Why Read? (4 page)

But I respected Catherine for speaking as she did, for unfolding herself bravely. In general, humanities classes, where questions
of ultimate belief should be asked and answered all the time, have nothing to do with those questions. It takes courage to
make this first step, and to speak candidly about yourself.

Some of the responses are anything but underelaborated. These tend to come from my orthodoxly religious students, many of
whom are well trained, maybe overtrained, in the finer points of doctrine. I get some hardcore believers. But in general it
wouldn't be fair to call them Falwell's children, because they're often among the most thoughtful students in the class. They,
unlike the proponents of the idea that God is light and that's all you need to know in life, are interested in delving into
major questions. They care about understanding the source of evil. They want to know what it means to live a good life. And
though they're rammed with doctrine, they're not always addicted to dogma. There's often more than a little room for doubt.
Even if their views are sometimes rock solid, they don't mind seeing them besieged. Because given their interests, they're
glad that "this discussion is not about any chance question, but about the way one should live."

Final Narratives

RELIGION IS THE right place to start a humanities course, for a number of reasons, even if what we're going on to do is to
read the novels of Henry James. One of them is that religion is likely to be a major element in my students' Final Narratives,
a term I adapt from Richard Rorty. A Final Narrative (Rorty actually says Final Vocabulary; I modify him slightly) involves
the ultimate set of terms that we use to confer value on experience. It's where our principles are manifest. When someone
talks feelingly about the Ten Commandments, or the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, or the innate goodness of human beings, or
about all human history being the history of class conflict, then, in all likelihood, she has revealed something close to
the core of her being. She's touched on her ultimate terms of commitment, the point beyond which argument and analysis are
unlikely to go, at least very quickly. Rorty puts it this way: "All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ
to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends
and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in
which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives."

Rorty's word "final" is ironic, or potentially so. His sense is that a "final" language ought to be anything but final. He
believes that we ought to be constantly challenging, testing, refining, and if need be overthrowing our ultimate terms and
stories, replacing them with others that serve us better. Certain people, says Rorty, are "always aware that the terms in
which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies,
and thus of their selves." But Rorty believes that most people never stray far from their initial narratives, the values that
they're imprinted with while they're growing up. Most of us stay at home.

Rorty calls people capable of adopting new languages "ironists," because they inflect even their most fervent commitments
with doubt. It's possible, they know, that what today they hold most intimately true will be replaced tomorrow by other, better
ways of seeing and saying things. They comprehend what Rorty likes to call the contingency of their own current state.

Appreciating this contingency is very close to appreciating one's own mortality. That is, Rorty's ironists are people who
know that they exist in time because it is time and the changes it brings that can make their former terminologies and their
former selves obsolete. Terms that serve your purposes one day will not necessarily do so the next. The ironists' willingness
to change narratives, expand their circles of self, is something of a brave act, in part because all awareness of existence
in time is awareness of death. To follow the ironists' path is to admit to mortality.

In trying to make contact with my students' Final Narratives, I ask about more than religion. I ask about how they imagine
the good life. I ask, sometimes, how they picture their lives in ten years if all turns out for the best. I want to know what
they hope to achieve in politics, in their professions, in family life, in love. Occasionally, I ask how they conceive of
Utopia, the best of all possible worlds, or of Dystopia, the worst. But usually, for me, the matter of religion is present,
a central part of the question.

There is nothing new about beginning a humanistic inquiry in this way. At the start of The Republic, Socrates asks his friends
what they think justice is. And for Socrates, justice is the public and private state conducive to the good life. The just
state and the just soul are mirror images of each other, comparably balanced. Socrates is quickly answered. Thrasymachus,
aggressively, sometimes boorishly, insists that justice is the interest of the stronger. Socrates isn't put off by Thrasymachus,
not at all. For Socrates recognizes that getting his students to reveal themselves as they are, or appear to themselves to
be, is the first step in giving them the chance to change.

Posing the question of religion and the good life allows students to become articulate about who and what they are. They often
react not with embarrassment or anxiety, but with surprise and pleasure, as if no one has ever thought to ask them such a
question and they've never posed it to themselves.

But beginning here, with religion, also implies a value judgment on my part—the judgment that the most consequential questions
for an individual life (even if one is, as I am, a longtime agnostic) are related to questions of faith. I also believe, for
reasons I will get to later, that at this historical juncture, the matter of belief is crucial to our common future.

Most professors of the humanities have little interest in religion as a field of live options. Most of us have had our crises
of faith early, if we've had them at all, and have adopted, almost as second nature, a secular vision of life. Others keep
their religious commitments separate from their pedagogy, and have for so long that they're are hardly aware of it. But what
is old to the teacher is new to the student. This question of belief matters greatly to the young, or at least it does in
my experience. Asking it can break through the ideologies of training and entertaining. Beneath that veneer of cool, students
are full of potent questions; they want to know how to navigate life, what to be, what to do. Matters of faith and worldliness
are of great import to our students and by turning away from them, by continuing our treaty with the dispensers of faith where
we tutor the mind and they take the heart and spirit, we do our students injustice.

We secular professors often forget that America is a religion-drenched nation. Ninety percent of us believe that God knows
and loves us personally, as individuals. More than the citizens of any other postindustrial nation, we Americans attend church—and
synagogue, and mosque. We affirm faith. We elect devout, or ostensibly devout, believers to the White House; recent presidents
have been born-again Christians. Probably one cannot be elected president of the United States—cannot be our Representative
Man—without professing strong religious faith. The struggle over whether America's future will be sacred or secular, or a
mix of the two, is critical to our common future.

