In an unpublished essay in the McLuhan papers in Ottawa dating from 1946 or 1947, McLuhan set out his impressions at the time of the University of Chicago.
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The Failure at Chicago
[1] Unfortunately there has been no revolution at the College of Chicago University. Only an intensification of existing procedures in the humanities has occurred. Obviously, students have been excited by their sense of being in the dramatic focus of a public experiment. More than elsewhere their minds participate in the mental processes of their preceptors. Loyalties are hot and obsessive, detachment is unknown. And the possibilities of self-education — the only means of escaping unmutilated from the technological and administrative manias of current institutions — have been whittled away to nothing.
Two serious situations result, then, from the emotional pressures at Chicago. First, a large public has been led to a false hope that in education something new was taking place. There, and at St. John’s College. Yet in the present state of the patient it may be asked whether false reports can serve any purpose beyond conferring brief notoriety on the doctor in charge. And, second, in the name of radical change and arduous tasks, the superior student has been denied his usual four years of browsing at a salutary distance from the class-room. He is here caught in a mental queue. Held by the promise of long denied nourishment. It is the point of this paper that he sits down, finally, to a Barmecide feast.
Before describing the fare offered at Chicago, it may be as well to explain briefly the character of the drama in which Hutchins and Adler have played to capacity houses in recent years. Both Hutchins and Adler have a flair for popular issues. Education in a democracy is basic politics. And it is out of a creditable sense of political relevance that these men have “made news” of education. What I think has not been noticed is that Hutchins and Adler really hold [2] strongly opposed positions. Adler’s differences with current education are merely personal and accidental. Nobody could be less concerned with contemporary or any culture than he. As much as a plastics engineer, he is of “know-how” all compact. A man of method and techniques. A dialectician for whom education can never include training in sensibility or taste. In the complete divorce of thought and feeling he is as unconscious and thoroughly Cartesian as Sidney Hook of Columbia Teachers College. Medieval scholasticism being as much the parent of modern technology as mass education is to all the reflex of the latter. Mr Hutchins, however, is really opposed to these highly abstract methods and stresses. His position largely coincides with the Ciceronian humanism which always characterizes the legal profession at its best. Political wisdom, social conscience, and urbane personal culture will always stand in some sort of opposition to the ardor of dialectical disputation and abstract technology, whether these appear in historical scholarship, business management, or engineering megalomania. There is considerable irony, therefore, in the fact that Mr. Hutchins has chosen as the scene of his reform a university least amenable to it, and for his agents the most gifted of his enemies. For, in a strictly impersonal sense, such able men as Professors McKeon, Crane, and Adler were predetermined agents of opposition to the sort of civic humanism which Hutchins had sought to introduce into an educational program which had long been the household drudge of a commercial spouse.
It must be said, then, that the public has not been deceived about Mr. Hutchins’ radical intentions. The deception lies in the supposition that he has succeeded in doing anything about them. To many it will be a bit of a shock to learn that the Dewey-eyed educationists are very much at home in the College at Chicago, and that these same educationists have imposed “objective tests” on this College.
Here is an exam question in Humanities 2 from September, 1944.
Directions: For each of the following items, blacken the answer space corresponding to the letter of the one best completion of the statement or the one best answer to the question.
From Shakespeare, Hamlet
Hamlet’s first soliloquy suggests that his melancholy is the direct result of [3]
A – his father’s death
B – his mother’s remarriage
C – the ghost’s revelations
D – his uncle’s refusal to let him return to Wittenburg
E – his natural temperament
[A later question in the same exam] The order in which the forgoing passages from the Odyssey occur in the text is
A – ABCD
B – DOBA
C – DBAC
D – ACDB
E – DBAC
From [an exam in] Humanities 2B, March, 1946:
Tom Jones
Passage: “He drank and sung, and roared; and when I gave him a gentle hint of the indecency of his actions, he fell into a violent passion, swore many oaths, called me rascal, and struck me.”
The consequences of this dialogue do not include
A – a rise in the fortunes of the speaker
B – a fall in the fortunes of the person spoken of
C – a change in the opinion held by the person spoken of concerning the person addressed
D – a change in the opinion held by the person addressed concerning the person spoken of
From [an exam in] Humanities 3A, June 1946:
Which one of the following matters is not employed by Hume as evidence in support of his view?
