1
20
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Continuing the Conversation
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Continuing the Conversation is a web and podcast series produced by St. John's College. Episodes 1-20 were released in 2023. <br /><br />More information about the series is available on the Continuing the Conversation page of the St. John's College website: <a href="https://www.sjc.edu/continuing-conversation">https://www.sjc.edu/continuing-conversation</a>.
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St. John's College
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2023
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moving image
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English
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Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, NM
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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00:40:13
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Zena Hitz + David Townsend: What Is Freedom & How Do We Cultivate It?
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Zena Hitz + David Townsend: What Is Freedom & How Do We Cultivate It? is episode 6 of the Continuing the Conversation series and podcast. The episode was published on February 15, 2023.
Liberal education is education for freedom. What kind of freedom does it or should it cultivate? Freedom without discipline is anarchy, and life without freedom is tyranny—or so says Annapolis tutor David Townsend, who joins host Zena Hitz in this probing conversation into the nature of freedom, the ways in which individuals and communities can cultivate it, and the need for self-discipline in tempering our freedoms. The two also discuss how a liberal education can free minds from the prejudices connatural to all human communities, and how the St. John’s education strives to do just that.
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Hitz, Zena, 1973-
Townsend, David L., 1947-
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St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.)
St. John's College (Santa Fe, N.M.)
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Annapolis, Md.
Santa Fe, N.M.
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2023-02-15
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mp4
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Freedom
Education, Humanistic
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English
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CtC_ep6_Townsend_ac
Tutors
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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00:56:10
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Moments in the Liberal Education of Frederick Douglass from <em>My Bondage and My Freedom</em>
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Video recording of a lecture delivered on August 26, 2022 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture".
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Macfarland, Joseph C.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2022-08-26
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Douglass, Frederick, 1818-1895
Education, Humanistic
Slavery--United States
Slaves--United States--Education
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English
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LEC_Macfarland_Joseph_2022-08-26_ac
Christopher B. Nelson Lecture
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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00:37:59
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Reading and Teaching the Constitution
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Video recording of a lecture delivered on June 29, 2022, by Steve Steinbach as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. <br /><br />Mr. Steinbach was a partner at a law firm in Washington, D.C. before leaving the legal profession for teaching. He is now the chair of the History department at Sidwell Friends, and is the author of <em>With Liberty and Justice for All?: The Constitution in the Classroom</em>. <br /><br />Mr. Steinbach describes his talk: "Is the Constitution of the United States a 'great book' in the St. John’s tradition? How might the document be read, taught, and understood intelligently, whether in the nation’s classrooms or our wider civic discourse? The lecture will explore the Constitution’s continuing relevance by focusing in part on two critical 'constitutional moments' from the past: the Alien and Sedition Acts controversy and the Dred Scott case."
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Steinbach, Steven A.
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2022-06-29
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moving image
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mp4
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Education, Humanistic
Alien and Sedition laws, 1798
Scott, Dred, 1809-1858
Constitutional law
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Langston, Emily
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English
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Steinbach_Steve_2022-06-29access
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
-
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
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00:36:49
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It’s Just Talking: Legal Advocacy and the Vital Role of Listening
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Video recording of a lecture delivered on July 6, 2022, by Gabriela Quercia Kahrl as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Ms. Kahrl is the Associate Director of the Chacon Center for Immigrant Justice at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law.
As part of the partnership between the Annapolis Graduate Institute and the Carey School of Law, Ms. Kahrl speaks about liberal education and the role of listening in legal advocacy, reflecting on the nature of conversations, oral advocacy as a kind of conversation, and why and how listening is a vital legal skill. Her lecture draws from texts/authors, including Simone Weil, the Bible, and Plato, and includes examples of legal practice.
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Kahrl, Gabriela Quercia
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St. John's College
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Annapolis, MD
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2022-07-06
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moving image
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mp4
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Education, Humanistic
Communication in law
Conversation
Legal assistance to immigrants
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Langston, Emily
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English
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Kharl_Gabreila_2022-07-06access
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
-
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Text
Our Polity
A lecture given at St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD
Joseph C. Macfarland
August 28, 2020
It customary for the dean’s lecture to do two things: to reflect on our common education, but,
more than this, to do so in a way that aims to exemplify the kind of learning that we undertake
in common, to deepen our understanding of some book or question. The longer I serve as dean,
the less time I find for such learning. So tonight’s lecture will not explore any particular book or
speculative question; instead, I mean to reflect on the nature of our small community, drawing
a little too easily from books we read in common, from many of my colleagues writings (past
and present), and from the ways we sometimes talk about our community, especially in
imaginative terms.
My talk has three parts:
1. Our polity
2. Liberal arts, and
3. The citiless
The first part: Our Polity
In speaking about our community we refer to the “polity.” There is a written document which
defines the parts of our community, its officers and directors, and their powers and
responsibilities; the document is called the “Polity.” But more casually we use the word to refer
to the community as presently embodied, the human beings who collectively make it up.
Parallel to this, a part of our community, the largest part, the student body, has their own
governing document; this is called “the Student Polity,” often “the Polity” for short, and in this
context, the body of all students is sometimes called “the polity.”1
There is a similar ambiguity at the origin of the word, “university.” When the first universities
came into being, the Latin word, universitas, referred to a number of persons joined in any kind
of association, for example, a “university” of barbers or a “university” of carpenters (Haskins,
9). In the middle ages, the students of Bologna, Italy, formed a student union, and in doing so
they coined the word, more or less as we now use it. They formed a union in order to gain
leverage in negotiating the terms of their residence in the city, and the responsibilities of the
1
The student polity is provided for in an article of the Polity per se.
1
�faculty in teaching them. The first “university,” as a student union, excluded faculty; conversely,
the first so-called “university” in Paris was a union of teachers, and excluded students.2
Our union of faculty, students, and staff, is not a “university,” [not a union], but a “polity.” St.
John’s has a charter that goes back to 1784, but it was in the early 1940’s, in the first decade of
the New Program, that a committee of tutors, consulting with the entire faculty, drafted the
first “Polity” as a supplement to the charter (JW Smith 48). The inaugural president,
Stringfellow Barr, asked the faculty, “to investigate thoroughly the type of polity that… would
be appropriately adapted to and coordinated with the aims of the program” (emphasis added).
I wonder if there is any other college in America—or the world—that sought to discover the
correct type of polity to serve its educational ends, or that continues to refer to itself in this
way? As most of you know, the word “polity” is a transliteration—via Latin—of the Greek word
politeia. And politeia is derived from the word polis, or city, a complete, self-sufficient political
community. For Aristotle, at least, the polis exists by nature and, like everything that exists by
nature, it has material and a form. The material of the city is the population, especially the
citizens. Citizens come to be and pass away, immigrate and emigrate, so that the whole
population, the material, is continually flowing. Yet through all this, the city, the polis, somehow
remains the same as itself (Politics 1276b12): it must therefore have a form separate from the
material. The word for the form of the polis is politeia: this is its enduring structure or
arrangement (taxis), a kind of fundamental law (1274b39; 1326a30). Cities come in many
forms, and there are different types of polity: monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, and so on, and
mixed forms as well. Thus, Barr’s question to the faculty: which type of polity is adapted to the
aims of our education?3
Of course, there is an element of foolish affectation in our common use of anglicized Greek
words like this—entirely fitting for a college located in “Annapolis.” 4 If we speak with precision,
the college is not a city; it is not a complete and independent community; it relies in infinite
ways on the political communities within which it is situated; so we cannot have a “polity.” It’s
a metaphor. Someone wishing to speak with precision might say that the college is a not-forprofit business in the service sector. The central function is an exchange of goods: the student
tenders payment for instruction, and instruction concludes with a recognized, valuable
credential. The relationship lasts as long as the terms of the exchange are met: faculty and staff
2
Haskins, 18. The “college” (collegium) was originally a hospice or residence hall.
Of course, one of the six forms of polity is called, simply, a “polity,” and it is a mixed form, a blend of democracy
and oligarchy.
4 Coincidentally, Francis Nicholson, the colonial official who seems to have given the name “Annapolis” to “Anne
Arundel’s Town,” also founded the King William School, predecessor to St. John’s (Murphy, 3, McWilliams, 18-21).
3
2
�are obliged to perform services faithfully, to deliver the product; students are obliged to meet
the conditions necessary to be awarded the degree. As a friendship based on utility, it is only as
durable as the exchange. In referring to the college as a polity, we signal that our community is
not defined by or limited to the activity of exchange. Aristotle says the city is distinguished from
a business in that it nourishes a stronger kind of friendship, one that aims at living well, that
might aim at human excellence (1280b5-1281a8). So there is some truth in our metaphorical
claim to be a polity.
In other ways, too, from the beginning St. John’s has imitated the well-arranged polis. Forgive
me if I take time to say things apparent to many, but it is, I think, an opportune time to repeat
them. The polis is small by nature (1325b33ff.): the good administration of a city requires that
the citizens be acquainted with one another, that they know one’s another’s character
(1326b15); this cannot happen when there are too many. In fact, too large a city cannot be
well-ordered, cannot have good laws, cannot be a polis at all (1326a25). Moreover, there is
greater beauty in what is measured. If the population grows too great, the appropriate remedy
is to send out a colony, to send out citizens who will form their own their own polis, a new
independent entity, with its own form and material, sometimes even destined to eclipse its
parent in beauty or greatness, as Syracuse eclipsed Corinth. And so also the college, smaller
than it is now and wishing to be no larger, established a second campus with the expectation
that more would follow.
Another sign of the best-formed polity is that it attends to the education of everyone on a
common plan (1337a30). In Sparta, famously, all citizens enjoyed the same education; they
shared hardships and trials of all kinds, and meals and conversations as well, aimed at
developing self-control and excellence in war. The end sought was not high, but the fact that
the education was elaborately contrived and common in character distinguished the city from
all others. St. John’s is perhaps most distinctive for its education being in common. Its original
raison d’être was the rejection of the elective system: no electives, no departments, no majors.
In the university, by contrast students differentiate themselves by their major, and within their
majors, by their subfields, and by their electives as well—they project and confirm their
individuality by these choices. Their education is á la carte: everyone sees, discusses, and has a
taste of what others at the table are having. In our small polity, the education is common to
students and tutors alike—despite our widely ranging interests and abilities, we share the same
trials and rewards. There is no one among us with whom you cannot talk about what you are
studying and what you are thinking. The commonness of the enterprise compresses or erases
hierarchical distinctions—there are no ranks in the faculty; and each tutor and student
addresses all others as equals, for in the classroom, “reason is the only recognized authority”
(Statement of the St. John’s Program), and each one of us needs others for our own learning.
3
�The commonness of the education enables the members of the polity to become friends, albeit
in varying degrees. Each achieves some understanding of himself by being reflected in a friend;
this mutual recognition is realized through shared activities of all kinds, high and low: athletics,
dance, singing, or philosophizing (cf. Ethics 1172a3).
The city is by nature, and human beings are political animals by nature, because they possess
speech, logos: our sounds express not merely pleasure and pain, but the beneficial and harmful,
just and unjust, good and bad (Politics 1253a10ff). More than any concrete, true polity, ours is
constituted by this shared logos; it is our principal work. We discuss the pleasurable and the
painful, just and unjust, good and the bad, but for the most part not in the way that citizens talk
about these things. For our principal work is not the rectification of injustice, or the acquisition
of goods, but investigation and understanding of these things. Certainly, as friends of a kind, we
do not tolerate injustice among ourselves, but when we are focused on the execution of justice
rather than its form or idea, we have descended from the higher purpose of our logos in order
to attend to its low but necessary conditions. For our polity, like the city, is grounded on
exercising the human capacity for logos, but about the pleasurable and painful, or the just and
unjust, mostly as they are related to the true and the false [the pair not present in Aristotle’s
list of four, given above].
Finally, the college may resemble a finely-formed ancient polity in being largely indifferent to
the arts and technology, focusing rather on the development of character and abilities. The arts
and technology are always pushing forward, the new cleverly superseding the old, whereas the
laws of a polity, especially the unwritten laws and practices, gain strength with time and are
weakened by change (1269a20). The advance of the arts can bring wealth, but the best city
aims at wealth only as condition for the development of character and mind (1323a39).
Aristotle notes that the pursuit of wealth is often achieved through trade by sea, but with
wealth thus subordinated, the best city stands only close enough to the sea to allow some
trade, but far enough from the sea to deter the citizens from becoming mariners.5
Part Two: Liberal Arts
We sometimes say we study the “liberal arts” or practice “liberal education.” I will not concern
myself with whether “arts” or “education” is the appropriate noun—although it is a good
5
Politics 1327b8. In the best practicable government, the “polity” in the narrow sense, the citizens are largely
farmers (compare 1292b25 with 1298b34). The city in isolation can be happy if it is well-governed (1325a1).
4
�question—I will muse instead on connotations of the adjective, “liberal.”6 One of the first
notable appearances of the phrase, “liberal arts,” is in the works of Cicero, and the root of the
Latin word for “liberal,” liber, is familiar even to us Johnnies from our punning Latin motto,
Facio liberos, et cetera.7 Something is liberal when it is free, or befitting a free-born person. In a
classical polity, free-birth is the lowest and broadest criterion for citizenship; it is the criterion
for citizenship used in a democracy, the rule of the multitude, the rule of the poor. To be “free”
means to be a citizen, to have a share in the polity, not to be ruled tyrannically or
monarchically.8
A liberal art or discipline prepares the citizen for participation in the polity; in the best polities,
education aims at a good life or some human excellence (Pol. 1337a34ff.). A good education
includes arts that are necessary and useful, such as grammar, arithmetic, or gymnastic, but only
if they are not pursued so far that the mind or body becomes impaired or less disposed to
virtue. No art should be pursued to the point that it makes the student less free, more servile.
In this context, opposite of “liberal” or “free” is “base” or “vulgar” (banausos). Cicero
distinguishes the “liberal” arts or trades from “base” ones (sordidus): the base trades include
manual labor, retail, and services providing pleasure [e.g., dance]; those trades requiring
serious thought (prudentia) are liberal, such as medicine, architecture, teaching, and farming. 9
These quasi-aristocratic connotations linger in the English word “liberality,” the virtue
characteristic of a free person. The liberal person may not be wealthy, but he is at least free
from material necessity; he has the capacity to make gifts in a fitting and beautiful way.10 In a
classical polity, to be free, to be a citizen, while broadly shared, is still a mark of distinction, it
separates the free citizens from non-citizens, from slaves or resident aliens. Freedom does not
imply universal equality, but often entails some degree of elevation. It is not uncommon, of
course, for free citizens to elevate themselves precisely by denying this freedom to others: as
the notable freedom of the Spartans was contingent upon on the slavery of the Helots.11
6
See the fine 2015 lecture by Dan Harrel, “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art.” My own quick sketch: liberal arts are part
of a classical and medieval heritage; liberal education is a modern formulation, and can imply an aversion to the
traditional list of arts. Even Dante, to the seven arts, added physics, metaphysics, and ethics (cf. Convivio).
Furthermore, arts implies that we acquire skills and competencies, and that there are disciplines that we come to
know or master. Education appears to be a way to renounce this focus on skills and competencies in favor of
metastrophic recognition, coming to know that we don’t know.
7 Prior to Cicero, Aristotle refers to the liberal sciences (eluetherai epistemai; Politics 1337b15). It is hard to say
that the phrase or notion has a chronological origin.
8 Cite the Politics on the criterion of citizenship in a democracy; check Cicero, De republica 1.32.48 (cited by Lewis
and Short).
9 De Officiis 1.41.150ff. Compare Politics 1337b4ff.
10 Politics 1338a32: there is a sort of education pursued not as “necessary or useful,” but “liberal and noble”; at
1338b3, “great-souled and free.”
11 Compare Machiavelli’s characterization of stance of the Roman people to those whom they conquered
(Discourses, Book 2), or Montesquieu’s Considerations of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans.
5
�If it is base for liberal education to be too deeply engaged in the useful or necessary
occupations, it seems to follow that whatever serious disciplines are not in the least necessary
nor useful, and do not serve external ends, but are pursued only for their own sakes, would be
the most free or liberal. Here, of course, the freedom of the liberal art depends less on the
status of the human being who pursues it, and more on the inner character of the art itself.
According to Aristotle, nature seeks not only that we labor (askolein) as we should, but, when
not working, that we use leisure well (1337b30; cf. Klein 165). Insofar as a virtuous action is
done for its own sake, insofar as it attains beauty, liberal education may aim at it. But the
courageous act, even if beautiful in itself, is generally also useful to the city, sometimes
indispensable. The education of the free develops not only one’s character but one’s mind
(1337a38-42), and the activities of the mind, inasmuch as they are for the sake of themselves,
are more free. Geometry and astronomy are liberal arts because they culminate in free
contemplation. In late antiquity, when the liberal arts came to be defined as exactly seven in
number, architecture and medicine were excluded from the list for dealing with mundane
rather than celestial matters.12
The liberal arts under this second understanding pull away from the city and the citizen, away
from the community of the free. Political freedom may be a condition for liberal learning—in
order to study well one needs some leisure—but the liberal arts in this mode do not
reciprocally serve or augment that political freedom. One can certainly imagine a city where the
entire education is designed to foster the very highest activities of the mind—I mean Kallipolis,
of Plato’s Republic—but this effort results in a highly stratified society, a city with very few free
persons in it.13
The “liberal” in “liberal arts” skews in one way to the city—to the community of free persons—
and in another way outside or beyond the city, to the celestial, to speak metaphorically. The
opposing movements are still evident in the way we speak about liberal education today,
although transformed in important ways.
12
Martianus Capella, 346. Cicero’s De oratore is cited as one of the first appearances of the phrase, “liberal arts,”
has artes quibus liberales doctrinae atque ingenuae continerentur (3.32.127). In this dialogue, an interlocutor
points out the incompatibility between having the leisure to pursue these arts, and the employment of rhetoric
amid political responsibilities (3.32.131).
13 And in this city, those who engage in the highest or freest activity, are the least free, being compelled to rule.
Klein: “It is important to see that there is a definite tension between the exigencies of political life and the selfsustained goal of liberal education. This tension is very great” (169). The death of Archimedes makes us see, “the
ultimate incommensurability between this kind of searching and questioning, the basis of all liberal learning, and
the implacable conditions of our existence” (170).
6
�The founders of the New Program were not shy about affirming the importance of liberal
education for citizenship in a democratic republic. On the eve of U.S. intervention in World War
II, Stringfellow Barr wrote that, “colleges like St. John’s,” were established to teach students,
“to practice the liberal arts, to use their intellects, to reflect, to make choices, in order that a
free society might be able to govern itself wisely, freely, and justly, and not fall prey to a
government by force” (Report of the President, May 1941). Self-governance as a nation stands
on the self-governance of the individual, and education in the liberal arts strengthens and
disciplines the powers by which young people come govern themselves.14
This connection between liberal education and free government comes without the ancient,
quasi-aristocratic distinction between the free and the unfree, between the liberal and the
base. According to Scott Buchanan, writing in 1945, in a democratic republic, there is no
division of labor between “higher functions” and lower: “it is an integral part of the American
dream that each man in our society may and must perform the highest functions. These
functions consist in the intelligent free choice of the ends and means of both our common and
individual life. This is a most glorious and most difficult proposition to which we are dedicated.
Among other things it means that each man must have his measure of liberal education…”
(Catalogue 1945).15
I am not the first to note that Barr and Buchanan connect liberal education to free citizenship
more closely than is now common for us.16 They echo the ancients, that education prepares
adults to act virtuously as free citizens—as our motto asserts—but education here does this not
by directly shaping the character of citizens, but by cultivating intellectual freedom. Education
challenges and sharpens the mind, and insofar as the mind is strengthened and disciplined, it
supplies the means by which the individual citizen may choose to act well.17 A liberal arts
14
“We live and enjoy liberty that we may pursue happiness, and the man who penned this triune phrase was
perfectly aware of where that happiness law: in the fullest possible development, and use, of man’s most human
powers, the powers of the intellect.” Cf. Buchanan, “Liberal Education and Politics” (1944): “For various reasons
the European citizen of the republic of learning would not have said that liberal education is for everybody. That is
the great revolutionary American contribution to our knowledge of what the liberal arts are….”
15 Buchanan: “Inner freedom or human liberty is indicated, not primarily civil liberties and economic freedom
about which modern liberalism is concerned. But as all the founding fathers of our institutions have insisted, inner
liberal education is a vital necessity if free men are to maintain and protect their external liberties in a democratic
state” (“In Search of a Liberal College,” 1937, 4.1).
