The Value of Education: Romance vs. Truth

 Duncan Richter

 

It is hard to see how values can be kept out of the goals of education.  The idea that education should be value-free is itself normative, after all, and if the goal is teaching facts or developing skills, we can always ask why this goal is preferred to others and what its value is.  Instead of addressing the question of whether we should aim to teach values, therefore, I will address the question of which values we should try to teach.  More specifically, I will concern myself with how education can best enable individuals to help others.  I will approach the issue by way of an investigation into two opposing views on the subject, those of Simone Weil and Richard Rorty.

            Weil's view is not immediately attractive.  For one thing, she argues rather unfashionably that the true value of school studies is that they increase our ability to pray properly.  For another she claims that:

When we force ourselves to fix the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise in which we have failed through sheer stupidity, a sense of our mediocrity is borne in upon us with irresistible evidence.  No knowledge is more to be desired. [p. 47]

  

For Weil the point of studying algebra is to increase one's power of attention and to encourage the virtue of humility.  The point of studying history, economics, or physics, would be the same.  Again this sounds unconvincing.   

            What is appealing about Weil's view, though, is that it has a secular side.  The key thing for Weil is to improve our ability to pay attention, which:

consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. [p. 49]

  

And this attention, according to Weil, is what the love of one's neighbour is made of.  "Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention." [p. 51]  That of course is a questionable view, but it is worth bearing in mind, especially if we relate the concept of attention as found in the work of Weil and Iris Murdoch with the concept of appreciation as used by Cora Diamond (neither Murdoch nor Diamond is committed to the idea that only attention is needed by unhappy people, but both see value in attention).  Those who care about the environment, for instance, are likely to value the ability to attend or appreciate that seems so absent from those who destroy rainforests, wetlands, and the rest.

            Merely attending to the truth is not something that Rorty values.  The goal of education according to him is not to put us in touch with any non-human Reality but rather to put us "in touch with our own potentialities." [p. 525]  Rorty endorses what he takes to be Dewey's view that "the only moral end" is growth towards:

 realization of the potentialities which have already been sketched out in the language we are now using--towards realization of our present vaguely sensed ideals. [p. 526]

 

We should try to improve, in other words, in whatever ways we vaguely sense are desirable.  Rorty freely admits that this is a vague ideal, but sees the only alternative as unacceptably theistic.  The "hermeneutic" view he advocates is defined primarily in opposition to a platonic valuing of what Rorty likes to call "objective truth" or Truth.  Such a view is objectionable because:

 On the pragmatist account, as on Heidegger's, Plato has substituted Truth for God as the goal of inquiry and life.  For some such tacit substitution is the only way in which one can make sense of "objective truth" as something morally important or philosophically controversial. [pp. 524-5]

  

Three things strike me as immediately debatable here.  The first is the assumption that it is wrong to believe in God, or to consider God to be the proper goal of inquiry and life.  The second is the idea that objective truth can be regarded as having moral value only if one is religious in some objectionable way (is Rorty simply begging the question here?).  The third is the implication that for the platonist the idea of objective truth is meant to be philosophically controversial.  I will address each of these concerns in turn.

Rorty's objection to God is not metaphysical but pragmatic or linguistic.  That is to say, he considers religious language to be no longer useful for solving our problems.  Anyone who disagrees is either wrong or else simply not one of us.  To say that such people are wrong seems unduly confident given our ignorance about the future and what it might take to solve all our current problems.  To say that such people are not us seems rather unfriendly, lacking in the spirit of solidarity.  I will say nothing more about this here though.

Rorty's objection to ascribing moral value to truth is more interesting.  There certainly is a religious flavour to Plato's conception of truth.  But it is doubtful whether such a flavour is essential to any realist or, one might say, common sense, conception of truth.  Rorty himself says that, "willingness to let one's theories crumble at the touch of a discomfirming experiment is a moral virtue." [p. 525]  He does not seem to consider the possibility that this is at least part of what others mean when they say that objective truth has moral value.  Certainly Weil would link, if not identify, the moral virtue to which Rorty refers with humility, and this is precisely one of the main reasons why we should attend to the truth, according to her.

Thirdly there is Rorty's implication that when those he opposes talk about objective truth they mean something philosophically controversial.  Plato's theory of the forms is controversial, of course, (although since almost everyone rejects it there is little actual controversy) but realists such as John Searle take themselves to be defending common sense. 

It seems to me therefore that Rorty has not at all shown that we need an alternative to what he calls the Platonist view.  Indeed the concepts of truth and reality seem almost impossible to avoid.  Surely Rorty's idea of human potentialities implicitly relies on the belief that these potentialities are truly real?  This does not mean that they constitute part of the furniture of the world.  It just means that there are such potentialities to be realized, that it makes sense (at least) to talk as Rorty does about realizing them.  Does this make Rorty himself a sort of non-metaphysical realist?  In some ways he seems to be.  He does not really object to the idea that truth is correspondence to reality.  Rather he objects to the idea that language corresponds to reality (which Rorty takes to be what people usually mean when they say that truth is correspondence to reality).  His objection to this idea is that "we have no idea what that would mean." [p. 525]  Despite not knowing what it means, he also asserts that it would be impossible to determine whether it were true.  If we really have no idea what something means, though, I do not see how we can have any idea about its verification. 

