On Knowingness with Jonathan Lear and Oedipus, the New Prince

Next week I start teaching a new honors course on Imperialism. Recently, I confided to my colleague, Lillian Cicerchia (of What’s Left of Philosophy fame), a growing fear about the class that the course readings had nothing to teach the students because the students think they already understand the topic since (I simplify and made more coherent what I actually said) they already know slavery and colonialism are very bad. I tried to explain what I meant, and I felt rather inarticulate. But Lillian seemed to grasp what I was aiming at and directed me to a Substack post by Freddie deBoer. His catchphrase for the phenomenon is student knowingness.

As it happens, that particular Substack is paywalled, but DeBoer wrote already about knowingness back in 2016 in Jacobin. Others have been writing about the phenomenon (including a particular kind of student knowingness), too, including Jonathan Malesic (in this NYT Op-ED; and this Psyche essay) as well as Simon Gladhill in Critical Inquiry back in 2006. And recently, Brian Klaas, on Substack here. So, I am rather late to this particular party (which seems like to defeat the spirit of knowingness).

Nearly all of the pieces I have linked to harken back (explicitly or implicitly) to Jonathan Lear’s characterization of knowingness in his Open Minded: Working out the Logic of the Soul (1998; Harvard. The references to Lear on knowingness usually omit that subtitle.) Because different implied definitions of knowingness where attributed to Lear, I thought it would be useful to take a look at Lear’s own wording.

I also had an ulterior motive. In the mid 1990s, when I was a PhD student at The University of Chicago, I was a kind of Lear groupie. I took a sequence of graduate seminars on the Oedipus trilogy with him, a course on Freud, and, I believe, one on Charmides. I wouldn’t describe myself a real groupie because I had no interest in doing my PhD with him, consider him a mentor, or model my own teaching or scholarship on his example. We never became close personally. And in the decades since, when fate made our paths cross, we have affected a polite familiarity; but no more. I would not present myself, for example, as his student. But back then I thought (and still hold) that he was a spectacularly excellent seminar instructor. So, I also had a kind of curiosity if his account of knowingness intersected at all with the material he had taught back then.

I was in for a shock. The third essay of the volume is titled “Knowingness and Abandonment: An Oedipus for our Time.” And it’s the only essay in which he discusses knowingness explicitly. The chapter is, in fact, a lecture he delivered to the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, March 1997. I had an uncanny feeling I have known all along what knowingness is, and, yet, somehow I couldn’t see it.

The essay itself is incredibly rich (including quite clever and prescient references to then contemporary political reporting/scandals). In part it is an admonition, even scolding, of psychoanalysts to stop pretending to be in the know on a ‘special secret’ than they can gift culture (p. 33). Lear has training in psychoanalysis, so that must have been a fun after lecture reception.

The heart of the lecture is an invitation to re-read and reconsider Oedipus Tyrannus and thereby to convey features of his account of knowingness and the human condition. For, in Lear’s hands Oedipus is the exemplar of knowingness, who rejects “the activity of interpretation” as pointless (p51). Crucially, Oedipus stakes his claim to political legitimacy on his practical acuity and subsequent worldly success (see pp. 41-2). I quote Lear:

Oedipus' practical reason can solve every problem, because it cannot see the problems it cannot solve. They are so meaningless, they cannot even be formulated: thus even dismissal becomes impossible. Oedipus is not the first philosopher; he is the first ersatz-philosopher. (p. 51)

Not being able to see the puzzle one cannot solve is pretty much Tom Kuhn’s definition of a scientist.

Now, I should say that I was never a meticulous note-taker in any class. At some point I realized I could pay attention to the lecture or discussion (and even participate in it) or I could take notes. But not both. While reading his lecture part of me wondered if in one of the boxes in my basement, there was a notepad with my notes on Lear’s seminar on Oedipus Tyrannus.

All experienced teachers are capable of teaching a text in one way and lecturing on it in public in another. One can hold a view at arm’s length after all. But teaching in a seminar is usually a way to find out what one really thinks or wishes to come to think on a topic. And I wanted to compare that lecture with my sediments of that seminar. Because I had the uncanny feeling that while I can tell you exactly who sat where and how each of us responded to Lear’s mannerisms three decades later, the lecture seemed wholly fresh to me. I felt I was reading these thoughts for the very first time.

Near the end of the lecture, Lear makes a move I recoiled from. And it may be worth trying to understand this.

