The inerrancy guaranteed to the fundamentalist's canon, text, and translation seeps (by the sound of him) into his commentary on that translated text -- so hard is it to hold the line round the category of matters on which one cannot possibly be mistaken. In the reverse direction also, the errancy readily acknowledged in the sceptic's translation seeps back, &c.
One sceptic equals one-seventh of a fundamentalist: all he has to do is remember what it is that he never doubts on Thursdays.
Science
T. H. Huxley: "In ultimate analysis everything is incomprehensible, and the whole object of science is simply to reduce the fundamental incomprehensibilities to the smallest possible number."
C. Truesdell: "By religion science I refer to the practices of those cults where the lingo and paraphernalia of science are used, not for enquiry, but for affirmation. The creative, intuitive act in science is replaced by a violent faith in one or other devotional recipe. There are three ways that religion science can be recognized. first, it is endlessly repetitive. While the greatest triumph of a scientist is to replace one whole corpus of concepts by another of his own making, in a religion the truth is already revealed, and of a successful composer of prayers no more is desired than skill in praise and juxtaposition. When overwhelmed by great floods of `research' papers containing merely different wordings of the same prayer, we recognise the source as being religion science. Second, what is called `proof' in religion is not distinguished from revelation, and logic, to the extent that it is used at all, is a device for erecting arpeggios upon a known hymn. So also when the literature of a science uses mathematical formulae, not as expressions of a chain of logic, but as ornaments for affirmations of faith, we recognise religion science. Third, the basic tenets of a religion, and generally also the beliefs of its high priests, are true, true beyond question, true forever. They need only proper interpretation, proper exegesis, to cover every case."
Michael Polanyi: "In the days when an idea could be silenced by showing that it was contrary to religion, theology was the greatest single source of fallacies. Today, when any human thought can be discredited by branding it as unscientific, the power previously exercised by theology has passed over to science; hence science has become in its turn the greatest single source of error."
Scientific Method
Gaston Bachelard: "Toutes les méthodes scientifiques actives sont précisément en pointe. Elles ne sont pas le résumé des habitudes gagnées dans la longue pratique d'une science. Ce n'est pas de la sagesse intellectuelle acquise. La méthode est vraiment une ruse d'acquisition, un stratagème nouveau à la frontière du savoir.
En d'autres termes, une méthode scientifique est une methode qui cherche le risque. Sûre de son acquit, elle se risque dans une acquisition. Le doute est en avant d'elle et non pas en arrière comme dans la vie cartésienne.
Il y a plus. Il semble que par un paradoxe insigne, l'esprit scientifique vive dans l'étrange espérance que la méthode scientifique elle-même trouve un échec total. Car un échec, c'est le fait nouveau, l'idée nouvelle. C'est l'espiègle fonction mathématique qui se passe du corset des dérivés en restant honnêtement continue.
On se détourne volontiers d'une méthode trop régulièrement féconde. Une telle méthode finit par passer du rang de méthode de découverte au rang de simple méthode d'enseignement. La clarté est parfois une séduction qui fait des victimes dans le rang des professeurs. On en rencontre qui, doucement, dans le ronronnement des leçons, se contentent d'une clarté ancienne et qui reculent d'une génération."
Scientist
William Whewell, 1834: "The tendency of the sciences has long been an increasing proclivity of separation and dismemberment. The mathematician turns away from the chemist; the chemist from the naturalist; between the mathematician and the chemist is to be interpolated a `physicien' (we have no English name for him), who studies heat, moisture and the like. And thus science, even mere physical science, loses all trace of unity. A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings at York, Oxford and Cambridge, in the last three summers. There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits. Philosophers was felt to be too wide and lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician; savans was rather assuming, besides being French instead of English; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist,and atheist -- but this was not generally palatable; others attempted to translate the term by which the members of similar associations in Germany have described themselves, but it was not found easy to discover an English equivalent for natur-forscher. The process of examination which it implies might suggest such undignified compounds as nature-poker, or nature-peeper; but these were indignantly rejected."
T. H. Huxley: "To any one who respects the English language, I think `Scientist' must be about as pleasing a word as `Electrocution'."
