Category: Meaning and Life and the Humanities

Attention Deficits

I am, it seems, about to embark on a long, convoluted journey into the mysteries of meaning.  I’ve been mulling over this topic for some years now, but didn’t think I was going to write another book.  But it seems that I am.  I have agreed to give two talks next year that will force me to get my thoughts on the subject into some kind of coherent form.  Basically, I want to distinguish questions of meaning from questions of causation/explanation—and make the old time Dilthey case that the humanities and the arts are more inclined to investigate questions of meaning.  But this all involves actually thinking through “the meaning of meaning.”  To that end, I have just started reading C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richard’s classic of that title.  My pole stars in this investigation will be, to no surprise, the pragmatists and Wittgenstein.

So the William James interest in “attention” will be one focus.  What do we attend to, what do we note, in any situation?  Clearly there is always “more” to be seen and taken in than any single observer manages to process.  What we attend to would seem to have some connection to what we find meaningful.  We notice those things we are predisposed to notice, which is a way of defining one’s “interests,” of identifying what are matters of concern and care to one, as contrasted to things of indifference.  (We are highly likely to notice things that inspire hostility or disgust, so it is the intensity of the engagement, not its positive or negative valence, that seems determinative here.)

Psychology since James’s day has paid a lot of attention (pun intended) to the oddities and pathologies of what we notice and what we fail to perceive.  I grabbed this little survey of some of that work from the academic blog Crooked Timber—and lodge it here because I will want to chase down its links at some future date.

“If stereotypes are the cause, why don’t we just eradicate them? Stereotypes arise, in part, because they must.  They belong to a broader category of cognitive attention biases which arise because we simply cannot pay attention to all of the particulars.  We take shortcuts. We bin people into categories.  We lump to live.  That lumping may be the result of rational calculations – it’s not worth our time to consider every particular (rational inattention bias). It may be that we lack the cognitive capacity (behavioral attention bias) or the time or experience to draw precise inferences (categorical cognition bias).   Regardless of the cause, we could not navigate the world without categorizing reality and therefore stereotyping.”

From Scott E Page, Stephen M Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and the Santa Fe Institute; taken from a blog post on Crooked Timber, August 14th, 2019.

Legacy

Some years back, when I was planning to step down as director of UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, someone asked me what I wanted my legacy to be.  My predecessor in the job (and the founder of the Institute), Ruel Tyson, who died recently at the age of 89, and whose funeral was this week, was very legacy conscious.  He wanted his name associated with the Institute—and cared deeply about the direction the Institute, and the University more generally, took even after his retirement.  He took pains not only to continue being involved with the Institute, but also to get into writing materials relevant to the Institute’s history and to its ongoing evolution.

Ruel’s death has me dwelling on such things, along with Martin Hägglund’s assertion in This Life (Pantheon Books, 2019) that “It is a central feature of our spiritual life that we remember the dead, just as it is a central feature of our spiritual life that we seek to be remembered after our death. This importance of memory—or recollection—is inseparable from the risk of forgetting.  Our fidelity to past generations is animated by the sense that they live only insofar as we sustain their memory, just as we will live on only insofar as future generations sustain the memory of us” (181-82).  Elsewhere he states baldly: there is “no afterlife apart from those who care to remember” us (167).  And continues: “The death of the beloved is irrevocable—it is a loss that cannot be recuperated—since there is no life other than this life” (167-68).

I fully believe that there is no life other than this life.  But I find myself uninterested in, unattached to, the idea of an afterlife in the memories of others.  Why should I care?  I will be beyond caring.  I have never thought of the books I have written as messages sent to some future.  I wrote them to address my contemporaries and desired a response from those contemporaries: to stir up their thoughts, to change their minds, to win their praise.  I wanted to be part of the conversation of my time—not a part of some conversation from which I was absent because dead.  Similarly, in my work at the university, I wanted to enable all kinds of intellectual adventures for my colleagues and students.  I was not at all focused on building the conditions for things that would happen after I was gone.  The here and now was all.

Yes, I care about my children’s lives—and the world they will inherit to live those lives in.  I want to give them the wherewithal to have good lives.  That wherewithal involves money, but plenty of other things, all I hope given as a gift of love.  But my children are not my “legacy.”  They are people with their own lives, albeit people I care deeply about.

