On teaching and on appropriateness.

I am an open, enthusiastic person. I make a lot of jokes without pausing for a laugh (this style seems particularly liable to misunderstanding by the Midwestern-born. I'm not sure why). I have something to say in response to most questions and comments, and generally I take everything to be related to everything else. So it happens, naturally enough, that I am just that way as a teacher. I discipline myself mainly with syllabi and prepared notes. The occasional self-injunction little avails; like Jane Eyre picturing herself as a missionary in India married to St. John Rivers, I can do it for a little while and without noticing revert to being as I am and acting as I act -- and like Jane Eyre I'm sensible enough to accept that, however deeply I may wish to change, and however much I admire those who do things in another way, that way is too foreign to my nature to figure in my long-term plans. Efforts to enshrine it there end, soon, in self-reproachful reversion. Jane Eyre considers the constant effort of will required, and realizes that even if to live so would be finer than to live according to her nature, she could not succeed, certainly not without a stronger force (St. John Rivers would do nicely) heating and beating and hammering her metal always into that other shape. So it goes. Jane Eyre is choosing how to live her own life. But my decision directly affects many more people than myself, and perhaps impacts some of them more than it does me. So it is particularly incumbent upon me to ensure that I do my best not just as I conceive it, but according also to standards that are set by others and not engrained in me, by which I have agreed to work. I do. I put a lot of work into syllabus, I prepare material thoroughly before class and write out notes for at least the most important points I would like to get to, I solicit conversation and try to manage the debate. That last is in fact not a part of -- though not incompatible with -- the usual standards for teaching such a class as I have been teaching. In a class of up to -- oh -- twenty, perhaps thirty students, student participation is very much the norm. In a larger class, like mine, too large for us to all face each other, it is not so common to devote most of the class to discussion. The students determine the shape and ambiance of any class that is not pure lecture or nearly, and the more students, the harder it is for the teacher to give them all voices. I have been lucky enough to teach remarkably good students always, so far, throughout my brief career. This term in particular they were lovely (though I suppose I say the same nearly every term). Under my supervision, the students built a running conversation. It did absolutely require my supervision, and on occasions when I let control out of my hands I erred. But it was their conversation. I was more than just another participant, but I wasn't on high or separate, either. I was trying to create a space where we could say anything (relevant); and then trying to manage the process of figuring out collectively what counted as relevant. Here is where we come to the topic of the title. I am always eager to let students know they should not be embarrassed to speak: that their comment is likely not "stupid," since if they are unsure of something probably several other people are, but also that a stupid comment is nothing to be ashamed of -- only something to be ashamed of repeating over and over without learning from it. To this end I used my nature, and showed by example that you can do something silly at one moment and be clever and helpful the next. So I made up silly examples, and used my students in them.* I brought in occasional props. I cold-called and told them just to say if they hadn't done the reading. Twice or three times I asked them all to close their eyes and raise their hands if they believed this or were persuaded by that. I often took attendance by having them call out their own names, so that they would learn each other's names and perhaps get more used to speaking in front of each other. I made jokes constantly (that is, I articulated at least half of the jokes that I wanted to make). I declared "Experimental Fridays" and changed things from time to time. And I told them stories. I told them stories about myself, sometimes true, sometimes untrue or elaborated, sometimes patently, outrageously false. I performed the just-linked monologue for them one Experimental Friday, and finished to an ovation, lots of questions, lots of "great class!"es, and came home to four additional, e-mailed "great class!"es. I would never, ever have felt comfortable doing that with a class that hadn't already been interested and willing and comfortable. (Of course I told them at the end that Daniel Dennett had really written the story and not me.) I let my guard down. That, in itself, is what I have struggled with. No particular possible inappropriate behavior. That I let my guard down so with them. That I told them things about myself when they asked me, or for the sake of examples. I wanted to open them up to talking about what they cared about, and to a large extent I succeeded. Several students have told me that this was their favorite class, and one said that writing the final paper had been the most intellectually engaging project of their freshman year. But I don't know. Socrates made himself the show and managed to draw people in to philosophy. It can be done. But I am no Socrates. I do not regret this, not knowing it's so because I do other things besides initiate challenging conversations with people I encounter. (For one, I go home to h, while Socrates does not appear to have been an exemplary family man.) But even Socrates sometimes was too much the show. Think of the view, crudely expressed in the pseudo-Platonic Theages and sophisticatedly in any number of Plato's dialogues -- the Apology and Alcibiades's speech in the Symposium -- that Socrates is magic. Plato rationalizes his magic to logos, to reason, to argument, to things in principle accessible to all of us by our humanity. Or think simply of the terrific differences between Xenophon's and Plato's Socrates. Xenophon's Socrates is magic mainly in being so outstandingly in self-control, in his being so temperate, so moderate, so tolerant of hardship. This isn't unrelated to Plato's view -- both present him as exceptionally the master of himself and his circumstances. And Aristotle's casually proposing him at Posterior Analytics 97ab? for an archetype of greatness of soul suggests that mastery and majesty remained dominant impressions of him. This is sort of drawing people in, but sort of only drawing them to oneself. And even if Socrates succeeds, surely there's something amiss. It might possibly be effective to interest people in a discipline by showing that some people engaged therein are interesting; would that justify it? It was never my intention to do that. But I worry that I may have depended too much on my nature in teaching, and to some students made myself a sideshow, when I only meant to be a ticket-taker. * Along the lines of "Now, S believes in witches, and I don't. So when the crops fail and my sheep are stricken down, and S says it must be because of a spell or a curse, I don't consider that an adequate explanation. But why not? How could S convince me? Well, he could bring me records of all the alleged curses laid on by witches and of all the agricultural problems in the neighborhood, and pick out patterns of similarity. Or he could show me a witch casting a spell, and hope I learn from experience what I wouldn't believe based on testimony. He could point to a particular witch who is now casting a particular spell, predict that it will be fulfilled, and point out when it is. Or he could show that the presence of witches helps us explain other phenomena, too. For instance, on my account, the crop failures have resulted from unexpected weather patterns, the sheep illnesses from bad luck, and the concurrent phenomenon of many local young women acting suddenly quite different than usual in similar ways, I attribute to a trip the girls took together that frightened them or some water they drank that was poisoned. S explains them all with witches. His explanation is certainly simpler and more elegant than mine, and it coheres perfectly well with all the facts we've given ... So should I start believing in witches?"

