410. Rooting in the Soil of Experience

Note: The following piece is the third in a series that began with "Herbert Feigl: Philosopher for the English Composition Teacher" (Philosophical Forum, Fall, 2017) and "Academic Freedom, Tenure, and the Unclouded Mind," (Philosophical Forum, Summer, 2018).  In a fuller form it was declined by Philosophical Forum and is published here as a post to help complete the series.

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You there, my dear colleague, what could have put you so flat on the floor?

"Would you believe, a simple fault in my thinking?"

Ah, you must be a philosopher, the only people I know who could be flattened by such a thing.  So I believe you and look forward to hearing about what must have been a great blow.

"It was, but what set me up for it was nothing special to me, I'll tell you.  I believed that Donald Trump was elected by Americans who hadn't gone to college, the people he called 'the poorly educated,' and loved.  I accepted his idea of the poorly educated and thought I knew who the people were.  Then I read that according to the exit polls 18.5 million college graduates voted for him.  As the implications of that fact hit me I went down."

But with the non-college supporters of Trump being easily in the majority nearly all commentators said he was "elected by people who hadn't gone to college."  Were they wrong?

"Candidates are elected by a total vote.  Change any group's contribution and you change the total, and so the outcome.  So "elected by" is imprecise.  And here it's irrelevant.  The teacher is worried about the size of college graduates' contribution.  Eighteen and a half million is a kick in the kidneys, something to worry about big time.

Could you be more precise about this, uh, "big time kick"

"Sure.  It's our realization that the people we had labored over, and certified as educated, and on our authority were called 'well educated,' were indistinguishable, in a vital matter, from the people we were calling 'poorly educated.'  If that doesn't hit you in the kidneys you haven't lived the life of a normal college professor."

Well, it does hit me, though it doesn't bring me where you are.

"Maybe you didn't start teaching early enough to have the expectations I and my generation had.  If you were a student in the forties and started teaching in the fifties and saw what the GI Bill and affluence were opening up you expected a future that would ring all the bells: the number of college graduates steadily going up, their percentage in the population rising, the quality of public discussion improving — all in the end giving us what democracies most need: a hedge against the ignorance of the multitude."

You believed what Thomas Jefferson believed, that if the masses were educated they would no longer be susceptible, as the masses of Europe were, to demagoguery.

"Yes."

And education would be accomplished by the schools we would fill with our young.

"Yes, and fill them we did.  In my lifetime the number of people with college degrees — showing that they had rounded off their sixteen-year education — grew from 6 million in 1940 to 108 million in 2016, and their percentage in the population rose from 4.6% to 33%."

Wow, thirty-three percent!  That tells me who that other fellow down there with you must be.  Thomas Jefferson.  Is he weeping?

"No, he's sore as hell.  'I pour a big part of my state's resources into schools,' he says, 'I make sure there's money for good teachers, I endow a university for God's sake.  I think we've made a great start.  And in the end?  An electorate I can't tell from the canaille of Europe, the mob I saw us leaving behind.'"

Oh Founding Father I hear you, I hear you.  You are certainly entitled to your complaint.  

"And to a full inquiry.  Which you can count on us, being professors, to conduct more carefully than any others you could turn to.  After taking such punishment for my carelessness, and feeling I am somehow responsible for the failure, I am this time going to leave nothing to correct."

Your resolve is mine.  We have to ask where and how we went wrong and what we can do to set things right.  And we don't want to miss any signs.  So.  At what moment did you, observing Trump's degree-holding followers, first say, "I've failed"?

"I'd say .... let's see, it was .... I'd say the moment after Trump, at a rally, had yelled, 'Drain that swamp!'  When I heard the whole crowd, the whole crowd, repeat, with beaming faces, 'Drain that swamp!'  I was so disappointed.  I knew there were a lot of college graduates there."

And from them you expected ... ?

"Frowns.  Questions. 'Swamp?  What swamp?  Where?  Show me so that I can see it in the administration.'"

