209. My Students Are Better Writers than Heidegger's Students

 

I have never had an English Composition student who wrote a piece — no, left my office with a piece — as bad as the one by Heidegger's student, Hannah Arendt, writing in 1969 at the height of her reputation as a political theorist and philosopher.  You can see it now, in abbreviated form, in the current (July 11) New York Review, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary by reprinting significant articles from the past.

Just look at how she opens an important section of her essay, the philosophical section:

What makes man is his faculty to act. It enables him to get together with his peers, to act in concert, and to reach out for goals and enterprises which would never enter his mind, let alone the desires of his heart, had he not been given this gift — to embark on something new.

Think about that "faculty to act."  It's what distinguishes you as a human being.  Have you ever thought of that before?  "Jeez, I can act.  I'm a human being."

Maybe the reason you haven't thought of it before is that it's so hard for you to think of yourself as not being able to act.  Of any living creature not being able to act.  Maybe, if you're a chemistry major, of anything not being able to act.  "Hell," I hear from the back of the room, "salt acts on iron.  Makes rust.  Isn't that an action?" 

So here is a writer — unless she's picked out her words with a dart — making a big, special philosophical deal out of something ordinary people can't see as special at all.  How can it be special when everything but a motionless blob of inert chemicals qualifies? 

If a reader doesn't see that right away, in the first sentence, if he thinks that triviality in common meaning will play out into deep philosophical significance rather than come back and bite you, he'll see it in the second.  But at greater cost.  If he's not a dull reader (not to be confused with the common reader) it will take him about three seconds to see that this wonderful faculty also lets him do a hundred million other, very different, things — like get together with his inferiors, act out of concert with them, reject goals and enterprises, frustrate desires, and embark on something old.  Unless he catches on to Arendt as a ponderous declarer of the obvious in the second item in the series (act in concert without, duh, the ability to act?) our reader is going to waste twice as much effort, and feel twice as much pain, as he would have if he'd twigged in after the first sentence.

In an English Comp essay the more pain you cause your reader, the more of his time you waste, the more laughter you provoke in him, the lower your grade is.  By those standards Arendt's essay gets the lowest grade in the class.  She must not have come to my office.  Oh no, of course not.  She went to Heidegger's office.  Why didn't the very first sentence in the essay reveal that to me?  Or at least the first three sentences:

Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end which must justify it.  And since when we act we never know with any amount of certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals.  Violence does not promote causes, it promotes neither History nor Revolution....

Forget that by "violence" she has to mean "the use of violence" (which can be rational or irrational), and just note that she tells us it's "instrumental by nature."  Not the usual "by its very nature," but still delivering the intrinsic.  Eliminating the observable.  My student and I see Lou Piniella over there throwing the furniture around in his office.  We think he's just expressing himself after a tough loss on the diamond but we've been told to be quiet.  You can't argue with deductions from the very nature of a thing.  He must have an end in view.

If you know the intrinsic you can speak in absolutes: "We never know with any amount of certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing."  Any amount of certainty.  So when my student tells me that he's pretty sure Piniella, who had gone further and thrown second base into center field, was going to be fined, I'd have to say, "Sorry, you still can't argue.  The nature of human beings does not allow them to have the slightest idea that such a thing will happen."

Writers who talk like that, writers who think you have to believe it because they're telling you, writers who speak like lords, writers who dismiss observation, writers who make it impossible to argue, those writers never make it out of some professors' offices.  Arendt would never have made it out of Professor R. M. Hare's office.  Hare is the Oxford professor who famously explained to a New Yorker reporter what gave British philosophers their advantage over continental (mainly German and French) philosophers: "Here you read a thing to your tutor and he says to you, 'What do you mean by that?' and then you have to tell him."  You sit there until you can make it clear.  Then you can turn in your essay.

Hare's office was in England and my office was in Ohio but both of us, I think, were trying to recreate Socrates' office in ancient Athens.  Both American teachers of composition and British teachers of philosophy set the same restriction:  nobody gets out (or sits in, for that matter) without explaining himself.  In other words, "You enter here you're taking part in a dialogue."  In both countries that would be understood to be a democratic dialogue.

Now on the continent it was, by all reports, entirely different.  The signs read, "You enter here you're listening to an authority."  Different philosophical traditions, different educations.  Students learn to speak authoritatively.  That is, if they don't watch themselves, they learn to speak like lords.

Composition teachers in America are paid to watch students, in case they can't watch themselves.  Speak like a lord in your essay and you'd better not turn it in.  The prof will wonder how you ever got out of his office.  If he reads a lordly essay he asks, "What office did this student come out of?"  If he reads Hannah Arendt's essay now, though, after he's learned some history and read philosophers like Hare, he doesn't have to ask.  Though a student could have learned (and still can learn) lordliness in any number of offices in Europe, only in Heidegger's could one have learned a lordliness like this.