Kant: Ideas as "Purposeless Purpose"
SITARAM
http://www.egroups.com/group/Sitaram
http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?forum=philosophy&show=0&cid=88385
http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?forum=philosophy&cid=88383&show=0
http://web.utk.edu/~unistudy/values/ethics98/miller.htm
I. Pedagogy as a Disappearing Angel: An Introduction
My until now undeclared war with the Syracuse University administration
concerning assessment and accountability began in the Summer of last year
(1997). I may well have been a little late coming to the fray, given the recent
appearance of an enormous literature. The deluge has been in print, in the
media and on the web: for example, Robert Bellah's essay, "Class Wars and
Cultures in the University Today: Why We Can't Defend Ourselves," in the
July/August issue of Academe (1997); Frank Kermode's review of John Ellis'
book, a review in the August Atlantic Monthly, entitled "The Academy versus the
Humanities"; James Groccia's article, "The Student as Customer versus the
Student as Learner," in About Campus' May/June issue; Joel Gold's article,
"Student Evaluations Deconstructed," in the Chronicle of Higher Education of
September 12th; Mark Edmundson's article in the September Harpers, "On the Uses
of a Liberal Education as Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students"; the
article in the January 16th Chronicle that reports the statistical research by
Anthony Greenwald and Gerald Gilmore casting doubt upon the assumption of any
value in student assessment; the article in a recent education supplement to
the Sunday New York Times, "The Ivory Tower Under Siege"; the report on
"Academic Capitalism, Managed Professionals, and Supply-Side Higher Education,"
by Gary Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter, in last Summer's issue of the journal,
Social Text; and a number of remarkable recent books, including William Spanos'
The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, Bill Readings' The University in
Ruins, Donald Kennedy's Academic Duty, and Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating
Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.
I won't continue this litany. The data is widely known. The point is that it
seemed to me in retrospect that my little battle was not a limited warfare, not
a border skirmish in upstate New York. Indeed, from California and Texas to
Tennessee and Connecticut, many academic professionals had personally told me
that similar battles were breaking out everywhere. I suppose the convening of
this third conference on values in higher education under the aegis of the
thematic of assessment and accountability is itself testimony to a national
tension, if not an academic not-so-civil war. Nor may the issues at stake be
limited even to North America. At the end of the book, Pourparlers (translated
as Negotiations), by the French theorist, Gilles Deleuze, the author bemoans
the fact that education in France has turned to business for its models, that
the principle of "getting paid for results" has taken over. "School," Deleuze
writes, "is being replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous
assessment. It's the surest way of turning education into a business" (179).
This is what my colleagues at Syracuse thought was happening also on this side
of the Atlantic, which led me into the accountability and assessment fray.
It began as a result of my responsibilities at Syracuse University as a
so-called "teaching professor" and "mentor"-a phrase and term that I absolutely
repudiate as empty rhetoric and without relevance to the proper work of any
university. I had mounted a July conference of colleagues at a lovely lodge in
the Adirondacks. The white paper produced after three days by the two-dozen
faculty in the humanities was filled with contestation and passion concerning
the rhetoric of our central administration, especially having to do with
calling Syracuse the number one "student-centered research university" and
identifying students as customers and consumers, and faculty as service
providers. The Chancellor had just before our Summer meeting written a memo to
all faculty entitled: "Customer is an Eight Letter Word"! But this was not the
only provocation. There had been pressure on the faculty from administrative
intitiatives to identify desired learning objectives and means of assessing
outcomes, a requirement to name in advance behavioral goals in the teaching of
arts and ideas, that is, in courses whose aim it was precisely to remain open
to discovery and surprise. I was directed by my friends at the conference to
send our position-paper to the Chancellor, the Vice Chancellor, the Vice
President for Undergraduate Teaching, as well as to publish it on a web-page
connected with my professorship. The results could not have been anticipated!
