HumCore Workshop #1: Between Karachi and California
Transcript
Alexander Key:
Welcome everybody to the first in this series of Humanities Core workshops where we're talking about the global humanities. It's given me a tremendous amount of pleasure to work with the group of people I've been working with at Stanford over the last couple of years on this kind of stuff.
Alexander Key:
And tonight it gives me tremendous pleasure to introduce our first two speakers. We have Dan Edelstein, our very own Dan Edelstein, the William H. Bonsall Professor of French, who is the founder of the Stanford Humanities Core, and leader in the humanities at Stanford, more generally, recipient of a number of teaching awards and the author of multiple publications of which I'll just share. This is one of his most recent books. So it's great to have Dan here. And I remember when Dan held a session, he brought the leader of the Columbia Core to Stanford to talk about the importance of a core education. And our second speaker, Muhammad Haris, has done at Habib University is being part of a university in Karachi that has put into practice the dreams that Dan and many of us shared of having a compulsory humanities core.
Alexander Key:
Professor Haris received his B.E. And his M.E. in civil engineering subsequently received his Ph.D. In philosophy. He's the assistant dean for the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Habib University in Karachi. And he's the director of the B.A. (Honors) in Comparative Literature. And I'll just give you a quick...this is the BA (Honors) and you should I think all be able to hear.
Muhammad Haris:
Samana:
Like in previous semester, we have the course... (video stops)
Alexander Key:
We're very lucky to have Professor Haris and Professor Edelstein with us this evening. What we're going to do is that each of them is going to speak for 15 minutes. I think Haris, we had you down to go first if that's OK. So Haris and then Dan are going to speak for 15 minutes each, probably kind of wave at them when they get to the 15-minute point. And then they're each going to get five minutes to talk back to each other. If anything, if they heard anything in each other's presentations they'd like to pick up on and then we're going to open it up for Q-&-A for everybody who's here. So with that, again, thank you all ever so much for coming. It's a privilege to be part of this group, and I will pass it over to my colleague Haris.
Muhammad Haris:
Yes. Thank you so much. Alexander. Am I audible? Can you hear me clearly?
Alexander Key:
Yeah. Perfect.
Muhammad Haris:
OK. OK. So thank you very much for this opportunity really. And it's a real honor for me to be in such distinguished company for this conversation. So Alexander has already introduced me. I teach philosophy at Habib University and I serve as program director for Comparative Humanities, and like what I'm going to do in my presentation, the hope here, is that I will explain the program a bit as to what our program is about and then address this question, which is the topic question for my presentation, really. And it's a question that I've been thinking about for some time. I haven't yet taken any concrete action in response to this question, but it's certainly a question on which we are having conversations in the program. So first of all, to tell you about the program, and I've prepared some very skeletal slides and the purpose of which is just keep myself focused more than anything else, and to give you some hints and especially those colleagues who are not familiar with who we are and what we do.
Muhammad Haris:
So the Comparative Humanities program effectively was launched in 2019. And that was also when I became the director for the program. When I became the director for the program, the program looked very different than what it is now, what it became. So in my first couple of semesters as program director, I along with a group of colleagues in Comparative Humanities — in those days, it used to be called Comparative Liberal Studies. So that's another thing that we changed the orientation of the program. And we, and that also came with the name change in the program. But effectively, the first thing that I would say is that we've, we have a very, let's say specific vision, when it comes to a student's journey in the program. And a pyramid or inverted funnel is heuristic image for cognitive progression in the program.
Muhammad Haris:
So students start in the first couple of years taking courses in what is known as the broadening sequence in the program core curriculum, and they're also taking broadening courses in their concentration areas of interest. And as they move into the third and fourth year of the program, they enter what we call a deepening sequence. So if in the first couple of years they're getting introduced to modes of inquiry and the humanities, and what is conceptual genealogies and what are different approaches to the closed reading of text and interpretation in the third and fourth year, they move towards the application of interpretive frameworks and towards assessment and evaluation of great books. But in particular, the secondary literature that evolves around great books, great texts, great figures. And at the end, every student in the program is required to produce a capstone paper in a capstone course, which is a course that they take in their penultimate semester.
Muhammad Haris:
Then some students go on write their theses. So that's the basic cognitive progression and the vision that we have for students' journey through the program. So the Comparative Humanities major is premised on a rigorous grounding in comparative hermeneutics. This requires a seven-course sequence designed to a broaden. So the two broadening courses in the Comparative Humanities curriculum are Introduction to Critical Inquiry in the Humanities and Conceptual Genealogies. The first course is now being taught twice. In this semester we have the second iteration of 101, and this is a course that we developed around the theme of love and desire. So it's major figures in philosophy, religion, history, literature, talking about the theme of love and desire. Conceptual genealogies is the second course in the broadening sequence.
Muhammad Haris:
The first couple of iterations have been on what is known as the slave master dialectic. And we are planning a third iteration of the course on the concept of the corporation. So that's in the works. Then we have three courses in the deepening sequence 301 comparative Hermeneutics 1, Major Works and Traditions seminar, like in the department parlance, we also call it the Intellectual Debate course because this course teaches students about looking at conflicting interpretations of major works, major figures or a key solving a problem. And the conflicting interpretation has produced recognizable kind of debate, which if it is published, which is available and that the instructors teaching the course introduce students to conflicting interpretations of the problems for the first iteration of the course is currently underway. And it's on Comparative Hermeneutics of the self. Then Comparative Hermeneutics 2, this is a major work in context.
Muhammad Haris:
The first iteration is going to be on the figure of Heidegger. And so effectively by the time students get to 401, they are in a position, or at least that's the ideal, that's the goal vision to grapple with one major figure or one major work, or a body of work in its own context, in its own tradition and look at the streams of certain scholarship that the major figure has spawned. Then there is a capstone research seminar, which we still haven't had opportunity to teach it. It's coming up in the fall semester, but we've planned it to be team-taught cross-disciplinary course. Then the Comparative Humanities core also includes a course called World Historical Figures - Leadership and Judgment, which examines the mechanisms of authority and power in world history. And we have a course called Criticism, Dissent and the Ethics of Disagreement (social responsibility through the figure of the public intellectual).
Muhammad Haris:
Then all students in the program are required to pursue two concentrations, either two primary concentrations or one primary, one secondary concentration. And the purpose of the concentrations is to cultivate disciplinary knowledge. And the approach to all four concentrations is synecdochal combined with intellectual history. So it's not only survey, or in practice survey element intellectual history element is rather compressed and diminished. And like the approach is — let's say rather diluted intellectual history combined with synecdochal approach to the field. And seminars and dialectical thinking and comparative traditions are a part of all four concentrations in continuity with the program focus and the premise for the program, which is comparative hermeneutics. Then I won't spend much time at all on this next slide, but just to let you know that all students at Habib University, including students in Comparative Humanities, have to take courses in the Habib Liberal Core curriculum.
