"Notes on Intellectual Friendship" & "Listening, Writing, Living"
BINST Student Interns reflect on the lessons and conversations from the past semester
Thinking with the Berkeley Institute is the substack newsletter-blog for our community to engage in and extend the conversations we’re having. The theme “Virtue and the Intellectual Life” united our programming and conversations this Spring 2024 semester at the Berkeley Institute.
Below, you will find reflections inspired by our Spring 2024 programming from our undergraduate interns Angelina Wilson and Dominic Vitz. In “Notes on Intellectual Friendship,” Angelina offers a reflection on the circumstances enabling and possibilities within intellectual friendship. In “Listening, Writing, Living,” Dominic shares three concrete practices he learned this semester in the effort to better attend to others and grow in virtue.
Notes on Intellectual Friendship
By Angelina Wilson,
UC Berkeley, English ‘24, Spring BINST Digital Content Intern
In undergraduate study we encounter “enough and to spare” new terms. Presumably we’ll latch onto the ones that matter to us while the rest will slip away. Some will be cultural slang learned from classmates, others disciplinary keywords central to our majors, and some are terms that emerge broadly across the academic intellectual context of the university. “Intellectual friendship” fits in this last category. I first encountered the term through the Berkeley Institute. While I’d certainly reflected on the benefits of friendship both generally and in academic contexts, the particular articulation of intellectual friendship was new to me. As I asked friends about it I found the unfamiliarity was shared. Intellectual friendship has a varied history and has meant different things at different times. I have come to understand intellectual friendship as a constellation of actions, modes of relation, and attunements to one’s interlocutors. These understandings exist in a dynamic interface and so, rather than following a linear narrative, it seems appropriate to share them in the form of jottings.
In what follows I’ll reflect on the ways our relationship to space and our commitment to rigorous thinking with amiability shape our intellectual friendships.
The Importance of Corridors
How often do you reflect on the physical environment you work in? Do you take the time in the move from task to task, meeting to meeting, place to place, to feel how these spaces act on you?
The simple act of being in the space of the Berkeley Institute, just off campus where the city meets the university, allows me to occupy place in such a way that I am more able to give of myself and receive of others in conversations and interactions. It is often in the in-between, the gathering before and after a seminar, walking each other home after an event, setting bags down and admitting you were confused about the reading, that the seeds of intellectual friendships are planted. I think of these spaces as corridors of time. These time corridors between scheduled events hold the in-between exchanges that shape the ways people approach the events themselves, influencing their thinking and ways of relating to each other. These corridors support an entry into a space which allows for vulnerable and genuine collective engagement.
The geographic location of the Berkeley Institute embodies these corridors. In its physical placement the Berkeley Institute sits between university life and city life. Places like this open lines of camaraderie and thinking that exist in the corridor-like space in-between events, in-between places, adjacent to the concrete parameters of the University.
Space and Vulnerability
UC Berkeley can be brutally competitive even for those actively seeking collaboration. In classes students face the anxiety to be seen as smart. Even in study groups and one-on-one meetings, I think we hold back out of fear of showing ourselves as ignorant and somehow lacking. These fears transfer to our modes of engagement in the classroom and with each other. It’s difficult to have conversations that move beyond a performance of personality or intellect, that share a moment of reflection or learning. This difficulty stems from a fear of recognizing each other’s strengths because we see them as our own weaknesses — an anxiety that is perhaps not unfounded. There are a limited amount of resources, job opportunities, and seats in the classroom. But these pressures can manifest in a transactional approach to intellectual work that forecloses collective thinking.
Nurturing conversations that allow for shared learning require vulnerability and honesty so we can witness each other’s strengths and have the confidence to realize and share our own. A place like the Berkeley Institute offers a recess from the struggle for resources and allows community members to discover their personal orientations and commitments. Binst brings together students, academics, and participants from a wide range of backgrounds so conversations can be unbound from the stress of qualifying your attendance; nothing you say affects the calculation of a grade. Once the pressure of performance for a grade is lifted and you’re no longer subconsciously justifying your right to speak and be present, you can give of yourself and engage with what others bring to the table. Neither your honesty nor the strengths of others are a threat to your presence or right to speak.
Mentors often give students the advice to be playful in one’s beginning lines of inquiry. Yet, in my experience, this is difficult to cultivate without community, without chums to revel in and notice strangeness or inconsistencies together.
Rigorous Thinking and Amiability
Can we be chummy with our intellectual interlocutors? How do our casual modes of relation support our academic work?
Rigorous thinking is characterized by close attention and asking critical questions. The particulars of rigorous thinking in practice might involve developing a claim or idea and then asking: what are the strong points of my claim? What are the weak points or inconsistencies? How is my idea situated in a particular context? How do the contextual constraints inform the claim? These questions can only be answered through close attention to one’s idea. Often, the most fruitful claims and questions are motivated by a pressing curiosity, an impulse to explore and understand something in detail. It is in the motivating impulse of curiosity that amiability becomes important.
