Dialog/Why study historical persons?
Why study historical persons?
Wherein R and V continue their discussion of how A Place to Study works. It is neither an encyclopedia nor a library. But what precisely is it?
R 1 — OK, spill it. When you found me up there by the list of Persons born before 1875, you were very worried. What's the problem?
V 2 — You said you were worried too. That's a long list. It's going to scare people. And its going to get a lot longer. And I'll bet another, just as long, for People born after 1874 will come soon, maybe it's already there. We've got to do something to break them up to a manageable scale.
R 3 — We will. Remember, these are master lists. Topical listings of different sorts will develop. It looks a bit daunting right now. I say, "Let it grow." That's not what's worrying me, right now.
V 4 — I hope you're right. I imagine you encountered somewhere the magical number seven, plus or minus two. Long lists overwhelm our working memory and I'll keep worrying until I see some topical chunks to work with. But you said you were worried too. What's your problem?
R 5 — Well, I'm worried and I'm not exactly sure why. I've been thinking about a place to study for a long time and over the years I've studied the life and work of few of the people on the list pretty well. It's seemed clear to me that a place to study needs to include all these people and more, but now that we have them here, at least nominally, I'm realizing I'm not exactly sure what we should be trying to do with each of them.
V 6 — Whoa! If you don't know, don't look at me! Now I'm really worried. The idea seemed simple — we are going to make a place to study each of them, separately and in relation each other, with lots of people studying them and kibitzing with each other. And I guess we'd add in for good measure "to study them and their significance for self-formation and liberal learning."
R 7 — That's the idea. But often it is easy to state an intent in words, thinking that by doing so you know what you need and mean to do. I started the list and set it up in chronological order with a link to the top page for each person on it and a link to the Wikipedia article about each person.
V 8 — Yes, and I looked at the cool way you made the table so that one can add information for additional persons easily, keeping everything in order. I can imagine how the page for each person will hold diverse discussions of them as they accumulate over time.
R 9 — Good. I'm glad you think the mechanics of it might work. But the mechanics don't worry me. Now that the time is finally coming when we are actually going to start putting substantive content on the site about some of these people, what are we going to say about them? That's what worries me.
V 10 — So you're saying it's not clear what it means to study the significance for self-formation and liberal learning through the life and work of other persons. I'm open to the idea that by interacting with the site and doing things on it people will be figuring out what that means. You like to talk about how perceptions and actions emerge. I can't imagine your wanting a checklist of to do's for each person to be filled out. Can you illustrate what's worrying you?
R 11 — I'll try. The list works as a start OK, and we put a draft of it up on the site and worked its basic mechanics out, and we can add further persons to it as we want. Well, I thought I'd add William Cobbett. I didn't know anything about him, but recently, a brief mention of him in an essay caught my attention. I read the Wikipedia entry on him, a pretty good survey of his life and work, and decided to add him. Then I decided to try drafting what might be a start on a top page for him. That's when a vague uneasiness became clearer.
V 12 — I don't know anything about Cobbett. What interested you and what got you worried?
R 13 — Well, I realized pretty quickly I had to check my first instincts to put up a lot of encyclopedic and bibliographic information about him. I th. . . .
V 14 — Wait! What's wrong with that? Does't A Place to Study have the mission to provide free, comprehensive resources to persons seeking to form themselves and acquire liberal learning in the digital commons? Shouldn't good encyclopedic and bibliographic information be among the the free, comprehensive resources we provide?
R 15 — Yes, but we need to do so respecting and nurturing the digital commons. A Place to Study is a small part of it. We've all grown up in acquisitive societies and often react with proprietary urges in situations where those are inappropriate. A good place to study is neither an encyclopedia nor a library although both are important in one. A Place to Study is becoming part of a complex intellectual ecology. Insofar as digital resources are actually digitally held in common everyplace, all the time, we should all take as our first task, not to provide resources, but to make them optimally useful, purposeful, effective within the whole commons.
V 16 — So you're implying that in the digital commons, the key thing is not competition, but fruitful cooperation.
R 17 — Yes. Of course, in cooperative efforts, people can and should disagree and have diverging interests and views. That's how cooperation gets fullness, force, and resilience. But the divergences share a common purpose and that's what puts a limit to them so that divergence pulls itself back as it starts to destabilize the whole effort. There's too much belief in competition for its own sake these days, which can destroy the cooperative spirit.
V 18 — OK. The digital commons has an intellectual ecology with different kinds of undertakings going on within it — academic and instructional institutions, libraries, museums, encyclopedic collections. A Place to Study is going to fit into that cooperatively as a distinctive part of the whole effort. We should use digital encyclopedias, not recaqpitulate them. But lets get back to Cobbett, that long list he's on, and the question of how we can and should deal with him and the others here on A Place to Study.