A – The use men make of history to discover laws of human nature
B – The use men make of their experience to discover laws of human nature
C – The use men make of the past in various speculative reasonings, like politics and morals
D – The use men make of various speculative reasonings, like politics and morals, to understand the past
From [an exam in] Humanities 3B, June 1946:
Addison proposes to derive his critical concepts mainly from:
A – Horace
B – Longinus
C – Aristotle
D – Zoilus and Monsieur Perrault
E – Contemporary critics
It should now be easy for the reader to credit the fact about the teacher in the College who had recently prepared one of these exams only to lose his key to the questions. It took him days and nights of furious research and speculation to decide which of the spaces he had originally intended to have blackened by the racing pencils of his students. Can there be [4] doubt concerning the mental habits imposed by this method of examination?
Would it not drive anybody to memorization of summaries and of the summaries of summaries? Would it not be fatal to success to have any real knowledge of the texts? Or is it astonishing that the students at Chicago are tense, brittle, humorless? Because the formalistic and sophistical categories of the exams are only matched by the dialectical procedures of the classrooms.
Some specific illustration of this last charge will perhaps be the most useful way of spending the allotted space here. For to say that an educational program is based on ratiocination without regard to perception and judgement is to define it as wholly inimical to humanism. That is to say, quite divorced from training in taste or discrimination. The man of method whether he be a lab technician, an administrator, or a literary historian is seldom interested in the modes of a living human order, either past or present. In practice, his perceptions are never trained to respond to the multiple and varied evidences of such life whether in a spoon or a poem. He is invariably a categorizer. A genre hunter. Such men flourish in all times and places; but since Descartes their methods have come to be universally applied to the discussion of the arts, the conduct of popular education, and to politics. Witness the Gallup polls. Thus in the nineteenth century history had to become Cartesian in order to be respectable. And historians sought the “scientific” precision of mathematics while glibly eviscerating their subject of its dramatistic character.
Instead, therefore, of looking into the details of curricula and faculty directives in the College at Chicago, it will be sufficient to consider the position and methods of Professors Adler, Crane and McKeon who have, in various degrees, been both impetus and guide to all that goes on in the College. And my abruptness in going to the gist of the matter will not, I hope, be regarded as an indication of any lack of respect for men of eminent integrity and achievement. Rather, I attach the utmost value to their concern for education and to the clarity with which they have endowed the basic issues.
[5] Without quibbling, then, there is no question in their minds of the curriculum providing content or furniture for the human mind. For them a book is not nutriment. It is bone to sharpen the teeth. A challenge to the dialectical method. A book is approached not as an experience but as a problem. It is not a world to be explored but a collection of arguments and strategies to be pinned to the mat. For the dialectician there is simply no sense in the question “Is it true or false?” or “Is it good or indifferent?” Because his method is essentially that of probable argument and [his] description can describe the true or false, the good and bad, equally well. In advance, metaphysics is ruled out by Professors Adler and McKeon, just as poetic is by Professor Crane. Thus Professor McKeon’s “Philosophic Bases of Art and Criticism” is excellent as a description of the ways in which poetic has been viewed in its relation to other activities and other modes of knowledge. But it is not concerned to discover the nature or function of poetic either intrinsically or in social education. For dialectic analysis and description can never be a means of discovery except in strict subordination to metaphysics. Divorced from metaphysics or presuming to control metaphysics, it makes the mind a week-end guest in any and every home of ideas, whence it departs to record the courtesies encountered, but without having experienced any of the dynamics of the situation.
For example, Aristotle’s Poetics is a basic work with Professors McKeon and Crane. Now what saved Aristotle from writing a mere dialectical description presenting a nature-morte, or a catalogued museum of poetic objects, was the fact that his dialectical procedure was not only modified by considerations of generic culture but was directed by a metaphysical interest. “Imitation” and “plot” are used by Aristotle in a sense to be defined by his physics and metaphysics. Of course, if you wish to discuss an art or science without engaging in them you must employ dialectics, says Aristotle, “for it is impossible to discuss them at all from the principles proper to the particular science in hand…” (McKeon’s Aristotle, p. 199). Since Aristotle doesn’t discuss poetry as a poet but [as] a metaphysician, he employs dialectics as his means. But the poet [6] doesn’t discuss poetry, as a poet. And the natural critic doesn’t discuss poetry but engages the perceptions and judgement of himself and the reader in active contact with it by any and every means which may suggest even a temporary relevance or effectiveness. In fact, there no more exists a critical method than a poetic method. Both poet and critic are essentially opportunist, one using a variety of means to make something, the other using a variety of means to focus the perceptions and judgement of himself and the student on the thing made.
