Month: January 2020

Essay 19: Going From Processee to Processor in Education: One’s Own Questions as Countervailing Force

A school such as a college or university processes each student in the administrative sense: obviously record-keeping means the students grades, years of attendance, tuition payments, etc. will be recorded and kept on file.

There is another level of processing, namely, school by definition means the student expects to face a gauntlet of questions in quizzes and midterms, in finals and exams, in the very entrance exams to get into the school in the first place.

A school is a “world” of questions, a site of constant “processing.”

To flourish intellectually, which is the theme of this book, the trick is to flip this over and become the processor. One does this by circumnavigation of the campus “carrying” one’s own questions or mega-questions and thinking of the entire campus as the “answer zone” for one’s “homemade” questions.  One’s own questions become a “countervailing force” to their questions in all the tests and exams and quizzes.

Some quick examples:

Jacob Bronowski is a world-famous educator whose TV series The Ascent of Man was  an international success. In one of his books, Bronowski raises the question of cause and effect in history and social sciences and offers the reader a “mega-question” to carry with him or her to organize an overall campus experience, a kind of educational motif for life during and after school. Bronowski asks:

“England then ceased to grow enough corn (i.e., food grains such as wheat) during Blake’s (1757-1827) lifetime. It is one of a web of changes, no single one of them cause and no one of them effect, whose strands cross over these seventy years. It is certainly linked with the growth of population; with thirty-five years of war,  piracy, and blockade; with mounting debts, taxes and poor-rates; with the rise in prices, and with economic let be (laissez-faire). And these in turn are linked with the enlargement of factory industry and of finished exports; with the enclosure of common land; with the decay of small holders and craftsmen, and the use of unskilled workers; with shifts in political power and loyalty, and with a changing social outlook.

“This is the web, bewildering in detail and overwhelming in the large, which goes by the name of the Industrial Revolution…

“To the end of the eighteenth century, woolen cloth made up one-third of England’s exports, and of her whole output. But cotton, the new staple of factory industry was gaining fast; and overtook wool…”

(Jacob Bronowski, William Blake and the Age of Revolution, Penguin Books, 1954, page 35-36)

The student could then fortify his or her understanding of this “cotton-based new history” through Prof. Sven Beckert’s masterful book from 2015, Empire of Cotton: A Global History and understand wool-to-cotton and cotton manufacturing as a “deep engine.”  In order to intellectually blossom and thrive and keep one’s autonomy and balance at a school, say, a college or university, the student must arm him or herself with one’s own “mega-questions” such as Bronowski’s “cause and effect” ones and the whole idea of his ‘web of changes.”

Today’s “web” in the internet sense is itself part of “webs of change” as is a spider’s web and all of this “meta-intelligence’ allows the student to “process” the school and not be simply a mindless processee. This book is about this transition to school-processor in a kind of “secret rebellion” against the “blur” of normal education whereby the contents of a course are almost completely forgotten days and weeks after the final.

Essay 18: What Is Education?

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a Danish thinker at the highest level, a kind of Danish Pascal.

In his Fear and Trembling essay, he asks:

“What is education?  I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself, and he who will not pass through this curriculum is helped very little by the fact that he was born in the most enlightened age.”

(Kierkegaard, “Fear and Trembling”, Problemata, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954, page 57)

Education at its deepest level is understood here as a process of “catching up with oneself.”

Every student who ever lived and who will ever live is both a student (which is a social role) and a person (an existential task).

Education, if profound, would “put on the table” both modes of going through life and then assign the “homework” of “circumnavigating” a life and an education and hold them together in one’s mind. Catching up with oneself is the effort to fight off and climb out of “lostness.”

Lostness is depicted in such classic American films from 1999 as Magnolia and American Beauty.

One can be lost in a city, in life, or in the cosmos. (Walker Percy’s novel, Lost in the Cosmos, is an exploration of this.)

In the “brutal sociology” of American life and society, there are “winners and losers.” (Remember the scene in the American classic movie, The Hustler, where Paul Newman (“Fast Eddie”) calls George C. Scott (“Bert”) a “loser.”

Catching up with oneself involves the fending off of this brutal American cultural bullying and help the person/student hold on to one’s self and know how to use an education to help in this. Thus, catching up this way achieves and protects one’s self-possession.

