©Paul A. Bové
1354 Royal Oak Drive
Wexford, PA 15090
Censorship and the Disciplines
As the case progressed, it became increasingly clear that the agitation against the Jews in France followed an international line. Thus the [Italian Jesuit Monthly] Civiltà Cattolica declared that Jews must be excluded from the nation everywhere, in France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. Catholic politicians were among the first to realize that latter day power politics must be based on the interplay of colonial ambitions. They were therefore the first to link anti-Semitism to imperialism.
--Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (116)
By its very structure colonialism is separatist and regionalist. Colonialism is not merely content to note the existence of tribes, it reinforces and differentiates them.
--Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (51)
Interdisciplinarity is an historical problem. At first, it seems to be an epistemological, methodological, or institutional problem and so we have largely treated it. How it is an historical problem is itself difficult. Writers and administrators place interdisciplinarity within many frames, each of which is itself specific to an historical context and which, as a gesture, is particular to modernity.[1]
As a problem of knowledge, interdisciplinarity is essentially historical. It is one way humans mediate their social lives through institutions. As such, it offers both a synchronic or planar field of examination and the possibility of genealogical accounts of human change. In other words, interdisciplinarity accords with the decline of Europe, the dominance of corporate and monopolistic power centers, and the nearly impossible cerebral demands of specialized disciplines themselves.
Moreover, in the last twenty-five years or so, especially academic humanists began to stress the word ‘discipline’ as a verb or gerund, emphasizing the shaping as a constraining element of discipline. Much of this line follows upon a reductive reading of Michel Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish. Despite Foucault’s admonition that power produces, and despite frequent verbal acknowledgement of that fact, academic cultural studies types, especially in the US, normalize ‘discipline’ as a repressive device in its very constraint of human knowledge and practice into certain forms. This story infuses interdisciplinarity with liberatory fantasies of alternative knowledges that exist outside, in the past, or in some forgotten or marginal range of life practice.
At more or less the same time as these humanists invoke the inter- of interdisciplinarity as a possible space of alternative life and knowledge, scientific labs, the state research establishment, and corporate research and publicity units embrace the same space as a point of innovation beyond the limits of any one discipline’s inventive capacity. As humanists embrace the fuzzy edges of disciplines for their catechetical and deconstructive effects upon normal orders of knowledge and practice, corporate power—including the universities—intentionally organize those catachreses in labs and research projects designed to make predictable and regular the innovatory processes. In one vision, inter- names a space of alternative possibility—much as multi- does in multi-cultural—while for the other, inter- names a solution to capital and the war machine’s needs profitably to invest and control space.
In English, ‘interdisciplinarity’ began as a term associated with the social sciences and the helping professions. The OED records the first use of the term as recently as 1937, in the December issue of the Journal of Educational Sociology: “Programs of study submitted should provide . . . for training of an inter-disciplinary nature.” Succeeding dictionary examples until 1972 also come from the softer social sciences—not from economics, for example. Along the way, the term enters public discourse appearing in newspapers and general magazines by 1965 and soon thereafter began to describe academic programs of all sorts that crossed or operated between disciplinary borders.[2] The OED’s definition of the term--“Of or pertaining to two or more disciplines or branches of learning; contributing to or benefiting from two or more disciplines”—economically catches the complexity and apparent simplicity of the idea’s foundational use. Something is of interdisciplinary concern if it implicates more than one discipline as, for example, the study of American Civilization at Harvard implicates the literary and historical disciplines. Each discipline has a claim on the topic and each adds to a sum total of knowledge beyond the other’s reach. In the end, a new sort of knowledge other than that available to either discipline, to any existing discipline, emerges to validate the inter- and to weaken the claims of the subsidiary practices. Yet this last idea specifies the OED’s definition: the new knowledge benefits from the existing disciplines and it might contribute to them, but the resulting new knowledge need not reside in the conceptual or practical space of either. From this process, of course, one possibility is that a new discipline might emerge. In this fact, we have a common and for some an unfortunate result while for others the same result is the happy because profitable invention of a new field such as molecular biology or bioengineering or cultural studies.
