Humanities on Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

Avem nevoie de educație umanistă

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 13:15:06 +0000

Hai să ne uităm la un screenshot al unui articol peste care am dat nu demult:

Articolul e de pe sfatulparintilor.ro și este neschimbat până azi, doar că are de două ori mai multe vizualizări decât atunci când am făcut screenshot-ul.

O să scriu aici câteva observații pe marginea fragmentului de articol care e vizibil aici (n-am răbdare să-l mai citesc o dată pe tot), ca punct de pornire pentru o discuție mai largă despre umanism și necesitățile „de suflet” ale oamenilor din ziua de azi. Fără vreo ordine anume:

„a performa” nu există în limba română, pare un englezism
„copilul pare neinteresant de școală” – ar rebui să fie „neinteresat”. Ar putea fi o greșeală de tastare, dar e ciudată în context
primul paragraf e plin de truisme, probabil în lipsa unor idei mai bune de începere a articolului
„fiecare copil este unic” – refrenul ultimei perioade
feng shui (din titlu) – aliniere la new age-ul cultural actual

O să adaug ceva care nu e evident din fragment: articolul recomandă studierea „coloanelor destinului” copiilor, din punct de vedere feng shui, ca să descopere aptitudinile și posibilitățile copilului.

Nu e un articol unic pe la noi: am văzut tone de cărți și articole în care tot felul de neaveniți își dau cu părerea despre cum îți poți îmbunătăți viața, relațiile, performanța la locul de muncă, despre cum poți deveni fericit sau sănătos. Ce frapează aici e doar faptul că o persoană ușor agramată dă lecții despre educarea copiilor, fără să dea vreun semn că s-a împăcat foarte bine cu educația proprie. Oala spartă îi dă ciobului lecții despre cum să fii întreg.

Însă tendința e cea generală: se caută răspunsuri la problemele vieții, dar se caută răspunsuri facile, care nu necesită prea mult efort. Se caută înțelepciune orientală, pentru că a noastră s-a cam „fumat”. Se pune accent pe unicitatea fiecăruia. Se caută ceva profund, care să vorbească despre natura umană, care să ne spună cine suntem și ce facem cu viețile noastre, de ce suntem săraci, de ce suntem bolnavi, de ce ne eșuează relațiile, de ce n-avem succes, ce ne împlinește, ce ne face fericiți.

Ceea ce e normal: oamenii nu sunt roboței. Tocmai de-asta avem la școală materii umaniste, de-asta învățăm literatură, filozofie și alte bazaconii „inutile”: pentru că sunt inutile în majoritatea carierelor, dar utile pentru formarea ca oameni.

De fapt, mint. Avem materii umaniste pentru că am avut și până acum materii umaniste. Materiile umaniste sunt tradiționale, deci sunt importante, deci trebuie făcute (cam ca integralele la matematică). Sunt un reflex – facem literatură, istorie și filozofie pentru că s-au tot făcut. Pentru că ne oferă „cultură”. La ce e bună cultura? La a fi o persoană cultă, evident. Știința te face de succes. Cultura te face cult. A fi cult e un lucru bun, dar enervant pentru ceilalți. Toată lumea știe asta.

Așa că discutăm de programe, de ce se dă la Bac, de canoanele literaturii și de faptul că ești incult dacă nu i-ai citit pe Balzac, Tolstoi și Pleșu. Așa că materiile umaniste își pierd din ce în ce mai tare relevanța pentru că nu-și pot exprima rolul real în viața noastră și utilitatea.

Dar dacă ar fi să mă uit mai atent la ce face umanismul, aș spune că ne explică lumea. Nouă, personal. Știința descrie ce se întâmplă sau se poate întâmpla în anumite condiții, dar umanismul ne ajută să ne adaptăm la lume ca persoane, să reacționăm când dăm de ceva nou. Ne oferă ceva sufletesc, adică fix ce caută toți new age-iștii de azi, zăpăciții care vor o „medicină pentru suflet”, cei care citesc cărți de dezvoltare și de încurajare personală, cei care pun mâna pe toate cărțile scrise de anonimi care-și dau cu părerea despre suflet.

