Love and Culture: Thinking and Life

Welcome to the web site of Gregory Desilet.

LOVE AND CULTURE

by W. B. Macomber

Chapter Ten) THINKING AND LIFE

How we need love to be experimental; language and life; Huck Finn and Stephen Dedalus; how words slip, slide, crack, decay, will not stay in place, will not stay put; the horror of growing old and the importance of acquiring a “thing” and increasing one's verbal skills as a defense; how to teach one's parents how to think and win their love; the importance of others to our thinking; the Socratic game and the Platonic game; I “blow my cool” briefly over the present state of education; a digression on a digression on leisure; the judgment of the minimal (“what counts as” this or that); mistakes, guilt, and creativity; Toynbee and William of Champeaux.

There will be errors committed all over the place. And consequently we are dependent on one another's love, support, confidence, if we are to behave in an experimental fashion—where we are going to make mistakes, and very serious mistakes, and make them fairly often. That's why I believe I can only be the sort of philosopher I want to be if I can elicit the love of my graduate students—their confidence in me, their understanding and appreciation of me, their willingness to go along with things which are not being handled in the traditional, conventional way in which they feel secure.

Theatetus 172d, “A free man must have time at his disposal to discourse interminably at his leisure.” There is a great digression in the Theatetus 172 to 177, and the digression is the whole point and message of the dialogue.

(From the audience: “Who said that?”) Plato. Sorry, if I don't cite a man, it will mean Plato (laughter). You see I thought the Theatetus identified it for you, because I'm used to dealing only with philosophy students for whom at least the titles of all of Plato's dialogues are familiar. You remind me again and again of things I take for granted, by which I don't just mean titles of dialogues and identifications and so on. You're always bringing me back to the heart—the fundamental, basic, simple thing that I want to say, and challenge me to say that again and again, to get my message across to you.

You see, there is virtually nothing that elicits my condescension any more. There never was overtly, but now I mean it. A question like that will lead me right into the heart of metaphysics. I don't find anything embarrassing. I myself once announced at the high table of University College, Toronto, that I had been to the Banning Institute about a student and had talked to “a man named Best.” After setting the entire table on its ear, I learned that I might have said I had been down to the telephone company “and talked to a man named Bell.” I once told Robert Finch, a distinguished professor of French and painter of gouaches, after an exhibition, that I had so enjoyed his pastiches. And I misspelled on my doctoral dissertation one of the institutions of higher learning I had attended on my cursus honorum—embarrassingly, the Ecole superieure de preparation et perfectionnement [sic] des professeurs de francaisa l’etranger.

As I say, there will be plenty of mistakes. I now see this as an integral part of pedagogy, catering to your most base (or basic) Oedipal drive to sharpen and refine your sensitivities, challenging you to catch me out. I have already lost all pride—almost all self-respect—at the chess-board and the gaming tables. I claim if one does not make mistakes, one isn’t venturing enough. The principle is no longer questioned in typing, speed reading, and business-law. Hegel's misquotations are sheer genius and provide employment for centuries of careful scholars. I now like to write in a white heat. I don't have time to check on all my quotations, as I once did. I ate a third of a suppository once (before I decided I must be on the wrong track), because I didn't have the courage to ask the doctor what it was for or how to “take” it. (I couldn't even think how to phrase the question.) I am not sorry about these idiotic mistakes; I find them delightful. And I'm not at all nonplussed by that question. I imagine there may be hundreds of you out there who didn't know either but would have preferred to miss the thing rather than to call attention to yourselves and run the risk of “giving yourselves away” (that interesting expression).

We must stay with simple things and keep things simple. This is apparently the message of the Dennis Dutton School in India, set up by one of the TAs. There is a short comment in the prospectus that the school issues, a comment of one of the students—and it's a formula for education in general, including higher education in the United States of America. “Our teachers,” the girl writes, “explain us, and they explain us very well.” Isn't that a grammatical fault? “They explain something to us.” Yes, yes, of course the teachers explain something to them, but basically they want to explain them. That's what it's all about: the grammatical error is ingenious. It's sheer genius and explains why a very erudite Frenchman (I think it was Andre Malraux) should say, “The tragedy of our age is that the command of language has passed to the lower classes.” That marvelous, erudite Frenchman: “The tragedy of our age is that the command of language has passed to the lower classes.”

