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St. John's College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2015
Emily Brooker Langston
Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families, friends,
and tutors – to the summer term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's College.
Today, the new students among us are becoming members of the St. John's
community, a community dedicated to liberal education - to an education that is freeing.
That the goal of this education is to make us free is proclaimed on the seal of the
college. You don't see the seal around quite as often as we did at one time, but you may
still find it in many places. For instance, it is embedded in the brick section of the quad,
before the steps descending toward the playing fields and college creek. On the seal is a
motto in Latin: “Facio Liberos ex liberis libris libraque.” Or, less alliteravly, in English,
“I make free adults out of children by means of books and a balance.”
I've chosen to begin with this motto, (and in fact I will only talk about the first
half of it: “I make free adults out of children..”) both because it offers a succinct
summary of the aim of the college and its program – and also because of part of it that
might be particularly interesting to us as members of the Graduate Institute. “I make free
adults,” it says... “out of children.” This reference to children seems roughly appropriate
when we apply it to the 17 and 18 year-olds who will walk across the stage of the
Francis Scott Key auditorium when the undergraduate program welcomes a new class in
�the fall. But for many years now, the college has also offered a Graduate Program. Can
the aims of the Graduate Institute be understood in the terms proposed by the motto?
Looking around this room – where are the children here? All of you have completed a
Bachelor's degree, many of you have spent years in a career or more than one, you have
raised families, you have other educational attainments and professional
accomplishments. Do we fit within the purpose set forth on the seal? If so, how?
So: “I make free adults out of children.”
Reading the phrase again, what might we notice? Firs, the motto asserts that
freedom is not something simply given to us, either as human beings or as members of a
particular political society. We do not come into the world as free. And this should make
us wonder what is meant by “freedom.” Certainly one popular understanding of the term
would have us suppose that we are MOST free when we are children, and become less
and less so as we enter into the responsibilities of the adult citizen. The motto, however,
claims that free people – whatever we may mean by that - are not born, they must be
formed. Accepting, for the purposes of the address, this rather bold assertion I will then
focus on the question - But what does it mean to say that these free people are formed
“OUT OF CHILDREN?” Are we all are somehow children, no matter our age, until we
have undergone some process of education? Or is there perhaps something special about
children, such that only out of “children” can free people be made? Both possibilities are
worth thinking about, and I will say a little about each.
�In order to consider this question farther, I will turn now to a text we now all have
in common; some of you may have read it for the first time in preparation for yesterday's
orientation seminar. I mean, of course, Plato’s dialogue Meno. I think I can find in that
dialogue at least three characteristics of what it might mean to be a child, or at least to be
childlike. Two highlight ways in which we are all children in so far as we are not
educated, while one demonstrates a sense in which we must be childlike in order to
become educated.
You all know that in this dialogue, Socrates makes the young man Meno admit
(quite grudgingly) that he cannot give an account of something he had thought he
understood. Stunned by the torpedo fish Socrates, Meno finds himself unable to define
“virtue” - a topic about which he himself says he had “made many speeches ... before
large audiences – and very good speeches I thought.” Meno has been exposed. Not only
does he not know what virtue is, until this very moment he did not know that he did not
know! He has assumptions about virtue, and about other things as well no doubt. These
assumptions are based somehow on examples he has encountered of men, women,
children, slave and others who are called “virtuous.” But he has never held these
assumptions up and looked at them or questioned them. He has left them unexamined
and so he does not know the shape even of his own thoughts on the matter, much less
how to conduct an inquiry into whether or not these thoughts are true. In this way he is
like a child, and like all of us in so far as we lack education. We move comfortably
�through the world, even perhaps thinking we know a great deal - but it is only because
we cannot really imagine anything about anything beyond the swarm of examples we
encounter in our immediate experience. We are full of unexamined, and quite possibly
false, opinion that we mistake for knowledge.
At this point in the dialogue, Meno, frustrated at having been made to look
foolish, challenges Socrates with the idea that one cannot seek for knowledge that one
does not have – for not knowing it already, how would one recognize it when one had
found it? Socrates in response tells Meno something he has heard from “wise men and
women… whose care it is to be able to give an account of their practices.” According to
these, and I quote: “As the soul has been born often, and has seen all things here and in
the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising
that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things.
…searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection.” So, Socrates suggests that we
have already learned everything in a time before our births, and that learning for us now
is a sort of remembering. Thus when we find what we have been searching for, we can
recognize it – much as we can recognize a name we have forgotten when someone else
mentions it.
It's an odd story, and aspects of it may strike us as not very plausible. Socrates
himself says he would not insist on every detail. But note what it essentially asserts.
Learning is not simply filling up a void called ignorance by pouring in content called
knowledge. Real learning has not taken place until the child, or student, checks the new
�information against something within herself. In other words, we are able to learn
because of something that is already within us. In order to be a child capable of being
educated, and thus of being made free, we cannot come simply with our unexamined
opinions; we bring something else, too. The account Socrates gives here suggests that
what we bring is in some way the knowledge itself already in us, and that learning is
recollection, almost a sort of “matching.” Other texts we read will suggest different
ideas and images for what we bring to the process of learning and how it takes place; I
do not want to recommend one or the other of them to you today; I simply want to note
that we have hit upon a second aspect of what we all have in common as children who
can be formed through education: as children, we are ignorant and full of unexamined
opinion– but we also have that within us that makes us educable.
Continuing now through the dialogue - in order to demonstrate that learning really
is a form of recollection, in the sense that it makes actual something that was in the
learner all along, Socrates asks to interact with Meno's slave boy. According to Meno,
the boy knows Greek but has not otherwise been educated. You all know what happens.
The slave boy first misidentifies the side of the double square. But then, when Socrates
shows him his error, he genuinely desires to know the truth of the matter. And when
Socrates points him in the right direction, he is able to recognize for himself the line that
was sought.
Like Meno, he begins by not knowing – and not even knowing that he does not
�know. Unlike Meno, however, when his ignorance is revealed to him, rather than
defending his initial intuition, or becoming obdurate or threatening, he begins to seek for
the truth and is able to learn. He began as childlike in the ways that we all are childlike
before we have begun to inquire. However, over the course of the conversation with
Socrates he evidences a childlike attitude in a different way. The dialogue doesn't give
us much to go on, but I like to imagine the slave boy shaking his head in puzzled wonder
when he realizes that the double side does not make a double square – then eagerly
following Socrates' diagram, and smiling with satisfaction when he sees the answer for
himself, or “recollects” it. Of course, there may be a different type of “showing”
involved in revealing virtue than there is in pointing to the side of the double square.
The example itself inspires a multitude of questions. However, my interest in the
analogy here is simply in what it shows us about the attitude of one who genuinely
makes progress in an inquiry. The slave boy is teachable. He is not angry or ashamed
when his ignorance is exposed; instead, he begins to wonder. It is this attitude that I
want to call childlike in the third sense. We are all children in the beginning, accepting
as given the presuppositions that define our world- but also somehow equipped with that
which will make us able to learn, to recollect the truth for ourselves. All free people are
made out such children - necessarily. But as the example we have just seen illustrates, it
is only when we are childlike in the third way, when we pursue knowledge openly and
courageously, with wonder and delight, that we are able to educated, and thus to be
made free.
�It may seem like I have veered a little from speaking about free adults being made
from children, to urging us to become children. There are certainly some books on the
program at St. John’s that do urge this. Jesus says to his disciples that to such as these
little ones belongs the kingdom of heaven. Nietzsche's Zarathustra presents the child as
the third metamorphosis of the spirit, a “sacred Yes.” It is deeply true, though I don't
have time to address it here, that in some ways the condition of being childlike may
come, if we are fortunate, at the End of our explorations, when, as Eliot puts it, we
“arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” For the moment, I not
recommending the state of being childlike as an end, but as a necessary part of the
beginning. It is in order to become Free Adults mentioned that we must begin as
children – not only as ignorant, and as essentially teachable, but as ardently desiring to
learn.