Muhammad Haris:
And Dr. Nauman Naqvi will be here with you in a few weeks to talk about the Habib Liberal Core curriculum specifically. And our program, in fact, it comes out of the Habib Liberal Core curriculum. The Habib Liberal Core curriculum had been in place for five years and then our program came into being out of the Habib Liberal Core curriculum and it's functioning. And then students also take free electives, we do manage to give them significant elective space. And it is possible for them to pursue minors in other programs, as well as the South Asian music minor, which is also offered from our program platform and e-portfolios are a requirement for graduation. Now, a summation of program, vision, mission goals, future directions, critical (assessment). So, essentially we are training our students and that's what we also say in the descriptions pertaining to the program that you go through this education program and premised on competitive hermeneutics.
Muhammad Haris:
And you complete your concentration, you take these seminars and dialectical thinking and you've gone through the core sequence. And what you come out doing, or that you developed this capacity as a student to think both critically and comparatively, to think flexibly across different traditions, different fields, different genres to bring into dialogue, major figures, to bring into dialogue, major works in different disciplines, across different periods and so on. That's the capacity that... Now there is a bit of critical assessment that like I started working on which I would like to share some ideas and mostly a series of question rather than a plan for action. But, the conversation really begins with the idea of inheritance and historicity that like in this present, in this historical moment and us being in Pakistan, what is the inheritance that we are contending with?
Muhammad Haris:
And that includes the cultural forms in our part of the world, which we have inherited. And those cultural forms also come to us in very damaged form in a damaged state. But nevertheless, there is heritage. There is tradition, there is social form, cultural form that is inherited. Like you also have inherited very directly a colonial structure of authority in our society. And there are other forms of oppression and violence, which we have inherited through history. So there is a certainly a dark side and a light side to the historical inheritance that we have the historicity, which constitutes our present. And I mean the question is that, does our program really address...
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
Muhammad Haris:
...that inheritance in the fullest possible sense. And, should we be worried about the inheritance in that as in, have a sense of urgency about our historical situation and historicity, and then have that concern translate into shaping or reshaping the program a bit, or our orientation to the various courses that we offer. So I'd like to talk about historicity and inheritance a bit, but just the point about what I think is the essential element in humanities education, and then to flesh it out a bit over here. An essential element in humanities education is the study of universals, exemplars, paradigms and forms. Is there such a thing as an ethically neutral paradigm or form, the question I'm asking? So there are ethical principles and underlying ethical assumptions. Take for example, paradigms in Plato and Marx. This example, like two sample figures considered as influential figures in the humanities.
Muhammad Haris:
Paradigms in Plato and Marx and the ethically loaded, though drastically different, external reference in both thinkers, the Ultimate/Good in Plato and the revolutionary proletariat in Marx now. Certainly we can be, like one could be teaching Marx or one could be teaching Plato and talk about universals in Plato and universals in Marx and never really talk about the ethical principle or the ethical underlying ethical assumptions, for that universal in Plato or in Marx. But my position is that paradigms, universals, forms and exemplars, which we teach and which we talk about in the humanities, always do have some kind of ethical underpinning and that there are ethical differences between thinkers across periods and not just theoretical and conceptual differences. There is a difference in ethical standpoint, there is a difference in ethical lens and not just conceptual lens.
Muhammad Haris:
And are we training our students well enough? Are we cultivating that kind of sensibility and the capacity to make judgments between different ethical standpoints and to choose an ethical standpoint of one's own, when coming to terms precisely with our time or their time and the moment in history. So just a bit about Pakistan, also over here, because our program is obviously not situated in the United States or in Europe. We are working in Karachi. The Pakistani state is a very specific kind of monstrosity. Perhaps, all states, nation-states in the world are a monstrosity of one kind of another. Pakistani states, certainly, presents itself as a very special kind of monstrosity — and we are living under it. And we are also living in a country and where the state has decided to heavily in debt, the population to the IMF.
Muhammad Haris:
We are deeply entrenched and you know how it works. When a country, when a society gets deeply entangled in a debt relation to IMF, then all that the people have is a promise of a better future, a brighter, better future, which is on the horizon, always to come, but actually it never really arrives. And that the present moment is quite saturated with catastrophes. So we are living in a Pakistan where we have — you can read about it in the news — very high rates of inflation and cost of life. And all the problems that come to people in countries that are heavily indebted to the IMF. Then we also have Pakistan-specific fascism, which is very much here. We are also carrying colonial imprint.
Muhammad Haris:
There is cultural devastation. There is immigration, like the problem of what is usually known as brain-drain, or just people aspiring to leave the country and go to the United States or Europe, or somewhere in the Middle East and there is also the very imminent threat of global warming and species extinction, which is of course also a global thing, global problem. But our society is particularly well urban and Alexander, you can like tell me very candidly if I run out of time or have I? Probably have.
Alexander Key:
And you get a second bite as a cherry, as it were, after Dan to get the stuff that you wanted to get across out then.
Muhammad Haris:
OK, alright. So I'll get to my final point really, final couple of points that humanities as a field is, as they say about philosophy certainly applies to humanities broadly is, a battlefield between, different theses, different theoretical positions and the question is that: Is the conflict between theoretical positions, a purely, precisely theoretical and conceptual conflict, or is there also a conflict between ethical standpoint, ethical presuppositions, ethical points of view and outlook. So that's one area in which I think I would like our program to be stronger, as in ... beyond teaching that one course specifically on ethics of disagreement at the public intellectual and social responsibility is to give students a more sustained focus on the ethical dimensions and underpinning of theoretical frameworks. And the other thing is to have a humanities curriculum that actually speaks to historicity and inheritance in our context specifically.
Muhammad Haris:
And the last thing really that I had was, just thinking about Walter Benjamin as an exemplar of a figure, who writes from the standpoint of the oppressed, but then also in interesting ways, combines being transcendence with very concrete historicity and certainly an acute awareness of the catastrophe, which affects what he calls the Jetztzeit, the messianic time, the now time, and maybe Benjamin is a model for our program and given our historical situation in context and really coming out of a culture where the platonic basis remains very strong in the way in which people would at the fork level, think about Islam and think about, let's say ontology. So, that's it. And I'm sorry for taking extra time. Thank you very much for listening.
