Subject: [HM] Using quotations
From: Robert Tragesser (RTragesser@compuserve.com)
Date: Wed Dec 22 1999 - 06:12:13 EST
Tony Gardiner wrote,
[[[ {TG} May I side with Cipra against Tragesser - partly by suggesting
that Tragesser has confused two different issues? The first issue is
whether quotations can be used creatively to make a point which the
original speaker or writer never dreamt of (or even the opposite of
what s/he intended). It is hard not to conclude that those who object
take themselves too seriously and are even guilty of imperialist
tendencies. (Why should the rest of us use such material only in ways
that please purists?) ]]]
My _greatest_ difficulty is with unexamined or unexplicated
quotations attributed to great or reknown persons. This is all too
often a device for by-passing the exercise of intelligence and diving
for the authority the attribution of the quotation confers. Perhaps it
is because the culture in which I was nurtured implanted in me an
absolute distrust, indeed an abhorrence of, "authority." Or more
exactly, looked at more positively, it implanted the sense that to
understand something one must get the details right.
That's not taking oneself too seriously; it is taking the
needs and requirements of genuine understanding seriously, and that's
what we are all after, are we not? Nor is it "imperialist" to ask
someone whose avowed aim is to help us to understand to not create
impediments.---Perhaps a related kind of example will help clarify the
point. The use of poorly integrated ("indecorous") images/metaphors,
sore-thumb metaphors, in say mathematical pedagogy. The most
egregiously horrible one such I can imagine is the image often given to
help the student "understand" what is meant by saying of some figures
that are of infinite extent but have a finite area that they could be
painted by a can of paint (of sufficient but finite volume). This might
be "cute", but for the life of me I can't see that it helps rather than
hinders. Indeed, the image should raise _confounding_ questions,
shouldn't it? Though images of this sort are (I think, wickedly)
presented in such a way that the auditors are supposed to feel that it
would be shameful to or idiotic to bring up the confounding questions.
-- Of course, the teacher who is thinking and has a genuine interest
in/appreciation of mathematics would encourage and address those
questions, and indeed perhaps explain how just such questions can lead
to tough and creative mathematical problems -- Are there mappings, and
what kinds of mappings, could count as "painting" such a finite area of
infinite extent by a 3-dimensional volume (e.g., cube) or, for that
matter, a 2-dimensional finite area (e.g. square). Given that the paint
is "fluid" and perfectly "mixable" and yet not capable of expansion or
contraction. TOUGH PROBLEMS! But instructive about where new
mathematics comes from (and so what is terrifically interesting about
mathematics)! And that's far different from the brain-dead illusion of
understanding the other rather evil and dishonest use of the paint can
image represents. . . . The same applies to unexplicated quotations,
that is quotations that for anyone the least bit thinking will raise all
sorts of confounding questions rather than reprehensibly giving the
illusion of seeing something.
If an unexamined and great-person-attributed quotation is being
used creatively, why not skip the quotation and give us the ideas "it"
inspired? If the great Weierstrass is said to have stated that every
mathematician must be part poet (or whatever), I am left either hanging
fire or beset by so very many questions. What did he have in mind by
"poetry"? for one. Imagine for example someone resisting mathematics
because it is "so cold and impersonal". Then I quote Weierstrass, and
are they supposed to say, well, that's a relief, or alright then,
maybe I'll give mathematics another hearing. . .? It would be somewhat
more intellectually honest and pedagogically creative to quote T.S.Eliot
to the effect that strong poetry strives to get away from the emotional
and the personal [meaning to give Wordsworth the boot]. But in either
case, I can't get myself into a position (as I couldn't in the case of
the can of paint image above) where any good comes from this. . .how one
is not left with too many questions. How is it that we are so easily
suckered into an illusion of understanding by such images and
quotations?
Implicit in this is a condemnation of our intellectual culture,
its timidity, its being so nerve-wracked by the shadows of the
(supposed) giants in its past (or tenure committees is it?). Gian-Carlo
Rota once explained why he occasionally put his own (philosophical)
ideas into the mouths of others -- "one doesn't dare say anything bright
and insightful without making a search of the archives for someone
famous and hopefully dead who said something like that." Background to
this: his conviction that our culture of letters/learning is highly
repressive consequent on its having only a now considerably diminished
understanding of what it is to think. Not understanding/appreciating
what it is to really think, it must distrust and suppress or exile or
humiliate anyone who inadvertently is doing real thinking. Well, I see
the habit and survival and sense of value of unexplicated quotations
from authorities (and the thrill this causes, the sense of
satisfaction; or more particularly, the absence of overwhelming
questions such quotations ought to be inspiring), as well as the
indecorous (cute) pedagogical images and metaphors (of the paint can
sort), as symptomatic of our having lost our minds, of our having lost
all sense of what it is to understand something, of what it is to
think.
robert tragesser
west(running)brook, connecticut
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