The real American has known this for a long time, since Mark Twain, when we saw the marvelous command of language Huck Finn exhibits. I never realized it until another graduate student, Jim Chesher, wrote a paper in which he contrasted Huck Finn wrestling with his conscience and Stephen Dedalus' experience in the confessional. You all know the importance I attach to James Joyce and his feeling about Catholicism and Christianity. I may have mentioned his confessional experience. Remember? One after another he spits out his “respectable” sins—things like theft, blackmail, arson, cheating, calumny, envy, hatred, respectable things like that—and the priest says, “Yes, my son, anything else? Yes, my son, anything else?” With each revelation we get closer and closer to it, and the last thing Stephen can throw up, before he has to get down to what we call the nitty-gritty and describe his sex-life, is—sloth. Sloth! He wanders around a lot and doesn't attend to his books; that's sloth, laziness. Well, as Richard II said the other night (marvelous thing going on now, Richard II and Midsummer Night's Dream is coming)—ah, Richard says, “Once I wasted time and now it wastes me.” That's the thrust of hell; that was the hell-substitute I've talked about.

Hell is old age. Hell is when people simply don't care about you anymore. And the more brilliant you were at the acme of your career, the more dreadful it must be when you're 85, rocking all by yourself on the porch, and a couple of teenagers who come by and say,

“Hey, you know that guy? He used to be middleweight champion of the world!”

“Yah?”

“Yah.”

“ What's his name?”

“Robinson.”

“Robinson?”

“Yah.”

“You mean he was middleweight champion of the world?”

That man used to dance with Madame Pompidou in the Palais Elysee and the Trocodero. Shwew! The toast of French and European society—and a very great man indeed. Now he sits rocking in his chair. So how are you going to have a better old age? Improve your verbal skills. Because everything else will go downhill, but your verbal skill can go on increasing ad infinitum, until the day you die.

The message of Greek lyric poetry is that we are growing older and that this means we are being robbed of our life by degrees, day by day. This is the meta-tragic insight of Greek lyric poetry—a great deal of it is about that. At first men are timeless—the men of the Iliad. The human figures of the great Greek epics do not age. Achilles does not age. He is self-identical; he is timeless. This is the epic posture toward life. The next development is lyric poetry, and lyric poetry begins to introduce the ravages of time into the individual life, the horror of growing older, of the arteries hardening, blood flowing less vitally. The world, as I say, gradually fades away, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” As reason (or is it sense?) begins to go, the world grows dimmer and dimmer. Your hearing begins to go and the world retreats in sound. Eliot describes all this in a memorable passage in “Little Gidding”:

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

The answer to the challenge of Greek lyric poetry is put in the words of Solon, the great legislator and lawgiver—a Greek politician, a Greek Richard Nixon or Lyndon B. Johnson. Imagine Nixon or L.B.J. coming up with the answer to the meta-tragic challenge of lyric poetry! That's the difference between our society and Greece. What Solon said was, “Every day I grow older, but every day I grow wiser.”

What Solon meant by that aphorism is that, when we are going downhill physically—from age 35, according to C.G. Jung—while in the second half of life, life is descending physically and we are gradually robbed of all our vitality and beauty and power, the mind can still go on gaining in power and pleasure. So men 80 should be infinitely wiser than men 20, and we should want to talk to them because they have had so much experience and have been thinking about it so intensely, with accumulating skill and advantage. The question is really: Why is life not like that? That is old age, and it's the only thing in life you have to fear—not death (which is an abstraction), or poverty (which for you—us—is no longer so serious) and certainly not “hell” any more. Hume liberates us from that “Bummer,” that Schreckgespenst, the threat of punishment.

There's no substantial soul-substratum underlying all our experiences, Hume argues, which could be punished after death, as we'd been taught for longer than anyone could remember. Nothing like the thread running through a string of beads; the beads themselves have hooks. There's no need for a thread—and similarly no soul-substratum underlying all our experiences, behind everything we do and say (even to ourselves). Consequently, nothing which can be punished after death. That's the “illocutionary force” of Hume's arguments, in Prof. Austin's terms; that's what he wants to do with his words. He wants to exorcise our fear of hellfire and damnation. It's been drummed into us for 1700 years by our stern Christian schoolmasters, remember, and we are all scared to death of it, scared out of our wits by it. It terrifies Hamlet/Shakespeare. Hume wants to exorcise the hobgoblins so that we can cultivate the cool to think. Because we have grown immensely worldly in the last two centuries, and everything we're doing is sin according to the teaching with which we were brought up. That's why Dr. Johnson, who believes life will descend into chaos without God and the King, refuses to shake hands with him. Well, it's not yet clear who is right, Hume or Johnson.

