“No one has yet determined what the body can do.” (Spinoza)

While it has always been thus, today more than ever, higher education consists of helping students find out what their bodies can do. We can, perhaps, limit this learning to their ability to do things with words, or, somewhat more generally, symbols. I stress that these “symbolic” skills are bodily because we have become a little too used to “off-loading” our understanding of the “mental” to machines. (Note, that when I call this a “symbolic” competence I don’t mean “merely” symbolic, or “just for show,” but pertaining to symbols.) I will never tire of emphasizing how impressed we should be with people in their twenties who can compose themselves, given their bodies as they are, in orderly prose paragraphs. I am, of course, also impressed with their math skills. And the essential thing in developing both of these skills is practice–to actually put words and numbers together by hand in meaningful ways. Prosthetic hands are perfectly legitimate, but mental prosthetics simply beg the question. In an important sense, minds just are what the body can do with symbols.

I think we need to be straight with our students about this. Their time at university should be spent disciplining their bodies so that they (their bodies) may “know things.” They must become able to make up their minds, speak their minds, and write down what they think, to compose themselves, in public but also in the privacy of their own minds, in coherent prose. Their thoughts should flow in a stream of consciousness that becomes sentences that become paragraphs that become essays. When they speak they should speak with the confidence of someone who knows what they’re talking about. When they write they should have the courage (born of that confidence) to expose their thinking to the criticism of their peers. They should present themselves as people who want to know if they wrong, ready to engage with people who are qualified to tell them when they are. This is a bodily comportment, a posture, a way of carrying yourself. It requires an attentive attitude and a particular tone of voice. The aim is to be become articulate, to find your composure.

Do I need to say that this training, this discipline, cannot be left to machines? There is no workaround when developing your own style. You must assemble your sentences and develop your arguments yourself.