Composure

“No one has yet determined what the body can do.” (Spinoza) While it has always been thus, today more than ever, higher education consists of helping students find out what their bodies can do. We can, perhaps, limit this learning to their ability to do things with words, or, somewhat more generally, symbols. I stress that these “symbolic” skills are bodily because we have become a little too used to “off-loading” our understanding of the “mental” to machines. (Note, that when I call this a “symbolic” competence I don’t mean “merely” symbolic, or “just for show,” but pertaining to symbols.) I will never tire of emphasizing how impressed we should be with people in their twenties who can compose themselves, given their bodies as they are, in orderly prose paragraphs. I am, of course, also impressed with their math skills. And the essential thing in developing both of these skills is practice–to actually put words and numbers together by hand in meaningful ways. Prosthetic hands are…