Doar că atâta timp cât umanismul continuă să se comporte superficial și închistat, o să respingă. „Oamenii nu mai citesc [și e de rău]” – alt refren al generației, pe lângă ăla cu „fiecare om e unic”, care e menit să te facă să te simți special, în ciudat faptului că mai sunt câteva miliarde de unici pe planetă. Nu e clar de ce e rău că nu citesc, în afara vagului concept că sunt mai inculți, deci e de rău.

Cred că ar merita reformată predarea umanismului în școli, pornind de la utilitatea lui pentru persoană. Ce înseamnă asta? Nu să formăm caractere prin școală, că nu suntem la făbricuța de oameni – ci să începem să le prezentăm elevilor concepte și idei. Să-i expunem unei lumi mai vaste decât cea cu care ar fi probabil să se confrunte în mod obișnuit. Să-i provocăm să gândească, să vadă dedesubturi. Dacă au crize existențiale la 30 de ani, să aibă măcar ceva de ce să-și aducă aminte, ca să știe unde să caute ce-și doresc.

O expunere mai mare la conceptele filzofice, la idei mai vechi, la curente vechi de gândire te face mai pregătit pentru viață: nu mai pici de fraier când apare primul „trainer personal” care să îngaime generalități. Pentru că știi mai multe, pentru că ai fost expus la concepte mai interesante și mai puternice, pentru că ai auzit și citit oameni mai coerenți vorbind despre lume. Pentru că ți-ai pierdut din naivitatea începătorului și ai fost învățat să privești problema din mai multe unghiuri, să-i cauți dedesubturile.

Mai demult îmi spunea cineva că naivitatea asta poate fi îndepărtată și printr-o pregătire științifică riguroasă, pentru că metoda științifică presupune să verifici tot, să experimentezi, să vezi dacă teoriile se confirmă. Ceea ce e și nu e valabil: un om de știință e obișnuit cu valorile absolute, cu idei adevărate și idei false. Umanismul privește totul mai relativ: da, afirmația asta e adevărată, dar și aia e, dar poate că două chestii care se bat cap în cap au fiecare adevărul ei etc.

Acuma, problema umaniștilor e că nu știu când să se oprească, când să spună „nu” și când să radă din temelii niște teorii care nu prea stau în picioare decât cu foarte multă bunăvoință, la fel cum am văzut ingineri picând în plasa unor farsori pe baza unor „dovezi incontestabile”. Se întâmplă, niciun domeniu nu e lipsit de pericole. Dar relativitatea asta, neîncrederea, tendința de a învârti o problemă și de a o privi din diverse unghiuri fără să spui nici da, nici nu cu toată gura, genul ăsta de a privi o lume vagă, complexă și cu o mie de substraturi pe care o are umanismul, prinde bine în viață împotriva vânzătorilor de „ulei de șarpe” sufletesc.

Deci beneficiile unei educații umaniste mai temeinice ar fi duble: unu, că-ți oferă un context larg ca să găsești răspunsuri la întrebările vieții; și doi, că dacă ai un context mai larg la dispoziție, ești mai greu de fraierit.

Dacă ar fi după mine, aș reforma educația umanistă cam așa:

