TEACHING
A teacher must pursue a lifetime program of serious and systematic reading. The earlier in life you start and the more sedulously you pursue your program, the better. There is no elevator to the upper floors of literacy, you must climb the stairs. Before I entered college I read indiscriminately and omnivorously, happily thrashing about in any portion of a library, always with more exuberance than method. In college, I found out to my astonishment and horror and joy the amount of knowledge that genuinely well read people had mastered. As I always knew I was going to be a professor, I thereafter undertook to read the best writers and learn whatever lessons I was capable of learning. I gravitated to writers that “spoke” to me, (as anyone should) and I read the complete works of my chosen individuals, so I could at least make some coherent progress. During the three summers between years in college, I read all of Shakespeare, then all of Plato then all of Nietzsche. From Shakespeare I learned what can be done with the English language; it had never occurred to me that such overwhelming power could be combined with an almost inhuman subtlety and precision. From Plato, I learned that Truth is deeply erotic; that Socrates personified what was best in poetry, divinity and knowledge; and that my many self imposed deficiencies required that I change my life. From Nietzsche, I learned that every insight is partial blindness, the value of intellectual generosity and that the only readers worthy of any great thinker are those who unafraid to risk their entire intellectual inheritance on a single roll of the dice.
The University of Chicago where I went to college is sometimes referred to as the “teacher of teachers”. This is a fair description. But it is equally true that any professor worth his salt is necessarily a teacher of teachers, because he continuously teaches himself. Teachers must first be learners and can never cease thier learning until death grants them emeritus status. U of C is where I learned that a teacher must be dialectical and able to think on his feet, responding to most questions or objections on the fly, without breaking his flow. Improvising at the piano is requires more, not less understanding of music than playing from sheet music.
In teaching my first university class at Columbia I was too severe, my students learned but they were scared of me and I gave them good reason to be. All cruelty is the product of weakness, and I was needlessly hard on them because I was scared of them. Although I had to teach it, I did not comprehend the Western intellectual tradition at the time. I was twenty-seven, only seven or eight years older than these undergraduates, I was insecure and did not know what I was doing. I had also suffered through too many years of graduate seminars where the amount that people spoke was all too often inversely proportional to the amount they understood. I vowed to myself that I would not suffer fools gladly once I got my own classroom. Foolishly, I treated my first class of undergraduates as my equals and I was withering in my contempt for wrong answers because I was far too certain that I knew what the right ones were. It was not until the following summer that I realized they are not my equals and if they were then I had no business teaching the class. Learn to shut up and instead of talking, ask yourself, “What kind of thinking would produce a mistake like that?”
Good teachers must work at talking less and listening more. In French, there’s a great expression to describe what speakers do when they indulge in rambling replies that don’t focus on the initial question: “noyer le poisson” which means, “drowning the fish”. Learn to spare the fish: piscine mercy is a pedagogical virtue. Teachers too often stop listening when they come to a juncture where a students is clearly wrong, but it is imperative to listen a little longer to identify the earlier juncture where the student stopped being right. Every teacher must embrace the fact that being wrong is the students’ job. Ignorance is what keeps us in business. Teachers should be heartened by the emergence of mistakes and never forget that being wrong in interesting ways is unteachable and a sign of genius, as Aristotle said about metaphor. If you are ever in a classroom where the students already know what you are trying to teach them you are wasting everybody’s time and you should go get honest work.
Whenever I coach young, newly minted assistant professors about teaching, I always insist on “Sugrue’s Law” which is, “If you need notes you’re not prepared”. By all means, write some ideas out or put them on the board, but one must throw the paper away just as class begins. The artwork is not something outside of them on a piece of paper: they are the artwork. Reading aloud is not teaching: if this is the best you can do, send them an email instead of teaching class. Teaching is a performance. Look up the Greek roots of the word enthusiasm. The late great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane is the model for all performing artists of every kind. His music burned like magnesium, so brightly that people were compelled to avert their eyes. Trane taught the world about music by being there, on the cutting edge of a coming into being where the Holy Spirit takes over and the artist is as surprised as the audience at what they are witnessing.
