Tag: disenchantment

Songs as an Informal University

We have already seen in “Songs as Another Kind of Parallel University” that trying to revive or rescue enchantment in a “disenchanted world” (Max Weber, “Entzauberung”) is a kind of philosophical “move” in love songs which has much to do with the impact on the West of the medieval troubadours.

Take this masterpiece song from the fifties musical My Fair Lady. Notice the explicit introduction of “enchantment” into the lyrics:

“On the Street Where You Live”

I have often walked
Down the street before,
But the pavement always stayed
Beneath my feet before
All at once am I
Several stories high,
Knowing I’m on the street where you live

Are there lilac trees
In the heart of town?
Can you hear a lark in any other part of town?
Does enchantment pour
Out of every door?
No, it’s just on the street where you live

And oh, the towering feeling
Just to know somehow you are near
The overpowering feeling
That any second you may suddenly appear

People stop and stare
They don’t bother me,
For there’s no where else on earth
That I would rather be

Let the time go by,
I won’t care if I
Can be here on the street where you live

People stop and stare
They don’t bother me,
For there’s no where else on earth
That I would rather be
Let the time go by
I won’t care if I
Can be here on the street where you live,
Can be here on the street where you live,
Can be here on the street where you live

The enchantment of love is also at the center of the song by Seals & Crofts, “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” from decades ago. In the same way that Jim Morrison and the Doors capture life’s basic randomized “thrownness” (Heidegger, “Geworfenheit”), Seals & Crofts capture life’s one-time ephemerality, as the title signals immediately:

“We May Never Pass This Way (Again)”

Life
So they say
Is but a game and they’d let it slip away
Love
Like the autumn sun
Should be dyin’
But it’s only just begun

Like the twilight in the road up ahead
They don’t see just where we’re goin’
And all the secrets in the universe
Whisper in our ears
All the years will come and go
Take us up
Always up

We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again

Dreams
So they say
Are for the fools and they let ’em drift away
Peace
Like the silent dove
Should be flyin’
But it’s only just begun

Like Columbus in the olden days
We must gather all our courage
Sail our ships out on the open seas
Cast away our fears
And all the years will come and go
Take us up
Always up

We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again

So
I wanna laugh while the laughin’ is easy
I wanna cry if makes it worthwhile
I may never pass this way again
That’s why I want it with you

’Cause
You make me feel like I’m more than a friend
Like I’m the journey and you’re the journey’s end
I may never pass this way again
That’s why I want it with you
Baby

We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again
We may never pass this way again

After deeply drinking in this and other songs, you could become more “attuned” to academic philosophy which would become less of an abstract and insipid blur. Pre-awareness and pre-understanding give you the receptivity you need and you get these from movies and songs and private life. The trick is to use meta-intelligence to straddle the campus and the off-campus worlds.

Songs as Another Kind of Parallel University

Meta Intelligence is a heterodox view of education where formal education (courses, diplomas, universities, fields) are incomplete and limited without adding informal education which is part of your life such as movies, songs, conversations and images (paintings, posters, etc). Your “lifeworld” (Edmund Husserl’s apt coinage) fuses all the kinds of education where the word education means thought-provoking and illuminating. Even personal experience counts such as illnesses or bad marriages! Only via this Meta Intelligence will you achieve a glimpsed “holism.” (Meta Intelligence is that meta-field outside fields, borders and boundaries.)

Take songs.

Think back to Jim Morrison’s classic tune, “Riders on the Storm” which begins:

“Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house, we’re born
Into this world, we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan
Riders on the storm”

This song (by the Doors), expresses in a simple way Heidegger’s notion of human existence as partly governed by “Geworfenheit” which derives from “werfen,” to throw. “Geworfenheit” means “thrownness.” Jim Morrison and his band the Doors are song–philosophers without (probably) being Heidegger’s acolytes. Max Weber, one of the fathers of modern sociology, uses the word “disenchantment” to describe the modern world, “Entzauberung” in German, where “zauber” means “magicality” and “ent” means “removal of,” and “ung” means “condition of being.” The magic here does not mean something like a card trick but rather sacred mysteries, perhaps like the feeling a medieval European felt on entering a cathedral.

Enchantment in the West survived in our notions of romantic love and was associated with the songs and outlook of the medieval troubadours. Such romantic enchantment which is fading from our culture in favor of sex is still celebrated in the classic Rogers and Hammerstein song, “Some Enchanted Evening” from the forties musical and fifties movie, South Pacific.

The song lyrics give you the philosophy of romantic love as the last stand of enchantment:

“Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger,
You may see a stranger across a crowded room,
And somehow you know, you know even then,
That somehow you’ll see here again and again.
Some enchanted evening, someone may be laughing,
You may hear her laughing across a crowded room,
And night after night, as strange as it seems,
The sound of her laughter will sing in your dreams.

“Who can explain it, who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.

“Some enchanted evening, when you find your true love,
When you hear her call you across a crowded room,
Then fly to her side and make her your own,
Or all through your life you may dream all alone.

“Once you have found her, never let her go,
Once you have found her, never let her go.”

Notice that “chant” is a component of enchantment.

One could say that conventional enchantment has been transferred to the world of science and mathematics where a deep beauty is intuited. Professor Frank Wilczek of MIT (Nobel Prize) wrote several books on this intersection of science and the quest for beauty whereas Sabine Hossenfelder of Germany has argued, per contra, that this will be a “bum steer.”

You should sense that like movies, songs give you a “side window” or back door into thinking and knowledge, which should be center stage and not depreciated.

Education and Holism from Day 1

A freshman enters a college whether in the U.S. or Japan or India or Brazil.

We keep trying to offer the view that holism must “rule” the discovery of a “major” or “field” in education.

This holism means placing on the “mental plate in front of the student” these dimensions of reality, considering that every student is first and always a person.

  1. “This is your life.” Every person (the predecessor to being a student) is born, lives and dies. Your education is part of this larger truth and you the student, being shrewd in the largest sense, wants to “factor in” the larger frameworks of book-learning (i.e., life itself).
  2. Shrewdness cannot be restricted to a ZIP code in a state that will be advantageous income-wise for orthodontists, divorce lawyers or pediatricians. Concern over “ZIP codes” when starting a career is fine and valid. However, it can’t be enough since the student is, as a person, more than a career “Olympic swimmer.”
  3. Micro-shrewdness (i.e., career tactics and smarts) has to be supplemented by “macro-shrewdness” (“this is my life” thinking). You have to carry some “enchantment” from your education with you, or the life you have will be desiccated or insipid. Ultimately, you will “outsmart” yourself.

Max Weber (died in 1920), the great sociologist, says of that modern world that it involves “Entzauberung” (disenchantment, where only technical cost-benefit thinking is seen as valid). This Weber insight tells you that a student/person has to find something enchanting to carry him or her through life, its blows and its helter-skelter “shapelessness.”

This is why we “insist” on holism in education everywhere from Day 1 so that these various levels of shrewdness are contemplated together and overspecialized “rabbit holes” are seen more clearly in their limitedness. The process of overview-creating and overview-pondering in the life of every freshman must be combined with “career-cleverness” by itself.