Alexander Key:
Tremendous. Thank you. Thank you ever so much Haris. Yeah. And, and also we're going to, I'm going to get the, the full slide deck from you, and we'll be sharing that afterwards and I will, can everybody hear me OK? I'm going to now pass it over with great pleasure to Dan Edelstein.
Dan Edelstein:
So Alexander, am I supposed to first respond or am I supposed to just, OK. I just do my...
Alexander Key:
Start with kind of you...
Dan Edelstein:
OK.
Alexander Key:
And then, Haris gets to respond, and then you get to respond to Haris.
Dan Edelstein:
OK. So I think there are some interesting, overlapping areas in our respective talks. I'm going to talk a bit less about ethics and sort of more about a problem that's emerged as we were really working on the Humanities Core, but it's also a problem that's sort of been around for all sorts of curricular reforms, going back a couple of decades. And it's really a question like, how do we organize the humanities both institutionally, but also intellectually? And I think that, working on the Humanities Core has really given this some... It's been a very helpful process, but it's also highlighted sort of where the problem is. So it seems like now in terms of organization, we have a spectrum with two extremities. On the one hand, we have fields. We're all, we're all very comfortable with fields.
Dan Edelstein:
We know our field, we know each other's field, there's a sort of a natural logic to the field. It has its journals, it has its conferences, it has its natural boundaries. And then on the other end, we have this thing that we're starting to all to work on as a Global Humanities, Comparative Humanities. And in a way there's also kind of a natural logic to that, which is like just the logic of totality, right? It's everything under the sun, can be part of Global Humanities. And then it's just a matter of figuring out how we put this together. But the piece I've I've been struggling with is, what's in the middle? What's between the local and the global? And I think the reason why this is so difficult to identify, and I was thinking of, Muhammad's conversation and in his talk about, traditions and the local inheritances and all that, is that, especially when you're talking about this in the West, how do you do this in a way that isn't ideologically corrupt?
Dan Edelstein:
What sort of can take the place, not in terms of, trying to come up for a more palatable version of Western Civilization but just almost epistemologically, how do we think about the relation between, the cultures and the times from Herodotus to Beckett and how do we even describe, what it seems is going on there as some sort of organizing principle. And this has just come up time and time again as even, institutionally and curricular, as we've tried to organize these various tracks. I'm always reminded of this great Jewish joke that my dad told me, which is the story of this little boy who's watching his mother make, what looks like a crepe. And he says, "Oh, can I eat it now?"
Dan Edelstein:
"Can I eat it now?" And she says, "No, we're not ready, not ready." And she folds it once and he goes, "Oh, is it ready?" And she goes, "No, no you have to wait." And she folds it two more times. Verred's probably the only one who's going to get this. And he goes, "Oh, is it now? Is it, is it ready? Is it ready? Can I eat it?" And finally she puts it on the plate and he looks at it and he goes, "Ugh, crepe lock," which is a sort of a Polish kind of food. And I always sort of feel like, with having, a Classics Department, a German Department, a French Department, etc. But if you put them all together into something that sounds and looks like Western Culture, people like, "Ugh, crepe lock, right".
Dan Edelstein:
There's a, there's a sense that, put together in that way. It's not appealing anymore. So, I should say, I'm just trying things out tonight. So, I might indeed take up Alexander on his offer to strike things from the record, if that if need be, but essentially, I wanted to actually start with the criticisms of, of Western Civilization and Western Culture, precisely in order to realize, let's take this seriously, what's wrong with these ideas? So there's two main ones that I think I want to focus on. And I'm not saying there aren't others, but I think the two really interesting ones are first geographical, right? We say Western, that's a geographical reference. It has a history of course. Grant and I are still supposed to take a walk and talk about Herodotus this and the role of geography in creating this Western tradition.
Dan Edelstein:
But I think that the, the problem there is, as Kwame Anthony Appiah pointed out in his influential articles and essays, why there's no such thing as Western Civilization, well, how do you draw that map? It seems like it's kind of shifting over time. Maybe we include the Middle East up until Islam, but then we don't, none of this really seems to make that much sense. And so this gets to Appiah's, I think deeper point, which is that cultures are naturally porous, right? That even if we could, even if there was this nice boundary, we could draw somewhere, that's not really the way that cultures work. Aesop's Fables might have more to do with the Panchatantra than with Homer, there's trade routes, etc. So, in a way, geography is kind of a really bad way to think about how we organize culture. So that's the first problem.
Dan Edelstein:
Now, the second big problem with Western civilization is really the role that civilization took on in the 18th and 19th centuries. And especially the way in which it became an ideological construct. So, the way in which, Western civilization, or this was about freedom. Eastern civilization — well, they're kind of about mysticism I'm thinking of André Malraux's terrible, in 1926, "La Tentation de l'Occident and all these sort of Orientalists stereotypes. And, I think, you know, the problem here again is that it's also kind of arbitrary. So freedom is important in ancient Greek philosophy and parts of, of Roman philosophy. But frankly, from the Battle of Actium to the French Revolution, you can't really say that freedom was the defining point of even, what goes by, Western civilization.
Dan Edelstein:
So whatever we choose to sort of try and pin down a culture or a civilization with any idea, you know, it's bound to be ideological, it's bound to be somewhat arbitrary. And of course, you know, there's the whole stain of, you know, the colonial effort, the "mission civilisatrice" stuffing the civilization down people's throats, which, is one of the reasons why, you know, Western civilization is just so unpalatable. So, Lisa's like, "Well, so do we need anything you could answer?" All right, it's all a myth, right? There's, there's lots of people saying, Western civilization, it's just this like imperialistic creation. And so we should just get rid of it. And, I agree in that, narrow sense that the way I've sketched it out, it has huge problems and it's not a helpful area, but I feel like, there's something missing.
Dan Edelstein:
And I'm reminded actually, I'm glad Ron is here tonight. I'm reminded of one of the early experiments in, in Hum Core when we first started these Friday sessions. So, for those of you who aren't familiar with the program, we'd meet twice a week with our sort of regional track. And then on Fridays, we'd all get together, all the different tracks. And, and the professors typically... The idea is that the students would talk to each other. It turns out it's just the faculty, but I just remember this wonderful session Christopher Krebs had given a lecture on Homer. And so I think it was about heroism in, in Homer and afterwards, Rhonda said, "that's, that's really fascinating." This is unthinkable and classical Chinese thought, you just don't get that. It's like one of these cases where, it's a completely different way of thinking about heroism.
