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The Challenges to Liberal Education and St. John’s College
in the Twenty-First Century
Christopher B. Nelson
Santa Fe Conference: What Is Liberal Education For?
October 19, 2014
The modern world is certainly doing everything it can to make liberal education difficult to
obtain. I suppose that it was always so. The pressures of the moment invariably seem so pressing
that it is hard to remember the Biblical injunction “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
And even harder to keep one’s eye on the goal of training one’s mind, heart, and soul for the
attainment of happiness, which is the ultimate end of liberal education, as the pursuit of happiness
is our political birthright.
I wish to examine a few of the rather practical demands upon higher education today and to close
with an overarching challenge to liberal education, in the hope that I may turn a largely
pessimistic task into an opportunity for all who care about liberal education.
One of the most insistent of these demands is the nearly universal call for reduction in the cost of
education. To most people, this means a reduction in the price being paid by students and their
families. While we would all like to pay less for the things we want and need, this demand fails to
recognize that colleges have done a remarkable job of containing costs. In the first place, at our
not-for-profit colleges no one actually pays for the full cost of their education, even if they pay
the full list price, because the costs are subsidized by government support, endowment income,
and gifts from friends, alumni, corporations, and foundations. Second, the inflation-adjusted price
of attending college at most independent colleges has, on average, actually remained stable or
dropped over the last decade due to generous financial aid programs. This has occurred despite
the recent uncertainty of our investment returns, fundraising challenges, and sharp increases in
financial aid as a result of the Great Recession. Third, many colleges have cut or frozen staffing
and compensation as well in order to reduce costs.
So colleges have, in fact, responded aggressively to the demand to reduce costs, although this fact
seems not to be well appreciated by the press, by our political leadership, or by the families of
college-bound students, who in increasing numbers are allowing price, more than quality of
educational offerings, to shape their choice of college.
Another demand that threatens higher education is the demand for ever more assessment of
student learning and assessment of the colleges that provide learning opportunities. In higher
education circles, there is something of a feeding frenzy surrounding the issue of assessment. The
federal government wants assessments that will allow it to compare colleges and universities that
provide “value”; accrediting organizations want assessments of student learning outcomes; state
agencies want assessments to prove that tax dollars are being spent efficiently; institutions want
internal assessments that they can use to demonstrate success to their own communities.
�The main purpose of all this assessment is to determine whether an institution effectively delivers
knowledge to its students, as though teaching and learning were a transaction, like a commodity
exchange. This view of education very much downplays the role of students in their own
education. I share the view of Mr. David Levine, in his remarks at this same conference, that no
matter how good one’s professor, no matter how great the learning material, no one else can learn
for you. Learning belongs to the student! If there is anything that is effective at St. John’s
College, it is learning. This is because the learner is at the center of learning at the College.
Current assessment models, it seems to me, habitually—and almost obsessionally—understate the
responsibility of the student for his or her own learning, and, what is more consequential,
overstate the responsibility of the teacher. Teachers are directed to provide clear written
statements of observable learning outcomes; to design courses in which students have the
opportunity to achieve those outcomes; to assess whether students achieve those outcomes; and to
use the assessments of students to improve the courses so that attainment of the prescribed
outcomes is enhanced. The standards do not entirely remove the student as an agent—the course
provides the “opportunity,” while the student must “achieve” the outcomes. But the assessment
procedures prescribe in advance the outcome for the student; the student can achieve nothing of
significance, as far as assessment goes, except what the professor preordains.
This is a mechanical and illiberal exercise. If the student fails to attain the end, is it because the
professor has not provided a sufficient opportunity? Or because the student, in his or her freedom,
hasn’t acted? Or, heaven forbid, because the student has upon reflection rejected the outcome
desired by the teacher in favor of another! The assessment procedure accurately measures the
effectiveness of the curriculum precisely to the extent that the student’s personal freedom is
discounted.
True learning is not about having the right answer. So measuring whether students have the right
answers is at best incidental to the essential aims of education. True learning is about mastering
the art of asking questions and seeking answers, and applying that mastery to your own life.
Ultimately, it is about developing the power of self-transformation - or self-formation, as so many
of the young are still developing a self to be transformed. This shaping of the self is the single
most valuable ability one can have for meeting the demands of the ever-changing world in which
we live. Meaningful assessment has to find a way of measuring attainment in these areas rather
than those best adapted to the economic metaphor.
The way to judge whether students have attained the sort of freedom that can be acquired by
study is simply to demand that they undertake and successfully complete an intellectual
investigation on their own. We do this in virtually every piece of writing required of our students
in every class at St. John’s College. And we do it in our classroom conversations and laboratories
as well. The regular practice of undertaking these independent investigations, we hope, will
become a habit that our alumni will use as a matter of course throughout their lives. This
independence will empower them to meet the challenges of life and work, and it will help them
shape lives worth living, arrived at through thoughtful exploration of the question of just what
kind of life they want to make for themselves.
On the whole, higher education would do well to repurpose most of the money being spent on
assessment. Use it instead to do away with large lecture classes (the very embodiment of
information transfer, or education-as-commodity) so that students can have serious discussions
with teachers, and teachers can practice the kind of continuous assessment that really matters in
helping students to meet the responsibilities of their own learning. But when there are lectures, let
�them be stimuli for serious conversation, so that the students can appropriate for themselves what
belongs to themselves, not the lecturer, as they thoughtfully sift through what they have heard.
A related demand that threatens liberal education is the demand for a national college ratings
program. The current government plan for improving higher education depends greatly on
developing a ratings system to determine which colleges offer “best value.” “Value” will have
price and cost as factors in determining the ratings. This sort of ratings system will certainly
produce unintended and detrimental consequences for liberal education.
To the extent that the value of an education is measured in monetary terms—by such factors as
cost, price, future earnings, and loan indebtedness—it fundamentally mischaracterizes the nature
of higher education. The highest learning—the kind that helps you to become the owner of your
life—is not a commodity any more than your life is a commodity. To measure the value of an
education largely in terms of its price of entry or its economic return is to be complicit in the
ongoing cheapening of education.
To the extent that value is not measured in economic terms, it will be extremely difficult to find a
common standard for determining the value of an education, since students weigh many different
factors in choosing a college suited to their individual needs. Ratings of any kind suggest that all
students are, or ought to be, looking for the same kind of thing from a college education; it also
assumes that colleges are more alike than they actually are. Better instead to find ways of getting
as much information as possible about each school to each student and let them make their own
ratings—ones that will suit their own individual needs!
Only freely educated citizens freely pursuing their own paths to a life worth living can shape a
society that will protect the lives and promote the happiness of us all. This statement ought to be
the basis of all public policy in this area. I think it explains the success of the Pell Grant Program,
which has resulted in a leveraging of federal dollars to give students from all walks of life a real
opportunity to exercise their choices freely within the broad range of accredited schools.
After discussing these demands, all relating in some way to the commodification of higher
education, let me now mention a challenge—probably the most pressing challenge that we
liberal arts colleges face: persuading our institutions, the press, and the public that society
desperately needs our kind of education. Here I can say a few encouraging words about how we
might, together, begin to turn the tide of opposition to liberal education.
The world seems to be approaching an inflection point in its previously insatiable demand for
more and more specialized knowledge. Today it is clamoring not only for intelligence and
specific expertise, but also for ingenuity and the ability to connect disparate areas of experience.
Those who do not recognize the liberal arts as the province of ingenuity and interconnection seem
to believe that these demands can be met by following the very course that led to uninventiveness
and fragmentation in the first place—namely, by pursuing more specialization. “If we just do
enough research,” they seem to think, “perhaps we could come up with a checklist, or a training
program, or a college curriculum that would deliver the ingenuity and integrated thinking we
want.”
This blind spot for anything that does not fit the research paradigm, which has been growing for
something like two hundred years now, prevents the world from seeing that the solution already
exists, and has existed for millennia. The human faculty that makes ingenuity and interconnection
possible is imagination. And developing imagination in all its forms is the proper excellence of
�the liberal arts. Through repeated encounters with the greatest writings and artworks of the past—
in literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, history, ethics, politics, music, painting, sculpture,
dance, and so on—we become accustomed to the habits of imagination that enabled our most
talented predecessors to conceive boldly, to invent what did not yet exist, to recreate both
themselves and the world around them.
To reinvent the world in the face of modern challenges, we need to reinvigorate imagination
through liberal education. But the world cannot see this, because liberal education is situated
precisely in its blind spot. And most of the current arguments in defense of liberal education
ignore this blind spot. We try to persuade those who see no practical benefits in liberal education
that it has higher aims—broad learning, development of character, and preparation for
citizenship. But these aims are incompatible with the research paradigm, and fall squarely in the
world’s blind spot. For the intended audience, this rhetoric makes insubstantial noises that seem
to come from no one, from nowhere.
We must stop defending liberal education in this way. Indeed, as Hunter Rawlings has recently
suggested (http://hechingerreport.org/content/offense-liberal-arts_17299), we should stop
defending liberal education altogether. The rhetorical task that faces us is not to make the world
see something it cannot see, but to point to something in its blind spot so clearly that its existence
cannot be denied, even if it is invisible.
Fortunately, liberal artists are good at rhetoric. We know how to hook an audience through its
desires and then persuade it to follow. The world wants ingenuity and interconnectedness? Then
that is the place to start. Let us create beautiful and aspirational arguments leading from ingenuity
and interconnectedness back to imagination and its guardian, liberal education. Let us abandon
the defensive posture altogether, and replace it with the confident bearing of a physician who
knows the cure. Let us recreate the rhetorical landscape around the world’s current desires. Let us
devise a new repertory of innovative and attractive tropes that will succeed where the old
defensive tropes have failed. Let us invent the positive rhetoric that will help to shrink the world’s
blind spot, so that it can begin to see liberal education, rather than specialized education, as the
answer to its needs.
I have no doubt that we liberal artists can do this. We are the offspring of godlike poets, the heirs
to the most persuasive rhetors who ever lived. If we can summon a smattering of their
inventiveness, tell our story with a fraction of their ardor, and forge fresh language suited to the
dignity of our object, we can wean the world from its addiction to specialization, at the very least
in our high schools and early years of college.
But we must do it in concert. The attack on liberal education will not likely be turned back by
individual efforts, no matter how ingenious. On the contrary, we must devise and deploy our
alternate rhetorical idiom as a coordinated force. We must use that idiom almost to the exclusion
of the other, refusing to speak in its terms. With persistence, if our vision is attractive enough, we
will crowd out and eventually replace the world’s idiom.
What will this rhetoric sound like? It will eschew the economic metaphors that distort the essence
of learning and teaching—rejecting terms like “value,” “investment,” “payoff,” “consumer,”
“provider,”—and it will invariably and vigorously question the use of such terms, so that the
users may begin to suspect they have a blind spot. It will defer the old tropes about breadth,
character, and citizenship, at least until we are certain that the blind spot has diminished enough
for our listeners to see where those arguments are coming from. And, finally, its central collection
of tropes will focus on imagination—imagination as the source of ingenuity and
�interconnectedness, imagination as the leader to be followed by specialization, imagination as the
priceless treasure protected and transmitted by the liberal arts.
Let me close by saying that we proponents of liberal education are, and have been for a long
time, implicated in bringing about the very threats that face us.
We do not understand our situation well if we portray it to ourselves as enlightened champions of
liberal education facing uncomprehending hordes of venal politicians and careerist parents. The
problem is cultural, and we advocates of liberal education are in part responsible for the
uncomprehending hordes.
Why do almost all of our politicians come from the ranks of lawyers, businessmen, or
professional office-seekers? Because of specialization. What societal institution is most
responsible for extreme specialization? Higher education. To the extent that those of us involved
in higher education have acquiesced to the historical trend toward ever-increasing specialization
and ever-diminishing liberal learning, we are responsible for raising up people who are incapable
of seeing beyond the blinders imposed by their specialties. Is it any wonder that such people do
not understand liberal education or its importance to the individual and to humanity?
The situation for liberal education will get better when integral citizens from all walks of life take
an active part in all the institutions that nourish our democracy.
No one can bring this about but us. So let’s get to work.
Thank you.
�
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The challenges to liberal education and St. John's College in the twenty-first century
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Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Christopher Nelson at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus.
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The Pursuit of Happiness
Convocation Address, August 24, 2016
Christopher B. Nelson
Welcome to the Class of 2020, to the entering students in the Graduate Institute, and to their families and
friends. To our returning students, faculty and staff, welcome back. I hope that all of you are as happy as I
am to see a new year underway.
It was on just such an occasion 50 years ago that I shook the hand of our president, signed the College
Register, and sat where you freshmen are sitting today, awaiting the happy start of a four-year adventure
into the books and conversation that comprise our Program of Study at St. John's. As I began to prepare
today's remarks, I tried to call up what it was I seeking when I chose to apply to St. John's those many
years ago. Some of it was very clear in my mind; some of it was quite foggy, not because of the passage
of time, but because I lacked the vocabulary to describe it.
First of all, I was very tired of hearing my teachers tell me what I needed to know, and then regurgitating
it back on tests designed to measure my learning, as if I could not determine that for myself. I wanted to
make my education my own, to participate in it, to talk through what we were studying, to take it
seriously … for my sake.
And then, there were the books, many of which I could not imagine reading on my own. I was happy to
have found a college where the faculty had formed a judgment that some books were better than others. I
am quite sure that it was not out of laziness that I thought it better to give myself over to these judgments
when I was just 18 years old. I knew at least that much about what I did not know to trust a well-read
faculty to help me get started on my education.
But there was something else that caught my attention, and I don't think I could have described it well
back then. It was this: the College's Program was said to be a kind of whole, like a fully-jigged puzzle,
where all the parts fit together. I think I understood that no one on the faculty would claim that the
Program was really complete or that the jigged pieces were perfect fits. I knew that parts of it had been
rearranged and substituted for others over time, and I imagined that the Program would continue to be
rearranged with experience, even that its elements might change. At the same time, I knew of no other
college that claimed it was trying to present a kind of whole to its students, and that there were unifying
aspects to its parts. And I thought it meant something that a faculty would care as much about the whole
as of its many parts, each of which held its own attractions which presented temptations to concentrate on
a part at the expense of the whole. (The rise of countless majors and electives over the last century and a
half in other colleges is proof enough of such temptation.)
I am sure my experience with life cannot have been so different from yours that you would not recognize
a yearning for a sense of wholeness in your life, that there often seem to be competing parts of the soul
fighting with one another while we are also trying to get a more complete understanding of ourselves and
the kind of life we wish to live. This desire for wholeness, a one-ness within us, is something we often
call "integrity", borrowed from the word "integer”, signifying unity, something that can help each of us be
the same person in public as we are in private, the same person when facing a trial as when at ease with
the world, the kind of person worthy of the trust of his or her family, friends and colleagues. The
satisfaction of this desire to make a complete whole for ourselves is something I wanted to call happiness.
I am convinced that this pursuit of happiness is what drove me to St. John's College, and I hope it has
been a part of what has brought you here as well.
�To satisfy this desire for a life of integrity, one needs to ask the right questions and explore the possible
answers: What does it mean to be human? How does my humanity reflect itself in my own unique life?
What kind of world do I live in and how is it changing? What tools do I need to navigate that world and
make sense of it? What ought I to do with my life? How might I help make this a better world? Is there a
divinity at work and what difference would that make?
I could not imagine being happy but unable to ask these questions in the company of others who also
cared about their answers. It seemed that my happiness was bound up with others in a common search for
understanding such things.
Frankly, it took me some time at St. John's College to see how many of the books that asked such
elemental questions were expressly concerned with human happiness. And it was through reading these
books and discussing them at length that I came to realize something rather obvious, that our happiness
requires that our actions are not only harmonious with one another and with our will, but that they are
directed toward what is truly good for us. Happiness comes from living a good life, enriched by all that a
human being really needs. But recognition of the good is not always easy, and not everyone agrees that it
can be pursued even if it is recognized.
We read the Iliad and see our heroes vying for honor and glory and ask if this is a proper object of desire.
Some of our warriors are saved by a god or goddess who loves them and would keep them from their fate.
Others come to an unhappy end, and we ask why some god did not swoop down from Olympus to divert
the spear flying toward its end. What control did these heroes actually have over their fate when even the
son of a god could be slain in battle? Or did the happy intervention by a god on behalf of a hero suggest
he was somehow worthy of the god's love and attention, a sign of his character, something within his
power to shape?
We read of Odysseus weeping to find his way home and into the arms of his Penelope. What is the
relationship between his happiness and their reunion, between his happiness and home itself? Indeed,
what does it mean to have a home? Odysseus had to leave home to find it, to suffer both abroad and on
his return in order to earn the right to repossess his home. But then what do we make of his desire to leave
again and in search of what end? Or is the search for happiness simply unending and the object of the
search always changing?
Herodotus tells us the story of Croesus, King of Lydia, who seeks the advice of Solon of Athens as to
who is the happiest man in the world, believing it could be none other than himself, the man with all the
wealth and power one could want. Solon answers with the stories of three men who lived well and died
well too. He cannot say of Croesus that he is the happiest, or most of blessed of men, until he has brought
his life to its end. Croesus does indeed suffer a terrible reversal of fortune, losing his kingdom and his son
in the bargain, and when facing death atop a funeral pyre with flames licking his feet, Croesus renounces
his pride, recognizing Solon's wisdom, and exclaims that no one who lives is happy, calling out Solon's
name, whereupon a storm burst forth and put out the flames. Happiness has deep roots in luck, chance,
fate, and the gods! Happiness is what happens to us, the story seems to say; it is not in our control.
Aeschylus weaves the drama of Agamemnon, who chose to sacrifice his daughter in order that he might
achieve glory and lead the campaign against Troy… only to suffer an unhappy end at the hands of his
queen. And of Orestes, who killed his mother as an act of justice for her murder of his father. Sophocles
tells us of Oedipus, saving a city while fulfilling a prophesy that he would kill his father, marry his
mother, and sire by her four children, themselves doomed to live out unhappy lives. For years, I just could
not see why each of these men and women should not be held fully responsible for everything that came
down upon their heads.
�Then, in time, I came to wonder if I was not being too hard on them. The choices they had to face are the
choices writ large that we all face from time to time, between family and country, duty and love, selfsacrifice and self-preservation, purity and compromise, and more. Resolution of such conflicts is not easy,
and each choice has consequences. No simple happy endings for these tragic protagonists! All contributed
to their own undoing; all were hunted down by gods or pursued by family curses for the choices they
made. Salvation, if it came, was a gift from the gods; man could not control his happiness in this world.
Mankind, in the words of the chorus of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, is an "unhappy race", and the man or
woman who escapes the tragic predicament of their humanity requires the intervention of the divine. All
others suffer.
I have to say that this view of humanity and the possibility of happiness did not sit well with me, not
when I first read these painfully beautiful plays, and not after many more readings. Even with another five
decades of experience behind me, reminding me of the aches and pains of growing up and then growing
older, the heartaches and losses that accompany our mortal condition, and the caprice of fortune’s wheel,
I take comfort in a conviction I have that I can find a measure of happiness in the choices I make in
shaping my life. I act as though I have freedom of choice, and I have convinced myself that this freedom
and my acting on it make a difference in my fortune, my search for happiness.
Freshmen and some of you in our Graduate Institute will soon be reading Plato’s Republic, in which
Socrates faces a challenge from two young brothers that he show them why their happiness depends on
living a just life and fighting injustice. One brother, Glaucon, makes the case that if it were not for fear of
getting caught and punished, we would all follow a life of injustice, seizing for ourselves whatever we
desired, not caring where we got it or how. Imagine, he says, that a man could have the power of an
ancestor of Gyges who took a gold ring from the finger of a corpse in a well that opened up during an
earthquake. This man found that when he wore the ring and turned it inward toward himself he became
invisible, but when he turned it outward he became visible again. He discovered he could take what he
wanted without being caught, and promptly proceeded to do so, taking first his King’s wife and then his
life, securing to himself wealth and power to rule over all. Such a man could become like a god among
men.
Then Glaucon asks us to imagine that the unjust man is so supremely unjust as to persuade others that he
is in fact just. He must seem to be what he is not and have the sterling reputation of a just man throughout
his whole life right up to his death. And the just man? He will be made to suffer the extreme of injustice:
“he’ll be whipped; he’ll be racked; he’ll be bound; he’ll have both eyes burned out; and at the end, when
he has undergone every sort of evil, he’ll be crucified…” Glaucon spares no detail in describing the
suffering that will be heaped upon this genuinely just man, who will have a reputation for injustice to his
dying day.
It takes a pretty long dialogue for Socrates to persuade Glaucon that it is better to be just for its own sake,
that it is thus better to suffer injustice than to do injustice, and that justice is a virtue of the soul necessary
to the happiness of the individual. Socrates does this by showing that justice is concerned with the inward
man, the one who sets in order his own inner life and is at peace with himself. We have within us by our
very nature the power to set this inner life in order and to become our own master.
You will read the Nichomachean Ethics, where Aristotle argues that every action or decision seems to
aim at some good. The ultimate good or final end of living is our happiness. And our most distinctly
human activity is the exercise of reason. Just as the good doctor procures health through the practice of
medicine (the doctor’s distinct virtue), the good warrior achieves victory through the making of war (the
warrior’s distinct virtue), so the good human being will attain happiness through the exercise of reason
�(mankind’s distinctly human virtue.) Happiness, for Aristotle, is “an activity in accordance with virtue.”
By positing that mankind is intended to fulfill a singular but common purpose, he allows for the
possibility that we can exercise our intellect to secure our happiness, and that we should in fact seek the
happiness which is appropriate and available to us all.
Questions concerning the possibility of the search for happiness run throughout the four-year
undergraduate curriculum and in all segments of the Graduate Institute, in our tutorials and laboratories,
as well as in our seminars.
