AIRY KISS OF HUMMING BIRD

It's all gone to hell or the confession of Harvard professor

One of my recent conviction is this: one needs to read no book in order to live in a good life. I don’t need the Bible even any more every day. Just refer to it on occasions when stuck. Jesus is ubiquitous. At a street corner or on the interstate. Who will guide you when a storm hits your vehicle with you inside? You, yourself is a book of your life. Every moment is a word to narrate about you toward the completion. When done, God’s finger makes the period. My oeuvre, says He. Welcome Thus greets The Author.

A book is an analogy of a life. Before the invention of printing for the mass publication, people, not necessarily selective mystics or theologians, but people, regular folks read the phenomena. Ornithological reading to forecast weather or fatal cosmic drama to predict. I’m part of it! The ancient people felt as such to an extent that today’s ecological crisis would have frighten them to an immediate death of selves in accordance. Correspondance, in another word. One can though live in a good life without Baudelaire, certainly. All moments of your life strike you with God’s thunder (metaphor) or touch you with ephemeral swings as humming bird’s airy kiss.

(courtesy to La Petite Presse, Heritage Collection; Graphique de France)

Time sways, turns, and laugh. See me, I’m yours. Extend your arms to catch the air. Cry over pages of your book before you tear those broken-heart sentences. Of course, there should be alternatives as otherwise. Framed institutionally or not, regardless, one now can read Louis Menand’s confession, published under the title “What’s So Great About Great-Books Courses?” (The New Yorker, 12/20/21 issue).

Disguised in a book-review or an opinion piece, Menand launched a cry of his soul, being torn again and again as a Harvard professor, in the top of top universities in the presently known universe, he deployed points by points in a manner and a style of research paper essay written for general readers. I confess. This is the 100th version of my comment on Menand. The good thing was I learned a new fact (to me) that Substack kept to update automatically all versions of writings at every minute until it is posted. This is the first time for me to have left it without posting and logout. Now, I’m back. Hello again, Professor Menand.

Menand’s confessional piece cannot be taken lightly for many reasons. It is full of knowledge of or information about the controversies laden college education, which was thoroughly discussed by an insider. Here and now in this morning, after one hundred of every minute-drafts, I myself decided to self-discipline with an analytical method. “What’s Good About Great-Book Course?” consists of five segments. Segment Three, starting with the paragraph “Between 2012 and 2019..”, is the core of his argument with heartful observations and empirical analysis while Segment Four (“In the creation of modern universities..”) brings the discussion into a restrained emotional height to Segment Five (“Humanities cannot win..” to be the shoot-down finish.

In Segment Three, Menand says:

For the advocates of liberal culture a century ago, the false god of literature departments was philology. Today, the false god is “theory.” Montás[*] complains that contemporary theory—he calls it “postmodernism”—subverts the college’s educational mission by calling into question terms like “truth” and “virtue.” A postmodernist, in his definition, is a person who believes that there is no capital-T truth, that “true” is just the compliment those with power pay to their own beliefs. “This unmooring of human reason from the possibility of ultimate truth in effect undermines all of Western metaphysics,” he tells us, “including ethics.” (He blames this all on Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he calls “Satan’s most acute theologian,” which is an amazing thing to say. Nietzsche wanted to free people to embrace life, not to send them to Hell. He didn’t believe in Hell. Or theology.)

(* Menand’s subject of interest, Roosevelt Montas. Columbia U professor, author of “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation” (Princeton U Press)

The cold spring falling upon Humanities as cruel as a poetic April is not new, however. Menand in Segment Two begins his thesis with:

It will probably not improve their[*] spirits to point out that professors have been making the same complaints ever since the American research university came into being, in the late nineteenth century. “Rescuing Socrates” and “The Lives of Literature” can be placed on a long shelf that contains books such as Hiram Corson’s “The Aims of Literary Study” (1894), Irving Babbitt’s “Literature and the American College” (1908), Robert Maynard Hutchins’s “The Higher Learning in America” (1936), Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” (1987), William Deresiewicz’s “Excellent Sheep” (2014), and dozens of other impassioned and sometimes eloquent works explaining that higher education has lost its soul. It’s a song that never ends.

(*Montas and Arnold Weinstein who published “The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing.” (Princeton U Press) Both are designated as genre authors of “It’s all gone to hell” category by Menand).

The aspects of conflicts are not in a single direction. The dispute about ideals vs the institutions’ priority. The conflict between generalists vs specialists. The face to face between humanities and science. The song of professors’ remorse will never end.

Educational institutions are operative as necessity. It is true that the administration regards students as financial assets for the institutions’ market share, probably in these days more than ever. Disciplinary advantages of the field of sciences in job markets are too attractive to subside. Postmodernists once erected their tower as Noam Chomsky stated, on his now-disabled-twitter, that the postmodernists tried to assimilate their philosophical and literary thoughts into the field of natural science by the reformation of linguistic expressions to claim an objectively acknowledgeable status equivalent to that of science.

