Tag: French language

Education and Spontaneous Learning

We give you examples of being receptive to the world around you and learning to see and hear as a form of education:

There is a show on PBS called Stories from the Stage. People come forward to a microphone on a stage and tell personal stories from their past, stories that they consider important, informative, educational (in the widest sense), and usable by the listener. One of the early “people at the mic” on stage is a teenage girl who says something, in a plaintive sorrowful voice, like: “I have been waiting far too long…to wait for someone…to see me.”

This perplexed girl is unwittingly raising the question of a deep human hunger: the hunger for “personhood.” At a young age, this primordial hunger expresses itself as somebody befriending me (i.e., the speaker needs a real friend) so that the befriended person comes into clearer focus to themselves, achieving personhood.

Very intelligent philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas of France have spent their entire lives trying to understand the connections between countenances (how a person “wears a face”), personhood, interactive life, etc.

In his book, The Face of the Other (the girl wants somebody to notice her and her face and like her and “smile upon her”) Levinas has a deep analysis of all these human yearnings and self-definitional journeys and quests:

“The Face of the Other” is an evocative phrase used by Emmanuel Levinas, an important twentieth-century philosopher.

  • “Other” (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not) usually translates the French word autrui, which means “the other person” or “someone else” (other than oneself). It is thus the personal other, the other person, whoever it is, that each of us encounters directly, or experiences the traces of, every day. Of course, we encounter a multiplicity of others, but Levinas more often uses the singular “other” to emphasize that we encounter others one at a time, face to face.
  • By “face,” Levinas means the human face (or in French, visage), but not thought of or experienced as a physical or aesthetic object. Rather, the first, usual, unreflective encounter with the face is the living presence of another person.

Thus, when we come “face to face” with another person, the experience is a social and ethical one (rather than intellectual, aesthetic, or merely physical). “Living presence,” for Levinas, would imply that the other person (as someone genuinely other than myself) is exposed to me—that is, is vulnerably present—and expresses him or herself simply by being there as an undeniable reality that I cannot reduce to images or ideas in my head.

This impossibility of capturing the other conceptually or otherwise reveals the other’s “infinity” (i.e., irreducibility to a finite [bounded] entity over which I can have power).

The other person is, of course, exposed and expressive in other ways than through the literal face (e.g., through speech, gesture, action, and bodily presence generally), but the face is the most exposed, most vulnerable, and most expressive aspect of the other’s presence.

Thus, a student could be channel surfing on TV, observe this young girl saying these things on Stories from the Stage, and expand one’s understanding of this entire set of hungers and self-identity efforts and go (say) from the moment of TV watching to reading Levinas.

This is a simple example from the current world of TV where a certain particular “cri de coeur” (French: “cry from the heart”) of a girl you don’t know at all could deepen and widen your understanding by following the thread to Levinas and other profound people. The girl’s plaint where she’s “waiting for someone to see me” becomes much deeper and can be understood on a larger canvas which is exactly what we want.

Many experiences from daily life, from walking around, from moments on TV, from tiny incidents, can be pathways to higher understanding and learning if you can see and hear “with the third eye and the third ear.” (Theodore Reik talks about “listening with the third ear.”)

Education is a kind of “applied awareness.”

Two Kinds of Extra Understanding: Pre and Post

We argue here in this proposal for an educational remedy that two dimensions of understanding must be added to “retro-fit” education.

In the first addition, call it pre-understanding, a student is given an overview not only of the field but of his or her life as well as the “techno-commercial” environment that characterizes the globe.

Pre-understanding includes such “overall cautions” offered to you by Calderón de la Barca’s 17th century classic Spanish play, Life is a Dream (Spanish: La vida es sueño). A student would perhaps ask: “what would it be like if I faced this “dreamlike quality” of life, as shown by the Spanish play, and suddenly realized that a life of “perfect myopia” is not what I want.

Hannah Arendt warns similarly of a life “like a leaf in the whirlwind of time.”