But of course, in recommending to you here this ardent desire to learn, I am
preaching to the choir. Your status as students in the Graduate Institute I think puts a
special emphasis on your desire to learn. As I mentioned at the beginning of this talk,
each of you has a Bachelor's degree, the culturally accepted credential of a generally
educated person. In differing arenas, you have found a way the world. And yet, here
you are, some of you probably confounding the expectations of those around you who
would propose that there are more practical ways you could spend your time. Here you
are, wanting to learn and to know.
�Although you are all probably tired of hearing about it by now, I want to return
one more time to the phrase that was the beginning of these reflections: I make free
adults out of children. A couple of weeks ago, a friend and former Associate Dean asked
me what I was writing about for my first convocation address. I replied that it would be
some sort of reflection on the motto of the college, referring to Meno. My friend said
that he, too, had once written a convocation address reflecting on the motto, but that he
had criticized it. The part he had criticized was the phrase “I make.” And of course, he
was right to be critical here. I think our example from Meno, and the third way we have
identified of being childlike, point to this. One thing the dialogue makes clear is that no
one can force another person to learn. Socrates can expose Meno’s ignorance and leave
him stunned, but he can’t make him go any further. It may be possible to help another
person to learn, as Socrates helps the slave boy to discover the diagonal, but unless the
person has a desire to learn and a willingness to submit to the process of inquiry – unless
the person is childlike in the third sense we have identified - nothing will happen.
Whosever may be the voice that is speaking through the motto, the “I” of “I make,” (is it
the voice of the college? Of the Program?) that I cannot claim simply to make free adults
out of children through education. The college, and the program, may provide the
opportunity for leaning to occur; but in the end you, the students, through the course of
study set before you and your own real effort, shape and make yourselves.
I’ll note in closing that the very structure of the activity we engage in together
�stresses this fact. Your tutors (who are not, after all, “professors”) will not stand in front
of the room and dispense information to you. Instead, you will sit together around a
table, with your attention focused on a different teacher, the text – and on a conversation
that moves from one to another as each of us picks up portions of what the text brings to
us, compares it to our own assumptions, and allows ourself to be challenged and even
changed. It is in this way that we come really to know our world and to be able to
inhabit it as free adults – choosing, rather than accepting unthinkingly, the way we
inhabit it. So I invite you now to come, to read and to talk with us as we all grow more
fully into our freedom – together. Thank you.
Before we disperse, let me announce that there are two Graduate Institute study groups
taking place this summer. One group is reading classic texts of psychoanalysis; the other
is reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Both groups are meeting on Saturday
mornings from 10 until noon. For information on the psychoanalysis group, contact Mr.
Maxwell; for the Kant group, contact Mr. LaFleur.
Also, this Wednesday night at 7:30, here in the Great Hall, we will host the first in our
Wednesday night lecture series – Mr. Abraham Jacob Greenstine will speak on “The
Problem of Absolute Knowing.”
Please join us now for the refreshments waiting at the back of the Hall, before your
preceptorials begin at 2 o'clock.
The 2015 summer term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est!
�
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St. John's College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Fall 2015
Emily Brooker Langston
Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families, friends,
and tutors – to the fall term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's College.
In particular, I’d like to welcome the students who are today becoming members
of the Graduate Institute. As you may know, the seal of the college portrays seven books
(representing the seven classical liberal arts) arranged in a circle around a set of scales.
There is a motto in Latin that reads: “Facio Liberos ex liberis libris libraque.” Or, less
alliteravely, in English, “I make free adults out of children by means of books and a
balance.” In my last convocation address I talked some about the first half of this motto “I make free adults out of children -” so I knew then I was setting myself the task of
saying something about the second half . The first half proclaims the goal of St. John’s,
or the program – to make free adults out of children. The second half gives us the
means: “by means of books and a balance.” I take the motto to be saying that by
means of learning we are made free.
Thus, the relationship between learning and freedom was already in the back of
my mind as I read through Herodotus’ magnificent, sprawling Histories with my
preceptorial this summer. Those of us who participated in a seminar on Plato’s Meno
earlier today have just been reminded of how perplexing the subject of leaning is. In
that dialogue, Socrates compares it to the process of remembering something that one
�had once known but has forgotten, so that the remembered or learned thing once again
becomes a part of the learner's conscious knowledge. In another dialogue, Theatetus,
learning is compared to having an object or idea make a stamp, an “im-pression,” on the
wax of one's soul. In either case, and in any case I can think of, learning involves an
interaction between a learner and a thing that was unknown, or at least forgotten. And
the learner is changed by that interaction.
If we think of learning as an encounter with the unfamiliar in which the learner is
changed, we can see the question of learning come into focus in an interesting way in
the Histories. As many of you know, Herodotus announces the nature of his grand
project in the first sentence of his work. He is writing, quote “so that the great and
wonderful deeds – some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians, - not go
unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other.” ( all quotes from
Andrea Purvis' translation in the Landmark Herodotus.) It doesn’t seem obvious that
learning would come into it. And yet one of the things one realizes early on in tackling
Herodotus is that there is very little that DOESN’T come into it. The reasons for the
Persian Wars cannot be summed up simply, in a few lines about ambition for territory or
(Herodotus disparagingly remarks at the beginning of the work) in a few stories about
kidnapped women. If we are to understand these wars, we must inquire about the very
character of the peoples - of the Greeks and Barbarians- who were involved in the
conflict. The description of the character of a people of course includes the forms that
political life takes, along with territorial aspiration and personal or national ambition –
�but language, mythology, dress, burial customs, religious ritual, local legend are all also
involved. And in describing these cultures to us, one of the issues to which Herodotus
returns regularly is the response of the various cultures to novelty: how does a culture
react to the customs of others with whom it comes into contact? How likely is that
culture to be changed by an experience of something new? If we accept for the moment
the premise that, though it may not be all there is to learning, learning has something to
do with being changed by taking in the new, then learning is for Herodotus a topic of
recurring interest. And understanding something about a culture’s attitude to learning
will tell us something deeply true about the character of a people.
It turns out that Herodotus sees a great deal of variation amongst cultures on this
issue. On one extreme, some cultures are highly resistant to exterior influence. We see
this particularly in the cultures of the Egyptians and Scythians, though for interestingly
different reasons. On the other extreme are the Persians who, Herodotus tells us, adopt
foreign customs avidly. Somewhere between these lie the Hellenes, to whom we will
return later – following the method of Herodotus, looking at the center more carefully
after having delineated the boundaries.
So what sorts of peoples are most resistant to taking in the new? Herodotus spends
the whole of book two telling us the about the culture of the Egyptians, who “shun
(practicing the customs) of everyone else in the world.” (153) We can make some sense
�of this from what Herodotus tells us about them. They are by their own reckoning a
very ancient people. As such, they have through many ages and dynasties been
“settled.” Rather than expanding their empire, they invest their energies in erecting huge
monuments of stone. That is why this country “has more marvels and monuments that
defy description than any other.” (133) Like all people according to Herodotus, they are
in some way akin to their land – in this case in character rather like the alluvial soil on
which much of the country is built, the result of one layer laid down upon another,
through centuries of slow accretion. The advanced age of their civilization seems like a
metaphor for their resistance to change; they are too old, settled in place, and established
in the traditions of millennia to be impressed by the achievements of others. In Plato’s
dialogue Timeus, an Egyptian priest famously expresses this attitude to the visiting
Solon: “O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children: there is not such a thing as an
old Greek."
If learning has something to do with being changed by the other, we can certainly
how resistance to learning looks like a sort of freedom – that is, freedom from influence.
