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.

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.

Essay 35: Education and the Need for Enchantment

Max Weber (1864-1920) and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) are considered the two fathers of modern sociology at the highest level.

Weber sees the modern world as the zone of “Ent-zauber-ung:” where ent means removal of, Zauber means magic or enchantment and ung means the process of.

He sees our world as “dis-enchanted.” Everything is scientific or profitable or unwelcome. This makes modern life a productive engine of sorts but extremely desiccated and arid and leads to what Durkheim calls “anomie” (the sense of being adrift, directionless).

We argue in this book that education should be seen as the “last exit” to enchantment before the “grind of life” comes down on the student after the “moratorium” of college.

What is enchantment? Enchantment is that special feeling about something, some topic, field, math problem, painting exhibit, novel, movie, debate, that there’s something there that “makes it all worthwhile” and like a great piece of music, “gets to you” and flies under all cynical radar. The best kind of enchantment can last from age 19-95, if you live that long.

Think of a math or physics problem or novel or painting that gives the student “permanent uplift.”

The pedagogical dimension of enchantment works like this: the student encounters a puzzle or conjecture or story or depiction that constitutes a “healthy obsession.”

After interaction with this phenomenon, he or she can “walk backwards” to the 900-page textbook and go to those pages that are relevant, this making the textbook more like a dictionary that serves as a handy reference book and not as a daunting, exhausting endless “Mt. Everest” of names and equations or faces or dates. The student can “conquer” textbooks by enchantment and only enchantment. Without that engine or motor for the mind and will, one is weighed down and demoralized in advance.

Let’s do two quick examples:

Heraclitus is supposed to have said, “you can’t step into the same river twice.” Zeno says you can’t really cross the street because first you have to reach the midpoint, then the next midnight, and so on forever. You never complete your crossing (see Joseph Mazur’s book, Zeno’s Paradox, from 2008).

Such ancient paradoxes are still perplexing. Great thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Whitehead, Frege, et al wrestled with them many decades.

It’s also puzzling that certain math or logic questions open up “oceans” of analysis. Why might that be? Is that enchanting or depressing?

The last chapter of Tolstoy’s War and Peace masterpiece is a set of reflections on history itself. It’s very enchanting as he wrestles with this “caprice machine” called history.

Enchantment gives you the first steps towards what we call “pre-understanding,” a prerequisite for all deep study.

Essay 7: Levels of Meaning in Human Affairs: Meta-Intelligent Views

We see “scientism” (i.e., the attempt to explain human behavior in terms of physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, etc. as incomplete at best:

In his book, Husserl and the Search for Certitude, Leszek Kołakowski notes:

“A baby does not see the same thing that an adult does when it “looks” at objects and is ignorant of their function and place in the purposeful order; an adult perceives objects as endowed with meaning, and he does not add the meaning to his perceptions; when I see a car, I see a car and not a colored surface that I interpret separately as part of a purposely organized universe; when I look at a text in an alphabet unknown tome I do not see what a person who can read it does, and I do not perceives differences that he sees directly, his understanding of the text converges with his seeing into one single act. It is convincing to say that a “meaning” consequently a “universal,” makes itself part of the perception.

Everyone agrees that perception is selective, because it is under pressure from biological and social circumstances.”

(Yale University Press, 1975, pages 54-55)

Professor Clifford Geertz (who died in 2006) looks for levels of meaning and meaningfulness in all human behavior to be explained “not by an experimental science in search of law but by an interpretative one in search of meaning:”

“Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” he states, “I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be, therefore, not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.

In this meta-intelligence book, we try to help the student see that mechanical “scientism” leads to a kind of “captive mind” sterility since we cannot get around man’s search for meaning and levels of meaning: since “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”