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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
�
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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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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
�
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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 for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Fall 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Community of Learning?"
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Fall 2012
What Is Liberal Education? Part II
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 shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by asking ‘what is
liberal education?’
As I reassured the audience of my summer convocation address, let me reassure you too:
I don’t mean to try to answer this question in the next fifteen minutes. My only somewhat more
modest goal involves dividing the question into two parts. Last term, I asked the question ‘what
is liberal?’, and with the assistance of the College’s motto, offered the following answer in the
case of education:
Liberal education is bookish education, freeing education, childlike education. As
education through conversation with the great books, it is the consummation of
practice and a courageous confrontation with what is most real. It is the education
of the free who know they are not free into a freedom they do not desire. It is an
education that forgets and begins again, that plays at the most serious things, and
that thereby gives us a world in which to live.
But this answer is obviously preliminary, because it depends in turn on the answer to a deeper
question. ‘That’s all very well, Mr. Black,” someone might say, “but what is education?” To
begin to answer this question, I propose to pose it to three great books, two of which are on the
reading list of our graduate Program. These books are Rousseau’s Emile, whose subtitle is On
1
�Education; Plato’s Republic, whose subtitle is On the Just; and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and
Evil, whose subtitle is Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.
If we understand what is asked in the question ‘what is education?’ it must be because we
think that there is such a thing. So why do we think this? Let’s confine ourselves to human
beings: the beings whose education is most interesting to us. When we observe the human
beings around us, we cannot help but be struck by the differences between them in their activities
and capacities. Some of them are capable of much, some of little; some need much, some need
little. Perhaps most strikingly, some human beings are largely capable of providing for their own
needs, and some are not. Once we are able to judge the ages of human beings, we might make
the following generalization: that human beings are born weak, because unable to care for
themselves; that as they age they sometimes flourish and become strong; and that if they live
long enough, the strong eventually decline and become weak again. These changes, these
differences between human beings at different ages, might even be more striking to us than those
underlying qualities that all human beings share. And the cause of these changes, Rousseau tells
us near the beginning of Emile, the cause that shapes human beings over the course of their lives,
is education.1 Education is the answer to the question of why human beings differ so much, not
just from one another, but each of them from one time to another.
But there is something puzzling about this first attempt at a definition of education, which
takes education as the cause in general of change in human beings. For we tend to want to think
of education as the cause, and so by extension as the process, of good change in human beings:
education, we think, changes us for the better. Rousseau acknowledges as much when he writes,
“[e]verything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by
education.” Education, we are likely to insist, is change in human beings in a certain direction:
2
�toward some completion, toward being grown, toward some good. It is odd to think of the
changes that, even in the best case, follow the completion of growth – that is, our inevitable
decline – as part of our education.
Rousseau takes this difficulty into account as he develops his argument in Emile. This
education, the one that gives us what we lack at birth but need when grown, comes from three
sources: nature, men, and things. “The internal development of our faculties and our organs,” he
explains, “is the education of nature. The use that we are taught to make of this development is
the education of men. And what we acquire from our own experience about the objects which
affect us is the education of things.” What we ordinarily think of as the content of our education
– the opinions we are taught about how things are and what we ought to do – is really only part
of our education, according to this account. And the expansion of the definition of education to
include internal developments and experiences, as well as opinions, makes it possible to
distinguish growth from decline, and good education both from bad and from no education at all.
Since each of the three educations must tend to the same end, Rousseau tells us, and the
education of nature “is in no way in our control,” a good education, an education properly
speaking, is one in which the educations of things and of men are directed to the end imposed by
the education of nature. And since we could not bring ourselves knowingly to pursue a
consistently harmful education – even if such an education is better than a contradictory one –
our supposition must be that the end imposed by the education of nature is good. Here, then, is a
second definition of education, one that seems closer to what we mean by the word: education is
the cause of good changes in human beings, because it is oriented by nature. Or, to put the same
point differently, for education to be the cause of good changes in human beings, there must be
such a thing as nature.
3
�This definition, which we arrived at with the assistance of Rousseau’s Emile, is shared by
a second great book, Plato’s Republic. At the beginning of Book Seven of that work, Plato has
his Socrates present an image of “our nature in its education and want of education.” Picture
human beings as if they were bound head and foot in a cave underground, such that they are all
forced to face a wall. Far above and behind them, a fire burns. Nearer, but still above and
behind them, other human beings stand along a road behind a partition, and carry artifacts that
they raise up above the partition, into the light of the fire, such that the artifacts cast shadows on
the wall that the prisoners face. While they do this, some of the puppeteers make sounds that
bounce off the wall, and so seem to come from the shadows. Socrates asks whether such human
beings, bound as they are, can see anything other than the shadows cast by themselves and by the
artifacts raised above the partition. His young interlocutor, Glaucon, says that they cannot. And
so Socrates concludes, with Glaucon’s agreement, that these human beings will take the shadows
of artificial things for the truth – when in fact the truth is only fully available to those who free
themselves or are freed from their bonds, who make the painful climb toward the dazzling light
at the mouth of the cave, and who emerge to look at and eventually to see the things themselves,
which are not artifacts, in the light of the sun.
The horror and the beauty of this image, the horror of our imprisonment and the beauty of
the promise of our liberation, are so striking that it is easy to pass over Socrates’ remark that this
is an image of our nature “in its education and want of education.” Is it clear which part of the
image represents which condition of our nature? Socrates tells us that we are in the cave “from
childhood,” not from birth: so there must be a point early in our lives when each of us, in the
language of the image, is brought down into the cave – by someone who is able to exit it, of
course – and placed in our bonds, facing the wall with its shadows. Could this point be when we
4
�are first able to understand and articulate speech: that is, at the beginning of what we ordinarily
call our education? Later in his conversation with Glaucon, Socrates does call the condition in
the cave one of “greater lack of learning,” but this hardly settles the question, since he also notes
that “education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be”: it is not the art of
putting knowledge into a soul that lacks it, but the art of turning the whole soul from that which
is coming into being to that which is, and finally to the brightest part of that which is, the good.
Socrates’ image teaches us that it is a question of education against education, then: there are
those who claim that education happens only inside the cave, and those who claim that education
happens only outside, in the light of the sun. And the difference between these two views,
certainly within the cave but perhaps also outside it, is a matter of life or death.
It is tempting, and perhaps also easy, to accept Socrates’ encouragement and side with
Glaucon in the view that education is the noble and painful struggle against artifice on behalf of
nature, against appearance on behalf of the truth, against becoming on behalf of being, and
against evil on behalf of the good itself. It is very tempting to believe that the peak of education
is a kind of emigration to the Isles of the Blessed: the achievement of heaven on earth. But this
would be to ignore Socrates’ remark that education is the art of turning the whole soul from
becoming to being. This remark implies that education, even as Socrates understands it, takes
place chiefly, and perhaps even entirely, within the cave. According to Socrates’ image, the
need for compulsion – another term for this art of turning – ceases once the soul has been forced
to stand up, to turn around, to walk, to look at the light, to climb the rough, steep, upward way,
and at last to emerge from the cave. Once outside of the cave, the soul only needs to become
accustomed to the light, in order to see everything that can be seen.
5
�Let’s turn to the last of our three great books, Beyond Good and Evil, for help in thinking
through some further implications of Socrates’ definition of education as an art of turning. In the
Preface to that work, Nietzsche claims that the good itself – the pole star of the Socratic art of
turning, by whose light education is to be distinguished from indoctrination – is an invention, an
error, and a piece of philosophic dogma. And throughout the work he opposes to this Platonic
dogma a series of painful questions. If there is such a thing as nature, is it good for human
beings? To the extent that we have access to the truth, it is good for us, and is it better for us
than appearance? Is there such a thing as being, and can it concern us more, or be worth more to
us, than becoming? And is there such a thing as evil, or is it really a distorted view of something
that is properly called good?
If education as Socrates understands it takes place entirely within the cave, then it seems
better to understand education in terms of fundamental questions like these than in terms of
philosophers’ predetermined, dogmatic answers to such questions. This does not mean,
however, that these questions lack answers. Roughly speaking, for example, Nietzsche seems to
think that the answer to each of these fundamental questions is ‘no.’ But it is in asking these
painful questions, in discovering how matters stand for oneself with regard to these questions,
that education understood as the art of turning primarily consists. What follows from these
questions – insight into which answers are given to us as predetermined, and which answers can
be changed – teaches us about the limits to our learning, and so educates us about what education
can be for us. In other words, despite the great foreground differences between Nietzsche and
Plato’s Socrates, they agree that education understood as the cause of good changes in human
beings now must mean the pursuit of self-knowledge: obedience to the Delphic command, ‘know
thyself.’ They agree that obedience to this command is painful, though they both hint that it is
6
�not only painful. And they agree that obedience to this command is not the matter of a moment,
nor of a few months or years, but of a lifetime. As Socrates’ image implies, each human being
who succeeds in escaping the cave also gains the power to be a puppeteer, or worse, one who
draws down the young and binds them in a cave of his own making.
On the basis of these brief reflections on three great books, I can now hazard an answer to
my opening question. What is liberal education? For education to be possible, for there to be a
cause of good changes in human beings, there must be a nature of human beings that can be
known, and a good of this nature in each case. If there is such a nature and such a good, then
education requires the pursuit of self-knowledge, the pursuit of knowledge of this nature and this
good. So education in the true sense must therefore above all be the repeated reopening of the
question of whether there is such a nature, one that can be known, and that has its corresponding
good. Education in this sense is intrinsically liberal: for it is with the assistance of great books
that we best seek to know ourselves, it is through self-knowledge that we find the freedom that
suits us, and it is in this freedom that we become childlike, ready to begin again asking with
playful seriousness our fundamental questions about nature, truth, being, and the good.
I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be two study groups this term, one
on the French language, meeting on Monday afternoons, from 3:30 to 5:00, in the Hartle Room,
beginning on September 10th, and the other on Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human, meeting on
Thursday afternoons, also from 3:30 to 5:00 in the Hartle Room, beginning on August 30th.
Schedules will be circulated by email. Also, I would like to invite you all to take part in the
refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial.
The fall 2012 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
7
�Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
22 August 2012
Delivered 23 August 2012
Notes
1
In this address, I draw chiefly on the beginning of Book One of Emile, page 38 in the Bloom translation; on
Republic 514a-518c; and on Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, and sections 9, 230, and 231.
8
�
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Fall 2013
On the Mathematics & Natural Science Segment
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a
community of learning, at a College 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 shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so
by examining the readings of the Mathematics & Natural Science segment.
The subject of this convocation address – the second of five, each treating one of the
segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address,
delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the
Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of
that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as
compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names
that determine the distinct subject matter treated by the readings in each segment. Now I hope to
make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the
segment title ‘Mathematics & Natural Science’? And before I proceed to answer my own
question, I should caution that the threads that I mean to follow for the next few minutes –
threads that run through the tutorial and seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected
to threads that run through other segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I
only insist that these threads are present in the segment readings, and that they are truly worth
1
�following. So again, what are the wonderful questions raised by ‘Mathematics & Natural
Science’?
At the risk of becoming predictable, let’s begin once again with the least promising word
in the segment title: the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ – or, more precisely, the ampersand. As
it did in the Philosophy & Theology segment title, the ampersand implies that there is something
double about the subject matter of the Mathematics & Natural Science segment. And once
again, this implication is borne out by a cursory glance at the reading lists of the segment’s
seminar and tutorial. In seminar, we begin with Lucretius’ bittersweet poem about atoms, On the
Nature of Things; then we turn to Plato’s dialogue about the musical making of the world, the
Timaeus, followed by Aristotle’s discussion of the four causes of natural things – things that
have a principle of rest and motion in themselves – in the Physics. In tutorial, by contrast, we
begin with the definitions, postulates and common notions found in Book I of Euclid’s Elements;
and we continue by demonstrating and discussing each of the forty-eight propositions in Book I.
So in what we might mischievously call the ‘Natural Science’ seminar, we begin by considering
the principles – which is to say, the causes – of natural things: whether they be atoms, the Same
and the Other, or form and matter. In what we might call the ‘Mathematics’ tutorial, by contrast,
we begin by considering points, lines, and figures – magnitudes and their parts – and by
convincing ourselves that if some truths be given, other truths must follow by necessity. What,
then, is the meaning of the ampersand that joins these two inquiries, into causes and into
magnitudes, in our segment title?
It will help to consider here the meaning of the two parts of the title ‘Mathematics &
Natural Science.’ ‘Natural Science’ seems easy enough: ‘science’ is another word for
‘knowledge’ – it consists of the things we know – and as for ‘nature,’ well, let’s leap over an
2
�abyss and just agree with Aristotle that it consists of the things that have a principle of rest and
motion in themselves, and so come to be and pass away. ‘Natural Science,’ then, amounts to
what we know of such things, especially concerning their causes. ‘Mathematics,’ on the other
hand, is a little trickier. Our English word is related to the ancient Greek noun ta mathēmata,
which in turn is related to the ancient Greek verb manthanō, meaning ‘I learn,’ ‘I perceive,’ or ‘I
understand.’ So ta mathēmata are the characteristically learnable, perceptible, understandable
things. We can see the bearing of this etymology if we consider the chief content of
mathematics, according to our ordinary understanding: namely, proofs about magnitudes and
multitudes, figures and numbers. Such proofs are characteristically learnable because they bring
with them the certainty of logical necessity, and because they hold for all time and place. For
example, once we have learned how to demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem – proposition 47
from Book I of the Elements – we know that it will prove true on Earth and on Mars and in the
Andromeda galaxy, and that it will hold true for all future time as it did for all past. This
characteristically knowable quality leads some to translate the ancient Greek word for the
knowable things, ta mathēmata, with the English word ‘science.’
Now before we rush to conclude that our segment title, ‘Mathematics & Natural Science,’
really just means ‘Science & More Science,’ let’s recall that abysmal word ‘natural.’ We said,
following Aristotle, that natural science in particular consists of knowledge about the causes of
things that change in time and place. But mathematics, by contrast, consists of characteristically
knowable things that do not change in time and place. And with this contrast, a wonderful
question hidden inside the ampersand of our segment title comes to light. Is it possible that the
characteristically knowable things, namely magnitude and number, are the causes of the natural
things? Is it possible that the things that do not change in time and place are the causes of the
3
�things that do? Let’s pause for a moment to savor and shudder at the magnitude of this question.
If the answer is yes, then natural science deserves the name ‘science,’ because the causes of
natural things are fully knowable. If the answer is no, on the other hand – if we mean by ‘cause’
something other than magnitude or multitude – then either this thing must prove as knowable as
the objects of mathematics, or we must resign ourselves to a nature that is to some degree
unknown and unknowable.
Some of you might have noticed that, in describing the readings of the Mathematics &
Natural Science seminar and tutorial, in each case I stopped after the first few readings. It turns
out that our first wonderful question in the segment readings – the question of whether the
mathematical things are the natural causes – equips us to understand a change that happens in the
middle of each reading list. In the seminar, this change is marked by the triumphant title of
Francis Bacon’s New Organon. The newness of Bacon’s organon comes from his sense that
neither the natural causes nor the natural things themselves are what ancient philosophers – like
Aristotle, author of the old organon – thought they were. It is a mistake, Bacon argues, to try to
deduce the causes from the things themselves, because nature loves to hide: neither the causes
nor the things themselves are apparent. The organic – which is to say instrumental or methodical
– character of the New Organon follows from this claim: if there are natures and natural causes,
but they are hidden, what is needed is a reliable way to force them into the open. This forceful
way is the method of experiment. After Bacon’s New Organon, we turn in seminar to a work by
René Descartes with the deceptively sober and technical title of Discourse on Method. Among
many other interesting things, Descartes suggests in that work a standard by which to measure
the certainty of knowledge, such as the knowledge gained from scientific experiment. This
4
�standard is clarity and distinctness; and it is brought over to natural science from – you guessed it
– mathematics.
So if we take the New Organon and the Discourse on Method together, they seem to
announce not just a break with the ancient study of natural science, in their self-consciously new
focus on method, but an answer to our question about whether the mathematical things are the
natural causes. Yes, Bacon and Descartes say, the natural causes can be known; and yes, they
can be known with the clarity and distinctness of mathematics; which is almost the same thing as
saying that yes, the mathematical things – and especially number – are the causes. The color red,
we might explain in this Baconian-Cartesian spirit, is nothing more than light with a wavelength
of 700 nanometers, while violet is nothing more than the same with a wavelength of 400. To
make red violet, indeed to make any color into any other, is merely a matter of changing a
number – proof that in this case, as in every case, number is the cause. Whatever ancient
philosophers like Lucretius might have known about the causes of natural things, the proof of the
superior knowledge available through the modern experimental, methodical, mathematical
natural science is the superior power of that science – power exercised, unlike the paltry power
of ancient natural science, for “the relief of man’s estate.” Isaac Newton’s Principia makes its
own new beginning to display what can be achieved in the field of mechanics by this modern
natural science, and in so doing argues that the natural world extends infinitely further than
Aristotle admits – that the natural world is in fact the world simply, and natural science, science
simply. Darwin and Jung follow the Baconian-Cartesian path, each in his own, sometimes
questionable way, extending modern science from what we now call physics to the fields of
biology and psychology. And with each new advance in knowledge comes an increase in power:
5
�modern physics can put human beings on the Moon; modern biology can shape living things to
our needs; and modern psychology can make human beings more useful.
Let’s turn away from this vision of a secular heaven on earth to look at the readings of the
‘Mathematics’ tutorial, and the change that happens from Euclid’s geometry to that of
Lobachevski. It does not diminish the signal knowability of mathematics, nor that of Euclid’s
geometry in particular, to notice that it is founded on a handful of postulates; but this does raise
some questions. While definitions isolate and name certain geometrical possibilities – or even, if
you wish, certain geometrical impossibilities – and common notions spell out the necessary logic
of mathematical proof, postulates set the limits of geometrical possibility itself. But the word
‘postulate’ comes from the Latin verb postulare, which means ‘to demand’; and the
corresponding word in Euclid’s Greek, aitēmaton, means much the same: a thing asked for,
begged, or demanded. A postulate, then, is precisely not a name, nor something that must be
granted for logical proof to be possible; rather, it is something would not jeopardize the
possibility of logical proof if it were otherwise.
But if mathematical proofs would be possible even if one of the postulates were not
granted, or if a different postulate were granted in its place, then mustn’t ta mathēmata, the
mathematical or characteristically knowable things, include the conclusions demonstrated by
such proofs? This question puts us on the road to different, non-Euclidean geometries, including
the geometry of Lobachevsky – not to mention different arithmetics, such as the arithmetic of
imaginary numbers. And this road leads to a mathematics that consists of a set, perhaps a
limitless set, of alternative geometries and arithmetics, each corresponding to postulates that
there might be good reason to grant. Moreover, if the knowable things consist of sets of such
geometries and arithmetics, and the knowable things are the causes of the natural things, then
6
�mustn’t these alternative geometries also be causes? This question puts us on the road to
discovering the use of non-Euclidean geometry in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the
use of imaginary numbers in Feynman’s account of quantum electrodynamics.
Now the discovery of such correspondences should not make us Pollyannaish. It would
be terribly useful, and a great boon for the prospect of knowledge in the fullest sense, if it should
turn out that the things we are most suited to know are also the things themselves. But the very
utility and appeal of this situation should make us suspicious. Could the correspondences we
have discovered, between the knowable things and the causes of the natural things, instead be
due to the form our mind necessarily gives to everything it perceives and knows? Have we
merely discovered a gift that we have made for ourselves, and hidden from ourselves, without
knowing it? If so, perhaps we should expect a correspondence between every possible arithmetic
or geometry and some possible being, but at the cost of suspecting that behind every being for us
could lie a being in itself, to which we have no access. The very perfection of our knowledge of
the beings for us would rule out our knowing the beings in themselves – presuming that the
beings in themselves are any concern of ours.
It could also be the case that the Baconian-Cartesian equation of knowledge with power
is incorrect, and that in fact we only know things to the extent we do not have power over them.
Take the limit case of the modern scientific project, in which human beings acquire the power to
turn anything into anything else. What would remain of knowledge about the objects of these
transformations, if nothing about them were durable, let alone unchanging in time and place? If
the miraculous power of a god, which must be ruled out for both mathematics and natural
science to be possible, reappears as the goal of the modern scientific project to relieve man’s
estate, then this project seems to aim at its own self-destruction. Here we see the questions we
7
�have been following through the Mathematics & Natural Science segment touch on the themes of
Philosophy & Theology.
Finally, there is the more present and clear danger of treating the mathematical things,
and especially numbers, as the only knowable things just because they are the easiest things to
know. For the same reason that 700 nanometers is not equivalent to the color red, and eightyfive percent is not equivalent to learning, knowing the magnitude and multitude of a thing might
not be enough to know it, or even its causes, fully. Every science requires that one be able to
count its objects, but to determine the unit in each case needs more than skill at counting. This
danger should especially be heeded in an egalitarian democracy: the regime that most of all seeks
to reduce questions of justice to problems of arithmetic. Here we see the questions that we have
been following through the Mathematics & Natural Science segment touch on the themes of
Politics & Society.
In conclusion, I would like to announce that there will be three Graduate Institute-hosted
study groups this term. One group will study Plato’s Laws, while another will study T.S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets. Both of these groups will meet on Thursday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:00,
beginning on August 29. A third group will meet to learn Italian, and to read Machiavelli’s
Prince. Schedules and meeting places for all three of these groups will be circulated by email.
Lastly, I would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the
Great Hall, before going to tutorial.
The fall 2013 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
20 August 2013
Delivered 22 August 2013
8
�
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2013
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2013-08-22
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Annapolis, MD
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An account of the resource
Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Fall 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the Mathematics & Natural Sciences Segment" in Annapolis, MD.
Convocation
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Graduate Institute
Tutors
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Fall 2014
On the Literature Segment
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a
community of learning, at a College 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 inquire into ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining
the Literature segment.
The subject of this convocation address – the last of five, each treating one of the
segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address,
delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the
Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of
that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as
compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names
announcing that each segment treats a distinct subject matter. Now I hope to make good on these
claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title
‘Literature’?
I pondered this question for a long time, in the dim cave of my office in the BBC, during
the hot and muggy summer of 2014. And those of you who know me will understand the despair
I was reduced to, because I could see no way forward. There is no ampersand in the segment
title ‘Literature’ – so how was I to begin? My mind twisted and turned, trying to answer this
1
�question, and my body twisted and turned too as a result: now sitting in my office chair, now
standing to think, now throwing myself into one of my soft and easy chairs, fit only for soft and
easy people. And then, late one Friday afternoon, while trying to figure out how to put my feet
up on my desk without kicking my laptop, I kicked instead an open drawer of my desk. In a puff
of dust, several folded sheets of paper fell loose from where they had been Scotch taped to the
underside of the desk drawer. I took up these pages, and began to read.
“Fall 1985 Graduate Institute Convocation Address. On the Literature Segment.
“I went down from the dim cave of my office into the hot summer sun, to the new coffee
shop on Maryland Avenue, alone with my thoughts, to purchase a cappuccino – because I needed
some coffee, and because I heard they were making this new drink there for the first time. The
coffee shop was crowded and noisy, and there was a line, so I purchased my cappuccino to go in
a Styrofoam cup, and began to make for the door, the sun, and my office. But just then, someone
took hold of my seersucker sleeve from behind and said, ‘Hey, you’re the Director of the
Graduate Institute, right?’
“I turned to see a student seated at a table, hunched over a much-annotated copy of what
looked like the Iliad while fixing me with an angry glare. ‘I am,’ I said, hesitating. ‘Mr…?’
“‘Ms.,’ she corrected, rolling her eyes. Then she pushed what was indeed the Iliad across
the table, toward me, with both hands. ‘Why do we read this stuff?’
“I sat down in the vacant chair, setting my cappuccino on the table. ‘You mean the
Iliad?’ I asked.
“All of it: Homer, the Greek tragedies and comedies, the Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare,
poetry. Literature,’ she intoned, in a plummy Masterpiece Theatre accent. ‘I came here, to St.
John’s, to study the greatest ideas in philosophy, in math and science, in politics. I came here to
2
�study what’s most true – not some stories made up by some dead Greek whose name may or may
not have been Homer.’
“I glanced at the doorway, and the bright world beyond it. ‘Aristotle says in the Poetics
that poetry is more philosophic than history,’ I ventured weakly, ‘because it speaks about general
rather than particular things, about what is likely or necessary rather than just about what
happened. And by poetry he means making, in the sense of making things up. He’s talking
about everything we read in the Literature segment, in a book that we read in the Literature
segment.’
