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Article Excerpt
1. Introduction
Ceux qui, comme porte nostre usage, entreprenent d'une mesme lecon & pareille mesure de conduite, regenter plusieurs esprits de si diverses mesures & formes: ce n'est pas merveille, si en tout un peuple d'enfants, ils en rencontrent a peine deux ou trois, qui rapportent quelque juste fruit de leur discipline. De l'institution des enfans, Montaigne
For more than a generation in the United States, and now increasingly in Europe, students have shown growing interest in the "tradition" of political theory. This particular literary practice is often said to be one of the guiding intellectual threads of the Western tradition as a whole. It is remarkable, therefore, that historically this "tradition" has had practically no professional practitioners. Its recent formation into an academic "discipline" appears to be a by-product of the modern aspiration to a "science of politics," the tensions inherent in which required at one and the same time a rejection and an acknowledgment of past political thought. (1) But institutional efforts to consolidate a field do not explain its popularity. Indeed, with the spirit of anti-politics so pervasive around the world, one is hard-pressed to understand the simultaneous intensification of curiosity about fundamental questions of politics. Yet, that is what the revival of political theory represents.
Perspicuous writers in this "tradition" have understood that no transformations in political life are more powerful than the ones which come with generational change. Some kind of control over the formation of new citizens is essential to politics. Thus, even in the perspective of momentary decision-making, politics must engage learning processes. Education, then, is where the subject matter of political theory meets the revived interest in that intellectual enterprise.
While it comes before us as a literary practice, political theory is primarily constituted through and constitutive of dialogue (in the broadest sense of that term). For this reason political theory stands in a special relation to mainstream practices of education for young adults in the United States. These practices, despite notable efforts to multiply student activity and dialogue, are mainly oriented by something almost entirely anti-dialogical: the peculiarly modern idea of Method. Please note that many of the commonsense connotations of the word "method"--orderly, systematic, careful, coherent, etc.--are not subject to critique in this essay. Our attention will focus, rather, on a specific but far-reaching movement of Early Modernity and its subsequent articulations. This idea and ideal of Method will be brought forward just below.
The purpose of this essay is twofold: first, to reconsider this distinction between Method and political theory (2); secondly, to show how the teaching of political theory exemplifies certain practical educational opportunities which might be used to counteract the negative effects of our "Methodistic" orientation. (3) I also aim to de-naturalize the word Method, which has become so familiar that we no longer know what it means. Recalling its history will ease the task of showing why the kind of teaching exemplified by political theory--but certainly not limited to it--is more than ever crucial to a satisfactory education for citizens.
2. What is Method?
Method is a pattern for activity and a set of claims concerning the significance of that activity. A few clear and distinct formal steps will get you where you want to go. These steps can be set down in instructions anyone can follow. That is the practical, winning, and apparently efficient modern ideal of Method from its early formulations by Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) in the sixteenth century to the present day.
To focus on this ideal of Method as such, we must temporarily step outside of many of the familiar debates about educational practice. Such contested topics as progressive vs. conservative, lax vs. tight standards, or classical vs. multicultural content will not be central concerns here. With the field thus cleared, the allegiance to Method becomes everywhere visible. From the textbook and the test to the lab and the lecture, there presides the standard put forward by the world's best-known Ramist, Rene Descartes, in his Discours de la methode (4): start from clear and distinct ideas, divide the matter into parts, proceed in order from the simple to the complex, and omit nothing. The content of this process may be anything: from bits of information and formulas to the elaborate conceptualizations that Max Weber eventually called ideal types. But in high schools and universities, the desire to educate, the social imperative to transmit knowledge, more often than not takes this Methodistic form.
Method has been tied to some admirable social goals. Descartes presents himself as the enemy of dogma. We may find premature the political view he ultimately traced to Method, which for example implied that civil disobedience is out of order for the cogito, as he called the thinking--and, thus, we must assume, the learning--subject. (5) However, Cartesian politics is only one (and a rather slight) consequence to be drawn from Method. Viewed more broadly, Method has clearly been a mechanism for the extension and equalization of society. Emerging early on as a kind of intellectual capital that could be individually appropriated but not owned, Method was a fruitful and generative machinery. Aspiring to be all form and no content, the knowledge machinery of Method could be reproduced with ease and set in motion anywhere, by anyone. It increasingly became available to a wide variety of people and applicable in many different situations. By the nineteenth century, Method seemed the perfect educational implement for increasingly mass democracy.