Dan Edelstein:
And it was... I'm probably mangling this because it was like three years ago and I forgot to write it down, but what I found so illuminating was I actually learned something both about Chinese culture that day and about Homeric philosophy, right? That you're really appreciating something particular here by noticing its difference with another culture. And I feel like that's what you lose when you don't have some kind of middle ground, you don't have this ability to recognize the degrees of similarity and dissimilarity between ideas. And that's actually, I think, important, it's important for understanding what you're working on and also for appreciating cultural differences. And I also want to go a bit farther. I think that, falling back on fields as basically our unit of analysis is just as mythologizing. What makes a field?
Dan Edelstein:
I'm in a department that in many universities is called romance languages, right? So, why do we do romance languages? Why is French with Italian? I mean, basically this is some inheritance of the German Research University ... lumped divided up knowledge and wissenschaft in certain ways. And we're still living in a world that Alexander von Humboldt imagined. Is that really what we're going to pledge our flag in and, say that this is the natural way of organizing knowledge? I don't think so. I feel like there is sort of a rationale for this beyond just, the sort of cultural one, I was describing. Now, the other alternative is to say, you could just go full nominalist or full globalist.
Dan Edelstein:
I'm not even going to do fields. I do. I do Voltaire and Rhonda is Confucius and we don't need anything in the middle. And you know, sometimes that works, sometimes it's interesting. I think that the real limit there is that, we're going to have a hard time pedaling our wears to students. Right, if we don't have some way of sort of bringing each other together, like what Blair has in common with a Victorianist or a modernist. If we can't kind of conceptualize that, it just becomes very difficult, I think to... Already we have a hard time with the humanities, but it becomes even harder. The alternative is just to go totally global. There's departments of literature, where there's no... I think actually San Diego still has one.
Dan Edelstein:
And I think sometimes that works great. The problem perhaps is that, you run the risk of just living in a completely decontextualized world. And again, for students, I think that's the most problematic. So let me try to sketch out a possible solution. And this is really the part where I'm really just kind of riffing here. And I was inspired by all of these, all these quotes by authors, from Seneca to Dubois, who talk about, what do they find in the liberal arts ... Or liberal education. And I think what's so interesting in all of them, is this, this sense of a connection, right? So this typically gets expressed with the metaphor of the conversation. So in Seneca's essay, on the shortness of life, he writes about all of his most intimate friends, who always have the time for him, who are always at home, meaning, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and others.
Dan Edelstein:
This is of course the famous letter of Machiavelli to Vettori, where he similarly describes, when he's in exile and coming in from a day of like capturing birds and glue, and then living this horrible life. But he, but he washes his hands. He puts on his nice clothes and he goes back and converses with the ancients. And even Dubois in "The Souls of Black Folk" has that beautiful line: "I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas." So, it seems like for all of these authors, it's this sort of the great conversation, this sense that we have... There are these connections that are there, that we can just pick up at any time. And what I think is interesting about focusing on connections is that, it doesn't matter what you're talking about.
Dan Edelstein:
There doesn't have to be a shared idea. You know Nietzsche spends pages and pages railing against Plato, but it doesn't matter. You don't have to agree for there to be a connection. It doesn't have to be some kind of ideological hole that is sort of bringing these people together. You can get precisely the kinds of disagreements that Muhammad was talking about, in some of their classes. Now, the way that.. Thinking about this is that, it's kind of like a network. And I should say, I'm really using networks in sort of the Lévi-Strauss way of like, networks are good to think with. So I'm not trying to literally describe this as a network. I'm just using a network to kind of imagine how this works. And I think it solves two of the big problems that I noticed first with civilization.
Dan Edelstein:
So think about porosity, the way that, no culture is closed. And this was a big point that, that Appiah makes well. No network is closed. I mean, that's the whole thing with networks that are almost always connect there's connections everywhere. I imagine if you were to bother to do a network graph of like all 20th-century authors, you'd probably find that there's only like three to four degrees of separation between any given nodes. So it's, they're always porous, but at the same time networks also cluster. So, it feels like there's this way in which, you can sort of have your cake and eat it too, that sure, there's connections. Like if you take like Epicurus famously was taught by Pyrrho who might have traveled to Alexander with India, there could be a really fascinating connection between Epicurus and Indian sages. Right? It kind of makes sense, actually, but of course at the same time and not exclusively, there are tons of edges or connections between Epicurus other Greek philosophers, Roman philosophers, modern Europeans. And so the clustering factor would be much stronger between that group, which isn't to say that's more important, which isn't to say that's more interesting. It's just, there is like a phenomenon that we could recognize there without having to rely on geographical or ideological descriptions.
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
Dan Edelstein:
The other reason I think that networks are kind of helpful to think with is that they occur at different scales. So in a way we can get our fields back. There would be a cluster of British romantics. That would be within a broader cluster of British authors, which would probably be next to a cluster of French and Spanish authors, which would in turn, if you zoom out enough, might have some connections with Indian and Chinese authors. You can kind of go up and down in scale. And at each point, there's a unit of analysis that kind of makes sense, but that isn't exclusive. It's not saying that this is the only way you should be thinking about these authors and indeed in some cases, if you look at romantics for instance, it might not be nationalism that defines it. It could well be the British romantics were more influenced by Rousseau than by other 18th-century authors.
Dan Edelstein:
And then finally, I think you could also here talk about waiting networks, but I'll skip that. So let me just conclude... I just want to underscore that my point is not to try to reconstruct Western Civ or Western culture. It's more like, how can we just talk about these different cultural organizations, maybe sometimes thinking about the weaker links will be what's more interesting. It's more interesting to think about Schopenhauer in relationship to the Upanishads maybe than to Hegel. But it feels like this would be a way to sort of help us organize and think about cultural groupings, cultural clusterings, which is kind a horrible expression, at different levels without having to fall back on sort of shady ideological constructions. Alright. Thank you very much.
Alexander Key:
Thank you, tremendous. Haris, you have a few minutes to add in.
Muhammad Haris:
Thank you so much, Alexander. And thank you, Dan, for the wonderful exposition, of course. There is so much that I want to address in what you've said. First of all, let's say an affirmation of what you're saying regarding the humanities and understanding the humanities in terms of communication, and dialogue, and dialectical interaction, and networking. That idea, or that thought is very much at work in our program. And just to give you a quick example, I am at this point, at this moment, designing a course. It's called "Jaun Elia and Philosophy." And Jaun Elia was a poet who was born in India, but lived and died in Karachi in around 2004. And there is really no English material on Jaun Elia, but Jaun Elia was an immensely well-read poet and was deeply inspired by philosophical romanticism. And also took up a very radically anti-Plato stance in his essays and so on.