How very remote this opportunism is from the method of the Chicago critics will shortly appear. Meantime the obvious fact should be stated at once, that while Aristotle carries us abstractly by his concepts of “imitation” and “plot”, to the intrinsic character, not only of tragedy but of all art, nobody was ever the better maker or critic of any work of art for having read the Poetics. (The converse is notoriously not true.) Yet it is a prime assumption of Professors McKeon and Crane that the dialectical procedure of the Poetics with its abstractions of plot, style, scene, diction, etc. affords a valid method for considering poems. Nothing could be less Aristotelian. Yet it is this assumption which leads the Chicago critics to label all divergent procedures as “platonic” and “dialectical”. This strategy, born of confusion, has bred further confusion and inspired some supererogatory heart searchings among natural critics.
When Aristotle says that metaphor is the test of a poet since it can’t be taught, or even when he indicates the analogy of improper proportion functioning through metaphor, he doesn’t in any way sharpen the perceptions or extend the experience of the reader of a poem. Thus Aristotle’s discussion of metaphor can in no way facilitate awareness of the rich life of a line like “multitudinous seas incarnadine”, for the life of the line is everywhere in it and in the play from which it comes. And whether a particular metaphor is efficient in embodying and [7] advancing the special conflict of the poem is not a question for which there is any ready-made answer. The answer can only grow from a complete exploration of all the life and coherence of the poem itself. And this fact, which for the critic is primary, had no interest for Aristotle. Of course, he would have agreed with the critic, and pointed out how their purposes were diverse. However, the sense in which “plot” is primary for Aristotle (as when he says that a poet will be more the poet of his plots than of his verses) at least indicates the criterion on which the critic founds his judgement of the value or nullity of a poem, or any work of art.
It is the critic’s plenary function to show by exploration how poems differ in character and value precisely in terms of “plot”. That is to say, in terms of the amount of felt life and action which is manifest in them. Poems aren’t about something. They do something. All poems tend to be dramatic, therefore. So that the critic is always asking the question, “what is the poet doing at this point?” not “What is the poet saying?” Thus, the crux of Professor Olson’s essay on Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium exhibits a major evasion when he says that “to attempt to find a plot in a lyric would be a profitless if not impossible task. ” He is at pains to abstract its logical structure, and begins his consideration of the poem by a paraphrase of its argument, concluding: “There are thus the following terms, one might say, from which the poem suspends”. The oppositions within the poem he considers within these terms, as though they were embedded in propositions. Having reduced the poem to statements or propositions, he proceeds to analyse then dialectically, easily arriving at the preconceived view that this “lyric” exhibits “a certain formal collocation of terms which is referable to nothing outside itself and may be called the soul of the poem in the sense in which Aristotle calls plot the soul of tragedy.” This kind of “lyric” is static, abstracting from “motion and change” says Professor Olson, whereas tragedy, epic, and comedy are dynamic because imitations of human actions. The principle of this kind of lyric is a tissue not of events but of ideas [8] and “the ordering of the poem” is done not “by necessity and probability, by the antecedents and consequents of action, but by dialectical priority and posteriority.”
If what Professor Olson says about this vividly dramatic poem were any more than a fragment of the truth concerning it then all readers should forever be absolved from reading it. Yeats appears as a formidable fifteenth century Occamist juggling mathematical ratios in the style of a speculative grammarian. And it is typical that Professor Olson never finds it necessary to refer to the way in which the conflicting “propositions” are modified by the heavily liturgical movement of the lines or the richly dramatic play of yearning and disgust in the imagery. Having begun by abstracting the themes and the “terms” of the poem each step is a retreat from the object until Professor Olson backs up against the stone wall of its “static” character.
It is to be supposed that Professor Olson regards this as a good poem. But he seems to have no interest in and no means of pointing this out. That a lyric, even the most stonily static, has a plot or action can be shown at once. I select the least promising and most rigidly glazed lyric I know.
Swiftly the years beyond recall;
Lovely is the stillness of this May morning.
There is not only conflict but resolution of conflict in this action. The poignancy of transience is poised against the possession of actual joy. A now is shared against the ruins of time. The poem is the imitation of a human action since the feeling and strategy involved are possible only in a fully rational consciousness. True, the action is of limited value. The poem is slight because of the meager materials involved. But the “plot” here has much more ontological content than that of any detective thriller, or of most popular novels, because there is some intensity of vision and immediacy of awareness. And it is through such perceptions and judgements as these that the critic always poses the problem of value as the criterion and means to developing taste and discrimination.
[9] But the goodness or nullity of poetic work must always be a datum for the dialecticians of Chicago. It is the same with the “great books” whose greatness Professor Adler says cannot be determined after 1850. The process of canonization requires nearly a hundred years.