“This earned me a derisive snort. ‘Did Mr. Aristotle write the Graduate Institute
curriculum? Is he available to answer my questions? And in any case, Mr. Director, you’ve
missed my point. Let’s grant that poetry is more philosophic than history. Are you or Mr.
Aristotle able to say that it’s more philosophic than philosophy? Besides, everybody knows that
what we call history here in the Graduate Institute is really philosophy. And it’s not even true
that poetry speaks of general rather than particular things. Open Thucydides, and read that in
such-and-such a year, Alcibiades got on a trireme and sailed to Sicily. Now open Chaucer, and
read in the Franklin’s Tale that Arveragus got on a boat and sailed to Brittany. The only thing
missing is the date! Both history and literature are full of pointless details that only obscure the
philosophic truth. At least the pointless details of history actually happened. Who cares that
Niraeus, the second most beautiful Greek after Achilles, only brought three ships to Troy?’
“I thought about the slow cooling of my coffee, despite the Styrofoam. ‘Maybe these
details are useful ways of clothing philosophic truth,’ I responded. ‘Doesn’t Lucretius say
something in De Rerum Natura about doctors putting honey on cups of bitter wormwood, and
about their patients being tricked but not betrayed? Maybe a beautiful story, full of imagined
3
�details, makes it more pleasant to read about painful philosophic truths. For example, take that
detail about Niraeus. Isn’t that Homer’s way of saying that beauty doesn’t bring military might,
and that Achilles doesn’t have his fifty ships at Troy because he’s the most beautiful? A literary
form could also make it more pleasant for authors to write painful truths,’ I added. ‘In a
philosophic treatise, everything an author writes is in his own name. In a literary work, he can
put a painful truth in the mouth of one of his characters, and blame it on the character if he needs
to.’
“The coffee shop had been noisy, but it suddenly went silent, and I felt a moment’s
shame for what I had just said – straining to make myself heard – too loudly. The student stared
levelly at me for a moment. ‘Lucretius is cool,’ she said at last, ‘and you get brownie points for
using Latin. But don’t you see that your esoteric argument is totally lame? First, if you can see
through it, and I can see through it, then everyone can see through it. Lucretius even tells you
that he’s doing it – and he tells you twice, three books apart, like he thinks you’ll forget. Second,
if everybody sees through the beautiful clothing, then no one’s going to buy it when an author
blames something on one of his characters. You’ll have to do a lot better than that, Mr. Director,
to convince me that there’s something to esotericism. Everybody knows that literature is
seductive. Read the second preface to Julie – you know,’ she responded to my raised eyebrow,
‘by Rousseau. They knew it in the eighteenth century. There was a whole debate about whether
too many people were reading novels, and about whether novels drive people mad. Novels were,
like, the Walkmans of the eighteenth century. And no one was letting their authors off the hook.’
“I started to say something to this, but the student was on a roll, and interrupted me.
‘And third, what’s wrong with you? Every time you say something to me, you repeat something
that you read in some book. You’re like that guy Montaigne writes about, in “Of pedantry,” who
4
�won’t say that he has an itchy backside until he looks up what itchy means and what a backside
is. I ask you a question, and you give me great books. Well, I want great ideas. So tell me
straight up, Mr. Director, because life is short. Why should I waste my time on literature?’
“The student had been speaking more and more angrily, and as she posed this last
question she slammed her Iliad shut. The coffee shop fell silent again. I reached for my drink,
snapped open the plastic lid, and drank deeply of cold foam and lukewarm, bitter coffee. Clearly
this cappuccino fad was going nowhere. But as the stimulant raced through my veins and the fog
cleared from my vision, I looked the student in the eye and asked, ‘you’ve read Julie? That’s not
on the Graduate Institute reading list.’
“And then I saw what I did not expect to see: the student blushed. I glanced away,
reflected for a moment, and then began again to speak.
“‘So you want a philosophic argument for why literature is as philosophically serious as
philosophy?’ I asked.
“The student nodded.
“‘Okay. Remember how in Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes
between five intellectual virtues: art, science, prudence, wisdom, and intellect?
“‘Kind of,’ she replied. ‘What I remember is that art has to do with making things,
science with knowing things that can’t be otherwise, and prudence with acting in matters that can
be otherwise. But I don’t remember so much about wisdom or intellect.’
“‘You’re on the right track,’ I said. ‘Wisdom has to do with knowing first principles, and
Aristotle confusingly calls it a combination of science and intellect. This makes more sense
when he says later that intellect is concerned with the ultimates in both directions: ultimate
general principles, and ultimate particulars. It’s a kind of perception.’
5
�“‘Let’s see if I’m following you,’ the student ventured. “An example of art is writing, an
example of science is physics, an example of prudence is tactics, and an example of both wisdom
and intellect is… philosophy?’
“I reflected again, and then said, ‘Let’s leave wisdom out of it for now. I find it easier to
think about single judgments, rather than bodies of knowledge. If we were to say that “avoid
comma splices” is part of the art of writing, Newton’s second law part of the science of physics,
and “Athens should not invade Sicily” is a judgment of prudence, then what would be a
judgment of the intellect?’
“‘Well,’ the student replied, ‘if Aristotle is right that the intellect concerns the ultimates,
both principles and particulars, then the principle of non-contradiction would have to be one of
its judgments, and others ought to have the form “this is a comma,” or “this is force, this mass,
and this acceleration,” or “this is Athens, and this Sicily.” These judgments would be a little like
definitions, but also different: they wouldn’t say “a comma is a punctuation mark indicating a
brief phrase,” or something like that, because that kind of definition is part of the art of writing.
Instead, they would be like a cross between definitions and perceptions. The “this” part of “this
is a comma” would indicate a sense perception, but the “is a comma” part would be a perception
of the intellect.’
“‘Great,’ I said, starting to enjoy myself. Even my cappuccino was tasting better. ‘So
let’s agree that we’ve got Aristotle’s meaning right, for the sake of argument. We might think
differently if we were to look at the text, but we don’t want to fetch a book and run the risk of
being called pedants, do we?’
“This earned me another eye roll.
6
�“‘So now consider this,’ I continued. ‘Aristotle also tells us in the Ethics that the moral
virtues come to us through habituation, but the intellectual virtues through teaching. This seems
straightforward in the cases of art and science. If you want to learn the art of writing, you visit
the writing assistant, or read a style manual, or best of all, read and emulate an excellent writer.
If you want to learn the science of physics, then you take a physics class, or do experiments on
your own, or read a textbook.’
“‘I can do the next one,’ my student broke in excitedly. ‘If you want to learn prudence,
then you hang out with prudent people, or read histories about prudent people, if you can’t find
any of them around.’
“‘Aristotle says as much in the Ethics,’ I agreed, after swallowing the last of my coffee.
‘But tell me this. How do we learn intellect? And I’m not thinking now of the ultimates in the
sense of first principles, like the principle of non-contradiction – which is discussed in the
Metaphysics. How do we learn the ultimate particulars, and get better at knowing them, so as to
know better that we’re using them correctly in the judgments made by art, science, and
prudence?’
“The student’s expression, which had been open and hopeful since we began talking
about Aristotle, began to cloud over. After a pause, she said quietly, ‘I bet you’re going to tell
me that the answer is’ – and she said the last word with the same accent – ‘Literature.’
“‘Why not?’ I pressed on. ‘We all probably get our first instruction in the ultimate
particulars from the opinions of the people around us – this is a human being, that one is a hero,
this one is a valet – but the particulars that we learn this way must be pretty narrow. And we can
broaden them by reading history, sure, but the historian is expected to keep to what did happen.
Only the poet in Aristotle’s sense can instead write about what could happen, or must have
7
�happened. The poet can purify events so that every detail reflects the philosophic truth; he can
write about the rare, extreme cases; and he can supply the internal details that no one has access
to, but that must have happened – like the speeches in Thucydides. And by doing all this he can
improve our intellects by enriching our sense of the ultimate particulars, to the benefit of all the
other intellectual virtues. Maybe this is what people mean when they say – I mean no one says it
now, but they’ll probably say it someday – that reading novels makes us more empathetic. Not
just that novels make us better disposed toward others, though they can do that, but that they give
us a richer sense of others’ inner lives, and make us more nuanced in our judgments about them.
And maybe this is why Aristotle says that wisdom is a combination of science and intellect. It’s
a combination of philosophy proper and literature.’
“I trailed off, and the student rewarded me with some brief, sardonic applause. ‘Not bad,
Mr. Director. I won’t even hold it against you that you mostly talked about what Aristotle
thinks. That’s the more dialectical way, isn’t it – to make use of what your opponent
acknowledges? But there’s one problem you haven’t addressed, one question that you won’t be
able to answer.’
This was the last line on the last page, and there were no more pages to be found. I
kicked every other drawer in my desk, to no avail. Then, noting the lateness of the hour, I
snatched up the pages that I did have, and went down, out of the cool dark cave of my office,
into the hot Maryland sun.
There will be three Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: one on Homer’s
Iliad, one on Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and The
World as Will and Representation, and one on Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. Schedules and
meeting places for these groups will be circulated by email soon. Let me encourage you all to
8
�attend the Dean’s Lecture tomorrow night, on another work of literature, titled “Moments in
Time: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1,” at 8:00 in the FSK Auditorium. And let
me also invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall,
before going to class.
The fall 2014 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
2 August 2014
Delivered on 21 August 2014
Note
For those philosophic souls who want to investigate what itchy means, and need to look up what a backside is, I
offer the following guidance. For the meaning of going down and blushing, see Books 1 and 7 of Plato’s Republic.
Aristotle makes his claims about poetry and history at the beginning of Chapter 9 of his Poetics. For beautiful
Niraeus, see Iliad Book 2, lines 671-675. The honey and wormwood image is found in On the Nature of Things,
Book 1, lines 934-948, and Book 4, lines 10-25. The full title of Rousseau’s Julie is Julie, or the New Héloïse,
Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps. “Of pedantry” is the twenty-fifth essay in
Book 1 of Montaigne’s Essays. The discussion of art, science, prudence, wisdom and intellect may be found chiefly
in Chapters 3 through 8 of Book 6 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle discusses the principle of noncontradiction in his Metaphysics, in Book 4, Chapters 3 through 8, and Book 11, Chapters 5 and 6. Finally, there is
a coffee shop on Maryland Avenue. I first met my future wife there, and later her son, to both of whom I dedicate
this address.
9
�
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Fall 2014 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the Literature Segment" in Annapolis, MD.
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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St. John's College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Fall 2015
Emily Brooker Langston
Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families, friends,
and tutors – to the fall term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's College.
In particular, I’d like to welcome the students who are today becoming members
of the Graduate Institute. As you may know, the seal of the college portrays seven books
(representing the seven classical liberal arts) arranged in a circle around a set of scales.
There is a motto in Latin that reads: “Facio Liberos ex liberis libris libraque.” Or, less
alliteravely, in English, “I make free adults out of children by means of books and a
balance.” In my last convocation address I talked some about the first half of this motto “I make free adults out of children -” so I knew then I was setting myself the task of
saying something about the second half . The first half proclaims the goal of St. John’s,
or the program – to make free adults out of children. The second half gives us the
means: “by means of books and a balance.” I take the motto to be saying that by
means of learning we are made free.
Thus, the relationship between learning and freedom was already in the back of
my mind as I read through Herodotus’ magnificent, sprawling Histories with my
preceptorial this summer. Those of us who participated in a seminar on Plato’s Meno
earlier today have just been reminded of how perplexing the subject of leaning is. In
that dialogue, Socrates compares it to the process of remembering something that one
�had once known but has forgotten, so that the remembered or learned thing once again
becomes a part of the learner's conscious knowledge. In another dialogue, Theatetus,
learning is compared to having an object or idea make a stamp, an “im-pression,” on the
wax of one's soul. In either case, and in any case I can think of, learning involves an
interaction between a learner and a thing that was unknown, or at least forgotten. And
the learner is changed by that interaction.
If we think of learning as an encounter with the unfamiliar in which the learner is
changed, we can see the question of learning come into focus in an interesting way in
the Histories. As many of you know, Herodotus announces the nature of his grand
project in the first sentence of his work. He is writing, quote “so that the great and
wonderful deeds – some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians, - not go
unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other.” ( all quotes from
Andrea Purvis' translation in the Landmark Herodotus.) It doesn’t seem obvious that
learning would come into it. And yet one of the things one realizes early on in tackling
Herodotus is that there is very little that DOESN’T come into it. The reasons for the
Persian Wars cannot be summed up simply, in a few lines about ambition for territory or
(Herodotus disparagingly remarks at the beginning of the work) in a few stories about
kidnapped women. If we are to understand these wars, we must inquire about the very
character of the peoples - of the Greeks and Barbarians- who were involved in the
conflict. The description of the character of a people of course includes the forms that
political life takes, along with territorial aspiration and personal or national ambition –
�but language, mythology, dress, burial customs, religious ritual, local legend are all also
involved. And in describing these cultures to us, one of the issues to which Herodotus
returns regularly is the response of the various cultures to novelty: how does a culture
react to the customs of others with whom it comes into contact? How likely is that
culture to be changed by an experience of something new? If we accept for the moment
the premise that, though it may not be all there is to learning, learning has something to
do with being changed by taking in the new, then learning is for Herodotus a topic of
recurring interest. And understanding something about a culture’s attitude to learning
will tell us something deeply true about the character of a people.
It turns out that Herodotus sees a great deal of variation amongst cultures on this
issue. On one extreme, some cultures are highly resistant to exterior influence. We see
this particularly in the cultures of the Egyptians and Scythians, though for interestingly
different reasons. On the other extreme are the Persians who, Herodotus tells us, adopt
foreign customs avidly. Somewhere between these lie the Hellenes, to whom we will
return later – following the method of Herodotus, looking at the center more carefully
after having delineated the boundaries.
So what sorts of peoples are most resistant to taking in the new? Herodotus spends
the whole of book two telling us the about the culture of the Egyptians, who “shun
(practicing the customs) of everyone else in the world.” (153) We can make some sense
�of this from what Herodotus tells us about them. They are by their own reckoning a
very ancient people. As such, they have through many ages and dynasties been
“settled.” Rather than expanding their empire, they invest their energies in erecting huge
monuments of stone. That is why this country “has more marvels and monuments that
defy description than any other.” (133) Like all people according to Herodotus, they are
in some way akin to their land – in this case in character rather like the alluvial soil on
which much of the country is built, the result of one layer laid down upon another,
through centuries of slow accretion. The advanced age of their civilization seems like a
metaphor for their resistance to change; they are too old, settled in place, and established
in the traditions of millennia to be impressed by the achievements of others. In Plato’s
dialogue Timeus, an Egyptian priest famously expresses this attitude to the visiting
Solon: “O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children: there is not such a thing as an
old Greek."
If learning has something to do with being changed by the other, we can certainly
how resistance to learning looks like a sort of freedom – that is, freedom from influence.
This understanding of freedom is expressed most clearly in the culture of the a second
people in the Histories, the Scythians- who, according to Herodotus, “avoid foreign
customs at all costs.” (311) Yet their culture is remarkably different from that of the
Egyptians. Rather than thinking of themselves as one of the oldest peoples of the world,
they explicitly claim to be the youngest. As opposed to the Egyptians, who have more
grand and amazing monuments than anyone else in the world, the Scythians build no
�monuments, permanent buildings, or even fixed settlements, at all. As Herodotus
describes them: “Instead of establishing homes or walls, they are all mounted archers
who carry their homes with them and derive their substance not from cultivated fields
but from their herds.” (301) How then might we understand the Scythian resistance to
being influenced by anything that comes from the outside? Compared to the Egyptians,
set in place, with lists of kings and priests reaching back through time and surrounded by
stone monuments of their own lengthy past, the Scythians would seem to have little
sense of a past at all. They are constantly moving across an undifferentiated landscape of
windswept, grassy plains. The preeminent fact about them is that they are impossible to
conquer. For, quote, “Since they make their homes on carts how could they not be
invincible or impossible even to engage in battle?” As the resistance of great age to
change provides a metaphor for the resistance of the Egyptians to influence, so the
restlessness of youth may give us a way to think about the Scythians. They have made
what Herodotus calls one “great discovery.” To quote further, “They have discovered
how to prevent any attacker from escaping them and how to make it impossible for
anyone to overtake them against their will.” (301) The entire way of life of the Scythians
is an attempt to preserve a sort of freedom. And they are free – at least in the sense that
they remain uninfluenced and unconquered, eluding even the forces of Darius. But the
Scythians’ great discovery comes at a great price. Their lives are harsh; they have few
records, do not cultivate the arts, and Scythians who experiment with foreign customs
are killed on the spot.
�On the other end of the spectrum from the Egyptians, who are too stiff to be inpressed, and the Scythians, who won’t sit still long enough, are the Persians. If learning
is simply taking in and being changed by the other, the Persians are voracious learners
indeed. To quote Herodotus: “Of all men, the Persians especially tend to adopt foreign
customs.” They particularly “inquire into the enjoyments of pleasure seekers in every
nation.” (73) Peoples absorbed in the Persian empire are not compelled to change their
language, dress, or other customs – and the Persians adopt whatever foreign customs
they find pleasing.
As we could see how the resistance to any influence might be understood as a sort
of freedom, we can also see how the Persian embrace of novelty looks like freedom;
Persians are free to dress and seek pleasures in the widest variety of ways. Herodotus
describes the army of Xerxes closing in upon the Greek peninsula as a wondrous
procession comprising most of the peoples of the known world – Thracians in fox-skin
caps and colorful cloaks, Ethiopians clad in leopard and lion skins with bows six feet
long, Assyrians with helmets of bronze, the Mochi with helmets of wood.
The description of so much variety begs the question, though: how does a society
that takes everything into itself remain ONE? The question comes clearly into focus in a
conversation between the Persian Great King Xerxes and the deposed Spartan king
Demaratus. Xerxes is unable to understand the Spartans, who fight as a unified body of
�free men sacrificing themselves willingly, compelled by a merely “inward” fear - the
fear of their own law. The only source of unity that can constrain the motley army of
Xerxes to fight as one is a force from without. The unity they have, the only unity in
which Xerxes truly believes, is the unity of men who are “compelled by the lash.”
Omnivorous absorption of otherness has enabled Xerxes to send, by Herodotus'
estimate, a force of 5,000,000 from Asia to Europe. But if anything, the stance of the
Persians seems antithetical to freedom. The parts of this monstrosity can only be held
together by force, and every person in the Persian Empire is ultimately no more than a
“slave” to the Great King. If there is a kind of learning characteristic of people who are
free, it must be more than the unquestioning acceptance of every novelty.
Finally, we turn to the Greeks, not unexpectedly the heroes of Herodotus’
narrative, and of this talk. It may seem odd to say THE Greeks, and indeed it is the sort
of locution that we are wary of at St. John’s, for all sorts of good reasons. Yet despite
the fact that the term embraces cultures as different as Athens and Sparta, in spite even
of the fact that some Greek-speaking cities have Medized (gone over to the Persian
side), Herodotus does speak of “the Greeks” - and his way of speaking helps to give the
term meaning.
On the issue of learning, Herodotus reports that the Greeks, unlike the Persians,
are somewhat resistant to taking up foreign ways. But unlike the Egyptians and the
Scythians, they do learn from others. Herodotus particularly emphasizes how much the
�Hellenes owe to Egypt. Some of what they have taken from the more ancient culture is
practical; for example, they have learned to divide up the year in to 12 months, using the
stars. Other influences bear directly upon their religious and cultural practices. “The
Egyptians,” Herodotus tells us, “were the first to establish the tradition of identifying
names for the 12 gods...the Hellenes adopted this practice from them. They were also the
first to assign altars, statues, and temples to the gods and to carve their figures in relief
on stone." (118) The Greeks learn many things, and many different sorts of things, from
other nations.
Still, this seems is very different from the indiscriminate incorporation practiced
by the Persians. In mathematics and astronomy, navigation and agriculture, the Greeks
see an innovation, make a judgment about its truth or usefulness, and adopt what seems
to them best. In questions of religion and culture, there is no wholesale taking on of the
exotic. Even though the innovation of having named gods comes from the Egyptians, the
gods in Greece do not look like Egyptian gods and are not given Egyptian names.
Theogenies arise linking them to the new land and culture. Though they may have
learned to make temples and altars, and to carve images of the gods, from the Egyptians,
the Greeks do not make "Egyptian" altars, temples, or images. Everything they bring
into the culture is made their own.
Thus, although they have not maintained a primitive cultural purity such as that
defended so ardently by the Scythians, they have also not lost a sense of themselves as a
single and singular people. When the Athenians, refusing to go over to the Persians,
�make their moving speech at the end of book eight, despite the squabbles and
differences over strategy that divide them, they proclaim their loyalty to, quote, “ the
Greek people, with whom we are united in sharing the same kinship and language, with
whom we have established shrines and conduct sacrifices to the gods together, and with
whom we also share the same way of life." (662) They can even appeal to a common
ideal of "freedom," which although it may look different in Athens and Sparta is
recognizable by the citizens of each city as the principle for the sake of which they
oppose the massive Persian force. And part of what Herodotus makes visible to us
through his deep cultural descriptions is that it is their approach to allowing themselves
to be changed, their approach in fact to learning, that makes this society of free citizens
possible. The Greeks adopt a stance of freedom in learning, neither rejecting everything
wholesale nor taking in everything indiscriminately. We see from them more clearly
what real learning is - an active process, involving the thoughtful evaluation and
incorporation of what they encounter, rather than a mere passive reception of
impressions. This active learning is their own participation in choosing what sort of
people they are and will become. It is an essential aspect and expression of their
freedom.
One last note – the approach to learning we’ve sketched here is also
characteristic of Herodotus himself. The title of the work we call the Histories might
better be translated as Inquiries. The word “history,” to the modern ear, suggests an
objective and orderly set of facts about the past – perhaps something to be absorbed, but
�not an activity. “Inquiry,” on the other hand, immediately suggests both an activity and
an agent, an inquirer. Herodotus' inquiring intellect is a constant presence in the
presentation of his Inquiries, interrupting the flow of his narrative to present us with his
own commentary and judgments. In his desire to learn and discern causes, he reports –
but then accepts, rejects, and shapes the evidence he encounters into a work that is wideranging and multifaceted but held together by an internal unity, a work that is distinctly
his own.
I invite you now to join us as we undertake the project of learning together,
encountering the new, and the new again, in our texts and conversations with one
another; neither rejecting unthinkingly nor accepting indiscriminately but learning as
free adults, actively shaping ourselves and our community.
THANK YOU.
Before we disperse, let me announce that there are four Graduate Institute study
groups taking place this fall: one on Milton's Paradise Lost; another on Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason ; another on the shorter works of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; and one
on Proust’s Swann’s Way. Information about meeting times, places, and readings will
be circulated in an email. Please join us for the refreshments that are waiting in the back
of the Great Hall before proceeding to your tutorials, which will begin at 5:15.
The 2015 fall term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est!
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Langston, Emily Brooker
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2015
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2015-08
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Emily Brooker Langston for the Fall 2015 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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Graduate Institute
Annapolis
Convocation, Summer 2010
Welcome to new and returning Graduate Institute students,
friends, family, and colleagues.
Aristotle says in the Ethics that, “all knowledge and every
intention desire[s] some good.” (1095a15) I propose to try today
to articulate the good at which we are aiming in our discussions
here at St. John’s. Though you have, no doubt, seen various
statements of the College’s goals in our literature and on our
website, I would like to approach this question from the inside,
and ask what we experience as fulfillment in our best class
conversations.
This is a difficult, perhaps hubristic, project for two reasons. First,
as you know, we aim at no particular result in our
conversations. To be sure, we limit ourselves to one particular
author, one particular shared reading, in each class. But it can
truly be said that we set off on uncharted waters (at least
uncharted by us), with no real captain on the ship, and propose to
meet whatever adventures befall us with only our native wit, our
general goodwill toward each other, the courage we are able to
summon in the face of the unknown, and whatever guidance we
can coax from the otherwise static words before us. I do not
believe I am overstating the situation. Tutors are not professors;
we have no fixed interpretation to which you must subscribe. The
questions we pose are as sincere—and as puzzling—as we can
discover. And the eccentric idea of a conversation among 20
�people with no agenda and no authority resists any simple
characterization of its form and spirit.
The second difficulty is that even tutors have varied
interpretations of our own activity. Each of us individually and
repeatedly examines our ends and means. In this endeavor, we
must set aside our idiosyncratic desires and goals: both the
questions most urgent to us (whether they be “What is virtue?” or
“Is language merely conventional?” or “Is God good?”) and also
any personal ambitions we may have. We each must try to
discern the common goals of the common activity. For the
experience of a shared project is definite and incontrovertible.
