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The past—Learning from versus learning about: A response to Faber
Nm Idcar m Psychoi. Vol. Prmred in Great Britam
7, No. 3, pp. 291-294.
1989
0732-118W89 $3.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press plc
THE PAST-LEARNING FROM VERSUS LEARNING ABOUT: A RESPONSE TO FABER* JAMES WALKUP Department of Psychiatry, SUNY Health Science Center, 450 Clarkson, Box 1203, Brooklyn, NY 11203-2098, U.S.A. Nietzsche, it appears, had a soft spot for the Buddha. So, too, does Professor Faber. Even I do, though I do not talk about it much. I suppose each of us imagines there is something worth learning in the stories about the Buddha. In addition to learning about the Buddha, Faber believes we Nietzsche’s gradual, steadily increasing are well advised “to contemplate attraction to Buddhism . . . which emerges in his writings after 1886 and which may be said . . . to . . . lend it a dimension that is . . . richly revealing” (p. 27). Or, put more precisely, Faber “ask[s] the reader” to contemplate. I cannot recall ever having been invited by one author to watch another author’s attraction grow. Although I found myself glad to have shown to me material I knew nothing about, Faber’s way of proceeding struck me as unusual enough to require some comment. In the paper’s “Beginnings,” Professor Faber invokes Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and the spirit of the Greek stage. His words (including some phrases from Nietzsche) serve well to introduce the bargain he means to strike with his reader: “Blessed with the capacity to turn their perception of misery into aesthetic celebrations, the ‘profound Hellenes’ can teach m to ‘look boldly into nature,’ and ourselves. We too can be chanting members of the satyr Chorus” (p. 26). Throughout the argument that follows, the scholarship that appears serves one of two purposes. First, it stages a spectacle, a carnival of looking and liking. Nietzsche looks at, initially dislikes, then comes to like the Buddha. Professor Faber likes Nietzsche’s liking and invites us to look at it. Professor Faber likes Nietzsche’s having changed his mind, but dislikes the incompleteness of the change-because, as he shows us, he (Faber) so likes the Buddha. Then, finally, Professor Faber has us (his readers) look at his own liking of the Buddha-this time not as the standard he uses to judge Nietzsche and others, but as a human affection worth emulating. We are invited to join our fellow onlookers. Second, there are three episodes mixed in with the liking and looking when Faber steps back from the spectacle for a second purpose: to explain. He explains two failures and one success. One failure is Nietzsche’s “failure” to realize fully the “reversal of his initial antipathy to Buddhism.” Another is Freud’s “failure” to follow Nietzsche in making peace with oriental thought and *Commentaryon M. D. Faber (1988) Back to a crossroad: 1, pp. 25-45.
No.
291
Nietzsche,
Freud,
and the East, Vol. 6,
292
J.
Walkup
its somatic focus. Both failures are explained by inner conflicts and resistance of the one who failed. The success, Nietzsche’s reversal of attitude, is attributed to two interpersonal factors (his personal friendship with the scholar Paul Deussen and his intellectual relationship to Schopenhauer) and one personal one (“his own personal maturation,” p. 25). The division between the spectacular and explanatory aspects of this essay reminded me of a distinction Richard King (1986) makes between two interpretive attitudes, learning from and learning about. Learning from is a form of Bildung. It is edifying, ethical, engaged. The subject searches and savors the object, extracting from it what can be had. Learning about is more guarded, an activity of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It asks: Who speaks in this text? How are sources, motives and interests concealed by these surfaces? The subject suspends a concern with personal judgment of an object of knowledge, asking not “Shall I take this in or spit it out ?” but “How is its appearance related to its reality?” (in whatever way the latter may be defined by the analytic approach used). Of course, there are mixed cases of the two, but the difference in attitude is deep and important. I shall make use of King’s notions in my comments on Faber’s method, in hopes of bringing the looking and liking into a meaningful relation to learning. In the learning about column, we place the accounts of Nietzsche’s failure to stay the course of his change, Freud’s failure to appreciate Buddhistic values, and Nietzsche’s successful, yet incomplete, reversal. Of course the “failure” is the failure to like Buddhism enough and the “success” is the flowering of appreciation for Buddhism. Only when a failure or success is spotted are we sent back to the texts to understand why. Behind the failures and the success an implicit scheme can be seen. It is a tale of learning from, of edification, of “hav[ing] done with the split, Oedipal, Sphinx-like human creature, divided in himself and in his relations, with others and [replacing] him with . . . one who appreciates and expresses his capacity for play, for spontaneous, exuberant life” (p. 44). The influence of this scheme can be seen in the very different ways success and failure are explained. Nietzsche successfully shifted his attitude, the abstract tells us, under the