The relation of the scholar and scholarship to the non-scholarly public has at least two sides. As with every question of service and self-service, complete selflessness is as despicable as complete egotism. The balance of life for self and for others must be maintained: service without the savor of private joys is an insult to those one serves, implying at once a false superiority in the one who serves and that the servant despises the good he works to achieve for others. Likewise, a life of jealous self-pleasuring egotism contravenes its own implicit goal — the flourishing of self — because the social, political, loving animals we are find the solitude of private pleasure empty in the long term.

These principles are as true for the scholar as for any other. On one hand, scholarship is a private joy, knowledge worth pursuing for its own sake; but on the other hand, a life of lazy intellectualism grows brittle and sallow like aging pulped-wood paper. The problem of the balance of service and self-service has grown more acute through the 20th century, and approaches some sort of tipping point at the beginning of the 21st. This is because our scholars are primarily professors. The vita contemplativa lies largely through a single institution: academia. And this institution bears in its divided heart the same problem of balance, albeit expressed as the contradiction between the transmission and the enlargement of knowledge, between teaching and research. In the 21st century, institutionalized scholars are squalling at the reduction of their unconditional support, at the retrenchment of tenure-track jobs and the devaluation of disciplines that don’t directly contribute to financial and technical prowess. Simultaneously, anti-intellectualist populism gains ground. Many see liberal education as a corrupting influence or a worthless and outmoded fashion, justly superseded by professional and managerial training.

My intention is to buck both trends, to speak about intellectual life as a good life without basing it unconditionally on a certain economic and social structure. Whether the intellectual was a Greek slave, a German hofmeister, or a tenured professor, the use of scholarship to the self and to the world remained the same. Wasting time politicizing one’s scholarship because of a perceived diminution in the social status or economic power of the scholarly life is ignominious, no less so than stupidly asserting that the scholarly life has no value. Improving and expanding the institutions of intellectual work is worth one’s time, but institutions are only the setting for a jewel.

This blog is an exercise in writing for the public, as a scholar, according to the principle of the balance of service and self-service. The fact is that I enjoy my scholarship. The reason I’m a scholar and not an engineer, or doctor, or lawyer, is that I enjoy reading and writing, analyzing and synthesizing, and the vigorous interactions of friendly argument. But I think that from these enjoyable pursuits arise vital public services: scholars should enlarge the minds of the public, criticize the conduct of public affairs, and guide novitiates and amateurs through the mazy halls of the treasury of scholarship. In this blog, I will be pursuing each of these public services in a distinctive way.

1. I intend to contribute to the expansion of public minds, by discoursing pleasantly and relevantly on serious books: “Pleasantly,” by writing as clearly and invitingly as I can; “relevantly,” by continually referring the ideas at stake in various books to the urgent problems of contemporary life; on “serious books,” by refusing to hold back from writing about even the most complex works of scholarship or literature.
2. In order to participate, also, in criticizing public affairs, I intend to experiment in what I shall call contemplative journalism. At the beginning of each month, I’ll choose an item in the news of world significance but passing interest to the news cycle (which will leave it behind in a week or two, to move on to the newest celebrity scandal or political contretemps), and I’ll pursue both the context and the repercussions of that topic for the whole month. In this way, I hope — for my own benefit as much as for that of my readers — to lift my knowledge of contemporary life out of the streaming flux of news sources.
3. Finally, in order to put myself at the service of eager readers who share my interests, I intend to publish weekly “Of Note” posts, in which I point out recent writing of quality on the set of interests peculiar to my scholarship.

What are those interests? I am studying for a PhD in philosophy, at Boston College, but pursue from within the confines of my discipline a research project involving scientific, legal, and religious traditions as they bear on questions of political theory, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. I also pursue minor interests in historiography, literary history, comparative religion, and stylistics.

This is the prospectus of Bifurcated Life, and I invite you to join me as a reader and commenter.