Now, often when we state our joint purpose, we—like many other
liberal arts institutions—speak of the cultivation of various
skills. Active learning in the public context of a classroom does
indeed hone one’s ability to reason, improve one’s recognition of
cogent arguments, develop clear and forceful communication,
train one in careful listening, and stimulate one to probe beneath
surface claims. These are many goods that arise from and are
necessary for our mode of learning. We set high standards for
each other with respect to these arts of apprehending, knowing,
and understanding. I feel sure you will be aware of your own
progress in these regards, and I have no doubt you will benefit
from acquiring these skills, universally acknowledged as useful.
But, when I said I wanted to ascertain the good we aim at “from
the inside,” I intended to ask whether the act of conversing has its
own good. To say we converse in order to acquire skills is to treat
conversation as merely a means to an end. Now, I do not
minimize its usefulness as a means for these purposes. But
Aristotle has persuaded me to set a higher standard than the
useful. He says, “that which is pursued for its own sake is more
perfect than that which is pursued for the sake of something
else.” (Ethics 1097a32) Now this thought may be a bit foreign to
�some of you. We’re all inured to encountering the question,
“What will you do with that?”—especially when people discover
our involvement with St. John’s. This question betrays a supreme
emphasis on usefulness—often the crudest sort of usefulness,
that guaranteeing career advancement or a significant increase in
earning power. But surely money itself is the paradigmatic
means, only useful to assist one towards some other end. The
really fascinating question, the question anyone truly interested in
us ought to ask, is: “What do you think fulfills you, what is your
end?”
Apparently, learning is not an activity people generally think of as
fulfilling. I find this attitude hard to understand. Surely, learning is
often difficult; it requires energy, attention, discipline, selfawareness, and openness to change. But many fulfilling activities
are difficult (playing piano, running a marathon, cooking a
gourmet meal). And, unlike those activities, our classes provide
occasions to clarify important issues such as: what priority to
place on family or philanthropy, whether love requires selfsacrifice, how to identify a friend. Seeking answers to such
questions is a noble pursuit. At least one of the goals of learning
is the ability to live and act well; and we can glean much wisdom
from the deepest thinkers of the Western tradition and from our
joint inquiries into their profound thoughts. Learning in this way
can help us discern the principles most conducive to a good life
and can help us to deliberate well about the “proper object and
the proper manner and the proper time” (Aristotle’s Ethics,
1142b28) consequent to such principles. Moreover, this end, of
acting so as to lead the best life, seems to be an end in itself,
simply choiceworthy.
However, once again the good I’ve descried is not really the good
inherent in the conversation. Whatever clarity we achieve may be
provoked by discussion, and certainly the proposed actions
�themselves would not be complete without this clarity of
purpose. But if action is the goal of our conversations, then the
real good is external to the classroom. And those of you about to
study the Ethics will be reminded forcefully by Aristotle of the
crucial role of habit and character in such action (1095b6,
1103a25-b22, 1152a31-33); intellectually grasping what virtue is
may not even amount to “half the battle.” So, if we do learn in
order to act, the value of the learning itself only fully manifests
through yet more effort of a different kind. Even more importantly
for my purpose here today, our conversations at St. John’s do not
necessarily result in shared conclusions about such matters.
Is there any good we strive for together as we engage in our
communal activity? Earlier I found the acquisition of arts
inadequate as a candidate; perhaps the other half of the phrase
“liberal arts” helps. Our education intends to be liberating; our
mission statement formulates this purpose as “...seek[ing] to free
human beings from the tyrannies of unexamined opinions, current
fashions, and inherited prejudices.” (Liberal Education in a
Community of Learning, Annapolis, St. John’s College, 2003,
p.1) To this end, we follow Montaigne’s advice:
Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve
and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust...he will
choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are
certain and assured....For if he embraces Xenophon’s and Plato’s
opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they
will be his.” (“On the Education of Children” from The Complete
Essays, translated by Donald Frame, p. 111.)
As we read the books which have been the original source of
many of our opinions, we become more self-aware. Seemingly
self-evident ideas often appear strange and unfamiliar when
confronted directly in their unmediated state; their shadowy nature
as opinion accepted on mere authority is revealed. Sometimes,
�as we consciously evaluate the integrity of our ideas, we also
become conscious of “having been wrong.” This experience is
not always pleasant, but discomfort at the disagreeableness of
truth may nevertheless be good. In the world outside the college,
being wrong is condemned; there we’re taught to be ashamed at
it, and a posture of confident, all-knowingness is cultivated. Here,
instead, we cultivate a pleasure in “having been wrong.” (It takes
some time to develop this pleasure.) We recognize this moment
of “having been wrong” as learning.
The Greek word Plato uses for this moment is “aporia.” Often
translated as “perplexity,” its etymology reveals a connotation of
placelessness. We see this unrooted state in Meno’s slave boy
when he realizes his assumption that he could easily name the
line that forms double a square is unjustified
(Meno, 84a). Naturally, a certain discomfort attends the
moment—the kind of discomfort that has Meno calling Socrates
names and trying to block every line of inquiry with his “captious
argument” (80a, 80d). To the extent that we agree with Socrates
that it is better to “feel the difficulty [we] are in,” (84a), we at the
College actively pursue such discomfort as a good. We
encourage the open and honest “Well, by Zeus, Socrates, I for
one do not know” of the slave boy rather than Meno’s
obstructionism. Of course, the slave boy has little status to lose,
and perhaps his opinions about geometry are not as deeply held
as the ones we need most to be liberated from.
Deeply held opinions can require a mighty convulsion in order to
be overthrown. Such a convulsion may not derive only from
conversation. When Achilles’ advice at the general council of
Greeks in Book I of the Iliad is spurned, he is shocked and
wounded. They refuse to heed him, not because his advice is
unwise, but because Agamemnon’s status (he is the titular
authority of the whole Greek army) trumps Achilles’ (I.281). Until
�that moment, Achilles seems to have assumed that his
recognition by all as the best warrior warrants also the honor due
the best man. The council’s violation of his assumption provokes
not only volcanic wrath in Achilles, but also a retreat away from
the battle and into extended meditation about his realization that
the world is not as he had perceived: What has he
accomplished? Why is his excellence seemingly not honored? Is
there a better way of life? Why should he care about other
Greeks? (IX. 315-343, 393-409, 608-619)
Perhaps such cataclysmic events are more effective than
conversation in freeing us from whatever opinion fetters
us. However, I think it is no accident that Achilles experiences his
revelation during deliberation in council rather than during the
press and urgency of hand-to-hand combat. No question about
first principles can truly be entertained as one is facing “invincible
hands spattered with bloody filth.” (XX. 504) And some version
of this problem of capitulation to urgent concerns and accepted
societal orders faces us all. As Montaigne points out in his essay
“Of Custom,”
The principal effect of the power of custom is to seize and
ensnare us in such a way that it is hardly within our power to get
ourselves back out of its grip and return into ourselves to reflect
and reason about its ordinances.
Life requires action; action requires choice; choice requires a
principle; custom supplies the requisite principle. The needed
perspective for questioning the community of opinion to which we
belong comes only when we are forcibly removed (as cavedwellers in Plato’s Republic must be) from that community or
when we voluntarily withdraw from it (and enroll in the Graduate
Institute). Rather than be at the mercy of chance events that may
or may not liberate us, if we are to improve our ability to judge
wisely, we need to withdraw ourselves from the crowd, consult
�our best selves, and begin a process of winnowing the contents of
our understanding.
To this extent St. John’s is something of a “magic mountain”—like
the retreat referred to in the title of the Thomas Mann novel some
of you will be studying in preceptorial. The novel takes place in a
sanatorium in Switzerland. People are there to undergo a cure for
tuberculosis. But their struggle with sickness removes them from
the everyday struggle for existence and frees them to engage in
conversations about intellectual, human, emotional, political,
moral, and philosophical matters. The main character Hans
Castorp, while visiting his cousin, decides he wants to be ill, is
attracted to the liberating, holiday atmosphere. There is also a
pleasing rigor to the curative regimen, but more importantly there
is time to cultivate an examination of the meaning of life in this
retreat from the everyday world of capitalism.
Now, I’m disturbed by the analogy just sketched between St.
John’s and a sanatorium; the connotation of illness implies the
need for a cure. Unfortunately, I suppose that the way I’ve
depicted the liberation of a liberal education corresponds with this
idea. For I’ve analyzed the process, I think consistently with
Socrates’ depiction, as a freeing from falsity and illusion. Such
liberation is more a negation, the destruction of an undesired
state, than a positive, healthy activity to be pursued. Even if this
“freedom from” is still a goal worth pursuing, when put in terms of
health, it seems incomplete in a radical way. Not surprisingly, the
self-aware, self-searching characters of
Mann’s Magic Mountain address this issue. At a certain point,
Naphta, one of Hans Castorp’s mentors and a fellow inmate,
defends illness as follows: “Disease was very human indeed. For
to be man was to be ailing. Man was essentially ailing, his state
of unhealthiness was what made him man...” (Magic Mountain, p.
465, Vintage International).
�This justification gives insight into the possibility that the mountain
is in fact a way of life. But don’t we all long to walk upright,
breathe deeply without coughing, stride boldly with no shortness
of breath? I cannot turn Naphta’s defense into an inspiring
affirmation of a positive good—only a cheerless attempt to make
a virtue of necessity. Of course, to the extent that we feel delight
in the very process of being cured, of being liberated from an
opinion masquerading as truth, the magic mountain is positively
good. But, to the extent that the falsity cries out to be replaced by
the healthy and true, our conversations, like those of Socrates
himself, often remain inconclusive and bereft of the particular
intellectual satisfaction attendant on clear and pure
knowledge. Such unimpeded vision more properly belongs to the
act of contemplation as depicted by Aristotle in Book X of
the Ethics, an act which depends least of all on other people
(1177a28-33) and which is most self-sufficient in the sense that it
can be carried on quite apart from conversation.
Is there a positive good, a real health, achieved through
conversation? It seems to me that a kind of intermediate state
exists between the self-sufficient, positively good state Aristotle
describes as political or communal (a state that is an end and not
merely a means, a state achieved through ethical action in
accordance with reason 1097b8-11, 1098a16-19) and the almost
divine but isolated self-sufficient state he describes as achieved
through true knowing (a state that seems more appropriate to Mt.
Olympus than it does to the Magic Mountain—1141b8). I claim a
third kind of self-sufficiency exists which is a hybrid of the
communal and individual. The best conversation forces us
simultaneously to live well with others—to practice the forms of
courage, justice, moderation appropriate to conversation—and
also to exercise what Aristotle calls the highest, most divine part
of our individual nature (1177a20, 1177b28)—namely,
reason. When, in the course of a conversation, we feel ourselves
�guided by some principle external to us even while we are most
vitally awake to our own thoughts, then a kind of austere and
noble harmony (both interpersonal and intrapersonal) comes into
being. I suppose this harmony depends upon the acknowledged
incompleteness of our wisdom, but the negative aspect is
alchemically transformed through our energetic, dynamic
activity. The completeness of attention involved, the fullness of
self which must be brought, the purification of extraneous goals
and motives necessary for such a moment—all produce an
independently choiceworthy activity. So, while many useful goods
may be aimed at in our conversation, I think I am willing to argue
that THIS is the good proper to conversation, the one we really
want to experience inside the classroom. I’m even willing to say
that it is an end in itself, for I myself feel truly alive, truly fulfilled at
such moments.
Marilyn Higuera
�
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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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Higuera, Marilyn
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2010
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2010-06
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Summer 2010 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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Text
St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2011
What Is Graduate Liberal Education?
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 graduate liberal education? Now as citizens of, or visitors in, a democracy dedicated not
to the achievement of happiness but to its pursuit, everything around us commands us to
preoccupy ourselves with means, with procedures, and with methods. We feel a need to
apologize for any way in which we might depart from the common run in how we live our lives.
Our danger is that an excessive self-concern will place obstacles in our path – obstacles like
seminars on seminar, conversations about conversation, questions that ask ‘what is a question?’ –
and hide from us the things themselves that ought to be the subject of our studies. My apology,
then, is that I mean my remarks this afternoon to be a temporary inoculation against this danger:
a short bout of the disease that will leave us, perhaps after some discomfort, with a clear
conscience, and in energetic good health.
So what is graduate liberal education? It suits this occasion for me to begin with the
word ‘graduate.’ This word stands for what binds together all of us here today. Students come
to the Graduate Institute at different times in their lives, from different backgrounds, and with
different goals. Some mean simply to continue their education, others mean to become better
1
�teachers, and still others mean eventually to pursue more advanced degrees elsewhere. But all
come having completed some form of undergraduate education. (The same is true, incidentally,
of the tutors, not just in the Graduate Institute, but at St. John’s as a whole.) And yet,
notwithstanding this publicly-acknowledged completion, each student and each tutor is brought
to the Graduate Institute of St. John’s College by an opposite feeling, one of incompletion: a
feeling of need, for example, or a sense that one’s education is not finished, or an anticipation of
pleasure at the thought of learning more. To give this feeling of incompletion its due, think of
this: while in many quarters it has become a matter of routine expectation that young people will
complete an undergraduate degree, this expectation has not yet been extended to the graduate
level. The feeling that brings each graduate student to St. John’s, like the sense that brings each
tutor here, is not bolstered by routine. To the contrary: many of us pursue our educations here
just when the demands of career and family are at their height, and so very much against
common expectation.
This feeling of incompletion, whatever its form, has from time to time been taken, or
rather, mistaken, for a sign that the undergraduate education that precedes it has been a failure.
This false inference has in turn even led to the allegation that the program of the Graduate
Institute is really a ‘second chance’ at the St. John’s undergraduate program – the Program, as
we sometimes call it – and that, in view of its relative brevity, the graduate program is ‘St. John’s
lite.’ But this allegation is unjust. It makes just as much sense to claim that, if a St. John’s
undergraduate were to say on graduation day that she wished that she could have had a
preceptorial on Plato’s Republic, or another chance to work through Euclid’s Elements, then her
undergraduate education was a failure. Indeed, it makes just as much sense to claim that, if a St.
John’s tutor were to be eager to reread Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for his Politics and
2
�Society tutorial, because he hoped to learn something from his reading, then both his
undergraduate and his graduate educations were failures – to say nothing about the time he spent
as a tutor at the College. So in the question ‘what is graduate liberal education,’ the word
‘graduate’ does not mean ‘failed undergraduate.’ It means something more affirmative.
The best way to get at this more affirmative meaning is to infer what we at St. John’s
think ‘graduate’ means from a comparison of the graduate and undergraduate programs. The
first differences that come to sight in such a comparison are quantitative. Undergraduates attend
four classes a semester for eight semesters; graduates attend three classes a term for four terms.
The undergraduate classes are seminars, tutorials, laboratories, and preceptorials; the graduate
classes are seminars, tutorials, and preceptorials. Undergraduates have two tutorials a semester,
language and mathematics; graduates have one a term, and its content depends on the segment.
So with respect to quantity, it does appear that the graduate program is to the undergraduate as
shorter is to longer or less to more.
But here at St. John’s we know that quantitative measures are laconic, if not wholly mute,
unless they are informed by qualitative judgments. And it is the qualitative differences between
the graduate and undergraduate programs that begin to shed light on the affirmative meaning of
the word ‘graduate.’ Notice that while each of the undergraduate classes, and above all seminar,
proceeds roughly chronologically through its readings, over all four years of the program, each
of the graduate classes is roughly chronological only within its segment, and more strictly so
only within each class. Since the chronological order is the default order in the undergraduate
program, adopted when no other ordering theory is at work, the curtailed chronological order of
the graduate program is a sign that some other consideration intrudes. That consideration,
clearly, is choice. Within certain limits – not every segment is offered every term, and the
3
�History segment must not be taken first – graduate students are allowed to choose the order of
their studies. Perhaps more importantly, since the master’s degree is granted after four segments
have been completed, graduate students are allowed to choose which segment to omit from their
studies. The same consideration informs the place of the preceptorial in the undergraduate and
graduate programs. While students in both programs choose their preceptorials from a list of
offerings, undergraduates can choose two, and the choice is a privilege reserved for juniors and
seniors, whereas graduates can choose four, one for each segment. This qualitative difference,
that the graduate program affords more scope for choice, indicates that by ‘graduate’ the College
means, in part, someone who can be entrusted with more choices in her education.
But why can graduates be entrusted with more choices? And more importantly, to what
end is their greater scope for choice? Another qualitative difference between our two programs
is helpful here. Notice that, in the place of the undergraduates’ four mathematics tutorials and
three labs, the graduates have a mathematics and natural science segment, with a seminar,
tutorial, and preceptorial. Only in the tutorial is the liberal art of mathematics cultivated through
regular demonstration; the preceptorials for this segment only occasionally involve
demonstration or practica. Instead, our graduate students study mathematics and natural science
chiefly by reading and discussing great books. Harvey, Newton, and Darwin are read in the
undergraduate tutorial or laboratory, but in the graduate seminar. Likewise, in the place of the
undergraduates’ four language tutorials and one music tutorial, the graduates have a literature
segment, with a seminar, tutorial, and preceptorial. Only in the tutorial, again, are the liberal arts
of grammar, rhetoric, and logic cultivated through the study of poetry and prose. Instead, our
graduate students study literature chiefly by reading and discussing great books. More tellingly,
in the place of translation, which is the central activity of many semesters of the four language
4
�tutorials of the undergraduate program, our graduate students can choose to take a Greek
preceptorial that is ancillary to reading a great book in its original language.
More so than in the undergraduate program, in the graduate program most of the classes
are centered on the reading and discussion of great books, as distinguished from the cultivation
of the liberal arts. The tutorial schedules in each of the five segments show that only in the
literature tutorial is there latitude for variations in scheduling and content – variations associated
with the cultivation of the liberal arts in the undergraduate tutorials. The strict schedules and
settled content of the other four graduate tutorials make them resemble seminars and
preceptorials in the graduate, and undergraduate, programs. Indeed, only one of the five segment
titles even names a liberal art; the others name fields of study, such as are often used to order
books in a bookstore. (I will say something about the dangerousness of our segment titles in a
subsequent convocation address.)
This comparison of the two programs that express the Program, each of which combines
in its own way the study of the great books with the cultivation of the liberal arts, makes the
qualitative meaning of their quantitative differences clear. Graduate students at St. John’s
College cultivate the liberal arts less than do their undergraduate colleagues, but they can thereby
devote proportionately more of their time to a more focused study of the great books of the
western tradition. By ‘graduate’ the College means someone who can be entrusted with more
choices in his education, because he can be presumed to have cultivated the liberal arts enough in
his life to study at the graduate level, and to make good choices of subjects for his study. This,
then, is the end of the greater scope of choice afforded to graduate students by the Program: to
permit them to focus on a few great books of a few kinds, so as to study them in greater depth,
with greater intensity. It is no accident that, while the seminar, as the class in which the liberal
5
�arts are exercised on the great books, is the heart of the undergraduate program, the heart of the
graduate program is the preceptorial, as the class in which one or a few great books are read with
the greatest focus.
So the conclusion, for the moment, of my inquiry – the answer I suggest to my question
‘what is graduate liberal education?’ – is the following: graduate liberal education is not so much
the continued cultivation of the liberal arts, as the more focused study of the great books of the
western tradition. Of course, like so many other answers to ‘what is?’ questions, this answer is
itself a riddle that poses another question: ‘what does it mean to study a great book?’ Common
sense tells us, after all, that we study not the books themselves but the things that the books are
about, human being and the world. Perhaps it would be better if we could get the books out of
our way, and go straight to the things themselves. As an epilogue to my inquiry today, I would
like to suggest a solution to this riddle – one that takes seriously the thought that the great books
are the things themselves.
When we at St. John’s College say that we study books, we mean that we study what is
essential about them, rather than what is accidental. In part, this means that we are not primarily
concerned with accidents of translation, or edition, or substantiation. The ways in which two
translations of the Republic or two editions of the Federalist Papers might differ are only
interesting to us insofar as they illuminate what is essential about these books. And it makes no
difference to us whether the books are written on parchment, printed on paper, or displayed on an
iPad, provided that what is essential shines through. But we are concerned to spend our limited
time on certain books, those whose essential content is great. What, then, do we mean by ‘great,’
with respect to books?
6
�At first it might seem that by ‘great’ we mean ‘the cause of great effects.’ This is not a
bad way to begin. For how else would we first suspect that a book is great, if not by hearing,
among everyone or among all those whom we admire, the opinion ‘this book is great’? And to
produce such an opinion among so many or such admirable people is surely to cause a great
effect. But it doesn’t take much reflection to see the problem with this view. How do we know
that the book in question is really the cause of, that is, really responsible for, this great effect?
The difference between the accidental and the essential is helpful here too. We are not interested
in books that have great effects by accident – for example, by being misunderstood. Such things
are in the territory of the intellectual historian. Rather, we are interested in books that essentially
cause great effects. For the same reason, we are not interested in books that fail to have great
effects by accident – again, for example, by being misunderstood. Rather, we are interested in
books that essentially intend to cause great effects.
The objection that books do not strictly speaking have intentions should not confute us.
Like every product of human art, a book has an intention only to the extent that the human being
who authored it had an intention: the rest is accident. (If your thoughts have just strayed to
numberless monkeys and the works of Shakespeare, I encourage you to try the experiment.) If
we are interested in books that essentially intend great effects, we are necessarily interested in
books whose authors also intended such effects. What we encounter in these great books is their
authors preserved and perfected, made young and beautiful.
But what is the greatest effect an author can intend? For surely there are effects greater
than merely spreading the opinion ‘this book is great.’ Here we are at the heart of the matter. To
foster and educate human beings, to help a human type become actual from among those
potentials that compose human nature; and, concomitantly, to take what is given to us in some
7
�disorder and illuminate a world, ordered in terms of first and last, foreground and background –
this is the greatest effect an author can intend. This, too, is what it means for the great books to
be the things themselves: that in the light of the human types they foster and the worlds they
illuminate, the things themselves also emerge. The traditional subjects of the liberal arts – the
words that are the fundamental beings in grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the magnitudes and
multitudes that are the fundamental beings in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy – are
first illuminated by the more comprehensive relation of human being and world articulated in a
great book. Such books furnish the minds of whole epochs of humankind. Such books,
regardless of the genre in which history has shelved them, are all products of their author’s love
of wisdom. And so they are worthy of our focused study, here in the Graduate Institute at St.
John’s College.
I would like to conclude this epilogue by announcing that there will be a study group this
term on Machiavelli’s Prince, held on Tuesday afternoons at 2:30 in the Hartle Room, beginning
on July 5th. 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 class.
The summer 2011 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff Black
Annapolis, Maryland
June 20, 2011
8
�
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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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8 pages
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2011
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2011-06-20
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Annapolis_GI_Summer_2011_Convocation
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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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pdf
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Black, Jeff J. S., 1970-
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is Graduate Liberal Education?"
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2012
What Is Liberal Education? Part I
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 shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by asking ‘what is
liberal education?’
Now let me reassure you that I don’t mean to try to answer this question in the next
fifteen minutes. My somewhat more modest goal is to divide the question into two parts, and
today to ask only ‘what is liberal?’ I mean to save the second part of the question, ‘what is
education?,’ for my next convocation address, in the fall 2012 term. Still, this modesty doesn’t
get me entirely out of difficulty. For now I find myself asking a ‘what is?’ question about an
adjective, ‘liberal’ – as if a quality of beings could itself be a being. Perhaps there is a noun that
gives meaning to this adjective? It turns out there could be as many as three.
There is a tradition here at St. John’s about this word, ‘liberal,’ that is a helpful place to
begin. It dates from the foundation of the New Program in 1937, when Scott Buchanan, the new
dean of the College, outlined its Program in a document titled “In Search of a Liberal College.”
To introduce his reader to the liberal arts, Buchanan begins with the etymology of ‘liberal,’
which he traces to three different Latin nouns: liber, or book; liberi, or free human beings;1 and
liberi, or children. Add a fourth Latin noun – libra, or balance – and a dash of alliterative
1
�whimsy, and you get the College’s motto: facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque, “I fashion free
human beings out of children by means of books and a balance.” Let’s leave aside libra, the
balance, which stands for laboratory science and which does not have a prominent place in the
graduate Program here at the College, and inquire instead into the meaning of ‘liberal’ through
the other three words.
