Relationships are crucial to study as to life, writes Umberto Eco.
The Guardian | 03/04/2004
I am going to tell you a very personal little story. Lots of people will wonder what it has to do with them, but I think it contains a moral. Three morals, in fact.
When I was not yet 20, I began work on my graduate thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. At that time, there was much controversy over whether medieval scholars held relevant and compelling ideas on art and beauty. In Benedetto Croce’s history of aesthetics, (Estetica, 1902), the great Italian philosopher dismissed 10 centuries in four-and-a-half highly sceptical pages.
Then I discovered that – in 1946 – a virtually unknown publisher in Bruges had issued the Études d’Esthétique Médiévale by Edgar de Bruyne. Those three volumes of about 1,500 pages were obviously a limited edition, but I finally managed to unearth them in two libraries. I spent months filling up hundreds of filing cards. There were no photocopiers in those days. But this task proved to be of far-reaching importance for my own studies – and for those of many others.
With painstaking care, De Bruyne had “scanned” (as we would say today, but there were no computers then either) tens of thousands of pages, most of which he researched and copied down complete with commentary. He reconstructed everything that had ever been said about medieval aesthetics, from Boethius to Duns Scotus, thus demonstrating that contemporaries paid remarkable attention to this question, even though the debate centred on theology, grammar, rhetoric or music.
My encounter with De Bruyne was of fundamental significance to me. Throughout my entire life I have continually fallen back on his three volumes (finally republished in French by Albin Michel five years ago, and now at everyone’s disposal once more). Every time I knowingly used De Bruyne’s work, I cited him. But goodness knows how many times I took as common knowledge things that I had actually learned from him. After my thesis was published, I sent him a copy, and in 1956 he wrote me a kind and generous letter. When I sent him another book of mine a few years later, I received a letter from his widow saying he had died. So I never had the chance to meet De Bruyne or to thank him for what he had given me.
Last year, in Brussels, a whole conference was devoted to him. A man of many parts, he wrote other philosophical works, a history of aesthetics in Dutch and innumerable essays. He was also a senator. Perhaps because I cited him so often in my own work, I was invited to give a talk about him as a historian of aesthetics.
And here comes the first moral.
This man revealed many things to me when I was 20. Now 50 years have gone by, and I am older than he was at his death. Despite this, a bond has been established. The pupil, unable to teach the master, is now going to teach others about the things he learned from him. I can repay a debt, and I feel extraordinarily at peace with my past.
But sitting down to write a 15-page speech about De Bruyne would have meant rereading those 1,500 pages and the other 1,200 or so of his history of aesthetics, not to mention many other thingshe wrote on these matters.
All I had to do, however, was open an old cardboard box, in which I had fortunately kept all the preparatory material for my thesis. The hundreds of filing cards, sheets of paper and pages of notebooks (only about 10 percent of which I actually used for my thesis) enabled me to solve the problem in a couple of days. You might say that I reread De Bruyne through the eyes of myself as a 20-year-old, but I checked out a few things in his texts, and I realised that my ideas on the subject hadn’t changed that much…except for the feeling that I was smarter then than I am now. I had more neurons.
And this brings us to the second moral of my tale. In a little book I once wrote, I said that a good thesis is like a pig. You don’t throw anything away, and even after decades you can still re-use it. I am glad I was right.
The last moral is different again. We often have to explain to young people why study is useful. It’s pointless telling them that it’s for the sake of knowledge, if they don’t care about knowledge. Nor is there any point in telling kids that an educated person gets through life better than an ignoramus, because they can always point to some genius who, from their standpoint, leads a wretched life.
And so the only answer is that the exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity and emotional attachments. It introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day.
And all this is very beautiful.
© Umberto Eco