16 Recent versions of the Statement of the Program have tended to be more modest about the connection
between liberal education and democratic citizenship, emphasizing the intervening steps between developing
powers and exercising them in citizenship. The direct work of the college is the “pursuit of fundamental
knowledge,” which entails “awareness” of “social and moral obligations,” and incidentally confers “the means and
will” to become a “free citizen.”
17 “The aim of the liberal arts is the inner freedom that comes from knowledge of the truth, a freedom to match
and justify the freedom that we liberals seek in the outer world” (“In Search of a Liberal College,” 1937, 3.19).
7
�college supports free government only through the medium of its students, and through their
sustained intellectual development.
This emphasis on freedom through intellectual development marks, I believe, a notion of what
it means for an education to be “liberal” that is more at home in a modern democratic republic
than a classical polis. Civil government is now instituted for the purpose of preserving freedoms
enjoyed by its citizens: freedom of speech, of assembly, and of worship. The responsibilities and
powers of civil government are circumscribed: government seeks the safety of the state, and
the security of its citizens and their property; the force of government has no effect on the
minds of citizens; its laws do not touch upon the truth or falsity of opinion; limited government
carves out a free domain for religion and, in doing so, for speculative thinking as well.18
Education at St. John’s may be called “liberal” most of all on account of this intellectual
freedom, one fostered within a modern democratic republic. As is said in the Statement of the
Program, there are only two rules in class: “all opinions must be heard and explored, however
sharply they may clash; [and], every opinion must be supported by argument.” As participants
in the discussion, we are constrained to give reasons for our opinions, and we are constrained
as well by the necessities we encounter within the logos itself, but as the questions we ask
nevertheless often remain open—better defined in the wake of our analysis—we are each free
to pour over the contours of the arguments again privately, to draw our own conclusions, and
to live accordingly.
Our democratic republic provides the conditions for this exercise of intellectual freedom, but, if
Barr and Buchanan are right, our exercise of this intellectual freedom, in turn, serves the
preservation of the republic. Yet despite this reciprocal relationship, the fact that this freedom
is internal, that it has its roots in our hearts and minds, means that the cooperative exercise of
such freedom requires a large measure of detachment from the wider, fortuitous political
circumstances which foster it.
A liberal education eschews utility and specialization; it assumes a detachment from the
constructed world and contemporary polemics. Our direct task is studying and discussing books
that raise persistent questions about the greatest themes in human experience, books that
have stood the test of time and have elicited various alternative, coherent interpretations.19 It
18
Locke in the Letter Concerning Toleration: “It is light that is needed to change a belief in the mind; punishment of
the body does not lend light” (8). Note Buchanan: “The individual citizen of this secular republic, as pupil, teacher,
or official, as well as the universities and schools, enjoyed this same liberties and immunities from the political
state that the church enjoyed. Freedom of thought and freedom of religion have this common history” (“Liberal
Education and Politics,” 397, in 1944).
19 Cf. J. Winfree Smith, 24; Buchanan, 1945 Catalogue.
8
�takes a sustained effort to read such books well, and through this effort to grasp the arguments,
to be transported in thought, to pose these questions for ourselves, and to pursue them
wherever they lead. Such questions shake our assumptions and cause us to see what is familiar
and gaze upon it now, as if, for the first time; we become detached, disoriented, turned around
(Klein 162). The experience of detachment is the cost of thinking deeply and well.
Penetrating inquiry requires the greatest freedom from contemporary common opinions; they
require that one not just “entertain,” but hear and methodically think through seeming
nonsense and heresies. To comprehend what a number is, one has to take seriously the
thought that the square-root-of-two is not a number, or that one is not a number; or to think
clearly about the cosmos, one has to take seriously the thought, confirmed, after all, by all the
appearances, that the ground beneath my feet is motionless. And it is no different in the
religion, ethics, or politics: to think thorough what justice is, one has to take seriously the
argument that the best regime is the kingship of the wise and the subjection of the unwise. It is
natural to feel a rush of derision, as you read how the heavens revolve about the earth, or to
feel a shudder at the argument that inequality is natural. If, despite your prior opinions, you felt
nothing as you contemplated these jarring thoughts, you would not be taking them seriously;
following the argument would be reduced to a verbal game of maneuver. But we also suspend
these felt responses, lest they prematurely tether our thinking.
Is freedom simply the end? Perhaps not. We are also lovers of wisdom—let it be very briefly
supposed that, if wisdom were achieved, and opinion were replaced by knowledge, then
everything one thinks would be constrained by necessity, and freedom might be reduced to
actively thinking what is true. But as lovers of wisdom, and so lacking it, the range and nature of
freedom itself remains one of our persisting questions, and provisionally, at least, a more ample
notion of freedom is sufficient to animate our community.
As a tiny community of learning, we embrace the ethos of a Greek polity: small, intimate,
sharing a way of life with long established, unwritten laws, nourishing a kind of friendship, and
ambitiously aimed at human excellence. But this tiny community is not a city in fact. We
embrace the shared ethos of a Greek polity for the sake of an intellectual freedom that was
unknown to those polities, one native to our present democratic republic. We speak with one
another frankly, freely, for the sake of following the argument wherever it leads—as modern
free thinkers—but, as citizens of our tiny polity, we do so as friends, tactfully, generously,
gently, neither expressing nor provoking anger.20 We suspend—or at least mute—our private
religious and political commitments, in order to take our place in a community whose activity
20
Drawing on my lecture from 2019, “Speaking Freely and the Conversational Virtues.”
9
�and end is conversation that questions, challenges, and deepens those individual thoughts and
commitments.
Part Three: Citiless
A “campus” is a field. For centuries, colleges were not campuses, not fields, but walled cloisters.
Students were kept in; the public was kept out (Delbanco, 38). Students were sequestered for
the quiet, long work of study. Extra-curricular activities were intra-mural, literally, “within the
walls.” The oldest continually existing college, the College of Spain (1364), at the oldest
university in Bologna, Italy, was designed as a refuge for international students, the ultramontani. At St. John’s, of course, we have no walls—unlike our neighbors across the street.
Students do, however, often speak of another barrier surrounding us: the “Johnnie Bubble.” It
is transparent, difficult to discern, and so difficult to penetrate; higher than any wall. When I
hear it referred to, it’s with a measure of satire, and a pinch of unease. There’s no gate, no
porter keeping us in, but one may bristle a little at the thought of not being able to get out.
The bubble is an indirect consequence of deliberate choices: we choose to inhabit a small polity
that enables our common way of life, although it can get claustrophobic; and we deliberately
cultivate a degree of detachment from the world of human action. To read long and well is
already to become a little “lost in thought” (cf. Zena Hitz); we lose ourselves in books whose
original era and worldly stance is generally foreign to our own. One in every five St. John’s
students hails from another nation; the nation in which the college is located is not their own;
insofar as we lose ourselves in the books and in the arguments that we spin out of them, we are
all resident aliens, for a time more present to one another and more present to the voices of
our authors than to the active world. For the sake of conversing with one another and with our
distant authors, we are temporary exiles from the public world of political activity; for a time,
we are citiless.
It is this quality of being citiless, detached and immersed in the arguments, that keeps us one
“college” in two disparate locations. Campus cultures and extracurricular activities differ; the
books on the reading lists vary; but in our central work, as liberal artists, we are much the same,
as if the location is not essential. In some degree, the same might be said of all the alumni who,
in their busy lives, continue to put a high value on the reading and thinking they did here and
continue to do. Detached from the world, searching in thought for what endures, the cloistered
10
�becomes somewhat other-worldly, so that while the cloister contracts one’s community
materially, it surprisingly also expands it.21
At the college we have actively cultivated this detachment. Decades ago, according to lore, the
faculty discussed whether it was wise for the coffee shop to have a newspaper box. It sounds
comical now that each of us carries in our pockets more news than we can read. The intention
was serious: could heightened concern for the news of the day, the active world, distract us
from our shared work, the study of venerable books and persisting questions? The skirmish was
reignited about a decade ago, as inevitably happens, when considering whether wifi should be
installed around campus: by limiting wireless connectivity, many tutors sought to make it easier
for us put away our devices and converse, face-to-face, in person, over a book. The skirmish
was won, but the war was not, as the Johnnie Bubble does not repel electromagnetic waves.
A bubble, of course, is fragile; it can vanish in a moment. But we would not, on the other hand,
wish the barrier to be too sturdy: a bubble may serve us better than a wall. As the Statement of
the Program says, the books, “illuminate the persisting questions of human existence and…
bear directly on the problems we face today.”22 We would not devote the time and effort to
reading the books if they did not provoke and deepen our thinking about our present lives.23 If
our shared conversations were perfectly separated from our private, lived concerns, it would
imply an analogous complete separation of theoretical and practical wisdom. It would imply
that the question, what can I know?, is entirely separate from, what must I do? It is difficult to
reach clarity about exactly how much detachment is salutary for our inquiries because the
relationship between theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom is itself one of the persisting
questions that occupy us. It would be destructive of our inquiries to assume that “every frame
of thought is an ideology,” that every speculative question is nothing but a practical question in
disguise.24 But neither would we want to erase the practical import of our speculative
inquiries—we hold it in abeyance, rather, to preserve the freedom and the rigor of our
thinking—and then let it back in, when we are better informed. As conversation partners, we
live as if citiless, as if aliens, for so long as necessary to think well and follow the argument
freely.
21
I have in mind Arendt, The Human Condition 2.7.53.
The Statement continues: “They express most originally, and often most perfectly, the ideas by which
contemporary life is knowingly or unknowingly governed. Their authors can speak to us almost as freshly as when
they spoke for the first time, for what they have to tell us is not of merely academic concern, nor is it remote from
our true interests.”
23 The books “change our minds, move our hearts, and touch our spirits.”
24 Eva Brann: “It is the fashion now to claim that all is politics, and that every frame of thought is an ideology. From
this claim it follows that theory and practice are nearly indistinguishable, since every theoretical proposition is also
a political ploy.”
22
11
�This is all less dramatic than I make it sound. True, if humans were political by nature, then
someone without a city would not be human at all, he would be beneath politics or above it, a
beast or god (1253a25). But I have argued that the college has its fitting home in a democratic
republic, in which the scope of government is fundamentally limited. And as it carves out a
domain of freedom for its inhabitants, we are assured a limited domain within which we can be
citiless.25
There is a second way in which we are now citiless, by which I mean, of course, that I am here,
alone, in the King William Room, and you are watching me from your home. Just as formerly St.
John’s-Annapolis and St. John’s-Santa Fe formed a single college, now all of us Annapolitans,
still much more dispersed are trying similarly to remain one college. When the lecture ends
(soon), we will not mingle, shoulder-to-shoulder in the FSK Lobby, a cup of coffee in hand, and
gossip about last night’s seminar, or the lecture, or incidental pastimes, as the buzz of mingled
voices in the background reminds us that we are citizens of an incessantly talking polity.
Instead, you will close the browser window, the same way you exit Facebook or Netflix.
While we have always detached ourselves from the world in order to engage in serious study
and conversation, this detachment did not mean removing ourselves to ours homes, the private
place where we provide for and satisfy bodily necessities. As members of the college, our
detachment used to mean retiring to our metaphorical polity, where our lives remain public,
where we venture our thoughts and questions in one another’s presence, to be heard and
responded to. Instead, most of us are now “working from home,” trying to carry on our public
lives from a private place, which does not serve either very well. You appreciated the irony of
the story of the faculty discussion about whether to install wifi on campus: not a decade after
worrying about whether it would too easy to lose oneself in a screen, we have been furiously
upgrading the wifi and making infinite other technological preparations—never quite
adequate—so that we can converse only through screens.
Early in the summer, a colleague drew an analogy between the predicament of the college
in the face of the pandemic, and Athens before the onslaught of the Persians. The analogy
was hyperbole, of course, but instructive, and a hyperbole I will embrace for this reason.
The course he recommended was the course we only belatedly followed: that we abandon
the city and take to the ships; that we rebuild our city when the perilous threat has
25
If the modern democratic republic is originally designed to tolerate multiple religions, then each person is
permitted to be both a citizen of the republic and a citizen of the city of God, in whatever form of it he believes in.
Religious toleration creates the conditions for multiple, coexisting, extra-political societies; those societies may be
essential to the well-being of the republic.
12
�receded; that “we are Athens, wherever we are, in the Agora, on our ships, or on Zoom.”
The decision was a vexed one; in retrospect, the counsel seems wise.
When the Athenians had fled Athens and yielded the sacred ground to the Persians—the
Acropolis in flames—the Athenian general Themistocles sought to persuade the other
Greeks—Spartans and Corinthians—to keep their ships nearby, so that they could fight the
Persians at sea. A Corinthian responded that Themistocles was a “citiless man,” aner apolis,
and so he had no right to speak: losing one’s city means losing one’s voice in counsel.26
Themistocles’ famous reply: “True, wretch, we have left behind our houses and our city
walls, for it is not worth being enslaved for the sake of lifeless things, but we still have a
city, the greatest in Hellas, our two hundred triremes.”27 At first Themistocles appears to
say that the Athenians in their ships, without fixed harbor or home, alone constitute the
city—he does subsequently relax the claim to say that, by means of such a navy, they can
conquer or establish a new fixed home. So, at St. John’s we, too, have taken to the ships—
to Zoom and YouTube—and even here, if we read long and well, ask questions freely, and
publicly venture our thoughts before the faces of our friends, we can continue to do our
distinctive work, continue to be the finest college of liberal learning.
There is another side to the story, however: as Plato and Plutarch observed later, taking to
the ships transformed Athenian political culture. Themistocles turned the Athenians from
typical “steadfast hoplites” into “sea-tossed mariners,” from honorable warriors and farmers
into lowly rowers.28 A change in the dominant technology accelerated changes in the character
of the people. The qualities required for success shifted from steadiness and courage to
quickness, cleverness, and duplicitous maneuver. Recall Artemisia at the battle, an Ionian
fighting with the Persians: when pursued by the Athenians, she had her ship ram an allied
Persian ship, in order to deceive the pursuing Athenians into thinking she was on their side. And
prior to the battle, the very mobility of the fleet, floating on the water, gave each of the Greek
admirals a strong incentive to stealthily withdraw rather than engage, to seek safety rather
than risk an outcome here and now.
Themistocles’ wisdom liberated Athens, indeed, liberated all Greece. But by means of this
newly-recognized power, he contrived not merely to free Athens from the Persians, but to erect
26
Herodotus 8.61, cf. 7.104 (about Demaratus, a Spartan exile). Citiless is clearly an insult here. Compare Politics
1253a3.
27 Plutarch, trans. Perrin, 35; trans. slightly modified.
28 Plutarch, 13, explicitly citing Plato’s Laws. To be fair, Athens as a city of merchants and mariners is evident
already in the social strife described in Plutarch’s life of Solon: perhaps Themistocles (and the Persians) only
accelerated Athens’ development.
13
�a new empire over others, Persians and Greeks (Plutarch 55-57). Taking to the ships opened up
new avenues for Athenian ambition, and ultimately stimulated an unsustainable longing for far
off places. Themistocles himself was pulled back from his ambitious design by more measured
comrades, yet nevertheless his design forecast the future of the city, for better and for worse.
At the critical moment, it is true that the Athenians took to their ships and abandoned their
city-walls and their temples, but they did not go far, a few miles only to Salamis and then, in the
straights of Salamis, even upon the yielding water, they “stood their ground” behind a wall of
wood, in order to reclaim their polis—citiless no more.29
29
Themistocles urges Eurybiades to stand his ground (Herodotus 8.62); Themistocles tells Aristides that the Greeks
(in their ships) were unwilling to stand and fight (8.80), so they had to be compelled to do so, by inducing the
Persians to enclose their position. Of course, Aristides, exemplary for his moderation, and no mariner, joined the
clash of fleets by standing his ground on a small island in the middle of the battle (8.95).
14
�Sources referenced
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Aristotle. The Politics. Tran. H. Rackam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932, 1990.
Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Tran. H. Rackam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1926, 1982.
Brann, Eva. “A Manifesto for Liberal Education.” The Imaginative Conservative (online). March
27, 2015.
Buchanan, Scott M. “In search of a liberal college : A program for the recovery of the classics
and the liberal arts” [manuscript]. 1937.
Buchanan, Scott M. “Liberal Education and Politics.” American Scholar (1944): 396-398.
Cicero. De Officiis. Trans. Walter Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913, 1997.
Cicero. De Oratore. Trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1942.
Delbanco, Andrew. College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Harrell, Daniel. “The Lost Idea of a Liberal Art.” SJC Digital Archives, given July 8, 2015.
Haskins, Charles Homer. The Rise of the Universities. New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1923;
Cornell University Press, 1957.
Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. David Grene. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Klein, Jacob. Lectures and Essays. Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College Press, 1985.
Locke, John. Locke on Toleration. Ed. Richard Vernon. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Martianus Capella. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. Trans. William Harris Stahl and
Richard Johnson. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
McWilliams, Jane Wilson. Annapolis, city on the Severn: a history. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2011.
Murphy, Emily. “A Complete and Generous Education”: 300 Years of Liberal Arts. Annapolis,
MD: St. John’s College Press, 1996.
15
�Plutarch. Lives: Themistocles and Camillus, etc. Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. 1928, 2001.
Smith, J. Winfree. A Search for the Liberal College: The Beginning of the St. John’s Program.
Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1983.
16
�
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Our Polity
Description
An account of the resource
Typescript of a lecture delivered on August 28, 2020 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture".
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Macfarland, Joseph C.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-08-28
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Subject
The topic of the resource
Student-administrator relationships
Polis (The Greek word)
Education, Humanistic
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Macfarland_Joseph_2020-08-28_Typescript
Christopher B. Nelson Lecture
Deans
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bd8bcf65749d37cf48b6b89ccf552814.mp4
3fed843f8fd66bd539d1828ee3ba209d
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:44:40
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
live YouTube webcast
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Our Polity
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Macfarland, Joseph C.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-08-28
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating: "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online. Make a typescript copy of my lecture available for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make a typescript of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
moving image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp4
Subject
The topic of the resource
Student-administrator relationships
Polis (The Greek word)
Education, Humanistic
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Macfarland_Joseph_2020-08-28
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered on August 28, 2020 by Joseph Macfarland as part of the Formal Lecture Series. First formal lecture of the academic year, previously referred to as the "Dean's Lecture", but now called the "Christopher B. Nelson Lecture".
Christopher B. Nelson Lecture
Friday night lecture
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/63d610444809b3d985ee8ee236ba637c.mp4
0999cfedaae5515bfe4a4a3ccd344726
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/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
formallectureseriesannapolis
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Zoom video conference
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:58:30
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Great Books as a Tool for Liberating African Americans
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered by Anika Prather, Founder of The Living Water School, on September 18, 2020 as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Dr. Prather offers this description for her lecture: "I will first review the history of how the Great Books or Classical studies have historically been instrumental in liberating African Americans and then I will connect that to current events and the importance of there being global citizens to fight this fight with our minds and hearts as MLK, Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis and so many others did, using the American documents and a deep understanding of them to hold our leadership accountable to the Constitution."
Dr. Prather has spent many years as a teacher, director of education, and head of public and Christian schools. She writes about the history of classical education in the black community as well as the power of classics in the classroom. She is the founder of The Living Water School in Fort Washington, Maryland and teaches in the classics department at Howard University.
Creator
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Prather, Anika
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-09-18
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
moving image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp4
Subject
The topic of the resource
Education, Humanistic
African American women--Education
Christian education
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Macfarland, Joseph C.
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Prather_Anika_2020-09-18
Friday night lecture
-
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9c322938f97a00bf754ecdf73a43bafc
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Zoom video conference
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:29:02
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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Community Colleges and Teaching in the Liberal Arts
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a panel discussion held on July 1, 2020 as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Like St. John’s, community colleges are institutions devoted primarily to teaching and learning. They reach a broad and diverse portion of our country’s population. (In 2017–18, 38% of undergraduates were attending 2-year public colleges.) St. John’s collaborated with Anne Arundel Community College to bring together for this panel discussion faculty from a number of community colleges that have implemented discussion-based liberal arts education, including Austin Community College, Hostos Community College, Borough of Manhattan Community College and LaGuardia Community College.
The panelists include Andrea Fabrizio and Gregory Marks of Hostos Community College, Daniel Gertner of LaGuardia Community College, Holly Messitt of Borough of Manhattan Community College, Theodore Hadzi-Antich of Austin Community College, and Steve Canaday of Anne Arundel Community College. The panel was introduced by Emily Langston and moderated by Erica Beall of St. John's College.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Fabrizio, Andrea
Marks, Gregory
Gertner, Daniel
Messitt, Holly
Hadzi-Antich, Theodore
Canaday, Steve
Beall, Erica
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-07-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Signed permissions form have been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
moving image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp4
Subject
The topic of the resource
Community college teaching
Education, Humanistic
Anne Arundel Community College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Langston, Emily
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PanelLecture_2020-07-01
Graduate Institute
Summer lecture series
Tutors
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4cabaaa22f2b7a8daf6f7577170cca81.mp4
8463b49f6747370c2c00f258c2275054
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series
Description
An account of the resource
The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Moving Image
A series of visual representations imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession. Examples include animations, movies, television programs, videos, zoetropes, or visual output from a simulation.