Sophomores are opening the year with Genesis and the Hebrew Bible. What does it mean to be made in
the image of God, and does this help us imagine a path to our happiness, or does it only reveal the chasm
between man and his Maker as to make happiness on Earth seem impossible? Is happiness to be found in
following God’s law? Is happiness available only through the Grace of God?
Juniors have spent the summer happily reading Don Quixote. Have you figured out what the object of his
quest is? Cervantes tells us:
“It now appeared to him fitting and necessary, in order to win a greater amount of honor for himself and
serve his country at the same time, to become a knight-errant and roam the world on horseback, in a suit
of armor; he would go in quest of adventures, by way of putting into practice all that he had read in his
books; he would right every manner of wrong, placing himself in situations of the greatest peril such as
would redound to the eternal glory of his name.”
Through Cervantes’ masterful portrait, the good Don seems to have achieved that eternal glory. But how
did he do it, this Sorrowful Knight of ours? And why, in order to stamp out injustice, did he need to suffer
the cruel abuses to his body in Part I and the torture of his mind in Part II? This is not the book that first
comes to mind in a discussion of happiness, and yet we yearn to see our hero assert his will, time and time
again, to achieve the greatness he would have in his re-imagination of himself. Our fine old gentleman,
Alonzo Quijano the Good, seems to achieve his end in making a new self in the figure of our knighterrant.
Seniors are reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Prince Andre seeks happiness in doing his duty, but loses
sight of those who are closest to him. Meanwhile, Pierre learns in the time of his captivity and deprivation
that man’s happiness lies within himself and that unhappiness arises from superfluity, from having too
much of what most men think they want. Pierre would give up considerable wealth in search of his
happiness. But if we can say that he secures his happiness, it would seem he actually found it in his
flashing Natasha.
How could I end a reflection on the pursuit of happiness without addressing our national birthright,
proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence? “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights; that among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I imagine that there are many who read this right to pursue
happiness as a right to seek whatever each of us desires for himself or herself, a statement approving of
the autonomy of each individual citizen to determine what is his or hers by right. But such a reading leads
to pure anarchy, where each citizen is given license to pursue his heart’s desire, hardly a recipe for a
democracy intended to achieve a people’s peaceful self-governance. What is the place of the public good?
Jefferson, principle author of the Declaration, was also known to say that “Happiness is the aim of life,
but virtue is the foundation of happiness.” He sounds a lot like Aristotle, and we should not lose sight of
the double aspect of the pursuit of happiness in the tension between its public and private aspects.
�Alexis de Tocqueville may have found the best way to explain how Americans reconcile the pursuit of
their individual self-interest with a desire to serve the greater good. “In the United States,” he says,
“hardly anybody talks of the beauty of virtue, but they maintain that virtue is useful and prove it every
day.” “They…content themselves with inquiring whether the personal advantage of each member of the
community does not consist in working for the good of all; and when they have hit upon some point on
which private interest and public interest meet and amalgamate, they are eager to bring it into notice.
Observations of this kind are gradually multiplied; what was only a single remark becomes a general
principle, and it is held as a truth that man serves himself in serving his fellow creatures and that it is in
his private interest to do good.” “Americans are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by
the principle of self-interest rightly understood.”
I will leave it to you to sort out this argument, and to determine whether it is a sustainable principle. But I
rather like the idea, and think it exerts a restraint on the blind degeneration of the pursuit of one’s
individual happiness into nothing but self-regard.
Every democracy requires free citizens, and free citizens must have free minds. A liberal education,
literally an education for freedom, is designed to free the mind to perform its public function. But above
all, that free mind is necessary for our personal happiness, for living a good life, the life suited to our
nature. On behalf of my colleagues at St. John’s College, I invite you to join us in uncovering this
gloriously human project of freeing ourselves to find our way to a better life. Discover for yourselves
whether you can and will pursue your happiness.
While we hope for you happiness, even joy, in your studies with us, we also hope you are able to have a
little fun while you’re at it. And there are loads of activities beyond these intellectual pursuits to satisfy
your many other desires, from participating in the athletic program to acting in a dramatic production,
from writing for the Gadfly to taking a painting class, from gazing at the stars to canoeing on the Severn,
from singing in one of the choral groups to playing in the orchestra. And here I am at the end of a
reflection on happiness with hardly a word about the joy and beauty we usually associate with happiness.
So,let me call upon our upperclassmen to remedy this deficiency, to rise and welcome the newest
members of our community with beautiful song! Mr. Stoltzfus, will you assist?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Welcome to St. John’s College!
Thank You.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
After the recessional, please join us outside the Mitchell Gallery for a reception and further conversation.
I declare the College in Session this 24th day of August, 2016.
CONVOCATUM EST!
�
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2016 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Pursuit of Happiness."
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Music of the Republic
Convocation, August, 2011
Christopher B. Nelson, President
St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD
Welcome to the Class of 2015 and their families. To the rest of the College community,
welcome back.
There comes a time in every year when I find myself saying to a friend or a prospective
student that this is a very musical College. After 20 years of speaking this way, I thought
I should ask myself just what I mean by this statement, and so I will try to unpack that
little observation and say a few words about the music we make at St. John’s College.
Each of you has experience with music; it has lifted you up or soothed you; it has
angered or frightened you; it has lightened or burdened the spirit, distracted your
attention, moved your feet and your arms, inspired an act, or aroused a love; it has
transported you to another time or place, or moved you in some way without your quite
being aware of it. Music pervades our lives and always has. It has power. It has
sometimes taken you outside of yourselves and at other times taken you deep within.
For these reasons, it has often been associated with things divine.
Not only have you had experience of the effects of music, many of you have brought
music with you to the College because it plays an important part in your daily lives. You
carry your i-pods, MP3 players, and smart phones, playing classical music and opera,
popular tunes and rock, jazz and blues, country and western, hip hop and rap. You
hum, sing or play your favorites to yourselves or with others. Music has its place when
you are alone and in fellowship. It serves as friend and refuge.
Why is this? How can we come to understand the power that music has in our lives?
What does it mean that we are somehow all musical beings? That to be human is
somehow to be musical? That without music we would be less than human? These are
questions I suggest you will be asking yourselves in your four years at St. John’s.
�You will also be making music while you are with us. To get at the question “what is this
music that we make?” I thought it would be fruitful to explore briefly the place of music in
four republics to which we belong and by which we live: the Republic of the United
States of America, the Republic of Letters, the Republic of Plato, and the Republic of St.
John’s College. What is the place of music in these four republics of ours?
The Republic of the United States of America
I have mentioned the music that you brought with you when you arrived on campus,
much of it performed by, written by, or listened to by Americans. But there is another
kind of music that might be said to capture the spirit of the land, something I would call
more elemental, seeking to get at the heart of our nation, to comprehend the
constitution of its people, to describe what it means, or ought to mean, to be an
American. And here I will suggest two, perhaps three, examples of this music. The first
is from Walt Whitman, a quintessential American poet:
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off for work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the
steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutters song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon
intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or
washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to no one else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. (“I Hear America Singing”)One
can feel the heartbeat of a new nation, of a people building a country from the sweat of
the brow. These Americans are making their own music in the work they do, and they
are celebrating that work as something that belongs especially to them as free
individuals, free to choose their work and free to enjoy their play.
�My second example allows us to recall that music can be an aid in helping us to see
and to seek the beautiful and the good. You all know the melody for “America the
Beautiful”, so I will not ruin it for you by trying to sing it solo. While the tune is pleasing,
the lyrics of Katherine Lee Bates help it to soar. The first stanza appeals to the gifts of
the natural world:
Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain!
But it is the second stanza that captures my heart, speaking to the people that made
this nation possible, and finally to the rule of law that sustains it:
Oh beautiful for pilgrim feet whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.
Here is a hymn to those who brought the spirit of freedom to a new land, and a prayer
that we Americans dedicate ourselves to self-control and the rule of law to protect the
freedom we have won. This is a noble anthem that we would do well to call up from time
to time – a song worth making our own, as members of a community bound together by
the will to protect an idea of freedom in the pursuit of happiness. This is, after all, the
republic that has made it possible for this College, dedicated to cultivating the arts of
freedom, the liberal arts, to thrive since before the formal founding of this nation. We in
turn, as well educated and independent thinking citizens, will prove to be the necessary
guardians of this republic.
A third example, if only our voices could scale a couple of registers, might be a song
written by one of our alumni, a graduate of the class of 1796, composer of the most
sung song in this country even today, written during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of
1812. I refer of course to our National Anthem, penned by Francis Scott Key: “Then, in
that hour of deliverance, my heart spoke. Does not such a country, and such defenders
of their country, deserve a song?” he said when he composed it.
Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
What does it mean for a country to “deserve” a song? And why should a song be the
�measure of worth?
I will leave these questions hanging as I move to a second republic to which we belong.
The Republic of Letters
These are the works of literary and musical imagination that constitute the heritage of
mankind. They have sprung from many civilizations and have spanned the centuries.
We study these works because they are fundamental to understanding our humanity;
they are the building blocks and cornerstones of our edifices in the humanities, arts and
sciences. When I speak of works of musical imagination, I mean any work that might be
said to belong to the ancient Muses, works of poetry or of musical or artistic
composition, where the chief work of the author, composer, artist, or performer is the
making of powerful images or likenesses of things.
Consider, for example, the moving lines that open the Iliad, which freshmen are reading
for their first seminar tomorrow evening:
Rage --- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
Murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
Hurling down to the House of the Dead so many sturdy souls,
Great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
Feasts for the dogs and birds,
And the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the first two broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
The images are vivid, the action compelling. I want to take up my spear and shield and
go to battle where heroes are made and lost. The song has irresistible momentum that
takes hold of the listener (or reader) from its first line. It grabs us in the chest, the seat of
sentiment and magnanimity, the locus of the spirit displayed by our heroes. Such is the
power of music. Even Homer is caught up by it, as he calls upon an Olympian Muse to
tell this story, to sing the song of Achilles’ rage long before it was put to the page.
Why does Homer need a Muse to tell this story? Why sing a song about rage, about a
�consuming aspect of a man? What is this will of Zeus that is moving inexorably toward
its end? What power does this god or any other god have over the affairs of mankind?
Homer has concentrated images that beg us to ask a host of questions in these opening
lines. That is another power that music has in common with poetry: the capacity for
concentration of energy and passion! (And by the way, is my reaction to this poem a
healthy one – that I want pick up and head off to battle? What exactly has gotten hold of
me? Have I been made captive to a powerful image rather than given freedom to
explore a question and seek a truth?)
In your sophomore year, you will read of David, another warrior, another musician, but
also an instrument of God. You will read the Psalms and sing their songs. God the
Muse, man the instrument! How frustrating and depressing this must be for the wholly
self-sufficient spirit that would have mankind be the creator and ruler of our world - that
would have us become like gods? What kind of freedom comes from obedience to God,
from becoming God’s instrument? Or do men and women gain their freedom only from
disobedience – something for our juniors to consider when reading Milton’s Paradise
Lost?
But musical compositions have always had a special place in the literary tradition. Music
was among the seven liberal arts as they were studied in the Middle Ages. As you will
recall, those seven liberal arts were divided into the trivium, the arts of communication
and language: grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium, the arts of counting
and measuring: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. It turns out that music has
mathematical elements that appear to be at its root, that is, that there is a correlation
between the musical intervals in our everyday songs and the length of a string that can
be plucked to play those sounds. You will learn from your own construction of a
monochord, a one-stringed instrument, that the correlation between those very musical
intervals and the divisions of the string that makes the sounds is described by a set of
ratios consisting of small whole numbers. Lo and behold, we have physical phenomena,
musical sounds, that have a mathematical form. Thus, there may something in music
that is grounded in nature, not just in our sensibility, suggesting a model of the very
mathematical physics you will be studying in your junior and senior laboratory. Music
makes the claim that it can be studied objectively. And this causes us again to ask in
�what way nature might be as musical as we human beings are.
Consider some of the great masterpieces of musical imagination. Sophomores spend
several weeks with Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Measure by measure, the
mathematical elements are analyzed, the melodies and harmonics studied, the rhythm
and meter explored, and the lyrics and gospel text applied. If we are ever going to get a
sense of the possibility of mathematical physics to explain an emotional or spiritual
response, it will be in our study of this masterpiece. It is indeed a passionate work of art,
and it begs the question what Bach’s music has to do with the Gospel of Matthew?
Does the music have a power over the listener that the Bible does not have over the
reader? And is this good or is it downright heresy?
We spend time with Mozart and study closely one of his operas, usually Don Giovanni.
Who are these human souls that step out onto the stage and sing the music that
belongs only to each of them, songs that reveal their character - or shape it - in time,
over the course of the opera? What is the relationship between the music and the
words? Consider the words alone and they are pretty poor examples of literature. But
set them to this music and they soar! They are playful or tragic; they tug at our
heartstrings; in Mozart’s hands, they are invariably beautiful. Whatever makes them
beautiful? Are there elements of beauty as there appear to be elements of music? Are
the two related? And what about the “ugly”? Are things ugly because they do not have
the same concord with nature that beautiful things do, that they are in discord with
nature? Is the beauty of a musical composition to be found in the mathematical order of
the piece, or is it more complicated than that?
I move on to our third republic.
The Republic of Plato
This is a dialogue that freshmen will be reading in the middle of their first semester. It
has been described by some as the indispensable text that sets forth the plan of study
for what we call the "Program" at St. John's College. It provides the model of a liberal
�education at work, where music has its place in the education of the young, as an aid in
the formation of character, an habituation that is useful in the training of the soul but not
in its education. This education of the soul is better served by philosophy, a love of and
pursuit of wisdom, which Socrates in this dialogue calls the greatest music of all.
Such is the power of music to grab hold of the soul that Socrates warns us of its
dangers. “So then,” Socrates says to his young interlocutor, Glaucon, “isn’t this why
upbringing in music is most sovereign? It’s because rhythm and concord most of all sink
down to the inmost soul and cling to her most vigorously as they bring gracefulness with
them; and they make a man graceful if he’s brought up correctly, but if not, then the
opposite.” Socrates points to ‘rhythm and concord’ for the source of music’s power, not
its tones, intervals, melodies, and harmonies.Is he right in that? Do we think he is right
about the power of music for good and for ill? If this dialogue is meant to be a kind of
model for how we go about things at this College, how should we study music at St.
John’s to avoid the bad and pursue the good? Should music rather be banned from the
College as Socrates insists it ought to be in the formal program of study for the
guardians of his Republic? What is the difference between the image-making of the
poets, artists and musicians on the one hand and the image-making of the philosopher
on the other --- whose image of the Sun serves as a metaphor for the Good, of the
Cave for our everyday dwelling places, and of the Divided Line for our path to Wisdom?
It is time to move on to our next republic, but I cannot help but pause to observe that we
are not without a sense of humor about the seriousness of this or any of these other
Republics. We even have a Battle Hymn to the Republic of Letters, written by one of our
tutors, Mr. Higuera, and performed by a group of tutors on one of those long, cold winter
days in a rite of distraction and fun that we call “Be Gone Dull Care”: Let me share the
first of several clever stanzas:
My mind has seen the glory of th' Idea of the Good,
That it's not the same as pleasure I have firmly understood,
And I wouldn't take a tyrant's power even if I could,
I'm marching from The Cave!
Marching, marching towards the sunlight,
�Marching, marching towards the sunlight,
Marching, marching towards the sunlight,
I'm marching from The Cave!
It is now quite clearly time to move to our fourth and last republic.
The Republic of St. John’s College
By now, you already have a feel for some of the kinds of music you will be singing,
hearing, and reflecting upon. We have taken seriously the effort to restore music as a
liberal art to the curriculum. As a close study of musical elements and musical literature
can best be undertaken by learning to make music, we ask all of our students to use the
one musical instrument they have in common --- their voices. Freshmen will sing
together throughout the year, learning the fundamentals of melody and basic notation,
before turning to sing some of the great choral works. Sophomores investigate rhythm
in words and in notes. They study the ratios of musical intervals and consider melody,
harmony and counterpoint, all in the context of some of the finest music ever composed
by Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and others.
And then throughout the College community, there seem to be countless occasions for
playing music and singing, and for listening to the fine musical performances of your
fellow citizens of this Republic. Join the St. John’s Chorus, the Madrigal Choir, Primum
Mobile, or the College Orchestra; come and perform at our Collegiums, or just come to
hear your classmates. I don’t think there is anything quite like experiencing the Muse at
play in this community.
Our purpose both in and out of the classroom, in the words of another of our tutors, Mr.
Kalkavage, “is to improve … [our] students’ aesthetic taste: to introduce them to truly
great music in an effort to beget a love for all things graceful and well formed. [We] hope
that the study of music begets … a habit of searching for causes and details of beautiful
things, and that the love of beauty will nourish the love of knowledge and truth. [And we]
hope they will strive to imitate in their day-to-day lives the virtues of harmoniousness,
proportion, good timing, … grace, and ‘striking the right note’ in thought, speech,
feeling, and action.” (Peter Kalkavage, “The Neglected Muse”, The American Educator
�Fall 2006)
In short, we want these four years to be intensely musical years so that you may
experience the liberation of mind and the harmony of soul that is achieved when both
mind and soul are directed toward the beautiful. Go forth and sing the songs that stir
you to engage in this search for beauty and truth! Make philosophy your Muse. You’ll
find that this is a pretty friendly Republic for that kind of activity.
Let me close by inviting you to listen to one of the simplest and, to my ear, one of the
most beautiful pieces of music we make: Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus, a song familiar to all
the residents of this Republic of St. John’s College. I invite all who cannot help
themselves to join in and sing with a few of our students and faculty who agreed earlier
today to lead us in song.
SING!
Thank you one and all.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Please join us for refreshments and conversation outside the lobby immediately
following the recession.
I declare the College in session this 24th day of August, 2011.
CONVOCATUM EST!!
�
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Music and the Republic."
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Text
Homer and the Power of Men That Have Chests
Convocation Address
August 27, 2003
Christopher B. Nelson
President, St. John’s College in Annapolis
Welcome to the class of 2007, to those beginning their studies in the Graduate Institute,
to parents and friends, and all members of the college community.
One of the many things I love about this college is that everyone must begin with Homer
— and not only Homer, but the Iliad. It’s not just that this happens to have been my
favorite book for most of my life. It is a collection of things, all of which have something
to do with your initiation into this community of learning, something to do with the
liberal education you are about to begin here.
Homer is arguably both the first and the best of poets and we want you to read the best
and most original of books at this college. Montaigne, another author you will meet here
in your sophomore year, wrote this about Homer:
“It was against the order of nature that he created the most excellent
production that can be. For things at birth are ordinarily imperfect; they
gain size and strength as they grow. He made the infancy of poetry and
of several sciences mature, perfect and accomplished. For this reason he
may be called the first and last of poets . . .” (Of the Most Outstanding
Men)
There is also something glorious about undertaking your studies at this particular
beginning, because the Iliad takes hold of the imagination from its first line, when it
sweeps the reader into the Achaean camps, to face the towering figure of Achilles: “Rage
--- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the
Achaeans countless losses…” The images and the pace of the poetry appear to be artless,
yet commanding.
The Iliad has a kind of immediacy you will find nowhere else. It has irresistible
momentum. It grabs you in the middle, somewhere in the vicinity of the chest or the
heart, and it demands the attention of your sensibility.
Consider the size of the heroes and the size of the themes. Who is this godlike Achilles
and what is his glory? What is the rage that has power over him? Where does it come
from? What are the consequences of unleashing it upon others? Is it purely a destructive
force? Can it be directed or controlled? What does it take to dissolve this rage?
Why are these men fighting? Who or what drove them to it? What is the price of
defending illicit love? Can one ever exercise control over the forces of nature, change
fate, or fight the gods?
Look at the great battle-armies. What propels these heroes to action, especially when they
have knowledge of the risks, dangers and dreadful consequences of battle? What is
courage? What good is honor, and what does it mean to die honorably? What is virtue
and excellence of character, and can you find these in the poem?
�Well, here is your chance to read about the bold and to talk about the question of character.
C. S. Lewis wrote a little book that perhaps you have read, The Abolition of Man, in which he argued
that modern education (he was writing in 1955) was failing to help the young develop a sense of
morality. In man, Lewis said,
“[the head rules the belly through the chest – the seat ... of magnanimity, of emotions
organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The chest – magnanimity –
sentiment – these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and
visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man:
for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”
What Lewis feared from modern education was that it would stamp out the spirited element in the
young, causing the atrophy of magnanimity and sentiment. And all the while, we clamor for more
drive, or more self-sacrifice:
“... {We} remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests
and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find
traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
C. S. Lewis may have had cause to complain, but you do not — not now. Surely there is not a more
powerful book anywhere than the Iliad with which to examine the virtues and vices, the beauty and
terrible power for good or ill, of men with chests. So the Iliad, and later, the Odyssey form a good
beginning to philosophy; they ask you to confront powerful aspects of your nature on your first day at
the college — aspects that often function independently of your rational capacity. You are asked to
face the spirited element within you and to wonder whether it can or should be shaped and tempered
by your reason.
I’ve been referring to a “spirited” element within man. You’ll be reading a lot about this in your
freshman year, first in Homer, then in Herodotus and Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle. The Greek word
is 2b:`l. It is variously used to mean the breath of life, the principle that animates life, the soul, the
heart, the spirit, an attitude that inspires action, a capacity for vigor, courage, mettle, liveliness,
indignation, anger, righteousness or pride. It is a word used of men and women both; it is what moves
individual men and women from thought to action. So, while the Iliad is a stage for the display and
destruction of 2b:`l among warrior men, you will have ample opportunity during the years for
recognizing its place in the breasts of women too. If you look hard, you may even find it used to
describe Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey.