In considering the procedure first of Professor Olson and now of Professor Maclean, regard is still had for the position of Professor Crane (and Professor McKeon) whose semi-official sanction their two essays obtained. Professor Maclean deals with Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Tis a beauteous evening, calm and free.” That this is a poem of very mediocre kind is of as little concern as the complex dramatic action of Yeats’s poem is to Professor Olson. Professor Maclean defines his merely dialectical and abstract interest in the sonnet as follows:
As the unity of a poem arises from the facts that it is divisible into parts and that these parts are harmoniously related, so the obligations resting upon this kind of criticism are two-fold: to discover the parts of a poem and to render an account of their relationships.
The same statement is equally applicable to any prose paragraph whatever. But instead of following Professor Maclean on his intricate and carefully worded journey away from the poem, I propose merely to mention the most obvious reasons for rejecting this poem as one not worthy of mention among Wordsworth’s successful sonnets, such, for example, as “Surprised by Joy”. There is evocation of the determining mood in the first five lines. It is simply one of sober pleasure touched by “solemn thought”. The mere appearance of conflict or ground of a plot or action comes only with the admonitory sixth line. But the character of the initial nood is determined by the sort of picturesqueness which can be had from comparing the still dusk of the evening to a nun kneeling in a dim church before an ostensorium. In resembling the spikes of the ostensorium to the shooting rays of the setting sun Wordsworth is turning a little conceit. One in which he has no compelling interest and for which he provides no more than a pretty function. And it is precisely this kind of slackness which is everywhere in the sonnet. The portentous “Listen!” [10] and the oracular “Thou liest in Abraham’s boson” are the awkward rhetorical gestures of Wordsworth in his very frequent acts of unwieldy excogitation. Dialectically, of course, this sonnet has the usual Wordsworth frame of reference. And to the dialectical approach it yields as much, or as little, as his good poems. But like many Wordsworth passages, it is lifeless and only to be called a “poem” by courtesy.
In observing the steady retreat of Professors Olson and Maclean from the objects of their analysis it becomes plain that their methods are incapable of reaching any judgement of value or of providing any training in sensibility. But it was quite unnecessary to study Aristotle in order to reach this position. For the position has been common to all literary and historical study for more than a century. It is part of the familiar Kantian trek away from existence to essentialism. However, a key statement for an understanding of this gratuitous clinging to Aristotle is provided by Professor McKeon:
Aristotle’s treatment of tragedy in the Poetics is the first attempt to consider poetry as art without concern for the educational, therapeutic, moral, and political effects of poetry, which were central to Plato’s treatment and which Aristotle takes up in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics.
What has already been said about Aristotle’s conception of plot in its relevance to the plenary critical functions, both of evaluation and training in sensibility, will have to serve for now as a critique of Professor McKeon’s view. And since his view explicitly divorces the study of the arts from any direct educational or social function, it puts the record quite straight.
Tom Jones is a much discussed book at Chicago. It is regarded as having an excellent plot and as being a literary product worthy of serious regard. But it is not so much “plot” in the sense of the felt life and vision, observable in its various scenes, as “plot” in the sense of an ingenious and consistent schema imposed on a group of characters that guides the discussion. In this latter sense Tom Jones affords a field-day to the dialectician. And one can best indicate the irrelevance. of dialectical abstraction of the “plot” from that novel by [11] illustrating a more relevant way of discussing the book. Thus in any particular scene, say that of Mr. Allworthy and the Foundling, the critic has to consider the author-reader relation, as well as the author’s view of his own work. Basic critical consideration, therefore, must ask what qualities of mind does the author assume in his reader for the enjoyment of his scenes? How much experience and how much alertness of judgement? For quite laborate dialectical structures are compatible with banal adventures and an adolescent level of emotional appeals, as is obvious in popular fiction.
Looking then at the specified scene from Tom Jones, we find that the sympathies of the reader (and author) are heavily engaged on the side of Mr. Allworthy whose character is one of invariable Pickwickian innocence and imprudence. The scene affords an instance of his spontaneous and unreflecting benevolence, which is very heavily underscored by contrasting it with the excessively prudential and reflective malice of Miss Deborah Wilkins. The entire scene is one of the utmost naiveté. Any dramatic tension which might have been achieved by economy and restraint is dissipated by verbosity and the heavy-handed ear-pulling of the reader by Fielding. For Fielding doesn’t trust his reader to provide either perception, wit, or judgement. His appeal, therefore, is frankly to a semi-literate group of non-conformist tradesmen who might be expected to adopt the attitudes of Miss Wilkins unless given a rude thrust in the direction of intellectual and moral honesty.