Catharsis was possible for the Athenian audience because there is relief in submission. Oedipus was abandoned by his parents, but he and his audience were surrounded by the gods. And there is profound comfort in being able to move almost automatically from hubristic overconfidence in human "knowingness" into humble religious submission. But for us that path is blocked. There is no obvious retreat from "knowingness," for there is nothing clear to submit to. We have been abandoned by our parents and abandoned by the gods. Since the Enlightenment, modernity has constituted itself around the idea that there are no categories which are simply given-that even the most basic categories like fate, family, nation must be legitimated before the tribunal of human reason, and cannot simply be handed down as part of the basic moral order of the universe. There seem to be no fixed categories which are simply handed down from beyond. There seem to be no meanings to our lives, no values, which are exempt from our critical scrutiny. This is what Nietzsche meant when he had his madman proclaim that God is dead. How can there be relief when everything is up to us? We seem thus to be trapped in the Oedipal position of "knowingness," with no place to go. (p. 53)

Let me start by expressing hesitancy about the idea that the effect of catharsis and the subsequent submission to the gods on the Athenian audience was one of comfort. Whatever release or relief is brought by catharsis, I am not so convinced the new state is comfort. But that’s, in part, because it is not obvious that submission to the Greek gods (say) of the household or polity is or is meant to be comfort inducing. I have a sense this partially Christianizes the Athenian audience.*

I am no expert on these matters.

Perhaps, I am misreading Lear. The comfort is not in the submission to the gods itself. But rather in the sequence to be able to move from (identification with) over-confidence to submission to the gods. The (ahh) cultural schema of the sequence of possible passions of accepted behavior in the Greek theater provides a form of familiarity that is itself comforting; and knowing that there is a place to release certain feelings into or by religious submission.

Lear, then, is diagnosing a loss or a permanent absence. And what has been lost, on this view, is a whole set of cultural practices that allowed citizens to grow out or abandon knowingness and substitute it for something else.

If we step back, we can see that Lear has moved from interpreting Oedipus in context of its original performance(s) to diagnosing an absence in our culture. I don’t mean to suggest he has done something illicit. Because the lecture is itself framed with an account why in our age “the order of knowingness” is accompanied by widespread “boredom and irritation,” (p. 36) while “the violation of the presumption to already know is met with moralizing fury” (p. 38). (On this last point see also DeBoer’s analysis of mockery when someone is shown not to already know.)

What’s worrisome about Lear’s diagnosis is that if one has students that exhibit knowingness — and notice I only have that fear, I can’t know that yet — and in the classroom one accidently or deliberately manages to make them aware of this stance (this is Lear’s term: p. 47; p. 50) it is not obvious one is doing them a service if they then can’t abandon knowingness for some other (ahh) stance.

As an aside, Goldhill (2006) plausibly suggests that eliminating knowingness is itself a dangerous madness. For, on his view it is a “discursive necessity.” (p. 723) We need to get on with each other in a world where we simply can’t know all we need to know. We might say (although he doesn’t) that knowingness is a side-effect of social complexity as, for example, Socrates himself reveals when he relies on Damon’s authority in the Republic. The question is, then, rather when is knowingness apt, and when it is not.

Be that as it may, I increasingly hold that the category of ‘modernity’ should be treated with some suspicion. In reflecting on its role in Lear’s essay and its wider use, I suspect its function in our intellectual lives is itself a means to create a species of knowingness for us/we. We presume to have a better view than the ‘pre-moderns’ or ‘savages.’+

I don’t discern such a gulf between Oedipus (and his Athenian audience) and us. For, Oedipus is a paradigmatic New Prince, who lacks Machiavellian Virtu. His knowingness makes him incapable of such Virtu. Rather than reading it as a pre-Enlightenment text, it should begin to guide us (as its original audiences might have been) in the proper art of government.

Lear is too subtle to be trapped with such elementary moves. His essay ends with an explicit rejection of both the Enlightenment consciousness that abandons itself to thinking as well as the two kinds of post-modern ones: (I) the pathetic one, which is treated as a “flight back” to “fundamentalist forms of religious engagement” and (ii) the avantgarde, playful “even mischievous, breaking up of traditional forms which one finds in so much postmodern literature, art, and philosophy.” (pp. 55) Goldhill is presumably an instance of (ii).

So, are we left with knowingness or species of nihilism? For reasons that are unclear (although surely are meant to echo Nietzsche), Lear adopts the tragic stance:

Tragedy begins with the recognition that neither response will work for long: that flight is not possible, that breaking up past orthodoxy is itself a defense which will eventually collapse. It is in such intimations that ancient Oedipus, Oedipus the tyrant, still has the power to reverberate deeply in our souls (p.55)

As a conclusion this is a non-sequitur. But I prefer to read it as an admonition to think for ourselves in the company of wise teachers like Sophocles. We, who are on the precipice of that expected collapse, could do worse than to re-read and be (ahh) reverberated through reflection on ancient Oedipus in the stolen moments before we must jump.

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*Having written that, Lear treats (plausibly) Oedipus as a “tale of abandonment” (p. 48) that is recurringly acted out by Oedipus; so the absence of comfort and comforting parents is rather important in Oedipus’ life.

+Lear treat “fundamentalist forms of religious engagement” as premodern (p. 55), but see my next paragraph.