THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Fiv THE MICHIGAN DAILYPage Fi~ A guided tour through the humanities mus ;eum ,t , t t By JON ROUSH Would y o u tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depe ds a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. 5 "I don't much care where --" said Alice. "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat. "- so long as I get some- where," Alice added as an ex- planation; "Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough. -Alice's Adventures in Wonderland "Well here goes nothing." -Prioner entering death chamber at San Quentin. If anyone is- looking for an epigraph for this age, I offer the two above. Alice's confusion is childlike, the confusion of pure hope, a subject looking for an object. The prisoner's despair is pure death, nothing enter- ing nothingness. They are dif- ferent responses to the same situation; Alice and the pris- oner both find themselves en- veloped by some mystifying pro- cess which seems to have noth- ing to do with their own wills.- In such a situation, if you re- gard the process as relatively benign you ask directions if you regard it as less hopeful, you become resigned to a more apocalyptic view. To many peo- ple, one or the other of these responses seems appropriate to this period in history - a per- iod, they feel, in which a man can no longer make choices for himself. The question is two- pronged: where are we going, and could we do anything about it if we knew? Does our ration- alized, technological society take matters into its machine- like hands so efficiently that any important decisions affect- ing our lives are inevitably made elsewhere? If there is an answer to that question, it involves education and art. Although it would be presumptuous to say that artists can solve the problems of the world, that presumption is less to be feared than the possibility that artists will turn their backs on the world. In education that kind of behavior would perpet- uate some unfortunate distinc- tions between art and thought and practical affairs. Such dis- tinctions helped get us in trou- ble in the first place, and they are more than ever inappropri- ate. Our problem is not simply to encourage artists to be en- gaged but to give all men the a power over their lives and sur- roundings that an artist has over his materials. That power is within our grasp for the first time in history, but to assume it wisely we will need to strike new alliances between the arts and the humanistic fields of sch- r olarship - philosophy, history and the academic study of lit- erature and the arts. Living must become quite literally a m re artistic enterprise, and tht will requiren developing a new science of man which draws on and develops its own peculiar art forms. In colleges and universities today, the humanities generally include those disciplines which study human creations and ac- tions but which forgo the tech- niques of the "hard" sciences. Although it is difficult to say very precisely what t h e dis- ciplines in this grab-bag have in common, in college curricula they are usually approached as the meals to the study of a tra- dition. Almost invariably, that tradition is congruent with the development of Western civili- zation. It is a tradition which is assumed to be continuous down to modern times, and there is assumed agreement about which objects and events' are most valuable and exem- plary in that tradition. T h e many different objectives which have been advanced for educa- tion in the humanities generally fall under one of two rubrics: the development in students of some particularly humane way of looking at the world or the transmission to students of key elements of the culture which they have inherited. In fact, 4 however, the first objective has little effect in the shaping of humanities curricula, because the fact is that few of us have had very clear ideas about how to develop in others a humane way of looking at things. On the other hand, most of us hold * pretty firm ideas about which elements of our cultural heri- tage merit preservation, and so by design or default the typical curriculum in the humanities is aimed at presenting those ob- jects with which "any educated m a n" should be familiar no matter what the official -ration- ale of the course may be. The typical humanities course or curriculum is a guided t o u r through a museum. This approach makes the role of the ats problematic. The so- called creative arts are normally kept at arm's length from the humanities curriculum. Often they are not officially included among those disciplines listed as "humanities" in the cata- logs, and when they are includ- ed, it is usually in those cours- es which teach students to study the arts but not to prac- tice