Many people have applied their minds to this constellation of possibilities. From deconstruction’s concern with marginalities of knowledge to DARPA’s funding of interdisciplinary developments in weapons and technology, the inter- space has proven a profitable area of capital investment. A computer search of the Modern Language Association’s Bibliography returns over 225 items listing ‘interdisciplinarity’ as a topic. Similarly, a Lexus-Nexus search of other academic databases returns more than 275 hits. With the possible exception of terms such as margin or difference, no term rewards investment as much as ‘inter-.’ Not only do we have interdisciplinary, but intercultural and an entire range of compounds formed by, at, and between the borders that interest us.
The OED once more helps us along. Let us remember that disciplinarity is itself a modern formation of a noun from an adjective, and so recent that the OED does not list it. Normally, critics follow this term through its adjectival form, disciplinary, back to its noun origins—discipline and disciple.[3] If we pause on the adjectival basis of ‘interdisciplinarity,’ however, we catch an element of meaning and use that aligns with the prefix.
Adjectives, we recall, are adjuncts, that is, they provide adjunctive qualities to a substantive. So, soup becomes hot soup. Similarly, knowledge becomes ‘disciplinary knowledge’ or practice ‘disciplinary formation.’ In this weak sense, disciplinarity is the result of an adjunction rather than the singular substance of the noun discipline or its plural additive form. Items in a plural stand by themselves—one foot, two feet. In the interdisciplinary mode, disciplines cannot and do not stand each alone and whatever the interdisciplinary is that emerges, it is always in the ambiguous but definite form of an adjunct construction. Its independence is limited even as it undermined the substantives it modifies. For the OED, an adjectival noun of this kind is just “that which cannot stand alone; a dependent; an accessory.” It is a substitute and a dependency, an accessory denying the modified its independence.
Interdisciplinarity is all these things as a game of spatial operators that reduces the historicity of knowledge to the apparent manageability of administration. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama’s attempt to draw world-historical conclusions from the end of the Cold War declared the end of history and the reduction of all social, political, and human processes to management issues.[4] The more recently published results of his interest in the interdisciplinary field of ‘biotechnology’ suggests that this new knowledge field might, in fact, achieve what state political economy seems to have ended in the last decade, something like human history.[5] Fukuyama warns that biotechnical intervention in the human genome might make liberal democracy impossible by making irrelevant all talk of democratic equality resting on something like the universal rights of man. This profound ethical and political problem presents another managerial dilemma: how to anticipate, plan for, and control possible outcomes—with a full awareness that prolepsis in the face of organized invention is impossible. Fukuyama cannot think of any way to deal with this potentially critical problem other than to circumscribe it within management, to reduce its historicity and its potentiality to restart human history.
Perhaps we expect too much from Fukuyama if we think the ‘inter-‘ of interdisciplinarity is a hope for history. ‘Inter-‘ does afford us a sense of time, but ‘intervening or happening in the time or period between,’ as the OED puts it—as in the word, intercessional or interwar—is a form of spatialization, a cognate of the fundamental meaning, “Situated, placed, or occurring locally, between or among.” This is why whatever is inter- whether it be interdisciplinarity or the interregnum of politics seems eminently manageable.
Only when the very constellation of this emergent ‘inter-‘ appears do we see its historicality. At first, interdisciplinarity simply marks the historical beginnings of the traditional disciplines and the increasing need for their transformation or reorganization. Institutional and cognitive inertia maintain disciplinary formations as often as their continuing intellectual vitality. In fact, as we all know, the weaker the discipline, that is, the less innovative, productive, and remunerated the field the more likely it will slide into some inharmonious relation of interdisciplinarity. When strong disciplines, such as economics or philosophy, join interdisciplinary efforts, it is as an individual contributor to a second line project rather than an effort to sustain or revivify the discipline’s own first-line ambitions. Universities with strong analytic philosophy departments rarely form ‘literature and philosophy’ majors while strong schools of materials engineering must join with chemists to do work in emerging fields like nano-technology. At this point, it seems as if inter-disciplinarity can be nothing more than a shortly open space, a spot of time, colonizable by the same post-historical forces of knowledge production and management as we expect on the most basic levels of our polity. That interdisciplinarity cannot satisfy utopian ambition counts against utopian desire within the framework of our moment—no matter how much ‘new knowledge’ or how many ‘new ways of talking’ seem to open in its spaces. We can make interdisciplinarity a worthy subject of intellectual historical reflection, to do so, however, we must refuse the terms of the ongoing conversation and join a much older thinking buried by the din of our anxious self-congratulations.