The reader may remember the movie classic A Man for all Seasons, in which there’s a scene very relevant to this where “Thomas More” played by Paul Scofield, reminds “Richard Rich,” (the relentless amoral opportunist) that self-possession is the highest good and if one loses that, one loses everything of value. He, “Thomas More,” describes it as a bit of water in your hand that falls on the ground and can’t ever be recovered.

Catching up with yourself is education’s help in keeping a grip on this “water in your hand.”

Essay 17: Holism in Sartre: What Are the Limits?

In his classic essay, What Is Literature? (also published as Literature and Existentialism) Sartre (1905-1980) gives the reader a sense of wider contexts surrounding everything:

“The work is never limited to the painted, sculpted, or narrated object. Just as one perceives things only against the background of the world, so the objects represented by art appear against the background of the universe.

“On the background on the adventures of Fabrice (hero of Stendhal’s novel, The Charterhouse of Parma) are the Italy of 1820, Austria, France the sky and the stars which the Abbe Blanis consults, and finally the whole earth. If the painter presents us with a field or a vase of flowers, his paintings are windows which are open on a whole world. We follow the red path which is buried among the wheat much farther than Van Gogh has painted it, among other wheat fields, under other clouds, to the river which empties into the sea, and we extend to infinity, to the other end of the world, the deep finality which supports the existence of the field and the earth. So that, through the various objects which it produces or reproduces, the creative act aims at a total renewal of the world.

“Each painting, each book, is a recovery of the totality of being.”

(Jean-Paul Sartre, Literature and Existentialism, Citadel Press, 1980)

In this “educational repair” we are presenting, we encourage students to wrap every lecture, field, topic, subject, discussion, problem in the wider context.

Where exactly to stop contextualizing in this way must be sensed by the student and cannot be stated as a fixed propositional truth.

Essay 16: Exercises in a More Cosmopolitan Education: The Case of Technology

The great Indonesian writer Toer (Pramoedya Ananata Toer) died in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Nobel prize several times.

One of his classic tetralogies, written in political confinement, was the “Buru Quartet”:

The Buru Quartet:

The first volume is This Earth of Mankind. The book takes place in 1898 when the protagonist is 18 years old and a stand-in for Toer, the author of the work. 

The protagonist emphasizes the deep effect his European education had on him and how his love of Western science and technology altered his inner life:

“One of the products of science at which I never stopped marveling was printing, especially zincography. Imagine, people can produce tens of thousands of copies of any photograph in just one day: pictures of landscapes, important people, new machines, American skyscrapers. Now I could see for myself everything from all over the world upon these printed sheets of paper. How deprived had the generation before me been—a generation that had been satisfied with the accumulation of its own footsteps in the lanes of its villages. I was truly grateful to all those people who had worked so tirelessly to give birth to these new wonders.  Five years ago, there were no printed pictures, only block and lithographic prints, which gave very poor representations of reality.

Reports from Europe and America brought word of the latest discoveries. Their awesomeness rivaled the magical powers of the gods and knights, my ancestors in the wayang shadow puppet theater. Trains—carriages without horses, without cattle, without buffalo—had been witnessed now for over ten years by my countrymen

And astonishment remains in their hearts even today. The distance from Betawi to Surabaya can be traveled in only three days! And they’re predicting it will soon take only a day and a night! A day and a night! A long train of carriages as big as houses, full of goods, and people too, all pulled by water power alone.

If I had ever been so lucky as to meet Stephenson (British railway pioneer), I would have made him an offering of a wreath of flowers, all orchids.