aș muta filozofia din clasa a 12-a (când n-o mai face nimeni că „vine Bacul”) în clasele a 9-a și a 10-a. Să se facă istoria filozofiei, cu explicații ale conceptelor de bază și ale modului în care s-a trecut de la o viziune a lumii la alta.
aș face ore de istoria culturii. Nu a Culturii mari, cu muzică și artă și toate cele, ci a culturii în sensul ei antropologic: ce obiceiuri aveau oamenii, ce credințe, cum trăiau, chestii de-astea.
aș băga mai multă literatură universală și mai puțină literatură română. Pentru că prima are multe de oferit, a doua e recentă și n-are foarte multe de zis.
aș povesti de istoria criticii și a teoriei literare, care e strâns legată de istoria literaturii. Ca să știm cu toții cum s-au chinuit înaintașii noștri să-și dea seama dacă o carte e bună sau proastă și cum încă n-a ajuns nimeni la nicio concluzie definitivă pentru că probabil că nu există una.
aș arunca la gunoi manualele de istorie care există azi, pentru că sunt niște aberații. Sincer, merită scrise unele mai bune, că momentan plăcerea de a învăța istorie se descoperă accidental și în afara școlii, pentru că în școală e chin. Mai mult accent pe cauze, efecte, ansamblu general, situație în epocă, mai multe povești care să aibă logică și să fie interesante.
aș scoate cărți de popularizare pentru domeniile de mai sus. Momentan nu prea văd cărți de istorie a filozofiei/culturii/literaturii decât de specialitate, care sunt prea greoaie pentru publicul larg (la istoria culturii mai șanse, însă…). Ar merge extrase unele dintre ideile mari, puse într-o formă accesiblă și relansate, cum ar veni. Cine vrea mai mult, merge la sursă acolo unde îl interesează.

Are sens ce zic aici? Sunt sigură că sunt persoane care pot ridica obiecții la multe idei pe care le-am scris, dar în mare, are sens ce zic? Pentru că mie mi se pare că da, există o cerere enormă de umanism, doar că nu știm să-i spunem pe nume. Dar școala nu e în stare să ofere ce ar trebui pentru că s-a învechit, a împietrit în forma curentă și oferă prea puțină valoare reală pentru efortul depus de elevi. Ar putea face mult mai mult, ar putea pregăti elevii pentru viață mai tare, doar că momentan nu prea ne punem problema asta.

Evident, n-am stat să gândesc toate detaliile problemei, pentru că ar fi un efort enorm, dar voiam să lansez discuția și să aud și alte păreri.

Sorana Corneanu's "Regimens of the Mind" [(Academic) Book Review]

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 09:12:51 +0000

Title: Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition

Author: Sorana Corneanu

Rating: 4/5

Is this book for me? Probably not. It’s an academic book of the difficult sort and far, far from an easy read. But if you’re up to a challenge, it can be pretty damned fascinating.

This review is way overdue, considering I finished reading the book awhile back. Still, this morning I was cheerfully reading an article on psychology and the scientific method which brought Regimens of the Mind back into my thoughts. So, time to discuss it.

I’ve already mentioned in another article that I believe the humanities have a horrible academic writing style. Most of the books I’ve been subjected to as an undergraduate student and afterward are highly difficult to read because of their sentence structure and their assumption that the reader has a highly specialized vocabulary and kick-ass history and culture skills. Regimens of the Mind is pretty much like that. You’ll find yourself googling terms like ‘postlapsarian condition’ (it’s the first that came to mind now. It means ’the condition of humankind after the Fall from the Garden of Eden’, yes?). Or, you know, looking up ‘regimens’. You’ll find yourself re-reading that last paragraph because you somehow failed to catch the meaning. Still, it’s a lot more readable than a lot of other academic texts out there – if you’re up to it, it’s a fun challenge.

Enough of my inner editor being a bitch. Because the humanities’ cryptic academic style is the only minus I think the book has.

You can’t tell from the title, but Regimens of the Mind is a book about the origins of the scientific method, of objectivity and reason – the way we take them for granted today. Imagine a world where people are trying to figure out what’s real and what isn’t, which arguments stand and which don’t. There’s no path that’s been laid down for it yet – sure, Aristotle went around explaining basic logic in Ancient Greece, but there’s a huge difference between theory and practice, between the simplicity of ‘if all A are B and x is an A, then x is B’ and being faced with the entirety of the material world and of the spiritual world, trying to tell when you’ve picked the right terms for your logical sentences. So people devise ways of explaining how to do that.

As an aside: you’ve got to love mankind, no? When we need something new, we create it. Whether it’s a computer, in order to decipher secret messages, or ways to further knowledge and understanding through providing clear guidelines of what to do and what not to do.

And there’s Francis Bacon, who starts discussing „idols of the mind”, false ideas which stop us from seeing the truth – because we have preconceptions and think we see more order in the universe than there really is, or because we simply like or don’t like certain things and want them to be true/not true. Or there’s John Locke, saying that sometimes we don’t see the truth because we subject to a higher authority telling us what to think – what the ’truth’ is. I’ll stop with the examples here – Sorana Corneanu presents them and their connections much more neatly than I would.

