Writing Academic
Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World
order
download chapters one and two
Endorsements
David Bevington, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
"To see true dialogue as a way of allowing conflicting voices to hear and understand one another is to offer hope of some resolution in our current world of polarization and impasse. Sharon's book on Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World does just that, by taking us back to some great debates of literary art, like Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which dialogic freedom takes the liberating form of seeking out a continuum of layers of knowing, as Portia and Shylock fail to navigate a way of transcending the hostility and cultural deafness that holds them apart. This thoughtful book is timely in the best sense." October 18, 2013
Caryl Emerson, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, Princeton University
“In 1919, a dark year for Europe full of dire pronouncements on the ‘crisis of culture,’ Mikhail Bakhtin began to develop an arsenal of precious philosophical ideas by which civilization might better live: intuitive empathy, dialogue, a carnival fearlessness and sense of the cosmic whole, the unfinalizability of consciousness. Over the next three decades he illustrated their dynamics through the literary genius of Dostoevsky, Goethe, Rabelais. Sharon Schuman’s book adopts a similar technique. In successive chapters, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Toni Morrison provide the lens and morally textured background for the “life of an idea” that Schuman has fashioned out of Bakhtinian materials to address our present culture’s crisis of freedom. It is a conceptual crisis peculiar to a free society (in Stalinist Russia, Bakhtin would have gazed on it in wonder). The two definitions Schuman considers foundational in the West—freedom as autonomy and freedom as enlightenment—must be supplemented by a concept less devoted to the static comfort zone of each person’s individual rights and belief. Moving with the dissonant other, she suggests, is possible, interesting, and wise. Decision-making and freedom are both “two-sided acts.” An outsiderly or “alien” view on things is essential to our own. As the reader gradually and gratefully comes to see, assimilating these insights through literature makes them not just politically relevant, but immortal.” December 15, 2013
Chapter Summaries: Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World
1: Introducing Dialogic Freedom
This chapter lays out the need for a new approach to thinking about freedom, beyond our love affairs with autonomy and with discovering the Truth. It advocates for a concept of dialogic freedom that urges us to consider ourselves more free the better able we are to see from the perspectives of others. The roots of this idea are to be found in writings by Mikhail Bakhtin, Aristotle, Tocqueville, Isaiah Berlin, and Hannah Arendt. From Aristotle comes an emphasis on the citizen as one who rules and is ruled in turn, and from Tocqueville the idea of public life as a “large free school.” From Bakhtin comes ideas about language as a “two-sided act,”determined both by speaker and; language as layers of meaning that we navigate; and language as a tug of war between unifying and fragmenting forces. These ideas are applied for the first time to the concept of freedom, with startling results. From Berlin comes the distinction between positive and negative liberty, and from Arendt the idea of freedom as virtuosity. Together these thinkers help us evolve a definition of dialogic freedom as a two-sided act, chosen within a field of unifying and fragmenting forces along a continuum of layers of knowing that are never final.
2: A Father Begs for his Son’s Corpse in the Iliad
Decisive moments from literature can help us see dialogic freedom in action. At the climax of the Iliad, King Priam penetrates enemy lines to retrieve his son’s corpse from Achilles. This encounter illustrates the two-sidedness of Achilles’ decision to release Hector’s body. It is not a decision he makes alone, but rather a decision coauthored by Priam. Achilles struggles between the rage of a warrior, who would like to continue dragging the corpse by its heels, round and round the battlefield, and the respect of a son, who would return the body to its father. The choice is difficult, and Priam succeeds in his mission only because he codetermines the image that winds up prevailing in Achilles’ mind—the image of his own elderly father, besieged by enemies, while his only son risks his life in a distant war. Priam is able to retrieve his son’s corpse only because for the moment he gets Achilles to resist the warrior’s impulse to kill and to participate instead in a father’s grief. In the Aeneid, Virgil recalls this moment, when he presents the son of Achilles giving Priam a very different reception. All empathy cast aside, this son drags Priam through his own son’s blood before killing him. This decision, too, is a two-sided act, in that Priam’s curses, a far cry from his pleas to Achilles in the Iliad, now magnify his killer’s deafness to his plight. These encounters from ancient literature introduce a key feature of dialogic freedom as a two-sided act and show that this aspect of how we decide has been passed down in our oldest stories.