On the subtle delights of teaching.

One of my favorite moments is always the moment when I can shrug and say, "Well, one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens and have my students get it.

On personality in philosophy, and once more on not liking Aristotle.

One of the things I've always loved about philosophy is how personal it is -- I mean that we all feel as though we knew many of the authors with whom we spend so much time. Some are naturals for perceived intimacy: the eloquent and prolific correspondent Seneca; Plato, arguably the single greatest contributor to literature ever; Augustine who puts his mind on display and practically pleads with you to riffle through the pages. Others offer themselves via a mysterious mix of writing style and idea patterns. There's dry, haughty Aristotle who only talks about aristocratic pastimes and occasionally says something that's not really a joke but you're pretty sure he thought it was; and airy, cocky Hume; Hobbes how self-satisfiedly sour; Spinoza whom you can see packing his straw-frail, ecstatic mysticism into bricks of theorems to build castles in the air ...It does prejudice one, though. Of course, thinking that women and non-Greeks are naturally slavish since congenitally missing the rationally commanding part of the soul -- when you've spent twenty years with Plato, who explicitly argues that slaves learn in just the same way as Socrates, whose republic contains no slaves and a ruling class whose women are on an absolutely equal footing with the men (though he does expect them to be fewer in number), whose Academy (supposedly) admitted female students! -- will tend to leave a bad taste in people's mouths regardless of their prior feelings towards you.

On babies.

My niece is nearly five months old, and every time I see her (usually every few weeks for a few days) her cognitive capacities are transformed from where they had been. Her body has changed, too: she grows, her legs thicken in preparation for eventual use, she makes new sounds, she sleeps through the night. (I.e. one six-hour stretch in the midst of one-to-two-hour chunks.) But even her bodily developments are in tandem with cognitive leaps and bounds. When my brother says "she's just discovered her legs this week," he means: her legs have come under her more direct and willed control. When she makes sounds that sound responsive, we know she isn't near speech yet, but also that this is how she becomes ready: she moves the muscles of her throat and jaw and tongue and sees what happens, and learns from it. That she has begun the years-long stage of grabbing at things means not that the muscles of her fingers and wrists have developed and not that her bones are stronger -- not mainly -- but that her brain has developed acces to new means of interacting with the outside world.

I won't say as much about the tiny teeth she can feel still perhaps months from breaking through the gum, but most of her development is in coordination and control. Her nerves are still learning to connect her muscles and vessels and organs and brain. She is in the process of what Descartes describes in Meditation Six, the pervasion of body by mind. No wonder that the older philosophers thought the soul had to be infused into the body, watching a small child; only that they believed it could be infused all at once.

On space and spaciousness.

