Anti-Climacus

In an effort to keep the ball rolling on the Auden paper, I want to return to something I posted here about what makes a text interesting to teach. I said "Canonical figures are interesting for teaching purposes when they... propose answers that are obviously wrong, but wrong in an illuminating way." This seems obvious to me, but I've found that there are few things more difficult to convince undergrads of than that a failed argument is often more interesting than a successful one.

Anecdote: I taught a course themed around theories of law and justice. The course was introductory, intended to present students with some major works of political theory that touched on interesting topics. In addition to lecturing on the major steps of particular arguments, I would sometimes take the occasion to model how they ought to go about reading a text. On one occasion, I was walking them through Hobbes' chapter on civil law in Leviathan. Hobbes, I noted, makes two arguments in that chapter that appear slightly different and which, read in a certain light, appear to contradict each other. The tension and contradiction were, I thought, illuminating. My students thought otherwise: if there was a fatal objection to the argument, why bother with it?

I was inclined at the time to think of this experience as a pedagogical failure on my part. Now I tend to see it as a rupture between two different kinds of learning: one in which material is to be received and assimilated as true, and one in which the truth or falsity of any particular argument is beside the point. These are, in another way, the two cultures of academia. A correct argument requires no further work. A wrong argument, if wrong in an illuminating way, can open up new aspects to a problem that have not yet been considered. Those new aspects lead naturally to further arguments, which is the nature of research. I suspect those of us who have gone into grad school have all had that kind of experience--a book or argument whose wrongness required some new argument as a response.

Now there remains the question of whether the 'received and assimilated' model is somehow lesser or just different. I would note, though, that even if one thinks it lesser, that cuts against both liberalism and conservatism: if the problem is a lack of further questioning, the ideological orientation of that material is irrelevant to what is problematic in that attitude. But I'll have to think on this more.