The Idea of a University (After John Henry Newman)

Author(s): Anne Carson

Source: The Threepenny Review, No. 78 (Summer, 1999), pp. 6-8
Published by: Threepenny Review
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 The Idea of a University
(afterJohn Henry Newman)
Anne Carson
Editor's Note: This talk was given in 1998 at an honorary occasion at McGill
University, where Anne Carson teaches classics, a discipline that no longer exists
THE_ as a separate department at McGill. The topic was assigned to her; the method is
her own.
THREEPENNY
I HAVETO say I found it hard to
REVIEW write this talk. I make my living as
a classical philologist, not an ideologue
"The Threepenny Review, launched in 1980, has built up a of institutions. Faced with the title
healthy national prestige, attracting contributions from "The Idea of a University," I found I
authors such as Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal.... Published had no idea whatsoever what to say
quarterly, The Threepenny Review is ample and handsome, about it. I felt like that anonymous per-
in appearance not unlike the New York Review of Books. son in the 83rd verse of Psalm 119 who
But its contents are those of an old-style little magazine- says, "For I am become like a bottle in
short stories mingled with poetry, memoirs and discursive the smoke." Now, being a philologist I
essays spanning the culture gamut-and the paper has little have to mention in passing that this
of the Anglophilia which has always characterized the verse is itself a bottle in the smoke. For
the word that the King James version
renders as bottle is an anachronism for
TIMES an original Hebrew word meaning
LITERARY some sort of vessel made out of animal
SUPPLEMENT skin or leather. And the phrase that
says "in the smoke" (which is carried in
all the Hebrew manuscripts and all the
English and French translations I could
find in the library) goes astray some-
how in both the Greek of the Septu-
agint and the Latin of the Vulgate,
appearing in these as a quite different
phrase meaning "in the frost." Frost
and smoke don't seem to me very easily
confusable phenomena, and none of
the textual experts I consulted on this
problem had any ready explanation of
what the discrepancy might mean.
Thanks to Our Donors That's the way it goes with philology:
the closer you look at a word the more
The Threepenny Review receives grants from the National Endowment distantly it looks back at you.
for the Arts, the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, the Bernard Osher John Henry Newman took a very
close look at the word university in an
Foundation, and the Open Society Institute. Numerous individual
essay called "On the Scope and Nature
donors, whose names are printed annually in the spring issue, have also of University Education," and there he
helped keep the magazine going. We are extremely grateful to all these tells us that this word reveals itself, first
sources of support. of all, etymologically. I shall quote him:
"A university by its very name profess-
es to teach universal knowledge." What
does Newman mean by universal
knowledge? Possibly (I thought at first)
knowledge that has the universe as its
content. But no (I discovered on further
A Note on the Artworks research), Newman's thinking about
what a university should teach is not
oriented toward content at all. For
The wood engravings reproduced in this issue are all from Zebra Noise knowledge that is oriented is knowl-
with a flatted seventh by Richard Wagener, in which twenty-six short edge that has a use. In Newman's view,
the knowledge that results from a real
fictions, evocative of the West in which the artist lives, are obliquely
university education has no use. It is
related to his biological alphabet of twenty-six accompanying engravings. useless. Or what he calls "liberal."
The engravings range from the armadillo, Tolypeutes trincinctus, to the Liberal, from Latin liber, means
meadow jumping mouse, Zapus hudsonius. (Only about half of the "free." It is the opposite of servus,
alphabet has been reproduced in this issue.) The book was designed by "servile," and denotes that which
Peter Koch in collaboration with the artist and the entire edition printed refuses to be informed by an end or
letterpress at the Koch studio. The edition is limited to seventy signed constrained to necessity. In their
and numbered copies, available from the printer at $2700 apiece. ancient context the Latin words liber
and servus obviously signify class dis-
Peter Koch, Printer is the publishing imprint from the printing office of tinction, free man and slave.
Peter Rutledge Koch, a fine letterpress printer and book designer in But we should note the odd linguistic
Berkeley, California. Since 1974 he has printed over thirty limited-edition
fact that the Latin adjective liber mean-
ing "free" is exactly the same word as
books in the centuries-old tradition of letterpress printing. In addition to
the Latin noun liber meaning "book."
his publishing and printing work, Mr. Koch lectures in Typography and
Surely this is no more than a random
the History of Printing at the University of California, Berkeley. homonym. Yet free men and books do
sort out together in many a pedagogical
For further information, please contact Peter Koch, Printer at 2203 theory, not least of all Newman's,
Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 (phone 510-849-0673, fax 849-1614) whose institutional product is charac-
terized by Newman as the state or con-
dition or habit of mind of a gentleman.
