|
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Modern Times
Here is one of my favorite quotations from Hegel:
The manner of study in ancient times differed from that of the modern age in that the former was the proper and complete formation of the natural consciousness. Putting itself to the test at every point of its existence, and philosophizing about everything it came across, it made itself into a universality that was active through and through. In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made; the effort to grasp and appropriate it is more the direct driving-forth of what is within and the truncated generation of the universal than it is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety of existence. Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it spiritual life.
Allow me to interpret. In the ancient world, the difficulty for thinking was in developing abstractions. The ancient mind was bound up with the images. It took its wisdom from metaphors and the story-telling that lies behind metaphors. Thus, long before there is philosophy, there are the poets like Homer and the writers of the books of Moses. An early task of philosophy was to develop abstract concepts. In Plato's dialogues, we can see this as the effort to form definitions, which the ancient Greeks were apparently unfamiliar with. A definition strives for a formula that comprehensively speaks to what a certain kind of thing is. For a mind unaccustomed to it, it is a terribly difficult task. To begin, you must identify examples of a thing, and find something in common in the examples. Then, to test the definition, you must strive to see if there are still more examples that won't fit the definition as it has been constructed. All of this is unnatural and somewhat disturbing. If your image of courage is Achilles, you want to honor Achilles when you think of courage. To lump Achilles in with less exemplary forms of courage, in order to construct the universal, might seem an injustice.
There seems to have been, however, among a small group of people, a great deal of energy for this effort of abstraction. A new way had opened up for the mind, and the world, in all its rich particularity, beckoned to be subsumed and organized by rational principle. In Plato's dialogues, when Socrates tries to describe what this process of reasoning looks like as a whole (such as the image of the divided line in the Republic), he tends to resort to a language that sounds more religious and mythic than it does scientific. As Bacon says, we tend to treat these ancient philosophers as wise old men, but in reality they were the youngsters in a new endeavor. The enthusiasm found in those texts for the possibility of wisdom can be likened, I believe, to the enthusiasm of the young generally. I have some recollection of that enthusiasm even with myself!
"In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made...."
How true! Hegel has a related comment that what was once the hard work of the most mature minds has become the games of children. For example, let us marvel once again at the development of a place-based numbering system and the techniques for multiplication that become available with it. Our elementary school children can perform calculations that would have taken great time and expertise in the ancient world. The democratic spirit emerged into the world with constant and intense opposition -- somewhat justified! -- but now our children learn about human equality as if it were the most obvious fact on the planet.
Education for us then is not so much an enthusiastic development of abstract thought as it is the unpacking of an abstract thought already formed. We hear the accounts of the world long before we encounter the world on our own, and many of these accounts are far removed from our ordinary experience. This is an unfortunate necessity. It is necessary because how else can the last three thousand years (or more) of civilization be instilled in a young mind other than by intense training? It is unfortunate because, as Hegel points out, such an education introduces a "fixity" to our concepts and diminishes their vitality.
This last point could use some elaboration. In my experience, most of my students and even many of my colleagues think like flow charts. Concepts become boxes with arrows leading from one box to another. If you introduce a new thought into this array, the student (and colleague) simply attempts to reattach all the broken arrows. The more elaborate one's flow chart is, the longer one can talk about all of the new connections being made.
Contrast the enthusiasm of the flow-charter reconfiguring a conceptual scheme with the enthusiasm of the ancient mind trying to develop abstractions in the first place. The former inherits a more sophisticated understanding of the world, perhaps, but the latter actually lives in the world and responds to it. Here we see the situation from which philosophy makes its ever-present call for wakefulness. To think with boxes and arrows is to carry an older wisdom forward like a corpse marks time in a tomb. The corpse must rise and walk again. There must be new life.
It is hard to articulate what this vitality means, because part of what it means is getting beyond the fixity of concepts, i.e., taking our definitions of concepts less seriously. I approach this by trying to see what someone is looking at as well as what they are saying about what they are looking at. It is important for me to look too. In following this route, we can come to understand why certain things are said and certain things not said. It is like communicating with a friend; so much goes without saying.
All of this is an overblown build up to an observation I have about Melville's Moby Dick. I started reading this last December, and have been picking at it ever since. I have learned to be thankful that I didn't read all of the great works that I thought I should have read by the age of 30. I especially need to forget that I read anything in high school; I have let some wonderful works languish on the stupid supposition that I have already encountered them.
Anyway, Moby Dick isn't what I expected it to be. So far only half the book has been narrative. Furthermore, the symbolic richness of the book is too much, too indigestible.
I hear Melville saying to me: "Ok, you know the great white whale represents something, that there must be some abstraction for which it is the symbol. Now that we've got that part of your brain distracted, let's learn something about whaling."
Eddie 4:09 PM
|