Duration
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01:26:57
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Teaching Poetry, Revelation, Mathematics, and Respect for Truth
Description
An account of the resource
Video recording of a lecture delivered on July 8, 2020 by Ted Hadzi-Antich as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Ted Hadzi-Antich, chair of the political science department at Austin Community College, presents a talk about teaching the first book of Euclid’s Elements in the context of other works studied in the Great Questions seminar. This lecture includes some animated presentations of Euclid propositions, including 1.47.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hadzi-Antich, Theodore
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-07-08
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to make an audiovisual recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation at the St. John's College Greenfield Library and to make an audiovisual recording of my lecture available online."
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
moving image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp4
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Langston, Emily
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Hadzi-Antich_Ted_2020-07-08
Subject
The topic of the resource
Education, Humanistic
Community college teaching
Euclid. Elements
Summer lecture series
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b6339d163b7a28ad952a2082722c1c8f.mp3
8eda3dccfb2e046005d07fe83ebcc61e
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Santa Fe Commencement Programs and Addresses
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
CD
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:22:05
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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Santa Fe Commencement Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2016
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of the Graduate Institute commencement address given on August 5, 2016 by Natalie Goldberg in Santa Fe, NM.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Goldberg, Natalie
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-08-05
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Education, Humanistic
Language
A language of the resource
English
Commencement
Graduate Institute
-
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PDF Text
Text
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
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
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
speechespresentationsotherlectures
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
10 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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From the virtual to the actual : the painful prospect of liberal education
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given on June 18, 2000 by David Levine in Santa Fe, NM.
Creator
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Levine, David Lawrence
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2000-06-18
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Subject
The topic of the resource
Education, Humanistic
Learning and scholarship
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24003176
Convocation
Graduate Institute
-
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4a14ca5892750a076406294a0cd5ea1a
PDF Text
Text
��������������������
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Lecture Transcripts—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus.
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
18 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The forgotten faculty : the place of phronesis or practical sense in liberal education
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on August 27, 2004 by David Levine as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Levine, David Lawrence
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2004-08-27
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Subject
The topic of the resource
Education, Humanistic
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24002948
Friday night lecture
-
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PDF Text
Text
Liberal Education in the Broad Buddhist Tradition: Visions and
Seminal Texts1
Shih Yu “Franklyn” Wu
Dharma Realm Buddhist University
I joined Dharma Realm Buddhist University (DRBU) in Fall 2010 just as the university began
to undergo a transformation. Aiming to expand its reach beyond a small community of
monastic and lay students whom it had served since 1976, the leadership of DRBU and its
parent organization initiated a campaign to redesign the university from the ground up. As we
began the campaign, we found ourselves asking questions such as “What does a Buddhist
college look like?” “What does a liberal education in the Buddhist tradition mean, and what is
it for?”
After much collective critical reflection on these and other related questions, we worked to
capture the main thrusts of our discussions in a reformulated mission statement for the
university:
[DRBU] is a community dedicated to liberal education in the broad Buddhist
tradition—a tradition characterized by knowledge in the arts and sciences,
self–cultivation, and the pursuit of wisdom. Its pedagogical aim is thus twofold: to
convey knowledge and to activate an intrinsic wisdom possessed by all individuals.
Developing this inherent capacity requires an orientation toward learning that is
dialogical, interactive, probing, and deeply self–reflective. Such education makes one
free in the deepest sense and opens the opportunity to pursue the highest goals of
human existence.
This statement became the basis for all subsequent developments of DRBU. Today, DRBU
offers two liberal education program: one masterslevel and one bachelorlevel. These two
programs are based on an educational model similar to models used at a number of colleges
loosely, and perhaps imprecisely, categorized as “Great Books Colleges.” DRBU’s programs
have a sequentially built, allrequired curriculum consisting of a collection of seminal classical
texts from Europe, India, and China with a distinct emphasis on texts from the broad Buddhist
tradition. Both programs also include a series of translationoriented language tutorials in
Classical Chinese and Sanskrit, and in the BA program we have added mathematics, natural
science, and music tutorials.
At DRBU, we want our students to take on their own “pursuit of wisdom,” even if, when they
first start the journey, they might not be able to grasp or articulate what wisdom is and how to
pursue it. The two curricula are virtually free of conventional textbooks or secondary criticisms
and the discipline expertise that tends to come with those materials. Instead, our students’
1
A small section of this paper was adapted from the 20132014 DRBU Catalog, which I codrafted with
several other members of the DRBU faculty.
1
�reading lists consist of classical great works. To further encourage direct encounters with the
texts, we also conduct our classes in a seminar style where discussion about the materials at
hand is the main mode of instruction. To do this, we as professors eschew the role of
authoritative expert in the classroom and act more as advanced learners. This shift in role
away from a more conventional understanding of “college professor” also allows all of us an
opportunity to learn something new outside of our fields and eventually become capable of
leading classes across the curriculum.
DRBU further added an experiential component to the two programs that entails close reading
of primary sources done in conjunction with a “laboratory” experience consisting of different
contemplative exercises. This unique hermeneutical tool, where intellectual inquiry is informed
and enhanced by contemplative practice, allows students to gain a fuller appreciation of
classical texts as both philosophical treatises and dynamic methods of inquiry. This
component is currently being tested with readings of Buddhist texts, though we are exploring
the idea of adding this experiential components to other texts in our curriculum.
DRBU’s decision to adopt and adapt this educational model is a carefullyconsidered one that
took much research as well as individual and group deliberation. This choice is a tribute to the
foundation that St. John’s College has laid down and the quality of education it continues to
offer today to its student. Crucially, we found a high degree of compatibility between this
model and our vision of Buddhist liberal education. I want to use this opportunity to share
several examples of seminal texts that help to shape that vision.
Interestingly, I find myself starting this discussion at the endwith the penultimate chapter of
the Avatamsaka (or Flower Adornment) Sutra, perhaps the grandest of all Buddhist classics.
The Gandavyuha chapter is an epic that tells the tale of the youth Sudhana’s spiritual quest.
In this epic, Sudhana encounters the bodhisattva Manjushri and resolves to realize ultimate
awakening (bodhisattvas are beings who have awakened to the nature of things and also
assist others toward the same awakening). In the subsequent exchanges, Manjushri advices
Sudhana that drawing near wise and goodknowing friends or teachers on the spiritual path
serves as the beginning and the logical course toward perfect wisdom. These wise and
goodknowing friends or teachers are referred to with the Sanskrit word “kalyanamitra”. This
word is often translated as spiritual friend, noble friend, or goodknowingandwise friend.
Although it is frequently used to designate a wise teacher who is more advanced along the
path of learning (such as the Buddha), it has also been used to indicate wholesome and
beneficial friendships among peers.
Heeding the advice, Sudhana takes Manjushri as his first wise teacher and asks him a series
of questions related to how one can learn and perfect practices of a Bodhisattva: (again
Bodhisattvas are beings who are themselves awakened and are assisting others toward
awakening)
2
�How is a bodhisattva to study [cultivate, tend toward, maintain, purify, accomplish,
follow, recollect, expand] Bodhisattva practices?2
Without responding to Sudhana’s questions directly, Manjushri reiterates the importance of
drawing near wise teachers. He then helps Sudhana refine his questions, and sends him to
pose these questions to the next wise teacher. The same pattern is repeated fifty some odd
times on Sudhana’s journey: Sudhana poses the questions to a wise teacher or noble friend ,
he or she responds to Sudhana’s questions, those responses lead to further questions, and
the teacher or friend sends Sudhana to the next teacher or friend to pose the set of new or
refined questions. Toward the end of the epic, Sudhana experiences an awakening during his
encounter with the bodhisattva Maitreya. Maitreya informs Sudhana that his next kalyanamitra
will again be his first: Manjushri, with whom he started his journey. Instead of refining or
changing Sudhana’s questions like the previous teachers did, he suggests that Sudhana
returns to the initial questions he asked Manjushri during their first encounter. Maitreya also
promises that Sudhana’s journey will come to an end of sort and he will find out from
Manjushri who his ultimate kalyanamitra is.
Next, as Sudhana travels to meet Manjushri, Manjushri extends his hand over a vast distance
and rubs Sudhana’s head. Then without entertaining the questions Sudhana had during their
first encounter, Manjushri praises Sudhana for undertaking the journey, has a wordless
exchange with Sudhana, and disappears. Sudhana, now awakened, ends his journey where
he startedwith Manjushri, the symbol of great wisdom. The bodhisattva also hints to
Sudhana that ultimately, he is his own true kalyanamitra.
This epic highlights a key concept that underlies the founding vision of DRBU: that wisdom,
even in its highest form, is inherent in all individuals and that therefore the pursuit of wisdom
may ultimately be an internal one. Second, even though wisdom is inherent, it is latent in most
individuals, and activating and drawing out wisdom requires efforts, perseverance, and
guidance from wise teachers and noble friends. Third, Sudhana’s journey from teacher to
teacher is driven by his own resolve for awakening and questions about how he may get
there; as he learns something new, he adjusts his questions with guidance from his wise
teachers so he can inquire even more deeply. His journey therefore models a kind of learning
that begins with curiosity and is sustained by questions. These concepts lend support to an
educational vision that entrusts significant responsibility to the students for their own learning
and fosters a trusting, supportive community of learners. DRBU’s allrequired curriculum,
small cohort size, discussioncentered instruction, and the nonexpert role that professors
play are wellaligned to this educational vision.
The Gandavyuha epic points to the importance of wise teachers and noble friends in pursuit
of wisdom, which presents a challenge. Although the community of learners that DRBU
2
I like how Cleary phrases this set of questions in his translation (1178) and the set of verbs (study,
cultivate, tend toward, etc.) from the BTTS translation (209).
3
�faculty and students form may serve the functions of a peer kalyanamitra (or noble friends),
the notion of a wise spiritual teacher (or dare I say, a guru) is not appropriate in a modern
higher education context.
This leads us to the next Buddhist classics: the Mahaparinibbana Sutta. The text begins with
the Buddha informing his disciples that he will die shortly. In response to his disciples’
questions on who will succeed him as their next wise teacher, the Buddha instructed his
students to take as their next “teacher” not an individual, but “the teachings”: the philosophy
and practices leading to selfknowledge and a clear understanding of the nature of reality
(Walshe 270). This vast body of knowledge, initially passed along as an oral tradition,
gradually coalesced into a collection of works known as the Dharma and Vinaya—the
Buddhist classics.
The use of two terms, Dharma and Vinaya, rather than the single term philosophy, highlights
the central defining feature of these works: the dynamic fusion of theory and praxis. Because
the “study of” and “doing of” philosophy mutually respond, the Buddhist classics were not
intended merely as abstract doctrinal expositions of readymade knowledge. Rather, they
were meant to both inform and form, to explain and engage. Overall, they aim to stimulate an
internal dialogue that encompasses the intellect, imagination, sensibility, and will, a process
called “selfcultivation.” The experiential component previously described is our attempt to
implement this vision of “selfcultivation” in DRBU’s programs.
The Buddha once compared these teachings in selfcultivation to a vast ocean: “...just as
the ocean has a single taste—that of salt—in the same way, this Dhamma and
Vinaya has a single taste: that of [liberation].” (Thanissaro, “Uposatha Sutta”; sec. 6)
The text invites questions rather than dictate answers: How does each individual construct a
world of meaning, and how can that world be transformed and deepened into a site of
liberation? The freeing up and broadening of the human spirit to pursue such questions was
the original intent of the Buddhist classics and the continuing purpose for studying them now.
The Buddha’s final teaching is strongly suggestive of a curriculum consisting of classical
primary texts and an approach to reading that is both critical and respectful. At DRBU we find
the intent and purpose of freeing up and broadening the human spirit to be part and parcel of
great works from different classical traditions. In fact, extending DRBU’s curriculum to include
primary texts from China and India’s many textual traditions, as well as the classical legacy of
Europe, can be understood as a richer and more meaningful process of broadening and
liberating the human spirit.
Given the vastness of each of these classical traditions, selecting texts for the curricula of
DRBU’s 2year masters and 4year bachelor programs has been, and will continue to be the
subject of healthy and active debate among members of the DRBU faculty. Given that
DRBU’s mission statement identifies wisdom as a highlevel marker for DRBU’s vision of
4
�Buddhist liberal education, the topic of wisdom seems the most appropriate starting point for
discussion on criteria for selecting texts.
Wisdom is a word many Western scholars use to translate the Sanskrit word prajñā (Pali:
paññā), to distinguish it from knowledge and understanding that is limited to an object or a
subject. It can be rendered loosely as “the act of knowing or understanding.” Various classical
texts have analogized prajñā to a “bright light” (Bodhi, The Numerical Discourses of the
Buddha 519), a “sharp knife” (Thanissaro, “Nandakovada Sutta”), and a “perfectly reflecting
mirror” (Heng Sure and Verhoeven 74).
The perfect mirror analogy describes a refined state of wisdom where the mind reflects the
objects of its consciousness free from distortion and retains no trace of them after they pass.
The knife and the bright light analogies point to the aspect of wisdom as a tool or skill of
inquiry and learning. These two aspects of wisdom form a virtuous cycle: through cultivation,
wisdom grows in effectiveness as a tool on the path of learning and inquiry; the use of this
tool leads to further penetration into the nature of things and ultimately leads to a liberated
mind accompanied by “perfectmirror” wisdomthe ability to truly “see things as they really
are.”
Classical commentary on the Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta labeled these two aspects of wisdom
“conceptual right view” and “experiential right view” (Bodhi, “In the Buddha’s Words” 303),
where right view is an alternate term for wisdom. Conceptual right view refers to an
intellectual command of the Buddha’s teaching or philosophy through deep questioning,
rigorous analysis, and precise and nuanced conceptual exercises. The capacity to
assiduously apply conceptual right views clears and sets the stage for direct, unmediated
insight, or experiential right view, to emerge from one’s own experience. In a classic
metaphor, the nature of things is like an object grasped or pointed to by the hand that is
conceptual right view, and experiential right view are the eyes that behold the object.
In the section on right view of the Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta (Thanissaro, “Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta”), the
elder Shariputra points to several structures a person can use to observe and analyze her
experiences and make changes to her attitudes and actions. In traditional texts, these
structures and several others are referred to as “soil of wisdom,” and they are among the
most well known conceptual tools and the most elemental building blocks used for
constructing bigger, more complex edifices. The domains of the soil of wisdom include:
● The nature of human existence, consciousness, and the objective realm (the Four
Noble Truth, the twelve links of dependent origination, the five aggregates, and the
elements)
● The mechanisms of causality (the twelve links of origination)
● An individual’s interaction and interconnection with others and the world around her
(the six sense bases, the elements, the taints, and the nutriments).
5
�Thorough and careful studying of these structures has been a standard part of training for
generations of Buddhist learners, and a strong intellectual grasp and mastery of these
structures is often considered to be a precursor, if not a prerequisite, to their penetration by
experiential wisdom. The examination of soil of wisdom, which requires the application and
development of intellectual skills and capacities, is thus well suited for the arena of higher
education. Further, the different categories of the soil of wisdomthe nature of human
existence, mechanisms of causality, and the relationship between self and the worldare
recurring themes that can be found in many seminal and abiding works from different
traditions. This is a useful criterion for selecting texts for the DRBU programs, namely,
whether text provide important insights and stimulate significant questions or deep reflections
about one or more of these themes.
So what is Buddhist liberal education for? The DRBU mission statement gives strong clues for
answering this question, which is why I have use a big part of this paper discussing wisdom
and its pursuit. I will end with two paragraphs from our catalog that were written to provide an
overview of DRBU’s programs:
“The ultimate goal of such inquiry is to develop men and women who can stand on
their own. By directly wrestling with the texts and, by extension, their own thoughts,
feelings, and tendencies, they acquire a hardwon confidence and clarity that serves
as a foundation for engaging life to its fullest. Amid all the conflicting desires and
complex issues they will encounter, such individuals can undertake for themselves to
discern, decide, and act upon what is true to themselves and responsible to others.
In this way, the goal of a liberally educated person is exercised and exemplified in
vivo, all along and throughout their learning experience. We adhere to the dictum ‘as
you hope to arrive, so proceed.’ If the goal is responsible, thoughtful, and creative
citizens, then in their formative experience, students must learn how to take
responsibility for their own development at every turn. The Buddhist view of a liberated
and enlightened individual and the Western view of a liberally educated and
responsible person clearly align on this goal. In both views, the individual is radically
free and radically responsible.”
6
�Work Cited
Trans. Heng Sure and Martin Verhoeven. The Sixth Patriarch’s Dharma Jewel Platform
Sutra. 4th ed. Ukiah: Buddhist Text Translation Society, 2014. Print.
Trans. Buddhist Texts Translation Society. The Flower adornment Sutra: Chapter 39, Entering
the Dharma Realm, Part 1. Talmage: Buddhist Text Translation Society, 1980. Print
In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon. Ed. Bhikkhu
Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2005. Print.
. The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Anguttarra Nikaya.
Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2012. Print.
The Flower Ornament Scripture. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Boston & London: Shambhala,
1993. Print
Trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu. “Uposatha Sutta: Uposatha (UD 5.5).” Access to Insight
(Legacy Edition). 3 Sep. 2012. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
. “Nandakovada Sutta: Nandaka’s Exhortation (MN146).” Access to Insight (Legacy
Edition). 30 Nov. 2013. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
. “Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta: Right View (MN 9).” Access to Insight (Legacy Edition). 30 Nov.
2012. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikaya. 2nd ed. Trans.
Maurice Walshe. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995. Print.
7
�
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Liberal education in the broad Buddhist tradition : visions and seminal texts
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PHILOSOPHICAL TRAINING, DYNAMIC THOUGHT, AND
THE PLEASURES OF COGNITIVE POWER
I was a philosophy major. When I graduated, my parents
attended graduation and met one of my professors,
Donald Crosby, a Whitehead scholar (among other
things). My dad asked him: “we’re proud that Rex
graduated – but philosophy? What’s he going to do with
that?” Crosby responded gently: “Well, among other
things, he’ll be better off because he’s done philosophy.”
My dad was incredulous: “Better off? How? He can’t
make any money with a philosophy degree!” Crosby
replied: “Well, sir, that only shows that there’s a
distinction between being better off and making money.”
It’s a running joke that majoring in philosophy puts you
on the royal road to a career in bartending or cab driving.
Now, I happen to like and respect bartenders and
cabbies, and I’ve known a couple who’ve made a good
living. But it’s unlikely that they are alone responsible for
the surprisingly high mid-career earnings of philosophy
majors. In a recent survey, Philosophy ranked 15th out of
50 majors in average mid-career earnings, at $81,000 a
1
�year.1 True, students earning a Bachelor’s degree in
Philosophy rank below the usual suspects, such as
Engineering and Physics. But earnings fifteen years out
from a B.A. in philosophy are on par with Finance and
Information Management degrees and with International
Relations degrees, and they’re ahead of all other
business degrees, all nursing degrees, all natural science
degrees other than Physics, all social science degrees
other than Economics, all nursing and health science
degrees, all arts and humanities degrees, and all criminal
justice degrees.
It’s likely that part of the explanation of this surprising
fact is that the population of philosophy students is a
self-selecting set of unusually smart, somewhat
obsessive, and attractively quirky students whose
combination of intellectual skills and idiosyncrasies drives
them to philosophy and keeps them there long enough
to benefit from the discipline’s virtues. It’s likely too that
those same traits in turn lead philosophy majors forward
1
“Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary,” from: http://www.payscale.com/2008-best-colleges/degrees.asp;
“Salary Increase by Major,” Wall Street Journal; from http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/infoDegrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html
2
�to make career choices that turn out to be remunerative.
And, indeed, we know that philosophy majors are well
represented in law and medicine, which, historically at
least, are among the highest paying careers out there.
Yet, I for one find these lucrative career trajectories a
little unexpected. I’ve taught philosophy for twenty-two
years, and in our department we disproportionately
attract and keep students of four types more than all
others combined:
(1) the disillusioned trying to come to grips with a
loss of childhood faith;
(2) the super-brainiacs double or triple majoring in
philosophy and Physics or Math or Fine Art or
Computer Science for no better reason than doing so
is hard;
(3) the political and social radicals who find in
philosophy an intellectual heft to buttress their
activist commitments; and
(4) the unlost wanderers who are bored with other
majors, have no interest in conforming to anyone or
3
�anything, and who find in philosophy departments a
group of other similar misfits.
