Education As Thinking Against Oneself*
Dr. Leonard Grob
Professor of Philosophy
Metropolitan Campus
Thank you. I am honored to have been asked to address this convocation.
For the past 16 years of my academic career at FDU I have studied the Holocaust. The phrase “thinking against oneself” in the title of my talk comes from a work by Theodore Adorno, the 20th century philosopher who wrote during the aftermath of the Holocaust. Adorno employed this phrase to characterize a kind of thinking he deemed necessary for guarding against the possibility of future genocides. Thinking that is assured of its own correctness — thinking that assumes it has hold of the truth — that kind of thinking, I would like to suggest this afternoon, has played a major role in creating the conditions in which genocide has flourished and continues to flourish in our time. For Adorno, thinking that does not test itself, does not call itself into question — such thinking may be likened to the music which the Nazi SS used to drown out the cries of its victims.
The academy has a special role to play in fostering a consciousness which thinks against itself, which adopts a critical stance toward all that we study. Those of us who are academics are entrusted not only with disseminating information to our students. We are also entrusted with fostering modes of reflection which process the data we transmit. What kind of reflection do we wish to encourage in our students?
From a study of the Holocaust we learn that formal education in and of itself guarantees nothing about the humanity of degree recipients. Of the fourteen men assembled in the Berlin suburb of Wanssee in January 1942 to plan “the final solution to the Jewish problem,” no fewer than nine held doctoral degrees. They had published a total of 35 books among them. What these Nazi leaders had failed to do with all their learnings was to call them into question, examine them critically. And they had failed to question the authority of those from whom these teachings issued.
In genuine education both students and teachers embrace what I name “the spirit of critique.” This critical spirit — what Socrates in Plato’s dialogues calls “humility” — is no mere cognitive skill, no mere set of pedagogical techniques to be employed in the service of intellectual game-playing. Socrates distinguishes himself from his peers in Athens by his greater willingness to call into question his “presumption to know.” His superior wisdom consists not in his ability to accumulate bits of knowledge — often thought to be a key criterion according to which professional expertise is judged. Socrates is wise because he sees that his perspective on a given issue is but one of many possible perspectives, because he is willing to enter into dialogue with others in order to weigh his perspective over against others. Socrates acknowledges his limitations, the inevitable narrowness of his own perspectives, and, ultimately, his — our — finitude as human.
This is not to say that we should discourage our students from taking stands on issues regarding the conduct of their lives. We cannot be tentative in our endeavor to live life well. We must vote for one candidate or another, take one position or another with regard to the burning social issues of the day. Yet the process of thinking against oneself means that the stands we take are always ultimately up for grabs — often deeply held, but always provisional, always awaiting the next argument to be read in a text, an op-ed piece, or a journal article; the next argument to issue forth from a dialogical encounter with a teacher, parent, child, friend, acquaintance. The mind of the genuine teacher/learner is always open to concepts to be gleaned from dialogical encounters with others. The door is never shut to that sharing of perspectives which leads me — ever anew — to think against myself. Only when we acknowledge our presumption to know does the door open to genuine inquiry and, in particular, to that moral inquiry which is my central concern this afternoon.
I said earlier that we are entrusted with the quality of reflection which processes the information we transmit to our students. But not all modes of reflection are created equal. We are entrusted with fostering those modes of reflection which will help humanize our world.
We have not always been worthy of this trust. Education in the Humanities, for example, has not always helped make the world humane. The education of Nazis prior to and during WWII provides a case study of a dramatic failure of education to humanize our world. I am reminded of the eyewitness account of the murder of a Jewish infant by a Nazi soldier from whose pocket could be seen protruding a work by the moral philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argues that others are worthy of my respect just because they are my fellow humans. How do we reconcile this soldier’s study of the precepts of a great ethical thinker with his smashing the skull of an infant? Do we, like many disillusioned observers of educational practice, simply deny the possibility that education can edify? Do we reject, out of hand, the notion that good education can help to produce good people, people who will not go about wantonly harming others? Or do we look into what lies behind a failure of education to educate-toward-goodness in order to rethink how we are to go about teaching? FDU’s mission statement notes a commitment to foster “ethical understanding.” How are we to realize this goal? How are we to respond to the survivor of the Holocaust who says (and I quote):
My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. So I’m suspicious of education. My request: Help your students to be human.