I grew up in Brooklyn and have mostly lived in urban areas, and when I am away I notice how my sense of space has been formed by that experience. In Chicago and Toronto the streets seem impossibly broad, there are no tall buildings in Paris, any place not on the water feels lonely and stranded. I don't know how to look at a field; they all look the same to me, though trees and flowers don't. I hate the way farm animals smell and the centralized planning (via zoning laws, community boards, and community pressures) of practically every American suburb.

I have lived in smallish towns of ~20,000-30,000 and found them more congenial: a small walkable area, streets and structures grown up haphazardly, reflecting their centuries; quiet spaces discovered only by the diligent; people of different ages passing and mingling on the streets; real neighborhoods, different in feel from block to block; and much else that is inaccessible but impressive. Distinctly, an overall devotion to pleasant liveability -- by my parochial urbanite's standards, anyway.

These towns (college towns, I should note) have accepted the principle of organized space and spontaneous growth. That is the city principle -- the suburbs are arranged so as to ignore unintended consequences, but cities live and die on the unintended, the planners outwitted by time. When I say that cities grow spontaneously I of course do not mean that they have wills of their own, but that order simply can't be imposed thoroughly for long on such a large number of people and such a large number of groups of people. You can't control all of the changes all of the time.

So the spontaneity of urban growth after all has something of freedom in it. Like weeds bursting through the cracks in a sidewalk the citizens reshape what was given to them.

On the demon of migraine.

When I was young and foolish, I held two beliefs so false that I wonder I wasn't disillusioned earlier:

(1) that there was something romantic about suffering and incapacity, perhaps about desperation, something artistic;
(2) that migraines were a species of headache.

Now I know that migraines are radically heterogeneous. I also know that any way you slice it, they steal a whole day from you: the episode itself may last as little as fifteen minutes, but you're too drained for anything else. I have had blind-vision migraines (by far the least bad kind in my experience), extreme sensitivity to light and sound migraines, aphasic migraines, abdominal migraines; migraines that overcome me with premonitions of death, and migraines that lack that shred of panic; migraines in class, at friends', on the street, at home, at all times of day and year in various patterns of frequency on three continents. I have lost nearly a month running to migraines, at one time. I went on anti-migraine medication after that, and it helps -- sometimes I think something will become a migraine, and then it doesn't -- but they are still migraines when they come. I have had migraines that lasted less than half an hour, all-day migraines (more rarely, thankfully; but this is one), interrupted migraines that resume later in the day or in the week, migraines whose full onset I was able to stave off until I got to a safer place, migraines whose onset came at an incredibly inconvenient time (they can be induced by stress, you know), migraines of whose onset I was unaware until I tried to speak and my interlocutor responded with concern as if to some garbled gobbledygook, tried to look and realized my unfocused eyes saw nothing but bright light wormed through with threads of still brighter light, heard a telephone ring down the hall and wept with the pain. I had my first migraine, blind with vision, only a few hours before my Greek class read Acts (4:19??) on Saul's blind vision onthe road to Damascus. I have been able to conduct conversations during a migraine and been felled in the middle of a thought. I have returned obsessively to the same thought and been unable to maintain any train of thought at all, and also I have had lulls during which my brain is less affected. I have told people it was nothing and I did not need their help, and begged them not to leave me. I have not been improved. I have learned only the two things, that suffering is pain, not art, and that migraines are not per se headaches. The first I already knew and the second Oliver Sacks could have taught me.

On September 11th.

My godmother was there. I didn't know for sure until the weekend, when she still hadn't been seen. Aleha hashalom, requiescat in pace.

My father was there the first time. By 2001 he worked in midtown. My mother and sisters were up in the East 70s and 80s.

My cousin was working at the Woolworth Building. She got out of the subway at Park Place or Chambers, saw the crowds flowing away from the surface, and got right back on the train.

My high school best friend hadn't started school yet and was going to Century 21, but she wasn't hurt.

And I was in Connecticut, in class, not understanding, even when a girl whose father worked at the Pentagon got up in the middle of class and walked out. Not understanding, I thought it was a movie at first (yes, just like the Onion says); I couldn't think what it meant. I was ashamed not to be in New York. I was only two weeks gone and going back the next week for Rosh HaShanah. I did go back, by then with extensions on all my papers and a never-taken-up invitation to group therapy. I got so much dust in my lungs over three days in Brooklyn Heights I was sick through Yom Kippur. It was everywhere. You could practically see it on the melted candles and missing persons signs all over the Promenade and all over downtown Manhattan. I walked the Bridge like a pilgrim among pilgrims, some in facemasks for protection as we got closer to the site. Everything was closed. The closest to feeling better I've ever come was walking home over the Bridge (the car side!) during the blackout two years later, when the crowds of strangers -- to each other, too -- were all talking and laughing, inviting each other to spontaneous who-knows-how-long-the-freezer-will-be-out barbecues and corner singalongs with guitar. Then too nobody could reach anybody, but it was all right.

