Notes from underground: St Andrews journey, part 2
The second instalment of my trip back to my old university
Waking early on my first morning in St. Andrews, there is a sharp booze taste on my tongue. But I force myself to do some yoga and a little writing. I work on some Latin and I type up poems which were written in fragments throughout my journey north. It had been light for hours before I woke—a soft, grey summer light, the colour of sea and cloud. My room is a tall-roofed town house room with large wooden shutters on the long windows. I keep the shutters open slightly to let the morning sun fall gently into the bedroom.
There are a number of events planned for the alumni weekend. I avoid them all. I had thought about going to the General Council AGM in the Old Parliament Hall where the debating society used to meet. This is an administrative meet-up which all alumni can attend, and I must be getting old because I am not uninterested in the challenges the university faces and the solutions they are proposing. Plus, it would be a chance to see inside the old hall and drink some free coffee. Instead, I go for a morning walk around the town and maybe try to find a battery for my camera. I walk along the Scores past the classics department and the philosophy department. There are no students now, just infrequent tourist couples and the sound of the wind in the tall Victorian trees.
I try both Boots and Rymans for a battery, with no luck. It is becoming clear that I will either have to order online or go to Dundee for a DSLR battery, but even then so much could go wrong that it would not be worth ruining my whole trip with such roundabout journeys or speculative plans that could lead to nothing. After asking the man at Rymans about where I might find a battery, a woman in a summery dress interrupts to tell me I might have to go to the Morrisons on the edge of town. She has pale, freckled skin and brown hair and eyes. Her dress is a floral pattern of yellow and brown. She is friendly, and her Fife accent gives her away as a local.
‘I’m going up that way myself, I can drop you off?’ The offer is so baffling, so matter-of-fact and made with plain goodness of will, that it throws me. In Oxford and in London where I lived previously, I have been used to suspicion and only ever faltering and hesitant shows of kindness. And I have been guilty of this hesitancy myself—in cities of high condensation you lose your patience, you get burned too many times and your nervous system is so drained that little acts of kindness are too risky.
The woman’s name is Lindsey. She’s in her early thirties and as we drive up to the supermarket she tells me about her work which involves travelling a lot, and she indicates that she is with a ‘partner’ who is in his sixties and that it makes for embarrassing social conversations at events and parties. Her conversation is small talk and she is preoccupied with the faulty car that her garage has provided her with. The car she drives at the moment is some sort of Honda estate, but her actual car is an Audi TT, which she is obviously proud to make known. We drive down Lamond Drive, a long suburban street of former council houses that have gradually become more plush and expensive over the decades. I tell Lindsey how I used to live on Warrack Street, just off Lamond Drive, in a rented bungalow, and this seems to put her at ease with me a little more. I am not one of these former students that only ever lived in a mansion house on North Street. I know the town a little. Having said all that, though, the place has changed, or it seems unfamiliar and familiar at the same time, and I’m uneasy with it.
Lindsey drops me off at Morrisons but there is no battery for sale there either. I walk back down Largo Road, which is now all built up with an Aldi and a Marks & Spencer, and it takes me down onto Bridge Street, where I had probably my most productive year as a student. The house was comfortable with large bedrooms and bay windows and each of us who lived there kept our own routine, kept out of each other’s hair. It was the most steady and stable I felt in all my degree, and it was that year in which I earned the marks to get through with a 2.1. I was also doing a lot of Tai Chi and Yoga that year, which kept me out of trouble and maintained routine and discipline.
By the time I make it home I have made peace with idea that I am simply not going to be able to get a battery or use my DSLR camera. I wrap up the camera in a dirty shirt and place it carefully in my bag. Out of sight is out of mind. I can put away the disappointment and just focus on writing poems and going for walks.
For the rest of the day, I browse the bookshops and do some writing in St. Mary’s Quad, the college grounds of the theology faculty and the psychology department, and also the garden of the Bute Medical building. I sit on a bench by Queen Mary’s thorn tree, looking onto the large, sprawling oak tree that dominates the quad. With a coffee, I enjoy the soft breeze of the June evening and write some poems in the coming dusk. I had not bought any poetry in the bookshops but had been browsing through Ted Hughes and Keith Douglas, and these have given me some music for my neurons to start firing away to.