Nonetheless, allegiance to the modern ideal of Method also raises up some perilous obstacles for an education oriented towards the general formation of independent, well-rounded and free-thinking citizens. It is these obstacles to democracy that I shall underscore in this essay.
In brief, education oriented by Method tends radically to reduce many registers of history and experience and to cover over the inherent plurality of knowledge. Method aims to deliver some one thing to students. But in the theater of education, as on the public stage of the world for which education prepares the citizen, the expectation for "unity of action" is bound to be disappointed. And it should be. To know is a process constituted by necessarily different and often cognitively irreconcilable parts. Democratic education must not only present this plurality but foster it as well. Unity of action in educational practice is a facade. Even granting that an imposition of certain types of intellectual orderliness is extremely important at the level of primary education, unity of knowledge and vision become impediments as the student becomes an adult. Allegiance to Method blocks us from taking this fact seriously. To do so would reveal a vista of entirely different forces. The gravitational center of education would shift. The problem to be solved by, for, and with students would become: How, in both thought and action, can one appreciate and thrive on plurality?
For, plurality is what generates the life in the life of the mind. This is true whether that mind goes to work at the office, the court, the factory, the school, or stays home to take care of the kids. To know is a constituent element of freedom, not because it permits mastery of the world (although it sometimes does that) but because the plural character of knowing creates a space of possibility and the potential for action. To understand the world we have to understand like the world is. This correspondence coincides with the capacity for action.
My purpose here is to come at the problem of education from one of its most fundamental components: the living relationship between teacher and student, and how that relationship is mediated by the matters they undertake to consider together. In this respect, my concerns arise in the realm of ethics and lead towards the life citizens live together. The following considerations point to real and consequential choices and commitments for the teacher who takes seriously the contradictory relationship between democracy and the Method-orientation of education. Only at our own risk do we exclude this aspect of the ethical situation of the teacher from the public debate over educational policy.
This inquiry is motivated by a particular aspect of my own experience as a teacher. I have noticed that political theory is especially resistant to the widely subscribed idea and practice of Method. This resistance presents some special difficulties in teaching "the most comprehensive master science" (as Aristotle called it in the Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b) in a context where Method-orientation is the rule. I will use the friction represented by, but certainly not limited to, the teaching of political theory to define a special potential for transformation already present within the contemporary liberal arts and sciences curriculum.
3. Modernity and Method
In the 1920s, Jakob Klein suggested that one great highway to "Modernity" was opened with the historical appearance in the sixteenth century of abstract numbers. (6) The novelty in this is hard to grasp but can hardly be overstated. Numbers had been considered, for example by Aristotle and the Aristotelians, as properties and, as such, always instantiated in something. What happens after Viete and Descartes is that "the intellect understands 'fiveness' as something separate from five objects." (7) This transformation operates on number from both sides: it cuts number off from the property it was understood to measure, and it frees it from space and time to allow thereby its application to everything. This change in the character of possible knowledge was unusually consequential. It traced out what would become a pervasive pattern. Where abstraction to universals was conceivable before, mathematics became the paradigm for a whole system of understanding that is abstract. It was increasingly taken to be the universal language of science because of this new completeness of its abstraction. It was pushed more and more explicitly as a form of knowledge not grounded in experience. (8) Not about anything in particular, it seemed to be about everything in general. Cutting ties to any particular circumstances, it promised the broadest application of knowledge. Thus, it became possible to believe--in the famous words used by Galileo in his Il Saggiatore--that truth is written in scripture and in nature, that "grandissimo libro scritto in lingua mathematica." (9) This language is not tied down by the irksome problem of reference. Not surprisingly, as Method develops hand-in-hand with the ideology of mathematics, one of its most powerful claims is to universality.
