“Scholarship has to exemplify a love for each other, not just a love for an idea.” Linda Tuhiwai Smith, June 30th, 2020, Massey University
I recently read or watched Jonathan Lear’s imagining the end lectures. Then, I saw that they will be out in a book this Fall, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. The lectures were thoughtful and really good. Still, Lear thinks that great humanist teachers needn’t care about their students. That’s a mistake. I think that he’s misled in his new work on cultural and personal durability by overemphasizing practical reasoning as the philosophical tradition has often done and failing to fully appreciate what I call ”relational” (interpersonal) reasoning. Seeking not just the true and the good but authentic harmony between people is something new to the philosophical tradition, supported by wisdom traditions outside of philosophy and by the invention of authenticity in modern thought. Getting a clearer picture of it unravels Lear’s tangle somewhat and, ironically, clarifies our practical purpose in learning. So I wanted to talk about it in this series that is itself about relational reasoning and philosophy.
Let me give three pieces of context: (1) The overall point of the lectures, (2) the role of practical reason in them, and (3) the setting in which the claim about great humanists appears.
(1) The overall point of Lear’s imagining the end lectures is to argue that, especially in times when the world is shaken and our imaginations come to life trying to make sense of what is happening and to process our loss, there can be a healthy ways to use the imagination as opposed to unhealthy ones. The core healthy use of the imagination is to keep a glimpse of what in ancient Greek was called the kalon. This signifier remains enigmatic due to the loss of the ancient Greek world and its lack of fittingness to our own, but the kalon means roughly, “the fine, noble, or beautiful,” in short, the good in actual human lives, not as an ideal.
The difficulty of glimpsing the kalon is compounded because when the world is shaken, what it means to flourish is up in the air and, to make things worse, our inherited concepts may have distorted our sense of the good through their injustice or other corruptions. Perhaps these inherited concepts have even led to the world being shaken, as is the case with climate change.
Since the world is shaken, our concepts may be distorted, and since the kalon is enigmatic anyway, one of the finest ways to keep a glimpse of the kalon – as a bare possibility and as a question with some intuitive and fragmentary appeal – is to turn to the humanities to see how people everywhere over time have sought wisdom, bright and beautiful. This practice of humanistic inquiry, critical and playful as Lear thinks of it, ends up being a healthy act of mourning seeking repetition in the Kierkegaardian sense, i.e., an implicit faith inside the practice of mourning that the kalon can return on firmer ground through the shaken world if only we stick with things and keep searching for the good.
So: in the context of a shaken world with distorted concepts, the humanities as a practice of working through the past, including the grief work of processing our attachments, allows us to form a non-narcissistic way of living into the open and conflicted future for the sake of the good life.
(2) The role of practical reason in all this is initially fairly simple but gets complex later. Practical reason is the form of reason that operates within the logic of the good. The good is what practical reason seeks. Lear, as a faithful Aristotelian on this score, interprets the work of imagination – mournful, playful, critical, faithful, and speculative all in measure – as a profoundly human organization of practical reasoning keyed to human flourishing.
The first twist in Lear’s reasoning comes from Kierkegaard in that Lear wants to find a language to talk about holding onto the hope of the kalon in times when our actual ethical life is suspended, i.e., when it does not seem clear how to go on. So he repurposes the logic of faith as Kierkegaard understood it – Lear once called it “radical hope” – to provide a deep subjective structure to practical reason. In the absence of the kalon, part of being excellent at practical reasoning is keeping open the space for the kalon even in the midst of cultural devastation, even in the midst of world shaking.
Then the second twist is to Kierkegaard’s logic of faith, this time by way of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” Kiekegaard spoke of faith’s logic as a repetition. Lear contrasts this with the “failed repetition” (Lear’s words) of pathological repetition compulsions as studied in Freudian psychoanalysis. Repetition compulsions do not understand how to go on when something is lost. They mechanically repeat a past life in the present, ill-fitting, knotty, and frustrating to all involved. Melancholic relations to the past are one giant repetition compulsion. The melancholic’s very identity rigidly reasserts itself attached to the lost world though this world can no longer be (think of Make America Great Again – the melancholic repetition compulsion of U.S. white supremacy).
