Conversations with History: Frederick Crews

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Frederick Cruz who is professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley and former chair of the English department there he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences his 12 books include skeptical engagements nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award the critics bear it away American fiction and the Academy the memory Wars Freud's legacy and dispute unauthorized Freud and the Random House handbook for writers which it which is in its sixth edition a professor Cruz welcome back to Berkeley glad to be with you I welcome you back since you're emeritus where were you born Philadelphia suburban Philadelphia neither neither the mainline nor downtown and what were the major influences in your younger years what extent that your parents influenced you oh I think they influenced me tremendously they were both readers they both been raised in considerable poverty and books had been extremely important to them personally in shaping them my mother was very literary my father was very scientific I feel that I got a little something of both sides and what sort of books did you read as a young person that you can recall today well if you go all the way back I read about nothing but sports when I was you know 11 or 12 years old I used to read the same book over and over it was good enough for me it was called blocking back and I remember my horror when I went at the age of about 35 I discovered that the initials in the name of the author of blocking back disguised a female author so so at that time you weren't ready for the shock of that realization no I I was raised in the traditional American youthful atmosphere of sports and competition what about important mentors as before you move on to college did you have any important mentors that really influenced you or shape you I had one and that was my tennis coach in high school who was also my math teacher who perceived that I had a brain and this was when I was about a junior I had been goofing off in high school considerably trying to amuse my friends to keep him from beating me up and he thought that I was wasting my time and he told me so and you know he gave me good intellectual lessons as well as tennis lessons and I'm tremendously grateful to him were you an athlete and yeah I was the co-captain of my tennis team I played tennis tournament tennis in high school but I could never even make a high school team if I had to do it all over again today the quality of tennis is so much better and where did you do your undergraduate work at Yale and what about your studies there was it in English it wasn't English although I this was 1955 when I graduated from Yale I entered for the first two years something called the directed studies program which required us to distribute our courses among Sciences Social Sciences literature philosophy and so on but with a coordinated faculty so each of them knew what the other was doing and it was certainly the greatest experience I'd ever had up up until that point maybe the best ever and to get to college and realized that I could devote myself to ideas and be you know rewarded for it was to me amazing and wonderful now was did this complement your childhood in a way you said your mother was very literate in literary and your father was patent attorney that's right you know I think I think my parents influence over me is something that I only gradually realized for example when I came to write my dissertation at Princeton and I got my degree there in 1958 PhD the topic of my dissertation was a EM Forster well he happened to be a favorite author of my mother's I'm not sure I ever consciously put that together when I chose Forster but obviously it was an important factor and and you mentioned that your father had more of a scientific bent and your mother more of a literary one because that seems to be a bifurcation or the two worlds that you engage throughout your career my father always hoped I would be a physicist or mathematician but he was a good sport realizing that I didn't have the aptitude I now regard scientific training or rather training in scientific thinking as an essential part of education and oddly enough I succeeded in ducking it some to some degree in my directed studies work at Yale because the courses that we did have to take in science weren't the bread-and-butter courses they were they were humanistically presented and in a way I never really got a full confrontation with scientific reasoning I had to figure it out for myself much later now in graduate school you did your degree at Princeton and sure you were saying and and any books in particular influenced you during that period well I have to say that when I was an undergraduate at Yale it was in the heyday of the new criticism and I was trained in those principles of formalistic analysis when I went to Princeton I came up against something called Christian humanism that dominated the the spirit of the English faculty and it was quite antithetical to new criticism in various ways but I found neither of these orientations particularly engaging to me personally so I found that most of the influences on me that seemed to matter were being brought in from the outside I remember in particular I was reading writers like Dostoevsky Nietzsche I began reading Freud I thought that the methodology in which I had been trained that was extremely tame and wasn't getting at whatever it was that was exciting me about literature and so you were reading the stuff on the side yes yes yeah I was uh-huh of course an author who was important to me at that time was Nathaniel Hawthorne and before I got my PhD I had published a paper on one of Hawthorne's novels then later when I was out here for a while and I published a couple of other books I went back to Hawthorne and it was Hawthorne that drew me very close to Freud mm-hmm because it struck me at the time that Hawthorne and Freud had an uncanny