Of course, other kinds of philosophy students also exist,
sometimes depending on the department’s affiliation
with other campus programs. For example, in the last
few years our department has attracted a small number
of Psychology double majors because we host an
interdisciplinary Center on Cognitive Studies.
If you look at the list, you’ll notice that three of the four
types are demonstrably not career-minded, and that the
only one that is – the brainiac double major – is only
indirectly career-minded. Yet when these students are
fed into the crucible of philosophic training, something
remarkable emerges – graduates whose training is about
as far removed from job preparation as can be imagined
but which nevertheless provides them a readily
transferable skill set that makes them promotable in
whatever job they land in. That’s what I’d like to focus on
in this talk. What is it about a philosophy degree that
turns out to be so useful?
Obviously and first, philosophic training is in the great
problems of philosophy – truth, beauty, the categories of
4
�existence, knowledge, justice, the moral good, and logic.
Knowing how to think about these perennial issues helps
philosophers understand others and the world better
than most, for, among other things, we’re quick studies
at identifying others’ core beliefs and we know how
difficult knowledge acquisition really is, and we are, as a
consequence, circumspect where others tend to the
bombastic and overwrought. But I think this knowledge
supervenes on something much more important, and
that is the dual ability to read and think well.
The simple truth is that reading and thinking well are
uncommon, scarce commodities that are goods for
employers, and philosophy trains students how to
cultivate these skills. The importance of this training
simply cannot be overstated. Recently, I was in Los
Angeles on a panel with Stacey Snyder, the co-chief
executive officer of Dreamworks, and Monica Karo, the
chief executive officer of OMD, the world’s largest media
buyer and the agency behind Apple’s marketing
campaigns for the last fifteen years. Our topic was the
commodification of attention. During our panel, Ms.
Snyder and Ms. Karo both said that what they value
5
�more than anything else is a person who has an opinion
and can make judgments, who can produce a
dispassionate argument in support of their judgments,
and who can speak and write clearly and directly. I wish I
had a video of that episode, for their description is a
description of what philosophy professors value and
what we try to cultivate in all of our students.
I don’t doubt for a minute that other majors also train
students to have some of these abilities. But I’m
prepared to defend the claim that no other major does
this training as directly or as relentlessly as philosophy,
for we work professionally with logic, we are professional
critics of language, and we are trained to critically assess
evidence across every domain we encounter. Such
training is provided in most philosophy courses, but
especially in courses in logic, critical thinking, the
philosophy of language, theory of knowledge, and
philosophy of science. In addition, ethics courses provide
students training in thinking clearly and carefully about
some of the most difficult questions they will invariably
confront as they enter the professional world.
6
�The result of an education in logic, theory of knowledge,
and philosophy of science is a kind of cross-training for
the intellect, made up of careful reading, clear writing,
and rigorous, critical, thinking. When this intellectual
cross-training is conjoined with the judgment cultivated
by ethics courses and courses in the world’s religions, the
product is someone who is not only well-prepared to
step into a wide range of jobs, but someone who is also
well-prepared to know when it’s time to leave a job.
Because philosophy majors can both see the big picture
and understand the most precise details and because
they can question assumptions, analyze arguments, and
occupy and understand alternative perspectives without
getting lost, they tend to stand out. And because their
training is in how to think well both in and out of the box,
they are unusually nimble in dynamic environments in
which complex decisions have to be made. And because
they have been trained to think well and write clearly
about basic questions, philosophy majors are wellprepared for talking and working with other humanities
types, scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists,
7
�lawyers, marketers, journalists, physicians, policy makers,
indeed, anyone who has to think for a living.
Not surprisingly, businesses recognize the benefits that
philosophy majors bring to their enterprises. Articles
have appeared recently in Business Week, The Guardian,
The London Times, The Times Education Supplement, and
the New York Times extolling the benefits of being a
philosophy major for business. 2 What these articles
consistently note is that while businesses have more
than enough experts working hard on specific problems,
they also reliably need individuals who can “connect the
dots,” employees who can extract knowledge from a
specialist’s expert domain without getting trapped in the
expert’s silo. For that kind of undertaking, a philosophic
training is tailor-made.
But it’s not just business that benefits when philosophy
majors are hired. Graduate and professional programs
alike welcome philosophy majors because they know
that philosophy majors will perform well. One measure
of their readiness for graduate and professional school is
“Philosophy is Back in Business,” Business Week 1/12/2010; David Brendel, “How Philosophy Makes You a Better
Leader,” Harvard Business Review 9/19/2014; “In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life
Examined,” New York Times 4/6/2008; “I Think, Therefore, I Earn,” The Guardian 11/20/2007; “More Things in
Heaven and Earth, Horatio,” Times Higher Education Supplement 01/09/2009;
2
8
�their performance on entrance exams. If the following
isn’t already known to this audience, it should be:
philosophy majors consistently score highest of all
disciplines on both the Graduate Record Exam’s and the
LSAT’s verbal reasoning and analytical writing sections,
and highest of all non-engineering or natural science
disciplines on the quantitative reasoning sections as
well. 3
Perhaps I’ve now done more than what is required to
persuade you that the job prospects for philosophy
majors are surprisingly good. In the remainder of this
presentation, I’d like to comment on one way of
understanding what it means to “be philosophical” about
issues when those issues are not discussed professionally
by philosophers or taught in the classroom.
One of the virtues of philosophic training is that it
cultivates within us a type of cognitive pleasure enjoyed
when we read carefully and exercise our ability to think.
This cognitive pleasure is one of the many consequences
of a training that insists on self-disciplining the
3
Philosophy Majors and the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide.pdf
9
�imagination, which, when left free to roam on its own,
inevitably falls down one rabbit hole after another, often
with disastrous consequences.
In his Aims of Education,4 Alfred North Whitehead puts
the fundamental point succinctly: “freedom and
discipline are the two essentials of education” (p.30), the
former because without it education reduces to tedious
indoctrination, the latter because with it the cognitive
power required for what he calls “the adventure of life
(Whitehead, p.98) is achieved. When we willingly (and
sometimes, it must be admitted, painfully) subject our
free-roaming imagination to the rigor and precision of
philosophy, then so long as that training has been welldesigned and is executed with care, the product is a
human mind that has “an intimate sense” for the power,
beauty, and structure of ideas (Whitehead, p.12). From
that cognitive dexterity emerges a unique cognitive
pleasure, a delight that we take in the ways ideas fit
together and fall apart, in the unexpected implications
that ideas sometimes have, and in the realization that
4
Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (NY: Free Press, 1967)
10
�our cognitive powers are actually greater than we might
ever have imagined.
Having achieved some level of cognitive competence, a
properly trained mind is progressively liberated from the
blinders others want us to wear and which we all too
often put on ourselves. For the curiosity and imagination
characteristic of the Aristotelian human being, having
been disciplined by philosophical training, are now free
to wander where directed. And she may be confident
that her habituated cognitive skillfulness will lead either
to a positive outcome or to an opportunity for further
reflection and deliberation. Even if the latter is
occasioned because something awful has happened, it is
for the well-trained mind not without consolation, for
the reflection and deliberation prompted by a bad
outcome is as much a cause for some, albeit different,
cognitive pleasures as those that would have been
occasioned by a good outcome.
I believe that it’s this kind of puzzling response that
marks people off as “being philosophical.” True, we
sometimes use the description to characterize people
who are fatalistic or, if that goes too far, are at least
11
�atypically restrained about misfortunes. But so long as
we fail to acknowledge that one so described by the
epithet might have reason not to be completely crushed
by hardship, we miss a part of what it is be philosophical,
namely, to have an unquenchable capacity to be
surprised and filled with wonder by the world and its
inhabitants, even when their antics cause distress.
I’ve called the cognitive power subserving this cultivated
cognitive pleasure a virtue. I think it is. Unfortunately, it
can also be a vice, as occurs for instance when it is
unleashed as a display on the unsuspecting. Moreover,
even where it remains a virtue, cognitive power and the
pleasure taken in it are often baffling to others who
know nothing of them. The philosophically-trained and
philosophically-minded person acknowledges both vice
and puzzlement, and tries to avoid the former while
explaining, where appropriate, the latter. Some of us
become professors and have the opportunity to
represent the type while providing elements of the
training required for reproducing it.
I suspect that the habituated disposition to dynamic and
measured judgment, judgment informed by multiple
12
�levels of analysis and different perspectives, is part of
what Crosby was after when he predicted that I would be
better off for having been a philosophy major. Suffice it
to say, it’s what I took from the training that he and
some of my other professors gave, and it’s a significant
part of what my philosophical colleagues and I try to
exemplify and impart. We frequently fail, as we must, but
the great works of philosophy continue to remind us of
what has been, and still can be, achieved.
Rex Welshon
13
�
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Philosophical training, dynamic thought, and the pleasures of cognitive power
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Liberty and Authority: Religious Dogma and Liberal Education in Tocqueville and Newman
Austin Walker, University of Chicago
While John Stuart Mill may characterize liberty and authority as antagonists at the beginning of
On Liberty, Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy brings Mill’s clear construction of opposites into
doubt. For Tocqueville, a democratic social state, above all others, presupposes a kind of intellectual and
religious authority if liberty is to be well-cultivated and well-used. American liberal education depends on
a prior religious education, and specifically, on a religious authority. Authority and liberty can be
antagonists, but for Tocqueville, in the best case, they can mutually reinforce one another.
A similar argument is undertaken by John Henry Newman in his Idea of a University. Newman’s
emphasis on the importance of theology sometimes baffles readers as to how he can claim to be teaching
a “liberal” education at all. 1 But, I will argue, Newman has a very subtle understanding of the interplay
between religious and democratic authority, an understanding that can be too easily obscured. Only
through analyzing Newman’s arguments in light of Tocqueville’s understanding of a democratic social
state can Newman be defended as no reactionary at all, but as a very astute observer of the manner in
which knowledge is gained in a democratic age, and the eternal and the particular are intertwined. Both
see in modernity the temptation to seek a single idea or single principle as a universal explanation of
human affairs. Newman’s education is elite while Tocqueville’s is popular, and Newman is concerned with
academic disciplines while Tocqueville with democratic individuals, but both advocate a liberal education
that liberates men from the tyranny of a single idea.
***
Tocqueville discovers in equality the promise of an ostensible freedom that tends towards a real,
if novel slavery. Democratic man, by his condition, is led towards a belief in his “own reason as the most
visible and nearest source of truth” (Democracy in America, Vol. 3, 700). Equality of conditions means
that “the man who inhabits democratic countries…sees near him only more or less similar beings” (731J.M. Roberts, “The Idea of a University Revisited,” Sara Castro-Klaren, “The Paradoxes of Self”; Frank Turner,
“Newman’s University and Ours”; even Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of a University: A Reexamination.
1
�732). Since these other men are not incontestably superior to him, he sees no reason not to trust his own
judgment over theirs. Equality encourages individual judgment if for no other reason than that it levels
what would have stood out as extraordinary, aristocratic persons who ought to have been believed.
At the same time, the promise of individual reason hardly ever results in profound and sensitive
discovery, and a desire to think for oneself most often terminates in a lazy adoption of “general ideas”. 2
Democratic men “have a great deal of curiosity and little leisure…little time remains for them to think.”
Therefore, they “love general ideas, because they exempt them from studying particular cases” (736).
The “ambition…to gain great success immediately [without] great effort,” finds a useful tool in general
ideas, which flatters democratic man into thinking he “portray[s] very vast matters at little cost” (736).
While the emancipation of individual reason initially promises great advances, it leads almost of necessity
to sloppy thinking.
The democratic passion for general ideas combines with the enthroning of individual reason in
order to propel democratic men towards a narrow understanding of the world. “All the truths that are
applicable to himself seem to him to apply equally or in the same way to each one of his fellow citizens.”
“Having contracted the habit of general ideas in the one area of his studies that concerns him most…he
transfers that habit to all the others.” Since men seem similar, it strikes his mind as plausible—or even
necessary—that they all be governed by the same force. Whatever branch of study is his specialty, he
attempts to universalize to explain the entire world. Thus the desire “to explain an ensemble of facts by
a sole cause becomes an ardent and often blind passion to the human mind” (732). Not only are men
drawn towards general explanations, they are also led to universalize their own experience or expertise
in order to create a governing general idea. Men are less at risk of universally becoming Marxist
materialists than lawyers are of assuming the law to be the only operative principle in the world (or
political economists with self-interest, to take only two examples).
In light of this danger, Tocqueville prescribes a single remedy, albeit a “painful but always
effective” (740) one. A practical struggle is the only cure for the lure of general ideas: “if there is a subject
concerning which a democracy is particularly liable to commit itself blindly and extravagantly to general
2
A working definition of a “general idea” is as follows: they “encompass a very great number of analogous objects
within the same form in order to think about them more comfortably” (727); they “do not attest to the strength of
human intelligence, but rather to its insufficiency, for there are no beings exactly the same in nature: no identical
facts; no rules applicable indiscriminately and in the same way to several matters at once” (728); and they “are
admirable in that they allow the human mind to make rapid judgments about a great number of matters at the
same time; but, on the other hand, they never provide it with anything other than incomplete notions, and they
always make it lose in exactitude what it gains in breadth” (729).
�ideas, the best possible corrective is to make the citizens pay daily, practical attention to it. That will force
them to go into details, and details will show them the weak point in the theory” (739). He offers the
example of the Americans who, by taking “a practical part in government”, “moderate the excessive taste
for general political theories” (ibid). By experiencing the authority of practical examples which contradict
or limit the teachings of a general theory, the excessive tendency towards general ideas can be controlled.
Practical engagement in a particular science best prevents a tendency to over-generalize.
Nevertheless, at a certain point, even practical engagement exhausts itself and must take cover
in received opinions. Man cannot live without some “dogmatic beliefs” (712ff.) and Tocqueville asserts
the impossibility that any group 3 of men can reason out their own first principles. “The inflexible laws of
[man’s] existence compel him” (ibid.) to accept some degree of received opinion. If even philosophers
must take “a million things on the faith of others” (715), what hope is there for the average democratic
man of deducing first principles? The span of human life is too short for the task, and one who attempted
it would have an intelligence made “independent and weak at the same time” from the perpetual
agitation involved in trying to discover all fundamental principles. Man “must make a choice and adopt
many beliefs without discussing them, in order to go more deeply into a small number that he has reserved
to examine for himself” (715). The only question, for Tocqueville, is whether the received opinion allows
man to become free. “Somewhere and somehow authority is always bound to play a part in intellectual
and moral life…the independence of the individual may be greater or less but can never be unlimited”
(716-7).
The beliefs most advantageous to be received are those of religion. “When there is no authority
in religion or politics, men are soon frightened by the limitless independence…with everything on the
move in the realm of the mind, they want the material order at least to be firm and stable, and as they
cannot accept their ancient beliefs again, they hand themselves over to a master” (745). The danger to
the freedom of the mind is even greater than to political freedom. “When a people’s religion is destroyed,
doubt invades the highest faculties of the mind and half paralyzes the rest.” Each man’s mind is filled with
“confused and changing notions about matters of the greatest importance.” “Opinions are ill-defended or
abandoned,” with the result that democratic man “in despair of solving unaided the greatest problems of
human destiny” “ignobly give[s] up thinking about them” (ibid). If man is asked to construct the universe
himself, he will despair and withdraw. But still seeking order and stability of some sort, he will long for a
political order that is secure rather than free. Individual judgment in religious matters undermines a free
3
Tocqueville hedges his bets about whether rare individuals are capable of such achievements
�political order. Religious liberalism tends towards political despotism. On the other hand, the security of
religious opinion in no small part creates the conditions for political practical engagement. Liberty
depends on a higher, received authority.
***
The tendencies that Tocqueville identifies in the development of democratic individuals,
Newman’s university recognizes in the specific intellectual disciplines. On their own, the disciplines tend
to refer everything to themselves and universalize their particular conclusions. The remedy for this
overgeneralization is Tocqueville’s remedy: practical interaction among the disciplines, just as practical,
political interactions among democratic individuals curb the passion for general ideas. At the same time,
the disciplines can only be forced into this productive disagreement if, at a higher level, an un-argued for
authority is accepted: for Newman, theology plays the role of Tocqueville’s salutary religious beliefs. If
democratic men jettison authoritative religious opinion, they tend to isolate themselves; if the intellectual
disciplines exclude theology, they try to universalize their own conclusions. Newman’s university deals
with the education of an elite, whereas Tocqueville’s liberal education is widespread and popular:
nevertheless, both rely on the same principled interaction between authority and liberty.
Tocqueville’s popular education relies on two levels of authority: a higher one received and a
lower one democratically and practically created. Newman’s university recapitulates these two layers of
authority, even if some critics fail to see double. Much has been made of Newman’s invocation of an
“imperial intellect” which is “majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning” (The Idea
of a University, 138), and ostensibly depends on the authority of theology to properly order the university.
Secular scholars scoff at the notion that a “liberal education” would presuppose clerical supervision. But
in their focus on the role of theology as authority, 4 they fail to appreciate the degree to which Newman’s
university is not “majestically calm,” but in fact the scene of practical rivalry among the disciplines.
Theology and practical rivalry work together to create a “philosophical habit of mind” (51). At the same
In the critical essays included in the Yale edition of The Idea of a University, several of the contributors mistakenly
take Newman’s authoritative science to be theology (Turner, 259; Castro-Klaren, 319; Garland, 278-80). J.M.
Roberts, in “The Idea of a University Revisited,” makes the same mistake (206-207). As will be shown below,
Newman’s authoritative science is philosophy, not theology.
4
�time, theology’s specific role can best be seen after the extent of the practical rivalry among the disciplines
is made clear.
While named the Idea of a University, the animating idea of Newman’s discourses is more
precisely a liberal education. A liberal education consists in the acquisition of liberal knowledge, a process
Newman defines as “philosophy.” Newman’s particular definition of philosophy depends on his special
understanding of knowledge. “All knowledge” for Newman, “forms one whole,” that can only be
separated off “portion from portion…by a mental abstraction.” The individual “sciences are the results of
that mental abstraction.” All the sciences are “but aspects of things,” with the consequence that they “at
once need and subserve each other” (51). So, in theory, all sciences are complementary. But this
complementarity is only theoretical—or rather, ideal.
Though the sciences “need and subserve each other,” they do not themselves necessarily
recognize this need. Of their own, each science tends “to the exclusion of others…scorning all principles
and reported facts which do not belong to their own pursuit, and thinking to effect everything without
aid from any other quarter” (50). As examples, Newman raises the substitution of chemistry for medicine
or of “political economy, or intellectual enlightenment,” as a cure for “vice, malevolence, and misery,”
which are properly ethical concerns. Newman particularly notes the tendency of political economy to
claim for itself “an ethical quality, by extolling it[self] as the road to virtue and happiness” (89). Each
science, for Newman, perfects a particular branch of knowledge while at the same time being unable to
discern its own limits.
In order for a proper understanding of the whole to arise, Newman argues that it must happen
that “one [science] corrects another” (49), such that each science is kept in its own bounds “by the very
rivalry of other studies” (167). The recognition of these boundaries, and the proper integration of the
sciences into a whole, is Newman’s particular definition of philosophy:
the comprehension of the bearings of one science on another, and the use of each to each, and
the location and limitation and adjustment and due appreciation of them all, one with another,
this belongs, I conceive, to a sort of science distinct from them all, and in some sense a science of
sciences, which is my own conception of what is meant by Philosophy, in the true sense of the
word, and of a philosophical habit of mind (51)
The cultivation of this kind of philosophy is effected by a liberal education (152, 167), so much so that the
terms philosophical education and liberal education end up being used synonymously by Newman.
�The universal or “broadening” features of Newman’s education have often been recognized. 5 Of
course, to emphasize breadth is to risk superficiality. How, exactly, can a university teach a student, in a
few years’ time, to see both the breadth of universal knowledge as well as the particular divisions between
each science? Newman himself clearly recognizes the necessity to specialize: students “cannot pursue
every subject which is open to them” and “in his own case he only pursues a few sciences out of the
multitude” (101). To try to learn everything is to make the mistake that “a smattering in a dozen branches
of study is not shallowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not” (142). A student must
specialize not only because of the limits of human life, but because the very process of specialization
teaches the necessary habits or disciplines of mind required by a liberal education. But then a liberal
education also presupposes a vast and encompassing view of the whole. How are these conflicting claims
reconciled?