So here we are, in this interesting world where objectivity and rationality emerge. It’s a fascinating read, especially if you’ve read theories of rationality in the contemporary world and have heard of a lot of reasoning mistakes by their modern, fancy, scientific-sounding names. Because things, as Corneanu presents them, are a bit more fascinating than you’d think.

Have you looked up ‘regimens’ and ‘cultura animi’ yet?… Because they explain the fun of it: ‘regimen’ means something like work-out, therapy, training – the sort of process you go through to make yourself better. And the ‘cultura animi’ isn’t far from the intuitive translation you might come up with: a cultivation of the soul. So all this reasoning stuff?… Thinking correctly about things, seeing nature objectively, as it were?… It’s not just for science, not just a method to figure out physics or chemistry. It’s for personal development. It’s a way to grow yourself. It’s a spiritual endeavor. It’s a way of life, of religious practice. The ‘Christian Virtuoso’ seeking to better himself through educating his mind, the ‘Lover of Truth’ pursuing reality are on the move, searching, in a pilgrimage of the soul.

That’s what makes Regimens of the Mind fascinating. Corneanu looks deep into the motivations these philosophers had for seeking the truth, for devising methods to discover it and to avoid mental traps. It’s an insight into another world, into a rich spiritual tradition that basically led to science being what it is. And she stops there, where you can pick up this strong, memorable insight into the past and consider it from any number of points of view.

The humanities are crap at writing

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:02:37 +0000

Dear Humanities Peers, This Is iRrAtionaL

A year ago, when I was a Master’s student, I complained to a clever friend (also a web developer) about one of the texts I had to read for university. I told him it was horrible to read, that I could barely understand what the author wanted and I wasn’t entirely sure I got the point.

„Why didn’t the author draw a picture?” he asked me.

I thought, wow, this guy really doesn’t get it. He’s never been in the humanities! So, I set about explaining that this was a Serious Text and the humanities needed no illustrations, that books with pictures were more difficult to make, that the concept was too subtle to be shown through images, that… well, basically, I threw every single reason I could basically come up with at him and as I went through each one I realized that it was absolute crap.

The real answer is this: the humanities are bullshit at writing. And they are crap at explaining.

It’s a paradox. We’re all Men of Letters around here, or People of Culture. Words are the tools of the trade, explanations and debates are what we do. We throw ideas, we juggle concepts and yet we seem to be unable to find a single damned good editor who will cut that 7-line sentence into smaller pieces and make it comprehensible at a first reading. And I’m not talking about people who aren’t good at what they do, either. I’m talking a generalized, pathological issue: the Men of Letters find themselves unable to string together two sentences in such a manner as to allow a lay person to follow their point.

Here’s Some Trees From That Forest We Can’t See

Don’t believe me? Here’s some quotes illustrating the problem. And this isn’t at all about the quality of the ideas in the text, it’s about the insane level of complexity the sentence and paragraph structures reach. I’ll start with my own professors, because I know them and I know their works. They know their stuff, but they’re often close to unreadable.

Second year of undergraduate studies, Victorian Literature. Ioana Zirra’s textbook „Contributions of the 19th Century – the Victorian Age – to the History of Literature and Ideas”:

What J. Hillis Miller identifies as the general starting point for the Victorian writer’s subjective structure of identity, i.e., the painful momentary separation or alienation of one member of the community who will become (apotheotically) reintegrated at the novel’s end into the social system corresponds with Frye’s characterisation of low-mimetic literature as a kind of comedy in which the sharing of the etymological ”comos” is foregrounded; Frye also mentions the new order triumphantly installed at the end of comedy as a qualitatively superior avatar of the same ruling social type which has been only momentarily tested or disturbed (by the, psychoanalytically speaking this time, confrontation of society with its other) only to be reborn in a perfected form (which, speaking in critical theory or ideological Marxist terms, is tantamount to ”the legitimation” of society). (chapter 4)

That is a single sentence, my friends. And it takes a bit of re-reading to understand what it says. I remember re-re-reading it before the exam and thinking, „Wow, I hope she doesn’t ask any punctual questions, because I can barely remember what some terms are.” She did. I didn’t do so well.

