Posted By BillHeise on May 22, 2009

Larry, my only regular commenter on this blog, wrote the following comment on yesterday’s post:

I remember the Secret Sharer in Mrs. Kelly’s class also, though I was not as enamored of her Jungian psycho-philosophy.  I would say that I distinctly remember her calling it a “night journey” rather than a “sea journey.”  Could be wrong, but on the other hand, who really gives a shit?

I thought I would take the opportunity of responding to Larry’s comment with a post on why I am writing my blog.

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I have said that I am a hyper-rational being. And this must make reading my blog annoying to people who don’t have a need for hyper-rational order in their lives. But let’s be clear here. I think Larry is probably right to have dismissed “The Secret Sharer” as one of those things you have to read in high school and then threw away. This is the experience of being in high school. Teachers make you read all sorts of stuff—I almost said crap—and students read all sorts of stuff without being very interested in it. That’s the way it always has been, and I believe that’s the way it should be.

Occasionally, someone gets trapped by a book, a work of art, or book on business theory—there are all sorts of possibilities in the world—and then they are lost to the world of adolescent possibility. They enter the world of action. They have decided that they are going to specialize in this field or that field. This happened to Larry in the same class in which it happened to me: Mrs. Kelly’s senior English class. However, I don’t believe that Mrs. Kelly had necessarily either of our responses in her mind when she decided on how she was going to teach the class. She was just trying to teach us the basic coping skills of argument with a smattering of humanism. She believed that Jung had found some answers to the problem of human nature.

I followed her argument for approximately 5 years before I realized that there was a problem. You can find out what the problems were by looking at my article on Joseph Campbell. When I got back to school, after having dropped out and studied on my own, I found that I had a very different attitude than many of my academic colleagues. This was not a problem in my undergraduate experience. On the contrary, it propelled me to the top of my class.

Graduate School

However in graduate school, I had a very different experience. What was once such an asset—my having thought “outside the box” of academia; this was because I had not been in academia as I was working through the same problems of the failures of modernism—became a liability in graduate school. People wanted me to conform to their postmodern model, but they could never answer the questions that I had raised in my life. And until they did, I couldn’t imagine why I should conform to their models, since they seemed to me to be so lacking in the answers that I was looking for. For their part, all they could see of me was that I was holding on to outdated ideas about “truth.”

The fact the matter was that at bottom academics do not believe in the human mind’s ability to capture the truth. They don’t believe in “truth.” They believe that truth is simply a matter of negotiation between competing parties. I’ve always been okay with that. The problem with academics, it seems to me, was that they believed that their position, having studied the great questions of life, gave them an “absolute” advantage over people who have not studied the great questions of life. This is the situation that governs the classroom. Teachers know things, and students come into their class hoping to take advantage of the teacher’s great knowledge.

However, occasionally students come to class with different questions or different approaches to the problem of knowledge. And this was my problem in graduate school. I was not able to grant my teachers expertise until they could satisfy me that they had answers. But academics in rhetoric do not have answers. The only answer that they have is that they know nothing, while anybody who thinks they know something knows less than they know. Until one recognizes the “absolute” advantage of a teacher (who has studied and found that they know nothing) over a student (who has not studied and still believes that they know something), the teacher has the responsibility to put their student in their place. [See my post on Sex Pistols v. the Banjo.]

The Perpetual Outsider

This put me in the position of being a perpetual outsider who wanted more than anything else to be an insider. The problem with me was that I was too rational. I could not believe that the cynicism of my fellow teachers about the possibilities of knowledge were true limitations. I did not have answers at the time, but I could think of enough exceptions that I would not submit to their skepticism.

The pressure put on me by academics eventually drove me out of academia altogether. It’s not that I think that I was not good enough to compete in an academic environment. It was that I had very different (and incompatible) ideas about knowledge, but I had no backing from academics for my ideas. This was brought home to me when, on the very last day of my academic experience, the day in which I had to defend my dissertation, one of my advisers said (after six years of studying with her at UIUC) “Now I get what you are trying to do.”

Occasionally someone would talk about my work in their job interviews, and people would applaud me and would say how interesting my work sounded. However, when I myself would go into a job interview, I would get asked a lot of questions about why I was so backward that I was going to pursue the connection between (surely useless) Aristotelian logic and (surely outdated) allegory. Didn’t everyone know that aesthetics had nothing to do with logic? And didn’t everyone know that allegory had been supplanted by symbol?

