private and public

This blog entry is not about any quranic verse. read at your discretion.

It occurs to me that many among those who aren’t in my line of work i.e. those who aren’t responsible for teaching college classes in what they call the humanities and/or arts & sciences live their public lives practicing and embodying and expressing the answers to questions that they ask or engage with or pursue in private (either alone with their close friends and trusted interlocutors/texts/scholars). Their private reflections and convictions are important and useful for informing and shaping the kind of lives they live – the things they do and avoid, value and reject in their public/social lives. Ask in private, live what you find true and meaningful in public (and also private). human beings don’t just think and ask questions. they live. they do things. they need to act from some conceptions and convictions or stabilized (however temporarily) perspectives or standpoints. often enough they can only act and do things as one among other agents and actors whose actions directly or indirectly make their own lives/actions possible and meaningful. each agent is, at some level, within a larger community of agents. And so privately reached answers come together in some particular, collective form of life and the soul’s itch of sociality is scratched.

I find that at least some of us who teach in the humanities are obliged to live life in the other direction. our job is to ask questions in public. we are tasked with sustaining conversations, year after year, that raise questions for one generation of students after another in a public setting, in full view of not only the students in ones classes but all who may listen to recorded lectures or read published writings. These questions and engagement with possibe answers and the gains and losses that may come with each make up the public/social lives of such folks. Then, and occassionally, in private, such folks try to live out the particular answers they choose and find compelling/true. To others, these people are a bit notorious and a nuisance really – they seem incapable of actually living (at least socially and publicly) any particular answer with any conviction and are assumed to lack the spine or will to committ publicly to any one form of life. This can be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on one’s perspective. On the plus side, if one is honest in one’s work as a humanities instructor and serves other minds by helping them engage with and ask questions (which is terrifying for many without some encouragement and role-modeling) one finds it impossible to worry about offending some norms of some form of life (and thus those who adhere to those forms of life). One gets to live one’s answers in private and that makes it less likely that ones convictions are shaped by worries of social/public approval and censure. But i think there is some truth to all this. those who teach in the humanities live in private what they ask in public and those who don’t have such teaching/public obligations live in public what they ask in private.