The word “education” comes from a Latin root that means “to lead out.” To be educated is to be led out of oneself, perhaps. Consider the experience of learning a foreign language, beautifully described by Iris Murdoch:
If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal.1
To learn Russian is to acquire new powers of expression, and probably of thinking too. One acquires the ability to act in settings that would otherwise be mystifying. Our fixation on autonomy clouds our understanding of such development because the skills one exercises in any impressive human performance are built up through submission—to “authoritative structures,” to use Murdoch’s phrase. Such structures provide those ecologies of attention in which minds may become powerful, and achieve genuine independence. In this chapter, then, I want to explore the possibility that there is a tension between the ideal of autonomy and education.
This suggestion may go down hard, as autonomy is arguably the central totem of modern life. It hovers about our concepts of individuality, creativity, and any number of other terms that convey the existential heroism we’re expected to live up to on a daily basis. It is an idea that we moderns have made our dignity hinge on.
EMPOWERMENT THROUGH SUBMISSION
Consider another example: the process of becoming a musician. This necessarily involves learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one’s fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician’s power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience. To what? To her teacher, perhaps, but this isn’t the main thing—there is such a thing as the self-taught musician. Her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to certain natural necessities of music that can be expressed mathematically. For example, halving the length of a string under a given tension raises its pitch by an octave. These facts do not arise from the human will, and there is no altering them. The education of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency, namely that it arises only within concrete limits. As the example of learning Russian illustrates, these limits need not be physical; the important thing is rather that they are external to the self.
There are yet other layers to the musician’s obedience: she plays a prior composition. Or she may improvise, but does so within given melodic forms. These are not natural givens, but rather cultural ones—the mixolydian scale, or an evening raga. At a broader level of musicality, she plays within a genre. It may be hard bop or West Coast cool, Hindustani or Karnataka, or some synthesis of her own, but not invention ex nihilo. To be sure, if one inquires historically, one finds that cultural forms are products of human will as exercised in the past; someone had to invent the mixolydian scale. But from the standpoint of any particular individual in the present, they are experienced as a horizon of possibility that has already been set (they are an “inheritance,” to anticipate the theme of Part III). Indeed, contingent cultural forms have the character of necessity for most people, us nongeniuses.
Once, while listening to the bluegrass guitarist Tony Rice in concert, I had the thought He can do whatever he wants. Such was his complete command of his instrument. Yet “freedom” doesn’t seem quite the right concept to capture this expressive power, if by that term we mean an untutored exercise of the will. His freedom, if that’s what it was, was artistically compelling because of the musical ideas it was in the service of. These ideas were his own, but not simply his own. His expressive power was born of artistic formation.
The kind of collaborative improvisation that takes place among musicians in bluegrass, jazz, or classical Indian music is a good example of what I mean by an ecology of attention. It is mutually adaptive. The improvisation is possible because all parties are attending to one another. It is fruitful only because they are also steeped in forms; the history of their art has become the genetic material, the constitutive fiber, of their own creativity. A master jazz musician quotes from The Real Book with the same ease that a master preacher does from the gospels, and the allusion is gotten. It may be taken up and commented upon by the other players; it may be pushed forward toward possibilities that hadn’t existed moments before, as they come into being only through the improvisation itself. One must be alert, opportunistic. As in ecology, that is how new forms arise.
Note that worries about “conformity” versus “individuality” are simply put aside in the account of creativity I have just sketched. More strongly: membership in a community is a prerequisite to creativity. What it means to learn Russian is to become part of the community of Russian speakers, without whom there would be no such thing as “Russian.” Likewise with bluegrass. These communities and aesthetic traditions provide a kind of cultural jig, within which our energies get ordered.
