There are a few reasons I find it difficult to write about Jacques Barzun. The first reason is that he is something like my imaginary mentor and critic. When I write, I continually ask myself, "What would Barzun say about this?" Writing about him seems to double the pressure: now he isn’t just reading over my shoulder, I have to actually look at him while I write – watching as he picks up on every questionable wording or phrase. (What would Barzun say about "wording"? What would he say about these parenthesized sentences?)
The second reason is that there are so many aspects of Jacques Barzun’s work, as a writer, historian, critic, and teacher, that there’s no good place to begin. Or rather, there are too many good places to begin: so many of his own statements are perfect introductory hooks or organizing themes – statements about the best way to write and compose ideas.
Such a device seems a bit gimmicky, but may be especially necessary when trying to represent Barzun because his work is about active truth-seeking, not absolute truth; he is the consummate pragmatist; he never promoted many identifiable ideas – unless you count the practice of continually challenging and reforming ideas. The most succinct phrase we could use to summarize his position might be "a reader of history does not read a history... he reads history," or perhaps "writing means rewriting." His active, non-reductive approach – along with a productive breadth that makes it impossible for anyone to fairly assess all of his work – poses a challenge to anyone who attempts a summary.
Actually, once you’ve engaged and understood Barzun’s attitude, it seems quite simple. The difficulty comes much earlier; the biggest obstacle before understanding any notion of pragmatism – or any pragmatic idea – is getting the sense of why we should care. People don’t just question the content of pragmatic claims, they tend to question why anyone would be inclined ask such questions or make such claims at all.
I had to overcome this obstacle myself, more than once. I tried reading John Dewey when I was in university, but he just seemed to prattle on about things that everybody already knew. The truth was that I unconsciously skimmed over the parts that didn’t make sense, or that weren't immediately interesting (which was most of it), assuming that it was mere padding for the few statements I already found congenial. I preferred Nietzsche instead, with his more bombastic style. Only after following the Nietzschean threads to their ungenerative ends did I return to Dewey – along with William James and Charles S. Peirce – to discover that the pragmatists handled the same general notions in a more sensible, concrete, and perhaps even more radical way. It was only after I looked into every other conceivable ideology, finding them all inadequate and flawed, that I realized why the pragmatists made such a fuss over such seemingly obvious concepts.
Now it’s difficult to produce a clear general statement or description of pragmatism without contradiction. That’s why I’m beginning to practice philosophy and history as one discipline rather than two. In Barzun’s words: "The very weakness of history, its uncertainty and inability to put things into neat bundles, is its great advantage over ready-made systems. It’s difficulties force the student’s gaze to discern in each event and person its unique character," because "no one idea, no one explanation, is omnicompetent."
Counter to this attitude, some people need to believe that life can be defined by an absolute, static framework. For such people, certainty isn’t just an abstract possibility, it seems to be an immanent reality with which they are firmly in touch. Being in contact with such certainty allows them to take it for granted and get down to the business of doing, building, conquering, winning. This Napoleonic drive has obvious advantages in terms of cultural evolution. People who are able to put doubt aside (or who never had any doubt to begin with) might make a lot of mistakes, but in the overall run of things, they are more likely to leave behind a legacy than those who never make any attempts. [See my more recent post about Dean Keith Simonton's work on creativity.]
On the other side of the spectrum, there are people who can’t help doubting and criticizing everything – people who can’t help noticing things from multiple perspectives – considering a larger range of factors and effects, who are naturally disinclined to take anything for granted. This type of person finds it almost impossible to commit to any form of certainty, and thus find it difficult to commit to any specific course of action. They would rather continue speculating and searching for new possibilities, in the hope that some unforseen event might provide the insight needed to make sense of things and guide them on their way.
This Hamlet-like disposition has obvious short-term disadvantages in the sphere of cultural evolution. These people might have a more thorough understanding of life, but their lack of production and concrete accomplishment means they will leave little behind to be remembered by – which means no foundation and few landmarks to help guide future doubters and seekers. In contrast, Napoleons leave behind territory and fortunes, so their descendants (or overthrowers) can simply step right into their shoes and continue to build on the same foundation. But each generation of Hamlets has to find their own way; their forerunners leave nothing behind: to leave behind something concrete would have meant being certain, which would have meant being wrong.