First: liber, or book. If ‘liberal’ means ‘bookish,’ then the education we pursue here is
indeed liberal education, for perhaps even more than those who pursue the undergraduate version
of the Program – as I claimed in my convocation address last summer – we in the Graduate
Institute learn together chiefly by reading great books and discussing the questions that arise
from our reading. Before we congratulate ourselves on our bookish education, though, we
should acknowledge that the term ‘bookish’ is pejorative to some. You may have heard the
disapproving phrase ‘book smart,’ which is sometimes contrasted to a more approving phrase,
like ‘street smart.’ The thought behind these phrases and this contrast is that a bookish education
is concerned with things that are unreal, because abstract, or theoretical, or fictional. ‘Street
smarts,’ on the other hand, come from lived experience with things that are real, because
concrete or practical. The people who use these phrases and make this contrast are probably
thinking that only the ‘school of hard knocks’ can equip us for a life well-lived; a liberal, bookish
education only equips us for a life well-read. If ‘liberal’ means ‘bookish,’ then, we are
compelled by their disapproval to wonder whether a liberal education is what we want.
It is fitting to grant in reply that the content of the books we read is abstract, or
theoretical, or fictional. We might even be tempted to sharpen the criticism: since we read the
great books, what we read about is most abstract, most theoretical, the greatest of fictions. But
we should also ask these critics what they mean by ‘real.’ The concrete or practical content of
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�the real experiences they advocate are deeds, rather than thoughts; ‘put down your books and live
a little’ could be their motto. But deeds are accompanied by thoughts, guided by thoughts, and
even magnified by thoughts. When we act we often begin by thinking; when we are kept from
acting we often argue; and when we are asked why we act, we often give reasons. When we
want to act with the assistance of others, we give them reasons. Moreover, every deed aims at a
state that is not yet achieved, which is to say, at a fiction. It turns out that the real, if it is
characterized by deeds, is shot through both with thought and with fiction. All ‘street smart’
human beings, we might say with a twinkle in our eyes, stretch out toward ‘book smarts.’ Their
stretching out is an inadvertent desire for liberal, bookish education.
Now we may have convinced our critics that deeds are embroiled with thoughts, and
reality with fiction. But isn’t it still the case that a bookish education is somehow more pallid
than real life experience? Don’t people read to escape the real world, to evade their
responsibilities? We can find a kind of reply to these questions near the end of Plato’s Phaedrus.
Having just invented a myth claiming that written speeches are good only as reminders to those
who already know – which is to say, that learning cannot come from books – Socrates imagines a
different kind of speech, one that is “written with knowledge in the soul of him who understands,
with power to defend itself, and knowing how to speak and to keep silent toward those it ought”
[276a-b]. He envisions, in other words, a writing that behaves like a living being, a writing the
reading of which is like interacting with a living being. The great books that are also our
teachers are such writings. Because they are written with knowledge, each time we turn to them
they speak to us in a way commensurate with our capacities. If conversation with a living being
is a real life experience – as our critics of bookish education would claim – then so too is reading
such a writing. Indeed, since they are purged of the mute, the everyday, and the accidental,
3
�reading the great books is more vivid than much of real life experience. Far from being an
evasion of the real world and its responsibilities, our liberal, bookish education confronts this
world directly and courageously.
Let’s turn to the second noun behind the adjective ‘liberal’: liberi, or free human beings.
It points to the meaning of liberal education that is perhaps most congenial to us, as participants
in a modern liberal democracy: liberal education as education of the free, as education to
freedom, as the education that most supports our political regime. But there are complications to
this meaning of ‘liberal’ that demand our attention; and it is a principle of education to be most
suspicious of what is congenial. First, is liberal education an education of the free, or an
education of the unfree to freedom? The great documents of our democracy tell us the former:
that we are endowed by our creator with an unalienable right to liberty, which government must
secure for us. But our motto tells us the latter: that the College, not the government, makes free
human beings – presumably out of those who are not free, despite being citizens of this great
republic. The government tells us that we are free to do what we want; but the College tells us
that we are not free until we know what we should want. Now St. John’s is supported in this
bold claim by one of the greatest of the great books that we read: the Republic of Plato. In that
dialogue Plato has his Socrates depict “our nature in its education and want of education”
through the image of a cave in which human beings are imprisoned “from childhood” [514a-b].
Human beings may be born free, Socrates’ image tells us, but most or perhaps all of us become
unfree as children, and we then need education if we are to become free again. If Socrates’
depiction is right, then a liberal education begins with the realization that we are not free; and the
belief that we are free is an obstacle to such an education.
4
�But this complication goes further. In Plato’s dialogue Meno, as we all know, Socrates
spends a lot of time trying to get a recalcitrant Meno to offer a satisfying definition of virtue. At
one point near the middle of the dialogue, after Meno has evaded Socrates’ demand in a variety
of ways, Socrates says that he will let himself be ruled by Meno, “since you don’t even attempt
to rule yourself – so that you can be free, I suppose” [86d-e]. By the end of the dialogue, the
freedom-loving Meno has learned nothing; the one who has learned the most from Socrates is
Meno’s obedient, nameless slave. If Socrates’ diagnosis is right, then liberal education not only
requires that we grant that we are not free; it also requires that we give up our desire for freedom.
We must become slaves of the speeches, following wherever they lead.
Can this be right, though? According to still another meaning of ‘liberal,’ liberal
education is education for free human beings, as distinguished from slaves, because it begins by
requiring that we have the leisure, the freedom from necessity, to pursue it. This freedom makes
liberal education an end in itself; to the extent that education is not an end in itself, to the extent
that it is not free from necessity, it is not liberal. This sense of ‘liberal’ reminds us that we
diminish liberal education when we talk only about the skills that accompany it, or the careers
for which it prepares us. But Socrates’ warning from the Meno about the desire to be free, and
about the need for us to rule ourselves, also reminds us that even activities for their own sake are
subject to rules, and not simply free from necessity. So how can it be that liberal education, the
education that is fitting for free human beings because it alone is for its own sake, nonetheless
requires that we acknowledge and accept that we are not free?
This brings me to the last of our Latin nouns: liberi, or children. According to our motto,
children are the raw material on which the College works, out of which to fashion free human
beings. This claim makes some sense for the undergraduate Program, but not for the Graduate
5
�Institute: since we require our students to have earned bachelor’s degrees, we cannot say that
they begin with us as children. But there is another respect in which the word liberi, or children,
could be applied to graduate students – and perhaps more so than to undergraduates. There is an
ancient accusation leveled against inquiry into fundamental questions, one that is at least as old
as Plato’s Gorgias: that such inquiry is childish. In that dialogue a young Athenian named
Callicles, angered by the claims Socrates makes about justice and punishment, bursts into the
conversation with a long speech, during which he tells Socrates that he feels about philosophy
the same way he feels about mumbling and playing around childishly:
For seeing philosophy in a young lad, I admire it, and it seems to me fitting, and I
consider this human being to be a free man, whereas the one who does not
philosophize I consider illiberal, someone who will never deem himself worthy of
any fine and noble affair. But whenever I see an older man still philosophizing
and not released from it, this man, Socrates, surely seems to me to need a beating
[485c-d].
We find an echo of the same view in Paul, who writes in his first Letter to the Corinthians,
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I
became a man, I put away childish things” [I Cor. 13:11]. Knowledge or faith about
fundamental matters is fitting for an adult; inquiry into fundamental matters is childish. So what
are we doing, inquiring at our age?
The best response to this accusation of childishness comes from a book by Friedrich
Nietzsche, titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It tells of a man named Zarathustra who wants to give
his happiness meaning by giving humankind a gift, and so descends from his mountain to the
valley and the town below. There he speaks to the townspeople, but he fails to convince them of
the value of his gift; so he begins to travel in search of companions, and while travelling he
makes a series of speeches. The first of these, spoken during his stay in a town called ‘The
Motley Cow,’ is titled “On the Three Metamorphoses.” In it Zarathustra describes three changes
6
�of shape in what he calls “the spirit”: “how the spirit becomes a camel, and the camel, a lion; and
the lion, finally, a child” [ASZ, 137]. The first metamorphosis, into a camel, occurs when the
spirit first wants to bear the most difficult burdens; the second, into a lion, occurs when these
burdens force the camel into the loneliest desert, and it must oppose the command ‘thou shalt’
with the demand ‘I will.’ If its opposition is successful, the lion wins freedom for itself, and it
can undergo the third metamorphosis, into a child. About this final form of the spirit Zarathustra
says: “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a
first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’” [ASZ, 139].
With Nietzsche’s help, then, we can correct those who accuse liberal education of being
childish, by saying that in its highest form it is instead childlike. Continuing inquiry into
fundamental questions is innocent, because it asks ‘what is?’ without regard for the practical
consequences, and because it is deaf to the adult demand that its questions be settled for the sake
of action. It is forgetting because it sets aside the authoritative answers to its questions. It is a
new beginning because it seeks to ask about what is first for human beings, what is given. And
perhaps most importantly, childlike education is a game in the highest sense. It combines the
freedom from necessity that distinguishes play from work with the willing subjection to
necessity that distinguishes play from rest. It combines the camel’s readiness to shoulder the
greatest burdens with the lion’s fierce demand that the burdens be of his own choosing. The
result is a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’: something that is for its own
sake, but that can be yoked to other things, and so give rise to a world.
Let this be the conclusion, for now, of this inquiry into ‘what is liberal?’ Liberal
education is bookish education, freeing education, childlike education. As education through
conversation with the great books, it is the consummation of practice and a courageous
7
�confrontation with what is most real. It is the education of the free who know they are not free
into a freedom they do not desire. It is an education that forgets and begins again, that plays at
the most serious things, and that thereby gives us a world in which to live. This is liberal; so
what, then, is education?
I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be a study group this term on
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which will meet on Tuesday afternoons, from 3:00 to 4:30, in
the Hartle Room, beginning on June 26th. We will read and discuss one act at each meeting.
Also, tomorrow at 2:00 there will be a writing workshop, also in the Hartle Room. Lastly, I
would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great
Hall, before going to preceptorial.
The summer 2012 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
17 June 2012
Delivered 18 June 2012
Notes
1
Actually, Buchanan wrote liberus, free human being; but I can find no evidence of this substantive form of the
adjective liber, or free.
8
�
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2012 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is Liberal Education? Part I" in Annapolis, MD.
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2014
On the Politics & Society Segment
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a
community of learning, at a College 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 inquire into ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining
the readings of the Politics & Society segment.
The subject of this convocation address – the fourth of five, each treating one of the
segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address,
delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the
Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of
that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as
compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names
announcing that each segment treats a distinct subject matter. Now I hope to make good on these
claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title ‘Politics
& Society? Before I proceed to answer my own question, I should caution you that the threads I
mean to follow for the next few minutes – threads that run through the tutorial and seminar
readings of the segment, and that are connected to threads that run through other segments – are
by no means the only ones worth following. I only insist that these threads are present in the
1
�segment readings, and that they are truly worth following. So again, what are the wonderful
questions raised by ‘Politics & Society?’
I hope that you will humor me as I begin, one last time, with what at first looks like the
least meaningful element of our segment title: the twisted and enigmatic ampersand. For what
brand of ‘and’ does this old-fashioned symbol stand? Does it stand for the ‘and’ of a hendiadys,
making ‘Politics & Society’ like ‘might and main’ – a phrase composed of two elements that
mean one thing, a phrase that is therefore superfluous and redundant? Or does the ampersand
stand for a genuinely additive, and therefore divisive, conjunction – one that links two things
perhaps ordinarily found together, like ‘flotsam and jetsam’: the one present by nature, the other
by art? Are ‘politics’ and ‘society’ one thing or two?
Let’s try to say what each of these words means. ‘Politics’ comes first, and is perhaps the
easier of the two. The English word comes to us from the Greek politikē, meaning ‘the things of
the polis’: that is, the things of the city, understanding the city as the body of the citizens. One
form of this word appears as the title of one of the books that we read in the Politics & Society
seminar: Aristotle’s Politics. At the beginning of that book, Aristotle tells us that every city is
some sort of community, and every community aims at some apparent good. The community
that aims at the most authoritative and comprehensive good, he continues, is called “the city or
the political community” [1252a1-6]. In the next chapter, Aristotle clarifies his point. The city
is the complete or self-sufficient community, so to speak, such that while it comes into being “for
the sake of living,” out of need and fear, “it exists for the sake of living well,” without need and
without fear. If the other incomplete and insufficient communities are by nature, like the family,
the household, and the village, then this complete and self-sufficient community is also by
2
�nature, as the first to achieve their ends. Evidently, Aristotle concludes, the city exists by nature,
and man is by nature a political animal [1252b25-1253a5].
Aristotle picks up this thread at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, which we read
first in the Politics & Society tutorial. If politics concerns the partnership whose end is the most
comprehensive and authoritative good – presuming that there is such a good – then if there is a
science of politics, it will be a science of this most comprehensive and authoritative good
[1094a15-1094b]. Everyone agrees that this good is happiness, Aristotle continues [1095a1520], but not everyone agrees on what leads to happiness: some say pleasure, some say political
activity, some say contemplation [1095b15-20]. These claims launch him on the main project of
the Ethics: to examine pleasure, moral virtue, and intellectual virtue to see to what extent each of
these merits the title of comprehensive and authoritative good – and so to what extent each of
them is of concern to politics.
We find a similar pattern near the beginning of the other Politics & Society seminar text
that has a word related to politikē in its title: Plato’s Politeia, better known to us by its Latin title
as the Republic. In this book, Socrates’ long defense of the goodness of the virtue of justice
begins with the construction of a city in speech, within which he and his companions hope to see
both justice and the good that comes of it writ large [369a]. This city begins as a “city of utmost
necessity,” composed of four or five men [369e], but under pressure first of the principle of
specialization and then of the desire for luxuries, the “city of utmost necessity” balloons,
according to Socrates, first into a “healthy city” and then into a “feverish city” [372e]. In the
eyes of Glaucon, one of Socrates’ young companions, by contrast, the healthy city is a “city of
sows” [372d], and only the feverish city is fit for people “nowadays” [372e]. Socrates and his
companions end up seeking justice and its consequences in this feverish city. Once again we see
3
�an investigation of virtue, as a candidate for the comprehensive and authoritative good, against
the backdrop of a complete and self-sufficient association, as opposed to an incomplete and
insufficient one. (That Socrates and Glaucon seem to disagree about what constitutes sufficiency
is only one of the interesting details I’m passing over.) The more familiar Latin translation of
politeia, or ‘regime,’ as res publica, or ‘public things,’ helps by reminding us that the regime,
constituted by a claim about the authoritative and comprehensive good, is the animating principle
of all things public and political, as opposed to private and pre-political.
The political realm, we can conclude, is the public realm of authoritative claims about the
comprehensive human good. There are several such claims, and politics is their contest with one
another for the right to rule. But what, then, is society?
The English word ‘society’ comes from the Latin socius, meaning ‘companion.’ Any
group of companions, this etymology suggests, constitutes an association, and so a society.
Society seems, then, to be the genus of which politics is a species. But the first use of this Latin
term in the Politics & Society segment comes in one of the tutorial readings: Aquinas’ “Treatise
on Law,” questions 90 through 97 of the first part of the second part of the mammoth Summa
Theologica. One occurrence of the term is particularly striking for our purposes. In question 95
article 4, Aquinas asks “Is Isidore’s Division of Human Laws Appropriate?” In his answer he
remarks in passing that it is proved, in Book I Chapter 1 of the Politics, that “man is by nature a
social animal [animal sociale; emphasis added].” Lest we think that Aquinas takes the political
and the social to be synonymous, he continues: “But those things which are derived from the law
of nature by way of particular determination belong to the civil right [ius civile] according as
each political community [civitas] decides on what is best for itself.” Though Aquinas does not
use Latin terms etymologically related to politikē, other than to refer to Aristotle’s Politics, he
4
�does not lack a term to distinguish politics from society: politics is the realm of the civitas, and
of civil right. And for someone as familiar with Aristotle as Aquinas clearly was, it’s easy to
detect in Aquinas’ distinction between the social and the civil something like Aristotle’s famous
distinction in the Ethics between what is just by nature and what is just by convention [1134b171135a5]. By this distinction, Aquinas suggests that the social is the sphere of natural human
association, and is governed by natural law, which is the same everywhere. The civil or political,
by contrast, is the sphere of conventional associations, and is governed by civil right, which
differs from place to place.
Two other passages from the Treatise on Law support this interpretation of Aquinas’
meaning. In question 94 article 2, Aquinas asks “Does the Natural Law Contain Several
Precepts or One Only?” His answer is that it contains several, and because human beings have
“a natural inclination to know the truth about God and to live in society,” two of these precepts
are “to shun ignorance, [and] to avoid offending those among whom one has to live.” Later, in
question 96 article 2, he asks “Does It Belong to Human Law” – the source of civil right,
remember – “to Repress All Vices?” And he answers:
human laws do not forbid all vices from which the virtuous abstain but only the
more grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain and
chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human
society could not be maintained; thus human law prohibits murder, theft, and
suchlike.
In introducing the idea of society into the Politics & Society readings, and distinguishing this
idea from the idea of politics, Aquinas thus redefines the political. It is no longer the public
realm of authoritative claims about the comprehensive human good. Rather, it is the realm of
conventional legal prohibitions against offense, also known as civil rights, which vary in their
particular character from place to place. Instead, society is the realm of authoritative claims
about the comprehensive good, based on the natural law. This law is comprehensive because it
5
�pertains to human beings as rational; it is good because all law aims at the common good of
those it rules; and it is authoritative because it comes from God.
By distinguishing society from politics in this way, Aquinas refounds, and so reorients,
the fundamental political question. No longer does the determination of the best regime depend
on the adjudication of claims about the best way of life, and so on the investigation of pleasure
and the moral and intellectual virtues. Now reason discovers the best way of life in the social
dictates of natural law, and politics need only determine which civil rights are required for us to
obey these dictates in each case. To a great extent, the political thinkers who come after Aquinas
accept this reorientation of the fundamental question. Among the readings in the Politics &
Society segment, for example, the first occurrence of the word ‘society’ in English comes,
unsurprisingly, in Hobbes’s Leviathan. But listen to how he uses it, in a famous passage that
demands to be read in full:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy
to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other
security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them
withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof
is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the Earth, no navigation, nor use of
the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no
instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no
knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no
society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and
the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short [XIII.9].
Hobbes lists society among those commodious things that only a commonwealth, with its
common power, can secure. As his argument develops in subsequent chapters of Leviathan, we
learn, as in Aquinas, that reason can discover the best way of life in the social dictates of natural
law – dictates such as “seek peace,” and “defend ourselves” [XIV.4] – and that politics need only
determine which civil rights are required for us to obey these dictates in each case. But notice
Hobbes’s striking innovation on Aquinas. The natural human state is the original human state,
6
�and the original human state is a state of war. Man is not naturally social according to Hobbes;
rather, society is always and everywhere the artificial product of the science of politics. The
tremendous gravity of the state of war requires a draconian allocation of rights to resist its
downward pull: all for the sovereign, and next to none for the subjects. And there is no ground
for disagreement with this allocation of rights, since there is no other comprehensive and
authoritative human good whose provision will guarantee peace [XI.1].
Though the political thinkers who follow Hobbes, like Locke, Rousseau, and the
American founders, disagree about the precise allocation of rights needed to constitute society,
they agree that this is the goal of politics: to make naturally asocial human beings social through
the political art. In the words of our 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 certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to
secure these Rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the
Consent of the Governed.”
Time does not permit me to wonder whether one seminar author I have not yet
mentioned, Friedrich Nietzsche, also falls into this Thomistic-Hobbesian scheme. Instead, let me
close by pointing out some of the implications of the thread I have just followed. First, the
difference marked by the ampersand between ‘politics’ and ‘society’ does not correspond to the
difference between the readings in the segment’s seminar and tutorial. We do not have a
‘Politics seminar’ and a ‘Society tutorial,’ for example. Instead, the difference between ‘politics’
and ‘society’ in each class seems primarily chronological, corresponding roughly to the
difference between the ancient and the modern readings, or perhaps more accurately, to that
between the polytheistic and the monotheistic ones. Second, we can now see, I think, some of
7
�the wonderful, terrible questions the segment raises. Is the political realm comprehensive and
self-sufficient? If so, are the alternative claims whose contest constitutes that realm – claims on
behalf of pleasure, or moral virtue, or intellectual virtue – irreducible alternatives? Or is the
political partial and derivative, because it is dependent on some higher social principle, like the
natural law, or some more fundamental social principle, like the fear of death? If so, is there one
such principle, or many? Finally, if the political is comprehensive but plural, or if it is not
comprehensive but depends on plural extra-political principles, does this herald nothing for
humanity but ceaseless war? And if, on the other hand, the political is dependent on a single
social principle, does this dependence promise peace – and how can we distinguish it from
universal tyranny?
There will be not one but four Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: on
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, on Rousseau’s Social Contract, on the short plays of Samuel Beckett,
and on Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Schedules and meeting places for all four of
these groups will be circulated by email when they become available. Let me also invite you all
to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class.
And new students are reminded to visit the IT department in the basement of Randall Hall
between preceptorial and tutorial to set up their email accounts.
The summer 2014 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
16 June 2014
Note
For my citations from Aristotle’s Politics, I have used the Second Edition of Carnes Lord’s translation. Citations
from his Nicomachean Ethics are from Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins’s translation. My citations from Plato’s
Republic are from Allan Bloom’s translation, also in its Second Edition. For Aquinas I used the translation found in
the Hackett collection titled On Law, Morality, and Politics. And for Hobbes’s Leviathan, I used the Curley edition,
also published by Hackett, which modernizes Hobbes’s spelling and punctuation.
8
�
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St. John's College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2015
Emily Brooker Langston
Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families, friends,
and tutors – to the summer term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's College.
Today, the new students among us are becoming members of the St. John's
community, a community dedicated to liberal education - to an education that is freeing.
That the goal of this education is to make us free is proclaimed on the seal of the
college. You don't see the seal around quite as often as we did at one time, but you may
still find it in many places. For instance, it is embedded in the brick section of the quad,
before the steps descending toward the playing fields and college creek. On the seal is a
motto in Latin: “Facio Liberos ex liberis libris libraque.” Or, less alliteravly, in English,
“I make free adults out of children by means of books and a balance.”
I've chosen to begin with this motto, (and in fact I will only talk about the first
half of it: “I make free adults out of children..”) both because it offers a succinct
summary of the aim of the college and its program – and also because of part of it that
might be particularly interesting to us as members of the Graduate Institute. “I make free
adults,” it says... “out of children.” This reference to children seems roughly appropriate
when we apply it to the 17 and 18 year-olds who will walk across the stage of the
Francis Scott Key auditorium when the undergraduate program welcomes a new class in
�the fall. But for many years now, the college has also offered a Graduate Program. Can
the aims of the Graduate Institute be understood in the terms proposed by the motto?
Looking around this room – where are the children here? All of you have completed a
Bachelor's degree, many of you have spent years in a career or more than one, you have
raised families, you have other educational attainments and professional
accomplishments. Do we fit within the purpose set forth on the seal? If so, how?
So: “I make free adults out of children.”
Reading the phrase again, what might we notice? Firs, the motto asserts that
freedom is not something simply given to us, either as human beings or as members of a
particular political society. We do not come into the world as free. And this should make
us wonder what is meant by “freedom.” Certainly one popular understanding of the term
would have us suppose that we are MOST free when we are children, and become less
and less so as we enter into the responsibilities of the adult citizen. The motto, however,
claims that free people – whatever we may mean by that - are not born, they must be
formed. Accepting, for the purposes of the address, this rather bold assertion I will then
focus on the question - But what does it mean to say that these free people are formed
“OUT OF CHILDREN?” Are we all are somehow children, no matter our age, until we
have undergone some process of education? Or is there perhaps something special about
children, such that only out of “children” can free people be made? Both possibilities are
worth thinking about, and I will say a little about each.
�In order to consider this question farther, I will turn now to a text we now all have
in common; some of you may have read it for the first time in preparation for yesterday's
orientation seminar. I mean, of course, Plato’s dialogue Meno. I think I can find in that
dialogue at least three characteristics of what it might mean to be a child, or at least to be
childlike. Two highlight ways in which we are all children in so far as we are not
educated, while one demonstrates a sense in which we must be childlike in order to
become educated.
You all know that in this dialogue, Socrates makes the young man Meno admit
(quite grudgingly) that he cannot give an account of something he had thought he
understood. Stunned by the torpedo fish Socrates, Meno finds himself unable to define
“virtue” - a topic about which he himself says he had “made many speeches ... before
large audiences – and very good speeches I thought.” Meno has been exposed. Not only
does he not know what virtue is, until this very moment he did not know that he did not
know! He has assumptions about virtue, and about other things as well no doubt. These
assumptions are based somehow on examples he has encountered of men, women,
children, slave and others who are called “virtuous.” But he has never held these
assumptions up and looked at them or questioned them. He has left them unexamined
and so he does not know the shape even of his own thoughts on the matter, much less
how to conduct an inquiry into whether or not these thoughts are true. In this way he is
like a child, and like all of us in so far as we lack education. We move comfortably
�through the world, even perhaps thinking we know a great deal - but it is only because
we cannot really imagine anything about anything beyond the swarm of examples we
encounter in our immediate experience. We are full of unexamined, and quite possibly
false, opinion that we mistake for knowledge.
