Many and Frequent Are the Defects of This Post

Matthew Arnold, in describing the subset of the middle, or Philistine, class that "gives all its energies to organising itself, through trades' unions and other means," asserts that this group is seeking to affirm "its class and its class-instinct, its ordinary self not its best self . . . not an inward perfection." Arnold claims that this class is occupied, "according to Plato's subtle expression, with the things of itself and not its real self."

Arnold seems smitten with some abstract ideal of mind, a tendency toward "truth" and "right reason" that a few from each class will always be inclined toward, but which requires the right circumstances to be brought to its full potential. With Nietzsche's "original model" of the "leaf" in my mind, and the argument surrounding it, it's difficult for me to take Arnold too seriously. And after all, wasn't the struggle of the working class to organize and demand rights very much in pursuing its "best self"? Isn't that what Karl Marx would tell us?

When Arnold says of the Populace, "What hope . . . of inculcating the belief that excellence dwells among high and steep rocks, and can only be reached by those who sweat blood to reach her," I get the feeling he's placing his own internal struggle toward some abstract perfection over the material struggles of the various classes he describes. Material existence is steeped in "bathos," but using the material world, such as "high and steep rocks," as metaphor for an internal striving toward "truth" is apparently admirable, noble, and to be encouraged and cultivated as much as possible.

Hume, like Arnold, is interested in discovering broadly applicable truth, though primarily with respect to taste and aesthetics. Like Gorgias and Protagoras, Hume contrasts sickness and health, describing the "man in fever" and his diminished senses as a means of illustrating a "sound and defective state" in "each creature." Only if there is "considerable uniformity of sentiment among men" who are in the "sound state" can an idea of the "perfect beauty" be formulated. Unfortunately, "many and frequent are the defects" that keep us from a clear, healthy perception.

This move toward establishing a healthy perception is a moral one, and it suggests once again that some cultivation is required to get there. Though I'm not always comfortable with how Arnold and Hume go about making their respective cases, I think they have a point. Certainly practicing rigorous analysis and careful argument, as well as keeping yourself open to the various sensations a given text or experience might excite, have both practical and intrinsic value. And they are not skills we are necessarily born with. Arnold spends quite a bit of time describing Prussian education for a reason, though his argument, that aristocrats ought to be using their elevated status to create exemplary educational institutions, is a little strange.

How then do we establish educational practices and institutions that allow and respect difference without resorting to quasi-religious idealization of essentially privileged and protected sensibilities?