It's important to note that the vast majority of people could probably go either way. However, without any directly compelling reason or reward for adopting the pragmatic, open attitude, the closed, Napoleonic attitude is over-represented among people's working attitudes and assumptions. Our institutions and conventions are a manifestation of this advantage; and they in turn perpetuate the conditions through which Napoleonic confidence and false certainty flourish.
But people with the Hamlet predisposition continue to be born, and continue to struggle to create pockets of creative openness in the system. I am unquestionably on the Hamlet end of the spectrum. (That is one of the few things I’ll claim with any confidence.) This is why I find Jacques Barzun to be such an important source of encouragement, insight, and disciplinary guidance.
Until a few days ago, I took the common interpretation of Hamlet for granted: "he thinks too much." Then I re-read Barzun’s personal essay, "Toward a Fateful Serenity." In it, Barzun claims that reading Hamlet actually reinvigorated and comforted him through the "emotional darkness" of his youth in First World War France. For him, as it is for me now, Hamlet is not a warning against the dangers of thinking too much, but a heroic demonstration of the value of intelligence – "in warding off menaces from all sides." In Harold Bloom’s word’s, "Hamlet thinks not too much but too well... His tragedy is not the tragedy of thought, but the Nietzschean tragedy of truth." Barzun distills from this an important lesson:
"In any age, life confronts all but the most obtuse with a set of impossible demands: it is an action to be performed without rehearsal or respite; it is a confused spectacle to be sorted out and charted; it is a mystery, not indeed to be solved, but to be restated according to some vision, however imperfect."
I feel like I live in a different world from everyone else. My world consists of ideas – or at least I recognize the world is made malleable by ideas; we can make sense of life through thinking – whereas most people obstinately refuse to recognize this. I feel like I’m watching one of those ridiculous staged wrestling matches, when the referee becomes distracted and misses the real action – the flagrant cheating happening behind his back – because he’s too occupied with some technical infraction. Like the rules of professional wrestling, our moral and ideological rules are frequently overlooked and abused, and are seldom very clear to begin with.
Life is too massive to see or grasp in its entirety; in order to remain aware of the general action, we need general ideas. But life doesn’t just play out in a spatial ring, it also occurs over time – it changes – so our general ideas must actively develop and grow; ideas are not to be taken as settled facts. To concern ourselves with this or that particular idea, which we mistake as an established truth, is like becoming distracted in one corner by some technicality, thus losing sight of the most important action – and our ability to influence it. My aim is to help people recognize the ongoing spectacle of ideas that I see so clearly – an intercourse that has the potential for more effective and meaningfully modes of living.
It might seem kind of arrogant for me to say that people need my help in this; but it's perhaps more accurately a backhanded way of asking for help. I need some support in this. Besides, it’s absurdly difficult to persuade people simply to turn around and look!
Some people seem to resent my intentions; they assume I'm just a kid who "thinks too much." But here is the frustrating paradox of the thinking life. Like anything else, the more you think, the better at it you should become; but unlike other activities (that are more easily quantified), good thinking can only be recognized by more good thinking. Nevertheless, people tend to make up for impoverished thinking by fortifying it with false esteem; the quality of one’s ideas seems to be inversely proportional with one’s devotion to them. While I resolve to think even more, the other side resolves to think less, and the farther apart we become.
But it isn’t just that I see something – call it Xyz – that they don’t. There’s an active process of discovery, consideration, doubt, and verification. First I see Xyz; then when they tell me that they don’t see it, I question my initial vision: "If others don’t see it, then maybe it isn’t really there." So I look from a different perspective. But Xyz is still there – and they still fail to see it. So I move over to their perspective, trying to see what they see (or rather, don’t see). From there, I find the obstacle in front of them: "Abc is in the way. Xyz is behind that. You need to look around the corner." But they don’t accept this explanation: "How dare you tell me that Abc obstructs my vision! Abc is not in the way; on the contrary, Abc is the whole truth. Look for yourself, do you see anything else besides Abc? Don’t talk to me about Xyz anymore. Your problem is you think too much, your imagination conjures up things that don’t exist."
Not only does thinking help people see things like the hypothetical Xyz, thinking is Xyz: its value is hidden behind obstacles (conventions, assumptions, material aims, emotional attachments) that people just aren’t inclined to look past. (I don’t mean to deny the value of material aims and emotional attachments; I only want to illustrate that other things are a part of that landscape as well, and these things are best mapped and articulated through intellect.)