So what can you do to protect yourself best from the greatest evil in life? (It's not cutting your hair or renouncing your sacred principles, your “inalienable rights”; Galileo should have taught you that.) You should study insatiably, to make yourselves beings of endless fascination, because eventually that will be all you have. Chiefly improving your verbal skills, so teenagers will enjoy talking to you, as you're rocking on the porch and gumming your food—and so you'll have something to tell them, for God's sake. They'll look to you like gods, as they're bouncing home from school, when you're 74. The older you get, the better they'll look if you're ready—if you've sailed to Byzantium with that other great W.B.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.

Socrates made it. “You know, my friend,” he says, “that I am not good at measuring (I take it he means minimal things, or I.Q.), and in the presence of the beautiful, I'm a measuring-line without marks, for almost all young people appear beautiful in my eyes (Charmides, 154b).

Now if hell is old age, sloth is unquestionably the one mortal sin, and all we need to know, to become “good” men, is King Richard's lament. So when Stephen Dedalus, in the confessional, throws up, his last pathetic delaying tactic, before he has to get down to the excruciating details of his sex-life (keyhole peeking on himself with the priest or psychiatrist)—his admission of the sin of sloth—he's really right on it. It's when we move on to sex (though more fascinating to one who has never known it) that we've lost it. That's the marvelous humor of Joyce's unforgettable account of an experience I've had hundreds of times, an integral part of my spiritual life when I was still a Catholic. I whooped when I came to sloth, and smiled when I realized how appropriate it was, like the question, “Who said that?” or the little girl's “They explain us very well.”

There doesn't need to be any punishment for a thing like sloth, if it is itself the great evil, if I can get you to see that. We have discovered ecology in the physical environment, and it's time that we extended it to the life of the spirit. There is no mystery to “goodness” or wisdom. We no longer need a God to wind our sundials. It's all an internally self-contained system.

We don't need to punish gluttony and drunkenness—they have their own built-in punishments (as some of us know to our cost). Gluttony now strikes us as absurd, but drunkenness may be an inescapable part of growing up. I think of a man who went to Ludlow Fair, left his necktie God knows where, and carried halfway home quarts of Ludlow beer. If my friend Tony Cristallo wants to writhe on his bed at 2:00 or 3:00 o'clock in the morning in preference to giving up the pleasures of the table or the mug, I can't understand it, but I say, let him! He sacrifices much for this “art”—a lowly art only because it is so transient, so ephemeral (in Christian terminology), with the fine edge gone in a matter of minutes.

But I was in school in India where a little girl writes, “Our teachers explain us very well.” She goes on: “They are prepared to explain us once, twice or thrice.” They do not become impatient if she doesn't understand. And then: “They teach us other things.” Just like that—“They teach us other things.” I can explain things ten times over, but always differently. (That's where professors go wrong.) It's only because you are rather dense (in comparison with me), after all, that I have my marvelous job. What does that mean? (The mind of the reader is set in motion.) It means other things besides their specialty, of course. The English teacher doesn't confine herself to English. She talks about “other things.” This may be where the student learns most. When a trained mind is behaving outside the field of its expertise, making mistakes, correcting itself—that's the process of thinking.

Why do we think that we prove ourselves to be “thinkers” if we never admit that the other person has a point? If you never give ground, if you succeed in making every one of your claims stand against all comers, does that mean you're a “thinker”? What about changing? What about saying “yes” even when you don't believe it? What about violating your deepest conviction, admitting grievous things erroneous things, dreadful things, just for the sake of the talk? See if the talk isn't better. It doesn't really matter whether we decide that God exists or does not exist, that the ontological argument does or does not hold water. The sun is going to shine tomorrow in either case. If God's in his heaven, all's well with the world, and if not, then we have just the world and how could we criticize it or find it deficient?

So a technique for getting to know your parents would be: in the midst of a hard, knock-down, drag-out argument—about liquor or pot, Vietnam (yes and no), short hair and long hair—all those deep, fundamental, moral questions (laughter)—all of a sudden, in the midst of the heat of debate, you give a point (!). You say “By God, I didn't think of that! That’s right!” And when they make the next point, you give on that one too, and another, until your whole case has collapsed and you've seen their point and admitted it (laughter). Lose an argument to them! That's how you'll teach them to think more effectively, rather than by any hard-edge argument that refutes all their most cherished presuppositions. If you're capable of this sort of thing. Actually, you are as rigidly bound to your crazy “moral principles” as your parents are to theirs. As between Polonius and Hamlet, I say: A pox on both your houses!