But mourning is essentially an associative and eventually playful process, despite the initial, fraught, heart-rending appearance to the contrary. People who learn how to mourn learn how to repeat life creatively, creating the ground for something new and, when mourning is complete, more spirited. This, Lear suggests, is actually a profound form of keeping the faith. Moreover, in an aside to Freud from Kierkegaard matching the aside to Kierkegaard he has just made from Freud, Lear thinks that if Freud had understood the positive repetition of keeping the spirited faith in our lost worlds by creating the ground for renewed ones, Freud could have been cued into what a healthy, not just pathological soul has structuring it: the healthy mind remains open through the structuring subjectivity of positive repetition.
All this Lear takes as inquiry into the logic of the soul understood as structured by its orientation toward the good, i.e., through practical reason. I will return to this, because here the distorting concepts of the Aristotelean tradition start to appear.
(3) Lear protects a space for the humanities by understanding them as the “playground” (his word) where we can exercise positive repetition around what it means to be human, by which he understands the search for the kalon. Apparently drawing on the kind of work Michael Thompson has been up to, Lear links the humanities to the study of the human in a normative sense. I wondered whether he (and Thompson) would be okay thinking of this through Sylvia Wynter’s notion of genres of being human too (I would think they’d have to be good with that). The idea here is that humanistic inquiry is inquiry into a being human to which we can aspire – travails, corruptions, distortions, and errors along the way included. Positive repetition is constitutive of this space when it is going well, because the kalon appears fragmentarily from pasts which are lost, worlds that are strange, and through the surfacing of our resistances and losses. In a broad sense, mourning is bound up with searching for the kalon in the humanities. But let’s not forget that to mourn is to live dying forward in a generous and hopeful orientation toward the future that comes after us.
Now one of the things that Lear thinks helps people remain oriented when they are lost is the unexpected and – it turns out – generous appearance of exemplars. Their presence helps us glimpse the kalon by presenting a fragment of possibility. The actual shows what is possible. Exemplars help us see what we might be missing. Given that in the context of searching, we may have lost our way – Lear’s central examples are of a time of a shaken world – exemplars are essentially interruptive (my word). They interrupt how we go on, even if we’re already lost, and shake us up to consider the kalon. We could be human like that.
Inside this space of the humanities, exemplars take on an important function in two ways. On the one hand, we consider exemplars in the subjects studied. We get to consider Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov or the chorus in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. These figures of imagination can interrupt our presumption beautifully and bring us to life in trying to make sense of them even as we feel that they may have slipped away in the past and perhaps (but perhaps not!) cannot quite figure how they relate to our world now.
On the other hand, the form of humanistic inquiry has exemplars in it, too: teachers. Teachers are the formal dimension of exemplarity in the humanities. They show us what is possible by actually being searchers for the kalon. We can put it this way: the subjects of the humanities may show us glimpses of the good life, but it is the teachers of the humanities who – when doing their job well – show us how to go on searching, that is, how to keep the faith.
In this context, Lear thinks that
Many of the teachers who influenced me were not interested in me at all. But in their teaching they put on display their fascination with and dedication to the area of study. There was something marvelous in their efforts to study and teach something they found marvelous.
(source)
In other words, some of the great teachers Lear knew did not care about him as a person; they may not have even known him; but they displayed to anyone who could be part of their humanistic space a set of profound practices of positive repetition.
On the face of it, Lear’s comment sounds right. If the great teachers Lear has in mind were like artists doing their thing, dancers dancing on a stage, athletes of supreme command of their sport, we might even say that these teachers couldn’t be interested in their students, for how could they accomplish their marvels if they had to keep thinking about the personal lives of their audience? But the normalcy of this way of looking at teaching, I believe, is due to distortion, namely, a distorted concept of learning.
So let me turn to that.
I mean these comments in a spirit of generosity. I respectfully disagree with my old teacher, Jonathan Lear. I loved his lectures enough to disagree with them:
One thing I thought during Lear’s lectures is that there is a dimension of the kind of soulful fluidity and goodness that he seeks that comes not intra-personally – his focus – but inter-personally. Good communication and difficult relating are their own positive repetition. On the face of it, his attention to teachers and exemplars might seem to acknowledge this, and so the discussion would be one of emphasis. But I do not think that it is. I think that the matter is one of logic.
