1 20 39 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f5dd24448212878cb4c7eaffc4f96e5b.pdf 72de20d7f198ec7b9f7f532433dceefb PDF Text Text Education of the Regime and the Soul in The Federalist∗ Charles C. Claunch∗∗ Abstract: As a general proposition, any regime requires at least some of its citizens to think and behave in ways that, at a minimum, do not undermine the regime. That requirement points to the need for education for at least some of the regime’s citizens. In presenting arguments for ratification of the U.S. Constitution, however, the authors of The Federalist make no explicit argument for such education. Despite this omission, The Federalist provides the basis for an education in citizenship in two respects. First, The Federalist, as a work of public, reasoned advocacy, teaches it readers not only the need for the Constitution and the meanings (or possible meanings) of it provisions, but how to think about it and how to act in the constitutional regime to be created under it. The authors intended The Federalist to be a continuing basis for thought, conversation, and action after ratification. Second, by dealing explicitly with what we now call the doctrine of judicial review, the authors of The Federalist made explicit the idea of a small group of specially-selected people voiding acts of the legislative and executive branches of the government. This role of the federal judiciary may be recognized as that of teacher. The federal courts’ interpretations of the Constitution and the law are the judges’ teachings, and the officers of the political branches and the regime’s citizens are the judges’ students. The Federalist and the work of judges serve as an education for governing ourselves as individual souls and as a Constitutional regime. This essay has its origins in a master’s essay I wrote for St. John’s College in Santa Fe in 2005.1 It’s a pleasure to revisit this place with a continuation of work that I started here almost ten years ago. The title of that thesis was “State and Soul in The Federalist.” The title of my essay today reflects better terminology – “regime” instead of “state” – and a concentration on and expansion of the final section of that essay. Very briefly: in “State and Soul in The Federalist,” I explored what is required of a citizen in the conception of the U.S. Constitution held by the authors of The Federalist. ∗ Presented at “What Is Liberal Education For? A Conference at St. John’s College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe Campus” on 16 October 2014. ∗∗ Charles C. Claunch is a Ph.D. student in the Institute of Philosophic Studies of the Braniff School of Liberal Arts and in the Department of Politics, University of Dallas, Irving, Texas. He is an adjunct professor of government at Tarrant County College, Fort Worth, Texas, and at Richland College, Dallas, Texas. He is also a Texas attorney and a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law (J.D., 1998). He completed both graduate degrees offered by St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico (M.A.L.A., 2004; M.A.E.C., 2005). 1 Charles C. Claunch, “State and Soul in The Federalist,” (M.A. Liberal Arts thesis, St. John’s College, Santa Fe, 2005). �2 Following up on the authors’ suggestion that government is “the greatest of all reflections on human nature,” I used the Constitutional regime described in The Federalist to understand both that regime and the individual “Constitutional soul.”2 In that original essay, I made the following broad points: 1. Power can be exercised legitimately by all three branches of the Constitutional regime, but the judiciary can void acts of the legislature and the executive; we call this today “judicial review.” This suggests, correspondingly, that the individual can use judgment, will, and force (to use the terms of The Federalist)3 but that judgment can exercise a certain kind of control over will and force.4 2. The necessary and proper clause5 suggests personal liberty with a necessarily broad reach and the supremacy clause6 suggests the acceptability of one’s acts, according to one’s judgment, as long as they are compatible with one’s responsibilities.7 3. The discussion of the control of faction in No. 10 of The Federalist suggests control of individual passions through (a) the development by the individual of a variety of interests, none of which motivate his actions completely but all of which engage his attention to some moderate degree, and (b) the reduction of time and energy devoted to any single interest, reducing the chances of waste or of indulging in passions with regard to any single interest.8 2 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Robert Scigliano (New York: Modern Library, 2000) (“The Federalist”), No. 51, 331. 3 Ibid., No. 78, 496. 4 Claunch, 2-6. 5 U.S. Constitution, art. 1, sec. 8, cl. 18. 6 Ibid., art. 6, cl. 2. 7 Claunch, 6-10. 8 The Federalist, No. 10, 53-61; Claunch, 11-15. �3 4. Appropriate judicial review and political acts mutually affect each other. Appropriate judicial review provides a reasoned sense of the limits of Constitutional power in various circumstances, and Constitutionally-minded deliberations, policy statements, and legal defenses justifying the political branches’ acts provide grist for the mill of a well-informed and wellreasoned judicial review. This suggests that similarly, individual judgment and one’s acts of will and force mutually affect each other. Individual judgment is used to determine the extent and responsibilities of one’s individual liberty, and in doing so it governs one’s acts of will and force; one’s acts of will and force and the reasons for them provide material on which individual judgment can operate.9 5. The actions of the Constitutional convention, the ratification of the Constitution, and the various methods of Constitutional amendment suggest the wisdom of adoption of new or revised individual standards in the presence of outmoded or inadequate standards. They should be changed greatly, however, only when necessary; generally, they should be changed only incrementally. The defense by the authors of The Federalist of Constitutional drafting, ratification, and amendment is an expression of their confidence in the capacity of the people, together and as individuals, to use judgment, will, and force to assess and change standards in a harmony that makes good use of liberty.10 6. The authors of The Federalist present the Constitution as an invitation to and a means for the people, individually and collectively, to rise above their usual selves at the same time as it tries to protect them from their failure to do so. This rise, however, requires an understanding of 9 Claunch, 15-21. 10 Ibid., 21-27. �4 the Constitution and of the individual. Both the existence and the lessons of The Federalist indicate that the authors believe that such understanding can be taught and learned.11 All of these broad points were developed to lead to the idea that The Federalist and judges play important roles in the education of the Constitutional regime and the citizen of that regime. I turn now to the final section of the thesis and my expansion of it for our conference today.12 The Constitution makes no explicit provision for, and The Federalist makes no explicit argument for, education. Despite the omission of an explicit discussion, however, The Federalist provides the basis for an education in citizenship in two respects. First, the authors of The Federalist, as a work of public, reasoned advocacy, teach their readers the need for the Constitution and the meanings or possible meanings of its provisions and how to think about it and how to act in the Constitutional regime to be created under it. With their detailed arguments, the authors ask their readers to think deeply and to assess or make cogent counterarguments concerning their government. In particular, the arguments of the authors regarding the meanings of the more contentious provisions make it clear that after ratification those provisions’ meanings and implications will have to be worked out in practice through day-to-day operation of the government. The thrust of The Federalist is that the Constitution allows its meanings and implications to unfold in time, within limits. Beyond assisting ratification, by making their arguments, they intended to shape future debates by providing a continuing basis for thought, conversation, and action after ratification. 11 Ibid., 27. 12 Ibid., 28-32. �5 Second, by dealing explicitly with what we now call the doctrine of judicial review, the authors of The Federalist made explicit the idea of a small group of specially-selected people voiding acts of the legislative and executive branches of the government, at times against the immediate will of the people but in conformance with the will of the people as expressed in the Constitution. Despite their argument that the judiciary is the “least dangerous” of the branches, the actual power of judicial review is clear enough from the authors’ discussion as a whole.13 If the judiciary’s interpretation of the law is to be called rule by an unelected elite, it is very indirect rule, practiced through decisions in cases raised by legislative and executive acts and subject to limitation and change through amendments to the Constitution. If it is to be called politics, it is an attenuated politics, filtered through the formal requirements of explaining decisions in terms of law, and again subject to limitation and change through Constitutional amendment. As an alternative to these negative characterizations, the role of the federal judiciary may be recognized positively as that of teacher. The federal courts’ interpretations of the Constitution and the law are the judges’ teachings, and the officers of the political branches and the regime’s citizens are their students. The judges and their interpretations are one source of understanding of how we, as a Constitutional regime and as individuals in it, may govern ourselves. Judges are fallible, like all other humans, and therefore their judging and their teachings are liable to fallibility. Their isolation from the political branches and from the politics of the people cannot isolate them from their own humanity. Judges must have and are expected to exercise the same qualities for which the authors of The Federalist hoped in the people’s choices as political agents—but the necessity of isolation means that they are expected to have the same 13 The Federalist, No. 78, 496. �6 weaknesses as the rest of us, too. The issue is whether judges can be expected, in their isolation from politics, to turn away from personal passions and illegitimate interests to a reasonable degree, or whether they should be expected to indulge them without adequate restraint. The mechanism described by the authors to prevent a concentration of power in one department in which “the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional right of the place,” has only limited applicability to the judiciary.14 The quality of ambition