*

Tuesday, September.

Tuesday.
September -- starting school.
I was reading: Plato,
Thucydides, and the
Iliad.
Living in them, really,
since I never wanted
anything but that, but
that one pure and simple
freedom to live in books.

I was thinking: men don't know
what they want, and so they
put up shapes in the sky,
because they've seen the shapes
that are already there,
that the gods, perhaps
that God has put up there,
in the stars.

But men again
perhaps didn't know what
they wanted, perhaps knew
and acted as they did
out of purest malice --
I cannot say, I am
no moral theorist --
and took them right back down --

the shapes --
not understanding
that they were already
back up there in the stars:

the Twins.

(Jan. 14 and 16, 2005)

After.

Newish movies have become old movies,
Instantly dated by catastrophe.
The skylines of their cities look so young -–
Subtly unrecognizable, solid
In a way that suggests nothing so much
As a sublimation. You can't believe
You didn't see it coming, looking now.
They were so ripe for it. Asking for it.

I had forgotten how they used to be
All in one piece like that, all in one place.

Anaxagoras says nothing ever
Comes to be or passes away, but has
Its elements reapportioned. The earth
In them has settled back into the earth,
The water into the river, the air
Has risen through the air we breathe, their fire
Returned unto the everlasting fire.

(November 10, 2005, during the commercial breaks of a movie ("When Harry Met Sally ..." yet) filmed partly in New York between 1970 and 2001)

Still.

Without comprehension
I cry every time I remember
or hear mentioned
even elisions
and mere allusions
to collusions
that bore collisions
into buildings
(decidedly,
suicidally
lily-gilding)
that September.

(January 5, 2006)

On what I do.

I thought it might be time for a post that at least alluded to ancient philosophy, so here is a very brief introduction to What I Do, pitched to the intelligent layman with more patience than experience with philosophy.

I am a graduate student in ancient philosophy, writing primarily at the moment about the ethical system of the Hellenistic (3rd-1st centuries BCE) Stoic school. My dissertation considers some aspects of self-sufficiency in the Stoic understanding of happiness.

The Stoics are extremists on many issues, and fond of paradox; they believe that knowledge is sufficient for virtue and that virtue is sufficient for happiness.

I'll have to interrupt here for a terminology note on "sufficiency." Take the conditional "p-->q," which should be read: "if p, then q," where p represents a proposition such as "Lindsay is older than Sam" and q represents a proposition such as "Sam is younger then Lindsay." In this instance, "p-->q" is all right, since it really is true that if Lindsay is older than Sam, then Sam is younger than Lindsay. Anyway, the terms "necessary" and "sufficient" are defined as follows:

If "p-->q," then: p is sufficient for q: that is, p's being the case is sufficient to ensure that q is the case -- not causally, but logically. And q is necessary for p: that is, if p is to be the case, then q must be the case.

So if virtue is sufficient for happiness, that means that where virtue is present, there too must happiness be. But that's crazy, isn't it? -- Can they really mean to say that a virtuous person being tortured on the rack with no obvious way out is happier -- not just better, but happier -- than a wicked person who is healthy, wealthy, comfortable, and content?

They do! This is where self-sufficiency comes in. An orthodox Stoic would tell you that only your mind -- Epictetus emphasizes especially the faculty of decision -- is within your control, and not anything outside of your mind; further, that nothing that isn't within your control can ultimately affect your happiness. So the virtuous person on the rack has the internal resources to remain happy, while the content wicked one lacks them.

If you haven't spent a lot of time with the Stoics, or maybe if you have too, you probably want to get off the boat here. I know I was repulsed when I first read Epictetus, towards the end of my Introduction to Ancient Philosophy class, as a freshman in college. I was fascinated with the Pyrrhonist Skeptics, fired up to defend Epicurean hedonism and atomism, willing to reread Plato over and over again. Aristotle and the Stoics left me cold.

I'm not exactly sure when or why this changed. Probably my enthusiasm for early Plato, whose theses are defended more steadily by the Stoics than by middle-period Plato, had something to do with it. The Apology* changed my life when I first read it, a very long time ago now. Perhaps I'll post about that some time.

Anyway, that's enough for now.



* Apologies for the fussy, stilted, dating-to-Teddy-Roosevelt-times Jowett translation. If you're at all interested, pick up the excellent Hackett Five Dialogues, translated by G.M.A. Grube, which you can find used for under five bucks but shouldn't run you more than fifteen or so even full price. Thank God for Hackett Publishing Company.