Second-hand gospels
There is a sort of fundamentalist who is very conscious of the danger of the secondary literature taking over (`To listen to any second-hand gospel is perdition of the first Gospel'). The Trappist fundamentalist, who denies himself the luxury of any commentary (on the not unreasonable grounds that human implication-rules can never be sufficiently strict), is for some reason a much rarer bird.
Seducibility
A belief-complex may like to think that it is less liable than its competitors to radical distortion, but would have earned the right to think so only if its own seducibility were part of its teaching. The danger is both universal and protean.
Example: Assume, say, the preaching of class war to be on the whole right. Its advocates will have considered the risk that the message will drive some hearers mad or sectarian. Assume, alternatively, that the preaching of universal brotherhood is on the whole right: the same comment is in order. In both (and all such) cases the advocates swallow hard and carry on, sharing however a profound reluctance to include in their message any indication that it was preceded by a very hard swallow.
Xisms which are silent about their own seducibility are self-condemned. Of course the price of breaking that silence is a high one.
Self
The self negotiates an independent buffer-state between the two Great Powers -- Due Reverence towards tradition and Receptiveness towards other minds -- by using each to subsidise subversion in the other, hoping to achieve what neither of them want: a little space for those few of one's ideas which are more than merely received, whether from the dead or the living.
Thomas Szasz: "Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all."
Conversely, where self-esteem sniffs, we learn the locus of a learnable being spurned.
George Santayana: "Every day accentuated the difference between himself and what happened to him. Living, real, and self-justified was only his own will, the inner spring of his being, the centre and judge of all that unaccountably went on. The world might sometimes seem obsequious and willing to be commanded: but presently it became tiresome, did what it shouldn't do, and showed itself to be cruelly alien, besetting, and unavoidable. This inexplicable wrongness in the world extended inwards sometimes into his own person, when his hands and feet wouldn't do things properly, or he choked or sneezed; all such interference of himself with himself was most ignominious and discouraging. Yes, and sometimes even worse could happen. Fatality, or alien accident, could invade that secret self of his which nobody else could see, and where at least he ought to have been able to play as he chose. But no: things would sometimes go wrong or run thin even there. The interest would die out, the pictures would fade or become ugly and frightening, and you couldn't stop the silly old words repeating and repeating themselves."
J.-P. Sartre: "Peignant de vrais objets avec de vrais mots tracés par une vraie plume, ce serait bien le diable si je ne devenais pas vrai moi aussi."
Sainte-Beuve: "Il est donné de nos jours, à un bien petit nombre, même parmi les plus délicats et ceux qui les apprécient le mieux, de recueillir, d'ordonner sa vie selon ses admirations et selon ses goûts, avec suite, avec noblesse. Je le cherche: où est-il celui qui peut se vanter d'être resté fidèle à soi-même, à son premier et à son plus beau passé? La plupart du temps l'on naît et l'on vit assujetti; la condition humaine ordinaire n'est qu'une suite de jougs successifs, et la seule liberté qui vous reste est d'en pouvoir quelquefois changer. Le travail presse, la nécessité commande, les circonstances entraînent: au risque de paraître se contredire et se démentir, il faut aller sans cesse et recommencer; il faut accepter ces emplois, ces métiers si divers, et, même en les remplissant avec le plus de conscience et de zèle, on élève de la poussière dans son chemin, on obscurcit ses images d'autrefois, on se ternit soi-même et l'on se nuit. Et c'est ainsi qu'avant d'avoir achevé de vieillir, on a passé par tant de vies successives qu'on ne sait plus bien, on en y resongeant, quelle est la vraie, quelle est celle pour laquelle on était fait et dont on était digne, quelle est celle qu'on aurait choisie."
Self-deception
Our new-conceived text arrives with a full set of the rosy filters needed to mask its many imperfections. That the set is so copious is indeed our only hope: by tomorrow we can, in the nature of things, rely on having mislaid one or two of them, and having some fudge exposed for what it is. Self-deception's work-rate is only superhuman after all.