I certainly don’t think of them as under any obligation to remember me or (worse) to memorialize me.  I have little filial piety myself (a fact I intend to ponder as I go along), but am made more uneasy by the thought of my children having filial piety than I am by their lacking it.  (Only a coincidence that I am writing this on father’s day, a day not celebrated in our household.)  I want my children’s love, not their reverence or piety.  And I want them to take the gifts I have given them (of all sorts) for granted, as the daily and completely unexceptional manifestation of a love that is like the air they breathe, simply an unquestioned fact of daily existence, sustaining but unremarkable.

It is not simply that I will be dead—and thus in no position to know that I am being remembered or to care.  It is also that memory is abstract.  It is leagues away from the full experience of being alive, in all its blooming, buzzing confusion, its welter of emotions, desires, hopes, and activities.  Those who knew you while you were alive know some of that concrete you, but soon enough you are just a name on a family tree, with only the slightest hints, some bare facts, maybe a photograph, maybe some letters, suggesting the actual person.  Such attenuated selfhood is nothing like life—and holds no appeal to me.  It seems a mug’s game to care about that time to come—just another way of not attending to the present, of focusing in on “this life.”

Jane and I went to another funeral yesterday (after Ruel’s on Tuesday).  This memorial service was for a lovely man who taught both of our children at the Quaker high school they attended.  Conducted as a Quaker meeting, we had 90 minutes of people sharing their memories of Jamie—and those memories did capture him to a remarkable degree.  He was concretely witnessed and imagined in what people had to say.  His lived reality, his personality, was caught and conveyed.

Now that is a memory process I can endorse; we were all filled with his spirit during and after those ninety minutes.  But I don’t think it helps—and don’t find myself wishing—to claim that kind of specific memory will last for more than ten or so years, or to think of even the fullest kind of memory in any way counts as a satisfactory afterlife.  To paraphrase Woody Allen (this catches the spirit, and nowhere close to the letter of his comment): I want the kind of afterlife where I am worrying about the mortgage that is due next Tuesday and what gift to buy for my beloved, whose birthday is next week.  In short, not an afterlife, but this life is what I want.  And I am perfectly happy to let the time after my death take care of itself, without its occupants feeling any obligation to keep me in mind.

The Tree of Life

I have just finished reading Richard Powers’ latest novel, The Overstory (Norton, 2018).  Powers is his own distinctive cross between a sci-fi writer and a realist.  His novels (of which I have read three or four) almost always center around an issue or a problem—and that problem is usually connected to a fairly new technological or scientific presence in our lives: DNA, computers, advanced “financial instruments.”  As with many sci-fi writers, his characters and his dialogue are often stilted, lacking the kind of psychological depth or witty interchanges (“witty” in the sense of clever, off-beat, unexpected rather than funny) that tend to hold my interest as a reader.  I find most sci-fi unreadable because too “thin” in character and language, while too wrapped up in elaborate explanations (that barely interest me) of the scientific/technological “set-up.” David Mitchell’s novels have the same downside for me as Powers’: too much scene setting and explanation, although Mitchell is a better stylist than Powers by far.

So is The Overstory Powers’ best novel?  Who knows?  It actually borrows its structure (somewhat) from Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, while the characters feel a tad less mechanical to me.  But I suspect that’s because the “big theme” (always the driving force of Powers’s novels) was much more compelling to me in this novel, with only Gain of the earlier ones holding my interest so successfully.

The big theme: how forests think (the title of a book that is clearly situated behind Powers’s work even though he does not acknowledge it, or any other sources.)  We are treated to a quasi-mystical panegyric to trees, while being given the recent scientific discoveries that trees communicate with one another; they do not live in accordance with the individualistic struggle for existence imagined by a certain version of Darwinian evolution, but (rather) exist within much larger eco-systems on which their survival and flourishing depend.  The novel’s overall message—hammered home repeatedly—is that humans are also part of that same eco-system—and that competition for the resources to sustain life as contrasted to cooperation to produce and maintain those resources can only lead to disaster.  Those disasters are not just ecological (climate change and depletion of things necessary to life), but also psychological.  The competitive, each against each, mentality is no way to live.