First, though, a comment about Søren Kierkegaard. The interpersonal was always something S.K. appreciated, but it was disfavored comparatively in his work due to his melancholic disposition. Even Practice in Christianity, which comes closer than Works of Love to gathering the strange dialectic of the interpersonal, or the forms of his direct addresses that seek the single individual abstractly, even these still take a curve inward into intra-psychic space, always, either down or up, depending on the text. It’s not that S.K. did not advance the interpersonal, for he did, but that his own working through his past and his culture favored interiority and the intra-personal, something he imagined as a relationship with God.
I personally take this unacknowledged setting as a fragment of the society of self-possession that has a strong relation to European imperialism. S.K. was moral; yet, limitedly, he was a person of his time too. The castle is hard to dissolve, for its vertical privilege draws on the year 0 for Christiandom, and its practices were displaced in imperialism and capitalism. To make these arguments here would take us too far afield, but the point is that Kierkegaard is not the best guide to the interpersonal at a certain point.
Ironically, the same goes for Freud. And this is a second point before I get back to teachers. Whereas the soul in Freud’s work is completely bound up with attachments and intra-psychic formation due to family systems, the logic of the soul that Freud uses to understand these things is practical, based on a view of the world outside the soul as a collection of objects of desire and need. At the worst, in Freud’s theory of drives, the interpersonal is obliterated as something subsumed in the drive of the soul to get what it wants or to destroy things. A reader of Freud with a modest degree of empathy cannot honestly deny the profound solipsism in Freud’s view of the psyche.
Nor does Aristotle’s reliance on practical reason, including the place held within the good life for theoretical reason, help us grasp the interpersonal. Justness – dikaiosyne – does concern “wrongs to others” (to echo Michael Thompson again). But Aristotle’s understanding of justness is subsumed in the practical task of completing life in a good way for the agent. Justness is there to contribute to flourishing. And so too are friends, the one other interruption of the apparently interpersonal in the Nicomachean Ethics.
Things look different when we start equally from the interpersonal. Suppose that the interpersonal is basic to the grammar of being human, just as being practical or trying to figure out what to think (i.e., being theoretical) are. Then justness is the interpersonal under the aspect of practical logic. We still have to grasp the interpersonal itself.
This is what attention to relational reasoning does. It grasps how being with each other is constitutive of being human even before we ask how being with each other can be part of the good life. Again, relational reason is grammar in Wittgenstein’s sense, just as practical and theoretical reason are. We relate, we act, we think in dynamically interwoven ways. Being with, doing good, and finding the true are co-operative in and co-constitutive of human life. Persons in relationships, agents acting, and subjects cogitating are different aspects – fundamental modes – of being human.
If we take the interpersonal as our focus, then we have to move away from focusing on practical reason and so even the good in the first instance. We have to focus on relational reasoning and its knowledge by acquaintance, harmony and difficulty, its being-with not doing things or knowing lots of things, and so on. There’s a different way to read Kierkegaard critically and to criticize Freud through all of this. There’s a way to get outside the constitutive vanity of Aristotle too – the way one has always to avoid doing virtue ethics in such a way that it really is too focused on you and yours, on how well you are faring.
In any event, there’s as much to say about the space of play that can emerge between people in unconditional and respectful relating as there is to say about the travails of faith. What I like about the former is that it is more ordinary. But no doubt the “inter” and the “intra” are knotted, and when healthy, keep the sail to the mast in this cosmic wind that is being-toward-nothingness in love.
When Lear notes that the great humanist teachers did not care about him (and so needn’t have done so) but cared rather about the great teachings, this must be understood as a practical comment, for knowledge by acquaintance in the learning situation is not taken as necessary. Yet once we go the route of relational reasoning, including of the moral nexus R. Jay Wallace articulated, we really do have to care about the single individuals in our lives, and there is no teaching worth its name without that care.
This is what I want to focus on for the remainder of my reflection. I think Lear’s concepts are distorted by their omission of relational reasoning as a logic, and this applies to Lear’s understanding of teaching as a predominantly practical act contextualizing theory. While humanistic teaching is practical in Lear’s sense of searching for the kalon, it cannot be mainly so. Rather, (1) it must be largely interpersonal. Moreover, (2) the kalon itself must refer us back to the interpersonal; the good must refer us back to being-with, one might even say before and above all else.