Evidently mankind is quite skilled at finding a justificatory route from any Principle A to any gratifying outcome B. And of course we need no lessons in drawing, from principles of universal altruism, conclusions of special benefit to ourselves. The most we can hope is that alarm-bells will be triggered by the detection not of fallacies but of conclusions a shade too gratifying.
There are two parts to this skill: rhetoric, to turn the warts into dimples, and a well-defended personality which never doubts that the route between principle and profit was indeed travelled in that direction, and not the reverse one. Whereas:
Alexandre Koyré: "En principe, rien n'est placé ici sous le signe d'évidences autonomes et de critères absolus. Les vérités les plus immédiates ne manquent pas en réalité d'être préadaptées aux systèmes qu'on veut fonder sur elles et qui en reçoivent en somme moins d'autorité qu'ils ne leur en confèrent."
Sainte-Beuve: "Le sage sait que le coeur humain est un labyrinthe ainsi fait, et avec un écho si bien ménagé, qu'une seule et même voix peut se faire à elle-même la demande et la réponse. Il tient donc ces réponses pour de simples reflets de désirs, des répercussions et des réflexions du même au même, qui ne prouvent autre chose que le foyer intérieur d'où elles sont parties."
Short cuts
Marvin Minsky: "There is a real conflict between the logician's goal and the educator's. The logician wants to minimize the variety of ideas, and doesn't mind a long, thin path. The educator (rightly) wants to make the paths short and doesn't mind -- in fact, prefers -- connections to many other ideas."
Coleridge: "In all processes of the Understanding the shortest way will be discovered the last. The shortest way gives me the knowlege best; the longest way makes me more knowing."
Silence
Benno Jacob: "It is in fact most striking, in relation to the decisively sacral meaning which the word has in the contemporary camp of heathendom, that it at no juncture plays any role whatsoever in Israelite religion, and more specifically in the ritual of this religion. The silence is so complete that it can only be interpreted as wilful. In the exercise of all his devotional duties, the Israelite priest is totally mute, with the exception of the blessing which he has to utter (Num. 6:24) and which (by virtue of its wording) is not only protected from any misunderstanding, but also expressly guaranteed against any kind of mistaken interpretation. Not one single word is prescribed for the priest to speak in any of his duties. He carries out his functions and sacrificial deeds without a word. He is instructed so fastidiously in the ritual to be observed in the service of the day of atonement, that not one definite word comes to our ears, because he has no such word to pronounce. The rites which he must observe with regard to a leper are so precisely laid down, that there is no whisper of any pertinent formula. The agenda ritual of the Israelite priest in effect only consists of agenda, i.e. acts. If we weigh up the other similarities between the Israelite cult and the cult of other ancient religions, this silence can only amount to conscious opposition. Every and any indication that the word is imbued through itself with some force, and that the prescribed formula operates with a magic effect, should be avoided at all costs."
Frédéric Gaussen: "Lorsqu'en 1920 Célestin Freinet est nommé à son premier poste, dans l'école à deux classes de Bar-sur-Loup, il sort d'une longue convalescence. Il a été gazé pendant la guerre et parle encore difficilement. Cette infirmité est à l'origine de ses recherches. Contraint de se taire en classe, il se dit qu'il faut amener les enfants à s'occuper tout seuls."
Jacques Dupin: "Ce que je vois et que je tais m'épouvante. Ce dont je parle, et que j'ignore, me délivre."
Michael Oakeshott: "The intellectual virtues may be imparted only by a teacher who really cares about them for their own sake, and never stoops to the priggishness of mentioning them. Not the cry but the rising of the wild duck impels the flock to follow him in flight."
Oliver Wendell Holmes sr.: "Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out the music."
Simplification
The ultimate objective is to Understand the Issues. What is the intermediate objective? The usual answer is: An unfortunately but necessarily simplified version. This makes life easier for one teacher, though harder for the next one. We would have more confidence in the strategy if its proponents were less complacent. To hear them you'd think the only remaining problem was how to make the simplification simpler still, without limit.
The position is quite symmetrical: against the confusing complexity of the real must be set the damage caused by sterilized examples. If this were medical research, participants would have to be informed of the dangers, and to give their consent. In writing.