R 19 — Right. Let's keep our focus. I think in the ecology of the digital commons, there is a common purpose, to use the cultural resources of humanity as well as we can to promote human fulfillment for each and all. Now in that, distinctive forms of effort work towards that common purpose trying to stick to what for each is its proper business. Like academe, the library/museum, and the encyclopedia, our proper business potentially makes use of the whole of human culture, but we do that in our distinctive way, to support autonomous study by an open community of peers seeking self-formation and liberal learning. What is our proper business with someone like William Cobbett that would differentiate it, for instance, from an academic effort to advance knowledge about Parliamentary reform in 19th century England and from an encyclopedia effort to summarize for any and all the current state of knowledge about his life and work?
V 20 — Hey! You asking me? I'm the newbie around here. You've been at this for a long time. Let me in on what you've learned. Don't play dumb.
R 21 — Uh. Yeah. But you know, maybe you don't, when things are old and familiar you get comfortable and the reasons for things seem less clear. You're here for a purpose. Tell me why.
V 22 — Well. You know. Don't you remember. When we first talked I said a friend mentioned A Place to Study kind of in passing and I thought I'd check it out. I was curious, that's all.
R 23 — Great! And you've hung around — just curious, that's all? You go to Wikipedia, curious about something. You read the entry on it, maybe check out a link or two, and then split? Is your curiosity here the same?
V 24 — No. Wikipedia is great for information about anything and everything. I like that it is there, quick, full, and free — wherever, whenever I need it. But A Place to Study is closer to what we did in college, I think, but there is a difference although it is hard to state.
R 25 — Interesting. You went to a pretty good school, if I recall, and did well enough while enjoying the full experience. You get information from the encyclopedia. What do you get from college?
V 26 — Well you know we all scatter about in different majors and continue to get a lot of information, a whole lot. But — I'll try to state what's common in the experience; each is learning, beginning to learn, how to participate in the generation of knowledge, understanding that very broadly, covering the work of the professions, business, science, the arts and humanities. We get a grounding, in principal at least, in the way one or another branch of academic or professional knowledge poses its problems and generates its answers and tries to bring them to bear in the work of the world.
R 27 — Impressive. I recently encountered the purposes of a college education put with a bit more fuzz: "to help students cultivate the knowledge, skills and capacity for leading considered lives, to enable and encourage them to participate effectively in our democracy, and to pursue fulfillment in their professional and personal lives." You spoke of a difference between what colleges do and what goes on here. Can you pin it down?
V 28 — Hmm. A while ago, I wouldn't have thought so, but now I think I can. In college, the initiation into asking questions, generating responses, and applying them to the work of the world, primarily concerned the world. It was questions about the world and how it works — even in the humanities, it's about how critics explicate texts and generate interpretations of them. You observed that I was here for a purpose. Studying arises through the purposes of the person studying. Education tends to instruct persons in and for purposes that may or may not coincide with their own.
R 29 — Yeah. You've been lucky because your purposes have more or less intersected with those of our educational institutions. A lot of kids get left out and messed up when their purposes differ too much from those of their schools and their teachers presume. But tell me, how might the way you would deal with William Cobbett here on A Place to Study, assuming you wanted to do so, differ from how it would have been done in college?
V 30 — I've got to smirk. We got pretty good dealing with people about whom we knew next to nothing in college! But I think I can speak to your question. If I encountered him in a college course, I would probably use some knowledge about his biographical experience to illustrate the politics of Parliamentary reform as you mentioned in first talking about him. Here, I know just enough to observe that he was largely self-educated and I might take an interest in him to better understand my processes of self-formation. But that objectifies it too much and I think I need to talk about something else to make the difference clear.
R 31 — Good by me. It is always wise in making a fine distinction to do it with something where we are confident about our grounds.
V 32 — Well, I don't want to claim too much, but in one course I related well to Miguel Cervantes Exemplary Novels, a bunch of tales about late medieval life sometimes edgy, sometimes sappy. Don Quixote was too long to fit in the syllabus and a lot of the stuff we read in the course seemed a bit stiff and abstract. These stories were caricatures of life situations, often a bit unbelievable, but human, all too human. It wasn't goody-two-shoes.
R 33 — But doesn't the term identify someone or something that should serve as a model?
V 34 — Unh, yes, but the phrase "serve as a model" doesn't really mean much. How does it come to do that? Is it enough for me to tell you to take it as a model?
R 35 — Well a lot of people speak and act as if it should be enough.
V 36 — Yeah. And a lot of people know that that goes in one ear and out the other. Cervantes said the reader had to extract the model. Nothing in and of itself simply exists as an exemplary something. It becomes so when a person judges it exemplary in her experience of it.
R 37 — Might we say that through study, through self-formation and learning liberally, a person expands, deepens, and enriches what they judge exemplary in their experience?
V 38 — I think we are trying to say, better to think and to do that. But it is difficult. As Cervantes said, each person must judge for themselves, draw what they take to be exemplary in pageant of their own experience.
R 39 — That's right. But can we push it further by asking what sort of judgment is a person making in extracting exemplarity from some experience. Is it different from simply saying that one especially likes something — I like vanilla ice cream better when it is made with vanilla beans, not vanilla extract?