This understanding of freedom is expressed most clearly in the culture of the a second
people in the Histories, the Scythians- who, according to Herodotus, “avoid foreign
customs at all costs.” (311) Yet their culture is remarkably different from that of the
Egyptians. Rather than thinking of themselves as one of the oldest peoples of the world,
they explicitly claim to be the youngest. As opposed to the Egyptians, who have more
grand and amazing monuments than anyone else in the world, the Scythians build no
�monuments, permanent buildings, or even fixed settlements, at all. As Herodotus
describes them: “Instead of establishing homes or walls, they are all mounted archers
who carry their homes with them and derive their substance not from cultivated fields
but from their herds.” (301) How then might we understand the Scythian resistance to
being influenced by anything that comes from the outside? Compared to the Egyptians,
set in place, with lists of kings and priests reaching back through time and surrounded by
stone monuments of their own lengthy past, the Scythians would seem to have little
sense of a past at all. They are constantly moving across an undifferentiated landscape of
windswept, grassy plains. The preeminent fact about them is that they are impossible to
conquer. For, quote, “Since they make their homes on carts how could they not be
invincible or impossible even to engage in battle?” As the resistance of great age to
change provides a metaphor for the resistance of the Egyptians to influence, so the
restlessness of youth may give us a way to think about the Scythians. They have made
what Herodotus calls one “great discovery.” To quote further, “They have discovered
how to prevent any attacker from escaping them and how to make it impossible for
anyone to overtake them against their will.” (301) The entire way of life of the Scythians
is an attempt to preserve a sort of freedom. And they are free – at least in the sense that
they remain uninfluenced and unconquered, eluding even the forces of Darius. But the
Scythians’ great discovery comes at a great price. Their lives are harsh; they have few
records, do not cultivate the arts, and Scythians who experiment with foreign customs
are killed on the spot.
�On the other end of the spectrum from the Egyptians, who are too stiff to be inpressed, and the Scythians, who won’t sit still long enough, are the Persians. If learning
is simply taking in and being changed by the other, the Persians are voracious learners
indeed. To quote Herodotus: “Of all men, the Persians especially tend to adopt foreign
customs.” They particularly “inquire into the enjoyments of pleasure seekers in every
nation.” (73) Peoples absorbed in the Persian empire are not compelled to change their
language, dress, or other customs – and the Persians adopt whatever foreign customs
they find pleasing.
As we could see how the resistance to any influence might be understood as a sort
of freedom, we can also see how the Persian embrace of novelty looks like freedom;
Persians are free to dress and seek pleasures in the widest variety of ways. Herodotus
describes the army of Xerxes closing in upon the Greek peninsula as a wondrous
procession comprising most of the peoples of the known world – Thracians in fox-skin
caps and colorful cloaks, Ethiopians clad in leopard and lion skins with bows six feet
long, Assyrians with helmets of bronze, the Mochi with helmets of wood.
The description of so much variety begs the question, though: how does a society
that takes everything into itself remain ONE? The question comes clearly into focus in a
conversation between the Persian Great King Xerxes and the deposed Spartan king
Demaratus. Xerxes is unable to understand the Spartans, who fight as a unified body of
�free men sacrificing themselves willingly, compelled by a merely “inward” fear - the
fear of their own law. The only source of unity that can constrain the motley army of
Xerxes to fight as one is a force from without. The unity they have, the only unity in
which Xerxes truly believes, is the unity of men who are “compelled by the lash.”
Omnivorous absorption of otherness has enabled Xerxes to send, by Herodotus'
estimate, a force of 5,000,000 from Asia to Europe. But if anything, the stance of the
Persians seems antithetical to freedom. The parts of this monstrosity can only be held
together by force, and every person in the Persian Empire is ultimately no more than a
“slave” to the Great King. If there is a kind of learning characteristic of people who are
free, it must be more than the unquestioning acceptance of every novelty.
Finally, we turn to the Greeks, not unexpectedly the heroes of Herodotus’
narrative, and of this talk. It may seem odd to say THE Greeks, and indeed it is the sort
of locution that we are wary of at St. John’s, for all sorts of good reasons. Yet despite
the fact that the term embraces cultures as different as Athens and Sparta, in spite even
of the fact that some Greek-speaking cities have Medized (gone over to the Persian
side), Herodotus does speak of “the Greeks” - and his way of speaking helps to give the
term meaning.
On the issue of learning, Herodotus reports that the Greeks, unlike the Persians,
are somewhat resistant to taking up foreign ways. But unlike the Egyptians and the
Scythians, they do learn from others. Herodotus particularly emphasizes how much the
�Hellenes owe to Egypt. Some of what they have taken from the more ancient culture is
practical; for example, they have learned to divide up the year in to 12 months, using the
stars. Other influences bear directly upon their religious and cultural practices. “The
Egyptians,” Herodotus tells us, “were the first to establish the tradition of identifying
names for the 12 gods...the Hellenes adopted this practice from them. They were also the
first to assign altars, statues, and temples to the gods and to carve their figures in relief
on stone." (118) The Greeks learn many things, and many different sorts of things, from
other nations.
Still, this seems is very different from the indiscriminate incorporation practiced
by the Persians. In mathematics and astronomy, navigation and agriculture, the Greeks
see an innovation, make a judgment about its truth or usefulness, and adopt what seems
to them best. In questions of religion and culture, there is no wholesale taking on of the
exotic. Even though the innovation of having named gods comes from the Egyptians, the
gods in Greece do not look like Egyptian gods and are not given Egyptian names.
Theogenies arise linking them to the new land and culture. Though they may have
learned to make temples and altars, and to carve images of the gods, from the Egyptians,
the Greeks do not make "Egyptian" altars, temples, or images. Everything they bring
into the culture is made their own.
Thus, although they have not maintained a primitive cultural purity such as that
defended so ardently by the Scythians, they have also not lost a sense of themselves as a
single and singular people. When the Athenians, refusing to go over to the Persians,
�make their moving speech at the end of book eight, despite the squabbles and
differences over strategy that divide them, they proclaim their loyalty to, quote, “ the
Greek people, with whom we are united in sharing the same kinship and language, with
whom we have established shrines and conduct sacrifices to the gods together, and with
whom we also share the same way of life." (662) They can even appeal to a common
ideal of "freedom," which although it may look different in Athens and Sparta is
recognizable by the citizens of each city as the principle for the sake of which they
oppose the massive Persian force. And part of what Herodotus makes visible to us
through his deep cultural descriptions is that it is their approach to allowing themselves
to be changed, their approach in fact to learning, that makes this society of free citizens
possible. The Greeks adopt a stance of freedom in learning, neither rejecting everything
wholesale nor taking in everything indiscriminately. We see from them more clearly
what real learning is - an active process, involving the thoughtful evaluation and
incorporation of what they encounter, rather than a mere passive reception of
impressions. This active learning is their own participation in choosing what sort of
people they are and will become. It is an essential aspect and expression of their
freedom.
One last note – the approach to learning we’ve sketched here is also
characteristic of Herodotus himself. The title of the work we call the Histories might
better be translated as Inquiries. The word “history,” to the modern ear, suggests an
objective and orderly set of facts about the past – perhaps something to be absorbed, but
�not an activity. “Inquiry,” on the other hand, immediately suggests both an activity and
an agent, an inquirer. Herodotus' inquiring intellect is a constant presence in the
presentation of his Inquiries, interrupting the flow of his narrative to present us with his
own commentary and judgments. In his desire to learn and discern causes, he reports –
but then accepts, rejects, and shapes the evidence he encounters into a work that is wideranging and multifaceted but held together by an internal unity, a work that is distinctly
his own.
