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Photographic Archive—Annapolis
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<p>The Greenfield Library photographic archive houses over 5,000 photographs. The photographs in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. The Library’s mission is to organize and preserve these unique visual materials, and to provide access to this collection. </p>
To learn more about our photographic use policy or to obtain high resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Photographic Archive Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Photographic Archive Use Policy</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Photographic Archive—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Annapolis, MD
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photographicarchiveannapolis
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25 x 20 cm.
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SJC-P-1710
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Convocation Ceremony in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium, Annapolis, Maryland
Contact sheet of Commencement in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium
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1 sheet : 17 prints from 35mm film : b&w
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Commencement
Convocation
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�����
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Speeches, presentations, and other lectures
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Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span>
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speechespresentationsotherlectures
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5 pages
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"I hate books" or making room for learning
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Transcript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given on June 15, 1997 by David Levine in Santa Fe, NM.
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Levine, David Lawrence
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Santa Fe, NM
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1997-06-15
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text
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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778. Emile.
Education
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English
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24000406
Convocation
Graduate Institute
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Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span>
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paper
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12 pages
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A world of worldless truths, an invitation to philosophy
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Transcript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given on June 20, 1999 by David Levine in Santa Fe, NM.
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Levine, David Lawrence
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St. John's College
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1999-06-20
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text
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Philosophy
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English
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24003175
Convocation
Graduate Institute
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Homer and the Power of Men That Have Chests
Convocation Address
August 27, 2003
Christopher B. Nelson
President, St. John’s College in Annapolis
Welcome to the class of 2007, to those beginning their studies in the Graduate Institute,
to parents and friends, and all members of the college community.
One of the many things I love about this college is that everyone must begin with Homer
— and not only Homer, but the Iliad. It’s not just that this happens to have been my
favorite book for most of my life. It is a collection of things, all of which have something
to do with your initiation into this community of learning, something to do with the
liberal education you are about to begin here.
Homer is arguably both the first and the best of poets and we want you to read the best
and most original of books at this college. Montaigne, another author you will meet here
in your sophomore year, wrote this about Homer:
“It was against the order of nature that he created the most excellent
production that can be. For things at birth are ordinarily imperfect; they
gain size and strength as they grow. He made the infancy of poetry and
of several sciences mature, perfect and accomplished. For this reason he
may be called the first and last of poets . . .” (Of the Most Outstanding
Men)
There is also something glorious about undertaking your studies at this particular
beginning, because the Iliad takes hold of the imagination from its first line, when it
sweeps the reader into the Achaean camps, to face the towering figure of Achilles: “Rage
--- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the
Achaeans countless losses…” The images and the pace of the poetry appear to be artless,
yet commanding.
The Iliad has a kind of immediacy you will find nowhere else. It has irresistible
momentum. It grabs you in the middle, somewhere in the vicinity of the chest or the
heart, and it demands the attention of your sensibility.
Consider the size of the heroes and the size of the themes. Who is this godlike Achilles
and what is his glory? What is the rage that has power over him? Where does it come
from? What are the consequences of unleashing it upon others? Is it purely a destructive
force? Can it be directed or controlled? What does it take to dissolve this rage?
Why are these men fighting? Who or what drove them to it? What is the price of
defending illicit love? Can one ever exercise control over the forces of nature, change
fate, or fight the gods?
Look at the great battle-armies. What propels these heroes to action, especially when they
have knowledge of the risks, dangers and dreadful consequences of battle? What is
courage? What good is honor, and what does it mean to die honorably? What is virtue
and excellence of character, and can you find these in the poem?
�Well, here is your chance to read about the bold and to talk about the question of character.
C. S. Lewis wrote a little book that perhaps you have read, The Abolition of Man, in which he argued
that modern education (he was writing in 1955) was failing to help the young develop a sense of
morality. In man, Lewis said,
“[the head rules the belly through the chest – the seat ... of magnanimity, of emotions
organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The chest – magnanimity –
sentiment – these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and
visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man:
for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”
What Lewis feared from modern education was that it would stamp out the spirited element in the
young, causing the atrophy of magnanimity and sentiment. And all the while, we clamor for more
drive, or more self-sacrifice:
“... {We} remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests
and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find
traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
C. S. Lewis may have had cause to complain, but you do not — not now. Surely there is not a more
powerful book anywhere than the Iliad with which to examine the virtues and vices, the beauty and
terrible power for good or ill, of men with chests. So the Iliad, and later, the Odyssey form a good
beginning to philosophy; they ask you to confront powerful aspects of your nature on your first day at
the college — aspects that often function independently of your rational capacity. You are asked to
face the spirited element within you and to wonder whether it can or should be shaped and tempered
by your reason.
I’ve been referring to a “spirited” element within man. You’ll be reading a lot about this in your
freshman year, first in Homer, then in Herodotus and Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle. The Greek word
is 2b:`l. It is variously used to mean the breath of life, the principle that animates life, the soul, the
heart, the spirit, an attitude that inspires action, a capacity for vigor, courage, mettle, liveliness,
indignation, anger, righteousness or pride. It is a word used of men and women both; it is what moves
individual men and women from thought to action. So, while the Iliad is a stage for the display and
destruction of 2b:`l among warrior men, you will have ample opportunity during the years for
recognizing its place in the breasts of women too. If you look hard, you may even find it used to
describe Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey.
Now back to the Iliad, where you are also asked to consider the power of community, the bonds of
friendship, the call of duty toward one’s own people, all abandoned by Achilles very early in the
poem. Achilles becomes both a lesser, meaner man and a distant, godlike emblem because of this. He
must learn to take responsibility for the awful consequences of his withdrawal from battle; he must
suffer a terrible personal loss and rise up above himself before he can again stand beside his fellow
Achaeans. He must also learn compassion before reentering the community of men.
�Why is community important? What is friendship, and what does it require? Where does the sense of
self belong in a community? These are the same questions you must ask when trying to learn the best
way to live with others.
You will read about the power of civil discourse as battle plans are shaped and reshaped, about the
path to wisdom through suffering and re-commitment, the power of human empathy, and the need for
magnanimity and generosity in dealing with others. And always in the shadows are the fates, spinning
and inevitably shortening the thread of life. We are, in the end, mortals and we must come to accept
this fact. How do we do this? We all want to know. How does one come to terms with death when
everything in our being screams with life and the will to live?
Who are the gods and what is our relation to them? What of honor, glory, mercy, forgiveness, and the
possibility for heroism? What is the authority of law and custom, and how should we behave when
this authority threatens the bonds of family? What do we make of Helen who strangely serves as a
kind of prime mover in the whole drama, but also as an object of spoil.
Name a theme in the realm of human activity that is not dealt with in the Iliad and you are likely to
find it in the Odyssey. There, our hero learns what it means to trade the offer of immortality for the
possibility of returning home, the need to face one’s demons and overcome one’s weaknesses before
deserving the right to return, the importance of taking life’s journey and facing its dangers and
temptations in order to grow, the necessity for leaving home in order to discover the bedrock that was
there all along. There, we find wisdom in survival, truth in lies, and strength in weakness. And always
is our hero’s happiness bound up with the need to search — to search at any price. This too sounds a
lot like the kind of question that you might need to examine to understand why you even decided to
come to St. John’s.
We meet the glorious Penelope, Odysseus’ match in every sense. How well has she raised their son to
manhood in his father’s 20-year absence? How has she maintained home, family and kingdom all on
her own? How should she treat her returning husband and gain mastery over this wayward stranger of
a man, to test his love and confirm that he is fit to return to his place beside her and his seat of power
in Ithaca? It is in the Odyssey that we see the strength of Homer’s women and goddesses who serve
as Odysseus’ protectors and saviors as well as his reason for returning — they become both the means
and the end of his journey from the world of Troy to home in Ithaca.
Last, you get the experience of beauty in Homer’s unforgettable images. I still wake up to dawn’s
rosy fingers stretching across the waters of the Chesapeake. I see the father’s unbound joy as he
tosses his young boy about in his arms, kissing him lovingly, before heading back out to the field of
honor for his final battle. I watch the wise and lovely Penelope at her spinning wheel, weaving the
web that makes Odysseus’s homecoming possible.
Consider now this new beginning to your education: you get the beautiful, the great, the first and the
last; you get to start with the issues of the heart and the spirit, those things that move you to action.
You will talk about honor and courage, beauty and glory, gods’ laws and man’s, mortality and death,
community and friendship, family and love, and the inevitable longing for the next challenge, the
search for an answer, the way to human happiness.
�With these first two books, you are diving into the greatest project of your education, which is to
consider how to compose your character, to figure out what is necessary to live life well — your life
— the one you are building for yourselves. In other words, you are not being told to love or admire
Achilles or Odysseus or Helen or Penelope — only to let them into your lives so that you may engage
with them. Incidentally, it is another fine quality of these poems that Homer doesn’t try to tell you
what to think; he lets the story act upon you without intervention. You get to think for yourselves
about what is fitting and what is not. But please listen to your classmates too; you might actually
learn something from them.
Our job, your tutors’ job, is to listen and to ask; yours is to read the books and wrestle with the
questions. You will experience no more liberating an activity than this, for a question is a door
opening wide, inviting you to explore and discover what’s inside. Trust yourselves to take advantage
of this invitation; we do. We believe in the power of your rational capacity. We believe in your power
to become your own teachers. Walk through this door, and you will soon find yourselves exercising
those intellectual muscles that will allow you to transform a little of what you read here and
something of what you hear there into a work that is all your own. We call this work “your
judgment.” And we suspect strongly that you’ll find that a little injection of the spirited element right
at the beginning will be just what you need to get your project going.
If you are now worried, however, that the classroom is the only place you may exercise the spirited
element within you, have no fear. There are many other opportunities around this campus, among
your friends or on your own, on the playing fields or upon the stage, in community activities or choral
groups, in competing for glory or singing to the gods:
“Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles . . .”
May the poet inspire each and every one of you to love your learning with us and move you to shape
a life that is worthy of living.
Thank you. And enjoy!
ggghggg
I declare the college in session for the entering class.
Convocatum Est
(Revised version of a talk given in January 2000, and again in June 2002.)
��
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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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5 pages
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paper
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Convocation Address, Fall 2003
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2003-08-27
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An account of the resource
Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2003 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Homer and the Power of Men That Have Chests."
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Convocation, Fall 2003
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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Nelson, Christopher B.
Convocation
Presidents
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August 23, 2006
(edited October 2, 2006)
The Sting of the Torpedo Fish
Convocation Address to the Class of 2010
Christopher B. Nelson
President
Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught? [to continue] Or if not
teachable, is it acquired by practice, or if neither, whether men possess it by nature or in
some other way?”
So begins Plato’s dialogue, Meno, opening as abruptly upon the reader as my remarks
have upon you this afternoon. You freshmen will spend a good part of this year with
Plato, his frustrating protagonist, Socrates, and this very dialogue, Meno, in both English
translation and the original Greek. I think I am on relatively safe ground in saying that the
reason we spend so much time on the Meno is that this dialogue belongs peculiarly to this
college; it is deeply rooted here. I hope to expose a few of those roots this afternoon --but let me first return to the beginning.
“Tell me, Socrates, if you can, whether human excellence can be taught? If not,
whether we can acquire it by practice? Or if neither of these, whether we are
born with it or it comes to us in some other way?”
Meno’s question is interesting, for it appears to go to the heart of some very big questions
all of us share: what does it mean to be human, and how can we be better human beings?
Parents would love to know how to raise children who are improvements on themselves;
all parents want what is best for their children. Teachers would be happy and honored
above all others if they could teach their students human virtue. As for students --- why
else are you here but that you believe that some answer might be given to Meno’s
question: What is the right path to virtue? How might I acquire human excellence?
But Meno’s question has its flaws. For one, it comes out of the blue and without context.
We are supposed to know, somehow, what Meno is talking about. We’re assumed to have
a common vocabulary and even a common understanding of basic concepts.
Speaking of vocabulary, some of you will have noted that I translated the Greek in two
different ways when I repeated Meno’s question in English --- an exercise you freshmen
will undertake as you try first to discover what is being said and what it means, before
asking whether it is true. Such attempts at translation will be first steps to get at the root
of Meno’s question.
�Socrates appreciates what is at stake in Meno’s question. He thus goes straight to the heart of it with a
response that would confound any student hoping to receive the almighty truth from a teacher.
Socrates in effect says: how can I say how virtue is acquired when I don’t even know what it is?
And worse, Socrates then says that he’s never met any other person who knows what virtue is. He
entreats Meno to help him understand what Meno thinks it to be. Meno makes the attempt,
responding confidently with what he has heard from other teachers, repeating their opinions as his
own. Yet, under Socrates’ questioning, Meno finds himself disowning the opinion he began with.
After two false starts, Meno begins to get uncomfortable with Socrates’ examination. When Socrates
begs him to start over yet a third time, Meno tries to divert the conversation from the question of
virtue to the problem with Socrates:
Socrates, I certainly used to hear, even before meeting you, that you never do anything else
than exist in a state of perplexity yourself and put others in a state of perplexity. And now you
seem to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and simply subduing me with incantations,
so that I come to be full of perplexity. And you seem to me, if it is even appropriate to make
something of a joke, to be altogether, both in looks and in other respects, like the flat torpedofish of the sea. For, indeed, it always makes anyone who approaches and touches it grow
numb, and you seem to me now to have done that very sort of thing to me, making me numb.
For truly, both in soul and in mouth, I am numb and have nothing with which I can answer
you. And yet thousands of times I have made a great many speeches about virtue, and before
many people, and done very well, in my own opinion anyway; yet now I’m altogether unable
to say what it is.
It is beginning to look as if Meno has no interest in the answer to the question and is more concerned
with his image or reputation than with the truth. On the other hand, Socrates is not satisfied; he still
wants to proceed with the search for an answer. He is also willing to conduct the search with Meno, a
man who seems to have no thoughts of his own. Socrates, in wishing to proceed, has done two things;
he’s told Meno that he’ll serve as Meno’s teacher if Meno will let him --- that is, that he will join
Meno in the search; and he’s told the reader that he is willing to do so because he might actually learn
something from Meno. He is truly open to the possibility that the teacher may learn from the student –
any student, even Meno. So, Meno, what is virtue?
Meno now tries a sting of his own, challenging Socrates with a classic learner’s paradox: either we
know something or we don’t. If we know it, we don’t need to search for it. But if we don’t already
know what we’re looking for, how will we ever recognize it when we see it?
Socrates will not be deterred by Meno’s attempt to bring the conversation to an abrupt halt. Instead,
he takes Meno’s problem seriously and answers in two ways. First, he repeats a myth he has heard
which suggests that learning is a kind of recollection, which requires an exercise of responsibility for
learning by the one doing the learning; learning does not occur when someone else, a teacher for
example, tries to put knowledge into a student. Instead, it is an act of recovery, in some way, of
something already known to us.
When Meno demonstrates that he doesn’t get it, Socrates resolves upon a way to show Meno what he
means, asking Meno to observe carefully as he examines one of Meno’s slave boys about a problem
in geometry which is new to him --- a problem which can be demonstrated by a drawing in the earth -- a problem, not incidentally, that you will be working on in your mathematics tutorial with Euclid.
The slave boy reaches a point where he expresses with confidence an answer which is false --- an
answer which he, himself, a few moments later comes to understand is wrong under Socrates’
questioning. The slave boy tries again with the same result. Socrates asks him to start over, just as he
�did with Meno a little earlier. He asks the boy to produce another answer, and the slave boy says:
“Indeed, Socrates, I do not know”.
Socrates turns to Meno, and by extension to us, and says:
Do you see, Meno, what advances he has made in his power of recollection? He did not
know at first, and he does not know now, what is the [answer]: but then he thought that he
knew, and answered confidently as if he knew, and had no difficulty; now he has difficulty,
and neither knows nor fancies that he knows.
Meno: True
Socrates: Is he not better off knowing his ignorance?
Meno: I think that he is.
Socrates: If we have made him doubt, and given him the “torpedo’s shock,” have we done
him any harm?
Meno: I think not.
Socrates: We have certainly, it would seem, assisted him in some degree to the discovery of
the truth; and now he will wish to remedy his ignorance, but then he would have been ready
to tell all the world again and again [the answer he gave at first?].
Meno: True.
Socrates persuades Meno that the slave boy simply would not have been ready to inquire and learn
the truth without first being reduced to perplexity. The torpedo’s shock not only didn’t hurt, it
positively helped; it was the condition for the learning that did occur (and the slave boy did go on,
with Socrates’ help, to find the solution to the geometry problem).
Socrates has shown us, the readers (and Meno, if he were listening), that understanding our own
ignorance is necessary for learning to take place – especially understanding our ignorance of the
everyday common things we thought we knew well. When we can look at the familiar and suddenly
realize that we really don’t understand it, when we can look at what we always thought we knew, and
ask “what is this thing?” then we are ready to learn and well along the path to better understanding. In
that state we are truly torpid, just as the slave boy was, and we bring a sense of “wonder” to our
search. This wonder comes not from something we understand, but rather from our desire to
understand --- what we sometimes call a love of learning, born not in understanding but in ignorance.
Socrates has done something else in his demonstration. He has also shown us the power of
discovering what something is NOT, and helped us see that knowing what something is not is much
more than knowing nothing; it is a kind of “knowing ignorance,” an “intelligent perplexity” that
comes from trying out and discarding false notions. He has also helped us see that we not only don’t
know what virtue is, we don’t even know what learning is.
�We now look at Meno and see that he is a slave … a slave to his pride, a slave to the opinions of
others, unwilling to examine what he clearly doesn’t understand. Meno’s problem is not that he’s
ignorant, but that he has no desire to be free from the shackles of that ignorance.
We look at the slave boy and see that he is free --- free from the false notions he’s been carrying
around with him, free from barriers to learning. This freedom, strangely, comes not from the certainty
of knowledge but from the recognition of his ignorance.
Let me return to the place where I began, when I said that this dialogue of Plato’s is deeply rooted at
the college. We want you to acquire the freedom of Meno’s slave boy, the freedom that allows you to
acknowledge the one certainty in life: “Indeed, Socrates, I do not know.” Recognition of that certainty
is the pathway to learning --- learning things that will belong to you, not just repeating things that
belong to others. We also want you to have practice with the tools you will need to acquire this
freedom --- tools that will help you to listen and to read attentively and deeply, to express yourselves
intelligibly and precisely, and to measure and reckon the world in which you live accurately and
comprehensively --- tools that will help give shape to your understanding who you are and where you
live, and what your responsibility is toward others and the world you together inhabit, the world of
the body and the world of the spirit.
We live with a deep paradox at the college --- one that you will confront right at the outset. We have
made very deliberate choices about what should and should not be included in this all required
curriculum (and there are many, many excellent works that are not on the program list simply because
there’s no room for them in just four years). Yet we tell you that, for all the conviction we might have
that these choices constitute the best undergraduate curriculum we can devise, this conviction is not
grounded in the answers these books purport to give but in the questions they raise. When we say that
this college is committed to radical inquiry, we mean inquiry into the very traditions and books that
have shaped the world we’re born into. This is why we are not ashamed to admit that though we are
called an institution of higher learning, we really do not know what learning is. We share the
conviction, nonetheless, that it is worth the search to find out. When we welcome you to St. John’s
College, we are welcoming you to join us in a search that we imagine will sustain all of us for all of
our lives --- a search for origins and foundations that will be firm enough to support the good life we
each wish to live. We call on you to join us as fellow lovers of learning, not as a would-be scholars.
One of the things you will discover as you read the several platonic dialogues on the program is that
they demand your engagement. They ask for you to reflect on how you might respond to Socrates. So,
let me venture into the conversation of the Meno with a small, tentative reflection on the question
Socrates puts to Meno: “what is virtue?” My thoughts, at least for now, are these: the way to virtue
may require that we come to know our great weakness, our own ignorance. This ignorance is
common to all who are less than divine; it is something we share with one another in our humanity. If
there is a connection between knowledge and right conduct, it is likely to be found in our ignorance
and in the humility it inspires, in seeing that every single one of us has a long, long way to go toward
understanding, in the endless search for truth. I suspect that human virtue lies somehow coterminous
with this strange path toward knowledge, a path through ignorance and therefore available to us all.
As we are not likely to attain great heights of knowledge, it is more likely that we can share with each
other the great peaks of desire. It may be that the love of learning, more than the attainment of
understanding, is what binds us together most tightly. It may also be this love of learning which
impels us to great acts of virtue, like the virtue we will be asking you to exhibit every day in class:
helping your classmates to experience the loving sting of the torpedo fish, helping them see that you
�too have a lot of baggage to unload, and coming to see that learning is best pursued in a community of
lovers of learning, each seeking what is best for the others.