Now back to the Iliad, where you are also asked to consider the power of community, the bonds of
friendship, the call of duty toward one’s own people, all abandoned by Achilles very early in the
poem. Achilles becomes both a lesser, meaner man and a distant, godlike emblem because of this. He
must learn to take responsibility for the awful consequences of his withdrawal from battle; he must
suffer a terrible personal loss and rise up above himself before he can again stand beside his fellow
Achaeans. He must also learn compassion before reentering the community of men.
�Why is community important? What is friendship, and what does it require? Where does the sense of
self belong in a community? These are the same questions you must ask when trying to learn the best
way to live with others.
You will read about the power of civil discourse as battle plans are shaped and reshaped, about the
path to wisdom through suffering and re-commitment, the power of human empathy, and the need for
magnanimity and generosity in dealing with others. And always in the shadows are the fates, spinning
and inevitably shortening the thread of life. We are, in the end, mortals and we must come to accept
this fact. How do we do this? We all want to know. How does one come to terms with death when
everything in our being screams with life and the will to live?
Who are the gods and what is our relation to them? What of honor, glory, mercy, forgiveness, and the
possibility for heroism? What is the authority of law and custom, and how should we behave when
this authority threatens the bonds of family? What do we make of Helen who strangely serves as a
kind of prime mover in the whole drama, but also as an object of spoil.
Name a theme in the realm of human activity that is not dealt with in the Iliad and you are likely to
find it in the Odyssey. There, our hero learns what it means to trade the offer of immortality for the
possibility of returning home, the need to face one’s demons and overcome one’s weaknesses before
deserving the right to return, the importance of taking life’s journey and facing its dangers and
temptations in order to grow, the necessity for leaving home in order to discover the bedrock that was
there all along. There, we find wisdom in survival, truth in lies, and strength in weakness. And always
is our hero’s happiness bound up with the need to search — to search at any price. This too sounds a
lot like the kind of question that you might need to examine to understand why you even decided to
come to St. John’s.
We meet the glorious Penelope, Odysseus’ match in every sense. How well has she raised their son to
manhood in his father’s 20-year absence? How has she maintained home, family and kingdom all on
her own? How should she treat her returning husband and gain mastery over this wayward stranger of
a man, to test his love and confirm that he is fit to return to his place beside her and his seat of power
in Ithaca? It is in the Odyssey that we see the strength of Homer’s women and goddesses who serve
as Odysseus’ protectors and saviors as well as his reason for returning — they become both the means
and the end of his journey from the world of Troy to home in Ithaca.
Last, you get the experience of beauty in Homer’s unforgettable images. I still wake up to dawn’s
rosy fingers stretching across the waters of the Chesapeake. I see the father’s unbound joy as he
tosses his young boy about in his arms, kissing him lovingly, before heading back out to the field of
honor for his final battle. I watch the wise and lovely Penelope at her spinning wheel, weaving the
web that makes Odysseus’s homecoming possible.
Consider now this new beginning to your education: you get the beautiful, the great, the first and the
last; you get to start with the issues of the heart and the spirit, those things that move you to action.
You will talk about honor and courage, beauty and glory, gods’ laws and man’s, mortality and death,
community and friendship, family and love, and the inevitable longing for the next challenge, the
search for an answer, the way to human happiness.
�With these first two books, you are diving into the greatest project of your education, which is to
consider how to compose your character, to figure out what is necessary to live life well — your life
— the one you are building for yourselves. In other words, you are not being told to love or admire
Achilles or Odysseus or Helen or Penelope — only to let them into your lives so that you may engage
with them. Incidentally, it is another fine quality of these poems that Homer doesn’t try to tell you
what to think; he lets the story act upon you without intervention. You get to think for yourselves
about what is fitting and what is not. But please listen to your classmates too; you might actually
learn something from them.
Our job, your tutors’ job, is to listen and to ask; yours is to read the books and wrestle with the
questions. You will experience no more liberating an activity than this, for a question is a door
opening wide, inviting you to explore and discover what’s inside. Trust yourselves to take advantage
of this invitation; we do. We believe in the power of your rational capacity. We believe in your power
to become your own teachers. Walk through this door, and you will soon find yourselves exercising
those intellectual muscles that will allow you to transform a little of what you read here and
something of what you hear there into a work that is all your own. We call this work “your
judgment.” And we suspect strongly that you’ll find that a little injection of the spirited element right
at the beginning will be just what you need to get your project going.
If you are now worried, however, that the classroom is the only place you may exercise the spirited
element within you, have no fear. There are many other opportunities around this campus, among
your friends or on your own, on the playing fields or upon the stage, in community activities or choral
groups, in competing for glory or singing to the gods:
“Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles . . .”
May the poet inspire each and every one of you to love your learning with us and move you to shape
a life that is worthy of living.
Thank you. And enjoy!
ggghggg
I declare the college in session for the entering class.
Convocatum Est
(Revised version of a talk given in January 2000, and again in June 2002.)
��
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Fall 2003
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2003 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Homer and the Power of Men That Have Chests."
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August 23, 2006
(edited October 2, 2006)
The Sting of the Torpedo Fish
Convocation Address to the Class of 2010
Christopher B. Nelson
President
Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught? [to continue] Or if not
teachable, is it acquired by practice, or if neither, whether men possess it by nature or in
some other way?”
So begins Plato’s dialogue, Meno, opening as abruptly upon the reader as my remarks
have upon you this afternoon. You freshmen will spend a good part of this year with
Plato, his frustrating protagonist, Socrates, and this very dialogue, Meno, in both English
translation and the original Greek. I think I am on relatively safe ground in saying that the
reason we spend so much time on the Meno is that this dialogue belongs peculiarly to this
college; it is deeply rooted here. I hope to expose a few of those roots this afternoon --but let me first return to the beginning.
“Tell me, Socrates, if you can, whether human excellence can be taught? If not,
whether we can acquire it by practice? Or if neither of these, whether we are
born with it or it comes to us in some other way?”
Meno’s question is interesting, for it appears to go to the heart of some very big questions
all of us share: what does it mean to be human, and how can we be better human beings?
Parents would love to know how to raise children who are improvements on themselves;
all parents want what is best for their children. Teachers would be happy and honored
above all others if they could teach their students human virtue. As for students --- why
else are you here but that you believe that some answer might be given to Meno’s
question: What is the right path to virtue? How might I acquire human excellence?
But Meno’s question has its flaws. For one, it comes out of the blue and without context.
We are supposed to know, somehow, what Meno is talking about. We’re assumed to have
a common vocabulary and even a common understanding of basic concepts.
Speaking of vocabulary, some of you will have noted that I translated the Greek in two
different ways when I repeated Meno’s question in English --- an exercise you freshmen
will undertake as you try first to discover what is being said and what it means, before
asking whether it is true. Such attempts at translation will be first steps to get at the root
of Meno’s question.
�Socrates appreciates what is at stake in Meno’s question. He thus goes straight to the heart of it with a
response that would confound any student hoping to receive the almighty truth from a teacher.
Socrates in effect says: how can I say how virtue is acquired when I don’t even know what it is?
And worse, Socrates then says that he’s never met any other person who knows what virtue is. He
entreats Meno to help him understand what Meno thinks it to be. Meno makes the attempt,
responding confidently with what he has heard from other teachers, repeating their opinions as his
own. Yet, under Socrates’ questioning, Meno finds himself disowning the opinion he began with.
After two false starts, Meno begins to get uncomfortable with Socrates’ examination. When Socrates
begs him to start over yet a third time, Meno tries to divert the conversation from the question of
virtue to the problem with Socrates:
Socrates, I certainly used to hear, even before meeting you, that you never do anything else
than exist in a state of perplexity yourself and put others in a state of perplexity. And now you
seem to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and simply subduing me with incantations,
so that I come to be full of perplexity. And you seem to me, if it is even appropriate to make
something of a joke, to be altogether, both in looks and in other respects, like the flat torpedofish of the sea. For, indeed, it always makes anyone who approaches and touches it grow
numb, and you seem to me now to have done that very sort of thing to me, making me numb.
For truly, both in soul and in mouth, I am numb and have nothing with which I can answer
you. And yet thousands of times I have made a great many speeches about virtue, and before
many people, and done very well, in my own opinion anyway; yet now I’m altogether unable
to say what it is.
It is beginning to look as if Meno has no interest in the answer to the question and is more concerned
with his image or reputation than with the truth. On the other hand, Socrates is not satisfied; he still
wants to proceed with the search for an answer. He is also willing to conduct the search with Meno, a
man who seems to have no thoughts of his own. Socrates, in wishing to proceed, has done two things;
he’s told Meno that he’ll serve as Meno’s teacher if Meno will let him --- that is, that he will join
Meno in the search; and he’s told the reader that he is willing to do so because he might actually learn
something from Meno. He is truly open to the possibility that the teacher may learn from the student –
any student, even Meno. So, Meno, what is virtue?
Meno now tries a sting of his own, challenging Socrates with a classic learner’s paradox: either we
know something or we don’t. If we know it, we don’t need to search for it. But if we don’t already
know what we’re looking for, how will we ever recognize it when we see it?
Socrates will not be deterred by Meno’s attempt to bring the conversation to an abrupt halt. Instead,
he takes Meno’s problem seriously and answers in two ways. First, he repeats a myth he has heard
which suggests that learning is a kind of recollection, which requires an exercise of responsibility for
learning by the one doing the learning; learning does not occur when someone else, a teacher for
example, tries to put knowledge into a student. Instead, it is an act of recovery, in some way, of
something already known to us.
When Meno demonstrates that he doesn’t get it, Socrates resolves upon a way to show Meno what he
means, asking Meno to observe carefully as he examines one of Meno’s slave boys about a problem
in geometry which is new to him --- a problem which can be demonstrated by a drawing in the earth -- a problem, not incidentally, that you will be working on in your mathematics tutorial with Euclid.
The slave boy reaches a point where he expresses with confidence an answer which is false --- an
answer which he, himself, a few moments later comes to understand is wrong under Socrates’
questioning. The slave boy tries again with the same result. Socrates asks him to start over, just as he
�did with Meno a little earlier. He asks the boy to produce another answer, and the slave boy says:
“Indeed, Socrates, I do not know”.
Socrates turns to Meno, and by extension to us, and says:
Do you see, Meno, what advances he has made in his power of recollection? He did not
know at first, and he does not know now, what is the [answer]: but then he thought that he
knew, and answered confidently as if he knew, and had no difficulty; now he has difficulty,
and neither knows nor fancies that he knows.
Meno: True
Socrates: Is he not better off knowing his ignorance?
Meno: I think that he is.
Socrates: If we have made him doubt, and given him the “torpedo’s shock,” have we done
him any harm?
Meno: I think not.
Socrates: We have certainly, it would seem, assisted him in some degree to the discovery of
the truth; and now he will wish to remedy his ignorance, but then he would have been ready
to tell all the world again and again [the answer he gave at first?].
Meno: True.
Socrates persuades Meno that the slave boy simply would not have been ready to inquire and learn
the truth without first being reduced to perplexity. The torpedo’s shock not only didn’t hurt, it
positively helped; it was the condition for the learning that did occur (and the slave boy did go on,
with Socrates’ help, to find the solution to the geometry problem).
Socrates has shown us, the readers (and Meno, if he were listening), that understanding our own
ignorance is necessary for learning to take place – especially understanding our ignorance of the
everyday common things we thought we knew well. When we can look at the familiar and suddenly
realize that we really don’t understand it, when we can look at what we always thought we knew, and
ask “what is this thing?” then we are ready to learn and well along the path to better understanding. In
that state we are truly torpid, just as the slave boy was, and we bring a sense of “wonder” to our
search. This wonder comes not from something we understand, but rather from our desire to
understand --- what we sometimes call a love of learning, born not in understanding but in ignorance.
Socrates has done something else in his demonstration. He has also shown us the power of
discovering what something is NOT, and helped us see that knowing what something is not is much
more than knowing nothing; it is a kind of “knowing ignorance,” an “intelligent perplexity” that
comes from trying out and discarding false notions. He has also helped us see that we not only don’t
know what virtue is, we don’t even know what learning is.
�We now look at Meno and see that he is a slave … a slave to his pride, a slave to the opinions of
others, unwilling to examine what he clearly doesn’t understand. Meno’s problem is not that he’s
ignorant, but that he has no desire to be free from the shackles of that ignorance.
We look at the slave boy and see that he is free --- free from the false notions he’s been carrying
around with him, free from barriers to learning. This freedom, strangely, comes not from the certainty
of knowledge but from the recognition of his ignorance.
Let me return to the place where I began, when I said that this dialogue of Plato’s is deeply rooted at
the college. We want you to acquire the freedom of Meno’s slave boy, the freedom that allows you to
acknowledge the one certainty in life: “Indeed, Socrates, I do not know.” Recognition of that certainty
is the pathway to learning --- learning things that will belong to you, not just repeating things that
belong to others. We also want you to have practice with the tools you will need to acquire this
freedom --- tools that will help you to listen and to read attentively and deeply, to express yourselves
intelligibly and precisely, and to measure and reckon the world in which you live accurately and
comprehensively --- tools that will help give shape to your understanding who you are and where you
live, and what your responsibility is toward others and the world you together inhabit, the world of
the body and the world of the spirit.
We live with a deep paradox at the college --- one that you will confront right at the outset. We have
made very deliberate choices about what should and should not be included in this all required
curriculum (and there are many, many excellent works that are not on the program list simply because
there’s no room for them in just four years). Yet we tell you that, for all the conviction we might have
that these choices constitute the best undergraduate curriculum we can devise, this conviction is not
grounded in the answers these books purport to give but in the questions they raise. When we say that
this college is committed to radical inquiry, we mean inquiry into the very traditions and books that
have shaped the world we’re born into. This is why we are not ashamed to admit that though we are
called an institution of higher learning, we really do not know what learning is. We share the
conviction, nonetheless, that it is worth the search to find out. When we welcome you to St. John’s
College, we are welcoming you to join us in a search that we imagine will sustain all of us for all of
our lives --- a search for origins and foundations that will be firm enough to support the good life we
each wish to live. We call on you to join us as fellow lovers of learning, not as a would-be scholars.
One of the things you will discover as you read the several platonic dialogues on the program is that
they demand your engagement. They ask for you to reflect on how you might respond to Socrates. So,
let me venture into the conversation of the Meno with a small, tentative reflection on the question
Socrates puts to Meno: “what is virtue?” My thoughts, at least for now, are these: the way to virtue
may require that we come to know our great weakness, our own ignorance. This ignorance is
common to all who are less than divine; it is something we share with one another in our humanity. If
there is a connection between knowledge and right conduct, it is likely to be found in our ignorance
and in the humility it inspires, in seeing that every single one of us has a long, long way to go toward
understanding, in the endless search for truth. I suspect that human virtue lies somehow coterminous
with this strange path toward knowledge, a path through ignorance and therefore available to us all.
As we are not likely to attain great heights of knowledge, it is more likely that we can share with each
other the great peaks of desire. It may be that the love of learning, more than the attainment of
understanding, is what binds us together most tightly. It may also be this love of learning which
impels us to great acts of virtue, like the virtue we will be asking you to exhibit every day in class:
helping your classmates to experience the loving sting of the torpedo fish, helping them see that you
�too have a lot of baggage to unload, and coming to see that learning is best pursued in a community of
lovers of learning, each seeking what is best for the others.
And now I see that I’ve found my way to a typical difficulty experienced by all Socratic interlocutors.
I’ve tried to say something about the nature of virtue, in terms of loving and learning, when I’m not
sure I know what these are. So, let me leave you with this question: Tell me, freshmen, what is this
love of learning that has brought you to our door, and where does it come from? --- for I do not know,
though I am happy in the thought that we have this much to share with each other for four full
glorious years.
Welcome to St. John’s College! May you experience the sting of the torpedo fish early and often.
May the sting never hurt, but help you along the path toward understanding and freedom.
Thank you.
*****
I declare the college in session this 23rd day of August, 2006.
Convocatum Est!
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Fall 2006
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2006 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Sting of the Torpedo Fish."
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Convocation, Fall 2006
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Text
August 22, 2007
The Gift of the Gadfly
Convocation 2007
Christopher B. Nelson
President, St. John’s College, Annapolis, Md.
h
“I was attached to this city by the god – though it seems a ridiculous
thing to say – as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat
sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred by a kind of gadfly.
It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me in
the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade
and reproach you all day long and everywhere I find myself in your
company.”
Socrates makes this claim in his own defense against charges of impiety and corruption of the
youth of Athens. It is typical of Socrates that he makes it hard for us to determine just when he
intends to deny the charges brought against him and when he would positively embrace them.
Socrates is a defense attorney’s worst nightmare and a grave digger’s delight; when in a hole, he
will take up the shovel and dig himself deeper.
Presented with one bill of particulars, Socrates adds new charges to the list against him.
Prosecuted for threatening the city’s good order, for challenging its authority figures and questioning their wisdom, he claims to be a gift to the city. Threatened with death for his behavior, he gives
no thought to himself, but instead begs to argue the case for the city. He asks the jury, for its own
sake, and the sake of the city, to avoid mistreating god’s gift to them by condemning Socrates, the
city’s greatest blessing—a blessing in the form of a gadfly, attached to the city, to stir it and rouse
each of its citizens, to persuade and reproach them, all day long and everywhere. On trial at age 70,
Socrates will not go quietly into retirement. His jury was sufficiently impressed with his defense
that it sentenced him to death. It does not take much imagination to picture what a pain in that
noble horse’s rear this gadfly, Socrates, must have been.
I apologize to our freshmen for giving away the outcome of the trial, for each of you will soon read
the account of it in Plato’s Apology. But I wanted to open my remarks with reference to it because I
think that each of us here at the college has something at stake in this trial, at least something at
stake in Socrates’ defense. Socrates certainly thinks so, and he will fight for it with all he has, comparing himself, ironically but rightly, I think, to Achilles, another hero our freshmen are encountering this week: the man of action, praised for his courage, his warrior’s excellence, and his fighting spirit. (More about this later.) Perhaps, I am also drawn to the dialogue as a former trial
lawyer. While I cringe when Socrates mocks both his accusers and his citizen jury, I find myself
�cheering his courage and willingness to embrace the claim that he may be both a threat to the
established power structure and a gift to the city. Armed only with questions and the will to question relentlessly, he threatens the status quo and the peace of mind of the city’s public opinion
shapers, and challenges the citizens’ thoughtless acceptance of whatever they are told. Socrates is
a destabilizing influence. Is he really the blessing to the city that he claims to be?
Let us first look at our city. Socrates claims that Athens is great and noble, made sluggish by its
size. What can he have meant by this? Not every city is great and noble. Indeed, we learn in a later
dialogue that Socrates would rather be put to death in Athens than be released to live anywhere
else. I can imagine a number of ways to think about the problem of this great city, but I’d like to
offer one for now. Athens is a democracy, or a kind of democracy of free male citizens; it is built
upon a respect for the individual and a trust that its citizens are capable of self-governance. Surely,
the protection of a democracy and the freedom of its citizens require that those citizens have an
education both in the traditions of the city and in the arts of freedom. The traditions of a city, its
customs, its idols, and even its laws, will frequently be at odds with the very things that encourage
the autonomy of the individual citizen---those arts that allow us to think for ourselves and to question the city fathers, popular opinion, and social custom.
One might say that a democracy of any size can only work well if its citizens agree on the need to
hold on to this tension between the needs of an ordered society and the needs of a free people. I
imagine that only in such societies can a Socrates have a home. Athens may be the best hope for
home for the free individual. But it may also be that in any well-ordered and relatively happy society there will always be a tendency for the people to fall asleep, to become comfortable in their
prosperity, to follow without much reflection the will of the many, and to ignore, resent or repress
the individual voice that would challenge custom and the comfort of its citizens. Let me call this
tendency to sleep a form of decay or corruption of a democratic society, which can only be countered by the wakeful vigilance of its citizens and the persistent effort to find ways of renewing the
city’s spirit, recalling it to its purposes. If the city’s business is justice, the citizen leadership must
always be alert to signs of corruption and open to correction; it must encourage in its citizens a
respect for justice which will require the people to think about what is right and wrong, not just
what is comfortable or expedient---to think about building a better tomorrow, not just protecting
their inheritance.
It is probably the case that even the good city is more likely to tolerate its gladflies than to learn
from them. Socrates seems to understand this; he argues and reproaches, to be sure. But it is never
clear that he has a particular lesson to teach. He would convince us of our ignorance, without finding for us an answer. His chief work would seem to consist in prodding us to wakefulness, to keep
us from the smug self-satisfaction that comes from sleeping through life without examining who
we are and what we ought to become. He seems to take it as an unqualified good that we should be
kept awake to this examination even if we can’t resolve the questions that such examination
requires us to ask.
How does Socrates prod us to wakefulness? Certainly not by giving us life’s answers. We’ve all slept
through those lectures. He does it by asking questions which open us up to the world. These are
not the questions you need to know to pass your multiple-choice or true-false exams; they are not
the questions designed to test your knowledge. Instead, they are questions that should help you
understand how much you still need to learn, and how little you really understand what you
thought you knew or were told by others. They are questions that will reduce you to a state of perplexity so that you may wonder at your ignorance and search hard for a better understanding.
�For Socrates, it is human to want to know, and the prod to encourage the human desire to know
something is the prod to be human. We all recognize that the desire to know something is
grounded in what we don’t know. Therefore, the best preparation for life, for becoming more fully
human, is less the acquisition of knowledge than the understanding of our ignorance. This in turn
will help us find the questions we need to ask to bring us to a better understanding. For a question
to help us, something must be at stake for us; it must make a real difference to us how we answer
the question. When Socrates tells the reader toward the end of the Apology that the unexamined
life is not worth living, he is telling us that we might as well be dead (or never born) as live a life
that is unexamined—a life without questions, the answers to which really matter to us.
