The Four Arts of the Chinese Literatus

The title of the blog, Apologia pro Literati Vita, has two sources. One is Cardinal Newman's memoirs, Apologia pro Vita Sua; I merely subtracted the pronoun and added the genitive form of literatus, the word generally used to describe the Chinese gentry scholar. Cultivating the virtues and arts of the literatus, the rediscovery of leisure, and the role, attitude and responsibility of the gentlemen towards his cultural patrimony are precepts inspired by my reading in Chinese philosophy, though the essential elements are no less present in the ancient Western philosophers.

The Chinese literatus was trained from childhood in the Chinese classics, the Confucian Analects, Mencius, The Doctrine of the Mean, the Taoist scriptures, particularly the Tao Te Ching and the works of Chuang Tzu, and the more catholic-minded, studied the Ch'an Buddhist scriptures. But above all, it was the works of Confucius and his followers that pre-occupied the minds of Song, Ming, and Q'ing literati. Men, young and old, read and re-read the Confucian classics in the hopes of obtaining the coveted jinshi degree. It was not uncommon for men in middle-age to devote their time and energy to obtaining the degree, perhaps studying with young sons or kinsmen who, half their age, also hoped to pass the Imperial exams.

If the Chinese literatus passed the exam, he could hope for a governmental job that would provide a lucrative income for his family. And when the literatus had successfully secured himself and his family an income and property and after he discharged his duties, he devoted himself to the art of leisure.

“Happiness is thought to depend on leisure, for we are busy so that we may have leisure, as we make war so that we may have peace," writes Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics. Leisure is the prerequisite for philosophy: the search for wisdom requires freedom, a freedom that can only come when one's own basic needs, for shelter or food, are satisfied.

The Chinese literatus, by virtue of his governmental provision, enjoyed a life of comfort and ease: his material wants were amply provided for and he enjoyed the respect of his colleagues and inferiors. He maintained this respect by a constant cultivation of the scholarly arts. He discharged his own official duties; he continued his study of the philosophical and religious classics of ancient China; he provided for his own sons' educations, and he practiced the Four Arts:

The Playing of the Guqin

Calligraphy

Playing Go

Painting

I hope in the future to enlarge on the theme of 'leisure', what I mean by the word, and its role in the most important cultural developments: philosophy, art, religion, literature. What's important about the Chinese literati tradition is the presence of a canon of philosophy and of artistic technique. Contrary to the Modernist sturm und drang, tradition does not mean cliches and kitsch. One need only study the history of Chinese landscape painting to see the work of millenia being distilled to a purer and higher degree, through a conscious use and adaptation of traditional techniques and through individual innovation. At present, there is no class in contemporary society trained in a widely accepted canon of philosophy or artistic technique.  T.S. Eliot, in his classic Christianity and Culture, writes:

"You cannot expect continuity and coherence in literature and the arts, unless you have a certain uniformity of culture, expressed in education by a settled, though not rigid agreement as to what everyone should know to some degree, and a positive distinction--however undemocratic it may sound--between the educated and the uneducated. I observed in America, that with a very high level of intelligence among undergraduates, progress was impeded by the fact that one could never assume that any two, unless they had been at the same school ... had studied the same subjects or read the same books, though the number of subjects in which they had been instructed was surprising ... In a negative liberal society you have no agreement as to there being any body of knowledge which any educated person should have acquired at any particular stage: the idea of wisdom disappears, and you get sporadic and unrelated experimentation."

Would that we had a class of individuals, educated to an exemplary degree, trained in music and the arts, philosophical in outlook. It seems impossible to imagine a happy future without some such class coming into its own. What will the modern American literatus look and what will his Four Arts be?

A Meditation on Joseph Epstein's "A Literary Education"

One of the prouder moments of my brief and ignominious teaching career was a lecture I gave on Penelope: it was given entirely ex tempore and was inspired by the insipid whining of a student. Accustomed as I was to the lack of curiosity shown by even my most gifted students, I was undone by a malevolent remark about the irrelevancy of Homer by a less than gifted student. What started as a tirade ended as what the students called the best class of the year. (Lest anyone condemn me for snobbery, imagine the ludicrous situation in which a mediocre student condescends to dismiss Homer.)