3: Passion and Freedom in Dante’s Inferno
In Canto V of the Inferno, Dante the pilgrim swoons in empathy for Francesca, the loquacious lover. The pilgrim coauthors Francesca’s decision to speak by being receptive to what she has to say, even as Paolo and Francesca coauthored their mutual decision to commit adultery. Meanwhile, Dante the poet coauthor’s the responses of readers by having us watch the pilgrim swoon, while at the same time we witness the poet’s placement of these sinners in Hell. Here Dante explores the dialogic ambiguities of deliberating from multiple perspectives and the possibility that empathy may be as dangerous a snare as is romantic passion.
4: Deaf to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice
The meaning of Portia’s famous speech on mercy changes radically, depending upon whether the listener is Shylock or one of Portia’s Christian friends. The same words that call to the Christians with an invitation to forgive call to Shylock with a reminder that he has the power to seek revenge. Portia and Shylock are largely deaf to each other’s perspectives. This chapter explores how receptivity to kindred voices, while essential to dialogic freedom, is also potentially destructive to it, precisely because it can entail deafness to the excluded other.
5: The Virtuosity of Satan in Paradise Lost
Milton’s Satan is expert at seeing from his listener’s perspective and manipulating it. He rises to myriad challenges in his encounters with fallen angels, his children, the anarch of Chaos, the sharpest-sighted spirit, and Eve. Satan’s virtuosity at getting what he wants illustrates the down side of dialogic freedom, in that he exploits it for evil purposes. Yet when Satan imagines Eve’s perspective, it almost derails his project. Ultimately, his capacity to see things more innocently for a moment only deepens his misery as he rededicates himself to his decision to destroy goodness. According to Milton, we need to strenuously exercise our intellects and hearts to see from as many perspectives as possible, as we seek to enact dialogic freedom in a fallen world.
6: The Grand Inquisitor’s Silent Christ
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor tries to force Christ to speak, while Ivan Karamazov attempts to derail his brother Alyosha from becoming a priest. In both cases the listener codetermines what the speaker decides to say and do just by listening silently. It is a frustrating situation, as the Grand Inquisitor tries one provocation after another to get Christ talking, and Ivan works hard to persuade his brother. It is also a battle between two perspectives: one that doubts man’s capacity to handle moral freedom, the other that insists on freedom in the form of a kiss. When Christ kisses the Grand Inquisitor and Alyosha kisses Ivan, that choice is coauthored by the arguments against freedom. The kiss “glows” in the recipient’s heart, challenging his intellectual ideal with a competing spiritual one. In the end, Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor must live with the agony of holding in their fevered brains two mutually exclusive perspectives, neither of which they can shake loose.
7: Goading a Reader of “In the Penal Colony”
If we imagine dialogic freedom on a continuum between zero and ten, with zero representing the options of a prisoner chained and gagged, and ten representing the omniscience an omnipotent God, Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” explores the end of the scale closest to zero. At the same time it challenges readers to reach in the opposite direction to embrace an ideal of dialogic freedom that eludes everyone in the story, including the narrator. This tale of an execution gone amuck dramatizes how characters function within a perverse reality. In the process it shows that even as their dialogic freedom breaks down, a reader’s role as witness to that process inspires him or her to desire, embrace, and enact that missing freedom.
8: Shaping the Master’s Vision in “Benito Cereno”
The African slave, Babo, exploits the master’s racist perspective in order to conceal a rebellion through which he has led other slaves to take over a Spanish merchant ship. The American sea captain, Amasa Delano, who comes aboard, is oblivious to this rebellion, blinded by the racism that disarms his suspicions before they can rise to the level of thought. Babo manipulates Delano by playing the role of the attentive servant, even as he intimidates the Spanish captain and crew. Within the field of forces for unity and chaos that involve Delano’s racist assumptions, the captain and crew’s terrorized behavior, and the shifting circumstances of the slave rebellion, Babo enacts his dialogic freedom. Melville’s controversial narrator invites readers first to share Delano’s perspective, then pulls the rug out, focusing us on the compromised freedom of white racists who fail to see what is happening before their eyes.