required by this competition among the branches seems incompatible with the particular quality of public-spiritedness required of judges. By participating in such institutional ambition contests, judges would risk setting themselves up as a third political branch that is concerned primarily with policy like the other two branches. In keeping with the unique nature of the role and power of the judiciary with respect to the other two governmental branches, the measures appropriate to assist judges in performing their role are different than the measures designed for politicians. To work successfully as judges and teachers, judges must exercise a self-control that is analogous to the governmental self-control that they exert on other parts of the government. Most crucially among government agents, judges must confine themselves to acts of will and force that lie within the boundaries imposed by their Constitutional positions. Their isolation improves their opportunity to internalize those constraints, but it does not give them the required means. Judges must have the will and the force to do what judgment tells them that they must do and to refrain from doing what it tells them that they must not do. They must direct and teach without dictating. If they are successful at self-control, they teach the remainder of the government and the people Constitutional self-control by exposition and example through their public, reasoned opinions and through the self-control that gives rise to those opinions. Thus, 14 Ibid., No. 51, 331. �7 well-behaved judges are also a source of our understanding of how we may govern ourselves as individuals. To illustrate well-behaved federal judges displaying such judicial self-control, I present two examples of relevant judicial teaching among many attractive candidates. The first example is Justice James Wilson’s seriatim opinion in Chisholm v. Georgia.15 The second example is the introductory part of the opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., in National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) v. Sebelius.16 Chisholm presented this question: was the State of Georgia subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court in a suit brought by two South Carolina citizens against Georgia to collect a debt? The relevant Constitutional provision stated that “[t]he Judicial Power [vested in the U.S. Supreme Court] shall extend … to Controversies … between a State and Citizens of another State ….”17 Taken literally, the Constitution granted the Court jurisdiction over states in suits like the Chisholm suit. But in answering objections to this provision in The Federalist, Publius argued that [i]t is inherent in the nature of sovereignty, not to be amenable to the suit of an individual without its consent …. [T]he exemption, as one of the several attributes of sovereignty, is now enjoyed by the government of every state in the union. Unless, therefore, there is a surrender of this immunity in the plan of the convention [the proposed Constitution], it will remain with the states, and the danger intimated must remain merely ideal…. [T]o ascribe to the federal courts, by mere implication, and in destruction of a pre-existing right of the state governments, a power which would involve such a consequence, would be altogether forced and unwarrantable.18 15 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793). 16 567 U.S. ________ (2012) (opinion of Roberts, C.J.) (slip opinion). Parts of this opinion – though not the introduction discussed here – were the opinion of the Court. 17 U.S. Constitution, art. 3, sec. 2, cl. 1. 18 The Federalist, No. 81, 521-22. �8 In seriatim opinions, four out of five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Justice Wilson, made the “forced and unwarrantable” inference dismissed by Publius, deciding that the Court had jurisdiction over Georgia, with one justice dissenting.19 Rather than starting with the relevant clause of the U.S. Constitution and its implications, Wilson started with the much broader question, “Do the people of the United States form a nation?” Wilson’s opinion in Chisholm is a rich display of learning in philosophy and law, and it can be appreciated as a lesson to the public about how to think about what ratifying the Constitution meant. Amusingly, Wilson used the wording of a toast to make a profound Constitutional point. He noted that the toast is given in the form, “[t]he United States,” instead of “[t]he People of the United States,” and that this reflects a confusion between the artificial person, the United States, and the natural person, the people of the United States, who “spoke it [the United States] into existence.”20 In adopting the Constitution, the people – including the people of Georgia speaking as part of the people of the United States – were capable of vesting and did in fact vest judicial power over states, including Georgia, in federal courts.21 Among the lines of argument that Wilson followed, I focus here on his treatment of the scope of Georgia’s sovereignty as a state of the United States. He argued that the citizens of Georgia, when “they acted upon the large scale of the Union,” acted “as a part of the ‘People of the United States’” and did not surrender their sovereign power to Georgia; rather, with respect 19 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 429-50 (seriatim opinion of Iredell, J., dissenting), 450-53 (seriatim opinion of Blair, J.), 453-66 (seriatim opinion of Wilson, J.), 466-69 (seriatim opinion of Cushing, J.), 469-79 (seriatim opinion of Jay, C.J.). 20 Wilson, James, Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793) (seriatim opinion), in Vol. 1, The Collected Works of James Wilson, eds. Kermit Hall and Mark David Hall (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 362. 21 Ibid., 362. �9 to the purposes of the Union, they retained their sovereign power to themselves.22 Consequently, the State of Georgia was not a sovereign state with regard to the Union.23 Later in his opinion, Wilson argued that the Court’s decision of the case at hand was one of purposes of the United States, so that Georgia was not sovereign for the purpose of the suit. He further argued at length that the people of the United States intended to form a national government for national purposes, complete with legislative, executive, and judicial power.24 Contrary to Publius, Wilson argues that to have allowed in this complete national scheme an exception for states to consent to be sued would “be repugnant to our very existence as a nation[.]”25 This is an instance in which Wilson’s teaching with regard to nationhood differed from that of Publius. As noted above, Publius saw nothing repugnant to the Constitutional regime for states to retain sovereign immunity. Only after following several other lines of argument to reach the conclusion that Georgia was subject to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in the suit (and I leave the others aside in the present essay) does Wilson turn to the meaning of the specific relevant text of the Constitution. “[C]ould this strict and appropriated language, describe, with more precise accuracy, the cause now depending before the tribunal?”26 The question is rhetorical, and the answer, to Wilson, obviously negative. Note that with respect the Constitutional text, Wilson and Publius taught two different but reasonable ways of reading the grant of power. Wilson read the grant strictly, requiring no additional language to deprive the states of the relevant aspect of sovereign 22 Ibid., 355 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 362-66. 25 Ibid., 365. 26 Ibid., 365-66. �10 immunity, while Publius read the grant in the context of the states’ historical powers, understanding it to be limited tacitly by the states’ sovereign immunity absent specific language denying that immunity to the states. Like the authors of The Federalist, Wilson explained the reasons for his opinion publicly and clearly, teaching the people a particular method of thinking about themselves and the Constitution that they had adopted. It was left to the people and their elected representatives to decide whether Wilson’s lessons, the lessons of The Federalist, or some other lessons would be accepted. In this particular case, the people – through their elected representatives in the Congress and in the requisite number of states – rejected his teaching and that of the Supreme Court majority. In 1794 the Congress proposed and in 1794 and 1795 the requisite number of state legislatures ratified the Eleventh Amendment to exempt a state from suits by citizens of another state or by citizens or subjects of a foreign state. This rapid response to the Court’s decision in Chisholm is itself an illustration of the capacity of the people, acting through their elected representatives, to react to federal judicial decisions. Chief Justice Roberts’s more recent opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius was a much more direct example of judicial teaching.27 In the first six pages, Roberts was obviously teaching his readers certain aspects of the judiciary’s relationship to the political branches, the people, and the Constitution. He began his lesson by pointing out that “[i]n our federal system, the National Government possesses only limited powers; the States and the people retain the remainder,” and by quoting Chief Justice Marshall’s observation that the extent of the powers granted to the federal government “will probably continue to arise, as long as our system shall exist.”28 “Resolving this controversy [the issue at hand] requires us to 27 National Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. ________ (2012) (slip opinion) (“NFIB”); NFIB, opinion of Roberts, C.J. 28 NFIB, opinion of Roberts, C.J., 2. �11 examine both the limits of the Government’s power, and our own limited role in policing those boundaries.”29 Our concern here is primarily with Roberts’s examination of the Court’s role in enforcing the limits of the federal government’s powers. Roberts argued that the Supreme Court reads Constitutional grants of power to the federal government “permissively” because it is reluctant to void acts of elected federal officials. In Roberts’s view of the Court’s role, the Court should void such an act only when the absence of Constitutional authority to pass the act (or, by extension, the absence of Constitutional authority to perform an executive act) is clearly demonstrated.30 “[Policy] decisions are entrusted to the Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”31 On the other hand, according to Roberts, “[o]ur deference in matters of policy cannot, however, become abdication on matters of law…. [T]here can be no question that it is the responsibility of this Court to enforce the limits on federal power by striking down acts of Congress that transgress those limits.”32 By logical extension, Roberts’s argument extends to voiding executive acts that transcend Constitutional limits, too. Aside from his obvious teaching of the role of the people and of elected officials in the Constitutional regime, Roberts’s argument implies that the Supreme Court and the federal courts generally have an educational role. When an issue is presented for decision by a court, that court must decide which Constitutional grants and limits on federal power are relevant to the issue, and it must explain the reasons for that decision to the public. The court must then decide whether the 29 Ibid., 2. 