I am only fitfully susceptible to mystical calls to experience some kind of unity with nature.  I am perfectly willing to embrace rationalistic arguments that cooperation, rather than competition, is the golden road to flourishing.  And, given Powers’s deficiencies as a writer, I would not have predicted that the mysticism of his book would move me.  But it did.  That we—the human race, the prosperous West and its imitators, the American rugged individualists—are living crazy and crazy-making lives comes through loud and clear in the novel.  That the alternative is some kind of tree-hugging is less obvious to me most days—but seems a much more attractive way to go when reading this novel.

I have said Powers is a realist.  So his tree-huggers in the novel ultimately fail in their efforts to protect forests from logging.  The forces of the crazy world are too strong for the small minority who uphold the holistic vision.  But he does have an ace up his sleeve; after all, it is “life” itself that is dependent on interlocking systems of dependency. So he does seem to believe that, in the long run, the crazies will be defeated, that the forces of life will overwhelm the death-dealers.  Of course, how long that long run will be, and what the life of the planet will look like when the Anthropocene comes to an end (and human life with it?) is impossible to picture.

Life will prevail.  That is Powers’ faith—or assertion.  Is that enough?  I have also read recently an excellent book by Peter J. Woodford: The Moral Meaning of Nature: Nietzsche’s Darwinian Religion and its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2018).  Woodford makes the convincing argument that Nietzsche takes from Darwin the idea that “life” is a force that motivates and compels.  Human behavior is driven by “life,” by what life needs.  Humans, like other living creatures, are puppets of life, blindly driven to meet its demands.  “When we speak of values, we speak under the inspiration, under the optic of life; life itself forces us to establish values; when we establish values, life itself values through us” (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols).

 

Here is Woodford’s fullest explanation of Nietzsche’s viewpoint:

“The concept that allows for the connection between the biological world, ethics, aesthetics, and religion is the concept of a teleological drive that defines living activity.  This drive is aimed at its own satisfaction and at obtaining the external conditions of its satisfaction. . . . Tragic drama reenacts the unrestricted, unsuppressed expression of [the] inexhaustible natural eros of life for itself. . . . Nietzsche conceived life as autotelic—that is, directed at itself as the source of its own satisfaction.  It was this autotelic nature of life that allowed Nietzsche to make the key move from description of a natural drive to discussion of the sources and criteria of ethical value and, further, to the project of a ‘revaluation of value’ that characterized his final writings.  Life desires itself, and only life itself is able to satisfy this desire.  So the affirmation of life captures what constitutes the genuine fulfillment, satisfaction, and flourishing of a biological entity.  Nietzsche’s appropriation of Darwinism transformed his recovery of tragedy into a project of recovering nature’s own basic affirmation of itself in a contemporary culture in which this affirmation appeared, to him at least, to be absent.  His project was thus inherently evaluative at the same time that it was a description of a principle that explained the nature and behavior of organic forms” (38).

Here’s my takeaway.  Both Powers and Nietzsche believe that they are describing the way that “life” operates.  Needless to say, they have very different visions of how life does its thing, with Powers seeing human competitiveness as a perverted deviation from the way life really works, while Nietzsche (at least at times) sees life as competition, as the struggle for power, all the way down.  (Cooperative schemes for Nietzsche are just subtle mechanisms to establish dominance—and submission to such schemes generates the sickness of ressentiment.)

What Wofford highlights is that this merger of the descriptive with the evaluative doesn’t really work.  How are we to prove that life is really this way when there are life forms that don’t act in the described way?  Competition and cooperation are both in play in the world.  What makes one “real life,” and the other some form of “perversion”?  Life, in other words, is a normative term, not a descriptive one.  Or, at the very least, there is no clean fact/value divide here; our biological descriptions are shot through and through with evaluation right from the start.  We could say that the most basic evaluative statement is that it is better to be alive than to be dead.  Which in Powers quickly morphs into the statement that it is better to be connected to other living beings within a system that generates a flourishing life, while in Nietzsche it becomes the statement that it is better to assume a way of living that gives fullest expression to life’s vital energies.