Some may well disagree with me about the centrality of religious matters, matters of ultimate belief, in shaping a true literary
education. I teach in the South, one of the more religiously engaged parts of the nation, after all. Fine. But I think the
point stands nonetheless. Get to your students' Final Narratives, and your own; seek out the defining beliefs. Uncover central
convictions about politics, love, money, the good life. It's there that, as Socrates knew, real thinking starts.

Circles

RORTY IS A pragmatic philosopher, and like his pragmatic forebears Dewey and James, his preeminent task is to translate the
work of Ralph Waldo Emerson into the present. Behind Rorty's reflections on Final Vocabularies, there lies one of the most
profound passages that Emerson wrote. The passage is from the essay "Circles," and it stands at the core of the kind of literary
education that I endorse.

In it Emerson brings forward a marvelous image for the way growth takes place in human beings, and perhaps, too, in society.
The image he summons is that of the circle, the circle understood as an image of both expansion
and
confinement. "The life of man," he writes, "is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all
sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end."

So far Emerson has made the process of human expansion seem almost automatic, as though it were a matter of natural evolutionary
force. But, as is his habit, Emerson goes on to revise himself, expand himself through refinement. "The extent to which this
generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert
effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,—as, for instance, an empire, rules of an
art, a local usage, a religious rite,—to heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify and hem in the life."

Emerson's insight is dialectical. Whatever gains we make in our knowledge of the self and the world, however liberating and
energizing our advances may be, they will eventually become standardized and dull. What once was the key to life will become
deadening ritual, common practice, a tired and tiresome Final Narrative. The critic Kenneth Burke is thinking of something
similar when he talks about "the bureaucratizing of the imaginative"; Robert Frost touches on the point when he observes that
a truth ceases to be entirely true when it's uttered even for the second time.

Emerson understands education as a process of enlargement, in which we move from the center of our being, off into progressively
more expansive ways of life. We can see this sort of thing happening on the largest scale when the author of Julius Caesar
becomes capable of creating the vast work that is Hamlet. Yet Hamlet is an outgrowth of Caesar, the character of Brutus expands—another
circle on the great deep, if you like—into the revealing mystery that is Hamlet. But such rippling outward happens every day,
too, as when a child leaves her family and goes out into the painful, promising world of school. Then the child's circle of
knowing has to expand to meet the new circumstances, or she'll suffer for it.

The aim of a literary education is, in Emerson's terms, the expansion of circles. One's current circle will eventually "solidify
and hem in the life." "But," Emerson immediately continues, "if the soul is quick and strong, it bursts over the boundary
on all sides, and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop
and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast
force, and to intense and innumerable expansions."

This passage, eloquent as it is, breeds many questions. How shall we understand the substance of these expanding rings? What
is their human content? How does one know that this or that new circle is conducive to better things than the old? Where does
the impetus for enlargement come from? Is it always time to move outward, or is there a time in life when it makes sense to
fall back, or to stand pat? What role do books have in this process? And what part does a teacher play? How does the student
put herself in the way of the kind of expansion that Emerson describes? How does she know that it's coming to pass? Is it
painful, pleasurable, both? Are such changes always for the better? Might they not also be changes for the worse?

For the purposes of literary education, I want to see these Emersonian circles as being composed of words. But the circles
will also be alive with feeling. They will be rife with the emotions—the attractions and powers and taboos—that infuse the
words that mean the most to us. Words like "mother" and "father" and "God" and "love" and "America" are not just blank counters
in a game designed to fill up a stray hour. They are words with a history, personal and collective, words differently valued,
differently felt, by each of us. We define them in ways partially our own, based on our experiences. And of course, the words
also define us. So we might think of Emerson's circles as Rorty's Final Narratives. And we might think of the question about
religion as a way to tap into one's ultimate terms, to make contact with one's outer-lying circles, and in so doing to initiate
the process of growth.

It's time, no doubt, for a provisional thesis statement: the function of a liberal arts education is to use major works of
art and intellect to influence one's Final Narrative, one's outermost circle of commitments. A liberal education uses books
to rejuvenate, reaffirm, replenish, revise, overwhelm, replace, in some cases (alas) even help begin to generate the web of
words that we're defined by. But this narrative isn't a thing of mere words. The narrative brings with it commitments and
hopes. A language, Wittgenstein thought, is a way of life. A new language, whether we learn it from a historian, a poet, a
painter, or a composer of music, is potentially a new way to live.

Grateful as I am for Rorty's translation and Emerson's luminous passage, there is one place where I must part company with
them both (and with Allan Bloom as well). For my hopes, I think, are larger than theirs. I believe that almost anyone who
has the opportunity to enjoy a liberal education—and such educations are not only to be had in schools; the world is full
of farmers, tradesmen and tradeswomen, mechanics, lawyers, and, up to some crucial moment, layabouts, who've used books to
turn their lives around—almost anyone is likely to be able to cultivate the power to look skeptically at his own life and
values and consider adopting new ones. This ability—to expand one's orbits—is central to the health of democracy. The most
inspired and inspiring Americans have always done so: others can and will join them. But the process is not an easy one. Allan
Bloom is quite right: liberal education does put everything at risk and requires students who are willing to risk everything.
Otherwise it can only touch what is uncommitted in the essentially committed student.