The question is whether the essence of thinking is to make a claim stand or to be continually turning over the questions, have another look at them, considering them again, not holding fast to any formulation, not lecturing with last year's notes, or notes 15 years old. Not because the material has changed; I haven't really changed my views on Kant, but when I lectured on him twice a year for 4 years, it went downhill every year. The best year was the first, when I was forging those ideas, and they were vital to me. The second year was pretty good, because I still thought them exciting and they were still becoming my own. But the third and fourth year—now struggling with my thesis, wishing I could approach Kant anew, from some other point of view perhaps, but with a thesis hanging around my neck like an albatross, using the same old notes for the sixth or eighth time (since I taught him twice a year)—it was like trying to tell a joke for the sixth or eight time (laughter).

You can't tell a joke six or eight times, not because the joke has ceased to be funny. It tickled me then, and I think it ought to tickle anyone now who is hearing it for the first time. But now it doesn't amuse me, and because it doesn't amuse me, I can't project any amusement. It's the same with an argument: when it ceases to thrill me, I can't project it to an audience. So I am continually reformulating, not because the “truth” has changed, but because I must be continually finding new words—more vital, simpler, and closer to you.

The emphasis is not on seeing; the emphasis is on saying, and it takes two to say, as well as to tango. Nietzsche says (and Austin would go right along with him in this), “Discourse is most meaningful directed to one person in one situation.” (I take it this applies best to making love.) Spoken discourse in concerto, in situation—that's where language is rooted and most vital. As I speak to two or three, in a concrete situation, it is still pretty vital, but not quite like one to one. If we assemble an audience of 700, Nietzsche thinks, a great deal of the meaning, vitality, and “truth” of the thing will necessarily be vitiated. And if we write down our thoughts, so that they can be read for all time, by people from all cultures and all contexts, then Nietzsche thinks language has lost virtually its entire vitality.

Plato goes along with this. He says a couple of times (in two places I know of), “A man shouldn't write; one should not write.” But there he is; he's doing it! There's a guilty conscience, looking over his shoulder at his master Socrates, who had just instituted a new game, the Socratic game of Giving Reasons, the glass-bead game, Glasperlen Spiel. So that the tongue becomes more powerful than the sword. That's essentially what Socrates represents. But Socrates has no more than introduced his game, which hasn't even been played for a generation yet, when Plato takes it over, shifts into an altogether new gear, and moves into the writing game. Then the Socratic game becomes the Platonic game, grounded primarily in writing rather than talking.

Plato somehow knows this, I think. He is very apologetic about stealing his master's game, and expresses this in the two passages where he says, “A man ought not to write.” That's formulating the challenge in its strongest possible form. Camus does the same thing. It is said of Camus that his books are the challenge to his life. From the time of writing that book until the time of writing the next book, his life can best be seen as the action response to the challenge of his own novel.

All our significant thinking nowadays occurs through reading and writing, not through listening and talking. That's why I say we are in the Platonic game, not the Socratic game. We don't learn very much from one another in the give-and-take of discourse. We do our most significant learning alone, with our books, in what I call the Cartesian posture; we tell one another what we've learned, in bull-sessions and seminars, but without making very much of an impression.

In all my years in the university, I've never seen a person learning through discourse. At best we clarify positions we already have, have already worked out on our own, by ourselves. I've never seen a person give a point in an argument or react to something someone else says as though it came to him as a genuine revelation and might substantially alter his thinking on the matter. All we do in both bull-sessions and seminars, for the most part, is argue, and no one seems to change in the slightest through it all. Lectures, by the way, are simply writing in disguise. They might as well be written, being entirely thought out in advance.

What a difference between a graduate seminar and the jazz combo, where the musicians cry back and forth at one another, “Go, man, go!” We carp and object and refute and the spirit of discourse never really gets going. In the graduate seminar, every man is a prima donna, and there is not a trace of group spirit. The typical response takes the form, “How could anyone (in his right mind) maintain a thing like that?” We are always begging one another, for God's sake, to open our eyes and see! We bludgeon and browbeat and seek to coerce one another with hard-edge arguments that only a nit-wit could fail to recognize and admit.

