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Why do you want to squash German
Romanticism?
"Because it's behind
postmodernism and the flatter we squash postmodernism the better life in
American universities will be."
What do you mean,
"squash"? You're in a university. You're supposed to
"refute." And you
don't refute isms, you refute arguments.
"I know, ism-talk isn't our
thing. And refutation is our big thing. But postmodernists don't do or say
things you can take down by refutation. There it is, right in Wikipedia:
'Postmodernism is not a method of doing philosophy, but rather a way of
approaching traditional ideas and practices in non-traditional ways.' So. You
go after their relativism and you run into Barbara Herrnstein Smith: 'The relativism
exhibited by this study is not a 'position,' not a 'conviction,' not a set of
'claims' about how certain things — reality, truth, meaning, reason, value and
so forth — really are. It is, rather, a general conceptual style or taste.' All
you can say about a taste is that it's bad. All you can do about the
tastemakers is squash them."
But those tastemakers were
academics. Surely you could argue with them.
"Believe me, I tried. The
visiting postmodernist said, 'I don't recognize your categories.' Another
visitor (we had to be instructed in the new theories) denied that there was
even a relative objectivity. He
(Stephen Mailloux) must have believed that there was no difference between 'You
are fat' and 'You weigh 310 pounds.' I gave up."
I sympathize, but how is German
Romanticism responsible?
"By reacting against the
Enlightenment so successfully. The Enlightenment, as Isaiah Berlin described it
for my generation, stood for rationality, universality, and empiricism. That
is, it stood for reason, epitomized for us in the scientific method, universal
values, epitomized in the Declaration of Independence (all men are created equal, with inalienable
rights), and experience-based knowledge, epitomized in the work of primarily
British philosophers (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume). The German Romantics doubted
reason, universal truth, and, if not experience itself, the claim that it was
the base for all knowledge. In the end (to take a liberty) their opposition to
the Enlightenment gave us Martin Heidegger and all those French intellectuals
and American professors who brought about the revolution in English departments
in the 80s and 90s."
Sounds like a big philosophical
enterprise, squashing all that.
"Yes, and 25 years ago that's
what I thought it would take. Now I know there was a simple alternative. All I
had to do was take my course in English Composition, the course nearly
everybody had to teach one section of, with philosophical seriousness. What did
my textbook tell students to do when they were writing an argumentative essay?
'Cite evidence.' That is, appeal to experience. 'Anticipate objections.' Yes,
test, probe, look for counter-examples, respect the law of non-contradiction —
just as in the scientific method. 'Watch out for absolute generalizations, beware
of catch-all explanations, don't evade the question.' Yes, reason well. 'Don't
sneer.' Yes, keep attitude out. Remain objective. When I explain these things
to students I'm promoting care in establishing belief, just as those trying to
free themselves from medieval superstition did. Just as scientists now do,
though much more systematically. The more thoroughly I explain the more deeply
I commit myself to the values of the Enlightenment.
"That's what English
Composition teaches the teacher. Learn its lessons and you'll see that you
can't be a postmodernist any place but in your office, writing articles. Go to
your Parking Committee meeting. Try to decide which department has the better
claim to a lot. You're stuck with the need for facts and logic. Do you believe
in academic freedom? You're stuck with the need to be objective. Professorial
objectivity was a condition of its recognition in the 1940 Statement on
Academic Freedom and Tenure by the AAUP and the Association of American
Colleges. Do you want tenure? Your main argument for it (made by your
representatives) is that it's necessary to preserve academic freedom.
"One great thing about
Composition is that it shows you (as you show your students) what sticks you
with what. Fling down a general statement and you're stuck with its
implications. Roll out a beautiful first paragraph and you're stuck with the
expectations it raises. All must fit together. And the glue (which you learn to
use in argument essays) is logic. The other great thing about Composition is
that it pulls you into the practical world, the one the people you're trying to
inform or influence live in.
"All right, you learn that in
your classroom and then you go back to your office and what do you find? That
you're as stuck with reason, universal truth, and experience-based knowledge
(the heart of the epistemology that Stanley Fish said was "lying in ruins
around us") as your students were with their own topic sentence. You are
stuck with the rationality required in the practical world. You were stuck as
soon as you described the course in the catalog.
"Finally, after you follow
all that your practice implies, you get to your theoretical foundations, the
ones your feet are really stuck in. You see that nobody, no German Romantic, no
Heidegger, no Derrida, has kicked them away, nor, as long as you're crossing
the hall to teach those freshmen, can they kick them away."
As long as the glue holds. If
logic is relative — and it's going to be for those who let pi itself be
relative — then the structure falls apart, the implications of practice for
theory fail to hold, and the postmodernist can remain comfortably in his
office.
"I know. That's why I say
'squash' instead of 'argue.' I hope to make him uncomfortable there."
Note: When I speak of "universal truth"
above I have in mind only what the 19th century mathematician William Kingdon
Clifford had in mind when he said, "It is wrong, always, everywhere and
for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
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