I was summoned to lengthy conversations with the Vice Chancellor and the
Director of the Center for Instructional Development, attacked orally and in
memoranda from the central administrative officers concerning my competence in
the classroom, and addressed (or rather, dressed down) directly in three
lengthy letters from the Chancellor. It seemed to be a case of kill the
messenger! After the third letter from my Chancellor, I found myself in
exasperation writing these irrational words to the senior officer of my
University: "You cannot possibly understand the pedagogical perspectives of my
colleagues and me if you cannot understand the phrase 'we have nothing to
teach, no way to teach it, together with the obligation to teach.'" I meant, of
course, that there are certain subject matters in arts and ideas whose nature
is that they are not "things," no-things, and therefore the goals of education,
at least in these particular instances. cannot be served up in a priori desired
learning outcomes nor assessed as products or commodities by student-customers
at the end of fourteen weeks. I was thinking that in the teaching of matters
that are in principle imponderable and undecideable-subject-matters like truth,
beauty, goodness, not to mention meanings and gods-commodification and
thingification in assessment might be entirely inappropriate and beside the
point. Many recent articulations lay behind my thought, as, for example, Mark
Taylor's theological essay, "How to Do Nothing with Words," Mikkel
Borch-Jacobsen's chapter on Lacan by this very same title, and Jacques
Derrida's now well-known Jerusalem essay, Comment ne pas parler (translated as
"How to Avoid Speaking"). Also, I should add that I thought that in writing to
the Chancellor I was paraphrasing a sentence by Samuel Beckett. In any case,
that was the very day Professor Burstein, our host, asked me for a title for
this talk.
The timing turned out to be terrible! That that sentence written in haste and
in rage to my Chancellor was to become my title here was not felicitous, as
will soon be apparent from my narrative. The problem was that when I searched
for the reference it vanished. I could not find it anywhere! Was it a case of
faulty memory, senility, or one more instance of giving a title that one would
later regret, committing oneself to writing something that one could not write?
To be sure, Beckett said things something like what I thought I remembered. In
Krapp's Last Tape, Krapp says: "Nothing to say, not a squeak" (25). In All that
Fall, Mrs. Rooney says: "This is nothing ... nothing" (1960: 61). In Embers
Henry says: "Nothing, all day nothing. All day all night nothing. Not a sound"
(1960: 121). And there is the famous line in Waiting for Godot: "Nothing
happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" (27) There is also Estragon's
line: "Nothing to be done" (14). And Vladimir's line: "There's nothing we can
do" (44). They also have a back and forth in which Estragon says: "I tell you I
wasn't doing anything." And Vladimir says: "Perhaps you weren't. But it's the
way of doing it that counts" (38). None of this was what I sought. I had
thought that Beckett had somewhere said about his vocation as an artist in our
time: "Nothing to say. No way to say it. Together with the obligation to
speak." Apparently he had not. What was I to do for my Tennesse talk?
I remembered a friend, Ted Estess, Dean of the Honors College of the University
of Houston. He was an expert on Beckett and would surely know the referent and
would be able to help. I e-mailed him my dilemma and he responded immediately.
But his lead turned out to be completely off the mark. In fact, he could not
find it either, and he told me that I had probably made it up. No help!
But what is a professional in the lineage of Socrates worth if she or he cannot
make use of failure, or-to change the text but not the trope-is there not
teacherly wisdom in the implicit advice of Lear's fool?-"What can you do with
nothing, Nuncle?" This is when I thought of another dramatist, Italian rather
than Irish. I mean Luigi Pirandello. When he was writing Six Characters in
Search of an Author, he was presented in his imagination with six characters
but no plot. So he wrote a play about that. I could do the same. I could write
a speech about pedagogical responsibility and accountability using my
irresponsibility and non-accountability as an example, showing that I indeed
had nothing to say and no way to say it, together with the responsibility to
speak. So I went to work on this nothing, only to be disappointed again. When
will a person learn not to try to be clever or to force signification?
My nothing was itself naughted when my friend Estess wrote belatedly that he
had found the citation! It was in a dialogue that Beckett had with Georges
Duthuit. You may already suspect that I had known nothing about this source
which, nonetheless, I had remembered! In the conversation Beckett and Duthuit
are speaking about a surrealist French painter named Tal Coat, and they note
that this artist is not painting things, but rather no-thing. Being finished
with the ideals of realism, on the one hand, and symbolism and expressionism,
on the other, Tal Coat-according to Beckett-had "nothing to express, nothing
with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no
desire to express, together with the obligation to express." After Beckett says
this, his conversation partner, Duthuit, says: "Perhaps that is enough for
today" (Esslin 17).