The alternative answer is: Practice with problems from the outset as authentic as possible; and being constantly alert for side-effects.
Access by the learner to the reference-books cannot bypass the discreet palm of the Teacher as Grand Vizier, By Appointment Official Simplifier and Authenticator, and only authorized Provider of Mnemonics.
In this new field of psychophantics I take it for granted that the essential dilemmas are not particularly technical. The specialists in it are naturally reluctant to concede this. They have made their discoveries the hard way, hacking through a thicket of what turned out to be superfluous esotericisms. They would scarcely deserve to be rewarded as they are if the way had been less hard. But now their task is to make the route they pioneered less meritorious to their successors. If the obsolescence the car-designer were asked to build in were his own, he too might be ambivalent about meeting the specification.
Gaston Bachelard: "Tout ce qui est facile à enseigner est inexact."
Skeletons
Theorists have been to some pains to distribute the skeletons in their theory in as large a number of cupboards as possible. This leads to a complexity that cannot be embraced even by themselves. The much smaller portion that they can embrace is still impossible to convey in one piece. The network is too complex, not to be apprehended in one blink; and its untraversed paths decay. Like CRTs or retinal vision, it survives in apparent stability only by continuous refreshment.
Among the "capital secrets in the art of prose composition" De Quincey mentions "the most powerful effects in written eloquence arise out of this reverberation, as it were, from each other in a rapid succession of sentences." Evidently `reverberation', if it extended to belief-complexes, would cover a good deal more than, say, `entailment' or `derivability'. Complexity on this scale provides many more cupboards for hiding skeletons, or for shifting them around, one jump ahead of the auditors. It's easier for large numbers of constituents to qualify (and so protect) each other. Any one of them is always to be interpeted in the light of some currently preferred other or others, in a way which provides necessary shades of meaning as no single constituent-proposition can, and necessary changes in shade of meaning which do not involve changing any of the presenting constituents.
What this adds is play, without which no machine works: the benefits of flexibility without the penalties of having to admit that the specification has been changed. This phrasing is intended to apply even-handedly to what is as necessary to proposers as to resisters of innovation.
These little meaning-tweaks can hardly be deliberate. Their creation is too quick, outwitting conscious thought. In an instant intuition finds the leak, bursts the balloon. Much later, and on rare occasions, we may glimpse how it was done, and offer in consequence either an amendment to the dictionary or an apology. This too applies equally to reformers and counter-reformers: both rely on an interval of non-rationality between the insight and its articulation --- after the equation has been solved and before the realization of what terms in it have been tweaked to make solution possible. Across the fence between them one might therefore hope, one day, to see less vituperation and more co-conspiratorial winks.
Slang
Emerson: "The language of the street is always strong, What can describe the folly and emptiness of scolding like the word jawing? I feel too the force of the double negative, though clean contrary to our grammar rules. And I confess to some pleasure from the stinging rhetoric of a rattling oath in the mouth of truckmen and teamsters. How laconic and brisk it is by the side of a page of the North American Review. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive; they walk and run. Moreover they who speak them have this elegancy, that they do not trip in their speech. It is a shower of bullets, whilst Cambridge men and Yale men correct themselves and begin again at every half sentence. Guts is a stronger word than intestines."
Stendhal: "Ce qui nous déplaît le plus dans la ville où nous sommes nés, dit M. Ipol, jeune philosophe, c'est ce langage vulgaire qui annonce des manières et des sentiments bas, et c'est précisément ce langage du peuple qui nous plaît le plus à l'étranger. Il est près de la nature, il est énergique, et la vulgarité que nous ne voyons pas ne peut nous empêcher d'être sensibles à ce premier mérite de toute langue poétique."
E. M. Cioran: "Les gens `distingués' n'inventent pas en matière de langage. Y excellent au contraire tous ceux qui improvisent par forfanterie ou se vautrent dans une grossièreté teintée d'émotion. Ce sont des natures, ils vivent à même les mots. Le génie verbal serait-il l'apanage des mauvais lieux? Il exige en tout cas un minimum de dégueulasserie."
