This new edition of my book has
been published eight years after the first. I initially wrote this book to
avoid repeating time and again the same recommendations to my students, and
since then the book has circulated widely. I am grateful to those colleagues
who still recommend it to their students. I am most grateful to those students
who discovered it by chance, after years of trying to unsuccessfully to
complete their college degree, and who wrote to me and said that these pages
had finally encouraged them to start their thesis, or to finish one they had
started. I must take some responsibility for facilitating an increase in the
number of Italian college graduates, although I am not sure that this is a good
thing.
Although I wrote this book
based on my personal university teaching experience, and with the humanities in
mind, I discovered that it was useful to almost everyone, since it focuses on
the spirit, mentality, and research methods required to write a good thesis,
rather than on its content. Therefore, this book has been read by people not
pursuing or not yet pursuing university studies, and even by middle school
students preparing research projects or reports.
This book has been translated
into the languages of foreign countries that have different thesis
requirements. Naturally, editors in those countries have made some adjustments,
yet it seems that on the whole they have been able to retain the general
argument. This
does not surprise me, since the methods necessary to conduct high-quality
research, at any level of complexity, are the same all over the world.
When I was writing this book,
the reform of the Italian university had not yet been implemented. In the
original introduction, I suggested that this book was appropriate not only for
the traditional laurea thesis but
also for the PhD thesis that was about to be implemented as part of these
reforms. I believe my prediction was sensible, and today I feel I can present
these pages even to a PhD student. (Although I hope that a PhD student has
already learned these things, one never knows.)
In the introduction to the
first edition, I talked about the shortcomings of the Italian university,
shortcomings that made my little book useful to the many thousands of students
who otherwise lacked the instruction to successfully complete their thesis.
Today, I would happily send the remaining copies of this book to the recycling
bin rather than have to republish it. Alas, these shortcomings remain, and my
original argument is as relevant today as it was in 1977.
Strange things have happened to
me since this book first appeared. For example, periodically I receive letters
from students who write, “I must write a thesis on such-and-such a topic.” (The
list of topics is immense. Some of them, I must admit, bewilder me.) They ask, “Would
you be so kind as to send me a complete bibliography so that I can proceed with
my work?” [Me asking Stephen Cohen.] Evidently these students have not
understood the purpose of the book, or have mistaken me for a wizard. This book
tries to teach one how to work independently, not how and where to find, as
Italians say, the prepared meal. Moreover, these students have not understood
that compiling a bibliography is a time-consuming project, and if I were to
complete even onf of these students’ requests, I would have to work a few
months, if not longer. If I had all that time available, I swear to you that I
would find a better way to spend it.
Here I would like to recount the
most curious thing that happened to me. It regards a section of this book,
specifically section 4.2.4 on the topic of “Academic Humility.” In this section
I attempted to show that the best ideas do not always come from major authors,
and that no intellectual contribution should be shunned because of the author’s
status. As an example, I recounted the writing of my own laurea thesis, during which I found a decisive idea that resolved a
thorny theoretical problem, in a small book of little originality written in
1887 by a certain abbot Vallet, a book that I found by chance in a market
stall.
After the book you are reading
appeared, Beniamino Palcido wrote a charming review in La Repubblica (22 September 1977). In it he likened this story of
my research adventure with the abbot Vallet to the fairy tale in which a
character becomes lost in the woods. As happens in fairy tales, and as has been
theorised by the Soviet formalist V.Y. Propp, the lost character meets a “donour”
who gives him a “magic key.” Placido’s interpretation of my story was not that
bizarre, considering that research is after all an adventure, but Placido
implied that, to tell my fairy tale, I had invented the abbot Vallet. When I
met Placido, I told him:
You are wrong; the abbot Vallet
exists, or rather he existed, and I still have his book at home. It has been
more than twenty years since I have opened it, but since I have a good visual
memory, to this day I remember the page on which I found that idea, and the red
exclamation point that I wrote in the margin. Come to my home and I will show
you the infamous book of the abbot Vallet.
No sonner said than done: we go
to my home, we pour ourselves two glasses of whiskey, I climb a small ladder to
reach the high shelf where, as I remembered, the fated book had rested for
twenty years. I find it, dust it, open it once again with a certain
trepidation, look for the equally fated page, which I find with its beautiful
exclamation point in the margin.
I show the page to Placido, and
then I read him the excerpt that had helped me so much. I read it, I read it
again, and I am astonished. The abbot Vallet had never formulated the idea that
I attributed to him; that is to say, he had never made the connection that
seemed so brilliant to me, a connection between the theory of judgement and the
theory of beauty.
Vallet wrote of something else.
Stimulated in some mysterious way by what he was saying, I made that connection
myself and, and as I identified the idea with the text I was underlining, I
attributed it to Vallet. And for more than twenty years I had been grateful to
the old abbot for something he had never given me. I had produced the magic key
on my own.
But is this how really how it
is? Is the merit of that idea truly mine? Had I never read Vallet, I would
never have had that idea. He may not have been the father of that idea, but he
certainly was, so to speak, its obstetrician. He did not gift me with anything,
but he kept my mind in shape, and he somehow stimulated my thinking. Is this
not also what we ask from a teacher, to provoke us to invent ideas?