Perhaps it should have been enough. After all, it comes close to the point that
I wanted to make about teaching arts and ideas. But it was not enough for me.
Who was Tal Coat, I wondered? I had never heard of this artist. There was no
listing of the name in any of the art books that I owned. The art librarian and
the professor of contemporary French painting at Syracuse University had
neither of them heard of such a figure. Nothing, again! All of this was
beginning to seem somehow like real research in the humanities, like real
teaching in the humanities, where one finally never can enjoy the luxury of
knowing the result, or at least one cannot ever know the final result.
Gratification and closure are infinitely deferred.
However, on the virtual reality of the World Wide Web I did find a flicker. A
word from an art dealer in Belgium confirmed that Tal Coat existed. He was born
in 1905 in Brittany, self-taught as a painter, little understood and known, and
disappeared mysteriously in 1985. He began as a realist and then became an
expressionist, but moved after the war to what the web page called "allusive
and fugitive manifestations" and monochromatic canvases in green, ochre and
black. He loved to paint the rocks near Chāteau Noir, the same rocks that
fascinated Cezanne. I could find little else. Things were dark.
(Incidentally, I hope that you will stay with me in this narrative. There is a
point here, or so I passionately hope! It's like teaching, isn't it? You never
know. You just try to be accountable to the material.)
Things were indeed dark. It was literally the darkest time of the calendar
year, the end of December, winter recess. I stopped trying. I tended to
personal affairs instead. In fact, I believe that I was giving up on my
original idea.
Christmas came with the usual tinsel and trimmings and other distractions. My
mother-in-law -being accountable and responsible in regard to my wish list to
Santa-gave me a new edition of the poetry of Wallace Stevens for Christmas. I
thanked her appropriately and turned right away to an assessment of its
contents by checking one of my favorite poems, "Angel Surrounded by Paysans."
In looking at the new critical apparatus by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson,
I discovered a surprising footnote to the poem (1004). There was Tal Coat! When
not trying, I found what I sought without knowing what I was seeking! The
experience I had had was somewhat like that of the poet. Sight unseen, Stevens
had in 1949 bought a still life of Tal Coat's from Paule Vidal, the daughter of
a dealer who owned the Librairie Coloniale in Paris. Though it was not what he
thought he was getting, Stevens became obsessed with the painting. He wrote to
Barbara Church (1977a: 654): "My Tal Coat occupies me as much as anything. It
does not come to rest, but it fits it." He named the painting "Angel Surrounded
by Paysans" and fourteen days after receiving the Tal Coat from Vidal, Stevens
wrote the poem of the same name and sent it to Nicholas Moore.
In the poem "the necessary angel of the earth" (i.e., poetry or art), through
whose imaginal reality one can "see the earth again," is characterized as an
"apparition" which, when we look for it, is "gone" (1975: 496-97). It is gone
like the Beckett quotation, like Tal Coat, like the no-thing of ideas and
imagination. Indeed, Stevens often wrote about this process of signification.
"Poetry," he said, "is a pheasant disappearing in the brush." (1977b: 173) It
is "the great cat that leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone" (1975:
264). It is like a "meteor" (1977b: 158), or like "an Indian [hidden] in his
glade" (1975: 412), or like "a woman writing a note and tearing it up" (1975:
488). Stevens also wrote: "I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of
inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes,/ The blackbird whistling / Or just
after" (1975: 93).