And now I see that I’ve found my way to a typical difficulty experienced by all Socratic interlocutors.
I’ve tried to say something about the nature of virtue, in terms of loving and learning, when I’m not
sure I know what these are. So, let me leave you with this question: Tell me, freshmen, what is this
love of learning that has brought you to our door, and where does it come from? --- for I do not know,
though I am happy in the thought that we have this much to share with each other for four full
glorious years.
Welcome to St. John’s College! May you experience the sting of the torpedo fish early and often.
May the sting never hurt, but help you along the path toward understanding and freedom.
Thank you.
*****
I declare the college in session this 23rd day of August, 2006.
Convocatum Est!
�
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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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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2006 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Sting of the Torpedo Fish."
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August 22, 2007
The Gift of the Gadfly
Convocation 2007
Christopher B. Nelson
President, St. John’s College, Annapolis, Md.
h
“I was attached to this city by the god – though it seems a ridiculous
thing to say – as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat
sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred by a kind of gadfly.
It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me in
the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade
and reproach you all day long and everywhere I find myself in your
company.”
Socrates makes this claim in his own defense against charges of impiety and corruption of the
youth of Athens. It is typical of Socrates that he makes it hard for us to determine just when he
intends to deny the charges brought against him and when he would positively embrace them.
Socrates is a defense attorney’s worst nightmare and a grave digger’s delight; when in a hole, he
will take up the shovel and dig himself deeper.
Presented with one bill of particulars, Socrates adds new charges to the list against him.
Prosecuted for threatening the city’s good order, for challenging its authority figures and questioning their wisdom, he claims to be a gift to the city. Threatened with death for his behavior, he gives
no thought to himself, but instead begs to argue the case for the city. He asks the jury, for its own
sake, and the sake of the city, to avoid mistreating god’s gift to them by condemning Socrates, the
city’s greatest blessing—a blessing in the form of a gadfly, attached to the city, to stir it and rouse
each of its citizens, to persuade and reproach them, all day long and everywhere. On trial at age 70,
Socrates will not go quietly into retirement. His jury was sufficiently impressed with his defense
that it sentenced him to death. It does not take much imagination to picture what a pain in that
noble horse’s rear this gadfly, Socrates, must have been.
I apologize to our freshmen for giving away the outcome of the trial, for each of you will soon read
the account of it in Plato’s Apology. But I wanted to open my remarks with reference to it because I
think that each of us here at the college has something at stake in this trial, at least something at
stake in Socrates’ defense. Socrates certainly thinks so, and he will fight for it with all he has, comparing himself, ironically but rightly, I think, to Achilles, another hero our freshmen are encountering this week: the man of action, praised for his courage, his warrior’s excellence, and his fighting spirit. (More about this later.) Perhaps, I am also drawn to the dialogue as a former trial
lawyer. While I cringe when Socrates mocks both his accusers and his citizen jury, I find myself
�cheering his courage and willingness to embrace the claim that he may be both a threat to the
established power structure and a gift to the city. Armed only with questions and the will to question relentlessly, he threatens the status quo and the peace of mind of the city’s public opinion
shapers, and challenges the citizens’ thoughtless acceptance of whatever they are told. Socrates is
a destabilizing influence. Is he really the blessing to the city that he claims to be?
Let us first look at our city. Socrates claims that Athens is great and noble, made sluggish by its
size. What can he have meant by this? Not every city is great and noble. Indeed, we learn in a later
dialogue that Socrates would rather be put to death in Athens than be released to live anywhere
else. I can imagine a number of ways to think about the problem of this great city, but I’d like to
offer one for now. Athens is a democracy, or a kind of democracy of free male citizens; it is built
upon a respect for the individual and a trust that its citizens are capable of self-governance. Surely,
the protection of a democracy and the freedom of its citizens require that those citizens have an
education both in the traditions of the city and in the arts of freedom. The traditions of a city, its
customs, its idols, and even its laws, will frequently be at odds with the very things that encourage
the autonomy of the individual citizen---those arts that allow us to think for ourselves and to question the city fathers, popular opinion, and social custom.
One might say that a democracy of any size can only work well if its citizens agree on the need to
hold on to this tension between the needs of an ordered society and the needs of a free people. I
imagine that only in such societies can a Socrates have a home. Athens may be the best hope for
home for the free individual. But it may also be that in any well-ordered and relatively happy society there will always be a tendency for the people to fall asleep, to become comfortable in their
prosperity, to follow without much reflection the will of the many, and to ignore, resent or repress
the individual voice that would challenge custom and the comfort of its citizens. Let me call this
tendency to sleep a form of decay or corruption of a democratic society, which can only be countered by the wakeful vigilance of its citizens and the persistent effort to find ways of renewing the
city’s spirit, recalling it to its purposes. If the city’s business is justice, the citizen leadership must
always be alert to signs of corruption and open to correction; it must encourage in its citizens a
respect for justice which will require the people to think about what is right and wrong, not just
what is comfortable or expedient---to think about building a better tomorrow, not just protecting
their inheritance.
It is probably the case that even the good city is more likely to tolerate its gladflies than to learn
from them. Socrates seems to understand this; he argues and reproaches, to be sure. But it is never
clear that he has a particular lesson to teach. He would convince us of our ignorance, without finding for us an answer. His chief work would seem to consist in prodding us to wakefulness, to keep
us from the smug self-satisfaction that comes from sleeping through life without examining who
we are and what we ought to become. He seems to take it as an unqualified good that we should be
kept awake to this examination even if we can’t resolve the questions that such examination
requires us to ask.
How does Socrates prod us to wakefulness? Certainly not by giving us life’s answers. We’ve all slept
through those lectures. He does it by asking questions which open us up to the world. These are
not the questions you need to know to pass your multiple-choice or true-false exams; they are not
the questions designed to test your knowledge. Instead, they are questions that should help you
understand how much you still need to learn, and how little you really understand what you
thought you knew or were told by others. They are questions that will reduce you to a state of perplexity so that you may wonder at your ignorance and search hard for a better understanding.
�For Socrates, it is human to want to know, and the prod to encourage the human desire to know
something is the prod to be human. We all recognize that the desire to know something is
grounded in what we don’t know. Therefore, the best preparation for life, for becoming more fully
human, is less the acquisition of knowledge than the understanding of our ignorance. This in turn
will help us find the questions we need to ask to bring us to a better understanding. For a question
to help us, something must be at stake for us; it must make a real difference to us how we answer
the question. When Socrates tells the reader toward the end of the Apology that the unexamined
life is not worth living, he is telling us that we might as well be dead (or never born) as live a life
that is unexamined—a life without questions, the answers to which really matter to us.
For Socrates, what is at stake is literally greater than life or death. Here is where he compares himself to Achilles who, knowing he will soon be killed after he slays the royal Hector, nonetheless
despises death: “ ‘Let me die at once,’ he said, ‘when once I have given the wrongdoer his desserts,
rather than remain here, a laughing-stock by the curved ships, a burden upon the earth.’ ”
Like Achilles, Socrates is not just willing to risk death for something he believes in; he is without
thought of death, as he faces danger rather than the disgrace of withdrawing from the search for
self-knowledge, the pursuit of which is Socrates’ only reason for living. The disgrace for Socrates
would be all the greater for backing away out of fear of the unknown. “To fear death, gentlemen,”
he says “is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does
not know. No man knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man…” True
to his search for self knowledge, mere death is no barrier. Socrates and Achilles live the lives that
belong to them, fully and completely, because they have some understanding of who they are and
what they are meant to do.
You will discover that Socrates is a local hero to many at this college. I know there are other such
heroes here; some are unyielding, bulwarks, upright (take Ajax or Antigone), while others are survivors, with a kind of practical wisdom that will see them through a changing world (Odysseus and
Penelope). In the literature throughout the Program, you will find examples of men and women
who will invite imitation. The question we must ask of each such character is this: who is this man
or woman, and what is at stake for me that I need to understand what moves them to do what they
do? The question that underlies Plato’s Apology is not the guilt or innocence of Socrates. It is
something closer to this: “Who is this man, Socrates? Is he living a life worth living---the life that
truly belongs to him? Does it matter to me and to the City that this man’s life should continue or
come to an end? Is it perhaps, even, a life worth imitating or undertaking as my own?” We cannot
judge Socrates until we know him better. And in judging him, we reveal ourselves. We had better
understand what is at stake for us before we decide the fate of Socrates and either keep him with us
or consign him to Hades and take up another. This is the prod to wakefulness that Socrates represents. And these persistent questions can be as annoying or inspiriting to the sleeping soul within
each of us as the gadfly is to the noble horse.
This whole program of instruction is designed to give you the tools to ask the question “Who are
you?” The invocation here is the same as the words at the entrance to the temple of Delphi, consulted by Socrates in his youth: “Know Thyself.” It presumes that the question “Who are you?” is a
real one, and that you yourselves have not answered it. It presumes that the stakes are high, that
your happiness depends upon your investigation into this question. It suggests that coming to
know yourself is a high and sacred duty, a task of monumental difficulty, requiring courage, and
worthy of being called “heroic.” And it suggests that the way each of you will choose to live your
life after St. John’s may depend on how you go about exploring the answer to the question: “Who
are you?”
�Nearly every book we read together will help you consider who you are and what your place is in the
world. What makes you a featherless biped, a rational being, a lover of wisdom, a son of Adam, a
child of God, a collection of molecules and a product of genes, an evolved kind of ape, an acquisitive animal, a noble savage with a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but created
equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights? Those are just a few of the possible answers you
will consider in your four years with us. In reading these books and asking of them whether they
speak any truths to you, you will be participating in an education appropriate to a great and noble
democracy—an education in the traditions of society, the arts of freedom, and the tension between
the two.
You will come to ask yourself whether answering these questions will help you shape your character. I cannot begin to imagine how each of you will find your own answer to that question. But I
think I can say with some confidence that your pursuit of these answers, and your wakefulness to
the things that matter, will be worthy of the humanity that lies within each of you.
We will ask each of you to remember the gift of the gadfly, prompting you to remain wakeful---and
ask each of you to serve as a prompt to the rest of the college community whenever we appear to be
sleeping. (Now, I ask you not to take this last injunction too literally but to allow yourselves, your
classmates and your tutors those hours of repose required for us all to remain alert and fit for daylight classes.)
On behalf of the entire college community, I welcome our newcomers to St. John’s College, welcome back the returning members of our community, and invite one and all to participate together
in this search for our humanity.
Thank you.
Following the recessional, I invite everyone to a reception behind the Mitchell Art Gallery.
I declare the College in session this 22nd day of August, 2007.
CONVOCATUM EST!
�
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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, Fall 2007
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2007 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Gift of the Gadfly."
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"The Republic of St. John's College"
Convocation Remarks of Christopher B. Nelson
President of St. John's College, Annapolis
August 27, 2008
Welcome to St. John's College. A warm welcome to our entering freshmen and their
families and friends! Welcome back to our returning students, faculty and staff!
I want to tell you a story which opened up a question for me that I simply could not resist
exploring in preparing these remarks.
In the spring of 2004, a friend of mine, the president of another liberal arts college,
called to ask for a favor. He was being given a six month sabbatical and wondered
whether he might enroll at St. John's College or take some classes with us over the fall
term. We talked some about the importance of beginning at the beginning, and he got
excited about reading Homer, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus and Sophocles
with our freshmen. He ended up auditing the fall freshman seminar, reading everything
expected of him, and remaining a silent participant in the conversation. You can read all
about his sabbatical experience in a newly published book entitled Racing Odysseus,
chronicling his experience in the classroom, on the quad, in the coffee shop, and
especially at the boathouse, where he resolved to join the novice crew and take up
rowing on the Severn River in the wee hours of each morning with a good sized group
of eager, if sleepy, students. It turns out that the star of the story is our very own Mr.
Pickens, Director of Athletics at the College, but several students and tutors play lead
support roles in the education of my friend, "Rusty" Martin.
After he'd been at the college a while, and become acquainted with many of our
students, mostly freshman, he found himself observing out loud to one of his crew
mates as follows:
"Like you, Tom, so many of the freshmen I have met applied only to St. John's. They seem to
have a real sense of what it means to be a Johnnie even before they get here." (Does this sound
familiar to any of you?)
"Maybe so," Tom responds ... "But they aren't Johnnies when they arrive."
"So when does that happen?" I ask, surprised by his response.
�"When they have completed Plato's Republic! Then they become Johnnies."
End of story. But I was now hooked on thinking through what I'd just read. What would it
mean to say that one becomes a member of this college community upon completing
the six seminars we devote to Plato's Republic in the middle of the freshman fall term?
(In fact, freshmen will be halfway through it at Parents' weekend, and you parents can
return to campus to test the theory and ask your students this question.)
I have no idea whether this view of Mr. Tom's is widely shared at the college, but I
thought it was worth taking seriously. So, I'd like to play with the idea for just a bit. I
recognize that I can only begin to tease out a few possible answers with a book as
inexhaustible as the Republic. But here's a start.
If there is a principal question at the root of the many that are explored in the Republic,
it may be "What good is justice? Should we choose to live the just life or the unjust, and
why?" Indeed, the dialogue opens with a spirited argument for the good of injustice but
closes with a myth that reminds the readers of the thousand years of punishment that
awaits the man who chooses a life of injustice over one devoted to justice. The dialogue
is Plato's longest, and engages more participants than is usual. The two principal
interlocutors, however, are the young Glaucon and Adeimantus, brothers to Plato
himself, who does not appear as a character in the drama.
These two young people, particularly Glaucon, behave a lot like St. Johnnies. They
pursue Socrates; they pursue conversation to get to the bottom of things they can
hardly fathom; Glaucon at least just won't let up; he questions everything at each turn.
Socrates quickly sees that he must take Glaucon seriously because Glaucon has both
passion and ambition. He can see the good in Glaucon's soul, in his desire for
understanding, but he can also see the dangers to both Glaucon and the state if a mind
as fertile as Glaucon's is not turned to the good and is instead allowed to play with false
icons. Glaucon needs to be persuaded that it is better to do right than wrong, and he
needs to own the argument himself; it must be a case that he will not forget, filled with
images, arguments and stories that will not fail to keep him straight. Socrates has his
work cut out for him, and he puts together as beautiful a set of images and arguments
as we can find in all literature.
�Of course, to ask the question "What good is justice?" provokes the next: "What then is
justice?" To help answer the question, Socrates and his two young helpers set about to
found a city in speech which is designed to help us see what justice might look like on a
large scale, in order that we might better understand what justice would look like in the
human soul. It turns out that this city is not populated by people that Glaucon can either
recognize or respect. He calls it a city of pigs, one that satisfies the appetite of the
stomach, but not of the chest or the head. There is no place in this city to practice
leisure, enjoy the finer arts, or move beyond a life of consumption to a life more noble.
They reorganize the city at least twice more, but each of these cities seems to fail
another of Glaucon's tests that they be realizable in our political world.
So, Socrates seeks to answer this demand with one of his more memorable statements,
in the dead center of the book: "Unless the philosophers rule as kings, (he says) ...
there will be no rest from ills for the cities, ... nor I think for human kind, nor will the
regime we have now described in speech ever come forth from nature, insofar as
possible, and see the light of the sun." We can only suppose that if the earlier versions
of the city were unrealistic, this latter suggestion — that the best king must also be a
philosopher, a lover of wisdom — would be still further beyond the bounds of
imagination for Socrates' interlocutors. To their credit, Glaucon and Adeimantus push
him on to justify his claim. Socrates agrees, and goes on to give an account of the life of
the philosopher and the education appropriate to him.
In the middle of this explanation, Socrates gives us three of the most memorable
images our students will encounter in their four years at the college. First, he compares
the Good, which is the object of the philosopher's search, to the Sun which is the source
of life, of all that is, but also the illuminator of all the appearances in the world. Socrates
cannot seem to say what the Good is, but he can give us a sense of what it is like.
Second, he proposes a geometric model, a "divided line" to give us a picture of what the
ascent to the Good might require of us mortals still in this world below, a sense of the
kind of intellectual activity we must engage in, the kind of journey we must take to get
closer to that object beyond us. In the study of mathematics, we quickly come to
understand that the pictures we draw of squares and triangles, lines and proportions,
are just images or representations of the true objects of geometry, which are only
accessible by thought. Through the image of the divided line, we come to appreciate the
�need to access a world of intelligible objects in order to better understand what lies
behind, and gives order to, their appearances in the visible world.
Third, in the cave analogy, Socrates gives us a drama to describe the great difficulty
and pain we can expect in making the ascent from the world of images to the one
source of all we can see and know. He asks us to imagine that we are all prisoners in a
cave, chained so that all we can see are the shadows cast upon a wall in front of us. We
cannot, on our own, turn around and see that these shadows are not real at all, but
mere reflections of objects carried by people behind us who are passing in front of a fire
which is the source of the light that casts the shadows. He describes first the pain, then
the disbelief, and finally the wonder experienced by a prisoner who is released from his
bonds and forced to turn around and look into the light of the fire and see what the
image makers have known all along.
But that is not all. This cave has an entrance open to the light of the sun across the
whole width of the cave. Socrates now asks us to imagine that the newly released
prisoner is dragged up the steep, rocky, upward way out into the light of the sun. At first,
he'd be blinded and see less well than before, but then he would get accustomed to the
light and see all the other things the world has to show him — the waters and the land
and the starry heavens above, until he could make out the sun itself and see what it is
like. That man would be happy at his freedom from the shadows below, and would pity
those still in the cave. His education would have literally been an education in the art of
turning around, the art of seeing better, in a truer light, what is already really there, of
seeing what ought to be seen.
Around here, we sometimes call this an education in the arts of freedom, or the liberal
arts — the arts that liberate us to flee the bonds of prejudice, the false opinions, and the
shadows about us, and see things as they truly are. Every image, every opinion
expressed by the image makers and spin doctors around us, should be an occasion for
us to pull ourselves, and others with us, out of our caves and into the light of the sun.
We recognize that this sun is there for everyone in the cave to access. The entrance to
the cave is open to all who are below.
After exploring these images, Socrates then constructs the education of the
philosopher, and explores the kinds of governments that arise when the rulers are no
longer philosophers. He closes with a grand overarching myth that attempts to
�incorporate the whole, reminding us that we have a lot at stake in the choices we make
in living our lives. Just as we are meant to see the city-building exercise that occurs in
the first nine books of the Republic as an image of the education of the individual soul,
so we see the closing myth as an image of the choices available to that soul. We see
that it is literally a matter of life or death (or at least a matter of great reward or
unimaginable punishment) how we choose to live our lives, and how wise we would be
to turn ourselves now to the question of justice so that we might learn to live a life that
practices it. The well regulated soul, one that is turned to the Good, that is whole, well
integrated and balanced, is also, we imagine, the soul best fit to rule our city.
I think it is time for me now to try to give my answer to the question I opened with: What
would it mean to say that our students don't become Johnnies until they've finished
the Republic?
The dialogue probably gives us the best account we have of what learning ought to be.
It belongs to us at the college, and serves as a kind of model for our program of
instruction. The book thus gives our students an opportunity to examine the education
they are then engaged in, allows them to ask what it would be like to construct a
curriculum fit for a philosopher king, and invites them to compare it to the one they are
undertaking at St. John's.
The Republic is a beautiful book, filled with the richest of images that help us remember
that the difficult search for truth is worth all the effort. It gives us poetic, musical and
mathematical images, myths and analogies, to aid us in our search for an
understanding of our world and our place in it, images we cannot possibly forget,
images that will be available to us forever.
Like all of Plato's dialogues, the Republic engages the readers and asks them to
become participants in the dialogue that Socrates is having with his friends. It asks us to
question the answers given by Glaucon and others, to try them out and formulate better
ones. It also helps to lead us up out of our own personal caves, encouraging us, and
showing us how to find our way to a life that is better than we have experienced
heretofore.
The Republic allows our freshmen to see how integrated the whole of learning is in
relation to the singular soul. It helps explain the importance of mathematics in our
�curriculum, that it is not just a tool required for the specialist in the sciences,
engineering, or the trades, but is an indispensable aid to philosophy itself, an aid to self
understanding.