[An aside: the Nazis, arguably, were a death cult–and managed to get lots and lots of people to value death over life.  What started with dealing out death to the other guy fairly quickly moved into embracing one’s own death, not–it seems to me–in the mode of sacrifice but in the mode of universal destruction for its own sake.  A general auto de fe.]

In short, to say that life will always win out says nothing about how long “perversions” can persist or about what life actually looks like.  And the answer to the second question—what life looks like—will always be infected by evaluative wishes, with what the describer wants life to look like.

That conclusion leaves me with two issues.  The first is pushed hard by Wofford in his book.  “Life” (it would seem) cannot be the determiner of values; we humans (and Powers’ book makes a strong case that other living beings besides humans are in on this game) evaluate different forms of life in terms of other goods: flourishing, pleasure, equality/justice.  This is an argument against “naturalism.”  Life (or nature) is not going to dictate our values; we are going to reserve the right/ability to evaluate what life/nature throws at us.  Cancer and death are, apparently, natural, but that doesn’t mean we have to value them positively.

The second issue is my pragmatist, Promethean one.  To what extent can human activity shape what life is.  Nietzsche has always struck me as a borderline masochist.  For all his hysterical rhetoric of activity, he positions himself to accept whatever life dishes out.  Amor fati and all that.  But humans and other living creatures alter the natural environment all the time to better suit their needs and desires.  So “life” is plastic—and, hence, a moving target.  It may speak with a certain voice, but it is only one voice in an ensemble.  I have no doubt that it is a voice to which humans currently pay too little heed. But it is not a dictator, not a voice to which we owe blind submission.  That’s because 1) we evaluate what life/nature dishes out and 2) because we have powers on our side to shape the forms life takes.

Finally, all of this means that if humans are currently shaping life/nature in destructive, life-threatening ways, we cannot expect life itself to set us on a better course.  The trees may win in the long run—but we all remember what Keynes said about the long run.  In the meantime, the trees are dying and we may not be very far behind them.

The Future of the Humanities

For some time now, I have a question that I use as a litmus test when speaking with professors of English.  Do you think there will be professors of Victorian literature on American campuses fifty years from now?  There is no discernible pattern, that I can tell, among the responses I get, which cover the full gamut from confident pronouncements that “of course there will be” to sharp laughter accompanying the assertion “I give them twenty years to go extinct.”  (For the record: UNC’s English department currently has five medievalists, seven Renaissance scholars, and six professors teaching Romantic and Victorian literature—that is, if I am allowed to count myself a Victorianist, as I sometime was.)

I have gone through four crises of the humanities in my lifetime, each coinciding with a serious economic downturn (1974, 1981, 1992, and 2008).  The 1981 slump cost me my job when the Humanities Department in which I taught was abolished.  The collapse of the dot.com boom did not generate its corresponding “death of the humanities” moment because, apparently, 9/11 showed us we needed poets.  They were trotted out nation-wide as America tried to come to terms with its grief.

Still, the crisis feels different this time.  Of course, I may just be old and tired and discouraged.  Not “may be.”  Certainly am.  But I think there are also real differences this time around—differences that point to a different future for the humanities.

In part, I am following up my posts about curriculum revision at UNC.  The coverage model is on the wane.  The notion that general education students should gain a familiarity with the whole of English literature is certainly moving toward extinction.  Classes are going to be more focused, more oriented to solving defined problems and imparting designated competencies.  Methods over content.

But, paradoxically, the decline of the professors of Victorian literature is linked to more coverage, not less.  The History Department can be our guide here.  At one time, History departments had two or three specialists in French history (roughly divided by centuries), three or four in English history, along with others who might specialize in Germany or Spain or Italy.  That all began to change (slowly, since it takes some time to turn over a tenured faculty) twenty or so years ago when the Eurocentric world of the American history department was broken open.  Now there needed to be specialists on China, on India, on Latin America, on Africa.  True, in some cases, these non-European specialists were planted in new “area studies” units (Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Near Eastern Studies etc.).  But usually even those located in area studies would hold a joint appointment in History—and those joint appointments ate up “faculty lines” formerly devoted to the 18th century French specialist.