At this point in the dialogue, Meno, frustrated at having been made to look
foolish, challenges Socrates with the idea that one cannot seek for knowledge that one
does not have – for not knowing it already, how would one recognize it when one had
found it? Socrates in response tells Meno something he has heard from “wise men and
women… whose care it is to be able to give an account of their practices.” According to
these, and I quote: “As the soul has been born often, and has seen all things here and in
the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising
that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things.
…searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection.” So, Socrates suggests that we
have already learned everything in a time before our births, and that learning for us now
is a sort of remembering. Thus when we find what we have been searching for, we can
recognize it – much as we can recognize a name we have forgotten when someone else
mentions it.
It's an odd story, and aspects of it may strike us as not very plausible. Socrates
himself says he would not insist on every detail. But note what it essentially asserts.
Learning is not simply filling up a void called ignorance by pouring in content called
knowledge. Real learning has not taken place until the child, or student, checks the new
�information against something within herself. In other words, we are able to learn
because of something that is already within us. In order to be a child capable of being
educated, and thus of being made free, we cannot come simply with our unexamined
opinions; we bring something else, too. The account Socrates gives here suggests that
what we bring is in some way the knowledge itself already in us, and that learning is
recollection, almost a sort of “matching.” Other texts we read will suggest different
ideas and images for what we bring to the process of learning and how it takes place; I
do not want to recommend one or the other of them to you today; I simply want to note
that we have hit upon a second aspect of what we all have in common as children who
can be formed through education: as children, we are ignorant and full of unexamined
opinion– but we also have that within us that makes us educable.
Continuing now through the dialogue - in order to demonstrate that learning really
is a form of recollection, in the sense that it makes actual something that was in the
learner all along, Socrates asks to interact with Meno's slave boy. According to Meno,
the boy knows Greek but has not otherwise been educated. You all know what happens.
The slave boy first misidentifies the side of the double square. But then, when Socrates
shows him his error, he genuinely desires to know the truth of the matter. And when
Socrates points him in the right direction, he is able to recognize for himself the line that
was sought.
Like Meno, he begins by not knowing – and not even knowing that he does not
�know. Unlike Meno, however, when his ignorance is revealed to him, rather than
defending his initial intuition, or becoming obdurate or threatening, he begins to seek for
the truth and is able to learn. He began as childlike in the ways that we all are childlike
before we have begun to inquire. However, over the course of the conversation with
Socrates he evidences a childlike attitude in a different way. The dialogue doesn't give
us much to go on, but I like to imagine the slave boy shaking his head in puzzled wonder
when he realizes that the double side does not make a double square – then eagerly
following Socrates' diagram, and smiling with satisfaction when he sees the answer for
himself, or “recollects” it. Of course, there may be a different type of “showing”
involved in revealing virtue than there is in pointing to the side of the double square.
The example itself inspires a multitude of questions. However, my interest in the
analogy here is simply in what it shows us about the attitude of one who genuinely
makes progress in an inquiry. The slave boy is teachable. He is not angry or ashamed
when his ignorance is exposed; instead, he begins to wonder. It is this attitude that I
want to call childlike in the third sense. We are all children in the beginning, accepting
as given the presuppositions that define our world- but also somehow equipped with that
which will make us able to learn, to recollect the truth for ourselves. All free people are
made out such children - necessarily. But as the example we have just seen illustrates, it
is only when we are childlike in the third way, when we pursue knowledge openly and
courageously, with wonder and delight, that we are able to educated, and thus to be
made free.
�It may seem like I have veered a little from speaking about free adults being made
from children, to urging us to become children. There are certainly some books on the
program at St. John’s that do urge this. Jesus says to his disciples that to such as these
little ones belongs the kingdom of heaven. Nietzsche's Zarathustra presents the child as
the third metamorphosis of the spirit, a “sacred Yes.” It is deeply true, though I don't
have time to address it here, that in some ways the condition of being childlike may
come, if we are fortunate, at the End of our explorations, when, as Eliot puts it, we
“arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” For the moment, I not
recommending the state of being childlike as an end, but as a necessary part of the
beginning. It is in order to become Free Adults mentioned that we must begin as
children – not only as ignorant, and as essentially teachable, but as ardently desiring to
learn.
But of course, in recommending to you here this ardent desire to learn, I am
preaching to the choir. Your status as students in the Graduate Institute I think puts a
special emphasis on your desire to learn. As I mentioned at the beginning of this talk,
each of you has a Bachelor's degree, the culturally accepted credential of a generally
educated person. In differing arenas, you have found a way the world. And yet, here
you are, some of you probably confounding the expectations of those around you who
would propose that there are more practical ways you could spend your time. Here you
are, wanting to learn and to know.
�Although you are all probably tired of hearing about it by now, I want to return
one more time to the phrase that was the beginning of these reflections: I make free
adults out of children. A couple of weeks ago, a friend and former Associate Dean asked
me what I was writing about for my first convocation address. I replied that it would be
some sort of reflection on the motto of the college, referring to Meno. My friend said
that he, too, had once written a convocation address reflecting on the motto, but that he
had criticized it. The part he had criticized was the phrase “I make.” And of course, he
was right to be critical here. I think our example from Meno, and the third way we have
identified of being childlike, point to this. One thing the dialogue makes clear is that no
one can force another person to learn. Socrates can expose Meno’s ignorance and leave
him stunned, but he can’t make him go any further. It may be possible to help another
person to learn, as Socrates helps the slave boy to discover the diagonal, but unless the
person has a desire to learn and a willingness to submit to the process of inquiry – unless
the person is childlike in the third sense we have identified - nothing will happen.
Whosever may be the voice that is speaking through the motto, the “I” of “I make,” (is it
the voice of the college? Of the Program?) that I cannot claim simply to make free adults
out of children through education. The college, and the program, may provide the
opportunity for leaning to occur; but in the end you, the students, through the course of
study set before you and your own real effort, shape and make yourselves.
I’ll note in closing that the very structure of the activity we engage in together
�stresses this fact. Your tutors (who are not, after all, “professors”) will not stand in front
of the room and dispense information to you. Instead, you will sit together around a
table, with your attention focused on a different teacher, the text – and on a conversation
that moves from one to another as each of us picks up portions of what the text brings to
us, compares it to our own assumptions, and allows ourself to be challenged and even
changed. It is in this way that we come really to know our world and to be able to
inhabit it as free adults – choosing, rather than accepting unthinkingly, the way we
inhabit it. So I invite you now to come, to read and to talk with us as we all grow more
fully into our freedom – together. Thank you.
Before we disperse, let me announce that there are two Graduate Institute study groups
taking place this summer. One group is reading classic texts of psychoanalysis; the other
is reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Both groups are meeting on Saturday
mornings from 10 until noon. For information on the psychoanalysis group, contact Mr.
Maxwell; for the Kant group, contact Mr. LaFleur.
Also, this Wednesday night at 7:30, here in the Great Hall, we will host the first in our
Wednesday night lecture series – Mr. Abraham Jacob Greenstine will speak on “The
Problem of Absolute Knowing.”
Please join us now for the refreshments waiting at the back of the Hall, before your
preceptorials begin at 2 o'clock.
The 2015 summer term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est!
�
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1
St. John's College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2016
Emily Brooker Langston
Good Afternoon and Welcome – students, families, friends, and tutors – to
the summer term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's College. Welcome
especially to those of you among us who are matriculating into the Graduate
Institute, and today become members of the community of St. John’s College.
I had occasion to think about this wonderful community from a different
perspective this past semester. Usually, I try to keep my topics for these talks
varied by basing them on something I’ve read together with students in the
Graduate Institute over the past term. But this past spring, my work for the college
took me in other directions and so I wasn’t able to teach. I made an effort to be a
part of a study group on Thucydides, but my schedule was erratic and I couldn’t
make it work. I felt guilty and regretful when the emails about the weekly
assignments – often accompanied by short comments about how great last week’s
discussion had been- arrived in my inbox. So, I wasn’t reading and talking in a
sustained way about a text with any of you. And I missed it.
�2
This made me ask myself though: what was I missing? For of course I can
read and think when I am by myself, and I did. I read essays, dialogues, short
stories, poems, and most memorably for me, as preparation for a senior oral in the
undergraduate program, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece 100 years of
Solitude. And I wasn’t short on human interaction and conversation either, not
even on conversation about relatively serious topics. I was traveling a lot, and
everywhere I went, I met interesting people who were interested in St. John’s. I
often ended up having conversations with them about questions arising from some
great work. Yet still I found that, compared with my usual life as a tutor at this
college, it was a strangely solitary existence.
But why should that worry me? After all, one could say that there is
something almost essentially solitary about intellectual life, about the life of
thinking and learning. Since I do like to talk about things I’ve read recently, I’ll
borrow an image here from Marquez’s strange and wonderful One Hundred Years
of Solitude – a book which doesn’t at first glance appear to be so much about
solitude as about a large family living in a small town, often in the same house.
But we find at the heart of the house built and shared by the tumultuous , mulitgenerational Buendia family a closed-off place of silence and solitude Melquiades’ room. It isn’t there from the beginning. It is built after the parts of the
house necessary for daily living have been established, for Melquiades - the
�3
traveling gypsy who first awakens wonder (according to Aristotle the beginning of
philosophy) in the mind of the patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendia. This
wonder spins him off into a sort of solitude in which the founder of the town and
former leader of men is rendered “useless” and even to many “ridiculous” by his
obsession with scientific and philosophical questions. Melquiades’ room is at times
over the course of a century shut off entirely, entered by no one, and then
rediscovered. It is seen very differently by different characters in the book. To the
embittered revolutionary Colonel Aureliano Buendia, it is full of cobwebs and
dust, ravaged by time. To his grand-nephew Aureliano Bablionia on the other
hand, who withdraws into the room to attempt to translate and interpret the strange
manuscripts it contains, it is untouched by time and full of sunlight.
The room then is an image of a solitary place in the midst of things yet apart,
of turning inward for reflection and study. Not for the study of practical things - it
is to those with that turn of mind the room seems simply a place of silence,
cobwebs, and decay. It is a place for the study of things that are timeless and
luminous.
Of course, the image I’ve borrowed from Marquez’s novel only underlines
the question I asked earlier; if we desire to think and read and learn, isn’t what we
really need our own place of withdrawal and solitude? Why do we need other
people? Why come together in a community like this one?
�4
The answer that would seem obvious in most other educational contexts is
that we come together in a place like a college or graduate school because we want
to learn from experts who will teach us things we don’t know. The experts are
gathered in one place, say at a university, and the students flock to them eagerly,
hoping to receive knowledge. However, this is explicitly what we say we DON’T
do at St. John’s. Our faculty are called tutors rather than professors to call attention
to the fact that they make no claim to be experts in the subject areas in which they
lead classes. They don’t lecture or dispense information. Instead, we read and learn
from the books together; and the tutors may – or may not – be the most
experienced learners in the room. Our studies together are in the spirit of a claim
made by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue Meno, the one book I know we all have in
common – the remarkable claim that, although learning takes place, quote:
“[T]here is no teaching.” (82a)
But if it is not to gather around teachers who dispense information, why
gather in a community to read and learn? And why does this community come to
mean so much to many of us? Although it is true that in some ways learning is
solitary – it is something that happens to me or in me – it also requires an
important sort of openness. When one learns, one is affected, changed. It may be
that the possibility of the openness needed for learning is connected to the
withdrawal I’ve spoken of. When the patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia is caught up
�5
in leading people through the jungle and founding a town, he doesn’t have time to
wonder about magnetism or whether the earth might be round, like an orange. In
the Meno, we see the young titular character to be vain, desperate to impress, and
(as his various attempts to define virtue reveal) consumed by the struggle for
wealth, power, and reputation. It seems likely that it is partially the slave boy’s
very distance from Meno’s preoccupations and ambitions that enables him to be
open enough to see his error about the side of the double square and to be
genuinely interested in figuring out the truth of the matter.
I think the connection between the openness needed for learning and a sort
of separation from the world suggests at least one possible reason that it’s
important for those who value learning to be a part of communities like this one. It
isn’t easy to maintain that openness. In our everyday lives, in what some call the
“Real World,” it can be hard to maintain the strong desire to learn. Like various
members of the Buendia family, we may be caught up in the cares and tasks of
home life, driven by the desire for erotic or material possession, caught up in the
machinations of the practices of politics and war. Or, like Meno, who as you will
remember attempts to close off the search for the definition of virtue with a logical
paradox about the impossibility of learning, we may simply tire and grow
frustrated with an endeavor that is quite strenuous and doesn’t seem to offer much
in the way of what is often called “Return on Investment.” If we want to persist in
�6
our “useless” inquiries, it helps to be a part of a community that supports that
commitment in the face of the pull toward other, more “practical,” activities – a
community that says to us – no, maybe the Real World is over here, in our
conversation; or maybe both worlds are real, but to think about this and understand
the different ways in which this might be so, we need a perspective that can only
come when we have created through withdrawal the possibility of moving between
worlds.
Of course, even with the support of a community, maintaining openness and
continuing to learn requires effort. Learning is an activity. I can’t simply withdraw
into Melquiades’ room or some other place of solitude and wait for learning to
happen to me; once I am inside, I have to get to work: questioning, reading,
translating. Nor can I approach a teacher and expect knowledge to be poured into
me as though I were an empty vessel. Returning to Meno, we hear Socrates exhort
his interlocutor: One must search for the things one does not know. It is an arduous
activity. And any stories that we tell each other to encourage one another in the
active search will make us (to quote Socrates again) “better people, braver and less
idle.”
�7
I think this matter of stories touches on another value we might find in a
community like St. John’s College. We are part of a community in which we tell
one another stories – by which we encourage one another in the search for what we
do not know. By this I don’t of course mean that we all accept the details of the
myth of recollection. The stories we tell take many forms. But they all inspire us
when we are already eager, and urge us on when the work becomes tiring. They
speak to the better part of our natures and even hold out the hope that engaging in
the search will somehow make us better people. One of the things I missed most
when I was away from our regular discussions was being in a place where stories
like this are constantly in the air.
One final thought about what makes engaging in this search together so
precious. In a true community of learning, our searching, our striving, is common.
And remarkably we find that what we are striving FOR is common as well. This is
very much unlike our experience of striving for things in the “Real World.”
Questions, theorems, forms, the objects of the intellect – these are universally
available, and unlike material goods, and for that matter unlike power and
reputation, they are not diminished by being shared. Phaedrus, in the Platonic
dialogue that bears his name, famously says that “the things of friends are
common.” One could spend a long time unpacking that, but one upshot of it seems
�8
to me to be that common intellectual inquiry is one of the most natural bases for
friendship.
So welcome. Welcome to this place in the midst of but slightly apart from
the world. Join us as we tell one another stories the encourage us to seek, and as we
strive together as friends toward the things that remain common even as they
become more fully our own.
Before we disperse, I’d like to let those of you who are new to us know that
the love of communal reading and learning that I’ve been talking about overflows
the classroom into a variety of student-led study groups; some spring up
spontaneously among friends, while others are more organized. There are five
“official” Graduate Institute study groups taking place this summer. One Group is
reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, one is studying Oswald Spengler’s “The
Decline of the West”, there is one on Quantum Physics, one on Twain’s The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and one that will be both thinking about and
making music. Information and reading schedules for the study groups are
available in the Graduate Institute office, and have been circulated in an email.
�9
Also, the GI is delighted to host the SJC summer lecture series. Please join us this
Wednesday night at 7:30, here in the Great Hall, for the first in our Wednesday
night lecture series and a following question period. St. John’s tutor Mr. David
Townsend will speak on “Imagination and Leadership.” Mr. Townsend asks that
we read Marilynn Robinson’s wonderful essay “Imagination and Leadership.” We
will circulate a link to an online version of the essay. And please join us now for
the refreshments waiting at the back of the Hall, before your preceptorials begin at
2 o'clock. The 2015 summer term of the Graduate Institute is now in session.
Convocatum est!
�
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Langston, Emily Brooker
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2016
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Annapolis Convocation, Spring
2010
Welcome. Welcome especially to our new Graduate Institute
students; welcome also to returning students and colleagues.
On this your first day at the Graduate Institute, I want to address
you on the subject not of great books and the profound thoughts
you will encounter therein nor on the subject of the rigors and
delights of independent thinking, a skill you will be honing here—
at least I will not be speaking of those things directly. These are
the obvious attractions of the program at St. John's. Today I
would like to reflect on one of its less conspicuous charms:
friendship.
My guess is you haven't really come here seeking friendship. You
have already had an undergraduate experience where you
probably formed lifelong attachments. And here you will not be
living together in dorms...nor sharing the trauma of ill-advised
unions and cruel breakups (thank goodness for that)...nor helping
each other to cope with groceries, laundry, time management,
etc. Some of you are long past those days, and you may even
have committed yourselves to the joys and trials of that particular
and demanding friendship found in family life. Nonetheless, you
are going to find friendship here, for I'm pretty sure it's impossible
to engage properly in our activity without experiencing a certain
kind of relationship to other students (and tutors) which is properly
called friendship.
The topic of friendship seems to be in the air this year. President
Nelson used his fall undergraduate convocation address to
consider the famous Greek phrase that "the things of friends are
common"; tutor Gary Borjesson gave a Friday night lecture
�concerning the friendship of dogs and men as a paradigm; and
friendship was one of the themes of the faculty NEH study group.
But my concern with this issue antedates those events. For a
while now, I have wanted to use the word friendship to
characterize my relations with students and colleagues, but have
been at a loss to subsume these relations under the existing
categories I have of friendship. So I'm going to use this
opportunity to try to better formulate the particular, special kind of
friendship that forms the bonds holding together this community—
at least insofar as it is a community of learners.
What do we normally mean by friendship? We use, perhaps
overuse, that word to characterize a broad array of relationships.
People with whom we share activities, whether poker or bowling
or moviegoing or Church, become our friends. A certain class of
friends comes with networking: work relationships, former
colleagues, potential bosses. Modern life even has us "friends"
with people we've never actually met—through Facebook or
LinkedIn or Twitter.
But we all recognize these are friends only in some extended,
casual use of the word. Sometimes we speak instead of our "true
friends," by which we often mean the people who are loyal to us.
Certainly, I value these friends; it is rare to find someone so
committed to us as to see past our inadequacies, to endure with
us our incapacitation by suffering, to forge a personal connection
that transcends mere characteristics or shared interests. I hope
each of you already has such a friend; I hope too that you may
find another here.
However, this kind of private relationship, based on affection and
fidelity and intimacy, is clearly not the one that permeates our
community. We do, by and large, like each other. But I mean here
to uncover the essence of a more public, shared bond that arises
organically through our common activity of joint inquiry. What is it
�about exploring together the persistent questions confronting us in
our lives that cultivates, perhaps even demands a sympathy
beyond general civility?
Perhaps the example of Socrates is relevant. Surely Socrates is a
paradigm of the probing questioner searching beyond mere
opinion and holding the highest of standards for knowledge, and
he also embodies that particular way of life which critiques itself
through engaging in dialogue with others. In these ways, he
seems a kindred soul, if not a friend, to every Johnnie ("Johnnie"
is how we affectionately refer to ourselves). And Socrates does in
fact tie philosophy and friendliness together—in a strange,
puzzling, almost humorous way—in the Republic, which those of
you in the Politics and Society segment will begin reading shortly.
As he founds his "city in speech," Socrates finds himself trying to
characterize the necessary traits in the people entrusted with
guarding the republic. Such guardians must be fiercely spirited in
order to fend off threats, but gentle towards their friends, their
fellow citizens (375c). We at St. John's also desire these
seemingly incompatible characteristics in the members of our
republic. If you don't have the spirited courage to venture your
interpretations, to fend off the allure of easy answers, to risk being
wrong, to face the loss of cherished opinions, our classes will fail.
On the other hand, if you don't respect each others' insights,
cultivate each others' potential, collaborate constructively with
each other, our classes will also fail.
Socrates and his interlocutors overcome their initial suspicion that
these qualities are impossible to unite when Socrates recollects
that there is an exemplar combining them; dogs, he says, have a
truly "philosophic" nature. "When [a dog] sees someone it doesn't
know, it's angry, although it never had any bad experience with
him. And when it sees someone it knows, it greets him warmly,
even if it never had a good experience with him." (376a) "How can
�the love of learning be denied to a creature whose criterion of the
friendly and the alien is intelligence and ignorance?" (376b)
Now, as a direct analogy for your relations with each other and
the outside world, this model fails. We at the College want to help
you develop your ability to interact with one another, but we leave
it to you to determine the character of your interactions with the
outside world. However, after your initial double-take at the notion
of a philosophic dog and in light of a certain respect for Socrates'
skill with images, you may begin to penetrate more deeply into
this humble metaphor. Real love of wisdom may indeed require
this black-and-white attitude toward truth. In fact, we at the
College hope you have a genuine passion for the truth and
eschew falsity in all its forms, not only lies, but also hypocrisy and
ignorance—even ignorance of your own ignorance. Moreover,
insofar as the right reaction to one's own ignorance is to stamp it
out, we even want you to engage in a spirited war (against
yourself). This much of the controlled fierceness of the guardian
dogs seems apt and desirable.
What the image fails to highlight, and what we at St. John's (as
well as Socrates in other circumstances) emphasize, is the
difficulty in distinguishing what it is we know. Dogs don't seem to
have this problem. But a few Meno-like experiences trying to
clarify the essence of virtue make one painfully aware that one's
opinions often masquerade as knowledge, thereby making one
friendly toward falsity and hostile toward truth. Recognizing this
possibility, we ought harbor a healthy suspicion of our immediate
judgments. Unlike the guard dog in Socrates' image, we must
open ourselves up to the unfamiliar and be ready to abandon the
familiar. We must be willing to be vulnerable. And we must feel
secure baring our very souls to one another. So I find myself
needing a very different model tying together friendship and
�philosophy—preferably one where I am not reduced to thinking
about friendliness toward truth rather than toward another person.
Aristotle's more explicit analysis of friendship may help. You may
be surprised to learn that Aristotle devotes two whole books to
this subject in the Nicomachean Ethics, the first text read in the
Politics and Society tutorial. He turns to friendship after he treats
of the ethical life in general and the various virtues specifically,
remarking that friendship is "a virtue or something with virtue."
(1155a4) In your classes, you will no doubt assess the truth of this
claim and investigate the role friendship plays in the ethical life.
Here, I want to see if Aristotle's analysis of friendship can help me
characterize the special rapport immanent in a classroom full of
people bound only by their passion to understand.
Characteristically, Aristotle begins from what is first (or most
clear) to us, analyzing the various ways we commonly use the
word "friend" –for people we invite on hikes and co-workers as
well as our intimates. After stressing the necessity and nobility of
friendship in the fully human life (1155a29), Aristotle, again
characteristically, proceeds to make distinctions which will allow
him to sift through our loose conceptions and isolate the essence
of friendship. He identifies three species of friendship: friendships
of utility, pleasure, and virtue (1156a6-8). Although he notes that
all friendships involve reciprocal goodwill (1155b34), he singles
out the last type, the friendship based on character, as the most
perfect (1156b8). Such friends are in fact both useful and
pleasant to each other, but this friendship is more noble in that
they are not friends for the sake of usefulness or pleasure, but for
the sake of the good. These friends are engaged in helping each
other to live the best and happiest life (1169b20-22)
No doubt you're willing to believe that here at the College you too
will assist each other to live the best life, but you probably would
identify that assistance as an accidental side-effect of your desire
�to improve yourself. It remains to be seen whether Aristotle will
account for a necessary connection between philosophy and a
friendly commitment to the welfare of another.
Aristotle's conception of the paradigmatic friendship embraces
three primary characteristics: disinterestedness, like-mindedness,
and activity. We can probably all agree that the best friends show
a disinterested concern for one another. We genuinely wish a true
friend well because of who the friend is and for his own sake
(1156b9-11) rather than because of the job he can bring us (even
if we are grateful for the job as well). Unself-interested regard for
another and action on his behalf are at the core of the best
friendships.
Initially, we might hesitate to posit like-mindedness as a
necessary component of friendship. We tend to identify likemindedness as a common world view, and we all have friends
with whom we profoundly disagree. Aristotle rightly, I think,
dismisses this interpretation; he points out that "it is not sameness
of opinion, for the latter might belong also to those who do not
know each other" (1167a21-22). Instead, Aristotle traces the
harmonious interdependence of friends to their agreement about
matters to be acted on, to having the same intentions regarding
what is of common interest (1167a28). Insofar as we admire our
friends, we must indeed be appreciating their virtues, their
conception of the good (a conception we affirm and subscribe to
ourselves). I think this is why Aristotle's characterization of the
friend as "another self" (1166a33) resonates so powerfully. It
captures our sense of the special union of sameness and
otherness we find in our most satisfying relationships.
