Leather elbows on a tweed coat, oh is that the best you can do?

Or: girls go to college to get more knowledge. Or: varsity blues. Or something. What is college or university for? Perhaps to provide students with certain knowledge, skills, and character traits. Perhaps to provide employers with suitable employees, society with suitable citizens, and students with suitable abilities to live a happy life. Perhaps to allow young people to have a good time for a few years before settling down. Perhaps we don't really know what it's for, but it's what we've done for hundreds of years (in various forms) and changing that might spell disaster.

Wanting to blog about this but knowing that I should prepare for class I picked up my notes for today's class in Poverty & Human Development course only to find myself reading this:

It is widely accepted that more education leads to better jobs and bigger paychecks. But more education also correlates to better, happier, and longer lives for individuals and pays big dividends for all of us in the form of increased civic engagement, greater neighborhood safety, more tolerance, and a more competitive economy. Globalization and technological change have made it extraordinarily difficult for poorly educated Americans to achieve economic self-sufficiency, self-respect, and resilience in the face of adversity. 

I can't escape it! So, what is the point of higher education? To some extent it is a rite of passage, more about football games and keg parties, and about proving that you belong to a certain class and can jump through the required hoops, than it is about learning anything. (Of course this applies primarily to the American college experience. Football played no part in my college experience, although there was rowing, i.e. getting drunk in the afternoon while other people rowed. Anyway, I am talking mostly about the United States, and the rest of the world has a tendency to copy what they do, so it has broader relevance too.) But there has to be an academic curriculum too, so what should it be?

In comments here j. writes:

i took the 'third mode' to be envisioned as a successor ('one and two must combine') meant to organize the split humanities traditions, rather than replacing them, necessarily. and to organize by trying to select and emphasize developments that have already taken place within existing traditions. of course, that is a bit of a power move.

i'm not sure what in the description given would make us think that rigor or depth would necessarily be lacking. are rigor and depth to be found in the humanities now?

And:

don't the disciplines mentioned under the third mode suggest a plurality of contested points, which is basically the same as the humanities now? and there is evidently some focusing of the political point intended (necessarily, since environmental questions seem to have been elevated compared to their non-institutionalized place during the twentieth century?), but i'm not sure how it's any more propagandistic than the presumptions favoring liberal individualism (as in liberal-arts-ism) throughout existing or older configurations of the humanities. and those older configurations did find room for -some- alternatives that questioned the prevailing arrangement and the point of it.

He's responding to things I said about things Scott McLemee said about Toby Miller's argument for “a blend of political economy, textual analysis, ethnography, and environmental studies such that students learn the materiality of how meaning is made, conveyed, and discarded,” a blend that would merge literature, philosophy, and history with media and communications studies. 

My concern about depth and rigor has to do with specialization. If students specialize in philosophy, say, or political economy, then they can learn more about it, get better at it, and go from being able to take introductory courses to being able to take more demanding, higher-level courses. Perhaps that is what Miller has in mind, but I would worry if someone wanted to replace a major in, for instance, history (or any other specialized discipline) with a blend of different subjects within the humanities. I fear that no one would learn much about anything in that case. If media studies, etc. are simply being added to philosophy, etc. then I have no great objection, as long as resources are not diverted from the more worthwhile to the less worthwhile. For instance, by all means let's study mass media, but let's not have a whole degree program in it if there isn't that much to be said (I don't know whether there is or not), or if it means no longer studying Shakespeare. 

As for propaganda, I think some propaganda is OK. Part of teaching physics is encouraging students to care about physics, to see its value and to see it as valuable. And the same goes for philosophy, media studies, and every other subject. Propaganda on behalf of academic disciplines is fine. As is propaganda on behalf of facts, e.g. facts about evolution, climate change, the state of the economy, and so on. Maybe that isn't really propaganda, but I mean that there are subjects on which students are likely to have false beliefs because of propaganda, and I think it is perfectly OK (if not better than that) for academics to make a point of teaching their students the truth about these things. But it should not, I believe, be any professor's mission to make students more left-wing or more right-wing on any particular issue or in general. Perhaps everyone would agree with that, but Miller's website says that he sees the goal of the humanities as being to produce "an aware and concerned citizenry." Actually that is OK with me, but it sounds like something that could easily fall into fairly naked propaganda of the bad kind. If the awareness and concern is all of the right-wing kind then I don't want it. If it's all of the left-wing kind then I think it could be counter-productive. Students might resist it (or not need it), and politicians are even more likely to want to scrap the humanities completely if they are taught as more-or-less openly left-wing propaganda. Taking Miller at his word I don't disagree, but I have concerns about what lies behind (or before) those words.