I was beginning to get the hang of this, but, like some stubborn literalist or
skeptic, I wanted to see the Stevens' painting in which the necessary angel
which disappears when one looks for it is actually a folded napkin, or a glass
of red wine, or (as Stevens thought) a Venetian glass bowl with a spray of
leaves in it. I suppose that it was to be expected that I could find it
nowhere. However, I did discover that Stevens' literary estate, including
pictures and paintings, had been lodged in the library at Trinity College in
Hartford. When I inquired after the image that I sought, a very helpful special
collections librarian there told me that the Stevens' materials were no longer
at Trinity. They had been moved to the Huntington Library in San Marino,
California. She gave me the phone number. After some negotiation with the
manuscript library at the Huntington, I was told that they would provide me
with a slide of the Tal Coat painting for ten dollars and for a promise that I
would use it only at this one lecture at the University of Tennessee, and with
appropriate reference to the Huntington Library. I wrote a check for ten
dollars and swore an oath, and so it was that I located the slide that you now
see on the screen Actually, what you see is a copy (slide) of a copy (painting)
of a copy (poem) of a copy (angel) of nothing, i.e., of the nothingness about
which I am talking, all the while remembering the advice of Martin Heidegger
that it is very difficult to talk about nothing, because in talking about it
one turns it into something (19), i.e., one turns it into a desired learning
objective and then it is assessable.
While searching for this image, I had located interesting comments concerning
it in many of Stevens' letters. For example, Stevens wrote to Paule Vidal in
Paris that he had heard that "Tal Coat is one of the few young painters from
whom it seems possible to expect a new reality" (1977a: 595). To Barbara Church
he commented about the painting, saying that "all of the objects have solidity,
burliness, aggressiveness. ... It contradicts all one's expectations of a still
life" (1977a: 654). To the French dealer the American poet wrote: "It is
obvious that this picture is the contrary of everything that one would expect
in a still life. Thus it is commonly said that a still life is a problem in the
painting of solids. Tal Coat has not interested himself in that problem. Here
all the objects are painted with a slap-dash intensity, the purpose of which is
to convey the vigor of the artist. Here nothing is mediocre or merely correct.
Tal Coat scorns the fastidious. Moreover, this is not a manifestation of the
crude strength of a peasant.... It is a display of imaginative force: an effort
to attain a certain reality purely by way of the artist's own vitality.... He
[Tal Coat] ... has the naturalness of a man who means to be something more than
a follower" (1977a: 655).
I hope by now you will begin to sense that all of the time-while appearing to
be reporting on the Beckett, Tal Coat, Stevens triangle-I have actually been
talking about teaching and about accountability and assessment in higher
education, especially in the humanities. So, teaching that is properly
accountable to itself and to its subject matter is like Tal Coat's painting. It
is the contrary of everything that one would expect, not solid but intense,
vigorous, scornful of the fastidious or the mediocre or the merely correct, a
display of imaginative force, strong and natural and vital, and never following
as a mere follower. It is the experience of a new reality, not what one desires
or expects. Again, Stevens writes to Church, now four years later: "[Tal Coat]
is so effective that the most brutal design gives one an unexpected
satisfaction" (1977a: 799), i.e., not a desired learning outcome, nor anything
that one can in principle assess.
II. What Counts? The Language of Accountability & Assessment
The errant wandering through Beckett, Tal Coat, and Stevens brings to mind a
story told to me by my former colleague, Professor Huston Smith. Huston had
taught Philosophy at MIT in the humanities program before coming to the
Department of Religion at Syracuse. One day he told me about having lunch with
a high-energy particle physicist at MIT. During the course of the lunch the
philosopher of religion and the post-quantum mechanics scientist discovered
that they had many perspectives in common on matters of cosmos, society, and
self. This did not much surprise Huston, but it did surprise the physicist.
What surprised Houston was the physicist's way of acknowledging his surprise.
The scientist said: "Why, there is only one difference between us. You don't
count!" So, counting is what counts. Assessment is what confirms value.
The play in language can provide wondrous discovery, i.e., learning and
unexpected surprise in learning outcomes. There are leaps in learning hiding in
words' metonymies, in the very words the people have used to name what they
think that they are naming when they name things. As Martin Heidegger says: "It
is not we who play with words, but the nature of language plays with us" (1968:
118-19). Wittgenstein says it this way: "A picture [ein Bild] held us captive.
It lay in our language, and our language repeated it to us inexorably" (115).
So, I propose for a moment to look at the two terms in the rhetoric of values
assessment in the contemporary university. Take the word and the idea of
"accountability," for example.