Socialization
Thomas Disch: "I need not explain to you the fundamental importance of education with respect to the national effort. Ultimately it is intelligence that is a nation's most vital resource, and education can be seen as the process of maximizing intelligence. However as such it is almost invariably a failure, since this primary purpose is sacrificed to the purpose of socialization. When intelligence is maximized, it is almost always at the expense of the socialization process and so, from society's point of view, little has been gained. A cruel dilemma."
But some attempts to maximize intelligence are misinterpreted. Whence confusion in some students: `I've been got at: my teachers have been trying to make me conform. They must have failed, because I'm saying this; or succeeded, because I'm not saying it well; failed, because I know I'm not saying it well; succeeded, because that knowledge gives me very little satisfaction.'
From this dilemma only oxymoron can rescue us. The aim of education is to create faithful enemies of the State.
Software
R. H. Horne, 1850: "Two other departments [among rubbish-tip pickers], called the 'soft-ware' and the 'hard-ware', are very important. The former includes all vegetable and animal matters -- everything that will decompose. These are selected and bagged at once, and carried off as soon as possible, to be sold as manure for ploughed land, wheat, barley, &c. Under this head, also, the dead cats are composed."
Solecism
It is no accident that the shibboleths of grammatical purity (or other tribal qualification) should regularly be trivia like split infinitives or agreement of past participles: within the capacity of the tiniest-minded pontificator and also, historically speaking, perfectly arbitrary.
Solecisms were idioms characteristic of Soloi; later, of similarly god-forsaken places. Anybody travelling to the backwoods and who wanted to fit in would have tried to acquire them. But mostly the travelling, and the learning, was in the other direction. If they needed to get on with Attic merchants or Corinthian sergeants or Cretan tutors, smart operators would try to avoid non-local expressions. This meant having an ear for six varieties, so far -- Attic, Corinthian, Cretan; hagglese, skivese and essayese.
Lindley Murray: Never say It's me.
Leonard Bloomfield: But many do. If enough did, you'd stop proscribing it, so it can't be an absolute proscription.
M: I meant to say, in present circumstances -- a qualification unnecessary, I would have thought, with a choice public like yourself, and a distraction for the wider public.
B: So you were playing the politician, melodramatising your case to sway an ignorant public for your own ends -- the usual ends of preserving a status quo under which you benefited. Under the guise of philanthropy, of improving the lot of the underprivileged, you were incidentally keeping control of the criteria of social discrimination.
M: And you were playing the demagogue, allowing the public to infer, from your attack on me, that your attitude to such discrimination is one of opposition or indifference; allowing them to infer, from your attack on absolute proscription, that you are opposed or indifferent even to relative proscription; while you carefully refrain from actually committing yourself. And your last refuge is to make a merit of this evasiveness, by issuing a definitional fiat that the grammarian's business stops where you stop. This enables you to indulge in the luxury of having views (as you must) on discrimination and proscription -- and views which might not be very different from mine -- while keeping them hidden from professional criticism.
B: But if I hold these views it is as a citizen, not as a professional linguist.
M: It would be nice if we could all be Sunday sociologists. But come Monday, when you have finished noting that It's me is attested, and the time comes to say something more about it -- such as the meaning it gets from the circumstances of its use -- you declare yourself incompetent.
V. Pareto: Perhaps, gentlemen, you are both equally puppets, acting as your time decrees. It may be that It's me was unseated as a discriminant by the efforts of Bloomfield; but it is rather more likely that his indifference to it did no more than reflect a social fait accompli. Similarly the fact that Bloomfield can make a merit of separating his professional from his personal persona dates his work rather closely: he cannot be expected to see that such merit is not a professional but a social matter. The difficulty was not seen by Murray, not faced by Bloomfield.
E. M. Cioran: "L'inconvénient de pratiquer une langue d'emprunt est de n'avoir pas le droit d'y faire trop de fautes. Or, c'est en cherchant l'incorrection sans pourtant en abuser, c'est en frôlant à chaque moment le solécisme, qu'on donne une apparence de vie à l'écriture."
