A few years ago a student told me at the beginning of the term that she was looking forward to my lit class because she anticipated that the reading would give her a pleasurable break from the seriousness of organic chemistry and the hard work of studying for the dental college entrance exam. (She also told me she expected to make an A). I gave her a lecture to the effect that my course was hard and had just as much claim to her serious attention as organic chemistry. As it turned out, she did make an A, because she took me seriously and rose to the challenge. Later, when I learned that this particular student was a Bosnian expatriate and an adult, I came to think my lecture at least partly wrong-headed and to feel some shame that it had required such a shift in perspective to show me my foolishness.

My discomfort as a humanist over the past good many years has not come primarily from the fact that I work in what has become the information industry so much as it has come from colleagues committed to one variety of anti-humanist ideology or other, including ultra-conservative colleagues who utter the word "textuality" with a sneer and hew to the canons of a New Criticism I have a hard time recognizing. Of course the culture wars are more or less over now, but a few years ago they had sufficiently warped my perspective that I sometimes mistook sheep for windmills. What I learned from my Bosnian-expatriate student was to remember that I had got into the business of being a scholar for love, just as Plato and Whitehead and Erasmus did. Thirty-five years ago I would have been (and was) delighted to encounter students who expected to enjoy my classes. I still treasure those students, and I continue to encounter them.

I think all rational inquiry requires a certain quality of attention, and that the details of specific modes of inquiry assume importance almost directly in proportion to their ability to evoke that quality of attention. A friend of mine, a physician and an Aggie (Texans will understand) becomes an entirely different person when his attention is directed towards a medical issue (and I don’t mean the politics of medicine) than he is when he is talking about almost anything else except football, to which he is also seriously committed. When he talks about medicine his voice is sometimes full of love and a kind of joy, always touched with a mindfulness that is an automatic part of his attending to the rational discourse to which he has given his life’s major energy.

I do not believe we study the humanities at any level primarily in order to become critical thinkers, or to grasp the history of ideas, or to learn to communicate. These are goods, but they are partial goods. On the other hand, I do believe we study the humanities in order to join a conversation, to set out on a quest. I believe it is the unique genius of the humanities, as they have been transmitted to us by the long tradition originating with the Greeks, to stand for that quality of attentiveness all learning requires, but only the humanities actively seek, and to stand for it in itself, abstracted from any particular mode of discourse. That is why the humanities are propaedeutic to other disciplines. They inculcate a way of being in the world.

The distinction between humanists and scientists is at least as old as the seventeenth century in the west (which of course has no monopoly on anything, not even blue jeans). Even Galileo, a humanist if ever there was one, of whom Milton speaks as "that Tuscan Artist," could sneer at humanists as mere interpreters of texts. There is a good recent book on this distinction by Anthony Grafton, entitled Defenders of the Text, published by Harvard UP in 1991. The seventeenth-century distinction between those who study texts and those who study nature breaks down, of course, though I know a good many acientists who continue to think there is such a thing as the unmediated study of nature.

Part of my own reconstruction as a humanist has involved some immersion in contemporary hermeneutics. I am defending here a view of humanism like Heidegger’s conception of thinking as dwelling, I think; at least that is what I mean to do.

Humanists dominated European and British universities until the nineteenth century, the great era of the various Wissenschaften, with the German universities forming the vanguard of the scientific culture. American universities were far behind the curve until scientific domination of learning solidified into the American research establishment in the mid-twentieth century, primarily I think because of the accidents of World War II. Now we are in the midst of further change. I’m not sure what it means, but I don’t want to be left out.

Us humanists are implicated in our own demise by having uncritically accepted the proposition that the final cause of learning is a text. For an old-fashioned humanist like me the text is a means. The final cause of learning is the soul’s weal. Such a view as mine might possibly be of some use in a culture of learning which has to some extent given up logocentrism. In this regard I might recommend a little book by R. G. Collingwood called Speculum Mentis. It’s out of print and requires some rational reconstruction, but I find it beautiful. Viewed from one perspective, the music of Bach is a text; viewed from another it is the fulfillment of human nature, historically situated, of course.

I think of Bach as an innovator. For a long time I more or less accepted the idea I had from Schweitzer that Bach was a culminator. Then, about fifteen years ago I became a member of a musical group that performs a lot of Bach and began to explore the cantatas. One season we performed an early cantata--I forget the number now--that uses violas da Gamba and folk tunes and a lot of romantic sound painting in what seemed to me a self-conscious attempt to do something unusual with the cantata formula. After that I began to listen in a new way.

I like the notion that Bach thought musically with his hands and feet, sometimes with his whole body. So much of his music has an intimate knowledge of the feel and heft of instruments, how the sound they make feels, how bodies feel and move playing them. Bach often writes for singers by analogy to instruments; I sometimes wonder if he really liked singers. He also writes differently for the violone and the organ pedals, giving some of his most wonderful music to the violone. I think perhaps his first love was the stringed instruments, which apparently he played first, and that the violone, the ground instrument, may have meant something special to him.

Whether or not Bach thought textually, the music for us is a text, though I do think Bach thought textually. I am presently involved in preparation for a performance of the B minor mass, which as you know involves much reworking of earlier musical texts. I’m not sure I think all the reworking surpasses the earlier working out, but I think Bach was striving to surpass himself, to rewrite four-part fugues as five-part fugues, etc. This piece, more than any other Bach I know, seems to push the limits. If you want to see some rhythmic limit pushing, look at what he does with the opening movement of the creed.

Bach also thought of music as the praise of God, signing both sacred and secular manuscripts with the motto ‘soli deo gloria’ or ‘SDG’ or some other variation of the sentiment, writing ‘Jesu juva’ at the head of many compositions. I have been reading some recent scholarship which argues that Bach believed that highly complex music, which pushed the limits of rule, was the more excellent praise of God. There is also a growing literature linking Bach to philosophy.

I think if Bach were alive today he would seek out the newest and most sophisticated musical technology, and just as he did with the clavier of his time, he would change the technology in strange and wonderful ways. But part of my intention in characterizing Bach’s music as the fulfillment of human nature requires Schweitzer’s notion of Bach as the culminating exemplar of a style, with all of its various potentialities for meaning and the creation of culture.

But as a singer I have to wonder about a composer who could write tenths for a bass to sing. I have been writing a poem about Bach, starting out trying to surpass a wonderful poem called "Fugue" by Richard Holinger. I don’t think I did surpass it, but I like my poem, anyway. The premise is that Bach writes a retraction, like Chaucer’s retraction, addressed to an idolatrous Bach lover like me. The young woman in Arnstadt, with whom Bach made music weekdays, figures in my poem.

[Posted at Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms, 19 - 24 February 1998]