Memorization & Canonical Texts
August 23rd, 2012 | Published in Intellectual Technics | 12 Comments
David Auerbach’s brilliant excerpting* from George Dreyfus’s The Sound of Two Hands Clapping connected a few hunches I’ve been pondering recently. On the one hand, what I think of as the problem of canons; on the other, the importance of memorization to a cohesive (and rich) inner life.
I have a vexed relation to canons, as long-time readers of my blog(s) know. I don’t much like the actual instances of them with which I’m acquainted. This is probably because I’ve lived in communities utterly committed to several readily inadequate canons in my twenty two years. I’ve lived in a community where the height of literature and imagination was considered to be the writings of C.S. Lewis. The writing club that first woke my literary ambitions, in my early teens, consisted almost entirely of people who would subscribe to this view. Later, at my ill-chosen college, I encountered the appalling ethno-religious prospect of a community entirely committed to a particular brand of Dutch calvinist intellectualism. For this community, the writings of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd were definitely canonical. They formed the unchanging background by recourse to which proper intellectuals were supposed to respond to any new idea or problem. It doesn’t work; I tried. So for a long time I thoroughly rejected the value of honoring a set of writings or writers who were exalted by their delimitations — exalted in such a way that it became a virtue to pretend one’s own original ideas were already to be found in these writings or writers. This attitude probably contributed to forming my antiquarian-style intellectual life.
But recently I’ve been increasingly fascinated by the promise of memorization.
Theoretically, a combination of the influence of George Steiner, Walter Benjamin, and R.G. Collingwood has had me thinking that the most important kind of self-formation is precisely the kind which conditions the reflexes of the mind. Conditioning these reflexes consists largely of internalizing the cultural productions of others. On the deserted ruins of abandoned texts, each one must build his own Rome of the mind. And, as Marcus Aurelius would put it, this city becomes a place of retreat where one abides and waits out the hardships of life. I have all kinds of incohate thoughts about this. And I’ve been trying to apply them by spending daily time on the memorization of passages culled from my reading. But as valuable as the practice is for a private individual like myself, I think its real benefits only manifest communally. And as soon as we start talking about communal memorization of important texts — we’re talking about canons.
Along with my fascination for memorization has come a fascination with schools of thought for whom such memorization is a central practice: rabbinical judaism, schools of sanskrit philosophy like Navya-Nyaya, the whole history of western classical studies, the spirituality of methodist preachers, and of course the impressive edifice of common law systems and the enormously suggestive ideal of equity.
I hadn’t really thought about how my interest in memorization forced the problem of canons on me until I read Auerbach’s post:
There is a tension at the heart of such philosophical debate within a tradition, which should be familiar to anyone who has studied in almost any philosophical school, from Christian Scholasticism to Midrash to analytic philosophy: the existence of unquestioned, agreed-upon foundational views allows for fervent and unfettered debate about consequent issues, but the foundation must remain untouched. (The higher stakes in Tibetan Buddhism emerge when Dreyfus tells of murders committed between competing schools.) For all the debate the inquiry is fundamentally more limited.
The issue of a canon becomes crucial here, since there needs to be some selection of texts to memorize and debate, and the lack of consensus in our culture today no doubt contributes to an unwillingness to have students privilege any particular text with such obsessive attention and assimilation.
So in my case I’ve actually internalized this tension. I am deeply, viscerally suspicious of canons, but I long to devote myself to one, to memorize it, and to share in a communal life defined by it. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with some friends about how alienation manifests itself in our lives — all of us felt alienated to some degree — and I concluded that for me it was the lack of an intellectual community to which I felt comfortable dedicating myself.
Interesting. Anyway, all of this was rather random, but hey — it’s my blog.
* ‘Brilliant excerpting’? Strange as the phrase may sound, I believe it applies unconditionally to many of Auerbach’s posts, posts which exhibit an extraordinary refinement of the drive to “curate,” a drive so vulgarly exhibited throughout much of the internet, a drive which accounts for much of the hollow-box effect where a few opinionators are amplified by echo. In contrast to this, Auerbach typically curates from a stream not readily accessible to the rest of us — his own reading. Somehow this seems more valuable than curating the wide river of the mass culture of commenting — each of us has the urge to do this for him or herself, so that an individual instance of such curation becomes more a way of identifying oneself as structured by certain recognizable positions, a way of showing that one is a unique configuration of independently common views. One profits from such a curator if one has an interest in them as an individual — if they are someone one wants to know better, to imitate, to hate, etc. But from a curator like Auerbach, who draws from a stream otherwise inaccessible, one profits in a different way. One actually learns new things. Consequently, Waggish is among a handful of blogs that have actually deeply influenced me.