Now for Philip Cartwright's concerns:

if you claim the ultimate value of humanities is the by-product of rigorous thinking then you are tacitly admitting that the subject matter has no intrinsic value. You might as well study chess problems or old episodes of Are You Being Served?

Yes, and unfortunately this is what some people do. Hence McLemee's reference to Angry Birds studies. Things of that general kind might be very good, but they seem to me to be less likely to be good than, say, Shakespeare studies, and they seem to politicians, parents, and voters like a very bad idea. So I don't (completely) deny their value, but I have doubts about it and I certainly think it is a bad move politically to allow the humanities to be seen to be encouraging this kind of thing.

Philip continues:

Now, it is by no means easy to demonstrate that studying literature (or, indeed, history) has any intrinsic value. Does it make you a "better person" (whatever the hell THAT means)? Does it turn callous oafs into caring, sensitive individuals? No, or certainly not often enough to justify its existence - assuming, of course, that the production of caring, sensitive individuals is itself a good thing (and that's not at all obviously true).

I'm reluctant to agree with this, but I probably do. That is, I don't think that studying literature or history will turn a callous oaf into a caring, sensitive individual. Nor do I think that it makes you into a better person. But I do think that it can make you into a better person, that it does so with some people. Me, for instance. Is that enough to justify its existence? Yes. But 'it' here can't be anything mass and compulsory. You don't make sensitive flowers even more sensitive by forcing things down their throats.

Having abandoned the intrinsic value argument, he goes on to describe two alternatives:

The first will cut little ice in today's market-driven world but it at least has the merit of honesty. It runs as follows: "Studying literature (and/or history) helps promote values that I believe in, and if you don't support those values then you can fuck off". I think we could label this "The Kulturkampf Defense".

The second defence is more pragmatic (ie, consequentialist). It says that a lot of employers actually don't want graduates who've spent three years learning a load of theory concerning their area of business - they'd rather teach that stuff to recruits themselves. In fact, they have to "un-teach" their vocationally-trained recruits, which is annoying and costly. They would rather have people who've proved that they're intelligent and hard-working but who haven't learnt a load of theoretical clap-trap that'll have to be jettisoned before they can become useful employees. Subjects like literature and history fit the bill very nicely - especially as many bright people show a marked inclination to study in those areas. So why not give them what they want and thereby give the employers what they want too? It's win/win. 

I have a lot of sympathy with the bracingly-expressed first point, and think the second is very important. I have nothing to add to it. On the first point, though, I would want to add (though perhaps I can't) that it isn't just a matter of what I believe in. If we have a common culture (and what other kind of culture could there be?) then there must be some sort of canon, some points of cultural significance. These might be studied just because they are good, but they might also be studied as elements of cultural literacy. Knowing them will help you understand and communicate with others, and keep the culture together. Giving up on this idea seems to involve a kind of cultural Thatcherism ("there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families"). Perhaps Shakespeare should not be central in American studies of literature, but someone should be: Emily Dickinson or Emerson or Toni Morrison or Walt Whitman or all of the above (or someone else). There's plenty of good stuff there, and I'm not sure how much one can separate seeing intrinsic value in these writings and valuing American culture. What does it mean to care about or value (the United States of) America but not to care about American history or literature? (And what would it mean to value American literature but not think that any of it was any good?) 

I sound more conservative (and more American) than I am, but anyone who has read the books in question knows that they are not essentially conservative. I do see value in American society supporting (yes, paying for) the study of its own culture and heritage, its history, literature, and philosophy, not as museum pieces but as the organs of a living body. By all means study other things too--European philosophy, East Asian religion, African history, contemporary mass media, etc., etc.--but the idea that the humanities should be discarded as old-fashioned or no longer relevant, an idea that comes from the (politically-minded) left and the (business-minded) right, seems like a form of despair, even suicide, to me. Almost no one says that we should discard them, but any move to scale them back (and Miller's book is called Blow Up the Humanities, after all) worries and depresses me. And if you don't support those values then you can fuck off. (I'm just kidding, of course. Comments welcome, etc. etc.)

