George Steiner:
Libido Sciendi

The polymath George Steiner was born and raised in Austria, spent his high school years in Paris, and much of his adult life in England and America. Sometimes referred to as “the smartest man in the world,” he has written on many subjects, but his far-ranging investigations have been rooted, from the first, in a concern to come to grips with the nature and significance of that age we call “modern.” For Steiner the “modern” begins with the pre-Socratics, however, and making sense of two and a half millennia would be a tall order for anyone. Over the years Steiner had focused his investigative energies on the theatre (The Death of Tragedy) the disasters of the twentieth century (In Bluebeard’s Castle), modern philosophy (Heidegger), and language itself (After Babel), among many other subjects. He has also dabbled in fiction and explored more than a few byways of comparative literature. His references are wide-ranging and sometimes obscure, but his tone is that of a concerned citizen of life and literature, rather than an academic.

I’ve read all or part of several of Steiner’s works, and have often found his observations to be stimulating, although I would be hard-pressed to pin-point exactly what he actually believes about the sweep of history we’re living through, other than that we all ought to be reading more Milton. When I came across his most recent work, Lessons of the Masters, I was naturally eager to pick it up, therefore. If anyone might be considered a “master” in the old-fashioned sense of the word, Steiner would be the man. I was disappointed to discover, reading the back flap, that the book doesn’t contain lessons from Steiner himself. Rather, it’s an examination of the master-disciple relationship as it has functioned through time. As such, it resembles Steiner’s other books, in that it contains many intriguing references and curious asides, but no specific thesis of great or serious import. We might almost consider it an exercise in table-talk, and the text has, indeed, been adapted from a series of lectures Steiner gave at Harvard in 2002.

In Steiner’s view, the master/disciple relationship can take one of three forms. The master can exploit and dominate the student; the student can exploit and turn on the master, or there can be a loving, nurturing relationship based on a shared respect for the educational process and the subject at hand. Steiner refers in passing repeatedly to the erotic dimension in education, but he never pauses to examine that aspect head-on, and we’re left with the vague impression that masters and disciples sometimes feel strongly about one another, though whether this is a good or a bad thing, and how it affects the actual process of transferring information remains unclear.

Steiner would no doubt be offended to hear that what goes on between master and disciple might be described as a “transfer of information.” In his view there is something holy and profound about the relationship, and he makes no bones about it. He also follows a well-worn path in suggesting that what passes between master and disciple must be transmitted orally. It isn’t a particular body of information, so much as it is an orientation to the universe. It is a living spirit that we pick up on and internalize more by intuition and shared participation than by merely absorbing data and technique.

These views are neither original nor startling. In fact, I believe that the emphasis on oral teaching isn’t really sound—many of us are disciples of masters we’ve never met—and following those same lines, I also think it might have been worthwhile examining the difference between genuine teaching, which results in a transfer of material, feeling, insight—and charismatic teaching, which results in the formation of a cult. As for the erotic aspect of the master/disciple relationship, I think it might have been worthwhile for Steiner to have distinguished between personal valences of affection and antipathy between master and disciple on the one hand, and a shared “love” of the material under review, be it musical technique or Kabbalistic arcana, on the other.

The great strength of Steiner’s book lies in his ability to characterize a field of study or an era in history in a few well-chosen words, so that the point he’s driving at comes across clearly, even though the details of the situation may remain sketchy. He doesn’t presume that we know everything he knows, but he offers suggestions for further research in every compact paragraph, by way of glosses on this or that thinker, school, or situation.

As in current transformational generative theories of language, semantic capacities are, for Augustine, innate. But this innateness is not physiological. Faith must precede grammar and the means of understanding.

The enormity of Heidegger’s Sprachschöpfung, of his language creation, enormity in originality and dimension as well, arguably, as in monstrosity, has only one precedent (of which Heidegger was acutely conscious): that of Martin Luther.

Empiricists such as Epicurus, Hume, John Stuart Mill, will elicit Alain’s respect; but he inherits from Lagneau an unwavering “transcendentalism,” an ultimately Platonic—Plato “that author justly called divine”—idealism grounded, as we have seen, in the dignity of matter.

Interspersed with such rapid-fire observations and judgments, Steiner will occasionally relax his pace to describe the career of a singular teacher at some length. These may be the most interesting passages in the book, in fact. His portraits of the French maitre Alain and the pianist Nadia Boulanger, his treatment of the scholarly underpinnings of Christopher Marlowe’s plays, and of the traditions of Hasidic teaching descending from the career of the Bal Shem Tol in eighteenth-century Poland, are fascinating. In an extended passage he even examines the Master/disciple relationship as it plays itself out between Fernando Pessoa’s multiple personalities! On the other hand, he devotes far too much attention to the somewhat hysterical bluster of Nietzsche’s quest for disciples; and his treatment of the Zen traditions of the east is weakened by an uncharacteristic, and unnecessary, sense of modesty.

In an afterward Steiner expresses all the usual fears about the effects of mass culture and the Internet on genuine learning, and a similar worry about the destructive impact of political correctness on academic life. The pettifoggeries of the academy itself receive criticism throughout the book, of course, with the French deconstructionist variety coming in for a special dose of derision, which in fact might profitably have been more fully elaborated. But to his credit, Steiner avoids extended harping, preferring to remain focused on what we can learn from the specific forms that the genuine Master/disciple relationship have taken across time.

In the end, not surprisingly, Steiner finds that genuine mastery is a rare thing, and the act of transmitting it invariably carries a spiritual tone. Thus:

Steiner seems to think that we live in an age of irreverence. “Scientism, feminism; mass democracy and its media. Can, should 'the lessons of the Masters' survive their tidal onrush?” Yet early in the book, in a rare personal aside, he proudly mentions that he has been conducting a seminar every Thursday in Austria for over thirty years, and at another point he remarks in a similar vein that he has students on five continents. I doubt if Steiner suffers from the irreverence of his own disciples. And in fact he goes on to argue that libido sciendi, the lust for knowledge, will always be incised in “the best” of men and women. It follows that the hallowed relationship between Master and disciple will continue to flourish, though the forms it might take remain obscure.