Jerome Neu –Teaching Statement 2004-05
Professor of Humanities

I try to upset the students, that is, get them to confront comfortable, unexamined assumptions.  In all my courses, the focus is on critical analysis (including self-critical analysis).  I endeavor to get students to see that argument is a form of respect—unthinking acceptance an evasion.  As Nietzsche put it, “It is a common error to have the courage of one’s convictions, when what is needed is the courage for an attack on one’s convictions.”

So, for example, the course I regularly teach on the “Philosophy of Law” (sponsored by both the Philosophy and Legal Study programs) is structured in such a way as to, right off, make the students feel the need for the sort of theory that the course goes on to develop and explore.  We start with some simple assault and rape cases, where students tend to have strong intuitions about the right outcome.  But conflict in the underlying principles and standards that might be used to justify those intuitions quickly emerges, and the course moves rapidly and deeply into more abstract issues that might otherwise not have seemed to have a compelling interest from the students’ point of view.  Their comfortable presumptions are made explicit and confronted, and they are offered help in thinking through the difficulties (the genuine difficulties).  In this course I make use of regular quizzes to make sure students are keeping up with and understanding the rather demanding reading.  An unusual feature of the quizzes is that they are closed book but open notes: the point, once more, is to encourage them to keep up with and understand the readings—not to memorize—and as a side-benefit they also learn to take more concise and selective notes, which in turn helps them prepare for the longer essay exams in the course.

In my seminars, the same goals of critical analysis are served through a special emphasis on paper writing.  (The large lecture course on “Introduction to Philosophy” that I regularly teach is also writing intensive, but there the paper reading is done by TAs.)  In seminars, both undergraduate and graduate, I typically require weekly short papers in response to the readings and issues (which I spell out in a detailed syllabus).  I make it a point to return the papers either at the end of the class (if they were submitted in advance) or at the next class, so that the students have constant feedback and the experience of writing can be cumulative.  Happily, the later papers in the course typically reward my efforts by being markedly better than the earlier ones.  Feedback works.  I also use the papers to structure the discussion in the seminar sessions, asking a few students to read their papers and then focusing class discussion and my own (in effect) mini-lectures around them.  Thus, in choosing their paper topics, the students also determine the direction and content of the session. 

Over the years I have taught seminars on, among other topics, “Injunctions” for Legal Studies (a program that, in its original form, I helped found in collaboration with Robert Meister of the Politics Department), “The Emotions” for both the Philosophy and Psychology Departments, and “On Insults” for both the Philosophy and Anthropology Departments.  I believe in interdisciplinary teaching and research and in the mutually reinforcing effects of teaching and research.  My teaching always involves readings from a variety of disciplines and on occasion it has involved active collaboration with instructors from other disciplines.  I have been doing periodic collaborative teaching since my very first years at Santa Cruz, when I co-taught a graduate seminar on “Interpretation” with C.L. Barber of the Literature Department.  (That was in the early 1970s when I was Chair of the program in History of Consciousness, which sponsored the seminar.)  

The topics I teach in seminars tend to be the topics I am writing on, which by their nature are multidisciplinary (if not eccentric).  The reason for crossing boundaries is simple: I always start with a question and I let the question take me wherever I need to go to find answers.  It is almost always to multiple disciplinary ports.  And students are almost always glad to join me on the journey.  For example, I regularly teach an undergraduate seminar on “The Emotions.”  (My book, A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion, emerged from the work done over the years in connection with that seminar.)  The readings are largely a mix of psychoanalytical and philosophical writings (with some sociology, anthropology, and literature as well).  The seminar itself is organized in a slightly lunatic fashion: we do a passion a week.  The sessions follow a certain natural order: starting with love, jealousy, and boredom, the course concludes with grief.  I use the analysis of particular emotions as a way to explore general issues (including universality, expression of emotion, and control), and to encourage the students to apply theoretical understandings to concrete experience. 

I am currently writing a book On Insults, and I’ve begun teaching a graduate seminar on the subject.  It is not a topic in any regular discipline, but it touches on issues in many.  The schoolyard wisdom about “sticks and stones” does not take one very far: insults do not take the form only of words, even words have effects, and the popular as well as the standard legal distinctions between speech and conduct are at least as problematic as they are helpful.  The questions addressed in the course include the following:  What kind of injury is an insult?  Is its infliction determined by the insulter or the insulted?  What does it reveal of the character of each and of the character of society and its conventions?  What is its role in social and legal life (from play to jokes to ritual to war and from blasphemy to defamation to hate speech)?  In pursuing the questions, philosophical, anthropological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and legal materials and approaches are emphasized.  The same resources of critical analysis and techniques of interrogation through writing that I use in all my courses and seminars are brought to bear.

I also teach a lecture course on the development of Freud’s concept of mind for the Psychology and Philosophy Departments every other year.  I do it mainly as a service, because I think every university should provide an opportunity for students to read systematically and critically through Freud.  While bits of Freud are touched on in many courses, I think his model of the mind and its mechanisms (from displacement and transference to identification) is crucial to social and individual understanding, and that a proper understanding of his thought requires a careful tracing of its development and consideration of the evidence and argument that moved Freud and that perhaps should move us. 

I also like teaching the Freud course (and edited the Cambridge Companion to Freud) because it helps make clear why Socrates was right to believe that the unexamined life is not worth living.  The unexamined life is not worth living because you are not then living it: you are instead moved by unexamined forces that determine what you do.  Understanding such forces is the first step towards greater freedom.  Examining one’s life is essential, among other reasons, because otherwise you risk always tripping over yourself (because of unacknowledged inner conflict).  Knowledge, including self-knowledge, is a condition of freedom and control.  My teaching, like my writing, is informed and motivated by the Spinozist hope that understanding our lives can help change them, can help make us more free.