Lionel Trilling delivered the first Thomas Jefferson lecture sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1972. Published under the title, Mind in the Modern World, this lecture now seems to be nothing more than a reactionary warning against affirmative action, government involvement in university education, and academic reluctance to defend its own standards.[6] Indeed, anticipating both the theory wars and the culture wars that raged from the 1960s to the recent past, Trilling speaks on behalf of an Arnoldian critical vision at a time when such humanism had, as Trilling notes, acquired the presumed status of political repression. Trilling’s willingness to discuss the fate of mind is what should interest us right now.
As Daniel O’Hara’s remarkable book on Trilling’s style makes inescapable, Lionel Trilling never came close to expressing a simple thought directly.[7] The aesthetic self-formation enacted in and implied by his style, simultaneously records Trilling’s awareness of the reasons to doubt mind’s ability to improve the physical and moral world while it also records his faith in human mind nonetheless. We can apprehend something of what this means from Trilling’s own comments on the ancient Greeks’ inauguration of the wonder the Renaissance gave us for mind.
In some respects this is a very long line indeed. It goes back to the philosophers of ancient Greece both in what might be called its aesthetic appreciation of mind, its admiration for the mental faculties almost for their own sake, apart from what practical ends they might achieve, and also in its assumption that mind can play a decisive part in the moral life of the individual person. In other respects its extent is relatively short, going back only to the Renaissance in its belief that what mind might encompass of knowledge of the physical universe has a direct bearing upon the quality of human existence, and also in its certitude that mind can, and should, be decisive in political life.[8]
We need not agree with all the elements in Trilling’s arsenal of ideological sensitivities to see the importance of his acute description of historical burden. In this quotation, Trilling provides not a definition but a general understanding of ‘mind’ that demarcates the continuing, fragile, and fluctuating faith of Western society in secular humanism, in human intellect free of mythical or dogmatic presumptions. If ‘mind’ is another name for secular humanism’s fragile historical existence then its historicality leads us to the time of its development and to its contemporary formations; without considering these together, we betray mind itself.
Trilling’s Arnoldian position, like that of his great successor at Columbia, Edward Said, depends upon the Victorian’s obsessive commitment to criticism. Trilling was a frightened conservative humanist, who literalized Arnold’s “famous characterization of literature as ‘a criticism of life,’” thereby unduly constricting the work of mind, of criticism, and of ‘literariness.’ Literature’s critical function, Trilling insisted, existed only in the print formations of the Renaissance raised to the central institutional and social place it had seemingly acquired by the 1930s. Trilling would never have written Benjamin’s essays appreciating, for example, the historical human transplanting of the literary critical into film and other electronic arts.
What matters for us, though, in Trilling’s text, beyond the anxiety and misunderstanding of cultural tendencies? It is the humanist’s fear that both criticism and the earned accomplishments of humanity’s efforts at social secularization would disappear with the suppression of print’s authority. More important that Trilling’s fear for literature is his fear for criticism. Literature matters so much because Trilling cannot imagine any human formation as essential to the act of criticism. If literature is a criticism of life, then what is criticism? Arnold’s answer: “to see the object as in itself it really is.”[9] It is essential that we set aside for now all possible epistemological and socio-cultural debates about either what this realist demand might mean or whose reality he envisions. As important as these matters are within a secular humanistic and historical society, they matter only if such a society, enabled by ‘mind’ stands as an ideal for achieving justice and equality, truth and beauty.
One might discuss many milestones profitably on the way from the Greeks to the Italian Renaissance in following the unfolding of mind.[10] Two major figures catch my eye in this context—Vico and Kant.