But alas no frowns.  Just beams.  So down you go.  I can see it.  A mouth that once firmly said "well-" and "poorly-educated" paralyzed.  Eyes that once recognized  knowledge and gains in knowledge blinded.  A brain that had its concepts of teaching and learning in order stunned into confusion.  A heart that beat high for the daily task pressed down to a murmur.

"Man, you're a poet.  But in this case I think your fancy words paint a true picture.  After I register all that I've seen at a Trump rally that's me."

Yes, I'm a poet, but only as every English teacher is a poet, a failed poet.   I went on (after going over to philosophy for a look and taking the same theory-of-knowledge course you took) I went on to teach poetry.  And in doing that I acquired notions of education that kept me from falling into your state.  The morning after the election I wasn't happy but I could still say "well-educated" and "poorly-educated" and my concepts of teaching and learning, vital to my concept of knowledge, were still in good order.  Indeed what I learned teaching poetry equipped me to explain what had happened.  And more.  It raised my hopes for the future. 

"I can't wait to hear your explanation and go over your equipment.  And, I must say, I am ready to reject the great claim you're making.  I've been offered too many silver bullets on the subject of education to believe there can be a ready solution to this problem."

I understand, but I can assure you that mine is no sudden discovery of silver.  It comes from the day-to-day observation of students.  How much they learn — or can learn — from poets.

 "Start there.  Start there.  Show me the student and the learning."

Righto.  Picture a student who has come to the university from an upstate town where all he has heard in discussion of religion or sex is meeting-house, or barber-shop, or locker-room.  He reads the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins or Thomas Carew and says, "Wow, that's Christianity!" or "That's sex!"

"Where?  How?  Show me.  Show me."

OK, OK, here's Christianity.  The poem is "God's Grandeur."  Hopkins has been looking at an industrialized, Godless world.  All is "seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil."   He has faith that somewhere God will show his presence but where, when?  Never again maybe?  Then he sees the sunrise:

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Entering class that morning I saw a student whose word "Christianity" allowed for no such visions. "Holy Ghost," if it had any meaning at all, had one odorized by Catholics.  Then he stands with Hopkins seeing in the sunrise a giant dove sheltering her young.  The "Wow" bursts out.  "Christianity" has had an inpouring of meaning and "Holy Ghost" has made a start.  Do you need more?

"Yes.  How about 'sex.'"

Ready.  Picture the upstate student's buddy.  All barber shop and locker-room.  (Or, today, online porn.)  He comes to Thomas Carew's "A Rapture."  Carew is making love to his mistress:

Now in more subtle wreaths I will entwine

My sinewy thighs, my arms and legs with thine;

Thou like a sea of milk shall lie displayed,

Whilst I the smooth calm ocean invade

With such a tempest, as when Jove of old

Fell down on Danaë in a storm of gold.

"Sex," after that tempest of gold, can't be just a dirty pool at the bottom of a tank.  The poem has added something to the meaning of the word, not a lot maybe, but something, that will be in him from now on.

"And seeing something like this happen again and again gave you your notion of education, the conception of learning that saved you from despair.  I've got to have that conception explained.  Fully enough to give me a reason to adopt it."

Well, after mulling it over all these years I certainly ought to be able to satisfy you.  It's that Wow moment I keep going back to.  What's going on inside the student?  A movement of the imagination outward — to a further world, to how much is in it, to new ways of looking at it, to more intense ways.  That's easily seen, and is seen.  What's harder and less commonly seen is that it is also a movement inward.  The poet's world flows into that place in the mind where words are kept, and adds to their meaning.  Picture that as what happens at enough Wow moments and you get the idea that this is what education is.  Words getting filled with meaning.  At first barely words.  Just sounds in the ear or marks on the page.  Then containers — tanks, barrels — with a little crude stuff in them.  Then meanings as barber shops and locker rooms fill them.  Then meanings as teachers fill them, with content from other minds and other times.

"I can't be a teacher without being pleased by that picture.  Minds with vacant places becoming filled."

Barrels, a vocabulary, ready to be dipped into.  Labels appropriate and neat.  A mind ready to communicate productively with other minds.  You have it.

"I do, but how do the degree-holding Trump voters fit into your picture?"