Again, I, the student ask: do I want such a Hannah Arendt-type leaf-in-the-whirlwind-like life, buried further under Calderón de la Barca’s “dream state”?

But that’s not all: while I’m learning about these “life dangers,” all around me from my block to the whole world, humanity does its “techno-commerce” via container ships and robots, hundreds of millions of vehicles and smartphones, multilateral exchange rates, and tariff policies. Real understanding has one eye on the personal and the other on the impersonal and not one or the other.

All of these personal and impersonal layers of the full truth must be faced and followed, “en face,” as they say in French (i.e., “without blinking”).

Call all this pre-understanding which includes of course a sense of how my “field” or major or concentration fits into the “architecture of knowledge” and not in isolation without connections or a “ramification structure.”

Post-understanding comes from the other end: my lifelong effort, after just about all that I learned about the six wives of King Henry VIII and the “mean value theorem”/Rolle’s theorem in freshman math, have been completely forgotten and have utterly evaporated in my mind, to re-understand my life and times and book-learning.

Pre-and post-understanding together allows the Wittgenstein phenomenon of “light falls gradually over the whole.”

Without these deeper dimensions of educational remedy, the student as a person would mostly stumble from “pillar to post” with “perfect myopia.” Education mostly adds to all the “fragmentariness” of the modern world and is in that sense, incomplete or even disorienting.

Education in this deep sense is supposed to be the antidote to this overall sense of modern “shapelessness,” to use Kierkegaard’s term.

Then and Now Thinking: Zola Novels

Émile Zola died in 1902 and gives us a social overview of France, people caught between all kinds of pressures and changing circumstances and disruptions.

La Curée (1871–72; English translation: “The Kill”) is the second novel in Émile Zola’s 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It deals with property speculation and the lives of the extremely wealthy nouveau riche (“new money”) of the Second French Empire (1852-1870), against the backdrop of Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s.

The Second French Empire, (officially the French Empire, French: Empire français), was the regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic (1848-1852) and the Third Republic (1870 to 1940).

Zola’s other novels such as L’Assommoir (“The Drinking Salon”) also have various kinds of “urban renewal” as backdrop.

Baron Haussmann, who died in 1891, was the “czar” of Parisian urban renewal and the speculation fever and real estate manipulating and maneuvering were echoes of Haussmann Paris.

Think of Robert Moses in New York a few decades ago and his remaking of NYC to fit automobiles and Jane Jacobs’s bitter struggle against Moses with her cars-should-adjust-to-the-city and not cities-to-cars view.

In Japan, in recent decades, real estate “nouveaux riches” are called “tochi narikin” (Japanese: 『土地成金』, “land rich”) and are similar to Zola’s “little foxes” since the way money was made was to know in advance via insider knowledge where railroads (say) were slated to be built and which stretches of land would be therefore needed and acquired by the government at any price (in the absence of “eminent domain”).

The debates and tensions raging around the Baron Haussmann Parisian bulldozing were obviously not about cars but the nature of the tensions was similar. Another dimension of these urban renewal “revolutions” was the impact on renters.

Thus Zola and his “society and social novels” do have “echoic” lessons for us and are “raw material” for “then and now” thinking which is a pillar of meta-intelligence (i.e., perspective-enhancing).

Then and now thinking helps students get some sense of long-term trends or resonances and to get away from history-started-this-morning myopia.

Education and the Pursuit of Improved Overviews

Professor Sherman Stein was a prominent mathematician and popularizer, and his book, Mathematics: The Man-Made Universe, is a modern classic. The subtitle “The Man-made Universe” already tells you that you’re looking at a clear exposition of “humans made math” in contrast to the “mathematics fundamentalism,” à la Professor Max Tegmark of MIT, whose tone seems to say mathematics allowed for reality and us.

This is of course a perfect “argument without end.” This is the kind of argument that should help a student to rethink their assumptions and not obsess about some once-and-for-all final understanding which can become an “idée fixe” (i.e., fixed idea in French, indicating being overly rigid or stuck).