9: Freedom Under Impossible Conditions in Beloved
Toni Morrison’s Beloved provides a unique window on life as experienced by the victims of slavery. In the process, it celebrates dialogic freedom under conditions guaranteed to eradicate it. The novel presents multiple perspectives on one central event, an escaped slave mother’s infanticide. It’s most cryptic passages are snatches of conversation between that mother and what may be the ghost of her murdered daughter. As these two characters struggle to communicate, the mother trying to make up for the past, the daughter refusing to be consoled, their dialogic freedom nearly evaporates. Morrison seems to be saying that although we are freer the more we can see things from others’ perspectives, this expansion of perspectives will not always be possible. In her novel, dialogic freedom becomes an imperative that is a matter of life and death.
10: Freedom Under Construction in a Polarized World
Today many subjects have become almost impossible to discuss. The problem is not that we disagree, but that we disagree dismissively, satisfied that we already know enough about our opponent’s position. Like the racism explored by Melville and Morrison, our polarized views lead to a debilitating narrowness that prevents us from seeing what is happening before our eyes. Our obsession with autonomy, rights, and the desire to know the Truth, only makes matters worse. In the abortion debate, for example, both sides champion a right—to live or to choose—as the only enlightened perspective and lament the narrow-minded of their opponents. This chapter presents an alternative approach: a dialogic perspective on the abortion debate, which opens possibilities for mutual understanding and action. Whether the subject is terrorism, war, poverty, global warming, the death penalty, immigration, or gay marriage, we all answer to many voices, real and imagined, the sheer number of which would lead to chaos if we tried to listen to all of them all the time. Thus we engage in a sifting and focusing process as we seek to balance the desire for unified explanations with the chaos of a world that resists our efforts at meaning-making. In this balancing act, we are constantly tempted to take refuge among the like-minded and dismiss everyone else. If we were to think of ourselves as more free, not the more we are left alone to do as we please, or the better able we are to see the Truth, but rather, the better able we are to see from the perspectives of others without becoming lost in them, we could begin to repair some of the damage we sustain every day in our polarized world.
Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World
order
download chapters one and two
Endorsements
David Bevington, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
"To see true dialogue as a way of allowing conflicting voices to hear and understand one another is to offer hope of some resolution in our current world of polarization and impasse. Sharon's book on Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World does just that, by taking us back to some great debates of literary art, like Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which dialogic freedom takes the liberating form of seeking out a continuum of layers of knowing, as Portia and Shylock fail to navigate a way of transcending the hostility and cultural deafness that holds them apart. This thoughtful book is timely in the best sense." October 18, 2013
Caryl Emerson, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, Princeton University
“In 1919, a dark year for Europe full of dire pronouncements on the ‘crisis of culture,’ Mikhail Bakhtin began to develop an arsenal of precious philosophical ideas by which civilization might better live: intuitive empathy, dialogue, a carnival fearlessness and sense of the cosmic whole, the unfinalizability of consciousness. Over the next three decades he illustrated their dynamics through the literary genius of Dostoevsky, Goethe, Rabelais. Sharon Schuman’s book adopts a similar technique. In successive chapters, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Toni Morrison provide the lens and morally textured background for the “life of an idea” that Schuman has fashioned out of Bakhtinian materials to address our present culture’s crisis of freedom. It is a conceptual crisis peculiar to a free society (in Stalinist Russia, Bakhtin would have gazed on it in wonder). The two definitions Schuman considers foundational in the West—freedom as autonomy and freedom as enlightenment—must be supplemented by a concept less devoted to the static comfort zone of each person’s individual rights and belief. Moving with the dissonant other, she suggests, is possible, interesting, and wise. Decision-making and freedom are both “two-sided acts.” An outsiderly or “alien” view on things is essential to our own. As the reader gradually and gratefully comes to see, assimilating these insights through literature makes them not just politically relevant, but immortal.” December 15, 2013
Chapter Summaries: Freedom and Dialogue in a Polarized World
1: Introducing Dialogic Freedom
This chapter lays out the need for a new approach to thinking about freedom, beyond our love affairs with autonomy and with discovering the Truth. It advocates for a concept of dialogic freedom that urges us to consider ourselves more free the better able we are to see from the perspectives of others. The roots of this idea are to be found in writings by Mikhail Bakhtin, Aristotle, Tocqueville, Isaiah Berlin, and Hannah Arendt. From Aristotle comes an emphasis on the citizen as one who rules and is ruled in turn, and from Tocqueville the idea of public life as a “large free school.” From Bakhtin comes ideas about language as a “two-sided act,”determined both by speaker and; language as layers of meaning that we navigate; and language as a tug of war between unifying and fragmenting forces. These ideas are applied for the first time to the concept of freedom, with startling results. From Berlin comes the distinction between positive and negative liberty, and from Arendt the idea of freedom as virtuosity. Together these thinkers help us evolve a definition of dialogic freedom as a two-sided act, chosen within a field of unifying and fragmenting forces along a continuum of layers of knowing that are never final.