Another quote, this time from Sorana Corneanu’s book, „Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition”, which I’m reading right now. It’s a splendid book and I love the topic, because right now I’m very interested in rationality, but I am honestly having difficulty following her.

Epicurean echoes in this general moral sense can also be detected in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), which includes a section on the way experimenting itself is “usefull for the cure of mens minds.” It can be that, Sprat argues, owing to its active nature. The passions of men’s minds (the “violent desires, malicious envies, intemperate joyes, and irregular griefs, by which the lives of most men become miserable, or guilty”) are mainly due to idleness, so that the “medicine” lies in “earnest employments” coupled with “innocent, various, lasting, and even sensible delights.” (page 80)

More humane in sentence structure, but full of quotes from the originals, often in their nigh-original spellings (I say nigh-original because I have the suspicion that the obsolete long S-es were replaced with the normal ’s’ that is still in use today). The book contains long paragraphs, often spanning more than half a page. If you’re not used to reading English from back when ‘useful’ was spelled with a double ’l’, your reading gets difficult, it slows down. Involuntarily, you can find yourself pausing a bit at the quotes as your mind is trying to signal that there’s something different in the text now than there was a second ago.

But are my former professors alone in this disease of complication? Definitely not. Let me quote Ricoeur’s „Oneself as Another”:

This sinister — though not exhaustive — enumeration of the figures of evil in the intersubjective dimension established by solicitude has its counterpart in the series of prescriptions and prohibitions stemming from the Golden Rule in accordance with the various compartments of interaction: you shall not lie, you shall not steal, you shall not kill, you shall not torture.

Yes, you can read it. Fluently? No. And that’s not just me. I’ve run across some goodreads reviews in my search for Ricoeur. One claimed that ‘15 pages per hour are a good pace’. Is it just because his ideas are so hard to get?… No. It’s also the language.

Jacques Derrida is similarly hard to read: he even coined the term différance as a deliberate homophone of différence. Come on, reader, spot the difference! Or maybe I should mention Bourdieu („the habitus is the work product of inculcation and appropriation necessary for those products of collective history that are the objective structures (eg, language, economics, etc..) able to reproduce The form of lasting dispositions in all organisms (which can, if you will, call individuals) permanently subject to the same packaging, then placed in the same material conditions of existence” – I’ve picked a random quote from Google, I don’t even care much where it’s from).

So, here I come and ask: why.

Let me make this clearer: WHY!

Why exactly are we doing this? Why are we, as humanists, accepting this situation in which our most profound texts must be our most obscure? Why do we never draw pictures? Why do we speak in winks and subtleties, in references which everybody should get (but maybe not all do), why do we seldom explain, why do we seldom bother to make our texts readable, pleasant, to let ideas shine through?

The humanities are crap at expressing themselves. We have no easy way to introduce new people into the system. We have few places where our core concepts and trends are explained in a friendly, easy manner. I see communities of programmers easing new people into programming languages, into concepts, into ideas and methods, providing help and support. What do we do? We huddle close together and sniff snobbishly at those below us – or, if we don’t, we just lose ourselves in our ivory towers.

A year ago, when my web developer friend suggested that we’re doing it wrong, I thought he was committing a sort of sacrilege. An academic book in the humanities is Something Special. It’s meant to be complex and hard to read, it’s not for everybody to understand. It wouldn’t stoop so low as to have pictures, or friendly diagrams, or a very comprehensible style. It’s not something you read easily and it shouldn’t be.

Well… Let’s stop there for a second. Why not? How much of the value of our ideas would be destroyed by saying them in a simpler way? Would Derrida’s theory of the infinite chain of signifiers be rendered invalid if I were to say it in a simple sentence? Or, God forbid, write it as computer code?1 If the answer is ‘yes’, something is obviously not right. It means that what we’re doing here is like a strange sort of art, like a Glass Bead Game that is very sophisticated and scholarly and referential and beautiful, but ultimately random and aimless. The theory somebody exposed would matter too little, as long as it held close to our standards of how things are done.