I did buy a second-hand copy of Aristotle’s De Anima from the small bookshop called Bouquiniste. This shop has been here for years, situated at the eastern, top end of Market Street, where the cobbled road narrows and is lined with terraced cottages. Opposite is a gated garden, somewhat like a college quad, called St John’s Gardens, and I am told later that it belongs to the history department. It is the first time I have noticed it. The grass is semi-wild and the space peaceful and empty. Inside Bouquiniste the shop is a tiny, narrow little room lined with books and carpeted with luxurious rugs. To the right as you go in the books are classics, then poetry, then biography. To the left are the novels and the local history sections. In the middle of the shop an oak table holds piles of books on all subjects, most very antique books from the nineteenth century—books by Robert Louise Stevenson, books with illustrations from painters like Edward Burne-Jones. There are some very old Dickens editions and some poetry by Tennyson. The man behind the counter is a familiar face, a former teacher with reddish cheeks and a bemused chuckle. He has the manner of a Church of Scotland minister from the seventies or eighties—friendly but slightly withholding in a cheery presbyterian sort of way. I tell him that I am back as an alumnus and that I can remember coming in here for the very first time during my fresher’s week. I bought a copy of some essays by Aldous Huxley. It is such a tiny, passing memory, but now it has all the significance of a ritual event. Coming back to Bouquiniste feels meaningful and I try to convey this to the owner.
After dinner that night I took what was remaining of my bottle of Cote Du Rhone down onto Castle Sands, armed with my Aristotle. The wind is light and steady, the air is warm but full of freshness and movement. Across the beach from where I have perched, a middle aged couple has created a fire. Another student couple comes down the path with a portable music system blasting out techno music. They look at me in me in my Nouvelle Vague-style, striped t-shirt with my wine bottle, notebook and Aristotle, and seem to recognise my incongruity with the normal St. Andrews type and the cragged, rugged environment. They also know that they have disturbed me, but they make a point of indifference and disappear behind a shard of wet rock, probably to do a little more than just petting. The techno music continues as I struggle on through De Anima.
Vague memories of reading parts of this book come back to me. In my final year of honours I had done a dissertation on whether Aristotle’s theory of the soul was a precursor to modern ‘Functionalism’ about the mind-body relationship. In philosophy of mind, there are those who account for the mind by proposing it must be a separate substance to the body, as something about the mind seems untethered by the mere laws of cause and effect. Our subjectivity just feels like it stands outside the laws of objects in the world. Descartes is our main source on this view, but it ends up requiring that we have some account for this ‘dualism’ of substances. In a scientific world we can’t just assume that the world is divided this way. What is this mental substance, and how exactly does it come to impact and direct the physical substance of our body? This is the classic ‘mind-body problem.’ One response is to go the other way and say that our mental experiences are nothing more than physical processes, that we experience things in a certain way but that doesn’t mean there is anything non-scientific going on. This is ‘Physicalism.’ While it has the advantage of accounting for the mind in a way consistent with modern science, it doesn’t really help us with the quality of experience, why our mental states have this peculiarly non-physical quality. A reaction to Physicalism is Functionalism, which says the question is not whether our mental states are separate substances or just physical ones, but what role they play, what job they are doing. Any account for them would look at their function, leaving the question of substance as irrelevant. Our minds could be made up of butter, Lego blocks, or the grey matter in our skulls, the point is that the substance is arranged in a certain way and performs a certain function, it is not the substance that makes mental states distinct. This definition is sometimes articulated as the claim that mental states are a software issue, rather than a hardware issue. This is what makes Aristotle an attractive forebear for Functionalists to claim. He too was reacting against those who wanted to postulate multiple substances, or who were making too hasty a reduction to materialism without adequately accounting for the formal structures of human psychology and biology. He felt the Pre-Socratics before him had stumbled upon incoherent positions that were unnecessary. For Aristotle, the principle which defines the things we call alive as opposed inert, is the Form, not the Substance—the way it is organised, not the matter it is built from.
This is where the Aristotle-as-Functionalist theory breaks down though. As I read in Hugh Lawson-Tancred’s Penguin introduction, we are on shaky ground when we try to align modern problems of the mind and body with those that Aristotle was trying to account for. Modern thinkers since Descartes have been trying to account for the introspective, self-conscious ego, the quality of subjective experience. For Aristotle, he was more interested in the ‘life principle’, the ‘anima’ which defines things that are alive versus inanimate objects.