Let me explain something of where I am going now. I will contend that the fundamental concern for all interested in the interdisciplinary must be opposition to religion in the name of that humanism Trilling calls mind. Along the way, one sees other possible topics for investigation. Not accidentally, Vico’s disagreement with Descartes develops as a defense of poetry against analysis and reduction—one of the prototypical ideals underlying both Arnold and Trilling’s concern for the literary. That is, as Vico’s poetry embodies the secular processes of human social creations, analysis stands as its opponent, as the turning away from a study of what humans do in pursuit of a method independent of circumstance and a truth aspiring to apodictic certainty. In a word, Descartes speaks for ignorance; Vico for learning. Even between these opponents, there is discipline.
In The Conflict of the Faculties, Immanuel Kant ran the risk of upsetting his prince and censors with a defense of thinking against the authority of faith especially as it aligns itself with state power and presumed social obligations to stable values and social truths.[11] We need to remember only that Kant reserved the Higher Faculties—Theology, Law, and Medicine—to the domain of the state, of obedience to right—whereas he characterized Philosophy as the lower faculty and free of state right. Kant’s brief historical characterization of the university’s functional beginnings resonates still. While its founders’ identity might be unknown their intent is clear: form a ‘public institution’ “to handle the entire content of learning (really, the thinker devoted to it) by mass production, so to speak—by a division of labor.” Each discipline or branch of learning, each field would be supervised by a professor who functioned as a trustee responsible as a public figure for the authenticity and legitimacy of learning and teaching. Taken together, the participants in this structure form a community, dealing with all areas of knowledge, and so best known as a university. The division of labor required divided responsibility and expertise so that separate faculties “would be authorized to perform certain functions”—admissions, examinations, and conferring degrees—or, as Kant says, the right “to create doctors.”[12]
In this story of the university’s founding intent, the state accepts a specific limit upon its right to discipline and censor the professors, the teaching, and the public circulation of produced knowledge. The higher faculties belong to the state that relinquishes care for the sciences to secular reason. Kant insists that the higher faculties are so-called not with reference to “the learned professions” but “with reference to the government.”
A faculty is considered higher only if its teachings—both as to their content and the way they are expounded to the public—interest the government itself, while the faculty whose function is only to look after the interests of science is called lower because it may use its own judgment about what it teaches. Now the government is interested primarily in means for securing the strongest and most lasting influence on the people, and the subjects which the higher faculties teach are just such means. Accordingly, the government reserves the right to itself to sanction the teachings of the higher faculties, but those of the lower faculty it leaves up to the scholars’ reason.[13]
Kant chooses to name the lower faculty left to its reason, the faculty of philosophy. It does us well to remember Kant’s little story when we worry about state intervention into the university. Kant took pains to make clear that the university’s largest social function is sanctioned teaching. He carefully reserved not only reason to a subsidiary element of the university, but truth itself. Setting aside for the moment later criticisms of the confusions of truth and falsehood in philosophical truth—the sort of stories associated with many from Nietzsche to Derrida—dwell on the fact that Kant recognized that the Higher Faculties had no obligation to the truth or to judgment. The state arrogated both and created the university to its ends. “For the government,” Kant writes, “does not teach, but it commands those who, in accepting its offices, have contracted to teach what it wants (whether this be true or not).[14]
Of course, Kant’s text arrogated to philosophy what he considered the highest qualities of mind and human life—reason, truth, and judgment. He could do this, however, because the state had not (or had not yet) come to understand its own proprietary relation to science. Moreover, it did not feel itself threatened by the independent production of secular and secularizing knowledge as long as it could control its distribution and effects. Censorship along with tenured loyalty assured the containment of reason’s ability, in Arnold’s terms, to see things as they really are—even if such seeing produced Kant’s own critiques. Either the university itself would be a caldron of conflict—a streit or struggle—contained by state power or the impossibility of the state’s project for the university—if and when the conflict of faculties made the point about the lower faculties’, the secular faculties’, great power. In essence, Kant’s book begins from the first and ends in the second alternative. ‘Higher’ derives from power, against which the enlightened ideal of speaking critical truth in public cannot compete for distinction. Famously, Kant opposes this power’s discipline to command—Believe!—with the freedom to speak the truth—I believe! It is an historical error in an as yet ignorant human nature that allows power to dominate truth. The height of reason grovels within the powerlessness of irrationality and ignorance. For Kant, explicitly, the battleground for freedom is the political sphere of what he calls “human nature.”[15]
Kantian humanism has had a difficult time in the last century. Hannah Arendt traced the processes that made it tragically impossible to speak of the universal rights of man. Intellectuals from Nietzsche to Lyotard and beyond have revealed the violence of its anthropological universality, even though various heroes of decolonization, such as Fanon, have often appealed to those very standards.
