Fear and Loathing in the Modern Classroom

“If it were up to me, I would let them speak.” Frustrated, a friend and I recollect our strewn-together suffocating experiences in the halls of the liberal arts, passionately discussing why the good ideas of the silent students in our philosophy class go unheard. Like puppies left out in the rain, whimpering at the door to be noticed and let inside, the modern classroom seems to leave students, with good questions, out to shiver and soak. These brilliant minds, brimming with eccentric ideas, starving to be heard, feel stunned upon entering the gates of purgatory: the philosophy classroom.

They are suspended in limbo: both ineffably reluctant to speak against the professorially-dominated tamber of class discussion and hopelessly buckled under the weight of a harrowing potentiality: the potential for arousing the disapproval of more people than just the professor, shattering rapport with would-be friends. If only you had just smiled and waved and gone with the process, we wouldn’t be having this conversation and you wouldn’t look stupid, disagreeing with a university-certified, and ostensibly credentialed, smart person.

Look at you! The others in the classroom decided to be marked present today in order to learn with you, not exclusively from you and your failed lapse of judgement. You shattered the prelapsarian, idyllic classroom habitat that the professor curated before you walked in the room, yet the students don’t know that and neither can you. It is glaringly evident that a force has been disturbed, but not evident enough to hold up in court, much less in an unconvincing explanation to an uninvolved third party. What secret agenda from the professor are you referring to, exactly? For all a jury is concerned with, you caused a disruption to the classroom learning environment and the teacher rightfully pointed it out. Disagreement becomes outlawed.

The Unremarkable Current

One may ask whether this pedagogical feng shui is at all disturbed or threatened by the occasional thought that drifts from the class’s curated direction. Does a teacher account for the overwhelming gravity their words effectuate when they engage in the presumptive exercise of teaching? Does the arc of the classroom bend toward the outspoken sentiments of the professor? If the professor, curator, teacher, is self-conscious of their influence, do they try to channel this power into something remarkable, or do they acquiesce to the allure of remaining uninteresting, agnostic to conviction, and nice?

If thought be a current, what is its character and where is it going?

The classroom exhibits an unremarkable current, leading nowhere. This is the inevitable course of class discussion. Unremarkable or inconsequential, it is performance and facsimile, so it does not matter. It causes nature to weep, feeding the lilies with a colorless, fluoride flow. It flows from a collective unconsciousness, an aberration to all that is natural to humanity, being particularly offensive to Reason. The sin of the unremarkable current is frustrated desire: a desire to subsume everything into the pull of streamlined, secular opinion. Like Hobbes’ Leviathan, you must heed an abominable proposition — to bring all faculties into subjection under an innocuous master.

Lapis blue and winding, the Dao puts to shame the insistence of this current. Like true water, the Dao fits the contours, edges, and empty space of reality, whose vocation is not to insist stagnation or reluctance. It beckons to us to come freely, without pretense and without a compulsion it could ever conceivably impose, exclaiming: “Teacher, do not bar those from coming!”

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.[1]

The good conversation mimics the River of Life and is alien to the ways of the unremarkable current. Does the River of Life insist on terms or does it naturally lead, those who are willing, into more life? So too does a healthy conversation adapt to those who participate, without relinquishing its integrity as a current. A current is still a current when it moves water along, but the unremarkable current threatens you to get in. This drab current is all too ubiquitous in modern living. In this essay, it has successfully offended Daoism, Christianity, and now, Mary Oliver herself:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees.

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.[2]

The River of Life could never compel. Becoming like water is to adapt, not to resist. Yet, in the classroom, we tell the current to resist those we disagree with, which is like telling water not to be wet, telling the individual to conform needlessly, and telling the soft animal of your body to love something other than it does naturally. To be unremarkable is to not be oneself.

Opportunity Cost

The opportunity cost of sounding stupid by raising a question, or a challenging counterpoint, amidst a class of unacquainted students, is paralyzing to visualize. Even more so is the image of provoking and fronting the ill-will of a precarious professor, who is all-too vengeful after your disruption to the signal chain of their belabored programming. Raising an honest point becomes much less appealing as a tenable option, irrespective of how pertinent or prescient your question or comment may be.

