Getting to Know the Know-It-Alls

At the beginning of On the Nature of Things, a sort of textbook of Epicurean philosophy, the Roman poet Lucretius explains his choice to write in verse by comparing his poem to a cup of bitter medicine whose rim has been smeared with honey. Just as young patients will heal quicker if they enjoy taking their medicine, young students will benefit from encountering Epicurus’s difficult but edifying doctrine in a form they find pleasurable, even if that pleasure is only “lip-deep.” Arnoud S.Q. Visser’s On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All, a book about how intellectuals ranging from Socrates to Dr. Strangelove have made themselves disliked, takes a similar view of intellectual effort and enjoyment. The book is full of useful considerations for pedants hoping to be less irritating, but Visser ultimately considers that irritation the cost of doing business: Worthwhile intellectual work is unavoidably challenging, and sometimes even unpleasant.