Essay 21: Learning to Process the University With Your Own Questions

You need to “subdue” or “master” a university by “imposing” or layering your own questions on theirs in quizzes and exams, finals and midterms.

Here’s an example: In the masterpiece, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933, Joseph Roth (died in 1939), the author writes about Berlin traffic and transport:

“After all, the passengers on a bus or streetcar make up a community of a kind.” (“Some Reflections on Traffic,” November 15, 1924.)

This idea of “small communities” including transitory ones, is developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault.  He calls them “heterotopias” (different places) which are neither utopias or dystopias.

This notion reminds us of Edmund Burke’s (18th century conservative thinker), founder of concept of society’s “little platoons” like friends, families, clubs, congregations in churches, which Burke cherishes.

Heterotopia is a concept elaborated by the leading French philosopher Michel Foucault (died in 1984).

Heterotopias are worlds within worlds…micro-societies.

Foucault provides examples: ships, cemeteries, bars, brothels, prisons, gardens of antiquity, fairs, Turkish baths and many more.

If we take the ship as the utmost heterotopia, a society without ships is inherently a repressive one.

Foucault outlines the notion of heterotopia on three occasions between 1966-67.

Foucault explains the link between utopias and heterotopias using the metaphor of a mirror. A mirror is a utopia because the image reflected is a ‘placeless place’, an unreal virtual place that allows one to see one’s own visibility. However, the mirror is also a heterotopia, in that it is a real object. Hence a dual function.

The heterotopia of the mirror is at once absolutely real, relating with the real space surrounding it, and absolutely unreal, creating a virtual image. Foucault discusses several possible types of heterotopia:

  • A ‘crisis heterotopia’ is a separate space like a boarding school or a motel room where activities like coming of age or a honeymoon take place out of sight. Foucault describes the crisis heterotopia as “reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis.” He also points that crisis heterotopias are constantly disappearing from society and being replaced by the following heterotopia of deviation.
  • ‘Heterotopias of deviation’ are institutions where we place individuals whose behavior is outside the norm (hospitals, asylums, prisons, rest homes, cemetery).
  • Heterotopia can be a single real place that juxtaposes several spaces. A garden can be a heterotopia, if it is a real space meant to be a microcosm of different environments, with plants from around the world.
  • ‘Heterotopias of time’ such as museums enclose in one place objects from all times and styles. They exist in time but also exist outside of time because they are built and preserved to be physically insusceptible to time’s ravages.
  • ‘Heterotopias of ritual or purification’ are spaces that are isolated and penetrable yet not freely accessible like a public place. Either entry to the heterotopia is compulsory like in entering a prison, or entry requires special rituals or gestures, like in a sauna or a hammam.
  • Heterotopia has a function in relation to all of the remaining spaces. The two functions are: heterotopia of illusion creates a space of illusion that exposes every real space, and the heterotopia of compensation is to create a real space—a space that is other.

You could use this idea of “heterotopias”(little societies and worlds) and apply it to the various buildings on a campus, the little worlds or sub-worlds of fields and faculties, to the sub-cultures of fraternities and dormitories, to sports teams and clubs, to classes of students at a lecture.

Joseph Roth is a “radical devotee” of the charms of local groupings and small “truths and atmospheres” such as these heterotopias and states:

“It’s only the minutiae of life that are important.” (What I Saw: Berlin, 1920-1933, “Going for a Walk,” 1921)

Looking through such lenses, a student could layer one’s own visions and questions on a university and counterbalance” theirs and bring enchantment to the current “knowledge factory.”

Essay 20: Becoming an Education-Processor (Continued)

We have just seen how the notion of going from processee to processor in education can bring some empowerment, shape and form to the educational “welter.”

Let’s give another simple example.

Consider this sentence from the classic work, The Triumph of the Middle Classes:

“In 1890 the stock exchanges of London, Paris, Berlin and New York, controlled the economic progress of the whole world.”

(Prof. Charles Moraze, Triumph of the Middle Classes, Anchor Books, 1966, page 525)

Stand back (i.e., using meta-intelligence) and the statement in this book is at the intersection of geography, financialization of the world, rise of stock markets, Western coerciveness, hegemonial policies, accidents of history, global division of labor and power, and so on.

This implies interrelated “webs of changes,” à la Bronowski, whom we have just seen in the previous essay.

To use this mega-question as a circumnavigatory device in trying to “process the campus” could empower the student and lead to a lifelong quest to understand, part of a full mental life and indeed life itself.

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.