As I recalled this episode, I
became aware that many times over the course of my readings, I had attributed
to others ideas that they had simply inspired me to look for; and many other
times I remained convinced that an idea was mine until, after revisiting some
books read many years before, I discovered that the idea, or its core, had come
to me from a certain author. One (unnecessary) credit I had given to Vallet
made me realise how many debts I had forgotten to pay. I believe the meaning of
this story, not dissonant with the other ideas in this book, is that research
is a mysterious adventure that inspire passion and holds many surprises. Not
just an individual but also an entire culture participates, as ideas sometimes
travel freely, migrate, disappear, and reappear. In this sense, ideas are
similar to jokes that become better as each person tells them.
Therefore, I decided that I
must preserve my gratitude to the abbot Vallet, precisely because he had been a magical donour. This is why,
as maybe some have already noticed, I introduced him as a main character in my
novel The Name of the Rose. He first
appears in the second line of the introduction, this time as a literal (yet
still mysterious and magical) donour of a lost manuscript, and a symbol of a
library in which books speak among themselves.
I am not sure what the moral of
the story is, but I know there is at least one, and it is very beautiful. I wish my readers to find many abbots Vallet over the course
of their lives, and I aspire to become someone else’s abbot Vallet.
4.2.4. Academic Humility
Do not let this subsection’s
title frighten you. It is not an ethical disquisition. It concerns reading and
filing methods.
You may have noticed that on
one of the cards, as a young scholar, I teased the author Biondolillo by
dismissing him in a few words. I am still convinced that I was justified in
doing so, because the author attempted to explain the important topic of the
aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas in only 18 lines. This case was extreme, but I
filed the card on the book, and I noted the author’s opinion anyway. I did this
not only because we must record all the opinions expressed on our topic, but
also because the best ideas may not come
from the major authors. And now, to prove this, I will tell you the story
of the abbot Vallet.
To fully understand this story,
I should explain the question that my thesis posed, and the interpretive
stumbling block that obstructed my work for about a year. Since this problem Is
not of general interest, let us say succintly that for contemporary aesthetics,
the moment of the perception of beauty is generally an intuitive moment, but
for St. Thomas the category of intuition did not exist. Many contemporary
interpreters have striven to demonstrate that he had somehow talked about
intuition, and in the process they did violence to his work. On the other hand,
St. Thomas’s moment of the perception of objects was so rapid and instantaneous
that it did not explain the enjoyment of complex aesthetic qualities, such as
the contrast of proportions, the relationship between the essence of a thing
and the way in which this essence organises matter, etc. The solution was (and
I arrived at it only a month before completing my thesis) in the discovery that
aesthetic contemplation lay in the much more complex act of judgement. But St.
Thomas did not explicitly say this. Nevertheless, the way in which he spoke of
the contemplation of beauty could only lead to this conclusion. Often this is precisely the scope of
interpretive research: to bring an author to say explicitly what he did not
say, but that he could not have avoided saying had the question been posed to
him. In other words, to show how, by comparing the various
statements, that answer must engage, in the terms of the author’s scrutinised
thought. Maybe the author did not give the answer because he thought it obvious,
or because – as in the case of St. Thomas – he had never organically treated
the question of aesthetics, but always discussed it incidentally, taking the
matter for granted.
Therefore, I had a problem, and
none of the authors I was reading helped me solve it (although if there was
anything original in my thesis, it was precisely this question, with the answer
that was to come out of it). And one day, while I was wandering disconsolate
and looking for texts to aid me, I found at a stand in Paris a little book that
attracted me at first for its beautiful binding. I opened it and found that it
was a book by a certain abbot Vallet, titled L’idée du Beau dans la philosophe de Saint Thomas d’Aquin []
(Louvain, 1887). I had not found it in any bibliography. It was the work of
a minor nineteenth-century author. Naturally I purchased it (and it was even
inexpensive). I began to read it, and I realised that the abbot Vallet was a
poor fellow who repeated preconceived ideas and did not discover anything new.
If I continued to read him, it was not for “academic humility,” but for pure
stubbornness, and to recoup the money I had spent. (I did not know such
humility yet, and in fact I learned it reading the book. The abbot Vallet was
to become my great mentor.) I continued reading, and at a certain point –
almost in parentheses, said probably unintentionally, the abbot not realising
his statement’s significance – I found a reference to the theory of judgement
linked to that of beauty. Eureka! I had found the key, provided by the poor
abbot Vallet, who had died a hundred years before, who was long since
forgotten, and yet who still had something to teach to someone willing to
listen.
This is academic humility: the
knowledge that anyone can teach us something. Perhaps this is because we are so
clever that we succeed in having someone less skilled than us teach us
something; or because even someone who does not seem very clever to us has some
hidden skills; or also because someone who inspires us may not inspire others. The
reasons are many. The point is that we must listen with respect to anyone,
without this exempting us from pronouncing our value judgements; or from the
knowledge that an author’s opinion is very different from ours, and that he is
ideologically very distant from us. [Joseph Nye, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz,
Kumar Sen, Joshua Cohen & Martha Nussbaum.] But even the sternest opponent can suggest some ideas to us. It may
depend on the weather, the season, and the hour of the day. Perhaps, had I read
the abbot Vallet a year before, I would not have caught the hint. And who knows
how many people more capable than I had read him without finding anything
interesting. But I learned from that episode that if I wanted to do research,
as a matter of principle I should not exclude any source. This is what I call
academic humility. Maybe this is hypocritical because it actually requires
pride rather than humility, but do not linger on moral questions: whether pride
or humility, practice it.