In my senior year of college I found myself reverting back more and more to a toddler-like sensibility. When reading, my brain always seemed to ask another “why.” Why questions are not always useful to ask as they can inhibit intuition. And yet there is something joyful in this line of inquiry because it approaches the puzzling and unintelligible with playfulness: A playfulness that opens curiosity and thus allows for critical questioning. A playfulness that seems to be cultivated in practicing amiability or acting chummy. It is the ability to point out a specific feature of a text to a friend and say “look how strange,” or “look how interesting” and have no pressure to have an answer — no pressure to produce an interpretation which could be the seeding ground for a more substantive argument. And yet we don’t often give ourselves space to make these observations because we tend to split thorough analysis and friendly banter into mutually exclusive modes of engagement.
Mentors often give students the advice to be playful in one’s beginning lines of inquiry. Yet, in my experience, this is difficult to cultivate without community, without chums to revel in and notice strangeness or inconsistencies together.
~
Of course, none of these above notes can exhaustively define intellectual friendship. My hope is that what I have sketched across them, and the examples of what the community at Binst has cultivated, can motivate us to bring modes of engagement that might otherwise be absent from the classroom back into student life.
Listening, Writing, Living: Three BINST-core practices Concerning Virtue
By Dominic Vitz
UC Berkeley, English ‘26, Spring BINST Development Intern
It seems as though life increasingly demands that I be productive, or, at the minimum, maintain the appearance of productivity. My color-coded Google Calendar, my cluttered desk, my tendency to jump from topic to topic in conversation reflect how so many things – our studies, our jobs, our responsibilities – jostle for our attention and time. This busyness sometimes feels like a flock of scavenger birds that plucks away at the precious time and limited attention we all have to offer, eroding our ability to understand each other. The Spring 2024 programming at the Berkeley Institute, and the mentors who facilitated these workshops and seminars, introduced me to – or helped me uncover – several practices that I want to continue to reflect on and employ in my own life.
“Listening to the Leading Edge”
When thinking with others, we can strive for civility and friendship by “listening for the leading edge”, setting our own responses aside, and assuming the best intentions.
During our first session of the Undergraduate Working Group, Dena discussed how charitable listening can foster intellectual friendships with our peers. Our intellectual interlocutors may often talk around the heart of their idea – an idea might be inchoate, partial, or unfinished. Dena stressed the value in listening to the “leading edge” of a conversation: listening attentively, searching after the heart of our interlocutor's words, and not getting caught up in composing our own “pithy response.” Intellectual friendship – and being a good friend, generally – asks us to understand first and respond second. As we begin to grasp what the other person says, we are able to listen for the best version of their idea or argument. We cultivate kindness and minimize judgment when we aim to see the truth in what our peers, interlocutors, and friends have to offer, even if we disagree. And by honing our awareness of how our colleague communicates, we become better speakers; we learn the various ways we ourselves dance around the essence of our own ideas.
“Tracing toward the Prompt”
To practice the technique of understanding others, we can create a prompt for ourselves from a poem or story written by someone else that we love and respect.
In an Undergraduate Working Group Session, Professor Elliott explained how one can peer inside an author’s imagination by reverse-engineering a text. I was struck by how this frames writing as a window for further understanding. We walked through this exercise to craft a prompt based upon Elizabeth Alexander’s “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe.” Professor Elliott asked us to imagine a prompt that might have spurred the author, Elizabeth Alexander, to craft this poem. Then, she instructed us to pen our own piece in response to this imagined prompt. Since then, I’ve been affected by how this transforms writing into a dialogue between authors, humanizing someone with whom we have never spoken. These practices help us better understand the author and sympathize with the experience of the audience. We start as an audience member, step into the author's original point-of-view, and step back again by writing our own piece with a new audience in mind. It’s a cliche sentiment, but seemingly true: as we stand in the audience’s shoes, we more deeply grasp how our writing can serve others, rather than ourselves.
The “Living Up” Ethos
We should recognize, appreciate, and surround ourselves with people in our lives – whether they be professors or peers, friends or family members, mentors or mentees – who see, understand, and affirm the best parts of us, who reflect a version of ourselves we can “live up” to.
To fully unpack this practice, I must turn to a brief anecdote. The other day I ran into a teacher who encouraged and mentored me during my formative high school years. Because she taught me for three years, she became acutely aware of my tendency to procrastinate. However, instead of forcing me to resist this tendency, she encouraged me to figure out how to accept it and use it to my advantage. In every interaction I have had with this teacher, she continually strove to affirm the best I had to offer, even when my good efforts proved imperfect. Caring friends and mentors recognize the good we have to offer and affirm those aspects of us. And I’ve experienced this several times this past semester at the Berkeley Institute. Either explicitly through their words or implicitly through their actions, friends and mentors give me a glimpse of who I am at my very best, rather than confining me to the box prescribed by a downturned mind. In so doing, they remind me that certain virtues – such as patience, sincerity, honesty, and kindness – remain worth cultivating. For example, at the Berkeley Institute this spring, I had a conversation with Helen where I mentioned that I was struggling to wrap my head around a particular poet. She then affirmed and built upon what I said, allowing me not only to better grasp how scholarship and interpretation function, but also encouraging me toward a better standard of literary engagement. Likewise, through handwritten letters at the conclusion of the Undergraduate Working Group, Dena recognized the virtues that each of us in the group lived out in some form or fashion. Not only was such a gesture quite kind, but it helped us see who we are and who we can be.
Listening, or listening to others, isn’t a one-way street. All of these practices – listening, writing, and living – have helped me not only attend better to others but also better appreciate when those around me offer their time and attention to cultivating these virtues. For all of this, I am deeply grateful.