By listening to words without attending to their meanings.  Speakers can use words within a familiar range, and put them together in approved combinations, and be talking through their hats.  Their words are a series of empty barrels, labeled and connected.  And if the education of the listener has consisted of memorizing labels and learning connections he or she is not going to know that.

"Ah....  Ah...."

Yes?

"Excuse me, but friend.  Friend.  You have just — to my surprise — won me over to your view.  I could have been one of those people.  As an undergraduate.  I scored high on examinations, and got top grades, and won prizes (as, I dare say, a lot of readers of philosophy journals did).  I became one of the smart people who saw that if you stopped to really understand what you were reading, if you went into the barrel, you were going to read less, and sound dumber, and score lower than the smarter smart people who had studied efficiently — that is, attended just to the labels.  You can file and index a hundred labels in the time it takes your competitor to fix, say, the word "spiritual."  Do the label trick well enough and nobody will know you're really dumb, dumb where it counts."

Nobody educated the same shallow way will know, that is.  Or educated that way and not given a bloody nose by those educated the other way, the way of deepened understanding of words heard and used.

"Bloody nose meaning, I take it, what lawyers get in a courtroom.  Will it distract us too much from our business if you tell about it?"

I don't think so, because it's part — I hope — of the education I am going to wind up plugging.  I was as successful a label-tender as anybody on the honor roll.  Then, after a history class, I got into a conversation some classmates were into.  We had all read the same text, on the making of the modern world.  Currents and influences, one ism following another, my meat, ending in  World War I.  Causes?  That was at issue.  I listened, entered their debate, and came away with my face hurting and my nose bleeding.   At home, after more careful, slower study I realized that everything I had to contribute had come through my hat.  It was a moment of learning to rival that of Jove's descent on Danaè.

"Moment of learning.  With students you have to call teachers.  That's got to fit into your notion of education." 

Yes, but later.  For now we have an explanation of the beaming college graduates at the Trump rally.  They got their degrees without a proper education in words.  Without poetry.  And to that angry fellow we say, "Mr. Jefferson, there's where we failed and here's one thing we can do to succeed: teach more poetry."

"Which I will take in the broad sense.  I see us giving more words meaning.  Adding more meaning to what they have.  Going deeper and deeper into the barrel.  Releasing flood after flood of understanding .  Taking more and more students through the Wow moment.  You have no idea how you're exciting me."

Excited by a moment in a poetry class.  You, a philosopher.  You aren't expected to get excited like this.

"No, but what you have just described is a moment of gained knowledge.  It's what my epistemology teacher called 'the Aha! moment.'  And if I had paid more attention to it long ago I might not have given up on the philosophy I thought was mine forever.  But this is a digression we can't afford."

Stay with it for a second.  The name of this philosophy you thought was yours forever?

"Logical empiricism.  All you really need to know is that I became more and more unhappy with the effort of that philosophy's adherents to 'root their terms firmly in the soil of experience,' as my epistemology teacher, Herbert Feigl, put it.  Logical empiricists had to take it as an axiom and Feigl insisted on it.  But most of them, really, made little effort.  Make a hypothesis, deduce its consequences, then devise an experiment that will show whether a key consequence will appear to the eye in the world we all experience.  Einstein's theory of relativity was their display test.  One star swims into the eyepiece at the right time and you're satisfied.  You can go back to those connected abstractions you're so good at, and love — the logical part of logical empiricism."

I see one of those plants in the rain forest, getting just enough nourishment from its seed stuck in a tree to drop a single filament to the ground, from which it will get the rest.  One damn filament.  Their model of sufficient knowledge.

"An unsatisfying model to us but necessarily satisfying to them because it met their stipulated conditions and required no change in their definitions.  If the propositions of your theory or system are faultlessly connected you can say the whole thing is empirically verified.  Whack those filament-supported propositions into a truth table and you can crank out hundreds of faultless propositions."

I see why you got excited and stopped me.  My poets were taking you down into the soil and rooting your words so firmly your epistemology teacher was bound to be happy.

"Yes, and that's exactly what I want you to do now, as deeply and fully and carefully as you can.  Choose your word.  Take me down into the soil it's rooted in.  Rub my nose in it.  Make me see what I wish I had seen seventy years ago."

