Culture

Tune in and free think

November 05, 2010
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The week that began with the government confirming its intention to remove all direct support for university teaching of the arts, social sciences and humanities is set to end in a cheerier fashion, on my radio at least, with the return of Radio 3’s annual Free Thinking Festival. Radio 3 describes its weekend of debates, interviews, and performances as a “festival of ideas,” and if previous years are anything to go by, the ideas on show—this year’s theme is The Pursuit of Happiness—will enjoy a lively outing at The Sage Gateshead. Since Radio 3 is inviting all comers to “fire questions at our speakers, sign up to speed-date a thinker or chill out in our Story Corner,” it may sound positively Eeyorish to describe the outing as a ‘lively’ one for the ideas—they seem to be heading to a rave.

One idea, however, that never makes it centre-stage at the Free Thinking Festival is the idea of free thinking itself. Like an MC, its role is to set the tone for the festival, without ever getting in the way of the main acts. Radio 3 says it is “about getting involved: exploring, sharing and debating ideas.” It certainly is. But there is more to free thinking than a free-for-all.

Free thinking becomes a serious matter when the very existence of thinking comes under threat. Such a threat may come from external authorities that exercise control over the content and dissemination of thought. But the threat to thinking may just as well come—more insidiously still—from within. Which of us does not sometimes suspect that we are slaves to our own habits of thought? Those to whom the thought never occurs are, I’d suggest, the truly enslaved.

In the face of threats and constraints, external and internal, free-thinking tests the limits, unpicks certainties, and peers over the wall. And it does all that, not gratuitously, but in the name of a greater principle: that elusive thing called truth.

Free thinking is encapsulated in a phrase first attributed to Aristotle: “Plato is my friend but a greater friend is truth.” That phrase reveals the quarrelsome egalitarian sociability that animates free thinking (a faint echo of which is to be heard in Radio 3’s insistence on “getting involved”). Free thinking is for neither meek conformists nor heroic loners but for people whose ideas spark into life when they rub up against the best brains. The challenge for free-thinkers is to see in the authority figure an equal who needs to be understood on his own terms—a difficult first task in its own right—but also challenged if he falls short.

That phrase about Plato came to be adapted by thinkers and writers across early modern Europe, from the Italian humanists to Michel de Montaigne, Isaac Newton, and beyond. Free thinking was not then primarily a matter of religious disbelief, as it often seems to be today, but a much wider anti-authoritarian cast of mind that early moderns could bring to bear on questions across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Newton used it to justify his contribution to the revolution in science. Montaigne wove it into his adventures of thought or ‘essays’ as a guiding principle for the author and the reader alike.

Free thinking belongs in a festival of ideas, then, and I for one will be tuning into Radio 3 this weekend. But free thinking is more than organized jollity at weekends. A sign at the main entrance of the British Library invites all comers to “step inside for a spot of free-thinking.” That seems to me right. Free thinking is hard work of the best kind. It flourishes in quiet corners of book-filled rooms, in laboratories, and also—dare I say it this week—in universities.

Richard Scholar is a lecturer in French at the University of Oxford. His book Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking is out now.