August 23rd, 2012 at 12:40 pm (#)
Wait, you’re twenty two?!
August 23rd, 2012 at 1:09 pm (#)
Um, yes. (?)
August 23rd, 2012 at 2:06 pm (#)
Interesting post. Can I just point out that there seems to me to be a real conflict between self-formation and a conditioning of reflexes? I don’t quite understand how the two can be identified with one another. I suppose I understand educational self-formation in the sense of ‘Bildung’ – which I understand (vaguely!) to refer to self-development, growth, self-nurture: ie something which has to be free, not tampered with. Whereas the conditioning of reflexes, for me, evokes behaviourist psychology and Pavlov – experiments with laboratory animals. Training and chaining, basically: the reverse of the liberation I associate with self-formation. I’m just saying that there seems to be a real tension between the process of memorization as a positive, valuable form of training – nurturing the soil of one’s cognition, as it were, and a contrary idea of memorization as indoctrination, the implantation of knowledge which is not to be transformed or expanded. (This makes me think, though, of my instinctive reaction to Adorno’s ‘Aesthetic Theory’: I was amazed that he actually managed to write such a voluminous book basically by simply shuffling and reordering 7 or 8 key concepts, like a Rubiks cube).
The whole issue of where to find an intellectual community nowadays is such a central one: I find it interesting, though unsurprising, that (to put this rather plainly) you don’t really seem to find one in the university where you study/work. The difficulty is of course intensified if (as in my case) you no longer work in a university or have contacts in an university. But whatever one’s personal situation, it seems (to me) that the fundamental structural phenomenon (to use a bit of a clumsy/rushed phrase) is that the proliferation of higher education has actually detonated a sense of intellectual community. The blogosphere seems to me to be more of a response to this phenomenon, than a cause of it – I don’t at all trust the analysis that you will find recently propounded by Marxist academics in the journal ‘Radical Philosophy’, that university intellectual life is somehow being contaminated and eroded by the informalities of intellectual production on the web, and that the university represents an aspect of a liberal public sphere/discourse which is to be defended against the incursions of bloggers. Which basically just boils down to a (very British) Marxist-statist suspicion of any form of ‘free enterprise’? Perhaps you have a different view from your position in US academia…
I’ve added the Waggish blog (&, found on it, the blog Chakira), to my already ridiculously long list of links on my blog!
August 23rd, 2012 at 2:21 pm (#)
I definitely pictured you as older than that.
August 23rd, 2012 at 3:26 pm (#)
@ Robert Bond:
You may be right about the incompatibility of self-formation and reflex conditioning. Or maybe it’s that I’m using wrong language for what I’m trying to express. Let me try again, and tell me what you think: What I have in mind with “intellectual reflexes,” I suppose, are more like Aristotelian habits — potencies the mind contains which must be awakened by practice, as Aristotle thought, but which can also be awakened, I think, by the internalization of certain kinds of culture. That’s what I mean to evoke rather than behaviorism, thought I can certainly see how my language of reflexes suggests behaviorism. Two of my favorite examples of “intellectual reflexes” — shall I call them habits instead, going forward? — are martial arts training and a judge’s cultivation of equity. In both cases, the problem is to train someone to perform a function in situations where there is no precedent, or where precedent simply doesn’t provide definitive guidance. It is out of the equitable judgments of many judges that common law develops, and then studying its development is supposed to be able to instill a sense of equity in future judges; likewise martial arts grow out of the experience of fighting, and then fighting in turn is supposed to be taught by a rehearsal of someone else’s experience (via practicing forms, for example). Still there is a weird gap between studying law or practicing martial forms and actually judging equitably or responding to the exigencies of a fight. I think one’s “inner life,” — by which I mean all the ends-in-themselves activities that go on in our minds, from the appreciation of art or nature, to moral choices — is similarly trained. A friend of mine who is an orthodox Jew recently told me that he is surprised to find that some of the most creative and original thinking being done within Judaism is coming from the ultra-orthodox, though he has his own qualms with fundamentalism. In light of what I’m trying to argue — that there is some sort of relationship between the self-discipline implicit in actions like memorizing a communally recognized canon of texts and self-formation (as Bildung, as you very appropriately put it) — my friend’s observation is unsurprising.
Does that change things at all or do you think it’s still inescapably paradoxical?
I find your thoughts on the university very interesting. Sometime I hope you will write at length — perhaps a blog post (or perhaps you already have — I’ll go look) — on what you mean by “the proliferation of higher education has actually detonated a sense of intellectual community.” But certainly you’re right that the university isn’t really an intellectual community in the thick, significant sense. And I couldn’t agree more with your critique of those who would attribute the problem to blogging! How ludicrous. If anything, blogging is one of the few ways one can attain a sense of intellectual community these days.