This is true even when visiting professors and world-famous authorities come to talk to the Philosophy Club. The response is purely negative, and the consensus afterwards is invariably that the man didn't say anything, or anything worth saying, that he didn't really “make his case,” or make any case. Often, unfortunately, this is true. But the question still remains: how can a man who has worked for 20 years in a field and been thinking for months about some question fail to say anything interesting or significant (or memorable) about it in an entire evening, sharing his thinking with virtual laymen (in his area of specialty, at least)? How is that possible?

I have found meetings of the Philosophy Club so fruitless, uninteresting, and energy-consuming, that I have given up going to them altogether. I still feel a certain duty to go (or a certain guilt about never going)—I believe this is why others go—but I no longer respect a host of duties and obligations; I'm no longer in my Kantian phase of development, though I lived it for ten years and strongly recommend it to others.

There are no general rules of life which apply when we are 7, 17, 35 and 84. This is what the Symposium is all about. My friend Don Canty's son Kevin hung a poster in his bedroom saying, “If it feels good, do it!” and Don asked what I thought. I immediately replied that that maxim, like every maxim, required a qualification to make it relevant to special circumstances. In this case, “If you're over 35 and it feels good, do it!” With that I'm in complete agreement! For people under 35, on the other hand, I recommend just the opposite: “If it doesn't feel good, do it!” How else are we to grow? What other index is there of what is growth-promoting at the initial stage of our development? As Dean MacDonald used to say, “If you're coasting (before age 35), you're surely going downhill.” After 35, I agree with Hermann Hesse (in Siddhartha) that “the river finds itself by flowing downwards.”

When Ravi Shankar sits down at the sitar, I want him to play any way he likes, not strive to live up to other men's norms, as he did for 20 years to get where he now is. If he follows the advice of his poster, I fear young Kevin Canty will never become a Ravi Shankar in anything, and I can't see anything else worth pursuing in life. A sense of duty or obligation about it, however, will ultimately not get him there either, though it can go a long way in the Kantian phase of development. Under these conditions, “Do as I say, and not as I do,” as my first sergeant in the army used to say (with the honesty of a William of Champeaux), makes perfect sense. Otherwise we have the absurdity of junior high school teachers walking a block from the school to smoke a cigarette behind a service station, as my brother Bob did for years. Isn't that absurd? It's because we have always believed that rules are basically absolute and must apply anywhere and everywhere, to anybody and everybody, if they are to apply at all.

This is the basic requirement of what I call a “timeless truth,” the basis of all moral thinking, of morality and mathematics. It's clear that 2 + 2 = 4 and the interior angles of a triangle are equal to 180 degrees anywhere and everywhere, and similarly that we should not kill, lie, cheat, steal, etc., etc. Kant makes this the cornerstone of his morality, what is called the “universalizability principle” (does it apply to everybody?), which gives rise to the categorical imperative (duty for the sake of duty). If teachers can smoke, why can't students? Our entire conception of thinking and life makes it progressively difficult to come up with any answer to this question, and so teachers must pretend to live the way students are obliged to live.

You need all sorts of things which I no longer need, and I need things you're not ready for yet. We live in quite different situations, which make quite different rules (or “obligations”) appropriate. You need more discipline; I need more spontaneity and relaxation. I am so into my work that it would make perfect sense to say to me, “For heaven's sake, relax a bit.” I sometimes desperately need to “goof off,” and one might even put this in the form of an imperative or obligation. But obviously it would make no sense to say to you (most of you, or most of the time) that you ought to spend more time goofing off. You should work more, almost without exception, and people over 35, almost without exception, should work less. In many cases, you should give up marijuana and your parents should try it, although (since you both live morally or mathematically) either possibility is equally out of the question. I never want to tell people what to do, but I insist on keeping all the possibilities open. When I live with people who observe strict dietary regulations, I enjoy bringing home rich chocolate cakes from Joe Cueller's and leaving them about the kitchen. (They never survive the night.) The trouble with morality is that it closes off possibilities; when your choices become moral choices, they don't admit of any alternative. You should mime your professors, and they should mime you.

I was talking about how little we learn from one another through talking and discourse, in bull-sessions and graduate seminars, how seldom we give a point, for the sake of the talk, or alter our views, or respond favorably to things other people say, the way jazz musicians are famous for responding to another man's blowing. In particular, students never listen seriously to one another. They listen to me when I'm talking, but as soon as a student begins talking in class—especially if what he has to say takes up any time—I can see other students switching off manifestly all around the table, and of course I find this very upsetting.