A network of railway tracks splintered my island, Java. The trains’ billowing smoke colored the sky of my homeland with black lines, which faded into nothingness. It was as if the world no longer knew distance—it too had been abolished by the telegraph. Power was no longer the monopoly of the elephant and the rhinoceros. They had been replaced by small manmade things: nuts, screws, and bolts. And over there in Europe, people had begun making even smaller machines, with even greater power, or at least with the same power as steam engines. Indeed, not with steam—with oil. There were also vague reports saying that a German had made a vehicle that worked by electricity. Oh Allah, and I
I couldn’t really understand what electricity was!
The forces of nature were beginning to be changed by man and put to his service. People were even planning to fly…
One of my teachers had said: ‘Just a little while longer, just a little while, …machines will replace all and every kind of work. You are fortunate indeed, my students, he said, to be able to witness the beginning of the modern era here in the Indies.’
Modern! How quickly that word had surged forward and multiplied itself like bacteria throughout the world…”

(Toer, This Earth of Mankind, Avon Books, 1993, page 17)

The reader will sense that this upheaval and sense of possibility, described by Toer, will grip the world and revolutionize lives and minds in a way that will demand that all education ‘cosmopolitanize’ itself not leave parochial blinders behind. One might also sense the possibility of anti-modern backlash movements.

Essay 15: Simplistic Critiques of Specialization Are Inadequate

There have been many critiques of specialization and the deepest ones involve the rise of the nihilistic techno-virtuosos of evil such as the Nazis who could make the transition from throughput of steel to throughput of corpses in death factories without a moment’s hesitation. One senses that “rationality” has here gone off the rails.

Husserl (died in 1938) observes that reason has become overspecialized, unilateral and instrumentalized, resulting in “a one-sided rationality that can become an evil. The sickness of Europe in 1935 thus cannot be isolated geographically or politically, the philosopher suggests.

At stake is a sickness of reason itself.” (quoted in The Enlightenment Past, Daniel Brewer, Cambridge University Press, 2011, page 202)

Adorno and Horkheimer in their classic social critique, Dialectic of Enlightenment published in 1944 argue that the whole Enlightenment project of rationality contains the seeds of 20th century irrationality epitomized by Nazi “experts” who became “technicians of evil.”

We have to tread carefully in this minefield because of a warning by Herman Melville when he says: “I like thinkers who can dive deeply before they soar.”  But how would one “dive deeply” without specializing. A field is also called a “discipline” or a “concentration” and those words tell you there’s something defensible about specializing since being a “featherdusting” dilettante cannot be the only alternative for that would be a “Hobson’s Choice” where both choices are bad or incomplete or unattractive.

The message of this educational remediation book you are reading is not that specialization is ipso facto bad but rather that the additional “skill” of also circumnavigating what life is and what knowledge is gives the student an evolving sense of overview, where all dimensions have been included, including his own existence.

Without this, one falls into the trapdoor expressed in the famous essay of William James “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” due to background and specialization “blinders.” Diplomas and careers aside, education’s purpose must be to come to grips with this Willliam James warning (i.e., you could “stumble” through your entire life without seeing anything larger than your training). You could become what they describe in German a bit harshly as a “Fachidiot” (a “specialist fool”).

Specialization, by itself, is not the problem even with the Husserl, Adorno and Horkheimer strictures. It’s rather the Jamesian “blindness in human beings” that’s the problem. 

Simplistic attacks on educational specialization as such don’t get at the profounder problem. The same William James talks about the Ph. D. “educational marathon” as “the Ph. D. octopus.” We do get an intuitive sense of what James is getting at while we do want to balance this with the Herman Melville admonition about “diving deeply before you soar.”

There are educational paradoxes here and we propose to handle them by “completeness excursions and exercises” which are the theme of this book.

Essay 14: Education via Literature: Crafts Versus Craftiness

We have already mentioned the famous “Ode to Man” in the Antigone of Sophocles, a play which serves as a theme in Heidegger’s classic, “What Is Metaphysics?”

One aspect of “man” that Sophocles highlights for us is the troubled link between craftiness (bad skill) and crafts (admirable skills, say carpentry.)

His “Ode to Man” goes like this:

“Wonders are many, yet of all
Things is Man the most wonderful.
He can sail on the stormy sea
Though the tempest rage, and the loud
Waves roar around, as he makes his
Path amid the towering surge.
Backwards and forwards, from season to season, his
Ox-team drives along the ploughshare.