2: A Father Begs for his Son’s Corpse in the Iliad
Decisive moments from literature can help us see dialogic freedom in action. At the climax of the Iliad, King Priam penetrates enemy lines to retrieve his son’s corpse from Achilles. This encounter illustrates the two-sidedness of Achilles’ decision to release Hector’s body. It is not a decision he makes alone, but rather a decision coauthored by Priam. Achilles struggles between the rage of a warrior, who would like to continue dragging the corpse by its heels, round and round the battlefield, and the respect of a son, who would return the body to its father. The choice is difficult, and Priam succeeds in his mission only because he codetermines the image that winds up prevailing in Achilles’ mind—the image of his own elderly father, besieged by enemies, while his only son risks his life in a distant war. Priam is able to retrieve his son’s corpse only because for the moment he gets Achilles to resist the warrior’s impulse to kill and to participate instead in a father’s grief. In the Aeneid, Virgil recalls this moment, when he presents the son of Achilles giving Priam a very different reception. All empathy cast aside, this son drags Priam through his own son’s blood before killing him. This decision, too, is a two-sided act, in that Priam’s curses, a far cry from his pleas to Achilles in the Iliad, now magnify his killer’s deafness to his plight. These encounters from ancient literature introduce a key feature of dialogic freedom as a two-sided act and show that this aspect of how we decide has been passed down in our oldest stories.
3: Passion and Freedom in Dante’s Inferno
In Canto V of the Inferno, Dante the pilgrim swoons in empathy for Francesca, the loquacious lover. The pilgrim coauthors Francesca’s decision to speak by being receptive to what she has to say, even as Paolo and Francesca coauthored their mutual decision to commit adultery. Meanwhile, Dante the poet coauthor’s the responses of readers by having us watch the pilgrim swoon, while at the same time we witness the poet’s placement of these sinners in Hell. Here Dante explores the dialogic ambiguities of deliberating from multiple perspectives and the possibility that empathy may be as dangerous a snare as is romantic passion.
4: Deaf to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice
The meaning of Portia’s famous speech on mercy changes radically, depending upon whether the listener is Shylock or one of Portia’s Christian friends. The same words that call to the Christians with an invitation to forgive call to Shylock with a reminder that he has the power to seek revenge. Portia and Shylock are largely deaf to each other’s perspectives. This chapter explores how receptivity to kindred voices, while essential to dialogic freedom, is also potentially destructive to it, precisely because it can entail deafness to the excluded other.
5: The Virtuosity of Satan in Paradise Lost
Milton’s Satan is expert at seeing from his listener’s perspective and manipulating it. He rises to myriad challenges in his encounters with fallen angels, his children, the anarch of Chaos, the sharpest-sighted spirit, and Eve. Satan’s virtuosity at getting what he wants illustrates the down side of dialogic freedom, in that he exploits it for evil purposes. Yet when Satan imagines Eve’s perspective, it almost derails his project. Ultimately, his capacity to see things more innocently for a moment only deepens his misery as he rededicates himself to his decision to destroy goodness. According to Milton, we need to strenuously exercise our intellects and hearts to see from as many perspectives as possible, as we seek to enact dialogic freedom in a fallen world.