30 Ibid., 6. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. �12 legislative or executive act at issue is a transgression of Constitutional limits, again publicly explaining the reasons for the decision. The fact that Roberts explains the role of the Court strongly implies that he understands that for the Court to be seen to be staying out of policy decisions and to be seen as making legitimate Constitutional decisions, it must explain its decisions publicly and credibly. Going beyond such limited efforts to retain credibility, Roberts’s teaching points to the Court’s role in educating the public and government officials about the Court’s responsibilities with regard to policy judgments and Constitutional judgments. Careful delineation of the policy and Constitutional questions and careful observance by judges of their responsibilities with respect to those questions serve to teach the public Constitutional and personal self-control. It is entirely possible, of course, that the Court can make a policy judgment by mistaking it for or disguising it as a Constitutional judgment, and it has been accused of doing so (e.g., in NFIB v. Sebelius). The value of public explanations, as noted in the discussion of Wilson and Chisholm, is that they provide material that government officials and the public can use to make their own judgments in accepting or rejecting their judges’ teachings. As the authors of The Federalist point out, if judges fail in self-control, the last resort lies in the people themselves.33 Do people need to be made ready for such responsibility, and if so, how? According to the authors of The Federalist, men require government “because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.”34 Free people require more than the constraining Constitutional regime described in The Federalist; they require self-control. The authors of The Federalist appeal to a capacity among their readers to 33 The Federalist, No. 51, 331-32. 34 Ibid., No. 15, 91. �13 consider their arguments. Individuals must learn, or they must be taught, even that preliminary skill, and, as the foregoing discussion suggests, much more is required of Constitutional citizens. They must have the capacity to choose their agents well and to observe and judge them carefully. To observe and judge the behavior of political officers and judges with respect to the Constitution, an individual must understand the dynamic of legislative and executive action and judicial review as they relate to his liberty so that he may act in his rationally-directed and rationally-constrained interests. The Constitutional regime requires self-constrained citizens who are capable of establishing and maintaining a government that can constrain them when necessary and a government that in turn can exercise and demonstrate power responsibly by exercising and demonstrating self-restraint. The Constitutional regime and the Constitutional citizen must mutually shape and sustain each other. The Federalist is a significant feature of that mutual shaping and sustaining, speaking to the people for a conception of the Constitution and providing a model for some of the continuing requirements of citizenship. The judiciary, as it plays its unique role in the Constitutional regime as intermediary between the people and their legislative and executive agents, speaking for the Constitution to the people and their agents and providing examples and explanations for the continuing requirements of government, is also a significant feature of that mutual shaping and sustaining.35 The Federalist and the work of judges serve as an education for governing ourselves as individual souls and as a Constitutional regime. 35 “It is far more rational to suppose, that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and their legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.” The Federalist, No. 78, 498. �14 Works Cited Claunch, Charles C. “State and Soul in The Federalist.” M.A. Liberal Arts thesis. St. John’s College, Santa Fe, 2005. Chisholm v. Georgia. 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793). Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and James Madison. The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States. Edited by Robert Scigliano. New York: Modern Library, 2000. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. 567 U.S. _______ (2012). Slip opinion. Roberts, John R., Jr. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. 567 U.S. _______ (2012) (opinion). Slip opinion. Wilson, James. Chisholm v. Georgia. 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793) (seriatim opinion). In Vol. 1, Collected Works of James Wilson. Edited by Kermit Hall and Mark David Hall. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007. � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 14 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 Education of the regime and the soul in The Federalist Description An account of the resource Paper presented October 16, 2014 by Charles Claunch at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Claunch, Charles 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 Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-16 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 Federalist. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004524 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/15d483e71169580f1e203bbf174b8dc4.pdf 343fe9fd9badf212c7c779dbc3d39de1 PDF Text Text The Reformation of Philosophy and the Cultivation of Taste: An Interpretation of Hume’s Essays by Derek Duplessie This paper will, by way of an examination of Hume’s Essays, endeavor to relate Hume’s critique of philosophy and his efforts to supply a new foundation for the sciences to his endorsement of the study of liberal arts. Of particular relevance here is Hume’s essay, “The Sceptic.” The title of the essay immediately confronts the reader with a difficulty: does “the sceptic” designate the topic of the essay, the posture of the author of the essay, or both? Although the essay’s title suggests that the essay itself might continue on to adumbrate the characterizing features of a particular philosophic school and its constituents—this essay does, after all, appear alongside essays entitled The Platonist, The Stoic, and The Epicurean—it is quickly made manifest that the essay will be concerned with articulating the grounds for skepticism regarding philosophy in general. What, then, are those deficiencies of philosophy which recommend a skeptical disposition towards the entire enterprise? Hume’s first and, perhaps, primary critique of the philosophers can be expressed as follows: Philosophers err in their failure to recognize the basic incongruity of the boundedness of human speculation on the one hand, and the vast multiplicity of nature’s processes on the other. In its attempt to provide an articulation of the natural whole, philosophy in fact obfuscates nature through its demand that the great variety of natural phenomena be artificially organized under a small set of rational formulae. The philosopher’s treatment of human life serves as a test case for or, perhaps, as the most conspicuous instantiation of this error. According to Hume, the philosopher fails 1 �to pay due notice to the great variety of inclinations manifest in human nature in his determined insistence that “his own pursuits are always…the most engaging, the objects of his passion the most valuable, and the road which he pursues the only one that leads to happiness” (Pg. 95). The philosopher’s failure to recognize the great diversity of human inclinations causes him to prematurely and dogmatically affirm the philosophic life as the best life, precisely because it is the life best suited to his particular temperament. According to Hume’s analysis, philosophy yields but one principle that can be considered “certain and undoubted”: “There is nothing, in itself, valuable or despicable, desirable or hateful, beautiful or deformed; but that these attributes arise from the particular constitution and fabric of human sentiment and affection” (Pg. 97). It turns out, then, that the cardinal philosophic insight is precisely that which Hume faults the philosophers for overlooking in the opening paragraphs of the essay. Hume likens the diversity of experiences of the “desirable and hateful, beautiful and deformed” to the diversity of judgments with respect to food, and to the privilege which a lover accords to his beloved, and a parent to his child. The insight into the subjectivity of such judgments—into the phenomenon of “taste”—compels us to wonder whether philosophy can make use of this insight in its onward march? Or, can philosophy as pursuit of the universal be modified so as to account for the particularity of human tastes? Hume ventures an answer to this question, noting in the first place the fundamental difference between natural science and mathematics on the one hand and the “science” of the beautiful and the ugly on the other. To illustrate the point, Hume describes the cast of mind appropriate to the study of astronomy. He writes, “If I examine 2 �the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, I endeavor to give them, in my conception, the same relations that they bear towards each other in the heavens” (Pg. 99). In the case of natural science, there is a real, if elusive, standard against which the truth or falsity of the mind’s determinations can be brought into relation. The relationship of the human spectator to the object is markedly different in the case of the beautiful and the ugly, the desirable and the odious. Unlike those natural bodies which are the object of natural science, aesthetic and moral “objects” cannot be studied with a disinterested gaze, since their very apprehension occasions pleasure and pain. The being of these objects depends upon their being a certain way for us—pleasure and pain, praise and blame always supervene with the experience of these aesthetic and moral objects. Whereas the mind can make use of a natural standard in its pursuit of natural objects, the mind in pursuit of aesthetic objects must recognize that the attribution of aesthetic and moral significance is made possible as a result of the sentiment of the subject, and that “this sentiment must depend upon the particular fabric or structure of the mind, which enables such particular forms to operate in such a particular manner, and produces a sympathy or conformity between the mind and its objects” (Pg. 100, emphasis added). The repeated invocation particularity in this discussion once again