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Education, Zen and the art of correspondence
Contemporary Review, Feb, 2005 by Chris Arthur
It could be argued that the landscape of fact is simply too horrific to look at directly without the blinkers variously supplied by those realms of discourse that subvert the truth, making what we must face appear more palatable. Attempts to import illicit levels of non-correspondence into our outlooks may gain credence from the fact that looking at reality directly may sometimes seem to be almost lethal (rather like the reported impact of glimpsing God's face). Ernest Becker, for example, urges that 'It cannot be over-stressed that to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying'. For Becker, a 'full apprehension' of our condition would drive us insane. He believes that a terrible anxiety is bound to result from 'the perception of the truth of one's condition'. In The Denial of Death he poses the question of what it means to be a self-conscious animal. His answer is simple: 'It means that one is food for worms'. According to Becker,
This is the terror: to have emerged from nothingness, to have a
name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating
yearning for life and self-expression--and with all this yet to
die.
Or, as that most acute of self-chroniclers, Henri-Frederic Amiel, put it, 'the universe seriously studied rouses one's terror'. He and Becker have both glimpsed R.S. Thomas's 'self-regulating machine of blood and faeces' operating beyond the deceptively simple terms of our ordinary descriptive vocabulary. Though there are, naturally, less grim outlooks, the way in which serious study is likely to result in something profoundly unsettling, if not terrifying, seems too often lost sight of in the teaching now offered by schools and universities. Education should be unnerving.
In The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde talks about the way in which beauty can be 'dimmed by the mist of familiarity'. Familiarity's mist can seep so deeply into our lives that the accounts it offers seem to fit things perfectly. In the assumption of unproblematic correspondence that familiarity propagates, much that is important, not only beauty, risks being lost. If a root concern of education is to ensure that our 'linguistic contours' map the 'landscape of fact' in a way that furthers our understanding of it, then we need to be able to disperse familiarity's mist so that we can see beyond the constraints both of ordinary discourse and of whatever political, religious or educational orthodoxy happens to be in favour.
The Russian formalists, particularly Victor Shklovsky, are associated with the idea of ostranenie, or strategies for making strange. Shklovsky saw the fundamental task of all art as providing such strategies, acting to estrange the familiar so as we can see things in all the disturbing incandescence of their raw nature, throw off the anaesthetic of custom and let the world stand before us afresh, uncovered by any of the customary contours with which we clad it. Such making strange would seem an essential preliminary to our educational endeavours--but how often is it effectively put into play? Yet, if students do not feel at least some element of Amiel's terror as they study the universe, is the seriousness of our teaching (and their learning) not called into question?