  

Value and culture

Robert Musil's Törless concludes that "things are just things and will probably always be so. And I shall probably go on for ever seeing them sometimes this way and sometimes that, sometimes with the eyes of reason, and sometimes with those other eyes. . . ." The eyes of reason are those of the engineer, the practical  person who sees no great mystery in anything. Those other eyes see "one open chasm of the sky above our heads and one slightly camouflaged chasm of the sky beneath our feet," while the reasonable person feels "as untroubled on the earth as in a room with the door locked." The image calls to mind (but is of course not the same as) Norman Malcolm's quotation of Wittgenstein:

A person caught in a philosophical confusion is like a man in a room who wants to get out but doesn’t know how.  He tries the window but it is too high.  He tries the chimney but it is too narrow.  And if he would only turn around he would see that the door has been open all the time!  (p. 44--I believe this is the only idea of Wittgenstein's that Heidegger ever mentions)

Wittgenstein also distinguishes two ways of thinking about or seeing things in the Lecture on Ethics. One he associates with science, and labels trivial, the other he associates with religion, ethics, and aesthetics, and regards as incapable of fitting into language (any more than a gallon of tea will fit into a tea cup). The natural and the supernatural, the worldly and the otherworldly, are simply not compatible. There is no translating the language of one into the language of the other. At any rate, this seems to be the general idea here.

That's what comes to mind when I read this and this. The first is a reasonable-sounding suggestion that we make the relevance of the humanities to the real world evident in our teaching:

For the past year, I have been a member of a several nursing search committees. In their teaching presentations, the candidates almost always stated clearly “Now we’re going to learn to think critically. Let’s begin by defining it.” I am wondering whether doing something similar in humanities classes might not help our students more clearly see the value of the humanities...

I don't mean to reject this kind of thing completely (perhaps I should), but it has some problems. One is that it seems likely to become tedious very quickly. Why not just always insist on defining terms that need to be defined, so that students get into the habit of doing this? From time to time we could point out the practical value of this habit, but almost always stating that you are about to learn to think critically before doing so would surely drive everyone mad. Secondly, what are students going to think when you don't preface your remarks or activities with words like these? That this part of the class is a waste of time? That seems quite likely to me. A friend of mine recently suggested that the point of teaching Victorian literature is to teach students how to construct an argument. That surely is not the whole point of it. The point has to do with the value of (some) Victorian literature, and its importance in and to our culture. If we give up on the idea of intrinsic aesthetic value and the importance of culture, then we give up on the humanities.

My second linked "this" above refers to a piece by Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed about a book by Toby Miller called Blow Up the Humanities. It sounds dreadful, but I haven't read it and so should bite my tongue. In McLemee's words:

What we must recognize, his argument goes, is that there are two forms of the humanities now. What the author calls "Humanities One" (with literature, history, and philosophy at their core) is just the privileged and exclusionary knowledge of old and dying elites, with little value, if any, to today’s heterogeneous, globalized, wired, and thrill-a-minute world. By contrast, we have studies of mass media and communications making up “Humanities Two,” which emerged and thrived in the 20th century outside “fancy schools with a privileged research status.”

In the future we must somehow establish a third mode: “a blend of political economy, textual analysis, ethnography, and environmental studies such that students learn the materiality of how meaning is made, conveyed, and discarded.” Enough with the monuments of unaging intellect!

According to his website:

Miller ultimately insists that these two humanities [One and Two above] must merge in order to survive and succeed in producing an aware and concerned citizenry.

So literature, philosophy  and history are irrelevant and must be replaced by the study of "how meaning is made" so that citizens become "aware and concerned." Students are to be made aware without being made aware of history, presumably, and to study meaning without studying the philosophy of language. And the people who fund public (non-elite) education are expected to pay for this? The non-privileged students who study it are expected to be able to get jobs with these skills (or this awareness and concern)? Art for art's sake I can buy. The same goes for raising political consciousness through the study of history and philosophy. But political goals without history or philosophy? The humanities without literature, or with some literature but with ethnography and environmental studies taking the place of some literature? This doesn't sound like the humanities at all any more. It sounds like a doomed attempt to replace the humanities with some hodgepodge of amateur science or pseudo-science. I feel the open chasm beneath our feet.

What is love?

The VMI Ethics Club is meeting tonight to discuss this question. I may or may not present some thoughts, but I might as well develop some before I go. It seems to me that a good way to start thinking about a question like this is to gather the thoughts of poets and philosophers (people who think carefully about things, but (often) in different ways) and to gather up one's own thoughts and experiences.

Poets often treat love as if it were a person. Auden, for instance, ("Are its stories vulgar but funny?", etc.) and Saint Paul ("Love is patient, love is kind"). Another common idea is that you can't say what love is. See, e.g., Al Green ("I can't explain this feeling") and Buddy Holly ("love is strange"). Above all poets and singers go on and on about love all the time. It's a bit like this fact about Wittgenstein:

In the end, in the 'Lecture on Ethics', the existence of language itself is what Wittgenstein wishes to say expresses what he seeks to express by describing the various experiences he puts forward in his examples (wonder at the existence of the world or the miraculous, a feeling of absolute safety, a feeling of guilt).    