This is to reframe the paradox of thinking life: the reason to look around corners is itself what is hidden around the corner; nobody bothers to look unless they already know what’s there, but without looking, they assume that nothing is there at all, and since they already believe they know what’s there (nothing), why bother looking? You might argue that my demonstration is a gross oversimplification – that there’s no way anyone could be so stupid – but people are so stupid, that’s what is so frustrating. (Stupidity in this sense is not a lack of brains but a refusal to use the brains one has.)
And this is how "thinking too much" has come to be considered a fault. Even people who recognize obstacles as obstacles refuse to look past them: at least by not looking, they can plea ignorance when something goes wrong. Plea ignorance to whom? To themselves: it helps maintain a clear conscience – "I couldn’t have done anything about that. I didn't know; I couldn't see it coming..." – though it doesn’t necessarily help make life any better, or living any more effective. It’s self-consignment to a mere spectator role, which is the least of its faults. The greater loss is social: it enables and encourages everyone else to be just as ignorant and ineffective, which seems to work fine until something changes, or until something goes wrong...
I will grant that looking around conceptual and ideological corners is not such an easy thing to do. It is literally disorienting. We take for granted our intuitive ability to maintain a sense of physical orientation as we move; it doesn’t disturb us that physical objects seem to change their size, shape, and position as we move in three dimensions. We can walk out the front door towards a tree that quickly appears larger as we approach; it was once a speck and yet soon looms over us. Then as we climb an adjacent hill, looking back we see the same tree now below, and our house has become the speck, minutely visible through the upper foliage of the tree. Our original perspective has reversed, and it makes us wonder, but it doesn’t frighten or confuse. Cognitive scientists and computer programmers alike will tell you that the cognitive processes behind the apparent simplicity are really far from simple.
With ideas it is different. The mind’s eye doesn’t have the same kind of hard-wired apparatus to maintain a coherent orientation as it moves around the ideological landscape. If people stray too far from their home position, they can’t make sense of all the new views and vistas; as if continually have to ask, "Is that tree still the same tree that I saw from my front door? Is that house still the same house as the one I just left?" Of course ideas are still the same, no matter how their apparent size, shape, and position seems to change; but our problem is that we tend to identify and situate ideas in absolute terms – we know our ideas as having a definite size, shape, and position – so when these terms change, even slightly, they become unfamiliar, they actually do become different in the limited sense by which we know them. Unless we are properly educated (probably from childhood) to 'move around' our ideological landscape and maintain relative appreciations of ideas, the burden of working out all of these changes and variations tends to be too great; the confusion of multiple changing perspectives forces people to stay at home, making up reasons not to venture out: "I don't need to venture out; I can see the truth perfectly from here. People who move around [think] too much only lose sight of it, becoming confused relativists."
But we seem to be approaching a whole new phase of cultural evolution. Before now, there has been little need to venture away from one’s ideological birthplace; that’s changing, because the landscape is changing: new vistas come to us. It has already become a cliché in business to talk about the importance of openness, empathy, professional adaptability, and personal growth. These aren’t just idealistic platitudes coming from humanist psychologists and romantic poets; these "soft" notions are promoted by hard-headed commonsense executives; the effectiveness of these ideas is demonstrated by rigorous, quantitative research. Ignore these recommendations at your own risk; in this age of global mobility and communications, total integration, and proliferating diversity – not to mention efficiency, capacity, and speed – no corner is safe from disruption.
So where do we look for guidance? How do we learn to make effective decisions in a complex ideological landscape? How do we overcome doubt in order to act? Fortunately, intelligent people have been asking (and answering) these questions for thousands of years – including characters like Socrates and Hamlet, and historians like Jacques Barzun, who remind us that "experience is neither fixed nor finished; it grows as we make it by our restless search for truth," which isn’t something to lament or condemn, but "should only strengthen tolerance and lessen our pretensions."
Sources:
- Of Human Freedom (1939; revised ed. 1976)
- Clio and the Doctors (1974)
- From Dawn to Decadence (2000)
- "Toward a Fateful Serenity," in A Jacques Barzun Reader (Michael Murray ed., 2002)
- Barzun & Graff The Modern Researcher (1977; 5th ed. 1992)
- Harold Bloom, Hamlet (from the Major Literary Characters series, 1990)
... and a small selection of further reading:
- Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964)
- Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers (1975)
- A Stroll with William James (1983)
- The Culture We Deserve (1989)
- Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991)
... but first see:
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