gestures towards the earlier mentioned defect of philosophy—in its clumsy effort to apply universal principles to particular instances, it fails to recognize, and therefore to account for, the particular as particular. To illustrate the insufficiency of an excessively ratiocinating or universalizing account of the beautiful—of an account which fails to collapse the sentiment of the 3 �subject and the aesthetic object—Hume describes the mathematician who reads the Aeneid and succeeds in understanding every detail of Aeneas’ voyage yet manages to remain ignorant of its beauty. Hume writes, “He knew, therefore, every thing in the poem: but he was ignorant of its beauty, because the beauty, properly speaking, lies not in the poem, but in the sentiment or taste of the reader.” The mathematician is capable of understanding everything and nothing about the poem simultaneously. The beautiful will remain forever elusive to any inquirer who seeks to locate it in the character of the object alone without considering the way in which the object, if it is in fact an aesthetic object, is conditioned by the peculiar passions of the subject who assigns the epithet, “beautiful or deformed, desirable or odious.” A turn to the passions ends up being the natural way forward in the wake of Hume’s treatment of philosophy’s shortcomings, since as Hume has already indicated, the passions are at the center of both phenomena that philosophy fails to capture: philosophy fails both to notice and to account for the phenomenon of taste, or in other words, for the multiplicity of human inclinations. Likewise, philosophy fails to account for the phenomenon of beauty because it seeks the principle of beauty in the object rather than in the subject. Philosophy’s failure on both accounts would seem to have much to do with its neglect of the passions—philosophy cannot account for the particularity of inclinations and tastes because it cannot account for the particularity of the passions, and philosophy cannot account for the beautiful, because it cannot account for the subjective passions which transform a common object into an aesthetic object. So at this point in the essay, having already indicated the bankruptcy of every universalizing, object-oriented account of beauty, Hume’s focus shifts towards “passion” 4 �and “enjoyment.” He writes, “All the difference, therefore, between one man and another, with regard to life, consists either in the passion, or in the enjoyment: and these differences are sufficient to produce the wide extremes of happiness and misery.” The character of passion and enjoyment is, then, apparently the key to understanding the very diversity of human inclinations that eludes the philosophers. Recall Hume’s earlier claim that the “infirmity” of philosophers is most conspicuous “in their reasonings concerning human life, and the methods of attaining happiness” (Pg. 95). This riddle can evidently be solved only through meditating on the play of particular passions and the objects towards which are affixed. Despite the skeptical posture that Hume assumes towards the attempt to apply universal principles to human life, he nevertheless provides a general, if “imperfect sketch” of the passions as they relate to human happiness. According to him, happiness demands that our passions be neither too violent nor too remiss. In addition to this desideratum, enjoyment requires a suitable object. Hume writes, “But where the temper is the best disposed for any enjoyment, the object is often wanting: and in this respect, the passions, which pursue external objects, contribute not so much to happiness as those which rest in ourselves; since we are neither so certain of attaining such objects, nor so secure in possessing them. A passion for learning is preferable, with regard to happiness…” (Pg. 102). Even a moderate temper cannot guarantee enjoyment if that temper is directed towards objects outside of the self—an external focus creates a space for the intervention of fortune’s capricious hand. Much of the remainder of the essay is concerned with enumerating the reasons for philosophy’s incapacity to directly bring about happiness through its instruction. Hume 5 �imagines a man naturally endowed with a “perverse frame of mind” who possesses none of the social passions, is unmoved by an affection for virtue and humanity, and has no particular desire for the applause and esteem of other men. Regarding this unfortunate human type, Hume writes, “I know not how I should address myself to such a one, or by what arguments I should endeavour to reform him…My philosophy affords no remedy in such a case…but then I ask, if any other philosophy can afford a remedy…Experience will soon convince us of the contrary” (Pg. 104). On the basis of this understanding of the utter impotence of philosophic principles to serve as a catalyst for the transformation and refinement of the passions, Hume concludes, “I will venture to affirm, that, perhaps, the chief benefit which results from philosophy, arises in an indirect manner, and proceeds more from its secret insensible influence, than from its immediate application” (Pg. 104). Philosophy’s beneficial effects can be harvested only through engaging in philosophy, not through the appropriation of any philosophic doctrine. To clarify this point, it will be necessary to say a bit more about the specific ways in which participating in philosophy can have a salutary effect upon the passions. Hume’s most explicit statement on the issue goes as follows: It is certain, that a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts softens and humanizes the temper, and cherishes those fine emotions, in which true virtue and honour consists. (Pg. 104-105) Notice, in the first place, that Hume’s discussion has for the moment substituted out philosophy for the science and liberal arts more generally. Serious study of the arts and sciences, by tempering the violent passions, reinforces the virtues that make that life possible to begin with. 6 �The discussion once again turns to address philosophy in particular. The difficulty with philosophy as a solution to the problem of human happiness is that, as beneficial as its indirect effects tend to be, philosophy rarely can rest satisfied with affecting circumstances only indirectly. Philosophy all too often transfigures itself into a set of rigid doctrines that, at best, have no effect upon the passions and, at worst, eradicate the good passions along with the bad, thereby standing in the way of the attainment of happiness. Let’s begin with the first, benign case. If philosophy turns out to be merely useless it will be on account of the paradoxical nature of all philosophical prescriptions: every theoretical insight passed along as an antidote to the tempestuous passions must be either natural and obvious, or it must be unnatural. If the insight is natural and obvious, the philosophic investigation is simply unnecessary. If the insight is unnatural, it will be useless because incapable of altering the natural affections. These sorts of philosophic reflections will prove too remote from practical life to affect any genuine and permanent transformation. Hume continues on to present a graver possibility still. Even if philosophers were able to advance insights capable of affecting human life, the general application of these principles would prove as toxic for the virtuous passions as they are for the vicious. “[Philosophic reflections] are, for the most part, general, and are applicable to all our affections. In vain do we hope to direct their influence only to one side…they will operate throughout, and spread an universal insensibility over the mind” (Pg. 107). It suffices to note that Hume’s critique of philosophy always takes the form of a critique of philosophic doctrines. 7 �It looks, therefore, as if his affirmation of philosophy as an activity distinct from the production of universal doctrines is, at bottom, an affirmation of skeptical philosophy, and, indeed, Hume’s own way of proceeding appears to instantiate this approach. Recall that Hume asks his readers at the outset of the essay to esteem his “opinion” as little as he himself does. This is precisely the opposite disposition as that of the philosophers who are at the center of Hume’s critique—those who have such confidence in their doctrines that they dogmatically attempt a universal application. In summary, Hume’s skepticism of philosophy engenders, not a wholesale rejection of philosophy, but a critical preparatory step towards the establishment (or, perhaps, reestablishing) of a different way of philosophizing; an approach that is experientially furnished and self-questioning. At this point, even despite the highly qualified character of his recommendation of the life of reflection, the reader may legitimately wonder whether Hume is guilty of reenacting the same error that he faults the philosophers for committing early on in the essay: Hasn’t Hume just endorsed his own way of life as being the most conducive to happiness in the face of ample evidence that other men are capable of living happy lives without engaging in reflective pursuits? In defense of Hume, allow me to venture a provisional response to this objection: In the first place, Hume demurs from going so far as to say that the life of study is the pleasantest for everyone. It is only so for “some tempers.” A more significant point of difference between Hume and the dogmatic philosophers is that, while the others’ endorsement of the philosophic life is premised upon an ignorance of the particular passions and their determinative role in bringing about particular enjoyment, Hume’s endorsement of the philosophic life is made on the 8 �basis of his awareness of the central importance of the passions—his recommendation of philosophy is premised on his claim that engaging in a life devoted to education can indirectly temper and refine the passions, thereby making them more conducive to happiness. A remaining issue is of course that the life characterized by learning is available only to a small few, and philosophy is of no use to those who are not actively engaged in it. How ought the greater part of humanity to go about refining the passions? It appears as though participation in the liberal arts and sciences may produce an effect similar to that produced by skeptical philosophy. Indeed, skeptical philosophy, as recognizing the significance of passion and particular humor in human life, may very well be extended to actually include the arts more generally—Hume’s essays, at very least, would appear to have much in common (at least in their aim) with other works of artistic genius which also endeavor to capture the particular and passion filled character of human experience. An extension of philosophy such that it is able to incorporate the arts also extends the way of life that philosophy represents to a wider swath of humanity—indeed it extends philosophy so far as to, at least potentially, include what Hume calls the “conversable world” which participates in the