Art History departments (because relatively small) have always worked on this model: limited numbers of faculty who were supposed, somehow, to cover all art in all places from the beginning of time.  The result was that, while courses covered that whole span, the department only featured scholars of certain periods.  There was no way to have an active scholar in all the possible areas to be studied.  Scholarly “coverage,” in other words, was impossible.

English and Philosophy departments are, in my view, certain to go down this path. English now has to cover world literatures written in English, as well as the literatures of groups formerly not studied (not part of the “canon”).  Philosophy, as well, now incldue non-Western thought, as well as practical, professional, and environmental  ethics, along with new interests in cognitive science.

There will not, fifty years from now, be no professors of Victorian literature in America.  But there will no longer be the presumption that every self-respecting department of English must have a professor of Victorian literature.  The scholarly coverage will be much more spotty—which means, among other things, that someone who wants to become a scholar of Victorian literature will know there are six places to reasonably pursue that ambition in graduate school instead of (as is the case now) assuming you can study Victorian literature in any graduate program.  Similarly, if 18th century English and Scottish empiricism is your heart’s desire, you will have to identify the six philosophy departments you can pursue that course of study.

There is, of course, the larger question.  Certainly (or, at least, it seems obvious to me, although hardly to all those I submit to my litmus test), it is a remarkable thing that our society sees fit to subsidize scholars of Victorian literature.  The prestige of English literature (not our national literature after all) is breath-taking if you reflect upon it for even three seconds.  What made Shakespeare into an American author, an absolute fixture in the American curriculum from seventh grade onwards?  What plausible stake could our society be said to have in subsidizing continued research into the fiction and life of Charles Dickens?  What compelling interest (as a court of law would phrase it) can be identified here?

Another paradox here, it seems to me.  I hate (positively hate, I tell you) the bromides offered (since Matthew Arnold at least) in generalized defenses of the humanities.  When I was (during my years as a director of a humanities center) called upon to speak about the value of the humanities, I always focused on individual examples of the kind of work my center was enabling.  The individual projects were fascinating—and of obvious interest to most halfway-educated and halfway-sympathetic audiences.  The fact that, within the humanities, intellectual inquiry leads to new knowledge and to new perspectives on old knowledge is the lifeblood of the whole enterprise.

But it is much harder to label that good work as necessary.  The world is a better, richer (I choose this word deliberately) place when it is possible for scholars to chase down fascinating ideas and stories because they are fascinating.  And I firmly believe that fascination will mean that people who have the inclination and the leisure will continue to do humanities work come hell and high water.  Yes, they will need the five hundred pounds a year and the room of one’s own that Virginia Woolf identified as the prerequisites, but people of such means are hardly an endangered species at the moment.  And, yes, it is true that society generally (especially after the fact, in the rear view mirror as it were) likes to be able to point to such achievements, to see them as signs of vitality, culture, high-mindedness and the like.  But that doesn’t say who is to pay.  The state?  The bargain up to now is that the scholars (as well as the poets and the novelists) teach for their crust of bread and for, what is more precious, the time to do their non-teaching work of scholarship and writing.  Philanthropists?  The arts in America are subsidized by private charity—and so is much of higher education (increasingly so as state support dwindles.)  The intricacies of this bargain warrant another post.  The market?  Never going to happen.  Poetry and scholarship is never going to pay for itself, and novels only very rarely so.

The humanities, then, are dependent on charity—or on the weird institution that is American higher education.  The humanities’ place in higher education is precarious—and the more the logic of the market is imposed on education, the more precarious that position becomes.  No surprise there.  But it is no help when my colleagues act as if the value of scholarship on Victorian literature is self-evident.  Just the opposite.  Its value is extremely hard to articulate.  We humanists do not have any knock-down arguments.  And there aren’t any out there just waiting to be discovered.  The ground has been too well covered for there to have been such an oversight.  The humanities are in the tough position of being a luxury, not a necessity, even as they are also a luxury which makes life worth living as contrasted to “bare life” (to appropriate Agamben’s phrase).  The cruelty of our times is that the overlords are perfectly content (hell, it is one of their primary aims) to have the vast majority only possess “bare life.”  Perhaps it was always thus, but that is no consolation. Not needing the humanities themselves, our overlords are hardly moved to consider how to provide it for others.