So… students are shushed. One may characterize such an experience in the liberal arts as sardonically grimacing back at the well-intentioned student. A mocking smile, prompted for assuming class is not a sycophantic game of who can grovel the best at the professor’s feet for a grade. Like a sick oxymoron, many young minds are freely caged: free to attend college, if they would like, and caged by the lack of viable options for maintaining a discursive, self-critiquing, and humble mind.

The studies befitting a free person, turned their back on me and many others. In the hope of intellectual freedom, students who enter the bastions of freeform are caged by a pair of twofold chains. They fall prey to the false promise of free inquiry, while also becoming shackled by the form the professor alone dictates. If the classroom be a republic, it is perpetually in crisis. The consul has thus elected a dictator to mimic that same ignominious perpetuity, leaving the students trembling and beholden to the autocrat’s whim.

But the form or structure of a professor’s sui generis teaching style and mandate are all but subject to the same force that occupies every human endeavor: the will and its sentiments. Oftentimes, sentiment not only brings teaching form to bear, on unwitting students, but it is likewise the sole progenitor and source of such form. Thus, questioning the form is inherently construed as an attempt to subvert the sentiment, which is hopelessly bound up within the will. It’s as audacious as performing separation surgery on conjoined twins, you are more than likely to mess-up and offend, and not all of us are as tactful and delicate as Dr. Ben Carson.

Connective Tissue: The Storm of Feeling and Feeling Real

Like the back-flesh of twins conjoined at the posterior, the inseparable quality of the connective tissue between will and sentiment is located within the spirit or thymos of the human soul. What prompts conviction in the soul is its spirited element, which equally tends toward both cowardice and bravery. In the Phaedrus, Plato describes a chariot pulled by two winged horses, and thus the spirit beckons to us, as an active principle of the soul. It demands action when prompted by the storm of feeling. This is the a priori assertion against fear that believes, in good faith, that good ideas are worth defending, even if a professor disagrees. It is the breathy whisper of bravery.

Back to the story. This entire somnambulistic dream sequence of awful experiences with professors, specifically within the liberal arts, is evocative of the storm of feeling. Let it be a storm because of the accumulated mistrust I harbor for those teachers who have no interest in students as individuals. They are obvious prisoners to the modern university system, paying off their community service hours through teaching. Their respite is research. In their Platonic cave of an office, they see no need to come up for breath, save to reheat a Hot Pocket. Who would guess that there are well-to-do, interesting students who long for a good teacher in the overworld, where the sun shines and the discipline of teaching reaches its zenith in intellectual community?

This storm was conjured up within me after I made a dear friend at a seminar I attended last year. He was shy and precocious (archetypical blend) and fervently curious. He disregarded both form and sentiment when it cluttered the doorway to learning. A Lovecraftian chill overtook my helpless mood, like a wolf wrapping its gnarled fangs around a young rabbit, when I reeled at the news that our professor for the seminar had pegged my new and cherished friend as a charlatan. The charges involved framing him as an iniquitous threat to the classroom’s learning environment, based on what I could only imagine was the professor’s perception of him as a threat to his own teaching office. He was rendered an ugly duckling whose heterodox thought patterns were offensive to the professor’s elitist sensibilities: sensibilities that could pass as villainous in an Austen novel.

My spirit was jolted. I felt it like an antitoxin against anti-thought. It was set against the opposing headwind wind that wages war on all those students who dare raise a grievance and silences those who never will—you obey, nonetheless. Even as I put my thoughts to paper, my heart sunk to the bottom of my stomach, in fear of what those in influence would think of me. But my spirit was whirred on by the prospect of usurping and upending and destroying the stagnation that impedes the flow of thoughts within the river of my mind. Hushing the young impedes the earnest. They desire to polish their thoughts on the whetstone of those older philosophers and curators of experienced wisdom who hold classes and seminars with one hope in mind — that they may hold a rage room of sorts, where fiery spirits and thoughts as incendiary as Vesuvius coat the floor with the ash of rebirth.