them. Both the scholar and the artist suffer from the dis- tinction, but more important, students suffer who accept the implication that the distinction between art and serious thought is absolute. The distinction is not absolute, and if we take ser- iously the problem of preparing a student for the future, then' we must take seriously the re- sponsibility to help him become artful as,well as knowledgeable. At one time, the museum ap- proach might have been cul- turally satisfactory,' although it has always been questionable pedagogy, but the traditional cultural foundation upon, which it once rested is now being un- dermined from several direc- tions. Its primary assumption is that objects and values will en- dure and therefore can be pre- served, but even that assump- tion is being questioned with increasing cogency. Imperman- ence is a hallmark of these times, a n d although sensitive men in all times have been op- pressed or exhilarated by the feeling that theirs was an age of unprecedented change, there is a new quality to the mutabil- ity of our age. It is not only swifter and more pervasive, but for the first time, the whole so- ciety is explicitly organized to promote it. Each of us is re- sponsible for it. Each of us is working to. produce next year's model, the next wonder drug, the newest industrial complex which will require the n Xt skyscraper which will produce the next al- teration in the cityscape, the .next cumulative addition to scholarship which will change our view of the past, the next fashionable artistic style. In the context of organized impermanence, two questions arise concerning the museum concept. The firstls fairly ob- vious, although the answer is obscure: in a world committed to change, what kind of sense does it make to talk about en- during values? The works and events which are normally studied in the humanities are considered important both be- cause they are deemed to repre- sent the utmost men can per- form and beecause of their part in a valued tradition. They en- dure because of their merit, and conversely, t h e i r durability proves their merit. Pindar was probably not the first poet to claim that his songs made him immortal, and Shakespeare was not the last. Yet although few people would predict the immi- nent eclipse of Shakespeare, nevertheless the value of en- durance itself no longer seems as great as it once did. Nor is our sense of tradition as sure as it once was, and consequently the justification of humanistic study as the preserver of per- tinent traditions is increasingly questionable. Some contemporary artists, experimenting with short-lived works and techniques of mass- production, have explicitly ab- jured the permanence of the unique work as a value. In doing so they have also raised the second question for the mus- eum concept: in a world com- mitted to change, it will be in- creasingly easy to objectify our most transient moods, and our perception of the world itself will alter so that it will become increasingly difficult to see any- thing but a reflection of our- selves. The situation has been described most clearly by a psychologist, Kenneth Craik: "The degree to which the shape of the physical envir- onment will be made respon- sive to human intentions, and the speed of that responsive- ness, will be vastly increased by developments in the tech- nological means of altering the physical environment. One psychological result will be a diminishing of the distinction between matter and fantasy. Psychologically, an object ap- pears to be a material entity -, if it is somewhat immutable and only slowly and effort- T sbooksbook-sbooksboos fully responsive to human in- tentions, while an object seems fanciful if it is effervescent and quickly, effortlessly re- sponsive to human intentions. Thus, one prediction I will hazard is that the physical environment will become less material and more whimsical, if not more spiritual." It would be interesting to see an elaboration of that idea by someone with psychiatric train- ing, but even to the untrained observer it is instructive to look at our present environment as a set of objectified fantasies. Whatever their significance may be, the content of those fan- tasies is rather discouraging. Our environment seems to have been shaped by two controlling fantasies: one involving unlimit- ed self-aggrandizement through spatial extension and the other involving death by strangula- tion or smothering. Both fan- tasies can evoke the same con- tenty millions of miles of high- ways in the process of apparent- ly infinite expansion; aircraft whose speed and capacity will apparently be increased indef- initely; nuclear delivery sys- tems and lines of defense being placed and replaced, duplicated and reduplicated; cities grow- ing and