6 THE THREEPENNYREVIEW
He emphasizes this:
Liberaleducationmakesnot the Christian,
not the Catholic, but the gentleman.It is
well to be a gentleman,it is well to have a
cultivatedintellect,a delicatetaste, a can-
did, equitable bearing in the conduct of
life-these are the connaturalqualitiesof a
large knowledge;they are the objectsof a
university.
And what exactly does Newman mean
by a "largeknowledge"? I quote again:
Knowledgeis calledby the nameof Science
or Philosophy when it is acted upon,
informed,or if I may use a strong figure
impregnatedby Reason.Reasonis the prin-
ciple of that intrinsic fecundity of
Knowledgewhich, to those who possessit,
is its especial value, and which dispenses
with the necessityof their looking abroad
for anyendto restuponexternalto itself.
Newman's universal knowledge rests
upon a principle of reason that frees it
to be useless. This reason need look for
no end outside itself, its value is intrin-
sic. Newman's ideal university is a
place where gentlemen may reason for
no reason.
The debate about whether reason
should have a reason, about whether
education should be useful or useless, is
as old as the profession of reason itself.
The first professional reasoners in the
Western tradition, I suppose, were the
sophists. Here is how the sophist
Protagoras (in Plato's dialogue of that
name) describes his own educational
program to a young man who has
come to him with his money in his
hand:
But fromme this youngman will learnnot
but what he has come to learn.My subject:
careof personalaffairs,so that he may best
managehis household,and careof political
affairs,so he becomesa real power in the
city, botha doeranda talker.
Protagoras' idea of a university is note-
worthy. He imagines a school in which
the student will dictate his own syl-
labus. "The young man will learn not
but what he has come to learn," says
Protagoras.This student already knows
what he wants to know; he is filled not
with questions but with an information
deficit. The spaces for the data are
ready and waiting inside him. He has
only to download whatever he needs
from Protagoras' program and pay the
price and carry it off as his own. The
price was high: by all accounts Pro-
tagoras made enough money as a
sophist to dedicate a life-size solid gold
statue of himself at Delphi. But perhaps
we should calculate this price not only
in gold. For does not an education that
is entirely career-oriented, does not a
university that defines its mission as
that of producing professional compe-
tencies, risk closing itself and its stu-
dents off from an experience of some
considerable importance? I mean the
experience of error. Not error in the
sense of getting an incorrectanswer, but
error in the sense of asking the wrong
question, or asking no question at all.
Let us consider another description
offered by Protagoras of how he thinks
higher education should work. His
model is that of learningthe alphabet:
You know how, when childrenare not yet
good at writing,the writingteachertraces
outlineswith the pencilbeforegivingthem
the slateand makesthemfollow the linesas
a guide in their own writing... Whoever
straysoutsidethe linesis punished...
Protagoras uses the handy Greek word
paradeigmata ("paradigms") of the
patterns that children trace over and
over in learning their letters. Repro-
ducing paradigms is both the end and
the means of this kind of education. It
reminds me of Michel Foucault's char-
acterization of the modern university as
an "institutional apparatus through
which society ensures its own unevent-
ful reproduction, at least cost to itself."
The fact is, for all their performative
dash and cutting-edge rhetoric and sen-
sational prices, the sophists were pro-
foundly conservative people. If they
were around today they would certain-
ly dominate professorships at major
universities, not to say the talk-show
circuit. For they perform that impor-
tant cultural work of distressing and
destabilizing the status quo in just such
a way as to preserve it. That is, cosmet-
ically. Cosmetic distress appeals to
wealthy young men as an educational
experience. And insofar as it remains
cosmetic, they can usually get their
fathers to pay for it. So a sophist's crite-
rion of what education should be is
whatever the market will bear. What
sells, they teach, and so their teaching
seeks out and confirms a lowest com-
mon denominator of opinion on all
matters of inquiry, especially the
inquiry into what education should
inquire into. Protagoras' student will
find himself in the sad state of the
post-Heideggerian tourist who travels
the world only to encounter himself
everywhere.