In the preface to Professor Stein’s mathematics survey classic, he writes:

“We all find ourselves in a world we never made. Though we become used to the kitchen sink, we do not understand the atoms that compose it. The kitchen sink, like all the objects surrounding us, is a convenient abstraction.

Mathematics, on the other hand is completely the work of man.

Each theorem, each proof, is the product of the human mind. In mathematics all the cards can be put on the table.

In this sense, mathematics is concrete whereas the world is abstract.”

(Sherman Stein, Mathematics The Man-Made Universe, Dover Publications, “Preface” Third Edition, page XIII, 1999)

Meta-intelligence tells you if views of what is real, what is concrete, what is abstract, what is man-made, what is mathematical, are so radically different depending on the interpreter or analyst, it makes prudent sense to keep various views in one’s mind and modify them or juggle them as you go along. Our ability as a species to nail down for eternity what the nature of mathematics, humans and kitchen sinks are and how they all interrelate, is elusive and tangled up in language, as Wittgenstein keeps saying.

Looking Backwards and Forwards at the Same Time

Janus and Bi-Directional Smarts

The Roman god Janus looks backwards and forwards at the same time and learning to be somewhat Janus-like is very conducive in the metaintelligence (i.e., larger overview) quest.

There’s a useful French phrase, “reculer pour mieux sauter” which means like a high jumper, you have to take steps backwards to jump higher. In other words, learn to look bi-directionally at the world.

First look back, then forward.

Here’s a concrete example:

W. Arthur Lewis, the “father” of development economics, originally from the Caribbean, taught at Princeton. He won the Nobel in 1979 and wrote various classics such as Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913 (1978).

Lewis writes:

In this book we shall not be attempting to give formal or complete explanations of why fluctuations occurred. Like the captain of a ship navigating in stormy seas, we shall need to identify the waves, without needing an exhaustive theory of what causes waves.

When analyzing these fluctuations economists have identified four different cycles, distinguished by length of periodicity, each of which is named after the economist who first wrote about it:

the Kitchin (about three years)
the Juglar (about nine years)
the Kuznets (about twenty years)
the Kondratiev (about fifty years)

(W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913, 1978, page 19)

Lewis gives us a quick overview of how we got to the era covered by his book:

“The essence of the industrial and agricultural revolutions in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century was in new ways of doing old things—of making iron, textiles and clothes, of growing cereals, and of transporting goods and services. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the revolution added a new twist—that of making new commodities: telephones, gramophones, typewriters, cameras, automobiles and so on, a seemingly endless process whose twentieth century additions include aeroplanes, radios, refrigerators, washing machines and pleasure boats.”

(Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913, page 29)

Professor Norman Stone in his masterpiece on WWI calls this late nineteenth century explosion of material change and inventions the greatest fast quantum leap in world history in transforming the world.

If one reads these lines with a “Janus mind” we wonder, looking forward from the Lewis book and its era:

  1. How does his catchy metaphor of waves in the ocean relate to fluctuations and cycles? When Ben Bernanke (Fed Chair) describes recent decades as “The Great Moderation” does he mean to imply that Lewis-type waves disappeared or got much smaller?
  2. Can computers and mobile phones really match cars and planes in profundity of impact? Or is it only the tremendous spread of mobile or smartphones in the Global South that can?

In fact, the recent economic history classic, Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth argues against the assumption of endless technical change as a growth accelerator or endless frontier:

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end?

Gordon challenges the view that economic growth can or will continue unabated, and he demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 can’t be repeated. He contends that the nation’s productivity growth, which has already slowed to a crawl, will be further held back by the vexing headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government. Gordon warns that the younger generation may be the first in American history that fails to exceed their parents’ standard of living, and that rather than depend on the great advances of the past, we must find new solutions to overcome the challenges facing us.

A critical voice in the debates over economic stagnation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.

  1. Why does one not read of the four cycles mentioned by Lewis (i.e., Kitchin) and the rest listed above in today’s business and financial press? Has there been some great discontinuity?