I invite you now to join us as we undertake the project of learning together,
encountering the new, and the new again, in our texts and conversations with one
another; neither rejecting unthinkingly nor accepting indiscriminately but learning as
free adults, actively shaping ourselves and our community.
THANK YOU.
Before we disperse, let me announce that there are four Graduate Institute study
groups taking place this fall: one on Milton's Paradise Lost; another on Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason ; another on the shorter works of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; and one
on Proust’s Swann’s Way. Information about meeting times, places, and readings will
be circulated in an email. Please join us for the refreshments that are waiting in the back
of the Great Hall before proceeding to your tutorials, which will begin at 5:15.
The 2015 fall term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est!
�
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St. John's College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2016
Emily Brooker Langston
Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families,
friends, and tutors – to the spring term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's
College. In particular, welcome to all of you who are today becoming members of
the Graduate Institute.
In an attempt to connect these talks to life in the Graduate Institute, I try to
make each a reflection on a text I read with students over the past semester – and
so I found myself wondering what to say about the text we studied in my most
recent preceptorial, Thomas Mann’s extraordinary Magic Mountain. It is a novel in
the classic tradition of the bildungsroman - which is only to say a novel about
education – so that would seem to make it a likely candidate for a convocation
address. However, what intrigues me most about the novel is that it is also about
time. And doesn’t it makes sense to consider time and education together? We all
know that education, even in the most basic sense of training, takes time; and
education in the more profound sense, the education that (as the motto of the
college puts it) would make “free adults out of children,” continues through time
and is never complete.
Mann’s novel doesn’t simply draw our attention to time, however; it
�confronts us with time as a mystery. The novel tells the story of Hans Castorp, a
“perfectly ordinary young man” who goes to a sanatorium in the high Alps for a
visit he intends to last for three weeks, and somehow stays for seven years. We are
informed that it is a story which should be told in verbs of the “deepest past” – but
“it does not actually owe its pastness to time.” (All quotes taken from the Vintage
John E. Woods translation.) And what is time? Mann’s narrator explicitly and
insistently raises the question. It is, (quote) “a secret – insubstantial and
omnipotent. A prerequisite of the external world, a motion intermingled and fused
with bodies existing and moving in space. But would there be no time if there were
no motion? No motion, if there were no time?”
At this point, you’ve probably started to wonder where this could be going.
Has someone really raised the question “What is time” in a convocation address?
Don’t worry, in the short time I have for this address, I am not going to try to
answer it. I am only going to look at one particularly important definition of time,
and at one powerful image from the novel, and attempt to make a few
observations. My first observation is that asking questions about time – in time –
causes one to interrogate one’s own speech. What do I mean, for example, when I
speak of “the time I have for this talk?” If you ask me how long the talk is, I might
respond - about 15 minutes. But of course the 15 minutes are not the talk. They
are only some sort of measure of one quality of the talk.
�Those who have taken the Mathematics and Natural Science segment (and I
will confess, parenthetically, that one of my subsidiary goals in this talk is to leave
those of you who might have some hesitation about signing up for a segment with
that title intrigued about the questions we discuss there) or who have had some
other opportunity to read Aristotle’s Physics may not be surprised by the famous
definition of time to which I will now turn. Both Mann’s questions about the
relationship between time and motion, and my observation relating time to
measurement, echo ideas we find there.
“Would there be no time if there were no motion? No motion, if there were
no time?” asked Mann. Aristotle actually proposes a quite definite answer to
Mann’s question about the relationship between time and motion, and which has
priority. It is motion. What is primary both in our experience and in itself is not
something we call time, which we can never seem to grasp, but change. And all
change, whether it be growth, decay, or change from place to place, is at bottom
motion. So where does time come in? “Time,” says Aristotle, “is the number of
motion with respect to the prior and posterior.” (quotes are taken from the
Hippocrates G. Apostle translation of the Physics.) Time then doesn’t exist in the
in its own right as a thing; rather, it is a sort of measure; a measure brought to
change by counting. According to Aristotle the primary motion upon which all
others are based is the rotating motion of the heavens; and the most inclusive
�notion of time, which encompasses us all, is the number of this regular, circular,
motion. Aristotle is bold enough to say that if there were no Counter, no intellect or
Soul to do the counting, then although there might be motion, there would be no
time.
And how might we bring Aristotle’s understanding of time to an
examination of education? Whatever else we may say about education, it doesn’t
seem far-fetched to me to say that education is a process of change, and thus a
motion. In fact, in the Physics, Aristotle uses education – divided into teaching
and learning – as an example of a particular sort of motion or change that can look
different depending upon the direction from which it is approached. Teaching and
learning are not the same, any more than acting and being acted upon are the same,
or going from Athens to Thebes is the same as going from Thebes to Athens - but
(quote) “that to which they belong, the motion, is the same.” (202b 20) It takes the
same amount of time for someone to teach me something as it does for me to learn
it because teaching and learning, though they are not identical on one another,
belong to the same motion.
Thinking about education along with Aristotle’s definition of time suggests
more about the sort of change we take education to be - at least insofar as it
changes us in the direction of what we should hope to become. Remember that, to
the assertion that “time is the number of motion,” the definition added “with
�respect to the prior and posterior.” This last part might raise the suspicion that the
definition is circular; don’t prior and posterior smuggle a sense of before and after,
of time, right into our definition of time? But “prior and posterior,” rather than
making the definition circular, are pointing toward a distinction Aristotle makes
between violent and natural motions. All change that is natural is a change from
potentiality toward actuality (book VIII ch. 4) The education that makes free
adults out of children is just this sort of change - a natural change, or motion, for
human beings. The posterior is implicit in the potential of the prior; the before is
taken up in the motion, the change, that takes us through the present to the after.
The free adult is potentially present in the child.
Stopping for a moment to take stock, what can we say so far? Education
seems to be a kind of change in a human being, toward a greater actualization of
human possibility. It occurs in time, but as time is merely the measurement or
number of the change, the time itself is not the point; one doesn’t undertake an
education, at least not usually, in order to fill time - but out of a desire for growth
and change.
And yet, consigning time to the status of a mere epiphenomenon doesn’t feel
entirely right. It seems to me that although I cannot point to time or grasp it, I in
�some way experience it; it may have qualities – may be, for example, fast or slow.
Though it may be the number of change, I also wonder whether it can change me.
As I consider my own experience, and particularly as I read Mann, I have a sense
of time as elusive and mysterious, and not without power.
Can I even say that, though? If time has some power, doesn’t it have to be
some thing? Mann’s narrator says at one point that time seems less like a noun than
like a verb, like an activity. Looking back to our Aristotelian definition, I think we
can safely say that it is at the very least closely related to an activity. If time is the
number of motion, and would not even exist without a subject that counts or
numbers, then we cannot think of time without also thinking about the activity of
counting. In its broadest sense, as I said earlier, the motion numbered is the
rotation of the heavens; and the time that encompasses us all is the number that
arises from the activity of the soul or intellect eternally counting these revolutions.
But not all motions are the prime motion. The universe is full of motions, natural
or unnatural, internally or externally caused. Likewise the activity of applying
number to motion is something we engage in on different and more local levels. In
some communities we count the return of seasons and the growth and decay of
crops, in others the rhythm of tides. Events like this one mark the regular return of
periods in the life of an academic community. And if we engage consistently in the
�activity of numbering motion in a particular way isn’t it likely to be true that this
activity, like any other regular activity, bends back and shapes us, the actors?