Muhammad Haris:
And certainly the theme of the death of God, what is known as the eclipse of God or the disappearance of God, that makes an appearance in his poetry. So I'm teaching the course with a person, a poet Syed Afzal Ahmed who's actually one of the greatest living poets in Urdu. But a very humble and unassuming sort of person and also specializes in what known as Sabk-e Hindi, 18th-century Persian poetry written in North India. So that kind of experiment, certainly our university and then the milieu of the program enables us to create that kind of communication between traditions, but then also between humanities areas and while we are maintaining the disciplinary and the field focus, we are also simultaneously trying to explode the boundaries between these disciplines and to have courses which are genuinely networked in that sense.
Muhammad Haris:
And just a couple of other remarks that I wanted to make to your wonderful commentary. So given where we are in Pakistan and in Karachi, I consider it very important to like to present to students a critique of what I would call a hermeneutics of suspicion — is to always already look at, if something is coming from what you would call Western civilization to look at it with suspicion and say, "OK, this is, you know... We are not going to trust it. We're not going to believe it because it..." So, in fact, in the conceptual genealogies course, which I've taught once and I'm involved in teaching again next semester, I begin the course with Nietzsche and I try to create some provocation around the genealogy of morals and what Nietzsche has to say about the hermeneutics of suspicion over there. So instead of suspicion, think affirmatively about the history of the humanities.
Muhammad Haris:
So that's one thing. The other point about what you have to say about ideology and the conversation on ethics is of course going to get very fraught and we can debate about it. So this is separate from the point about looking at humanities dialectically and in conversation and as communication, and rather to actually parse out the differences between ethical standpoints and even ideological standpoints. And so in a world, which is I think the whole world, and then our world more so than other parts of the world, deeply damaged by let's say this thing called capitalism and all its contradictions. So I think thinking a bit, or at least presenting to students, some ideologically driven literature in the humanities, literature coming out of what is known as the Marxist way, also is I think it's important.
Muhammad Haris:
And, the very last point, I promised that... Here one thing that we try to do in all of our courses, and in fact, it's not us teachers trying to do it, it's students, is that we try to keep discussion on the humanities very, very raw and urgent. And as students who are bringing in... So our students, the students in our program and students in the university who take humanities courses, they take these courses because they look at sources in the humanities at sites to go to, to address these very deep pressing problems that they have about what they see as their ontological condition, what they see as their political condition. And I think the greatest authors, you know, Western civilization or not, doesn't matter, but I think the greatest minds, the greatest authors do have something to give to young people which they can actually, if they really get into these books and texts, it speaks to the very urgent questions and crises, which they are going through in their own lives as they live through what I think are rather catastrophic times. So thank you very much.
Alexander Key:
Tremendous. Thank you. Dan, a few minutes before the Q-&-A.
Dan Edelstein:
Yeah. I mean, it's really fascinating to hear such a... I mean, I'm so grateful to Alexander for organizing this sort of global forum here that we get to hear about the humanities in such different context and settings. I feel like maybe I see a little bit of what you're describing in our students as well. I mean, I'm teaching in class right now for frosh, for the first-year students, that's a first year requirement, on the point of what's the point of college and the good life. And I do sort of see it as one of my goals to really try, and Ron's teaching this too at the same time, but we're kind of trying to like deprogram them, get them to stop in their tracks and really think about the point of all of this, and to stop just sort of going through the motions and jumping on the conveyor belt to get somewhere.
Dan Edelstein:
And some of that is getting them to question well, why do you think it is most important to make a lot of money? You know, tell me. And I do think that there's kind of an urgent... We need to make this relevant. I think if you don't, if we teach any of this, just as like taking it for granted that they're going to care, we'll just slowly wither up, at least for many of them, maybe they'll be the happy few who come find us, but I do think we face a crisis of relevance. I also feel that one of the things I try to do is steer some of them not away from, but at least point out that there's intrinsic value to doing this. Right?
Dan Edelstein:
That it's not just about... I guess, against Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, that sometimes the point is just to understand the world, not to change it, because they seem to want to rush into changing the world. And it's not that I don't want them to change the world, but I'd like them to think a little bit about what they're doing beforehand. And I think for that, they do have to step back and not be instrumental about everything that they're studying and learning because I do feel like whether it's instrumental in a kind of, "I want to get a consultancy job," or it's "I want to go work in this social justice nonprofit," I feel like that instrumentality is actually always an obstacle towards really engaging in this kind of conversation. The life of the mind that I think is ultimately one of the greatest things that we can give students.
Alexander Key:
Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you both. Thank you both ever so much. So now we've got a bit of time for Q-&-A. I'm going to abuse my position as organizer to sneak in the first couple of questions if I may. So one thing that I wanted, one thing that I wanted to say to Dan, when Dan was talking about networks and the more complex and perhaps more accurate story that networks can tell as opposed to civilizational blocks, is... And Dan also said, like the West for example, you can say the Middle East is part of the West until Islam, and then it's not part of the West, and it strikes me as someone who works mostly on Arabic, the, the lack of connection between Islamic civilization, classical Arabic culture, and European culture.
Alexander Key:
Or in Dan's vocabulary, the way these two networks would be very separate, they would cluster that kind of separate thing. It's just a story of empires. I find that on some way, the way I think about global humanities just slips into global empires. There's the Imperial West, there's the Imperial U.S. as it exists today, there was the Imperial Britain, there's the Imperial Islamic world. And in the end, and I worry about just turning it into comparative empire studies, but I feel like that does happen to me. And a version of the same sort of question to Haris is that when we talk about ethics and when we talk about the importance of ideology and dealing with conflicting interpretations and in the inherited damaged forms in Pakistan, and I would say quite frankly, that California is full of inherited damaged forms as well.
Alexander Key:
In fact, the inherited forms are much more damaged here than they are in elsewhere. It seems like that conversation just pushes us into thinking about the humanities as political. And yet I noticed that we tend not to say political too much, and I don't know, and Dan was kind of getting at that, I think towards the end of his comment, that tension between how political should it be is, so again, something that I don't really know. So yeah, if either of you would want to respond to those thoughts and then, yeah. And then people can sort of wave their hands or put their hands up in the reactions or whatever.
Dan Edelstein:
Yeah. You know, it's funny. I think that's a great point, Alexander, and actually, I've been sort of toying around with the idea of writing something longer about this, but essentially the two moments I think that made something that we at one point called Western culture or Western civilization possible, were the Macedonian Empire and the spread of Greek as lingua franca throughout the eastern Mediterranean and the Roman Empire, which synthesizes all of those previous Mediterranean cultures and ultimately Christianity. You can write three quarters of your... It's what I used to tell my students, but obviously it's an exaggeration, you can tell three quarters of European history under the tagline of Otto III of renovatio imperii Romanorum. Right? It's all still about trying to restore the Roman empire, frankly all the way up to the treaty of Rome and the E.U.
