Universities are cloistered gardens. The classroom is the innermost sanctum of that cloister, where worldly demands can be blocked out long enough for a group of people—some of whom had no prior interest—to share a poem by Horace, or an argument by Aristotle. In the past few weeks, as schools have sent students home, that sanctum has been breached. Moving classes online means replacing the shared, clean space of the classroom with a collection of private and cluttered rooms. Even when we cannot see the piles of dishes and laundry, or hear the children yelling, the cares that lurk in the background divide and distract us. Many universities are expanding their pass/fail options, an acknowledgment of how hard it is to keep the coronavirus out of the room—and to keep Horace or Aristotle in it.
To some, these problems will seem trivial. Don’t we have bigger concerns at the moment than ancient poets and philosophers, or the difference between a B-plus and an A-minus? Even in good times, the humanistic academy is mocked as a wheel turning nothing; in an emergency, when doctors, delivery personnel, and other essential workers are scrambling to keep society intact, no one has patience with the wheel’s demand to keep turning. What is the role of Aristotle, or the person who studies him, in a crisis?
Perhaps the most pessimistic answer to this question can be found in the essays of Jean Améry, an Austrian Jew, born Hanns Mayer, who wrote movingly of how his own humanistic learning failed him during the Second World War. Faced with the sheer physical brutality of the concentration camps, Améry came to see the intellectual life as a game, and intellectuals as “nothing more than homines ludentes,” or people playing. He compared himself unfavorably to those prisoners who had a political or religious cause to cling to—Marxists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics, and practicing Jews. Being part of a larger struggle made them “unshakable, calm, strong,” he wrote. Their cause served as a kind of substratum, which made life during the camps continuous with life before and after it, whereas people like himself—humanists, philosophers, skeptics—fell into despair, and, in the face of atrocity, “no longer believed in the reality of the world of the mind.”
Améry was ready to grant that intellectuals with a practical mission, who advocate for a moral cause, are capable of heroism. We might count Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Marx and Gandhi; Jesus and Muhammad; and Mary Wollstonecraft and Susan B. Anthony in this group. These intellectuals fought for equality, dignity, and the sanctity of human life. Jean Améry did not identify as one of them.
Améry was also tortured by the Gestapo, and confessed that he would readily have betrayed his comrades if he had had any information to reveal. He thus distinguishes himself from another sort of intellectual hero—those who have the fortitude to refuse to speak, when tortured, or to insist on speaking, when pressured to remain silent. Galileo is the classic example of such an intellectual martyr. one might also cite Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Spinoza.
Nothing prevents these two categories from intersecting: some people are both silenced and have causes. But many humanistic intellectuals belong to neither category—no cause to fight for, no enemy to fight against. These causeless, unmartyred intellectuals are the people whom Améry found wanting. He described not only their physical weakness—they have trouble fending off pickpockets, enduring an uppercut, or even making their beds—but also how poorly they fare socially, their inability to communicate with non-intellectual comrades. Améry’s hope was for such people to prove heroic in every disaster, including those of great physical deprivation. If we ask, instead, whether they do so in any disaster, our outlook might change. In fact, if there is any crisis that ought to prove the worth of the humanistic intellectual, it is the peculiar one that we face today.
The coronavirus is, for the vast majority of us, a call to inaction. It puts life on pause, diminishes our place in the world, and forces us to turn inward. In response, we have settled on some shared tactics. Those who have no practical part in ameliorating the crisis might, if they are free to do so—no children to entertain, the ability to earn money from home—strive to bury themselves in work. Productivity can serve as a talisman, or a coping mechanism. one might also indulge in distraction: video games that simulate the work we cannot do, movies that substitute a fictional world for the one that might be collapsing around us, alcohol to blunt the pain and fear. Productivity numbs us in one way, distraction in another, and when both routes fail to yield the desired effect, we turn to anxiety—namely, by consuming the news.
Numbness or anxiety: are these our choices? Humanism points to another possibility. Aristotle distinguished between relaxation (anapausis), which is when we take a rest from activity with a view to resuming that activity, and true leisure (scholē), which is inaction meant for a higher purpose—theoria, or contemplation. The academy exists for the sake of contemplation. (Indeed, the English word “school” comes from scholē.) Contemplation is not readily classified as a belief that one fights for, and attempts to squeeze its value into the language of justice or dignity or basic human rights will fall flat. It is better characterized as an object of love and reverence, and a source of fulfillment. For humanists, contemplation is not a cause. It is a calling.
At the moment, if someone can dedicate empty hours to a higher calling, she is turning straw into gold. It follows that humanists should find ourselves well equipped to flourish, given the circumstances. Now is an apt time to ponder the fact that the human condition means living under the shadow of death. It is an apt time to situate the present in the broad sweep of history. Deprived of the reality of human connection, we are at least in a position to appreciate the idea of it. And, given that many of us are teachers, we should also be able to communicate this to others—to offer them a way out of numbness and anxiety. For perhaps the first time in history, a global catastrophe has forced a huge, literate, Internet-savvy population indoors. And yet, if this is the test we humanists have been waiting for, then it is a test I find myself unable to pass.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the same fantasy over and over again. In it, I fall asleep and wake up when the pandemic is over. To relieve my guilt over not helping others, my mind extends the sleep over the whole land, as in fairy tales. Everyone healthy and not caring for the sick just lies there, peacefully, for months, even years. Then they wake up happily, and things go back to the way they were.
In fact, I am not asleep. I am awake, following the news incessantly, annoyed by the tiniest inconveniences and obstacles. Jean Améry was tortured by the Gestapo; I am having a panic attack because I can no longer access my campus office. People outside are gasping for air, dying; meanwhile, the mess in my bedroom prevents me from working. What depresses me most is my laxity. Suddenly, it’s O.K. to let my kids play video games, to wear the same clothes as yesterday, to put minimum effort into dinner, night after night, to read and write and think less than usual. My forgiveness of myself strikes me as a form of despair—the very opposite of rising to meet a challenge, which involves holding oneself to a higher set of standards. I have never felt less heroic.