If you apply a “Janus mind” to the past (described by Lewis) and our sense of the future (described by techno-pessimists like Gordon) you get a more thoughtful sense of “the human prospect.”

Essay 46: Novelists As Prophetic?

There are three French novelists who say prophetic things in their writings, predictions that are based on intuition and sensibility and not on any formal forecasting at all, but far-seeing nevertheless. Consider these three:

Jules Verne (died in 1905):

Paris in the Twentieth Century (French: Paris au XXe siècle) is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The book presents Paris in August 1960, 97 years in Verne’s future, where society places value only on business and technology.

Written in 1863 but first published 131 years later (1994), the novel follows a young man who struggles unsuccessfully to live in a technologically advanced, but culturally backwards world.  Often referred to as Verne’s “lost novel,” the work paints a grim, dystopian view of a technological future civilization.

Verne’s predictions for 1960:

The book’s description of the technology of 1960 was in some ways remarkably close to actual 1960s technology.

The book described in detail advances such as cars powered by internal combustion engines (“gas-cabs”) together with the necessary supporting infrastructure such as gas stations and paved asphalt roads, elevated and underground passenger train systems and high-speed trains powered by magnetism and compressed air, skyscrapers, electric lights that illuminate entire cities at night, fax machines (“picture-telegraphs”), elevators, primitive computers which can send messages to each other as part of a network somewhat resembling the Internet (described as sophisticated electrically powered mechanical calculators which can send information to each other across vast distances), the utilization of wind power, automated security systems, the electric chair, and remotely-controlled weapons systems, as well as weapons destructive enough to make war unthinkable.

The book also predicts the growth of suburbs and mass-produced higher education (the opening scene has Dufrénoy attending a mass graduation of 250,000 students), department stores, and massive hotels. A version of feminism has also arisen in society, with women moving into the workplace and a rise in illegitimate births. It also makes accurate predictions of 20th-century music, predicting the rise of electronic music, and describes a musical instrument similar to a synthesizer, and the replacement of classical music performances with a recorded music industry.  It predicts that the entertainment industry would be dominated by lewd stage plays, often involving nudity and sexually explicit scenes.

Flaubert (died in 1880):

In his posthumous novel published in 1881, Bouvard and Pécuchet, a satire on random knowledge-seeking, the two clerks of the book title, conclude that sometime in the future, America will “take over” the world or its hegemonial leadership. To see that America would supplant Europe, in those days, is quite “counterintuitive.”

Bouvard and Pécuchet details the adventures of two Parisian copy-clerks, François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet, of the same age and nearly identical temperament. They meet one hot summer day in 1838 by the canal Saint-Martin and form an instant, symbiotic friendship. When Bouvard inherits a sizable fortune, the two decide to move to the countryside. They find a 94-acre (380,000 m2) property near the town of Chavignolles in Normandy, between Caen and Falaise, and 100 miles (160 km) west of Rouen. Their search for intellectual stimulation leads them, over the course of years, to flounder through almost every branch of knowledge.

Balzac (died in 1850):

In his novel, The Wild Ass’s Skin (La Peau de Chagrin), Balzac describes scenes and conversations which lead one insightful interpreter of his to remark:  “On the level of world history, this incident can be read as an allegorical prefiguration of the contemporary conversion of Asia to the materialistic motivations of the technological societies of the West.”  (Balzac: An Interpretation of La Comédie Humaine, F.J.W. Hemmings, Random House, 1967, page 173)

Hemmings says:  “Europe and then American norms are generally accepted among what we call the advanced societies of the world: a civilization concerned above all to stimulate and then gratify the innumerable private desires of its citizens…In Balzac’s day, this civilization had reached its highest development in Paris.”  (Hemmings’s book, page 173)

These three novelists bring to mind Heidegger’s (died in 1976) more recent sense that science and technology from Europe would take over dominant “planetary thinking” and that would “wring out” any sense of “being” or “being-in-the world.”