likeness of Outlook and I still think they do but the key inference that I drew in the early 60s was that the resemblance between Hawthorne and Freud could only be explained by the fact that Freud was on to a correct way of looking at human psychology that sent me off in a direction that I repented of have been repenting of for a long time and you know much later it occurred to me that Hawthorne and Freud resembled one another because they were both part of the same broad historical movement namely romanticism with its introspection in its sense of the divide itself secrets that one hides from oneself and others and so forth and this this notion of the closet romantic both in yourself and in in many of your colleagues in English Department during the later struggles is a theme that appears again and again your work uh-huh well yes okay so now the key question is let's go back to your career a little here you come to Berkeley is that the first job you had and then you see the first and only job I've had my resume it's about that big so so part of what your your work is about in a way is coming to terms with this romantic self and and marrying it to scientific discipline now the question I have for you is do you think it mattered a great deal that you came to Berkeley and stayed here which is a place both for protest and for a civil science well the protest was an important part of my life because I was an anti-war activist from 1965 to about 1970 I ceased being an activist when the Republicans became activists I figured I could relax at that point but this happened to coincide with the period in which I was conducting graduate seminars in psychoanalytic criticism and privately wondering about the basis of psychoanalysis as a system of thought and it might just be a funny coincidence but about the time that I reverted to a kind of garden-variety liberalism in my political outlook I also lost faith in this other form of radicalism this intellectual radicalism that was psychoanalysis and I should say that psychoanalysis as an institution isn't radical in the least nothing could be more establishment in this country but in the Academy in literary studies up through most of the 1960s it was a very unusual and controversial point of view as I look at some of your work I drew a conclusion about you and I would like to have you relate to my thoughts about you and disprove them if not you seem to me to be a critic obviously but also a liberal and an empiricist and and so I'd like to parse those words and see if their meaning in your particular case in in the critic spirit away you speak of your concern for understanding American literature with as few illusions as possible what did you mean by that well of course that's a book about what I consider to be methodological dead ends that have been taken from the late 60s until that book was published in 1992 and it's ironic because part of that methodology is definitely psychoanalysis the fact that I got off the trial he didn't slow the trolley down at all my work had been somewhat influential but when I recanted it the recantation was not the least bit influential psychoanalysis has a methodology kept going meanwhile it got combined with various currents of thought from France chiefly in Western Europe more generally currents that can be summarized in the word post-structuralist deconstruction Foucault Derry da all the rest of it and by the time I wrote sceptical engagements 1986 I felt that literary criticism or literary theory had become extraordinarily top-heavy and dogmatic that on the one hand theorists thought of themselves as very skeptical of to the verge of nihilism certainly a kind of epistemic nihilism where they felt that they were taking nothing for granted and on the other hand they were relying on doctrines like psychoanalysis that were highly Orthodox and full of a priori unexamined assumptions and it seems to me that if you want to do justice to literary art you have to clear away this underbrush and try to look at the works not only for themselves but in their social and biographical context without all these assumptions so so in a way it's it's about the facts and relating them to reality I was struck when push comes to shove the the several themes of your work come down to explode exposing and I quote you here the fear of facing the world including its works of literature without an intellectual narcotic at hand yeah I like that sense yeah you know why do we read literature we read literature because it gives us things that we can't get from any other source we can't get it from paraphrases we can't get it from theory about literature the writer is out there on the edge of something trying to do something that is new that is unique and if it's a great writer you owe that person the respect of being ready to respond to that which is new in the work but all of this theoretical background serves to anesthetize you against exactly that risk now the second adjective that I applied to you was liberal in a classic traditional sense and and you say somewhere I think it's in the critic spirit way I value singular departures from established belief and practice even when these efforts produce clouded results the best novelists themselves have been liberal in the sense courting isolation and incoherence in the hope of making something new yes absolutely I mean look at think of Melville for example think of just how deeply opposed he was to the spirit of his own time and how lonely he was and how many years he spent really with writer's block because he felt that he no longer had an audience and that the audience he had had had misunderstood him as a kind of popular travel writer his greatest works could not be understood in his lifetime but instead of repudiating them he he fell silent at least as a fiction writer until the very end with Billy Budd when he wrote another one of these great tragic highly ambiguous works that doesn't tody to anybody's values it's an expression of his own vision of of the way things are and