Of course, not everyone towed this line. Early in the twentieth century thinkers as diverse as Dewey, Bergson, Benjamin, and Heidegger raised the stakes. The "experience" from which mathematics seeks to escape is not only the sensationalism often identified with Locke or later hard-headed empiricists. It is, more importantly here, the experience that accretes in a human being as the result of a long history of doing and thus cannot be separated from temporality and memory. Based in action, experience takes shape through the common language and stories of a particular community. An anti-Cartesianism, developing from Spinoza and Vico to Hegel and George Herbert Mead, made clear that experience in this sense always involves other people. After Kant rocketed Method into broader circulation, conventionalists like Mach, Duhem, and Poincare tried to cut it down to size. Even Karl Popper understood Method as a social crucible. All these various ways of thinking seemed new because they appeared against the backdrop of modernity, inscribed as it was with Method. In fact, the idea that others have an essential part in one's experience has roots deeper than Western philosophy itself. Even for Plato, that paradigmatic idealist and in many respects a natural affiliate for Descartes, knowledge would best be attained in the sort of experience that depended on the presence of others and the chance circumstances they might bring to that subtle interplay of the known and the unknown, dialectic. In this process there were no pre-established steps, only a desire to achieve clarity and avoid contradiction. As spelled out in his Gorgias, Plato's conditions for dialectic amount to exacting but personalized qualities ... like previous knowledge (episteme), goodwill (eunoia), and the courage to speak the truth (parrhesia). These qualities, in turn, did not establish a formal grid. Rather, they aimed at nurturing a sort of friendship that makes dialectical conversation productive of knowledge (Gorgias 487 et passim).
Nonetheless, fissures often opened between knowledge and experience. This required some way of mediating between the two. In early modernity, the "imaginary experiment" could occupy this position because "the study of nature in the seventeenth century was neither predominantly idealistic nor empirical ... it was first and foremost constructive." (10) That is, the relevant experience was no longer what you had lived, but what you could make under controlled conditions of logic or the laboratory. A recent direction in historiography of science has shown that much of this making (poiesis) in the seventeenth century was not limited to the laboratory, but also occurred in the rhetorical practices of writing. (11) Generally, the known became more and more the product of a limited and increasingly self-contained process of making. Abstract number, and its mathematical language, was quite at home in this abstract space of practice.
Riding the vehicle of constructivism, the paradoxical split between experience and knowledge extended from the mathematical and laboratory sciences to the study of humanity. When Hobbes wrote that we must "feign the world to be annihilated" and then, like "a watch or some such small engine," build it up again through the "Art" by which "is created that great LEVIA-THAN called a COMMON-WEALTH or STATE," he was doing for politics what Descartes did for epistemology. (12)
Fed, at first in a trickle, by an approach to education centered on the idea of Method, this abstract constructivism had consequences for the knower as well as the known. (13) Method appears quite early in the popular form of printed manuals, instructing people, for instance, on how to dance or play the lute. (14) The shift to higher culture comes with Petrus Ramus, whose work is definitive both in its impact on the core curriculum and its sweeping success. Almost a century before Descartes, Ramus and his associates made Method an instrument of the religion-charged politics of knowledge in Paris. It is not only because Ramus converted to Protestantism in 1561--and was "martyred" in 1572--that Protestants everywhere adopted his approach. As we shall see, Ramism ran in a line parallel to the decisive Protestant practice of sidestepping Church authority to engage the holy text one-on-one.
Ramist Method was trained on rhetoric and logic but radically reordered the relation between them. From rhetoric's traditional division of discursive activity, Ramus reassigns the constructive parts of discovery (inventio) and arrangement (dispositio) to logic, leaving to rhetoric only the increasingly vacuous style and delivery, as the fifth part, memory, dwindled to nothing in the age of print. This appropriation by Ramist Method allowed for a series of distinct and ordered steps from which anyone could learn the matter at hand. It made extensive use of charts, divided into dichotomies, as reductive aids to memory. Ramus was "the greatest master of the shortcut the world has ever known." (15) Method was offered as a quick way to get at types of knowledge which previously had required a long process of accretion through practice. Involving a shift from talking to thinking, it could be undertaken by one person alone. The attractions of Ramist Method exerted an especially strong pull on what Perry Miller called "the New England Mind," and "at Harvard College ... the Ramean method was the one approved." Indeed, the "teaching of Ramus was, as it...
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