More than anything, however, I think it must be in our several seminars on
the Republic that we become aware of the republic that is shaping itself around us, the
republic of friends around the table who are searching together for answers to the
deepest of questions: how we ought to be living our lives. We, like Glaucon and
Adeimantus, find ourselves being initiated into the one republic that Socrates and his
friends have succeeded in realizing. At St. John's, we call this republic our community of
learning.
In the world, we often speak of the ties that "bind" us to a human community as healthy
things, often beautiful and reaffirming ties. It is easy to forget the dark side of this image
which is that we can be "tied" and "bound" to a community as to a cave that we fear to
escape. We can become yoked to a larger political body by a common interest, a piece
of territory, a tribal custom, a shared enemy, or a popular idea — foundations that we
may cease to question. And questioning these foundations of community can become
taboo, as the chains tighten about us.
We are fortunate, then, that the larger community most of us belong to, the United
States of America, is founded on a paradox: the ties that bind us as Americans are
rooted in human freedom, and the more we exercise the freedom to question our
institutions the stronger are our ties to the founding principal. That freedom, protected
by our laws, provides us with a very comfortable and open cave in which to live our lives
and shape our institutions.
We at St John's have taken advantage of that freedom and that cave to found a college
grounded in a very similar paradox: we find our truest sense of community in an image
of human freedom that finds us somehow "together" seeking to escape the confines of
the individual caves that imprison each of us. For lovers of wisdom, the young Glaucons
among us, the desire to see things as they are, to strive toward the source of our being
and come in to the light of the sun, is too beautiful an activity to resist — and too
wonderful not to share with others. We make this search for truth, this struggle to climb
out of our caves, our chief community endeavor.
�Perhaps, in our search for such a liberating community, and in our occasionally
achieving it, "then, we become Johnnies". Nonetheless, I will today welcome you to the
Republic of St. John's College. I'm done trying to justify why you must wait 10 weeks to
become one of us. We are happy to call you ours today, and to welcome you to our
community of learning.
Thank You.
I declare the College in session this 27th day of August, 2008.
CONVOCATUM EST!
�
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2008 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Republic of St. John's College."
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“The Things of Friends Are Common”
Convocation Address, August 26, 2009
Christopher B. Nelson, President
St. John’s College, Annapolis MD
Welcome to the Class of 2013 and to your families. To the rest of our college community,
welcome back. Welcome, friends all!
I came to a rather startling realization over the summer as I was preparing to greet our
newcomers: that I had returned to this college to take the position I now hold in the year in which
most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have passed quickly, it seems to me now,
and my appreciation for the community of learning I joined back then has grown, as my
friendships within the community have deepened. I think I became a wee bit sentimental as I
ruminated upon my first year as a student at St. John’s more than 40 years ago. My Greek has
gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the things learned first are remembered best, and I
have kept with me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my first days at the
college.
and
.
The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are difficult” or “Noble things are
difficult.” The second can be translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What friends
have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my youth we used a different Greek grammar
book, so this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson Introduction to Ancient Greek
that you will be working with in your first semester of the Greek Tutorial. And there they were,
the same two sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and predicate position of the
definite article, and I rediscovered something I once must have known about the two sentences I
had carried with me all these years: that they are both nominal sentences with the article in the
predicate position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole sentences without the use of a
verb. (Grammar is a handy tool, don’t you think?) Well, I was pretty sure that I had not
committed these sentences to memory for the substantive-making power of the article . It’s
more likely that I remembered them because they were both quite short, and perhaps because
they appeared to carry a mystery and a whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if
only I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new
text that “nominal sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless character of maxims
or folk-sayings.” (Mollin and Williamson at 31)
I wanted to understand better the little maxim
“The things of friends are
common.” The sentence seemed to capture a beautiful thought, and I had the efficient notion
that if I made the effort to understand this maxim better, I also might come to see why “beautiful
things are difficult.” Two birds, one arrow --- so to speak!
So, I begin my reflection by asking whether this little maxim means that friends share what they
have, or that they ought to share what they have. Today, I give you half of the lunch I packed for
us both, and tomorrow you will share yours with me. But the sandwiches we eat are hardly
common to us both; quite the opposite, they are rationed out separately to each of us, albeit
�equally. We may each have an equal share in a good thing, but not a common good. We each
consume what the other does not and cannot consume. So it is with all sorts of goods, earthly
goods, goods that are external to us; what I give to you in the spirit of sharing with a friend is
something I will no longer have after giving it. I will have less of it after sharing it than I did
before I shared it, however good and generous my act of friendship has been, and however much
I imagine I may have gained in the improvement of my character by sharing it.
But what then are the things that could be common to friends? What kinds of things can truly be
held in common without having to be shared or meted out among friends? I suppose things of the
soul are of this nature, things that belong to the heart, the spirit, or the mind, things that belong to
our inner lives. We both may love a single object or a person without our having to share that
love as we might share the expense of a gift to the beloved one. My love doesn’t grow less
because you love too. And of course, if we should actually love one another, that love is surely
greater and stronger for it being reciprocated and reinforced over and over. So it is with the
intellect. When I learn something you have shared with me, it does not pass from you to me like
milk from a pitcher; you have lost nothing, and yet I have gained something that is now common
to us both. The sum of what is common to us has just grown; it has not been redistributed. And
should we together go about learning something new, we will each be richer for what we come to
have in common.
Why, though, do we say that these ‘things in common’ belong to ‘friends’? I think it must have
something to do with the reason we seek these common things. We are moved to love something
because it is beautiful, or to love some person because he or she is beautiful to us. We seek to
know something because we believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that this
knowledge will be good for us, perhaps even that it can be turned to good in the world about us.
These things we have in common are beautiful and good things, and we wish beautiful and good
things for our friends. If the common goods are those that increase by pursuing them together,
then the greatest acts of friendship must be the searching together for such a common good.
St. John’s College exists for this purpose: to provide a place and countless opportunities for our
students to pursue together the common goods of the intellect. We call ourselves a community of
learning, aware that the word ‘community’ in English, as in Greek, has the same root as the word
‘common’. We make many an effort to put into practice the conviction that we learn best when
we learn with others, who like us, wish to increase the common good. Such a community offers
some pretty fine opportunities for friendship.
We also have a common curriculum that has us all reading books that are worthy of our
attention, even of our love --- books written by men and women who were themselves model
fellow learners. The books and the authors may even become our friends, as can the characters in
some of those books. If you have not already met the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, you soon
will, and you will be spending a lot of time with him in your freshman year. For some of you,
this may be the beginning of a lifelong friendship with a character who would converse with you
over and over if you open yourselves to the possibility. The words on the page may remain the
same, but the reader brings a new conversationalist to the text every time he or she returns to the
dialogue. At least, so it is with me. I call Socrates a friend of mine because I know that he seeks
only my own good. He has taught me humility, at least such as I possess it at all.
�I have many such friends in the Program. Some of them are books: Homer’s Iliad has been my
companion since the seventh grade, and I never tire of returning to it. The Aeneid has become a
more recent friend who has helped me understand and better bear the responsibilities of
fatherhood and the trials of leadership. The Books of Genesis and Job have helped me
understand what it means to be human and how great is the distance between the human and the
divine; I read them to remind me of how little I really understand about the relation between the
two, which in turn serves as a spur to seeking to understand better. Euclid’s Elements may be the
finest example on the St. John’s Program of the practice of the liberal arts, and it is beautiful for
its logical, progressive movement from the elemental to the truly grand. Plato’s Republic is the
finest book about education ever written; it inspires much of what I do as I practice my vocation
at the College, reminding me that a community of learning is reshaping and refounding itself any
time a few of its members come together to engage in learning for its own sake --- and that this is
what we ought always to be encouraging at this college, even by device when necessary.
Other friends of mine are authors: Sophocles, who can evoke a human sympathy to inspire pity
in each of his dramas; George Washington, whose restraint in the use of power is evident in his
finest writings and in the mark he left on the founding of this country; Abraham Lincoln, whom I
consider this country’s finest poet, whose very words reshaped what it meant to be an American;
Jane Austen, whose every sentence can be called perfect (and so she is a beautiful author to me);
and Martin Luther King, who taught me that non-violent protest is more than a successful tactical
measure to achieve a political end, but a proper and loving response to the hateful misconduct of
fellow human souls.
Then there remain the characters whom I embrace as friends: besides Socrates, there is Hector,
Breaker of Horses, ‘Oh my Warrior’; and Penelope, who weaves the path that allows Odysseus
to return home and is far worthier of his love than he is of hers. There is Don Quixote, the
indomitable spirit, and Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooks, whose simple acts of goodness change
the whole world about her. I rather like Milton’s Eve, mother of us all, who still shines pretty
brightly in the face of his spectacular Satan. I was a teenager when I met Shakespeare’s Prince
Hal, and I grew to adulthood with him, probably following a little too closely his path to
responsibility. There’s the innocent Billy Budd, unprepared to face the force of evil in man, and
his Captain Vere, the good man who suffers to do his duty.
You will also read some reflections on friendship: this winter, Aristotle will provide freshmen
with a framework for considering different kinds of friendships and the goods they afford. You
should ask whether you think his list is complete, and whether your own experiences of
friendship are embraced by his explication. And then there are examples of friendships, pairs of
friends, in many of the books, who will also provide lessons in friendship, for better or worse:
Patroclus and Achilles, David and Jonathan, Hal and Falstaff, Huck and Jim, Emma and
Knightly, to name a few.
As you work your way through the Program, you will have the assistance of many friends, some
of whom will still be breathing while others will be living on in the pages you’ll be reading
during your years with us. They will help you as you struggle with the big questions that in turn
will help to free you to live a life that truly belongs to you. It will be these friends, who are
�outside of you but standing close by, who will help you find your own answers to the questions:
Who am I? What is my place in the world? And how ought I to live my life? One of my more
beautiful living friends, a colleague here at the college, has put it this way: “Our friends are
doubly our benefactors: They take us out of ourselves and they help us to return, to face together
with them our common human condition.” (Eva Brann, Open Secrets/Inward Prospects, at 55.)
Another of my friends, a St. John’s classmate and medical doctor, gave last year’s graduating
class in Santa Fe this reminder, that we can learn from our friendships with the books how we
might be better friends to one another. “It is the great book that is the life of every person,
regardless of station in life,” he said. “So often we make shallow and inaccurate presumptions
about people, like the cliché of telling a book by its cover, which robs you of the deeper
experience that defines us as humans in our relationship to each other. For me every patient is a
great book with a story to tell and much to teach me, and I am sometimes ashamed when my
presumptions are exposed and I then see the remarkable person within, between the covers of the
book of the story of their own lives.” This doctor has devoted himself to saving the lives of
patients suffering from cancer, and he has this to say about how he is guided by the spirit of
community and friendship within the soul of every human being: “In my own work, it is
sometimes said, we are guided … by the idea that to save a person’s life, it is considered as if
one has saved the world. To me that has always meant the life saved is much more than a single
life restored, as that person is someone’s spouse, someone’s brother or sister, someone’s parent,
or child, a member of a community, of a church, synagogue or mosque, or a friend, and as all are
affected by loss, all are restored by their return.” (Stephen J. Forman, 2009 Commencement
Address, Santa Fe) This statement is a powerful testament to the wonder of friendship at work in
the world.
In this last story, I have moved us away from the inner world of reflection and learning to the
outer world of putting what one has learned to work in a life devoted to helping others. The
second must always follow the first. By this, I mean that you owe it to yourselves and others to
take advantage of the opportunities this community offers you to learn with your classmates and
tutors what it takes to acquire a little self-understanding before you go out and put it to work in
the world. And in the process, we hope that you will make a few friends who will stay with you
for the rest of your lives, enriching your lives because ‘what friends have, they have in common.’
I wish to close with a kind of benediction. This little nominal sentence
happens to be the penultimate sentence in one of Plato’s dialogues, The Phaedrus, the only book
you will read twice for seminar, at the end of both your freshman and senior years. Phaedrus and
Socrates have engaged in the highest form of friendship as they have conversed together to try to
understand how a man or woman might achieve harmony and balance in the soul by directing
that soul to a love for the beautiful. Socrates concludes with this prayer to the gods:
Friend Pan and however many other gods are here, grant
me to become beautiful in respect to the things within. And
as to whatever things I have outside, grant that they be
friendly to the things inside me. May I believe the wise
man to be rich. May I have as big a mass of gold as no one
�other than the moderate man of sound mind could bear or
bring along.
Do we still need something else, Phaedrus? For I think I’ve
prayed in a measured fashion.
To which Phaedrus responds:
And pray also for these things for me. For friends’ things
are in common.
(Plato, Phaedrus, Nichols translation, lines 279b-279c)
May each of you, as well, learn to enjoy the benefits of such friendships in your time at this
College! (And now, in the concluding words of Socrates, “Let’s go” and get started.)
Thank you!
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
I declare the College in session this 26th day of August, 2009.
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 Address, Fall 2009
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2009-08-26
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2009 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Things of Friends Are Common."
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Convocation, Fall 2009
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Annapolis, MD
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Music of the Republic
Convocation, August, 2011
Christopher B. Nelson, President
St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD
Welcome to the Class of 2015 and their families. To the rest of the College community,
welcome back.
There comes a time in every year when I find myself saying to a friend or a prospective
student that this is a very musical College. After 20 years of speaking this way, I thought
I should ask myself just what I mean by this statement, and so I will try to unpack that
little observation and say a few words about the music we make at St. John’s College.
Each of you has experience with music; it has lifted you up or soothed you; it has
angered or frightened you; it has lightened or burdened the spirit, distracted your
attention, moved your feet and your arms, inspired an act, or aroused a love; it has
transported you to another time or place, or moved you in some way without your quite
being aware of it. Music pervades our lives and always has. It has power. It has
sometimes taken you outside of yourselves and at other times taken you deep within.
For these reasons, it has often been associated with things divine.
Not only have you had experience of the effects of music, many of you have brought
music with you to the College because it plays an important part in your daily lives. You
carry your i-pods, MP3 players, and smart phones, playing classical music and opera,
popular tunes and rock, jazz and blues, country and western, hip hop and rap. You
hum, sing or play your favorites to yourselves or with others. Music has its place when
you are alone and in fellowship. It serves as friend and refuge.
Why is this? How can we come to understand the power that music has in our lives?
What does it mean that we are somehow all musical beings? That to be human is
somehow to be musical? That without music we would be less than human? These are
questions I suggest you will be asking yourselves in your four years at St. John’s.
�You will also be making music while you are with us. To get at the question “what is this
music that we make?” I thought it would be fruitful to explore briefly the place of music in
four republics to which we belong and by which we live: the Republic of the United
States of America, the Republic of Letters, the Republic of Plato, and the Republic of St.
John’s College. What is the place of music in these four republics of ours?
The Republic of the United States of America
I have mentioned the music that you brought with you when you arrived on campus,
much of it performed by, written by, or listened to by Americans. But there is another
kind of music that might be said to capture the spirit of the land, something I would call
more elemental, seeking to get at the heart of our nation, to comprehend the
constitution of its people, to describe what it means, or ought to mean, to be an
American. And here I will suggest two, perhaps three, examples of this music. The first
is from Walt Whitman, a quintessential American poet:
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off for work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the
steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutters song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon
intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or
washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to no one else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. (“I Hear America Singing”)One
can feel the heartbeat of a new nation, of a people building a country from the sweat of
the brow. These Americans are making their own music in the work they do, and they
are celebrating that work as something that belongs especially to them as free
individuals, free to choose their work and free to enjoy their play.
�My second example allows us to recall that music can be an aid in helping us to see
and to seek the beautiful and the good. You all know the melody for “America the
Beautiful”, so I will not ruin it for you by trying to sing it solo. While the tune is pleasing,
the lyrics of Katherine Lee Bates help it to soar. The first stanza appeals to the gifts of
the natural world:
Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain!
But it is the second stanza that captures my heart, speaking to the people that made
this nation possible, and finally to the rule of law that sustains it:
Oh beautiful for pilgrim feet whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.
Here is a hymn to those who brought the spirit of freedom to a new land, and a prayer
that we Americans dedicate ourselves to self-control and the rule of law to protect the
freedom we have won. This is a noble anthem that we would do well to call up from time
to time – a song worth making our own, as members of a community bound together by
the will to protect an idea of freedom in the pursuit of happiness. This is, after all, the
republic that has made it possible for this College, dedicated to cultivating the arts of
freedom, the liberal arts, to thrive since before the formal founding of this nation. We in
turn, as well educated and independent thinking citizens, will prove to be the necessary
guardians of this republic.
A third example, if only our voices could scale a couple of registers, might be a song
written by one of our alumni, a graduate of the class of 1796, composer of the most
sung song in this country even today, written during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of
1812. I refer of course to our National Anthem, penned by Francis Scott Key: “Then, in
that hour of deliverance, my heart spoke. Does not such a country, and such defenders
of their country, deserve a song?” he said when he composed it.
Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
What does it mean for a country to “deserve” a song? And why should a song be the
�measure of worth?
I will leave these questions hanging as I move to a second republic to which we belong.
The Republic of Letters
These are the works of literary and musical imagination that constitute the heritage of
mankind. They have sprung from many civilizations and have spanned the centuries.
We study these works because they are fundamental to understanding our humanity;
they are the building blocks and cornerstones of our edifices in the humanities, arts and
sciences. When I speak of works of musical imagination, I mean any work that might be
said to belong to the ancient Muses, works of poetry or of musical or artistic
composition, where the chief work of the author, composer, artist, or performer is the
making of powerful images or likenesses of things.
Consider, for example, the moving lines that open the Iliad, which freshmen are reading
for their first seminar tomorrow evening:
Rage --- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
Murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
Hurling down to the House of the Dead so many sturdy souls,
Great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
Feasts for the dogs and birds,
And the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the first two broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
The images are vivid, the action compelling. I want to take up my spear and shield and
go to battle where heroes are made and lost. The song has irresistible momentum that
takes hold of the listener (or reader) from its first line. It grabs us in the chest, the seat of
sentiment and magnanimity, the locus of the spirit displayed by our heroes. Such is the
power of music. Even Homer is caught up by it, as he calls upon an Olympian Muse to
tell this story, to sing the song of Achilles’ rage long before it was put to the page.
Why does Homer need a Muse to tell this story? Why sing a song about rage, about a
�consuming aspect of a man? What is this will of Zeus that is moving inexorably toward
its end? What power does this god or any other god have over the affairs of mankind?
Homer has concentrated images that beg us to ask a host of questions in these opening
lines. That is another power that music has in common with poetry: the capacity for
concentration of energy and passion! (And by the way, is my reaction to this poem a
healthy one – that I want pick up and head off to battle? What exactly has gotten hold of
me? Have I been made captive to a powerful image rather than given freedom to
explore a question and seek a truth?)
In your sophomore year, you will read of David, another warrior, another musician, but
also an instrument of God. You will read the Psalms and sing their songs. God the
Muse, man the instrument! How frustrating and depressing this must be for the wholly
self-sufficient spirit that would have mankind be the creator and ruler of our world - that
would have us become like gods? What kind of freedom comes from obedience to God,
from becoming God’s instrument? Or do men and women gain their freedom only from
disobedience – something for our juniors to consider when reading Milton’s Paradise
Lost?
But musical compositions have always had a special place in the literary tradition. Music
was among the seven liberal arts as they were studied in the Middle Ages. As you will
recall, those seven liberal arts were divided into the trivium, the arts of communication
and language: grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium, the arts of counting
and measuring: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. It turns out that music has
mathematical elements that appear to be at its root, that is, that there is a correlation
between the musical intervals in our everyday songs and the length of a string that can
be plucked to play those sounds. You will learn from your own construction of a
monochord, a one-stringed instrument, that the correlation between those very musical
intervals and the divisions of the string that makes the sounds is described by a set of
ratios consisting of small whole numbers. Lo and behold, we have physical phenomena,
musical sounds, that have a mathematical form. Thus, there may something in music
that is grounded in nature, not just in our sensibility, suggesting a model of the very
mathematical physics you will be studying in your junior and senior laboratory. Music
makes the claim that it can be studied objectively. And this causes us again to ask in
�what way nature might be as musical as we human beings are.
Consider some of the great masterpieces of musical imagination. Sophomores spend
several weeks with Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Measure by measure, the
mathematical elements are analyzed, the melodies and harmonics studied, the rhythm
and meter explored, and the lyrics and gospel text applied. If we are ever going to get a
sense of the possibility of mathematical physics to explain an emotional or spiritual
response, it will be in our study of this masterpiece. It is indeed a passionate work of art,
and it begs the question what Bach’s music has to do with the Gospel of Matthew?
