Links
Archives
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
|
Purity and Worldiness Here’s a sentence from Frank Kermode: “The humanities are corrupted in the academy, the institution intended to do society’s purest and most serious thinking for it.” Every person who’s been through a Ph.D. program in English at any point during the last two decades has been primed to respond to Kermode’s sentence in the following way: “What do you mean, ‘pure’? Sounds fascistic to me. And ‘corrupted’ in terms of what Eurocentric standard? ‘Intended’? Don’t you need to consider who’s doing the ‘intending’ here? The absence of any radical interrogation of the positionality of the speaker of such a sentence...” Allow me, however, to tiptoe away from this inquisitor and get back to business. Today in the academy, worldliness, not the purity Kermode has in mind, is all. There is a word for reflective twenty-first century people who successfully resist worldliness, and that word is monks. If you want to see a true commitment to purity and seriousness of thought, go to Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia and watch white-robed benedictines in their silent ora and labora, their lectio divina, their gregorian cantus. [Yes, I know that worldly people can only picture monks as gnomes guzzling bourbon while they stir the monastery’s fudge. This sort of perceptual limitation is the reason we call worldly people worldly.] But do not go to the American university or college in search of unworldly - or even ambivalently worldly - contemplatives. Some university presidents exemplify the unapologetic acquisitiveness and the simulacral mode of being of the worldly citizen of twenty-first century America. Intellectuals embody a kind of mental mediation between these two extremes of worldliness and purity - in this world but not fully of it, they bring an honest critical consciousness to bear on the benighted things and personalities of contemporary existence. They share with monks a disgust with the greed ("The University News has obtained the list of [University of Missouri] administration raises that provoked the expulsion of a Kansas City Star reporter from a faculty senate meeting last month and triggered outrage among many faculty members," reports a college news service on a story that began to emerge at the end of last year. "The list revealed that during the last two years administrators have given themselves raises of up to 110 percent while virtually freezing the salaries of those who teach classes..."), the arrogance, and the ugliness of the profane world. “The intellectual,” writes Theodor Adorno, “particularly when philosophically inclined, is cut off from practical life: revulsion from it has driven him to concern himself with so-called things of the mind.” But this withdrawal also drives the intellectual’s critical power: “Only someone who keeps himself in some measure pure,” Adorno continues, “has hatred, nerves, freedom and mobility enough to oppose the world...” In theory, the university and in particular its humanities division should be just the place for the properly ambivalent, semi-withdrawn intellectual to struggle with this problem and possibly generate serious thought that opposes what we ought to oppose (and celebrates what we ought to celebrate) in the world. This, again, is what Kermode has in mind. But most American universities have no place for, have no idea of, have no pre-existing models of, the quasi-worldly contemplative truly serious about intellectual honesty and moral scrupulousness. For them, the odd cropping up of such a person in their midst -- the sudden appearance of, say, Iris Murdoch or Simone Weil -- would be an embarrassment, an intolerably nonstandard deviation from the norm. To be sure, every American college or university campus today is expected to have somewhere on the faculty its very own Professor Peculiar - usually a Jew with funny hair like Harold Bloom or Albert Einstein. But this is in the way of a mascot. Truly serious contemplatives on campus get smacked right and left - on one side, the consultant-professoriate disdains their messy dressing habits and relative indifference to status and salary; on the other side, the cultural theorists revile their relative withdrawal from political activism and their efforts to retain a certain innocence (an innocence the cultural theorists dismiss as faux-naivete) in a degraded world. Meanwhile, though, as Andrew Delbanco suggests, benighted contemporary English professors themselves begin to look like a religious sect, albeit a dwindling one: “English today exhibits the contradictory attributes of a religion in its late phase—a certain desperation to attract converts, combined with an evident lack of convinced belief in its own scriptures and traditions. ...The sad news is that teachers of literature have lost faith in their subject and in themselves.” The even sadder news is that although students continue to come to the university with the “human craving for contact with works of art that somehow register one's own longings and yet exceed what one has been able to articulate by and for oneself,” writes Delbanco, this craving now, more often than not, goes unfulfilled, because the teachers of these students have lost faith. |