The Midnight Philosopher

Dr. Matthew Nini

... the book I've written is perhaps a strange book for an academic to write. But it is very much an expression of freedom and of thinking in a way that is unconventional insofar as it is a thinking that seeks to connect with human experience that academic writing and thinking can sometimes miss. And I've tried to phrase this through the metaphor of day and night. Day is the place of logic; it's the place where things are linear and proceed from the first step to the last step, going from beginning to end. Things are identifiable, have limits. Whereas the night symbolizes something more human, something less linear, something darker, where things are not as easily visible as they are in the daytime. And so, night thinking is a way of tapping into part of the human experience that is lost in the peer-reviewed journal article or the scholarly monograph. The kind of thinking that is maybe better represented by religion, myths, stories, poetry, music.

Dr. Matthew Nini

Now, what is a fragment? A fragment is a thought, a story, a narrative that is fundamentally unfinished. It begins somewhere, and then never goes anywhere afterwards; it trails off, as it were. So the thought has begun, something is constituted, something is formed, whether it's an anecdote about a person, an observation about something, a historical remark, the interpretation of a text. And then it's left off in a sort of poetic way. It wanders off into the night, and the reader is left to meditate on this. And of course, these don't proceed in linear fashion. You don't have to read the first fragment, and then the second, and then the third. You could, in theory, open the book up to any page, and begin reading, and find something to engage with, to dialogue with, since a huge element of the book is connecting with one's inner dialogue partner, what Socrates called his daimon, his inner, inner. And this silent conversation is, I think, the essence of philosophy. And this is what happens when one dwells in wonder. A sort of dialectic begins, and we see this in the Platonic tradition.

Dr. Matthew Nini

If one really trusts the student, one cannot teach the student in the way that the modern technological, scientific pedagogue would imagine the student should be taught, or perhaps not so much the pedagogue as the administrator at whose beck and call the pedagogue is doing his contemporary work, or perhaps mischief. One could liken this to an idea from Martin Heidegger, technology in Heidegger. Now, there's an idea, if you read Heidegger's essay concerning the question of technology, technique is not simply a bunch of things; it's an attitude, a way of approaching the world. We see this with artificial intelligence today. People think that AI will replace them. I think that's often because they approach the world as a series of tasks to be accomplished, of little boxes to be ticked. Of course, if you see your life as a bunch of little boxes to be ticked, AI will do it better than you can, but that's fundamentally not what life is. And if you see education in this very transactional way, sort of opening up the head and pouring in information and then sealing it up again, well, that won't get you very far. That is treating the human as if it were merely a piece of technology, whereas the human is something alive and breathing. And this means that the fundamental attitude of the teacher should be this faith in the student to be able to think the problem through.

Dr. Matthew Nini

There is a beautiful moment in the book when he's reading some Latin, and one sees his inner thought process at work. At the exact moment when he discovers that he is no longer translating in his mind the text from Cicero or whoever he's reading, but really reading it, having made it his own, engaging with it. That's a moment of wonder. This great miracle of learning, of really understanding something, is a moment of wonder, and it brings us back to that which is oldest in us.

Dr. Matthew Nini

To share the wisdom he has acquired with this one person, is an act that is greater and more meaningful than being the best glass bead game player. It is through this gravitational pull of love that we were talking about with Dante, with Augustine, with other figures. That he sees what this playfulness is about. This sort of divine playfulness of the love that moves the stars, that is playfully moving the universe forward, but is not playing games with us.