“He can trap the cheerful birds,
Setting a snare, and all the wild
Beasts of the earth he has learned to catch, and
Fish that teem in the deep sea, with
Nets knotted of stout cords; of
Such inventiveness is man
Through his inventions he becomes lord
Even of the beasts of the mountain: the long-haired
Horse he subdues to the yoke on his neck, and the
Hill-bred bull of strength untiring

“And speech he has learned, and thought
So swift, and the temper of mind
To dwell within cities, and not to lie bare
Amid the keen biting frosts
Or cower beneath pelting rain;
Painful sickness he can cure
By his own skill…”

“Surpassing belief, the device and
Cunning that Man has attained…”

(Antigone, Choral Ode 1, Oxford University Press, 1998, page 13)

Sophocles introduces the “strain” between good skillfulness and tricky “cunning” which leads not to comfort and greatness but to woe.

Notice that this Sophocles vision of man as good-craftsman but bad-craftsman of schemes and plots is a deep theme in later culture.

In post-Sophoclean writings (say Roman literature) writing there is the constant tension between “machina” (our machine) and machination.

These writers sense in some implicit way that technology and crafts are benevolent “tricks” based on man’s inventiveness (as you see mentioned in Antigone and the “Ode to Man”) but that man becomes destructively wily and cunning, destroying himself and others.

One classic example of this comes from the great History of the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides. Pericles is the orator of genius while Alcibiades is a “crafty” demagogue and trickster whose words are not uplifting à la Pericles but part of a “deception” game. His sudden manipulative call for an invasion of Sicily in 415 helps to finish Athens.

Essay 13: Can Philosophy Educate Us? Somebody as a Some Body

The German philosopher Husserl (died 1938) educates us by positing two levels of “having a body.”

You can get a slightly strange sense of this when you see that “being somebody” could be written as “being some body.”

Husserl raises this issue of the body and in particular one’s own body. 

In his masterful book Husserl, David Bell writes:

“In one sense my own body is a physical object, a material, spatio-temporal object like any other: it has a weight, a size, a chemical composition, a history, and so forth. Husserl’s term for the human body viewed merely as a physical object is “Der Koerper.” Quite clearly, however, there is also a sense in which my own body is not given to me in that way: it is experienced and known by me in ways quite different from those in which I experience or know other physical objects. I do not, as it were, stumble across my body in the course of experience in anything like the way in which I come across a building, say, or another person. It is not simply that my own body is very familiar to me, nor even that it is ‘always there,’ like some substantial shadow from which I can never ‘escape.’ It is rather that, at a certain level, my ‘relation’ to my body is not strictly speaking a relation at all: it is not, at least, a relation between me and some other object.

“Although my body is certainly a physical object, and is, moreover, the intentional object of many acts of perception, conception, and memory, there is also a sense in which my own body is a subject. And in this sense my body is unique amongst intentional physical objects in that it belongs, also, on the subjective side of the intentional relation.

“My body can feel tired, my legs can feel stiff, my hands can feel the warmth of the fire, and so forth. My own body is an object-subject, or a body-subject.

“Husserl calls the human body viewed in this way ‘der Leib,’ a term which I shall translate as ‘the living body.’ My ‘living body’ is immediately expressive: when I am tired, or amused, or in pain, it is that object which yawns, smiles or cries out.”

(David Bell, Husserl, Routledge, 1991, page 208)

Gabriel Marcel, who taught at Harvard in the 50’s, wrestles with this Husserl point when he (Marcel) writes in his “metaphysical diary” that he has been perplexed for decades over the fact that “I both have a body while I am a body.” Having and being are entwined in a way that I can’t separate.” I have and I am are coiled around each other.

We have an intuitive sense of these entwinings when we say of a person, “he’s a busybody” (busy body/busybody) or “I am somebody” (some body) and not a nobody (no body).

Husserl restates this thesis this way:

“A human being is not a mere combination or aggregation of one thing, called a body, and another called a mind. The human body is through and through a conscious body: every movement of the body is “full of mind”–coming, going, standing still, laughing, dancing, speaking, etc.”

“When I put my hand too close to the fire, it is, when all is said and done, my hand that hurts.”

(David Bell, Husserl, Routledge, 1991, page 209)

In other words, you have a body and your body has you and you have each other. The body you weigh on the scale in the bathroom is one among several “players” and cannot be understood only as a mechanism.

In daily life, we do glimpse this a bit when we use worlds like psychosomatic.

Husserl was Heidegger‘s teacher and mentor.