Only when we think against ourselves, only when we are willing — in dialogue — to examine beliefs closest to home does the possibility for moral discourse at the heart of all genuine education emerge. The very decision to engage in honest dialogue with others means that I have adopted a respectful position toward those others — opening myself to the possibility that they have something to say which will challenge, complement — perhaps outright oppose — perspectives I’ve always deemed “the right ones.” To acknowledge my limitations and to enter into dialogue is already to have begun to lead a life in which I honor the personhood of the other. To engage in dialogue is to renounce the use of verbal or physical force to impose my views upon another. To engage in Socratic dialogue is thus to refuse the use of force, to reject violence. It is to engage in a form of peacemaking — the very opposite of the actions of the Nazi faithful who subscribed to fixed ideological positions which they then endeavored to impose — first verbally, then bodily — upon others.
If, as I have argued, everything is “up for grabs,” — if we are to be Socratic learners — it is fair to ask what distinguishes the authority of the teacher from that of her or his students in the classroom? To say that teachers are no longer authorities in the traditional sense of that word is not to say that the transmission of content mastered by them as professionals has but little to contribute to the educational process. Such expertise is a vital component of excellence in education. Its vitality, however, depends on the degree to which so-called experts realize their expertise in a spirit of inquiry. To use expertise in this spirit is to interrogate the world, to question the assumption that the structures of the world are givens. We must urge our students — and remind ourselves — to examine the “truths” we hold dear. As provisional, all knowledge concerning what might constitute a good life is now cast into a gray zone of ever-expanding complexity. We must embrace that ambiguity which inevitably attends any examination of what a good life means. Our students might well walk out of our classrooms shaking their heads in consternation, as we proceed to complicate — and thus enrich — their lives.
No discipline is exempt from the work of critical inquiry. The expertise of the teacher must be exercised in the service of questioning the very human construction of the world around us: its social forms, its politics, its power relations. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
- A computer science expert might ask questions about the human matrix within which computers exist. Whose purposes do computers serve? Who has access to computers and who does not? Why?
- Math instructors might pose questions regarding the alleged neutrality of statistics, as well as their potential to mystify. To what ends have statistic been used? How might they be used? Can they ever be value-free?
- Business education might similarly be infused with the spirit of critical inquiry. Such issues as honesty in the workplace, whistle blowing, concern for the environment might be raised not just in courses called business ethics but in business courses across the curriculum.
- The historian might ask just whose history is being told, and by whom? Are only the voices of the privileged being heard? Art instructors might ask how art has been used throughout the course of human history. The urban planning instructor might ask whose purposes are served by the choices made regarding the creation and maintenance of a city’s infrastructure.
Posing such questions demonstrates to our students that learning is an activity undertaken more in the interrogative than the declarative mode. Teachers model teachability for their students. What the Socratic teacher comes to teach is not solely a fixed body of knowledge or a fixed set of skills. What she or he comes to teach is the desire to be taught. Only if teachers subject their own beliefs to critical scrutiny can they legitimately offer them to students. Teachers possess a fuller awareness than do their students of their presumption to know.
What Nazi educators did so well was to transmit a fixed body of so-called knowledge to their students — a practice which the Brazilian philosopher Paolo Freire names the banking concept of education: Students come to the classroom to make withdrawals from the bank of knowledge whose sole locus is the mind of the instructor. What I am suggesting this afternoon is something quite different. Teachers must rankle, unsettle their students in the process of helping them interrogate the full range of contexts in which they live. Teachers must be provocateurs. Rather than socializing students to the givens of society, education must de-socialize students. In the course of making what is familiar strange, education empowers us to create a vision of how we wish the world to be and gives us the tools to move toward its creation. As Freire reminds us, critical reflection and action are inextricably linked. Action without reflection is random; reflection without action is sterile. If we reflect genuinely on our world, we begin the work of its reconstruction, its repair. I would argue that the ultimate purpose of education is to work toward this healing of our so troubled world.
And we live in particularly troubled times, our society rent by fundamental divisions. Socratic dialogue is all too rare. Something profound lies beneath the often superficial distinctions drawn between left and right, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. There is a greater societal divide to be addressed: the divide between those who, uncritically, believe what they think, and those who think against themselves. Our survival as a civil society, our moral survival —perhaps even our physical survival — depends upon which of these two ways of being prevails.
Let all of us in this University community renew a dedication to thinking against ourselves.