Does the music have a power over the listener that the Bible does not have over the
reader? And is this good or is it downright heresy?
We spend time with Mozart and study closely one of his operas, usually Don Giovanni.
Who are these human souls that step out onto the stage and sing the music that
belongs only to each of them, songs that reveal their character - or shape it - in time,
over the course of the opera? What is the relationship between the music and the
words? Consider the words alone and they are pretty poor examples of literature. But
set them to this music and they soar! They are playful or tragic; they tug at our
heartstrings; in Mozart’s hands, they are invariably beautiful. Whatever makes them
beautiful? Are there elements of beauty as there appear to be elements of music? Are
the two related? And what about the “ugly”? Are things ugly because they do not have
the same concord with nature that beautiful things do, that they are in discord with
nature? Is the beauty of a musical composition to be found in the mathematical order of
the piece, or is it more complicated than that?
I move on to our third republic.
The Republic of Plato
This is a dialogue that freshmen will be reading in the middle of their first semester. It
has been described by some as the indispensable text that sets forth the plan of study
for what we call the "Program" at St. John's College. It provides the model of a liberal
�education at work, where music has its place in the education of the young, as an aid in
the formation of character, an habituation that is useful in the training of the soul but not
in its education. This education of the soul is better served by philosophy, a love of and
pursuit of wisdom, which Socrates in this dialogue calls the greatest music of all.
Such is the power of music to grab hold of the soul that Socrates warns us of its
dangers. “So then,” Socrates says to his young interlocutor, Glaucon, “isn’t this why
upbringing in music is most sovereign? It’s because rhythm and concord most of all sink
down to the inmost soul and cling to her most vigorously as they bring gracefulness with
them; and they make a man graceful if he’s brought up correctly, but if not, then the
opposite.” Socrates points to ‘rhythm and concord’ for the source of music’s power, not
its tones, intervals, melodies, and harmonies.Is he right in that? Do we think he is right
about the power of music for good and for ill? If this dialogue is meant to be a kind of
model for how we go about things at this College, how should we study music at St.
John’s to avoid the bad and pursue the good? Should music rather be banned from the
College as Socrates insists it ought to be in the formal program of study for the
guardians of his Republic? What is the difference between the image-making of the
poets, artists and musicians on the one hand and the image-making of the philosopher
on the other --- whose image of the Sun serves as a metaphor for the Good, of the
Cave for our everyday dwelling places, and of the Divided Line for our path to Wisdom?
It is time to move on to our next republic, but I cannot help but pause to observe that we
are not without a sense of humor about the seriousness of this or any of these other
Republics. We even have a Battle Hymn to the Republic of Letters, written by one of our
tutors, Mr. Higuera, and performed by a group of tutors on one of those long, cold winter
days in a rite of distraction and fun that we call “Be Gone Dull Care”: Let me share the
first of several clever stanzas:
My mind has seen the glory of th' Idea of the Good,
That it's not the same as pleasure I have firmly understood,
And I wouldn't take a tyrant's power even if I could,
I'm marching from The Cave!
Marching, marching towards the sunlight,
�Marching, marching towards the sunlight,
Marching, marching towards the sunlight,
I'm marching from The Cave!
It is now quite clearly time to move to our fourth and last republic.
The Republic of St. John’s College
By now, you already have a feel for some of the kinds of music you will be singing,
hearing, and reflecting upon. We have taken seriously the effort to restore music as a
liberal art to the curriculum. As a close study of musical elements and musical literature
can best be undertaken by learning to make music, we ask all of our students to use the
one musical instrument they have in common --- their voices. Freshmen will sing
together throughout the year, learning the fundamentals of melody and basic notation,
before turning to sing some of the great choral works. Sophomores investigate rhythm
in words and in notes. They study the ratios of musical intervals and consider melody,
harmony and counterpoint, all in the context of some of the finest music ever composed
by Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and others.
And then throughout the College community, there seem to be countless occasions for
playing music and singing, and for listening to the fine musical performances of your
fellow citizens of this Republic. Join the St. John’s Chorus, the Madrigal Choir, Primum
Mobile, or the College Orchestra; come and perform at our Collegiums, or just come to
hear your classmates. I don’t think there is anything quite like experiencing the Muse at
play in this community.
Our purpose both in and out of the classroom, in the words of another of our tutors, Mr.
Kalkavage, “is to improve … [our] students’ aesthetic taste: to introduce them to truly
great music in an effort to beget a love for all things graceful and well formed. [We] hope
that the study of music begets … a habit of searching for causes and details of beautiful
things, and that the love of beauty will nourish the love of knowledge and truth. [And we]
hope they will strive to imitate in their day-to-day lives the virtues of harmoniousness,
proportion, good timing, … grace, and ‘striking the right note’ in thought, speech,
feeling, and action.” (Peter Kalkavage, “The Neglected Muse”, The American Educator
�Fall 2006)
In short, we want these four years to be intensely musical years so that you may
experience the liberation of mind and the harmony of soul that is achieved when both
mind and soul are directed toward the beautiful. Go forth and sing the songs that stir
you to engage in this search for beauty and truth! Make philosophy your Muse. You’ll
find that this is a pretty friendly Republic for that kind of activity.
Let me close by inviting you to listen to one of the simplest and, to my ear, one of the
most beautiful pieces of music we make: Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus, a song familiar to all
the residents of this Republic of St. John’s College. I invite all who cannot help
themselves to join in and sing with a few of our students and faculty who agreed earlier
today to lead us in song.
SING!
Thank you one and all.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Please join us for refreshments and conversation outside the lobby immediately
following the recession.
I declare the College in session this 24th day of August, 2011.
CONVOCATUM EST!!
�
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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, Fall 2011
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Music and the Republic."
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Nelson, Christopher B.
Convocation
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Text
Welcome to Wonderland
St. John's College, Annapolis
Convocation Address 8/21/13
Christopher B. Nelson, President
Welcome to St. John's College! Welcome to our freshman class, their families and friends! Welcome
back to the rest of the College community!
Most of you know something of the springtime lawn sport at which this College is said to excel. And
many of you have attended more than a few of our annual contests with the US Naval Academy.
Honor and Glory are at stake in the match of wits that characterizes croquet in Annapolis. But
costume and dance are every bit as much a part of the day as is watching the grass grow.
This last year, our Student Committee on Instruction added a Saturday morning seminar to precede the big
match. The reading was from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the timeless classic about a little girl
drifting off to sleep on a river bank when a White Rabbit ran by, saying to itself in remarkably good English
“Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” But when Alice saw the Rabbit pull a watch from its waistcoat pocket,
she leapt to her feet “burning with curiosity” and followed the Rabbit down the rabbit hole, tumbling into
Wonderland, a strange new world filled with yet more strange little worlds. (Alice at 3-6)
The Croquet seminar selections were, appropriately, the chapters on the Mad Tea-Partyand the Queen’s
Croquet Ground. You may remember that the croquet court was all ridges and furrows, the balls live
hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the wickets were playing-card soldiers doubled up over
themselves to make arches. The only rule to the game was that the Queen of Hearts must win; the price of
failure and the Queen’s displeasure: “Off with their heads!” The game came to a halt when the Queen
ordered the executioner to cut off the head of the Cheshire Cat. But as the Cat was all head, face, and smile,
detached from a body, the players took to arguing whether the head could be cut off from a body that wasn’t.
It’s a question we might leave to our own Imperial Wicket, as our croquet team captain is called.
The seminar got me to wondering about Wonderland and all the things that could be learned from wandering
through it, and so I reread Alice in Wonderland over the summer. From beginning to end, Alice was moved by
curiosity to open each closed door to explore a new room, a new garden, new occupants, new societies, new
manners and mores, new grammars, new arguments, new logical—or not so logical—constructs. After each
exploration, she would discover a bottle that read "DRINK ME!" or a morsel that read "EAT ME!" to which
she would respond: "I know something interesting is sure to happen whenever I eat or drink anything." And
so she would drink or eat, finding herself growing or shrinking to meet the terrors or confusions of whatever
she would encounter on the other side of the next door. (Alice at 29)
With each new encounter, she experienced something both familiar and unfamiliar: rabbits were familiar, but
talking rabbits were not; a deck of playing cards was familiar but having each card play out a role in the
Queen's Courtyard was new; a cat was familiar but a smiling cat without a body was unfamiliar. When asked
by a talking caterpillar "Who are you?" Alice responded that she hardly knew: "At least I know who
I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then." "What do
you mean by that?" said the Caterpillar sternly. "Explain yourself!" "I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir" said
Alice, "because I'm not myself, you see." (Alice at 37)
Alice had become detached from herself and was looking back at herself in wonderment. When the caterpillar
didn't understand what she meant, Alice replied: "[W]hen you have to turn into a chrysalis—you know some
�day, you will—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel a little queer, won't you?" (Alice at
38)
Now this exchange is quite remarkable. Alice has turned from wondering about the world outside
her, with all of its familiar and unfamiliar elements, to wondering about herself and who she is, and
then to trying to help another creature become detached enough to wonder at its own evolution and
state of being. This is exactly the process, and these exactly the sort of questions, that can liberate
us and others from the limitations of what we think we know, from our everyday unexamined
assumptions about our everyday lives.
This activity lies at the heart of liberal education. It involves the exercise of imagination. We must
imagine that we can step outside ourselves and outside our habitual assumptions in order to ask the
truly fundamental questions that undergird all other questions, whether those questions lead to the
discovery of something new and unknown before (like the discovery of a new planet, a previously
unknown subatomic particle, or the cure for polio), or the recovery of something once known and
now forgotten (like the recurrent need to rediscover an understanding of the American Civil War), or
the reexamination of something not sufficiently understood (like the need to better understand the
meaning of justice or of right and wrong—concepts we use daily but understand imperfectly).
Some of you may be wondering why I am bothering with the dreams of a fictional little girl when
there are so many more important things, so many new things to discover, so much new knowledge
to acquire. So let us consider another example, this time a physicist.
As it happens, this summer I was also reading a couple of books by Richard Feynman, the Nobelprize-winning theoretical physicist known for his work on the path-integral formulation of quantum
mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of
supercooled liquid helium. He may be best remembered for his testimony in a televised
Congressional hearing explaining the failure of the O-rings of the space shuttle Challenger. It was
Feynman’s curiosity, his incessant need to know, his puzzlement and wonder at the world around
him, his joy in the study of physics, that led him to become one of the world's great physicists.
Once, when Feynman was a student at MIT, he was expected to write a paper for a philosophy class
in which he had paid no attention. So he decided to tackle a problem his father had given him as a
child: Suppose some Martians were to come to Earth, and Martians never slept. They didn't have
any idea of this thing we call sleep. So, they ask you: “How does it feel to go to sleep? Do your
thoughts suddenly stop? How does the mind actually turn off?”
Being the careful observer that he was, Feynman went about studying himself. He proceeded to
watch himself very carefully each day and each night for four weeks to see what happened. He
noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas in your head continue but they become less and less
logically connected. But you don't notice that they are less well connected until you ask yourself
"What made me think of that?" and you try to work your way back, often unsuccessfully. In the end,
he wrote up his observations, noting that he didn't really know what it's like to fall asleep, only what
it's like while watching himself enter the state. He concluded his paper with a little poem that pointed
out the problem with introspection:
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
(Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! at 46-48)
�Once again, we find our subject, this time Mr. Feynman, stepping outside of himself to try to
understand something within. This escape from the self is an act of liberation, freeing the mind to
look inward and study itself as if it were unfamiliar. This act of imagination is necessary for the most
fruitful kind of learning.
In Alice and in Feynman we see wonder first operating as a kind of curiosity: "I wonder what is on
the other side of that door? Let me open it and see." Or "I wonder how the mind shuts down when it
is going to sleep. Let me study it and see." In each case, the wonder turns to something like awe
when the question turns back on itself: "I cannot tell you who I am because I am not myself. Then
who am I?" Or "I cannot explain what it’s like to fall asleep because I am no longer conscious to
study it. I wonder why I still wonder." These latter expressions require that we take the self that we
think we know and call it into question: "Of course I knew who I was, but now I wonder who I really
am." "Of course I am a curious person, but now I wonder why."
The ability to wonder at yourself requires suspension of disbelief: you must be able to withstand the pressure
to return to your default setting of thinking that you know who you are. This same ability to suspend disbelief
is critical in creating both art and knowledge. In last month's New Republic magazine, Judith Shulevitz argues
that there is no science without fancy, wonder and the exercise of the imagination. Suspension of disbelief, she
says, is required for the "world building" behind all good science fiction. And what is suspension of disbelief
but the freedom to imagine something out of the ordinary, the possibility of a future that you may lay claim to
one day. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea made the possibility of the submarine seem
a little more accessible to a later generation. His Clipper of the Clouds prefigured the helicopter. AndStar
Trek’s hand-held communication device directly influenced the invention of the flip-flop cell phone. (The New
Republic, July9, 2013.)
I hasten to add that suspension of disbelief is necessary for the "world building" you are undertaking as you
build a life for yourselves, a life worthy of your hopes and dreams. Now what do you imagine you need to
learn to free yourself to ask the questions and shape the life that would belong to you? I imagine that it is the
encouragement to wonder about the world around you and the world within you. How will you free your
imagination to do that? This will probably require a lot of practice, something we encourage you to do at this
College.
Preparing for your seminar on the Iliad, you freshmen may wonder what these men are fighting about. What
makes a man a hero? What is the role of the gods, and what is the will of Zeus? Why should we imagine that
the will of Zeus is being accomplished in this book? Who is the Muse who is speaking through Homer? Why
do we care more about the risks taken by our heroic humans than the accomplishments of the Olympian gods?
In reading Euclid’s Elements, you will surely wonder how anything may be something that has no part, or what
breadthless length can be? In what sense can we say that mathematical objects exist, that they have both
meaning and being? Why do we imagine that mathematics may be the language of nature? Or that when we
describe something mathematically it has a correlation with things we can see and touch? Why do we trust
mathematical truths at all?
In your language tutorial, you may wonder why you are reading a dead language with an unfamiliar
alphabet. How can this help you understand the English language better? You may wonder, after
several efforts, whether any sentence written in another language can be properly translated at all.
What does this say about language and our ability to communicate with one another? How do we
make the best of such a precarious exercise? And will you wonder, as I once did, about the ability to
write intelligible sentences in Greek without the use of a verb? Ah, the substantive-making power of
the article τά in the predicate position!
In your laboratory, you will be observing plants and animals. You may wonder why you can prune a
plant to make it healthier but should not prune an animal and expect the same. How does it happen
�that a whole carrot can grow from a small scratch of tissue from another carrot’s tap root? What are
the principles of the plant’s organization contained in that tap root? What can you learn about the
Magnolia tree from studying one of its leaves? But when you wonder what the meaning of life is, you
will find that the laboratory will only help you find a part of the answer.
Sophomores are reading Genesis, wondering what it might mean that light and day were created before the sun
was formed. Why are there two different stories explaining the creation of man and woman? Why did God
forbid Adam and Eve to eat of the tree in the middle of the garden? Why is it right that we are made in the
image of God but not right that we might want to be like God or to reach God, as we learn from the story of the
Tower of Babel? Why does God destroy most of life on Earth in the great flood and then repent? And who are
we to question the Almighty?
Juniors are reading Don Quixote, wondering what kind of madness can move us to love. What is the
connection between the love of a Knight for his Lady, the Knight’s desire for glory, and his love of the Divine?
What does Quixote see in Dulcinea that moves him to take on a whole world? Is this knight like me, fighting
seemingly hopeless battles for causes we simply must believe in? How is it that some of us see a hum-drum
world with hum-drum eyes while others possess enough imagination to see the possibility of a world worthy of
the striving that belongs to a knight-errant?
Seniors are reading Tolstoy's magnificent War and Peace, wondering how Napoleon ever imagined he could
conquer the Russian spirit. What is the spirit tapped by General Kutuzov that makes Russian victory
inevitable? How does Napoleon inspire his troops? Why is it that war can be described as fearful and merry?
What is Pierre searching for that will bring peace to his soul? What does it mean that the love of death is a
virtue? Why do we fall in love with the lively Natasha? What is the happiness of self-sacrifice that
characterizes Princess Marya? Are there laws of history that govern the movement of peoples, as we say there
are laws of physics governing the movement of bodies?
St. John's College exists to help you develop the capacity for wonder at ever-deepening levels. At first, you
will wonder why something strange and new to you is what it is or doeswhat it does. Soon you will be
confronted with the things you thought you understood perfectly well and find that you did not know them as
well as you thought you did. The familiar will become unfamiliar. That is when you will become free of the
preconceived and unexamined opinions you have carried with you for years. You will then have the
opportunity to examine those opinions anew and either own them for yourself or discard them as false because
you will have acquired a knowledge of what you know and why you know, and hopefully also of the limits and
provisional nature of the knowledge you possess and of the need to examine such things over and over as you
recover and rediscover the truths about the world about you and the world within you.
Along the way, you will likely find yourself in some rabbit hole and may discover a whole new world
beneath you that you will have never imagined before. It is this exercise of the imagination and this
recovery of the power of wonder that will set you free.
I am reminded of this daily from personal experience. Joyce and I have sixteen grandchildren, all of
whom are themselves reminders of the richness of imagination in the young. Nathaniel, a six-year
old grandson sought out his Grandmother: “Nana, Do you ever wonder about Nurse Sharks?” he
asked. She replied, without having ever heard of nurse sharks: “Oh, I do wonder about Nurse Sharks
and would love to learn more about them!” Last weekend, eight-year-old Masayda discovered an old
brass key to an antique desk and wondered whether, if she used it, the desk would open into a
Secret Garden as she had seen in the movie of that name! She and her Nana went on that
adventure together and their story remains a secret today.
Joyce and I have been made younger by our grandchildren, not because they are young in age,
loud, raucous and hard to keep up with—as of course they are!—but because they have the lively
imaginations necessary for exploration, discovery, and recovery of the world that is there to be
�known! They include us enthusiastically in their explorations, and this requires suspension of
disbelief on our part, and courage on their part, to open the next door to—who-knows-where?
I parked my car in one of those big plain BWI asphalt parking lots the other day, only to hear a little
boy say to his mother, just getting out of a car nearby: “Mommy, did we park next to a volcano?” To
her negative response, he said “Oh good! Because volcanoes can be pretty bad for us!” Every
venture into the imagination has its risks and can be perilous, as Alice discovered. But consider the
rewards!
St. John's has a Latin pun for its motto: Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque.“ I make free adults from
children by means of books and a balance.” I often think this means that an education in freedom is not
possible without the would-be adult first becoming like a child, capable of the kind of wonder experienced by
our Alice.
Oh Dear! Oh Dear! I worry I have kept you too late!
Off with you to the Wonderland that is St. John's College!
May you discover and never cease to wonder at the beauty of the world around you, at the richness
and depth of the books before you, and at the devotion of this community to the learning of each and
every one of you!
Thank you.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I declare the College in session this 21st day of August, 2013.
Convocatum Est!
* Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, The Folio Society, St. Edmundsbury Press, 1998
* Richard P. Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character, W.W.
Norton, 1985
�
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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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5 pages
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Convocation Address, Fall 2013
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2013-08-21
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Welcome to Wonderland."
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Convocation, Fall 2013
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Annapolis, MD
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text
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pdf
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Nelson, Christopher B.
Convocation
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Tutors
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Convocation 2014:
Everything Important in
Life Is Unknown
St. John’s College opened the 2014-15 academic year on August 20 with Convocation,
the annual ceremony rich with traditions. Nearly 140 freshmen in Annapolis participated
in a procession from McDowell Hall to Francis Scott Key auditorium, where each
student is called on the stage to meet President Christopher B. Nelson. Students sign
the college’s register and receive an Ancient Greek lexicon as a gift from the college.
Here is the Convocation address:
Welcome to the Class of 2018. Welcome to their families and friends. Welcome Back to
the rest of the College community! There is nothing in the world like the energy in this
room as we open our doors to another year of learning together.
Like everyone else here, I prepared for this fresh beginning by reading a few new books
over the summer. Among them was an elegant little volume written by Roger
Rosenblatt: Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing. It is a partliteral, part-fictional account of what was studied, written and said in one of Rosenblatt’s
graduate classes in writing at Stony Brook University.
Some months after the class was over,Rosenblatt and his students enjoyed a reunion
dinner at a local restaurant, which like most reunions had a pleasant diversionary quality
filled with the conversation and good humor that characterizes friendship at its best—
friendship born of the shared study of things that are of great importance to those who
have opened themselves fully to one another in the interest of their learning together. At
the end of the evening,Rosenblatt was asked: “Is there anything you haven’t told us?”