"Accountability." It goes without saying that both the noun and verb forms of
the word "account" come from the noun and verb forms of the word "count," which
means "enumeration" or " to compute." The family includes the words "counter"
(token) and "countless," as well as the words "putative," "amputate,"
"compute," "deputation," "dispute," "disputant," "impute," "imputation,"
"repute" and "reputation." Already one can see that there is some "fight" and
some disputed signification in the word before we even use it.
The base for the family is Latin putare, meaning (a) "to prune," (b) "to
purify," "to correct" (an account), therefore also "to count" or "calculate."
But whichever sense of putare our notion of "accounting" comes from, there is
implied some pruning (downsizing?) and some implicit political correctness or
Puritanical self-confidence. In the Sanskrit background, there is a relation to
the family of words from which we get the word "pave," Latin paure, meaning "to
beat" or "tread earth down to level it," i.e., to flatten (mediocrity,
democritization). There is also a connection to the Latin puteus, meaning "a
hole cut in the ground," especially "a well," from which Middle English has the
word "pit," meaning a "cavity." I'll return to this cave at the end.
The compounds of putare that are relevant to English are amputare, "to prune or
cut around (am- for ambi-, meaning "on both sides), so "amputation"; computare,
"to count" (intensive use of con-), hence "compute" means "really to count";
deputare, "to cut downwards," so to esteem, allot, depute, as in a deputy or
deputation; disputare, "to think about contentiously"; imputare, "to put into
the reckoning"; reputare, "to reckon or examine accounts again and again, to
think over, to credit, so to repute and reputation." There also belong to this
family "recount," to count again, or to relate, by way of French reconter,
since Old French conter became differentiated into French conter, to tell, and
French compter, to count (Partridge 124, 476).
Think of this verbal complex in relation to the words of the poet: "How do I
love thee? Let me count the ways." The poem actually means: Don't count! Write
a poem! And don't count on it! It's the love that counts not the counting. The
jazz standard says: "Will I be in that number when the saints go marchin' in?"
But in the singing there is implied the advice: Don't count! The number 144,000
is not a number, not a numbering. It means to discourage adding things up, like
merits. Luther mounted a reformation against that. It you start counting, you
might miss the rapture! (I'm speaking about education, not religion.)
"Assessment." There are similar problems with the language of assessment. If
one were to bring the perspectives from the business and commercial world, the
world of "total quality management," to bear upon assessment in the university,
then one might first observe that it is not very high quality management to use
the word "assessment" when what one really means is "evaluation." The term
"assessment" has become empty jargon, meaning nothing, a real miracle term.
The word has actually referred to courts (a judge assesses a fine) and taxation
(as in the assessment of property). In the former case, guilt is assumed and it
is just a question of how much one is going to have to pay. In the other case,
it is assumed that one should pay and it is just a question of how much. I well
realize that this term has passed from business and commerce, from law and
government, into the vernacular and that it merely means "evaluation." I
realize, too, that to say "evaluate" education and teaching is not a rhetoric
that is inflated enough to make university administrations sound like they are
doing something out of the ordinary. But does the university want to ignore
precision of ideas and language? Do we really want to use a term that carries
these negative, if unconscious, connotations about behavior? Are we accountable
about accountability? Are we willing to assess assessment?
There are some philosophers and theorists who have argued that language speaks,
not the people who use language. These thinkers have argued that, even if we
wanted to, we couldn't be Alice's Humpty Dumpty, who said that words would mean
whatever he intended them to mean. Confucius-during a moment of cultural
confusion in ancient China-called for a "rectification of names" in the land,
for a proper use of language, without which, he seemed to believe, there could
be no justice, or truth, or beauty.
The point about language is linked to the story of Huston Smith, who didn't
count, according to the pun of his MIT colleague! Smith has argued passionately
in his later life and writings for the important value of being accountable to
matters that are precisely un-countable. According to Smith, the
unassessables-at least in quantifiable and empirical terms-are the following:
(1) qualities, (2) invisibles, (3) meanings that are existential as opposed to
cognitive, (4) purposes that are metaphysical as opposed to teleonomical, and
(5) values that are normative rather than descriptive. In my view, the
experiences that some teaching professionals cherish for students have
precisely to do with quality, invisibility, existential meaning, metaphysical
purposes, and normative values. For these professors-on Smith's view-education
is in principle not assessable.