influence of “personal maturation.” Faber has in mind Nietzsche’s overcoming of his ambivalence toward Schopenhauer and the “alteration of attitude and mood, the life change as it were,” which came with the new vantage point, the “new mental and physical plateau,” available to Nietzsche as he grew older (p. 28). According to Faber (who here relies upon Hayman), the other influence on Nietzsche’s shift is his richly edifying friendship with Paul Deussen, translator of the Sutras of the Vendanta and the Upanishads. The forces at work here (talking, drinking, festive birthdays) certainly sound healthy and, what is at least as important, they operate on what we can call a genuinely human scale. On the other hand, a failure to be edified by Buddhism sounds a little sick when Faber describes it. We hear how Nietzsche was haunted by unsatisfactory identifications, gelding, and slow emotional starvation by his parents. In addition, Freud’s inability or unwillingness to follow Nietzsche in positively
The past-learning
from vs. learning about
293
evaluating Buddhism is traced, first, to his “lifelong refusal” to explore the early symbiotic relationship between mother and infant and, second, to the emotional source of that refusal: “Freud’s ‘hang-ups’,” which, if the source cited by Faber is correct, can be attributed to Freud’s unconscious fantasies, fears, and temptations (p. 42). Is it fair for Faber to explain agreement by growth and friendship, disagreement by intrapsychic conflicts ? If this were an explanatory essay, devoted to learning about, the answer would clearly be no. But I think Faber can say yes, so long as he persuades us that, fundamentally, this is an edifying, not an explanatory, essay. If he invites us to join a satyr chorus, how can we demand Socratic skepticism? His openly personal statement of Buddhistic values surely supports a claim that his essay is edifying, an attempt to awaken an equally personal response from the reader. And, he might add, in a theatrical context, the charge of unfairness is not particularly weighty when lodged against an otherwise compelling performance. The problem with this reply is that is relocates, rather than resolving, a more general problem of essays which ask the reader to learn about only so that he or she can learn from. If the desire to learn from is strong enough, a reader might agree to set aside the humdrum values of a graduate seminar, agree not to ask why Faber chooses to use Erikson instead of Mahler, Stern, Trevarthen, or one of a dozen others, and agree not to ask what rules, if any, determine when the switch is allowed from the thematized norms that govern learning about to the more intuitive ones for Learning from. The problem is that however much one might be willing to follow Nietzsche’s example of learning from the Buddha, however much one might be willing to consider that learning from is closer to a judgment of taste than a judgment of pure reason, there sometimes comes a point when the sympathetic openness necessary to learn from runs dry. What then? My question is not merely rhetorical. Despite the appeal of this essay, my sympathetic attention played out when the more mundane aspects of the Buddhist vision were rehearsed. Although offered by Faber with appropriate modesty and prudence, neither “a hygienic, Eastern program” which promises “deep, healing relaxation in New York” nor “Eastern techniques for enhancing our psychological and bodily well-being” have much appeal to me (p. 41). I prefer talking, drinking, and festive birthdays. Need Faber and I end our conversation, each agreeing to tend his own garden? I suspect the answer will depend on how one reads what might be called-perhaps glibly-the meaning market. In boom times, learning from will be popular because, as King says, learning from assumes “a multiplicity of meanings at large in the world” (1986, p. 30). A lifestyle of wholistic hygiene need not conflict with one of chatty celebrations. In times of scarcei resources, cautious consumers will be inclined to learn about because, as King says, learning about assumes “that sources of meaning have dried up, that our resources are depleted” (ibid.). We know very little about the social and psychological conditions that influence the expectation of plenty or scarcity in this domain. I am sure there are
294
J. Walkup
traces of both attitudes to be found in most readers and most thought communities. It seems likely that the structures of a text can trigger one or the other, at least to some degree. Helpful as it sometimes may be to discuss Nietzsche’s fears and fantasies, I doubt they do much to account for the fascinating dialectic between attitude and text. How is it, we are left to wonder, that his expectation of scarcity, suggested by his conviction that “God is dead,” lent itself to the multiplicity of fictions his texts create. Interesting as I found Faber’s engaging, well-written paper to be, I found myself wishing he offered a more wide-ranging dialectic, one more addressed to the cultural and broadly psychological sources of meaning-making which are not well understood by comments on an author’s childhood or his ‘failures.’ REFERENCES King, R. (1986). Self-realization and solidarity: Rorty and the judging self. In J. Smith & W. Kerrigan (Eds.), Pragmatism’s Freud: The moral disposition of psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
7, No. 3, pp. 291-294.