He acknowledged that there was something he might have mentioned but it was difficult
and the hour was late, so he parted from his students to a good-hearted chorus of boos,
and decided to toss in his parting shot at a distance, in a letter at the close of the book
he was writing about his class.
�The letter was addressed “To My Ungrateful Students:”
What he had to say went far beyond the advice of an instructor concerned with
technique in good writing: the need for precision and restraint, the use of anticipation
over surprise and imagination over invention, the preference for the noun over the
adjective and the verb over the adverb. Instead, he told a story of a conversation he’d
had with Lewis Thomas toward the end of Thomas’s life, in which Thomas said that he
would rather talk about life than death. “There’s an art to living,” he said. “And it has to
do with usefulness. I would die content if I knew that I had led a useful life.”
Rosenblatt then advised his students:
“For your writing to be great ... it must be useful to the world. And for that to happen you
must form an opinion of the world. And for that to happen, you need to observe the
world, closely and steadily, with a mind open to change. And for that to happen you
have to live in the world... . You must love the world as it is, because the world, for all its
murder and madness, is worth loving. Nothing you write will matter unless it moves the
human heart.”
But what is useful to the world? The world will only tell you “what it wants, which
changes from moment to moment, and is nearly always cockeyed… The world is an
appetite waiting to be defined. The greatest love you can show it is to create what it
needs, which means you must know that yourself.” The great writers are great,
Rosenblatt says, “because their subjects and themes are great, and thus their
usefulness is great as well. Their souls are great, and they have had the good sense
and courage to consult their souls before their pens touched paper.”
“When Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, George Eliot, or Chekhov are recalled,” Rosenblatt
writes, “it is as if tidal waves are washing over us. We cannot catch our breath.” And
what do the great writers have in common? “All have … a certain innocence of mind
that allows them to observe life openly and with a sense of fair play, though not without
judgment.” They also have an appreciation of uncertainty, which is necessary if one is
concerned with coming to know the truth, a never-ending journey. Poets grapple with
the difficulties of knowing the truth, but so do scientists. For both, ignorance is crucial.
Why? Because, Rosenblatt says, “everything important in life is unknown.”
�What Rosenblatt wants for his future writers is the same as what all good teachers want
for their students: the ability to recognize the source of greatness within themselves; the
desire to improve on that soul, making it capacious, kind, and rational; and the continual
effort to cultivate the innocence of mind that lets us live freely and openly in the world.
His brief description can be applied to education generally. We call it liberal education—
education in the art of living well, free from the constraints enclosing us, free from the
boundaries of our educational disciplines and specialties, free from the prejudices of our
upbringing and popular opinion, free from the many caves that confine us all too
comfortably.
At St. John’s College, we offer such a liberal education—one that helps us understand
ourselves and the world around us; one that helps us develop an adaptable mind,
equally open to tradition and to progress; one that gives us practice in the art of inquiry,
in asking the questions humans have been asking since we first began to speak. They
are questions arising from the depths of wonder; questions revealing the depths of our
ignorance about the world and about ourselves; questions demonstrating a startling
truth: that our ignorance is the source of our greatest strength. For it is ignorance, not
knowledge, that propels us forward. It generates the desire to know, which draws us
expectantly into the unknown. This is what the world needs: a good understanding of
how to develop and where to direct our desire to know.
If this assessment is true—and I believe it is—then the best conceivable education, the
education at which college-bound students should aim and the one that is most useful
to the world, comes from studying the greatest literary, scientific, philosophical, political,
artistic, and musical works known to mankind, because their authors have the most to
teach. Of all who have left records behind, they have understood most profoundly that
we have much to learn, that the wonders of learning are exhilarating though its
challenges are humbling.
Take Galileo, an author read in your junior year. He is supposed to have said, “Doubt is
the father of invention.” Why did he think that doubt is generative while others consider
it paralyzing or destructive? Because doubt is the source of understanding and
innovation. It is what causes us to ask the next question, which in turn leads us to a new
possibility. It threatens the comfortable sense of security that would keep us tied to what
�we thought we knew instead of asking: what does this new understanding cause us to
ask that will allow us to reach beyond it?
Michael Faraday, another author from the junior year, argued that to acquire the habits
to form good judgment, an individual must engage in a program of self-education that
rejects the blind dependency on the dogma of others; he must examine himself and
become his own sharpest critic. “This education has for its first and last step humility. It
can commence only because of a conviction of deficiency.” (Observations on Mental
Education)
Faraday’s is yet another call to “know thyself” better before advancing a judgment on
anything else, a lesson all freshmen learn in their encounter with Socrates, the greatest
skeptic of them all. Only when we understand that depth of our own ignorance, when we
understand how little we know, are we ready to develop the lifelong habits that will best
support learning. Only when we are free from conventional thinking, free to doubt what
we have been taught about the world, can we imagine a whole new way to see the
world and our place in it. This need to imagine a better world than the one we know is
another reason why everything important in life is unknown.
You lucky freshmen are reading Homer, the poet who may best demonstrate this power
of the imagination, the journey-making faculty and the source of human creative power.
The imagination is the beginning and end of any search for meaning, the connection
between the world we live in and the one we would shape for ourselves. I can think of
no finer example of the exercise of imagination than in Homer’s Odyssey.
Constantine Cavafy captured the spirit of the Odyssey in his 1911 poem “Ithaka”
“Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if lasts for years,
So you are old by the time you reach the island,
Wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
Not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.”
“Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.”
�We at the College imagine that your four-year journey through the Program will help you
find your own Ithaca, the beginning and end of your search for meaning.
There is a reason we at St. John’s College are proud to say: “The Following Teachers
Will Return to St. John’s Next Year”: Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles; Euclid,
Apollonius, and Lobachevski; Newton, Einstein, and Heisenberg; Shakespeare, Milton,
and Cervantes; Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Plato and Aristotle; Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy; Austen and Woolf; Kant, and Hegel; the Bible and the founding documents of
our nation. What incomparable teachers they are, capable of helping you find your way
to the answers you seek to the big questions you have: How should I live my life? How
can I be useful to the world?
With teachers like these, what do we expect of you, our students? We ask you to
engage with each of these authors whose works span the ages. We ask you to be of
every age just as they were, displaced from the world they were born into, wondering at
it, learning from it, loving it, recognizing its ugliness and its beauty, and making it a
better world for their contributions to it. Along the way we imagine that your discourse
with the books and authors will cause you to look deeply into the greatest mystery of all,
your very souls.
You will not be alone in this four-year journey through the Program. You will have a
faculty of tutors who will share this journey with you. Their principle responsibilities are
two-fold: to serve as models of inquiry and independence; and to engage
with your questions as they arise, to join with you in yoursearch for answers, as you
learn how to interrogate yourselves and one another in the endless search for meaning.
You will also have with you your fellow students, including those gathered here today to
welcome you into our community with all the enthusiasm worthy of fellow learners. I will
leave you with a poetic image from a book you will be reading in your sophomore year:
Dante’s Divine Comedy, a poem written in three parts. Our hero Dante is guided on a
journey through the Inferno, the place of despair, Purgatorio, the place of hope, and
Paradiso, the place of fulfillment. As Dante, a mortal visitor, is led into the second realm
of Paradiso, inhabited by shades in a blessed spirit world, he is swarmed upon as if by
fish to their food.
�“As in a fish-pool that is calm and clear the fish draw to that which comes from the
outside, taking it to be their food, so I saw plainly more than a thousand splendors draw
towards us, and in each I heard: ‘Lo, one who will increase our loves!’ And as each
shade came near, it appeared to be full of happiness, by the bright effulgence that came
forth from it.”
The simile suggests that even in the heavenly sphere the human spirit is fed by
fellowship and the desire to know. Human companionship and the conversation which
follows are seen as food for the spirit. I close with this image to say to our freshmen that
you are not only here to feed on the conversation that is the highest activity of this
College. You are also food for the rest of our College community that has been drawn
here today to greet you, recognizing that your arrival will increase the love of learning
shared by our students, faculty, and staff.
May you find here at St. John’s College a curriculum that awakens in you the desire to
know! May you keep that desire ever-fresh! May you find fellow companions that will
help you uncover your ignorance of the world so that you may be free to explore the
unknown—because everything important in life is unknown.
Thank you!
I declare the College in session this 20th day of August, 2014
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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6 pages
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paper
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Convocation Address, Fall 2014
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2014-08-20
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Everything Important in Life Is Unknown."
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Convocation, Fall 2014
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
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Nelson, Christopher B.
Convocation
Presidents
Tutors
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Convocation 2015:
Mathematics, a Gateway to
Philosophy and the Search for
Truth
St. John’s College in Annapolis opened the 2015-16 academic year on August 26 with
Convocation, the annual ceremony rich with traditions. Nearly 120 freshmen
participated in a procession from McDowell Hall to Francis Scott Key auditorium, where
each student is called on the stage to meet President Christopher B. Nelson. Students
sign the college’s register and receive an Ancient Greek lexicon as a gift from the
college.
Here is the 2015 Convocation address:
Welcome to St. John’s College. To our returning students, faculty and staff, welcome
back. To our freshmen and their families, we are very happy to have you joining us.
In the next few days, you freshmen will begin working your way through a book that I
think, more than any other, serves as an exemplar of guidance in an activity we try to
undertake in all of our classes, especially our tutorials. I speak of Euclid’sElements. I
imagine that there may be one or two among you who do not now love mathematics
and may even be a little intimidated by it. Let me put it another way: there may be
among you a few who have no idea how much you will come to love the study of
mathematics and more particularly this first and most beautiful book of geometry and
proportions.
If so, you would not be the first. As we sit in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium of Mellon
Hall, I am reminded of the difficulty Paul Mellon had with his Mathematics Tutorial in the
autumn of his freshman year, 1940. Paul Mellon, philanthropist and heir to the Mellon
Bank Fortune, was the single most important financial supporter of the College from the
early years of the New Program until 1964 and later through his estate. Mellon had
started as a mature student, having degrees from both Yale and Cambridge. He had
�done well in plane geometry, memorizing theorems at Choate and receiving a perfect
score on his College Boards. But he was flabbergasted and embarrassed that he could
not do his demonstrations of Euclid’s propositions at the blackboard at St. John’s. As
things progressed from bad to worse, Mellon wrote to his psychiatrist, explaining the
problem. He received a letter in reply, part of which says this:
“It is an asinine prejudice that mathematics has anything to do with the training of the
mind. It has as little to do with the mind as music, which also doesn’t train the mind in
the case of one who isn’t musical. . . . So, I think you waste your time absolutely when
you try to study mathematics. Mathematics is a hellish and perfectly useless torture for
somebody who hasn’t the gift in that way, as it is the most boring nonsense to be forced
to learn to play an instrument when one isn’t musical. Tell your professors that their
psychological knowledge is a bit weak.”
The letter was signed: “I remain yours cordially, Carl Jung.”
And you wonder why no book by Carl Jung is on our Program in Annapolis!
I may have taken a risk in telling you this story, lest you mistakenly believe that Jung
provides a legitimate excuse to treat one of the most beautiful books ever written as
useless torture.
I got lucky some 55 years ago to have discovered Euclid. I was in the seventh grade, in
an age when all girls took Home Economics (a semester each of Cooking and Sewing)
and all boys took a semester of Shop followed by one in Mechanical Drawing. For
Christmas, between semesters, my parents gave me a drawing board, ruler, compass,
T-Square, various plastic triangles, proper pencils, and a pad of drawing paper. I went
straight to work, doing all the exercises that awaited me in the coming semester,
finishing them before the class had barely started, so completely had I fallen for the
beauty of precise draftsmanship.
When I had finished the textbook exercises, I went to my father to see if he could find
something more for me to draw. He understood my need and, like any good alumnus of
St. John’s College, pulled down from his bookshelf a 1941 edition of Book I of
Euclid’s Elements. I am pretty certain that I skipped the definitions, postulates and
common notions, something I do NOT recommend to our freshmen.
�So, starting with Proposition 1: “On a finite straight line to construct an equilateral
triangle,” I drew a line and two circles whose centers were the end points of the straight
line and whose distance to the circles’ circumference was that very same straight line.
“Oh, good,” I thought, as I took out my ruler and compass, drew the figures shown in the
proof, and constructed the equilateral triangle, labeling everything according to the
drawing in the Euclid text. I then proceeded to do the same for all 48 propositions of
Book I.
Back to Dad: “Now what?” I asked. “Book II?”
Instead, he asked me to set aside my ruler, compass, and other tools, and try
Proposition 1 again without them, freehand. Well, I went about it as carefully as I could,
drawing the line and circles, labeling the points and intersections. But what I drew
frankly did not look like an equilateral triangle. Mine was a pretty lopsided figure. I said I
just couldn’t do it freehand, as I was no good at drawing perfect circles.
My father then asked me to go through the proof out loud and show him where I had
gone wrong. And so I did, and I proved that my triangle was indeed an equilateral
triangle, notwithstanding how lopsided it looked. This was my first “Eureka!” moment in
mathematics, when I came to realize that the drawings were merely imperfect images of
the perfect figures Euclid was constructing in his geometry, using definitions, postulates,
and common notions as his tools instead of my draftsman’s mechanical tools, which
had their own imperfections too. Euclid’s proof was true and would hold up, however
poorly I had drawn my figures.
Now I went more slowly through Book I a second time, figuring out how those
elementary building blocks so simply laid out in the first three pages could prove all of
the propositions in the book. I was now freed of my mechanical tools and able to work in
a new world made real by the application of a handful of definitions, a few rules of
construction or postulates of the imagination, and a few axioms of logic. I was getting
behind the appearances of the geometrical drawings to understand better the reality of
the objects of geometry: a point that has no part, a line without breadth, neither of which
could be seen with the eye or drawn with the pencil; circles and triangles that could only
be imperfectly represented in my drawings, even those made with the finest of
mechanical tools. I could dwell in a world lodged firmly in the imagination, somehow
more perfect, more “real,” than the one I usually inhabited with my family and friends, a
�world filled with objects that have color, dimension and shape, a world we experience in
time and space.
I soon began to wonder what it might mean to have discovered an imaginary world that
could explain the number, size, shape, and movement of bodies in our earthly world and
in the heavens above. Sometime later I would ask the question a little differently: What
would it mean to understand that all of mathematics is a metaphorical language used to
describe the relationships among things in the physical world that I inhabited during
most of my waking hours? How were we to judge how far we could draw out that
metaphor? And I came back to the question as to which world was the more real and
what was the proper relationship between the two. From these questions sprang my
love of mathematics and mathematical physics.
Another thing in the Elements caught my imagination some years later. It was contained
in Euclid’s five postulates. I asked how it was that I could draw the line on which I would
construct the equilateral triangle of Proposition 1. It was not by virtue of having the
definition of a line as “breadthless length”. That definition did not seem to bring the line
into being or to tell me that I had the power to make it so. How was I to take the very
first step in the very first proof? Well, there it was: “Let it be postulated: (1) To draw a
straight line from any point to any point,” Euclid seemed to describe an activity and give
the reader the power to engage in that activity. We know that we cannot really draw a
line with breadthless length, but Euclid was giving us both permission and power to do
so. Euclid was a teacher of geometry, helping us see in time and space how to go about
understanding these geometrical objects of imagination in relation to one another. The
construction could be understood best by the unfolding, or revealing, of its nature in a
series of steps taken in succession over time.
And then years later, a senior colleague of mine helped me understand the complex
grammatical construction of the postulates in the original Greek, that they did not direct
an activity so much as reveal what these timeless figures were as though they were
coming into being in time. To give you an idea of what I mean, let me compare two
different translations of another famous text.
The sophomores are reading Genesis just now. Consider the differences in these two
translations of the opening of that book:
�The King James version reads: “In the Beginning, God created the heaven and the
earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the
deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there
be light; and there was light.”
Another version from the Tanakh, translated by the Jewish Publication Society, reads:
“When God began to create the heaven and earth—the earth being unformed and void,
with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the
water—God said. ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.’”
In the first translation, it is as though God created the heavens and earth out of nothing.
So, the imperative “Let there be light!” seems to suggest a kind of supernatural calling
into being. In the second, it is as though God was bringing order to chaos over time. It
allows us better to imagine “Let there be light!” as a revealing of what that order might
be, a revealing of what had been dark. The second translation contains an ambiguity
between the revelation of what is and the activity of calling it into being. I think Euclid is
doing something like this in his postulates, revealing what these timeless objects of the
imagination are even as we observe them coming into being.
We students of Euclid are thus engaged in an activity that appears to be bringing
geometrical objects into being even as we are recognizing them for what they already
are, timeless and permanent, already possessing all the properties that will be revealed
over the course of the remainder of the book. When we go to the board in our
mathematics tutorial and repeat the steps in Euclid’s propositions, we are engaged in a
journey of the imagination to reflect on the origin, nature, and elements of a line, a
circle, a construction, a proof. The truth of the proposition is revealed to us through the
application of reason to our imagination.
This activity, trying to understand origins and elements, lies at the heart of much of what
we do in our study together at St. John’s. But we cannot always start at the beginning
as Euclid did, with first principles and elements, building up our understanding from
there. Nonetheless, because we have had this experience with Euclid, we imagine that
we can work our way back from the appearances, from the phenomena, from the
opinions of mankind, to the origins, principles, and elements that underlie what we are
hearing, reading, and seeing with our senses, to uncover their origins, foundations, and
�elements. If we cannot start at the beginning, we must instead work to recover that
beginning and uncover the elements of the object of our study.
This is why we sometimes call a St. John’s education “elemental” or “elementary,” not
because what we seek to learn is simple or easy to grasp, but because we are always
looking to uncover what lies beneath or behind what we think we are seeing. We are
seeking to find a truth about the object of our study, just as we have come to see the
truth of a Euclidian proposition through the application of both the intellect and the
imagination to the original, elementary building blocks.
Achilles rages. Why is he angry? What lies behind his rage? Is it natural or not? Good
or bad? Is it justified? Can it be controlled or not? If in the end his anger is resolved and
some sense of humanity restored, how did this happen and why?
“The will of Zeus was moving toward its end.” What has Zeus’s will got to do with
Achilles’s wrath? Does that will control the fate of the warriors? Who are these gods and
do they determine the outcomes of battle or do they serve as poetic metaphors for
deathless forces we cannot control or comprehend?
We wish to understand what it means to be human and we want to know about the
world we inhabit. What are our origins? What was in the beginning? How do we live and
grow? How do we satisfy our needs? How ought we to express our love and sympathy?
How become better and wiser? How use our talents to make this a better world? How
ought we to treat our planet and use the resources nature has provided? We need to
know something about ourselves and our world to answer these questions. We need to
uncover a truth we can recognize for what it is—a helpful way-station and landing place
on our way to a deeper search for an answer to a question newly raised by the answer
we have just uncovered. And on it goes, delving deeper into foundations, looking for the
elements of the construction we call our world.
At other colleges and universities these elements are rooted in isolated disciplines:
chemistry, biology, psychology, or political science; earth science, astronomy, geology,
or physics; perhaps history, theology, poetry, or music. We appreciate the need to
specialize in order to get a refined understanding of any one thing. But how can you
ever come to uncover the truth of a mere part of something without having some
understanding of its relationship to other parts or to the whole of which it is a part?
�You already have some experience of an integrated whole; for the most part, you have
lived a life that has not been lived in an isolated discipline. And yet you have likely been
unconscious of most of the elements and foundations of your world. We take seriously
your need to be conscious in your search for an understanding of yourselves and your
world, the interconnectedness between the two, their origins and elements. And we
have constructed a curriculum and a way of helping you bring it to life within yourselves.
So, what has Euclid got to do with all of this? First of all, Euclid permanently refutes Carl
Jung. The study of his Elementshas everything to do with the training of the mind,
exercising the imagination, using your reason, and applying it to the world you live in.
His book is an exemplar of the study of elements and origins that you will be looking for
in all of your study here. And lucky for you, it is only one of some 130 original works of
imagination, each of which has been chosen for its capacity to help you uncover
something you may recognize as a truth about yourself or your world, each of which will
help you find the next question you need to ask to understand something still more
fundamental in your search for answers to the many questions you have—the questions
that have undoubtedly brought you to this College.
But I am not finished with Dr. Jung! Not only has mathematics got everything to do with
the training of the mind, but it has everything to do with the elements of music, which is
not the boring nonsense Dr. Jung claims it to be. And to prove the point, I invite all of
our upper-classmen to rise and use their one common musical instrument—their
voices—to welcome our freshmen to our community.