The tendency of some philosophers to talk nonsense about language in no way invalidates the perfectly ordinary and useful concepts of truth and reality.  Realizing this might help us to avoid what Rorty sees is the dangerous step of telling students that there is no such thing as objective truth.  This is dangerous, he rightly points out, because it encourages what he calls "vulgar relativism", the idea that "every view is as good as every other". [p. 527]  Rorty's response to such relativism is striking:

 The difference between vulgar relativism and pragmatism is that pragmatism says the fact that a view is ours--our language's, our tradition's, our culture's, is an excellent prima facie reason for holding it. [p. 527]

  

Solidarity, apparently of the us-against-them variety (or at least us-and-not-them), here takes priority over truth.  Pragmatism thus understood will strike many people as unacceptably arbitrary, especially if the language, culture, and tradition identified as "ours" excludes all religious belief.  This is connected with Rorty's self-conscious attempt to move away from truth, or receptiveness to truth, as the goal of education.  The cure for vulgar relativism, raised by the Rortyan claim that "God doesn't exist" [p. 527], is hero-worship, according to Rorty.  However, this romantic hero-worship is recommended in an oddly detached, unromantic way.  Rorty says that:

 it doesn't make much difference whether a student's heroes are chemists or poets, or whether the discipline in which he immerses himself is philosophy or mathematics.  All that matters is that the student not see what he's doing as less or more than what it is--participation in a community effort, learning to take a hand in what is going on, learning to speak more of the language which his time and place in history has destined him to speak. [p. 529]

  

            If he really means this then Rorty thinks that the point of studying chemistry or poetry is to learn anti-realist philosophy.  Let's assume that he means instead that learning chemistry, say, is part of what it means to learn to speak our language, and that this is a good thing, if only because it brings us together.  I think he ought to mean that.  If he does, then it is odd that he should suggest it is unimportant what kind of heroes students are encouraged to have.  They ought to be encouraged to have the kind of heroes who will inspire and enable them to speak our language more effectively.  Chemists and poets are much better candidates for such a job than philosophers, surely.  Non-Rortyan philosophers are likely to encourage metaphysical error (i.e. metaphysics), as Rorty sees things.  Rortyan philosophers are likely to encourage a lack of interest in science if not outright vulgar relativism.  After all, Rorty acknowledges the danger of his ideas being crudely misunderstood, and himself says that if thermodynamics is to be included in a core curriculum it is not because "thermodynamics is important, but that scientists are." [p. 533]  "What matters," he says, "is that there … be some common subject of conversation." [p. 532]  "The aim of such conversations is … not to seek the Truth but just to bind us together." [p. 532]

            In my experience conversations between anti-realist philosophers of Rorty's ilk and scientists who genuinely believe, say, that thermodynamics is important are unlikely to bind the two together in anything more friendly than a wrestling bout.  Taking Rorty's talk of conversation seriously means thinking of the conversation as more than an idle chat in which the artists patronizingly pretend to take an interest in what the scientists are saying and doing.  To be bound together in any community worth having we must share interests, i.e. beliefs about what is important.  This will not be achieved by those who (unlike Rorty I believe) hold that all that matters is that there be some such community. 

            The ideal community would be one in which we not only genuinely shared interests but in which we took an active (but not too active) interest in each other.  Rorty of course is against cruelty and for solving humanity's problems, but he says little about how we can or should take an interest in one another.  Weil's opinion is that to do so properly is a real art, and that learning to take a real interest in such things as thermodynamics can help teach it to us.  Indeed we must take a kind of interest in everything to achieve the state of virtuous nothingness that Weil sees as our true goal. In Stephen Mulhall's words:

 The nothingness to which we must freely tend is not a simple absence; it is a practice of dying to the self.  As Kierkegaard spells out in Works of Love, it constitutes a form of love in which the believer loses herself in the object of love, which in the Christian case is the whole of creation but most particularly the neighbour. [p. 308]

  

Losing oneself in the whole of creation is not the kind of romantic,utilitarian, arbitrary interest that Rorty recommends.  It is better called attention than interest because it is patient, attentive, loving, rather than active and oriented towards problem-solving.  At this level we have a fundamental ethical difference between Weil and Rorty.  I find myself torn between the two, but my point is not to take sides.  Rather I want to show that Rorty's view is not as obviously better than Weil's as one might at first think.  True, Weil is a Christian, which will alienate many from her choice of words at least.  But love of the world and most particularly one's neighbour, understood not as us but as everyone, does not have to involve reference to God.  And Rorty's parochial, anti-religious, openly vague ideas about the realization of potentialities are not preferable to religious ideas on the grounds of any relative lack of mumbo-jumbo. 

As far as education goes the practical differences between those who favour Weil and those who support Rorty might be quite small.  Rorty believes in teaching a core curriculum of whatever the best available teachers most love or value.  Weil too believes in a varied curriculum.  Rorty believes that the absence of a platonic standard does not leave everything arbitrary because there is such a thing as the common sense of our community.  This common sense is likely to be fairly conservative and so would include the works of Shakespeare, the Iliad, and so on, along with algebra and chemistry.  Weil too values these subjects.  Rorty and Weil both even seem to value humility and see school studies as a way to achieve it.

The great difference between the two concerns the true purpose of academic study and therefore how it should be conducted.  But a teacher who openly shares Rorty's indifference to the heroes and subjects presented to students is unlikely to achieve Rorty's stated goals.  There would surely have to be at least a pretence of genuine interest in thermodynamics or whatever.  The teachers (taken together, not necessarily each individual) would have to teach as if they loved the whole of creation, in other words.  And real problem-solving involves learning lessons that might not directly involve problem-solving and the acquisition of such virtues as patience.  In other words, following Weil's methods might be the best way to reach Rorty's goals. 

 

 

 

 

 

References

 

Stephen Mulhall Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994).

Richard Rorty "Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching" in Steven M. Cahn (ed.) Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1997).

Simone Weil "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God" in George A. Panichas (ed.) The Simone Weil Reader (Moyer Bell, Mt. Kisco, New York, 1977).