That said, it is Aristotle’s framing of the question of the mind and body relationship that remains useful to us. Lawson-Tancred does admit this, but even more so does David Chalmers, the cognitive scientist and philosopher at Yale. A recent book of his tries to argue that Aristotle’s theory of mind offers a whole alternative construction of the relationship between mind and matter, which avoids the dualism that has mired Western thought since Descartes. So for Chalmers the issue is not whether Aristotle was a proto-Functionalist, but that he has a useful conceptual alternative to the way we think about mind and body, which allows us to avoid dualism or reductionism, or even to have to seek solutions to the mind-body ‘problem’ in the first place.
As I sit there in the dark, with the fire pit in the distance and the wind thrusting gulls across grey clouds and listening to the waves roll onto the black, damp shingle, I can’t say if I understood all of this back in my honours year. I can’t really claim to understand it now. All I know is that there is a thrill, a kind of rapture, that comes from reading Aristotle in the raw. Too much of modern philosophy becomes about parsing out conceptual distinctions. The result is that fascinating problems which illuminate the human condition become nothing more than technical and arid abstractions. What is ironic is that there is no more acute distinction-maker and concept-chopper than Aristotle. Modern ‘analytical’ philosophers are quite full of themselves thinking they are doing something fresh with old problems by applying rigorous analysis. Aristotle was there way before them, nearly 3000 years before. So what makes Aristotle much more enjoyable to read? He is quite dry himself, it has to be said, and he is rarely easy to follow. But there is something about ancient philosophy, about ancient writers in general actually, that has a humanist appeal. They are not claiming to be technicians and experts, they are not positioning themselves as priests performing specialised tasks. They assume that if you are reading them, you must be some kind of equal. You have the sense of being in the trenches together, battling against concepts and problems in a shared war of reason versus supposition. Just because you don’t get it first time round, doesn’t mean Aristotle thinks you are a dumb ass. The same cannot be said when you read most modern philosophy.
I continue to read Aristotle well into the night. Another couple comes down onto the beach, slightly yuppyish in expensive-looking sports clothes. They sit on a piece of rock and watch the darkness coming in with the tide. They have a small terrier which dashes about the wet sands and when he darts past me he growls. I finish my wine, and I realise I have made quite a big dent in the De Anima, while also reading some other materials I have brought with me for a book review. I even managed to do some writing.
It was the night of the graduation ball. Earlier I had seen boys in kilts and girls in glittering gowns passing through the quadrangle at St. Salvator’s, making elegant spectacles of themselves like it was a Hollywood event. Throughout the day there have been many graduates in white ties and gowns, looking handsome and scholarly and proud. I admire them, but I do not want to be them. Despite appearances, my trip back to St. Andrews is not one of mere nostalgia. I am here to reclaim my original ideal of the place, before I got caught up in seeking social favour and distracting myself in drink and the pursuit of recognition from others. Even when I was in the mix of parties and pub sessions and spending afternoons in coffee shops whining and wasting time, I had always wanted the experience of midnight bohemia, rather than just ‘youthful fun.’ I had wanted the euphoria and the sublime of new ideas, shared in the drama of human intimacy. But my generation did not see human connection as a path to wisdom or a way of sharing learning; my generation wanted entertainment and sought relief from the drudgery of life through hedonism and ironic abandon. Eventually, I would give in to all this, but it left a hole in me, a sense of unfinished business. I ended up feeling I had to apologise for admiring the life of the mind, indeed for admiring and valuing anything at all. So I am back here not to go down memory lane, but to reclaim that part of myself I gave up in order to please others and fit in. It is not anyone else’s fault, it is mine, and I feel due self-recrimination for it.
So my night with wine and Aristotle on the rush and crash of the beach has been a taste of the kind of life I always wanted at St. Andrews. A Byronic thrill of eros combined with logos, where the ideas in great works can spur an inner exaltation, maybe even transformation. Philosophy for me is always first and foremost an aesthetic experience, that is, an experience of change and turbulence within—not clarity. If this involves a conceptual reordering this is simply a by-product, something that has to be worked out after the fact. It is not the starting point and it is definitely not the ultimate goal. Philosophy is a vehicle of self-expression, because expressivism is a path to truth. Through deepening our expression of self, we truly realise ourselves. Art, philosophy, love—it’s all the same thing, the pursuit of flourishing through inner transformation. As private and lonely as my night on the beach was, I did experience this. This is a landscape of awe, the drama of the coastline and ghosts of the medieval town combine terror and wonder, and if you let them work on you, without any flight into distraction or indulgence, you can feel yourself be changed. I only wish I had had the courage to let this happen to me when I was studying here.