Mark Edmundson is a professor of literature who has said some interesting things about the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, as well as the larger cultural implications of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.
Does he make sense in all of these cases? No. He’s a little too trendy for my tastes. But he nonetheless makes observations with a literary panache and critical acumen that leads a reader like me to think in ways that further inquiry.
But then, that may be too generous given evidence in his recent riff on a lyric of a Bruce Springsteen song, “Hungry Heart.”
He says that our current students lack “hungry hearts.” As Springsteen has it, we’re all hungry.
But this observation as Edmundson wants to make it is simply a shallow permutation of Allan Bloom’s “Souls Without Longing.”
At least Bloom was concerned with that toward which toward souls ought to be longing. Even if Bloom was skeptical regarding the completion to be found in God (or artistic beauty or political justice), Bloom also offered the character of Socrates as exemplary of probity that was even beyond Nietzsche’s redlichheit.
Bloom offered the idea of the “philosopher” who was erotically unattached to anything that was particular other than that which was otherwise considered to be important in the highest sense (noesis noesios?).
Edmundson, on the other hand, offers us the “hungry heart” who goes to college, and who hopes to find some meaning. But this student is still a “hungry heart” a la Bruce Springsteen not St. Augustine.
I agree that without a hungry heart education becomes stale. However praising Springsteen’s hungry heart seems to be praising one aspect of the current problem from which we suffer. I’m not sure that dead beat dads who would rather get drunk in terms of their own freedom is worth celebrating, even if such types tend to be the deepest in terms of human questions (but usually after very painful stories the like that Bruce Springsteen is masterful). This is the reality that Springsteen is singing.
So I am not sure that Edmundson encouraging “hungry hearts” is encouraging the best of education.
After all the Springsteen lyrics say—
“Got a wife and kids in Baltimore jack;
I went for a ride and I never went back…”
This may be true, but it is way too harsh a basis from which one could defend the liberal arts and true longings which transcend ordinary definition. It speaks of the empty transcendence of freedom to be one’s own in such a way that at best one becomes a recluse like Greta Garbo who only wanted to be alone.
I thought Edmundson was worthwhile reading in his other books, but on this one interpretation of the “hungry heart” he is beyond the pale, and I wonder of his sanity.
Surrely there is a better defense of the liberal arts and its freedom of thought than the “dead beat” dad of Springsteen’s song. Springsteen himself knows better than this.
April 14th, 2012 | 8:10 am
John, Edmundson’s essay does not go any further into Springsteen’s song than to use its main title.
Indeed, the only moment where he reflects on why some students have a “hungry heart” and others don’t is to:
a) offer up Freud’s idea that hungering students displayed great curiosity about sex as children,
b) reject this as absurd,
c) replace it with the idea that children brought up in stable, loving families are the ones most likely to develop hungry hearts.
And to that, I would say that, yes, c) can be important…but I what I would also say is that the students with the hearts most attuned to liberal learning tend to be, in my experience…Christian. As professor you consider your students and say, “there’s something about so-and-so,” and then at some point their present or past church attendance becomes apparent. I.e., a better song here is the one Peter likes to quote: “I Wonder as I Wander.” http://bigthink.com/ideas/41676
I remember being a grad student in the St. John’s College master’s program, and a tutor saying to me, “there’s something about you that just makes you excel more in seminar, makes you get what we’re trying to do here above and beyond the other students.” Inside, I was thinking, “a lot of it is because I’m Christian.” Other tutors at St. John’s, such as my atheist “high-Straussian” colleague David Bolotin, understood this–for them it was simply a matter of fact that students from serious religious backgrounds often were the best students. Such students, for one thing, knew what it was to become dedicated to the “word,” to study it as if their souls depended upon it.
My sample (from five colleges) is small, but the only other categories I can think of as applying regularly to the to the best/hungriest students are a) foreign exchange, b) homosexual, c) parent is military officer, or d) highly musical. There are exceptions, and many students have remained mysteries to me, and there are a handful who combine ambition and reticence in a way that I cannot tell if their excellence is hunger-driven or not, but these are the patterns I have noticed, and the Christian one leaps out.
In any case, I confess I have an envious mixture of kudos, disdain, and suspicion for Edmundson getting musings as basic as these published in the NYT magazine.
April 16th, 2012 | 10:15 pm
Beautiful remarks about education and your students Carl. My experience basically confirms yours. After teaching for several years at one particular podunk community college, my experience is that students with a firm understanding and belief in Christianity tend to be the best students in terms of “hunger,” in terms of an ability to grasp the subject matter, and in terms of teaching me new things.
I also find–but this is a community college–that serious students in the sciences are very good. Not only do they appreciate the rigor that I attempt in my classes, but they can recognize the importance of the questions that my courses have to offer. They tend to grasp the material and then move on.
I’ve never made a convincing enough case to make for a conversion from modern natural science and mathematics to philosophy, but this is not my intention anyway.
You have to meet students where they are, of course. But then you have to present a compelling case that makes sense to the truth of real life as it is presented to people, and do so in a way that makes oneself only a “midwife.” I think my “science” students had simply never confronted a case for politics, religion, “philosophy,” that was beyond stereotype and cliche. But I must admit that while I love them, most of my students a seriously academically challenged. This leaves much to be desired on both the teacher and student level.
BTW–I agree with you. You should have had a NYTimes op ed a long time ago, especially if such drivel like Edmunson’s could be published.
April 16th, 2012 | 11:47 pm
BTW, I rhetorically spoke of Prof. Edmundson as someone worth reading. I exaggerated the case of their acumen and panache, even if, truth be told, I wasted my time reading the books.
But then the fact that I mentioned them, must say something in their favor–they stuck in my mind. I mention them even if as negative examples of how one could get published in the NYTimes.
April 17th, 2012 | 7:31 pm
Interesting about the science students…I’ll have to keep my eye on that.
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