V 40 — Hmm. I think it is a little like a preference for vanilla bean ice cream. I'll stay away from brand names. That's all a bit too mundane, though. There's something more to it. I feel the preference stands for something.
R 41 — I think we are getting somewhere. There are lots of concepts — principles and maxims, abstract ideas with which we think about experience. These have names and definitions and standard modes of application. We can use them quite dispassionately in thinking about behavior as in discussing whether avarice or cupidity best describes the character of a particular politician. When we judge something exemplary, however, we feel it representing a concept while infusing the concept with valence, an emotive force, attractive or repulsive, so that in an appropriate situation the concept becomes an aspirational goal endowed with the power to shape what we do and seek to actualize or avoid.
V 42 — Hey, you know, this is going to help me understand something that started to bother me in college, even a bit before. We're all hit with lots of big problems in the news and in courses — climate change, principles of good governance, inequality, injustice, racism, authoritarianism, misogyny, a complacent sleaze among those we should be looking up to. We get to know a lot about all this stuff; we're informed, but most of us are inert. We have check-box opinions. Some become rabid fans of this faction or that, ready to cheer and demonstrate support, to confront the system, or better yet the fans of an opposing faction. Life becomes a big show. I think we need to discriminate between celebrity and exemplarity to get to something solid.
R 43 — I suspect you're right that we should distinguish between celebrity and exemplarity. Like exemplarity, celebrity seems to infuse principles and possibilities with emotive force, apparent as strong attraction or repulsion, yet I'd say there's a difference, difficult to pin point yet very important, or perhaps to speak more honestly from my subjectivity, celebrity makes me feel uncomfortable, raising feelings of caution, whereas exemplarity elicits a sense of confidence, a feeling of hope.
"Exemplarity and aptness" (José Ortega y Gasset)
V 44 — Well, I've got to say that slowly you've become an exemplar for me of respecting the wisdom of words. You've got the OED on your phone. Let's look the derivation of celebrity and exemplar up. I think that'll pin point the difference pretty well.
R 45 — OK. Here's celebrity, from the Latin, celebritas, a "state of being busy or crowded, festival, games or other celebration characterized by crowded conditions, reputation, renown, fame, frequency or commonness."
V 46 — See, it's a contagion, something that happens in a crowd; it gets induced in persons, independent of their personal judgment. What about exemplarity?
R 47 — For it we have to go back through example, which comes from exemplum, "sample, specimen, specimen of conduct, instance, deterrent, parallel, precedent, pattern, model, style, manner, mode, archetype, substance (of a letter or document), copy, reproduction, transcript."
V 48 — Great! For something to be taken as a sample, specimen, instance, or all the rest, the speaker has to make a judgment, "here is a sample of something significant." The speaker is not the victim of the contagion, but the agent of her judgment.
R 49 — Interesting. Our queasiness arises with the sense that moving judgment can arise for us through both considered reflection and through an infection from our circumstances. Now we've worked this our pretty slowly, step by step. I fear if we keep this pace, we'll be her all day and into the night. Let's try to shift gears to go a little faster. What does our recognition of the difference between celebrity and exemplarity have to do with our original question, why study historical persons?
V 50 — Well, if I can use of big word, historicity works like the masks we learned to use in during the Covid plague. It filters out much, not all, that induces contagion. You might almost say that it is the same people who don't get the value of masks and don't appreciate the uses of history. But at any rate, history gives us the opportunity to think about human agency, observing and making judgments about specimens of conduct, instances, deterrents, parallels, precedents, patterns, models, styles, manners, modes, archetypes, substances.
R 51 — Good. I see that. But if I remember correctly, we got to the idea of exemplarity when you noted how our experiential world is sort of deficient in it, partly by blanketed by so our getting infected by feelings of celebrity about so many things in so many ways. But I had the sense that you also found it hard to recognize exemplars in our cultural experience. Am I wrong?
V 52 — No. You know, in college I had the freshman/sophomore initiation into contemporary civilization and then I majored in European history and took a number of courses in literature. And it's only now, stumbling onto A Place to Study that I'm thinking that I might have done more with those opportunities. But truthfully, I'm thinking that study here involves a mode of inquiry and reflection that I didn't encounter much in college. I don't think it particularly help me to form judgments of exemplarity.
R 53 — Well, I won't say that that's you fault. But I'm curious whether you have any ideas it didn't help?
V 54 — Yeah, I do. But it is going to sound a little strange. Looking back, I think my formal education, and the whole setting in which it occurred, made lousy use of my ignorance. It is a great big collective effort to propagate a pretension to knowledge.
R 55 — Interesting, but what does this have to do with why we might study historical persons? And why your courses in European history and the like seem to you to have missed the mark?
V 56 — Well, basically, my encounter with "history" was like peeling an onion, successive layers of detail and complexity addressing what happened and why. In the modes of scholarly history the narrative of what happened and why have become very abstract. What does the phrase, "the subject of history" mean to you? Let's stop there. What do you think it could mean? What should it mean?