A worthwhile education

As much as I would love to write my final column about the moral obligations of those who leave the gate this June, I will not.

Anyway, I feel that charity is something that has to come from one's own heart, not from the writings of some amateur columnist.

Another part of me, yet, wants to write about the grandiose Princeton edifices, traditions and mores that I will surely miss – but here I will heed the advice of one of my roommates who criticizes the "over-nostalgic" tone of my columns. No Gothic talk here.

What I will impart are a couple sober lessons I learned at this place. One, is that no matter how novel you think your thoughts are, you will often soon find that someone else before you has thought about it and written about it. I remember coming in as a freshman thinking that I had my own proprietary formula for life, my own covert philosophy with which I would one day enlighten the world, only to very quickly learn that it was a subcategory of utilitarianism.

This phenomenon is good in that it enables us to connect to historical thinkers, realize the universal nature of their ideas and have a solid foundation upon which to embellish the subject.

The bad part is that we students hungry for our own ideas are often denied the right to call them our own. Locke once described the way in which property is made one's own. He said, "Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property." In a way, it is a "first come, first served" theory.

If one applies this notion of property to the realm of ideas, one will realize that it will be hard for us to make ideas our own by extracting them from the common state of "idea" nature, as they have already been extracted and appropriated by the great thinkers of the past. Whether they be the Benthams of philosophies, the Shakespeares of plots or the Webers of sociological observed phenomena, the plethora of minds has already acquired all the proprietary rights to all groundbreaking ideas.

One needs only take a walk through the dark aisles of Firestone's obscure sections to realize that not only are there no more watershed philosophies to had, but there is physically no more space for a new long-shot philosophy book to be placed. I do feel though that the natural sciences, for which luckily there are different libraries on campus, offer more hope for true innovation. After all, these disciplines have been checked by the limits of the technologies of their respective times.

Another big lesson I have learned is that there are no obvious first principles — something that I started college thinking I would find upon some shining city on a hill. I took all the courses that offered the best chances of finding such axioms — from Ethics and Public Policy to The Just Society to even a class solely devoted to Kant. But at the end of the day, I realize that there are no obvious first principles to emerge through the academic process — instead there are multiple truths. What then often happens is that our non-rational intuition and experiences have to creep into the discussion for us to come to a satisfying conclusion — hence my reluctance to intellectualize the need for charity at the beginning of this very column.

Alasdair MacIntyre, a notable philosophy professor, writes about this phenomenon in liberal arts education, albeit a more extreme version of it. He says, "What the student is confronted with . . . is an apparent inconclusiveness in all argument . . . which seems to abandon him or her to his or her prerational preferences. . . . So the student emerges from a liberal education someone whose education has been as much a process of depreciation as of enrichment."

My education here has certainly been far from a depreciation, but it is something that has come through many indirect channels. Whether it be through interviewing Former Secretary George Schultz about the difference between the wars of the past and the terrorism of the present, through observing the ever-present tendencies of humans toward aristocracy visa-vis eating club dynamics, or through the multidisciplinary and ultimately unavailing quest for first principles, I can truly say that my holistic education, if not my academic education, at Princeton is something truly worthy recounting to my grandchildren.

Sorry, the nostalgia just slipped in. Steven Kamara is a politics major from Manhassat Hills, N.Y. Email him at skamara@princeton.edu.