiom of a field and to see the world through a lens and with tools with which it equipped you. Each of you has written a thesis on some specialized topic or another, and in some cases you may be something close to the reigning expert on your subject. You have gone from being a "freshman" who, presumably, knew very little at the beginning, and through slow but steady exposure to several area studies, then to a single area, have blossomed into an adult with extensive knowledge on a certain subject.

From here on out, things will only get worse. Many of you, now, go forth to find gainful employment that will only continue to narrow the range of your daily activities, particularly if you seek to get ahead in a particular job. Others of you will enter various professional or graduate schools to delve deeper into narrower subjects. For many, even most of you, the numbers of people with whom you daily associate is about to drop precipitously: from several hundred, potentially, on any given day in classes, in dorms, at Frist, or on Prospect Street, to a handful at work, in graduate or professional school, at play, at home. You came here as mile-wide rivers of only several inches depth; you leave as gorges — deep, etched with experience, but narrower.

Between the time of naïve freshness and profound seniority was that middle time of the sophomore. All of you know by now the meaning of the insult that you bore for one entire year — the time when everyone called you, and you called yourself, a "wise fool." As the label captures, it was a time of new knowledge badly wielded, of smart-alecky upstarts who knew just enough to sound smart, but not enough to be wise. Words like "perspicacious" were sprinkled into papers, but not always quite correctly, and rarely in support of a profound insight. It was the college equivalent of adolescence, a slightly awkward time between finishing requirements and the declaration of major, between fitting in at a residential college and finding a home at a club, between always talking about where you came from and always dreaming about where you were going.

Now, in hindsight, it was also an enviable if unconscious highlight of a lifetime, that time before you had to narrow yourself to a major, a career, a self-selected group of people, a set of limiting life-choices. It was that brief moment between the lightness of irresponsible childhood and the weight of Atlas-like burdens. It was a time of openness, of promise, of the vistas afforded by that widening river, now cramped by the soaring walls of the ravine. Looked at differently, in hindsight and with the benefits of gained "wisdom," to be a "wise fool" may be a desirable state indeed.

When Socrates was a very senior man, he told the Athenians that he had in fact achieved the wisdom that was often attributed to him by means of the recognition that, "in respect to wisdom," he was "really worthless." His wisdom lie in his admission that he had none; it was the starting point of his wisdom, the beginning of philosophy. It was the impetus for his life of inquiry and thoughtfulness, and the source of his conclusion that the "unexamined life is not worth living." He was a "sophomore" in the best sense, a wise man aware of his "foolishness," a fool aware of the limits of his wisdom. Therein lay his actual wisdom.

We can't unlearn what we know, and nor should we, but we can restrain our claims to how much it matters. By doing so, we admit to ourselves our lack of real wisdom, and open ourselves to the prospects of learning by and with others. We return to being a sophomore, to that heady time of possibilities, before closure, finals, and endings. Good luck to all of you. Patrick Deneen is an assistant professor in the Politics department. He can be reached at pdeneen@princeton.edu.