For Socrates, what is at stake is literally greater than life or death. Here is where he compares himself to Achilles who, knowing he will soon be killed after he slays the royal Hector, nonetheless
despises death: “ ‘Let me die at once,’ he said, ‘when once I have given the wrongdoer his desserts,
rather than remain here, a laughing-stock by the curved ships, a burden upon the earth.’ ”
Like Achilles, Socrates is not just willing to risk death for something he believes in; he is without
thought of death, as he faces danger rather than the disgrace of withdrawing from the search for
self-knowledge, the pursuit of which is Socrates’ only reason for living. The disgrace for Socrates
would be all the greater for backing away out of fear of the unknown. “To fear death, gentlemen,”
he says “is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does
not know. No man knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man…” True
to his search for self knowledge, mere death is no barrier. Socrates and Achilles live the lives that
belong to them, fully and completely, because they have some understanding of who they are and
what they are meant to do.
You will discover that Socrates is a local hero to many at this college. I know there are other such
heroes here; some are unyielding, bulwarks, upright (take Ajax or Antigone), while others are survivors, with a kind of practical wisdom that will see them through a changing world (Odysseus and
Penelope). In the literature throughout the Program, you will find examples of men and women
who will invite imitation. The question we must ask of each such character is this: who is this man
or woman, and what is at stake for me that I need to understand what moves them to do what they
do? The question that underlies Plato’s Apology is not the guilt or innocence of Socrates. It is
something closer to this: “Who is this man, Socrates? Is he living a life worth living---the life that
truly belongs to him? Does it matter to me and to the City that this man’s life should continue or
come to an end? Is it perhaps, even, a life worth imitating or undertaking as my own?” We cannot
judge Socrates until we know him better. And in judging him, we reveal ourselves. We had better
understand what is at stake for us before we decide the fate of Socrates and either keep him with us
or consign him to Hades and take up another. This is the prod to wakefulness that Socrates represents. And these persistent questions can be as annoying or inspiriting to the sleeping soul within
each of us as the gadfly is to the noble horse.
This whole program of instruction is designed to give you the tools to ask the question “Who are
you?” The invocation here is the same as the words at the entrance to the temple of Delphi, consulted by Socrates in his youth: “Know Thyself.” It presumes that the question “Who are you?” is a
real one, and that you yourselves have not answered it. It presumes that the stakes are high, that
your happiness depends upon your investigation into this question. It suggests that coming to
know yourself is a high and sacred duty, a task of monumental difficulty, requiring courage, and
worthy of being called “heroic.” And it suggests that the way each of you will choose to live your
life after St. John’s may depend on how you go about exploring the answer to the question: “Who
are you?”
�Nearly every book we read together will help you consider who you are and what your place is in the
world. What makes you a featherless biped, a rational being, a lover of wisdom, a son of Adam, a
child of God, a collection of molecules and a product of genes, an evolved kind of ape, an acquisitive animal, a noble savage with a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but created
equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights? Those are just a few of the possible answers you
will consider in your four years with us. In reading these books and asking of them whether they
speak any truths to you, you will be participating in an education appropriate to a great and noble
democracy—an education in the traditions of society, the arts of freedom, and the tension between
the two.
You will come to ask yourself whether answering these questions will help you shape your character. I cannot begin to imagine how each of you will find your own answer to that question. But I
think I can say with some confidence that your pursuit of these answers, and your wakefulness to
the things that matter, will be worthy of the humanity that lies within each of you.
We will ask each of you to remember the gift of the gadfly, prompting you to remain wakeful---and
ask each of you to serve as a prompt to the rest of the college community whenever we appear to be
sleeping. (Now, I ask you not to take this last injunction too literally but to allow yourselves, your
classmates and your tutors those hours of repose required for us all to remain alert and fit for daylight classes.)
On behalf of the entire college community, I welcome our newcomers to St. John’s College, welcome back the returning members of our community, and invite one and all to participate together
in this search for our humanity.
Thank you.
Following the recessional, I invite everyone to a reception behind the Mitchell Art Gallery.
I declare the College in session this 22nd day of August, 2007.
CONVOCATUM EST!
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Fall 2007
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2007 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Gift of the Gadfly."
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Convocation, Fall 2007
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"The Republic of St. John's College"
Convocation Remarks of Christopher B. Nelson
President of St. John's College, Annapolis
August 27, 2008
Welcome to St. John's College. A warm welcome to our entering freshmen and their
families and friends! Welcome back to our returning students, faculty and staff!
I want to tell you a story which opened up a question for me that I simply could not resist
exploring in preparing these remarks.
In the spring of 2004, a friend of mine, the president of another liberal arts college,
called to ask for a favor. He was being given a six month sabbatical and wondered
whether he might enroll at St. John's College or take some classes with us over the fall
term. We talked some about the importance of beginning at the beginning, and he got
excited about reading Homer, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus and Sophocles
with our freshmen. He ended up auditing the fall freshman seminar, reading everything
expected of him, and remaining a silent participant in the conversation. You can read all
about his sabbatical experience in a newly published book entitled Racing Odysseus,
chronicling his experience in the classroom, on the quad, in the coffee shop, and
especially at the boathouse, where he resolved to join the novice crew and take up
rowing on the Severn River in the wee hours of each morning with a good sized group
of eager, if sleepy, students. It turns out that the star of the story is our very own Mr.
Pickens, Director of Athletics at the College, but several students and tutors play lead
support roles in the education of my friend, "Rusty" Martin.
After he'd been at the college a while, and become acquainted with many of our
students, mostly freshman, he found himself observing out loud to one of his crew
mates as follows:
"Like you, Tom, so many of the freshmen I have met applied only to St. John's. They seem to
have a real sense of what it means to be a Johnnie even before they get here." (Does this sound
familiar to any of you?)
"Maybe so," Tom responds ... "But they aren't Johnnies when they arrive."
"So when does that happen?" I ask, surprised by his response.
�"When they have completed Plato's Republic! Then they become Johnnies."
End of story. But I was now hooked on thinking through what I'd just read. What would it
mean to say that one becomes a member of this college community upon completing
the six seminars we devote to Plato's Republic in the middle of the freshman fall term?
(In fact, freshmen will be halfway through it at Parents' weekend, and you parents can
return to campus to test the theory and ask your students this question.)
I have no idea whether this view of Mr. Tom's is widely shared at the college, but I
thought it was worth taking seriously. So, I'd like to play with the idea for just a bit. I
recognize that I can only begin to tease out a few possible answers with a book as
inexhaustible as the Republic. But here's a start.
If there is a principal question at the root of the many that are explored in the Republic,
it may be "What good is justice? Should we choose to live the just life or the unjust, and
why?" Indeed, the dialogue opens with a spirited argument for the good of injustice but
closes with a myth that reminds the readers of the thousand years of punishment that
awaits the man who chooses a life of injustice over one devoted to justice. The dialogue
is Plato's longest, and engages more participants than is usual. The two principal
interlocutors, however, are the young Glaucon and Adeimantus, brothers to Plato
himself, who does not appear as a character in the drama.
These two young people, particularly Glaucon, behave a lot like St. Johnnies. They
pursue Socrates; they pursue conversation to get to the bottom of things they can
hardly fathom; Glaucon at least just won't let up; he questions everything at each turn.
Socrates quickly sees that he must take Glaucon seriously because Glaucon has both
passion and ambition. He can see the good in Glaucon's soul, in his desire for
understanding, but he can also see the dangers to both Glaucon and the state if a mind
as fertile as Glaucon's is not turned to the good and is instead allowed to play with false
icons. Glaucon needs to be persuaded that it is better to do right than wrong, and he
needs to own the argument himself; it must be a case that he will not forget, filled with
images, arguments and stories that will not fail to keep him straight. Socrates has his
work cut out for him, and he puts together as beautiful a set of images and arguments
as we can find in all literature.
�Of course, to ask the question "What good is justice?" provokes the next: "What then is
justice?" To help answer the question, Socrates and his two young helpers set about to
found a city in speech which is designed to help us see what justice might look like on a
large scale, in order that we might better understand what justice would look like in the
human soul. It turns out that this city is not populated by people that Glaucon can either
recognize or respect. He calls it a city of pigs, one that satisfies the appetite of the
stomach, but not of the chest or the head. There is no place in this city to practice
leisure, enjoy the finer arts, or move beyond a life of consumption to a life more noble.
They reorganize the city at least twice more, but each of these cities seems to fail
another of Glaucon's tests that they be realizable in our political world.
So, Socrates seeks to answer this demand with one of his more memorable statements,
in the dead center of the book: "Unless the philosophers rule as kings, (he says) ...
there will be no rest from ills for the cities, ... nor I think for human kind, nor will the
regime we have now described in speech ever come forth from nature, insofar as
possible, and see the light of the sun." We can only suppose that if the earlier versions
of the city were unrealistic, this latter suggestion — that the best king must also be a
philosopher, a lover of wisdom — would be still further beyond the bounds of
imagination for Socrates' interlocutors. To their credit, Glaucon and Adeimantus push
him on to justify his claim. Socrates agrees, and goes on to give an account of the life of
the philosopher and the education appropriate to him.
In the middle of this explanation, Socrates gives us three of the most memorable
images our students will encounter in their four years at the college. First, he compares
the Good, which is the object of the philosopher's search, to the Sun which is the source
of life, of all that is, but also the illuminator of all the appearances in the world. Socrates
cannot seem to say what the Good is, but he can give us a sense of what it is like.
Second, he proposes a geometric model, a "divided line" to give us a picture of what the
ascent to the Good might require of us mortals still in this world below, a sense of the
kind of intellectual activity we must engage in, the kind of journey we must take to get
closer to that object beyond us. In the study of mathematics, we quickly come to
understand that the pictures we draw of squares and triangles, lines and proportions,
are just images or representations of the true objects of geometry, which are only
accessible by thought. Through the image of the divided line, we come to appreciate the
�need to access a world of intelligible objects in order to better understand what lies
behind, and gives order to, their appearances in the visible world.
Third, in the cave analogy, Socrates gives us a drama to describe the great difficulty
and pain we can expect in making the ascent from the world of images to the one
source of all we can see and know. He asks us to imagine that we are all prisoners in a
cave, chained so that all we can see are the shadows cast upon a wall in front of us. We
cannot, on our own, turn around and see that these shadows are not real at all, but
mere reflections of objects carried by people behind us who are passing in front of a fire
which is the source of the light that casts the shadows. He describes first the pain, then
the disbelief, and finally the wonder experienced by a prisoner who is released from his
bonds and forced to turn around and look into the light of the fire and see what the
image makers have known all along.
But that is not all. This cave has an entrance open to the light of the sun across the
whole width of the cave. Socrates now asks us to imagine that the newly released
prisoner is dragged up the steep, rocky, upward way out into the light of the sun. At first,
he'd be blinded and see less well than before, but then he would get accustomed to the
light and see all the other things the world has to show him — the waters and the land
and the starry heavens above, until he could make out the sun itself and see what it is
like. That man would be happy at his freedom from the shadows below, and would pity
those still in the cave. His education would have literally been an education in the art of
turning around, the art of seeing better, in a truer light, what is already really there, of
seeing what ought to be seen.
Around here, we sometimes call this an education in the arts of freedom, or the liberal
arts — the arts that liberate us to flee the bonds of prejudice, the false opinions, and the
shadows about us, and see things as they truly are. Every image, every opinion
expressed by the image makers and spin doctors around us, should be an occasion for
us to pull ourselves, and others with us, out of our caves and into the light of the sun.
We recognize that this sun is there for everyone in the cave to access. The entrance to
the cave is open to all who are below.
After exploring these images, Socrates then constructs the education of the
philosopher, and explores the kinds of governments that arise when the rulers are no
longer philosophers. He closes with a grand overarching myth that attempts to
�incorporate the whole, reminding us that we have a lot at stake in the choices we make
in living our lives. Just as we are meant to see the city-building exercise that occurs in
the first nine books of the Republic as an image of the education of the individual soul,
so we see the closing myth as an image of the choices available to that soul. We see
that it is literally a matter of life or death (or at least a matter of great reward or
unimaginable punishment) how we choose to live our lives, and how wise we would be
to turn ourselves now to the question of justice so that we might learn to live a life that
practices it. The well regulated soul, one that is turned to the Good, that is whole, well
integrated and balanced, is also, we imagine, the soul best fit to rule our city.
I think it is time for me now to try to give my answer to the question I opened with: What
would it mean to say that our students don't become Johnnies until they've finished
the Republic?
The dialogue probably gives us the best account we have of what learning ought to be.
It belongs to us at the college, and serves as a kind of model for our program of
instruction. The book thus gives our students an opportunity to examine the education
they are then engaged in, allows them to ask what it would be like to construct a
curriculum fit for a philosopher king, and invites them to compare it to the one they are
undertaking at St. John's.
The Republic is a beautiful book, filled with the richest of images that help us remember
that the difficult search for truth is worth all the effort. It gives us poetic, musical and
mathematical images, myths and analogies, to aid us in our search for an
understanding of our world and our place in it, images we cannot possibly forget,
images that will be available to us forever.
Like all of Plato's dialogues, the Republic engages the readers and asks them to
become participants in the dialogue that Socrates is having with his friends. It asks us to
question the answers given by Glaucon and others, to try them out and formulate better
ones. It also helps to lead us up out of our own personal caves, encouraging us, and
showing us how to find our way to a life that is better than we have experienced
heretofore.
The Republic allows our freshmen to see how integrated the whole of learning is in
relation to the singular soul. It helps explain the importance of mathematics in our
�curriculum, that it is not just a tool required for the specialist in the sciences,
engineering, or the trades, but is an indispensable aid to philosophy itself, an aid to self
understanding.
More than anything, however, I think it must be in our several seminars on
the Republic that we become aware of the republic that is shaping itself around us, the
republic of friends around the table who are searching together for answers to the
deepest of questions: how we ought to be living our lives. We, like Glaucon and
Adeimantus, find ourselves being initiated into the one republic that Socrates and his
friends have succeeded in realizing. At St. John's, we call this republic our community of
learning.
In the world, we often speak of the ties that "bind" us to a human community as healthy
things, often beautiful and reaffirming ties. It is easy to forget the dark side of this image
which is that we can be "tied" and "bound" to a community as to a cave that we fear to
escape. We can become yoked to a larger political body by a common interest, a piece
of territory, a tribal custom, a shared enemy, or a popular idea — foundations that we
may cease to question. And questioning these foundations of community can become
taboo, as the chains tighten about us.
We are fortunate, then, that the larger community most of us belong to, the United
States of America, is founded on a paradox: the ties that bind us as Americans are
rooted in human freedom, and the more we exercise the freedom to question our
institutions the stronger are our ties to the founding principal. That freedom, protected
by our laws, provides us with a very comfortable and open cave in which to live our lives
and shape our institutions.
We at St John's have taken advantage of that freedom and that cave to found a college
grounded in a very similar paradox: we find our truest sense of community in an image
of human freedom that finds us somehow "together" seeking to escape the confines of
the individual caves that imprison each of us. For lovers of wisdom, the young Glaucons
among us, the desire to see things as they are, to strive toward the source of our being
and come in to the light of the sun, is too beautiful an activity to resist — and too
wonderful not to share with others. We make this search for truth, this struggle to climb
out of our caves, our chief community endeavor.
�Perhaps, in our search for such a liberating community, and in our occasionally
achieving it, "then, we become Johnnies". Nonetheless, I will today welcome you to the
Republic of St. John's College. I'm done trying to justify why you must wait 10 weeks to
become one of us. We are happy to call you ours today, and to welcome you to our
community of learning.
Thank You.
I declare the College in session this 27th day of August, 2008.
CONVOCATUM EST!
�
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Convocation Addresses
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Description
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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convocation
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7 pages
Original Format
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paper
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Title
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Convocation Address, Fall 2008
Date
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2008-08-27
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2008 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Republic of St. John's College."
Identifier
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Convocation, Fall 2008
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
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Nelson, Christopher B.
Convocation
Presidents
Tutors
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“The Things of Friends Are Common”
Convocation Address, August 26, 2009
Christopher B. Nelson, President
St. John’s College, Annapolis MD
Welcome to the Class of 2013 and to your families. To the rest of our college community,
welcome back. Welcome, friends all!
I came to a rather startling realization over the summer as I was preparing to greet our
newcomers: that I had returned to this college to take the position I now hold in the year in which
most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have passed quickly, it seems to me now,
and my appreciation for the community of learning I joined back then has grown, as my
friendships within the community have deepened. I think I became a wee bit sentimental as I
ruminated upon my first year as a student at St. John’s more than 40 years ago. My Greek has
gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the things learned first are remembered best, and I
have kept with me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my first days at the
college.
and
.
The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are difficult” or “Noble things are
difficult.” The second can be translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What friends
have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my youth we used a different Greek grammar
book, so this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson Introduction to Ancient Greek
that you will be working with in your first semester of the Greek Tutorial. And there they were,
the same two sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and predicate position of the
definite article, and I rediscovered something I once must have known about the two sentences I
had carried with me all these years: that they are both nominal sentences with the article in the
predicate position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole sentences without the use of a
verb. (Grammar is a handy tool, don’t you think?) Well, I was pretty sure that I had not
committed these sentences to memory for the substantive-making power of the article . It’s
more likely that I remembered them because they were both quite short, and perhaps because
they appeared to carry a mystery and a whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if
only I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new
text that “nominal sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless character of maxims
or folk-sayings.” (Mollin and Williamson at 31)
I wanted to understand better the little maxim
“The things of friends are
common.” The sentence seemed to capture a beautiful thought, and I had the efficient notion
that if I made the effort to understand this maxim better, I also might come to see why “beautiful
things are difficult.” Two birds, one arrow --- so to speak!
So, I begin my reflection by asking whether this little maxim means that friends share what they
have, or that they ought to share what they have. Today, I give you half of the lunch I packed for
us both, and tomorrow you will share yours with me. But the sandwiches we eat are hardly
common to us both; quite the opposite, they are rationed out separately to each of us, albeit
�equally. We may each have an equal share in a good thing, but not a common good. We each
consume what the other does not and cannot consume. So it is with all sorts of goods, earthly
goods, goods that are external to us; what I give to you in the spirit of sharing with a friend is
something I will no longer have after giving it. I will have less of it after sharing it than I did
before I shared it, however good and generous my act of friendship has been, and however much
I imagine I may have gained in the improvement of my character by sharing it.
But what then are the things that could be common to friends? What kinds of things can truly be
held in common without having to be shared or meted out among friends? I suppose things of the
soul are of this nature, things that belong to the heart, the spirit, or the mind, things that belong to
our inner lives. We both may love a single object or a person without our having to share that
love as we might share the expense of a gift to the beloved one. My love doesn’t grow less
because you love too. And of course, if we should actually love one another, that love is surely
greater and stronger for it being reciprocated and reinforced over and over. So it is with the
intellect. When I learn something you have shared with me, it does not pass from you to me like
milk from a pitcher; you have lost nothing, and yet I have gained something that is now common
to us both. The sum of what is common to us has just grown; it has not been redistributed. And
should we together go about learning something new, we will each be richer for what we come to
have in common.
Why, though, do we say that these ‘things in common’ belong to ‘friends’? I think it must have
something to do with the reason we seek these common things. We are moved to love something
because it is beautiful, or to love some person because he or she is beautiful to us. We seek to
know something because we believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that this
knowledge will be good for us, perhaps even that it can be turned to good in the world about us.
These things we have in common are beautiful and good things, and we wish beautiful and good
things for our friends. If the common goods are those that increase by pursuing them together,
then the greatest acts of friendship must be the searching together for such a common good.
St. John’s College exists for this purpose: to provide a place and countless opportunities for our
students to pursue together the common goods of the intellect. We call ourselves a community of
learning, aware that the word ‘community’ in English, as in Greek, has the same root as the word
‘common’. We make many an effort to put into practice the conviction that we learn best when
we learn with others, who like us, wish to increase the common good. Such a community offers
some pretty fine opportunities for friendship.
We also have a common curriculum that has us all reading books that are worthy of our
attention, even of our love --- books written by men and women who were themselves model
fellow learners. The books and the authors may even become our friends, as can the characters in
some of those books. If you have not already met the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, you soon
will, and you will be spending a lot of time with him in your freshman year. For some of you,
this may be the beginning of a lifelong friendship with a character who would converse with you
over and over if you open yourselves to the possibility. The words on the page may remain the
same, but the reader brings a new conversationalist to the text every time he or she returns to the
dialogue. At least, so it is with me. I call Socrates a friend of mine because I know that he seeks
only my own good. He has taught me humility, at least such as I possess it at all.
�I have many such friends in the Program. Some of them are books: Homer’s Iliad has been my
companion since the seventh grade, and I never tire of returning to it. The Aeneid has become a
more recent friend who has helped me understand and better bear the responsibilities of
fatherhood and the trials of leadership. The Books of Genesis and Job have helped me
understand what it means to be human and how great is the distance between the human and the
divine; I read them to remind me of how little I really understand about the relation between the
two, which in turn serves as a spur to seeking to understand better. Euclid’s Elements may be the
finest example on the St. John’s Program of the practice of the liberal arts, and it is beautiful for
its logical, progressive movement from the elemental to the truly grand. Plato’s Republic is the
finest book about education ever written; it inspires much of what I do as I practice my vocation
at the College, reminding me that a community of learning is reshaping and refounding itself any
time a few of its members come together to engage in learning for its own sake --- and that this is
what we ought always to be encouraging at this college, even by device when necessary.