For an example of the way we humans are shaped by our own numbering, I
will turn from Aristotle back to the Magic Mountain. One of the recurrent themes
of that book is the difference between life in the flatlands and life on the mountain,
and much of the difference comes down to a difference in the sense of time. At the
International Sanatorium Berghof, each day is marked by no less than five
sumptuous meals and three “rest cures,” which divide the motion of the day into
periods such as “between first and second breakfast.” Then, although the day is so
closely divided, other units of time to which we flatlanders are accustomed have
lost all meaning; the next smallest unit of time of which anyone is aware is said to
be a month. This unusual method of counting has a profound and disorienting
effect upon Hans Castorp. With days that seem full, and without weeks to hold
onto, months slip away almost before one notices that they have begun.
Mann offers another extremely rich image for the lived experience of
time that confirms our intuition of its formative power – the image of music. Music
also puts number to a kind of motion. As the narrator puts it, music “measures and
divides,” and presents itself “as movement toward an end.” (531) Like time, at
least as I experience it, music has qualities, shape, moves now more quickly now
more slowly. It may be pleasant but insipid, like the light music that a concert band
�provides to the citizens of the Magic Mountain every other Sunday, making the
lightest of marks halfway through the monthly unit. Or it may be grand and
inspiring, stretching and extending the soul as the listener attempts to take in all
that transpires. In either case, it affects those who live in and with it. The chapter of
the Magic Mountain that arguably presents the apex of Hans Castorp’s educational
development is entitled “Fullness of Harmony,” and describes his extended
emotional and intellectual engagement with several great works of music. One of
the most important source books for anyone thinking about education, Plato’s
Republic, has much to say about how music may mold the soul of the individual
and the shape of the polis.
I’m reaching the end of my 15 minutes, - and so, remembering that this is a
convocation address, I must ask - what do these musings about the formative
power of the activity of numbering motion, leave us able to say about the activity
we engage in together here in the Graduate Institute? We don’t make music
together in the GI (though they do in the undergraduate program), but we do have
our own peculiar ways of numbering motion together. You are joining a
community, entering into a local time you will share with your classmates and
tutors, in which we number weeks, and find that within each week the Mondays
and Thursdays have a particular accented quality that shapes our perception of the
other days. In which a seminar, which measured by the movement of the hand of
�your watch around a circular path takes two hours, is a unit recognized by all that
may sometimes fly, very occasionally may creep.
It’s still true, of course, that the shape of the week and the movement of a
seminar are not the point of what we do. For this education, the books we read and
the conversations we share are the critical elements. It takes time to read and to
talk, but time, as we looked at Aristotle’s definition, seemed to dissolve in our
hands. Still, there is an activity implied by the giving of number to motion and that
activity, like all activities we engage in regularly, affects us. The way we number
time matters. Our common way of experiencing time is part of what creates a
powerful and cohesive sense of community, a community with periods of intense
activity but also, we hope, with time for reflection. And this community provides
the context which creates the possibility for our other activities and for the change
we experience together – the development toward a more fully realized and free
humanity which is liberal education.
So again, welcome. Welcome to the beginning of to an unusual motion of
development and change – counted in four segments, in 12 classes, in set numbers
of seminars and tutorials, but numbered more variously with respect to weeks and
months, according to the different paths we take – Welcome to the Graduate
Institute! THANK YOU.
�
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1
St. John's College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2016
Emily Brooker Langston
Good Afternoon and Welcome – students, families, friends, and tutors – to
the summer term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's College. Welcome
especially to those of you among us who are matriculating into the Graduate
Institute, and today become members of the community of St. John’s College.
I had occasion to think about this wonderful community from a different
perspective this past semester. Usually, I try to keep my topics for these talks
varied by basing them on something I’ve read together with students in the
Graduate Institute over the past term. But this past spring, my work for the college
took me in other directions and so I wasn’t able to teach. I made an effort to be a
part of a study group on Thucydides, but my schedule was erratic and I couldn’t
make it work. I felt guilty and regretful when the emails about the weekly
assignments – often accompanied by short comments about how great last week’s
discussion had been- arrived in my inbox. So, I wasn’t reading and talking in a
sustained way about a text with any of you. And I missed it.
�2
This made me ask myself though: what was I missing? For of course I can
read and think when I am by myself, and I did. I read essays, dialogues, short
stories, poems, and most memorably for me, as preparation for a senior oral in the
undergraduate program, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece 100 years of
Solitude. And I wasn’t short on human interaction and conversation either, not
even on conversation about relatively serious topics. I was traveling a lot, and
everywhere I went, I met interesting people who were interested in St. John’s. I
often ended up having conversations with them about questions arising from some
great work. Yet still I found that, compared with my usual life as a tutor at this
college, it was a strangely solitary existence.
But why should that worry me? After all, one could say that there is
something almost essentially solitary about intellectual life, about the life of
thinking and learning. Since I do like to talk about things I’ve read recently, I’ll
borrow an image here from Marquez’s strange and wonderful One Hundred Years
of Solitude – a book which doesn’t at first glance appear to be so much about
solitude as about a large family living in a small town, often in the same house.
But we find at the heart of the house built and shared by the tumultuous , mulitgenerational Buendia family a closed-off place of silence and solitude Melquiades’ room. It isn’t there from the beginning. It is built after the parts of the
house necessary for daily living have been established, for Melquiades - the
�3
traveling gypsy who first awakens wonder (according to Aristotle the beginning of
philosophy) in the mind of the patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendia. This
wonder spins him off into a sort of solitude in which the founder of the town and
former leader of men is rendered “useless” and even to many “ridiculous” by his
obsession with scientific and philosophical questions. Melquiades’ room is at times
over the course of a century shut off entirely, entered by no one, and then
rediscovered. It is seen very differently by different characters in the book. To the
embittered revolutionary Colonel Aureliano Buendia, it is full of cobwebs and
dust, ravaged by time. To his grand-nephew Aureliano Bablionia on the other
hand, who withdraws into the room to attempt to translate and interpret the strange
manuscripts it contains, it is untouched by time and full of sunlight.
The room then is an image of a solitary place in the midst of things yet apart,
of turning inward for reflection and study. Not for the study of practical things - it
is to those with that turn of mind the room seems simply a place of silence,
cobwebs, and decay. It is a place for the study of things that are timeless and
luminous.
Of course, the image I’ve borrowed from Marquez’s novel only underlines
the question I asked earlier; if we desire to think and read and learn, isn’t what we
really need our own place of withdrawal and solitude? Why do we need other
people? Why come together in a community like this one?
�4
The answer that would seem obvious in most other educational contexts is
that we come together in a place like a college or graduate school because we want
to learn from experts who will teach us things we don’t know. The experts are
gathered in one place, say at a university, and the students flock to them eagerly,
hoping to receive knowledge. However, this is explicitly what we say we DON’T
do at St. John’s. Our faculty are called tutors rather than professors to call attention
to the fact that they make no claim to be experts in the subject areas in which they
lead classes. They don’t lecture or dispense information. Instead, we read and learn
from the books together; and the tutors may – or may not – be the most
experienced learners in the room. Our studies together are in the spirit of a claim
made by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue Meno, the one book I know we all have in
common – the remarkable claim that, although learning takes place, quote:
“[T]here is no teaching.” (82a)
But if it is not to gather around teachers who dispense information, why
gather in a community to read and learn? And why does this community come to
mean so much to many of us? Although it is true that in some ways learning is
solitary – it is something that happens to me or in me – it also requires an
important sort of openness. When one learns, one is affected, changed. It may be
that the possibility of the openness needed for learning is connected to the
withdrawal I’ve spoken of. When the patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia is caught up
�5
in leading people through the jungle and founding a town, he doesn’t have time to
wonder about magnetism or whether the earth might be round, like an orange. In
the Meno, we see the young titular character to be vain, desperate to impress, and
(as his various attempts to define virtue reveal) consumed by the struggle for
wealth, power, and reputation. It seems likely that it is partially the slave boy’s
very distance from Meno’s preoccupations and ambitions that enables him to be
open enough to see his error about the side of the double square and to be
genuinely interested in figuring out the truth of the matter.