The third element Aristotle claims as essential is that friends
participate in common activities, especially those activities
directed toward a good life. Indeed, he claims true companionship
entails "living with" the other person (1171b29). Only then can we
�rejoice in the observation of a friend's accomplishment of morally
praiseworthy acts; only in close and regular contact can we find
sustenance and indispensable support in his advice and counsel
as we try to discern our own moral path. The best friends not only
stimulate each other to action but also encourage each other to
develop, assist each other to grow in wisdom. This realization of a
practical, ethical element in friendship is the fruit of Aristotle's
insight that happiness is an activity in accordance with virtue
(rather than a mood or emotion).
Now Aristotle's treatment of friendship, as I mentioned, is
embedded in a book on ethics. His portrait of the perfect,
unqualified friendship depicts virtuous activity as the necessary
basis for mutual respect and joint pleasure. But we here at St.
John's do not intend to be answering the question of what virtue is
for you; in fact, we intend to raise that question in sharply
provocative ways. While versions of justice and courage and
temperance all are requisite in the classroom discussions, they
appear as modes of speech and thought rather than action as
such.
But Aristotle does link his perfect friendship with discussion,
noting that above all"living with" one's friend means:
"shar[ing] in discussion and thought—for this is what living together
would seem to mean for human beings, and not feeding in the same place,
as with cattle" (1170b10-14).
Further, Aristotle broaches the topic of friendship only after a full
treatment of the intellectual virtues, upon which he realizes true
ethical virtue must depend. Now, the commitment you have made
to attend the Graduate Institute emanates from a certain kind of
intellectual virtue. You have signed up for more than a degree
program; you're exploring a way of life. The twelve of you have
set a high standard for what you want to count as wisdom and
you have refused to be mere passive recipients of such wisdom.
�You will rejoice to see these virtues shining forth in the "other
selves" surrounding you here.
And while the activity you all engage in here is one of thought
rather than philanthropy or politics, it will be shared in the fullest
sense of that word. You will collaborate with every ounce of your
energy in order to successfully think another's thought, formulate
a reaction, and use the text to constructively criticize that reaction.
Even though we don't share common histories, backgrounds, or
creeds, you will feel the presence of a common goal, the quest for
truth, and a common standard, reasoned argument, guiding every
discussion.
The more fully you engage in this common activity, the more you
will find your goals inextricably bound to the goals of your
companions. The more the quest for truth dominates, the less
concerned you will be that you were the one to utter that selfcontradictory, absurd interpretation and the more pleased you will
be to see someone else resolve the paradox and point the way to
a new path where we can safely tread. In this way, a selfforgetting regard for the other will necessarily inhabit you. And in
this sense, you will be friends.
Now, in the Nicomachean Ethics, friendship forms a bridge
between an analysis of the ethical virtues and an account of the
most perfect and pleasant activity, namely contemplation. A
certain tension in the book arises: is the best life the more public,
etchical life or the private, almost divinely self-sufficient
contemplative life? Something like this tension probably pervades
our classes as well. As the myth of recollection emphasizes, the
experience of knowledge finally happens deep within oneself. But
I think the experience of coming to know happens amongst us
friends.
Let us go forge this new friendship then. Convocatum est.
�Marilyn Higuera
�
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2010
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Annapolis Convocation, Spring
2011
Welcome. Welcome especially to our new, select group of
Graduate Institute students. Welcome also to returning students
and colleagues.
Last summer, for one of our Wednesday evening "Life of the
Mind" events (these rather informal events take the place of the
more formal Friday evening lectures that occur during the regular
academic year), I put together a panel of tutors to discuss the
question, "What is Philosophy?" For that occasion, I asked each
tutor to select a program author and give a 10-minute
interpretation of what that author thought constituted the activity of
philosophy. The presentations were so thought-provoking that, in
the intense question period that followed, we never got around to
what we ourselves think philosophy is. But here at St. John's—
where we aim at living the examined life, where questions
regarding truth are welcomed in classes on Euclidean geometry,
Chaucer's tales, or the Bible, where the questions persist whether
in the classroom or the Coffee Shop, at an After Seminar
Gathering or at home—it seems only right to press ourselves to
tackle that question. Today, in honor of your joining our
community, I am going to put myself on the spot and venture to
define philosophy.
Let me beat a hasty retreat. I will try today to say what I think
philosophy is, as practiced here and as I have gleaned from my
32 years of experience at St. John's. This version should not be
considered what "we" think philosophy is—for, as you will soon
discover, each tutor and each student is continually articulating,
questioning, re-evaluating, and re-articulating what it is that we
practice here, what constitutes the program, and virtually every
�other element of the best life as well. None of us would say the
exact same things and we surely have some radical
disagreements.
Furthermore, I have real trepidations about making the attempt to
say even what I think philosophy is. Last year, when one of my
colleagues was relating an anecdote to me, she recounted in
passing that she had identified herself as a philosopher—and I
found myself doing a double-take. I realized that I would never
identify myself as a philosopher to anyone. Of course, I have no
degree in philosophy, as she does. But I also would never identify
myself as a mathematician even though I do have degrees in that
field. As a tutor, I am clearly not an expert—not even in "my" field.
Though I have some skills, I suppose, and I definitely possess
arcane information that not everyone has, I do not spend my time
considering abstract entities invented just yesterday nor struggling
to prove claims about those entities. I simply don't feel that I am
pursuing the authentic activity.
On the other hand, am I not authentically doing philosophy here at
the College? What am I doing if not philosophy as I examine the
profoundest ideas both in great books and in our own lives?
Having reflected to this point on my colleague's open assumption
of the mantle of philosophy, I realize I quite admire it and begin to
wonder. Shouldn't I too claim to be a philosopher?
As you may know, the etymology of the word "philosophy" is
Greek: philos—meaning lover, and sophia—meaning wisdom.
Can I not claim to be a lover of wisdom? Who wouldn't claim to be
a lover of wisdom? Well, during a seminar oral examination last
term, one of my students described people she knew who claimed
knowledge was unimportant, indeed that made decisions on the
basis of that claim. But such people reveal their desire to "know
better" than others around them, don't they? Aren't they claiming
they have superior wisdom about the best way to live—even as
�they scorn the reading of books and the raising of questions? As
Aristotle claims in the Metaphysics, "All men by nature desire to
know." (980a) But neither Aristotle nor I would claim those people
my student described are living the philosophic life; indeed, they
themselves are trying very hard to reject the philosophic life. What
do I think characterizes a person who loves wisdom? What is the
essence of the philosophic activity?
One common claim of the participants in the summer panel on
philosophy was that each author considered philosophy to be a
"way of life." I immediately agreed. But I have learned to be
suspicious of easy agreement. So I have since been prodding
myself to examine what I mean when I say that "philosophy is a
way of life."
As is often the case, it's easier to say what I don't mean.
Sometimes when we refer to "philosophy" we simply mean that
someone studied philosophy at some university and got a degree.
Certainly, this is not what I mean. To allow someone else to
determine a set of books and ideas which are labeled
"philosophy" and become conversant and knowledgeable about
what they contain is too empty for me to want to make a life of it.
Even the deeper version—where the expert is genuinely weighing
various arguments against each other—seems more a valuable
skill than a true identity.
Sometimes we speak of someone's "philosophy of life," by which
we mean a set of beliefs, a creed—or at least a system, by which
the person lives. This also is not what I intend by "philosophy."
Though most days I long achingly for such a creed (one that
would guarantee the best decisions), I don't see how
unquestioning adherence to a code (no matter how hard-won nor
how profound) could really constitute the activity of philosophy
itself. Moreover, reading Don Quixote for my preceptorial last term
has reminded me that every interaction with the world challenges
�such a code, requires—at a minimum—re-examination but usually
re-interpretation and sometimes abandonment. What we see as
giants often reveal themselves to be mere windmills. And
meanwhile the too, too solid windmills of life resist one's lance
and sometimes break it.
In the republic of letters, "philosophy" sometimes refers to the
study of the truths and principles underlying all knowledge and
being. This concept of philosophy seems a worthier candidate
than the other two, but it does not, at least on the surface, appear
to be a way of life. This formulation obscures the vexed character
of the philosopher's relation to truths and principles.
At this College, we are keenly conscious of the difficulty of
knowing the truth. Let me, in my perplexity, turn toward one of our
profound original sources for help. In the inception of our Great
Books program, the Socratic life as depicted by Plato provided
much inspiration and guidance for our activities in this community.
Many of my own ideas about the philosophic life stem from the
picture I have constructed through reading the Republic, the
Apology, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, and, of course, the Meno.
As you yourself saw in Socrates' interactions with Meno, Socrates
resists the glib answer—whether it be a secondhand speech of
the professional rhetorician Gorgias or an overhasty dismissal of
mundane matters. He lingers over even the most basic questions:
What is a bee? What is a figure? How do I form a double square?
During my years at St. John's I've learned to allow these
questions to bring me up short, to pause and reflect on each
word, to check the momentum impelling me to leap over the
simple-sounding. In the process of so doing, the familiar becomes
unfamiliar. We see with fresh eyes both the diagonal of a square
and ourselves. Suddenly we do not quite recognize the square
root of 8; we begin to wonder whether we should really call
square root of 8 a number; whether we know what virtue is;
�whether we, like Meno, are asking questions only to find out what
other people say and not because we really want to know, really
love wisdom.
But how do I tell whether I "really" love wisdom? Once a doubt
creeps in regarding my unexamined, unconscious motives, it's
difficult to judge whether I'm directing myself toward wisdom or
wandering, lost among shadowy opinions. My own touchstone
necessarily derives from experiences akin to those of the
slaveboy, moments that not only feel like the lifting of a veil
between my eyes and some object of thought but that also are
accompanied by a sense that a previously dormant part of myself
has suddenly quickened with life and activity. Life lived in the
absence of this invigoration feels, if not dead, at least empty. Or
perhaps more accurately, that other life lacks a vital dimension.
As Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader, "On Not Knowing
Greek" p. 32) has put it:
... all can feel the indomitable honesty, the courage, the love of truth which
draw Socrates and us in his wake to the summit where, if we too may stand
for a moment, it is to enjoy the greatest felicity of which we are capable.
I don't think I, or Woolf, can persuade someone that this
dimension exists. But I do think experience has engendered in me
a passion to think, to endure the struggle toward clarity. But how
do these momentary glimpses of felicity constitute a way of life?
I'm not satisfied that I've focused on the key element yet.
Love of wisdom, as manifest in Socrates and cultivated at St.
John's, requires absolute honesty. Socrates is unafraid to admit
ignorance publicly. And he frequently adjures his interlocutor to
speak "just what he thinks" rather than what someone else has
said; he demands of Meno, "What is your own account of virtue?"
(71d) One reason we eschew secondary sources here at the
College is that the din of other voices tends to drown out one's
own thought. It sounds an easy matter to "say what you think," but
�it's actually much easier to know what someone else has said or
to guess what others want to hear. And secondary sources are
not the only danger to developing one's own honest thought.
Even if others can ask just the right question to shake us out of
complacent judgments, provide us with a well-chosen instance of
a general claim that illuminates an otherwise dark and puzzling
construction of the world, surprise us out of a deeply satisfying
interpretation with a carefully crafted formulation, or refute one of
our claims with a reasoned analysis, no one can have the "Aha!"
moment for us. So a philosopher doesn't let Plato or Aristotle or a
tutor or another student simply tell him/her what to think. But what
does the philosopher do? How does the philosopher free the
voice inside struggling to be heard?
To look within and evaluate the structure, quality, and range of
one's experience, the integrity of the conclusions drawn from that
experience, and the consistency of the complex web of those
conclusions—that demands rigor, humility, suffering, submission,
courage, tirelessness. If one dwells with this kind of love of
wisdom, nothing is so cherished or so private that it is not to be
held up to scrutiny. The supreme challenge of this kind of honesty
is a lifetime project. Perhaps this is what I mean by making
philosophy a way of life?
But many, perhaps most, people think they are being honest with
themselves and others. Is there some special way for a
philosopher to scrutinize his opinions, debunk his own illusions,
penetrate his own defenses? All too often in the past, I have
wrongly thought I understood. Just as the slaveboy was fooled by
the resonant sound and delightful simplicity of a "double area"
arising from a "double length," I have been seduced by mere
words. Just as Meno was only able to accept a definition in the
"high, poetic style" (76e) of Gorgias and could not "hear" the
better, perhaps truer, definition, I too have exhibited a weakness
�for the lofty adjective, the idealistic phrase, the neat dichotomy. Is
there some characteristic other than the only partially reliable
ability to analyze one's own claims that sets the philosophic life
apart?
In Plato's dialogue Phaedo, as Socrates spends his last day on
earth in prison waiting for the fatal cup of hemlock, he depicts a
mode of existence for the philosopher that is thoroughgoing and
quite stark. This topic of conversation is launched by Socrates'
claim to his friends that he is willing and indeed even eager to die
(62c). In response to his friends' incredulous reactions, he makes
the yet more astounding claim that "philosophy, practiced in the
right way," is "one thing only, namely training ....for dying and to
be dead." (64a) He explains that pleasures of food, drink, sight,
and all pleasures of the body distract a person from pursuing the
full truth of the being of things in general (64c-66c). So "real
philosophers train for dying, and to be dead is for them less
terrible than for all other men." (67e) For they have purified their
soul—"in separating so far as may be the soul from the body, and
habituating it to assemble and gather itself together from every
region of the body, so as to dwell alone and apart, so far as
possible, both in this present life and in the life to come, released
from the body's fetters." (67c)
Now, here indeed is a version of philosophy that is a way of life—
but a highly problematic one. Not only does it not echo very much
our own way of life here at the College (we do rather enjoy the
wine and food as well as the conversation at our after-seminar
gatherings), but it presents itself as a way of death at least as
much as a way of life. As one of Socrates' interlocutors puts it,
"[the many] would say [such a person] has one foot in the grave."
(65a)
�To think that the body is simply a hindrance to truth is probably
not in my capacity, not least because it seems also to undermine
the power of music and poetry. Worse yet, this version of
philosophy, where private cares must be set aside, normal
obligations disdained, and connections to family and friends
attenuated, seems almost inhuman. In the Phaedo, this
indifference to earthly concerns is admitted to be inhuman, in the
sense that it is described as divine. And I am inspired by talk of
the soul longing for its own eternal ground of the truth; I'm even
more moved by the picture Plato paints of the dying Socrates. He
never once weeps; he never even trembles; he continues calmly
discoursing about various subjects—not only philosophy, but also
the various possibilities of life after death, or no life after death; he
is a rock for his grieving friends. I truly hope that I can confront my
hour of death as nobly and with as much equanimity as this
Socrates.
Nonetheless, I cannot live this life. I'm probably too weak an
individual to be an ascetic, even if I believed this was in fact the
philosophic life. But the truth is: I can't believe such asceticism is
the way to wisdom. Even Socrates' admissions that the goal of
philosophy is, strictly speaking, unachievable in this life and that
the philosopher is only cultivating a certain attitude towards the
body, even these admissions do not salvage this version of
philosophy for me. I suspect truth of being various, of descending
on us in a multitude of shapes, of being grasped through the
imagination as well as the intellect, of residing in friendships and
society as well as in the individual.
But perhaps Socrates intends something more subtle than his
conversation in the Phaedo superficially indicates. Though
Socrates does, at the beginning of the dialogue, send his family
away in order to converse with his friends, we are first allowed to
see the 70-year old Socrates not only with his wife but also with
�his toddler son. Then we see him reflecting on the inextricably
linked natures of pleasure and pain as his shackles are removed
and we hear him connecting his own immediate bodily experience
to his conclusions about the nature of pleasure and pain. Then we
learn that he has been composing songs in case dialectical
conversation did not properly fulfill his vocation. Music, poetry,
friends, family, pleasure, pain, conversation—these still engage
the nobly dying Socrates.
Perhaps being philosophic is more about holding a certain
posture towards all of life—an attentiveness toward the world,
toward oneself, and toward others; a readiness to act on the basis
of thought and not merely on the basis of custom or pleasure; a
critical observation—to be sure of opinions and ideas but also of
life, awake to the timeless within the temporal. I still don't think I
will be able any time soon to say, "I am a philosopher." But I will
say that I am working toward being a philosopher. And I hope
you'll work with me as well.
Marilyn Higuera
�
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2011
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2012
What Is a Segment?
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. Today I mean to do so by looking at
the graduate program, and asking ‘what is a segment?’
It is easy to be at a loss in the face of such a ‘what is?’ question, since it is not clear that a
segment is one of the beings. Rather, ‘segment’ is the conventional name we give to the parts of
the graduate program here at St. John’s, of which there are five: Philosophy & Theology, Politics
& Society, Mathematics & Natural Science, Literature, and History. These segments can be
taken in almost any order, though the History segment cannot be taken first; and completing four
of five segments entitles the student to a Master’s of Arts in Liberal Arts. Given that the name
‘segment’ is a convention, we might at first think that the question ‘what is a segment?’ is an
empty one: couldn’t these things just as well have been called parts of the graduate program?
But once we recognize that the undergraduate expression of the St. John’s Program does not
have segments – its parts are either the four years, freshman to senior, or the four classes,
seminar, tutorial, preceptorial, and laboratory – we see that the name ‘segment’ marks something
distinctive about the graduate expression of the Program.
1
�So the question ‘what is a segment?’ becomes something like ‘what were they thinking
when they called the parts of the graduate program – parts in some sense other than the sense in
which the different classes are parts – segments?’ And now we are not without resources, for we
can ask more generally, ‘what do people mean when they use the word segment?’ The word
means ‘part,’ certainly; but more strictly it means a part which has been, or can be, cut from a
whole. A segment, in other words, is not a natural part, the way a finger is part of a hand, or a
hand part of a human body. Rather, a segment is a part by violence: something that, were it not
for the cutting, we might not see as a part at all.
The particularly geometrical meaning of the term makes the need for cutting more clear.
In definition six of Book Three of his Elements, Euclid tells us that “a segment [τµῆµα: the word
means a part cut off] of a circle is the figure contained by a straight line and a circumference of a
circle.” From this we get our more modern geometrical uses of the term, such as in the phrase
‘line segment,’ which means a part cut off by two points from an infinite, or at least endless,
straight line. These particularly geometrical uses of the word ‘segment’ have two features in
common. First, the part is a segment because it must be cut off from the whole to be
distinguished as a part; and this is so because the whole is a homogeneous magnitude: a finite
area in the case of the circle, and an infinite length in the case of the straight line. The
homogeneity of the magnitude means that it has no natural parts, and that any part of it can be
distinguished as a part by cutting. Second, the segment so distinguished, because of the
homogeneity of its whole, can suffice as an indication of the whole. Given a straight line
segment, we can produce it in both directions, or remove its endpoints, to find the whole modern
straight line. And given any segment of a circle, no matter how small, we can find the whole
circle too.
2
�Could these two intimations of the geometrical meaning of ‘segment’ hold true for the
term as we use it in the graduate program? In calling its parts ‘segments,’ that is, could the
intention have been to intimate that the graduate program is a homogeneous whole, cut
arbitrarily into parts, each of which points back to the whole?
I think the answer to these questions is ‘yes.’ Despite appearances, the graduate program
here at St. John’s is a homogeneous whole – as is the undergraduate program, incidentally – and
its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. To be convinced of this view,
we need to look into, and try to see through, several other conventional terms that stand in our
way. Chief among these are the names we give to the segments and to our classes. The names
of our classes are easier to overcome, so let’s begin with them.
I hope it will surprise no one here to learn that our seminars are not restricted to
seminarians, nor are they literally seed-plots; nor do we bring in preceptors – that is,
commanders or instructors – to teach our preceptorials; nor are we called tutors – that is,
watchers or guardians – because our charges have not yet reached the age of legal majority.
Despite their evocative names, our classes differ mainly in size, in the number of tutors and
students in each. The activity of each, the pursuit through conversation of answers to
fundamental questions, is the same; and even though in some tutorials the demonstration of
mathematical propositions or the analysis of poetry is the chief technique, nothing in principle
prevents a preceptorial or even a seminar from reading a text closely, or attending to a
demonstration at the board. Even the composition of each segment out of a seminar, a tutorial,
and a preceptorial is not a matter of necessity – though it is, I hasten to add, a matter of strict
policy. While there are practical reasons to entrust a smaller class with the tasks of
demonstration in the Mathematics & Natural Science tutorial, and analysis in the Literature
3
�tutorial, it is not as clear that the readings of the Politics & Society, Philosophy & Theology, or
History tutorials could not be assigned to a seminar, nor that the seminar readings from these
segments would be ill-suited to a tutorial. There is nothing about Plato’s Republic, for example,
that suits it to be discussed by twenty people, nor about Hobbes’s Leviathan that suits it to
sixteen. We can even make much the same claim about preceptorials: that all of our seminar and
tutorial books are worthy of the intense scrutiny of a preceptorial, and that only practical
considerations should bar us from including our preceptorial books in the seminar and tutorial
reading lists.
The reason why our segments do in fact consist of a seminar, a tutorial, and a preceptorial
seems mostly to have to do with our judgment that each segment should consist of a required and
an elective component: the elective component is the preceptorial, while the required component
is shared between the seminar and the tutorial, in various ways, depending on the segment.
Sometimes the ampersand marks the division of labor: in the Philosophy & Theology segment
we have a largely-philosophy tutorial and a largely-theology seminar; in the Mathematics &
Natural Science segment it is the tutorial that takes mathematics, and the seminar natural science.
But sometimes this is not the case. If there really is such a thing as society, it is not clear
whether the Politics & Society seminar or tutorial treats it more fully. Where there is no
ampersand in the segment title, by contrast, the division of labor between the seminar and
tutorial is that the seminar in some fashion takes the ancients and the tutorial the moderns. The
Literature seminar is unapologetically Hellenic, while the tutorial handles the rest of literature.
The History seminar reaches as late as Gibbon among its authors, but as late as the fall of the
Roman Empire among its subjects; the tutorial picks up with Augustine and the rise of
Christianity.
4
�I hope this is enough to convince you that the different names we give to our classes –
seminar, tutorial, and preceptorial – are no barrier to understanding the graduate program as
homogeneous. The names we give to our segments, on the other hand, present more of a
challenge. Everywhere we look in higher education today, we see these names and similar ones
written above the majors and departments: Philosophy, Theology, Political Science, Sociology,
Mathematics, Physics, Literature, and History. But we should not infer from our adoption of
such titles for our segments that we agree with the thinking that leads to majors and departments.
Elsewhere, the title of a major often amounts to a compressed, predetermined answer to a series
of predetermined questions. It tells students what they will be studying, and sometimes even
what kind of profession they will have when they are done. It asserts the existence of the kinds
of beings that the discipline studies, that they are somehow knowable, and that they are worth
knowing. Perhaps most importantly, it reassures students about what they will be doing when
they study: physics majors can evade essays, and philosophy majors escape problem sets.
For us, by contrast, the titles of our segments should stand as compressed questions in
need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder that is the opposite of reassuring. Is there such
a thing as a life lived under the sole guidance of reason, or under the authority of revelation – and
ought we to think that one or the other of these lives can make us happy? Is there a distinct
realm of politics, or does it always reduce to philosophy or to theology? Are there beings that
are characteristically knowable, and if so, what sort of beings are they? Are the natural beings
among these beings, and so knowable as well? Is there a place for poetry or music in a happy
life, and do they provide something that reason and revelation cannot? Is there such a thing as
history, does it involve novelty or progress, and will it end? We must not take these titles that
we use merely to name the segments – numbering them would also have been confusing – as
5
�grounds for thinking that we know in advance what sort of questions and answers can be asked
and given in our classes, and hence that we know in advance the limits of what we might learn.