6: The Grand Inquisitor’s Silent Christ
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor tries to force Christ to speak, while Ivan Karamazov attempts to derail his brother Alyosha from becoming a priest. In both cases the listener codetermines what the speaker decides to say and do just by listening silently. It is a frustrating situation, as the Grand Inquisitor tries one provocation after another to get Christ talking, and Ivan works hard to persuade his brother. It is also a battle between two perspectives: one that doubts man’s capacity to handle moral freedom, the other that insists on freedom in the form of a kiss. When Christ kisses the Grand Inquisitor and Alyosha kisses Ivan, that choice is coauthored by the arguments against freedom. The kiss “glows” in the recipient’s heart, challenging his intellectual ideal with a competing spiritual one. In the end, Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor must live with the agony of holding in their fevered brains two mutually exclusive perspectives, neither of which they can shake loose.
7: Goading a Reader of “In the Penal Colony”
If we imagine dialogic freedom on a continuum between zero and ten, with zero representing the options of a prisoner chained and gagged, and ten representing the omniscience an omnipotent God, Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” explores the end of the scale closest to zero. At the same time it challenges readers to reach in the opposite direction to embrace an ideal of dialogic freedom that eludes everyone in the story, including the narrator. This tale of an execution gone amuck dramatizes how characters function within a perverse reality. In the process it shows that even as their dialogic freedom breaks down, a reader’s role as witness to that process inspires him or her to desire, embrace, and enact that missing freedom.
8: Shaping the Master’s Vision in “Benito Cereno”
The African slave, Babo, exploits the master’s racist perspective in order to conceal a rebellion through which he has led other slaves to take over a Spanish merchant ship. The American sea captain, Amasa Delano, who comes aboard, is oblivious to this rebellion, blinded by the racism that disarms his suspicions before they can rise to the level of thought. Babo manipulates Delano by playing the role of the attentive servant, even as he intimidates the Spanish captain and crew. Within the field of forces for unity and chaos that involve Delano’s racist assumptions, the captain and crew’s terrorized behavior, and the shifting circumstances of the slave rebellion, Babo enacts his dialogic freedom. Melville’s controversial narrator invites readers first to share Delano’s perspective, then pulls the rug out, focusing us on the compromised freedom of white racists who fail to see what is happening before their eyes.
9: Freedom Under Impossible Conditions in Beloved
Toni Morrison’s Beloved provides a unique window on life as experienced by the victims of slavery. In the process, it celebrates dialogic freedom under conditions guaranteed to eradicate it. The novel presents multiple perspectives on one central event, an escaped slave mother’s infanticide. It’s most cryptic passages are snatches of conversation between that mother and what may be the ghost of her murdered daughter. As these two characters struggle to communicate, the mother trying to make up for the past, the daughter refusing to be consoled, their dialogic freedom nearly evaporates. Morrison seems to be saying that although we are freer the more we can see things from others’ perspectives, this expansion of perspectives will not always be possible. In her novel, dialogic freedom becomes an imperative that is a matter of life and death.
10: Freedom Under Construction in a Polarized World
Today many subjects have become almost impossible to discuss. The problem is not that we disagree, but that we disagree dismissively, satisfied that we already know enough about our opponent’s position. Like the racism explored by Melville and Morrison, our polarized views lead to a debilitating narrowness that prevents us from seeing what is happening before our eyes. Our obsession with autonomy, rights, and the desire to know the Truth, only makes matters worse. In the abortion debate, for example, both sides champion a right—to live or to choose—as the only enlightened perspective and lament the narrow-minded of their opponents. This chapter presents an alternative approach: a dialogic perspective on the abortion debate, which opens possibilities for mutual understanding and action. Whether the subject is terrorism, war, poverty, global warming, the death penalty, immigration, or gay marriage, we all answer to many voices, real and imagined, the sheer number of which would lead to chaos if we tried to listen to all of them all the time. Thus we engage in a sifting and focusing process as we seek to balance the desire for unified explanations with the chaos of a world that resists our efforts at meaning-making. In this balancing act, we are constantly tempted to take refuge among the like-minded and dismiss everyone else. If we were to think of ourselves as more free, not the more we are left alone to do as we please, or the better able we are to see the Truth, but rather, the better able we are to see from the perspectives of others without becoming lost in them, we could begin to repair some of the damage we sustain every day in our polarized world.