Dan Edelstein:
So, I mean I agree that empires are huge in creating these sort of large scale clusters and maybe you're right, that the sort of... At a certain scale, all we're really seeing are the results of imperial clustering. On the other hand, I still think that... I guess you could take it a step down and say, well, nation-building is similar ... but I don't know if we can get around that. I mean, I see the problem, but I kind of think that maybe we just need to sort of work with that. That's history, right? If we get rid of that, we're just writing history out of it.
Alexander Key:
Haris?
Muhammad Haris:
Yes. Yes. Alexander, yes. So I'd like to certainly respond to your questions. So the way our program is currently is precisely ethically neutral and politically neutral. That's how the program is structured. That's the stance that we have actively taken. But the question is that these great books and ideas and literatures, whether you're looking at authors in Western civilization, or you're looking at authors from our region, from our part of the world, Farsi and Arabic and so on. These great minds when they present us with universals and paradigms, are they ethically neutral in there? Because my position is that no there is a very definite ethical standpoint.
Muhammad Haris:
There is a very definite... It might not be explicitly stated and I keep going back to Marx, I do like to read Marx a bit and teach Marx, but Marx never uses moral language. Never. He never once uses the term justice in any of his books, because for him the whole thing about capitalism is kind of rife with contradictions. And so for Marx, there is no point in talking about justice because the whole totality is exploitative and so on. So whether it's implicit or explicit, there are ethical standpoints, there are ethical positions, which underpin these books, these ideas, these conceptual frameworks that we are teaching our students. So really a simple concern here and yet an urgent one in my view is to enable our students to see not just differences in conceptual framework, but differences in ethical standpoint and in ethical position.
Muhammad Haris:
So that's one thing. The other point about humanities being, in general, sort of ethically and politically neutral in the way in which the curriculums are presented. I mean, isn't that the kind of thing which has led to, or the kind of problem which led to the decline in humanities departments and programs globally? Because the humanities are not speaking to urgent political, like precisely, political issues and problems the way in which someone in a political science department might be doing.
Muhammad Haris:
So when we look at people in sociology and in political science, we say oh, OK, this is shallow stuff. What are they? They're just churning out existing discourses on race and gender and so on and so forth. But the thing is that from within the humanities also, we can be speaking to these deep-rooted social, cultural and moral issues. In fact, give students a much richer criteria for making judgment when it comes to these very fraught, moral problems, which they are contending with in their lives. So these are my two quick responses to your second excellent question. Thank you very much.
Alexander Key:
Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. And now we have a couple of questions and if you don't mind, I'll kind of introduce people because I know who they are. So Professor Blair Hoxby teaches English. He's currently teaching in the Humanities Core, The Renaissance in Europe.
Professor Blair Hoxby:
Great. Thank you. This is an interesting conversation. I guess I just had sort of three quick comments. One is mostly responding more to the beginning of Dan's statement. I feel as just being sort of anti-intellectual and just worrying about what works in the classroom and so forth, I don't think we need to be that apologetic. I think that all of our cultures have amazing things that we have accomplished in the West, in Japan, in Islam, and so forth. And we all have blood on our hands and are guilty of genocides or conquests or oppression of women or other awful things. And it just seems to me in the most basic sense, if you want students to like what you're trying to teach, that you need to be enthusiastic about what is great about that culture, but also honest and open, like open-eyed with them about what was a failure and what they might want to correct in the future and so forth.
Professor Blair Hoxby:
So they can figure out how they're going to take something away for themselves. Right? So I don't know, it just doesn't seem that complicated to me, but it seems to me like if we're running away defensively about why you would want to study ancient Greek or Roman culture or something, we've already lost before we start. So I object to the defensiveness.
Professor Blair Hoxby:
Second, I think on the ethics, I don't know that a whole program or a whole course needs to have a single ethic. I mean, at least I find it very natural if I'm teaching the Stoics. I love the Stoics. I just pretend I'm Seneca for a week and I teach Seneca and although I don't particularly love Luther in all ways, I do become Luther for a week and explain, what he has to tell us and so forth. And I, again, I think that you can make it clear what is the ethical force of what they're reading and why it might be of importance to them without necessarily saying this whole course, "In the end we realized Marx was right and Luther was wrong," or something.
Professor Blair Hoxby:
I just don't see that that's essential, but I do think it's essential that you show that many of these thinkers have been absolutely grappling about what makes life important and how you should treat other people and how their thinking can apply to our own students' thinking, I guess. And finally, on the networks thing, I'm sure that could be done intelligently and we are all intelligent people. So we can probably do a better job than Stanford's algorithms, but think about, you know, on the Stanford Library. Right? If you put in any name and look at the network, it's garbage. And so it's a very... I think it's a very dangerous model and I really think it could turn out. Yeah. I think it could be very bad unless it were done very intelligently by people. That's it.
Alexander Key:
Tremendous. Yeah, and responses from either of the speakers?
Dan Edelstein:
So I actually just want to clarify one thing. I'm not suggesting we literally map any of this. I was really just using that word as a thought model, not as something to do practically. I think it would be crazy and impossible really. How would you even determine edges and you'd just get a giant hairball. So I agree, it's not something I'd recommend doing. Just quickly on the defensiveness. I think the reason that I've found myself on the defensive is that I've often been put there and not so much by students, frankly, but by our colleagues.
Professor Blair Hoxby:
I agree about that. I think you're right about that, but that's our problem that we need to fix.
Dan Edelstein:
Yeah. Right. But I feel like part of fixing it is just at least being able to come up with a way of talking about what we're doing, that doesn't open itself to these kinds of attacks that we know are always there.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]
Alexander Key:
Tremendous. OK, thanks for coming, Professor. Professor, who will be speaking from UCI, who will be speaking later in the workshop series. OK, so a question from Chiara Giovanni, who is an advanced Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature, and is also working as a research assistant with this workshop series. Chiara?
Chiara:
Thank you. This is more of a quick question for Dan, because I don't actually know how labor conditions work around universities in Pakistan. But if that's something that Haris feels equipped to speak to, then I would love to hear his response. I was really intrigued by the discussion about how to organize the humanities logistically and intellectually, and the pros and cons of maybe having something like a Literary Studies Department, and how that might lead to a kind of decontextualization. I'm curious how much of the building of literature departments is actually about building clusters and networks of people, and trying to overcome field and disciplinary boundaries, and more of a condensing due to cuts and defunding of the humanities and individual literature departments.