Idyllic vision often sounds too flowery for the cold, impermeable soil of existence, so what stifles this vision from bursting into the recalcitrant fortress of reality? It is our own human imperfection and our obsession with pride, but the thymos is not allured by such trappings.

When the storm of feeling beckons to you, you obey. Embodied within the muse, who lowers her wispy hair and blows sweet kisses, reminiscent of a distant conviction, or the sylph who blows past with the wind of vitriolic and righteous response to present evil, conviction may take a similar shape. Righteous indignation takes the form of a wind, driving away the chaff of the wicked.[3] You are responsible for the evil if you do not take heed, just as James says of the Word,

“Do not merely listen to the Word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the Word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.”[4]

We have lost our face in the mirror and forgotten what it means to introspect, to open up to the consideration of not only false premises, but true ones as well. In fear of our own face, we become too scared of how we actually look. We have become sole proprietors of the ensuing fungal guilt found in the distance between ideal and reality that grows with every effort made to eschew. Denial becomes autonomic, and the dissonance peremptorily steals our agency, shrinks our spirit, and truncates our charity.

Our thoughts, no longer sui generis, become derivative and insurmountably futile. We believe truth to be pale, given, and monolithic instead of kaleidoscopic and dynamic, insisting on charitable interaction with the other. Truth calls us to cast off the burden of incipience, which otherwise weighs us down with the convenient hubris to ignore the character of truth as wrapped in veil—a veil to be tugged and grasped.

Herman Khan talks of a learned or educated incapacity — a phenomenon common in the stilted realms of academia and common discourse. It is characteristic of a closing off of the porous element of the intuition. This intuition is stunted and neglected in favor of a learned form of procedural methodology. The archetypical free thinkers swiftly devolve into norm-enforcers, who fail to recognize the least common denominator on the scale of intellectual honesty is recognizing limits, where alternative opinions may exist as heterodox but possibly true.

Who will save us from ourselves and our own self-indulgent pity? Our risk-aversion may save us from failure and embarrassment, in the world of popular opinion, but it notably prevents us from feeling real. In a decomposing world riddled with the webs of modern appearances and sentiments, the healthy rebellion against the sloppy world of artifice is the premise for the question: Are you sick of getting steamrolled by mindless conversation? Again, I ask, who will save us from the modern appearances of anti-spirit and orient the listening student to the intuition of conscience?

The Delusion of Infinite Knowledge

What we see is what we imitate. René Girard’s thesis on Mimetic History is born within the innate human capacity to equally imitate good and bad desires, because what becomes the object of mimetic desire is the sole determinant for our behavior. In the case of the classroom, the teacher presents themselves as the object of this desire. If the classroom exists in an untouched state of nature, it is natural for an underlying centripetal force to take shape, where the terminating point of spiraling intersection, as the class tumbles down the whirlpool, is the teacher themselves. But a class cannot be solely predicated on a teacher—their wants, desires, opinions, etc.

There lies an understudied tension between expertise and complete obliviousness, which makes a teacher’s job that much more consequential. They personify the thymos: bearing equal potential to ruin or enrich a student’s academic destiny. The engine for this distinction is based on where the teacher lands in their belief of the delusion of infinite knowledge.

The dualistic apprehension of the thymos, pushed and pulled, parallels the two understandings of philosophy at work: Philosophy as a desire to know all and philosophy as entanglement. My argument is that philosophy, rightly understood, encourages entanglement within the Grand Entanglement. It is the child of awe. Philosophers do well to get lost in the sauce themselves. If they are lost, they may share the progress of their quest within the sauce without injury to their intellectual stature. If they claim the sauce is discovered and its contours intricately understood, as a science, they lie, betraying both mystery and themselves as philosophers. The philosopher must take custody of his awe and forget not his obligation to it.

Bringing students into the same awe and wonder felt in the mystery of the deep questions asked in class, is not prescriptive. The teachers so afraid of dogma, tend to equally exhibit a proportional commitment to the interpretation of philosophy as infinite knowledge. If all questions have been answered, and the teacher claims to have these answers, not only is mystery nullified, but here lies a tendency to forget love, and its cousin charity.

