The Valuation and Evaluation of Writing

Nick Shere

 

A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.—Weil, Gravity and Grace, p.53

 

One may know texts, and be able to trace their thought constructions with precision—and yet not understand them.—Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence

 

Behind all logic too and its apparent autonomy there stand evaluations, in plainer terms physiological demands for the preservation of a certain species of life.—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

 

 

1.  Valuation. 1

1.a Phenomenological Conditions for Value in Writing. 1

1.a.i 1

1.a.ii 1

1.a.iii 2

1.a.iv. 2

1.a.v. 3

1.a.vi 3

1.b Reading, Writing, Reality. 4

1.b.i Reality. 4

1.b.ii Reality in Writing. 6

1.b.ii.1 Reality and Writing. 6

1.b.ii.2 Reality and the Value of Writing. 7

 

 

 

 

 

1.  Valuation

1.a Phenomenological Conditions for Value in Writing

1.a.i

                There are certain conditions under which reading (that is, the experience and process of reading) and writing (that is, the experience and process of writing) can have value for me. Either one must be inherently an act of discovery, never merely the composition or absorption of information. What does it mean for writing to be an act of discovery? First and foremost it must be the case that I do not know too clearly when I begin the process of writing what I am going to say. I can think that I know what I am going to say, I can have very clear expectations, but if these expectations are not either drastically exceeded or heavily disappointed, then my writing will have discovered nothing new. To say that writing should be an act of discovery is not to say that every writer must always say something that is “original,” still less that they should express an “original idea.” Even if it is possible to draw a firm line between original and derivative thoughts, that is not what is meant by writing as discovery—after all, many more or less new ideas have been articulated poorly, and many old ideas have been re-interpreted or even merely repeated with new vigor by writers engaged in discovering them.

1.a.ii

                The “discovery” a writer makes is the same discovery a traveler makes setting foot on a distant shore. While it is almost certainly not the case that her foot is the first foot to do so, it is still the first time that her foot has done so. It is a new experience, a changing experience, not necessarily for the land discovered, but certainly for the traveler discovering. So it is with a writer; I know I have begun to write well on a topic not when I express something about it unheard-of by others, but when, through the process of forming words about it, I discover something about it that I had not known before I began, or when I take my understanding to a depth it had not achieved before I set pen to paper.

                Wittgenstein has said writing is not the outward expression of an inward thought, but rather is “thinking on paper” in the same way that talking is “thinking out loud.” Seeing paper as a medium of thought rather than as a medium only of the representation of thought is a good step toward understanding the conditions for writing being worthwhile. My thought is worth something when it achieves some new height or depth, some new image or formulation, that I had not thought of before, when it expands me. This is why, I suppose, I have always sensed something either essentially false or essentially ridiculous about the “pre-writing” schoolchildren are encouraged to perform; it is not only that such exercises are tentative, but to the extent that they are accurate prefigurements of the writing process, they signal the mediocrity of the writing that is about to be done. Either they limit the thinking one allows oneself to perform on the paper, or they are the sign that the thought that is about to be thought has already been known, at least in its borders, peaks, and depths—that is, in its most important features. Thus the writing becomes merely a “fleshing-out” of an already-had frame. If, on the other hand, they are false, they represent less an outline of what is later to be accomplished than the articulation of some initial problem, dilemma, what have you, that the it is the task of writing to destroy and rebuild. Writing as discovery necessitates the betrayal of our initial pre-visions of what is to be accomplished; thus such visions should either be dim or undergirded by a tragic willfulness that they be betrayed.