Other friends of mine are authors: Sophocles, who can evoke a human sympathy to inspire pity
in each of his dramas; George Washington, whose restraint in the use of power is evident in his
finest writings and in the mark he left on the founding of this country; Abraham Lincoln, whom I
consider this country’s finest poet, whose very words reshaped what it meant to be an American;
Jane Austen, whose every sentence can be called perfect (and so she is a beautiful author to me);
and Martin Luther King, who taught me that non-violent protest is more than a successful tactical
measure to achieve a political end, but a proper and loving response to the hateful misconduct of
fellow human souls.
Then there remain the characters whom I embrace as friends: besides Socrates, there is Hector,
Breaker of Horses, ‘Oh my Warrior’; and Penelope, who weaves the path that allows Odysseus
to return home and is far worthier of his love than he is of hers. There is Don Quixote, the
indomitable spirit, and Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooks, whose simple acts of goodness change
the whole world about her. I rather like Milton’s Eve, mother of us all, who still shines pretty
brightly in the face of his spectacular Satan. I was a teenager when I met Shakespeare’s Prince
Hal, and I grew to adulthood with him, probably following a little too closely his path to
responsibility. There’s the innocent Billy Budd, unprepared to face the force of evil in man, and
his Captain Vere, the good man who suffers to do his duty.
You will also read some reflections on friendship: this winter, Aristotle will provide freshmen
with a framework for considering different kinds of friendships and the goods they afford. You
should ask whether you think his list is complete, and whether your own experiences of
friendship are embraced by his explication. And then there are examples of friendships, pairs of
friends, in many of the books, who will also provide lessons in friendship, for better or worse:
Patroclus and Achilles, David and Jonathan, Hal and Falstaff, Huck and Jim, Emma and
Knightly, to name a few.
As you work your way through the Program, you will have the assistance of many friends, some
of whom will still be breathing while others will be living on in the pages you’ll be reading
during your years with us. They will help you as you struggle with the big questions that in turn
will help to free you to live a life that truly belongs to you. It will be these friends, who are
�outside of you but standing close by, who will help you find your own answers to the questions:
Who am I? What is my place in the world? And how ought I to live my life? One of my more
beautiful living friends, a colleague here at the college, has put it this way: “Our friends are
doubly our benefactors: They take us out of ourselves and they help us to return, to face together
with them our common human condition.” (Eva Brann, Open Secrets/Inward Prospects, at 55.)
Another of my friends, a St. John’s classmate and medical doctor, gave last year’s graduating
class in Santa Fe this reminder, that we can learn from our friendships with the books how we
might be better friends to one another. “It is the great book that is the life of every person,
regardless of station in life,” he said. “So often we make shallow and inaccurate presumptions
about people, like the cliché of telling a book by its cover, which robs you of the deeper
experience that defines us as humans in our relationship to each other. For me every patient is a
great book with a story to tell and much to teach me, and I am sometimes ashamed when my
presumptions are exposed and I then see the remarkable person within, between the covers of the
book of the story of their own lives.” This doctor has devoted himself to saving the lives of
patients suffering from cancer, and he has this to say about how he is guided by the spirit of
community and friendship within the soul of every human being: “In my own work, it is
sometimes said, we are guided … by the idea that to save a person’s life, it is considered as if
one has saved the world. To me that has always meant the life saved is much more than a single
life restored, as that person is someone’s spouse, someone’s brother or sister, someone’s parent,
or child, a member of a community, of a church, synagogue or mosque, or a friend, and as all are
affected by loss, all are restored by their return.” (Stephen J. Forman, 2009 Commencement
Address, Santa Fe) This statement is a powerful testament to the wonder of friendship at work in
the world.
In this last story, I have moved us away from the inner world of reflection and learning to the
outer world of putting what one has learned to work in a life devoted to helping others. The
second must always follow the first. By this, I mean that you owe it to yourselves and others to
take advantage of the opportunities this community offers you to learn with your classmates and
tutors what it takes to acquire a little self-understanding before you go out and put it to work in
the world. And in the process, we hope that you will make a few friends who will stay with you
for the rest of your lives, enriching your lives because ‘what friends have, they have in common.’
I wish to close with a kind of benediction. This little nominal sentence
happens to be the penultimate sentence in one of Plato’s dialogues, The Phaedrus, the only book
you will read twice for seminar, at the end of both your freshman and senior years. Phaedrus and
Socrates have engaged in the highest form of friendship as they have conversed together to try to
understand how a man or woman might achieve harmony and balance in the soul by directing
that soul to a love for the beautiful. Socrates concludes with this prayer to the gods:
Friend Pan and however many other gods are here, grant
me to become beautiful in respect to the things within. And
as to whatever things I have outside, grant that they be
friendly to the things inside me. May I believe the wise
man to be rich. May I have as big a mass of gold as no one
�other than the moderate man of sound mind could bear or
bring along.
Do we still need something else, Phaedrus? For I think I’ve
prayed in a measured fashion.
To which Phaedrus responds:
And pray also for these things for me. For friends’ things
are in common.
(Plato, Phaedrus, Nichols translation, lines 279b-279c)
May each of you, as well, learn to enjoy the benefits of such friendships in your time at this
College! (And now, in the concluding words of Socrates, “Let’s go” and get started.)
Thank you!
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
I declare the College in session this 26th day of August, 2009.
CONVOCATUM EST!
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2009 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Things of Friends Are Common."
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Convocation
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Text
Welcome to Wonderland
St. John's College, Annapolis
Convocation Address 8/21/13
Christopher B. Nelson, President
Welcome to St. John's College! Welcome to our freshman class, their families and friends! Welcome
back to the rest of the College community!
Most of you know something of the springtime lawn sport at which this College is said to excel. And
many of you have attended more than a few of our annual contests with the US Naval Academy.
Honor and Glory are at stake in the match of wits that characterizes croquet in Annapolis. But
costume and dance are every bit as much a part of the day as is watching the grass grow.
This last year, our Student Committee on Instruction added a Saturday morning seminar to precede the big
match. The reading was from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the timeless classic about a little girl
drifting off to sleep on a river bank when a White Rabbit ran by, saying to itself in remarkably good English
“Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” But when Alice saw the Rabbit pull a watch from its waistcoat pocket,
she leapt to her feet “burning with curiosity” and followed the Rabbit down the rabbit hole, tumbling into
Wonderland, a strange new world filled with yet more strange little worlds. (Alice at 3-6)
The Croquet seminar selections were, appropriately, the chapters on the Mad Tea-Partyand the Queen’s
Croquet Ground. You may remember that the croquet court was all ridges and furrows, the balls live
hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the wickets were playing-card soldiers doubled up over
themselves to make arches. The only rule to the game was that the Queen of Hearts must win; the price of
failure and the Queen’s displeasure: “Off with their heads!” The game came to a halt when the Queen
ordered the executioner to cut off the head of the Cheshire Cat. But as the Cat was all head, face, and smile,
detached from a body, the players took to arguing whether the head could be cut off from a body that wasn’t.
It’s a question we might leave to our own Imperial Wicket, as our croquet team captain is called.
The seminar got me to wondering about Wonderland and all the things that could be learned from wandering
through it, and so I reread Alice in Wonderland over the summer. From beginning to end, Alice was moved by
curiosity to open each closed door to explore a new room, a new garden, new occupants, new societies, new
manners and mores, new grammars, new arguments, new logical—or not so logical—constructs. After each
exploration, she would discover a bottle that read "DRINK ME!" or a morsel that read "EAT ME!" to which
she would respond: "I know something interesting is sure to happen whenever I eat or drink anything." And
so she would drink or eat, finding herself growing or shrinking to meet the terrors or confusions of whatever
she would encounter on the other side of the next door. (Alice at 29)
With each new encounter, she experienced something both familiar and unfamiliar: rabbits were familiar, but
talking rabbits were not; a deck of playing cards was familiar but having each card play out a role in the
Queen's Courtyard was new; a cat was familiar but a smiling cat without a body was unfamiliar. When asked
by a talking caterpillar "Who are you?" Alice responded that she hardly knew: "At least I know who
I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then." "What do
you mean by that?" said the Caterpillar sternly. "Explain yourself!" "I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir" said
Alice, "because I'm not myself, you see." (Alice at 37)
Alice had become detached from herself and was looking back at herself in wonderment. When the caterpillar
didn't understand what she meant, Alice replied: "[W]hen you have to turn into a chrysalis—you know some
�day, you will—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel a little queer, won't you?" (Alice at
38)
Now this exchange is quite remarkable. Alice has turned from wondering about the world outside
her, with all of its familiar and unfamiliar elements, to wondering about herself and who she is, and
then to trying to help another creature become detached enough to wonder at its own evolution and
state of being. This is exactly the process, and these exactly the sort of questions, that can liberate
us and others from the limitations of what we think we know, from our everyday unexamined
assumptions about our everyday lives.
This activity lies at the heart of liberal education. It involves the exercise of imagination. We must
imagine that we can step outside ourselves and outside our habitual assumptions in order to ask the
truly fundamental questions that undergird all other questions, whether those questions lead to the
discovery of something new and unknown before (like the discovery of a new planet, a previously
unknown subatomic particle, or the cure for polio), or the recovery of something once known and
now forgotten (like the recurrent need to rediscover an understanding of the American Civil War), or
the reexamination of something not sufficiently understood (like the need to better understand the
meaning of justice or of right and wrong—concepts we use daily but understand imperfectly).
Some of you may be wondering why I am bothering with the dreams of a fictional little girl when
there are so many more important things, so many new things to discover, so much new knowledge
to acquire. So let us consider another example, this time a physicist.
As it happens, this summer I was also reading a couple of books by Richard Feynman, the Nobelprize-winning theoretical physicist known for his work on the path-integral formulation of quantum
mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of
supercooled liquid helium. He may be best remembered for his testimony in a televised
Congressional hearing explaining the failure of the O-rings of the space shuttle Challenger. It was
Feynman’s curiosity, his incessant need to know, his puzzlement and wonder at the world around
him, his joy in the study of physics, that led him to become one of the world's great physicists.
Once, when Feynman was a student at MIT, he was expected to write a paper for a philosophy class
in which he had paid no attention. So he decided to tackle a problem his father had given him as a
child: Suppose some Martians were to come to Earth, and Martians never slept. They didn't have
any idea of this thing we call sleep. So, they ask you: “How does it feel to go to sleep? Do your
thoughts suddenly stop? How does the mind actually turn off?”
Being the careful observer that he was, Feynman went about studying himself. He proceeded to
watch himself very carefully each day and each night for four weeks to see what happened. He
noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas in your head continue but they become less and less
logically connected. But you don't notice that they are less well connected until you ask yourself
"What made me think of that?" and you try to work your way back, often unsuccessfully. In the end,
he wrote up his observations, noting that he didn't really know what it's like to fall asleep, only what
it's like while watching himself enter the state. He concluded his paper with a little poem that pointed
out the problem with introspection:
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
(Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! at 46-48)
�Once again, we find our subject, this time Mr. Feynman, stepping outside of himself to try to
understand something within. This escape from the self is an act of liberation, freeing the mind to
look inward and study itself as if it were unfamiliar. This act of imagination is necessary for the most
fruitful kind of learning.
In Alice and in Feynman we see wonder first operating as a kind of curiosity: "I wonder what is on
the other side of that door? Let me open it and see." Or "I wonder how the mind shuts down when it
is going to sleep. Let me study it and see." In each case, the wonder turns to something like awe
when the question turns back on itself: "I cannot tell you who I am because I am not myself. Then
who am I?" Or "I cannot explain what it’s like to fall asleep because I am no longer conscious to
study it. I wonder why I still wonder." These latter expressions require that we take the self that we
think we know and call it into question: "Of course I knew who I was, but now I wonder who I really
am." "Of course I am a curious person, but now I wonder why."
The ability to wonder at yourself requires suspension of disbelief: you must be able to withstand the pressure
to return to your default setting of thinking that you know who you are. This same ability to suspend disbelief
is critical in creating both art and knowledge. In last month's New Republic magazine, Judith Shulevitz argues
that there is no science without fancy, wonder and the exercise of the imagination. Suspension of disbelief, she
says, is required for the "world building" behind all good science fiction. And what is suspension of disbelief
but the freedom to imagine something out of the ordinary, the possibility of a future that you may lay claim to
one day. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea made the possibility of the submarine seem
a little more accessible to a later generation. His Clipper of the Clouds prefigured the helicopter. AndStar
Trek’s hand-held communication device directly influenced the invention of the flip-flop cell phone. (The New
Republic, July9, 2013.)
I hasten to add that suspension of disbelief is necessary for the "world building" you are undertaking as you
build a life for yourselves, a life worthy of your hopes and dreams. Now what do you imagine you need to
learn to free yourself to ask the questions and shape the life that would belong to you? I imagine that it is the
encouragement to wonder about the world around you and the world within you. How will you free your
imagination to do that? This will probably require a lot of practice, something we encourage you to do at this
College.
Preparing for your seminar on the Iliad, you freshmen may wonder what these men are fighting about. What
makes a man a hero? What is the role of the gods, and what is the will of Zeus? Why should we imagine that
the will of Zeus is being accomplished in this book? Who is the Muse who is speaking through Homer? Why
do we care more about the risks taken by our heroic humans than the accomplishments of the Olympian gods?
In reading Euclid’s Elements, you will surely wonder how anything may be something that has no part, or what
breadthless length can be? In what sense can we say that mathematical objects exist, that they have both
meaning and being? Why do we imagine that mathematics may be the language of nature? Or that when we
describe something mathematically it has a correlation with things we can see and touch? Why do we trust
mathematical truths at all?
In your language tutorial, you may wonder why you are reading a dead language with an unfamiliar
alphabet. How can this help you understand the English language better? You may wonder, after
several efforts, whether any sentence written in another language can be properly translated at all.
What does this say about language and our ability to communicate with one another? How do we
make the best of such a precarious exercise? And will you wonder, as I once did, about the ability to
write intelligible sentences in Greek without the use of a verb? Ah, the substantive-making power of
the article τά in the predicate position!
In your laboratory, you will be observing plants and animals. You may wonder why you can prune a
plant to make it healthier but should not prune an animal and expect the same. How does it happen
�that a whole carrot can grow from a small scratch of tissue from another carrot’s tap root? What are
the principles of the plant’s organization contained in that tap root? What can you learn about the
Magnolia tree from studying one of its leaves? But when you wonder what the meaning of life is, you
will find that the laboratory will only help you find a part of the answer.
Sophomores are reading Genesis, wondering what it might mean that light and day were created before the sun
was formed. Why are there two different stories explaining the creation of man and woman? Why did God
forbid Adam and Eve to eat of the tree in the middle of the garden? Why is it right that we are made in the
image of God but not right that we might want to be like God or to reach God, as we learn from the story of the
Tower of Babel? Why does God destroy most of life on Earth in the great flood and then repent? And who are
we to question the Almighty?
Juniors are reading Don Quixote, wondering what kind of madness can move us to love. What is the
connection between the love of a Knight for his Lady, the Knight’s desire for glory, and his love of the Divine?
What does Quixote see in Dulcinea that moves him to take on a whole world? Is this knight like me, fighting
seemingly hopeless battles for causes we simply must believe in? How is it that some of us see a hum-drum
world with hum-drum eyes while others possess enough imagination to see the possibility of a world worthy of
the striving that belongs to a knight-errant?
Seniors are reading Tolstoy's magnificent War and Peace, wondering how Napoleon ever imagined he could
conquer the Russian spirit. What is the spirit tapped by General Kutuzov that makes Russian victory
inevitable? How does Napoleon inspire his troops? Why is it that war can be described as fearful and merry?
What is Pierre searching for that will bring peace to his soul? What does it mean that the love of death is a
virtue? Why do we fall in love with the lively Natasha? What is the happiness of self-sacrifice that
characterizes Princess Marya? Are there laws of history that govern the movement of peoples, as we say there
are laws of physics governing the movement of bodies?
St. John's College exists to help you develop the capacity for wonder at ever-deepening levels. At first, you
will wonder why something strange and new to you is what it is or doeswhat it does. Soon you will be
confronted with the things you thought you understood perfectly well and find that you did not know them as
well as you thought you did. The familiar will become unfamiliar. That is when you will become free of the
preconceived and unexamined opinions you have carried with you for years. You will then have the
opportunity to examine those opinions anew and either own them for yourself or discard them as false because
you will have acquired a knowledge of what you know and why you know, and hopefully also of the limits and
provisional nature of the knowledge you possess and of the need to examine such things over and over as you
recover and rediscover the truths about the world about you and the world within you.
Along the way, you will likely find yourself in some rabbit hole and may discover a whole new world
beneath you that you will have never imagined before. It is this exercise of the imagination and this
recovery of the power of wonder that will set you free.
I am reminded of this daily from personal experience. Joyce and I have sixteen grandchildren, all of
whom are themselves reminders of the richness of imagination in the young. Nathaniel, a six-year
old grandson sought out his Grandmother: “Nana, Do you ever wonder about Nurse Sharks?” he
asked. She replied, without having ever heard of nurse sharks: “Oh, I do wonder about Nurse Sharks
and would love to learn more about them!” Last weekend, eight-year-old Masayda discovered an old
brass key to an antique desk and wondered whether, if she used it, the desk would open into a
Secret Garden as she had seen in the movie of that name! She and her Nana went on that
adventure together and their story remains a secret today.
Joyce and I have been made younger by our grandchildren, not because they are young in age,
loud, raucous and hard to keep up with—as of course they are!—but because they have the lively
imaginations necessary for exploration, discovery, and recovery of the world that is there to be
�known! They include us enthusiastically in their explorations, and this requires suspension of
disbelief on our part, and courage on their part, to open the next door to—who-knows-where?
I parked my car in one of those big plain BWI asphalt parking lots the other day, only to hear a little
boy say to his mother, just getting out of a car nearby: “Mommy, did we park next to a volcano?” To
her negative response, he said “Oh good! Because volcanoes can be pretty bad for us!” Every
venture into the imagination has its risks and can be perilous, as Alice discovered. But consider the
rewards!
St. John's has a Latin pun for its motto: Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque.“ I make free adults from
children by means of books and a balance.” I often think this means that an education in freedom is not
possible without the would-be adult first becoming like a child, capable of the kind of wonder experienced by
our Alice.
Oh Dear! Oh Dear! I worry I have kept you too late!
Off with you to the Wonderland that is St. John's College!
May you discover and never cease to wonder at the beauty of the world around you, at the richness
and depth of the books before you, and at the devotion of this community to the learning of each and
every one of you!
Thank you.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I declare the College in session this 21st day of August, 2013.
Convocatum Est!
* Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, The Folio Society, St. Edmundsbury Press, 1998
* Richard P. Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character, W.W.
Norton, 1985
�
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Convocation Addresses
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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convocation
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5 pages
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paper
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Convocation Address, Fall 2013
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2013-08-21
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Welcome to Wonderland."
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Convocation, Fall 2013
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College
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English
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text
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Convocation 2014:
Everything Important in
Life Is Unknown
St. John’s College opened the 2014-15 academic year on August 20 with Convocation,
the annual ceremony rich with traditions. Nearly 140 freshmen in Annapolis participated
in a procession from McDowell Hall to Francis Scott Key auditorium, where each
student is called on the stage to meet President Christopher B. Nelson. Students sign
the college’s register and receive an Ancient Greek lexicon as a gift from the college.
Here is the Convocation address:
Welcome to the Class of 2018. Welcome to their families and friends. Welcome Back to
the rest of the College community! There is nothing in the world like the energy in this
room as we open our doors to another year of learning together.
Like everyone else here, I prepared for this fresh beginning by reading a few new books
over the summer. Among them was an elegant little volume written by Roger
Rosenblatt: Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing. It is a partliteral, part-fictional account of what was studied, written and said in one of Rosenblatt’s
graduate classes in writing at Stony Brook University.
Some months after the class was over,Rosenblatt and his students enjoyed a reunion
dinner at a local restaurant, which like most reunions had a pleasant diversionary quality
filled with the conversation and good humor that characterizes friendship at its best—
friendship born of the shared study of things that are of great importance to those who
have opened themselves fully to one another in the interest of their learning together. At
the end of the evening,Rosenblatt was asked: “Is there anything you haven’t told us?”
He acknowledged that there was something he might have mentioned but it was difficult
and the hour was late, so he parted from his students to a good-hearted chorus of boos,
and decided to toss in his parting shot at a distance, in a letter at the close of the book
he was writing about his class.
�The letter was addressed “To My Ungrateful Students:”
What he had to say went far beyond the advice of an instructor concerned with
technique in good writing: the need for precision and restraint, the use of anticipation
over surprise and imagination over invention, the preference for the noun over the
adjective and the verb over the adverb. Instead, he told a story of a conversation he’d
had with Lewis Thomas toward the end of Thomas’s life, in which Thomas said that he
would rather talk about life than death. “There’s an art to living,” he said. “And it has to
do with usefulness. I would die content if I knew that I had led a useful life.”
Rosenblatt then advised his students:
“For your writing to be great ... it must be useful to the world. And for that to happen you
must form an opinion of the world. And for that to happen, you need to observe the
world, closely and steadily, with a mind open to change. And for that to happen you
have to live in the world... . You must love the world as it is, because the world, for all its
murder and madness, is worth loving. Nothing you write will matter unless it moves the
human heart.”
But what is useful to the world? The world will only tell you “what it wants, which
changes from moment to moment, and is nearly always cockeyed… The world is an
appetite waiting to be defined. The greatest love you can show it is to create what it
needs, which means you must know that yourself.” The great writers are great,
Rosenblatt says, “because their subjects and themes are great, and thus their
usefulness is great as well. Their souls are great, and they have had the good sense
and courage to consult their souls before their pens touched paper.”