arts. Hume’s endorsement of the liberal arts more generally comes to light in relation to his emphasis on the great influence of fortune in human affairs. This point comes out most clearly in Hume’s essay, Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion, in which he draws a distinction between these two different species of delicacy. The delicacy of passion, according to Hume, makes those who possess it “extremely sensible to all the accidents of life, and gives them a lively joy upon every prosperous event, as well as a piercing 9 �grief when they meet with misfortune and adversity” (Pg. 10). This quality gives rise to a volatile temper, very much subject to the whims of particular circumstances. Hume insists that there is no one who would not rather possess a “cool and sedate temper,” since, “Good or ill fortune is very little at our disposal…Great pleasures are much less frequent than great pains” (Pg. 10). Because fortune is not under our command, it will always be well advised to hope for a moderate temper, but the acquisition of such a temper requires that those possessing delicacy of passion make efforts to pacify this peculiar sensibility. Hume presents a second sensibility, “the delicacy of taste”, as parallel to the first and yet capable of moderating the former’s pernicious effects. Just as delicacy of passion produces a sensitivity to prosperity and adversity, those who possess delicacy of taste are characterized by an acute sensitivity to “beauty and deformity.” The cultivation of delicacy of taste, according to Hume, is the best antidote to delicacy of passion. He writes, “I am persuaded that nothing is so proper to cure us of this delicacy of passion as the cultivating of that higher and more refined taste, which enables us to judge of the characters of men, of the compositions of genius, and of the productions of the nobler arts…and this is a new reason for cultivating a relish in the liberal arts” (Pg. 11). This claim recalls Hume’s statement in The Sceptic that the chief triumph of philosophy is that “it insensibly refines the temper, and it points out to us those dispositions which we should endeavour to attain, by a constant bent of mind, and by repeated habit” (Pg. 105). Cultivating delicacy of taste through engagement with the liberal arts guards men against the adversities of fortune in two slightly different ways: it tempers the extreme passions which threaten to render life intolerable in the face of misfortune, and it requires 10 �us to turn our gaze towards and find satisfaction in works of genius, which are themselves not subject to the cruel determinations of fortune. This brief digression was intended to expose the kinship between Hume’s description of the effect that engagement in the philosophic life has on the passions in The Sceptic, and his description of the effect that participation in the liberal arts more generally has upon the same in Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion. The concurrence of these two accounts suggests, to this reader at least, that if Hume does not already regard philosophy and the arts to be intimately related, he certainly appears to be engaged in a project to diminish whatever distance remains between the two. This effort is related to what appears to be a larger project to reform moral philosophy so as to equip it to be capable of addressing human life in all of its particularity. The particularity of human life owes to the particularity of the passions and the objects of those passions, and these passions are as much responsible for the experience of moral beauty as they are for the experience of any other sort of beauty. As such, ethical thinking must be brought into relation with aesthetic thinking, and towards the end of establishing this relationship, the skeptical philosophic approach to human life must become extended to include the study and practice of the arts, the mimetic representation of the very passions which set ethical life into motion. Related to this philosophic project to bridge the theoretical gap between moral philosophy and the arts is another social project that Hume undertakes to negotiate between the “learned” and “conversable” worlds. The learned world includes the solitary men who are engaged in difficult operations of the mind, while the conversable world includes those who are characterized by “a sociable disposition, and a taste for pleasure, 11 �an inclination for the easier and more gentle exercises of the understanding, for obvious reflections on human affairs” (Pg. 1). The detachment of each of these worlds from the other has a dual effect: It results in the impoverishment of the conversable world and in the utter irrelevance of the learned world, mired down as it is in a theoretical morass of its own making. In short, a conversable world insulated from learning is a world that has nothing to converse about, and a learned world that is sheltered from common life is a world in which genuine learning has either ceased or ceased to be good for life. That the elimination of the space between these two worlds is a central aim of Hume’s essays is announced in his essay, aptly titled, Of Essay Writing. Hume writes, It is to be hoped that this league betwixt the learned and conversable worlds…will be still further improved to their mutual advantage; and to that end, I know nothing more advantageous than such Essays as these with which I endeavor to entertain the public. (Pg. 2) Hume’s entertaining and accessible essays endeavor to bridge the distance separating these two worlds by stimulating intelligent conversation among the conversable. These sorts of essays can elevate the minds of those engaged in common life, thus preparing the conversable world for the cultivation of the higher arts which temper the vulgar passions and contribute to the virtuous disposition. A conversable world that is engaged with the liberal arts together with a learned world that recognizes the theoretical need—a need particularly salient for moral philosophy—to meditate on the particularity of common life establishes a fertile ground upon which a reformed, skeptical philosophy which both benefits and benefits from society might blossom and augment the enjoyment of the learned and the conversable alike. 12 � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 12 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 reformation of philosophy and the cultivation of taste : an interpretation of Hume's Essays Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Derek Duplessie at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Duplessie, Derek 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 2014-10-16 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 Hume, David, 1711-1776. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004529 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f06e1b8dd24f8d5791b8bd16c66f21a3.pdf bf746c2f7d68cc3683810f0040071796 PDF Text Text Metaphor and Innovation: A (Reluctantly) Instrumental Case for the Liberal Arts Rob Goodman Ph.D. Student, Columbia University October 16, 2014 This is a paper about how liberal education can make a strong case for its usefulness— and, secondarily, about why it should not have to make such a case. It is generally and rightly considered unfair to begin a paper like this with the weakest and ugliest version of the argument to be criticized. But it is equally unfair to wish this version of the argument away or to understate its prevalence, especially when it will ring so familiar to anyone who has studied the liberal arts. A kind of scholarly bias in favor of the most respectable interlocutors can blind us to the contempt, and even anger, that can mark the conversation about liberal education happening all around us. With that in mind, here is a classic of the genre, a comment posted on an online article that raised the topic of art history: Your art history major was the culmination of 12 years spent in school prepping for college only to get there and realizing you’re not cognitively astute enough to actually make it through any form of program where you were graded on something other than your worthless opinion on how someone did what they did…you realized that your mental abilities amounted to the lowest rung of collegiate cop out degrees and the only prescription for your mental illness was more art classes and less of the CRITICAL THINKING classes a more scientifically polished mind could handle…when you graduate, and I need a cup of delicious fair trade organic bold roasted hipster goodness, I’ll know what coffee shop to find you as you will surely be the barista making it for me. Here’s a tip, go back to school and actually do something this time…it’s time to swallow your pride and eat some science.…Math and science. This country needs more people who can do it and not read blogs on it in between their painting sessions. 1 [Sic.] These are familiar tropes in what we can call the “contempt for the liberal arts” literature. Those of us who study the liberal arts have a unearned sense of cultural superiority. We are intellectually unqualified for more serious and lucrative fields. We will be punished for these sins by the market. Above all, the liberal arts are useless. In more presentable forms, these arguments play a dominant role in our national discourse on education. We see them in plans, like one recently proposed by the governor 1 “Swedish Art Gallery Holds First Art Auction Based on Emotions,” Gawker, July 5, 2014 (anonymous comment on article), http://goo.gl/NlekXM. 1 �of Florida, to charge higher state college tuition for fields like English and history. 2 We see them in unsubstantiated warnings of a “STEM shortage” and its imminent danger to our economy. We see them in the 21st-century version of xenophobic “Yellow Peril” rhetoric, “the idea that China and India are churning out an unstoppable army of engineers who will render the United States incapable of competing”—alongside the implication that studying the liberal arts under such conditions is vaguely disloyal. 3 We even hear them in President Obama’s remark that “folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” 4 Beneath this discourse, there are deeper currents: age-old dichotomies between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, 5 between the “useful arts” (or even “servile arts”) and the liberal arts, or the much more recent distinction between STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and every other discipline. (An entirely different paper could be written on the process by which mathematics, once supposed to be the purest and most unearthly of disciplines, was conscripted to the service of the useful arts.) In other words, both defenders and critics of the liberal arts are inheritors of an ancient argument—and I have no wish to discredit the critics by associating them with the least palatable version of their case, the version with which I began. I only want to suggest that defenders of the liberal arts do their own case a disservice when they ignore the very real public resentment of their disciplines. The ancient argument is, in large part, one about usefulness and uselessness; and at this cultural moment, the very notion of uselessness is an object of anger. I would suggest that advocates for the liberal arts confront this anger in two ways. First, there is a very strong case to be made that the dichotomy between useful and liberal is flawed: that the technical progress that so occupies critics of the liberal arts in fact relies to an unexpected degree on the metaphorical and figurative thought that the liberal arts excel in cultivating. But second, and more ambitiously, liberal studies ought to lead us to challenge many accounts of education as an instrumental good. *** 2 Alison Griswold, “Majoring in the Humanities Might Soon Cost You More in Florida,” Forbes, January 18, 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/alisongriswold/2013/01/18/majoring-in-the-humanities-might-soon-costyou-more-in-florida. 