Writing in the occupied city of Naples, under the frightening eye of the Inquisition, Vico imagined a realm called secular human life, lived by those peoples not determined by the book. He declared, in opposition to analysts of all kinds, that the only things humans can know and understand are those things humans have made—primarily themselves and their societies. He followed on Dante, Scaliger, Machiavelli, and those other especially Italian intellectuals whose remaking of the ancients’ wisdom produced the world of modern humanity. In Vico’s case, always and literally, the church and state in their combined violence, threatened mind by burning those who would speak or think heretically.
Secular human knowledge has in theory and in its practical initiation always been a form of conflict, of threatened existence, of dramatic tension with state and religion. Each of these forms has its own discipline, of course, so that these conflicts are and always were conflicts of discipline with life and death stakes. When the stakes are indifferent, mind is absent—whether God returns as recompense or not. When Ian Hacking, for example, blithely congratulates himself for the freedom to carry his own discipline anywhere he wants by virtue of wit and curiosity, he recalls the evident root of his untroubled interdisciplinarity as an escape from discipleship. Disciples can be secular or religious, as Aristotle to Plato or Xavier to Ignatius. Hacking must quite not mean it when he describes his personal role model, Leibniz, as ‘predisciplinary man.’ Immediately, he tells us what he takes from Leibniz is curiosity and discipline! Hacking is actually a little clearer on what he wants to say than this. He means that Leibniz worked across an enormous range of topics that, today, we subsume under different disciplines. In this simple sense, Leibniz comes before the Kantian division of labor. But curiosity requires discipline to be productive and Hacking admits to learning it. So what is the ideal? It might be Mary Douglass who, Hacking writes, “applies her keen and totally unconventional mind and skills where she is interested. I shall have to ask her next time I see her, does she think of herself as anything other than a (non-conformist) anthropologist of a particular kind, education and tradition?” The Vichian and Kantian passionate struggles have become this ‘complacent’ liberalism.
Trilling’s Arnoldian conservatism regretted institutional changes that threaten not only critical dominance but also the academy’s very commitment to mind. Trilling’s humanism worried complacency as an intellectual transgression against the history of mind’s efforts. At the center of Trilling’s commitment is a Kantian concern for critical reason’s relation to truth and so citizenship. Danger lies in the social transformations of mind’s value into professional or social status: “By an inevitable inference, the intellectual disciplines in which [professors] give instruction are to be regarded not as of intrinsic value, but, at best, as elements of a rite of social passage and, at worst, as devices of social exclusion."[16] Trilling knew his Kant and his contemporaries. The state’s police authority became the social authority of passage and credentialing. More important, the professors came to have no passion: they all profess as if teaching in the higher faculties, without reason, judgment, or freedom. Passionate politics had made the university into an agency of freedom for Tilling when the upper classes came to realize the power of free knowledge. They
had somehow got hold of the idea that mind, not in one or another of its specific formal disciplines but in what any one discipline might imply of the essence of mind, was of consequence in statecraft and in the carrying on of national life. What they would seem suddenly to have identified and wanted to capture for themselves was what nowadays we might call the mystique of mind--its energy, its intentionality, its impulse toward inclusiveness and completeness, its search for coherence with due regard for the integrity of the elements which it brings into relation with each other, its power of looking before and after.[17]
For those who understand, discipline implies the “mystique of mind.” Disciplines are a capacity of mind’s quality and evidence of its desirability as the ethical, aesthetic possibility of human political life. That Trilling sketches mind’s political character in terms critics recognize as poetic—intentionality of form; integrity of parts; placement in context; and visionary coherence—is hardly accidental. Rather than dismiss Trilling as nostalgic or elitist take seriously his metaphoric transference of the qualities of secular humanism—mind as historicity—from the literary to the political. This Vichian moment explains why Edward Said, whose politics were overtly quite different from Trilling’s, would nonetheless approvingly cite Trilling as a predecessor. Common ground is the intellectual critical commitment to the priority of human mind and life at work in purely historical secular terms building societies on the bases of knowledge, experience, judgment, and justice.