(1) Humanists must care about the people facing them. This is because the primary form and content of the humanities is learning how to be human and the human is a social being. We should take Marx from the 1844 Manuscripts and the analyses of Lukács about seventy-five years later to heart here. But we should also take the Jesus of Kierkegaard’s passion for wisdom with us here too. And we should involve the family system and the goal of learning to relate to others non-narcissistically – we should take the great ache of mourning – with us also. To speak of the human as if the human were solipsistic is a profound mistake in grasping the human form of life. Not only is it alienated, it is alien in the ways Wittgenstein sensitized us to see in the later parts of the Philosophical Investigations. If a humanist does not care about the people facing them, they are in profound contradiction with their calling. We have to be remotely human to make a human life.
(2) When I was about twenty four, I wrote Lear – also my advisor Susan Neiman and another teacher Karsten Harries – that what I wanted above all when I entered graduate school and the discipline of philosophy was to find “wisdom, bright and beautiful.” I wrote it on a slip of paper, and I put it in the mailbox. It was part of my whimsical and kinda weird (I was a weird kid) way of thanking my teachers from undergrad. I now see that I was talking about the kalon. I may even have understood it through Lear’s seminar on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in Fall 1993!
Well, it was a quaint wish, some might say, and destined to be disappointed by the profession, if not the discipline, of philosophy. But that beautiful, bright life I imagined was a social one in which people live together well. And that meant in the first instance, that people were with each other. If the kalon is an enigmatic signifier for the fragmentary vision of how to be human, it is nothing if not a vision of being-with. How could we talk about a human life worth living in which our relationships to each other are not at stake?
Well, maybe we could: in capitalism, where relating is subverted by transacting; or in colonialism, where relationships are haunted by domination, disrupted by cycles of abuse, pre-empted by narcissistic self-possession (and that in capitalism too!). But these would not be kalon lives. The concept of “worth” here would suck.
Kalon lives, if I know anything at all, are made of relationships with each other, and that means the kalon must refer back to the interpersonal, and the good life we seek must get its bearing in part and at first through coming to terms with the reality of each other. The good is set up by the prior span – the dynamic tension – of being with, even in the structure of our minds, even in the structure of our language. And it makes sense that the last spirited act of many a life is a goodbye, for the thing outliving our lives is relationship, not action.
Great humanist teachers cannot avoid the reality of the people facing them. To do so would be to void their credibility and fail to keep the faith. A primary form of positive repetition in humanistic teaching is care for the people we face in the space of teaching. We cannot care for anyone if we don’t care about them. And them, you, the specific and singular person, as Kierkegaard did say well. The reason why is that we are people, not practical or theoretical objects.
We can ask why there still is this myth floating about of great teachers who are so self-absorbed that they are not plain and simple people facing other people as equals who deserve care first and foremost as real people. I have my hunches about why this myth persists, for I have never been cool with the pomp and circumstance of the Imperial universities that still set the score and pulse for so much anglophone academia. Those places are elite and flawed to their bones. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make the best of them and try to be well with each other in them. It means that flourishing through them takes some work to keep the faith, and even some mourning that the humanities have been betrayed in precisely the place where they are supposed to be most alive.
But, man, the playground of wisdom, bright and beautiful, is not in the elite, Imperial space of the university where teachers on stage have the license to not care about the very people who are their students. That just ain’t right. Someday, I hope we can say to that model of education, “good riddance.”
Image sources: personal photos taken at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Summer 2021
This is an installment of Into Philosophy.
ge·ni·al | ˈjēnyəl | adjective friendly and cheerful: waved to them in genial greeting. • literary (especially of air or climate) pleasantly mild and warm. DERIVATIVES genially | ˈjēnyəlē | adverb ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Latin genialis ‘nuptial, productive.’ The Latin sense was adopted into English; hence the senses ‘mild and conducive to growth’ (mid 17th century), later ‘cheerful, kindly’ (mid 18th century).
Revised June 12th, 2022, in Aunt Ruth’s home in New York City
