Reading Heidegger Changed My Life

Okay, I'm not really sure Heidegger changed my life, though I do remember samples of his work being part of my existentialism survey course and can recall animated conversations about them over coffee after class. But how much of the knowledge and training that I have used to build my life can I consciously grasp and enumerate by source, the origins now well buried in the slow and steady chisel work of a nurturing liberal arts education? If I had spent my days under a rock or in a lab coat, how different would I be today? How much of what we idealize as our humanness is bound up in our genes, and how much in the mind we develop through our study of the world around us--in the consumption of literature, philosophy, music, art, and the surrounding conversations that lead to more questions and ways of seeing?

I kept coming back to these ideas and personal self-analysis as I read Mark Slouka's education policy-poking essay Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school in Harper's September issue. Slouka is looking at what we teach our children these days and why, because he sees the fetishization of math and science in current education standards, and he's worried--particularly due to the assumption that math and science are what students need (and only need) for our nation to excel in the global marketplace. He argues that when all lives are valued only in terms of dollars and cents, workers who can endure boring and rote tasks (and earn great SAT scores) will be, on paper, much more valuable to the engine. Poets, not so much.

But that's terribly short sighted if we also buy into the idea that the future will be all about the "creative class". Slouka notes that our army of cooperate office workers are indeed having some trouble keeping up on the communications end of things, and that's dangerous to a democracy when you think about how much we as a society rely on gifted writers and orators (and filmmakers and musicians) to challenge power. So it seems this is an issue that it's vital we reframe and consider in terms of political health and civic life before we stray too far, no matter how hard it is to push back against the balance sheet instincts of American companies fighting for their profits in a tough economy. Math and science can't be all there is. A philosophy degree is not an idyll pursuit. We need the humanities.

Why? Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of.

This, I would submit, is value--and cheap at the price. This is utility of a higher order. Considering where the rising arcs of our ignorance and our deference lead, what could represent a better investment? Given our fondness for slogans, our childlike susceptibility to bullying and rant, our impatience with both evidence and ambiguity, what could earn us, over time, a better rate of return?

(full article)

And if you find yourself getting as stirred up by this discussion as I did, you have more reading to do.