Or maybe the answer is ’no’. Derrida’s theory would still be Derrida’s theory. Ricoeur would still be Ricoeur. The humanities would not tumble and fall. In that case, why do we do it to ourselves? Why do we write impossible books and articles?

Look at science books. Do you know what stands out first? Structure. Clear chapters and subchapters, paragraphs, short sentences. Clarity. It’s funny how clarity in communication is not a staple of people who have to do with philology and books, but of engineers and programmers, of scientists and anybody but us. Heck, if you have wikipedia open to compensate for not knowing enough physics, Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity is easier to read than Derrida or Ricoeur.

At one point I thought this was natural. It’s how the humanities do it. Right now I find it a headache and just a generally wrong direction to be wandering in. Why are we doing this?

Maybe we have a sort of Freudian… erm… phallic envy. Programmers and scientists are so difficult to understand that everybody respects them. Maybe we want to prove that we’re the same. We can be difficult as well! We can be pretty incomprehensible to the layman. It’s not all ease and empty words, it’s hard!

Or maybe we’re so damned high up on our high horses that we can’t take lessons. Screw editors, our egos need to be fed. No word of ours shall be changed, no phrasing can possibly do but our own. We are the rulers here and we take no directions, we let nobody impose anything on us!

A sadder case would be if we can’t act any differently. If indeed many people out there are right and we can’t, in fact, keep our ideas coherent enough in our heads that we can express enumerations as bullet-point lists. Maybe we can’t draw a simple rectangles-and-arrows sort of logical image that would help others understand our theory. Maybe we simply can’t put stuff in a table because our brains are muddled from too little maths. We can’t tell what we’re all talking about, so we’re wandering about in the dark, touching things – and whenever we come across something that seems new, we coin a new word. Or we come up with a new theory. We change the meaning of something. Instead of trying to come closer together and get some sort of general map of the things we deal with, we indulge in strife, in an aspiration for uniqueness which are so blinding that we barely see past our own noses. The world goes on and we wonder why nobody cares, why nobody realizes what amazing treasures our own little corner of knowledge holds.

Or perhaps this is the way it’s always been done? For all of our supposed innovation, we’re sticking to old norms that have always been around. This is the way texts before us have been written and this is how we will write – if we were to write more freely, more simply, more coherently, using smaller words and providing clearer explanations, we might lose our respectability.

But in the end, this is how it is: with just a few rare exceptions (like Linda Hutcheon or some of the fanfiction-theorizing authors I encountered in my reading for my MA paper), we suck at writing. Our heroes suck at writing. Our professors and colleagues and all those around us suck at writing. Instead of seeing this as the handicap it really is, we treat it like a badge of honor. Instead of searching for simplicity and elegance of style, we search for big, pompous words. We hide behind notions invented by bigger names than our own and dodge criticism by becoming obscure.

What we’re actually doing is turning a weakness into a subtle art and we’re either not noticing that we’ve done so, or we’re pretending it’s a quality.

Who’s willing to make the overdue change to readability already?

Footnote 1: I've wanted to do this ever since I understood what Derrida was all about.
There's something about this one theory that reminded me of my high school Turbo Pascal
classes. I could just see the crazy code flying.
So.
-create a Word class, with one variable for spelling and one for pronunciation
-add a pointer variable, which you call Meaning. Have 'Meaning' refer to another Word.
-put in a number of Words and make certain that all their Meaning variables point to other
Words (no NIL references)
-start a while loop, saying that the meaning of the word is equal to Word.Meaning; the meaning
should, of course, be a Word, so it can be referred to by your pointer.
-the end condition for the while loop is 'when Word.Meaning is not a pointer'

Congratulations! You now have a system in which every word's meaning refers to the meaning of
another word, never taking you to any actual, real thing that would be what the word really
means. You can go on forever and ever searching for that meaning.

In other words, yeah. You've got an infinite loop. Welcome to Derrida 1.01.