1989
0732-118W89 $3.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press plc
THE PAST-LEARNING FROM VERSUS LEARNING ABOUT: A RESPONSE TO FABER* JAMES WALKUP Department of Psychiatry, SUNY Health Science Center, 450 Clarkson, Box 1203, Brooklyn, NY 11203-2098, U.S.A. Nietzsche, it appears, had a soft spot for the Buddha. So, too, does Professor Faber. Even I do, though I do not talk about it much. I suppose each of us imagines there is something worth learning in the stories about the Buddha. In addition to learning about the Buddha, Faber believes we Nietzsche’s gradual, steadily increasing are well advised “to contemplate attraction to Buddhism . . . which emerges in his writings after 1886 and which may be said . . . to . . . lend it a dimension that is . . . richly revealing” (p. 27). Or, put more precisely, Faber “ask[s] the reader” to contemplate. I cannot recall ever having been invited by one author to watch another author’s attraction grow. Although I found myself glad to have shown to me material I knew nothing about, Faber’s way of proceeding struck me as unusual enough to require some comment. In the paper’s “Beginnings,” Professor Faber invokes Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and the spirit of the Greek stage. His words (including some phrases from Nietzsche) serve well to introduce the bargain he means to strike with his reader: “Blessed with the capacity to turn their perception of misery into aesthetic celebrations, the ‘profound Hellenes’ can teach m to ‘look boldly into nature,’ and ourselves. We too can be chanting members of the satyr Chorus” (p. 26). Throughout the argument that follows, the scholarship that appears serves one of two purposes. First, it stages a spectacle, a carnival of looking and liking. Nietzsche looks at, initially dislikes, then comes to like the Buddha. Professor Faber likes Nietzsche’s liking and invites us to look at it. Professor Faber likes Nietzsche’s having changed his mind, but dislikes the incompleteness of the change-because, as he shows us, he (Faber) so likes the Buddha. Then, finally, Professor Faber has us (his readers) look at his own liking of the Buddha-this time not as the standard he uses to judge Nietzsche and others, but as a human affection worth emulating. We are invited to join our fellow onlookers. Second, there are three episodes mixed in with the liking and looking when Faber steps back from the spectacle for a second purpose: to explain. He explains two failures and one success. One failure is Nietzsche’s “failure” to realize fully the “reversal of his initial antipathy to Buddhism.” Another is Freud’s “failure” to follow Nietzsche in making peace with oriental thought and *Commentaryon M. D. Faber (1988) Back to a crossroad: 1, pp. 25-45.
No.
291
Nietzsche,
Freud,
and the East, Vol. 6,
292
J.
Walkup
its somatic focus. Both failures are explained by inner conflicts and resistance of the one who failed. The success, Nietzsche’s reversal of attitude, is attributed to two interpersonal factors (his personal friendship with the scholar Paul Deussen and his intellectual relationship to Schopenhauer) and one personal one (“his own personal maturation,” p. 25). The division between the spectacular and explanatory aspects of this essay reminded me of a distinction Richard King (1986) makes between two interpretive attitudes, learning from and learning about. Learning from is a form of Bildung. It is edifying, ethical, engaged. The subject searches and savors the object, extracting from it what can be had. Learning about is more guarded, an activity of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It asks: Who speaks in this text? How are sources, motives and interests concealed by these surfaces? The subject suspends a concern with personal judgment of an object of knowledge, asking not “Shall I take this in or spit it out ?” but “How is its appearance related to its reality?” (in whatever way the latter may be defined by the analytic approach used). Of course, there are mixed cases of the two, but the difference in attitude is deep and important. I shall make use of King’s notions in my comments on Faber’s method, in hopes of bringing the looking and liking into a meaningful relation to learning. In the learning about column, we place the accounts of Nietzsche’s failure to stay the course of his change, Freud’s failure to appreciate Buddhistic values, and Nietzsche’s successful, yet incomplete, reversal. Of course the “failure” is the failure to like Buddhism enough and the “success” is the flowering of appreciation for Buddhism. Only when a failure or success is spotted are we sent back to the texts to understand why. Behind the failures and the success an implicit scheme can be seen. It is a tale of learning from, of edification, of “hav[ing] done with the split, Oedipal, Sphinx-like human creature, divided in himself and in his relations, with others and [replacing] him with . . . one who appreciates and expresses his capacity for play, for spontaneous, exuberant life” (p. 44). The influence of this scheme can be seen in the very different ways success and failure are explained. Nietzsche successfully shifted his attitude, the abstract tells us, under the influence of “personal maturation.” Faber has in mind Nietzsche’s overcoming of his