I think this is obvious. Yet to emphasize community in this way is to stand athwart one of the main veins of the American creed, our individualism. We are Cartesians without having to read Descartes, as Tocqueville famously said. Descartes began his inquiries by putting aside all supposed knowledge received from “example or custom” in order to “reform my own thoughts and to build upon a foundation which is completely my own.”2 On the Cartesian view, being rational requires freeing your mind of any taint of authority of the sort that operates in communities. Kant concurs: Enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity … [This immaturity consists not in a] lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use [one’s own understanding] without the guidance of another.” Further, “laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large portion of men … remain immature for life.”3
As this language suggests, epistemic individualism is a moral ideal, at least as much as it is a doctrine about how we acquire knowledge. It is closely related to the ideal of “authenticity” that shows up throughout American letters. “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” Emerson wrote in his essay “Self-Reliance.”4 Walt Whitman’s democratic hero “walks at his ease through and out of that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not.” Whitman goes on: “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead … nor feed on the specters in books.” To live authentically, Norman Mailer would write a century later, one has to “divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”5
In his masterful book The Masterless, Wilfred McClay writes that after the experience of totalitarianism (largely as conveyed by émigré scholars), American intellectuals in the 1950s were alert to any threat against the individual, and found plenty such at home. Mailer was not alone in seeing little difference between a quick death at the hands of the state and a slow death by conformity. For this generation, McClay writes, “the fantasy of devouring totalism and the fantasy of an unencumbered self went together, standing in symbiosis, testimony to a continuing reliance upon an uncertain notion of individual autonomy—and an even more unsteady conception of the grounds (if any) for genuine social connectedness.”6
The uncertain notion of individual autonomy that McClay refers to would seem to be one that regards autonomy as the simple opposite of heteronomy. From the Jacksonian to the Beat era, other people have often appeared to the American as a disfiguring source of heteronomy. In a culture predicated on this autonomy-heteronomy distinction, it is difficult to think clearly about attention—the faculty that joins us to the world—because everything located outside your head is regarded as a potential source of unfreedom, and therefore a threat to the self. This makes education a tricky matter.
MAKING GLASS: JOINT ATTENTION IN ACTION
I once watched a group of three glassmakers work together. Peter Houk is director of the MIT Glass Lab and one of the leading glassblowers in the United States. Erik Demain is a professor of computer science at MIT; Martin Demain, his father, is both an artist-in-residence at MIT and the coauthor of some hundred-odd scientific papers, most of them with his son. The three of them get together to make glass as a team several times per week. Their collaboration appears to have begun out of intellectual curiosity, and then grew into something more purposive and consuming—so much so that it threatens to take over their academic careers. They now find themselves advancing the state of the art of glassmaking for its own sake. In doing so, they are self-consciously participating in an ancient art that goes back to the times of the Egyptian pharaohs.
I watched them design and then fabricate a piece of “cane” (like a candy cane or barber shop pole) about fifteen feet long, starting from molten blobs of different-colored glass that they stuck together. Being MIT guys, they first designed the cross section of the cane on a computer. Being experienced, they were able to anticipate the transformations of a cross section as it gets twisted and elongated. And, vice versa, they were able to work backward from a desired effect in the cane to a cross-sectional shape that would produce such an effect once twisted and elongated, in what mathematicians call a “screw transform.” They developed a computer program to enhance their ability to visualize the process, and to help novices see these things too, at the design stage.
The first thing that hits you in the “hot shop” is the sheer beauty of molten glass. Its colors are various, depending on its temperature and chemistry. The air surrounding a blob of glass seems to become liquid, shimmering with heat waves that trail off in eddies.
Peter, Erik, and Martin gather from the furnace blobs of glass of various sizes and shapes (therefore having different thermal masses and weird thermal gradients within them) and maintain the fluid, molten state of these blobs by frequently inserting them into another furnace, the “glory hole.” Timing is everything. Sometimes they will cool part of the surface of a blob by dipping one end of it in water, or give a superficial heating to the skin with a propane torch. In an email Peter Houk writes, “It’s important when working on a complex piece to pay close attention to how the plan is evolving and to be able, as a team, to shift directions when necessary, often very fast. Communication is very important. Some moments require moving even faster than verbal communication can allow for.”
The glass has a certain urgency to it, but there was no hint of panic in this team. Indeed it was striking how calm they were as they moved around the shop in concert. Houk believes this kind of cooperation is “one of the key things our program is teaching students at MIT.” Being MIT students, they often want to reduce the process to a set of formulas describing heat transfer, viscosity, and the like. But the morphing of molten glass—its drooping, turning, and solidifying—is something you have to feel from the end of a rod. Houk says you can’t really see the heat transfer that is pertinent to your plan of manipulations; only by actually manipulating the glass does it convey its current state and likely trajectory.
For a complex piece, these manipulations require more than one pair of hands, each attuned to the current state of their part of the whole. They also have to be attuned to what is taking shape in the hands of their collaborators.
