The Huston Smith Reader. Huston Smith
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elements—Hume's impressions, Russell and Moore's sense data—are first spotted and then built into wholes, knowing (we now see) is polar. Part and whole are in dialogue from the start. No man looks at the world with pristine eyes; he sees it edited, and editorial policy is always forged in the widest field of vision available.
The same holds true for ethics, for doing is vectored by overview as much as knowing is. “Deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and more universal craving in the human make-up. It is the craving for knowledge of the right direction—for orientation [Shelton 1936].”
In playing the game of life-orientation, the first rule is to capture everything in sight, for the elusive might prove to be crucial; if it is and it escapes your net, you may get rich, but you won't win. The second rule is to set what has been captured in order, to array it in pattern or design. Thus the twin principles of gestalt philosophy are: (a) attention to the whole, taking care to see that nothing of importance has been omitted; and (b) attention to the pattern of the whole's parts. Complementing clarity and consistency which are the virtues of analytic philosophy, the virtues of gestalt philosophy are scope and design.
Now back to lecturing. As a gestalt philosopher both these principles of scope and design figure in the way I approach my task. Scope enters to position the topic to be discussed within the panoply of human interests generally. Why among the myriad of things we could talk about during this hour or this semester are we giving time to this? The answer needn't take much time; indeed, no time at all if it is self-evident and acceptable. But it must be evident and acceptable to students, not just to me; that's crucial. Answers which, however evident, are not acceptable to students are: “because the professor happens to be working on a paper of the subject,” “because this is what the instructor was taught in graduate school, so knows most about—read, is most invulnerable with respect to,” “because having avoided math the student needs a course in philosophy to graduate,” or “because it will help those who intend to continue in philosophy to get into graduate school.”
Once the topic has been positioned in the sense of linked to an acknowledged human interest or need, the elements bearing on the topic must be positioned. Enter pattern or design.
Paintings begin with a discovery, a new and exhilarating perception. Immediately the painter faces enormous difficulties; he must force shapes and static colors to embody what he has felt and seen. The lecturer's task is analogous. He, too, must fix, articulate, and objectify what on first discovery was nebulous, fluid, and private. How, within the artifice of a class hour, can he make a subtle aspect of life or being evident? Every sentence calls for knowledge of his materials and their limitations and an unswerving eye on the effect intended. It is an old problem: how anything of the real can pass the gap between intuition and expression. The passage can be effected only by translation, not from one language into another, but from one mode of being into another, from reception into creation. Everything at the instructor's disposal—facts, concepts, anecdotes, analogies, arguments, humor—must work to enforce the intended impression to the end that at the hour's close the student feels, “that's true and important, or at least interesting.” It's no good if he stops with “that's true.” As Whitehead noted, “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.” As irrelevancies deaden the effect, omission is of the essence.
What constitutes a masterpiece here, or (to drop hyperbole) at least an authentic work of art? When a person for whom the topic in question is vital, who as a consequence has lived with it and pondered it, summons everything he or she has discerned on the problem, distills it, compresses it, pounds it into a form that makes sense! Thoughts emerge, not in mere succession, but architecturally, in meaningful pattern—possibly, in addition, they emerge as incarnated in a life that is being lived, his or her own. That's what sent me walking out of Mandel Hall on air those Chicago afternoons. And that, now that I think of it, is the way subliminally I have sensed myself as a lecturer: traveller, pilgrim, archeologist of space and time, trying with the help of a parcel here and a fragment there to piece together the largest possible meaning for life and the world. Such meaning, though it is intelligible, exceeds the merely rational. Or if one prefers, is the highest category of the rational.
In characterizing lecturing as art, my model has been the painter rather than the actor. Not that lectures can't be dramatic performances too; they can be, as the adage that every good teacher is part ham attests. But the comparison means little to me—again, the variety in teaching styles. Writing is as different from speaking as reading is from listening, but the feelings that infuse me while writing and lecturing are much the same. Attention is fixed on content; issues of delivery and audience contact work themselves out unconsciously.
METHOD II
It will be apparent from what I have said that I haven't lost faith in the mix of lecture and discussion that is higher education's abiding rubric. I continue to teach one course each term by this format; it involves me and, given the averages, students show symptoms of satisfaction. But there has been a change. For the last eight years I have also taught a course by almost opposite canons.
This second course roots back to the summer of 1965, when I was invited to Bethel, Maine, to observe for two weeks the work of the National Training Laboratories with small groups: T- (for Training) groups, encounter groups, or human interaction laboratories as they have come to be called. By pleasant coincidence, I was to bring back from Bethel what Bethel had originally drawn from my own home base, for it was from Kurt Lewin's pioneering work at M.I.T. that the National Training Laboratories evolved. Something happened to me at Bethel, but it is also the case that I was ready for it to happen. It wasn't that I had grown disillusioned with higher education, but the question of whether it might not be better had become insistent. For however one assessed its virtues, university learning struck me—and still strikes me—as:
1. Insufficiently experimental. It scans less than does industry for improved ways of doing things.
2. Too authoritarian. Persons aged 17 to 25 years would at other times have been launched in the world. Here they continue to be subjected overwhelmingly to directives that flow down to them instead of rising from their own volitions.
3. Too passive in the role in which it places students. On this point clear proof is at hand. Take a word count in almost any class: who talks most, even in discussion classes and seminars? As learning requires doing, the arrangement is ideal for teachers, but one hears that it's the students who pay tuition.
4. Too detached from students’ on-going lives, their hopes and involvements, the points where their psychic energy is most invested. It is as if the curriculum's cerebral thrust connects with the top 6 inches of the student's frame while leaving the other 60 inches idling. “It is by living, by dying, by being damned that one becomes a theologian,” Luther advises us, “not by understanding, reading, and speculating.” Or perhaps by both? What is clear is that academic reading, speculating, and understanding is joined very little to students’ living, dying, and damnation. The most substantial recent study of American education, Charles Silberman's (1970) Crisis in the Classroom, concludes that reformers and innovators have an obligation to lobby for more emphasis on the education of feelings and the imagination and for a slow-down in cognitive rat-racing.
5. Too impersonal. Colleges used to be communities. Universities have in our time become almost the opposite: huge anticommunities like virtually every other institution in our mass, mobile, agglomerate society where rules and regulations take precedence over persons and seasoned relationships.
What encounter groups showed me first and above all else was a way to generate involvement. I hadn't been at Bethel 48 hours before my entire life seemed to sink or swim in terms of my group—my 15 strangers, none of whom I had laid eyes on two days before nor was I likely to see again 10 days thereafter. Swiftly, almost instantly, the criss-cross of human interactions—words, feelings, glances, gestures—had enmeshed me. Thought was emphatically involved, for apart from the therapeutic hour each afternoon when I deliberately turned my mind off and flung myself into the blissfully uncritical arms of impersonal nature (a