1.a.iii

                “Discovery” in reading consists essentially of taking a text personally. The easiest case of this is when reading offends us. We know we have succeeded in taking a text personally when we want to throw it across the room. For this reason, many of our most important readings are foreshadowed by disgust, just as many of our most important human relationships begin not with like but with dislike. It is sometimes more difficult to know when we have succeeded in taking personally a text with which we are inclined to agree; we tend to mask our personal investment in what seems true to us, as though its truth were more real or secure by being unrelated to our own feelings and personality. But two of the more obvious ways to tell when we have read well that which pleases us are: (1) the intuitive and necessarily not entirely rational willingness to defend the text, its claims, and its author—particularly those aspects of the text or claims made in it which are the least pleasing to the reader, and (2) the invasion of the text into unrelated domains of our consciousness—the unbidden and unavoidable appearance of ideas, phrases, metaphors, images, and assumptions in our thinking on diverse topics, especially those to which the author did not intend the text to pertain. The fullest expressions of the latter would be apparitions in dreams, unintended plagiarisms, especially in speech or casual writing, and the complete inability to form chains of thought and argumentation on any given subject without recourse to the text.

1.a.iv

                The reader may have noticed by this point that I have only talked around the thing I am attempting to get at—I have named it, I have discussed some of its correlates and some of the conditions of it or criteria for it, but I have not gotten at the thing in itself. Nor will I do so now. Rather, as a thing is often most easily grasped by means of its opposites, I will note that writing devoid of discovery is the mere recapitulation or regurgitation of the already discovered, known, found, understood. Its contents are without life, disconnected from the organic activities of the writer. Reading devoid of discovery is marked by the attitudes of those sophomoric readers who merely collate, classify, and mark information for manipulation, who are not themselves marked or marred by the experience of reading, who do not know how to take what they read personally. The difference between the two sorts of readers can easily be seen in the way they mark up their books: the detached reader’s notes are clear and concise; they point to the key arguments and evidence of the author, they emphasize where emphasis is needed and allow for more rapid digestion of facts without obscuring at all the text itself. When one comes across a book which has been read by a reader of this sort, one is always pleasantly surprised at the ways in which their reading has in fact enhanced the work’s readability, which is a particular blessing if the work happens to bear on the test or on a paper one must submit. These readers leave books more accessible to others precisely because they do not react to the book personally enough. When a reader has really taken a book personally and annotated on this basis, the book is utterly useless to anyone else, for vast tracts of it are obscured by commentary, the margins cluttered with hastily written praise or damnation, expansions or refutation of the author’s arguments, tangential connections of no substance, and in general the clutter of a serious reading. Consider how a thing is underlined or circled—is it with the careful precision of the detached, lifeless reader, or with the hasty passion of someone who gives a damn? A single stroke may speak volumes. Of course, a passionate reader may have trained himself to exhibit restraint, and this may even be a virtue, especially with other peoples’ books, but within, the maelstrom must still rage.

1.a.v

                Now, it should be noted that the greatest possible factual throughput—the speediest and most clear distribution of facts—will always take place between a writer engaged the dead sort of writing, and a reader expert in the lifeless sort of reading. “Efficiency” and “mechanical” are connotatively undisentangleable, twins conjoined since their emergence in the industrial revolution. But while we have become aware of some of the defects associated with mechanical processes, particularly with the incompatibility of organic human life with over-mechanization, we still retain quite strongly a sense of the value of efficiency. This is not wholly wrong; as an economic concept, it certainly holds great power. But we often mistake efficiency for efficacy, and particularly make the error of thinking that a thing that is more efficient is more efficacious, while not noticing that the process by which efficiency is achieved may involve a degradation of quality that actively undermines efficacy.

                Thus efficiency, while it is by no means without its uses, makes it easy for us to think that such tepid, corpselike clarity represents an ideal. The idealization of efficiency underlies the characteristic modern western attitude toward education that is often identified with the “banking concept of education” critiqued by Paolo Freire[1]—education which is conceived as the transference of knowledge which is purely objective, having no connection to the organic and dynamic life of the subjects (teacher and student) engaged in education. Freire calls this the “banking concept” of education because it is a pedagogical vision defined by some of the same motivations and assumptions as financial transactions—knowledge is conceived economically as a sort of impersonal, abstract, quantifiable and measurable thing, generic and manipulable. It is invested in the student—under conditions of high or low risk—and, according to luck, fate, and pedantic skill, it yields more or less worthy fruit. In any case, the ideal is one of efficiency, because the more efficient education is—the more knowledge moved from the teacher’s mind to the student—the cheaper it is, both literally and metaphorically—since the time and effort of the teacher are the coin spent in the process of investing knowledge, and since time and effort on the part of the teacher possess, in fact, fixed monetary values, i.e., salary.