Houk is generally the “gaffer”: the team leader who sits at the bench and is responsible for communicating the plan to his (tenured) assistants. He and the piece he is working on are the center of attention. From that position he conducts a kind of group dance that has to be adaptively fluid, or molten, because the glass itself has these qualities. He tells me:
“Different gaffers have different styles as far as how verbal they are in communicating their plan to their team before starting a project and during the making of a hot piece. Some gaffers, like the famous Venetian glassblower Lino Tagliapietra, barely say anything at all, even at the outset. Maybe just a few words about how the process will start out, and rarely any drawings of the finished product. I’ve watched him work many times, and his process reminds me a little of how Miles Davis worked with his bands: some structure to work with, but not too much information and then the rest improvisation within a fairly structured system. His assistants have to be able to read what is going on from nonverbal cues and by looking at what the glass is doing. That’s why he has had the same team for fifteen-plus years. It’s very typical in the Venetian tradition for a master and his first and second assistant to stay together for an entire career, and watching a team like this work together is a special treat.
“Improvising with glass is a tricky thing, though. If you get too unscripted, things can go badly wrong, and glass is not a very forgiving material. So it’s a delicate line … There are times when shit happens and the glass does something unexpected, and at those times it’s really interesting to see how different gaffers and teams deal with the unexpected. Some ride with it and some break down and throw the piece away. Lino once said to me, ‘It’s not so much what you can make that determines how good a glassblower you are—it’s what you can fix.’”
The manipulations that give rise to a finished piece can’t be fully specified ahead of time. Rather, the piece is the frozen record of a team’s coordinated finesse in responding to one another and to the glass. Having witnessed its making, I could only view the finished cane that Houk and the Demains produced that day as a sort of ecological specimen—a fossilized bit of joint attention.
What might follow from regarding it this way? Is there any consequence to my ecological metaphor? I believe it can inform our understanding of how competence arises, and help to clear away some misapprehensions about education that have deep roots in the West, and carry special peril in our current moment.
SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AS PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE
Michael Polanyi wrote, “An art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription for it exists. It can be passed on only by example from master to apprentice. This restricts the range of diffusion to that of personal contacts, and we find accordingly that craftsmanship tends to survive in closely circumscribed local traditions.”7
Polanyi is here talking about craft knowledge, but he was seeking a larger epistemological point. Polanyi was one of the most prominent physical chemists of the middle of the twentieth century. In the second half of his life he took up philosophy in an effort to understand his own experience of scientific discovery. His elaboration of “tacit knowledge” entailed a criticism of the then-prevailing ideas of how science proceeds, tied to wider claims about the nature of reason. The logical positivists conceived reason to be rulelike, whereas according to Polanyi, a scientist relies on a lot of knowledge that can’t be rendered explicit, and an inherent feature of this kind of knowledge is that it is “personal.” He explained:
The declared aim of modern science is to establish a strictly detached, objective knowledge. Any falling short of this ideal is accepted only as a temporary imperfection, which we must aim at eliminating. But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge, then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge. The ideal of exact science would turn out to be fundamentally misleading and possibly a source of devastating fallacies.8
To understand what Polanyi has in mind when he speaks of “devastating fallacies,” it helps to know something further about his life. A Hungarian, he was a refugee from the Soviet project to achieve rational planning of scientific research. The Communists’ attempt to submit science to a five-year plan, in the service of social utility, spurred him to articulate a set of ideas that puts limits on any such project for the direction of research.
For Polanyi, scientific inquiry is above all a practice, best understood as a kind of craft. “I regard knowing as an active comprehension of the things known, an action that requires skill.” He draws a parallel between science and craft that I take to be stronger than a mere analogy—rather, they are two expressions of the same mode of apprehending the world: by grappling with real things.
Writing after the war, he pointed out:
While the articulate contents of science are successfully taught all over the world in hundreds of new universities, the unspecifiable art of scientific research has not yet penetrated to many of these. The regions of Europe in which the scientific method first originated 400 years ago are scientifically still more fruitful today [1958], in spite of their impoverishment, than several overseas areas where much more money is available for scientific research. Without the opportunity offered to young scientists to serve an apprenticeship in Europe, and without the migration of European scientists to the new countries, research centres overseas could hardly ever have made much headway.9
LIBERAL EDUCATION AS APPRENTICESHIP
It would be a gross misreading to take this as an expression of “Eurocentrism.” Polanyi’s point is that to have science, you must have scientists. Scientists are formed. They cannot be conjured wherever “money is available,” or public purposes press (I take him to be referring to the United States).