I think the connection between the openness needed for learning and a sort
of separation from the world suggests at least one possible reason that it’s
important for those who value learning to be a part of communities like this one. It
isn’t easy to maintain that openness. In our everyday lives, in what some call the
“Real World,” it can be hard to maintain the strong desire to learn. Like various
members of the Buendia family, we may be caught up in the cares and tasks of
home life, driven by the desire for erotic or material possession, caught up in the
machinations of the practices of politics and war. Or, like Meno, who as you will
remember attempts to close off the search for the definition of virtue with a logical
paradox about the impossibility of learning, we may simply tire and grow
frustrated with an endeavor that is quite strenuous and doesn’t seem to offer much
in the way of what is often called “Return on Investment.” If we want to persist in
�6
our “useless” inquiries, it helps to be a part of a community that supports that
commitment in the face of the pull toward other, more “practical,” activities – a
community that says to us – no, maybe the Real World is over here, in our
conversation; or maybe both worlds are real, but to think about this and understand
the different ways in which this might be so, we need a perspective that can only
come when we have created through withdrawal the possibility of moving between
worlds.
Of course, even with the support of a community, maintaining openness and
continuing to learn requires effort. Learning is an activity. I can’t simply withdraw
into Melquiades’ room or some other place of solitude and wait for learning to
happen to me; once I am inside, I have to get to work: questioning, reading,
translating. Nor can I approach a teacher and expect knowledge to be poured into
me as though I were an empty vessel. Returning to Meno, we hear Socrates exhort
his interlocutor: One must search for the things one does not know. It is an arduous
activity. And any stories that we tell each other to encourage one another in the
active search will make us (to quote Socrates again) “better people, braver and less
idle.”
�7
I think this matter of stories touches on another value we might find in a
community like St. John’s College. We are part of a community in which we tell
one another stories – by which we encourage one another in the search for what we
do not know. By this I don’t of course mean that we all accept the details of the
myth of recollection. The stories we tell take many forms. But they all inspire us
when we are already eager, and urge us on when the work becomes tiring. They
speak to the better part of our natures and even hold out the hope that engaging in
the search will somehow make us better people. One of the things I missed most
when I was away from our regular discussions was being in a place where stories
like this are constantly in the air.
One final thought about what makes engaging in this search together so
precious. In a true community of learning, our searching, our striving, is common.
And remarkably we find that what we are striving FOR is common as well. This is
very much unlike our experience of striving for things in the “Real World.”
Questions, theorems, forms, the objects of the intellect – these are universally
available, and unlike material goods, and for that matter unlike power and
reputation, they are not diminished by being shared. Phaedrus, in the Platonic
dialogue that bears his name, famously says that “the things of friends are
common.” One could spend a long time unpacking that, but one upshot of it seems
�8
to me to be that common intellectual inquiry is one of the most natural bases for
friendship.
So welcome. Welcome to this place in the midst of but slightly apart from
the world. Join us as we tell one another stories the encourage us to seek, and as we
strive together as friends toward the things that remain common even as they
become more fully our own.
Before we disperse, I’d like to let those of you who are new to us know that
the love of communal reading and learning that I’ve been talking about overflows
the classroom into a variety of student-led study groups; some spring up
spontaneously among friends, while others are more organized. There are five
“official” Graduate Institute study groups taking place this summer. One Group is
reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, one is studying Oswald Spengler’s “The
Decline of the West”, there is one on Quantum Physics, one on Twain’s The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and one that will be both thinking about and
making music. Information and reading schedules for the study groups are
available in the Graduate Institute office, and have been circulated in an email.
�9
Also, the GI is delighted to host the SJC summer lecture series. Please join us this
Wednesday night at 7:30, here in the Great Hall, for the first in our Wednesday
night lecture series and a following question period. St. John’s tutor Mr. David
Townsend will speak on “Imagination and Leadership.” Mr. Townsend asks that
we read Marilynn Robinson’s wonderful essay “Imagination and Leadership.” We
will circulate a link to an online version of the essay. And please join us now for
the refreshments waiting at the back of the Hall, before your preceptorials begin at
2 o'clock. The 2015 summer term of the Graduate Institute is now in session.
Convocatum est!
�
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Convocation Addresses
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Langston, Emily Brooker
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2016
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Emily Brooker Langston for the Summer 2016 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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1
St. John's College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2017
Emily Brooker Langston
Living in the In-Between
Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families,
friends, and tutors – to the spring term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's
College.
In particular, I’d like to welcome you who are today becoming students in
the Graduate Institute. The year 2017 marks the 50th year of the GI. We’ll be
celebrating this anniversary at events through the year, so it seems appropriate to
say something today, at the beginning of this year of celebration, about the
beginnings of the institute, especially as its beginnings reveal something of the
community you are about to join.
As those of you doing the mental math will have figured out by now, the
first GI classes were held in 1967. To be precise, The Institute came into being in
the summer of 1967, on St. John’s brand new campus in Santa Fe New Mexico.
Then-president Richard Weigle obtained a grant from the Carnegie Foundation
offering support for five summers to found a summer graduate program in the
liberal arts. The initial sketch of the curriculum was drawn up by Lawrence Berns,
in consultation with many of the members of the Santa Fe faculty at the time, for a
�2
program originally called the “Teachers Institute in Liberal Education.” That
initial summer saw an enrollment of 33 students. It wasn’t as many as the founders
had hoped to attract (though it seems to me like an impressive accomplishment!)but aside from that the program was regarded by all as a great success; every
student who enrolled for that first summer elected to return in subsequent
summers; there was NO attrition. . To quote a report by Robert Goldwin, the
institute’s first director, students were “Like (people) too long in the desert
suddenly transported to an oasis. This was just what they had always hoped for but
had never really seen.”
I won’t move forward now with a year-by-year account of the emergence of
the program, though I would like to mention Elliott Zuckerman, who took over the
leadership of the Institute from Robert Goldwin after that first summer, and Geoff
Comber whose persistence is largely responsible for bringing the GI to the
Annapolis Campus. A lively account of the history of the GI has been written by
Larry Burns and is available online in the college digital archives.
Instead, I’d like to return to talking about the students. Even in that
first year, there was some surprise at the variety of students to whom the program
appealed. At the end of that first summer, Goldwin suggested changing the name
from the Teachers’ Institute to the Graduate Institute, to make it clear that this
education was for anyone who desired to undertake it. That first diverse group of
�3
33 did include a number of teachers - nine from inner-city schools in Baltimore as well as various residents of Santa Fe, Los Alamos and a places further afield.
Some came straight from college, but most already had some graduate work in
their backgrounds; many even had advanced degrees. Which is to say, that the first
GI student body looked in many ways like the student body we have today - a
substantial number of teachers, but also retirees, recent college graduates, people
working in other professions, in the military, government agencies, and NGOs.
They were also like current GI students in another, more significant, way; they, like
you here today, were willing to make a deliberate and unusual educational choice
at a time of life when it is neither expected nor convenient.
Such a choice must arise from a real and serious desire for the activity we
engage in together at the college. At its core, this activity is the same in the
Graduate Institute as in the Undergraduate Program. We are all engaged in liberal
education, in an education that we believe will render us more free. But making the
choice to undertake this education- in medias res as it were- necessitates a
different relationship with or stance toward your studies than that of the typical St.
John’s undergraduate. Very few undergraduates here attend part time, and most of
them live on or very close to campus. They are able to separate themselves, not
entirely but somewhat, from the world – forming a tight-knit community in what
you will sometimes hear called the “Johnnie Bubble.” But members of the
�4
Graduate Institute can’t live in a bubble (no matter how much some of us might
wish to from time to time!) Whether you come in the summer or during the
academic year, you have commitments – careers, families, the multitudes of
obligations of adulthood- that can’t and shouldn’t simply be put aside. Of necessity
you find yourself living in the in-between, engaging with these texts and this
community as you remain engaged also with what is called, with greater or lesser
degrees of irony, the “Real World.”