1.a.vi

                Is there a metaphor/image similarly expressive of the type of literacy which I have described as being characterized by discovery? Many are possible, but I find especially rich one suggested by historian and activist Vincent Harding, a passage from Genesis:[2]

Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved. The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Gen. 32:24-31. (RSV)

 

Harding identifies the task of the reader confronting a difficult author with the predicament of Jacob who struggles with the dimly seen figure. There are two key elements here, in relation to the question at hand (difficult reading). The first is that, in our struggle with the author, we must hold fast and refuse to let go, “unless [he] blesses [us].” This blessing—in this case, the understanding we gain by our encounter with the text—is available only as a result of intersubjective struggle, and it requires that this struggle continue past the point of pain and fatigue. The second element is that this struggle both wounds us and transforms us. Beyond being merely and generically blessed, Jacob is profoundly altered by the fight in two ways: he has been given a new name, and he has a (probably quite severe) limp. The act of renaming is symbolic of personal transformation, while the particular name he is given reflects the intensity and grandeur of his struggle.[3] As for his wound, the pain can be read as symbolic of the essentially traumatic nature of any transformation; the encounter with reality (in this case the divine reality) brings about a violent change in us—a “dislocation” in more senses than one, perhaps. Throughout the bible, encounters with God are understood as essentially dangerous; Moses can only see His back, etc. One might say, in expanding on Harding’s metaphor, that no one can grapple with the divine reality and emerge unscathed.

                The point is that this is not only a way of relating to God; it is a way of relating to any elusive, challenging reality—which is to say, any reality, since the real is never also the simple. It is, most importantly, a way, perhaps The Way, of reading. It is when we latch onto an author who troubles us, who seems indeed to threaten or menace our very selves (i.e., our self-understandings) or to race forever beyond the range of our understanding, an author who appears to us as unreadable, and when we refuse to let go of that author until we have met—and been remade by—the reality of her, the fullness of her voice, that we have attainted to true reading.

If we understand reading this way (that is to say, if once we have read in this way, and been transformed) we can begin to see that, rather than being a virtue, efficiency of information transport can actually get in the way of the fullest experience of reading, by allowing the reader to internalize a stock of objective factual information[4] without ever taking it personally—without having to stop and endure the wearying struggle for understanding.

                Now, it should not be thought that this is merely a simple value reversal. It would be ridiculous to say that, instead of desiring that our writing and reading be as efficient as possible, they be as inefficient as possible. It is to say that a degree, perhaps a considerable degree, of inefficiency is necessary—though not sufficient—for real reading. Nor is it to say that all reading could or should be so intense. On the contrary, functional literacy would be unattainable for one who could only read this way all the time. But the most important, most valuable readings are, at least in my experience, like this.

1.b Reading, Writing, Reality

1.b.i Reality

                Now, armed with the necessary metaphor, we may come a step closer to the heart of it. To put things rather too simply, what I mean is this: that value in reading and writing should be derived from, indeed should be the extent to which the act of reading or writing brings us into contact with reality.

                It is with considerable angst that I allow myself to use the word I mean—reality—because the risk is so great of being misunderstood, of being understood easily and wrongly, of being read poorly. The reason I placed the metaphor first and made it a condition of moving on to this more explicit articulation is not that it makes reading easier or apprehension quicker, but because, perhaps counterintuitively, the explicit statement is open to broader interpretation. “Reality,” being one of those mighty words by which philosophies rise and fall, has many meanings, but I mean it only in those ways which fit the previous discussion of Harding’s metaphor. Jacob’s wrestling match is the essential limit of all readings I will accept of the statement that value in reading and writing should be the extent to which the act of reading or writing brings us into contact with reality. Most particularly, I do not mean that a piece of writing is valuable because it is true, at least so far as truth is taken to mean “factual accuracy” or “the right answer.” Much writing is valuable which is highly inaccurate, much is of little value that expresses undisputed facts.