On the very few occasions when I have listened to the lectures I’ve taped, I’ve sometimes been surprised by what I hear. I think to myself, “that’s interesting…I didn’t know I knew that.” This is how Trane sometimes soloed for an hour or more without repeating himself or even knowing what he was going to play next. For those of a scientific bent, I believe this might be described as “listening” to the silent right hemisphere of the brain, which is speechless because it does not control language. Those that are by nature intellectually right-handed in particular must strive to articulate the silence of the left hand. This comes easier to intellectual southpaws like myself. This Dionysian ecstasy I am talking about is what Chuang-Tzu was gesturing at in his parable of the butcher and the emperor. It is important to have some silent time before class when the students are not to bother you as you put some ideas on the board for them to follow and take notes from. You cannot enter the Zen state described by the butcher while distracted. Abgelassenheit, as Meister Eckhardt instructed us. Learn to focus your mind like a magnifying glass. Class begins when your mind sets thoughts on fire.
I also insist that young professors must have something to say that is worth hearing and if they don’t they are wasting everybody’s time. When lecturing about Locke or Descartes or whoever, one can always tell the students what Quentin Skinner says, or what Leo Strauss says, or what some other authority says, but the real question is what do you say. Any professor that cannot answer that question has no business being behind a podium. After figuring out something to say, paradoxically, the next step in becoming teacher is that you must learn how to refrain from saying it. There can be no wisdom without silence. I said that one must have something to say, not that one must say it. As the Fool said to King Lear, you must have “more than two tens in a score”.
You are trying to show your students how to think, not what to think. No teacher worth paying attention to is trying to mass produce bad imitations of himself. The dialectical apotheosis of teaching is reached when you students develop the ability to tell you that you are wrong, and why they think so, as Aristotle did with his teacher Plato. You are a midwife helping the students give birth to themselves. This activity is the inverse of a snake eating its own tail. It is the inconceivable, the miraculous, the impossible: something from nothing. The exemplars of this active silence for me have always been the great Jewish rabbis, like Maimonides or Hillel, because they always seemed to say less than they knew. All teaching is seduction, as a careful examination of Socrates or Nietzsche will disclose. Driven by an eros that they do not know they have, this withholding of speech brings students circling back, like sharks drawn to blood in the water. Socrates understood that capable students, driven by an impulse that they neither control nor understand, are easily whipped into an Apollonian rather than a Dionysian frenzy, because unbeknownst to them they desire Something Else more than they desire air. Teaching at the university level is the intellectual Dance of the Seven Veils, where you always modestly keep an Eighth in reserve.
The final stage of development for a teacher is to learn how to become transparent. The greatest practitioners of any performing art are masters of sprezzatura: they make the extraordinarily difficult appear easy, effortless, inevitable – which it emphatically is not. This is perhaps best understood by a musical metaphor. When you listen to a beginner practice the piano, all that can be heard is the awkward, intrusive presence of the player, which is realized in a river of mistakes flowing from the keyboard. In contrast, the greatest interpreters of any musical tradition, the late great Vladimir Horowitz playing Mozowski’s Etude number 1 for example, were great because they mastered the art of getting out of the way, dis-covering the composition and unveiling the music so it could finally be seen. The height of musicianship is to figure out how not to be heard, finding apparently effortless repose in the inaudible source of all music. Listen to Carlos Santana solo as a prime example. He makes virtuosity look easy. It takes natural gifts plus much work to become a human superconductor that allows a perfectly unhindered flow from Something Else with no human impedance.
When teaching the Great Books, you must become transparent, a silent musician. You must learn how to get out of the way and let Dante or Dostoyevsky or Sophocles or whoever do the talking. Stop flattering yourself; you are not that interesting. These great minds are smarter than you are and you must dispense with your ego and learn how to resist the temptation to upstage them. When you are teaching, always remember: This is not about you. This is the only way to completely command a seminar room or lecture hall. After articulating some knowledge and coming up with something worth listening to, you must then say less than you know and learn how to shut up. As Kant said, “There are many things I believe that I’ll never say, but I will never say what I don’t believe.”