(from my library. Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) is usually said as a postmodernist. Deleuze écrit très beau. Pierre Manent is a French straussian. Albert Camus (1913-1960) is known as an existential writer. Giordano Bruno (1548-1660) was a model figure for the disciplinary synthesis. Many people know St. Augustin. Everyone knows Frederic Douglass)

In Segment Four, Menand cites Weinstein:

[H]umanists cannot win a war against science. They should not be fighting a war against science. They should be defending their role in the knowledge business, not standing aloof in the name of unspecified and unspecifiable higher things. They need to connect with disciplines outside the humanities, to get out of their silos.

However, in my view, the inter-disciplinary perspective would change humanities’ knowledge to mere information by analytical minds. I argue. How does a computer read a work of literature? The combination of computer science and philology dissects an artwork to be an assemblage of morphologies building up to sentences able to stimulate cognitive receptions at various degrees to create psychological reactions. In an extension from this, a human life would be seen as a package of analytical events carrying different rates of plausibility and consequentiality at each and all moments, as to be mere data. In the bottom, a question is which filed is more suitable to train minds in technical languages methodically.

One needs to read no book to live in a good life, I say. Louis Menand self-figures in Segment Four:

You can see the problem. Universities like Brown and Columbia[*] make big investments in training scholars and researchers in their doctoral programs, and then, after they are credentialled and hired as professors, supporting their work with office and laboratory space, libraries, computers and related technology, research budgets, conference and travel funds, sabbaticals, and so on. Why should an English professor who got his degree with a dissertation on the American Transcendentalists (as Montás did), and who doesn’t read Italian or know anything about medieval Christianity, teach Dante (in a week!), when you have a whole department of Italian-literature scholars on your faculty? What qualifies a man like Arnold Weinstein, who has spent his entire adult life in the literature departments of Ivy League universities, to guide eighteen-year-olds in ruminations on the state of their souls and the nature of the good life?

(* Montas teaches at Columbia, Weinstein at Brown)

Then, what is a good life? In Segment Three, Menand retrospectively raises his continuous voice:

And if, as these authors insist, education is about self-knowledge and the nature of the good, what are those things supposed to look like? How do we know them when we get there? What does it mean to be human? What exactly is the good life?

Professors in a tower of songs sung to the height of sky. It would be nothing easier than that teachers determine their mission to be an educational trainer. The biggest thesis of Menand is on. Teachers of great-books courses conversely realize their incapacity of guiding students by the means of those great authors without diminishing them as adaptable to selective scenes of quotidien life in modern days if the practability of learning is aimed at. Plato’s truth is not an argumentative method to develop ethical reasonings in diversity of a community.

Menand concludes in the last segment to turn against his own field to ask at large about the universities’ reason of being:

Isn’t it a little arrogant for humanists like the authors of these books[*] to presume that economics professors and life-science professors and computer-science professors don’t care about their students’ personal development? The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight. Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not. We are not better or worse than anyone else. I* have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. I teach a great-books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was seventeen. But I don’t think I’m a better person. 

(* Montas, Weinstein, and those others who lament the decline of humanities)

I see Menand’s resignation as confessed. On the other hand, John McWhorter says in his “Yes, Great Books Make Us Better People” (NYT 12/17/21):

Menand, certainly, doesn’t think contemplating these questions[*] has no value. But how can it be that becoming equipped to debate them didn’t improve his, or most people’s sense of preparation for this vale of tears called life? My mother taught at a university, and when I was around 10, I asked her what college was for, given that even at that age I sensed that students, at least outside of the sciences, were not being filled with quantities of basic knowledge in the same way they were in elementary, middle and high school. She said that after four years of college, students have, or should have, a sense of the world’s complexity, that everything did not easily reduce to common-sense observations of the kind you preface with “Well, all I know is …”

(* The intellectual history of mankind is thought out to be questions as initially and subsequently raised, seemingly resolved, yet unresolved, questioned again differently, answered differently, and how to receive all those in today’s minds.)

McWhorter brings a citation to shape his advocacy for Great-Books Courses, In short, what humanities and liberal arts can or ought to do.

“A Core education serves a leveling function” for students, [Montas] says, “sharpening their historical awareness of how the world has come to be what it is, giving them a shared vocabulary with which to describe and act upon it, and equipping them to communicate with others who bring different backgrounds and perspectives to the conversation.”

This is very likely one of the most precisely phrased summary of goal in the liberal arts education. Which, yet, reveals a self-contradiction. The inner-circle discussions thus ends in this way. The above-citation is a protocole of mission statement in which great books are manualized. Menand with this regard is correct. Introversion of the higher education as an operative system would never resolve the agony of teachers in humanities, who know a life, any life, is bigger than course materials.