So I left academia for the brighter, and much less stressful, field of business. And I would’ve still been in business had I not had a stroke four and a half years ago.

Why I Blog

The stroke drove me back to writing. I had sort of been planning on writing a novel eventually, and I had been working for about five years on my book Writing For People Who Hate Writing. But honestly, I never had any intention of pursuing those goals to their ends. I was much more interested in the process of figuring out my position than I was in the end of making money.

The blog came about after I had realized that I was going to pursue writing, not as a hobby, but as my profession. I realized that I needed to make my position plain to others. I’m not famous, and consequently I do not have a lot of readers. I am not blogging because I intend to become famous. This is purely personal. I’m coming to terms with how I got here.

After I left academia, I was ashamed that I had wasted so many years pursuing a goal that seemed once so important and now seemed like an enormous waste of time. Two years after I got out of graduate school that I was making more money than any of my academic colleagues. Two years after that, I was pulling in several times one can make in a year as an academic. While I thought this was a little unfair, it was also a much less stressful life.

I went back to teaching in this environment, because I still felt that teaching was a noble thing to do. But I went back into teaching computer skills to tech majors at a local technical college. Here I thought that I could find some meaning that I could impart to my students other than the “I-don’t-know-anything-and-neither-do-you” current that ran through my graduate studies classes. This turned out to be very productive for me. It eventually caused me to write the book, Writing for People Who Hate Writing, which in my mind is an extended essay written for people who are not convinced that writing has any meaning in the universe whatsoever. I disagree with my students, and I tell them so in the beginning of the book.

Back to Human Nature

This is one of the questions that I’m attempting to address in this blog: the question of the relationship between language and human action. I don’t believe, as my rhetoric professors believe, that the possibilities of human action extend only so far as our ability to verbalize our experience in the world. This is why I’m writing so much about the culture of music, rather than language. This is one of those philosophical propositions introduced to me (and I assume to the philosophical world) by Susan Langer, who argued that there was more in the philosophical vocabulary than was dreamed of in the philosophical vocabulary.

The experience of my rhetoric professors is guided by Wittgenstein, who, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, announces belief that he had said all that could be said on the subject of our mind’s engagement with the world outside itself. Wittgenstein had traveled from his first proposition (“The world is everything that is the case”) to his last proposition (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”). By leaving things “about which one cannot speak” unresolved, I believe that Wittgenstein has torn up the notion of “truth.” In the meantime, every human argument in the world about which one can speak is simply a negotiation between two competing political parties.

This is important to me. I’m sure it’s as boring as can be for you. I have told you more than once that I am a hyper-rational being, but I don’t believe that rationality–even hyper-rationalty–is adequate to the task of determining the truth of any subject/object to which the rational mind turns.  The argument that I am making in this blog is that there is a human nature that lies beneath politics and culture. And it is that about which we cannot speak in strictly rational terms.

Here’s a for instance. You and I both have had the identical experience of trying drugs and finding out that drugs are not the answer to our problems. You found this out despite the fact that you were looking at drugs to make you numb. I found out the same thing, despite the fact that I could not have any interest in numbing myself. Beneath our divergent experiences with language and rhetoric, we both had a similar experience.

By accepting the arguments of Wittgenstein, my humanities professors had surrendered to a virulent form of skepticism which had robbed everybody, except the “philosophers” who accepted that there are no good philosophical arguments, any ground on which to stand. This made me, who did not believe this in graduate school, not simply a person with a different point of view: it made me an enemy who must be put in its place before anyone would even listen to my (at the time poorly-formed) arguments. My frustration with politics and culture as the ends of inquiry stem from my experience in graduate school.

I respect their arguments about the relative processes by which culture operates on the human mind. I am even attempting to do some “cultural” criticism in my “What I am Listening to This Week” section of the blog. But I believe that academics are continuing to substitute the “ends” of those processes as their sole domain. I do not believe that the substitution of ends for the process of discovery is wise or necessary. The process of discovery will continue long after any individual academic is dead. It will continue long after our entire culture is dead.

The process of history will determine who among us is right among us, and who is wrong. The efforts of individual scholars to position themselves in the mainstream of history is futile. It is not really up to them. This is an illusion of the self-centered, individualistic view of the world, which does not take into account the fact that there are some processes that are simply out of the individual’s control.

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