“When Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, George Eliot, or Chekhov are recalled,” Rosenblatt
writes, “it is as if tidal waves are washing over us. We cannot catch our breath.” And
what do the great writers have in common? “All have … a certain innocence of mind
that allows them to observe life openly and with a sense of fair play, though not without
judgment.” They also have an appreciation of uncertainty, which is necessary if one is
concerned with coming to know the truth, a never-ending journey. Poets grapple with
the difficulties of knowing the truth, but so do scientists. For both, ignorance is crucial.
Why? Because, Rosenblatt says, “everything important in life is unknown.”
�What Rosenblatt wants for his future writers is the same as what all good teachers want
for their students: the ability to recognize the source of greatness within themselves; the
desire to improve on that soul, making it capacious, kind, and rational; and the continual
effort to cultivate the innocence of mind that lets us live freely and openly in the world.
His brief description can be applied to education generally. We call it liberal education—
education in the art of living well, free from the constraints enclosing us, free from the
boundaries of our educational disciplines and specialties, free from the prejudices of our
upbringing and popular opinion, free from the many caves that confine us all too
comfortably.
At St. John’s College, we offer such a liberal education—one that helps us understand
ourselves and the world around us; one that helps us develop an adaptable mind,
equally open to tradition and to progress; one that gives us practice in the art of inquiry,
in asking the questions humans have been asking since we first began to speak. They
are questions arising from the depths of wonder; questions revealing the depths of our
ignorance about the world and about ourselves; questions demonstrating a startling
truth: that our ignorance is the source of our greatest strength. For it is ignorance, not
knowledge, that propels us forward. It generates the desire to know, which draws us
expectantly into the unknown. This is what the world needs: a good understanding of
how to develop and where to direct our desire to know.
If this assessment is true—and I believe it is—then the best conceivable education, the
education at which college-bound students should aim and the one that is most useful
to the world, comes from studying the greatest literary, scientific, philosophical, political,
artistic, and musical works known to mankind, because their authors have the most to
teach. Of all who have left records behind, they have understood most profoundly that
we have much to learn, that the wonders of learning are exhilarating though its
challenges are humbling.
Take Galileo, an author read in your junior year. He is supposed to have said, “Doubt is
the father of invention.” Why did he think that doubt is generative while others consider
it paralyzing or destructive? Because doubt is the source of understanding and
innovation. It is what causes us to ask the next question, which in turn leads us to a new
possibility. It threatens the comfortable sense of security that would keep us tied to what
�we thought we knew instead of asking: what does this new understanding cause us to
ask that will allow us to reach beyond it?
Michael Faraday, another author from the junior year, argued that to acquire the habits
to form good judgment, an individual must engage in a program of self-education that
rejects the blind dependency on the dogma of others; he must examine himself and
become his own sharpest critic. “This education has for its first and last step humility. It
can commence only because of a conviction of deficiency.” (Observations on Mental
Education)
Faraday’s is yet another call to “know thyself” better before advancing a judgment on
anything else, a lesson all freshmen learn in their encounter with Socrates, the greatest
skeptic of them all. Only when we understand that depth of our own ignorance, when we
understand how little we know, are we ready to develop the lifelong habits that will best
support learning. Only when we are free from conventional thinking, free to doubt what
we have been taught about the world, can we imagine a whole new way to see the
world and our place in it. This need to imagine a better world than the one we know is
another reason why everything important in life is unknown.
You lucky freshmen are reading Homer, the poet who may best demonstrate this power
of the imagination, the journey-making faculty and the source of human creative power.
The imagination is the beginning and end of any search for meaning, the connection
between the world we live in and the one we would shape for ourselves. I can think of
no finer example of the exercise of imagination than in Homer’s Odyssey.
Constantine Cavafy captured the spirit of the Odyssey in his 1911 poem “Ithaka”
“Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if lasts for years,
So you are old by the time you reach the island,
Wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
Not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.”
“Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.”
�We at the College imagine that your four-year journey through the Program will help you
find your own Ithaca, the beginning and end of your search for meaning.
There is a reason we at St. John’s College are proud to say: “The Following Teachers
Will Return to St. John’s Next Year”: Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles; Euclid,
Apollonius, and Lobachevski; Newton, Einstein, and Heisenberg; Shakespeare, Milton,
and Cervantes; Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Plato and Aristotle; Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy; Austen and Woolf; Kant, and Hegel; the Bible and the founding documents of
our nation. What incomparable teachers they are, capable of helping you find your way
to the answers you seek to the big questions you have: How should I live my life? How
can I be useful to the world?
With teachers like these, what do we expect of you, our students? We ask you to
engage with each of these authors whose works span the ages. We ask you to be of
every age just as they were, displaced from the world they were born into, wondering at
it, learning from it, loving it, recognizing its ugliness and its beauty, and making it a
better world for their contributions to it. Along the way we imagine that your discourse
with the books and authors will cause you to look deeply into the greatest mystery of all,
your very souls.
You will not be alone in this four-year journey through the Program. You will have a
faculty of tutors who will share this journey with you. Their principle responsibilities are
two-fold: to serve as models of inquiry and independence; and to engage
with your questions as they arise, to join with you in yoursearch for answers, as you
learn how to interrogate yourselves and one another in the endless search for meaning.
You will also have with you your fellow students, including those gathered here today to
welcome you into our community with all the enthusiasm worthy of fellow learners. I will
leave you with a poetic image from a book you will be reading in your sophomore year:
Dante’s Divine Comedy, a poem written in three parts. Our hero Dante is guided on a
journey through the Inferno, the place of despair, Purgatorio, the place of hope, and
Paradiso, the place of fulfillment. As Dante, a mortal visitor, is led into the second realm
of Paradiso, inhabited by shades in a blessed spirit world, he is swarmed upon as if by
fish to their food.
�“As in a fish-pool that is calm and clear the fish draw to that which comes from the
outside, taking it to be their food, so I saw plainly more than a thousand splendors draw
towards us, and in each I heard: ‘Lo, one who will increase our loves!’ And as each
shade came near, it appeared to be full of happiness, by the bright effulgence that came
forth from it.”
The simile suggests that even in the heavenly sphere the human spirit is fed by
fellowship and the desire to know. Human companionship and the conversation which
follows are seen as food for the spirit. I close with this image to say to our freshmen that
you are not only here to feed on the conversation that is the highest activity of this
College. You are also food for the rest of our College community that has been drawn
here today to greet you, recognizing that your arrival will increase the love of learning
shared by our students, faculty, and staff.
May you find here at St. John’s College a curriculum that awakens in you the desire to
know! May you keep that desire ever-fresh! May you find fellow companions that will
help you uncover your ignorance of the world so that you may be free to explore the
unknown—because everything important in life is unknown.
Thank you!
I declare the College in session this 20th day of August, 2014
Convocatum Est!
�
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Convocation Addresses
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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6 pages
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Convocation Address, Fall 2014
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2014-08-20
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Everything Important in Life Is Unknown."
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Convocation, Fall 2014
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Annapolis, MD
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Convocation
Presidents
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Convocation 2015:
Mathematics, a Gateway to
Philosophy and the Search for
Truth
St. John’s College in Annapolis opened the 2015-16 academic year on August 26 with
Convocation, the annual ceremony rich with traditions. Nearly 120 freshmen
participated in a procession from McDowell Hall to Francis Scott Key auditorium, where
each student is called on the stage to meet President Christopher B. Nelson. Students
sign the college’s register and receive an Ancient Greek lexicon as a gift from the
college.
Here is the 2015 Convocation address:
Welcome to St. John’s College. To our returning students, faculty and staff, welcome
back. To our freshmen and their families, we are very happy to have you joining us.
In the next few days, you freshmen will begin working your way through a book that I
think, more than any other, serves as an exemplar of guidance in an activity we try to
undertake in all of our classes, especially our tutorials. I speak of Euclid’sElements. I
imagine that there may be one or two among you who do not now love mathematics
and may even be a little intimidated by it. Let me put it another way: there may be
among you a few who have no idea how much you will come to love the study of
mathematics and more particularly this first and most beautiful book of geometry and
proportions.
If so, you would not be the first. As we sit in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium of Mellon
Hall, I am reminded of the difficulty Paul Mellon had with his Mathematics Tutorial in the
autumn of his freshman year, 1940. Paul Mellon, philanthropist and heir to the Mellon
Bank Fortune, was the single most important financial supporter of the College from the
early years of the New Program until 1964 and later through his estate. Mellon had
started as a mature student, having degrees from both Yale and Cambridge. He had
�done well in plane geometry, memorizing theorems at Choate and receiving a perfect
score on his College Boards. But he was flabbergasted and embarrassed that he could
not do his demonstrations of Euclid’s propositions at the blackboard at St. John’s. As
things progressed from bad to worse, Mellon wrote to his psychiatrist, explaining the
problem. He received a letter in reply, part of which says this:
“It is an asinine prejudice that mathematics has anything to do with the training of the
mind. It has as little to do with the mind as music, which also doesn’t train the mind in
the case of one who isn’t musical. . . . So, I think you waste your time absolutely when
you try to study mathematics. Mathematics is a hellish and perfectly useless torture for
somebody who hasn’t the gift in that way, as it is the most boring nonsense to be forced
to learn to play an instrument when one isn’t musical. Tell your professors that their
psychological knowledge is a bit weak.”
The letter was signed: “I remain yours cordially, Carl Jung.”
And you wonder why no book by Carl Jung is on our Program in Annapolis!
I may have taken a risk in telling you this story, lest you mistakenly believe that Jung
provides a legitimate excuse to treat one of the most beautiful books ever written as
useless torture.
I got lucky some 55 years ago to have discovered Euclid. I was in the seventh grade, in
an age when all girls took Home Economics (a semester each of Cooking and Sewing)
and all boys took a semester of Shop followed by one in Mechanical Drawing. For
Christmas, between semesters, my parents gave me a drawing board, ruler, compass,
T-Square, various plastic triangles, proper pencils, and a pad of drawing paper. I went
straight to work, doing all the exercises that awaited me in the coming semester,
finishing them before the class had barely started, so completely had I fallen for the
beauty of precise draftsmanship.
When I had finished the textbook exercises, I went to my father to see if he could find
something more for me to draw. He understood my need and, like any good alumnus of
St. John’s College, pulled down from his bookshelf a 1941 edition of Book I of
Euclid’s Elements. I am pretty certain that I skipped the definitions, postulates and
common notions, something I do NOT recommend to our freshmen.
�So, starting with Proposition 1: “On a finite straight line to construct an equilateral
triangle,” I drew a line and two circles whose centers were the end points of the straight
line and whose distance to the circles’ circumference was that very same straight line.
“Oh, good,” I thought, as I took out my ruler and compass, drew the figures shown in the
proof, and constructed the equilateral triangle, labeling everything according to the
drawing in the Euclid text. I then proceeded to do the same for all 48 propositions of
Book I.
Back to Dad: “Now what?” I asked. “Book II?”
Instead, he asked me to set aside my ruler, compass, and other tools, and try
Proposition 1 again without them, freehand. Well, I went about it as carefully as I could,
drawing the line and circles, labeling the points and intersections. But what I drew
frankly did not look like an equilateral triangle. Mine was a pretty lopsided figure. I said I
just couldn’t do it freehand, as I was no good at drawing perfect circles.
My father then asked me to go through the proof out loud and show him where I had
gone wrong. And so I did, and I proved that my triangle was indeed an equilateral
triangle, notwithstanding how lopsided it looked. This was my first “Eureka!” moment in
mathematics, when I came to realize that the drawings were merely imperfect images of
the perfect figures Euclid was constructing in his geometry, using definitions, postulates,
and common notions as his tools instead of my draftsman’s mechanical tools, which
had their own imperfections too. Euclid’s proof was true and would hold up, however
poorly I had drawn my figures.
Now I went more slowly through Book I a second time, figuring out how those
elementary building blocks so simply laid out in the first three pages could prove all of
the propositions in the book. I was now freed of my mechanical tools and able to work in
a new world made real by the application of a handful of definitions, a few rules of
construction or postulates of the imagination, and a few axioms of logic. I was getting
behind the appearances of the geometrical drawings to understand better the reality of
the objects of geometry: a point that has no part, a line without breadth, neither of which
could be seen with the eye or drawn with the pencil; circles and triangles that could only
be imperfectly represented in my drawings, even those made with the finest of
mechanical tools. I could dwell in a world lodged firmly in the imagination, somehow
more perfect, more “real,” than the one I usually inhabited with my family and friends, a
�world filled with objects that have color, dimension and shape, a world we experience in
time and space.
I soon began to wonder what it might mean to have discovered an imaginary world that
could explain the number, size, shape, and movement of bodies in our earthly world and
in the heavens above. Sometime later I would ask the question a little differently: What
would it mean to understand that all of mathematics is a metaphorical language used to
describe the relationships among things in the physical world that I inhabited during
most of my waking hours? How were we to judge how far we could draw out that
metaphor? And I came back to the question as to which world was the more real and
what was the proper relationship between the two. From these questions sprang my
love of mathematics and mathematical physics.
Another thing in the Elements caught my imagination some years later. It was contained
in Euclid’s five postulates. I asked how it was that I could draw the line on which I would
construct the equilateral triangle of Proposition 1. It was not by virtue of having the
definition of a line as “breadthless length”. That definition did not seem to bring the line
into being or to tell me that I had the power to make it so. How was I to take the very
first step in the very first proof? Well, there it was: “Let it be postulated: (1) To draw a
straight line from any point to any point,” Euclid seemed to describe an activity and give
the reader the power to engage in that activity. We know that we cannot really draw a
line with breadthless length, but Euclid was giving us both permission and power to do
so. Euclid was a teacher of geometry, helping us see in time and space how to go about
understanding these geometrical objects of imagination in relation to one another. The
construction could be understood best by the unfolding, or revealing, of its nature in a
series of steps taken in succession over time.
And then years later, a senior colleague of mine helped me understand the complex
grammatical construction of the postulates in the original Greek, that they did not direct
an activity so much as reveal what these timeless figures were as though they were
coming into being in time. To give you an idea of what I mean, let me compare two
different translations of another famous text.
The sophomores are reading Genesis just now. Consider the differences in these two
translations of the opening of that book:
�The King James version reads: “In the Beginning, God created the heaven and the
earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the
deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there
be light; and there was light.”
Another version from the Tanakh, translated by the Jewish Publication Society, reads:
“When God began to create the heaven and earth—the earth being unformed and void,
with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the
water—God said. ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.’”
In the first translation, it is as though God created the heavens and earth out of nothing.
So, the imperative “Let there be light!” seems to suggest a kind of supernatural calling
into being. In the second, it is as though God was bringing order to chaos over time. It
allows us better to imagine “Let there be light!” as a revealing of what that order might
be, a revealing of what had been dark. The second translation contains an ambiguity
between the revelation of what is and the activity of calling it into being. I think Euclid is
doing something like this in his postulates, revealing what these timeless objects of the
imagination are even as we observe them coming into being.
We students of Euclid are thus engaged in an activity that appears to be bringing
geometrical objects into being even as we are recognizing them for what they already
are, timeless and permanent, already possessing all the properties that will be revealed
over the course of the remainder of the book. When we go to the board in our
mathematics tutorial and repeat the steps in Euclid’s propositions, we are engaged in a
journey of the imagination to reflect on the origin, nature, and elements of a line, a
circle, a construction, a proof. The truth of the proposition is revealed to us through the
application of reason to our imagination.
This activity, trying to understand origins and elements, lies at the heart of much of what
we do in our study together at St. John’s. But we cannot always start at the beginning
as Euclid did, with first principles and elements, building up our understanding from
there. Nonetheless, because we have had this experience with Euclid, we imagine that
we can work our way back from the appearances, from the phenomena, from the
opinions of mankind, to the origins, principles, and elements that underlie what we are
hearing, reading, and seeing with our senses, to uncover their origins, foundations, and
�elements. If we cannot start at the beginning, we must instead work to recover that
beginning and uncover the elements of the object of our study.
This is why we sometimes call a St. John’s education “elemental” or “elementary,” not
because what we seek to learn is simple or easy to grasp, but because we are always
looking to uncover what lies beneath or behind what we think we are seeing. We are
seeking to find a truth about the object of our study, just as we have come to see the
truth of a Euclidian proposition through the application of both the intellect and the
imagination to the original, elementary building blocks.
Achilles rages. Why is he angry? What lies behind his rage? Is it natural or not? Good
or bad? Is it justified? Can it be controlled or not? If in the end his anger is resolved and
some sense of humanity restored, how did this happen and why?
“The will of Zeus was moving toward its end.” What has Zeus’s will got to do with
Achilles’s wrath? Does that will control the fate of the warriors? Who are these gods and
do they determine the outcomes of battle or do they serve as poetic metaphors for
deathless forces we cannot control or comprehend?
We wish to understand what it means to be human and we want to know about the
world we inhabit. What are our origins? What was in the beginning? How do we live and
grow? How do we satisfy our needs? How ought we to express our love and sympathy?
How become better and wiser? How use our talents to make this a better world? How
ought we to treat our planet and use the resources nature has provided? We need to
know something about ourselves and our world to answer these questions. We need to
uncover a truth we can recognize for what it is—a helpful way-station and landing place
on our way to a deeper search for an answer to a question newly raised by the answer
we have just uncovered. And on it goes, delving deeper into foundations, looking for the
elements of the construction we call our world.
At other colleges and universities these elements are rooted in isolated disciplines:
chemistry, biology, psychology, or political science; earth science, astronomy, geology,
or physics; perhaps history, theology, poetry, or music. We appreciate the need to
specialize in order to get a refined understanding of any one thing. But how can you
ever come to uncover the truth of a mere part of something without having some
understanding of its relationship to other parts or to the whole of which it is a part?
�You already have some experience of an integrated whole; for the most part, you have
lived a life that has not been lived in an isolated discipline. And yet you have likely been
unconscious of most of the elements and foundations of your world. We take seriously
your need to be conscious in your search for an understanding of yourselves and your
world, the interconnectedness between the two, their origins and elements. And we
have constructed a curriculum and a way of helping you bring it to life within yourselves.
So, what has Euclid got to do with all of this? First of all, Euclid permanently refutes Carl
Jung. The study of his Elementshas everything to do with the training of the mind,
exercising the imagination, using your reason, and applying it to the world you live in.
His book is an exemplar of the study of elements and origins that you will be looking for
in all of your study here. And lucky for you, it is only one of some 130 original works of
imagination, each of which has been chosen for its capacity to help you uncover
something you may recognize as a truth about yourself or your world, each of which will
help you find the next question you need to ask to understand something still more
fundamental in your search for answers to the many questions you have—the questions
that have undoubtedly brought you to this College.
But I am not finished with Dr. Jung! Not only has mathematics got everything to do with
the training of the mind, but it has everything to do with the elements of music, which is
not the boring nonsense Dr. Jung claims it to be. And to prove the point, I invite all of
our upper-classmen to rise and use their one common musical instrument—their
voices—to welcome our freshmen to our community.
[All Rise to Sing Sicut Cervus]
Thank you. After the recessional, I invite everyone to join us for refreshments and
conversation outside the Mitchell Gallery through the doors of Mellon Hall.
I declare the College in session this 26th day of August, 2015.
CONVOCATUM EST!
�
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Convocation Addresses
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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An account of the resource
Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Identifier
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convocation
Text
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7 pages
Original Format
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paper
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Convocation Address, Fall 2015
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2015-08-26
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2015 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Mathematics, a Gateway to Philosophy and the Search for Truth."
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Convocation, Fall 2015
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Nelson, Christopher B.
Convocation
Presidents
Tutors
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Of Bees, Fish and Cannibals
Convocation Address
Annapolis, Maryland
January 14, 2004
Christopher B. Nelson
President
Welcome to the newest members of the class of 2007, to the new members of the Graduate
Institute, and to their families and friends. And welcome back to the rest of the college
community.
By way of introducing you to St. John's, I want to say a few words about cannibals and
cannibalism. I spent some time over the holidays with one of my favorite essays of Montaigne,
On the Education of Children. Montaigne is, incidentally, one of the authors you will be reading
in your sophomore year. It happens that he also wrote a little essay on cannibalism, but that has
little to do with my object today. In his Education of Children, Montaigne offers loads of good
advice. To parent he suggests that they send their children away from home to be tutored. To
students, he counsels that they should be silent and modest for social intercourse, but fastidious
in choosing and sorting their arguments, and fond of pertinence, and consequently of brevity --above all to surrender and throw their arms before the truth, wherever they encounter it.
Montaigne also has a wonderful understanding of what learning is all about, and it has to do with
grasping something the student may call his own her own. Let me quote from two of his
passages:
Let [the student] be asked for an account not merely of the words of his lesson,
but of its sense and substance, and let him judge the profit he has made by the
testimony not of his memory, but of his life, let him be made to show what he has
learned in a hundred aspects, and apply it to as many different subjects, to see if
he has yet properly grasped it and made it his own . . . It is a sign of rawness and
indigestion to disgorge food just as we swallowed it. The stomach has not done its
work if he has not changed the condition and form of what has been given it to
cook.
And later:
Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who
first spoke them than to the man who says them later . . . The bees plunder the
flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all
theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from
others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to
wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.
As I was chewing on this essay, I recalled how I was used to receiving copies of speeches written
�by your Marshall here, Miss Brann, with a little note saying that they were “for cannibalistic
use.” Now, those who know Miss Brann will readily recognize that such talks would be
veritable gold mines, filled with things a college president might want to use in talking about
liberal education. Let us call these things a “banquet” so as not to mix metaphors. I had been
invited to remove parts of what was contained in a paper that I might use them in my own talks
from time to time — parts of a talk that was not of my own making.