It might be nice to be able to say that in the end the existence of songs itself is what expresses what we want to express by describing various experiences of what we call love. And these songs, of course, include hymns, anthems, and football songs as well as love songs happy and sad. But that might not be maximally informative.

Larkin has something to say about the relation between love and selfishness. His poem "Love" ends with this stanza:

Still, vicious or virtuous,

Love suits most of us.

Only the bleeder found
Selfish this wrong way round
Is ever wholly rebuffed,
And he can get stuffed.  

That's a complicated sentence: Only the bleeder found selfish this wrong way round is ever wholly rebuffed. A bleeder is a person (as in Ian Dury's "There ain't half been some clever bastards (lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders"), but "this wrong way round" sounds self-referential, the words themselves grammatically awry. I suppose it must refer to a "wrong way round" that has been recently mentioned, and that would be: "My life is for me. As well ignore gravity." This kind of 'plain truth' might be irrefutable (or it might not, but I don't want to try to refute it), but it is the attitude of a selfish bleeder who can get stuffed. (Larkin thus seems to reject himself in roughly the way that Schopenhauer rejects solipsism: you would have to be crazy to think that way.)

The philosophers are another matter. There is something depressing about the prospect of reading what philosophers have to say about love. It isn't surprising to find this sort of thing:

To summarize: if x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be with y. He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards some other end.

I think this is obviously false, but I also fear that even getting into it will damage me in some way. Quickly, then, I don't so much want to benefit the people and things I love as I want them to be benefited. I wish my family well and want to be with them, for instance, but as long as they all do well then, other things being equal, I don't care whether the goods they receive come from me or someone else or their own efforts. (The ceteris paribus clause is important here. I don't want someone else moving in and taking my place.) And I do not at all think that any member of my family has some determinate characteristic in virtue of which I think it worthwhile to benefit and be with them.

Kant is more interesting:

Love as inclination cannot be commanded; but beneficence from duty when no inclination impels us and even when a natural and unconquerable aversion opposes such beneficence is practical and not pathological love. Such love resides in the will and not in the propensities of feeling, in principles of action and not in tender sympathy; and only practical love can be commanded.

This, it seems to me, is half true and half false. The falseness comes in the implicit distinction between actions and feelings. The will is not as distinct as all that from propensities of feeling. Caring for someone, taking care of them, is not simply a matter of ensuring certain outcomes (clean sheets, clean plate, medicines administered, etc.) nor of performing certain behaviors (smile, say 'hello,' etc.). Better care is taken by those who do these things in a caring way (which does not mean with a certain inner accompaniment). No doubt that can be faked to a certain extent, but this extent is not clearly determinate, it seems to me, and I don't see why really caring, or at least trying to really care, can't be commanded.

Love is a feeling, I don't deny it, but the best way to understand it might be to do so by way of thinking about the behavior that exhibits it rather than trying to get the feeling itself into phenomenological focus. I used to think that I loved the people in my family in different ways but then I realized that I was describing differences between the people rather than differences in my feelings towards them. Love is like a lens that colors our perceptions of what we love, but it is also like a gravitational field that pulls us in the direction of what we love, or pulls our attention that way. We think and talk about what we love, perhaps seeing it in great focus or perhaps seeing it blindly, or with selective blindness. "Every man thinks he has the prettiest wife at home," as Arsene Wenger once said (insightfully, if perhaps also naively). Socrates might have had love in mind when he said that:

the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and [...] the life which is unexamined is not worth living     

People who converse daily about virtue surely love virtue. The unexamined life is the life of someone who does not love wisdom, who cares little or nothing for it. Or so I sometimes think. To love is to see (think of, treat, feel about) as good. Now if we can just figure out what thinking and goodness are, we'll have cracked it.

Inequality

This piece by Jospeh E. Stiglitz is interesting and touches on some points that Tommi Uschanov has raised before about what people in the United States think about inequality (see also this video, which was all over Facebook recently). The stuff about Singapore put me off a little, since I don't think of Singapore as being the most democratic or free place in the world, but it gets onto Scandinavia towards the end and reads less like a puff piece for one government's policies.

Wisdom

"Things happen: that's wisdom in its entirety," says Törless.

