The Huston Smith Reader. Huston Smith
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and took off in a rickety jalopy for the Serengeti Plain. There was no road map, but that was logical because as far as I could make out there were no roads. I did encounter one road sign during the day, but I couldn't read it, besides which it had fallen over, so I couldn't tell which way its arms pointed.
A couple of hours into the desert, it suddenly dawned on me that I was completely lost. And out of gas. When we rent a car here we assume the tank to be full. Not there. They give you about enough to get out of the lot, but I didn't know that and hadn't checked. At a total standstill, I could not think of a thing to do. The car was too hot to sit in, and there were no trees to shade me from the blistering sun. Giraffes were friendly; one virtually looked over my shoulder when I had had to change a threadbare tire. There were other animals, but at that hour no lions. Dry bones were everywhere, though—portents of my impending fate. I ate my packed lunch, started rationing my last bottle of water, and tried to think of a plan of action.
None had suggested itself when two figures appeared dimly on the horizon. I started toward them, but with every step I took, they retreated. I quickened my pace, making frantic gestures of distress, and they gradually slowed their pace to allow me to catch up with them. They were disconcertingly large and wore nothing but spears taller than themselves, and flapping cloths over their shoulders to ward off the sun somewhat.
What then could I do? I was in human company but without words to communicate. Something had to be done, so I seized one of them by the wrist and marched him to my dysfunctional car, his companion in tow. This seemed to amuse them, and why not? What had our move to a pile of metal accomplished?
The two of them conversed and then started to leave, but I seized my hostage's wrist again. Human beings were my only lifeline, and I wasn't going to let it be severed. More laughter and conversation between them, and then one of them started off while leaving his companion with me. When he returned he had in tow a small boy who knew a few words of English, such as hello, good-bye, and the like. So, pointing in different directions, I said, “School, school!”
He gave no signs of comprehension, but after more conversation, he and the man who had fetched him went off, leaving my hostage with me. In about an hour, the man returned with ten adult cohorts, and the sun set that evening on as bizarre a scene (I feel sure) as the Serengeti Plain had ever staged: a white man, seated in state at the wheel of his car steering, while twelve Masai warriors pushed him across the sands. My propellers were taking the experience as a great lark. Laughing and all talking simultaneously, they sounded like a flock of happy birds. My first thought was, Who listens? then immediately, Who cares? They were having such a great time.
Six miles across the plain they delivered me to the school I had asked for, which turned out to be Olduvai Gorge, where a decade or so earlier Louis and Mary Leakey [with their son Richard] discovered the tooth that “set the human race back a million years,” as the press reported their discovery. That encounter left me with a profound sense of human connectedness. There we were, as different in every way—ethnically, linguistically, culturally—as any two groups on our planet. Yet without a single word in common, we connected. They understood my predicament and responded with a will and with style.
Beware of the differences that blind us to the unity that binds us.
BOOK TWO
The Sacred Dimensions of Everyday Life
3
Two Kinds of Teaching
When I think back over the memorable teachers I had or have known, the fact that stands out most is the diversity of their styles. Bill Levi at Roosevelt College would sit cross-legged on the desk, moving nothing during the entire class hour save his lips and his mind. Meanwhile, at nearby University of Chicago, David Greene was a pacer. Fresh from his farm at eight on wintry mornings, manure still clinging to his boots as Greek poured from his mouth, he strode with a vigor that made the advancing wall seem adversary. We felt sure that sooner or later he would slam his face into it, but he never did; invariably in the nick of time he would swirl and bounce off the wall not his head but his behind, thereby gaining momentum for the return journey. Gustav Bergmann, logical positivist at the State University of Iowa, was so authoritarian that when a student dared to question something he had said he thundered, “Let's get one thing straight: from 10:00 to 11:00 A.M. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, there is but one God, and his name is Bergmann!” His opposite was a teacher so nondirective on principle that students used to say he not only didn't believe anything, he didn't even suspect anything. I had teachers who wrestled with me socratically as evangelists wrestled with the village drunkard, and teachers who simply dished it out—very well indeed!
The surprising thing is that learning occurred in all these contexts. I conclude that there is no one way to teach; in writing here of two ways I write only of ways that have taken shape in me. Who knows who learns and under what conditions? The act remains essentially mysterious, like love, or sex, or life itself; more strange than familiar, less science than art, a word to which I shall return.
METHOD I
During its first 20 years, my teaching followed a single pattern. Questions and discussion were encouraged and were fun, but lectures were the focus.
Today, lecturers are on the defensive. Almost everything we would like students to know we can place in their hands via paperback. They can read faster than they can listen to us, and print is durable; they can go back if they miss something or forget.
All this is true, but the points don't add up to the conclusion that lectures are passé. One of my most memorable learning experiences was a course Thornton Wilder offered, once only, at the University of Chicago. The classroom was in fact an auditorium, and it was invariably packed. If there was a single question or comment from the floor I don't remember it, yet the exhilaration of those hours I shall never forget. I would leave the auditorium walking on air. In those early afternoons of autumn even Chicago was beautiful.
Plays, too, can be read faster than we can sit through an evening at the theater, but reading doesn't take the place of the performance. Moreover, lectures provide the opportunity for trying out ideas while they are in process of formation and are thus part of the teacher's laboratory. The advantage to the listener is that he or she is not presented with a finished treatise but is watching a living mind at work and being given an insight into its strategies.
Just as there is no one way to teach, so, too, there is no one way to lecture. John Dewey's lectures are said to have been rambling and dull—until the student awoke to the fact that he was witness to a powerful mind's direct involvement in the act of thinking. Minds have their own dispositions: some, like Wittgenstein's, are splitters; mine happens to be a lumper. This fact, so apparent that I suspect that it is grounded in my brain structure, makes metaphysical reticence impossible for me. And, as it affects my approach to lecturing in other ways as well, before saying more about lecturing proper I propose to indicate why a wholistic approach to my field is, in my case, the only approach possible.
Gestalt psychology has made its mark, and gestalt therapy is bidding to do so. In this age of analysis, this heyday of analytic philosophy, is there a place for wholistic, gestalt philosophy as well?
If this discipline takes its cues from the sciences, the answer seems clearly “yes.” Gestalt psychology I have already mentioned; psychology abandoned atomism with its discovery that there is no area of experience, perceptual or otherwise, that is free from what positivists used to call noncognitive factors. In biology, the attempts of molecular genetics “to reach the beautiful simplicity of biological principles through concepts derived from experimental systems in which the ordered structure that is the source of this simplicity has been destroyed [are proving to be] increasingly futile,” and physics, in its complete experience, “does not support the precept that all complex systems are explicable in terms of properties observable in their isolated parts [Commoner 1969].”
Turning to philosophy itself, epistemology has found element analysis ineffectual. Whether we approach knowing analytically or phenomenologically, reports agree: there is no datum unpatterned, no figure without ground, no fact without theory. Instead of a one-way