                So what do I mean by reality? My intent is to use the term as Simone Weil uses it.

There is nothing real [whenever] there is nothing unforeseen. In science, in reasoning, one sees in the problems one is dealing with only what one has put there oneself (hypotheses.) If in actions there was nothing except what we ourselves suppose them to contain, nothing would ever get done, since there would be no snags. All sorts of accidents can occur between the time when I have seen what the problem is and the time when I have acted. Reality is defined by that. It is what is not contained in the problem as such; reality is what method does not allow us to foresee.

                Why is it that reality can only appear like this, in a negative sort of way? What marks off the ‘self’ is method; it has no other source than ourselves: it is when we really employ method that we really begin to exist. As long as one employs method only on symbols, one remains within the limits of a sort of game. In action that has method about it, we ourselves act, since it is we ourselves who have found the method. We really act because what is unforeseen presents itself to us.—Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, p. 72-3 (Emphasis added)

 

A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.—Weil, Gravity and Grace, p.53

 

Reality comes into view when we see that nature is not only an obstacle which allows us to act in an ordered way but it is also an obstacle which infinitely transcends us.—Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, p.111 (Emphasis added)

 

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: cf. The Upanishads, the Taoists, and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love.  That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.—Weil, in The Simone Weil Anthology, ed. George A. Panichas.

 

Reality emerges through the encounter of the self with it, or, rather, it is that self and reality exist in relation to each other. But the reality is not only what is not the self. It is that which extends from beyond our ken to delimit the range of the possibilities of our actions. It should be noted that Weil is here concerned not with laying out a description of a one or the one “real” world as opposed to others, but with describing the experience of reality, and more specifically the conditions under which an experience can have the quality of reality within human experience. Indeed, it is perhaps helpful to say that Weil’s reality is not a thing but a quality possessed by particular experiences of things. She is not concerned with proving any particular real rationally or empirically (indeed, she argues that reality is precisely that which is beyond proof [FILL]), but rather with articulating the phenomenological conditions under which reality emerges for us. This is not to say that Weil does not belief that there is one reality—indeed, she is more or less a Platonist—but her phenomenological discussion of reality is in fact most amenable to a pluralistic interpretation.

                Weil is especially conscious of the tenuousness of reality. Reality is lost whenever there is nothing unforeseen—that is, when our methodological and theorizing capabilities have eliminated (really or putatively) the possibility of anything intruding which we have not previously subjected to our conceptualization, which we have not domesticated by means of our reason. When we are not surprised or upset by the course of events, we are in a “game” and not in reality.

                The real is real only by escaping beyond our ability to apprehend it, only by being “an obstacle which infinitely transcends us.” Harding’s metaphor expresses this well, for the heavenly combatant has just this character of being an object which both structures our actions and constantly exceeds the range of our possibilities. While struggling with God or his proxy, Jacob is caught in just the same predicament as a Weilian thinker struggling with reality; the obstacle is not something one can win against, but rather something one can at best not be beaten by. Weil acknowledges the pragmatic principle that sentient life consists in transforming what would destroy us into the tool of our very survival. [FILL Weil, Dewey] This transcendent object is elusive, dangerous, unscrupulous, and alien to our finite goals and desires. It is a thing that comes upon us unwilling, but from which, with the proper effort, we can win not a victory over it but an essential transformation of ourselves by it.

                Weil developed this idea of reality early on; it appears in her Lectures on Philosophy (actually lecture notes taken by one of her lycee students) as her attempt to articulate a coherent materialism. More specifically, she conceived it as an extension, amendment, or correction of pragmatism. It should be noted that Weil does not seem to have been especially familiar with pragmatism, but rather to have encountered it in passing in James’s psychological writings. It is assumed that Weil was not overly familiar with pragmatism, because of such assertions as [FILL]—if she had any thorough familiarity with the writings of James on pragmatism or especially of those of Dewey, she would have known that pragmatism well aware of the importance of methodicality.

