Re: Jim's Problem with Authors

Here's a reply to your older post. I think my most recent replies probably go
in a more fruitful direction about authorial intent. Most of these replies are
to side issues.

"L. Manning Vines" wrote:

> I do every day see people who cannot read Homer (or Aristotle, or Chaucer,
> or Spinoza, or. . .) in his own terms, who are confrontational and
> aggressive to books, who are dismissive of ideas that they don't already
> agree with, who project things onto books which plainly are not there.
> Sometimes a person has a very hard time not adding words where there aren't
> any, or seeing something challenging and puzzling and outside of his or her
> beliefs without dismissing it and the author behind it. I must admit that
> I've been reminded of this to the degree of cringing every time you've
> spoken so dismissively of Freud (although I haven't read him yet, so must
> wait a while before saying anything more).
>

Robbie...talk about presumption. The primary difference between us is that I've
actually read Freud, and you haven't -- so when I say that he is quite capable
of contradicting himself from sentence to sentence, I could plausibly be right
in this -- but you have no plausible reason to cringe. When I say he invented a
myth, that the physical structures of the mind he envisioned simply aren't
there, a neurosurgeon (for example) would agree with me. But you
cringe...without even having read Freud.

I've recently read _Beyond the Pleasure Principle_ and _Civilization and Its
Discontents_ and written pretty detailed, chapter by chapter summaries for an
exam I'll be taking in January. I have the right to my opinion. You have no
right to cringe.

> And: "The liberal arts education you describe is alive and well and thriving
> only in universities where the humanities are still respected."
>
> The humanities people have it just as wrong. Taking a math class means
> memorizing rules and theorems and solving problems on tests. Taking a
> physics class means accepting whatever dogma the teacher ascribes to,
> without considering the very philosophical principles it all rests upon.
> Taking an introduction to philosophy class means listening to some Ph.D.
> candidate talk about Kant, perhaps reading a little bit of Kant, and
> thinking about it enough to write a decent paper demonstrating an
> understanding of what the Ph.D. candidate was talking about. If the teacher
> is particularly good, there might be some worthwhile discussion.
>

Good Lord, Robbie, what universe are you living in? :) What you've just
described is THE quintessential humanities/liberal arts educational paradigm.
There's a big difference, of course, between lower division courses and upper
division courses.

My educational history led me through four institutions.

First, local community college. Classes less than 30, generally had decent
classroom discussion. In _Introduction to Philosophy_, read snippets of
primary texts. I'd say the budgets were distributed pretty fairly between the
humanities and sciences.

>From there I went to a 4 year state university. Had English classes with over
70 people in them. One day a week was class lecture, one day the class was
divided in half for discussion. We still had over 30 people in the class. We
had a difficult time having good classroom discussion.

The budget heavily favored the sciences. The English Dept said it offered four
options for an English degree -- Creative Writing, Literature, Technical
Writing, Linguistics.

All that was ever offered were literature and technical writing courses. The
literature courses weren't that deep. I dropped out of this program because I
went a year not taking a single English course I needed.

>From there I transfered to a small private college. Average class size -- less
than 15. GREAT classroom discussion, reading of primary texts, etc.

I'm in a similar environment now, in grad school.

> But this, it seems to me, cannot compare to sitting down with KANT by
> carefully and thoughtfully and sensitively reading The Critique of Pure
> Reason, and gathering with a group of people in a similar situation, and
> opening a conversation with a question like, "So what the Hell is Kant
> saying?" This works especially well if we've already spent some time going
> through this process with Plato and Aristotle and Machiavelli and Descartes
> and Hobbes and Rousseau and Spinoza and Hume.
>

And you expect this in an _Introduction to Philosophy_ class taught at the
undergrad level? You've obviously _never_ taught, Robbie, or don't really know
what first year undergrads in, say, community colleges or your average four year
state u. can handle.

I took a graduate seminar in Kant/Hegel, and we did just what you advocated --
read through Critique of Pure Reason, sat around, and talked about it. That's
only going to happen in small, upper division courses populated by philosophy
majors, or on the graduate level. It will never happen in an Intro course. My
students at the community college I'm now teaching at need it spoon fed to them
-- this is the first time they've read this kind of material. We nail down a
few basic ideas and discuss those. It's the best that can be done. The more
experienced phil professor that hired me thinks I'm still trying to do too much.

But you _know_ what these kids need without ever having taught an intro course,
right?

Who's being presumptuous?

> Most of the colleges that care about the humanities, just like most of the
> colleges of science and technology, nurture the split between the Two
> Cultures. This, I believe, is ultimately destructive. It is my opinion
> that we ought to treat science and literature similarly, our study of both
> being primarily by reading and discussing original books -- literary or
> mathematical or scientific -- undigested by Prof. Knowitall. We can benefit
> from his input, but his ideas about Kant are not as helpful to us as Kant's
> own ideas, which, luckily for us, he wrote down.
>

Fabulous idea, happens some places, I'd like to see it happen more places.

> If a book can mean several things, even several mutually contradictory
> things, why then cannot an author intend the book to mean them?

Of course he can. I can guarantee that some of them were not intended by the
author, but are legitimately there.

> It does seem to me that meaning is such a substantive thing that it cannot
> be accidental. If a thinking mind did not intend it to be in the book, it
> most probably isn't there.
>

There's a difference between saying that a "thinking mind intended the book,"
and, "a thinking mind intended every possible meaning generated by the book."

You seem to be arguing one, then the other, at different times.

> You don't need to agree with them to understand them. If you truly cannot
> even come near to an understanding of another person, whether you agree with
> him or find him abhorrent, you are either missing some fundamental
> sympathetic piece of man, you aren't trying, you don't have enough
> information, or the person is actually some extreme sort of raving lunatic
> entirely void of human quality.
>

Again, you're confusing _any_ understanding of a person with _total_
understanding of a person. I can understand _some_ of any given person's
motivations. That is radically different from a complete understanding of the
person and _all_ their motivations. If _any_ part of a person is
incomprehensible to me, then it's quite possible _some_ of their words are as
well -- at least, their intended meaning for their words.

> "The degree of sensibility is so great that. . ."
>

It's interesting that in your original reply, as in your second reply, you
delete the word "anyway."

I read it because you put it there, but to defend your reading you need to
delete it?

> As an unabashed, almost fist-shaking classicist;

Who you are is irrelevant to this discussion -- I'm not impressed with your
qualifications, because people more qualified than you disagree with you.

Jim

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Tue Oct 29 14:36:37 2002