it's it's just tremendous now if you're gonna get that accurate knowledge about Melville let's say what what what skills do you need what materials do you have to look at you have to know the corpus of his work backwards and forwards you have to know what he read you have to know the philosophical sources that interested him you have to know the temper of his times you have to know the political issues that he was engaged in you must know his biography but above all you must learn to catch the way his mind works to figure out the characteristic way in which he puts thoughts and words together and nobody can help you do that it's just a question of you and the text so so that in a way your isolation loneliness and courage in a way in looking at an author could be said to mirror that author's own courage isolation and loneliness in in creating his work well that's a pretty heroic way of looking at somebody just doing what he was gonna do anyway I mean I I've always loved books and to get paid for teaching books was a treat for me it's nothing nothing particularly courageous about it well but one could make the argument that had you continue your Freudian studies in the sense of doing Freud as opposed to critiquing him that might what you just said my whole true but it is the case that in you had been teaching a graduate seminar on Freud for four years you were perceived as a student training future students before I didn't and you completely broke so that cetera that that that is different no that is that is true and that's one of the reasons I make Freudians uneasy mm-hmm is that I have been on their side and thought it over and decided not to be any longer which means either I made a correct intellectual decision or there's something terribly wrong with me psychologically and you can imagine which alternative is that's all to them that's right now the key tool in in your journey so to speak is the scientific method and and your commitment to empiricism in the work that you do explain that to us how in in literary studies one adopts that methodology and and undertakes one studies well the phrase the scientific method is kind of a red flag most philosophers of science virtually all philosophers of science today would deny that there is such a thing as a scientific method in the sense of an algorithm that leads us to correct results in our propositions about the world that was the dream of logical positivism and it's it's been exploded so scientific method in that sense is certainly not what I have in mind what interests me is general rationality of which science is a part and general rationality requires us to observe the world carefully to consider alternative hypotheses to our own hypotheses to gather evidence in a responsible way to answer objections these are habits of mind that science shares with good history good sociology good political science good economics what have you and I summarize all this and what I call the empirical attitude it's a combination of feeling responsible to the evidence that is available feeling responsible to go out and find out evidence including the evidence that is contrary to one's presumptions and responsibility to be logical with oneself and others and this is an ideal that is not so much individual as social the rational attitude doesn't really work when simply applied to oneself it it is something that we owe to each other we submit our ideas to each other in a way that enables them to be clear enough noncontradictory enough to be accessible to refutation and that's as true of propositions about literature as it is propositions about quarks and protons now let's talk a little about the Academy during your career and whether those principles that you just enunciated retained their vitality in the humanities I guess you would conclude that they didn't so I want to know what are the strengths and the weaknesses of the university insofar as it tolerates dissent and creates a discourse which is rational well of course the university exists to court differences of opinion but principal differences of opinion what's happened in the humanities is a general assault on the very idea of the empirical the very idea of the rational which are now associated with such social evils as racism patriarchy and so forth and in the vacuum that is created by this denigration of the empirical nothing is left but cliquish nests nothing is left but power if and and and this can all be put very concretely in terms of tenure decisions a person submits a body of work for evaluation to be so that he or she can be retained for the rest of the career or fired on what basis is this work to be evaluated well if there isn't a critical mass of tenured people who believe in the empirical attitude then the work can only be evaluated according to whom it pleases whose interests it pleases and then it's a question of what clique you belong to and what what kinds of fashionable references you're willing to make and I must say that in my 36 years of teaching at Berkeley I saw a changing of the guard in this direction that was very disturbing to me so the university then creates systems that don't handle the scent very well you seem to be saying well I think the prevalence of originality and individuality in the university has always been somewhat exaggerated in any in any era there's always a lot more conformism among these people who regard themselves as unique than they're willing to admit but I think there's been a qualitative leap in the wrong direction in the last 20 years now how do we account for that at one point I think in in skeptical engagements you suggest that in addition to the exercise of power and the gratification that comes with choices associated with power that also at work was a surface of graduate students and a concern about well what is there to study it's all been studied know precisely this sounds very cynical but I sincerely believed that the economic crisis of the academic profession especially in the humanities has had a powerful methodological