eyes in the back of the head

Calvin College graduation this afternoon. i was looking down upon a sea of black mortarboards, with their occasional tapings, reading the booklet in which all the graduates' names were inscribed, according to their primary affiliation—and thinking about intellectual division of labour as it is, most strikingly (in the sense of "ostensibly") reflected in lines drawn departmentally.

but first (although, i warn you now: this is probably still going to all be about interdisciplinarity): Nick Wolterstorff's address. i wonder if the figure of the commencement speaker is a secular reincarnation of (and sanctioned quite apart from institutional religion in a particular manner that, nonetheless, uses the terms and method thereof) the pastor and his speech, a sermon. admittedly, i've not attended a lot of graduations (least of all my own); the point i may well be trying to make may well be complicated in using Calvin as an example: it's impossible to expect a community so steeped in the language and practice of Reformed theology to do anything without hermeneutics and exegesis, while managing to claim consistency. [which is why, incidentally, the little issue of last year's speaker was troubling far beyond his mere existence: it seemed to represent a decision made, not according to principle or long-precedented adherence thereto, but to influence of a particularly insidious political variety which seemed, but extremely loosely and superficially, to speak the required language, but altogether unintelligibly.]

Nick spoke about eyes and their necessary plurality (that one eye is insufficient formed the structure and pared-down content of his talk). an obstetrician's advice to the nurse attending to a mother with stillborn child: look with two eyes: one to check the IV, the other to weep. the IV eye becomes, in metaphor and implication, that of knowledge and discernment; the weepy one, the eye of compassion. both necessary; the two inseparable.

i want to discuss two aspects of this construction that, depending on what they mean (and whose elaboration would, ultimately, be more illuminating than the presentation of example followed by its explication and potential for application. read: sermon), have implication on the way in which knowledge does and can function—and the way knowledge, as a whole, is divided up and approached "according to" these divisions.

i thought i listened carefully. and i thought i heard Nick claim that neither eye needed to be capable of sight. i'm fairly certain he was not, here, speaking outside the metaphor and, thus, about the metaphor (the self-evident "these are not real eyes, you know." elbow poke in the ribs—or should i say "wink, wink"), but from within its premise. that the weeping eye may be both blind and, yet, effective—at least for its purported task of producing tears—i more readily accept (although, below, qualms will follow). but insofar as, at least in the story at hand, the eye which checks the vitals is that of objective/observable knowledge, i cannot fathom how the metaphor—or its correlative reality—can continue to function if this organ is anything less than 20/20. certainly, other metaphors could be made (about an eye which compensates for the other, about eye-glasses (John Calvin's or otherwhose), etcetera)), but it did not seem that, this afternoon, they were.

knowledge which cannot see is not itself. which brings up several other questions: can emotion function blindly. of course, what is called "emotion"—and even "knowledge"—can, in that they do, pass for their respective epitomes. but, really, this is most unsatisfactory.

which makes me wonder—all right, this will be 3 (or 2.5, given that this point is related to the above one) topics—whether two distinguishable eyes are necessary. if, instead, two eyes of equal capacity, containing all of the qualities in question would be more appropriate in both life and its instruction. because perspective seems to be more than somewhat crucial to this whole description—and contained within the truism about the necessity of two spaced-apart eyes for perspective, itself, to exist the further requirement: these eyes must be identical in pierce-strength (either naturally or (for the poor devils who dream most terribly of vast lakes and sinking spectacles) correctedly)) and, moreover, looking at the same object. this last bit holds centrality, reflected back in waves upon the entire premise: in order to look upon the same object, to assess it with knowledge and with compassion, must not each eye be skilled in each of these "types" of sight? must not they be inseparable in a manner different from Nick's example (where one discrete eye takes up the task of knowing, the other of feeling, but both are needed), that not only idealises the complete synthesis of knowledge and compassion in vision—but, in fact, requires it and, additionally, requires it doubled and equal, in order for true vision to exist at all?

by way of explicitly directing the example towards the soon-to-be graduates (the customary "go into all the world and...wait! first, clock your fellow regressors in the head with your flung hat"), Nick chose to sketch out the role of each eye in a number of given professions. for example, the Teacher: whose eye of knowledge grades exams fairly, all the while watching (with the eye that (we hope invisibly, if at all literally) cries)) students as complex and emotional beings and relating to them as such.

i must note, though: he got as far as the Teacher. as far (via Doctor, Lawyer, and Businessperson) and no further. this would have been evident in any situation, but it was particularly so given that the graduating class sat, clumped up in/with their departments and that these, themselves, amounted to a grand master narrative division between Sciences and Humanities (front to back, side to side). to omit, in example, approximately half of those supposed to heed the advice given seems to call for a different sort of "advice" altogether and some, namely, that addresses the problem (and Problem) of ethics in the Humanities themselves.

it seems rather profound, and with implications on the search for ethical knowledge and/as action, that it is nearly (beyond some very basic generalities) impossible to say, as it would be in the case of a Doctor or Lawyer, what roles ought to be taken by the discerning and compassionate eyes in the case of, say, the Philologist (should one, actually, still exist somewhere other than a museum of natural freakishness—but this is another question for another day) or Historian, never mind the scholar of Literature. it is both out of this dilemma, and because of it, that i have made the above case for the separate, but equal, eyes in the task of seeing. it is all fine and good to neatly categorise certain types of activities (scouring the witness' evidence, running laboratory experiments) as projects for the discerning eye, and others (listening to the witness presenting said evidence, asking about the human cost of experimentation) for the weeping one, but, in many ways, artificial—and, perhaps, damagingly so. if it seems possible to divide up the labour of sight between two eyes along qualitative lines, it is only because this has been done, either historically or for utilitarian ease and valuation of activity (it is, after all, the disciplines in which "things happen" that this method is both used and, upon knee-jerk consideration, seems most justified/able—as for the others which, to degrees, engage in ceaseless debates and internal writhings about how best to employ the eyes, well...and, thus, activity becomes sufficient unto and because of itself).

if it is more difficult to say what true and correct seeing in the Humanities might, well, look like, the pressing nature of engaging with such a question and achieving some sort of answer emerges in new clarity. obviously, some of the methods of science have been deemed unacceptable to handle the problems and subject matter of the Humanities. this seems more like frustration than anything actually indicative of the kind of rifts sometimes presented with incredible absolutism. what remains consistently unasked is: what are the methods of the Humanities and, if these can be articulated with clarity, what would they offer to the Sciences and, by extension, to the whole enterprise of striving for knowledge. that the Humanities are, notoriously, miserable about communicating method without sounding ridiculous has led to their (often somewhat justifiably) being written off as having nothing to say about the subject. this is no excuse—either for the Humanities in failing to reflect in a meaningful and communicable manner, or for the Sciences in turning away in frustration.

what the Humanities have to offer is simply this: an example of the context and manner in which the inseparable eyes perform the functions of discernment and compassion simultaneously and without either dividing up the labour (between) themselves or allowing for a critic/investigator to do so in investigative or descriptive commentary. ethical action in the Humanities occurs when, and because, the eyes both do it all. when they perform their job badly, they, thus, do it extremely and unacceptably badly: a single functioning eye which attempts to engage both the compassionate and discernment capacities of knowledge, without its twin for perspectival alignment, ends up doing more damage than one which, in losing its correlated but opposite pair, "only" either feels or probes, primarily because the former eye is lulled into believing that nothing is wrong, that it can still address the compassionate and discerning tasks—and, thereby, ethics—but can only manipulate their jargons, having lost the ability to participate in language itself.

and as for departmental divisions, i leave you with this:





need i say more?