You can see whether people are following (or interested or “with it”) or not—this is Wittgenstein's notion of metaphysics at the surface, that “inner” terminology (like doubting, hoping, expecting) refers to things which we can see in our manifest behavior patterns. This is really an extension of Hegel's claim that the “inner” and “outer” are not separate things, as Descartes' distinction between res cogitans and res extensa might suggest (a “body” and a “mind” concealed behind it). I see, and do not simply have to infer, how people react to one another (which doesn't mean I can't be mistaken). And what I see is people not reacting or responding to one another at all, which is also what I read about in existentialists, novelists, and the theatre of the absurd.

The university strikes me as immensely solipsistic or Cartesian—each person an island, concentrating exclusively on his own thoughts. I claim that we don't learn from one another, and the evidence on which I base my claim is how seldom we quote one another, or employ one another's “things” creatively. Bull-sessions are simply passing time and no one seems to be learning anything. So I claim we don’t learn from one another, through talking. We may learn on another—like Fisher and Spassky—but not from one another. Students all strike me as walking Hamlet-figures, professors as walking Faust-figures—immensely solipsistic, no really satisfying communication, and each man learning or thinking entirely on his own.

As I say, non-communication is one of the dominant themes of (continental) philosophy, literature, and drama at the present time. You will find it in Heidegger, Sartre, Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, John Updike, D.H. Lawrence, Peter Weiss, Günter Grass, Brecht and Weil, in Dada, German expressionism, and the theater of the absurd—you'll find it everywhere. I find it most especially in the university and Isla Vista.

There is scarcely any other great theme of twentieth century literature. And yet if one brings the theme “close to home”—suggests that it applies right here—it is thought to be bad taste, and terribly embarrassing. But it must have been embarrassing for William Blake to write:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

Or W.H. Auden:

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

That is life right around them that the two poets are writing about. Or A.E. Housman in “Terrence, This Is Stupid Stuff.” And of course it is embarrassing, if people understood.

What is going on here, if someone takes exception to my view and claims that there is communication all over the place and I have just been missing it, is not a discussion of fact; it's not what we call an empirical question. It's a question of language, a linguistic or verbal (a priori) question. You see, you can't refute Euclid by discovering a triangle with interior angles equal to 179. After he has measured with the most precise instruments possible several times, and absolutely convinced himself of the fact, he'll simply scratch his head and say, “Funny, it looks exactly like a triangle. I'd have sworn that was a triangle,” and go back to his triangles, not in the least shaken. And so with the way I use the word “communication.” If you show me what you call communication all over the university, I'll simply reply that that's not what I mean by communication. That's what I call “chatter,” Heidegger's Gerede. Similarly, if you claim that the university is a joyous place, I conclude that we use the words “joy” and “joyous” differently.

I'm familiar with this from my long experience with language games. I know that Freud uses the word “sexual” much more broadly than it is ordinarily used, and so I don't take him to be a nit-wit when he claims that my champing on a cigarette-holder, for example, is sexual, or that infants are sexual. By “sexual” Freud means what I would call “sensual”—yes, champing on my cigarette holder is sensual, and I'm grateful to Dr. Freud for reminding me of this. What we call “sexual,” Freud calls “genital,” and champing on my cigarette-holder isn't a genital experience, but an aural, mammary one.

I'm too philosophically sophisticated and too deeply imbued with the spirit of contemporary linguistic analysis to get sucked into fruitless, sterile debate over whether Freud's claim is true or not, whether or not it's the case, a fact, that all our experience is sexual, whether there really is such a thing as “libido” or “super-ego,” economic determinism, electrons and the like. I know that a “realist” in the Middle Ages is what we nowadays call an “idealist” (roughly), that when many people use the word “bad” they mean “good” (or “excellent”), that, if a black man uses the word “nigger,” he means it as a sign of respect, which is the same as Mexican-Americans’ use of the word “Chicano” (or “boy”).

I'm prepared for the most extreme changes in terminology from my years in the history of philosophy, and I know that in philosophy we are debating the proper use of language and not the facts of life. Most people are held enthralled by words (whether “higher states of consciousness” and “karma” or “democracy,” “duty,” and “Mom's blueberry pie”), and I know, with Thomas Hobbes, that “words are wise men's counters, but the money of fools.” I can speak Aristotle with Aristotelians, Thomas Aquinas with Aquinists, Kant with Kantians, Freud with psychoanalysts, and Marx with doctrinaire Marxists, without either becoming wholly immersed in any of these languages, nor rejecting them for failing to correspond with the facts and leading to all manner of manifest absurdity.