Chiara:
Because my impression was that a lot of that, particularly in the U.K. where I'm from — the condensing of a German Department, and a French Department, and so on, into a single Modern Languages, is much more about budget cuts. And so, I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit, and more broadly perhaps how we might work with some of these constraints, when thinking about continuing existing curricula, and whether in Stanford or in Karachi, thinking about planning new avenues of pedagogical exploration of the humanities?
Dan Edelstein:
That's a great question, Chiara. I think most of the time, you're right. It's definitely more for administrative reasons that these departments get closed. Though I do believe, and maybe Sharon, who mentioned that UCSC, has a Department of Literature, might comment on how that came about. I think places like San Diego and Santa Cruz where that's the structure, that it was implemented that way originally, so there was kind of an intellectual rationale, not just an administrative one. Sharon, do you want to comment on that?
Sharon:
Briefly, Santa Cruz came into existence in 1965 in a kind of utopian impulse. And yeah, Literature was Literature from the very beginning, because the whole campus was designed in a way to minimize field disciplines. As it's evolved over the years, what it turns out now is that we teach in material from a range of languages, that in any other university would be four, five or six departments. And yet, we're smaller than the typical English department. But the result is that no one is looking over your shoulder. You can kind of teach whatever you want.
Sharon:
And I'd have to say that all of my colleagues obviously come out of training in a recognizable national or whatever literary tradition, but almost everyone I'd say in my department is somehow pushing the boundaries of their original disciplinary training. So, intellectually, it's a really fantastic kind of stew of ideas, and different groups that come together in interest groups, and then reformulate. It's kind of constantly in motion.
Dan Edelstein:
Yeah, if I could just... I think that's wonderful that these other models do exist. But also, to Blair's point, I feel like if we can... I feel like it's so random to be in these departments that were created, as I said, we're living in Humboldt's world. For a while actually, Google has under, if you search for my name, it said, "Romaniste," which I quite liked actually. Romanist. But it was these bizarre categories. But I do sort of feel like if we can think of a better intellectual rationale for how to organize the humanities, maybe the next time someone creates a Habib University, or a Santa Cruz University... I won't refer to the university that was just announced today, but that you could do something a little more original. Maybe there's a different way than what the Humboldts thought about back in the 18-teens.
Muhammad Haris:
Yes, I'd like to respond very quickly to Chiara. Is that right?
Chiara:
Chiara. Thank you.
Muhammad Haris:
OK. When it comes to labor capital conditions, we have capitalism here, our own version of it. That kind of conflict between the labor and capital exists over here also. There is exploitation of teaching staff and so on. That continues. On the positive side, we do have a university over here that is committed to having a Liberal Core program, which is not the comparative humanities program, it's like a liberal core program for the entire university, like all students have to take history, philosophy, and logic, and language and expression courses, in the Liberal Core curriculum.
Muhammad Haris:
Some of our Liberal Core courses are actually very, very ideologically driven, and the universities are committed. For instance, we have a course called, "What is Modernity?" In any other, I think, university in Pakistan, that course couldn't be taught. It wouldn't exist, because it's a critique of modernity. It begins with the book, "Exterminate All The Brutes," by Sven Lindqvist. We have that, and the university is very committed to our program, even though the Comparative Humanities program is still very small. We admit only 10 to 12 students in one batch.
Muhammad Haris:
But the university keeps providing funds for the program, and in fact, we are launching a major faculty recruitment process just now in different areas across the programs, because the university leadership thinks that the program is premised on some strong conceptual foundations, and they find the idea to be exciting. The audience for the program, the students who do come and talk to us, they find the program exciting. The hope is that despite there being the capital labor tensions, the program will go on, at least in the near future.
Muhammad Haris:
I don't see a reason to worry about the program being struck down, or the Liberal Core suddenly going out of existence, because the institution has a very strong commitment, and Pakistan is a barren landscape for higher education. It truly is. Our university in that sense, despite being a small university, it really does shine through in Pakistan. Thank you. I hope that addresses your question.
Alexander Key:
And Habib is basically hiring tenure-track faculty to start these courses as a broad thing. It's not running on the model of some of the American and British institutions that are working with adjunct faculty.
Muhammad Haris:
We don't have tenure, let me be honest. No. We don't. Yeah, so you would say that it's ... faculty, but you have a rolling contract. You do have a system in place for people to seek promotion, and get promotion. Now, I'll be honest, we have a severe turnover problem of professors coming in and leaving after two semesters, three semesters. Why? Because Karachi is a tough city to live in. I'm from Karachi, so it's OK. This is my home and city.
Muhammad Haris:
But for someone to come to Karachi from elsewhere in Pakistan, or for someone to come to Karachi from another country, it's not an easy city to settle into. We do have a very serious turnover problem. But the university keeps hiring, and as I said, we have just initiated a major search. We've currently advertised two positions: one in Comparative Literature and then one in Urdu Literature, South Asian Literature, looking for Ph.D.s, and that we are in the process of interviewing candidates currently for that. Thank you.
Alexander Key:
Keith. Keith Baker, Professor in History, who is currently going to be teaching with Dan Edelstein in the spring. Are you there, Keith? I see you put your hand up.
Keith:
Can you hear me now?
Alexander Key:
Yes.
Keith:
Thank you. It's been very fascinating. I just had a thought about networks. It seems to me that the idea of networks is a kind of two-dimensional metaphor. One could think of networks very effectively, I think, and in very imaginary ways, transhistorically. But I wonder how one would build historicity into that model? It seems to me one would have to have a three-dimensional conception of networks, rather than just a two-dimensional one. I don't know how that would work, but it does seem to me the risk of the network approach would be the risk of a kind of ahistorical interpretation.
Dan Edelstein:
I mean, you're right, of course. I think in a way though, I guess my answer would be, maybe there's some value to the ahistoricity. And by that, I'm not sort of pushing some kind of presentist, decontextualized point, but I'm going back to Seneca, Machiavelli, Dubost, who were saying, the whole point is that they're always at home. The whole point is that these authors are not lost in time. They're not completely foreign to us. We still have a connection to them.
Dan Edelstein:
In a way, that's what creates the culture, right? It's by feeling that you're still part of that, the way that Blair was saying with Seneca. My kids tease me, because I'm always talking about "my friend Seneca." Like, "Who is this Seneca?" "He's been dead for 2,000 years, but he's a really good friend." And that also I think is meaningful, in the way that these cultural structures come about. Though obviously, you're losing something if you emphasize that, so I take your point completely.