Now to say that each of our segment titles points to a fundamental question is not yet to
show that the graduate program is homogeneous, nor that it is a whole. Could there not be a
series of fundamental questions, perhaps even an infinite series, each of which has nothing to do
with the other, and so each of which indicates and demarcates its own field of inquiry? I can
almost imagine such a series; but as soon as I require that these questions have nothing to do
with one another, they cease to be meaningful to me as questions. Our experience in
preceptorial, the experience that some of you will soon have for the first time, gives good
guidance here. Most of the preceptorials offered this term count toward all three of the term’s
segments: Philosophy & Theology, Politics & Society, and History. And yet very few of the
fundamental and interesting questions asked in these preceptorials will present themselves
exclusively as philosophical, theological, political, or historical questions. It will occur neither
to students nor to tutors, while pursuing these questions, that there are certain directions the
conversation cannot take because a disciplinary boundary would be crossed. And it will not be
evident which segment each student is taking, from the tendency of his or her remarks to reside
in one discipline or another. To the contrary: while the interesting and fundamental questions we
pursue in our classes can originate in the concerns of many, perhaps infinitely many, disciplines,
as interesting they all indicate a relation between the thing asked about and us, the questioners
and answerers; and as fundamental they all point to the central questions of what we are as
questioning and answering beings, and how we should live. So it is precisely the interesting
character of the questions indicated by our segment titles, and pursued in our classes, that
indicates the wholeness of the Program in both its undergraduate and graduate expressions – and
6
�in doing so, indicates the problematic and aspirational wholeness of the human being. And
similarly it is precisely the fundamental character of these questions that indicates the problem
that we are, the human problem that constitutes the Program’s homogeneity.
What, then, is a segment? For us, here in the Graduate Institute, a segment is three
classes in which we read great books, gathered under a title which is meant to provoke
interesting and fundamental questions, all of which point back to the first and characteristic
question for a human being: ‘how should I live?’ I do not mean by this conclusion to deny that
certain questions are more likely to be pursued in the classes of one segment than in those of
another; in the Mathematics and Natural Science tutorial, for example, we would be remiss if we
did not discuss Euclid’s definition of a straight line, whereas this definition is not a frequent
topic of conversation in the Literature seminar. But I do mean to insist that our segment titles,
and the segments themselves, ought not to be taken as signs of deep differences, natural kinds,
among the books that we read and the questions that we ask. The St. John’s program is a whole,
not a heap.
But why this insistence? Why ask ‘what is a segment?’ Just as graduate students have a
special practical need for a segmented program, since the pace and order of their studies are not
as regular as those of undergraduates, they also run special risks once the segments have names,
as ours do. For some of you may already have studied, may have degrees in, may even have
advanced degrees in disciplines that share the names of our segments. I insist on the
questionableness of these names in part to point out that no matter your previous education, you
haven’t done this before. Our task in our classes is to make the most familiar books and authors
unfamiliar and newly challenging. I also insist on the questionableness of our segments’ names
to discourage the practice of worrying about which segments to take, and in which order. While
7
�it is respectable to have reasons to want to read particular books by particular authors, we should
keep in mind that what we find in the pages of every great book is human being, and human
being more wonderful, and less reassuring, than we can imagine.
I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be a study group this term on
Shakespeare’s Roman plays: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. We will
read Titus Andronicus during the summer term. This term, the group will meet on Thursday
afternoons, from 3:30 to 5:30, in the Hartle Room, beginning on January 19th. Watch your email
accounts for a schedule of readings. 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 spring 2012 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
January 4, 2012
Delivered January 9, 2012
8
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2012
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2012-01-09
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2012 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Segment?"
Convocation
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Graduate Institute
Tutors
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2013
On Liberal Education as a Commodity
“Education is the only commodity that people are willing to pay for and not receive.”
I don’t know how this maxim strikes you, but I remember vividly how it struck me, as a
young undergraduate sitting in an introductory economics lecture: with the shocking
combination of strangeness and rightness that is the sign of a new truth. The circumstances
which led my professor to pronounce this maxim have faded from my memory: perhaps he was
peeved that his lecture was ill-attended, or perhaps he was dismayed at his students’ poor
performance on a recent exam. But the force of the maxim has not faded for me, over the
intervening quarter-century. It seemed then, and it still seems now, to capture almost perfectly
the puzzling combination on the part of most human beings of an eagerness to be educated, and
an unwillingness to do what is needed to become educated. Hence, “education is the only
commodity that people are willing to pay for and not receive.”
Reflecting on my professor’s maxim from the perspective of the graduate and
undergraduate Programs at St. John’s, it’s easy to say that things here are different. And justice
demands that we acknowledge that, with respect to this maxim, things indeed are different at the
College. We have no ‘ten-minute rule,’ for example – no mythical rule that claims to determine
how long students are obliged to wait after the beginning of a class for a late professor to arrive,
before they are within their rights to disperse. To the contrary, one of the most concrete
implications of our saying that the great books, not the tutors, are the teachers here at the College
is that our classes begin on time, whether the tutor is present or not. The tutors assist students
1
�with their learning, and they witness this learning; but their presence is neither necessary nor
sufficient for learning to take place. And this is as it should be: for ‘ten-minute rules’ and similar
legalistic evasions are fundamentally thoughtless. From the perspective of learning, either what
a professor has to say is likely to be helpful, or it is not. If the former, then one should be willing
to wait as long as is reasonable, and surely longer than ten minutes; if the latter, then why wait
that long – indeed, why come to class at all? So we should acknowledge that students at St.
John’s, and perhaps especially graduate students at the College, become members of this
community of learning because they are willing to do what is necessary to learn, and so to
receive the education that they have paid for.
But justice also demands that we press beyond this moment of self-congratulation, to see
as clearly as we can how we relate to our education, as graduate students and as tutors here at St.
John’s. Can we really say – speaking as students, for example – that we have never chosen to
cut a class, nor wished that we could do so, for the sake of some other activity that, if pressed, we
would acknowledge has less likelihood of educating us? Can we really say that we have never
forgone the opportunity to work on an essay for the sake of some apparently more pressing or
pleasant activity, in the vague hope that there will be time enough to write the essay later? Or,
speculating more cautiously, from the perspective of a tutor, isn’t learning at St. John’s
sometimes like being forced to consume a delicious meal at gunpoint? Sure, we all love to read
Plato, or Aristotle, or Rousseau, or Nietzsche – but must we do so right now? And must we rush
to be finished by 7:15, and ready with our opening question? Certainly some of the feeling of
constraint that comes with education is due to our membership in a community of learning, with
all the compromise and limitation that entails. But could there be something about learning
2
�itself, about education itself, that makes perhaps even the most willing and self-selecting among
us seek to evade its demands?
My professor’s maxim is helpful here, by framing its insight in the language of
economics. It begins, “Education is the only commodity…,” and it acquires its force with the
concluding image of a thoughtless consumer who pays for this commodity but neglects to
receive it. But is education a commodity? My economics textbook from that same introductory
class defines a commodity as “any item of use to a consumer or producer.” And though it is
fashionable, especially in our circles, to say that a liberal education above all is not useful in this
way – it is, rather, for its own sake – this seems to me to go too far. None of us would be here if
we suspected that becoming liberally educated would make no difference to our lives, or that it
would change them for the worse. Each of us hopes that education will change us for the better;
this is its use. For this reason, education is a commodity: it is an item that both producer and
consumer agree is of use, and that they try to price based on their mutual sense of its usefulness.
But education differs from other commodities in one crucial respect: it is the only
commodity about which its producer and its consumer necessarily disagree about what the
commodity itself is. The reason for this disagreement is straightforward. To desire education,
one must lack it, and know that one lacks it. But to lack education means to be ignorant to some
extent of what it means to be educated – which also means to have opinions about education that
are to some extent mistaken. Conversely, to provide education one must be educated, and know
what it means to be educated. Therefore there is a necessary misunderstanding between those
who would ‘produce’ education and those who would ‘consume’ it, as to exactly what is being
produced and consumed. Now economists are familiar with versions of this misunderstanding
that arise by accident with other commodities. Consumers might be unaware of the supply of a
3
�commodity, or of the demand for it in neighboring markets, and so they might end up paying a
price that is too high or too low. Such misunderstandings are inefficiencies in the operation of
the market that should be removed by better communication. But only in the case of education, I
would submit – and especially the most comprehensive kind of education, liberal education – is
it impossible to remove such misunderstandings in advance, because the understanding of the
commodity is the commodity. This is what makes it possible for the hapless student in my
professor’s maxim to pay for an education that he does not receive. The student pays for an
education that he wrongly understands in terms of grades and a degree, and he fails to receive the
education that his professor rightly understands in terms of the more comprehensive insight that
comes only with long labor.
I hope it is by now clear that the puzzle that I raised with my professor’s maxim, and
pursued using the language of economics, is really the same puzzle about learning that arises in
Plato’s dialogue Meno. In perhaps the most famous of his many attempts to evade the labors
Socrates is trying to impose on him, Meno – the ‘poster child’ for those who pay for their
education but fail to receive it – makes the following claim: it makes no sense to labor to learn
what one does not know. Either one knows a thing fully, Meno reasons, in which case there is
no need to learn it; or one does not know a thing at all, in which case there is no way to learn it.
For how would you begin to learn, let alone finish learning, something of which you are utterly
ignorant?
Socrates’ solution to Meno’s evasive puzzle is to insist that there is a condition other than
either knowing or not knowing: a mixed condition in which we have opinions about the things
that are, some of which are true, and some false. This mixed condition is the human condition,
according to Socrates: no human being ever finds himself on either horn of Meno’s dilemma,
4
�either knowing something fully, or being utterly ignorant of it. And as the dialogue continues,
Socrates is able to explain on the basis of this mixed condition how it is that human beings learn:
by juxtaposing our opinions with one another and with the things in the world, we first come to
know in a determinate way what it is that we do not know, and then – often with the help of a
teacher – we learn these things, to the extent that human beings can know them. Socrates’ name
for this human kind of learning is ‘recollection.’
What I have said so far about the Socratic doctrine of recollection in the Meno is
commonplace, and overlooks several interesting details. But there is a less commonplace
connection between the doctrine of recollection and another famous Socratic doctrine, advanced
in the Republic: the doctrine of the well-born falsehood, or the noble lie. Socrates introduces this
falsehood into his conversation about the best regime because he needs it, to give all the citizens
of the regime – or failing that, at all the citizens but the rulers – a natural attachment to their city
and to the land on which it is built, as well as a pious attachment to the city’s caste system. Now
the language of the falsehood is language that Socrates earlier calls tragic, and associates with
the style of Gorgias. (Interestingly, it is also language for which Socrates’ interlocutor at the
time, Glaucon, has no taste.) It replaces things that are simple and knowable with things that are
complex and mysterious: the rearing and education of the citizens, for example, become their
fashioning beneath the earth, and the discernment by the rulers of the virtues of the citizens
becomes their discernment of metals placed within the citizens by a god. These replacements
make the falsehood persuasive, and the attachment of the citizens to their regime more firm. But
in the Meno, Meno himself is said to be a lover of tragic language, which is associated there too
with Gorgias. Meno also prefers the complex and mysterious to the simple and knowable: a
definition of color, for example, as “an emanation of shapes commensurate with sight and hence
5
�subject to perception,” rather than a definition of shape as “that which alone of the beings
happens always to accompany color.” And in that dialogue, Socrates also comes up with a wellborn falsehood, one that makes use of Meno’s preferred, tragic language to describe our mixed
human condition, and to claim on the basis of this condition that learning is possible.
I take this connection between the falsehoods of the Republic and the Meno – their
common use of tragic language – to indicate the following. First, where important matters are
concerned, we are all to some degree resistant to learning. Our resistance comes from our
attachment to opinions that make us feel that we know more than we do. Learning always feels
to us at first like losing something; and losing something hurts. This pain marks the distance
between the learner and the teacher, and explains why they necessarily misunderstand one
another. But second, and more hopefully, wise teachers can use the very source of our resistance
to learning – our faith that we already know what is most important for us to know – to
encourage us to endure the pain of learning, and to face this pain again and again.
One consequence of these claims is that our teachers and administrators should not be
ashamed to speak of a liberal arts education as a commodity. Not only is this required in order to
be understood in our commercial society, in which as many things as possible have their price; it
is also recommended as a way of encouraging students to learn. There is something tragic in the
claims that a liberal arts education will produce skills in speaking, writing and thinking; or that it
will prepare students for the workplace of the future; or that it will guarantee a lucrative career;
or that it will produce better citizens of a democracy; or that it will make students happy –
something tragic, and so something false. But these are well-born falsehoods: they are false only
because they are partial, they resemble the truth, and they do more good than harm.
6
�Lastly, the members of our community should not be ashamed to speak in this way
because this is how the great books have always spoken to their readers: by knowing how to
speak and how to keep silent when they ought; by knowing just what to say. In his greatest
work, Emile, about the education of an imaginary child, Rousseau tells a beautiful story in this
vein about one such great book: Plutarch’s Lives. A young boy who has just read the “Life of
Alexander” is made by his foolish teacher to babble at a dinner party about the episode in which
Alexander dares to drink a potion given him by his friend Philip – despite having just received
intelligence that Philip means to poison him. This intelligence turns out to be false, and
Alexander lives; but the guests at the party disagree about whether Alexander’s action is
courageous, or foolhardy. “After the dinner,” Rousseau writes,
suspecting, on the basis of several bits of evidence, that my young doctor had
understood nothing at all of the story he had told so well, I took him by the hand
and went for a turn in the park with him. Having questioned him at my ease, I
found that more than anyone he admired Alexander’s much-vaunted courage. But
do you know in what he found this courage to consist? Solely in having
swallowed at a single gulp a bad-tasting potion, without hesitation, without the
least sign of repugnance. The poor child, who has been made to take medicine
not two weeks before, and who had taken it only after a mighty effort, still had its
aftertaste in his mouth. Death and poisoning stood in his mind only for
disagreeable sensations; and he did not conceive, for his part, of any other poison
than [medicine]. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the hero’s firmness had
made a great impression on the boy’s young heart, and that, at the next medicine
he would have to swallow, he had resolved to be an Alexander. Without going
into clarifications which were evidently out of his reach, I confirmed him in these
laudable dispositions.
I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be five Graduate Institute-hosted
study groups this term. Two will meet on Monday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:00, beginning on
January 14th: one on Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and one on three of Shakespeare’s
plays: All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. A third group,
on the French language, will meet on Mondays from 3:30 to 5:00, but beginning on January 21st.
A group will meet on Thursday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:00, beginning on January 10th, to read
7
�the last part of Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human, and the whole of Dawn. And a group will
meet on Friday afternoons from 4:00 to 6:00, beginning on January 18th, to read Heidegger’s
Nietzsche lectures. Schedules for these groups will be circulated by email. Also, I would like to
invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going
to tutorial.
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. The spring 2013 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session.
Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
4 January 2013
Delivered 7 January 2013
Note
Those who would like to see just how many interesting details I have overlooked should consider Meno 75b-77b and
80d-81e in comparison with Republic 413a-415d. The story about Alexander taking his medicine can be found near
the middle of Book Two of Emile.
8
�
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On Liberal Education as a Commodity" in Annapolis, MD.
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2014
On the History Segment
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a
community of learning, at a College 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 inquire into ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining
the readings of the History segment.
The subject of this convocation address – the third of five, each treating one of the
segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address,
delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the
Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of
that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as
compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names
that determine the distinct subject matter treated by the readings in each segment. Now I hope to
make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the
segment title ‘History’? Before I proceed to answer my own question, I should caution you that
the threads I mean to follow for the next few minutes – threads that run through the tutorial and
seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected to threads that run through other
segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I only insist that these threads are
1
�present in the segment readings, and that they are truly worth following. So again, what are the
wonderful questions raised by ‘History’?
Those of you who recall my procedure in my last two convocation addresses will be
relieved to see that this time, our segment title contains no ampersand, and so makes no
questionable claim that two things are properly understood as one. But the required portion of
the history segment is still divided into a seminar and a tutorial; so we can wonder about the
principle of this division. In the History seminar, we read the Books of Samuel and Kings from
the Hebrew Scriptures, Herodotus’ Histories, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, several of
Plutarch’s Lives, Tacitus’ Annals, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; in the
tutorial we read parts of Augustine’s City of God, Vico’s New Science, Kant’s Idea for a
Universal History and Contest of Faculties, Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Marx’s German
Ideology, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life by Nietzsche, Husserl’s
Vienna Lecture, and Heidegger’s Age of the World Picture. Were it not for the puzzling
presence of the interloper Gibbon, who wrote in the eighteenth century CE, around the same time
as Kant, we could conclude that the division between the seminar and the tutorial, like the
organization of many classes in our graduate and undergraduate programs, is chronological by
author. But Gibbon’s membership among the History seminar authors suggests that the division
between seminar and tutorial is actually chronological by subject – by time period depicted
historically. In Samuel and Kings we read of events that are to have happened before the tenth
century BCE, and the seminar readings extend from there to the portions of Gibbon that we read,
which cover events in the first and second century CE. The tutorial readings pick up with
Augustine, who wrote in the fifth century CE, and run through to Heidegger’s attempt to
characterize the historical spirit of the twentieth century.
2
�There’s something to this interpretation of the division between seminar and tutorial, but
it doesn’t tell the whole story. For as soon as we turn to examine the subjects of the tutorial
authors, we discover that they don’t concern themselves with historical events later than those
treated by the seminar authors, but with all historical events, with history as a whole. To steal
some terms from the titles of their respective works, the seminar authors write Inquiries into
particular events – the Greek word ἱστορία, whence we get the word history, means inquiry –
whereas the tutorial authors write Universal Histories, or Philosophies of History. The
beginnings of the first readings in each class exemplify this difference. I Samuel begins simply,
artlessly, in the middle of things: “And there was a man…” [I Samuel 1:1]. The City of God, by
contrast, begins:
Most glorious is the City of God: whether in this passing age, where she dwells by
faith as a pilgrim among the ungodly, or in the security of that eternal home which
she now patiently awaits until ‘righteousness shall return unto judgment’, but
which she will then possess perfectly, in final victory and perfect peace [Book 1,
Preface].
The former work begins with a particular, a man; the latter by looking back to the whole passing
age and forward to the perfect end of eternity. Perhaps we have discovered an ampersand in our
segment title after all, and this difference between the seminar and tutorial readings ought to lead
us to call the segment ‘Inquiry & Universal History,’ or just ‘History & History.’
To get a better sense of the causes and extent of this difference, let’s let more of the
History segment authors speak for themselves. Here’s how Herodotus begins his book:
Here is the showing-forth of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that
neither what human beings have done might disappear in time, nor the deeds great
and admirable, partly shown forth by the Greeks and partly by the barbarians,
might be without fame: his inquiry shows forth both other things and through
what cause they warred against one another [Book I, 1].
Herodotus inquires into the deeds of human beings, and in particular into the great and admirable
deeds of Greeks and barbarians, for the sake of memory and fame, and for the sake of knowledge
3
�of causes. The deeds in question – which are chiefly deeds done in war – are worthy of memory
and fame, and knowledge of their causes is worth possessing, because they are great and
admirable, with a greatness not solely Greek, nor barbarian, but human. Likewise, Thucydides
begins thus:
Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the
Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and
believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that
had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both
the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he
could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who
delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation. Indeed, this was the greatest
movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the
barbarian world – I had almost said of mankind. For though the events of remote
antiquity, and even those that more immediately precede the war, could not from
lapse of time be clearly ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried as
far back as was practicable lead me to trust, all point to the conclusion that there
was nothing on a greater scale, either in war or in other matters [I.1.1-3].
Thucydides also justifies his inquiry by the human greatness to be discovered in the event,
another war, into which he inquires.
This view, that history means inquiry into particular events that disclose a lasting human
greatness, and so are worth remembering, runs through the readings of the History seminar.
Plutarch modifies it in his “Life of Alexander,” but only to insist that lasting human greatness is
not necessarily seen only in war: “For it is not histories that I am writing,” he says, “but lives;
and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a
slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where
thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities” [I.1]. And Tacitus modifies this
view in his Annals, but only to insist that partisan passions distort inquiries into lasting human
greatness, which must be dispassionate to be worthy of memory:
The Roman people of old, however, had their successes and adversities recalled
by brilliant writers; and to tell of Augustus’ times there was no dearth of
deserving talents, until they were deterred by swelling sycophancy. The affairs of
4
�Tiberius and Gaius, as of Claudius and Nero, were falsified through dread while
the men themselves flourished, and composed with hatred fresh after their fall.
Hence my plan is the transmission of a mere few things about Augustus and of his
final period, then of Tiberius’ principate and the remainder – without anger and
partiality, any reasons for which I keep at a distance [I.1.2].
In the History seminar it is only with Gibbon, writing sixteen hundred years after Tacitus,
but about the same events, that a deep challenge to this view of history first comes to light. In
Chapter XV of the first volume of Decline and Fall, our last seminar reading, Gibbon turns to “a
candid but rational inquiry into the progress of Christianity,” which he holds to be an essential
part of the history of the Roman Empire. But here Gibbon confronts a problem. The Tacitean
law of dispassion – what Gibbon calls “the great law of impartiality” – requires the historian to
confess the imperfections of the believers in the Christian revelation; but faith in its divine origin
requires the historian to profess the perfection of this revelation. “Our curiosity,” Gibbon writes,
is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so
remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth. To this inquiry an
obvious but satisfactory answer may be returned; that it was owing to the
convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its great
Author. But as truth and reason seldom find so favorable a reception in the world,
and as the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of
the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to
execute its purpose, we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission,
to ask, not indeed what were the first, but what were the secondary causes of the
rapid growth of the Christian church [487-488]?
According to Gibbon, then, the belief in divine providence poses a deep challenge to the view
that history is an inquiry into the natural causes of lasting human greatness. This challenge is so
deep that Gibbon is forced to invent a distinction between the first, divine causes of the growth
of Christianity, and the secondary, human causes of this growth. The historian, as distinguished
from the theologian, is restricted to the study of these secondary causes. But we might wonder,
given the extent of divine power, whether these secondary causes are in fact necessary, and
whether, if they are unnecessary, they are in fact causes.
5
�This view of history, as the record of divine providence, extends throughout the readings
of the History tutorial, and distinguishes these readings from those of the seminar. It is found in
explicitly religious form in Augustine, who writes,
the City of God of which we speak is that to which the Scriptures bear witness:
the Scriptures which, excelling all the writings of all the nations in their divine
authority, have brought under their sway every kind of human genius, not by a
chance motion of the soul, but clearly by the supreme disposition of providence
[XI.1];
and it is found in more secular forms in the works we read by Vico, Kant, Hegel, and Marx.
Vico envisions a “new Science [that] must therefore be a demonstration, so to speak, of what
providence has wrought in human history” [section 342], while Kant writes in his Idea for a
Universal History, “the history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realization of
a hidden plan of nature” to perfect the natural capacities of mankind [Eighth Proposition], so that
history thus understood is a “justification of nature – or rather perhaps of providence” [Ninth
Proposition]. For his part, Hegel grandly offers a Philosophy of History that is guided by “the
simple conception… that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world,
therefore, presents us with a rational process” [9] – a conception that consorts with the belief that
“a Providence (that of God) presides over the events of the World” [13]. And Marx sees history
as a necessary dialectic of material conditions, ending in a heaven on earth
where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production
and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to
hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after
dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd
or critic [53].
You may already have noticed, even from these brief indications, that a strange note has
crept in to these developments of the view that history is the record of divine providence. Since
this view of history is based on the Christian scriptures, and these scriptures give an account of
6
�the world from its beginning in God’s creation to its end in God’s kingdom, the histories
animated by this view are necessarily universal as well as providential. Accordingly, every
tutorial author that we have so far mentioned takes as his subject human history as a whole.
Moreover, since the Christian scriptures tell the story of the fall of man and promise his eventual
redemption from sin, these universal histories are necessarily progressive: each points to an
image of some perfect human end, whether in this world or in the next. But to the extent that
these universal providential histories are also held to be rational, strange conclusions result.
Vico, for example, struggles to preserve the eternal necessity of his science in the face of the
historical contingency of providence. “Since [human] institutions have been established by
divine providence,” he writes, “the course of the institutions of the nations had to be, must now
be, and will have to be such as our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were born from
time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case” [section 348]. In the Contest of
Faculties, Kant points to the French Revolution as evidence that the human race will enjoy
continual progress [section 7]. Hegel goes so far as to say that history teaches that “the real
world is as it ought to be” [36], while Marx makes human nature depend on the material
conditions that determine production [42]. In short, the attempt to transform the mysterious
operation of providence into a rational process, visible in history, compels the universal historian
to equate what is at each moment with what is best at that moment, and so to deny that there is
such a thing as lasting human greatness, into which we can inquire.
Of our tutorial authors, Friedrich Nietzsche is the first to call into question the aspirations
of universal history, by subordinating history and its scientific truths to the standard of life.
Husserl and Heidegger follow Nietzsche in this, each in his own way. But I shall pass over how
these thinkers accomplish this, so that my convocation address not be as long as human history
7
�itself. I will only say that, in subordinating history to another standard – whether it be life, or the
infinite task of philosophy, or the disclosure of being – it is by no means clear that these thinkers
return to the ancient view of history as an inquiry into natural events that disclose a lasting
human greatness. But from this conclusion to the tutorial readings, at least one of the wonderful
questions raised by the history segment should be clear. Is history an inquiry into lasting human
greatness, or is it the record of a necessary progress that denies the possibility of such greatness?
