your Sunday read 24th November, 2024

A well-researched original piece to get you thinking.

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Thumbnail Credits: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick

Hey Scholar👋

What happens when a student dares to challenge their mentor? In academia, we are often taught to learn from and build upon the guidance of our mentors—but how often do we talk about the necessity of pushing back, questioning, or even breaking away from them?

Our story this week explores the role of intellectual defiance in shaping us as independent scholars, highlighting that scholarly growth often comes not just from unquestioning loyalty to our mentors, but from challenging, refining, and sometimes even overturning the ideas they pass down.

So grab a beverage and your reading glasses, let's get thinking.

Einstein Said No, Bohr Said Too Bad: Intellectual Rebellion for the Young Scholar

- Written by The Critic

Aristotle spent nearly 20 years studying under Plato at the Academy, earning the nickname "the mind of the school" and likely ranking among Plato's top students. Yet, when he reached the height of his own intellectual career, he broke away from his mentor's teachings, both critiquing and fundamentally rejecting key aspects of Plato's philosophy.

Building upon the work of predecessors is a well-established practice in scholarship. But Aristotle didn't just expand on Plato's teachings—he actively pushed back against them. Some of his work, particularly in Politics, reads less like an evolution of Platonic thought and more like a pointed rejection. The split between them was much like that between the earth and sky. No seriously, take a look at this depiction of Plato and Aristotle by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael:

Plato, pointing skyward, represents his focus on transcendent Forms, while Aristotle, gesturing outward, embodies his commitment to empirical observation. Where Plato saw the highest truths in abstraction, Aristotle laid the foundation for empirical science.

What I'm getting at here is that Aristotle's intellectual legacy was not built on unwavering loyalty to Plato and his ideas. Had Aristotle absorbed Plato's teachings? Absolutely. His deep familiarity with Platonic scholarship—particularly the dialectical method of questioning ideas to arrive at truth—likely enabled him to dismantle it so effectively. But it was probably not Aristotle's strict adherence and conformance to his mentor's teachings that shaped his scholarship. More likely, it was his departure. 

This raises an important question:

is diverging from—and at times even rejecting—the ideas and knowledge passed down by our mentors a necessary part of becoming independent scholars?

If we turn to more recent history, Aristotle's departure from Plato is just one of many instances where a student broke away from their mentor to establish their own scholarship. 

Take for instance, the infamous split between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung—one of the most dramatic schisms in the history of psychology. Freud once referred to Jung as "the crown prince" of psychoanalysis, believing he would carry his legacy forward. But as Jung developed his own theories, breaking away from Freud's rigid focus on sexuality and the unconscious, their relationship soured—intellectually and personally. What had begun as a mentorship turned into an ideological war—

one that nevertheless allowed Jung to claim his scientific freedom and leave his own mark on psychology.

And not to forget one of the most famous intellectual clashes in scientific history: Albert Einstein vs. Niels Bohr. While the two were of contemporaries rather than mentor and mentee, Bohr was, in many ways, building on Einstein's early work in quantum mechanics. However, he took it in a direction Einstein refused to accept. 

Einstein fought Bohr's ideas to the end, resisting the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. But it was precisely Bohr's willingness to challenge Einstein's thinking that shaped the very foundation of modern quantum theory—suggesting that sometimes,

progress depends not on reverence, but on defiance.

In the scholarly world, daring to question, challenge, and at times, reject those who came before us appears to be an important modus operandi for establishing new scholarship. 

And yet young scholars are rarely ever taught to 'disagree' - especially in the context of the mentor-mentee relationship. 

It is more customary to assign mentors, advisors, and supervisors god-like status: their ideas to be unquestioningly accepted, not disputed. This power imbalance is a well-known, well-rehearsed fact of academic life. 

Particularly in modern doctoral programs, where supervisors quite literally 'make or break' a PhD, the fact remains: you need them to be on your side. They decide when a thesis is defensible (though of course, it's up to you to actually defend it in the end) and they have the connections and the reputation you'll want to leverage for landing a postdoc or winning a grant. Which makes any possible divergence a delicate balancing act at best or something to entirely avoid at worst.

But is this status quo really the best way forward for producing good scholars—and, by extension, good scholarship?

Returning to Aristotle's famous words—“Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is the truth”—we see more than just a personal break from a mentor. We see a fundamental characteristic of intellectual growth: that it is not just about preserving and building upon inherited knowledge, but also about knowing when to challenge it. As history shows, the advancement of scholarship depends not just on obedience to the past but on the courage to question it.

When you think of knowledge as being cumulative, it makes perfect sense for your work to have to build on the work of your mentor. In the same way that a wall is made from laying bricks on top of each other, so too is knowledge constructed: each new piece of knowledge or discovery adds to the existing structure. It seems foolish to suggest that your work would depart from that of your mentor, because otherwise where do you lay the next brick? But what if knowledge isn't just about building vertically? 

So perhaps the lesson here is not just that disagreement is an inevitable part of knowledge-making, but that it is an essential one. We often speak about building on the work of our mentors, but maybe we need to speak more about the necessity of breaking and building away. Inheriting knowledge is one thing; reshaping it, critiquing it, even dismantling it when necessary—that is what drives our intellectual growth as scholars forward. 

If you have any questions, feedback or comments on The Scholarly Letter, drop a comment or write to us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you!