effect if there are fewer and fewer places for graduate students to occupy in the profession if there are more and more graduate students pursuing a fewer and fewer places a premium has to be placed on the sheer production of this course a general unspoken fear comes over everyone that this course is being used up that the things that are worth saying have been said and what this does is to place a premium on methodology that will loosen the constraints upon discourse and certainly this is this is what psychoanalysis is largely about in the university psychoanalysis is a beautiful system of seeming rules which are actually licences to arrive at pre-arranged conclusions in multiple ways there are there are multiple paths to a conclusion one has already reached but at no point are there constraints which threaten to decertify once a priori belief so the methodology acquires a value in and of itself as a free-for-all as a hermeneutic free-for-all and that's why empirically based objections to such a system of thought fall on deaf ears in the humanities and you suggest in in looking at Freudianism and I think you're also suggesting at some point in your comments about graduate programs in English that the this fits very nicely with the need to perpetuate the movement or the subfield within the discipline I'm not quite sure I know what you mean by the movement well in other words in the case of Freud basically the the the self validation the closed system contributes to what the movement which which is its own perpetuation not as a as a scientific study but rather as a validation of Freudian psychoanalysis no I do agree with that and I would generalize it to characterize psychoanalysis itself is to say psychoanalysis under the guise of curing people of mental ailments has been essentially a movement that replicates itself and whose central purpose is to replicate itself or as I once put it it produces more converts than cures let's talk a little about Freud we keep coming back to that helped us understand better how and why you're thinking about him changed and at one point you say in one of your books I know for myself however that my disillusionment with psychoanalysis occurred in my new stages over many years you've given us a sense of that but is there anything that you would like to add well sure in in the academic year 1965-66 I had a handsome fellowship I had an ACLs grant and I also had a residency at the Social Sciences think-tank in Palo Alto and allegedly I was broadening and deepening my acquaintance with psychoanalysis but what actually happened is that I came up against a lot of very sharp people most of whom were not believers in psychoanalysis and some of whom very helpfully sent me out to read dissenting opinions about it and I did that reading and I would like to be able to say that a light bulb went off and I said oh god this has been a terrible mistake instead I went back and started teaching my graduate seminar that's when I did as soon as I returned from from Stanford but in the back of my mind these doubts nagged at me and they continued to grow for about four or five years by 1970 I couldn't after 1970 I couldn't offer that seminar anymore I had too many reservations but even so if you read the things that I wrote in the early 70s you'll see that I was still struggling to hang on to something something in the psychoanalytic vision and it wasn't until 1980 that I completely washed my hands of the last blessed hope of that kind I think for me personally this is an important fact that it took me so long because what's said about me in psychoanalytic circles is that I had the kind of sudden conversion that characterized Stalinists who then became cold warriors no it wasn't like that at all and a lot of your reading was wit dealt with the philosophy of science or had you done that in an earlier period no I had not done nearly enough of it and I can earlier period and I think people like Karl Popper it was extremely important to me or an earnest Nagel Sidney hook a few others I remember in particular there's one there was one article by Nagel in a book that Hooke had edited I think 1957 1959 don't remember the date but it was just a methodological critique no more than 10 or 15 pages but it was absolutely unanswerable since it was unanswerable I tried to turn my back on it and then I found that I couldn't now what were your other reference in other words I gather you began reading extensively materials on Freud that were increasingly critical of the way he had practiced s-- as a physician and a psychoanalyst well as it happens the the so-called revisionist movement in Freud studies began right around 1969 1970 who works by Paul Rosen inari Ellenberger Frank Chafee and this movement grew to be something really quite spectacular in in my opinion with for example Frank sulloway's major book of 1979 Freud biologist of the mind Adolph green bombs the foundations of psychoanalysis 1984 and then of course the publication of the uncensored of Freud fleece letters of 1985 the implications of these studies are still just beginning to be felt but they are quite revolutionary and that's why the last book that I did was an anthology of revisionist Freud studies to try to give the general public a sampling the general literate public a sampling of this absolutely stunning new knowledge of the difference the gap between Freud's claims and what he was actually experiencing and doing at the time that his claims cover and so it was more than he was a bad scientist in some ways he was a charlatan he was a charlatan in 1896 he published three papers on the etiology of hysteria claiming that he had cured X number of patients first it was thirteen than it was eighteen and he had cured them all by presenting them or rather by obliging them to remember that they had been sexually abused as children in 1897 he lost faith in this theory but he told his colleagues that this was the way to cure hysteria so he had a scientific obligation to tell people about his change of