I don't think you know what you are asking for.  That's going to be a laborious process.  Some of the time, to be sure, the Moment just comes, to a lone reader, who will look up from the page, but most of the time it requires careful preparation, and co-operation by others, and patience by everybody.  One poem, one passage, one insight, at a time. That's the business of poetry class. I doubt that you will have the patience to do it here or find the reward worth it.

"And I don't think you understand the implications of the view you have sold me on.  It's the only view left at the end of the line.  You can set up any standard, any measure, by which you will call people educated — grades, degrees, extent of the encyclopedia absorbed, range of the search engine used — and design any test to select them, but as long as the test is in words, the takers of the test, the degree-holders, can't be called educated if their word-answers aren't rooted in the soil of experience.  That's what you'll be showing me, rooting.  Unless it's done you are poorly educated."

If your barrels are empty you are a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  You are a Donald Trump.  And if your listeners' barrels are empty they won't know a clang from  a ringing truth — to go poetic on you.

"Sounds pretty good to me.  Let me continue in your vein.  About one of my barrels, the one labeled 'education.'  It's been emptied, and I want to refill it.  With better stuff, heavier stuff that won't fail the new, tougher tests.  No clang in the cymbals.  No...no...well, I can't do poetry.  Take me back to the soil of experience.  You were going to choose a word and go over a poem deepening the word's meaning for a student.  Showing me how the student gets 'educated' in the only way that lets you use the word with confidence.  I'm ready to get my nose dirty."

All right, an exemplary word and an exemplary poem.  On the spot I can't do it.  Give me a week.  I'll come back with my best example.

"You take a week I'll raise my expectations.  You, old achiever, see that you're taking a test that I will grade.  And I'll tell you that for a high grade the word you choose can't be a little one.  You can come to an Aha moment over the structure of the benzine molecule or the arrangement of nucleic acids and gain great knowledge, but it's not going to matter much in the world outside your science.  A big word to us is one that matters in our society.  Even bigger if it helps solve current problems.  It's not that the benzine circle or the DNA helix don't matter, or that getting them straight is minor business.  But not getting them straight can't mess up our knowledge of our society or that of others — not, say, the way messing up what 'Christianity' or 'Islam' refers to could."

Got it.  A big word.  "Consumerism" or "patriarchy," like that.

"Yes.  The urgency in those words, the need to understand them in order to solve current problems, makes them bigger.  Eternally big words get bigger as society's needs expand in their area."

OK, an eternally big word now made urgent.  I may need two weeks.

 II

All right, the word is "sex."  The connection to current problems is through "porn," the urgency of which you can have no doubt of if you dip into the string of articles appearing earlier this year in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the New York Times or read Maggie Jones' account in the New York Times Magazine (2-7-18) of an attempt in a Boston high school to counter the effect of online porn (as primary sex education).  It has gone viral, as has Ross Douthat's Op-Ed response to it.

"I'll accept that.  'Porn' is urgent, making 'sex' bigger."

Good.  I have already showed you the first expansion of the meaning of "sex" in the mind of the naive male student when he hears Carew speak of his penetration of his mistress as an invasion by a shower of gold, like Jove's on Danaë.  It's not porn but it's too close to it to change much.  For a really big expansion I have chosen Robert Herrick's "To the Nymphs, Drinking at the Fountain":

Reach with your whiter hands to me

   Some crystal of the spring;

And I about the cup shall see

   Fresh lilies flourishing.

Or else, sweet nymph, do you but this—

   To the glass your lips incline;

And I shall see by that one kiss

   The water turned to wine.

All right, after the student sees the situation here (he may need help: village maids at a fountain, the speaker asking for a drink) he can see the hands, skin white as lilies.  Nice.

Stay close to that situation.  He asks the girl to take a drink herself first.  Lips reflected in the water.  Red lips.  God how red.  How it goes with the white.  What a tingle he's feeling.  The moment is a kiss.  Wow.  A miracle.

