It may be true to say culture - or being cultured - is important for everyone. But it is certainly more important in and among some places, persons, and professions than others. One type of person and profession who and which needs culture is that of an aspiring teacher of the humanities. My essay then is directed especially towards myself and all of us brave (or stupid) souls who endeavor to spend innumerable years in graduate school to teach people things that many people regard as worthless. Worth noting is the fact that these same people are almost never cultured and that their dismissal is almost justifiable when the professors of humanities have themselves abandoned culture. This suggests that whatever culture or being cultured is, it lies deep at heart of the humanities. It also indicates our concern here is not with a value-neutral “culture,” of which the anthropologist may speak. Here “culture” is something very different - not everyone has it and it is not value-neutral.
In the beginning of his From Dawn to Decadence, Jacque Barzun, one of our great men of letters, informs us that culture originally referred to a “well furnished mind.” This is a helpful beginning. We all have mental furnishing; the problem is that some or much of it is rather shabby. Perhaps we have a gauche lamp from the thrift store lighting a sparsely furnished room, decorated with an alarming pastiche of wall paper, posters, and trivial odd and ends. Presumably if one could peep inside the average college student’s mind, their mental furnishings may resemble something like the above, with variations on whatever theme captivates their personality. Obviously, this is no good if we want culture, if we want to be cultured. But how does this happen and is it really important? Certainly it is not as simple as tossing the lamp into a dumpster, and calling a home decorator, armed with smelling salts (for when she first sees your furnisher) and a blow-torch (for when she resuscitates).
But perhaps we have moved off our path in asking “how” and need to stop and further ponder what culture is. We have the idea of a well furnished mind, fine, but if we probe deeper we discover that what lies at the root of the subject is cultivation, what the Germans have termed Bildung (though their term is much more rich than any single English translation), self-formation (remember the English class in which the teacher talked about “Bildungsroman,” the novel of development). Though it was not a new goal, the German Romantics particularly emphasized developing a “beautiful soul,” cultivating one’s taste, morality, and habits, to conform to some noble ideal by which you shaped your life and to which you strived for ever greater conformity. Now we sense we are much closer to understanding why someone who goes to the symphony may be described, perhaps quite improperly, as “cultured.” There are associations between “culture” and good taste that are quite natural when viewed within the context of self-formation according to a noble ideal.
What is crucial to observe is that that in Bildung the emphasis is on self-formation. The self is not a passive subject, unable to actively shape itself or its world. We Americans recognize something similar when we say “He was a self-made man,” he formed himself. The point is not that we are unaffected by our cultural (here used in the neutral sense) environment; it is precisely that we are so formed, and the issue is whether we are self-consciously and actively shaping our cultural environment in such a way that we are being formed according to an ideal, or are we passively, unreflectively subject like slaves to our preferences and immediate cultural surroundings? In the latter case such people often wear their chains willingly, even with pride, and they occasionally snarl at those who would question them on such matters, dismissing any contrarian opinion as a matter of “preference.” Here we may interrupt out musings and ask: can anything be done for such people? The answer is yes, and explaining why it so moves us closer to understanding the importance of culture for the humanities.
The greatest remedy for the person noted above is the poison of reflection, the distance offered by thought. People who are not actively shaping themselves via their cultural environment tend to exist in an immediate (un-mediated) relation with their objects of preference, pleasure, desire, and the world in general. When thought interposes itself between them and their object, mediation has occurred, which we call “reflection,” a pulling back from and thinking on an object (hence phrases like “reflective distance”). The beginning of the end of the unreflective, passive life is signaled by the object of reflection moving from those objects around us to the most important, in this context, of all objects: the self. Through distancing ourselves from ourselves, reflecting on our desires, preferences, and influences, we take the first decisive step towards overcoming their slavery and beginning the search for excellence, an ideal by which we can begin to re-form our cultural surroundings and thus our selves. Self-formation thus assumes this specific kind of self-consciousness.
The reader may think I forgot my stated purpose. In fact, the desire to say something meaningful about the humanities required the foundations here sketched. Now that we have a context for understanding what culture, Bildung, is, we can easily relate it to the humanities.
The humanities are, in the Western academy, the repository of the greatest writing and art our civilization has produced and preserved. To be cultured is to shape one’s self by those things that are most excellent, and such excellence is largely to be found in the Western literary and artistic canons. Listening to a Beethoven symphony no more makes one cultured than reading Shakespeare. Being cultured is having one’s musical sensibilities formed by Beethoven rather than Coldplay (a fine contemporary group), one’s sense of language and its beauty, its sounds, its structure, shaped by its greatest speakers and writers, not by the crudity of the chat room. This is why and how we recognize cultured people: their examples in conversations, their syntax, their thought, and their sensibilities are ennobled, apt, profound, witty, because they have been shaped by great speakers, writers, and thinkers. When Paul admonishes us to think on what is beautiful his point is just this: what we think, hear, see, will shape and form us. Is it not clear, then, why those of us who desire to teach the humanities have a special need for culture?
If we are not forming ourselves by excellence, if our classroom material is simply that which we teach and not that by which we have been taught and forever shaped and changed, how can we hope to instill in others the desire to rise from mediocrity, from confused and debased language, to an appreciation of beauty and nobility of mind? Like the humanities’ detractors, we will simply view such notions as idealistic rubbish. But it is by those ideals that we strive to preserve our language, our music, and our minds from becoming rubbish – a noble task.
___
Samuel Loncar is a Philosophy major at Liberty University.