mind but he didn't he didn't even hint at it until 1905 and even then he wasn't clear meanwhile where were the thirteen patients where were the eighteen patients you read the Freud fleece letters and you find that for its patients were leaving at the time that he didn't bite by 1897 he didn't have any patients worth mentioning and he hadn't cured any of them and he knew it perfectly well well if a scientist did that today of course he would be stripped of his job he would be stripped of his research funds he would be disgraced for life but Freud was so brilliant at controlling his own legend that people can hear charges like this and even admit that they're true and yet not have their faith in a system of thought affected in any way so what is the way that he succeeded then he succeeded in presenting himself to the public through a highly organized propaganda machine by the way which is what he turned the intellect the the International psychoanalytical Association into he succeeded in presenting himself as the personification of a certain kind of Nietzschean courage combined with scientific rigor aesthetic aesthetic responsibility that was attuned to the spirit of the times namely anti Victorianism the Western world was ready to overthrow a very tired looking Christianizing moral order and to give more sway to the instinctual side of life sex in particular and Freud portrayed himself as a person who reluctantly faced reluctantly but courageously faced the twin demons of sex and aggression and like like Prometheus or like some other Greek god who goes into the underworld he came back to earth with these pieces of dangerous knowledge and he tamed them and made them accessible to us so that we can now be cured of our neurotic ailments thanks to him he turned himself into a god a kind of man God and people fell for it and at a certain point I felt for it and and he but he there were particular ways and instruments by which he even moved beyond the the power that came from being suitable for the time so to speak I mean literally he established the small group that would put out disinformation about those who opposed his theories well that's right the group was called the committee and it consisted of his closest associates people like Ferengi and Jones just a handful of people they had a secret ring and they had they had a matter back they had a kind of blood oath and their mission was to propagate Ford's ideas but specifically whatever ideas Freud felt were proper at the time so that as Freud's views changed their view has changed and what they did was to slander his enemies and to prevent and to prevent them from having access to the relevant journals Jung I think was the very first victim of this movement because it was formed in response to the threat that Freud perceived from Jung's dissidents from him around 1912 the whole thing went on until about 1926 in complete secrecy and its existence was not acknowledged until about 1940 but it was a propaganda apparatus and a very very successful one so that in in many ways and you point this out and I believe sceptical engagements that there are similarities between Freud's movement and the communist movement there certainly are similarities and it goes pretty deep because ultimately Freud and Marx are twin theorists of the unconscious for Marx we are unconscious of the interests that shape our consciousness we don't know we think we have these ethical values but what we really have are our class interests based on our position in the structure of manufacturing and ownership for Freud the unconscious is that which harbors our shameful instinctual life and so our conscious life is a compromise between these feelings that we can't acknowledge and all of the influence of the super-ego which tries to deny it well if you take these two views of the unconscious you'll find that both of them cast ordinary people in a very belittling light ordinary people are not aware of what's truly motivating them they need to be told what's motivating them which means they need to be ruled and if you reach civilization and its discontents which is I think the most overrated book ever written you will find Freud talking about America and its democracy and how what it really needs is a strong central leader the people seem to think that they know what they want but of course they don't they can't rule themselves it's an unruly country and I find it fascinating that Freud's politics lean toward this authoritarianism that is ultimately implicit in the theory itself interestingly enough I called you a demo a little at the beginning and I have a quote here from you you you speak of your of your notion of learning as involving keen debate not reverence for great books historical consciousness and self reflection not supposedly timeless values and continual expansion of our national Canon you're talking about American literature but but in other words the very things you just described about mark and Freud go against that really that they they're trying to stifle debate in a way as they offer this narcotic about the forces that are gripping either the mind or the world well I think that's absolutely right even though Freud and Marx both were cultivated people who enjoyed and appreciated the arts so their primary the primary influence of their authoritarianism wasn't exercised in the field of commentary about the Arts let's move away from Freud and talk a little about great writers and distinguished writing what are the characteristics of distinguished literary writings or is that too gross syphilis yeah it's very very hard to say precisely because the great writer and one always thinks immediately of Shakespeare is the one who is least explainable in terms of his contemporaries mm-hmm you know you can read Marlowe and Shakespeare who were writing the same kinds of plays at the same time but there's a qualitative leap there that is almost indefinable but we all feel that it's there now does it go back to what we quoted you as saying earlier they the