[All Rise to Sing Sicut Cervus]
Thank you. After the recessional, I invite everyone to join us for refreshments and
conversation outside the Mitchell Gallery through the doors of Mellon Hall.
I declare the College in session this 26th day of August, 2015.
CONVOCATUM EST!
�
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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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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2015 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Mathematics, a Gateway to Philosophy and the Search for Truth."
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Convocation
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The Pursuit of Happiness
Convocation Address, August 24, 2016
Christopher B. Nelson
Welcome to the Class of 2020, to the entering students in the Graduate Institute, and to their families and
friends. To our returning students, faculty and staff, welcome back. I hope that all of you are as happy as I
am to see a new year underway.
It was on just such an occasion 50 years ago that I shook the hand of our president, signed the College
Register, and sat where you freshmen are sitting today, awaiting the happy start of a four-year adventure
into the books and conversation that comprise our Program of Study at St. John's. As I began to prepare
today's remarks, I tried to call up what it was I seeking when I chose to apply to St. John's those many
years ago. Some of it was very clear in my mind; some of it was quite foggy, not because of the passage
of time, but because I lacked the vocabulary to describe it.
First of all, I was very tired of hearing my teachers tell me what I needed to know, and then regurgitating
it back on tests designed to measure my learning, as if I could not determine that for myself. I wanted to
make my education my own, to participate in it, to talk through what we were studying, to take it
seriously … for my sake.
And then, there were the books, many of which I could not imagine reading on my own. I was happy to
have found a college where the faculty had formed a judgment that some books were better than others. I
am quite sure that it was not out of laziness that I thought it better to give myself over to these judgments
when I was just 18 years old. I knew at least that much about what I did not know to trust a well-read
faculty to help me get started on my education.
But there was something else that caught my attention, and I don't think I could have described it well
back then. It was this: the College's Program was said to be a kind of whole, like a fully-jigged puzzle,
where all the parts fit together. I think I understood that no one on the faculty would claim that the
Program was really complete or that the jigged pieces were perfect fits. I knew that parts of it had been
rearranged and substituted for others over time, and I imagined that the Program would continue to be
rearranged with experience, even that its elements might change. At the same time, I knew of no other
college that claimed it was trying to present a kind of whole to its students, and that there were unifying
aspects to its parts. And I thought it meant something that a faculty would care as much about the whole
as of its many parts, each of which held its own attractions which presented temptations to concentrate on
a part at the expense of the whole. (The rise of countless majors and electives over the last century and a
half in other colleges is proof enough of such temptation.)
I am sure my experience with life cannot have been so different from yours that you would not recognize
a yearning for a sense of wholeness in your life, that there often seem to be competing parts of the soul
fighting with one another while we are also trying to get a more complete understanding of ourselves and
the kind of life we wish to live. This desire for wholeness, a one-ness within us, is something we often
call "integrity", borrowed from the word "integer”, signifying unity, something that can help each of us be
the same person in public as we are in private, the same person when facing a trial as when at ease with
the world, the kind of person worthy of the trust of his or her family, friends and colleagues. The
satisfaction of this desire to make a complete whole for ourselves is something I wanted to call happiness.
I am convinced that this pursuit of happiness is what drove me to St. John's College, and I hope it has
been a part of what has brought you here as well.
�To satisfy this desire for a life of integrity, one needs to ask the right questions and explore the possible
answers: What does it mean to be human? How does my humanity reflect itself in my own unique life?
What kind of world do I live in and how is it changing? What tools do I need to navigate that world and
make sense of it? What ought I to do with my life? How might I help make this a better world? Is there a
divinity at work and what difference would that make?
I could not imagine being happy but unable to ask these questions in the company of others who also
cared about their answers. It seemed that my happiness was bound up with others in a common search for
understanding such things.
Frankly, it took me some time at St. John's College to see how many of the books that asked such
elemental questions were expressly concerned with human happiness. And it was through reading these
books and discussing them at length that I came to realize something rather obvious, that our happiness
requires that our actions are not only harmonious with one another and with our will, but that they are
directed toward what is truly good for us. Happiness comes from living a good life, enriched by all that a
human being really needs. But recognition of the good is not always easy, and not everyone agrees that it
can be pursued even if it is recognized.
We read the Iliad and see our heroes vying for honor and glory and ask if this is a proper object of desire.
Some of our warriors are saved by a god or goddess who loves them and would keep them from their fate.
Others come to an unhappy end, and we ask why some god did not swoop down from Olympus to divert
the spear flying toward its end. What control did these heroes actually have over their fate when even the
son of a god could be slain in battle? Or did the happy intervention by a god on behalf of a hero suggest
he was somehow worthy of the god's love and attention, a sign of his character, something within his
power to shape?
We read of Odysseus weeping to find his way home and into the arms of his Penelope. What is the
relationship between his happiness and their reunion, between his happiness and home itself? Indeed,
what does it mean to have a home? Odysseus had to leave home to find it, to suffer both abroad and on
his return in order to earn the right to repossess his home. But then what do we make of his desire to leave
again and in search of what end? Or is the search for happiness simply unending and the object of the
search always changing?
Herodotus tells us the story of Croesus, King of Lydia, who seeks the advice of Solon of Athens as to
who is the happiest man in the world, believing it could be none other than himself, the man with all the
wealth and power one could want. Solon answers with the stories of three men who lived well and died
well too. He cannot say of Croesus that he is the happiest, or most of blessed of men, until he has brought
his life to its end. Croesus does indeed suffer a terrible reversal of fortune, losing his kingdom and his son
in the bargain, and when facing death atop a funeral pyre with flames licking his feet, Croesus renounces
his pride, recognizing Solon's wisdom, and exclaims that no one who lives is happy, calling out Solon's
name, whereupon a storm burst forth and put out the flames. Happiness has deep roots in luck, chance,
fate, and the gods! Happiness is what happens to us, the story seems to say; it is not in our control.
Aeschylus weaves the drama of Agamemnon, who chose to sacrifice his daughter in order that he might
achieve glory and lead the campaign against Troy… only to suffer an unhappy end at the hands of his
queen. And of Orestes, who killed his mother as an act of justice for her murder of his father. Sophocles
tells us of Oedipus, saving a city while fulfilling a prophesy that he would kill his father, marry his
mother, and sire by her four children, themselves doomed to live out unhappy lives. For years, I just could
not see why each of these men and women should not be held fully responsible for everything that came
down upon their heads.
�Then, in time, I came to wonder if I was not being too hard on them. The choices they had to face are the
choices writ large that we all face from time to time, between family and country, duty and love, selfsacrifice and self-preservation, purity and compromise, and more. Resolution of such conflicts is not easy,
and each choice has consequences. No simple happy endings for these tragic protagonists! All contributed
to their own undoing; all were hunted down by gods or pursued by family curses for the choices they
made. Salvation, if it came, was a gift from the gods; man could not control his happiness in this world.
Mankind, in the words of the chorus of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, is an "unhappy race", and the man or
woman who escapes the tragic predicament of their humanity requires the intervention of the divine. All
others suffer.
I have to say that this view of humanity and the possibility of happiness did not sit well with me, not
when I first read these painfully beautiful plays, and not after many more readings. Even with another five
decades of experience behind me, reminding me of the aches and pains of growing up and then growing
older, the heartaches and losses that accompany our mortal condition, and the caprice of fortune’s wheel,
I take comfort in a conviction I have that I can find a measure of happiness in the choices I make in
shaping my life. I act as though I have freedom of choice, and I have convinced myself that this freedom
and my acting on it make a difference in my fortune, my search for happiness.
Freshmen and some of you in our Graduate Institute will soon be reading Plato’s Republic, in which
Socrates faces a challenge from two young brothers that he show them why their happiness depends on
living a just life and fighting injustice. One brother, Glaucon, makes the case that if it were not for fear of
getting caught and punished, we would all follow a life of injustice, seizing for ourselves whatever we
desired, not caring where we got it or how. Imagine, he says, that a man could have the power of an
ancestor of Gyges who took a gold ring from the finger of a corpse in a well that opened up during an
earthquake. This man found that when he wore the ring and turned it inward toward himself he became
invisible, but when he turned it outward he became visible again. He discovered he could take what he
wanted without being caught, and promptly proceeded to do so, taking first his King’s wife and then his
life, securing to himself wealth and power to rule over all. Such a man could become like a god among
men.
Then Glaucon asks us to imagine that the unjust man is so supremely unjust as to persuade others that he
is in fact just. He must seem to be what he is not and have the sterling reputation of a just man throughout
his whole life right up to his death. And the just man? He will be made to suffer the extreme of injustice:
“he’ll be whipped; he’ll be racked; he’ll be bound; he’ll have both eyes burned out; and at the end, when
he has undergone every sort of evil, he’ll be crucified…” Glaucon spares no detail in describing the
suffering that will be heaped upon this genuinely just man, who will have a reputation for injustice to his
dying day.
It takes a pretty long dialogue for Socrates to persuade Glaucon that it is better to be just for its own sake,
that it is thus better to suffer injustice than to do injustice, and that justice is a virtue of the soul necessary
to the happiness of the individual. Socrates does this by showing that justice is concerned with the inward
man, the one who sets in order his own inner life and is at peace with himself. We have within us by our
very nature the power to set this inner life in order and to become our own master.
You will read the Nichomachean Ethics, where Aristotle argues that every action or decision seems to
aim at some good. The ultimate good or final end of living is our happiness. And our most distinctly
human activity is the exercise of reason. Just as the good doctor procures health through the practice of
medicine (the doctor’s distinct virtue), the good warrior achieves victory through the making of war (the
warrior’s distinct virtue), so the good human being will attain happiness through the exercise of reason
�(mankind’s distinctly human virtue.) Happiness, for Aristotle, is “an activity in accordance with virtue.”
By positing that mankind is intended to fulfill a singular but common purpose, he allows for the
possibility that we can exercise our intellect to secure our happiness, and that we should in fact seek the
happiness which is appropriate and available to us all.
Questions concerning the possibility of the search for happiness run throughout the four-year
undergraduate curriculum and in all segments of the Graduate Institute, in our tutorials and laboratories,
as well as in our seminars.
Sophomores are opening the year with Genesis and the Hebrew Bible. What does it mean to be made in
the image of God, and does this help us imagine a path to our happiness, or does it only reveal the chasm
between man and his Maker as to make happiness on Earth seem impossible? Is happiness to be found in
following God’s law? Is happiness available only through the Grace of God?
Juniors have spent the summer happily reading Don Quixote. Have you figured out what the object of his
quest is? Cervantes tells us:
“It now appeared to him fitting and necessary, in order to win a greater amount of honor for himself and
serve his country at the same time, to become a knight-errant and roam the world on horseback, in a suit
of armor; he would go in quest of adventures, by way of putting into practice all that he had read in his
books; he would right every manner of wrong, placing himself in situations of the greatest peril such as
would redound to the eternal glory of his name.”
Through Cervantes’ masterful portrait, the good Don seems to have achieved that eternal glory. But how
did he do it, this Sorrowful Knight of ours? And why, in order to stamp out injustice, did he need to suffer
the cruel abuses to his body in Part I and the torture of his mind in Part II? This is not the book that first
comes to mind in a discussion of happiness, and yet we yearn to see our hero assert his will, time and time
again, to achieve the greatness he would have in his re-imagination of himself. Our fine old gentleman,
Alonzo Quijano the Good, seems to achieve his end in making a new self in the figure of our knighterrant.
Seniors are reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Prince Andre seeks happiness in doing his duty, but loses
sight of those who are closest to him. Meanwhile, Pierre learns in the time of his captivity and deprivation
that man’s happiness lies within himself and that unhappiness arises from superfluity, from having too
much of what most men think they want. Pierre would give up considerable wealth in search of his
happiness. But if we can say that he secures his happiness, it would seem he actually found it in his
flashing Natasha.
How could I end a reflection on the pursuit of happiness without addressing our national birthright,
proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence? “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights; that among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I imagine that there are many who read this right to pursue
happiness as a right to seek whatever each of us desires for himself or herself, a statement approving of
the autonomy of each individual citizen to determine what is his or hers by right. But such a reading leads
to pure anarchy, where each citizen is given license to pursue his heart’s desire, hardly a recipe for a
democracy intended to achieve a people’s peaceful self-governance. What is the place of the public good?
Jefferson, principle author of the Declaration, was also known to say that “Happiness is the aim of life,
but virtue is the foundation of happiness.” He sounds a lot like Aristotle, and we should not lose sight of
the double aspect of the pursuit of happiness in the tension between its public and private aspects.
�Alexis de Tocqueville may have found the best way to explain how Americans reconcile the pursuit of
their individual self-interest with a desire to serve the greater good. “In the United States,” he says,
“hardly anybody talks of the beauty of virtue, but they maintain that virtue is useful and prove it every
day.” “They…content themselves with inquiring whether the personal advantage of each member of the
community does not consist in working for the good of all; and when they have hit upon some point on
which private interest and public interest meet and amalgamate, they are eager to bring it into notice.
Observations of this kind are gradually multiplied; what was only a single remark becomes a general
principle, and it is held as a truth that man serves himself in serving his fellow creatures and that it is in
his private interest to do good.” “Americans are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by
the principle of self-interest rightly understood.”
I will leave it to you to sort out this argument, and to determine whether it is a sustainable principle. But I
rather like the idea, and think it exerts a restraint on the blind degeneration of the pursuit of one’s
individual happiness into nothing but self-regard.
Every democracy requires free citizens, and free citizens must have free minds. A liberal education,
literally an education for freedom, is designed to free the mind to perform its public function. But above
all, that free mind is necessary for our personal happiness, for living a good life, the life suited to our
nature. On behalf of my colleagues at St. John’s College, I invite you to join us in uncovering this
gloriously human project of freeing ourselves to find our way to a better life. Discover for yourselves
whether you can and will pursue your happiness.
While we hope for you happiness, even joy, in your studies with us, we also hope you are able to have a
little fun while you’re at it. And there are loads of activities beyond these intellectual pursuits to satisfy
your many other desires, from participating in the athletic program to acting in a dramatic production,
from writing for the Gadfly to taking a painting class, from gazing at the stars to canoeing on the Severn,
from singing in one of the choral groups to playing in the orchestra. And here I am at the end of a
reflection on happiness with hardly a word about the joy and beauty we usually associate with happiness.
So,let me call upon our upperclassmen to remedy this deficiency, to rise and welcome the newest
members of our community with beautiful song! Mr. Stoltzfus, will you assist?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Welcome to St. John’s College!
Thank You.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
After the recessional, please join us outside the Mitchell Gallery for a reception and further conversation.
I declare the College in Session this 24th day of August, 2016.
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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digital
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5 pages
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Convocation Address, Fall 2016
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2016 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Pursuit of Happiness."
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2016-08-24
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English
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Fall 2016 Convocation Address-The Pursuit of Happiness
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Nelson, Christopher B.
Convocation
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Convocation Addresses
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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.
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convocation
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Convocation Address, Fall 2017
Description
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Audio recording of the convocation address given by Pano Kanelos for the Fall 2017 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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Kanelos, Panayiotis
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Annapolis, MD
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2017-08-23
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St. John’s College Convocation
August 23, 2017
Pano Kanelos
It is with great pleasure that I would like to welcome the Class of 2021 and our entering
Graduate Institute students into our St. John’s community. We are honored to have you here. I
would like to welcome as well all family and friends who are joining us today – thank you for all
the support you give these wonderful young people. And to the returning students, faculty and
staff – I would like to thank you personally for allowing me to join this community. Just like our
first-year students, I feel like I’ve entered a place of a garden of delight and wonder.
It was customary in the nineteenth century, at American colleges such as St. John’s, for the
college president to offer a capstone course to graduating seniors. This class, generally titled
“Moral Philosophy”, was meant to be the culmination of one’s college experience. “Moral
philosophy” was the end towards which all the separate courses of study pointed. It
represented the telos of one’s education.
Those nineteenth-century presidents must have been made of sterner stuff than this twentyfirst century president. I am certain, were I to presume to offer instruction in moral philosophy
at the end of your St. John’s experience, I would could only do more harm than good. Let us
leave the end of your studies in more qualified hands, those of your tutors, those of the texts
you encounter, and most critically, your very own.
Yet here we are at a beginning, called together in assembly, which is the meaning of
convocation, a radical beginning for those of you who are joining us in your first year, and an
only slight less profound beginning for those of us who have already been resident in this
community.
And at this beginning, I would like to draw inspiration from those past presidents and have us
take a look at our end. In fact, what I would like to do this afternoon is provide a framework for
you to think about the arc of your education at St. John’s College. To this end, I would like to fix
in your mind a tableau, an evocative image provided by one of your teachers, the great lover of
wisdom, Plato. My hope is that this image will remain with you during your time here in the
college, and that it will be one that you will return to again and again in the years that follow.
�The endpoint of the experience of the Program of Instruction is a text, Plato’s Phaedrus. This is
the final work on our four-year long seminar reading list in Annapolis. This may seem
anomalous to some, given that all the other readings in seminar are roughly chronological in
sequence. Why, at the end of the arc, after having marched resolutely from the classical world
to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, are we circling back around to this ancient work?
And to strike yet another seemingly discordant note, those of you who study the seminar
reading list with any attention, will mark another peculiarity – there is only one text over our
four-year course of study, that we read not once, but twice – Plato’s Phaedrus.
The Phaedrus marks the end point of our first undergraduate year of study; it also marks the
endpoint of the Program of Instruction. Thus when we reach the end of the Program we are
both at an end, yet also circling back around to an earlier point. We complete a circuit, a
coming again, a revolution. The end is, and is not, the end.
Which brings us to the image that I would like to fix in your mind as you charge forth into this
year and those to come.
Picture a chariot. This chariot, pulled by two winged steeds, is traversing the sky. The driver,
sweating, straining, struggles to maintain control. One of the horses, white, noble in bearing,
heaves upward, wrenching the chariot towards the heavens. The other horse, black, disfigured,
drags the craft perilously towards the earth. Their journey is an erratic one, a dangerous one.
This dynamic image is taken from the Phaedrus. It is an image of the human soul.
In the Phaedrus, Plato describes the chariots of the gods, each harnessed to two white, noble
horses, parading one after the other into the heavens. Led by Zeus, the gods ascend
effortlessly into the ether, where they contemplate the Forms:
" What is in this place is without color and without shape and without solidity, a reality that
really is what it is, the subject of all true knowledge, visible only to intelligence, the soul's
steersman. Now a god's mind is nourished by intelligence and pure knowledge, as is the mind of
any soul that is concerned to take in what is appropriate to it, and so it is delighted at last to be
seeing what is real and watching what is true, feeding on all this and feeling wonderful, until
the circular motion brings it around to where it started. On the way around it has a view of
Justice as it is; it has a view of Self-control; it has a view of Truth. And when the soul has seen all
the things that are as they are and feasted on them, it sinks back inside heaven and goes home.
On its arrival, the charioteer stables the horses by the manger, throws in ambrosia, and gives
them nectar to drink besides. Now that is the life of the gods.”
�The life of mortals, however, is not quite so serene. The chariot represents for Plato the
tripartite human soul. The driver of the chariot signifies the intellect, our ratiocinative powers.
The white horse represents what the Greeks termed our “thumos” or spiritedness. Our thumos
seeks glory, honor, and recognition. It goads us towards excellence and pricks us when we act
shamefully. The black horse embodies our appetites, which are drawn towards earthly
pleasures, material gain and comfort. Human reason, in the figure of the charioteer, aims for
enlightenment. But it is yoked to these other human drives. Thus, trailing the gods,
desperately following in their wake, the human soul invariably falters.
Again, from the Phaedrus: "As for the other souls, one that follows a god most closely, making
itself most like that god, raises the head of its charioteer up to the place outside and is carried
around in the circular motion with the others. Although distracted by the horses, this soul does
have a view of Reality, just barely. Another soul rises at one time and falls at another, and
because its horses pull it violently in different directions, it sees some real things and misses
others. The remaining souls are all eagerly straining to keep up, but are unable to rise; they are
carried around below the surface, trampling and striking one another as each tries to get ahead
of the others...”
Such is the fate of human souls. What comes without effort to the gods, possessed of pure
intellect, is attained only fleetingly by mortals, and even then, only by a select few. Depending
upon on how extensive a glimpse of the Forms they achieve, determines their human identity.
Those who have steered their chariots above the rim of the sky and who have glimpsed Reality
in its authentic form are compelled by an overwhelming desire to return that exalted station.
