Pleasure & Learning

So, first a suggestion of five, often overlapping, "motivating forces": pleasure, survival, obligation, strategy and habit. I'm sure you can find ways that all of these support learning in some ways, but I'm going to zero in on pleasure for the moment.

Another disclaimer - I'm thinking about the question of "what motivates learning?" in general to some extent, but mostly drawing on preparation for an academic career.

Now, to get even more schematic, let's go to three kinds of pleasure that could go along with learning -

1. Autonomous Pleasure
The pleasure that is often figured as most ideal. It is the pleasure that arises spontaneously from the activity of learning. It is the immanent pleasure of the learning experience. It is like the pleasure of loving.
2. Social Reward
This is the pleasure that comes from social feedback loops as the learner masters or accomplishes something. It is the pleasurable reception of a goldstar, an A-plus, a field-trip privilege, a fellowship, a vigorous applause at the end of a presentation, a sense of respect and admiration from those around you.
3. Tension and Release
The pleasure that comes only after completing a stressful project. This resembles one of Freud's models of sexual arousal and satisfaction - that the initial stage is one of excitation, a stimulus whose contact causes a condition of tension that is unpleasant as well as pleasurable (as evidenced for Freud by the desire to linger in that state of tension rather than immediately move to orgasm). Writing a paper can be like this.

Compassion and Scholarship

One way to think of ethics is as self-consciously endorsed explanations or guides for behavior, at least intended behavior. Like any behavior we tend self-reflect upon, scholarship has its ethics. Yet discussions about the ethics of scholarship seem to be rather rare or narrow, even though you might think academics are just the sorts who ask such abstract questions regarding everyday activity. Perhaps scholars in general are loathsome to critically examine their own practices and routines beyond "method." Talk about "academic integrity" usually boils down to a rather simplistic set of laws about not fudging data/facts or plagiarism.

But certainly there are a lot more ethical questions we can ask about scholarship. For many there is an implicit ethic that the scholar tries brings to the fore those experiences that tend to be most marginalized or purposively hidden or excluded from public view. That's certainly a principle that guides me in what I'm looking for while reading as well as thinking about my own work. Yet I think this ethic would be more robust if scholarship was more often seen as something that can be guided by an ethic of compassion. Compassion, to me, is a good-willed curiosity oriented towards the unknown or the other. Compassion is a response to a confusing and undeniably cruel world that affirms a faithful commitment of goodwill to what might be a groundless existence. Compassion need not rule out all suspicious or revolt against oppression, though I think it does place goodwill and care first.

More than anything, an ethos of compassion might make academic dialogues more comfortable spaces to be for people of different knowledge backgrounds. My guess is that one cause of anti-intellectual attitudes is the well-known tendency of academics is to either take the potentially condescending attitude towards someone as a student or pounce on perceived ignorance with scorn and quick judgment. An ethic of compassion may help us work out a cooperative ethos rather than making so many academic discussions sounds like rounds at a debate tournament.