Abstract
The Humanities have traditionally held an important place in university’s curricula. Their import actually used to make all the difference between a university degree and an institute of technology one. Times have changed. Since the late seventies, Hayek’s “Chicago School” of economics has fostered a new agenda that basically has no patience for old-fashioned cultural issues lacking immediate cash value. Like all other public organizations, universities had to adapt and their well-documented transformation is now almost complete (Newfield in After political correctness: The humanities and society in the 1990s, 1995; Readings in The university in Ruins, 1996; Woodhouse in Selling out. Academic freedom and the corporate market, 2009). Institutes of higher education stand as solid pillars of the “knowledge economy,” but the more they became attuned to the requirements of the “market,” the less they could fulfil their initial agenda, which was to contribute to the common good and to foster personal growth, as well as granting some form of skillful practice. This paper is made of three main parts. After a short reminder on the current state of academic affairs, A. N. Whitehead’s (1861–1947) pedagogical vision is sketched, then his methodological recommendations are introduced, and eventually his emphasis on “duty and reverence” analyzed.
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Notes
One recognizes one of the three slogans of the 1984s Party: “War is peace; Freedom is slavery; Ignorance is strenght.” My reference to 1984 is intended to clarify the highly ambiguous use of academic freedom in the current corporate climate.
Ryle—who does not cite Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness—speaks of category-mistake: “A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks 'But where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University.'” (Ryle 1949, p. 16)
“What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art.” (OT3–4 = AE 1)
“English education […] suffers from a lack of definite aim, and from an external machinery which kills its vitality. […] It has not decided whether to produce amateurs or experts. The profound change in the world which the nineteenth century has produced is that the growth of knowledge has given foresight. The amateur is essentially a man with appreciation and with immense versatility in mastering a given routine. But he lacks the foresight which comes from special knowledge. The object of this address is to suggest how to produce the expert without loss of the essential virtues of the amateur.” (OT 26 = AE 13)
Cf. “The students are alive, and the purpose of education is to stimulate and guide their self-development.” (AE v) “Now the natural mode by which living organisms are excited towards suitable self-development is enjoyment.” (AE 31)
“Beautiful things have dignity. Enjoy the rhythm of your dancing and admire the beauty of your embroidery or your bookbinding. In whatever you do, have an ideal of excellence. Any separation between art and work is not only an error, but it is very bad business. Our brave allies, the French, have made Paris the art centre of the world. They have built up and maintain their large and lucrative trade in the decorative products of France, mainly by reason of three qualities which they possess. In the first place, they enjoy art themselves, and reverence it. In the second place, they have a tremendous power of hard work. And in the third place, every Frenchman, and still more every French woman, have within them an immense fund of common sense. The threefold secret is, Love of Art, Industry, and Common Sense.” (OT 66)
“Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art. […] The valuable intellectual development is self-development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. […] A saying due to Archbishop Temple illustrates my meaning. […]” (OT3-4 = AE 1)
Cf. “What I have said about art is a parable which applies to other occupations and other studies. It is more than a parable; it is the literal truth. The love of art is the love of excellence, it is the enjoyment of the triumph of design over the shapeless products of chance forces. An engineer, who is worth his salt, loves the beauty of his machines, shown in their adjustment of parts and in their swift, smooth motions. He loves also the sense of foresight and of insight which knowledge can give him. People say that machinery and commerce are driving beauty out of the modern world. I do not believe it. A new beauty is being added, a more intellectual beauty, appealing to the under standing as much as to the eye. (OT 67)
“The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumined with any spark of vitality. Let the main ideas which are introduced into a child's education be few and important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible.” (OT 5 = AE 2)
“The solution which I am urging, is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum.” (OT 13 = AE 6)
“The recourse to metaphysics is like throwing a match into the powder magazine. It blows up the whole arena.” (CN 29)
“The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.” (PR 5)
“As a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country […]. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are “geniuses” in the religious line […].” (James 1902, p. 6)
“There is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts:—The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.
—The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers. […] The man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself […]. He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.” (James 1902, p. 508; cf. p. 128)
“Where authority is unavoidable, what is needed is reverence. A man who is to educate really well, and is to make the young grow and develop into their full stature, must be filled through and through with the spirit of reverence. It is reverence towards others that is lacking in those who advocate machine-made cast-iron systems: militarism, capitalism, Fabian scientific organization, and all the other prisons into which reformers and reactionaries try to force the human spirit. In education, with its codes of rules emanating from a Government office, its large classes and fixed curriculum and overworked teachers, its determination to produce a dead level of glib mediocrity, the lack of reverence for the child is all but universal. Reverence requires imagination and vital warmth; it requires most imagination in respect of those who have least actual achievement or power. The child is weak and superficially foolish, the teacher is strong, and in an every-day sense wiser than the child. The teacher without reverence, or the bureaucrat without reverence, easily despises the child for these outward inferiorities. 'He thinks it is his duty to "mould" the child: in imagination he is the potter with the clay. And so he gives to the child some unnatural shape, which hardens with age, producing strains and spiritual dissatisfactions, out of which grow cruelty and envy, and the belief that others must be compelled to undergo the same distortions. The man who has reverence will not think it his duty to "mould" the young.” (Russell 1916, pp. 145–146) Cf. Woodhouse 1992, esp. pp. 142 sq.
Cf. Verlet 1993.
“With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.” (Chomsky 1967 citing Macdonald 1944; Cf. Gare 1996; Lacroix-Riz 2006/2010; Newfield 2003, 2008; Orwell 1949/2003; Turner 1985; Weber 2013)
One should refrain from using uncritically the term “elite,” that actually refers to the aristocracy. Anyone familiar with Aristotle’s political typology knows that, by definition, the aristocrats govern for the common good whereas the oligarchs are only concerned about their own power.
References
Abbreviations of Whitehead’s Works
AE—Whitehead, Alfred North, The Aims of Education and Other Essays [1929], New York, The Free Press, 1967.
CN—Whitehead, Alfred North, The Concept of Nature. Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919[1920], Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1964.
OT—Whitehead, Alfred North, The Organisation of Thought, Educational and Scientific, London, Williams and Norgate, 1917.
PR—Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927–28 [1929], Corrected Edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, New York, The Free Press, 1978.
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Acknowledgement
The author wishes to thank the Vice-President Research, University Visiting Lecturers’ Fund, Humanities Research Unit, Dean of Education, Department of Educational Foundations—and especially Dr H. Woodhouse for issuing the invitation and coordinating the event.
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Weber, M. “Freedom is Slavery”: A Whiteheadian Interpretation of the Place of the Sciences and Humanities in Today’s University. Interchange 46, 153–168 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-015-9239-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-015-9239-5