To encounter oneself is to arrive at
an end, a closed place, an answered
question. It has been a strong belief of
educators from Sokrates to Immanuel
Kant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, New-
man, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that
questioned questions, open places, and
beginnings should be the locus of edu-
cation. Sokrates, as Plato depicts him, is
always digging behind the answers peo-
ple give him to find the questions that
underlie them, then digging behind
those questions to find the prior ques-
tion on which they can rest. There
seems to be no end to it. Indeed for a
thinker like Heidegger there is no end
to it. Heidegger tells us that behind all
the questions we can think up lies
another question, which is an abyss.
The abyss he calls the question about
being. He thinks it may be the only
question worth asking. It lies slightly.
before the beginning of all other begin-
nings. This is (I would imagine) a dark
place, we might say an aorist place-
boundless, unlimited, and indetermi-
nate-where things become like a bot-
tle in the smoke. It is a place with
which Sokrates was very familiar. For
he discovers it and rediscovers it in his
SUMMER 1999
conversations with people, which often
end up in that situation called in Greek
an aporia, meaning literally "wayless-
ness," i.e., bafflement, puzzlement,
impasse, a wrong answer to a wrong
question. Sokrates usually claims to be
surprised when he and his interlocutor
arrive at aporia and often, at that point,
he brightly proposes starting the con-
versation all over again. Almost no one
takes him up on this. Nonetheless, to
judge from the accounts of Plato and
Xenophon, it is no accident that
Sokratic conversations repeatedly find
their way to aporia. Sokrates spent
years of his life standing around Athens
asking questions of people who gave
the wrong answers, indeed asking ques-
tions in such a way as to elicit wrong
answers. Plato went out of his way to
record the whole history of these ques-
tions and wrong answers, rather than
simply to summarize the main issues
and reduce the "problematic" of
G zero-I can only conclude that this title
Sokrates to a neat Home Page. Both
Plato and Sokrates appear to have
thought there was something valuable
to be got from arriving at aporia, from
standing in the place of the wrong
answer, from being in an aorist dark-
ness where not only answers but ques-
tions become questionable. This is the
experience of error. Let's see what it
feels like.
F COURSE the best way to experi-
ence error would be to engage in
an aporetic dialogue with Sokrates. But
we live in an Iron Age and will have to
make do with an analogy. A brief anal-
ogy. (Was it not Marilyn Monroe who
said, "I read poetry to save time"?)
Here is a poetic example of the state of
mind we call error:
[?]madethreeseasons,summer
andwinterand autumnthird
and fourthspring,when
thereis bloomingbutto eat enough
is not.
(Alkman fragment 20 Poetae Melici Graeci)
This is a simple poem and contains a
plain arithmetic error. The poet does
not appear to know that 3+1=4.
Perhaps a few facts about this poet
would be helpful. Alkman lived in
Sparta in the seventh century BC.
Sparta was a poor place and it is
unlikely Alkman led a wealthy or well-
fed life there. He will have grown his
own food and known what it felt like
to arrive at that pale green early spring
season when "to eat enough is not."
Hunger always feels like a mistake
when it happens to you. Alkman makes
us experience this mistake with him by
an effective use of arithmetic error. For
a poor Spartanpoet with nothing left in
his cupboard at the end of winter,
along comes spring like an afterthought
of the natural economy, unbalancing
his checkbook and enjambing his verse.
The poem breaks off unexpectedly,
leaving us three beats into an iambic
metron, hungry for an explanation of
where spring came from and surprised
by its intrusion into the poetic account.
Surpriseat the intrusion of truth is an
important constituent of the experience
of error. This moment is often marked
in the Sokratic dialogues by the appear-
ance of a blush on someone's cheek.
Aristotle describes it, more psychologi-
cally, as an event that puts the soul in
conversation with itself:
For it becomes quite clear that one has
learnedsomething,becauseof the contra-
diction, and the soul seems to say, How
true, yet I mistook it!
A mistake for Aristotle is a moment of
dramatic recognition and reversal,
when the soul turns to look at its own
reasoning process. If we glance again at
Alkman's poem we can see where this
look is directed: it goes back to the
beginning of the four seasons that start-
ed out to be three seasons and there we
find, before the first word of the first
verse of the poem, standing as the agent
of the act of creation, a question mark:
[?]. At least in the English translation it
is a question mark-in the Greek text
there is nothing at all: Alkman's main
verb has no subject.
