Talk:A&HH6577/Assignment2

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Contents 1 Discussion reading for Henry Adams and the Contingency of Education 1.1 Supplementary 1.2 Queries 2 Talk 2.1 Initial reaction to Becker

Discussion reading for Henry Adams and the Contingency of Education

• Becker, Carl. “The Education of Henry Adams.” The American Historical Review. vol. 24, no. 3 (April 1919): 422-434. Online.

Supplementary

• Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918. Online.

• Adams, Henry. “The Rule of Phase Applied to History.” In The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, pp. 267-311. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919. Online.

Queries

It occurs to me that Becker views Henry Adams as somewhat of a tragic figure. A man who was incapable of seeing his own accomplishments due to the fact that nothing would, or could, ever measure up to the heights to which he longed to ascend. I don't believe that anything short of the presidency could have assuaged Adam's drive towards greatness, and even then such a man could hardly have been content. This was, to be sure, not a new dillemma during this period in history.

One must remember that Henry Adams grew up during what Mark Twain so correctly termed the "Guilded Age." It was during this period that the great captains of industry like John D. Rockafeller were attempted to mold their children into models of themselves. Yet what child could hope to even reach the heights of a Rockafeller or Dupont, let alone surpass them? The end result was largely a lost generation of young men who simply shattered under the pressure of living within their parents shadows. One can see how this drive would have been even more severe for Henry Adams, who had not just his father to look up to, but also great Adam's that traced back well over six generations.

In the end, I find that I agree with Becker and his view of Henry Adams as a tragic figure, but I also believe that Adams was a product of his time as surely as John D. Rockafeller Jr. Adams and his siblings were doomed to live a life that they felt was inferior simply due to the fact that the bar was set too high. So what do the rest of you believe. Could Henry Adams have ever lived a fulfilling life in his own eyes, or was the pressure of lineage and time simply to great for any man to overcome?

jab2210 (Jeff Bremick)

Jeff, I saw that your comments got set in the outlined box - this occurs when there are spaces leading the text. If you want to indent a paragraph, a colon at the front of the line will do that. I took the liberty of changing the format. eric

Talk

Initial reaction to Becker

Becker claims that Adams’ education was Adams own realization of the lack of a philosophy of history. It seems from the first block quote (423) that Adams was as occupied with a theory of history as he was due to a “break of continuity” experienced during his life. Not yet having read the autobiography, I’m still in the dark about what either the “dynamo in the gallery of machines” or the “engine-house outside” refer to. It is clear that Adams considers faith and electricity to be equally insular (and even incompatible) cultural forces, which seems to me to be a decent way of describing the cultural transition experienced at or around the turn-of-the-century, even if it compares unfavorably to more developed concepts such as Durkheim’s mechanical/organic solidarity or Toennies’ gesell/gemeinschaft (links?). Perhaps Adams’ life-long occupation with a philosophy of history should be seen as his attempt to solve the “pedagogical problem” of his time – this fracture between pre-industrial and industrial modes of life. For if some purpose or larger narrative were revealed within which that cultural fracture stands, then the important and consequential influence Adams considered himself not to have achieved would at least be ameliorated by having prepared the way for the next generation to make progress toward an end worth pursuing.

It seems to me that there is a difference between the concept of the pedagogical problem as one that is re-posed with each historical phase, and Adams’ notion that a philosophy of history ought to correspond to the laws of the universe in the same way that physical theories do. I’ve got a few thoughts on how Adams in fact straddles this difference given his comments on himself as a manikin, but I’ll have to air those in class and get people’s reactions before they’re intelligible enough to write down. If the idea that a fixed point could be set against which human progress should be measured no longer squares with the idea that our only epistemic certainty is the lack of certainty (whether that point is “when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe” or any other), then it is no wonder that we’re no closer to achieving Adams’ goal than he was. What I don’t have enough sociological data to decide is this: is there perhaps an even greater degree of the “what-does-it-all-mean” sentiment these days (due in part to our certainty in uncertainty), or is a theory/philosophy/teleology of history no longer a pedagogical problem in our culture. Of course as I write that last sentence it occurs to me that a distinction needs to be made between whether a theory of history in fact remains a pedagogical problem and that we just don’t recognize it as such, or whether it has lost all relevance.

I guess that’s all for now – I had intended to put more reactions down on paper, but I don’t want to monopolize space or the “top-fold” of our talk section. For what it’s worth, I’m posting some latin translations which probably aren’t that good, but they’re what I could find on the internet:

Apologia pro vita sua: apology for his life

Hic jacet homunculus scriptor doctor barbaricus Henricus Adams adae filius et evae primo explicuit socnam: Here, in this place, lies the manikin, author, teacher, and uncivilized Henry Adams, late son and ? explanation ?.

Eric Strome 13:21, 13 September 2007 (EDT)

Carl Becker’s “The Education of Henry Adams” provided the springboard for our grappling with the notion of the great “question of the pedagogical problem.” As we finish this semester’s reading with Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” it seems to me that Adams’ views on educating oneself within a multifarious world have been present in each of our readings and provides a philosophical umbrella to each of our scholarly contributions. Through Becker’s examination, Adam’s seems to convey his constant struggle, and frustration, in his inability to analyze with clarity the challenges of knowing within the context of the whirlwinds of life -- to chart tangible points of reference as to the changes in our educational experiences (“educational” beyond the structure of the school house) – our ways of knowing and understanding the world around us. How can we seek to understand what we know, and how might what we know change? How might we resist the lure of latching onto the current day pedagogical trend in our eager effort to define it, but instead, strive to have the vision and tools to diagnose the problem by being able to consider the full, faceted context of history, current day factors, as well as future influences. Adams seems brooding in his quest and disappointed with his success.

While Adams was writing during a time of great scientific and philosophical discoveries, don’t we find ourselves in a similar place? As we in our current day try to understand ourselves and the meaningfulness of our individual contributions, don’t we also have to consider our place in our cosmic world? s.pierson