User:KYPark/1988

The essence of the proposal involved three necessary types of learning and respective types of teaching: knowing what, knowing how, and knowing why: One of these was lacking from present-day practice after kindergarten and first grade.

Didactic instruction (traditional lecturing) was by and large the primary mode of teaching being applied in the traditional system. Its purpose was for the acquisition of organized knowledge or facts. Adler placed the least value on this form of knowledge, arguing that it generally fades away with time, asserting for example that he had forgotten almost all of the information imparted to him in this fashion.

[...]

The Socratic method (extended discussion) is the only path to understanding basic ideas and values. This cannot be acquired through didactic teaching or coaching. The basis of discussion cannot be textbooks, but must be works of art and books that deal with ideas and values. Adler states that our teachers are totally untrained for this. [my Gothic]

Properly critical discourse as Leavis understood it, that is a discourse concerned with discriminations of value and significance, has to meet these conflicting demands. It is an impersonal, or objectified, account of what can only be personal. I believe that Leavis's rhetoric is peculiarly conscious of an intrinsic conflict rather than confused by an avoidable one. It is possible to minimize or disguise this inherent conflict by appealing to an ideological frame of reference or by assuming consensus in the readership but, even where consensus apparently exists, Leavis wishes precisely to make the implied existential commitments fully conscious. The value of literature for him lies in its capacity to do this.

Perry Anderson has expressed the philosophical incoherence of his practice as 'an insistent metaphysical vocabulary combined with a positivist methodology'.12 If Leavis were attempting to formulate an overall theory this might be a damaging combination. But Leavis is concerned with the nature of significance in language. The 'metaphysical' and the 'positivist' are rather the ideal poles, neither of them purely attainable, between which significance comes into being in Leavis's creative conception of language. All the critic, or reader, has is the 'words on the page' but what we might understand by that phrase will depend, at the least, on a larger conception of language. I have suggested that Leavis's conception of language as an index of the quality of being, and as the very means by which significances are created and known, questions precisely this polarity. His view of the gestural and enactive significance of language challenges the dualism habitually imposed at the level of meaning. Anderson's discussion ignores this fundamental presiss on which Leavis's practice rests. One may, of course, dissent from Leavis's view of language, or even find it beneath discussion, but it is the ground of his practice and Anderson's ignoring of it is symptomatic and characteristic. I don't think he is leaving it out; it just does not register in his terms at all.

Leavis's own discourse is not an attempt to translate literary works into a philosophical account; indeed he insists that they are usually untranslatable in the respect. His criticism is an attempt to participate in the creative act of the work using a discourse that accepts the creative premisses of imaginative literature. 'Dwelling' within the work, but with his own personality and experience rather than the writer's, he performs a holistic act of mixed endorsement and dissent, an act of discovery bearing on both the self and the work, and which is analogous to the primary creative act of composition. Anderson comments on Leavis's appeal to the word 'life' (in Leavis's approving account of Lawrence's The daughters of the vicar) that the meaning of the word is entirely circular; it means only what the tale demonstrates it to mean. but what about Lawrence's use of such a term? Is that illegitimate, or meaningless, because it is only given an ostensive and dramatic definition? Leavis's later insistence that '"life" is a necessary word' was an insistence that critical discourse must have some way of recognising, if not translating, or theoretically accounting for, the recognitions at stake in works of literature. The act of reading, although it is conditioned by the text concerned, should be as fundamental as the act of creation. The danger with proscribing Leavis's kind of usage is that it may entail proscribing much of our literature; or, more precisely, much of the significance of our literature.

In sum, the openness of Leavis's central terms is a way of pointing up such significances in literary texts without translating them into another, inappropriate discourse. It is an attempt to preserve the integrity of the text while analysing it. The word 'maturity' in the present lecture is 'defined' by participation in the young captain's experience; with this in turn seen as an analogue of Conrad's own. It may be that the theme of the work, and Leavis's admiration for Conrad's achievement at large, lead him in some measure to overvalue this tale, but the standard of maturity that is being invoked seems to me to acquire a clear and appropriate definition. If it means only what the tale itself can justify that is no bad thing. Indeed it is a double point of accuracy: it means neither less nor more than it should.

Perhaps the recognition that should be taken from Leavis's later use of Michael Polanyi and Marjorie Grene lies here. His appeal to these writers' accounts of the personal factors in knowledge, particularly in science, has been seen as a sign of his philosophical naivety. I think myself that Polanyi's strength is not in epistemology or ontology as self-sufficient areas of enquiry. His shrewdness is of a more pragmatical kind directed at the collaborative processes by which knowledge is acquired and tested. It is rather in their a-philosophical aspects that Polanyi and Grene provide an analogue to Leavis's conception of critical discourse. His concern for emotional quality and moral truth values is no more ... (pp. 109-110)

Conclusion

[c]ritique still requires the authority of experience contingent on an impersonal responsibility in the individual. There is always a danger of not knowing what the more implicit, but indispensable, premisses of critical activity are. This sense of responsibility governs Leavis's criticism at all times and he can therefore illuminate the implicit, but often unacknowledged, processes of judgement. These equally underlie theoretically self-conscious practices which seek either to eschew them or simply to take them for granted as if they were automatically guaranteed by the ideological stance. Henry James said of criticism that there is no answer but to be very 'intelligent'. Lawrence said the critic can only record the 'sincere emotion' occasioned by the work. Such formulations are unhelpfully truistic and it is understandable that we should wish to give a more principled elaboration of the critical craft. But not perhaps if it makes us lose touch with these truisms as if there were some kind of alternative to them. To mediate on the truth of the truistic is also necessary. What has been said concerning 'thinking' and 'sincerity' in this account of Leavis will indicate how James and Lawrence, in their characteristic ways, are saying the same thing. It seems to me to be an important, if elusive, thing and part of Leavis's value is to make accessible the truth within the truism.

Much of the day-to-day activity of literary criticism rests implicitly on the kind of premisses concerning language and significance outline in this study. The difference between Leavis and many academic practitioners is not one of principle but of seriousness. It sometimes appears to be one of principle because Leavis's phenomenology of reading focuses on the subliminal, or tacit, dimension of language. For any student of literature, or language, who wishes to arrive at an understanding of the nature of 'literary' significance, Leavis surely remains an indispensable figure to come to terms with. Provided, of course, that this is based on a holistic appreciation of his stance and not on a set of isolable principles. For Leavis focuses the inescapable responsibility of criticism. Indeed, his concentration is so unswervingly on the heart of the matter in this respect that he has only the narrowest path to tread at times between the ineffable and the banal. He is them like a man staring into the sun. Faced so directly, the source of illumination is blinding. But this directness is also his pre-eminent importance. He is a uniquely challenging example of what responsiveness to life in language might mean.

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