Waggish is brilliant. Like you, David Auerbach is an intellectual thriving outside the walls of academia. A model that appeals to me more and more, I can tell you.
August 23rd, 2012 at 4:19 pm (#)
What’s wrong with everybody coming up with their own personal canon? It used to be that people would make Commonplace Books to organize the quotes they liked from authors. Establishing a community wide canon always, always leads to censorship. Plus it just devolves into bickering about what should be in the canon based on people’s needs for what the canon is supposed to prove. For example when the protestants rebelled against roman catholicism they changed the canon of the bible to exclude books that did things like give a clear statement about purgatory. They took what they wanted and ditched what the didn’t. So I think as I said that everybody should come up with their own personal canon. That’s more pluralist.
August 23rd, 2012 at 5:47 pm (#)
@ Tristram: I think that what you call for is what actually happens for most people — or those who pursue self-development by internalizing culture at all, that is. I thoroughly agree about the dangers of community-wide canonizations. No arguments here. I tried to express the background of my opposition to that in my post. But the other half of my post — and the more interesting half — is about the opposite. I’m also coming to think that the internalization of culture is much more beneficial in a community than on one’s own. Perhaps the deleterious effects of community-wide canons aren’t simply effects of those canons qua community-wide canons, but because of the specific content of those canons and the uses to which they are put?
August 23rd, 2012 at 8:26 pm (#)
Thanks for your detailed clarification of what you are thinking of with ‘intellectual reflexes’ – the analogy with the creativity enabled by orthodox Jewish thought is particularly suggestive.
I still find the idea of training intellectual creativity paradoxical; but maybe it’s just because I’m still locked within a sort of vitalism (or (Romantic) supernaturalism) that associates mental potencies with biological spontaneity or else inspiration (derived from a transcendental source). Creativity, I still think, is a gift, it either flowers or it doesn’t – but maybe all we need to do is to distinguish creativity from learning, which obviously can involve discipline.
August 23rd, 2012 at 10:45 pm (#)
All of the traditional Canons (cannons) are now completely useless – in Truth & Reality they always were.
REAL Intelligence is tacit, or intrinsically wordless, living existence.
Which is to say that Right Life only begins when one has transcended the binding force of all of the traditional texts, all of which bind one to the mortal fear-saturated meat-body level of existence.
First transcend the mind, not the body.
Inwardness and ALL thinking is flight from Life and Love.
Only the body is Full of Consciousness.
Therefore, be the body only, feeling into Life.
Surrender the mind into Love, until the body dissolves in Light.
Dare this Ecstasy , and never be made thoughtful by birth and experience and death.
August 24th, 2012 at 9:06 pm (#)
No, I’m pretty sure “deleterious effect of canons” just comes from them being canons at all. The problem is you can’t limit your sources of truth without committing to the persecution of those who disagree with the sources you picked.
August 24th, 2012 at 9:28 pm (#)
@ Tristram: You know, I read something today that relates to this discussion. It was in Collingwood’s The New Leviathan. He says at the beginning of that book that we shouldn’t define a discipline in terms of its subject, but its subject in terms of the discipline. He gives the example of “physiognomy”, which he takes to have the subject “life.” He says that if we define life as something we know beforehand, to delimit what we mean by physiognomy, then we are basically duty-bound to persecute scientists who in their investigation of life discover it to involve things other than those things we “just recognized” in our naive first state. Instead, he says, we should say that life is what physiognomy studies, and when asked to define life we should simply give the most up to date summation of what physiognomy tells us.
He then says that the people who have really achieved mastery of a science do so when they realize that they will never know with definitive certainty what the subject of their science really is, when they’ve reconciled themselves, in other words, to the fact that this subject actually needs to be investigated at all. In other words — these are my words — learning a discipline is a way of discovering the need for that discipline in the first place.
I think we can at least imagine something similar in the case of canons. The problem you describe seems to derive from people’s tendency to prescribe the utility of their canons in advance. Not to step on anybody’s toes, but christians are a perfect example of this. Mistranslations in the Septuagint version of the Jewish scriptures suddenly become theological arguments for the divinity of Christ? You had to have some dogmas that you brought to the table along with what you found there for that particular argument to work.
But imagine — this is what my reflections in the post were getting at — that one committed to a canon purely for the disciplinary value of being committed, along with a bunch of other people. Without pre-defining the utility of that canon, I mean. Mightn’t an amazing gush of creativity and social criticism and communal practices emerge from this discipline?
November 20th, 2012 at 11:50 pm (#)
[...] a commentary upon their commonplace books at two points in the semester. As for contemplation, still inspired by The Sound of Two Hands Clapping, I think I will have them highlight the most important two or [...]