Appeals to precisely the same dull audience vitiated the quality of Goldsmith, Scott, and Dickens. And Jane Austen’s clearcut superiority is at least partly owing to her not bothering to penetrate this Philistine complacency. These are simple rhetorical judgements. Yet the Chicago dialecticians eschew them as incompatible with Aristotle’s Poetics. The critic knows very well after a few pages that the slack relations which Fielding sets up between the reader and the episodes and himself will persist throughout. Now it is this set of relations, the quality of these dramatic tensions, which constitute “style”. Diction trots far behind. But in the College [12] there is much talk about Gibbon’s style or Christopher Morley’s style or Swift’s style without any consideration of this set of agent relationships. The result is to leave the student groping amidst intangibilities and irrelevance.
Professor Warner Taylor is probably the only living man who could mention any difference between the diction and sentence structure of Swift and Fielding. He counts the words. But Swift’s style is worlds away from Fielding’s because Swift makes serious demands on his reader. Thus his Modest Proposal is electric with tensions between Swift and his subject and the audience. It is a work of rhetoric. That is, its purpose is not to be contemplated or explored like poetic work but to persuade, to alter opinions, to make an impact, to produce action. Swift’s “irony” in this pamphlet, as in most of his work, is to wear a mask. On the mask are the features of an earnest, methodical unimaginative and self-righteous man. He speaks as one concerned about a particular social problem. His tones are those of unimpassioned discussion. His assumptions are those of the political scientists and economists of Swift’s day. The dialectic of his discourse follows a probable path from these assumptions, and the grotesque inhumanity of the conclusions is patently in the postulates. So that the superficial peripeteia of the dialectic really directs attention throughout to the face behind the Philistine mask. That is, the face of Swift himself, contorted with rage against the smug villainy of the public-spirited men of his time. His passion is a commentary on the unimpassioned mask and on the dialectic, as well. And the pleasure of the reader is proportioned to the demands made upon him in these ways. But as the methods of Adler, McKeon, and Crane are unable to reveal the complexity of this pamphlet, they are unable to establish its style and excellence.
Most people in the College disclaim Professor Adler’s influence there. However, Professor Adler shares with Professor’s McKeon and Crane and others that preoccupation with dialectical method which renders him powerless to value prose or poetry. His inability in prose is plain from How To [13] Read a Book where reading is made an exercise in isolating the rationalistic procedures only. It is a method which necessarily ignores nine-tenths of prose. Worst of all, it compels a reader to follow bad prose just as far as good prose. But Art and Prudence exhibits this dilemma in greater profusion. Having no secure sense of the relevance of one thing rather than another– or of one book or one movie rather than another– he proceeds to give an esthetic carte blanche to all media which can lay claim even to utilizing the mechanic arts. Having discovered a valid speculative distinction between art and prudence, Professor Adler can see no more than Professor McKeon, where those activities are necessarily merged in practice. How, as R.P. Blackmur says of Henry James, art is “the viable presentation of moral value; in the degree that the report was intelligent and intense the morals were sound.” Finding in dialectics no available means of unifying the interests and experience of man and society, Professors Adler and McKeon can naturally discover no basis for fusing art and prudence.
And since the College at Chicago, like St. John’s, shows neither awareness nor concern with the need to forge anew a unified sensibility, to restore the close harmony of thought, action, and feeling, it must be judged not as a genuinely contemporary experiment but merely a continuation of that dichotomized Cartesian culture of the Enlightenment. For it is the mark of truly contemporary minds that they are deeply aware of actual interfusion of human interests. So that since Baudelaire, the most vital contemporary culture has gained stride and momentum and, in fact, has lost the Cartesian limp. But of the new gains for cultural unity and community achieved by a Freud, a Malinowski, a Dawson, a Giedion, or a Corbusier, nothing appears at Chicago or in the great books program. Chicago persists, along with all the rest, in a naive rationalism which regards a poem, a philosophy, a building, or a political constitution as a Leibnitzian monad without windows. So that only by pre-established harmony, assured by the possession of dialectical skill, can a person and such objects ever be said to have “met”. [14] That is only another way of saying that student and teacher alike are cut off from the nutritional properties of art and civilization. Thus, the dilemma is precisely that of the ordinary man in relation to a commercial job today. Abstract commerce and dialectical education are the outside and inside of the same situation. In a word, Chicago has not really accepted the challenge of our contemporary condition but is, willy-nilly, a helpless reflection of the same. But from the Sallence which its experiments have conferred on the basic issues, much help can be gained towards establishing a college which would not be a carbon copy of the confusions of the great society. Because there are many people at Chicago, as well as many more who are interested in Chicago, who earnestly desire such a new college, this effort to focus the causes of failure was undertaken.