Reducing the allure of mind to a management problem as US universities have done so much recently, corresponds not to the death of literature but to the death of criticism. If the inter- space were transgressive of limits or creative beyond the boundaries, then it would attract us as mind did Vico, Trilling, Said and others. We would feel its allure as the guarantor of both seeing reality and passionately carrying out a criticism of life. Pathetically, inter-disciplinarity formalizes a social disregard for mind essential to a polity that increasingly censors the chances to intend form as Trilling defines mind’s visionary energies.
Hannah Arendt is the most important thinker of how societies turn against human mind and its historicity, in part, of course, because of mind’s own actions. The turn against mind, so to speak, is nothing but more human history. Trilling could not quite think how mind lost its way and so in the best US tradition created a paranoid Manichaeism. Arendt, however, makes imponderably clear that American forms of mass democracy destroy more thoroughly Kant’s humanistic ideals than the worst forms of twentieth century utopianism. Arendt, in a manner typical of her generation, and like Trilling with his emphasis on mind’s intent, avoids the worst despairing conclusions by stressing that the human capacity to begin, to take a step, affords alone some potential solace that human history can survive the mind’s destitution. This puts mind in its historical place, of course, but it offers little solace not because the capacity to begin seems so slim but because no beginning in itself offers any possible reason to believe that what might come is in any way better than what has been or now is. Difference is not betterment.
Arendt’s deeper concern is that American power arrangements aspire to arrest the possibility of beginning. Arendt concludes specifically that post-European global arrangements, dominated by the US and American forms, will prohibit all political being and organize loneliness and isolation in such a way as to make alternatives seem impossible if not undesirable. Fact and illusion come under control in a finally managed end of history. Fukuyama and his allies merely embody the end of Arendt’s tale.
Interdisciplinarity productively contains beginning within the managed administrative forms of the ahistorical. I believe that Trilling used the term ‘mind’ rather than other terms such as reason because he both continued and modified the position most associated with the Frankfurt School. He did not deny their kind of claim that reason had abused itself in becoming bureaucratic rationality; rather, he chose a more complexly encoded term than reason to define the critical historical complexity of human intention and formative intelligence. If you will, reason as rationalization is a threat to mind, but Trilling does not categorize mind as a potential threat to itself. Reason as rationalization is close to Arendt’s image of American forms, but those forms do not exhaust mind precisely because they threaten it. They are not an expression of mind as bureaucracy is of reason.
In my retelling of this tale, America appears as hostile to mind—as its censor. I think there is a clear reading of Trilling and Arendt that would make a convincing case for this notion. If so, then interdisciplinarity is important as one censoring device the chief of which must be those American revivals that exist, in fact, to arrest mind.
Kant’s text defines the lower faculty, which is interested in truth and judgment, as a secular faculty that might make even faith responsive to its questions. Simultaneously, he allows the state the right to act as censor through its powerful management of populations via god, law, and the body. He opts for a domain outside the censor, and he is not foolish enough to believe it might be the university itself. Rather, as with Said, Kant asserts the right of the university to contain the utopian space of judgment and truth. The censor surrounds it as a wasteland does hope. Kant has anticipated recent discussion on ‘bio-power’ by underlying Foucault’s thinking on power, knowledge, and the body. Kant, however, importantly begins his discussion with religion:
By public teaching about the first of these [eternal well-being], the government can exercise very great influence to uncover the inmost thoughts and guide the most secret intentions of its subjects. By teachings regarding the second [civil well-being], it helps to keep their external conduct under the reins of public laws, and by its teachings regarding the third [bodily well-being], it make sure that it will have a strong and numerous people to serve its purposes.[18]
In this practice, the state acts according to reason. Trouble starts, as it were, when the censor extends its power into the domain of judgment and truth. Knowing that truth and judgment have no place in the realms of god, law, and the body, Kant allows that the state’s schema is rational because its censorship paradoxically does not confuse itself with right judgment.