What made the lecture stimulating to the students was not substantially anything I had to say about Homer or in this particular case, Penelope. I claim no especial knowledge of the Odyssey other than as an interested reader, but in this case, I presented the Odyssey, uniquely (to my students, at least), as a source of human wisdom. I used the example of Penelope because my class, an Honors class, was overwhelmingly female but also because she served as an excellent example of the kind of moral and philosophical wisdom that most students learn from revelation: I wanted to demonstrate to my students that Homer, like St. Paul or Socrates, could teach them something about what it means to live a life of meaning. That the virtues of the Odyssey are counter to the gravity of our own society made the task more difficult but not impossible: the virtues of loyalty, of honor, of familial attachment, of patriotism are not entirely extinguished. I too labored under a providential dispensation: my students were generally catechized Christians and their religious upbringing and education had accustomed them, if only subliminally, to the philosophical ideal of truth-seeking and right-living.

As I said, Penelope offered me a useful and in this instance successful example of literature's utility (which in no way do I interpret as profitability). Literature, like philosophy, is a source, a far more universal source, of human wisdom: its purpose is surely to delight (and that is no mean end) but as a confirmed believer in reason and tradition, the best literature serves equally to adumbrate the wisdom and folly of human endeavor: human creativity, the best that it is thought and said, painted and composed, offers a vision of the good life that is the counterpoint of modernity's fixation on the ugly, the unreasoned, the bureaucratic. The determinism of the pedagogical elites, whether scientific or economic, leaves no room for the redemptive role of education: literacy or numeracy are ends to be pursued either for their own sake or in service to abstractions, such as "democracy" or "equality." For the educational determinist, Penelope is not the portrait of feminine virtue; neither is she a heroine to be emulated. Her story, in a generous reading (the reading likely to be found at the secondary level), is a collection of terms and facts to be memorized and regurgitated, or in a less generous reading (more common to the university), a misleading caricature sketched by the first chauvinist (or any other maledictory misnomer common in contemporary academic "discourse.") Neither reading offers the student an opportunity to experience the text as a living experience: the first is the product of a narrow preoccupation with facts and statistics, the second with ideology. Both deny, in unequal measure (I find the second far more noxious), the transcendence of human creativity and its questing after an ideal type of man. Penelope's loom might be the preoccupation in the first reading (as a symbol, say), and Penelope's "household status" in the second.

By argument and demonstration, I was able to show to my students both the wisdom and justice of Homer's depiction of Penelope: not unnaturally, the students responded enthusiastically to Homer's endorsement of fidelity. In their own lives, the students could contrast the relative merits and depredations of fidelity and its opposite. Unfortunately, this lecture came near the conclusion of the year, and unafraid as I was to challenge the boundaries and limits of the curriculum, it was the only lecture of its kind.

It was my brief foray into the realm of "literary education," the subject of Joseph Epstein's fine essay in the New Criterion. Epstein's "education" is equally one of the mind and soul: it is not religious or dependent on revelation, though it does appeal to the higher spiritual faculties. However, it is not narrow moral didacticism, nor is it shallow aestheticism. It is an education both in truth, goodness, and beauty but also an education in delight. Too much modern literature is neither delightful nor true, either to higher ideals or to life. By teaching the best literature to young minds, it is possible to simultaneously teach them the highest things and to impart to them an incipient capacity to be intrigued, deeply moved, delighted by a work of art. I end with a quote from Epstein's essay:



"For the thirty years that I taught literature courses at Northwestern University, I preferred to think that I was a better teacher than I was a student. (I also came to believe that a better education is to be had through teaching than through listening to teachers—and if that ain’t the sound of one hand clapping, then I don’t know what is.) In this teaching, I made no attempt to turn my undergraduate students into imitation or apprentice scholars, but instead I wanted them to acquire, as best they were able, what a small number of great writers thought was useful knowledge in this mystery-laden life."

"I wanted my students to come away from their reading learning, for example, from Charles Dickens the importance of friendship, loyalty, and kindness in a hard world; from Joseph Conrad the central place of fulfilling one’s duty in a life dominated by spiritual solitude; from Willa Cather, the dignity that patient suffering and resignation can bring; from Tolstoy, the divinity that the most ordinary moments can provide—kissing a child in her bed goodnight, working in a field, greeting a son returned home from war; and from Henry James, I wanted them to learn that it is the obligation of every sentient human being to stay perpetually on the qui vive and become a man or woman on whom nothing is lost, and never to forget, as James puts in his novel The Princess Casamassima, that 'the figures on the chessboard [are] still the passions and the jealousies and superstitions of man.' ”

Homework and the Rise of the 12-Hour Schoolday

Permit me to relate a little anecdote.