Rémy de Gourmont: "Les langues s'élaborent dans les rues et non dans les universités; elles ne se maintiennent pures qu'à la condition de n'être ni codifiées ni enseignées."
Speech
Animals must get rid of CO2 or die. To Homo sapiens God has given muscles more powerful than are strictly needed for that task; the creature can therefore afford to divert some of the gas along a route more complex than strictly necessary. This fortuitous by-product of excretion -- a luxury acquired at the expense of maximum metabolic efficiency -- is called Speech. Whether this diversion of energy endangers the species is as yet undetermined. What is certain is that the constant exercise of these organs of ejaculation is addictive beyond the dreams of drug-barons.
Spelling
Thorstein Veblen: "As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found, outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless academic life."
Mark Twain: "He came from an unknown land -- the first Maori did -- then sailed back in a canoe and brought his tribe... That that first Maori could come is understandable, for anybody can come to a place when he isn't trying to; but how that discoverer found his way back home again without a compass is his secret, and he died with it in him. His language indicates that he came from Polynesia. He told where he came from, but he couldn't spell well, so one can't find the place on the map, because people who could spell better than he could spelled the resemblance all out of it when they made the map. However, it is better to have a map that is spelled right than one that has information on it."
Statements
The Ministry said: `Certainly Mr Peart said that to Mr Jopling at the meeting. It is not an announcement, and it is not an agreed statement.' Guardian 9 Sept. 1975
Y. Bar-Hillel: "Sometimes a sentence-token which is not meant by its producer to be a statement is understood so by a listener or reader, and we can, of course, very well imagine the opposite situation."
Paul Feyerabend: "The statement [Plato's `Knowledge is perception'] (and, for that matter, all statements claiming to express knowledge) is not a well defined semantic entity; it is an instrument for assembling a content which constantly changes and whose development is inexitricably intertwined with the accidents of history."
Structure A single discovery-claim is resisted on the grounds that if true it would suffice to bring down a major belief-'structure'. Few of the resisters see anything odd in the notion of a 'structure' at once so crucial and so vulnerable to a single flaw. Worse: that discovery-claim is not the only one of its kind. What is being defended has, it seemed, an indefinite number of perfectly-fitting keystones, the slightest imperfection in any one of which would lay everything in ruins. Itıs hard to imagine a real structure with this characteristic.
Stumbling-blocks
Origen: "But if the usefulness of the law and the sequence and ease of the narrative were at first sight clearly discernible throughout, we should be unaware that there was anything beyond the obvious meaning for us to understand. Consequently the Word of God has arranged for certain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and hindrances and impossibilities to be inserted in the midst of the law and the history, in order that we may not be completely drawn away by the sheer attractiveness of the language."
Coleridge: "In works, the object of which is to make us better acquainted with our own nature, a writer, whose meaning is everywhere comprehended as quickly as his sentences can be read will not have added either to the stock of our knowledge, or to the vigour of our intellect. For how can we gather strength, but by exercise? How can a truth, new to us, be made our own without examination and self questioning! But whatever demands effort, demands time. Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity."
Emerson: "Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times."
Subject & Predicate Before the beginning, the committal to paper, are a number of assumptions which might have been specified first, except that to do so would delay the beginning intolerably. Instead some at least must be left to emerge be reconstructed out of the anecdote that follows. Something similar holds for the innocent-looking requirement that we begin by saying what we are going to talk about (the Subject) and only then proceed to what we have to say about it (the Predicate). But Subjectı cannot straightforwardly state "all and only" the portion of reality being focussed on: it may fend off some ambiguities, but only the likelier ones, and only to the extent of the writerıs skill in anticipating them and in weighing their likelihood.
Symbols
Kenneth Burke: "Noting how man's distinctive trait, his way with symbols, is the source of both his typical accomplishments and his typical disabilities, education as here conceived would be first and foremost `of a divided mind,' and would make itself at home in such divisiveness. The pious `fear of God' would be replaced by a partially impious `fear of symbol-using' (that is, an ironic fear of the very resourcefulness that is man's greatest boast). The educational training here advocated would be in its very essence negative, as negative as the Ten Commandments."