COLUMN: Finding the life of the mind
When students commence their college education, they often believe that it will change their lives in a practical way. They will study to become engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, entrepreneurs, along with myriad other noble and useful possibilities. But how many also arrive at university in search of the life of the mind? Tom Wolfe’s novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons” pursues that very question by asking us to consider what the life of the mind is: is the human mind hardwired so that every aspect of a human life is determined by biology, or do environment and education have an impact? In fact, the novel is something of an experiment in the debate between nurture and nature, newly revived by the field of sociobiology and remarkable advances in neuroscience.
There has been much discussion about the literary merits of “I Am Charlotte Simmons”. It won an award for the worst sex scene in literature for the year it came out. Whatever its stylistic merits, the book raises a vital question for college students. It is an age old question: who am I?
Wolfe takes Charlotte Simmons, an academically successful, socially isolated girl from Sparta, a small town in the hills of North Carolina, and gives her a prestigious academic scholarship to the fictional elite campus of Dupont University. Wolfe’s objective in the novel is to determine the relative significance of Charlotte’s enviable IQ and her environment in forming and influencing her ambitions and her behavior. Wolfe’s literary experiment takes Charlotte from her austere, morally upright family and drops her in the midst of a liberal, elite University campus, in a coed dorm, with a sophisticated roommate, and to make things interesting, he gives Charlotte the desire for social success. Because Wolfe is a fair man, he provides Charlotte with the opportunity for status at Dupont, in both academic and social spheres. Wolfe registers Charlotte for a neuroscience class and makes her social life interesting by hooking her up with a handsome but notorious frat boy, as well as a star basketball player.
Charlotte quite literally believes she finds the life of the mind as a star student in Dr. Starling’s Introduction to Neuroscience class. The question the professor asks the class to consider from the start is whether human beings are genetically determined animals with a rational mind; much like a rock with consciousness, which has no ability to change the arc of its flight once thrown, but only the capacity to rationalize the path nature has chosen for it or whether external influences, like good teachers and great books, and the free will to act on what we learn, can really change the trajectory of our lives?
Is Charlotte the same Charlotte Simmons from beginning to end? Charlotte arrives at Dupont as a brilliant, dedicated student, exhilarated by the prospect of finding the life of the mind and a cohort of like-minded geniuses, of which she had been deprived in Sparta. But Wolfe suggests that Charlotte changes teams as she becomes suffused in the sexually charged culture of Dupont University.
Charlotte sadly suffers a fall from her academic eminence when she is quickly diverted from her quest for knowledge by pedestrian distractions – boys and frat-house parties. Before her academic fall, however, Charlotte inadvertently has a profound influence on one of the star basketball players at Dupont University. Jojo Johanssen has followed the path of other athletes, into dumbed down courses, like “Stocks for Jocks,” an economics course created just to get the athletes through their undergraduate education with cooperative teachers. Charlotte, who mistakenly signs up for one of these specially designed courses in French literature for athletes, chastises Jojo for succumbing to peer pressure instead of owning up to his obvious interest in the books. She recommends that Jojo take a course in philosophy if he wants to get a real education at Dupont.
The result for Jojo is something of a conversion, a kind of Platonic turning of the soul towards the desire for knowledge. Even in the face of resistance and mockery from the basketball coach, who takes to calling him Socrates, Jojo dangerously takes up the life of the mind in a course called the “Age of Socrates,” in response. Jojo finds he likes philosophy, that Plato and Aristotle speak to him about the most important questions a human being can ask: what is the best way of life? What is justice? What is beauty? More than that, Jojo discovers that understanding the ideas of Plato and Aristotle is exhilarating. He begins to refer to his life in terms of his academic turnaround, “Before Socrates and After Socrates, BS and AS.” Facing suspension from school for cheating before his scholarly conversion and a slump on the basketball court, Jojo perseveres through the “Age of Socrates” and changes his academic trajectory. A moment of insight into his own soul prompted by Charlotte’s disapproval, a rational decision and an act of will, along with many hours of study, unexpectedly introduce Jojo to the life of the mind at the University. Studying Plato and Aristotle changes Jojo’s life.
Wolfe’s literary experiment with Charlotte and Jojo leads him to conclude that external influences, such as culture and status group concerns, matter a great deal to what human beings do with their genetic coding and natural inclinations. Charlotte cares more about admiration than academic excellence. But Jojo’s academic conversion reveals to him the possibility that he can become a serious student and a thoughtful human being. Through the study of great books, Jojo becomes open to the idea that there is more to life than basketball.
Which is it then – biology, society or the human intellect – that makes us who we are? You would be truly pursuing the life of the mind if at some point in your college education you seriously considered this question: who am I?
Carol McNamara is a senior lecturer in the political science department.