In his second lecture (“What Can We Understand?”), Chomsky took up the question of what humans are capable of understanding and his answer, generally, was that we can understand what we can understand, and that means that we can’t understand what is beyond our innate mental capacities. This does not mean, he said, that what we can’t understand is not real: “What is mysterious to me is not an argument that it does not exist.” It’s just that while language is powerful and creative, its power and creativity have limits; and since language is thought rather than an addition to or clothing of thought, the limits of language are the limits of what we can fruitfully think about. Nor, Chomsky declared, are those limits capable of being enlarged or transcended in time. This is as good as it gets. There is “no evolution in our capacity for language.” These assertions are offered as a counter to what Chomsky sees as the over-optimistic Enlightenment belief — common to many empiricist philosophies — that ours is a “limitless explanatory power” and that “we can do anything.” Our limits, he concluded, should not be lamented, for the fact of limits enables perception and predication, “If there were no limits,” everything would be mush, and “there would be no scope” for definite action. (Here we might think of Wordsworth’s great sonnet, “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.”)

In the third lecture (“What is the Common Good?”) Chomsky turned from the philosophy of mind and language to political philosophy and the question of what constitutes a truly democratic society. He likened dogmatic intellectual structures that interfere with free inquiry to coercive political structures that stifle the individual’s creative independence and fail to encourage humanity’s “richest diversity.” He asserted that any institution marked by domination and hierarchy must rise to the challenge of justifying itself, and if it cannot meet the challenge, it should be dismantled. He contrasted two accounts of democracy: one — associated by him with James Madison — distrusts the “unwashed” populace and puts its faith in representative government where those doing the representing (and the voting and the distributing of goods) constitute a moneyed and propertied elite; the other — associated by him with Adam Smith (in one of his moods), J. S. Mill, the 1960s and a tradition of anarchist writing — seeks to expand the franchise and multiply choices in the realms of thought, politics and economics. The impulse of this second, libertarian, strain of democracy, is “to free society from economic or theological guardianship,” and by “theological” Chomsky meant not formal religion as such but any assumed and frozen ideology that blocked inquiry and limited participation. There can’t, in short, be “too much democracy.”

I was enchanted, even ravished, by these lectures, not because I agreed with the positions they staked out, but because of the spectacle they presented of an intelligence exercising itself on a set of significant philosophical questions. It was thought of the highest order performed by a thinker, now 85 years old, who by and large eschewed rhetorical flourishes (he has called his own speaking style “boring” and says he likes it that way) and just did it, where ‘it” was the patient exploration of deep issues that had been explored before him by a succession of predecessors, fully acknowledged, in a conversation that is forever being continued and forever being replenished.

Yes, I said to myself, this is what we — those of us who bought a ticket on this particular train — do; we think about problems and puzzles and try to advance the understanding of them; and we do that kind of thinking because its pleasures are, in a strong sense, athletic and provide for us, at least on occasion, the experience of fully realizing whatever capabilities we might have. And we do it in order to have that experience, and to share it with colleagues and students of like mind, and not to make a moral or political point.

As I listened I imagined a member of the audience (at least of the first two lectures) who came to hear a disquisition on the nature of language and mind and left with an understanding of what had been said but without knowing anything of Chomsky’s political views. At first glance it might seem to be different in the case of the third lecture, which addressed an explicitly political topic. But here, too, the mode of interrogation was more analytic than polemical: the two concepts of democracy were laid out and explicated by reference to their distinguished expositors. To be sure, it was clear which one Chomsky preferred, but that preference led to no particular political recommendation, only the recommendation that we should strive for “social arrangements that are conducive to the rights and welfare of people.” That, however, is (as Chomsky observed) a universally accepted truism: it would be hard to imagine someone on the other side standing up for social arrangements that had the effect of undermining a citizenry’s welfare and violating its rights (although of course there are plenty of governments that do just that).