This in-between-ness puts demands on you, and in turn on the educational
Program. Some of the differences between the forms the Program takes at the
undergraduate and graduate levels – such as the ability of GI students to take a
preceptorial, which is to say an “elective,” every semester – I think can be simply
put down to a sense that students who are older and more experienced may be
offered a modicum more choice. Other differences, though, were originally the
result of rethinking the Program in light of what it meant to offer a program of
liberal education, that would be rigorous and true to the mission of the college, to
students with unavoidable ongoing commitments.
A couple of these differences have become defining features of the Graduate
Institute program today. The most significant is certainly the division of the
program into segments. The founders of the GI considered this a concession – not
so much to an academic culture obsessed with marking out territories of expertise,
�5
as to the fact that they needed to divide the program into coherent chunks that
could be offered in eight weeks of intensive summer study to students who would
have a substantial break between terms. Evidence that it is a concession is found in
the very term we use for each of these chunks; we call them “segments.” The word
segment comes from the Latin, secare, to cut; a segment is something cut off. So
“Politics and Society” for example, the segment that some of you will be taking
this semester and that was offered during the first GI summer, is not considered to
be a subject-area unto itself but instead something cut off from a larger, integrated
whole.
The fact, again, that although we adhere to a strict order within the segments,
the segments themselves may be taken in almost any order was also a concession –
this time to the fact that we can’t offer every segment every term, but we need to
bring in new students every term, and so students need to be able to start with
whatever segments are being offered. And this again has necessitated that we focus
less on technical subjects such as mathematics and foreign language study where a
certain amount of expertise must be developed cumulatively and in order. The
majority of our students earn the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts degree without
engaging in any foreign language study – and it is possible to do so without
without taking any mathematics (Although I urge you not to! Many GI students,
and especially those who were most hesitant to take it, find the Math and Natural
�6
Sciences segment find it the most freeing of all.)
What emerged from all this necessary adjustment, however, was not simply
a cut-up, truncated version of the undergraduate program; rather, as my
predecessor in this role Jeff Black made clear in an address entitled “Liberal
Education for Adults,” it is a version of the St. John’s program with its own
integrity and distinctive features. For instance, reading the books organized into
segments means that certain questions arise more persistently over the course of a
semester, and it is easier to trace a strand of thought or a question from an ancient
to a modern thinker. The fact that both new and returning students are likely to be
present in any class means that the discussion of the class remains more focused on
the books in that particular segment, rather than ranging widely over a long list of
books that everyone can be presumed to have read. The fact that we do less math,
science, and foreign language study means that we have more time in tutorial to
devote to a close reading of key texts within a segment. These differences help
make a program in the liberal arts that is particularly appropriate for older students
living between worlds.
Finally, though, no educational program, however well-conceived, could
ensure the success of this endeavor. What sustains the community of learning in the
Graduate Institute year after year, as students and faculty alike negotiate the
tension between engagement in liberal education and engagement with the world?
�7
It’s a pressing question not only for students of the Graduate Institute, but for all of
us. For (assuming that we remain engaged in learning at all after leaving school)
the space within this tension is where most of us spend our lives. I won’t attempt to
answer this question fully in my remaining few minutes, but I think even to begin
to answer I must return to what I was saying about you, the students of the GI, and
the unusual choice that brought you here. As I said earlier, it is a choice that
evidences a strong desire to undertake the project of liberal education. What can
we say about such a desire? The desire to become more free through learning,
already requires both the self-knowledge to admit that we are less than fully free
and at least the hope that we might become more free by pursuing knowledge
about essential things. We admit that there is something about this undertaking of
being human in the world that we don’t fully grasp. But of course, realizing that
there is something we don’t grasp is only the first step. To know that we only have
to look at Meno- rich, good-looking and well-connected, certainly engaged with
his contemporary world - who, when his ignorance about virtue is exposed,
responds with bluster and threats – then throws up his hands as he makes the
debater’s argument that it is not even worth trying to know such things. I think I
can safely say that most of you, unlike Meno, at some level already believe that it
IS worthwhile to seek what we do not know. But the task is not easy. It requires
that we be, in the words of Socrates to Meno, “energetic and keen on the search.”
�8
Without a continual recommitment to the search this life in-between would be
impossible. We rely on this quality in you, this resolve to resist the claims of the
immediate and return again and again to search with us for what we do not know;
we rely on it, and I think as a community we can encourage it in one another – but
as the example of Meno again makes clear we can’t simply instill it where it isn’t
present. Socrates tells us that this belief and this search will make us “better, braver
and less idle.” It is something very close to virtue; and as with virtue, it is hard to
say where it comes from. - Maybe, as is suggested regarding virtue in the second
half of the dialogue, it is a gift from the gods. - May we for the next 50 years
continue to be blessed with students so gifted.
�9
I would like to conclude by mentioning four study-groups that will be taking place
this spring in the Graduate Institute, open to all members of the college
community. There will be one on Don Quixote; the quantum physics group will be
reading Gamow’s Thirty Years that Shook Physics and Bohr’s Discussions with
Einstien on the Epistomilogical Problems in Atomic Physics; one on
Krishnamurti’s The Awakening of Intelligence, ; and one on several of the works of
Hannah Arendt. Information about all the study groups is available in the GI office
and will be circulated in an email.
I invite you now to enjoy the refreshments at the back of the Great Hall before
going to your tutorials, which will begin at 5:15.
The spring 2017 session of the Graduate Institute in Annapolis is now in session.
CONVOCATUM EST.
�10
�
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Convocation Addresses
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2017
Description
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Typescript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given by Emily Brooker Langston in January 2017 in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Living in the in-between".
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Langston, Emily Brooker
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2017-01
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Convocation Address Spring 2017
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d97a468065b2625d433c3171eed74689.pdf
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St. John's College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2018
Emily Brooker Langston
Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families,
friends, and tutors – to the spring term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's
College. In particular, welcome to all of you who are today becoming members of
the Graduate Institute.
I’ve spoken a couple of times in the past about the seal of the college. Are
those of you who are joining us today for the first time familiar with it? You can
find it in many places around campus - for instance, it is embedded in the brick
section of the quad, before the steps descending toward the playing fields and
college creek. The seal is circular and features a picture of a balance-scale,
surrounded by seven books representing the seven liberal arts. Inscribed around the
edges of the seal is a motto in Latin: “Facio Liberos ex liberis libris libraque.” Or,
less alliteravly, in English, “I make free people out of children by means of books
and a balance.”
In earlier talks I’ve wondered about the applicability of the seal to the
Graduate Institute, and what it might mean to assert that students in the GI come to
the program as “children.” Today, though, I want to take a different tack and push
back a little against the motto on the seal. I want to think about what it means to
�learn as an adult. To explore this, I will talk about an adult I spent a lot of time
thinking about with my literature seminar this past semester – the “man of many
ways,” Odysseus.
It is clear from the very beginning of the Odyssey that this will be the tale of
a man at or even past the prime of his life, not a character in formation. He comes
to us already with a back-story, one we know primarily through the Illiad. Even
there we encounter him as one of the older, more experienced warriors. He is not a
prodigy like Diomedes or Achilles, but a man whose value to his companions
comes even more from his experience with stratagems and his sagacity than it does
from his prowess as a warrior. The opening lines of the epic read as follows (all
translations are Richard Lattimore’s):
“Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was
Driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.
Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,
Many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea,
Struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.”