Alexander Key:
Yeah, and I would just jump into say, it flattens the... We're not the only people who flatten. If you go and read people someone from Pakistan writing in Arabic in the 1600s, they flatten in exactly the same way, and talk to people from thousands of miles and centuries away as if they were right next to them. Haris, and then Grant Parker.
Muhammad Haris:
Actually, I just wanted to respond to Professor Baker's comment. Because this is precisely the worry that I have about our program as it exists, because we do have a sort of inner network, without using that idiom. But I am afraid that we might just be pushing our students into a sort of theoretical wilderness, where all they have is comparative analysis, and they are comparing one thinker and one school of thought with another, and creating conversation between genres and periods. But the kind of depth that we are looking for, and the depth that comes in with an emphasis on historicity, and on inheritance, and that deep engagement with historicity, we might just be missing out on that by not creating linkages between the humanities texts and questions of inheritance and historicity. I am very encouraged by that comment from Professor Baker. Thank you.
Alexander Key:
Grant?
Grant Parker:
Thank you. I'm not quite sure what my point is really, but I did have the vertiginous experience of teaching Greeks and Romans one year, and that's my home department in my university. But the next year, going out on a limb and adding South Asia and Africa to the mix, precisely because I wanted to see what kind of conversations known and cherished colleagues would develop, since we had already done our combination the year before, and we were pushing comparison and connections more... harder that second time. But for me, the interesting thing was to rethink the historicizing, because when I taught the Greeks and Romans, which is what I have a lot more experience doing frankly, I tended... It was hard for me to get beyond the historicizing side, because the whole thing was plotted on some kind of linear diachrony, which is clearly of pedagogical use.
Grant Parker:
If students know that Homer comes early on, and then later on when you have Virgil and Ovid, or whatever, that is some kind of knowledge for students to get. But it seemed more exciting, more interesting, more edgy, and more radical to work with colleagues, some of whom are on this call, to identify the themes that we really cared about, and to choose our texts less with a view to a diachronic trajectory, which was impossible of course, since I had chosen two very broad areas to talk about. But if that comparison was the aim, then the historicizing element was still there, that it served a subsidiary function. It was a means to an end, whereas the first time, I hadn't got far enough beyond that means, I felt.
Grant Parker:
That was an interesting contrast for me, those two different iterations, and it certainly whetted my appetite for connections, and for a very flexible notion of what networks are. But networks that remain historically grounded, yet intellectually nourished by a sense of very flexible, very exciting, very unexpected connections, which may or may not... Well, connections and comparisons, and they're really different things, and trying to keep those different things in play. Some of the comparisons that we made within our team were unexpected for all of us, and that was very, very exciting.
Grant Parker:
I think our students got some of that excitement as well, because there was a sense that this was not a well-trodden path. We were all making up this path together, and that was I think one of the most rewarding parts of it certainly for me. I'll stop my ramble there, by saying that firstly, I don't think networks have to be de-historicized, but it's a matter of scale. Do we have just 10 weeks to cover so much? It's a matter of unequal spread though, let's be honest about those. But it's those connections and comparisons, which in my view were very nourishing and exciting for those involved. Thanks.
Alexander Key:
Yeah, and I should say, for those of you who don't already know that Professor Parker in the Classics Department is teaching Hum Core last year and next year. This year is a brief hiatus, but a firm commitment that he will be back next year. OK, so we're five minutes from the end, and I'm going to ask both the two speakers if they have any sort of closing minute or so thoughts.
Dan Edelstein:
I'm happy to say something. Actually, it was kind of inspired by Grant's point. I find this question of the historicizing just so fascinating, because it's sort of like curing cancer. No one is against historicizing. We all believe it's so important, and it is kind of terrifying how our students have often just no sense of whether something happened 20 years ago or 2,000 years ago. At the same time, there's something kind of beautiful about, for them, about presenting it in a way that they can feel that immediate connection.
Dan Edelstein:
I'm reminded of this, I think it's in Allan Bloom, in "The Closing of the American Mind," where he writes about these students at Chicago, who in their essays would refer to "Mr. Aristotle." It was like, Mr. Aristotle, and Mr. Lincoln. It was all the same to them. These were people who had important messages for them to hear. On the one hand, you can sort of throw your hands up like, oy, how can they not think of the historicity here? On the other hand though, maybe that is kind of to Grant's point too, how are we going to catch them? How do we make this relevant?
Dan Edelstein:
If we start by saying, "This happened a really long time ago. There was this totally different society. Also, this society did all these horrible things that you'd probably be offended by, so when you're reading this, you might want to hold your nose." Or, is it like, let's start with this encounter that could just take your breath away. I find sometimes when with Seneca or Epicurus, students are blown away. They didn't know you could think that way, and that sort of initial encounter sometimes I think is also just really worth preserving.
Alexander Key:
Haris?
Muhammad Haris:
Yes, thank you so much, Dan, and thank you, Alexander, and all the participants, and all the wonderful input over here. Certainly, I think there is a balance that one has to be looking for when it comes to presenting these great books, and authors, and ideas, and questions pertaining to historicity, and to inheritance, and some deep-seated moral conflicts and questions. For instance, when I get to teach Plato, which is always an honor and a pleasure, and different in the context of different philosophy courses, I make a deliberate effort to not historicize Plato, in teaching Plato.
Muhammad Haris:
Because there is just something about the arguments in Plato, when Plato makes points about the chasm of gap between the visible and the invisible, and describing the theory of forms, and the various dialogues, that it's important for students to get it. To understand that distinction between the visible and the invisible, or when Plato describes philosophy as therapy for the soul, as therapeia in the Republic. It's important for students to actually not worry about historicizing Plato, and rather pay attention to the force of the argument, and the clarity with which the argument and the dialog is being presented.
Muhammad Haris:
Certainly, I think that's a very important lesson that I've learned in the last few minutes of this conversation, of this importance of maintaining this balance between presenting the argument, presenting the concept, the clarity with which the great author has spoken about a matter, and then the question of historicity, and the other much darker question of inheritance in our present. Thank you so much. This has been a very enlightening conversation.
Alexander Key:
Thank you. Yeah, it's been wonderful. It's been a privilege. We'll be sharing the edited video, and the transcript, and some notes and analysis in the next few weeks, and then we'll have the rest of the workshops. Thank you all ever so much. I can't wait for our next meeting. Yeah, and I'm very grateful to Dan and to Haris.
Dan Edelstein:
Thank you so much. Thanks for organizing this, Alexander, and thanks to everyone for coming.
Muhammad Haris:
Thank you very much.
Alexander Key:
Thank you.
Muhammad Haris:
Thank you, Alexander. Have a good evening. Bye-bye.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:35:55]