I know an individual who rises each morning at 6:30 a.m. He dresses, brushes his teeth, combs his hair, eats his breakfast. He then commutes to his place of work, a commute of an hour’s duration. Once he arrives, he is subject to a routine of work, occasional rests, and a short lunch before then departing for the day, 8 hours after he arrived. He commutes home, arriving at roughly 5:00 p.m. A day thus begun at roughly 7 a.m. ends 10 hours later. Hardly unusual, you might retort. Ah but you see, the individual I’m describing is a young boy, his place of work a school. His name and age are unimportant and of little consequence: he could be any number of boys at any number of schools. And this little boy’s day is not over yet. At the conclusion of his 10-hour day, he now faces the prospect of a further 2 hours of homework, making his grand total of work a blistering 12 hours (or put more strikingly, 3/4 of his waking hours).

When added up, these numbers are formidable, and although the situation I describe may be extreme, it is not necessarily unique. In too many schools, there is a cult of homework, where teachers have an almost touching faith in its usefulness. By virtue of their authority, wielded with the blunt force trauma of a stack of textbooks, they intend to “learn” their students. Homework is a means towards that end, its usefulness apparently unquestioned, its effectiveness unstudied. The cult of homework, however, is but an unfortunate aspect of a wider problem, whose import I hope to show by relating a personal experience.

I was, not long ago, horrified to hear an education expert unwittingly refer to students as “products.” Her ‘slip’ gave me some insight into the bureaucratic, technical mind. For my expert, education could be reduced to schemes, schedules, calculations: appeals could be made to cognitive research to justify such endeavors, as if the student was bodiless mind, or worse, soul-less mind. Intuition and inspiration were banished: education was now the realm of sophists and economists, who had calculated to a nicety the procedures and routines of a successful teacher and an efficient classroom.

This view of education might be best defined as education-as-an-industrial-process. Students are products, their minds receptacles, empty until filled by cheap labor. This process should be conducted with maximal efficiency and minimum cost, and the product should be duly delivered on time. Homework is but one of the ploys of industrial education. It greases the wheels of inefficiency, and it can serve the illusion, in the worst scenarios, that real learning is taking place.

I am not, however, taking aim at all homework. In fact, I believe homework can and occasionally does serve a salutary purpose. But it must have a purpose that is transparent or at least accessible to the teacher, the parent, and most importantly, the student. Homework as a mechanism for learning is not, so far as I can tell, particularly efficient, and it rarely is self-evidently purposeful. Too often, it can be reading-for-reading’s-sake or as bludgeoning 20 more long division problems into a beleaguered student’s mind. Lest I be misinterpreted, I am not an academic anarchist. There should be order to learning, students should be assigned challenging work, and learning should be constant. But there should be limits to the reach of a school or of a teacher. The tentacles of homework, stretching from school to home, too often bespeak an absorption into the industrial-education process, whose uniformity and predictability serve only to confirm the student’s suspicion that learning, after all, is a terrible thing.

I encourage teachers to allow fate, or Providence, some role in education. Little Billy may very well choose to spend his three hours of freedom watching television or surfing unsavory sites, if his teacher doesn’t load him down with homework. But he might, just might, read a good (and unassigned) book, play a musical instrument, take a karate lesson, help his dad fix the lawn-mower. These experiences are worthwhile and should not be overlooked as important contributions to the education of the young. There is a sheer and unalloyed delight in the unpredictability of learning: I needn’t rehearse the litany of scholars, writers, scientists, artists, saints, who found joy in learning only after their schooling was finished, when education could be had for 35 cents in library fines. The experience of reading a great novel can be ruined merely by being assigned, its content reduced to a host of irrelevant or unworthy questions, while the real substance, its philosophical or religious ponderings, its investigations into human nature, are ignored or rejected as unfit for student consumption. Homework can never ask (or answer) the questions really posed by the reading of a great book. It is hopelessly individualistic, solitary, unredeemed by the spark of intellectual curiosity and mutual comprehension that can only happen in the company of others equally interested.

A century and more ago, liberal experts rightly campaigned for the restriction of child labor; their present-day successors seem intent on undoing their work, replacing the child’s 12-hour workday with a 12-hour school day. The industrial wheel has come full circle.

I am everywhere and always the opponent of education as process, as a machine. I’m disgusted by it, and I find it insulting to human dignity. There is an older, wiser tradition, represented by the likes of Aristotle, Confucius, and Christ. For them, education is a way of life that is above all characterized by a penetrating insight into the realities, limits, and possibilities of human nature, an insight impossible to industrial education.