growing and growing; and the whole process consum- ing oxygen, fuel and other re- sources a n d leaving in their place an ingenious array of pol- lutants. Our fantasies are com- pulsive: overpopulation, over- crowding,,overkill. If then tech- nology offers the means f o r making the world even more fantasy-like, we c'ould be par- doned for declining the privi- lege. Unfortunately, -however, that seems to be one choice realistically is not open to us, and we might more profitably spend our time improving the fantasies. The missing factor in t h e nightmare being played around us is art. It is art which takes the content of fantasy and shapes it, controls it, limits it, and creates from it something humane. The problem facing us is not simply to learn to be more creative; one could argue that we are too religiously creative now. Even as we are creating a superabundance of people and things, we find it easier to con- tinue to create anew than to work to adapt that which exists. It requires a great deal of cre- ativity to solve the problems in- volved in placing an airport in the middle of the Everglades, to obliterate a natural environ- ment and replace it with an un- stable, artificial one, but there are good reasons for regarding that creativity as misplaced. Even the discipline of a r t, however, would not be sufficient to make a totally responsive en- vironment bearable. It is here that the arts and the humanities will most 'certainly need to de- velop a united front. We need to develop a mode of rigorous scholarship in human affairs which is imbued with artistic judgment of proportion, which is concerned with questions of value, and which h a s as its arena not the museum but the marketplace or legislative cham- ber. The kind of art that can control the way we project our- selves in the world will per- haps be most like the 'art of a happening, in which an event and an environment mutually inform each other, where each individual is a creative partici- pant within a surrounding form. We a r e already beginning to take seriously the need for beau- ty in our environment, and'we must also begin to recognize the need for beauty in our pro- cesses and events. The human- istic disciplines are concerned with evaluating different kinds of human expression, and they should be able to deal with this kind as well. When is a political campaign or a meeting or the constructing of a building beau- tiful? How can they be structur- ed so as to be beautiful? Such art would not be value-free. It would need to draw on the skills of' the humanistic disciplines to approach fundamental ques- tions of human values and to Judge the expression of those values. It was, after all, Plato who first asked about the beau- ty of actions.1 These two effects of imperm- anence - the apparent irrele- vance of the past and the event- ful environment - both point to the need for 'a new-kind of humanistic education which has as its objective the discipline and artful expression of indi- vidual concerns. We need to ed- ucate artisans: men who are skillful in the means'of techno- logy and whose sense of utility is tempered by the sensibility of art. They would have the power over themselves to re- shape fantasy into objects and environments which would be most useful to most men. Some of them would be at home in corporate executive offices, some on zoning commissions, some in federal and state regulatory would be the creator of envir- onments and events, and his en- tire lifetime would be a single tradition, perhaps the longest continuous tradition in which he would participate. Man is becoming the most durable element in his material environment, and o n e man's memory is becoming the most durable element in his intel- lectual environment; conse- quently, in any discussion of humanistic education, it is clear that we need to rethink the role of tradition. It is probably not appropriate to expect a univer- sity to reconstruct traditions. That has never been a univer-' sity's task,'and for good rea- sons. A tradition is different from history in that a tradition ::{":??"}:r-:"iJ}:'r irr:R;4}:":":":{:{{{Svtit i:?:. ::::{{{E4:":.:?@piii:4: r{:: ::. {{":": .:."?':'%{:r'r."::,rv,"::{{{{ i':"%" }: F",: , . :,'::'r,'s"}."....:k:-:"::i:; }:{tiSG}'r3::r:<{v:{"b:::i:"::{:F. f{ ::": ii4:{7F:.::.".",":."..r:::":: i:":":::.:^.:{ r:":":: :":{{i: :;: ::{ ri ":"::"}$:?"