Graduate School: A Semantic Field
“Enlightenment is a man’s exit from his self-incurred minority. … If I have a book which provides meaning for me, a pastor who has conscience for me, a doctor who will judge my diet for me, and so on, then I do not need to exert myself. I do not have any need to think; if I can pay, others will take over the tedious job for me” (“Enlightenment” 135).
After Kant writes that women, the “fair sex,” are under “the supervision” of (male) “guardians,” he compares them to domestic animals: “After having made their domestic animals dumb and having carefully prevented these quiet creatures from daring to take any step beyond the lead-strings to which they have fastened them, these guardians then show them the danger which threatens them. Now this danger is not really so very great; for they would presumably learn to walk after some stumbling. However, an example of this kind intimidates and frightens people out of all further attempts” (“Enlightenment,” 135). With more women entering the scholarly field according to Graduate Study for the 21st Century, still, he writes, female academics’ percentage is in the low-40s. After reading Semenza, I have drawn the parallel between his and Kant’s’ theories: that graduate students may (likely) feel they are “walking after some stumbling.”
As we graduate students move out of our “self-incurred minority” into presumably “enlightenment” in graduate school, to become what Kant calls the “others (who) will take over the tedious job (of discourse on the humanities) for” others in our society, I am reminded of an idea that my undergraduate professor posited to our class: that the value of his Ph.D. was to teach him how little he actually knows. “It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the minority which has become almost natural for him,” Kant writes. “He has even become fond of it and for the time being is incapable of employing his own intelligence, because he has never been allowed to make the attempt” (“Enlightenment,” 135). This rings particularly true in our post-Karl Rovian, “liberal elite” and knowledge-bashing society.
Kant argues for the necessity of freedom for the “public use” of one’s reason (denoting its distribution to the public) versus the “private use” (denoting its employment in service of a civil post/office) (“Enlightenment,” 136). The scholar has “the obligation to communicate to the public all his diligently examined and well-intentioned thoughts…” (“Enlightenment,” 137). Hence tenure.
Post Enlightenment, it seems the M.A. and Ph.D. process is specifically designed to tease out what Kant calls “the most difficult of [reason’s] duties”: “self-knowledge” (“Critique,” 5). I believe, to the contrary, that to “know thyself” only via reason is not to know the “full human” as Kant asserts the importance of later on in this essay. From the exercise of writing and updating the CV, to “finding” out what to write one’s dissertation about, interact with potential committee members, learn how to do mundane tasks well such as organize one’s file cabinet and schedule, to learn at what hours one is most productive, to juggle family with professional priorities–these are all Kantian exercises in the “experience” vein of knowledge–not merely ideas/abstractions, but grounding us to the earth.
Another take-away from Kant is the way in which he linearly proceeds through his argument of ideas in a mathematical/scientific/logical fashion; scholarly writing style appears to be a product of his methods. Kant makes an interesting distinction between the advancement of knowledge, circling or repeating knowledge, enlarging it, or disfiguring it (“Critique,” 8). He operates under the hierarchy (bottom to top): disfiguring, circling (at least you’re not ruining it), enlarging (bigger is better?), advancement (forward/productive progress). If in the scholarly field we wish to “advance” versus enlarge, circle or disfigure, knowledge, then Kant has a blueprint for us.
Graduate Studies for the 21st Century recommends that graduate students not only take “theoretical” classes but also “practical” classes, reminiscent of Kant’s explanation of theoretical and practical knowledge, or types of reason. “Experience, as a kind of knowledge, requires understanding,” Kant writes (“Critique,” 13). To assist in my understanding, I have drafted with the following equation: Experience/Knowledge + Understanding = X. (Currently, I understand X to equate to Kant’s goal of “true” enlightenment but need to think on this some more.) While, for Kant, objects can be experienced, ideas, as abstractions, cannot–all that we can know of ideas are “what we ourselves put into them” (“Critique,” 13). “It will be asked,” Kant writes, “what kind of treasure it is which we mean to bequeath to posterity in this metaphysic of ours, after it has been purified by criticism and thereby brought to a permanent condition?” (“Critique,” 16). I see this as the form of academic discourse we conduct, in the classroom and through publication, citation and response, today, likely as a carry-over from Kant and others’ enlightenment “ideas”–which are experiences that we have “experienced” firsthand in graduate school. In his spirit of academic purification aka criticism, I disagree with his notion that words/ideas cannot be experienced, because I have experienced ideas, words, in my being–they an energy and emotional charge which–while admittedly opening up a Derridean semantic field of multiple potential meanings–I and others often experience a physical, emotional response to certain either inflammatory or nostalgic, or other emotion-inducing words and ideas. One need only look to the example of the emotional experience my husband and myself had last night when someone criticized his Nike shoes due to the new sponsor situation. To that end ideas are experienced–and not just as or due to what we ourselves put into them, but to what society and others have put into them as well.
In a 2006 episode of Iconoclast, Maya Angelou told Dave Chappelle that words are things:
“I believe that a word is a thing. It is non visible. It is audible only for the time it’s there. It hangs in the air. But I believe it is a thing. I believe it goes into the upholstery. And then into the rugs, and into my hair, and into my clothes, and then finally into my body. I believe that words are things. And I live on them. … Now when I see a bottle, come from the pharmacy, it says P-O-I-S-O-N. And there’s skull and bones. Then I know that the contents of that thing — the bottle is nothing — the content is poison. If I pour that content into Bavarian crystal, it is still poison. … I’m just saying, it’s just an idea. That words are things.”
When Kant writes, “Certain kinds of knowledge leave the field of all possible experience, and seem to enlarge [again, not advance] the sphere of our judgments beyond the limits of experience by means of concepts to which experience can never supply any corresponding object” (“Critique,” 27). This would require fully new ideas, one would think, that do not build on previous ones–as Aquinas would call an “infinite regression.” To that end I pose the question(s): If a word is a thing, then what “thing” would “Enlightenment” be–in Angelou’s words, it is “non visible,” “audible only for the time it’s there”–but if is a thing, what is it? What has it “gone into” (upholstery, rugs, hair, clothes, “then finally into” academics’ bodies or the “body” of the academe)? (Spoiler alert: I argue that “Enlightenment” has in fact poured into the fabric of our being in this culture/society not least in graduate programs as outlined above.) Further, has this weekly response to the reading (1) disfigured, (2) circled around, (3) enlarged, or (4) advanced Kant’s essays “Critique of Pure Reason,” “What Is Enlightenment” and Semenza’s Graduate Studies for the 21st Century? (As a response, hopefully it has “enlarged” or at least “circled around” it.)
Works Cited
“Dave Chappelle + Maya Angelou.” Iconoclast, directed by Joe Berlinger, RadicalMedia, 2006.
Kant, Immanuel. “Critique of Pure Reason.” Basic Writings of Kant, edited by Allen W. Wood, Modern Library, 2001, pp 3-41.
— “What Is Enlightenment?” Basic Writings of Kant, edited by Allen W. Wood, Modern Library, 2001, pp 135-141.
Semenza, Gregory. Graduate Study for the 21st Century. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