The teacher who willfully lays claim to infinite knowledge tends toward rendering the purpose of class and themselves obsolete.[5] The gap between teacher and student is now an infinite gulf and charity is no longer the bridge between such a rift. Charity is replaced with matter-of-fact ideology dumping, fixing no room for unique encounters with questions of worth. What’s the use? The teacher knows everything already! This is simply a matter of subsuming one’s own opinion to that of the professor’s, in a vain, infinite regression of appeals to the effigy of said professor’s pulsating intellect.

Martha Nussbaum’s prognostication augers poorly for any teacher who bases their curriculum, syllabus, and grading scale (and any other metric, expectation, or learning objective in the class) on nothing but themselves. The teacher is the Alpha and the Omega: the student begins the class in awe of the instructor and ends the class as a mimetic copy of the teacher—unsolicited opinions and all.

“Nothing imperfect, that is, no limited being, a fortiori no human being or human agreement, is ever good measure of anything. Protagoras’s anthropocentric dictum is a recipe for inadequacy.”^[6]

Being anthropocentric is an arguably true proxy for how self-absorbed these professors tend to be themselves. They fulfill this inadequate Protagorean dictum to its fullest extent, even obliquely, unconscious of how egocentric they truly are. Forget Protagorean dictum, that is a Protagorean curse — to be unconsciously stupid and inescapably ignorant of this is a devastatingly ironic hilarity.

I grant that there are smart professors out there and many who were hired not only for their expertise, but their love for the game itself, when they benevolently teach students. My argument maintains that lazy teaching and the inability of a student to identify with class material is symptomatic of self-absorption on the professor’s end. These elements are fulfilled in the professor as exhibitionist, concerned merely with flaunting their smarts. Either a student claps, cheers, and takes your opinion as law or they sniff out the delusion of grandeur from the outset, but in neither of these situations is the student actually taught!

We are college students — what do we know? We need your help, teacher! And you are stymieing the thoughts of the young before they are ever breathed.

It is akin to shoving a remorseless loaded sniper rifle into the mouth of a perfectly innocent ewe lamb for simply bleating­ — the only thing it knows how to do. You rub the tip of the gun into its soft mouth as if to say, “It is incorrect to make such a pathetic noise,” while similarly admonishing a student that “it is incorrect to question such things.” Both animal and student don’t know any better! How else do you expect a sheep to behave?! That’s why they need your guidance, and you blow their head off before they can even start to understand what they should be doing.

For the lamb, you hold it closely to your breast and give it the attention it yearns for: to feel the bold wing of a shepherd guardian. For the student, you offer a tender nudge. You consider their potentially near-sighted comments as opportunities. By doing this faithfully, you win the respect of the class once more, as you masterfully transform what is not on topic into what flows perfectly within the course of discussion. Just as a shepherd leads his sheep beside still waters,[7] the teacher is gently leading his students into truth, not discouraging them from even making an attempt at truth.

This is reflective of the awful pattern so true of our society when someone would rather be wrong and accepted than right and isolated. I know I am no better, but I dare not silence the part within me that longs to be true, regardless of the consequences. I urge that we should heed, in fear and trembling, the spirit, and thus have faith that the thymos reaches toward something much more dignified and further up than bland human pride. In fear and loathing, let us pay attention to intuition and conscience, but, in loathing, cast off the trajectory of intellectual pride—where student is atomized, and teacher is Leviathan.

I am now in my classroom, back home in Gainesville—The Swamp—and my professor is going on about how “I hope I’ve thrown you into a torrent of ‘what’s going on?!’ He speaks with ardent passion and a measured and recalcitrant concern for his students whom he overtly pours over.

NOTES:

[1] Revelation 22:17

[2] Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, lines 1-5

[3] Psalm 1:4, NIV

[4] James 1:22-25, NIV

[5] 1 Corinthians 13:2, KJV

[6] Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 242

[7] Psalm 23:2

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