Not done yet, though.  If the student knows enough about Christianity and the sacrament of Holy Communion (another place for teacher-help) he will be able to put himself at the altar rail, where, if he's good enough at situation construction, he will see the girl serving.  The cup.  The hands around it lilies.  Easter!  He hardly knew the half of "miracle."   He gets an extra charge.  From religion.  Driven home in the last line.  And it's an erotic charge!  Tingle raised to a higher power!  Who'd have thought this was in the "sex" barrel?

"Who'd have expected a gain in knowledge to be made here?"

For the relevance of this expansion of the meaning of "sex" to the current porn problem let's think about  what generates tingles.  Big tingles are generated by emissions from breasts and buttocks and naked skin, little ones from ankles and feet and arms that wrap around a shawl.  (I am trying to rise to your level of scientific precision.)  Big ones are easy to receive, as witness the constant pulses from the media, registering day and night.  Little ones often need poets:

Two little feet — in dreams

They wake my heart like sunny beams...

Under the dinner tables’ cloth,

In spring, on green of grass and moss,

In winter, by the fireplaces,

On glassy parquet of a hall... (Pushkin)

Or:

Whenas in silks my Julia goes, 

Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows 

That liquefaction of her clothes. 

Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see 

That brave vibration each way free, 

O how that glittering taketh me!  (Herrick)

The movement of feet on this surface and that, the undulation of silk.  The poet, then the teacher, tunes your dial.  Your antenna pick up the emission and you tingle.  "Liquefaction!  She turns skirts into flowing water!"  The Wow is a little one, but it comes in clearly.

Now porn.  Here it is, kid, full front, the goal of it all, home plate.  No mediation, no poets, no education necessary.  Not with an emission as powerful as this.  Do you feel the difference?

"Yes.  The whole nine yards between Pushkin and pornography."

Good.  How much do you know about the losing battle against pornography in our society?

"A lot, as anybody my age is bound to.  I started out as a battler myself, wearing religious colors.  And I gave up early, as any student of science is bound to.  You had a chance of victory when you could show that porn had bad consequences.  When your religion, generally accepted in society, recognized the connection between porn and masturbation, casting seed on the ground, and called it sin, you had them.  If not punishment, then guilt.  When science removed those consequences from your argument and your religion from its accepted place in society you didn't.  And there weren't any others in sight."

No bad consequences, no argument left.  But I, observer of students of poetry, believe that pornography does have a bad consequence.  It injures the imagination, and every male of our species who watches porn (meaning every male of our species) knows it.  Let's make you the test.  The next time you return from the porn world turn directly to the real world, the rich world, the poet's world, full of tiny feet and moving silk.  Try to dial in.  My guess is you'll get silence.  You're flat-lined.  Every prong on your antenna has melted.

"I don't have to take the test.  I confirm your guess.  And I see that the way to victory over porn is through development of the imagination.  If all the male antennae are extended, all the feet and ankles and cute little ways will register."

As, among listeners to a political debate — and this is the extension that so invites me — all the provisos and conditions and qualifications would register.  The nuances.  If the antennae were out.  If they were and nothing but one big signal were coming through there would be — among those whose barrels  were full (you see how the metaphors come together) — a frown, and questions about the transmitter. 

"All that we have said about pornography appears to apply to demagoguery.  I think we've gone a fair way toward solving our two great problems."

You say "fair way."  Let me tell you something before I should.  I go all the way.  To total victory.  I see a whole society in which poetry has won out over porn.  All the male antennae are extended, and all the feet and ankles and cute little ways are registering.  Then, after seeing the close connection between society's acceptance of porn and its acceptance of demagoguery, I see complete pedagogical success.  All teachers take their students through the Moment of Understanding, everybody's alert, the antennae are out for distinctions and qualifications, nobody tolerates words he doesn't understand, conservatism is more than the Tea Party, liberalism is larger than MSNBC, Hugh Hefner goes broke, and Donald Trump loses the election.

"Some vision.  I long to share it.  And, especially, share your hope.   But to do that I have to know more precisely how you get to it."

Precisely, yes.  And I can't do it.  Not yet anyway.   I was telling you about a leap, an intuitive leap.

"All right, let's leave it there, with your evidence, and a suggestion, and a half-formed vision."

Till we meet again.