3 Freddie deBoer, “STEM: Still No Shortage,” Medium, November 27, 2013, medium.com/i-m-h-o/stemstill-no-shortage-c6f6eed505c1. 4 Scott Jaschik, “Apology from Obama,” Inside Higher Ed, February 19, 2014, www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/19/professor-art-history-receives-handwritten-apologypresident-obama. President Obama later sent an apology note to one of the art history professors who objected to the statement. 5 For a short history of this debate, see Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 271-76. In the early modern era, for instance, shunning the vita activa was described as “barbarous isolation, illiterate, inferior, fruitless, infertile, treasonous, inhuman, rotting in laziness, sterile, unjust, vain” (quoting from sources including Petrarch, Bruni, and Alberti). Of course, we get a sense of the shifting contours of this argument from the fact that those who launched such attacks were themselves humanists and would likely be the victims of similar epithets in our time. 2 �Technical innovation tends to enter the world wrapped in metaphor. As the philosopher Owen Barfield put it, “When a new thing or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing object which most closely resembles it.” 6 Barfield was describing a problem in historical linguistics: whenever old words are applied to new objects, the task of reconstructing ancient cultures from their vocabularies grows muddied. As an obvious example, he pointed out the absurdity of assuming that the ancient Celts used internal combustion engines just because they would have understood the word “car.” In reality, “car” has come to us through a chain of metaphors, from chariots to wagons to wheeled vehicles in general to our current usage. Our vocabulary for technology is suffused with metaphor: we carry miniature computers in our pockets and still call them “phones,” we “dial” them, and we “plug” them into sockets and “charge” them (in the way that wagons and cannons were once charged) with something that is electricus or amber-like (because amber rubbed with a cloth gives off static). 7 This is a story, however, of more than etymological interest. I would suggest that there is more to be learned about the ways in which change in metaphor plays a causal role in technical change—in which language does not merely describe but conditions innovation. 8 As a very brief case study, consider the metaphorical history of the hot-air balloon. In particular, I want to link two important moments in that history, those of conception and of explanation. In 1777, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier was watching clothes drying over a fire when he noticed a shirt swept up in a billow of air. Six years later, applying the same principle of fabric filled by heated air, he and his brother demonstrated their hot-air balloon and accomplished the first manned human flight. 9 In Paris, a grand monument was planned in their honor; though the project stalled in its earliest stages, a five-foot clay model still exists, sculpted by the artist Clodion soon after the first balloon demonstrations. At first glance, it is hard to see that the modeled clay depicts a balloon at all: the body of the object is encrusted with layers of tiny, winged cherubs. They appear to make the machine fly under their own power: they stoke the fire at its base, waft up in gusts of air, and propel it with their wings. Two full-sized angelic figures (perhaps Fama and Aeolus) cling to the top of the fabric shell: one blows a herald’s trumpet, and another 6 Owen Barfield, History in English Words, rev. ed. (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 1967), 24. Brian Baigrie, Electricity and Magnetism: A Historical Perspective (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 7-8. 8 There is a significant literature on metaphor as productive of new knowledge, and, more recently, on the practical applications of metaphor in computing design, a topic I discuss below. See, e.g., Pippin Barr et al., “A Semiotic Model of User Interface Metaphor,” in Virtual, Distributed and Flexible Organisations: Studies in Organisational Semiotics, ed. Kecheng Liu (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2004); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Aaron st Marcus, “Metaphors and User Interfaces in the 21 Century,” Interactions 9(2) (2002): 7-10; Christian Nill and Vishal Sikka, “Modeling Software Applications and User Interfaces Using Metaphorical Entities,” CEUR Workshop Proceedings 159 (October 2005); and Bent Sørensen, “The Concept of Metaphor According to the Philosophers C.S. Pierce and U. Eco—A Tentative Comparison,” Signs 5 (2011): 156-85. 9 Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation 1783-1784 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983), 15. 7 3 �supplies the lateral motion by puffing up his cheeks and blowing, straining himself as if it would take all of his effort to overcome the weight of the dangling babies and make the contraption move. 10 To judge by our standard categories, we have in that brief history a moment of science and a moment of art: one productive and valuable, one superfluous or at least parasitical. But consider again those cherubs and the very real problem they are solving: representing human flight to a world in which actual human flight is only months old. Imagine the model blown up to monumental size and stripped of its cherubs in the name of “realism”: to an audience that had never seen a balloon, it would most likely resemble a lopsided sphere standing incomprehensibly on a pedestal. When Clodion sculpted his model, a fire-powered, human-carrying sack of fabric was entirely new—but flying cherubs were old. Putti had been soaring across the ceilings of Europe’s churches and palaces for centuries. 11 As Barfield observed, it is often only in terms of the old that the new makes initial sense. Without the putti, the balloon monument would likely have been unintelligible; with the help of their metaphor, a flight powered by angels rather than expanding air, an object as alien as a flying machine was domesticated into a familiar visual culture. Clodion’s metaphor played the role of explaining, even justifying, Montgolfier’s balloon. More importantly, though, the processes that brought both objects into being would seem to have a great deal in common. They both demanded conceptual leaps from old to new, and from like to like: the insight that turned a balloon into a piece of Rococo art was not so different from the insight that turned a billowing shirt into a balloon. This is what I mean by innovation conditioned by metaphor, not simply described by metaphor after the fact. (Incidentally, this process can be iterative, as well, as new objects and concepts grow old and are redeployed as metaphors in their turn. In 1906, Paris finally erected a balloon monument to commemorate the flying messengers of the Franco-Prussian War. 12 By then, of course, balloons were familiar enough that no symbol of flight, angelic or otherwise, was required. Balloons, in fact, had become metaphors of their own, as in “speech balloons,” or the verb “to balloon,” which took on the meaning of swelling up in the 19th century.) But perhaps more interesting for our purpose are the negative cases: cases that demonstrate the harmful effects of metaphors that are somehow defective. By defective metaphors, I mean those so dulled by familiarity that they constrain our sense of the possible, even as we have lost sight of their artificiality: they function like Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles.” And I suggest that these cases might reward our attention the 10 For an illustration of the model, see Clodion, “Model for a Proposed Monument to Commemorate the Invention of the Balloon,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collectiononline/search/199410. 11 See Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 12 Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870-1997 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 54. 4 �most just because uncovering and exploring the implications of metaphor is an activity for which scholars and students of the liberal arts are already well prepared. Consider, in another brief case study, the birth and death of the computer “desktop.” For at least a generation, our desktops have been almost exclusively imaginary: we hardly ever use the word to refer to the surface of a desk. In the days of the earliest graphical user interfaces, though, the comparison of a computer to a piece of office furniture was unfamiliar enough that it had to be explicitly spelled out for consumers. “First of all,” read one of the earliest Macintosh print advertisements in 1984, “we made the screen layout resemble a desktop, displaying pictures of objects you’ll have no trouble recognizing. File folders. Clipboards. Even a trash can.” 13 When the image was still fresh, a computer interface resembled a desktop; now, it just is one. And yet, once interfaces were desktops, it seemed to grow progressively harder to imagine that an interface could be anything else. An image that once explained now constrained, as became clear in the commercial failure of early-generation handheld computers. As Mike Kuniavsky writes in his survey of computing design, one of the most notable failures of these early mobile operating systems came as a result of taking the desktop metaphor far too literally. The Magic Cap OS debuted on Sony and Motorola tablets in 1994. On startup, the user was confronted with an image of a desk housing a touchtone phone and a rolodex. To access other applications, the user clicked out of the “office,” navigated down a “hallway,” and poked into a variety of “rooms.” The internet browser was a further trek: down the hallway, out of the office building, down the main street to the town square, and into a diner, where the internet was represented by a poster. This largely unworkable system illustrates, Kuniavsky argues, how “the metaphor that seemed so helpful may start creating more problems than it solves.” 