ambivalence toward Schopenhauer and the “alteration of attitude and mood, the life change as it were,” which came with the new vantage point, the “new mental and physical plateau,” available to Nietzsche as he grew older (p. 28). According to Faber (who here relies upon Hayman), the other influence on Nietzsche’s shift is his richly edifying friendship with Paul Deussen, translator of the Sutras of the Vendanta and the Upanishads. The forces at work here (talking, drinking, festive birthdays) certainly sound healthy and, what is at least as important, they operate on what we can call a genuinely human scale. On the other hand, a failure to be edified by Buddhism sounds a little sick when Faber describes it. We hear how Nietzsche was haunted by unsatisfactory identifications, gelding, and slow emotional starvation by his parents. In addition, Freud’s inability or unwillingness to follow Nietzsche in positively
The past-learning
from vs. learning about
293
evaluating Buddhism is traced, first, to his “lifelong refusal” to explore the early symbiotic relationship between mother and infant and, second, to the emotional source of that refusal: “Freud’s ‘hang-ups’,” which, if the source cited by Faber is correct, can be attributed to Freud’s unconscious fantasies, fears, and temptations (p. 42). Is it fair for Faber to explain agreement by growth and friendship, disagreement by intrapsychic conflicts ? If this were an explanatory essay, devoted to learning about, the answer would clearly be no. But I think Faber can say yes, so long as he persuades us that, fundamentally, this is an edifying, not an explanatory, essay. If he invites us to join a satyr chorus, how can we demand Socratic skepticism? His openly personal statement of Buddhistic values surely supports a claim that his essay is edifying, an attempt to awaken an equally personal response from the reader. And, he might add, in a theatrical context, the charge of unfairness is not particularly weighty when lodged against an otherwise compelling performance. The problem with this reply is that is relocates, rather than resolving, a more general problem of essays which ask the reader to learn about only so that he or she can learn from. If the desire to learn from is strong enough, a reader might agree to set aside the humdrum values of a graduate seminar, agree not to ask why Faber chooses to use Erikson instead of Mahler, Stern, Trevarthen, or one of a dozen others, and agree not to ask what rules, if any, determine when the switch is allowed from the thematized norms that govern learning about to the more intuitive ones for Learning from. The problem is that however much one might be willing to follow Nietzsche’s example of learning from the Buddha, however much one might be willing to consider that learning from is closer to a judgment of taste than a judgment of pure reason, there sometimes comes a point when the sympathetic openness necessary to learn from runs dry. What then? My question is not merely rhetorical. Despite the appeal of this essay, my sympathetic attention played out when the more mundane aspects of the Buddhist vision were rehearsed. Although offered by Faber with appropriate modesty and prudence, neither “a hygienic, Eastern program” which promises “deep, healing relaxation in New York” nor “Eastern techniques for enhancing our psychological and bodily well-being” have much appeal to me (p. 41). I prefer talking, drinking, and festive birthdays. Need Faber and I end our conversation, each agreeing to tend his own garden? I suspect the answer will depend on how one reads what might be called-perhaps glibly-the meaning market. In boom times, learning from will be popular because, as King says, learning from assumes “a multiplicity of meanings at large in the world” (1986, p. 30). A lifestyle of wholistic hygiene need not conflict with one of chatty celebrations. In times of scarcei resources, cautious consumers will be inclined to learn about because, as King says, learning about assumes “that sources of meaning have dried up, that our resources are depleted” (ibid.). We know very little about the social and psychological conditions that influence the expectation of plenty or scarcity in this domain. I am sure there are
294
J. Walkup
traces of both attitudes to be found in most readers and most thought communities. It seems likely that the structures of a text can trigger one or the other, at least to some degree. Helpful as it sometimes may be to discuss Nietzsche’s fears and fantasies, I doubt they do much to account for the fascinating dialectic between attitude and text. How is it, we are left to wonder, that his expectation of scarcity, suggested by his conviction that “God is dead,” lent itself to the multiplicity of fictions his texts create. Interesting as I found Faber’s engaging, well-written paper to be, I found myself wishing he offered a more wide-ranging dialectic, one more addressed to the cultural and broadly psychological sources of meaning-making which are not well understood by comments on an author’s childhood or his ‘failures.’ REFERENCES King, R. (1986). Self-realization and solidarity: Rorty and the judging self. In J. Smith & W. Kerrigan (Eds.), Pragmatism’s Freud: The moral disposition of psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.