                She is correct, however, in her intuition that the infinitely-transcending function of reality is underrepresented in pragmatism; indeed, it is sometimes presented as one of the school’s essential lacks. It is intimately connected to the stunted sense of the tragic which many commentators have discussed—particularly when we refer to the “modern” tragedy emphasized by West in his “prophetic pragmatism.” (For West, the modern tragic sense requires that we acknowledge that our best efforts may not be successful. A more thoroughgoing tragedian might insist that tragedy for moderns still mean that our best efforts may contain the very seeds of our own undoing. In the former case, Weil’s transcending object is the tragic, while in the latter, it is only a part of it.) In emphasizing this function of reality, we might say that this aspect of Weil’s philosophy approaches being a religious pragmatism, just as West’s does. There are echoes of it, too, in some of James’s religiously-oriented writings. For example:

He who says “life is real, life is earnest,” however much he may speak of the fundamental mysteriousness of things, gives a distinct definition to that mysteriousness by ascribing to it the right to claim from us the particular mood called seriousness—which means the willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.—James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in Essays on Faith and Morals, p.86

 

                We could even say that Dewey demonstrates a related understanding in his surprisingly nuanced consideration of the conversion experience in A Common Faith. In Deweyan terms, Weilian reality would be the quality that our environment has of never being totally pliable to our adaptations of it, but always forcing us to adapt ourselves to it. Dewey reflects on the environments infinite excession of our methodical control in Experience and Nature as well:

[FILL]

                The essential and constant difference, of course, is that the ortho-pragmatists and especially Dewey will always at close of day choose to emphasize the plasticity of our environment and its malleability for our will, while a pragmatism which has integrated the tragic sense and/or one which has the religious attitude (in the Kierkegaardian sense (elaborated by Weil, Buber, and others)—the understanding that the essence of religion is the relationship of the finite individual to the transcendent divine reality) will always feel that it is necessary, essential, even sacred that the environment should not be primarily malleable.

1.b.ii Reality in Writing

1.b.ii.1 Reality and Writing

                What has reality in this sense to do with reading and writing? And how does it impart value to them? Certainly reality does not appear in writing itself, for writing is part of (indeed, the paragon of) what Weil designates as “method”; it is precisely an extension of ourselves. Nietzsche says that, “Behind all logic too and its apparent autonomy there stand evaluations, in plainer terms physiological demands for the preservation of a certain species of life.” All this really signifies is that our methods, our writings, do not merely emerge from our specific life, but constitute an essential part of our very selves and constitute conditions of our continued existence as such. That is to say, all our ideas are personal in the very specific sense of being part of our person. Thus, reality cannot appear in writing precisely because method and reality are defined by their relationship; but by the very same token the place of reality in writing is made clear—reality appears not in but beyond writing; it is nowhere in writing but is rather that against which writing is thrown, a constant presence looming just past the page. Writing reaches out to the world as a blind man’s stick does.

                In writing, we seek to use method to come to the end of method, because beyond method lies the world. When we strive for it—when we make the effort of Jacob—we cannot bring it to light, cannot force it to name itself and reduce itself to words. Indeed, if we could turn it to words it would no longer be reality, but just another jot of method. We know reality by its constant excession not merely of our practical attempts in the world to tame its vagaries, but also of our very attempts to define it, to cognize it, to epistemologically domesticate it. What the writer can do is to hold fast to it and to match its elusiveness with her own willingness to be transformed. Thus writing becomes a mode—indeed, perhaps the mode—of self-adaptation to that “object which infinitely transcends us.”

1.b.ii.2 Reality and the Value of Writing

                Thus, as far as the value of the experience of writing goes, it consists in the quality of this transformative struggle with reality. The struggle is valuable inasmuch as it is fruitful—inasmuch as it succeeds in enabling us to bring about new articulations of ourselves that place us on a stronger footing for encountering reality. This may take many forms—it may mean strengthening and clarifying ideas we had previously had only dimly; it may mean the acquisition of new ideas or the elimination of old; it may mean complete redistributions of beliefs, values, and habitual ways of seeing. It has, in other words, no already-specified effect upon the existing self.