14 In comparison, why do so many of us find the current generation of mobile operating systems much more intuitive? As in the case of Montgolfier and Clodion, at least two categories of explanation are available to us. A kind of technological determinism would point to the development of cheap and lightweight touchscreens in the decade after Magic Cap’s debut. But an account more sensitive to the effects of language would argue for the priority of a conceptual leap that made the technological leap feasible: abandoning a worn-out metaphor. In this account, users had grown so used to the language of desktops, folders, recycling bins, and so on that they had ceased to readily call to mind objects outside of computers. The metaphor had served its purpose, and rather than being reflexively adhered to, it could be discarded. Where the designers of Magic Cap took the desktop metaphor for granted, the designers of iOS de-naturalized it: that is, recognized it as a human creation that could be manipulated or abandoned. Now, I have no desire to hold up the iPhone as the pinnacle of civilization—only to suggest that this step of de-naturalization, recognizing metaphor as metaphor, is far more demanding than it seems in retrospect. I would argue that there is a history of 13 Mike Kuniavsky, Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design (Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2010), 27. 14 Ibid., 40-42. 5 �technological failures, misfires, and dead-ends to be written as a history of metaphor: of the capacity of language to inhibit and constrain as much as it inspires. 15 And this sense of constrained possibilities has an import well beyond the details of our gadgets. For instance, as Kuniavsky observes, the metaphor of “cloud” computing suggests an amorphous vapor that “extends beyond our reach and does not have a defined shape or boundary. Events that happen in the cloud may be outside the control of any one person in it.” 16 Does the image of data stored in a cloud temper our expectations of privacy? 17 In this sense, taking a critical stance toward our technology—whether the stance of the inventor who hopes to improve on it, or of the social critic who questions the assumptions and demands it makes of us—requires a critical stance toward the language habitually used to describe it. 18 And of course, the patron saint of this criticism remains Orwell, with his admonition that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Perhaps most corrupting of all is a careless attachment to those metaphors Orwell called “dying”: not the newly vivid ones (like “desktop” in 1984), nor the truly dead ones that have ceased reminding us of images at all (like the “hands” of a clock), but those that retain a metaphor’s power to direct and constrain our thought without being immediately apparent as such. 19 Because yesterday’s object in need of explanation can 15 While it is not my goal to sketch such a history here, it might include such landmarks as the decadeslong persistence of the “horseless carriage” metaphor in car design, long after bodies resembling carriages had ceased to be necessary. (“Incredibly,” Rolf Harms and Michael Yamartino write, “engineers kept designing the whip holder into early models before realizing that it wasn’t necessary anymore.”) It might also include the persistence of seafaring metaphors for spaceflight, which arguably helped draw funding and attention away from more productive unmanned exploration. Last, such a history might one th day include a discussion of self-driving cars unnecessarily cast into the shapes 20 -century sedans and minivans, and ultimately displaced by new competitors that choose to jettison such metaphors. See Harms and Yamartino, “The Economics of the Cloud,” Microsoft, November 2010, www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/presskits/cloud/docs/the-economics-of-the-cloud.pdf. 16 Kuniavsky, Smart Things, 30. 17 Similarly, the image of a desktop is, in its way, a message about the kind of people who “ought” to use computers: our computers presume, at the very level of their language, that their users are the kind of people who spend their time at office desks. 18 The same could surely be said for metaphors in politics as well as in technology. For instance, one experiment showed that changing a single word in a news report on crime—describing crime as either a “virus” or a “beast”—led to a significant change in the anti-crime policies subjects proposed in response. “Participants who read that crime was a virus were more likely to propose treating the crime problem by investigating the root causes of the issue and instituting social reforms than participants who read that crime was a beast. Participants who read that crime was a beast were more likely to propose fighting back against the crime problem by hiring police officers and building jails—to catch and cage the criminals— than participants who read that crime was a virus.” Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky, “Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning,” PLOS ONE, February 23, 2011, 10.1371/journal.pone.0016782. For a broader discussion of the power of “framing” effects in political discourse, and the normative questions raised by this power, see Dennis Chong and James N. Druckman, “Framing Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 103-26. 19 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in A Collection of Essays (New York: Harvest, 1981), 156-71. An important predecessor in this line of thought is Jeremy Bentham: see Bentham, Handbook of Political Fallacies (New York: Crowell, 1971). Of particular interest is Bentham’s discussion of the abuse of metonymy as a “eulogistic covering,” in which the interests of concrete political actors are subsumed under more palatable abstract nouns (e.g., The Crown, The Law, The Court, Property). As Bentham writes, 6 �become today’s metaphor, and because today’s metaphor can live out a finite life-cycle, the critical task is a continuous one. In sum, there is a ready response to those critics of the liberal arts who would make technical innovation the barometer of our wellbeing: that the values prioritized in the “contempt for the liberal arts” literature cannot so easily be separated from linguistic creativity, especially a cultivated sense for the possibilities and limits of metaphor. And that sense has long been at the heart of liberal education. The sheer persuasive force of imagery is a theme rung early and often in the humanistic canon. Aristotle stresses that concepts expressed in terms of metaphor are most likely to be retained: “His acquisition of the new idea impresses him all the more. His mind seems to say, ‘Yes, to be sure; I never thought of that.’” 20 Cicero, too, agrees that an effective metaphor “has direct appeal to the senses,” and that “the most complete pictures are formed in our minds of the things that have been conveyed to them and imprinted on them by the senses.” 21 But a student of the liberal arts encounters more than just praise of metaphor’s potency over our minds. Near the beginning of his or her education is likely to be one of the most sustained and closely-investigated metaphors in the canon, the metaphor of the city as a human soul, and among the other milestones marking that education are likely to be such other master-images as the City of God, the Leviathan, and the Invisible Hand, each with their own polemical power and limitations. Perhaps that education will also include the study of key symbolism in music, religious symbolism in visual art, or the allegorical tradition in literature. Even among those philosophers whose preference for scientistic prose leads them to be highly critical of figurative language—such as Hobbes or Locke, who wrote that “all the artificial and figurative applications of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas”—the student will find the conviction that metaphor demands critical attention. Among many other things, then, liberal education is training against passivity in the face of metaphor. And there is good reason to expect that schools and colleges that excise this training from their curricula will produce graduates prone to be unaware of, and trapped in, the dominant metaphors of the day. There are real costs to separating technical and figurative skills. There should be a place for both in a common liberal system, one intended to liberate us from habitual ways of seeing. *** “the object and effect is, that…in the stead of the more or less obnoxious individual or individuals, the object present is a creature of the fancy, by the idea of which, as in poetry, the imagination is tickled—a phantom which, by means of the power with which the individual or class is clothed is constituted an object of respect and veneration.” Interestingly enough, in the same work Bentham discusses the dyslogistic use of “innovation,” a term that has since taken on a highly eulogistic connotation, which is the sense in which I use it here. 20 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Dover, 2004), 1412a17ff. In fact, Aristotle’s intuition—that audiences are more likely to retain abstract concepts when they are couched in concrete images—has found support in recent research on the effects of metaphorical language. For a survey of this research, see Britt Peterson, “The Power of Mental Pictures,” Chronicle of Higher Education Review, September 1, 2014. 21 Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E.W. Sutton (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967), 3.41.163; 2.87.357. 7 �Of course, liberal education is characterized by metaphors of its own, ones we are free to challenge or endorse, but not to ignore. The metaphor we use to describe what we do might presume (or at least might once have presumed, in an earlier stage of vividness) that liberal education liberates. But in an even older formulation, which I believe retains its value, liberal education is the course of study proper to those who are already liberated: liberal arts are the arts of a free man or woman. 22 Free in comparison to what? In the tradition from which the idea of the liberal arts derived this earlier meaning, freedom was something of an exclusive status. In this tradition, writes Philip Pettit, “liberty is always cast as the opposition between liber and servus, citizen and slave.” Study of the liberal arts was considered appropriate to the liber not only because such a person was free from certain kinds of “servile” work. More importantly, the freedom inherent in the liberal arts—their eclecticism, their resistance to narrow specialization, their stance at a remove from the pressures of economic or practical usefulness—was held to be an expression of the liber’s freedom. When we call our arts liberal, we are echoing the presumption of those who believed that these arts are just what one would choose to study if one were free. And the defining feature of this freedom, according to Pettit, is that the liber “is not subject to the arbitrary power of another.” 