In the time since Polanyi wrote, America has developed its own traditions. Entering graduate school in the natural sciences, at the end of your first year you join a lab and spend most of your waking hours for the next seven-odd years within its typically cinder-block walls. (A year of courtship is required so that researchers and new graduate students can form an assessment—of one another’s character, not least.) Through long immersion in a particular field of practice and inquiry, you become a connoisseur of a certain class of intellectual problems. You adopt the language of your subfield, but also a shared, usually inarticulate sense of what sort of problems are worth investigating: what to take seriously. In the course of this apprenticeship you make the characteristic mistakes of a novice, and suffer their humiliations before your teachers (who include the more advanced graduate students). Conversely, you experience elation at those moments when you feel a growing mastery—you’re becoming a journeyman. Through these experiences, theoretical thought and methodological tools get joined to a sense of personal involvement. It is not that you have simply swallowed a set of doctrines. Rather, the judgments of the discipline have become your own. Through such formation, you earn a certain independence.10
Such a culture of scientific apprenticeship has not yet developed in China or the Persian Gulf oil states. They have plenty of money and pressing public purposes, but these countries would seem to occupy a position similar to that of the United States in the middle of the twentieth century, when we depended on émigré scientists to help guide such endeavors as the Manhattan Project. Our scientists had access to the same handbooks of physical constants and the same textbooks and research journals and plenty of funding, but were not yet initiated into scientific inquiry as a mode of personal knowledge that is socially incubated, beginning with imitation. The Manhattan Project had a significant lasting effect by providing a setting for mentorship, which then reproduced itself in American universities. My own father was a beneficiary of these developments. After fighting in Europe he attended junior college on the GI Bill, transferred to U.C. Berkeley, and eventually joined the lab of Louis Alvarez, who supervised his doctoral work. This was the era of the bubble chamber, the advent of particle physics. My dad used to tell stories—some firsthand, some through the common lore of the lab—about the émigré figures who towered over physics in those days.
But the culture of scientific apprenticeship that developed in Europe, and then later in America, did so without warrant from the official self-understanding of modern science. As Polanyi writes, “To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness.”11 This is intolerable if, like Descartes, you think that to be rational is to reject “example or custom” in order to “reform my own thoughts and to build upon a foundation which is completely my own.” The paradox of the Cartesian project is that from a beginning point that is radically self-enclosed, one is supposed to proceed by an impersonal method, as this will secure objective knowledge—the kind that carries no taint of the knower himself. Polanyi turns this whole procedure on its head: through submission to authority, in the social context of the lab, one develops certain skills, the exercise of which constitutes a form of inquiry in which the element of personal involvement is ineliminable.
Let’s dwell for a minute on the role that Polanyi assigns to trust: “You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things.” This suggests there is a moral relation between teacher and student that is at the heart of the educational process. Of course, the student must trust that the master is competent. But he also must trust that his intention is not manipulative. It is the absence of just this trust that we found at the origins of Enlightenment epistemology in the previous chapter: a thorough rejection of the testimony and example of others. This rejection begins as a project for liberation—from manipulation by kings and priests—and blossoms into an ideal of epistemic self-responsibility. But the original ethic of suspicion leaves a trace throughout. This stance of suspicion amounts to a kind of honor ethic, or epistemic machismo. To be subject to the sort of authority that asserts itself through a claim to knowledge is to risk being duped, and this is offensive not merely to one’s freedom but to one’s pride.
If Polanyi is right about how scientists are formed, then the actual practice of science proceeds in spite of its foundational Enlightenment doctrines: it requires trust. The idea that there is a method of scientific discovery, one that can be transmitted by mere prescription rather than by personal example, harmonizes with our political psychology, and this surely contributes to its appeal. The conceit latent in the term “method” is that one merely has to follow a procedure and, voilà, here comes the discovery. No long immersion in a particular field of practice and inquiry is needed; no habituation to its peculiar aesthetic pleasures; no joining of affect to judgment. Just follow the rules. The idea of method promises to democratize inquiry by locating it in a generic self (one of Kant’s “rational beings”) that need not have any prerequisite experiences: a self that is not situated.