best American novelists have made singular departures from established belief in practice yes I would say so I mean I Faulkner whom I certainly had in mind when I wrote that sentence is it is a good example and Faulkner was a very confused man Faulkner's views on race are nothing to write home about he didn't know which side of the fence he was on but out of his confusion he wrote extraordinarily powerful fiction that was highly empathetic what Faulkner could do was to put himself into the body and mind of a black man or a white man or a woman with equal facility this is genius at work there's no explaining it and certainly there's no formula for reproducing it now and this would explain to us why a critic has to place an author in in his own personal history and in the history of his times really to come to an understanding of the issues that he's grappling with well yes if you want to find out what's unique about a writer you're obliged to be well-acquainted with with his or her contemporaries for sure and you know in general a literary critic wants to understand what's there and it isn't just understanding what's unique it's understanding the whole package perhaps the author is can perhaps the authors terribly overrated because when we get to know the contemporaries we see that it's not as new as we thought it was well let the chips fall where they may and and part of your your struggle is to even to come to terms with overcoming the author's own representation of himself certainly people in general do not understand themselves terribly well and there's no reason to think that an author is transparent to himself this being so however we still want to be wary of methodologies which give us the idea that we will know in advance what the deep secret factors are we don't know that in advance in your meta criticism of the critics one of the telling points that you make is they're they're so engaged by their own theory by that that they really want to put aside the facts of a particular life well yes or more typically they will light upon a fact or a handful of facts that are particularly congenial to the theory at hand and then these facts become the only facts you know being the great intellectual model perhaps the most influential intellectual model in the humanities in our time has been the work of Foucault this is exactly what Foucault did with history he brilliantly amplified the significance of out-of-the-way facts which he then took to be the essence of the whole civilization or the whole segment of time that he would call an epistemic then the civilization he did not have an empirical frame of mind and if you'd asked him about he would have agreed with you the empiricism is old-fashioned it's not the way to go and presumably his followers would be ones to confirm his conclusions as as opposed to of valuating them in in in light of different theories well yes I mean again in this empirical vacuum that I described to you the citation of intellectual Authority becomes a substitute for reasoning and to cite the so-called correct authorities not always politically correct but the ones who are who are current at the moment is a is a large part of what is required if one wants to be taken for an intellectual whereas my view is almost exactly the opposite the appeal to Authority can never be satisfactory even if the authority is right now part of your job as an educator is to teach students to recognize these myths and illusions and one of the ways they can go about doing that is learning to write and for many years you were the head of the freshman composition program here and as I pointed out you the author of the Random House handbook so let's talk a little about writing can we learn to write well and how do we do that well I got through graduate school so quickly that I had never even been a TA I got my PhD in three years and then I was just told to start teaching freshman English here in 1958 I hadn't the faintest idea how to do it I didn't wasn't even told which books to assign is just kind of told to go in there and do it and the kids that I was teaching were not much younger than I was I was 25 and I found this tremendously exhausting and challenging but also very exciting and I was almost like one of these little Gosling's that konrad lorenz writes about you know I got bonded to freshman English and I never ceased loving the teaching of composition later when I went through some of the intellectual changes that I've been discussing with you I started up a course called practical writing that was for everybody but English majors they were not welcome but with a with a series of a sequence of sessions between myself as a lecturer and specially trained TAS from other fields we had social scientists and humanists and hard scientists all doing writing and we were all talking about the same general topic which was precisely rationality and rhetorical presentation and that was one of the most exciting courses I ever taught did that for several years in the 80s but back in the 70s I decided to write a composition handbook for a number of reasons some of which were just very personally practical and I found that it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be because I found that one could use better literary examples and one could even create whimsical characters who had a kind of plot line going through the book so this book was quite different from the usual fare that was being produced in in that genre and it was it was very successful in every way you make a point in the introduction to the Random House which I would like to ask you about you tell the student you must realize that effective prose is not like a brass ring at all it is more like the destination of a journey approachable by steps that anyone can follow and and then you go on to say we do not have things to say we acquire them in the process of working on definite problems that catch our attention yes well I believe that profoundly and ice I make a statement to freshmen because freshmen