I should like for a few moments to amplify Smith's point in regard to our
conference thematic. For the sake of brevity, I will put these reflections in
the form of aphorisms or epigrams. I believe that it was Michelet who said that
an epigram is a half-truth so said as to irritate the person who believes in
the other half. Perhaps there is a half truth in Michelet's saying, but it is
not my purpose to provoke you, but rather to provoke thought, things to think
about and to talk about at the beginning of our deliberations together at this
conference.
III. Aphorisms
* There is too much talk about teaching these days. It all leads to
self-consciousness. No one knows what teaching is. It always must be thought in
terms of something else. Metaphor and metonymy are need. Imagination and
vision. Not counting and assessment.
* Teaching is like baseball. Even in the majors it's not baseball very often.
Most of the time it's pretty boring. But sometimes it is baseball. And then it
is really something. While waiting for it to be baseball, what does one do? One
plays second base as best one can. Outcomes assessment implies that the value
in baseball is that it be baseball all the time. It also implies that the
players can control it. But that's not the way things are. Even for the pros.
People who call for outcomes assessment don't understand the game. They don't
understand the nature of the game.
* There are two things that one learns from baseball: (1) You don't have to
swing at every pitch. (2) You know when a pitcher (professor) is tiring when
the ball starts rising. It takes a lot of energy and concentration to keep it
down. Letting it soar is easy.
* What is impossible is to undertake an evaluation of value in higher education
if one takes one's eye off the subject matter and puts it instead on the
performance of the teacher and/or the student. Education is not the passing of
information from one person who has it to someone who does not. It is not the
trading of databases. Rather, the subject matter is a vessel into which the
professor and the student place themselves together. And then they see what
happens. They observe and take note. It is like alchemy. One cares for the
process in the alchemical vessel. It is like two people being in love.
* To speak of "improvement" in teaching is nonsense if the eye is really on the
egos of the professor and the student rather than on the subject matter. Do we
"improve" the subject matter by our activity? The irony is that attention to
desired learning outcomes and to outcomes assessment produces in fact just what
it sets out to eradicate: namely, emphasis on the professoriat rather than on
the student. Assessment is a narcissistic endeavor. It is not student-centered.
It puts the focus of consciousness on questions like "How am I doing?" and "How
can I improve?" We are only student-centered when we have enough regard for the
student to focus on the subject matter and to trust students to take care of
themselves. They are not stupid. And they are not children.
* In education, as in love, sometimes the only way to improve the quality and
value of education is to stop focusing on oneself and to stop asking, "Am I
doing it well?" Such ego-consciousness can ruin learning just as it can be a
pain in the neck to the lover. When the child says, "Look, Ma, I'm dancing!"
she or he is no longer dancing. It is the same with teaching and learning, not
to mention loving. If you ask about it, you are not doing it.
* Teaching in the humanities is like the fire-consumed stick in Buddhism. A
disciple once asked the Buddha how one should approach his teachings, given
that the overall aim of the Buddha's teaching was non-attachment, including
non-attachment to the teachings! The Buddha replied that his teaching was like
a stick that keeps the fire going, stirring the coals, until the stick is
itself consumed by the fire. The stick disappears, like Wallace Stevens' angel.
There is nothing in the end to assess, if the teaching is really successful.
* Confucius said: "Do not wish for quick results, nor look for small
advantages. It you seek quick results, you will not attain the ultimate goal.
If you are led astray by small advantages, you will never accomplish great
things" (Smith 159). There are no quick results in education. If an educator
seeks a quick result, the ultimate goal of great teaching is not accomplished.
No assessment is worthwhile until many years have passed. And then the need for
assessment has passed anyway.
* The great teachers-Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu,
Maimondies, al-Ghazzali, etc.-
zerkanX
> the ultimate goal of great teaching is...
Not what you learn but how you learned.