If human nature as secular historicism creates and accepts this politics, it does so because mind survives. When power extends itself through the domain of dogma into the realm proper to mind, then the intellectual and mind come under threat; indeed, freedom itself comes under threat because, as Arendt concluded, the capacity to be human flickers.
Milton had already argued passionately but futilely that no rationally self-interested state or social order would be so ‘pusillanimous’ as to threaten “that freedom of writing should be restrained by a discipline imitated from the prelates, and learnt by them from the Inquisition.”[19] Anticipating Kant, Milton warned, “A man may be a heretic in the truth,” if the state censor thinking and coerce assent from a man “without knowing other reason.” The social result is disaster for humans live in a false relation to each other: “Truth,” Milton writes, “is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.”[20] Of course, Milton warns against a certain sort of theocracy, a social arrangement in which precisely those activities of mind which Trilling says the English came to see as essential to statecraft—a society that would deny the humanistic conception of nature by arresting mind’s intentionality in turgidity. What would dogma destroy? “There is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.” Those who hope to defend the Gospel “are found the persecutors.” Milton’s god makes use of “men of rare abilities . . . in the discovery of truth,” which need not lie always in the rigidity of the present’s enshrined past. Zealots do not see the value of human mind, even in god’s service, and cannot make needed distinctions, to “resolve to stop their mouths because we fear they come with new and dangerous opinions.”[21]
In Trilling’s sense, mind intends as for Arendt it begins. For Milton, this is how the social universe so dependent on truth must be. Milton, more radical than Kant, equates licensing books with constraining invention at the grace of god. Only hypocrisy would bind books to good behavior.
Recall that the censor originally dealt with the population and that in Rome the censor conducted both the census and regulated morals. In its Latin root, censere means, “to estimate, rate, assess, be of opinion” [OED]. Almost all the Higher Faculties’ functions reside in the term.
Post-Foucauldian opinion, especially in the English-speaking world, leans toward eliding censere with ‘discipline.’ As we know from Milton, this is a traditional and well-founded claim, since Milton could identify censorship with being ‘bejesuited’[22]—and it is harder to imagine a more rigorous discipline than that of the Jesuits and their founder, Ignatius. We should not follow this line too far, however, because there was no more critical mind than that of the classically trained Foucault, who began his education in what was formally a Jesuit college. As David Macey says in The Lives of Michel Foucault, “for the adult Foucault, disciplined devotion to intellectual work was almost an ethic.”[23]
In Milton’s terms, intellectual discipline is not quite enough; to be properly rated as a truth-bearer, god must grace the talented to reveal it. I ask again that we set aside momentarily ideological predispositions to notice that Milton recognizes the world as the place of historical human life, no matter god’s interventions. For grace does nothing but align human capacity with the truth’s demands for recognition. Secularized, this is not far either from Arnold’s view of criticism’s necessity or Trilling’s judgment of mind’s human essentiality.
Perhaps there is no fairer test of Milton than the life of Charles Darwin. He had no disciplinary home, and yet had remarkable discipline; he destroyed the discipline of dogma, and so provoked the censorious fear of human mind at work. There is no better tale of secular mind than Darwin’s well-known account of his discoveries. I do not want to draw special attention to his growing into atheism because of science. Rather I want to relate two points: first, that Darwin’s developed habit of mind seems rather close to the general qualities of mind Trilling so admires; and second, that such mind leads toward the materialistic and human and inevitably away from not only god but the authority of censorship. These two points taken together culminate in the avowed hostility to Darwin that characterizes contemporary American religious hostility to mind and they culminate my attempt to place the discussion of inter-disciplines within a more historical analysis of how we might preserve the university’s founding purpose as a venue for mind.