So if we differ on the question of the amount of communication which presently obtains in the university, I'm alert to our difference being in the way we use language. What you mean by communication doesn't satisfy my requirements. I wouldn't call that communication at all. Surely this is the case with all extraordinary men—our dramatists, novelists, and existentialists—when they claim there is no communication between people. They are simply no longer satisfied with what ordinarily passes (self-evidently) for communication. I believe that non-academic men communicate far more, and in a different way, than troubled intellectuals usually imagine. When I say there is no communication, I mean that my ideal of communication is totally lacking, and people seem to be simply projecting an image and grinding axes on one another. How does this check with your experience?

I say there is so little communication in the university because there is so little agreement. When I say that I have never seen communication here (Toronto and Paris and Heidelberg and Munich are a different cup of tea altogether) I mean that I have never seen two men agreeing, much less reaching agreement from an initial basis of difference. I have never seen a man give a point, or express admiration (much less thrilled awe and wonder) at something another man said. I have never seen any manifest influence or impact of one man on another, except through the medium of reading. Students rarely talk of the most exciting ideas of their professors (never of one another's), and professors never talk of the most exciting ideas of their students. I have never learned anything about my colleague's thinking from students, although I live with them and am constantly questioning them about their courses (since I would love to get the gist of the material at second hand, in an hour or so of talk). From all this I conclude that there is very little genuine learning going on in the university and that our sense of achievement—we who have made teaching our life—is almost wholly illusory. That is why we lay such great importance on publication and teach our classes for our colleagues. There is really no other criterion of differentiation. Where teaching—where real teaching—is concerned, there is hardly a shade of difference among any of us. There is not a trace of genuine influence to remind us that we are real. There is no propagation going on at the spiritual level, none at all. Every issue of Nexus spills over with insults and contempt. Revolutionary activism and books of Eastern mysticism are “where it's at”—certainly not anything that's going on here in the university. Where teaching is concerned, we are all quite sterile. Students simply want to get through the university, that's all. As one student said, “Who would ever want to talk with a professor just for the pleasure of it?”

All this is not “our fault.” That is what I call the “fallacy of sin.” The undesirable state of affairs we confront, now as always, is not the result of personal deficiencies and decisions. It's built into the environment and results from our collective decisions, decisions which no one in particular makes. You may do anything you like; it won't change things very much—won't change them at all. Kant's moral philosophy is about this. You might as well give away your estate and all your serfs in Czarist Russia—Tolstoy's (and Pierre Bezuhov's) predicament. With the quarter system and our vast department store of courses and 48 courses in four years and reading lists of six and eight and ten books (even if you assign only one book) and one tatty little lounge and no communication whatever between departments and virtually no extra-curricular activities and one S.U. for the entire university and no traditions or customs to speak of (the Plous Award, which we promptly make a mockery), it is difficult to see how humanistic education is possible any more, or how there can be genuine communication or any very considerable personal influence.

The personal element of education—Louis Agassiz at one end of a log and a student at the other—is being systematically legislated out of existence, to make room for Heidegger's das Man, and no one in particular is doing it. Heidegger's philosophy is about this. There is simply no basis on which personal relations between professors and students can take place, and more important, nothing to promote cultural activities and intellectual relationships among students. Isla Vista is the result. “The son,” Nietzsche writes, “is the exposed secret of the father”—a message I would very much like to bring to the older generation, with its moral condemnation of the generation which it itself spawned and fostered. And so I.V. is the “exposed secret” of UCSB. That is what we have succeeded in producing, we who have devoted our lives to teaching and the western tradition, what Ezra Pound calls “that tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work”—that and nothing more.

(Question from the audience.) Pardon me? Well, apparently discourse is a “happening.” Some things happen and some things don't (laughter). An awful lot of things don't. We've been repeating the Handel and the Mozart sort of endlessly because I haven't gotten around to going (or just dropping a line) to the music library and saying, “Could you put together another tape for me,” and list this and that. Silly-little things like that, for some reason, I can't get around to. I'm dreadfully over-committed and defaulting seriously. That's really true; Sami knows how I have defaulted. He might miss a grant because I didn't get my letter of recommendation in—he's asked me three times, and it's a week overdue. But trying to keep my thinking close to my life, I say: If you don't make mistakes and default now and then, you're not venturing enough. The average life finds a little area of mastery (or competence), stays rigorously within it, moves within the accepted groove, and then succeeds in performing all obligations. But such a being is called a Pharisee. I'm trying to “get myself off the hook,” you see.