So right from the start we are told that this is a complex man, a man “of
many ways,” who has already lived through great adventures as part of the sack of
Troy. And we are told that the story we will hear now is not one of going out,
winning a great battle, and gaining glory but a story of returning home.
It almost goes without saying that a story of a homecoming of this sort, a
homecoming through great trials after long years and a great adventure, is a story
�of an adult. The characteristic story of a young person is a story of setting out,
launching oneself into the world. We have such a narrative in the Odyssey, in the
story of Telemachus’ quest to find his father; it is part of the incomparable beauty
of the epic that the story of Telemachus’ setting out and Odysseus’ coming home
are intertwined. Classes in the undergraduate program are full of young people
launching themselves with greater and lesser degrees of bravado, trepidation,
curiosity, and ambition. Like Telemachus in the court of Menelaus, they encounter
the adult world with wonder and with a longing to be recognized and welcomed,
and it is a delight to converse with them. In the Graduate Institute, though, students
bring to their classes a wider range of human experience. Some around the table
are still setting out, just out of college, reaching for what they will become. Others
however bring to the discussion decades of experience in a wide variety of
professions, in families and communities, in peace and in war. These are students
who have made an unusual and deliberate choice to seek this education as adults.
One of the great joys of classes in the Graduate Institute is experiencing the
interaction of the perspectives that students of differing ages and experience bring
to our discussions.
So, to continue my inquiry, Odysseus returns home not to find out who he is,
but to re - establish himself as husband, son, father, and king. There is, as my
�colleague Margaret Kirby noted in her fine lecture on the Odyssey earlier this year,
a motif of recognition running through the epic. Odysseus must know again his
wife, son, father, and faithful retainers, and be known again by them, as well. This
recognition is only possible because - although he returns to Ithaca decades older
and disguised as a beggar - he remains recognizable. The interplay between the
aspects of Odysseus that are complex and fluid and that within him that, through it
all, remains recognizably Odysseus is brought to our attention by the epithet that is
most frequently applied to him. He is “polutlas”, often translated by Lattimore as
“much-enduring.”
“Much-enduring Odysseus” The phrase certainly emphasizes the suffering
Odysseus has undergone, the adventures he has lived through, and the disguises in
which he has appeared, but it is also indicates that there is an enduring center to
this man. Let’s look, very quickly, at a couple of instances in which the epithet
occurs. When, after leaving Calypso’s island, Odysseus is on a storm-tossed raft
and is in sight of shore, the sea nymph Ino appears to him telling him to leave the
raft and swim for it. She gives him her veil to tie around himself, saying it is
immortal and will not allow him to perish. Instead of immediately taking her
advice, however, “much-enduring Odysseus” consults himself and decides to stay
on the raft as long as it will carry him, swimming toward shore with the aid of the
veil only after the raft has been dashed to bits. In a second example occurring at
�the very end of his journey: when he sees his father Laertus, Odysseus desires to
reveal himself, weep, and tell his father everything – but surpressing that first
impulse “much enduring” Odysseus decides instead to approach his father in
disguise and test him. The point I am trying too hastily to make with these
examples is that the epithet is often associated with moments when we see the
interplay between his self-knowledge and his ability to use his experience to judge
and adapt himself to circumstances; between his enduring self and purpose, and the
many-ness of his schemes and courses of action. In the two examples I have
chosen we see him question the advice of an immortal and gauge his own chances
in a battle with the sea; and we see his ability to evaluate and hold in check his
own first impulses. In each situation he endures not by being unyieldingly inert but
through a prudent adaptability that demands both knowledge of the world in
evaluating the situation and settled self-knowledge in determining his way forward.
This sort of knowledge, I submit, is characteristic not of children but of (at least
some but not all!) adults.
Returning now to the subject of education, I will ask - what does any of this
imply about the ability to learn? Doesn’t learning imply a self that is not settled but
that is formed by the learning process? There surely there is a sort of learning that
is mostly formative. Returning to the example of Telemachus, we can see that he is
engaged in this sort of learning – gaining skill in speaking in public assemblies,
�and in planning and fighting, as he grows to become a leader and man like his
father. Odysseus learns too, however. We actually hear it in the first lines of the
epic, that I quoted at the beginning of this talk. Lattimore’s translation of line three
reads: “Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of.” [The
Greek word is a form of “gignosko”, to learn or recognize, and in past tenses to
“know”] His skills as an orator and warrior are unquestioned, his experience of the
world is vast, but about the deepest questions, including about the minds of men,
Odysseus learns. And some of that learning may be most effectively undertaken
by one who questions, judges, and evaluates knowing something both of the world
and of the self she or he brings to inquiry.
Thinking about these different types of learning may give us insight into the
difference in curriculum between the undergraduate program at St. John’s and the
program of the Graduate Institute. Note the distinction between liberal education
(an education that is freeing) and the liberal arts (the seven subject areas of the
trivium and quadrivium represented by the books on the seal… grammar logic
rhetoric arithmetic geometry, astronomy, music) which are the tools of that
education. As the seal puts it, we are educated into freedom “by means of” books
and a balance. In the undergraduate program fully half the classes are devoted to
learning skills associated with these seven liberal arts. Students have tutorials in
language, mathematics, and music. In the Graduate Institute, on the other hand, we
�assume a student comes to the program having some level of competence in these
arts. And so in our tutorials we spend almost all our time not learning techniques
associated with one or another of the liberal arts but reading more slowly and
discussing with one another some of the books that, in our judgment, contain some
of the greatest thoughts that have been conceived by human beings – or, echoing
the opening lines of the epic - by the minds of men. This is an education that,
although it may help form children into adults, is also completely fitting FOR
adults – for anyone, in fact, who desires wisdom and greater freedom.
I want to conclude by noting that an indication of the wide-ranging
backgrounds, skills, interests of the students in the Graduate Institute may be seen
in the huge variety of student-led study-groups that spring up every semester. I
usually list those I know of at the end of this talk, but I won’t even attempt it today
since as far as I know there are currently TEN in formation. I will simply tell you
that information about these groups is posted on the bulletin board downstairs in
this building and will be circulated in an email, and that the groups are open not
only to GIs but to all members of the college community.
The spring 2018 semester of the Graduate Institute in Annapolis is now in session.
CONVOCATUM EST
�
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Convocation Addresses
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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convocation
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2018
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Typescript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given by Emily Brooker Langston in January 2018 in Annapolis, MD.
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Langston, Emily Brooker
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2018-01
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pdf
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English
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Convocation, Spring 2018 Langston, Emily
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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Convocation Addresses
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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00:19:05
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Convocation, Graduate Institute, Summer 2018
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Audio recording of the convocation for the Graduate Institute given by Emily Langston for the Summer 2018 semester in Annapolis, MD. Introduction by Panayiotis Kanelos.
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Langston, Emily Brooker
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Annapolis, MD
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2018-06-11
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mp3
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English
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SummerConvocation2018
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Kanelos, Panayiotis
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<a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3927" title="Typescript">Typescript</a>
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Presidents
Tutors
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Convocation Addresses
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
convocation
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Microsoft Word document
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
8 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2018
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Emily Langston on June 11, 2018 for the Summer 2018 semester in Annapolis, MD. The address is titled "Parts and Wholes."
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Langston, Emily Brooker
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-06-11
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Convocation Summer 2018 Parts and Wholes_Emily Langston
Relation
A related resource
<a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3926" title="Sound recording">Sound recording</a>
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7e5807d3072efca7e278abcfe9c41a3c.pdf
2034038ab6ad27270a051228d07d7067
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Convocation Addresses
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
convocation
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Word doc
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
7 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2019
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given by Emily Brooker Langston for the Spring 2019 semester on January 7, 2019 in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Joy of Recognition".
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Langston, Emily Brooker
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-01-07
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
GI Convocation 2019
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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