After recounting how boring and unrewarding he found medical and theological courses, Darwin laments not studying enough mathematics but praises certain friends and professors, especially at Cambridge, who accommodate and stir his thinking. Not until the voyage on the Beagle, though, does Darwin acquire what Milton might call the grace needed to make use of his exceptional talents:
I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind. I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, although they were already fairly developed. The investigation of the geology of all the places visited was far more important, as reasoning here comes into play . . . . [added to observation] always reasoning and predicting what will be found elsewhere, light soon begins to dawn on the district, and the structure of the whole becomes more or less intelligible.[24]
It takes little explication to see the aesthetic nature of this training and its resultant apprehensions. While the older Darwin lost his taste for art, he retained it for landscape. Most important, however, he refused to assent to any idea that the aesthetic emotions themselves might account for the existence of an extra-human intelligence as it impinges on the affects:
The state of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and which was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not essentially differ from that which is often called the sense of sublimity; and however difficult it may be to explain the genesis of this sense, it can hardly be advanced as an argument for the existence of God, any more than the powerful though vague and similar feelings excited by music.[25]
Fundamentalists can respond to this apprehension in various ways. The most evidently censorious might be the most important in public life—that is, biblical literalists and others who demand that we acknowledge the legitimacy of their private fantasies—but for the intellectual and academic world, the greatest danger lies in the censorship that replaces ‘difficulty’ with final settlements. What are these? Final settlements are frames of interpretive reference that seem to the administrative mind to account for all possible events. While they do not imagine themselves as master narratives, they do present themselves as the inevitable key to all elaborations, which they variously see as after-effects of the fundamentals they alone envision.
‘Difficulty,’ which here I use as another metonym in the long chain I have stretched over our topic, is the life of the mind. It is not explicable ab ovo and certainly not ever merely recognized. It is history, and it is history as people live it, not simply as those great minds Milton admires. Recall that Milton’s Puritanism might play a role in his delimiting grace to the few. On that topic, great American writers have sometimes, although in the minority, offered different opinions. Darwin thought of our topic: difficulty is nothing less than the conflict of faculties, in this case, what we might call the aesthetic and what we might call the humility of intellectual discipline. ‘Dif-‘ is ‘dis-‘ which is the Greek that means two. Some this complexity ‘disses’ our faculties—but that is a good thing. We must ‘dis’ ourselves. How else will we learn the humility of living minds?
[1] This is what Heidegger refers to as “The Age of the World Picture.”
[2] (Oddly enough, though, ‘interdisciplinarity’ is absent from the online edition of The American Heritage dictionary.)
[3] Cf. Ian Hacking, “The Complacent Disciplinarian,” at the following URL: http://www.interdisciplines.org/interdisciplinarity/papers/7 as of April 1, 2005. This is a site sponsored by Science Po.
[4] Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and The Last Man. New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992.
[5] Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
[6] Lionel Trilling, Mind in the Modern World: The 1972 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (New York: Viking Press, 1972).
[7] Daniel T. O’Hara, Lionel Trilling: The Work of Liberation (Madison: the University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 57 – 59.
[8] Trilling, pp. 5 – 6.
[9] Trilling, p. 17.
[10] See, for example, Henry Adams’s treatment of Abelard in Mount Saint Michel and Chartres as well as Paul A. Bové, "Abandoning Knowledge: Disciplines, Discourse and Dogma - Henry Adams's Mont Saint Michel and Chartres," New Literary History 25 (Summer 1994): 601 - 620.
[11] Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. & introduced by Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
[12] Kant, p. 23.
[13] Kant, p. 27.
[14] Kant, p. 27.
[15] Kant, p. 29.
[16] Trilling, p. 25.
[17] Trilling, p. 38 - 39.
[18] Kant, pp. 31 – 33.
[19] John Milton, “Areopagitica,” John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 739.
[20] Milton, p. 739.
[21] Milton, p. 748.
[22] Milton, 748.
[23] David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), p. 8.
[24] Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882. Ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1969; reprint of Harcourt edition of 1958), p. 77.
[25] Darwin, Autobiography, pp. 91 – 92.
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