Steiner - Lessons of the Masters

Lessons of the Masters

The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 20012002

George Steiner

AFTERWORD

Will the orders of relationship between Masters and disciples, as I have sketched them, persist?

A need to transmit knowledge and skills, a desire to acquire them, are constants of the human condition. Mastery and apprenticeship, instruction and its acquisition must continue so long as societies exist. Life as we know it could not carry on without them. But there are significant changes now under way.

The exponential role and authority of the sciences and of technology in the affairs of the planet go far deeper than economics or the pragmatic. They constitute a tectonic movement, a shift of gravity as far-reaching as is the gradual erosion from adult mentality of religious world views, an erosion precisely correlative with the sovereignty of the scientific. I have referred to evidence that energies and excellence of intellect are already being invested in the sciences beyond any other enterprise. This new equilibrium will be generalized. Computation, information theory and retrieval, the ubiquity of the internet and the global web enact far more than a technological revolution. They entail transformations of awareness, of habits of perception and articulation, of reciprocal sensibility which we are scarcely beginning to gauge. At manifold terminals and synapses they will connect with our (possibly analogous) nervous system and cerebral structures. Software will become, as it were, internalized and consciousness may have to grow a second skin.

The impact on the learning process is already momentous. At his console, the schoolchild branches into new worlds. As does the student with his laptop and the researcher surfing the web. Conditions of collaborative exchange and debate, of memory storage, of immediate transmission and graphic representation have already reorganized numerous aspects of Wissenschaft. The screen can teach, examine, demonstrate, interact with a precision, a clarity, and a patience exceeding that of a human instructor. Its resources can be disseminated and enlisted at will. It knows neither prejudice nor fatigue. In turn, the apprentice can question, object, answer back in a dialectic whose pedagogic value may come to surpass that of spoken discourse.

As if in reaction, recourse to the therapeutic sage, to the guru and more or less secularized shaman is widespread, particularly in the insomniac west. Never have there been more faith healers, purveyors of the occult, spiritual consiglierithe mafioso designation is appropriateor cunning quacks. I have alluded to the often factitious but undeniable wave of Orientalism and mysticism. Even more influential are the reticulations of the psychoanalytic, the rivalries between its Masters, the covens of dependence and discipleship, which colour so many facets of our idiom and mores. Here, although in a guise which can come near to travesty, the classic motifs of mastery and discipleship flourish. In certain ways, the New Age, the climate after Freud, are pre-Socratic. Pythagoras and Empedocles would feel at home.

The charismatic aura of the inspired teacher, the romance of the persona in the pedagogic act will surely endure. At a serious level, however, the domains to which these will apply look to be increasingly restricted. More and more, the transmission of knowledge and of techn will rely on other means and modes of engagement. Human fidelity and betrayal, Zarathustras commandments of love and rebellion, the one exigent of the other, are foreign to the electronic.

Women Masters have been few, though eminent. From Syracuse, Athens, Antioch onward, women disciples have been abundant. This demography is now altering. In the study of literature and modern languages, young women already outnumber young men. Feminization is broadening throughout the humanities and liberal arts. Women are fighting for their just place in the sun of science and technology. The patriarchal structure inherent in the relations of Master to disciple is receding. Gender identity and sexual demarcation are blurring. Nevertheless, the constructs of fidelity and betrayal, of auctoritas and rebellion, of mimesis and rivalry we have looked at are bound to change. In regard to her male followerseven the term disciple may take on a different resonancethe woman Master will develop reflexes, expectations, and symbolic motions of a novel and complex kind. Reciprocally, the male apprentice will arrive at attitudes at once devoted and, in some sense, neutral. Women disciples to women may find themselves in a situation both simplified and unstable, even if we disregard altogether the complicating pulse of the erotic. As yet, the literature is sparse and marginal. I have cited what testimony there is around Nadia Boulanger and Simone Weil. There are premonitions in the fictions of Iris Murdoch. Material is certain to increase. As yet, one can only conjecture as to unprecedented values and tensions.

The third mutation is the most important. It is also the most difficult to define. Whatever its ethnic context, whatever the relevant civilization, Mastery and discipleship have been deeply grounded in religious experience and cult. At their source, the lessons of the Masters were those of the priest. Modulation into pre-Socratic and classical philosophy was almost imperceptible. The magisterium of the medieval and Renaissance Master was formally that of the doctor of divinity, of Thomas Aquinas or St. Bonaventura in the chair. The theological inheritance weakened but its conventions remained in force throughout secular modernity. These forms, these conventions of spirit were underwritten by an almost unexamined, self-evident reverence. To revere ones Matre was the native and natural code of relationship. Where reverence and deference pale, a closely derived respect, a voluntary submission remains. In an enfolding sense, whose definition in the west dates back to Aristotle and Cicero, the dynamism is that of admiration, of admiring pride in the Masters stature and in his acceptance of ones discipleship. This is our master, famous calm and dead, / Borne on our shoulders.

I would entitle our present age as that of irreverence. The causes of this fundamental transformation are those of political revolution, of social upheaval (Ortegas notorious revolt of the masses), of the scepticism obligatory in the sciences. Admiration, let alone reverence, have grown outmoded. We are addicts of envy, of denigration, of downward levelling. Our idols must exhibit clay heads. Where incense rises, it does so towards athletes, pop stars, the money-mad, or the kings of crime. Celebrity, as it saturates our media existence, is the contrary to fama. The wearing, millionfold, of the football gods jersey number or of the crooners hairdo is the contrary to discipleship. Correspondingly, the notion of the sage verges on the risible. Consciousness is populist and egalitarian, or pretends to be. Any manifest turning towards an elite, towards that aristocracy of the intellect self-evident to Max Weber, is close to being proscribed by the democratization of a mass-consumption system (this democratization comporting, unquestionably, liberations, honesties, hopes of the first order). The exercise of reverence is reverting to its far origins in the religious and ritual sphere. Throughout mundane, secular relations the prevailing note, often bracingly American, is that of challenging impertinence. Monuments of unaging intellect, perhaps even our brains, are covered with graffiti. At whose entrance do students rise?