For Newman, the seat of learning is as important as the character of liberal knowledge, and it is
the university itself that reconciles the apparently contradictory demands of universality and
specialization inherent in a liberal education. Broad understanding—that is, philosophy—comes not
through direct study, but through the process of living amongst the turmoil of the various branches of
knowledge. Students “will be gainers by living among those and under those who represent the whole
circle (of knowledge). This I conceive to be the advantage of a seat of universal learning” (101). When
disciples of the various branches are brought together, they naturally “adjust…the claims and relations of
their respective subjects of investigation.” Thus the student “profits by an intellectual tradition, which is
independent of particular teachers…he apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on
which it rests.” By living among the branches of knowledge, “a habit of mind is formed” in the student.
Newman underscores this point later, when he contrasts various professors “in a university and
out of it.” Outside of a university, giving lectures on his own, “he is in danger of being absorbed and
narrowed by his pursuit” (166). But inside a university, “he is kept from extravagance by the very rivalry
of other studies” and he gains “a special illumination and largeness of mind” so that “he treats his own
5
Much has been said by various scholars about the character of Liberal Knowledge as Newman conceives it, and
much attention has rightly been paid to Newman’s opposition of Benthamite or utilitarian principles of knowledge
(Kelly, A Conservative at Heart?, 176-180). Ian Ker has highlighted Newman’s “fundamental requirement…[to] be
able to think clearly” in a manner that isn’t “narrowly specialized” (Ker, The Achievement of John Henry Newman,
33). G.H. Bantock has noticed the importance that a “tradition of (objective) value that will transcend the
individual and social purposes of man” (Bantock, Authority and Education, 130). Stephen Kelly has rightly seen
that since Newman conceives of a university as teaching universal knowledge, Newman’s liberal education
necessarily “incorporated both the liberal ‘philosophical’ and the professional ‘mechanical’ educational elements
of learning” (A Conservative at Heart?, 184).
�[subject] in consequence with a philosophy and a resource, which belongs not to the study itself, but to
his liberal education [emphasis mine]” (167). No scholar of Newman, to my knowledge, has recognized
the importance of this last sentence. Newman claims that the very fact of being in a university provides
a professor with a liberal education, and that this largeness of education is achieved not through
peaceable contemplation, but by means of “the very rivalry of other studies.” Theology is important for
Newman, no doubt. But theology is no imperial master within the university. Philosophy, not theology,
is the science that regulates all other studies, and it appears that philosophy is not, as it were, a discipline
that can be taught so much as a habit of inquiry that develops by being present within an active and
tumultuous university. In other words, no professor teaches philosophy so much as the university, by its
very activity, represents philosophy almost unconsciously. Newman may talk about the harmony of
universal knowledge, but that harmony is only apparent from God’s point of view. For man to achieve a
philosophical understanding requires an agonistic process: and this agonism is encouraged and regulated
by the university.
Once we understand the work that the sciences themselves are performing in Newman’s
university, we can finally be clear on the place of theology. J.M. Roberts, in his criticism of Newman’s
understanding of theology, displays the typical secular skepticism. Roberts is subjected to “an outbreak
of spontaneous hilarity” (Roberts, “The Idea of a University Revisited,” 207) by two of Newman’s
arguments. First, that the university should actively police a particular “unity of an intellectual system”
(206), wherein theology “arbitrate[s] uncertainties and…correct[s] divagation from right order” (207). And
second, when Newman describes the interaction between professors as “a picture of an imaginary
senate” (207). 6 Doesn’t Newman know, says Roberts, that the politics of the university are so intense
because the stakes are so low?
Roberts takes Newman to task for his argument that the theology department of a university
ought to enforce clear disciplinary boundaries when so much exciting research is happening “at the
borders” (Roberts, 209) of the sciences. As I have hoped to show from my argument above, Roberts
completely misunderstands Newman. Of course interesting work is going to happen on the fringes. That
is where the quasi-political debates about boundaries will take place and where political economists and
ethicists (and theologians) will be able to discover truly where they stand in relation to one another.
6
In Newman’s own words: “professors are like the ministers of various political powers…they represent their
respective sciences, and attend to the private interests of those sciences respectively; and, should dispute
arise…they are the persons to talk over and arrange it” (Idea, 369).
�Roberts misreads Newman because Roberts fails to see that it isn’t an imperial theology, but the sciences
themselves that will correct one another. Roberts, even though he quotes Newman on this very subject,
apparently believes that Newman believes that a university should have an all-powerful theology
department which disciplines each science authoritatively, preserving a kind of static order. Newman does
admit theology into his university as an important science, but he includes theology so that it will be able
to defend itself as a science by means of this same “rivalry.” Newman never argues that theology
sufficiently teaches the philosophical habit of mind characteristic of a liberal education. 7 The study of
theology does not and cannot—by itself—create or perfect liberal knowledge.
In discussing the role of theology, we have to be especially clear about the “non-religious” role
that theology plays. The development of liberal knowledge depends on the interaction of the sciences
with one another. The sciences, on their own, tend to isolate and universalize themselves. For Newman,
only theology is capable of forcing the sciences to engage in a way that limits their isolating and
universalizing tendencies.
Theology is at the center because Newman recognizes, like Tocqueville, that without certain
definite and authoritative assumptions, things fall apart. I am not arguing that Newman secretly believes
theology to be only an “authoritative opinion.” Newman devotes a full discourse to the argument that
theology is in fact a science (Idea, 19-42).
Nevertheless, Newman’s university depends on one
authoritative assumption: that all branches of knowledge are parts of a universal whole and can therefore
be reconciled with and be corrected by one another. 8 Theology supports this assumption through the
assertion of (or argument for) a created and knowable world. Without this keystone, Newman apparently
believes, the overwhelming tendency of the individual disciplines is to universalize themselves to the
exclusion of others. As we have seen above, this argument finds its companion in Tocqueville: if
authoritative opinion about first principles is jettisoned, man despairs of solving such questions by his
individual reason and isolates himself. Only by accepting authoritative opinion can productive political
interaction occur. And without this political or practical engagement, narrow views remain unchallenged
and are tempted into masquerading as general causes.
7
Newman himself is clear on the point that theology can just as easily degenerate into a merely “useful” study if it
is undertaken not for its own sake but for the purpose of pastoral or priestly care (Idea, 108-109).
8
Compare to Newman’s description of the representative of “the philosophy of an imperial intellect” who “has
one cardinal maxim in his philosophy…that truth cannot be contrary to truth; if he has a second, it is, that truth
often seems contrary to truth; and, if a third, it is the practical conclusion, that we must be patient with such
appearances, and not be hasty to pronounce them to be really of a more formidable character” (Idea, 461).
�Once a higher authority is made secure, experience and practice predominate in Newman’s liberal
education. Philosophy, or liberal education, only develops in a student through his being present in a
university in which the various disciplines—while assuming themselves to be part of a whole—check each
other by rivalry.
These disciplinary boundaries can never be static, so there can never be an
“authoritative” demarcation for the students to memorize. Discoveries in physics or biology challenge
and are challenged by political philosophy and literature. As a student watches the professors engaged
in a quasi-political debate, a kind of practical wisdom forms within the student, which can sense when a
claim to truth is reasonable and when it isn’t. For such an education, failures are almost as useful as
successes. The evolutionary biologist who claims that, say, there is a moral obligation to abort children
with Down Syndrome contributes as much to a liberal education as does the theologian who demurs to
established physical laws.
As with Newman, so with Tocqueville: a liberal education comes from the experience of liberty.
What Tocqueville says of statesmanship may also be true of a liberal education: “it is only in an
atmosphere of freedom that the qualities of mind indispensable to true statesmanship can mature and
fructify” (Ancien Regime, 144). But as Newman argues, the theologian and the biologist can only be forced
to talk to one another in a university where theology asserts the unity of the sciences. The “atmosphere
of freedom” in Newman’s university requires a theological unifying principle.
A university cannot exist without theology, but in its absence, various disciplines will attempt take
its place (181-182). The problem in this case is that an implicit theology will replace an explicit one. And
since the greatest achievement of Newman’s liberal university is a recognition of explicit boundaries of
knowledge, the most important questions (What belongs to this world? What doesn’t?) can never be
asked in a competent way. The careful obscuring of questions about principle is, in the opinion of both
Newman and Tocqueville, the great philosophical weakness of democratic liberalism as well as its great
practical support. If ideas are not practically challenged, they will expand past their proper boundaries.
Newman and Tocqueville both fear the prospect of men who, having given up thinking about general
ideas, are unconsciously governed by one or a few of them. Liberty from what might be called an
ideological tyranny is cultivated through practice, but this practice presupposes some dogmatic harmony.
Freedom from all dogmatism is not a human possibility, and it is through recognizing this that a limited
but real liberty can be cultivated. Tocqueville is concerned with democratic individuals, and Newman with
intellectual disciplines. Nevertheless, in their two objects they see a similar tendency towards an
overemphasis on general ideas, and a remedy in the cultivation of a practical and quasi-political debate.
�At this point we might be forgiven for asking what relevance this can possibly have: both
Tocqueville in politics and Newman in the development of ideas argue that freedom depends on
authoritative religious opinion. Practical interaction can do much to create authority, but at bottom
remains a dependence on a higher authority. We live in a world that has apparently jettisoned the desire
to search for or to accept (or even to reject) authoritative religious opinion. Is not Newman (and even
Tocqueville) made irrelevant by this circumstance? Perhaps we ought rather to wonder if our ostensible
progress beyond authoritative religious opinion isn’t really another means by which we disguise our
reliance on unexamined beliefs. Newman argues that no matter the circumstances, authoritative opinion
will inevitably re-emerge, the nature of the disciplines being what they are. The best that we might do is
attempt to discover what this opinion is, and to bring it to light. A new and implicit theology, in a sense,
will always be constructed on the incursions of political science and ethics and psychology into what was
once theology’s realm. 9 If this new theology proves inadequate or repulsive, we would at least be in the
position of recognizing the unattractiveness of a necessary opinion, and ascending from it. 10 Or, to use
an older analogy: we can never ascend from the cave if we never realize that we are inside of one.
See especially Idea of a University, Discourse 8, “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Religious Duty,” and Newman’s
discussion of the “Religion of Reason” (182-211).
10
Such would be Newman’s response to a critic, like Roberts, who says that this kind of “political” engagement
between departments and professors is impossible. Yes, Newman would say, it is impossible in your university,
because you lack the unifying belief in a knowable world and the ultimate harmony of the intellectual disciplines.
Such a belief can never be the product of argument or deduction, but must be secured beforehand, and religious
dogma is the only means thereof. This, at least, would be Newman’s response. It is left to the reader to decide its
adequacy.
9
�Bibliography:
Bantock, G.H. Freedom and Authority in Education. Chicago: H. Regnery, 1952.
Castro-Klaren, Sara. “The Paradox of Self in the Idea of a University,” The Idea of a University, 318-338.
Edited by Frank Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Garland, Martha McMackin. “Newman in His Own Day,” The Idea of a University, 265-281. Edited by
Frank Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Kelly, Stephen. A Conservative at Heart? The Political and Social Thought of John Henry Newman. Dublin:
Columbia Press, 2012.
Ker, Ian. The Achievement of John Henry Newman. South Bend, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1991.
Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. Dublin: Ashfield Press, 2009.
Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. Edited by Frank Turner. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1996.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Idea of the University: A Reexamination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Roberts, J.M. "The Idea of a University Revisited," Newman after a Hundred Years, 193-222. Edited by
Ian Ker and Alan Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition. Edited by Eduardo Nolla.
Translated by James T. Schleifer. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010.
Tocqueville, Alexis. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Garden City,
N.Y: Doubleday, 1955.
Turner, Frank. “Newman’s University and Ours,” The Idea of a University, 282-301. Edited by Frank
Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
�
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"What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers
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Liberty and authority : religious dogma and liberal education in Tocqueville and Newman
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Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Austin Walker 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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Newman, John Henry, 1801-1890.
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859.
Education, Humanistic
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Heideggerian perfectionism and the phenomenology of the pedagogical truth event
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Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Iain Thomson 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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Thomson, Iain D. (Iain Donald), 1968-
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Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976.
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Uniting Freedom and Lawfulness: Kant on the Power and Limits of Aesthetic Education
Samuel A. Stoner
“Each original author must be a poet.”
--Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View
Immanuel Kant recognized the important role of education in human life, he took
the question of the nature and meaning of education very seriously, and he understood
education, in its highest form, as education for freedom. In this sense, Kant was a champion
of liberal education. Our guiding question in what follows will be the question of whether
and how Kant’s attempt to think through education as education for freedom can and
should inform our own understanding of liberal education, today. We shall approach this
question by examining Kant’s account of aesthetic education.
Kant is one of the first great modern philosophers to take the educational
significance of aesthetics seriously, and he founds a tradition of reflection on the moral,
cultural, and metaphysical significance of beauty and fine art that is carried forward by
Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, among many others—a
tradition that continues to shape our thinking, today. This essay explores Kant’s account of
aesthetic education, its power, and its limits. We shall see that, for Kant, aesthetic
education is especially concerned with the realization of freedom in and for human life. My
hope is that thinking through some of the questions that lie in the background of Kant’s
investigation of aesthetic education and Kant’s way of approaching these questions through
an analysis of aesthetic education will help us to further our own thinking about liberal
education and the status of beauty and the arts therein.
I.
Kant on the Problem(s) of Freedom
1
�To begin, it is important to recall that Kant self-consciously carries forward the
Enlightenment’s emphasis on the importance freedom. Indeed, Kant’s entire philosophical
project can be understood as an attempt to define and promote true human freedom. That
said, Kant recognizes that certain problems confront our attempts to realize freedom in the
world. Four such problems are especially relevant for Kant’s account of aesthetic
education. First, Kant’s critique of reason uncovers an important tension between nature
and freedom—“an incalculable gulf” between the causally-determined phenomenal world
on one hand and reason’s moral vocation, on the other. 1 However, reason qua moral
always already demands that this incalculable gulf be bridged for the sake reason’s own
moral projects. Thus, reason’s self-critique seems to undermine reason’s own-most
demands, thereby calling the possibility and meaning rational, philosophical inquiry into
question. The question of whether and how the tension between nature and freedom can
be resolved is of fundamental importance to Kant’s entire critical project and especially to
his analysis of beauty in the third Critique. Second, Kant notes an important difference
between external, political freedom and internal, moral and/or intellectual freedom. And,
though Kant claims that political freedom is possible even in a city of devils, he indicates
that the strong emphasis on the primacy of political freedom in the modern liberal state
tends to overshadow the more fundamental importance of moral and intellectual freedom.
Indeed, Kant ultimately concludes that moral and intellectual freedom are vital conditions
of a lasting, free, republican state. The question of how to synthesize internal and external
freedom constitutes the vital core of Kant’s political theory. Third, Kant recognizes a
tension between tradition and creative freedom. For, Kant sees that the great artworks of
the past tend to become models for imitation rather than examples of the power and
2
�possibilities of originality. The question of how it is possible to be influenced by tradition
without being enslaved by it occupies a central place in Kant’s analysis of genius. Finally,
Kant acknowledges an important tension between philosophical doctrine, which
determines thinking from without, and philosophical reflection, which embodies the
freedom to think for oneself about all philosophical doctrines. This tension emerges most
clearly in Kant’s distinction between historical cognition and rational cognition in the first
Critique, and motivates Kant’s famous claim that one can never learn philosophy but only
how to philosophize. 2 The question of how philosophers can promote philosophical
reflection is of crucial importance for Kant, both as a thinker in his own right and as an
author who writes for other thinkers. In what follows, I will attempt to draw out the ways
that aesthetic education, on Kant’s account, addresses each of these four tensions.
II.
Beauty and Moral Education
Any discussion of Kant’s account of aesthetic education must begin with his claim
that beauty is the symbol of the morally good. 3 Though Kant suggests a deep connection
between beauty and morality, he does not identify the beautiful with the good, as if the
contemplation of beautiful objects necessarily makes us better human beings. Instead,
Kant argues that beauty contributes to moral formation indirectly, by preparing those who
encounter beauty for moral judgment. More specifically, Kant highlights a formal similarity
between judgments of taste and moral judgments—both are disinterested. By habituating
us to disinterested judging, encounters with beauty prepare us to disregard our own
private interests for the sake of reason’s moral law. Indeed, Kant concludes that beauty’s
symbolization of morality points toward a sort of resolution to the tension between nature
and freedom—“taste,” Kant writes, “makes possible the transition from sensible charm
3
�to…habitual moral interest without too violent a leap.” 4 The question of the meaning of
Kant’s subtle acknowledgement that the transition between nature and freedom always
requires a more or less violent leap merits careful reflection. For our purposes, though, the
significant point is that Kant indicates that encounters with beauty indirectly contribute to
moral development and that an aesthetic education that exposes its students to beauty
contributes, if only indirectly, to humanity’s moral progress.
III.
Beauty and Social Unification
In addition to noting its indirect role in moral education, Kant highlights aesthetic
education’s social and political significance. For, strikingly, in the concluding paragraphs of
his analysis of aesthetic judgment, Kant suddenly turns his attention to the great difficulties
that confront the “task of uniting freedom” with law. 5 Despite humanity’s “vigorous drive
toward the lawful sociability,” Kant notes that laws are made and propagated by a small
subsection of society and will therefore seem alien and alienating to many of the people
they govern, like external authorities that work to determine thoughts and actions from
without. 6 As a result, most people will tend to follow laws out of fear, not because they
respect these laws and freely adopt them as their own. But, the free adherence to law by all
citizens is a necessary condition of a free, enduring, and morally good political society.
Thus, we must wonder: how is it possible to unite the few, who make up the legislative
class, with the many, who make up the bulk of society? How is it possible to bring forth a
unified society whose members do not simply bow to authoritative laws imposed from
without but rather freely adopt their society’s laws as their own?
Kant reasonably claims that such social unification depends on “the art of the
reciprocal communication of the ideas of the most educated part [of society] with the
4
�cruder.” 7 But, how is such reciprocal communication possible? Kant highlights the
importance of discovering a shared “standard for taste,” i.e., a common stock of beautiful
images. For, taste is “a universal human sense”—a natural capacity, shared by all human
beings, that allows one to feel the pleasurable intellectual activity that grounds all aesthetic
experience. 8 And, because aesthetic pleasure justly claims to be “valid for mankind in
general,” the capacity of taste ultimately grounds the universal communicability of
aesthetic pleasure. 9 Accordingly, the cultivation of a common set of beautiful images opens
up the possibility of a mode of meaningful communication about these images that
transcends social differences. What is more, such communication about beauty lays the
ground for (1) a wide-spread recognition of the shared humanity of all members of society,
(2) a “universal feeling of sympathy” with and for other human beings, and ultimately (3)
the shared capacity to communicate intimately with others, regardless of their social class,
about more general ideas, questions, and problems. 10 Accordingly, Kant concludes that a
shared approach to beauty through a common stock of beautiful images forms a middle
ground between “higher culture and contented nature” that can mediate social, political,
and economic differences. 11 In this way, the aesthetic education of society can contribute
to the unification of society and lay the ground for a political culture in which the rule of
law is united with individual autonomy.
IV.
The Aesthetic Education of the Artist
Thus far, we have focused primarily on the more or less universal moral and
political significance of aesthetic education, and we have discovered two different ways
aesthetic education might cultivate freedom in and for humanity. At this point, however,
5
�we shall take up a more particular aspect of Kant’s exploration of aesthetic education—his
characterization of the aesthetic education of artists.
Kant argues that “beautiful art is possible only as a product of genius.” 12 Genius,
here, names “the inborn predisposition of mind…through which nature gives the rule to
art.” 13 More specifically, genius refers to the natural capacity that allows an artist to select
and express an “aesthetic idea”—i.e., a powerful image that provokes aesthetic pleasure in
those who encounter it. Thus, genius describes the special talent that allows an artist to
create beautiful art.
Unsurprisingly, genius’s beautiful art plays a vital role in the education of other
artists, and Kant indicates that it does so in two distinct ways. First, genius’s beautiful
artworks serve as models for imitation. Kant sees that genius’s beautiful art can and often
does make such a deep impression on its audience that it indelibly shapes and permanently
influences its audience’s approach to art. In Kant’s terms, genius’s beautiful artworks serve
others “as a standard or rule for judging.” 14 Importantly, though, judgment plays a vital
role in artistic production. Thus, genius’s art will inform the creative processes of the
artists it influences—if and when an artist encounters a powerful work of art, his
experience of this work shapes his notion of what a great artwork should be and guides his
attempts to create such beautiful artworks in the future. Accordingly, Kant concludes that
genius’s beautiful art often gives rise to (1) a form of imitation, in which an artist’s
productive activity is wholly determined by rules that are extracted from a genius’s
artwork(s) and ultimately to (2) ‘schools’ or traditions that provide “a methodical
instruction in accordance with rules” to their students in an attempt to carry forward the
legacy and distinctive style of their founder(s). 15
6
�All that said, imitation is foreign to genius. Genius, on Kant’s account, is
characterized precisely by its originality—its creation in accordance with rules that
originate in its own nature. By inspiring methodical imitation, then, genius’s art seems to
foreclose the possibility of future geniuses. We are led to wonder: Can genius contribute to
the aesthetic education of other geniuses? How can new geniuses ever arise out of an old
tradition? How is the aesthetic education of genius possible?