Often, we quote from others to add ornament to our own words. But cannibalistic use is not
ornamental use. Somehow, I was meant to consume the talk before making use of it. Just as the
stomach must change the condition and form of the meal it has just eaten in order that the body
may receive nutrition, so must the mind transform the written matter it has taken in, in order that
it may be nourished and its judgment improved. I figured I was being invited to plunder in order
to make a work of my own, after I'd sifted through the material, considered it carefully, judged
for myself what was worthy and for what purpose, and transformed it somehow to fit me.
In this reflection, I was beginning to understand Montaigne, I think. But I was also getting an
insight into the heart of liberal education — that the students themselves must learn to become
their own guardians, that in the end they must use their own reason to find their way. So, I asked
myself whether it mattered what food was served up and how it was served to our students.
Well, I know I am preaching to the choir here. You would not have come to St. John's College in
the first place — if you had not had at least an intuitive grasp that it matters deeply that the food
we serve up for thought is the best we know for the nourishment of the mind and soul, for the
development of their faculties. And you know just as well that it matters deeply how it is served.
You want a banquet set before you and you need the time to taste everything served, to test it and
question it before forming a judgment and rejecting it, doubting it, or making it your own. You
understand that the authority of teachers can become an obstacle to learning precisely because
their authority belongs to them and is not your own. So you want the teacher to listen to you
before responding in turn. You want the liberty to chew on your own questions, not just take in
someone else's gospel. You want to be the arbiter of your own opinions, but you need the tools to
judge your own questions fairly, with your eye on the truth.
I think that is why you are here at St. John's. We offer you tools for working with questions. We
offer you opportunities for extended conversation and leisure for reflection about the questions
that will help you shape the person you will become. We offer you rich reading material as food
for thought, and a faculty modest enough to know that the books themselves make better teachers
than the more ordinary mortals sitting on the other side of the aisle.
We want you to plunder the ideas these many books have to offer, but afterward make of them
honey which is all yours. We want you to digest what you read and hear, and change what you
take in to make it a work you can call your own. This means that purely bookish competence is
not what we seek (even though competence in all the books in this program would take many
lifetimes to achieve). Instead, we hope to help you build a kind of “honest curiosity to inquire
into all things,” to help you exercise the habit of shared inquiry, where you will learn to listen
well to others, speak when you have something pertinent to say, and build a kind of confidence
in yourselves that comes from exercising your reason freely for your own purposes. We want
�you to learn the freedom that is required to make wise choices for yourselves so that you may
live better lives.
There is a rather wonderful image for all this in another book you will be reading before long —
an image I was reminded of another generously spirited tutor. I am referring to Dante's Divine
Comedy, a poem written in three parts, where our hero Dante is guided on a journey through the
Inferno, the place of despair, Purgatorio, the place of hope, and Paradiso, the heavenly place of
fulfillment. As Dante, a mortal man and visitor, is led into the second realm of Paradiso, which is
inhabited by shades in a blessed spirit world, he is swarmed upon as if by fish to their food.
Dante puts it this way:
As in a fish-pool that is calm and clear the fish draw to that which comes from the
outside, taking it to be their food, so I saw plainly more than a thousand
splendors draw towards us, and in each I heard: “Lo, one who will increase our
loves!” And as each shade came near it appeared to be full of happiness, by the
bright effulgence that came forth from it.
The simile suggests that even in the heavenly sphere the human spirit is fed by fellowship. The
eagerness for human company and the conversation (which follows) is seen as food for the spirit,
and is made apparent by an increase in the heavenly light permeating them. These spirits rush to
their new visitor for the increase of their love, which for Dante seems to follow from a
knowledge and understanding of the way the world works and the heavens move.
I close with this image to remind you that you are not only here to feed. You are food for the rest
of your classmates and friends. Fellowship and friendship come from learning like this in a
community where each of its members flocks eagerly to the newest arrivals, its freshmen, to
share and to learn for the sake of learning itself — and for the happiness that follows from the
activity of learning together.
We bid you to come to the table. The banquet set before you has more variety and depth than the
imagination can capture. Eat generously. Chew it all carefully and thoughtfully, taking in what
you come to know is right, placing in doubt what seems uncertain, and rejecting what you know
to be wrong, what you know can never be used cannibalistically, because it simply is not
something you can call your own.
I welcome the cannibal in each of you, and encourage you to make cannibalistic use of the fouryear program of instruction we will be setting before you.
And in that spirit, may you learn to love the project you are embarked upon and the fellowship of
your classmates. May you succeed in taking in our program, and making of it something
beautiful which is also something you may call your own.
Thank you.
* * * * *
I declare the college in session this 14rd day of January 2004.
�Convocatum Est!
�
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Convocation Addresses
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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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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4 pages
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paper
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2004
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2004-01-14
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An account of the resource
Typescript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given by Chris Nelson on January 14, 2004 in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Of Bees, Fish and Cannibals."
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Convocation, Spring 2004
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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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Nelson, Christopher B.
Convocation
Graduate Institute
Presidents
Tutors
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“Fit for the World”
Commencement Address, May 2017
St. John’s College in Annapolis
Christopher B. Nelson
Thank you for the honor of the invitation to address you today. The last time I did so, you had no
choice in the matter, as you seniors were just embarking on the four-year adventure of your studies at
the College, while you in the Graduate Institute were just undertaking an exciting extension of your
formal studies. In August of 2013, when most of you arrived, I welcomed you to the Wonderland that is
St. John’s College. Today we send you out into the World, another kind of Wonderland.
Indeed, I have wondered at something Scott Buchanan said nearly 50 years ago about the relationship
between these two worlds. Most of you know that Buchanan was the principal architect of the New
Program of study brought to St. John's College in 1937. That New Program, back when Buchanan was
dean, was in large measure much like the program we enjoy today. Shortly before he died in 1968,
Buchanan was interviewed by his old friend, Harris Wofford. These conversations were collected in a
book entitled Embers of the World: Conversations with Scott Buchanan.
The book closes with a comment by Buchanan that has bothered me since I first read it some 45 years
ago. It was this: "We used to say at St. John's that we were preparing people to be misfits, and we
meant that in a very broad sense. Perhaps misfits in the universe for the time being."
I can imagine that if I were to affirm that statement without explanation and close these remarks now,
some of you would demand a refund of your tuition. So, you can understand why I have been restless
for all these years, wondering at Buchanan’s remark while serving as your president. At long last, I
thought I ought at least to make an effort to understand why Buchanan said this, what he meant by it,
and whether I thought it was true, for your sake as well as my own.
The Case for the Misfit
Why might it be a positive good that the College should be preparing you to be “misfits” in the world?
Consider, for example, the place of a misfit in a world characterized by conflict, where change is sought
through violence alone, where rhetorical force is laced with fear-mongering or hatred. Such a misfit
might bring reason to bear on the rancor, and imagination to the resolution of conflict.
Or consider a world that is so conventional that people rarely contribute anything original or inventive
…. where so little of our natural human capacity, and none of our imagination, is exercised! What kind
of world would it be if everyone acted as though they had the answers to life and no one had any
questions of it?
What is the place of a misfit in a world that is out of joint? Or a world that has reduced all value to an
economic metaphor? Where everything has a price and nothing is priceless? Where the end of life is
service to the global economy? And the end of education is simply to fit one for the marketplace!
Page 1 of 6
�What is the place of a misfit in a world governed by one rule only: that it’s what we can get for
ourselves that counts, a world that does not accept that it is in our nature to do good for one another?
Many of you will recognize those worlds or will imagine that all of these descriptions characterize
aspects of the world we live in. The world is hardly perfect; a misfit may be what it needs from time to
time to get it on a better path. Perhaps when Buchanan spoke of preparing “misfits in the universe for
the time being,” he meant that misfits entering the world today could help shape the world of
tomorrow, one that would be a better fit for the imaginative, reform-minded individual.
Question: Why is Socrates so beloved of many of us at St. John’s? Is it because he was a misfit in the
world of Athens? Recall his argument for the defense in Plato’s Apology:
“I was attached to this city by the god – though it seems a ridiculous thing to say – as upon a
great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be
stirred by a kind of gadfly. It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me
in the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade and reproach you all
day long and everywhere I find myself in your company.”
Socrates even likened himself to Achilles, who despised death rather than shirk his responsibility to
avenge his friend and live the life of a coward ever after. If Socrates is a kind of hero to many of us,
dare we ask whether we are prepared to be the gadfly he claimed to be and run the risks he ran? It is a
lot of trouble to speak truth to power, and it takes courage.
Recall Antigone, a heroine to many! Are we prepared to make the sacrifice she made for her defense of
community mores that were out of favor in a kingdom itself out of joint?
Are these the kinds of misfits Buchanan was talking about? Are these sacrifices to be expected of you?
You want to be a doctor or lawyer, a soldier or farmer, a writer or painter, a scientist or engineer, a
teacher or librarian. You are attracted to politics, or investment banking, or the revolution in
technology. These are all fitting occupations in our world, all useful to it. Was Buchanan speaking of
you when he said what he did? What should distinguish you from others in the worlds you are entering
when you leave here?
When Buchanan made his remark about misfits in the universe, he seemed to have used it as a
punctuation to his reflection on the fate of tragic heroes. He understood that people generally identify
tragedy with calamity or death, but he thought that these were merely accidental to the real point:
that tragedy is about blindness and recognition, what the hero or heroine has learned from some
misfortune, like Oedipus recognizing who he is - his father's killer, his mother's husband, and his
children's brother - and then destroying his offending eyes that were useless to his recognition of
himself as the source of the pollution in Thebes!
This may be why we sometimes call such a protagonist a "tragic hero," someone "willing to pay the
price for a certain kind of integrity and rationality and honesty...," Buchanan would say. He even went
Page 2 of 6
�so far as to say that "happiness would be the life of a hero...who's willing to pay the price" for that
integrity for he will have "maintained his soul." Such happiness can extract a high price, sometimes
beyond the breaking point, he acknowledged. (Of course, the tragic hero may also come to recognize
his blindness without enjoying the happiness that might have followed. Recall Othello, confronting his
green-eyed monster; or Lear, his blindness to a daughter’s love.)
Ask yourselves: Is this what you have been up to at St. John’s College: stretching your imagination,
confronting your blindness and ignorance, and coming to some recognition, however tentative, of who
you are in all your imperfection, what propels you to go where you must, what calls you to do what
you will, what gives each of you a singular soul, what makes you whole?
Do you recognize that you have sometimes been brought to a breaking point, when it hurt you to
accept your blindness of something or someone, or when you heard a voice within you that you hardly
recognized confront you with a truth you wished you could deny but could not? Are you prepared to
keep asking these questions when you leave here, alive to the learning now begun? Do you have the
courage to maintain your integrity in a world that may often seem not to care for what you think or
who you are? Will you continue this search for an understanding of yourself and your world while
engaged in the career you may choose to pursue, even if you should confront an uncomfortable truth
about the work you are doing?
The Case for the World
I recognize that in trying to make a good home for our misfit, I may have come down pretty hard on
the world, blaming it for our woes, setting up heroes and heroines to confront it. I now would ask you
to look again at that world.
In your four years at the College, you have been asking as many questions of your world as you have of
yourselves. You have studied the heavens above and the earth below, the movement of planets and
the elements of matter, the conception and growth of living things and the relation of their parts to
their wholes, the laws of nature (such as they are) and the forces at work in the world - even spooky
action at a distance.
In the world of human affairs, you have studied political, societal, religious, psychological, historical,
economic, and ethical forces that have more or less shaped the societies we live in … or vice versa.
These forces may seem more capricious than those you have studied in the laboratory, but they have
nonetheless influenced the world you will be living in, the world that belongs to you as much as you
belong to it.
The mysteries of the human heart, and of the soul within you, are every bit as wondrous as the
mysteries of the political and the natural worlds. And so you have asked questions of the world, in part
because it is your nature to wish to know, in part because you wish to know your place within that
world, and in part, I dare say, because it is your world and you are bent on loving it as you love
yourselves. It will be your love of the world that will bridge the divide between you and it.
Page 3 of 6
�Your world needs you; it needs your desire to understand it, your openness to what it has to teach you,
your acceptance of its imperfections, and your sincere wish and best efforts to be useful to it because
you care for it as it has cared for you, however unconscious that care may have been.
The Case for the Hero in the World
Once again, consider Socrates and how he put the case in his own defense: that he was a gift of the
god, and that he was attached “as upon a great and noble horse” that needed to be stirred. That great
and noble horse was the City of Athens, the world’s first democracy of any sort, the city that reared
and educated the man, the city that Socrates so loved he would not trade a death sentence in Athens
for life in any other city. This was Socrates’s world. He saw his service as a gadfly to be a divine gift, a
gift of love for his world in the hope that he could help Athens recognize the corruption within it,
correct its course and recover its integrity. How different is Socrates’s world from ours?
In her essay When I was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson located the American Western hero
on the frontier, something she called “neither a place nor a thing.” Such a hero could perhaps be
located someplace in the imagination, on a frontier of society, a frontier of science, a frontier of
medicine or law or technology or any other discipline you might commit yourselves to. The frontier
might be on the edge of a habitable wilderness, at a town hall meeting, in the workplace, or even
within the warmth of a household. These frontiers will always remain open.
Robinson described the archetypal hero or heroine as sometimes a visionary, sometimes a critic,
sometimes a rescuer or an avenger, expressing discontent with the status quo and a willingness,
perhaps even a calling, to seek change, always with a positive interest in the good of society. But she
added something more, a reflection on the beauty of human society: “Rousseau said men are born
free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Since the time of the Hebrew prophets it has been the role of
the outsider to loosen those chains, or lengthen them, if only by bringing the rumor of a life lived
otherwise.”
The Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic reminds us that we need help to break the chains that have
kept us staring comfortably at the mere shadows of things; that we need to be turned around to face
the reality that has been hidden from us; that we need to be dragged up the rocky slope and out into
the light of the sun where we can see the extraordinary beauty of the world of things as they are; and
that the journey up is a painful one. We realize how exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, it must be
to make this journey to understanding alone. We need that “outsider” to shake us up and help us free
ourselves to make lives worthy of our humanity.
The Case for Your Education
This image of the lone individual in society should be a familiar one. Consider the paradox you face
every day in your education at our College: the learning you each come to enjoy is yours alone, but you
pursue it in the company of others. You make from the bits and pieces that you have read, heard, and
thought through, something entirely new that belongs to you alone. And yet, you have needed others
Page 4 of 6
�around you, helping you with your discoveries of the world, helping you uncover unsettling truths
about yourselves, and opening fruitful paths to your learning.
Nonetheless, what you have learned you have freely learned (it is your learning, not a learned
professor’s or someone else’s.) That freedom has helped you develop an adaptable mind, equally open
to tradition and to progress, one that gives you practice in the art of inquiry, in asking the questions
the human race has asked since mankind first began to speak. They are questions arising from the
depths of wonder; questions revealing the vast extent of your ignorance about the world and about
yourselves; questions demonstrating a startling truth: that your ignorance is the source of your
greatest strength. For it is ignorance, not knowledge, that will propel you forward. It generates the
desire to know, which draws you expectantly into the unknown.
This humility of the intellect is actually a powerful force. We often call it wisdom, and it is one of the
things the world needs: a good understanding of how to develop and where to direct our desire to
know and our desire to be better women and men. This generative force is also something your
professions will need, something your co-workers and neighbors will need and hopefully appreciate,
and something your children will need to live well in the world they will one day inherit.
You are fit to enter the world, having had four years of practice in the art of recognition without having
to pay the price of an Oedipus or an Antigone or an Othello or a Lear. You have had this practice within
the confines of a relatively safe classroom and among friends who have helped you recognize what you
don’t know and what you still need to learn to grapple with what the world will throw at you. These
friends - the books and the natural objects of your study, your tutors, and your classmates – these
friends have helped you understand both the limitations of your reach and the possibilities open to
you. They have freed you from conventional thinking, freed you to doubt what you have been taught
about the world, and thus freed you to imagine a world different from the one you find yourselves in
and the possibility of a future that you may lay claim to one day, a future you may even help to shape.
This mention of the power of the imagination reminds me of a story that may shed some light on what
Buchanan might have had in mind when he said we were making misfits in the universe. Stringfellow
Barr, president of St. John’s when Buchanan was dean, said this of his friend: “The difference between
Scott and me was that when I see a baby, I’m enchanted with him; and Scott is always feeling, ‘Well,
that’s not the baby I had in mind. Babies ought to do better than that.’ All human enterprises, including
birth, seem to him a little disappointing. He’s a Platonist in the sense he’s got some notion of the baby
in the back of his mind that no baby lives up to, whereas to me it’s such a miracle the little brat is alive
– so what, if he has defects. His ears stick out and he’s cross-eyed, certainly, but he’s alive.” Barr was
talking then about the birth of the St. John’s Program, but his observations about Buchanan – about
Buchanan as a kind of Socrates – these observations may help us understand how Buchanan saw the
world in general, and that only misfits were well fit to recognize the world as it is and the world as it is
meant to be … and then to make the effort to do something to close the gap between the two.
It is now your turn to take the gift of your education out into the world, which needs the open,
thoughtful, loving stewards, critics, and visionaries you are capable of being. May you fare well and
find happiness in this endeavor!
Page 5 of 6
�Thank you!
Page 6 of 6
�
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Commencement Programs and Addresses
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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An account of the resource
Addresses given at commencement and programs of events related to, and including, the annual commencement ceremonies at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />The College Archives holds programs and/or addresses for the following years:<br />
<ul>
<li>1796</li>
<li>1835-1836</li>
<li>1842</li>
<li>1852</li>
<li>1856-1857</li>
<li>1870</li>
<li>1878</li>
<li>1880</li>
<li>1890</li>
<li>1893</li>
<li>1895</li>
<li>1897</li>
<li>1907</li>
<li>1910-1918</li>
<li>1920-1924</li>
<li>1928-1929</li>
<li>1932</li>
<li>1936-1937</li>
<li>1939-1945</li>
<li>1947-present </li>
</ul>
Click on <strong><a title="Commencement Programs and Addresses" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=18&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the Commencement Programs and Addresses Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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commencementprograms
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Word doc
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6 pages
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Commencement Address, Spring 2017
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Typescript of the commencement address given on May 14, 2017 by Christopher Nelson at the end of the Spring 2017 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Fit for the World."
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Nelson, Christopher B.
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Commencement, Spring 2017 Chris Nelson Fit for the World May 14 2017
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Commencement
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Tutors
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Addresses given at commencement and programs of events related to, and including, the annual commencement ceremonies at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />The College Archives holds programs and/or addresses for the following years:<br />
<ul>
<li>1796</li>
<li>1835-1836</li>
<li>1842</li>
<li>1852</li>
<li>1856-1857</li>
<li>1870</li>
<li>1878</li>
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<li>1890</li>
<li>1893</li>
<li>1895</li>
<li>1897</li>
<li>1907</li>
<li>1910-1918</li>
<li>1920-1924</li>
<li>1928-1929</li>
<li>1932</li>
<li>1936-1937</li>
<li>1939-1945</li>
<li>1947-present </li>
</ul>
Click on <strong><a title="Commencement Programs and Addresses" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=18&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in the Commencement Programs and Addresses Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Commencement Address, Spring 2017
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Audio recording of the commencement address given on May 14, 2017 by Christopher Nelson at the end of the Spring 2017 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Fit for the World."
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Nelson, Christopher B.
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SJCAnnapolisGraduation2017
Commencement
Deans
Presidents
Tutors
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Text
“Fit for the World”
Commencement Address, May 2017
St. John’s College in Santa Fe
Christopher B. Nelson
My congratulations to all of you seniors and students in the Graduate Institute, and
congratulations to your families and loved ones, who have seen you through these years of joy
and challenge.
Thank you for the honor of the invitation to address you today. Once again a beautiful day in
Santa Fe! I have often spoken to my friends of the wonder of this College, which enjoys 365
days of perfect weather; Santa Fe has 363 of them, and Annapolis has all the rest.
I love returning to my second home here on this campus, where I walked across the platform to
receive my diploma some 47 years ago, back in the days before Weigle Hall was built, when
Camino Cruz Blanca was a dirt road, and when the Graduate Institute was born. But it was in
the year of my graduation when a book was published that ended on a note that has troubled
me for all these years. It is time I came to terms with it.
I am speaking of a comment made by Scott Buchanan in a series of interviews he had with his
old friend Harris Wofford that were collected in a book entitled Embers of the World:
Conversations with Scott Buchanan. Most of you know that Buchanan was the principal
architect of the New Program of study brought to St. John's College in 1937. We are talking prehistory for us on the Western Campus of the College. That New Program, back when Buchanan
was dean, was in large measure much like the program we enjoy today on both of our
campuses.
The book closes with a comment by Buchanan that has bothered me since I first read it some 45
years ago. It was this: "We used to say at St. John's that we were preparing people to be misfits,
and we meant that in a very broad sense. Perhaps misfits in the universe for the time being."
I can imagine that if I were to affirm that statement without explanation and close these
remarks now, some of you would demand a refund of your tuition. So, you can understand why
I have been restless for all these years, wondering at Buchanan’s remark while serving as one of
this College’s presidents. At long last, I thought I ought at least to make an effort to understand
why Buchanan said this, what he meant by it, and whether I thought it was true, for your sake
as well as my own.
The Case for the Misfit
Why might it be a positive good that the College should be preparing you to be “misfits” in the
world?
�Consider, for example, the place of a misfit in a world characterized by conflict, where change is
sought through violence alone, where rhetorical force is laced with fear-mongering or hatred.
Such a misfit might bring reason to bear on the rancor, and imagination to the resolution of
conflict.
Or consider a world that is so conventional that people rarely contribute anything original or
inventive …. where so little of our natural human capacity, and none of our imagination, is
exercised! What kind of world would it be if everyone acted as though they had the answers to
life and no one had any questions of it?