Polanyi saw an alliance between this misapprehension of scientific practice and efforts to direct research according to some societal goal, for example a Soviet five-year plan of scheduled technological breakthroughs. After many forms of tradition and local knowledge were deliberately destroyed in China during the Cultural Revolution (a spasm of hyperenlightenment), one can imagine the frustration of the current Chinese regime as it now pours billions into its universities, hoping for discovery and innovation but instead producing rule followers.
The question arises how our own intellectual traditions, both scientific and humanistic, will be affected by the current transformation of the American university along the lines of a business enterprise. We are told that there are exciting efficiencies to be realized by replacing face-to-face instruction with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). However appropriate—even ideal—they may be for instruction in some narrow technical matters (I am a big user of YouTube instructional videos on topics like computer-aided design, and how to build electronic fuel injection systems), in the arts and sciences we should take notice that MOOCs divorce the articulate content of a field from personal interaction with a teacher who has made it his vocation to live with the field’s questions. There is, then, a certain harmony between these institutional developments and our deep supposition that the ideal of perfect “clarity”—of precise formalization—is both possible and desirable and that, if realized, it would make any field transmissible by impersonal means. But let us heed Polanyi’s warning that “the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge.”
Polanyi’s argument about the role of unspecifiable, tacit knowledge in expertise; his elaboration of personal commitment as the core of intellectual inquiry, understood as a craft skill; his demonstration that scientific competence is transmitted through apprenticeship to authoritative teachers—from all of this, “it follows that an art which has fallen into disuse for the period of a generation is altogether lost.” He goes on:
There are hundreds of examples of this, to which the process of mechanization is continually adding new ones. These losses are usually irretrievable. It is pathetic to watch the endless efforts—equipped with microscopy and chemistry, with mathematics and electronics—to reproduce a single violin of the kind the half-literate Stradivari turned out as a matter of routine more than 200 years ago.12
Cultural Revolutions aren’t imposed only by totalitarian regimes. We call ours “the creative destruction of capitalism,” and shower venture capital on “disruptive technologies,” especially ones that promise to mechanize human interaction. It hardly needs to be said that the results are both positive and negative. But it does need to be said that in the university, the survival of our traditions of intellectual apprenticeship should not be taken for granted. They will not be well equipped to defend themselves against the Maoist MBAs if they are not aware of themselves as traditions, but remain wed to a conception of knowledge as something that is transmissible to atomized individuals, without loss. On that conception, there is no clear reason why one ought to be creeped out by the idea of a central repository of knowledge, to which we are all connected in a Massive Online intellectual life.
I am not much inclined to defend undergraduate education in its current form, and have expressed a fairly jaundiced view of its role in society elsewhere.13 But one of the things you learn in studying the history of politics is that power is consolidated by eliminating intermediate structures of authority, often under the banner of liberation from those authorities. In his book The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, Tocqueville gives an account of this process in the case of France in the century preceding the Revolution. He shows that the idea of “absolute sovereignty” was not an ancient concept, but an invention of the eighteenth century that was made possible by the monarch’s weakening of the “independent orders” of society—self-governing bodies such as professional guilds and universities. The revolutionists inherited this (fairly recent) centralization of power from the monarchy, and now defended such centralization as the guarantor of liberty against all intermediate forms of social authority (the kind exercised by independent associations). The ideal of total liberty required total centralization of power, now in the name of the people. Today it is the vanguardist disrupters at Google who promise to deliver us from parochialism. If Polanyi is right about how scientists and other thinkers are formed, then to weaken the local authority of teachers and traditions that embody “personal knowledge” is a bad idea, on both epistemic and political grounds.
It is part of our Enlightenment heritage that we are taught to take an intransigent stance against the authority of other people. In the budding romance between Silicon Valley and our universities, there is an exciting prospect that “the scent of people might be removed altogether” (as Jaron Lanier said in another context). If you can’t smell it and you can’t touch it, whatever authority is acting must be that of reason itself! Quite apart from the business appeal of MOOCs for universities (payroll is a lamentable thing), mechanizing instruction is appealing also because it fits with our ideal of epistemic self-responsibility.
As we will see shortly, this aspiration to self-responsibility is at odds with some elementary facts about human beings, in particular the role that other people play for us in conditioning the way we grasp the world.