<.'ir}}:":"::{ { {:r: ;'+": "::^ ? pare students for the revitaliza- tion of traditions in their own lives. Few colleges have achieved such a role today. Usually, mak- ing the past accessible involves telling a student what to think about the past. Rarely is he en- couraged to be challenged by the past, and if he does per- cieve such a challenge on his own, he soon learns not to con- fess it. Yet this kind of chal- lenge is what traditions are all about. We must find ways for students to be challenged by the past and to challenge it, and it is here that the arts can be most useful. The museum con- cept of the humanities has nev-' er actually worked, because men have always sought to recon- struct their own past, and the museum concept is particularly inappropriate now, when ,t h e past often does not s e e iii so much a burden as simply an ir- relevancy,. If the past can be- come relevant to a man who lives through ,the n e x t fifty years, it will happen because he has been able to fashion his own statenent of meaning and to test it against others, not be- cause he feels heir to one past or another. He will not be inter- ested in received opinions. For him the arts can provide the means for meaningful personal statements; and because po- ducts of the arts are, in a ery real sense, timeless, the arts can provide paradigmatic experienc- es of the present's challenge to the past. The present distinction be- tween the studio course and the academic course or between lit- erary criticism and creative' writing allows a student to go ahead a n d "express himself" without having to answer to the past in any way. I have heard several teachers complain that students have a romantic no- tion of self- expression which ignores the necessity for hard work and discipline. Yet it is ironic that those same profes- sors in their own courses rarely suggest ways for students to use their discipline for responsible self-expression. As Henry David Aiken has put it, a student is permitted-to write about Scho- penhauer but not to write like him. The sad outcome is that by enforcing the distinction be- tween thinking and doing, pro- fessors of the humanities have permitted doing without think- ing and thinking without doing. A course is merely academic if it fails to -encourage students to make meaningful choices, choic- es that have real consequences for the student himself. Be- cause such choices are difficult and because > some people pre- fer to let others make choices for them, teachers in the arts must consciously strive to see that they are made. If a student in a course in music composition is asked to compose like Mo- zart, he may complete the exer- cise satisfactorily without mak- ing any judgments about his own commitments. He may learn about Mozart, and that is good; he may broaden his own repertoire of compositional styles, and that is better; but unless he is moved to take Mo- zart personally, as a friend or a foe, he will not be able to make his own way in the musical en- vironment which Mozart helped create. He m a y remember enough Mozart to pass an exam, but unless it is the kind of per- sonal memory which orders the present and suggests the future, his memory will be useless. He might as well have amnesia. Our society is peopled by artistic amnesiacs. Men come out of hu- manities courses in some of the "best" colleges in the country and come to work in Manhat- tan in some of the ugliest build- ings in the country, and yet they do not like ugliness; .presumably they simply do not notice it, or choose to ignore it. They are not reliable judges of the signifi- cance of their environment, be- cause they have not been train- ed to perceive the kind of mean- ings an environment implies.' If we assume that the per- ception of form is a human need, then the arts must play a crucial role in the education of every man, but it will not be the role which is usually and most easily devised for -the arts. That"role was devised to intro- duce children and young men and women into a world where art is the ornament of genteel lives, or a good hedge against the market, or anything else except an essential, part of one's life. Our world is dominated by process rather than form and histdry and will be so until we know what form looks like when we see it. Education must provide stu- dents with some capacity for sensual perception and expres- sion, with an understanding of the necessary interplay of per- ception and expression. The judgment of human creations obviously requires the ability to perceive different options. The student needs to know what the past can provide in the way of models of perception, and he will need to experiment with ways to perceive and ways to integrate his own perceptions. To the extent. that he is aware of the continuity of his mode of seeing (or hearing, or touch- ing, or reading) with that of other men, he will have a sense of rootedness in a tradition which he can accept as his own. But the mode of seeing must still be genuinely his. He will be the creator of his perception, and that means he must know what it means to create an art- ful object or event. The importance of these post- ulates extends beyond educa- ticpal policy. If