These three writers gave us “allegorical prefigurations” (to use the Hemmings’s phrase above) of the present which are startling in their far-seeing sense of things and that raises the question: who might their equivalents be in our time?

Essay 37: The Language Phenomenon in Education

Wittgenstein (1889–1951) identifies language as the principal “confusion-machine” within philosophy:

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.

“What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”

Education if deep and meaningful would put language itself in front of a student to understand the “bewitchment” and to perhaps “escape from the fly-bottle.” The fly-bottle is roughly “the captive mind syndrome” described by Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet-thinker.

There are various aspects of this language-watching:

Hans-Georg Gadamer (Heidegger’s successor, who died in 2002) writes:

“It is not that scientific methods are mistaken, but ‘this does not mean that people would be able to solve the problems that face us, peaceful coexistence of peoples and the preservation of the balance of nature, with science as such. It is obvious that not mathematics but the linguistic nature of people is the basis of civilization.’”

(German Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2000, pages 122/123)

This is readily seeable. Imagine Einstein and Kurt Gödel walking near the Princeton campus. They speak to each other in German, their native tongue which they both “inhabit.” Gödel communicates the limits to logic and Einstein the limits to modern physics such as quantum mechanics. They bring in Bohr and Heisenberg and the “Copenhagen Interpretation” as a counter-view. They refer to equations and experiments and conjectures and puzzles, current papers and conferences.

They take “communicative action” by use of speech using German as a means.

There are two levels here that are always confused: the ontological (i.e., all the why-questions people ask using language) and the ontic level, all the how-questions people pose using mathematics and laboratory results (e.g., Higgs boson).

Gödel once made the observation that if you look at language as a kind of logical system, it’s absolutely puzzling that people can communicate at all since language is so utterly ambiguous and “polyvalent.”

Take the sentence: “Men now count.” Out of context, does it mean count as in the sense of numeracy, one, two, three apples in front of me or do you mean perhaps that men in a certain country were given the right to vote and now “count” politically. Without the context and the ability to contextualize, no sentence by itself makes certain sense at all.

This is partly why Wittgenstein sees philosophy problems as “language games.”

Heidegger coming from “being-in-the-world” as foundational, and calls language “the house of being.”

You inhabit a native language the way you “inhabit” a family home or a home town. You flow through.

When a child of ten plays marbles (as analyzed by Piaget) and his native language (say French) comes pouring out of him in a spontaneous gusher, how can we really explain it since the child doesn’t look up syntactical rules and grammatical definitions when he speaks. The words flow.

Heidegger retorts that language speaks you in other words, you’re channeling the language in a way a songwriter explains how a song comes to him. In the end, it’s something spontaneous and not propositional like grammar is.

A moment’s reflection shows you how “slippery” language is: 

A man driving to New York says to you, “the car died on me halfway there.”  He does not mean the car was “on” him physically. To die on doesn’t really mean perish forever, it means, on average, stopped to function in a way that usually can be fixed in the garage.  It means this reparable conking out of the car gave him a big headache and aggravation as he waited for the Triple A people to get there and do the paperwork. You visualize all these layers and twists.

Again, without a human context, the sentence “the car died on me” makes little sense. Without a human context, “the sky is blue” makes incomplete sense too. Does a camel or cricket see a blue sky?

A full education would explore these dimensions of language and this has nothing to do with bringing back Latin or Greek or studying a foreign language to meet a Ph.D. requirement.  Formal linguistics à la Chomsky, Fodor, Katz, etc. is not what’s being discussed, as interesting as all that might be.

It also is not about language genes such as FAP-2 or how vocal cords work since these questions are ontic (i.e., how does it work?) and not ontological (i.e., what does something mean or imply?). Thinking about language in an engineering sense with the human mouth as a “buccal cavity” is quite legitimate and a voice coach might do well to do that.  We are talking about something else:  the centrality of language in human self-understanding, functioning and the making of meaning.