Essay 12: Can There Be an Archimedean Vantage Point Outside of Everything? Isaiah Berlin

We saw in our discussion of Descartes and his knowledge quest (we quoted “Meditation 2” from his Meditations of 1641) that he “flirts” with the idea of finding an Archimedean point outside everything.

The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin (died in 1997) argues that this is intrinsically unreachable and beyond our ken:

“I am certain, for example, that I am not at this moment the Emperor of Mars dreaming a dream in which I am a university teacher on the earth; but I should find it exceedingly hard to justify my certainty by inductive methods that avoid circularity. Most of the certainties on which are lives are founded would scarcely pass this test. The vast majority of the types of reasoning on which our beliefs rest, or by which we should seek to justify them if they were challenged, are not reducible to formal deductive or inductive schemata, or combinations of them.

“If I am asked what rational grounds I have for supposing that I am not on Mars, or that the Emperor Napoleon existed and was not merely a sun myth, and if in answer to this I try to make explicit the general propositions which entail this conclusion, together with the specific evidence for them, and the evidence for the reliability of this evidence, and the evidence for that evidence in its turn, and so on, I shall not get very far. The web is too complex, the elements too many and not, to say the least, easily isolated and tested one by one; anyone can satisfy himself by trying to analyse and state them explicitly. The true reason for accepting the propositions that I live on earth, and that an Emperor Napoleon I existed, is that to assert their contradictories is to destroy too much of what we take for granted about the present and the past.

“For the total texture is what we begin and end with. There is no Archimedean point outside it whence we can survey the whole of it and pronounce upon it.”

(Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories, Princeton University Press, 1988, page 114)

The idea of the ultimate “detached observer” whether Plato or Descartes who can jump over his own human shadow and specify existence and “know the mind of God” (as Stephen Hawking proposed) is a kind of false and even delusional holism and not the educational “exercises in holism” we propose where all  exercises are tentative and have no claim to finality.

Essay 11: Sartre Gives Us a Clue About a Kind of Holism

In his book chapter, “Existentialist Psychoanalysis,” Sartre (1905-1980), the French thinker, offers us a “flashlight” of understanding when he writes:

“The principle of this psychoanalysis is that man is a totality and not a collection. Consequently he expresses himself as a whole in even his most insignificant and his most superficial behavior. In other words, there is not a taste, a mannerism, or a human act which is not revealing.

“The goal of psychoanalysis is to decipher the empirical behavior patterns of man. The essential task is an hermeneutic; that is a deciphering…”

(Existentialism and Human Emotions, Citadel Press, 1985, page 68)

In other words, if you think of a person as an unofficial novelist (i.e., storyteller) of his or her own life, with a philosophical commentary that accompanies the novel, you have not a laundry list of attributes, but a meaning interpreter on a short physiological leash of food, rest, headaches, skin rashes, sprained ankles and all the other bodily reminders of the biomedical pressures that accompany the person-as-novelist situation.

Essay 10: Towards a Cosmopolitan Re-Education

Education today is still completely parochial and we will now give an example of making education completely cosmopolitan (i.e., based on global “inputs”).

There’s a Japanese critique of the entire Western tradition of technology-and-man defeating nature. We will come to the Japanese critique in a moment. First, we remind the reader of Western ideas of man as conqueror of nature: think of Sophocles’ classic play Antigone where perhaps the most famous choral ode in Greek drama occurs, “Ode to Man” which celebrates man’s techno-rise (our word technology derives from Greek “techne”):

“Humanity has built ships to conquer the seas, crafted plows to tame the earth, bent animals to his will, raised houses to defeat the rain and the snow.”

Nearly everything is about humanity asserting its will over nature.

One finds a restatement of this conquest-of nature theme in fellow Greek dramatist Aeschylus in his great Prometheus Bound, where he criticizes the men of old in their pre-Promethean ignorance:

Prometheus:

“They handled all things in bewilderment and confusion. They did not know of building houses with bricks to face the sun; they did not know how to work in wood. They lived like swarming ants in holes in the ground, in the sunless caves of the earth. For them there was no secure token by which to tell winter nor the flowering spring nor the summer with its crops; all their doings were without intelligent calculation until I showed them the rising of the stars, and the settings, hard to observe. And further I discovered to them numbering, pre-eminent among subtle devices, and the combining of letters as a means of remembering all things, the Muses’ mother, skilled in craft.