There's a nice essay on the novel here. It could be interesting to compare Musil's philosophy with Wittgenstein's. A couple of quotes:

By exercising great and manifold skill we manage to produce a dazzling deception by the aid of which we are capable of living alongside the most uncanny things and remaining perfectly calm by it. […] We are capable of living between one open chasm of the sky above our heads and one slightly camouflaged chasm of the sky beneath our feet, feeling ourselves as untroubled on the earth as in a room with the door locked. 

(That's Ulrich from the second volume of The Man Without Qualities.)

Every work of art offers not merely an immediate experience but an experience that can never be completely repeated. […] The person dancing or listening, who yields himself to the moment of the music, the viewer, the person transported, is liberated from everything before and after […] This condition is never of long duration except in pathological form; it is a hypothetical borderline case, which one approaches only to fall back repeatedly into the normal condition, and precisely this distinguishes art from mysticism, that art never entirely loses its connection with the ordinary attitude. It seems, then, like a dependent condition, like a bridge arching away from solid ground as if it possessed a corresponding pier in the realm of the imaginary.

That's Musil himself. Both quotations taken from Achille C. Varzi's essay.

We're hiring again (but not in philosophy)

Job ad here:

Assistant or Associate Professor of English

March 14, 2013Multiple tenure-track positions, beginning August 2013, to teach in an English major that integrates fields in the humanities and the arts - rhetoric and writing, literature, fine arts, and philosophy - through a central focus on rhetorical studies. 

We seek candidates who demonstrate a strong interest in engaging in the opportunities that an interdisciplinary department like ours presents for teaching, scholarly engagement, community outreach, and mentorship of students. Assistant or associate professor rank possible. Preference will be given to candidates with Ph.D. by August 2013, but ABDs will be considered. 

Candidates must both fill out an on-line application at the Virginia jobs site and submit required supporting materials (a letter of application, résumé, official transcript, and three letters of recommendation) either by e-mail to RCSearch@vmi.edu or by mail to Dr. Emily Miller, Head, Department of English and Fine Arts, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA 24450. 

Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the positions have been filled. Interviews via Skype and/or at CEA. 

In a continuing effort to enrich its academic environment and provide equal educational and employment opportunities, VMI encourages women, minorities, disabled individuals and veterans to apply. 

Virginia Military Institute is a state-supported undergraduate military college of engineering, the sciences, humanities, and the social sciences with a strong emphasis on teaching excellence. 

Military experience is not required for faculty.

How to succeed

Marcus Arvan has some good advice on how to be a successfully published philosopher. If you're interested in that kind of thing then you've probably seen it already, but here are his main points:

1. Habits that foster a positive daily attitude and emotional well-being are of paramount importance.
2. Write first thing in the morning, without any form of self-censorship, setting a firm 3-5 page requirement for yourself, which you assiduously keep to and do not go over.
3. Give yourself a couple hours a day of "alone time" outside away from the computer if you can.
4. Send stuff out; don't sit on your work.
5. When your work gets rejected, send it out again immediately.
6. Don't work "in secret", but don't seek out so much feedback that you begin to doubt yourself.
7. Follow every "rule of publishing" as a rule of thumb, but only a rule of thumb.
8. The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
9. Only work on weekdays--take weekends off.

#1 sounds much easier said than done, but it's closely related to #2. If you write a bunch of stuff every day you will feel good about your work. But that brings us to #2, which seems to require a couple of hours first thing in the morning. Don't people have classes to teach or kids to take to school? Are you supposed to get up at 4 or 5 in the morning? I just can't see how I, to take a random example, could do this. The same goes for #3. 

#4 is probably a good idea, although I suspect one of the things I might regret the most at the end of my career is sending stuff out too quickly. I often think things are done that I later realize I could have improved significantly if I had just sat on them a bit longer and read them over with fresher eyes. #5 is probably a good idea too, but sometimes surely work is rejected because it isn't that good. It might be worth considering this possibility. Knowing when something is ready, or as good as you will ever be able to make it, is much easier said than done. Something similar could be said about points 6, 7 (which is #2 again in different words), and 8.

I like #9.

All in all I'm not sure how useful this advice is except for graduate students working on their dissertations and early career academics trying to get tenure at less-then-stellar places. If you're at a place that cares a lot about quality then I doubt you can afford to churn work out like this. And unless you are desperately seeking employment and/or tenure (which of course a lot of people are) then you probably owe it to the world not to churn. I also can't see this plan working for anyone with children, unless they live in a very 'traditional' my-wife-takes-care-of-that-side-of-things way. I do think it's good advice, but not for everyone. And it helps to show what it takes to make it these days in the profession, what we have come to.