Humanistic Critique of Education. Группа авторов
of methods that would be a technical equivalent of such uneasiness as, in religious terms, has been called the “fear of God.” And we would seek for a technical equivalent of “mortification,” thereby hoping to make active and mundane a kind of scruples now too often confined to the separate realm of the cloister.
But such “technicalizing” would produce notable changes of emphasis, since we are here discussing purely secular modes of education. In this realm, the pious “fear of God” would be replaced by a partially impious “fear of symbol-using” (that is, an ironic fear of the very resourcefulness that is man’s greatest boast). And “mortification” in the religious sense would have, as its secular “dramatistic” analogue, a methodic distrust of competitive ambitions which goad us either as individuals or as groups. Or, more accurately: We would try, at least within the limited orbit of theory, or contemplation, to perfect techniques for doubting much that is now accepted as lying beyond the shadow of a doubt.
A mere inculcating of “tolerance,” “good will,” “respect for the rights of others,” and such, cannot be enough. Such attitudes are all too airily “positive.” And the educational training here advocated would be in its very essence negative, as negative as the Ten Commandments.
Yet its negativity would be of a paradoxical sort; we might label it “Faustological,” since it would center in the study of ambition as a disease. At the same time it would concede that we had all better be very, very ambitious and sufficiently exacting in our ambitiousness to cancel off the many prompter ambitions that, given the new weapons, threaten to destroy us.
The pragmatic, the admonitory, and the appreciative thus merge. For we would study the means by which men have been able to increase their assertiveness; thereby we should be “appreciating” human genius, yet doing so with fearsomeness (albeit a fearsomeness which our technical approach enables us to temper in the kindly spirit of comedy, while we tentatively seek to develop ways of looking upon us all as fools rather than as knaves). But in such tripleness of emphasis, the admonitory (the “negative”) is to be treated as “foremost among the equals.”
The aim, then, is to droop, at least ad interim (within the special conditions of the educational enterprise, considered as but one stage of a person life)—but to droop so methodically, with such an emphasis upon method, that each day can bristle with assertions, as we attempt to perfect our lore of the human scramble (what Goethe calls the Zeitenstrudel, and Diderot the grand branle).
Education, as so conceived, would brood, as with the Flaubert who wrote L’Education Sentimentale. But in its attempts to perfect a technique of brooding, it would learn to cherish the documents as never before. No expunging of records here. All must be kept, and faithfully examined; and not just that it may be approved or disapproved, but also that it be considered as a challenge to our prowess in placing it within the unending human dialogue as a whole.
If we temporarily risk being stopped by such a discipline, let us realize that the discipline is ideally designed precisely to that end. Education must not be thought of merely as a means of preparing students for market, though that’s what much of it now is. Education must be thought of as a technique of preparatory withdrawal, the institutionalizing of an attitude that one should be able to recover at crucial moments, all along the subsequent way.
Admittedly, this view of education as a kind of smiling hypochondriasis presents some difficulties. The promissory, by its very nature, likes to look forward. And there is apparently danger lest youth would either too greatly resist such doctrines as a mere “counsel of despair,” or would accept them only too thoroughly, if a whole educational program were undertaken in such a spirit. Perhaps, the world being what it is, this enterprise could be but one course in a curriculum, rather than the guiding principle behind educational policy in general. But if so, at least it would be conceived of as a kind of “central” or “over-all’ course, a “synoptic” project for “unifying the curriculum” by asking the students themselves to think of their various courses in terms of a single distinctive human trait (the linguistic) that imposes its genius upon all particular studies.
Also, there can be much very active enjoyment in approaching the precious documents from this point of view. When the mortifying “fear of man as symbol-user” has been “comically” technicalized, such an attitude does not by any means close our horizons but opens many new vistas, making all aspects of symbolic activity somehow “contemporary” with us.
“Drooping,” as so qualified, can be quite muscular.
Educational Process
Methodology
Primarily, we are ever to be on the lookout for grammatical and dialectical resources in general, while inspecting particular works for the discovery of special cases that forever keep threatening our frame of generalizations. In this respect, the procedure is not different from the traditional modes of inquiry and placement. But it has a somewhat “existentialist” aspect, in that we constantly re-begin from unique experiences (since each book that we take as our point of departure leads into our generalizations from one unique set of conditions, and accordingly compels us to see them in a perspective never quite duplicated, if we take any other book as our “informing experience”). Later, when discussing the negative, we shall consider another point at which this position closely parallels the existentialist one, if we have interpreted it correctly.
The study is thus built pedagogically about the “indexing” of some specific “symbolic structure,” in the attempt to study the nature of a work’s internal consistency and of its unfolding. But in contrast with courses in “literary appreciation,” the generalizations at which we aim are not confined to a concern with the work’s “beauty.” Our quest concerns its linguistic nature in general; and then, beyond that, the insight it may afford into man’s ways as symbol-user.
We proceed on the assumption that the “perfect case” for analytic purposes is a definitive literary text. This view, in turn, is doubtless but a variant of the traditional analogy whereby “nature” was likened to a “scripture” which would be legible if one but knew the language it was written in. In this case, the “signs” manifested by a human personality or by a social incident (or social order, or social movement, or cultural trend in general) would be treated as relatively obscure aspects of motivational structures that are least obscure in literary texts. There would thus be no difference “in principle” between textual analysis and social analysis. But though textual analysis would be the “ideal norm” here, there is no reason why specialists in other sciences could not apply the same procedures, mutatis mutandis, to their subjects (as with Freud’s systematic attention to the “free associations” of his patients, or the use of questionnaires in polls of public opinion). Our major difference (if there is any essential difference!) is in the over-all direction we would give to such procedures.
When the great executive has finished his murder thriller, and relaxed into a well-earned sleep after having gone, by a certain disciplinary route, from the killing of the victim to the killing of the mystery, our vigil has but begun. We must ask: “What does the victim equal? . . . What does the killer equal? . . . What does the virtuously or disingenuously instigatory heroine equal? . . . What are the stages of this journey?” etc.
And we do this, not just to learn something about the given work, but ultimately in the hope of learning something about the ways in which the “personality” of the work relates to the “personality” of a social order; and then, in accordance with our project for methodic drooping, we look for ways whereby the work embodies, however assertively, even militantly, the malaise of a given property structure (with the goads, and “mortifications,” and demands upon our “patience,” and invitations to victimage, that are intrinsic to any such order).
Tragedies are quite convenient for our purposes, since we accept Aristotle’s statement that tragic poetry aims at a kind of “catharsis”—and the explicitly civic, stately, or courtly nature of the tragedies traditionally accepted as great, makes easier our search for routes that clearly link mere “personal equations” with the “great persecutional words,” such as fate, law, right, justice, Themis, Moira, Nemesis, necessity. But other species of expression are also inspected for kinds of catharsis