“It was I who first yoked beasts for them in the yokes and made of those beasts the slaves of trace chain and pack saddle that they might be man’s substitute in the hardest tasks; and I harnessed to the carriage, so that they loved the rein, horses, the crowning pride of the rich man’s luxury. It was I and none other who discovered ships, the sail-driven wagons that the sea buffets. Such were the contrivances that I discovered for men.

“Greatest was this: in the former times if a man fell sick he had no defense against the sickness, neither healing food nor drink, nor unguent; but through the lack of drugs men wasted away, until I showed them the blending of mild simples wherewith they drive out all manner of diseases…It was I who made visible to men’s eyes the flaming signs of the sky that were before dim. So much for these. beneath the earth, man’s hidden blessing, copper, iron, silver, and gold—will anyone claim to have discovered these before I did?

“One brief word will tell the whole story: all arts that mortals have come from Prometheus.”

(Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, University of Chicago Press, Aeschylus II, 1956, pages 155-156)

One can begin to see how “Promethean man” culminates in Francis Bacon’s (died in 1626) admonition to “place Nature on the rack so that man might force her to tell her secrets.” 

Thus, the Western tradition comes close to a war on nature itself.

Now we come to a critique of this from Japan on the other side of the Pacific:

Natsume Sōseki (died in 1916), the greatest writer in modern Japanese literature, has a protagonist in the 1913 classic Kojin (“The Wayfarer”):

“Constant motion and flow is our very fate.”

“Man’s insecurity stems from the advance of science. Never once has science, which never ceases to move forward, allowed us to pause.

From walking to rickshaw, from rickshaw to carriage, from carriage to train, from train to automobile, from there on to the dirigible, further on to the airplane, and further on and on—no matter how far we may go, it won’t let us take a breath. How far it will sweep us along, nobody knows for sure. It is really frightening.”

(Sōseki, The Wayfarer, Tuttle Books, 1967, page 285)

This sense of things that Promethean/Baconian man will place mankind in a runaway train with no brakes or endpoint is a critique that makes us think. The counterargument that we know of no other way out of poverty is “co-valid” and we have a kind of legitimate “argument without end” which cannot be easily dismissed. We cannot really divide the world into proponents of science/technology on the one side and Luddites on the other. That is too simplistic. There are legitimate concerns about de-humanization through modern science and technology in Adorno and Horkheimer, say, who fear a global shipwreck based on this “runaway train with no brakes or endpoint.” The current climate change crisis comes to mind.

Our main point here is not to enter this argument or to take sides but to show the reader how a cosmopolitan “post-parochial” education might look and how this kind of meta-intelligent pedagogy would be deeply “eye-opening” and help the Wittgenstein process where “light dawns gradually over the whole” as we have seen.

Cosmopolitan Re-Education That Includes Movies and Songs

Another dimension of cosmopolitanism in education is the complete assimilation of movies and songs into the analysis (i.e., all-media cosmopolitanism). here’s a movie example that continues the argument between the conquer nature position and de-humanization fears.

Think of the movie Things to Come.

Things to Come is a 1936 movie masterpiece based on an H.G. Wells sociological sci-fi masterpiece.

In the last minutes of the movie, there’s an exchange between “John Cabal” (played by Raymond Massey) who looks at the stars and says, “All or nothing. We must conquer all of it or disappear. No rest for man in general.”

The other man (“Passworthy”) radically differs: “we are such small little creatures and cannot live that way.”

The storyline of this movie:

A global war begins in 1940. This war drags out over many decades until most of the people still alive (mostly those born after the war started) do not even know who started it or why. Nothing is being manufactured at all any more and society has broken down into primitive localized communities. In 1966, a great plague wipes out most of what people are left but small numbers still survive. One day a strange aircraft lands at one of these communities and its pilot tells of an organization which is rebuilding civilization and slowly moving across the world re-civilizing these groups of survivors. Great reconstruction takes place over the next few decades and society is once again great and strong. The world’s population is now living in underground cities. 

In the year 2035, on the eve of man’s first flight to the moon, a popular uprising against progress (which some people claim has caused the wars of the past) gains support and becomes violent.