a fatalist is a person who has no faith in his own ability to direct his course and consequently submits to a course conceived elsewhere, then, we have reared a nation of fatal- ists. It is ironic that this has happened in a nation usually thought of as "optimistic" and "future-oriented"-with its no- tion of manifest destiny and its adulation of productivity and progress-but that orientation is at the root of the matter. Such goalsras those cannot be phrased in terms of the indi- vidual human being, and men instinctively perceive their ir- relevance to actually living out each day. Their promise of a future for an individual person- ality is illusory. Time passes without shaping anything. Americans are pro- ducers of produce, and Amer- -ican consumers perishable. Tne myth of progress and produc- tion preclude the possibility of arrival. We have no eschatology, just escalation. Nor can we un- til we have developed an art which allows each of us to re- assert form upon time. We move from school to job to job, 'om farm to city to suburb, from house to house, and are not free. A college could help its students see the paradoxial relation be- tween ,tradition and freedom if it were prepared to introduce a radically new kind of cur-- riculum, administration, and faculty. Not to do -so will make liberal education-the education of free men-a thing of the past. I. U "Men come out of humanities courses in some of the 'best' colleges in the country and come to work in Manhattan in some of the ugliest buildings in the country, and yet they do not like ugliness; presumably they simply do not notice it, or choose to ignore it. They are not reliable judges of the significance of their en- vironment, because they have not been trained to perceive the kind of mean ings an environ- ment implies." f~>S~S:Y."~: .Y"'f:V::S:::":."i.S"::: ."f::Y: .W':t '.'f:t' :"!t:'.":'.. !lf.1.1:........... .4;::..:'".{':!....5. + :"1.:::'::::.5':::::'"." ^ agencies. And because the ef- feet of technology is to disperse at least some kinds of power, the artisan's judgment would be necessary in voters and con- sumers. Since technology has made our total environment the medium of our art, we had bet- ter become accomplished in the craft. The beginning, and end of the craft is self-knowledge. The ar- tisan would be living in an age in which a single man's life- time will confront h i m with problems which he could not possibly have forseen and for which there are no convention- al solutions. He would still study works of the past, but their his- tory would not be his. He would- participate in traditions not as a discoverer but as an artist, whose one final truth is his own. Through his o w n choices he is kept alive by individuals who are responding to the felt de- mand of the past at the same time that they are responding to immediate and personal de- mands of their own. Conse- quently there is always a dialec- tical tension between the past and the present instances of a tradition. If there is no such tension, we are dealing either with a cliche or with an invention. Because a tradition has no substance outside t h e recurrent expres- sions of men who participate in it, it requires continual recre-_ ation as well as study. The role of the school, then, is to make the past accessible to the stu- dent at the same time that it allows him to explore his own capacity for thought and action. In the arts as in the humanities, the role of the schod is to pre- The istory of the (hurch s Attitude Toward Abortion 8:00 P.M.--February 10, 1969 NEWMAN STUDENT CENTER 331 Thompson Professor Noonan is perhaps best known for the role he playedafter Vatican I1 as a consultant to the Papal Comrnmis- sion on Problems of the Family, Population, and Natality and for the book that arose as a result of that work, Contracep- tion: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Cannonists. Dr. Noonan holds a B.A. from Harvard, a .PhD. from the Catholic University of America, and an LLB. from Harvard Law School. Presently he is 6 Professor of Law at the University of California Law School. In addition to teaching, Prof. Noonan edits the Natural Law Forum and serves as the director of the Natural Law Institute at the University of Notre Dame. - ' DON'T MISS the PAPERBACK BOOK SALE at F OLLETTFS STATE STREET AT NORTH UNIVERSITY " ANN ARBOR r L PHILIP KAPLEAUl, Resident Teacher Zen" Meditation Center of Rochester February 12 through Febiuary 1y4 i BUDDHISM-FILM LECTURE DISCUSSION ZASEN Wednesday, 7:30 P.M. Multipurpose Room Undergrad Library Thursday, 9:00 A.M. Residential College Greene Lounge Thursday, 3:00 P.M. Residential College Fr-- _ - OPEN SEMINAR r" .y"6"rr r xfprme ;{,;.v ,.,.c-rrm rF+.'Y.s?};rvrr.;.;.}p"7r":y:6"?'rti"R reYrx+vay:"Yr,::rKp;'{"".°"rnv;?C¢A';:?,^q .;'fi:r,, "i