Kant argues that, in special cases, genius can provoke artists to abandon their desire
to imitate great artworks in order to attend to their own natural capacity for selecting and
expressing aesthetic ideas, independently of external influence. Kant names this distinctive
mode of imitation succession (Nachfolge). Succession is an especially important mode of
influence, for Kant, because it allows genius’s art to inform a student without undermining
the student’s originality and, therefore, the student’s ability to prove his own genius. Of
course, succession is difficult to achieve, and genius is an extremely rare talent. But, unlike
scholastic, methodical imitation, succession holds out the possibility that genius can
contribute to the aesthetic education of future geniuses by (1) freeing the potential genius
from the constraint of tradition, (2) freeing him for original artistic production, and thereby
(3) freeing him to participate in the tradition as a new link the great chain of genius.
All that said, it would be a mistake to conclude that genius is defined wholly by its
originality or that it wholly transcends scholastic instruction. Indeed, Kant is highly critical
of the unreflective and unrestrained pursuit of originality. He recognizes the possibility of
“original nonsense” that cannot, as such, be beautiful, and he demands that genius cultivate
a form of “discipline” that allows its products to remain purposive (i.e., beautiful) for their
7
�audience so that these products can enjoy “a posterity among others…in an ever
progressing culture.” 16 Thus, Kant claims that “there is no beautiful art in which something
mechanical, which can be grasped and followed according to rules, and thus something
academically correct, does not constitute the essential condition of the art,” and that
“genius can only provide rich material for products of art; its elaboration and form require
a talent that has been academically trained, in order to make a use of it that can stand up to
the power of judgment.” 17 Though they cannot themselves produce genius, then, the
schools are breeding grounds for genius, providing potential geniuses with the skills and
discipline necessary for the production of beautiful art. To realize their vocation, however,
potential geniuses must benefit from academic training without succumbing to the
scholastic tendency toward methodical imitation. The aesthetic education of genius
simultaneously cultivates a regard for tradition’s power and an independence from
tradition’s authority. Genius’s art inherits a tradition, while at the same time transcending
this tradition. Genius, in other words, embodies a freedom from tradition that nevertheless
harmonizes with tradition’s lawful character. Genius participates in tradition by
transforming tradition. Genius, for Kant, is the soul of living tradition.
V.
Beauty’s Philosophical Significance
Having discussed aesthetic education’s significance for morality, politics, and art, we
are now in a position to begin our approach to a fourth very important but oft overlooked
form of aesthetic education in Kant, namely, the aesthetic education of the philosopher. In
what follows, I will suggest that the philosopher’s aesthetic education is two-fold.
First, Kant’s fundamental analysis of beauty unearths an important metaphysical
insight; for, it ultimately allows him to reflect on the possibility of a “supersensible
8
�substratum of humanity,” in and through which nature and freedom are unified. 18 This
reflection attains its full clarity and depth in Kant’s resolution to the antinomy of taste.
Here, Kant argues that judgments of taste depend on an “indeterminate and also
indeterminable” concept of “the supersensible substratum of all our faculties” because the
existence of such a substratum is the necessary condition of the purposive but free accord
of the imagination’s spontaneous activity with the understanding’s lawfulness, which
accord grounds aesthetic pleasure and, thereby, the experience of beauty. 19 Though Kant’s
critical restriction of knowledge to the realm of possible experience necessarily implies a
unbridgeable gulf between nature and freedom and, by implication, the impossibility of
knowledge of the ground of the unity of nature and freedom in the subject, Kant maintains
that a thoroughgoing investigation of the meaning of beauty provides insight into the
possibility of this unity and even an awareness of its actuality. Thus, Kant’s investigation of
beauty teaches him about the possibility of the self-consistency of reason and, by
implication, the possibility of the meaningfulness of philosophical inquiry in general. It is
for this reason that CPJ is not only the conclusion but also the culmination of Kant’s critical
philosophy.
Second, in addition to providing metaphysical insight, Kant’s aesthetics also sheds
light on the nature and meaning of philosophical activity, as such. More specifically, Kant’s
account of the aesthetic education of genius and the process of genial succession elucidates
the structure of the problem of philosophical influence and begins to point the way toward
this problem’s solution. The problem of philosophical influence concerns philosophical
communication and emerges clearly in the first Critique’s distinction between historical
cognition, as a passive way of knowing involving memorization, and rational cognition, as
9
�an active way of knowing in which one thinks for oneself. 20 Historical cognition, according
to Kant, is a form of methodical imitation (Nachahmung) and it ultimately transforms one
into “a plaster cast of a living human being” formed “according to an alien reason.” 21
Rational cognition, on the other hand, is always drawn from “the universal spring of
reason” and embodies philosophical reflection qua the dynamic process of thinking
through a question or a problem for oneself, independently of all external authorities. With
this distinction in mind, Kant notes that systematically argued and powerfully expressed
philosophical doctrines tend to promote merely historical cognition rather than
philosophical reflection. But, Kant emphasizes the great importance of free, philosophical
reflection. Thus, the question arises: how is it possible to inherit and learn from a
philosophical tradition without being determined by this tradition. How is philosophical
education possible?
At this point, I hope that the formal parallel between the problem confronting
philosophical education on the one hand, and the problem that seemed to confront the
aesthetic education of genius, on the other, is beginning to emerge—both are grounded in
the question of how it is possible for a teacher to influence his pupil without simply
indoctrinating this pupil and thereby undermining the pupil’s freedom to think or create
for himself. We have already seen that Kant accounts for the aesthetic education of genius
by appealing to succession (Nachfolge), the unique mode of influence whereby a genius
inspires a potential genius to imitate his original way of producing beautiful artworks
rather than the beautiful artworks he produces. Now, it is crucial to note that Kant does
not limit the notion of succession to the sphere of genial influence. In fact, Kant argues that
succession answers to the more general question of how the great books—“classical”
10
�works, as he calls them—ought to contribute to human thinking. 22 Kant argues that the
great authors of the past must not “make their successors (Nachfolgenden) into mere
imitators (Nachahmern),” but rather “by means of their way-of-proceeding
(Verfahren)…put others on the right path for seeking out…principles in themselves and
thus for following their own, often better, course.” 23 Kant explicitly identifies this mode of
influence as a form succession (Nachfolge), which he now describes, in general terms, as
“any influence that the products of an exemplary author”—and here, he means any
exemplary author—have on their readers that allow these readers “to create from the same
sources from which the [exemplary author] created,” and to learn from their predecessors
“only the manner of conducting oneself in doing so.” 24 Succession in other words is the
essence of a liberal, philosophical education that teaches its students to think for
themselves in and through the careful study of the great works of the past.
All that said, the crucial question remains open: How is succession possible? Or,
how is philosophical education possible? Or again, how is liberal education possible? My
own thought is that Kant looks to and learns from the example of genius and especially the
example of poetry in his attempt to answer these questions. For, the example of great
poetry reveals that poets achieve succession in and through the provocative images
(aesthetic ideas) they produce. I would argue that Kant learns from the poets that
philosophers must supplement their powerful logical arguments, which naturally strive to
determine their audience’s thinking, with poetic images in order to provoke their readers
to think for themselves about these arguments rather than simply accepting them as
authoritative doctrines. Unfortunately, I cannot defend this claim here, but I will
11
�nevertheless suggest that the less on Kant learns from the poets is the vital core of Kant’s
own aesthetic education in the third Critique.
VI.
Conclusion
Kant interpretation aside, though, the question of the possibility of the mode of
influence Kant calls succession—a mode of influence that allows one to learn from a
tradition while maintaining sufficient freedom to think for oneself about this tradition, its
meaning, and its future—seems to me to lie very close to the heart of the question of
whether and why liberal education is still important to, possible in, and necessary for
today’s world. It should be a very serious question for those of us who love and study the
Great Books and especially for those of us who attempt to teach students through these
books. This question should challenge us, and I believe its answer is less obvious than we
often suspect. And if Kant cannot provide us with a final answer, he can help us to
formulate the question and think through its significance. We carry forward the spirit, if
not the letter, of Kant’s thought by working to answer this question for ourselves: How can
we achieve succession in our own thinking and teaching?
5.175.
A835/B863 ff.
3 5.351 ff.
4 5.354.
5 5.355.
6 5.355.
7 5.356.
8 5.356.
9 5.356.
10 5.355.
11 5.356.
12 5.307.
13 5.307.
14 5.308.
15 5.318.
1
2
12
�5.308, 5.319.
5.310.
18 5:340.
19 5.339, 5.344.
20 A835/B863 ff.
21 A836/B864.
22 5.282.
23 5.283.
24 5.283.
16
17
13
�
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Uniting freedom and lawfulness : Kant on the power and limits of aesthetic education
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Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Samuel Stoner 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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Stoner, Samuel A.
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Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804.
Education, Humanistic
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24004552
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Text
Having the Capacity for Theoretical Reason
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics examines what human virtue (arête, excellence) is,
how one becomes virtuous, and how being-in-activity virtuously is related to achieving the
good that can be realized in action (1096b33), “that for the sake of which everything else is
done” (1097a18-19). 1 Aristotle chooses to ground his approach to this question in the
“function” (ergon) of human being, which is the kind of work that is distinctive of the human
being (I.7, 1097b23 ff.). He identifies three kinds of activities (energeiai) of which human beings
are capable, which he then associates with three parts of soul: nutrition and growth (threptike
… kai auxetike), perception/sensation (aesthesis), and what he calls “rational action” or the
“being-in-action of the part that has reason” (“praktike tis tou logon echontos”) (1098a1-4). His
thought seems to be: human being has a certain constitution or structure, as do all beings; if
one wishes to know what is the best work or activity human being can achieve, one should start
by understanding what work or activity is distinctive of the human being, and then proceed to
discover what the greatest excellence or perfection of that might be. Stipulating that putting a
capacity into activity (energeia) is better than merely possessing it (1098a6), and assuming that,
since only human beings, among natural beings have reason, Aristotle concludes, “Thus the
proper work [ergon] of a human being must be the being-at-work [energeia] of soul in
accordance with reason [kata logon], or at least not without reason” (1098a7-8).
Since Aristotle grounds his exploration and account of virtue in the functional structure
of the human soul, the Nicomachean Ethics, as it explores what virtue is and how human beings
may attain it, offers a compelling account of the capacities the human being has to be-at-work
and to be-in-activity. For today, the particular question I wish to explore is what Aristotle
means by the phrase “with reason” (kata logon), in particular with regard to his discussion and
account of ethical virtue (ethike), and what his investigation of ethical virtue tells us about the
capacities of human being to achieve the good.
In chapter 13 of Book I, preparatory to launching his investigation of virtue, Aristotle
redraws his outline of the soul. He replaces “perception” with “desire” (epithumetikon kai
11
Most passages from Aristotle’s text follow Martin Ostwald, Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (Prentice Hall, 1962).
When I borrow from other translations, I will note that. Occasionally, I will amend Ostwald’s translation, striving
for a more literal rendition.
1
�holos orektikon) (1102a32 ff.; 1102b30), because perception per se does not move us to act,
whereas desire does (see VI.2, 1139a19). He also characterizes both the nutritive part and the
newly recast desiring part as irrational (1102a28). The third part remains, for the moment,
simply rational. He then drops the nutritive part, as it plays no role in action.
Aristotle explains why he characterizes desire as irrational (alogon), saying that the
desiring part “fights against and resists the guidance of reason” (1102b17), and it “opposes and
reacts against reason” (1102b24). Yet he also says of the desiring part that it “participates
[metechei] in reason somewhat [pos]” (1102b30-31) because it is capable of “complying with
reason and accepting its leadership” (1102b32), and it can “listen to reason as [a child] would to
a father” (1103a3). He then turns to explore how the desiring part of the soul—which he will
identify with our disposition or character (hexis)—can become or be made excellent.
Someone who has an excellent character or disposition desires what is truly good.
Human beings are born with the capacity (dunamis) for this excellence, but the capacity has to
be developed. It is developed, claims Aristotle at the beginning of Book II, by the person
engaging in habitually doing good actions for, he says, “ethical virtue (ethike) develops out of
habit (ethos)” (1103a17). This means that we become just (i.e., come to have a just character, a
disposition that desires what is just) by habitually—repeatedly and consistently—doing just
actions, and self-controlled by habitually practicing self-control. “For from similar energeiai
come-to-be [similar] dispositions (hexeis)” (1103b21-22). At this point, Aristotle is emphasizing
the irrational, or, perhaps better stated, the childlike nature of desire. Character is molded or
trained, not intellectually taught, and this seems in keeping with his saying earlier that desire
has the capacity to listen to and follow reason as a child listens to a parent. 2 In light of this, it
seems perfectly fitting for Aristotle to say that the goal in ethical training and education is “not
in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good” (1103b28).
If indeed habituation is what shapes our character, that suggests that we are products
of our upbringing, shaped and molded by our parents and our teachers from a very early age—
before we are able to think for ourselves. By the time we come to be thinking beings, our
characters will have been largely determined. It also implies that a good upbringing is key:
2
One is reminded here of Socrates’ education of the guardians in the city in speech in the Republic (esp. Book III).
2
�commands to do good actions, consistently and repeatedly offered, supplemented with either
reward or punishment, will shape our character into something good (see 1106b10-12). What
remains then to do is to acquire experience and understanding of the world in order to be able
to exercise or express our good character by doing truly good actions. To be sure, Aristotle
later in Book II raises several questions about whether habituation is sufficient to makes us be
truly virtuous persons and agents, wondering “if they perform just actions and exercise selfcontrol, [must they not already be] just and self-controlled” (II.4, 1105a18-20). And yet, almost
immediately he appears to dismiss the difficulty saying that, “without performing [just and selfcontrolled acts], nobody could even be on the way to becoming good” (1105b10-12).
Given that desire is for some end, and the shape of our desires constitutes our
character, our character is what determines the ends toward which we direct our choices and
our actions. For action begins with some target—a desired or wished-for end. If we have a
good character, our desired target will be good, for virtue “makes us aim at the right target”
(VI.12, 1144a8).
The way Aristotle has been developing his account, it presents us with a grave difficulty,
which he leads up to by first discussing whether human beings are voluntary or involuntary
agents, or, in other words, are we justly held responsible for our choices and our actions. What
Aristotle wants to claim is that we are, indeed, voluntary agents, in virtually all circumstances.
Considering the commonly offered extenuating excuses of force and ignorance, Aristotle
concludes that only in the most extreme case—where the agent contributes nothing—may one
say one was forced and acted involuntarily (III.1, 1110b15-17). With regard to ignorance,
Aristotle allows that we may be ignorant of certain particulars, but we are never excusably
ignorant of the universal, which is, presumably, the good (1110b30-1111a1). That seems to
mean that we are responsible for knowing that we should be aiming for the good and—at least
on some general level—we are responsible for knowing what that good is. Applying his
recurring example of medicine and health, this is analogous to saying that, though not everyone
is a doctor, and therefore not everyone has the science or knowledge of medicine and its
mastery of particulars, nevertheless everyone should know that the aim of the doctor is health
(the good), and one should also know, at least in a general way, what health is.
3
�The difficulty, which seems to stem directly from Aristotle’s claim that ethical virtue, and
therefore good character, comes to be by habituation, is that that appears to make us mere
products of our upbringing rather than responsible, self-ruling or independent, agents.
Aristotle highlights this difficulty when he says,
But someone might say that all human beings pursue what appears good to them [tou
phainomenou agathou], but they are not in control of [ou kurioi] how things appear; depending
on the kind of person each man is, that is how the good appears to him [hopoios poth’ ekastos
esti, toiouto kai to telos phainetai auto] (III.5, 1114a31-1114b1).
If, as the objection suggests, we are merely products of our nature and our upbringing, with no
control over how the good appears to us, then it cannot be the case that we are truly voluntary
agents. For since the end guides and thereby to a great extent determines the means, we
should be pitied and pardoned for our choices and our acts, but not held responsible, or
blamed or punished (see III.1, 1111a1-2; cf. 1110a17-18). On the other hand, if Aristotle is
correct in his claim that we truly have the capacity, and therefore the responsibility, most
particularly to know what we are doing and to know that it is good (1110b30-1111a1), then it
seems that something more than habituation—even if it is good habituation and good
upbringing (see 1105b10-12)—is needed in order for us truly to achieve ethical virtue and to
become truly good. 3 In short, the question the objector raises is whether or not, and to what
extent and how, human beings truly do have the capacity to alter or overcome either their
upbringing or their nature, such that they may justly be held responsible for knowing the good.
For Aristotle to uphold his argument and defend it against the objector, he must show that how
3
In a lot of contemporary debates, the discussion is presented as an opposition between nature and nurture.
Aristotle is presenting something quite different. Whether our dispositions are molded by nurture or
(pre)determined by nature, both possibilities would seem to align with the “opponent” Aristotle is citing. For,
while he focuses largely on habituation and training, he also acknowledges in a few passages that different
individuals have different innate dispositions or characteristics, and that these may cause them to approach and to
see the world differently. For example, some by nature seem to be more timid, whereas others seem to be more
daring; some perhaps might be more angry whereas others might be more pacific. (See, for example, Aristotle’s
discussion about how the mean appears differently to different people, II.7, 1107b27-1108a1; 1108a32-35;
1108b4-6.) In the end, both those who have been habituated and those who are predisposed are determined in
their view of the end, and it is this that Aristotle wishes to challenge and, ultimately, reject.
4
�the end appears to an individual depends (to some extent at least), and is within the control of,
the individual himself. And though he does say in Book III that we must be [held] responsible
because we are in some way [pos] co-causes [sunaitioi] of our disposition or character
(1114b22-23), he does not explain there how this is so. That task he appears to leave to Book
VI.
Aristotle begins Book VI stating that he has completed his discussion of the ethical
virtues and that it is now time to discuss the other virtues, by which he means the virtues of the
thinking or rational part of the soul (dianoia; peri tou logou echontos ) (1138b35-1139a3;
1139a5). The reader is inclined to think at this point that Aristotle has completed his discussion
of virtuous character (hexis) and is now turning to examine the intellectual virtue (dianoetike)
that he had mentioned at the beginning of Book II (II.1, 1103a14), in keeping with the apparent
sharp divide he had drawn earlier between the desiring part of the soul and the rational part,
and the distinct functions and corresponding virtues of each. What Aristotle actually does,
however, is rather different. While he does indeed examine the rational part of the human soul
(the part having reason: to logon echon), he claims from the beginning that the choice
necessary for truly virtuous action requires that the desire be correct (orexin orthen) and the
reasoning true (logon alethe) 1139a25), that “what reason affirms, desire must pursue” 4 (“ta
auta ton men [i.e., logos] phanai, ten de [i.e., orexis] diokein,” 1139a25-26), and that “the good
state for the [part] that thinks and acts is for truth to be in agreement [homologos echousa]
with correct appetite” (1139a29-31). And, when he arrives at the end of Book VI, Aristotle
announces: “We must consider virtue yet one more time (palin)” (1144b1). He then proceeds
to distinguish between what he calls “natural virtue [phusike arête]” and “virtue in the strict
sense [kuria arête].” 5 Natural virtue, Aristotle says, is in us since our birth, manifest in us since
childhood (1144b4-5, 8). 6 And yet, he says, “we seek (zetoumen) something more, the good in
4
Here I follow W.D. Ross’s translation, from “The Basic Works of Aristotle,” ed. by Richard McKeon (Random
House, 1941).
5
Ross’s translation. Ostwald translates “kuria” as true, but Ross’s translation seems closer to the sense of
“authoritative” implied by the Greek.
6
Whether Aristotle means that each of us has all of these inclinations—for justice, moderation, etc.—in us already
from birth, or whether some of us have some and some, others (accounting for the different natural dispositions
or temperaments he seems to be referencing at the end of Book II. See II.7, 1107a28-1108a8; II.8, 1109a13-14;
5
�the strict sense [kurios], and to possess these qualities in a different way” (1144b6-8). In order
to achieve virtue “in the strict sense” and to come to possess a virtuous character (the virtuous
characteristics) “in another way,” according to Aristotle, we need the addition of nous
(intelligence or mind) (1144b9).
At first glance, it appears that nous should play no role in ethical virtue. For just as
Aristotle had initially drawn a sharp divide between (irrational) desire and reason (I.13 ff.; see
also 1139a3-5), so too at the beginning of Book VI he draws a sharp divide between practical
reason and theoretical reason: practical reason is concerned with things that “may be
otherwise”; theoretical reason, with “things whose first principles do not admit of being
otherwise” (1139a6-8). Action takes place within the sphere that is the concern of practical
reason; good choice and virtuous action require both ethical virtue and phronesis. Nous, on the
other hand, is knowledge of unchanging first principles (see 1140b34-45), and is thus an
excellence of theoretical reason.