Now it is unusual in Greek for a
main verb to have no subject. In fact
you could call it a grammatical mis-
take. Strict philologists will tell you this
mistake is not interesting, just a sign
that Alkman's poem is a fragment bro-
ken off a longer text; and they will
assure you that Alkman almost certain-
ly did name the agent of creation in
some verse now lost to us that came
before the beginning of what we have
here. On the other hand, it is, as you
know, a principle aim of strict philolo-
gy to reduce all textual delight to an
accident of transmission and I am per-
sonally uneasy with any claim to know
exactly what a poet means to say or
how a poem came to be. So I prefer to
leave the question mark there at the
start of verse one and to admire
Alkman's nerve in confronting the apo-
ria that it brackets. The fact remains, it
is very hard to see what came before
the beginning. But I can appreciate
Heidegger's suggestion that this is the
question worth asking.
W HENSOKRATES
at his
suggested to the
trial that instead of
judges
putting him to death they give him a
free dinner every night in the town hall
of Athens, he was offering them the
chance to risk everything they had in
exchange for a moment they couldn't
see the edges of. He was offering them
the possibility of total error and the
likelihood of complete loss of profit.
He was offering an Idea. I think I agree
with John Henry Newman that the
presence or absence of an Idea is what
makes the difference between sophistry
and a university. I wish, therefore, that
I had an Idea to give you. But there it
is. I don't.
So instead I'll offer a philological
observation. Given the amount of time,
thought, research, energy and sheer
anxiety that I have expended on efforts
to come to grips with my own Idea of
the University-all of which came up
I was given, The Idea of the University,
is an oxymoron. Ideas do not arise in
places like universities. And if they do
arise there they cannot long survive. As
St. Matthew implies in his description
of the angel who sat on Christ's tomb,
a real idea has about the longevity of a
bolt of lightning and may be equally
difficult to come to grips with.
But maybe coming to grips is not the
point. After all, the effectiveness of an
oxymoron lies in the fact that it cannot
be grasped, its components cancel each
other out-or would do so if they had
to meet in the phenomenal world.
Sweet and sour sauce is an exception;
generally speaking, oxymora do not
survive translation to reality. But that
doesn't mean they are pointless. As a
figure of thought, an oxymoron serves
two functions. It causes contradiction
in the mind and discomfort to the sens-
es. Take, for example, an oxymoron
that turns up in the scholia to the man-
uscripts of the Agamemnon of
Aeschylus: peirar apeiron means literal-
ly "limitless limit" or "endless end."
The phrase is composed of a noun and
an adjective; the adjective apeiron is
cognate with the noun peirar-in fact is
a negative version of it. The noun is oxymoron. Both the sweet and the
thought to derive from a very old word sour, the finite and the infinite parts of
meaning "rope end"-that is, the knot the compound are real and necessary.
tied in the end of a rope to keep it from They guarantee one another, somehow.
unraveling. The plural form of this
noun means a whole lot of rope end
and therefore a net or woven mesh.
This oxymoron occurs in a scholiastic
paraphrase of the death scene of
Agamemnon; here the scholiast is
describing the famous net in which
Clytemnestra envelops Agamemnon so
that she can stab him to death.
Obviously the phrase is a bad pun as
well as an oxymoron (not to say ill-
omened in its context) and I hesitate to
commend it as poetic invention. But it
may provide us with a usefully intricate
image of our situation as a university.
Think of the university as a network
of rope ends, each of them holding
tight to its place in the mesh so as to
prevent the unraveling of the whole.
Each rope end is a point of finitude and
the university is a sum of these fini-
tudes. Yet, oddly enough, this summary
finitude has infinity as its attribute.
Because you can never stop trying to
put an end to infinity. Just as you can
never stop trying to come to grips with
the Idea of the University. That is the
net in which we are caught. To keep Not even a sophist can take the rope
trying to have this Idea is why we are out of a rope end. Yet the two things
here. But it is important to remember are not identical. Our university can
that the object of our creativity is an never become its own Idea. No one but
The HauntedMere
[Beowulf, lines 1310-1379]
After the attack on Heorot Hall by Grendel's mother, King Hrothgar tells Beowulf about the monsters and their underwaterden
Beowulfwas quicklybroughtto the chamber:
the winnerof fights,the arch-warrior,
camefirst-footingin with his fellowtroops
to wherethe kingin his wisdomwaited,
stillwonderingwhetherAlmightyGod
wouldeverturnthe tide of his misfortunes.