The longer the soul has spent among the universals, the stronger the memory of what it has
witnessed. Souls whose experience of the heavens was most sustained, return to earth as
philosophers. Their compulsion to return to an unalloyed Reality manifests itself in desire, in a
passion for truth – hence they are denominated lovers of wisdom.
Other souls return to earth in descending order, each having seen and understood less and less
of Reality, from law-abiding kings, to merchants, physicians, prophets, poets, craftsmen or
farmers, sophists, and finally, the least enlightened, tyrants. You may read that final category
as you will…
This is neither the time nor place to offer an extended exegesis on Plato’s Allegory of the
Chariot. Instead, I would like to offer a set of six brief observations. Then I would like to
address how this allegory may be applied to your education.
1. The soul described by Plato is dynamic. It is in motion. Its path is not predetermined,
but is rather the result of effort. We are creatures that change and develop.
�2. The soul is multifaceted, composite. We are not simply rational creatures, but creatures
of passion. We are driven by desires, both edifying and destructive. The intellect may
try to steer these desires, yet it is also dependent upon them for forward motion.
3. We cannot simply cut the black horse loose – without its strength, we cannot ascend
into the heavens. Yet our earthly desires must be informed by our reason and aligned
with our spiritedness to propel us in the right direction.
4. The white horse may also present dangers. Thumos properly directed can lead to noble
action. But thumos unbridled, like the anger of Achilles, can lead to rage and the loss of
control.
5. As mortals, even our greatest efforts to seek Truth ultimately falter. Yet what marks us
most is the desire for Truth, rather than its attainment. In this we are more glorious
than even the gods.
6. It is the memory of what they have seen that draws souls back into the heavens. To
know something is to return to it. To love something is to desire to return to it.
So what do these unruly steeds and frantic charioteer have to do with your experience at St.
John’s?
To answer this question, we must first ask ourselves others: Is this thing we call education the
formation of the intellect or the formation of the soul? Is knowledge dependent upon powers
of the mind, or habits of character? Are these things separable?
For Plato, they clearly are not. To seek truth, one must cultivate one’s character, one must
allow the passion for what is honorable to rein in and lead the passion for baser things. In fact,
one must train the passions to act in accord with the Good.
As Aristotle says, “To be always seeking after the useful, does not become free and exalted
souls.” Liberal education is an education that liberates – this is the root implication of liberal.
Plato’s chariot is an image of free and exalted souls, those souls that soar as best they can
towards the heavens.
The course of that flight for those of you joining St. John’s, as well as for those of you currently
mid-air, is the course of your experience in the Program. Yours are minds traversing a set of
texts, a constellation of intensified human experience. Yet the Program is not the end itself. It
is an opportunity for you to strive for higher things. And your striving will be animated by your
thumos.
Let me provide an example. Recently, I ran into a couple of Johnnies at a restaurant on Main
Street in Annapolis. Our conversation turned towards the coming semester. I mentioned that I
would be leading a preceptorial, but was still mulling over the topic. I asked them what they
would be interested in taking. One of the young women immediately responded, “Anything!
�As long as it’s really difficult.” That right there, that impulse that rose in this young woman to
seek the challenging path, was an expression of her thumos. You could practically feel the
white horse lifting her upwards.
As you make your way through St. John’s, the black horse will be at work as well, tugging you in
the other direction. It will be most obviously evident in simple, base distractions: when Netflix
calls more loudly than Plato. When your confidence is shaken and you question the utility of
your education. Most perniciously, you may also find yourself subject to the cynicism that
seems to pervade the general culture about the pursuit of truth itself. To resist these impulses,
you must have courage.
This is not to say that you should only read books. Dancing, sports, conversation, and courtship
are all arenas for thumos, where the passions quicken and where one may strive for excellence.
We are composite beings, not disembodied minds. Live your life robustly while you are here.
Be engaged. Be active. Be open to other remarkable souls that share this journey with you.
Like the arc of Plato’s chariot, your pathway through St. John’s will come to its end. This may
feel to you like a falling from the heavens to the earth. Yet as Plato instructs us, the end is not
the end. Your future will be nourished by the memory of what you encounter here. The higher
you soar, the longer you sustain your flight, the more potent your memory will be of the finer
things. We are not gods – what we apprehend we apprehend only fleetingly. Yet you will
continue to be free and exalted souls as you continue to be propelled by what is honorable,
what is excellent and what is good. This will be fed by your love for wisdom. Remember, to
know something is to return to it. To love something is to desire to return to it. The end is not
the end.
In Plato’s account, the wings of the both horses are nourished by beauty, enabling us to soar.
At this moment, at the beginning of this journey, I would like to invite Mr. Stoltzfus to lead our
students in a particular offering of beauty to sustain us as we move forward into this academic
year. Mr. Stoltzfus!
Thank you all for that truly inspiring rendition of Sicut Cervus. Immediately following the
ceremony today, please join us for a reception in the FSK lobby. I will ask all guest to remain in
your places until the platform party freshmen, new GI students and faculty have processed out.
With great pleasure, “I officially declare the College 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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5 pages
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Convocation Address, Fall 2017
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Pano Kanelos for the Fall 2017 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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Kanelos, Panayiotis
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Annapolis, MD
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2017-08-23
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text
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English
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Convocation Addresses
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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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.
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convocation
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Convocation Address, Fall 2018
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Audio recording of the convocation address given by Pano Kanelos for the Fall 2018 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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Kanelos, Panayiotis
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Annapolis, MD
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Convocation Addresses
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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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.
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Convocation Address, Fall 2019
Description
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Audio recording of the convocation address given by Pano Kanelos for the Fall 2019 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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Kanelos, Panayiotis
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St. John's College
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Annapolis - Fall 2009
Convocation Address
Welcome especially to our new Graduate Institute students; welcome also to friends and family, returning
students, colleagues.
Today you new students become members of the St. John’s community, a community dedicated to liberal
education in its most profound sense, that is, an education truly freeing—from preconceptions and
illusions, from hasty answers to the deepest questions of human existence, from the limitations of a toonarrow perspective. Your entry into our community proceeds today through the portal of either the
Literature segment or the Mathematics and Natural Science segment. Often in our society, the liberal arts
are seen as antithetical to the technical, scientific disciplines; a chasm even wider than the ravines
separating individual academic fields separates the humanities-oriented part of liberal arts from such
“hard” sciences as physics, chemistry, even mathematics. Here at St. John’s we do not sanction such
compartmentalization of the world of study; our organization of the Graduate Institute program into
segments reflects the pressure of practical constraints rather than an assumption about valid categories
of knowledge. For that reason, I’d like to use this occasion to make a beginning toward liberating us from
a too-constricting notion of science.
As with the question “What is virtue?” in the dialogue Meno, the question “What is science?” tends to elicit
a whole “swarm” of responses. During the course of your readings in the Mathematics & Natural Science
seminar, you will encounter many interpretations of science—from Lucretius’ epic poetry distilling all
things into void and atoms, to Bacon’s reconstruction of science on experimental foundations, to
Newton’s axiomatic system. Some versions will call themselves physics, some versions will assume the
title of natural science, or natural history, or natural philosophy. These varied denominations reveal a
significant reason that we should suspend our faith in the boundary lines of academia and return to the
sources; we may thus begin to see both science and the world through clearer eyes.
As an example of this challenging activity, I will here consider Plato’s dialogue, Timaeus. In it, the title
character responds to Socrates’ expressed desire to see his utopian republic in action by telling a story of
the origin of the cosmos, a creation myth if you will, what Timaeus himself calls a “likely story.” I will leave
it to you in your seminars to figure out how a creation myth may be an animation of Socrates’ political “city
�in speech.” I would like to examine in the rest of this talk the way in which science and story might be
linked (rather than relegated to two separate segments, say).
Timaeus’ preface to his story exhibits his own trepidation and uncertainty about his task. He feels the
need to pray for the gods’ approval of a discourse concerning how the universe was created, “or perhaps
is not created” (27c). He explicitly recognizes that his task is different from the task of philosophy.
Philosophy studies that which is “apprehensible with the aid of reasoning since it is ever uniformly
existent.” But the cosmos “is visible and tangible and possessed of a body.” Thus, it is only apprehensible
through “opinion with the aid of sensation” (28c). Timaeus must explicate the world of becoming, things
which come into being and pass away, the world of change. This is a good description of the arena we
generally concede to science. Timaeus immediately makes us conscious that this world is susceptible
only of opinion. We moderns rush headlong to use the word “knowledge” for the latest chemical and
cosmological and medical theories (even if scientists themselves are sometimes more circumspect about
the hypothetical character of their assumptions); then we reserve the word “opinion” for the realms of
politics and religion and literature.
Timaeus, in the face of the instability and ephemerality of the world confronting us, does not lose heart.
Instead, he invokes ourselves as well as the gods, gathers up his courage, and begins clarifying the limits
attending the project of describing the birth of the world. These are:
1. We must assume a cause of the cosmos.
2. We must assume the cosmos has come into being, since it is material and physical and
our experience of physical things is that they are generated.
3. The cause of its coming into being, the architect, is good, and wanted the Cosmos to be
beautiful, so he kept his eye fixed upon a perfectly stable, unchanging paradigm when he
constructed this fluid, evershifting, pulsing- with-life being of the cosmos.
Now, these three assumptions are all dubious. But let me point out: though their expression may be
unfamiliar, they themselves are not wholly unfamiliar. The first is reminiscent of our own scientific trust in
the world of causes, specifically of what we call efficient causes. We need to look for a mover of anything
that is moved—a shove or a push or a force. The second emphasizes, as science usually does, the
material character of what we are studying and the perceptual way we imbibe it, even if the logic positing
a necessary beginning for the whole of such stuff transcends perception. The third, an assumption
Timaeus himself recognizes as pious, may, in its appeal to beauty and goodness, involve more than mere
�lawfulness—but science’s assertion of lawfulness can never simply be deduced (and sometimes rests on
such grounds). Timaeus’ overt appeal to piety legitimately calls such faith in lawfulness to our attention.
After his preliminary laying out of assumptions, Timaeus makes his surprising—at least to us—turn
towards story-telling. He cautions Socrates that he will be unable to give a perfectly consistent and
precise account (the Greek word is “logos”—connected to reason as well as speech). Instead we will all
have to be satisfied with something he calls a “likely story.” I suspect that, when you read it, the tale that
Timaeus subsequently recounts may strike you all as whimsical and eccentric rather than scientific.
Nonetheless, Timaeus does give an explanation of the origin and nature of the cosmos. From the motions
of the planets to the functioning of the liver, Timaeus elucidates various causes, drawing heavily on
mathematics—the ratios underpinning the musical scale, the figures constituting the geometrical solids,
and the circles used in astronomical predictions. But Timaeus depicts himself as designing a story rather
than as giving a reasoned proof.
For many years I’ve intended to formulate more precisely the meaning of his puzzling phrase “likely
story,” each word of which is provocative. The Greek word for story here is indeed “mythos.” And
Timaeus’ account is certainly a creation myth, involving a demiurge building an entire world from scratch.
But “mythos” has a broader range of meaning in Greek than we tend to give “myth.” I think we always use
that word with a soupcon of contempt—“that’s just a myth” we say; especially in the context of science,
we indicate our superiority by calling something a myth. The word “story,” unlike “myth,” evokes affection
and warmth in us. The Canterbury Tales are not myths to us; they are romances steeped in reality,
distillations of the human experience resonating within us. Would we ever allow a story to be a vehicle for
science, or even science itself?
Surely, one reason we glow at the prospect of a story is that we expect to be entertained. From the time
we cuddle in our mother’s laps, ears expectantly open, eager for adventure in thought, we associate new
worlds, new visions, and new friends with stories. We are accustomed to allowing ourselves to live and
breathe the air of some new world, to tread companionably along with strange characters, to thrill to new
horizons. I balk a bit at describing this receptivity as passive; yet, I think I must admit that part of the
pleasure of a story resides in the feeling that we need only step on board to be carried somewhere fresh
and exciting. Someone else has charted the course and will do the navigation. Even I, with degrees in
mathematics, have a very different feeling when I turn over a leaf in a book and confront a page dappled
with equations; a special summoning of energy is required.
But surely the dichotomy I’ve drawn is not precisely accurate. When reading a story, I must focus my
concentration as well. And any good story actively engages the intelligence. The reader must re-create
�the world the author has discovered in his own imagination and shine the interior light of his experience
on the winding trail marked off by the author. While Homer may, in his first twenty lines, circumscribe the
field of our vision to the problem of Achilles’ wrath, we ourselves must piece together the strange
components of this almost elemental force, must analyze Achilles’ reactions, must press toward an
understanding of the essence of this wrath. In order to understand Achilles, we must grope towards a
vision of what honor means to those indomitable warriors of the Iliad and clear an arena where Achilles
and we can meet on common ground. Are these intellectual activities so different from those employed in
understanding the physical or biological world around us?
I’m not at all sure they are. To penetrate the mediating language of mathematical symbols is a daunting
and perhaps specialized enterprise, but the use of such symbols seems secondary to the goal of
understanding the world around us. Scientific works do often present themselves as treatises and
highlight the deductive character of the thinking involved. But stories too sometimes require us to make
arguments from premises, perhaps premises of character types rather than definitions of motion—but
arguments nonetheless.
Moreover, upon reading that most deductive of all great books, Euclid’s Elements, we tutors frequently
assign a paper at the end of Book I asking students to “tell the story of Book I.” We are not asking
students to do a creative writing piece when we make this assignment. Rather, we recognize that Euclid’s
work focuses our attention on certain themes or issues, acquaints us with the characters and qualities of
various entities, and develops relationships through surprising connections and interactions that can
ultimately be fit into a whole. On the other hand, making this assignment of re-casting Book I as a story
indicates that we recognize the need for the student to unearth an arc of events for himself. The series of
logical deductions is more patently obvious; however, the thematic connections are an integral, if subtler,
part of Euclid’s project. Deduction and story-telling may be inextricably bound up with the task of all
human understanding—receiving different emphasis in different endeavors or from different authors, but
both necessary if we are to understand at all.
I believe Timaeus aspires to this full and diverse use of intelligence when he constructs the edifice of his
“likely story.” The Greek word translated as “likely” has its origin in the word for image or likeness. Though
there is some connection to probability and likelihood, I think Plato means us to hear the connection to
imagination and similarity predominating. The true power of science as story is thus brought home, for
both the scientific account and the story ought reflect actuality. Just as Odysseus’ tales of carefree lotuseaters and lawless Cyclops convey the deepest truths about temptations to be overcome on a journey
back home to one’s most rooted self, so may Timaeus’ account of the cosmos as a living, breathing
�organism capture more essential aspects of the world around us than the most statistically verified of
equations.
Likeliness in this sense inheres in the transcendent vision provided by imagination. Now imagination is a
faculty not highly regarded by scientists today. We prefer judging our current theories by their predictive
power. But when pressed regarding the absolute truth of a theory, most scientists will characterize their
work as model-construction rather than truth-seeking. Surely this is an admission that, like Timaeus, they
live in the world of opinion and trust. Model-building is not exclusively deductive; some genius of insight
must penetrate to first principles, must extract the intelligible from perception. Experiments cannot
substitute for this mysterious but very human talent. Like good story-tellers, scientists must weave
together disparate, unpliable strands of material, hoping to achieve some precision of focus, to animate a
dramatic insight, to gain subltety of perception. You may be interested to know that the word “theory” has
its (Greek) roots in seeing/beholding—in contemplation to be sure, but also in theater. Whether we
engage in science or literature, we seek an epiphany.
But how will we judge the likeliness of a story if not, or not simply, by predictive power? I’m not sure there
is a method for discovering how much truth a story has. As with the Canterbury Tales and Homer’s epics,
we must consult ourselves. We must “recollect,” aided by the questioning and discussion of other wise
beings, whether, for example, Timaeus’ version of space as a nurse and receptacle embodies the
essential characteristics of space better than a Cartesian grid with three axes and the capacity for
measurement. We must gauge the story’s explanatory power and probe the concreteness, integrity, and
clarity of the resulting vision.
Such probing carries us beyond and out of the world of the story. The danger of stories, of course, is that
we will simply allow ourselves to be seduced and entertained by them rather than doing such probing. We
must not allow ourselves to accede to Timaeus when he pleads:
You must remember that I who speak and you my judges have human nature. So, in order to receive the
likely story about these things, it is fitting not to search beyond this. (29c4-d3)
Instead, we must press beyond the confines of each page, whether the pages are Platonic or Newtonian
or Homeric. Whether the author frankly tells us, as Timaeus does, that his imitation is merely imitation, or
presents his fictional insights as a veiled and disembodied author, we must glut our greed for the truth.
We must have a passion for wisdom. To this extent everything we do—math, science, literature,
philosophy—in the classroom or in our lives—ought be truly philosophic. Only then will our education be
liberal and liberating.
�By Marilyn Higuera, Director
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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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.
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Higuera, Marilyn
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2009
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2009-08
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Annapolis_GI_Fall_2009_Convocation
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Fall 2009 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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Annapolis Convocation, Fall
2010
Welcome to new and returning Graduate Institute students,
friends, family, and colleagues.
Today you new students are beginning a program of study in
which the books you read will challenge you to confront
fundamental questions, to re-examine cherished opinions, and to
analyze the very structure of your world. You are beginning this
program in either the Literature or the Mathematics and Natural
Science segment. Perhaps you see a vast gulf between the world
of mathematics and the world of literature. No doubt, these
categories reflect our sense of two radically different human
possibilities. However, we at St. John's hesitate to pigeonhole our
texts and we often prefer to leave it to you to disentangle the
various threads of knowledge. Euclid's Elements is a constructed
work of art and rhetoric as well as a progressive development of
the logical consequences of certain axioms. Characters in
Sophocles' Antigone propound reasoned arguments for and
against the primacy of the state even as they embody the raging
passions, flawed insecurities, and irrational loyalties of all-toohuman individuals. So, in the Graduate Institute, the organization
of "great books" into categories for our segments is done with a
bit of a bad conscience; it is knowingly done more for the sake of
practical considerations than as a serious claim regarding the
boundaries of either the books or the issues therein.
In this spirit of modest challenge regarding the
compartmentalization of learning, I would like today to reflect
�upon an underlying shared motif in our Mathematics and Natural
Science and Literature segments: namely, imagination.
The role of imagination in literature—both on the part of the
author and as necessitated in the reader—is universally
acknowledged. Whether we view it with suspicion ("oh, that could
only happen in your imagination") or with reverence ("in metaphor
the imagination is life"—Wallace Stevens, Three Academic
Pieces), we all experience a particular sort of consciousness
when we open a novel or play or epic and begin to read.
Immediately, we envision a scrawny knight on a skeletal steed
accompanied by a rotund peasant, charging a giant/windmill with
lance atilt. Or, guided by the well-turned phrase, we conjure up a
gory battlefield littered with corpses where Greek and Trojan
antagonists pause to exchange personal histories before swinging
the bludgeon or thrusting the spear. Literature works upon our
minds, quickening our productive powers and prompting us to
construct a world, usually a little bit alien, populated with vivid,
captivating images.
You may, on the other hand, be only beginning to appreciate the
role of imagination in mathematics—as you linger over the
definitions and postulates of Euclid's geometry. Unlike the austere
equations of algebra that you will have experienced in a prior
educational life, Euclid's formulations prompt, indeed demand,
active visualization. True, the first definition, "A point is that which
has no part" resists easy visualization. Nonetheless, in order to
understand this definition, very quickly we begin trying to picture
something which has no part. Usually, someone draws a dot on
the chalkboard. However, we can literally see the specks (or
parts) of chalk dust, so instead we represent the dot in our mind's
eye; we strip away the specks of chalk dust; we isolate a speck;
we zoom in with our mind's eye microscope and attempt to
examine whether we have stripped away all parts and are left with
�a single, ultimate unity. Surely we are exercising our imagination
in this process—a process we repeat with the second definition,
"A line is breadthless length." Again, we must picture something,
some stretching forth through the inner space of the mind; again,
we must strip away any visible width from this image; we must
repeat this process so long as any width is "visible"; we must try
to isolate the direction until it is all but invisible.