What is the place of a misfit in a world that is out of joint? Or a world that has reduced all value
to an economic metaphor? Where everything has a price and nothing is priceless? Where the
end of life is service to the global economy? And the end of education is simply to fit one for
the marketplace!
What is the place of a misfit in a world governed by one rule only: that it’s what we can get for
ourselves that counts, a world that does not accept that it is in our nature to do good for one
another?
Many of you will recognize those worlds or will imagine that all of these descriptions
characterize aspects of the world we live in. The world is hardly perfect; a misfit may be what it
needs from time to time to get it on a better path. Perhaps when Buchanan spoke of preparing
“misfits in the universe for the time being,” he meant that misfits entering the world today
could help shape the world of tomorrow, one that would be a better fit for the imaginative,
reform-minded individual.
Question: Why is Socrates so beloved of many of us at St. John’s? Is it because he was a misfit in
the world of Athens? Recall his argument for the defense in Plato’s Apology:
“I was attached to this city by the god – though it seems a
ridiculous thing to say – as upon a great and noble horse
which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed
to be stirred by a kind of gadfly. It is to fulfill some such
function that I believe the god has placed me in the city. I
never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade
and reproach you all day long and everywhere I find myself
in your company.”
Socrates even likened himself to Achilles, who despised death rather than shirk his
responsibility to avenge his friend and live the life of a coward ever after. If Socrates is a kind of
hero to many of us, dare we ask whether we are prepared to be the gadfly he claimed to be and
run the risks he ran? It is a lot of trouble to speak truth to power, and it takes courage.
�Recall Antigone, a heroine to many! Are we prepared to make the sacrifice she made for her
defense of community mores that were out of favor in a kingdom itself out of joint?
Are these the kinds of misfits Buchanan was talking about? Are these sacrifices to be expected
of you? You want to be a doctor or lawyer, a soldier or farmer, a writer or painter, a scientist or
engineer, a teacher or librarian. You are attracted to politics, or investment banking, or the
revolution in technology. These are all fitting occupations in our world, all useful to it. Was
Buchanan speaking of you when he said what he did? What should distinguish you from others
in the worlds you are entering when you leave here?
When Buchanan made his remark about misfits in the universe, he seemed to have used it as a
punctuation to his reflection on the fate of tragic heroes. He understood that people generally
identify tragedy with calamity or death, but he thought that these were merely accidental to
the real point: that tragedy is about blindness and recognition, what the hero or heroine has
learned from some misfortune, like Oedipus recognizing who he is - his father's killer, his
mother's husband, and his children's brother - and then destroying his offending eyes that were
useless to his recognition of himself as the source of the pollution in Thebes!
This may be why we sometimes call such a protagonist a "tragic hero," someone "willing to pay
the price for a certain kind of integrity and rationality and honesty...," Buchanan would say. He
even went so far as to say that "happiness would be the life of a hero...who's willing to pay the
price" for that integrity for he will have "maintained his soul." Such happiness can extract a high
price, sometimes beyond the breaking point, he acknowledged. (Of course, the tragic hero may
also come to recognize his blindness without enjoying the happiness that might have followed.
Recall Othello, confronting his green-eyed monster; or Lear, his blindness to a daughter’s love.)
Ask yourselves: Is this what you have been up to at St. John’s College: stretching your
imagination, confronting your blindness and ignorance, and coming to some recognition,
however tentative, of who you are in all your imperfection, what propels you to go where you
must, what calls you to do what you will, what gives each of you a singular soul, what makes
you whole?
Do you recognize that you have sometimes been brought to a breaking point, when it hurt you
to accept your blindness of something or someone, or when you heard a voice within you that
you hardly recognized confront you with a truth you wished you could deny but could not? Are
you prepared to keep asking these questions when you leave here, alive to the learning now
begun? Do you have the courage to maintain your integrity in a world that may often seem not
to care for what you think or who you are? Will you continue this search for an understanding
of yourself and your world while engaged in the career you may choose to pursue, even if you
should confront an uncomfortable truth about the work you are doing?
�The Case for the World
I recognize that in trying to make a good home for our misfit, I may have come down pretty
hard on the world, blaming it for our woes, setting up heroes and heroines to confront it. I now
would ask you to look again at that world.
In your four years at the College, you have been asking as many questions of your world as you
have of yourselves. You have studied the heavens above and the earth below, the movement of
planets and the elements of matter, the conception and growth of living things and the relation
of their parts to their wholes, the laws of nature (such as they are) and the forces at work in the
world - even spooky action at a distance.
In the world of human affairs, you have studied political, societal, religious, psychological,
historical, economic, and ethical forces that have more or less shaped the societies we live in …
or vice versa. These forces may seem more capricious than those you have studied in the
laboratory, but they have nonetheless influenced the world you will be living in, the world that
belongs to you as much as you belong to it.
The mysteries of the human heart, and of the soul within you, are every bit as wondrous as the
mysteries of the political and the natural worlds. And so you have asked questions of the world,
in part because it is your nature to wish to know, in part because you wish to know your place
within that world, and in part, I dare say, because it is your world and you are bent on loving it
as you love yourselves. It will be your love of the world that will bridge the divide between you
and it.
Your world needs you; it needs your desire to understand it, your openness to what it has to
teach you, your acceptance of its imperfections, and your sincere wish and best efforts to be
useful to it because you care for it as it has cared for you, however unconscious that care may
have been.
The Case for the Hero in the World
Once again, consider Socrates and how he put the case in his own defense: that he was a gift of
the god, and that he was attached “as upon a great and noble horse” that needed to be stirred.
That great and noble horse was the City of Athens, the world’s first democracy of any sort, the
city that reared and educated the man, the city that Socrates so loved he would not trade a
death sentence in Athens for life in any other city. This was Socrates’s world. He saw his service
as a gadfly to be a divine gift, a gift of love for his world in the hope that he could help Athens
recognize the corruption within it, correct its course and recover its integrity. How different is
Socrates’s world from ours?
In her essay When I was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson located the American
Western hero on the frontier, something she called “neither a place nor a thing.” Such a hero
could perhaps be located someplace in the imagination, on a frontier of society, a frontier of
�science, a frontier of medicine or law or technology or any other discipline you might commit
yourselves to. The frontier might be on the edge of a habitable wilderness, at a town hall
meeting, in the workplace, or even within the warmth of a household. These frontiers will
always remain open.
Robinson described the archetypal hero or heroine as sometimes a visionary, sometimes a
critic, sometimes a rescuer or an avenger, expressing discontent with the status quo and a
willingness, perhaps even a calling, to seek change, always with a positive interest in the good
of society. But she added something more, a reflection on the beauty of human society:
“Rousseau said men are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Since the time of the
Hebrew prophets it has been the role of the outsider to loosen those chains, or lengthen them,
if only by bringing the rumor of a life lived otherwise.”
The Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic reminds us that we need help to break the chains
that have kept us staring comfortably at the mere shadows of things; that we need to be turned
around to face the reality that has been hidden from us; that we need to be dragged up the
rocky slope and out into the light of the sun where we can see the extraordinary beauty of the
world of things as they are; and that the journey up is a painful one. We realize how
exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, it must be to make this journey to understanding alone.
We need that “outsider” to shake us up and help us free ourselves to make lives worthy of our
humanity.
The Case for Your Education
This image of the lone individual in society should be a familiar one. Consider the paradox you
face every day in your education at our College: the learning you each come to enjoy is yours
alone, but you pursue it in the company of others. You make from the bits and pieces that you
have read, heard, and thought through, something entirely new that belongs to you alone. And
yet, you have needed others around you, helping you with your discoveries of the world,
helping you uncover unsettling truths about yourselves, and opening fruitful paths to your
learning.
Nonetheless, what you have learned you have freely learned (it is your learning, not a learned
professor’s or someone else’s.) That freedom has helped you develop an adaptable mind,
equally open to tradition and to progress, one that gives you practice in the art of inquiry, in
asking the questions the human race has asked since mankind first began to speak. They are
questions arising from the depths of wonder; questions revealing the vast extent of your
ignorance about the world and about yourselves; questions demonstrating a startling truth:
that your ignorance is the source of your greatest strength. For it is ignorance, not knowledge,
that will propel you forward. It generates the desire to know, which draws you expectantly into
the unknown.
This humility of the intellect is actually a powerful force. We often call it wisdom, and it is one
of the things the world needs: a good understanding of how to develop and where to direct our
�desire to know and our desire to be better women and men. This generative force is also
something your professions will need, something your co-workers and neighbors will need and
hopefully appreciate, and something your children will need to live well in the world they will
one day inherit.
You are fit to enter the world, having had four years of practice in the art of recognition without
having to pay the price of an Oedipus or an Antigone or an Othello or a Lear. You have had this
practice within the confines of a relatively safe classroom and among friends who have helped
you recognize what you don’t know and what you still need to learn to grapple with what the
world will throw at you. These friends - the books and the natural objects of your study, your
tutors, and your classmates – these friends have helped you understand both the limitations of
your reach and the possibilities open to you. They have freed you from conventional thinking,
freed you to doubt what you have been taught about the world, and thus freed you to imagine
a world different from the one you find yourselves in and the possibility of a future that you
may lay claim to one day, a future you may even help to shape.
This mention of the power of the imagination reminds me of a story that may shed some light
on what Buchanan might have had in mind when he said we were making misfits in the
universe. Stringfellow Barr, president of St. John’s when Buchanan was dean, said this of his
friend: “The difference between Scott and me was that when I see a baby, I’m enchanted with
him; and Scott is always feeling, ‘Well, that’s not the baby I had in mind. Babies ought to do
better than that.’ All human enterprises, including birth, seem to him a little disappointing. He’s
a Platonist in the sense he’s got some notion of the baby in the back of his mind that no baby
lives up to, whereas to me it’s such a miracle the little brat is alive – so what, if he has defects.
His ears stick out and he’s cross-eyed, certainly, but he’s alive.” Barr was talking then about the
birth of the St. John’s Program, but his observations about Buchanan – about Buchanan as a
kind of Socrates – these observations may help us understand how Buchanan saw the world in
general, and that only misfits were well fit to recognize the world as it is and the world as it is
meant to be … and then to make the effort to do something to close the gap between the two.
It is now your turn to take the gift of your education out into the world, which needs the open,
thoughtful, loving stewards, critics, and visionaries you are capable of being. May you fare well
and find happiness in this endeavor!
Thank you!
�
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Fit for the world
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Transcript of the commencement address given on May 20, 2017 by Christopher Nelson in Santa Fe, NM.
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Nelson, C. Commencement 05-2017
Commencement
Presidents
Santa Fe
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PDF Text
Text
Remarks at Retirement Dinner Celebration
Christopher B. Nelson
June 16, 2017
This whole affair and the celebratory events leading up to it have been rather overwhelming for me, and I
want to thank all of you for the honor of your presence here this evening. I see friends from my
engagement in every kind of activity associated with the life of this College: from those colleagues who
teach and work with me at St. John's, to members of our governing board, current and former leaders of
our Alumni Association, alumni from all over, including classmates from my class of 1970, parents of
students who graduated from the College in the last few decades, friends from town, leaders of our
Caritas Society, Friends' Board, and the Mitchell Gallery Board, and supporters of our community's
Historic Annapolis Foundation, Opera, Symphony, and Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, colleagues
from other colleges and leadership from our national and statewide presidential associations. What a
strong, loving community you make! How could I not be happy having been a part of something so farreaching and magnificent?!
My thanks to all for your support of our financial aid program for students, to which you have contributed
by joining us this evening! Also to those of you who have addressed us this evening. I do not deserve
such friends but am certainly the happier for having them.
- To Ron Fielding, my thanks for your friendship from our early days at St. John’s College
some 50 years ago, for your leadership of our Board, and for the board’s confidence in and
support of the College’s future as exemplified in the capital campaign now underway, chaired
by Warren Spector. I’d like to recognize four former board chairs among us: Chuck Nelson,
Steve Feinberg, Greg Curtis, and Sharon Bishop. I add my deep thanks to them and to all of
the members of the Board of Visitors and Governors for the privilege of service these many
years and for their devotion to the College and its distinctive Program of Instruction. Perhaps,
I should recognize one further former board member, Brownie Anderson, who chaired the
presidential search committee who reached out to me in 1990;
- To Mark Roosevelt for his leadership and support of the College as a whole on both of our
campuses; also for his help in our presidential transition. To this I add my warmest welcome to
our incoming president, Pano Kanelos, now about to take the reins in Annapolis. Pano, for
those who have not met you, would you stand and wave a hand so that others can find their
way to greeting you on their own?
- To Joe Macfarland for his very fine assumption of the duties of the deanship during this period
of transition and for his helpful advice throughout the year. I cannot have said enough over the
years about the virtue of our Polity in articulating carefully and reasonably the respective
responsibilities of the deans and presidents to ensure the security of our Program of Study.
And I see that we have among us this evening all of the deans with whom I have served on this
campus, each of whom made my service at the College better for their care and advice: Eva
Brann, Harvey Flaumenhaft, Michael Dink, Pamela Kraus, and now Joe Macfarland. Thank
you all! And thanks to their Santa Fe counterparts over the years, now represented in the
person of Matt Davis, dean in Santa Fe, and his immediate predecessor, Ned Walpin, who is
with us today;
�- To our fellow officers, all of whom have come to the College recently and have worked hard
and successfully to integrate themselves into our governing structure on both campuses: Joe
Smolskis, Mike Duran, Laurie Reinhardt, and Phelosha Collaros; and two of their predecessors
here this evening with whom I worked happily for some two decades before their retirement:
Barbara Goyette and Bud Billups. Most of you knew Jeff Bishop when he was a part of the
leadership team; his widow, Sue, and daughter, March, are with us this evening;
- To the faculty and staff, without whom we would be a mere shell of ourselves. No group of
individuals has given more, or more sacrificially, to the happiness and success of this College
than those who serve it day in and day out, those who give of themselves to educate and
support our students in countless ways;
- To Adrian Trevisan, president of our alumni association, his incoming successor, Tia Pausic,
and their presidential predecessors who are also here: Frank Atwell, who flew in from Hawaii,
Allan Hoffman, Sharon Bishop, Glenda Eoyang, and Phelosha Collaros;
- To Don Nicholson, president of the Friends of St. John’s College, and to Anna Greenberg, Jim
Cheevers and Dennis Younger for the past leadership of the Caritas Society and Mitchell
Gallery Board;
- To David Warren and Tina Bjarekull, the superb heads of our national and statewide
independent higher education associations, and to Beth Garraway, the former head of the
Maryland Association. What a pleasure it has been to work with each of you!
- And to my Executive Assistant, Ashleigh Cadmus, whose cheerful manner, ready willingness
to help in anything asked of her, and whose professionalism I could not have done without.
Then there are three of my classmates who started St. John’s with me 51 years ago: Steve Forman, Susan
Lobell and Ron Fielding. One has a sense of continuity and comfort from, and especially a gratitude for,
such long-term friendships. Thank you for being here!
My father is here this evening. To him and my mother I owe the gift of life and an exposure to a St. John's
education. He introduced me early on to Homer, Euclid, Sophocles, Plato and more. But he also led
Sunday evening seminars at our home on Program readings when I was in high school. There I got my
first taste for a way of learning that allowed each of us in these seminars to make our education our own,
while at the same time helping our fellow learners come to their own learning as well.
Some 22 members of the Nelson clan are with us this evening including all of my siblings, four of our
children and a few nieces and in-laws - some 10 of whom are alumni of the College on one campus or the
other. Even three of our sixteen grandchildren are here to enjoy the festivities: Kinan, Xavier, and Anders.
I thank all of you for coming such great distances to be with Joyce and me this weekend.
There are two more people who deserve special mention this evening. Ken Upton of Ken's Creative
Kitchen has catered this affair. As always, the setting, the tables and presentation are beautiful and
flawless, and the food and wine chosen by him delicious and memorable. Ken and his wife Doran have
been generous, contributing members of this College community. Besides, I've loved him as a friend for
some 25 years now. He and his team have made it easy and a pure pleasure for Joyce and me to entertain
the College's many friends, alumni, faculty and staff over the years, supplementing the fine service of our
in-house catering firm, Bon Apetit.
�And finally there is Joyce! She has asked me to thank you on her own behalf as well, but I know of no
more selfless and generous a person than Joyce, who has given of herself to the College, to its many
friends, to the entertainment needs of the office, to the College’s gardens at home and on campus, to the
many students she has befriended and supported in times of their need, and to the community of
Annapolis and its many cultural and artistic institutions. At her request, Nay, at her insistence, I have
never but once publicly acknowledged her contributions over these 26 years, but now I must break with
her and thank her for her service to the College and for her steadfast support of me. In her retirement from
her own busy career as an attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, Joyce is now
pursuing a Masters’ Degree in the Graduate Institute, securing her position as a permanent member of the
College community. I could never have served these 26 years without her support and her quick, sober,
and most practical advice, usually counseling a certain kind of restraint that does not come naturally to
me. Joyce, my thanks - with my love.
It is time to turn the attention of us all to our proper object - the College itself. I'd like to do this by
proposing a concluding toast. As many of you know, it is a tradition at the College for the dean to give a
closing toast each year to our graduating seniors at the final dinner held in their honor. It is a toast to the
four republics by which we live and to which we belong. This evening, I'd like to offer a version of this
Toast to the Republics. Former deans in the room will recognize how shamelessly I have borrowed bits
and pieces of this from some of their own. But there it is then. We don't call this a 'community' of learning
for nothing. So --We drink first to the Republic of Letters.
These are the books and authors who have befriended our students and faculty over the course of
their studies at the College. They have spanned several civilizations and a few centuries. The
older works have survived the test of time because they are fundamental to understanding our
humanity; they are the building blocks and cornerstones of our edifices in the humanities, arts and
sciences. The newer ones test our ability to think afresh with each generation about the turns of
thought and discoveries that have been made that will cast a new light upon those deeply human
questions: What is this world I have been born into? What is my place within it? And what am I
meant to do with the life I have been given?
This Republic is a beckoning republic, welcoming every would-be immigrant who is fleeing
narrow-mindedness and willing to engage in serious dialogue across all sorts of boundaries:
disciplinary, national, cultural, and religious.
The second of my toasts is to The Republic of Plato.
This is the indispensable text that sets forth the plan of study for what we call the "Program" at St.
John's College. It provides the model of a liberal education at work. It teaches us both what it
might mean to be enslaved in our own personal caves and how we might climb out of those caves
into the light of the sun, freeing ourselves (with a little help) from the shadows below. This book
articulates the problem of what it means to be a republic, one that must support a kind of
dialectical interplay between the private good and the common good – perhaps even a tension
between the two that cannot ever quite be reconciled.
My third toast is to the Republic of the United States of America, whose foundation in freedom
grounded in law, has made it possible for this College, dedicated to cultivating the arts of
freedom, the liberal arts, to thrive since before the formal founding of this nation.
We owe this republic a debt of gratitude for our very freedom to think and speak critically about
it. We may not owe it our love, but surely many of us do love it for the freedom we enjoy to
�express our individual hopes and dreams, and then to find paths open to us to achieve those
dreams alongside others who see this as the common heritage of us all who belong to this country
of ours.
We drink fourth to this tiny Republic of St. John's College, grown huge by the company of its
many alumni and friends, as evidenced by your fellowship this evening. But it is also in this
republic where we have established a community of learning, in which our students have come to
realize that the conversation and inquiry among fellow learners are a shared experience and a
genuine common good - a good that has impressed itself deeply upon me.
This last reflection then brings me to a fifth and final toast.
This is a toast to that republic laid up high in our imagination, that aboriginal idea of community,
the image in us of a pattern of friendship in its highest and most liberal form, best expressed in
the closing lines of Plato’s Phaedrus. That dialogue embraces a conversation between Socrates
and his friend Phaedrus in which they explore how one might achieve harmony and balance in the
soul by directing the soul to the beautiful. Socrates concludes with a prayer to the gods:
“Friend Pan and however many other gods are here, grant me to be beautiful with respect to the
things within. And as to whatever things I have outside, grant that they be friendly to the things
inside me. May I believe the wise man to be rich! May I have as big a mass of gold as no one
other than a moderate man of sound mind could bear or bring along!”
Socrates then asks:
“Do we still need something else, Phaedrus? For I think I’ve prayed in a measured fashion.”
To which Phaedrus responds:
“And pray also for me. For what friends have, they have in common.”
This is a beautiful reflection that acknowledges that what we have in common are the things of
the intellect and of the heart that do not grow weaker for having been given away, but grow
stronger for having been shared and held in common by us as well.
It is the project of all of us in higher education who care about our students that we give them the
tools they require to struggle with the questions in life that will help to free them to make lives
worth living. It will be our friends - including everyone in this room - who will today and
tomorrow stand ready to give their love, encouragement and support to this generation of students
and each succeeding one in order that they may enter the world beyond this College and continue
to share in this gloriously human project that we call a liberal education.
Let us raise our glasses and drink to the five republics to which we belong and by which we live.
I thank each of you for your support of St. John’s College and for being with us this evening.
Thank you one and all.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Speeches, presentations, and other lectures
Description
An account of the resource
Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span>
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
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speechespresentationsotherlectures
Text
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Original Format
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Word doc
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
4 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Remarks at Retirement Dinner Celebration.
Description
An account of the resource
Remarks given by Chris Nelson on June 16, 2017 at his Retirement Dinner Celebration.
Creator
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Nelson, Christopher B.
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Date
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2017-06-17
Rights
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The owner of this publication has given permission for access.
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Language
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English
Identifier
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Remarks at Retirement Dinner June 16 2017 (Nelson)
Presidents
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