And yet without including theoretical reason in virtue, we would remain forever either
as children (1144b8), or at the mercy of the chance effects of our nature and our upbringing
(III.5, ca. 1114b1). In fact, although Aristotle opens Book VI with the ostensible purpose of
defining virtuous practical reason (phronesis) in part by distinguishing it from other kinds of
intellectual excellences, by the end of Book VI he is articulating the necessary role that
theoretical reason has to play in phronesis and for human beings to become truly good and to
act truly virtuously. And it is as he arrives at this conclusion that Aristotle truly answers the
objection from Book III. For the objection implicitly denied that human beings have the
capacity for theoretical reflection on and investigation of the good, insisting instead that we are
slaves either to our upbringing or to our natures, or both.
Even more importantly, however, it is especially fitting—and telling, in order to refute
the objection from Book III—that Aristotle assigns nous as the kind of thinking and knowledge
that we need to transform our natural dispositions into true ethical virtue. For nous is
knowledge of the truth of ultimate first principles (we find Aristotle attributing to nous
knowledge of “to eschaton” as well as of “archai”; see, e.g., VI.6, 1141a8; VI.11, 1143a29). In
II.9, 1109b2-28), he does not make clear. The point, however, is that the natural inclination or disposition alone
does not constitute the “orexin orthen” necessary for ethical virtue and truly virtuous action.
6
�the case of a universally acknowledged topic of theoretical reason, such as geometry or
mathematics (see VI.8, 1142a13), nous would know the first principles (as opposed to science,
episteme, which must simply presuppose them: NE 1139b30; Meta IV, 1005a12-14); science
would know and be able to show apodeictically what follows from those first principles; and
one would have sophia when one had both nous and episteme together (see VI.7, 1141a17-18:
“it is necessary for the wise man to know not only what follows from first principles, but also
that he have the truth concerning the first principles”).
But what kind of knowledge is “nous”? Aristotle says that it is knowledge (or, many wish
to claim, intuition or insight) into “ta eschata”—“ultimate particulars,” which may mean either
ultimate facts (a particular in all of its idiosyncratic particularity) or first principles. Nous is the
knowledge of both (1143a35-36). It is not, however, as science is, apodeictic. For many
interpreters, what this leaves is that it is a kind of intuition, as Aristotle speaks of “the eye of
the soul” which “sees” the end, which is the guiding principle (arche) of the truly phronimos
decision and virtuous action (1144a28-1144b1). To understand this “eye of the soul” as [mere]
intuition, however, seems to fit more with the way Aristotle spoke in Book III than with the
account he is developing in Book VI. For in Book III, when Aristotle was giving voice to the
skeptical objection about whether we could ever know the true (now called “kurios”) good, or
whether we were confined to only the seeming good, he did his best to develop and support
the objector’s contention as much as possible. Thus, we hear him saying there that “the aiming
at the end is not self-chosen [authairetos], one must be born, as it were [hosper], having the
vision [opsin] by which to judge beautifully and to choose what is truly good; and he is wellendowed by nature in whom this grows beautifully” (1114b6-8). Here in Book VI, however, the
keen “vision of the soul” is not a gift of nature, but an achievement of theoretical reason (nous).
To understand this, we need to recognize, and Aristotle does draw our attention to this, that
deductive thinking or demonstration is not the only kind of thinking that is possible; there is
also inductive thinking (epagoge): “induction is the principle (arche) of [knowledge of] the
universal; whereas demonstration proceeds from universals” (1139b28-29). 7 One is reminded
here of Socrates’ description, when he is discussing the divided line in Republic Book VI, of how
7
Following Ross’s translation.
7
�one proceeds in the highest part of the intelligible realm: beginning from hypotheses, one
makes one’s way to the unhypothetical archen (Rep VI.510b6-7). When one arrives at the end
of epagoge (induction), one “sees” the principle (arche), which seems to mean, it is obvious, it
can be nothing else. And this might be why Aristotle calls nous a perception (aesthesis) at one
point (1143b5). As he explains, it is not perception literally, namely, the kind associated with
our five senses. Rather, it is the kind of perceiving we do “when we perceive that the triangle is
the ultimate [figure]” (1142a27-29).8 To arrive at nous requires a process of thinking, a process
of moving from particular to universal (see Post.An. II.19, esp. 100a14-100b3), “and this process
does not cease until the indivisible concepts, the true universals, are established” (Post.An.
100b2). This is the kind of thinking, Aristotle seems to say by the end of Book VI, that is
essential if one is to have the possibility of achieving true virtue, kuria arête, which involves
knowledge of what is truly good. But investigation into what is truly good is precisely what
Aristotle is engaged in in the Nicomachean Ethics, as he explores the question of what is the
highest human good, the highest end of action. The Ethics, therefore, offers both an account
and an example of what one must consider and how one’s investigation must proceed if one
truly wishes to come to know the first principles, or the archai, and it makes it clear that what
we need to do is to investigate and examine our hypotheses (or opinions or experiences—
whatever we have gathered) if we are to arrive at these first principles.
In the Metaphysics Aristotle calls the kind of thinking that investigates archai
“philosophy” (1005b7). Many take this to be an exclusive category, available only to a few.
And perhaps in the highest sense, philosophy is only available to a few. But beginning as he did
in the Nicomachean Ethics with the function of human being, the work of which human being
as human being is capable, Aristotle seems to be offering to us at the same time a more
comprehensive account. For his argument suggests that human beings in general (that is, as a
genus) have the capacity to wonder whether their understanding of the good is in fact correct
(see 1144b6-7: though we are born with some natural virtue, nevertheless “we seek something
more…”). We have this capacity because we have theoretical reason: this allows us to begin
from particulars and arrive at universals; we desire and pursue particular goods, but are also
8
Here, I follow Ostwald. See also his note 37 about this passage.
8
�able to wonder about and inquire into “the good life.” Theoretical reason makes it possible for
us to seek to support and defend the views we already have, but it also makes it possible for us
to envision and explore other possibilities. Any human being who wonders if his understanding
of the good is correct has already broken out of the deterministic cave articulated by the
objector in Book III. But this possibility, Aristotle seems to be saying, is within all of us, it is part
of what a human being is.
However long the path toward nous may be, the tools for beginning on this path are
already within us: they include the innate desire for the good, together with the capacity for
thinking, both of particulars and of universals, both practically and theoretically. What we need
in order to develop these tools, and our capacities is not more habituators. What we need are
individuals who will prod and prompt us to question and investigate, and share with us the best
examples they have experienced and learned so that we too may learn from them.
The journey from where he began at the end of Book I, to where he arrives by the end
of Book VI, is a long one. And yet Aristotle encapsulates it in one word. Where originally he
had said that “virtue is in accordance with [kata] correct reason,” he now says that “our
disposition is virtuous only if united with [meta] correct reason” (1144b26-27). “In accordance
with” was consonant with his likening the desiring part of the soul to a child. “United with,” on
the other hand, suggests a joint purpose, a functioning-together of character and reason
without which we cannot fulfill our ergon or achieve the good.
--Evanthia Speliotis
Bellarmine University
September 2014
9
�
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"What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers
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Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Evanthia Speliotis 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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Piety, Knowledge, and Critical Inquiry in Plato’s Euthyphro (with reference to Plato’s Apology)
David Shiner
Shimer College
For those of us who are deeply committed to the practice of critical inquiry, few if any texts
are more valuable than the dialogues of Plato. Indeed, the conventional emphasis on the
role of critical inquiry in Plato’s dialogues, justified though it unquestionably is, may at
times lead to us to undervalue their many other virtues. The signal importance of those
other virtues is brought to light when it becomes clear that they are bound up with the very
raison d’etre for the sort of critical inquiry that Socrates employs in most of the Platonic
writings. To illustrate this, I shall in this paper briefly examine the relationship between
Socrates’ practice of critical inquiry and the virtues of piety and a proper approach to
knowledge claims in Plato’s Euthyphro, while also referencing his Apology.
The Euthyphro begins with the title character greeting Socrates outside the court where he
(Socrates) is about to be tried. Each man tells the other why he is there. Socrates recounts
some of the charges against him, charges which will be familiar to readers of Plato’s
Apology, the action of which occurs directly after the events presented in the Euthyphro: he
corrupts the youth of Athens by inventing new gods and failing to acknowledge the old ones
(3A). For his part, Euthyphro says that he has come to the court to prosecute his father for
manslaughter. When Socrates expresses surprise at this, Euthyphro, claiming to be an
expert in religious matters, responds that he is undertaking this action in accordance with
divine law. Socrates responds by proposing that he become Euthyphro’s pupil so that he
can argue in court that he regards it to be “of great importance to know about things
divine” (5A), which will presumably undermine the charge of impiety which his accusers
have levied against him. The remainder of the dialogue consists primarily in Socrates
questioning Euthyphro, presumably as pupil to teacher. Euthyphro proves unable to provide
an account of piety that satisfies the standards of Socratic inquiry, and the dialogue ends
without any such account having been given.
That is to say, there is no overt account of piety in the dialogue that is to be regarded as
satisfactory. Is there, however, a covert account, an implicit conception of piety that reveals
itself upon deeper investigation? And, if there is indeed such an account, how might it be
related to the sort of critical inquiry that Socrates undertakes within the dialogue?
We’ll begin our exploration of these questions by examining the textual evidence
concerning Euthyphro’s claim to be a religious expert. As was previously noted, Euthyphro
1
�justifies his prosecution of his father by referring to divine law. In explaining this to
Socrates, he acknowledges that all of his relatives disagree with his action, likewise on
religious grounds; they have unanimously told him that “for a son to prosecute his father as
a murderer is impious” (4D). Upon hearing this, Socrates asks Euthyphro whether he has
“such an accurate knowledge of divine things” that he has no fear that he might in fact be
committing an act of impiety (4E). Euthyphro reaffirms his confidence in his decision,
claiming that his knowledge of divine matters makes him better than “the general run of
men” (5A), presumably including the rest of his family.
Plato provides ample evidence that Euthyphro’s claim should be regarded with suspicion.
Earlier in the dialogue, Euthyphro tells Socrates that he (Euthyphro) has the gift of
prophesy, boasting, “I have never made a prediction that did not come true” (3C). Shortly
thereafter Socrates says about his court case, “[T]here is no knowing how the case will turn
out. Only you prophets can tell.” Euthyphro responds, “Well, Socrates, I dare say that
nothing will come of it. Very likely you will carry your case” (3E). Given that any reader of
this dialogue would be well aware of Socrates’ subsequent conviction and execution at the
hands of the Athenian court, Plato could hardly have made Euthyphro’s lack of prophetic
ability plainer. This episode casts considerable doubt on subsequent claims Euthyphro
makes concerning his religious expertise, which in turn implies that his confidence in those
claims is unwarranted.
After proposing that Euthyphro become his teacher, Socrates asks him to state what piety
is. Euthyphro replies by recounting the well-known story from Greek mythology in which
Zeus bound his father, Cronos, in chains for wronging him, just as Cronos had previously
castrated his father, Ouranos, for similar reasons. Socrates responds by asking Euthyphro
whether he thinks that he (Socrates) is being brought to trial because he “somehow” finds it
difficult to accept such stories of the gods. He then concedes that he might be wrong to
doubt those stories, stating that if experts on religion, such as Euthyphro claims to be,
believe them, he (Socrates) will be duty-bound to believe them as well. This, he says, is
because his is “ignorant about these matters” (6B). Thus, Socrates’ awareness of his own
ignorance leads him not only to doubt received wisdom, but even to doubt his own doubts.
With this response, Socrates tacitly draws a clear distinction between Euthyphro and
himself. Euthyphro claims to know everything worth knowing about piety. Socrates, on the
contrary, claims to know nothing about it. On the basis of his claim to possess religious
knowledge, Euthyphro is certain that he is practicing piety in prosecuting his father, in part
on the basis of the analogy of himself with Zeus, the all-knowing. On the basis of his claim
to lack religious knowledge, Socrates professes his uncertainty not only about the veracity
2
�of the traditional stories of the gods, but also about his doubts about those stories.
Therefore, as Socrates states explicitly, if Euthyphro actually has the knowledge that he
claims to have, his knowledge will trump Socrates’ ignorance, and Socrates will be dutybound to follow his lead.
The key word here is “if.” Socrates sets forth all of his conditions hypothetically, setting the
stage for him to try, throughout the rest of the dialogue, to discover whether Euthyphro can
demonstrate that he actually has the knowledge that he claims to have. In so doing,
Socrates doesn’t simply accept Euthyphro’s stories, or for that matter anything Euthyphro
says about piety, “on faith,” as we might put it. Such acceptance would constitute an appeal
to exactly the sort of unquestioning certainty which Socrates rejects, since he, as a
professed non-knower with respect to such matters, wouldn’t have any basis on which to
accept it.
By asking Euthyphro whether he thinks that he (Socrates) is being prosecuted for impiety
because he has difficulty in believing the traditional stories of the gods, Socrates shifts the
conversation from a declarative to an interrogative mode. He also subtly and skillfully shifts
the subject of the conversation from piety itself to the status of knowledge claims about
piety. In doing this, Socrates paves the way for critical inquiry, which entails a shift in the
conversation from statements of traditional belief to hypotheses.
Statements of traditional belief, such as those Euthyphro favors, are authoritative and
presumptively non-disverifiable propositions. The hypothetical approach, on the other
hand, regards such statements as assumptions, and thus as subject to critical inquiry. In
highlighting the shift from traditional belief to critical inquiry, Plato regularly makes it clear
where Socrates doubts, and where Euthyphro – and we – should do likewise. For example,
when Euthyphro exhibits confidence in the veracity of the traditional stories of quarrels
between the gods, Socrates notes that this characterization of the gods would put them in
the same position as human disputants “if they really do have quarrels about right and
wrong, as you say they do” (8D). The key word here is, again, “if.” This and subsequent
instances of classifying statements about the disputes of the gods as assumptions, rather
than as statements to be accepted on the basis of authority and/or tradition, clearly
differentiate Socrates from Euthyphro with respect to their approaches to the kinds of
knowledge claims that Euthyphro routinely makes. Euthyphro professes certainty that the
gods engage in disputes with each other; in fact, he tells Socrates that he knows much more
about those disputes than the ordinary Athenian does (6B). Socrates, on the other hand,
exhibits the intellectual humility appropriate for a professed noon-knower by neither
3
�affirming nor denying this claim but rather regarding it as an assumption and therefore in
need of further investigation.
Critical inquiry depends upon the hypothetical mode championed by Socrates; the
recounting of traditional myths set forth as matters of fact eschews it. Euthyphro evidently
fails to recognize the disjunction between the two in agreeing to submit his beliefs to
critical inquiry. His consent and even encouragement of critical inquiry throughout the
dialogue, while simultaneously preserving confidence in his infallibility with respect to
divine matters, indicates that he has no real understanding of the nature of the
hypothetical realm. He is evidently unaware that submitting his beliefs to critical inquiry
potentially undermines them by converting them into hypothetical statements – that is,
assumptions which could be otherwise. This lack of awareness on Euthyphro’s part appears
to be a byproduct of his confidence in his claims of knowledge, and Plato gives us ample
evidence that this confidence is unwarranted. That evidence includes Euthyphro’s
demonstrably false claim of unerring prophesy, his presumptuous assertion that he is
permitted, indeed expected, to act in the same manner as the king of the gods, and his
manifest inability to present a definition of piety that can satisfy the rigors of critical inquiry.
Euthyphro continues to proclaim confidence in his knowledge of divine matters throughout
the dialogue, and the fact that he is still making this claim as the dialogue approaches its
end (13E) indicates that he has learned little if anything along the way. Socrates’ final
statements to him demonstrate this in several ways, not the least of which is – again – their
hypothetical character. First, he exhorts Euthyphro to tell him the “absolute truth” about
the gods because “if anyone knows, of all mankind, it is you” (15D). This statement, we can
reliably conclude on the basis of Euthyphro’s utter failure to satisfactorily demonstrate his
alleged knowledge, invokes an implicit conclusion based on the logical form known as
modus tollens. The content of that syllogism is this: If anyone knows the truth about the
gods, Euthyphro knows it (as Socrates states); Euthyphro doesn’t know it (as the dialogue
makes abundantly clear); therefore no one knows it. Next, Socrates turns Euthyphro’s claim
to possess religious knowledge into another hypothetical: “If you didn’t know precisely
what is pious and impious, it is unthinkable that...you would ever have moved to prosecute
your aged sire” (15D). This statement implies a sort of modus ponens: after all that has
transpired, Euthyphro should recognize that he does not in fact know what he claims (or
claimed) to know about piety and impiety, the consequence of which is that he should not
have prosecuted his father in accordance with what he thought were the dictates of piety.
The fact that Euthyphro has made no evident progress during the course of the dialogue
leads Socrates to say to him, “I am sure you think you know exactly what is pious and what
4
�is not” (15E). This phrasing acknowledges the fact that Euthyphro continues to think he
knows what he claims to know, although it is by now equally evident that he does not
actually know it. Euthyphro has been shorn of his knowledge claims – not by Socrates, but
by his own shortcomings as disclosed by critical inquiry.
From this examination of the Euthyphro we might be inclined to infer that critical inquiry
and piety are at odds, and that the former has trumped the latter in this dialogue. More
specifically, since it appears that an uncritical piety such as Euthyphro’s cannot be
maintained in the face of critical inquiry, we might wonder whether critical inquiry must
perforce be impious. Such a conclusion would be unwarranted. In order to understand the
proper relationship between the two, we must turn from the Euthyphro to its sequel, both
in time and, we might say, complementarity: the Apology, Plato’s account of Socrates’
defense in court.
Early in the Apology, Socrates endeavors to account for the reputation that has rendered
him subject to prosecution on the grounds of impiety. As he tells the Athenian jury, “I have
gained this reputation, gentlemen, from nothing more or less than a kind of wisdom. What
kind of wisdom do I mean? Human wisdom, I suppose. It seems that I really am wise in this
limited sense” (20D). By way of contrast, concerning “wisdom that is more than human,”
Socrates says, “I certainly have no knowledge of such wisdom” (20E). How, then, does
Socrates know that he has any wisdom at all? Because “the god at Delphi,” presumably
Apollo, had famously told his friend Chaerephon many years earlier that no one was wiser
than Socrates (21A).
In Plato’s account, Socrates’ reaction to the oracle’s declaration is typical: he wonders
about it. As he tells the jury, “I said to myself, ‘What does the god mean? Why does he not
use plain language? I am only too conscious that I have no claim to wisdom, great or small,
so what can he mean by asserting that I am the wisest man in the world?’” (21B). So he
wanders about Athens trying to better understand the truth of the god’s declaration by
asking questions of people who claim to be knowledgeable about various matters. In other
words, Socrates responds to a knowledge claim by wondering about the meaning of the
claim, asserting the insufficiency of his own knowledge, and investigating the claim by
means of critical inquiry – that is, by undertaking the same process he effected with
Euthyphro. The only significant difference is that here, unlike in the Euthyphro, Socrates
seems to take for granted that the oracle’s claim must be true if properly understood; as he
says, the god “cannot be telling a lie” because “that would not be right for him” (21B). In
other words, piety demands that Socrates treat a truth claim by a god differently from a
5
�truth claim by a human being. Nevertheless, intellectual humility and critical inquiry are
present in essentially the same way in both dialogues.
Why, then, does Socrates initiate critical inquiry with his fellow Athenians? A number of
passages in the Apology leave no room for doubt: he sees it a religious quest (“I pursued my
investigation at the god’s command” (22A)). Once Socrates discovers the meaning of the
oracle, namely that “real wisdom is the property of God, and…human wisdom has little or
no value” (23A), his response is “to give aid to the god” by “undertaking service on the
god’s behalf” (23B). This service, which is prominently displayed in numerous other Platonic
dialogues, consists in this: “[W]hen I think that any person is not wise, I try to help the
cause of God by proving that he is not” (23C). He even goes so far as to affirm that “God
appointed me…to the duty of living the philosophic life, examining myself and others”
(28E). Critical inquiry is therefore a religious obligation for Socrates, one that he willingly
takes on even though he, as a mere mortal, does not know exactly what the divine law is –
and, unlike Euthyphro, does not claim to know.