So Beowulfenteredwith his bandin attendance
andthe woodenfloor-boardsbangedand rang
as he advanced,hurryingto address
the princeof the Ingwins,askingif he'drested
sincethe urgentsummonshadcome as a surprise.
ThenHrothgar,the Shieldings'helmet,spoke:
"Rest?Whatis rest?Sorrowhas returned.
Alasfor the Danes!Aeschereis dead.
He was Yrmenlafselderbrother
and a soul-mateto me, a truementor,
my righthandmanwhenthe ranksclashed
and our boar-crestshad to takea battering
in the lineof action.Aescherewas everything
the worldadmiresin a wise manand a friend.
Thenthis roamingkillercamein a fury
and slaughteredhim in Heorot.Whereshe is hiding,
gluttingon the corpseandgloryingin herescape,
I cannottell;she has takenup the feud
becauseof lastnight,whenyou killedGrendel,
wrestledand rackedhim in ruinouscombat
sincefor too long he had terrorizedus
with his depredations.He diedin battle,
paidwith his life;and now this powerful
otherone arrives,this evil force
out to avengeherkinsman'sdeath...
I haveheardit said by my peoplein hall,
counselorswho live in the uplandcountry,
thattheyhavecaughtglimpsesof two suchcreatures
8 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW
a sophist would claim that a business to decorate it with alibis like creative
school can appropriate infinitude. restructuring.But to acknowledge it as
Universities and Ideas of Universities strife and keep it where it is-in the
seem to exist in a strife that is real and space between us and them, the space
between the way things are and the
way they could be, that space with
brackets around it containing not quite
a bottle, not quite smoke-that space
which some ancient Greeks called dai-
monic.
Speaking ofdaimonic, I suppose you
know the story of the two devils on
Tuesday afternoon. One Tuesday after-
noon in hell, two devils were sitting
around debating with one another how
best they might discourage human
beings from seeking after God. One
devil said, "It's easy. All we have to do
is tell them there is no heaven." The
other devil said, "No, that won't work.
In fact, I think we should tell them
there is no hell." So they argued back
and forth for some time and at last,
unable to resolve the question, went to
consult an expert. Satan was in his
office. He let them in and listened to
their problem, then sat pulling on his
beard for a few moments. Finally he
looked up. "Actually, you're both
wrong," he said. "If you really want to
stop human beings from seeking after
necessary. So far as I can see, our task God, it's no use telling them there is no
is to maintain this strife as stubbornly heaven. No use telling them there is no
as possible-not to collapse it, not to hell. Just tell them there is no
blur it, not to pretend it isn't there, not D
difference."
prowlingthe moors,hugemarauders
fromsome otherworld.One of thesethings,
as faras anyonecan everdiscern,
looks likea woman;the other,warped
in the shapeof a man,movesbeyondthe pale,
an unnaturalbirth,biggerthanany man.
Countrypeoplecalledhim Grendel
in formerdays.Theyknow no father
and theirwhole ancestryis hiddenin a past
of demonsand ghosts.Theydwellapart
amongwolveson the hills,on windsweptcrags
and treacherouskeshes,wherecold streams
pourdown the mountainanddisappear
undermistand moorland.
A few milesfromhere
a frost-stiffenedwood waitsand keepswatch
abovea mere;the overhangingbank
is a mazeof tree-rootsmirroredin its surface.
At nightthere,somethinguncannyhappens:
the waterburns.Andthe merebottom
has neverbeensoundedby the sons of men.
On its bank,the heather-stepper halts:
the hartin flightfrompursuinghounds
will turnto facethemwith firm-sethorns
and die in the wood ratherthandive
beneathits surface.Thatis no good place.
Whenwind blows up and stormyweather
makescloudsscudand the skiesweep,
out of its depthsa dirtysurge
is pitchedtowardsthe heavens.Now helpdepends
againon you and on you alone.
The gap of dangerwherethe demonwaits
is stillunknownto you. Seekit if you dare."
-translated from Old Englishby SeamusHeaney