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.

108. In Defense of "Publish or Perish"

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Ah, the ghost of deans past, rising again to speak for the real world, rising to dispute my last post (#107). "You forget, you forget. Sing your song about Socrates, that he didn't publish a single word, that he would never have gotten a Ph.D.  Promote his tradition, concentrate on the good life, make the classroom experience the center of higher education. So in the criteria for tenure and promotion you manage to put teaching ahead of publication. And what do you discover? That teaching is the hardest thing in the world to measure. Nothing is reliable, not test scores, not classroom visits, not student evaluations. Scores can be raised by teaching to the test, visit reports are subjective, and student evaluations can give a very distorted picture."

You mean student evaluations aren't reliable?

"Not enough to make trustworthy comparisons. The year they had him students can complain about a teacher as a crabby futz and ten years later thank him for teaching them everything they needed to know. The 'humane' and 'relevant' livewire can be called, in hindsight, a 'shallow entertainer.' It's all so subjective. Student evaluations are helpful, but they require a sophisticated reading. And that will vary according to the sophisticate.

"Publication can easily be measured and reliably used for comparison. Much can be quantified: how many articles, how many times cited by others in the field, how many long reviews. There may be some subjectivity in the editors' choice of articles but they, the gatekeepers, are guided by the peers of the discipline. That thins out the subjectivity. No matter how strongly you urge a Promotion and Tenure committee to prioritize teaching they are going to gravitate toward publication — just because, in a swamp, it gives them some firm, accessible ground to stand on.

"I know, that's gravitation, convenience, not justification. So forget it. Let's talk about your idealistic principles, the ones you inherit from Plato's Socrates. Socrates left you with no doubt about the right approach to truth. It's through dialogue, debate, what you all later lovingly called 'dialectic testing.' The question is, Do you want tough testing or easy testing? Say you've come up with a piece of truth. Will you test it in the classroom? That's too easy. Your students don't know how to be tough. If you really love truth, and are really committed to the Socratic way, you'll lay your piece out in a journal, where the really tough people can test it.

"That, I think, is what one of Plato's most eloquent spokesmen, John Milton, would want you to do. Truth,' he said, 'can't be won without dust and heat,' down in the arena. 'That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.' He who shuns such a trial 'slinks out of the race.' And you know what? That classroom, for all its connection to the good life, for all it contributes to the examination of it, for all its beauty, is a place you are slinking to."

"That's a hard thing to say, but if you accept it I'll tell you something else. You can't want me, your dean, to let you or any of your colleagues do that kind of slinking. First because you want credit for that piece of truth, and you want the credit to be granted objectively. You don't want it to be based on anybody's report of its success in your classroom; you want it to be based on reports that can be compared with other reports — like number of citations. In other words, you, if you really want to adhere to Socratic principles, want our present system. For all its faults."

107. The Structure of Academic Revolutions

Want to know what drives a revolution in an academic discipline? Ask a young searcher for truth what he would rather have in his hand at the end of three years, a new statement of truth or a letter from the dean granting him tenure.

OK, your subject may well plump for the truth. That's nothing to sneeze at, a bona fide truth. But now do this: substitute in his hand a statement of what might possibly be the truth and put around him peers who possibly won't, or can't, recognize it as the truth. He could live alone with it, in an attic, for decades. Put that against a grant of tenure.

You there in the outside world, struggling to hang onto your job, running the rat race, getting by on a smile and a shoeshine, surely you understand the desire for tenure. I mean, a lifetime hold on well-paid independence? a yearly three-month vacation? What's not to understand? But still, you can under-estimate, you can fail to feel the full strength of it, the belief in it.  Have you ever heard that awed statement about the philosophy professor who had made himself into the purest possible nihilist (believer in nothing)?  "He believes only in tenure."

All right you've got that strong desire for tenure. Now give those who don't have it only three or four years to get it. Have them during those years teach some large lower-level courses. Give them a few of the administrative jobs the tenured profs are sick of. Anything to make sure a new Ph. D. doesn't have the time to sit back and think deeply — the way nearly every other discoverer of a significant truth has had to do. Then, a key provision: make publication in a refereed journal — a journal in which our young searcher will have to compete with all those in his discipline who have had the time to sit back and think deeply — a condition of his obtaining tenure.

The young searcher knows about learned journals. You get into them by stirring up truth. And he's got clear eyes. He sees that he's churning garbage. What else can he do on his schedule? Last, he's got a very reasonable human fear: that those deep thinkers, and particularly the journal editors, are good enough at garbage detection to see what he's doing. His only hope is that the distinction between truth and garbage can be obscured long enough for his garbage to get past the editor and onto the list the dean uses to grant tenure. And where does garbage most easily get a pass? In a revolution. You know, like the thing Sigmund Freud pulled off.

But you've got to be sure of the conditions. You don't want any garbage detectors coming down from the dean's office, or one department raking over another department's garbage. So look for department autonomy. Then if you can find a department that has successfully rejected the tests for garbage, or disputed the category, or denied it had distinguishing features, you're on the way. Your ideal, I think, is what Sinclair Lewis called the state university of his time, "a vast department store" — that is, a university from which the notion of a common academic enterprise had been entirely removed.

You have to be careful in your choice of a department. There's no hope in those fields where a new arrival can go to a frontier of knowledge and, using established research methods, add, or stir up, some recognizable truth. You want a field where there's no frontier, or if there is one nobody agrees on where it is, or whether it's moving forward or backward. Like in the arts and, often, the humanities.

You'll find a field of confusion somewhere in there. Uncovering a good one is not nearly so hard as it was before the German Ph. D. program became the model for everybody. Now there are so many arts, crafts, skills, and sports made into "fields" with a "graduate faculty" imposing "responsible standards," so many young scholars wandering around looking for a non-existent frontier, so much pointless rigor, so much free-floating scientism, so much confusion, that you can start a revolution without half trying.

And, without too much effort, you can keep it going — long enough, maybe (if you still haven't had time to really think) to get a promotion out of it. It won't be hard if you've started right. If you've got people revolting against predecessors whose position can be easily, but not too obviously, caricatured; if they've chosen, as a latently revolutionary father, someone who won't disown them when they give his doctrines the necessary exaggeration; if they've introduced enough new terminology to earn credit for new ideas (a vocabulary shift is a sign of a paradigm shift, right?); and if they've managed to start a journal where display of these things will be safe from non-revolutionary criticism, then, since the criteria for promotion are pretty much the same as those for tenure, you'll have no trouble.

The only thing your revolution really has to fear is a revival of the Socratic tradition. When Socrates put the pursuit of the good life at the center of the academic enterprise he marginalized (to spear a good word out of one revolution) every specialty to come. Specialists were the servants of those examining and, yes, enjoying, what was good — the art, the craft, the skill, the sport. The philologist in this tradition is prized for his service to the Chaucer story, the joy in it, not for his philology.

Since your revolution presumes the specialization of the Germanic tradition, with fields and disciplines and a graduate faculty and publication, it's going to fall apart in any institution that decenters (ah, another good word) it in favor of the Socratic tradition. The center (or, more appropriately, the heart) will be in the undergraduate classroom, or in the sculpt lab, or out on the track. With joy going for it. You're not going to be able to build up much steam for a revolution out on the margins.

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