On Schelling and the Utility of The Large Lecture Hall

“One can doubt to what extent these individuals who mouth the words “freedom of thought” are themselves actually willing to admit freedom of thought, which they most often lay claim to primarily for their own incidental opinions, while considering themselves justified in assailing other opposing views by any means that stands in their power”—Schelling

I am often teased by my friends in analytic philosophy that I am widely read, but I don’t recall reading Schelling (1775 – 1854) before this week. But I am reading his (1842) The Berlin lectures in The Grounding of Positive Philosophy in Bruce Matthews’ (2007) translation (SUNY). [I have not checked the German.) The second lecture has the title “On the Academic Study of Philosophy,” but it is really about how to think about the worth of attending large lectures in philosophy.

I have to admit that I read what Schelling has to say with more than disinterested curiosity. For many years, I taught a required first year course where it was not uncommon that I had anywhere between four hundred to six hundred students. Once a friend who teaches at a wealthy private university with very small classes remarked that they didn’t think such lectures had much to do with philosophy. This hit a nerve because I often wondered to what degree the showmanship and jocular nature of public lectures were a kind of pact with the devil.

Schelling explains to his students how to listen “to philosophy lectures,” (p. 101) and he explains “the most fruitful method of taking notes.” (p. 104) In fact, rather than trying to capture all of his remarks in exhaustive detail, Schelling suggests that during the lectures students should focus on capturing the transitions between the essential points. And that after class they should try to reconstruct the argument based on these transitions. He then adds:

Still better is when more do this collectively, one helping and supplementing the other, so that through such collaboration the entirety is once again produced. Only thereby does the lesson come alive for each student, and the more deeply inspired content won through this shared effort and discussion will become at the same time the bond of a true, spiritual friendship. For this is the greatest appeal of the academic life, or at least it should be—this being together with others, so united in one common purpose, as in the course of life that follows people cannot be so easily united again. (p. 104)

What I love about this passage is that Schelling grasps here that his lectures are just an occasion, a trigger, for something more vital in his students. Their attempt at collaborative reconstruction of the lectures after the fact allows for a shared project of understanding that generates a meaningful and rather rare kind of friendship. Something similar is familiar from study or reading groups on a shared text.

The kind of collaborative, independence generated by such an experience “is contrary to the education in despotic states [which] seeks only to bring it down. There, education brings about…servility.” (Spirit of the Law, Book 4, Chapter 3.) By contrast, what Schelling has in mind “cultivates a type of shared spirit of scientific inquiry and a youth imbued with character, who does not falter with ambivalence, but who decisively turns away from what is base, in whichever form it may present itself.” (p. 105)

Interestingly enough, the point is not to tell students what to think, but rather to create the occasion for their free thinking. And this is so even if one recognizes that putting young bodies together for a few years also means they will be interested in “sunshine and even mindless merriment.” (p. 105) Schelling then turns to the students’ existential needs:

But they are to search the darker shadows of more serious matters as well, and it is essential that such gravity does not assault the manner or the subject matter they pursue. That teacher is no friend of youth who attempts to fill them with the grief and sorrow for the ways of the world or the course of politics when they must first acquire the strength of guiding convictions and beliefs. (p. 105, emphasis added)

It is common to domesticate in popular discussions something akin to what Schelling has in mind here in two ways. First, is a rejection of political pontification during lectures. Second, is to suggest that students need tools for thinking (or the job-market, etc.). While both are not irrelevant, what Schelling suggests is something subtly different. In their collaborative project of reconstructing the lectures, the students do end up with strongly held views and principles.