tend to come in believing that they do have things to say and they've already experienced wonderful things that they want to tell you about and reached wonderful conclusions and what they've experienced generally is what their classmates have experienced which isn't a great deal and what I want to tell them what I've wanted to tell them is that the things that are really exciting are the things that you don't know yet but that you will find out if you grapple with a real problem in a way that opens your mind to objections to your first thoughts about that problem and the sign that this is happening is the struggle over drafts with prose if you find that your first drafts are perfectly adequate it means that you're an egotist that you're in love with your words experienced writers become increasingly suspicious of their own drafts and even suspicious of their own enthusiasm for their drafts and they try insofar as possible to critique them themselves but if they're really lucky and they have some honest friends or relations who are also intelligent they submit the work to criticism and they listen to the criticism and are inclined to believe the criticism because more often than not the criticism shows them something they did not want to see about their own work you state that your philosophy of education I think this was in the critic spirited way is to make our students more capable of independent judgment by teaching them to read accurately and to write scrupulously in a comprehensible idiom our own prose can be an example in this regard we can also mediate between relatively uninformed readers and great works of imagination holding out alternatives to a life of passive consumption and manipulation I couldn't agree more that's what that's what teaching literature ought to be all about and by the way that's why I always preferred teaching undergraduates even when I was you know surrounded by acolytes among graduate students when I was a freudian the undergraduate teaching was always more exciting for me simply because you had minds that were more ready to be changed that were not pre professional didn't have the theories down didn't have the theories down you know I in in my last years as a teacher here I found increasingly that the graduate students understood the profession better than I did and I thought that was terrible mm-hmm I thought that they should postpone this kind of cannae insider knowledge of the way the department's work as long as possible but they seem to know it when they came in it's a kind of premature shrewdness which shuts down intellectual options I always try to end these interviews with lessons learned that's hard thing for anybody to do but look if we look back at the 20th century one sees the power of many bad ideas and and you've latched on to demonstrating that with regard to one in particular psychoanalysis what what what would you advise students as they face the 21st century and the charlatans that will undoubtedly appear well it's not so much advising students as advising their instructors that the students should be exposed to the practice of reason the students should be given the opportunity to choose between alternative ideas on the basis of evidence and logic and I think there are very few courses that are offered including in the sciences but do this most introductions to the sciences give the student and acquaintance with the present state of the field but not with the criteria that make one idea more appealing than another to a given scientist so I think I think we as educators need to elevate Rash empirical values to a higher place in the curriculum than it generally occupies where do you think that kind of teaching what discipline will it come out of or will it have to be interdisciplinary I think it can be done in just about any discipline but I would also envision interdisciplinary efforts by you know master teachers I mean I think of someone like John Searles such a charismatic teacher he could do a wonderful course in exactly this this kind of thinking that would be open to the whole you know freshman class it would be given in the Greek theater one final question the contribution of the humanities to a liberal education is in decline is that a cause of concern to you well it's a cause of tremendous concern to me I think our whole culture is becoming rapidly more technocratic and more materialistic I think that money counts for more in the minds of students than it ever has before job security counts for a great deal and you can't blame the students for that but you can you can notice that it's a it's the temper of the times the idea that one's undergraduate years are time of intellectual exploration is disappearing specialization is becoming earlier and earlier I don't think the replacement of books by television and the internet is such a hot idea so yes I think that the decline of the humanities is very very bad and in my own life I have felt that the free reading that I did as well as the assigned reading that I did have stood me in very good stead in all kinds of ways that I couldn't possibly have anticipated at the time there's a storehouse of history and culture there in the back of your mind which gives you a basis of comparison a way of distancing yourself from the hurly-burly around you and if I've been able to resist the pressure of conformity to trends I think it's partly because I did get a pretty darn good exposure to points of view that were not my own and we're not those of my time and you're somewhere or other there they're part of my mind and I think in the best of all possible worlds everybody should have such opportunity professor Cruz thank you very much for joining us today and talking about your intellectual Odyssey and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 6,386

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: UC, Berkeley, Frederick, Crews, writer, English, language

Id: ApctzxcHv60

Length: 57min 7sec (3427 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 12 2008