I've got to be trying new things and my attention is all on the new. So fundamental things, important things, sometimes don't get done. And that's why I must live in guilt. This is typical of the creative artist. He wallows in guilt—a good deal of it quite justified. Marx is a dreadful father who allows two of his children to die. He should have followed the tradition of celibacy of clergy. Shakespeare was not a good husband and father, although I hold it not to be his fault but society's. And Gandhi must turn away from his wife and child, when he discovers India, the way St. Augustine must kick his mistress (whose name we're never told) and child out of the house when he discovers his God. Great men and creative artists have plenty to be guilty about.

(More from the audience.) Oh, okay, announcements, okay. I'm always getting into digressions! But the digressions are often just what I want to say, following the example of the Theatetus. The digression from 172 to 177 is the point of the dialogue, the difference between the life of the philosopher and the life of the businessman. The one has to work by the clock, Plato says, and the other doesn't—he floats over the entire earth, contemplating its many-faceted splendors. Whereas the businessman, warrior, statesman, active man, man of affairs, must be rushing continually and never has “time at his disposal to discourse interminably at his leisure.” That's what I want to do and can only do if I can engage the support of my TAs, who take entire onus of a course like this off my shoulders. That's why I maintain we can have the sort of man Plato talks about in Theatetus 172d only if he can win the love and respect and support (active support)—elicit the thumos-motivation—of those around him.

Can TAs perform their duties minimally if they don't come to the lectures? I don't know. I can't judge a minimal question. What is a minimal philosopher? What is a minimal performance in philosophy? What is a minimal B.A.? I don't know—I haven't the foggiest idea. B.A. doesn't mean anything to me anyway, from the vast majority I've met. But it's the minimal demand for anything that most throws me.

What is thinking and what is non-thinking? Where is the line that divides the two? There is no line! That's the point: there is no line. It's utterly arbitrary who passes and who fails, who is two percent above the line arbitrarily set as “thinking” and who is two percent below. I can't tell. Does this reflect on my competence as a teacher in philosophy? “He can't tell art from non-art. He can't tell something a man made with skill and devotion, specifically to be beautiful, from a crankshaft.” A trick they're always playing on people at art exhibits, with the innocent gilded crankshaft. “He can't tell art from non-art.” We don't know whether a computer did it, or a man—the music.

Do I suffer in prestige if I can't judge a basically competent thinker from an incompetent one? I think not. Take Chopin—put him to the test! You're supposed to know something about nocturnes and etudes—what is a nocturne? What's an etude? Distinguish for us please, an etude from a non-etude, a nocturne from a non-nocturne. We're going to play you a few hundred nocturnes now and we want you to tell us of each whether it is or is not a (“real”) nocturne. We're going to play you so many you won’t remember them and the same ones will recur 3, 4, 5, 6 times to see if there is any consensus in your mind, whether you really know or are just guessing. Is there a Chopin consensus about what distinguishes a nocturne from a non-nocturne? I doubt it. And so we philosophers must judge performances in philosophy in fear and trembling, Furcht und Zittern. We must realize that we grade theses in philosophy the way our colleagues in the art department grade canvases, not the way our colleagues in the math and physics departments grade proofs and experiments. Otherwise we're hopelessly 18th century, two centuries behind the times.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to appeal to the most creative, I suppose, and therefore default on a lot of minimal things and require the support of my TAs. And then, you see, we get into a conflict, where a wedge is driven between us. Who's responsible here? Whose word is it? I certainly want to say the TAs, on everything involving writing. That is not my field of competence; they have to do it. They're competent; they're my junior colleagues and I trust their judgment implicitly. It's trusting their judgment and your judgment, treating all the members of the university with genuine respect. This is a part of my new philosophy of education.

I want to tell you what I think “thinking” is. The way Toynbee did it was to write a blurb for a volume of critical essays which simply tore him apart. Toynbee wrote his great Study of History only to get people thinking about the meaning of history. And when a volume of critical essays appeared tearing him apart—o one of them pointed out that, in the index there are two references to God and 14 to Toynbee (laughter). Toynbee writes a glowing blurb to put on the cover, so that it would sell more copies. He's following the tradition of my great namesake, William of Champeaux, who has long been a hero of mine because, in his debates with Peter Abelard, he admitted three times that he was wrong, simply dead wrong (or incoherent) and that makes him for me, in some sense, the greatest thinker of all time, or the most honest.

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