This peculiar constructing of an image of Euclid's definitions
certainly involves the imagination. Drawn images are, we infer,
not the ones that Euclid intends. Why then does Euclid formulate
his first postulate as: "to draw a straight line from any point to any
point"
It is a puzzle. However, I might note that the Greek word
translated as "draw" also means "lead" as in "lead the troops into
battle." So perhaps this verb conveys more the sense of an
energetic activity required of the student of geometry than a
physical drawing. We must be able to summon forth, to "lead" a
line out of one point to another. But what translators generally fail
to capture is that Euclid uses not only an infinitive (which already
mutes the sense of activity), but a perfect infinitive—something
like "to have drawn." So, though Euclid points us to activity, he
places us in an odd temporal relation to such activity. The activity
has already been accomplished. Moreover, the infinitive is not a
direct command to us, nor even a permission to us to perform this
activity.
Taking into account Euclid's prefatory clause, "Let the following
be postulated," we may construe Euclid to be begging for our
permission. But again, translators have trouble rendering Euclid's
exact grammar: he uses a third person perfect passive
imperative. No wonder they have trouble. We have little
experience of the third person imperative in English; the St.
John's Greek text suggests that the playwright's "Enter the king"
�is an equivalent. Such an imperative does not directly address the
reader, but instead some other, hidden being who presumably
can implement the command. The passivity of Euclid's imperative
further weakens any sense of our participation in the process. I
too am inadequate to yield a faithful translation, but perhaps "Let
it have been begged: to have led out a line from any point to any
point."
What then does Euclid want us to do? His text is filled with action
verbs such as "describe," "apply," "construct," as well as "draw."
These verbs are almost universally governed by the
aforementioned perfect passive imperative; nevertheless, they are
powerful incitements to temporal processes. What is our relation
to these processes and to the objects they animate?
Speusippus, Plato's nephew and his successor as head of his
Academy, is reputed to have commented on Euclid's geometrical
objects:
...it is better to assert that all these things are and that we observe the
coming-into-being of these not in the manner of making, but of
recognizing, treating the timeless beings as though they were presently
coming into being....
The language Speusippus chooses, "as though they were
presently coming into being," highlights, I think, the opposing
aspects I've noted in Euclid's treatment. This phrase, "as though"
also captures the imaginative aspect of his entire enterprise.
While Euclid is not telling us that we must create a line, ex nihilo,
out of nothing, he is encouraging us to reflect upon, to imagine, its
having come into being, its genesis, its nature.
Similarly, every Euclidean proof launches us on a discursive and
imaginative journey. First, the proposition states a universal truth,
such as: "In isosceles triangles, the angles at the base are equal
to one another." Next, some particular figure, here a definite
isosceles triangle ABC, is called up for inspection—using the
�perfect passive imperative that lets us know the triangle
connecting those points has previously been constructed. What
follows is a step-by-step unfolding of a discovery of the relations
establishing the truth. These relations permeate the object
already—an object whose existence is antecedent to the proof
itself. But we are presumably only now revealing them to
ourselves. If someone goes to the board to reiterate the relevant
steps, you begin to appreciate how integral the imagination is to
understanding the proposition. Should the person at the board
make the mistake of drawing first the entire finished diagram with
all the enhancements to be added by the various steps, rather
than allowing the drawing to take shape gradually, you will find it
nearly impossible to understand, to see, to grasp the
interconnected relations that exhibit the general truth proposed.
As we present each relation to ourselves in embodied form, i.e.,
drawn on the board, we use double vision of a sort to see through
the drawn diagram to the perfected vision in our mind's eye (we
do this almost effortlessly); simultaneously, we subject this
perfected vision to the crucible of our critical reasoning (this
requires some real effort and the assistance of Euclid's prose).
Thus, our activity while doing proofs mediates between
thoughtless receptivity of facts or sensations and timeless
apprehension of timeless truths. And this mediation relies crucially
upon imagination. Only through an imaginative encounter with the
unfolding proof are we roused from mere passive sensation,
inspired to an examination of the architecture of our inner space,
and pushed forward and beyond our initial survey.
Certainly, unrestrained imagination cannot achieve the desired
moment of dawning recognition that the proposition must
necessarily be true. Imaginative constructions must be
challenged, questioned, articulated, limited by the requirements of
reason. But I would like to point out that reason needs some
�regulation also; Meno's slave boy is seduced by the attractive,
echoing sound of the words, when he leaps to the notion that
"double the line will produce double the square." Socrates uses a
drawn image to help him correct his own mistake.
Here, I am speaking as though imagination and reason perform
their functions in some clearly separated, disjunct fashion. But I
think the case is much more complex. Even the perfected vision
necessary to "see" a point or line or triangle is not clearly the
domain of imagination alone. Can imagination truly achieve a
depiction of partlessness or breadthlessness? Does imagination
achieve the final leap from a dot to a point? We intuit that the
repetitive visualization process, stripping away breadth from a
ruler, say, could proceed ad infinitum; and this understanding
gives rise to some shaped idea in us. But the understanding must
partner with imagination to give us access to such an idea—an
idea we are fairly confident is identical for each of us, a specific,
articulable, unambiguous, and essentially spatial idea. An idea we
access through spatial, visualizable images. Trying to understand
geometry without the imagination may be like a blind person
reasoning about colors.
This partnership between imagination and reason functions in the
proof activity I described before as well. As we bring the diagram
itself into being in front of us, we are simultaneously bringing our
own understanding of the proposition into being. Here too, it is
difficult to disentangle the vision of the understanding as it grasps
the truth of each step and of the whole from the vision of the
imagination as it peers into the diagram to see the claims
themselves. Speusippus articulated this vision as a "recognizing";
the Greek word there is different from the one Plato uses in the
Meno regarding recollection. However, I think both words strive to
capture the aspect of the experience of knowing that feels as
though it is a looking, a looking at something at once separate
�and other, yet immediately appropriated. I note that Socrates
chose a geometrical example to illustrate his notion of
recollection. No doubt there are many reasons for his choice, but I
think one reason is that such an example highlights the
indispensable role of images in coming to know.
Perhaps it seems extravagant to claim that images are necessary
for knowledge. We at St. John's stress that reason is the arbiter in
our discussions, and I certainly don't want to minimize reason's
importance. But I am in good company when I emphasize images
in our search for a glimpse of unchangeable, immutable truths. In
De Anima, Aristotle asserts that "without imagination, there can
be no thought." (427b16) One of Descartes' rules is "not to
recognize those metaphysical entities which really cannot be
presented to the imagination." (Rules for the Direction of the
Mind, Rule XIV, p. 57) For Kant, imagination is called upon to put
together even space and time, as well as every appearance of an
object in space and time. He says:
Synthesis in general... is the mere result of the power of imagination, a
blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have
no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious.
(Critique of Pure Reason, B103)
To focus more intently on the power of the imagination as
encompassing both our story-making capacity and our
mathematical activity, I'm going finally to turn toward Plato. In fact,
I'm going to turn toward an image that Plato uses in a book we've
placed in neither Literature nor Mathematics/Natural Science but
in the Politics and Society segment, namely the Republic. It is,
however, a book that speaks to us as complete human beings.
Somewhere near the heart of that enormous work (509d-511e),
Socrates proposes an image of a divided line as a representation
of the entire cosmos, both the sensible world and the intellectual
world. He uses the image to depict the relationships of various
�categories of things, to chart an ascent through these categories
up to the idea of the good, and to discuss the human powers
correlate to each stage of the journey. I'm going to isolate one
layer of this rich and complicated image: the image is itself about
images.
Socrates divides the line first to represent visible and intelligible
things; then he divides each of those segments similarly. The
visibles are further separated into images (shadows, reflections in
water, mirror appearances) and the objects of which those things
are images (animals, plants, artifacts). The intelligibles are divided
into ideas approached deductively—for example, geometrical
ideas—and ideas grasped without hypotheses. Socrates
proposes (517b) that the visibles themselves reflect the same
relationship to the intelligibles that the first subdivision does:
visible objects are images of the intelligible objects. Note the
reversal of our usual interpretation of the material world as the
real thing from which we abstract vapory concepts.
Socrates uses the divided line to discuss four different human
relations to the four categories of objects (comparison, trust,
deductive thinking, understanding). Though an unmediated
knowledge of ideas is held out as the proper intellectual
engagement with the very highest category, the divided line itself
is a result of Socrates' reluctance to speak "about what one
doesn't know as though one knew." (506c) Socrates presents his
interlocutors with the poetic/mathematical metaphor of the divided
line when they press him to reveal his own (mere) opinions about
the good and knowledge (506b). Apparently, at least this instance
of image-making allows him to speak appropriately about what he
does not know. Of course, the divided line has a patent character
as an image; we are in no danger of being seduced into thinking
the visible things actually are a line. But why is this image the
right kind of speech for communicating Socrates' opinions (even if
�he must warn us to guard against any unwilling deception
therein—507a)? It helps to remember that, for Socrates, opinions
are never mere opinions; images are never mere images; they
are waystations on the path toward truth.
I conjecture that the line itself reveals something even more
general than Socrates elucidates; it elicits a fifth mode of thinking.
The relationship each part of the line possesses to its neighbor is
that of being an image. The philosophic ascent up the line
involves understanding—seeing—the imaging relationship, seeing
each image as an image (rather than imbibing it as a complete
and finished story).
Inspection of an image, whether poetic or geometric, whether a
living organism or a painting, is a proper activity of the
philosopher. The realization that an animal or a poem or a circle is
an image—both manifesting and hiding reality—is what moves us
as thinkers up the divided line, what puts us at least at the point
between two parts of the divided line. We become fully engaged
with what's in front of us, asking questions, making judgments,
winnowing claims—even making helpful images. Only thus do we
reveal to ourselves the potential for something we might call
recollection or recognition or learning.
Marilyn Higuera
�
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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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9 pages
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Higuera, Marilyn
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2010
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2010-08
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Annapolis_GI_Fall_2010_Convocation
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Annapolis, MD
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text
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Fall 2010 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
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Tutors
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Fall 2011
What Is a Community of Learning?
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself
as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions,
and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from
time to time turn the searchlight of inquiry on ourselves. So I mean to take this occasion to ask:
what is a community of learning? My suspicion is that the phrase involves a latent but
fundamental tension between its component terms, ‘community’ and ‘learning.’ To expose this
tension, I propose to begin by investigating the meaning of each term in turn, under the guidance
of Plato’s Socrates.
Let us put learning first, as we ought to do here at St. John’s. What, then, is learning?
One answer, and I think a true and beautiful answer, is found in the Meno, part of which every
incoming Graduate Institute student reads in the course of our new student orientation.
Responding to Meno’s paralyzing claim that it is impossible to seek anything – because either
one knows what one is seeking, and so has no need to seek it, or one does not know what one is
seeking, and so does not know how to seek it – Socrates raises a third possibility: we know what
we are seeking, but we have forgotten it. Learning, therefore, is recollection, remembering what
we once knew but have forgotten. The human soul, Socrates explains to the enthralled Meno, is
immortal, and death and birth are only apparent changes that do not entail the soul’s destruction.
Since the immortal soul has therefore seen all things, both on the earth and in the underworld,
1
�there is nothing that it has not learned. And since the whole of nature is akin, it suffices for a
human being to recollect one thing, in order for him to be able to recall everything else for
himself.
It is not hard to see that Socrates’ story does not in fact allege that learning is
recollection, as Socrates claims, and Meno concludes it does. If what we call learning is
recollection, and we recollect what we once knew but have forgotten, then recollection
presupposes knowledge. So where did this knowledge come from? The answer, according to
Socrates’ story, is that it came from seeing: knowing is primarily having seen, and so learning is
primarily seeing. And indeed, this is what we see in the subsequent geometry lesson with
Meno’s slave. All Socrates needs to do, for the slave to learn to find the side of the double
square, is to make the slave see that the square drawn on the so-called diagonal is in fact twice as
big as the square drawn on the original side. The slave’s opinions about the name of the side of
the double square – for example, that this name must, in order to be speakable, contain some
mention of a numerical ratio with the original side – are reasonable, but they are obstacles to his
seeing what Socrates wants him to see, obstacles that Socrates must clear away by refutation if
the slave is to see clearly. If the slave were to go through the same lesson repeatedly and in
various ways, Socrates concludes, he would end up having knowledge about such things no less
precisely than anyone. That is, he would know such things as well as it is possible for a human
being to know them.
Now if learning is primarily nothing other than seeing, it seems to me to follow that it is
an essentially private activity, one that takes place entirely in the one who sees. This is not to
deny that it can be pursued in a community, with friends or colleagues; it is only to deny that it
must be pursued in common. The same thing follows, I think, even when the seeing involved is
2
�metaphorical, and the thing seen is seen in the speeches uttered in our common life. Even when
the thing learned is common, the learning is not essentially in common. Now it is true that the
slave boy needs Socrates to help him to clear away the incorrect opinions he has about the side of
the double square. But if these obstacles to seeing are due, not to what the slave has seen, but to
what he has heard from his community – as the Meno implies, and the Republic’s cave story
states outright – then it follows nonetheless that learning requires community only as a source of
things to see, and not as a means to seeing.
But I have gotten ahead of myself. For what is a community? Once again, a Platonic
dialogue is helpful. For human beings to be in a community, they must hold things in common.
As Socrates and Glaucon agree in the Republic, the greatest good in the organization of a city,
the common good at which the legislator aims, is what binds it together and makes it one: the
community of pleasure and pain, which leads the citizens to say ‘my own’ and ‘not my own’
about the same things, and in the same way. More generally, we can say that any community
extends just as far as does this sense of a common good, marked by these opinions about what is
and is not its own. But much earlier in their long conversation, Socrates and Glaucon also agree
that, at least in the case of the citizens of the city in speech, these opinions about ‘my own’ and
‘not my own,’ about who is a citizen and who a stranger, are founded on a lie: namely, a story
that all the citizens are brothers, born of and nursed by the land that they inhabit. More
generally, we can say that the sense of the common good in every community is marked by
correct opinions that are, if not lies, at least not held because they have been seen to be true.
Since each community is founded and maintained by the promulgation of such correct opinions,
it is absolutely forbidden to call these opinions into question, whether by laughing at them, or by
inquiring into their truth. To do so is to call the community itself into question.
3
�By now it should be clear what I have in mind by the latent but fundamental tension that I
suspect in the phrase ‘community of learning.’ Learning, according to the Meno and the
Republic, is an essentially private activity that does not require a community for its completion.
And every community, according to the Republic and the Meno, is founded on correct opinions
that are resistant to inquiry, and that therefore pose particularly recalcitrant obstacles to
community members seeing what is – that is, to their learning. This latent but fundamental
tension between community and learning is made vivid by Socrates’ image of the cave in the
Republic. We are like prisoners confined to a deep cave, Socrates says, whose necks and legs are
bound so that what we can see is limited to what is right before us. Above and behind us, where
we cannot look, unbound denizens of the cave carry artifacts back and forth in front of a fire, so
that shadows are cast by these artifacts on the cave wall that we face. The cave wall also reflects
sounds made by some of these puppeteers, so that we take them for sounds made by the
shadows. We take the shadows themselves for real beings, and the ones that seem to speak for
real human beings.
Socrates makes it clear that the cave is an image of the community by remarking that,
while it is an image of our nature in its education and want of education, we find ourselves in it
not from birth but from childhood. Our first education must have amounted to an induction into
the cave; a second, deeper education is needed for us to escape it. Moreover, the image suggests
that while a kind of learning is possible within the cave – some of the prisoners get very good at
discerning, naming, and predicting the shadows – this so-called learning is based on a
fundamental falsehood: never having seen either the source of the shadows or any other kind of
being, the prisoners take the effects for causes, and artifacts for natures. (We should note that
4
�this would be the case even if there were no world beyond the cave.) What is learned in the cave
is correct opinion rather than truth, though it bears some intelligible relationship to truth.
It is conventional, in edifying addresses of this kind, that the speaker, having identified
some apparently intractable problem, go on to offer a surprising solution. I am sorry to say that I
have no such solution to offer with respect to the phrase ‘community of learning.’ To repeat:
learning, understood as seeing, does not require a community for its completion; and every
community poses barriers, in the form of correct opinions, to learning. Unless learning is
something other than literal or metaphorical seeing, or unless there are communities that do not
depend on correct opinion for their sense of the common good, it seems that the phrase
‘community of learning’ must involve a contradiction: in the respect that there is learning, there
is no community, and in the respect that there is a community, there is no learning. But both the
image of the cave in the Republic and the scene with the slave in the Meno do suggest one way in
which the consistency of the phrase might be saved. According to Socrates, while the release
and healing of the prisoners in the cave can happen by nature, it helps to have a free human being
in the cave, one who can release the prisoners, compel them to stand up, walk, and turn toward
the light, and even drag them by force out of the cave. This releasing, compelling, and dragging
is the closest one can come to helping to see, and so the one who does this is the closest thing to
a teacher. Similarly, while Socrates quite reasonably claims that he is not teaching Meno’s slave
when he sets the latter’s opinions against one another – after all, he does not tell the slave the
correct opinion – he does help him to see that he does not know the side of the double square.
This compulsion, this setting of opinion against opinion, has more in common with the means
used by the community than it does with seeing, but it can lead to seeing.
5
�This conclusion points to a more consistent meaning for the phrase ‘community of
learning.’ Since we all always already find ourselves in a community, with our necks and legs
bound, and our heads pointed in a fixed direction, it would be very helpful to us if we could find
and join another community, one whose correct opinions oppose and counteract those that
constitute and maintain the broader community in which we find ourselves. Such a ‘remedial
community’ would have orthodoxies of its own, of course, and these would necessarily stand as
obstacles to learning. But if these orthodoxies were well-chosen, they could also contradict the
orthodoxies of the broader community, call them into question, and help us to loosen the bonds
that limit our field of view. Such a remedial community, though an obstacle to learning when
seen from the highest perspective, when seen from our perspective could help us to learn.
This, I submit, is the best true answer to the question ‘what is a community of learning’;
and it is by being such a remedial community that St John’s College earns the right to call itself a
community of learning. More particularly, it is by means of this notion that the several practices
of the College that seem unnecessary to learning when seen from the highest perspective –
practices like our largely-required graduate program, our requirement of attendance and
participation in the conversation, our imposition of due dates for essays, and our determination of
class lists and teaching assignments – are justified. The notion of a remedial community helps us
to see, for example, that it is a lie in the soul to justify turning in a late paper on grounds of
learning. It is true that the thought comes when it wants to, and not when we want it to; so it is
true that due dates make no sense from the highest perspective. But we have no right to this
highest perspective. We are prisoners in a cave. The due date of an essay protects learning by
giving it a standing in the world of the cave equal to the standing of the important shadows that
6
�parade before our eyes. It protects learning by opposing compulsion to compulsion, correct
opinion to correct opinion.
Similarly, it is a lie in the soul to justify skipping a class, or sitting silently in one, on
grounds of learning. It is true that we might learn more reading by ourselves in our rooms, or by
coming to class just to listen, than by coming to class and saying what we think; so it is true that
the requirements of attendance and participation make no sense from the highest perspective.
But we are prisoners in a cave. We have no right to this highest perspective. These requirements
protect learning by giving it a standing in the world of the cave equal to that of flat tires and
doctor’s appointments.
It should not escape our notice that this notion of a community of learning as a remedial
community also supplies us with a helpful standard to judge the College. If the orthodoxies of
St. John’s do not oppose and counteract those of the broader community, if they instead echo and
magnify the latter, then the College is a community of learning in name only. St. John’s and its
Graduate Institute ought to be a shelter from the ever-increasing busyness and prevailing shortterm fearfulness that characterize the current mood of the surrounding community. This does not
mean that we should expect serenity within these walls; the image of the cave suggests that if we
are not kicking and screaming, if we do not feel ourselves to be under compulsion, if we are not
temporarily blinded, we are not being prepared for learning. But we should expect that the mood
of our studies here will not be the mood of the surrounding community. If it is, we can only
struggle by ourselves, or hope for the assistance of a wise, and free, friend.
So come to class, and speak in class, and turn your essays in on time, even if, or
especially if, you must struggle to do so. Your struggles are not a sufficient sign of learning, but
if it is true that we all find ourselves prisoners in a cave, they are a necessary sign.
7
�I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be a study group this term on
Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. Please watch your email for an announcement of the place
and time. I would also like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back
of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial.
The summer 2011 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
August 25, 2011
8
�
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
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Convocation Addresses
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
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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.
Identifier
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convocation
Text
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Page numeration
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8 pages
Original Format
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digital
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
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2011
Date
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2011-08-25
Identifier
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Annapolis_GI_Fall_2011_Convocation
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Publisher
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St. John's College
Language
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English
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Creator
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Black, Jeff J. S., 1970-
Rights
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Fall 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Community of Learning?"
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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