Since the second of these alternatives especially claims the name ‘History’ for itself, this
wonderful question could also be put thus: is there such a thing as ‘History’? Lastly, it should
also be clear, from everything that is at stake in this question, why, of all the segments in the
graduate program, Graduate Institute students are prohibited from taking the History segment
first. By basing our program almost entirely on the reading and discussion of great books, we
depend, perhaps more than members of any other community of learning, on the belief that there
is such a thing as lasting human greatness.
To conclude, let me announce that there will be five Graduate Institute-hosted study
groups this term: on Plato’s Republic, on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, on Arabic poetry, on
Greek tragedy, and on Richard Feynman’s Quantum Electrodynamics. Schedules and meeting
places for all five of these groups will be circulated by email when they become available. Let
me also invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall,
before going to class.
The spring 2014 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
14 December 2013
Delivered 6 January 2014
8
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2014
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2014 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the History Segment" in Annapolis, MD.
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2015
What Is a Tutor?
(Or, On the Future of Our Educational Institution)
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a community
of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to
pursuing answers to these questions. For the past eleven terms, in just as many convocation
addresses, I have tried to shed light on various aspects of the graduate program here at St. John’s.
But in this, my twelfth and final address as Associate Dean for the Graduate Program, I mean to
shine the light of inquiry closer to home – at the risk of doing what Coriolanus refused to do, and
displaying my wounds. I mean to ask: what is a tutor?
This question may seem perverse. How can someone who professes himself a tutor ask, in
public no less, what a tutor is? To this I reply: there is no guarantee that the names we use all the
time are the correct ones. In the Theaetetus, Plato’s Socrates claims that “those who spend their
lives in philosophy” are almost ignorant of whether their neighbors are human beings. This should
remind us that we too run the risk of using the wrong words for the things we encounter in the
world. Consider the word ‘tutor.’ While nowadays it takes some digging in the College’s website
to verify the fact, here at St. John’s, faculty members are indeed called ‘tutors,’ in order to
distinguish them from professors. On the Annapolis page for prospective faculty, we find this
claim: “We use the title ‘tutor’ to highlight that learning is an ongoing, cooperative enterprise in
which some are at different stages [from] others.” Professors, we are led to infer, downplay or even
deny – by their reliance on lectures – the ongoing, cooperative, and individual character of learning.
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�We could be forgiven for further inferring that, by calling themselves ‘tutors,’ the faculty at St.
John’s means to indicate not just their difference from professors, but their superiority to them.
Any such pretensions are quickly punctured, however, by none other than the Oxford
English Dictionary. As it archly informs us, the particularly American meaning of ‘tutor’ is “a
teacher subordinate to a professor” [my emphasis]. But it also gives us the etymology of the word,
which gets us off to a helpful start. ‘Tutor’ comes from the Latin verb tueri, which means ‘to
watch’ – and so, derivatively, ‘to take care of,’ ‘guard,’ or ‘protect.’ A tutor in the original sense
protected a child and his estate in the absence of his father. But this purely defensive sense of the
word has become obsolete. In its modern meaning, the prophylactic sense is combined with a
pedagogical sense. Nowadays, a tutor is “one employed in the supervision and instruction of a
youth in a private household.”
Why this pedagogical addition to the work of a tutor? It must have come from the sense that
for the young, protection and supervision are not enough. No lesser a defender of the sufficiency of
human nature – or in his formula, “the natural goodness of man” – than Jean-Jacques Rousseau is
compelled to acknowledge, in his educational treatise Emile, that nature can at most be entrusted
with one-half, or perhaps only one-third, of the education of a human being who is meant to live in
society. Since even the best-guarded young can turn out badly, no one should employ a supervisor
who is not also an instructor, who in addition to protecting the young from malign external
influences, takes care to expose them to benign ones. To be employed, then, a tutor must also be an
instructor, which is to say, a teacher. Until so-called competency-based education rules the land, no
student will receive a college degree for having been left to herself for four years, provided only
that she has been adequately supervised and protected. Professing via lectures is not required, nor
perhaps even recommended, but teaching and learning are necessary. So to be a tutor in this
modern sense, one must teach.
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�Here, then, is a first answer to our guiding question: a tutor is a teacher. How satisfying is
this answer? To test it, let’s turn to one of the books we read in the Philosophy & Theology tutorial:
Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche. In the first section of the fourth part of that book, a
part titled “Epigrams and Interludes,” we find this warning: “Whoever is a teacher from the ground
up, takes all things in earnest only in relation to his students – even his own self.” To want to teach
is to want another human being to learn, which, absent an omnipotent speech, is to want to
accommodate oneself to the conditions of another human being’s learning. To want to
accommodate oneself wholly in this way, even in one’s own ground – to be willing to say anything,
so long as it produces a change in the listener – is to take one’s own self seriously only in relation to
one’s students. It is, in other words, to place a higher value on the one who does not know than on
the one who knows: to judge that the student’s unknown genius has a higher value than the
teacher’s known teaching. The limit of this willingness to bend oneself into whatever shape the
student needs, this faith that each student has an unknown, and perhaps unknowable genius, is an
education that stresses form rather than content, and that judges, not what a student has learned, but
only that she has learned – which is to say, changed. What is worse, this subordination involves the
thoroughgoing teacher in a contradiction, since one has a right to teach only if knowing is more
valuable than not knowing.
So Nietzsche hints that we cannot be wholly satisfied with the thought that a tutor is simply
a teacher. But he has much more to say on the question. While this playful epigram is his first
mention of teachers [Lehrer] in Beyond Good and Evil, and his only substantial one, he devotes the
whole of Part Six of the book to those who, literally, have been taught: “We Scholars [Wir
Gelehrten].” Though as a former philologist Nietzsche identifies himself as a scholar, experience
has given him access to a higher ideal than the scholarly, and to a ground from which to criticize
scholars, those who are wholly what they have been taught. Objectivity is the scholarly ideal,
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�Nietzsche writes, and to the extent that a scholar achieves this ideal he becomes a precious
instrument, like a mirror:
he lives to submit before everything that wants to be known, without any other desire
than for that which knowing, “mirroring,” gives, – he waits, until something comes,
and then spreads himself delicately out, so that even light footsteps and the slipping
over of ghostly beings not be lost on his surface and skin.
In the light of his ideal the scholar squints at the subjective aspects of his person; he has time for the
objects of his study, but none for himself, and he demands of others the same submission. He is
industrious and patient, measured and even in his capacities and needs, dependent on the approval
of others, familiar, egalitarian, mediocre, and envious. As a thoroughgoing learner, he is the ideal
match for the thoroughgoing teacher. Like a mirror, his face remains empty until something like a
book – any book – is put in front of it.
Nietzsche grants that scholars have very serious reasons for pursuing this objective ideal.
The extent of human knowledge is vast and growing, all the more so now than in Nietzsche’s day.
To want to learn everything is to risk exhaustion; to want to learn only some things, before one
knows everything, is to risk either dilettantism or an arbitrary, ignorant choice. None of us wants to
be deceived in the things that are most important to us to know; and this intellectual conscience
demands that if we learn anything, we should learn it well. So we succumb to specialization, for the
sake of our self-respect, and the respect of others. The ideal of objectivity recasts this necessity as a
virtue, by dignifying our careful submission before anything that wants to be known, our careful
cultivation of our scholarly patch of grass. But the price of the objective ideal is high, for we
scholars become skeptical and envious of everything that is not objective: of everything that can
judge with a clear conscience for personal, subjective reasons. Indeed, we must be skeptical of
philosophy in particular, wherever we detect that it is not objective – that is, not scholarly. So
through a combination of intellectual conscience and exhaustion, we scholars end by putting
ourselves in the place of philosophers. Those who are skeptical about the possibility of judgment
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�displace those responsible for making the most comprehensive judgments. This, in Nietzsche’s
account in Part Six of Beyond Good and Evil, is the consequence for students of learning from those
who are teachers from the ground up. Wholly selfless teachers produce students wholly lacking in
selves.
It’s time for a brief summary: a step backward for the sake of a leap forward. A tutor cannot
simply be a guardian, since this presumes that the young need nothing but protection to turn out
well. But a tutor cannot simply be a teacher, either, since wholehearted teachers educate young who
are nothing for themselves. What meaning of ‘tutor’ remains, on which we can wholeheartedly
pride ourselves? I once overheard a colleague of mine say something on this score that I find
helpful: “a tutor is someone who deserves a sabbatical.” Lest I be suspected of just now having
taken my leap too far into the subjective and personal, let me explain what I take this colleague to
mean.
When times are good, and circumstances ordinary, each faculty member at St. John’s
College receives a sabbatical every seventh year of her tenure. We say that this respite from
teaching is for the sake of study, rest, and renewal of spirit, in anticipation of future teaching. But
we require from tutors neither a plan for a proposed sabbatical, detailing the studies to be pursued
and the rest to be taken, nor a report on a completed sabbatical. We do not test the spirits of our
returning tutors, to see whether they truly have been renewed. All that we require of a tutor
returning from sabbatical is that she resume teaching, for at least two more years. Now a practice
designed and described in this way, as a matter of instruction and not of compensation, rests on two
presuppositions. First, it presupposes that a tutor’s teaching will be benefited by study that is not
dictated by teaching. It acknowledges that, however much we may learn while we teach, the
learning that is incidental to teaching is not enough – even from the perspective of the demands of
teaching. Second, and more importantly in my view, by requiring neither a plan nor a report for a
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�sabbatical, our practice acknowledges that the tutor, and not the College, is the best judge of what
counts as study, rest, and renewal of spirit – and that allowing tutors to exercise this judgment will
benefit their teaching. Our practice acknowledges that tutors are not teachers from the ground up;
we could say, with a wink at our modern arithmomania, that they are six parts teachers, and one part
something else. But this one part is the important part, for it is the ground of the rest. And here is
where the aptness of my colleague’s dictum becomes clear. A tutor is someone who deserves a
sabbatical, because a tutor, in the precise sense, is someone who can be trusted to make independent
judgments about the ground of her teaching. A tutor is someone whose own work is the work of the
College, not because she pursues it always with an eye to the needs of the College, but because she
knows that the activity of her own intellect and imagination is the source of the life in her teaching.
The College depends on such tutors to constitute its community of learning – to make it more than a
community of teaching. No array of scholarly specialists, however wisely selected, can take their
place.
To add some detail to this vision of what a tutor is, we can turn back to Part Six of Beyond
Good and Evil, to the ideal that Nietzsche opposes to the scholarly. “In the face of a world of
‘modern ideas,’ which would banish everybody into a nook and ‘specialty,’” Nietzsche writes – and
we should interject here that this is our world, to an even greater degree than it was Nietzsche’s –
a philosopher – supposing that today there could be philosophers – would be
compelled to place the greatness of the human being, the concept of ‘greatness,’
precisely in his comprehensiveness and multiplicity, in his wholeness in
manifoldness. He would even determine worth and rank from this, how much and
how many things one could bear and take upon oneself, how far one could stretch his
responsibility.
Let’s heed Nietzsche’s warning that what a philosopher is cannot be taught [nicht zu lehren],
and give the anti-scholarly ideal a more modest name, one more suited to saying what a tutor is.
Let’s call this the comprehensive ideal. Far from being scholarly mirrors who submit themselves
before every thought that comes along, who wish to do nothing more than understand each author as
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�he understood himself, who are Platonists because it is Monday afternoon, and monotheists because
it is Monday night, devotees of the comprehensive ideal seek to place everything they comprehend
into an ordered whole in which they can live. They are skeptics, not in the sense that they try to
bend every exclamation point into a question mark, but in the sense that they test every thought to
see whether it is solid and shapely enough to be of use. They are courageous, deft, and methodical
critics, not in order to anatomize every idea they touch, but in order to be able, when called on, to
stand alone and give an account of themselves, and of the world they are trying to be. Seen in the
light of the comprehensive ideal, it is clear why a tutor is someone who deserves a sabbatical. A
sabbatical is the appropriate conclusion to the creation of a world.
But what can a tutor striving for the comprehensive ideal be for her students? At the root of
the German word for teacher, Lehrer, is the word Lehre, or ‘instruction’ – a word closely related to
Lehr, or ‘model.’ We see something similar in the etymology of ‘to teach,’ which can be traced
back to the Greek word δείκνυµι, meaning ‘to show.’ We are accustomed to say here at the College
that tutors are model learners, but we should remember that they are also models of having learned,
of living with learning. Tutors who aspire to the comprehensive ideal model this ideal for their
students, and show them that it can be lived. They show them that their learning is neither for its
own sake, in that morally humble but metaphysically proud phrase, nor for the sake of some job,
family, institution, or community to which they must subordinate themselves, or into which they
must fit. Rather, their learning is for the sake of the wholeness in manifoldness of the being that
longs to comprehend a world – the wholeness in manifoldness that is the true end of liberal
education. It is by protecting this possibility, in tutors, staff, and students alike, that our remedial
community earns the right to be called a community of learning. It is through this wholeness in
manifoldness of the human being, in the highest sense of the term, that our two programs of
instruction, the graduate and the undergraduate, win the right to consider themselves wholes. And it
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�is in pursuit of this wholeness in manifoldness that liberal education, our bookish, freeing, childlike
education, becomes what it is:
the consummation of practice and a courageous confrontation with what is most
real… the education of the free who know they are not free into a freedom that they
do not desire… an education that forgets and begins again, that plays at the most
serious things, and that thereby gives us a world in which to live.
There will be five Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: one on Homer’s
Odyssey, one on Euclid’s Elements, one on Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, one on Shakespeare’s
Henry plays, and one on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Schedules and meeting
places for these groups will be circulated by email soon. By way of conclusion, let me invite you
all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class.
The spring 2015 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff J.S. Black
Annapolis, Maryland
5 January 2015
Note
In my beginning, I have Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in mind, but also the beginning of section 204, in Part Six of Beyond
Good and Evil. Socrates’ remark can be found at Theaetetus, 174B. For “the natural goodness of man,” see Rousseau’s
note for philosophers in the Final Reply; the passage of Emile to which I refer is on page 38 of Bloom’s edition.
Nietzsche’s epigram about the teacher from the ground up is section 63 of Beyond Good and Evil; the translation is my
own. Part Six of that book had a strong influence on the whole argument of this address: I quote from sections 207 and
212, making my own translations there too; but the aspects of Nietzsche’s argument that I do not mention are more
interesting. The final quotation is from my Summer 2012 convocation address, “What Is Liberal Education? Part I.”
8
�
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2015 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Tutor? Or, On the Future of Our Educational Institution" in Annapolis, MD.
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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St. John's College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Spring 2016
Emily Brooker Langston
Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families,
friends, and tutors – to the spring term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's
College. In particular, welcome to all of you who are today becoming members of
the Graduate Institute.
In an attempt to connect these talks to life in the Graduate Institute, I try to
make each a reflection on a text I read with students over the past semester – and
so I found myself wondering what to say about the text we studied in my most
recent preceptorial, Thomas Mann’s extraordinary Magic Mountain. It is a novel in
the classic tradition of the bildungsroman - which is only to say a novel about
education – so that would seem to make it a likely candidate for a convocation
address. However, what intrigues me most about the novel is that it is also about
time. And doesn’t it makes sense to consider time and education together? We all
know that education, even in the most basic sense of training, takes time; and
education in the more profound sense, the education that (as the motto of the
college puts it) would make “free adults out of children,” continues through time
and is never complete.
Mann’s novel doesn’t simply draw our attention to time, however; it
�confronts us with time as a mystery. The novel tells the story of Hans Castorp, a
“perfectly ordinary young man” who goes to a sanatorium in the high Alps for a
visit he intends to last for three weeks, and somehow stays for seven years. We are
informed that it is a story which should be told in verbs of the “deepest past” – but
“it does not actually owe its pastness to time.” (All quotes taken from the Vintage
John E. Woods translation.) And what is time? Mann’s narrator explicitly and
insistently raises the question. It is, (quote) “a secret – insubstantial and
omnipotent. A prerequisite of the external world, a motion intermingled and fused
with bodies existing and moving in space. But would there be no time if there were
no motion? No motion, if there were no time?”
At this point, you’ve probably started to wonder where this could be going.
Has someone really raised the question “What is time” in a convocation address?
Don’t worry, in the short time I have for this address, I am not going to try to
answer it. I am only going to look at one particularly important definition of time,
and at one powerful image from the novel, and attempt to make a few
observations. My first observation is that asking questions about time – in time –
causes one to interrogate one’s own speech. What do I mean, for example, when I
speak of “the time I have for this talk?” If you ask me how long the talk is, I might
respond - about 15 minutes. But of course the 15 minutes are not the talk. They
are only some sort of measure of one quality of the talk.
�Those who have taken the Mathematics and Natural Science segment (and I
will confess, parenthetically, that one of my subsidiary goals in this talk is to leave
those of you who might have some hesitation about signing up for a segment with
that title intrigued about the questions we discuss there) or who have had some
other opportunity to read Aristotle’s Physics may not be surprised by the famous
definition of time to which I will now turn. Both Mann’s questions about the
relationship between time and motion, and my observation relating time to
measurement, echo ideas we find there.
“Would there be no time if there were no motion? No motion, if there were
no time?” asked Mann. Aristotle actually proposes a quite definite answer to
Mann’s question about the relationship between time and motion, and which has
priority. It is motion. What is primary both in our experience and in itself is not
something we call time, which we can never seem to grasp, but change. And all
change, whether it be growth, decay, or change from place to place, is at bottom
motion. So where does time come in? “Time,” says Aristotle, “is the number of
motion with respect to the prior and posterior.” (quotes are taken from the
Hippocrates G. Apostle translation of the Physics.) Time then doesn’t exist in the
in its own right as a thing; rather, it is a sort of measure; a measure brought to
change by counting. According to Aristotle the primary motion upon which all
others are based is the rotating motion of the heavens; and the most inclusive
�notion of time, which encompasses us all, is the number of this regular, circular,
motion. Aristotle is bold enough to say that if there were no Counter, no intellect or
Soul to do the counting, then although there might be motion, there would be no
time.
And how might we bring Aristotle’s understanding of time to an
examination of education? Whatever else we may say about education, it doesn’t
seem far-fetched to me to say that education is a process of change, and thus a
motion. In fact, in the Physics, Aristotle uses education – divided into teaching
and learning – as an example of a particular sort of motion or change that can look
different depending upon the direction from which it is approached. Teaching and
learning are not the same, any more than acting and being acted upon are the same,
or going from Athens to Thebes is the same as going from Thebes to Athens - but
(quote) “that to which they belong, the motion, is the same.” (202b 20) It takes the
same amount of time for someone to teach me something as it does for me to learn
it because teaching and learning, though they are not identical on one another,
belong to the same motion.
Thinking about education along with Aristotle’s definition of time suggests
more about the sort of change we take education to be - at least insofar as it
changes us in the direction of what we should hope to become. Remember that, to
the assertion that “time is the number of motion,” the definition added “with
�respect to the prior and posterior.” This last part might raise the suspicion that the
definition is circular; don’t prior and posterior smuggle a sense of before and after,
of time, right into our definition of time? But “prior and posterior,” rather than
making the definition circular, are pointing toward a distinction Aristotle makes
between violent and natural motions. All change that is natural is a change from
potentiality toward actuality (book VIII ch. 4) The education that makes free
adults out of children is just this sort of change - a natural change, or motion, for
human beings. The posterior is implicit in the potential of the prior; the before is
taken up in the motion, the change, that takes us through the present to the after.
The free adult is potentially present in the child.
Stopping for a moment to take stock, what can we say so far? Education
seems to be a kind of change in a human being, toward a greater actualization of
human possibility. It occurs in time, but as time is merely the measurement or
number of the change, the time itself is not the point; one doesn’t undertake an
education, at least not usually, in order to fill time - but out of a desire for growth
and change.
And yet, consigning time to the status of a mere epiphenomenon doesn’t feel
entirely right. It seems to me that although I cannot point to time or grasp it, I in
�some way experience it; it may have qualities – may be, for example, fast or slow.
Though it may be the number of change, I also wonder whether it can change me.
As I consider my own experience, and particularly as I read Mann, I have a sense
of time as elusive and mysterious, and not without power.
Can I even say that, though? If time has some power, doesn’t it have to be
some thing? Mann’s narrator says at one point that time seems less like a noun than
like a verb, like an activity. Looking back to our Aristotelian definition, I think we
can safely say that it is at the very least closely related to an activity. If time is the
number of motion, and would not even exist without a subject that counts or
numbers, then we cannot think of time without also thinking about the activity of
counting. In its broadest sense, as I said earlier, the motion numbered is the
rotation of the heavens; and the time that encompasses us all is the number that
arises from the activity of the soul or intellect eternally counting these revolutions.
But not all motions are the prime motion. The universe is full of motions, natural
or unnatural, internally or externally caused. Likewise the activity of applying
number to motion is something we engage in on different and more local levels. In
some communities we count the return of seasons and the growth and decay of
crops, in others the rhythm of tides. Events like this one mark the regular return of
periods in the life of an academic community. And if we engage consistently in the
�activity of numbering motion in a particular way isn’t it likely to be true that this
activity, like any other regular activity, bends back and shapes us, the actors?
For an example of the way we humans are shaped by our own numbering, I
will turn from Aristotle back to the Magic Mountain. One of the recurrent themes
of that book is the difference between life in the flatlands and life on the mountain,
and much of the difference comes down to a difference in the sense of time. At the
International Sanatorium Berghof, each day is marked by no less than five
sumptuous meals and three “rest cures,” which divide the motion of the day into
periods such as “between first and second breakfast.” Then, although the day is so
closely divided, other units of time to which we flatlanders are accustomed have
lost all meaning; the next smallest unit of time of which anyone is aware is said to
be a month. This unusual method of counting has a profound and disorienting
effect upon Hans Castorp. With days that seem full, and without weeks to hold
onto, months slip away almost before one notices that they have begun.
Mann offers another extremely rich image for the lived experience of
time that confirms our intuition of its formative power – the image of music. Music
also puts number to a kind of motion. As the narrator puts it, music “measures and
divides,” and presents itself “as movement toward an end.” (531) Like time, at
least as I experience it, music has qualities, shape, moves now more quickly now
more slowly. It may be pleasant but insipid, like the light music that a concert band
�provides to the citizens of the Magic Mountain every other Sunday, making the
lightest of marks halfway through the monthly unit. Or it may be grand and
inspiring, stretching and extending the soul as the listener attempts to take in all
that transpires. In either case, it affects those who live in and with it. The chapter of
the Magic Mountain that arguably presents the apex of Hans Castorp’s educational
development is entitled “Fullness of Harmony,” and describes his extended
emotional and intellectual engagement with several great works of music. One of
the most important source books for anyone thinking about education, Plato’s
Republic, has much to say about how music may mold the soul of the individual
and the shape of the polis.
I’m reaching the end of my 15 minutes, - and so, remembering that this is a
convocation address, I must ask - what do these musings about the formative
power of the activity of numbering motion, leave us able to say about the activity
we engage in together here in the Graduate Institute? We don’t make music
together in the GI (though they do in the undergraduate program), but we do have
our own peculiar ways of numbering motion together. You are joining a
community, entering into a local time you will share with your classmates and
tutors, in which we number weeks, and find that within each week the Mondays
and Thursdays have a particular accented quality that shapes our perception of the
other days. In which a seminar, which measured by the movement of the hand of
�your watch around a circular path takes two hours, is a unit recognized by all that
may sometimes fly, very occasionally may creep.
It’s still true, of course, that the shape of the week and the movement of a
seminar are not the point of what we do. For this education, the books we read and
the conversations we share are the critical elements. It takes time to read and to
talk, but time, as we looked at Aristotle’s definition, seemed to dissolve in our
hands. Still, there is an activity implied by the giving of number to motion and that
activity, like all activities we engage in regularly, affects us. The way we number
time matters. Our common way of experiencing time is part of what creates a
powerful and cohesive sense of community, a community with periods of intense
activity but also, we hope, with time for reflection. And this community provides
the context which creates the possibility for our other activities and for the change
we experience together – the development toward a more fully realized and free
humanity which is liberal education.
So again, welcome. Welcome to the beginning of to an unusual motion of
development and change – counted in four segments, in 12 classes, in set numbers
of seminars and tutorials, but numbered more variously with respect to weeks and
months, according to the different paths we take – Welcome to the Graduate
Institute! THANK YOU.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Convocation Addresses
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
convocation
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
9 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
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/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Langston, Emily Brooker
Title
A name given to the resource
Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2016
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Annapolis_GI_Spring_2016_Convocation
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Emily Brooker Langston for the Spring 2016 semester in Annapolis, MD.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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