Socrates does not profess complete ignorance about divine matters. Indeed he cannot do
so, for that would render his claim to be undertaking a religious quest nonsensical. The
basic truths about the gods that he claims to know include, for example, that they are
responsible for all the good things that we humans possess (Euthyphro 15A) and that they
cannot lie because it would not be right for them to do so (Apology 21B). But, unlike
Euthyphro, he also believes that our understanding of the nature and activities of the gods
is extremely limited, and that recognition of that limitation is a sign of the proper
intellectual humility which is an essential feature of both piety and human wisdom. And so
Socrates’ wisdom is the result of a religious quest, a demonstration of his piety as well as of
his intellectual humility. This stands in stark contrast with Euthyphro, whose lack of wisdom
is manifest in the opposite traits, as well as of Socrates’ accusers in the Athenian court.
To conclude: In both the Euthyphro and the Apology, Plato demonstrates that Socrates
doubts the traditional stories of the gods not because he is not pious, but because he is. In
conducting his investigations, Socrates provides a model of the proper relationship between
piety and critical inquiry. The lynchpin between them is intellectual humility, which stands
in stark contrast to the vacuous arrogance demonstrated by Euthyphro, as well as by
Socrates’ accusers. In order to follow the model of the quest for knowledge that Plato
proposes and Socrates personifies, one need not practice piety or critical inquiry in precisely
the way that Socrates does; but one must set out on that quest with an uncommon level of
commitment, and with genuine humility. This is where liberal education begins.
6
�
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Piety, knowledge, and critical inquiry in Plato's Euthyphro (with reference to Plato's Apology)
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Julie C. Park
Lecturer, Collegiate Seminar
Saint Mary's College of California
Panel: Religious Texts within the Liberal Arts
Title: Homer's Polytheism
Questions
It is difficult to teach religious books in a liberal arts classroom. The difficulty has to do with
the way they are read outside the classroom, where reading religious books is often a form of
devotion. This devotion assumes a belief in the God of the book, and a faith that the book is true.
Students tend to bring this assumption with them into the classroom. So they have a hard time seeing
the point of reading the books of other religions. Why should they read books they don't think are
true? What is the point of their reading stories about gods in which they do not believe?
One common answer appeals to mutual understanding and respect. Reading the books of
other religions helps students understand and respect other people. This is true. But approaching
religious books in this way prevents us from engaging in an actual dialogue with the books. Rather
than approaching the books as possible sources of truth, this approach reduces them to sources of
interesting information about other people's errors and delusions.
The difficulty is especially acute in the case of Homer. When I teach Homer, students tend to
ask two basic questions. My theist students ask why they should read Homer if they do not believe
in the Homeric gods. And my atheist students ask why they have to read Homer if they don't believe
in any gods at all. If we do not believe in the gods of a religion, how can we engage in a genuine
dialogue with its books? How can we read such books as possible sources of truth?
Two Steps
The first step toward an answer to this question is simple: We have to shift from the question
of belief to the question of understanding. Understanding in the most basic sense is prior to belief.
In order to either believe or disbelieve in a god, we have to first assume a basic understanding of
who or what a god is. This basic understanding may be shared by both believers and unbelievers.
�For example, theists in the Abrahamic traditions affirm the existence of God, and atheists in the
Abrahamic traditions deny the existence of God, but both theists and atheists take for granted an
understanding of the nature of the God whose existence they affirm or deny. Questions of
understanding at this level precede questions of belief or unbelief. This is especially true in reading
Homer, who did not "believe in" the gods in the sense that Christians believe in God. Eva Brann
makes this point in her book, Homeric Moments: "The mode of belief or disbelief is in fact quite
misapplied here. The Homeric gods are not 'believed in'" in the same way that the God of Abraham
requires (Homeric Moments, 36). So the first step is to show our students that, before we can
meaningfully believe or disbelieve in the existence of the Homeric gods, we first have to understand
the nature of the Homeric gods--we have to understand who or what they are.
A second step is to show that to understand Homer we have to suspend our understanding of
divinity--our assumptions about the nature of the gods. If we uncritically assume an Abrahamic
understanding of divinity, for example, we will never be able to take the Homeric gods seriously. A
perfect example of this lack of seriousness is the article on atheism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. The article informs us that the gods of Homer are so far from the God of Abraham that
they are not really gods at all. I quote:
"Atheism" means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God. I shall
here assume that the God in question is that of a sophisticated monotheism. The
tribal gods of the early inhabitants of Palestine are of little or no philosophical
interest... Similarly the Greek and Roman gods were more like mythical heroes and
heroines than like the omnipotent, omniscient and good God postulated by medieval
and modern philosophy. 1
In other words, the gods of Homer are so ungodlike, so unworthy of being taken seriously, that there
is no point even bothering to deny they exist. This is a textbook example of ethnocentric blindness.
We cannot understand Homer if we uncritically take for granted an Abrahamic understanding of the
divine. In order to engage in a dialogue with Homer--to approach Homer as a possible source of
truth--we have to try to explicate and clarify the understanding of divinity implicit in Homer's work.
To do this we have to suspend our assumptions about the divine, and ask very simply: Who
or what is a god in Homer? What for Homer is the essence of the divine?
�The Gods in Homer
When we first start reading Homer we are struck by something strange: Homer considers
divine a number of beings that we don't consider divine at all. First, there are the supernatural beings
who live on Olympus, who to us seem more human than godlike. But second, he sees as "gods" the
kinds of beings that we consider natural phenomena, such as the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and the
winds. And third, he also sees as "gods" the kinds of beings that we would call psychological, such
as Sleep, Dream, Persuasion, Conflict, Panic, Rout, and Grief.
Why does Homer see these beings as gods? What for Homer makes them all divine? What
are the core traits that all these gods share in common?
I think the meaning of divinity, for Homer, is implicit in the epithets he gives to the gods.
Homer uses three main epithets. The first epithet is that the gods are "the immortals." The second
epithet is that they are "the stronger ones." And the third epithet is that the gods are "the givers of
gifts." These epithets point to the three traits that for Homer are essential to divinity.
The first trait is immortality. A being is not divine unless it is immortal.
The second trait is superhuman strength. A being is divine if it is stronger than human
beings, and if human beings are under its power.
The third trait is generosity. A being is divine if it gives to humans what humans cannot give
to themselves. The gods are the source of our gifts and of the givens of human existence.
This is why the Sun is a god: it is immortal; it is stronger than us, and it gives us light. This is
why Sleep is divine: it never dies; it's a power that overcomes us; and it gives us rest and
rejuvenation. This is why Eros is a god: it has been around forever; it's a power that takes possession
of us and drives us insane; and it is something we cannot summon at will, and that comes over us
whether we want it to or not.
This account of the Homeric gods helps students see how the question of understanding
precedes the question of belief. The challenge of Homer is not that we do not believe in the
existence of the Homeric gods. Everyone believes in the existence of the Sun, and of Sleep, and of
�Eros. The challenge of Homer is that he has a different understanding of divinity, and a different
vision of the place of gods in human existence.
So the question is not: Do we believe that the Homeric gods exist?
Instead the question is: How does Homer understand divinity and humanity? And to what
extent can we retrieve and share this understanding? What does this understanding of gods and men
illuminate about human existence? How does it shed light on the world in which we live?
Four Dimensions of Homeric Thought
I would argue that Homer's understanding of the gods has four distinct dimensions. At
different moments he understands the gods in four distinct but related ways. There is an explanatory
dimension of Homer's thought; there is a descriptive dimension; there is an ethical dimenion of
Homeric thinking. And a fourth dimension of Homeric theology I would call contemplative.
Let me go through these four dimension of Homer's thought one at a time.
The Explanatory Dimension of Homer's Thought
The most obvious aspect of Homer's thought is the explanatory dimension. Homer invokes
the gods to explain why events happen as they do. The gods in this sense are the invisible causes of
otherwise inexplicable events. If something happens for no obvious human or natural reason, that
happening is explained as the action of a god.
For example, at the start of The Iliad the Greek soldiers are dying of sickness. Why?
According to Homer, it is not because their food is rotten and they are living in filth. It is because
Apollo is angry that Agamemnon disrespected his priest, and the plague is Apollo's punishment.
Notice that the explanatory dimension of Homeric thought is confined to the Olympian gods.
Homer describes only the Olympian gods as acting in this way--taking the initiative and intervening
in human affairs.2 It is true that the non-Olympian gods, such as Sleep or Dream, also intervene in
human life, but they do so as agents of the Olympians. When Delusion comes over Agamemnon,
�for example, Delusion is acting as the agent of Zeus. Likewise when Eros and Sleep come over
Zeus, for example, they are merely the agents of Aphrodite and Hera. When the West Wind keeps
the fleets at Aulis, it is acting on behalf of Artemis. Homer never attributes agency to anything that
we would call a natural or psychological phenomenon. The Olympian gods are always the cause of
anything extraordinary done by the non-Olympian gods.
Today we find it hard to take seriously this side of Homer's thought. Science offers better
explanations than stories about the gods. If the Greek soldiers got sick, it was probably because they
were living in filth and eating rotten food. If they blamed Apollo for their sickness, it was probably
because they were scapegoating Agamemnon. Gods had nothing to do with it. At the level of
explanatory thought, it seems, we understand the Greeks better than they understood themselves.
I would argue, however, that even in the explanatory dimension, Homer's theology
sometimes holds insights that are worth taking seriously. But to see this we first have to understand
the other dimensions of Homer's thought.
The Descriptive Dimension of Homer's Thought
There is also a descriptive dimension to Homer's thinking about the gods. Homer uses stories
of the gods to describe certain kinds of experience. We often have the experience of powers that
come over us and overcome us, that take possession of us and alter our attunement to the world:
sleep, dream, persuasion, delusion, lust, eros, inspiration, and insight. Under the influence of these
powers, and in light of their presence, the world appears differently to us, and we do things that we
would never do if we were not under their sway. When Homer speaks of the gods, he is sometimes
merely describing these experiences of being subject to powers beyond our control.
The obvious example is Hypnos, which we call sleep. Sleep is a power that comes over us
and overcomes us. We cannot summon it at will, but we cannot resist it for long. When we deprive
ourselves of sleep the world starts to seem crummy and depressing. When we surrender to sleep,
after weeks of deprivation, we wake up and the world seems wonderful again. At the start of each
semester, my students have a hard time understanding how sleep could be seen as a god. But at the
�end of the semester, after too many late nights, they understand that sleep is divine.
Another example is the Muse, the source of what we call "inspiration." When he speaks of
the Muses, Homer is simply naming the powers that inspire great art. We cannot summon these
powers at will, but we can create the conditions under which they are most likely to come over us.
And when inspiration comes to us, it alters our vision and enables us to do what we could never do
through willpower alone. Nietzsche gave a very precise description of this experience in Ecce
Homo.3
A third example is Aphrodite, which we call "sexual attraction." Remember the story that
Homer tells in The Iliad of Aphrodite coming to Helen in the person of her maid, who uses her
words to arouse her desire for Paris. It is clear that the presence of Aphrodite simply stands for the
power of desire. In this story we recognize a description of a universal human experience--the
experience of being overwhelmed with lust for a person one does not respect or even especially like.
A last example is Athena, the name Homer gives to what we call skill or insight. Think of the
time when Athena came to Telemachus in the person of Mentes, an old friend of Odysseus. The
words of Mentes ignited a moment of clarity for Telemachus, who suddenly saw himself and his
situation in a new light: "[S]he left in his spirit determination and courage, and he remembered his
father even more than he had before, and he guessed the meaning, and his heart was full of wonder,
for he thought it was a divinity" (1: 320-323).
This descriptive dimension of Homer's thought has nothing supernatural about it.4 Each of
these stories of the gods simply describes a common and recognizable human experience--the
experience of being overcome by and under the influence of powers beyond our control. Homeric
theology illuminates this part of human existence as much today as it did thousands of years ago.
The Ethical Dimension of Homer's Thought
There is also an ethical dimension to Homer's vision of the gods. The ethical significance of
Homeric theology is hard to see, because the gods do things that are obviously immoral. And not
�just immoral according to our moral code, but immoral according to the morality of Homer himself:
Aphrodite cheats on her husband; Hera lies to Zeus; Athena deceives Pandarus. The Homeric gods
are not morally perfect; if anything they are bad role models for human beings.
But while they are ambiguous with respect to moral behavior, the Olympian gods are
superlative with respect to human excellence. Their home on Olympus, the highest mountain in
Greece, implies that they are "higher" than the other gods, that is, greater in virtue, honor, and
blessings. Each Olympian god exemplifies the highest virtues proper to a specific domain of human
existence. Athena exemplifies superlative wisdom. Aphrodite exemplifies superlative beauty.
Hephaistos exemplifies superlative craftsmanship. Hera exemplifies superlative sovereignty within
the domestic sphere. Together the Olympian gods embody a vision of human life at its highest.
This dimension of Homer's thought is both strange and familiar. It is strange since Homer
obviously values moral rectitude less than excellence. For Homer the highest thing that humans can
aspire to is not righteousness but greatness--doing or being something better than anyone else: a
great warrior; a great athlete; a great beauty; a great poet. But this side of Homer's thought is also
familiar because many people still live by Homer's values: they have a code of morals, but the focus
and meaning of their lives is in their aspiration to greatness. Today this aspect of our lives is largely
obscured by the language of the Abrahamic tradition, which values righteousness over excellence.
Homer's theology is relevant today because it illuminates and clarifies this aspiration to greatness.
Homeric theology also helps to clarify the meaning of devotion. Homer clearly understood
that human beings cannot achieve greatness through willpower alone. In order to do or be
something better than anyone else, we need the gifts of the gods: talent, charisma, inspiration, the
surge of skill and strength that athletes call "flow." We cannot give these powers to ourselves. We
cannot summon the gods at will. But if we devote ourselves to something we love--family,
craftsmanship, music, erotics, or wisdom--if give ourselves to it, if we arrange our lives around it, if
we cultivate its virtues and engage in its practices, we can create the conditions under which it is most
likely that a god will come over us. A musician cannot summon inspiration at will, but if he devotes
his life to music, then inspiration is more likely to come. An athelete cannot choose to be in the
�flow, but if she devotes herself to a sport then moments will come when she effortlessly performs at
the highest level. A philosopher cannot make herself wise, but if she devotes her life to the search
for wisdom then at times wisdom may come as if of its own accord. To be devoted to a god is to
cultivate the conditions under which the god may come over you. To achieve greatness, we each
have to sense what we love most, what inspires and enthuses us, and we have to choose it and devote
ourselves to it with an undivided heart.
The ethical dimension of Homer's thought is illuminating in another way. Each of the
Olympian gods exemplifies the good proper to a distinct domain of human existence. All the
Olympian gods are equal--no god or goddess is higher than the others. And the gods sometimes
come in conflict with each other. If we take the descriptive dimension of Homer's thought seriously,
this means that to be human is to be drawn towards a plurality of goods, which are all equal, but
which may come into conflict with each other. Erotic love is good, marriage is good, wisdom is
good, but these three goods are not necessarily conducive to one another. At the deepest level of his
thought, Homer offers us a vision of human life: to be human is to be drawn toward and torn
between a plurality of goods.
I think this vision of human existence is implicit in the myth of the judgment of Paris. Three
goddesses--Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite--each claimed to be the most beautiful, and asked Paris to
judge between them. Each offered Paris gifts: Hera offered power; Athena offered wisdom;
Aphrodite offered him beauty. Later, when Helen met Paris she had to make the same choice: she
could choose domestic life (Hera) and wisdom (Athena); or she could choose to leave her family and
elope with a beautiful stranger (Aphrodite). Her choice mirrored the choice made by Paris when he
judged the three goddesses. The story says: to be human is to have to choose between different and
conflicting goods.
At this point we can now see more clearly the explanatory dimension of Homer's thought.
Since the story of the judgment of Paris is about the causes of the Trojan War, it is also part of the
explanatory dimension of Homer's thought. The story explains the origins of the war, not in a
pseudo-scientific way, but in a mythical way. It says the Trojan War started because humans and
�gods tried to exclude Eris, the goddess of conflict or strife, from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis.
Eris came to the wedding anyway, took revenge for her exclusion by overcoming the gods and
setting them against each other. This story is not a superstition but a myth. And the myth points to a
real insight, which is that Eris, Strife or Conflict, will not be excluded. The myth tells us that Strife is
a god--a power to humans are subject, and which we fail to recognize at our peril. If we try to
exclude conflict from our lives--if we don't make a place for conflict--then conflict will overcome
and destroy us.
The Contemplative Dimension of Homer's Thought
There is a fourth side to Homer's discourse on the gods. Homer often shows the gods on
Olympus contemplating human life. The classic example occurs in Book 17 of the Iliad, when Zeus
looks down the immortal horses that belong to Achilles, and the warriors fighting over the dead
body of Patroclus. Zeus says to the horses:
Poor wretches, why then did we ever give you to the lord Peleus, a mortal man, and
you yourselves are immortal and ageless? Only so that among unhappy men you
also might be grieved? Since among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on
it there is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is (17: 442-447)
By telling a human story from the perspective of the gods, Homer invites us to imaginatively put
ourselves in their place, to contemplate human existence as though from above and outside human
life, to see our ephemeral lives from the perspective of eternity.5
Goethe recognized the contemplative dimension of Homer in a letter he wrote to Schiller in
1798. He wrote:
Your letter found me...in the Iliad, to which I always return with delight. It is always
as if one were in a balloon, far above everything earthly; as if one were truly in that
intermediate zone where the gods float hither and thither. (Hadot, PWL 238)
The Iliad has the power to raise us above everyday life and let us contemplate human existence as
though from above and from the outside. In his book, Poetry and Truth, Goethe wrote that this
power is essential to all true poetry.
True poetry can be recognized by the fact that, like a secular Gospel, through the
�inner cheerfulness and outward pleasure it procures us, it can free us from the
mundane burdens which weigh upon us. Like a hot-air balloon, it lifts us up into
higher regions, along with the ballast that clings to us, and lets us see, from a birdseye-view, the mad labyrinths of the world spread out before us. (Hadot, PWL 239)
I think that Goethe here is only half right. It is true that the Iliad lifts us up and lets us contemplate
human life as though from Olympus. But it also shows us the world from the perspective of
Achilles, who knows he has only a few more weeks to live. The emotional power of the poem
comes from this stark juxtaposition of perspectives, so that it lets us see the world from the
perspective of eternity and from the perspective of men on the threshold of death.
Conclusion
Let me conclude with my original question: How to teach religious texts in a liberal arts
classroom? How can we approach texts from other religious traditions as possible sources of insight?
My answer is that we have to take two steps. First, we have to shift our focus from questions
of belief to questions of understanding. Second, we have to suspend our inherited understanding of
the divine, and to be open to radically different views about the meaning of divinity. If we approach
Homer in this way, we find that his theology illuminates human life in a number of ways.
First, Homer's descriptions of divine possession illuminate a kind of human experience--the
experience of being overcome by powers that exceed our control, in whose light the world appears
differently to us, and under whose influence we act in ways we would never act on our own.
Second, Homer's stories of the gods convey not just a general ethos but a number of specific
ethical insights. They illuminate the aspiration to greatness, our inability to reach greatness through
our efforts alone, the meaning of devotion, and the tragic necessity of having to decide what to
devote ourselves to. These insights belong to an ethos that illuminates a condition of human
existence--that to be human means to be drawn toward and torn between a plurality of equal but
conflicting goods.
Third, the figures of the Olympian gods articulate the power of human self-transcendence-our power to see human life as though from outside and above, from the perspective of eternity, and
also to see life as though from the end of life and the threshold of death.
�By shifting our focus from questions of belief to questions of understanding, by suspending
our assumptions about the meaning of divinity, by opening ourselves to and making our own a
different understanding of divinity, we can approach religious texts from other traditions as partners
in a genuine dialogue, that is, as sources of genuine self-understanding and truth.
Notes
1.
Smart, J. J. C., "Atheism and Agnosticism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring
2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/atheismagnosticism/).
2.
A non-Olympian god in Homer hardly ever acts on his or her own initiative. One exception
is when Odysseus swims ashore in the Odyssey and the river listens to him. So the non-Olympian
god can sometimes have some kind of agency. Eris, or Strife, is also an exception, one that, I would
argue, proves the rule.
3.
Nietzsche writes, "Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of
what poets of strong ages called inspiration?... The concept of revelation, in the sense that something
suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes
and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes,
one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly
formed" (Ecce Homo, p. 72).
4.
Eva Brann similarly argues, "nothing is ever done that could not have been done by the
humans themselves" (Homeric Moments, 43).
5.
See also Book 1: 498-499, Book 5: 753-754, and Book 11: 79-83.
Secondary Sources
Eva Brann, Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (2002)
Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (1985)
Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, All Things Shining (2011)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as quoted in Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995)
Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero: In 24 Hours (2013)
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Seth Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer's Iliad (1984)
Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Universe, the Gods, and Men (1999)
�
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"What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers
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Homer's polytheism
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Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Julie Park 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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