23 We ourselves are free to reject this entire line of thought—as we should, I would quickly add, if it were still tied to such an exclusive notion of who might qualify as free. But it need not be tied to such a notion. As Pettit notes, the originators of this line of thought “only ever imagined that it was an ideal for an élite of propertied, mainstream males; they were all men, after all, and men of their times. But there is every reason why we should reappropriate their ideal and reintroduce it as a universal ideal for the members of a contemporary society.” 24 Contemporary democracy is not simply an experiment in selfgovernment, but an experiment—though surely challenged and incomplete—in status. Democratic culture is our ongoing attempt to universalize the status of liber. We see the attempt in democratic manners, in which anyone can in principle lay claim to the formerly exclusive titles of “sir” and “ma’am,” and in which we do not order one another, but ask: “[If it] please [you].” 25 More broadly, we testify to this experiment in status when, as Tocqueville wrote, we treat “every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea [as] a germ of power placed within the reach of the people.” He went on: Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the graces of the mind, the fire of imagination, depth of thought, and all the gifts which Heaven scatters at a venture turned to the advantage of democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by throwing 22 See e.g., Seneca, Epistle 88: “You see why ‘liberal studies’ are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman.” Seneca, Moral Epistles, vol. 2., trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1917-25). 23 Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 31. 24 Ibid., 6. 25 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 122. 8 �into bold relief the natural greatness of man. Its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilization and knowledge; and literature became an arsenal open to all, where the poor and the weak daily resorted for arms. 26 These “graces of the mind” are not only valuable up to the point at which they free us; they are also the way in which we enjoy and express our freedom. If they have a telos, perhaps it is to finish the instrumental work and arrive at the expressive work. 27 It is for just this reason that any instrumental case for the liberal arts—including the one I have offered in this paper—should be made with reluctance. Among the varieties of arbitrary power that compromise our freedom, an especially common form in our times is being made to spontaneously justify one’s usefulness under threat of nebulous penalties. That is especially the case when the standards of utility are themselves arbitrary and constantly shifting. 28 But this is the demand—prove your utility or face the amorphous consequences—that is so often placed on the liberal arts and those who would study them. It is entirely fair to ask, then: does an account founded on the liberal arts’ utility, such as this paper’s, only legitimize this demand? Perhaps it does. But we cannot wish away the dominant strain of thought that we have to persuade: one that values education largely in terms of its instrumental returns. I have granted premises here that, in a more perfect world, I would not grant. I have proposed an answer to our critics in their own terms: that the ends they valorize when criticizing the liberal arts are actually best attained through the liberal arts. Those critics would surely add that any view of education as a non-instrumental good is merely the view of privilege. It is: but our very practice of liberal education in a democratic culture commits us to expand the circle of that privilege as widely as possible, rather than acceding to its current dimensions. There is such a thing as an argument made under protest. To value liberal education is often to live under protest. And advocates of this education have long understood that they can do so honestly as long as they are clear about premises: as long as they know and speak the difference between arguments that are, and are not, of the moment. As John Henry Newman put it: Just as in morals, honesty is the best policy, as being profitable in a secular aspect, though such profit is not the measure of its worth, so too as regards 26 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Revere (Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2003), 14-15. 27 This is not to imply that the liberal arts will inevitably work in such a way in a democracy; Tocqueville’s well-known concern with “leveling” offers ways in which they may not. 28 As deBoer puts it, “Trying to predict what particular set of discrete and limited skills will be useful in the future is a mug’s game. It’s a fundamentally risky way for an individual to behave, and for policy decisions that are supposed to be based on the most good for the most people, it’s incoherent strategy….Individuals can navigate the markets, if they’re smart, privileged, and lucky. But great masses of people never can.” DeBoer, “Chasing Skills Is a Bad Bet and Bad Policy,” July 9, 2014, fredrikdeboer.com/2014/07/09/chasing-skills-is-a-bad-bet-and-bad-policy. 9 �what may be called the virtues of the Intellect, their very possession indeed is a substantial good, and is enough, yet still that substance has a shadow, inseparable from it, viz., its social and political usefulness. 29 This is a good metaphor on which to end. Some things are substance, and some shadow. 29 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated (London: Longmans, 1905), 180. 10 �Works Cited Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. New York: Dover, 2004. Baigrie, Brian. Electricity and Magnetism: A Historical Perspective. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Rev. ed. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 1967. Barr, Pippin, et al. “A Semiotic Model of User Interface Metaphor.” In Virtual, Distributed and Flexible Organisations: Studies in Organisational Semiotics. Ed. Kecheng Liu. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2004. Bentham, Jeremy. Handbook of Political Fallacies. New York: Crowell, 1971. Chong, Dennis and James N. Druckman. “Framing Theory.” Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 103-26. Cicero. De Oratore. Trans. E.W. Sutton. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967. Clodion. “Model for a Proposed Monument to Commemorate the Invention of the Balloon.” Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/collection/thecollection-online/search/199410. DeBoer, Freddie. “Chasing Skills Is a Bad Bet and Bad Policy.” July 9, 2014. fredrikdeboer.com/2014/07/09/chasing-skills-is-a-bad-bet-and-bad-policy. —. “STEM: Still No Shortage.” Medium. November 27, 2013. medium.com/i-m-ho/stem-still-no-shortage-c6f6eed505c1. Dempsey, Charles. Inventing the Renaissance Putto. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Gillispie, Charles Coulston. The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation 1783-1784. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House, 2011. Griswold, Alison. “Majoring in the Humanities Might Soon Cost You More in Florida.” Forbes. January 18, 2013. www.forbes.com/sites/alisongriswold/2013/01/18/majoring-in-the-humanitiesmight-soon-cost-you-more-in-florida. Harms, Rolf and Michael Yamartino. “The Economics of the Cloud.” Microsoft. November 2010. www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/presskits/cloud/docs/theeconomics-of-the-cloud.pdf Jaschik, Scott. “Apology from Obama.” Inside Higher Ed. February 19, 2014. www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/19/professor-art-history-receiveshandwritten-apology-president-obama. Kuniavsky, Mike. Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2010. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Marcus, Aaron. “Metaphors and User Interfaces in the 21st Century.” Interactions 9(2) (2002): 7-10. Michalski, Sergiusz. Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870-1997. London: Reaktion Books, 1998. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated. London: Longmans, 1905. 11 �Nill, Christian and Vishal Sikka. “Modeling Software Applications and User Interfaces Using Metaphorical Entities.” CEUR Workshop Proceedings 159 (October 2005). Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” In A Collection of Essays. New York: Harvest, 1981. Peterson, Britt. “The Power of Mental Pictures.” Chronicle of Higher Education Review. September 1, 2014. Pettit, Philip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Thibodeau, Paul H. and Lera Boroditsky. “Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning.” PLOS ONE. February 23, 2011. 10.1371/journal.pone.0016782. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Trans. Henry Revere. Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2003. Seneca. Moral Epistles. Vol. 2. Trans. Richard M. Gummere. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1917-25. Sørensen, Bent. “The Concept of Metaphor According to the Philosophers C.S. Pierce and U. Eco—A Tentative Comparison.” Signs 5 (2011): 156-85. “Swedish Art Gallery Holds First Art Auction Based on Emotions.” Gawker. July 5, 2014. http://goo.gl/NlekXM. Vickers, Brian. In Defense of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. 12 � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 12 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 Metaphor and innovation : a (reluctantly) instrumental case for the liberal arts Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Rob Goodman at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Goodman, Rob 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 2014-10-16 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 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 24004530 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/55446f0b23e3e2a81fe1d3d6d80ed78f.pdf 26f17eaf2cdea869619a7cf7767bce09 PDF Text Text Nakedness in Plato’s Republic Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr. Austin Community College The Republic is a book of liberation. Its central teaching, that philosophy should rule city and soul, spurns readers to pull off the adornments of convention. As such, the experience of reading The Republic is an undressing. The Republic challenges us to disrobe the conventions that cover our nature by confronting the shame that prevents us from seeing it. In support of this central teaching, there are many images and allusions of nakedness. I will begin to explore nakedness and its significance in The Republic by focusing on a part of Glaucon’s challenge in Book II and its relationship to the later elaboration of the ideal city in Book V. Drawing from these passages, I will discuss the role nakedness plays in the quest for truth, concluding with some reflections on The Republic’s place in a liberal education. The majority of dialogue of The Republic focuses on an elaboration of an ideal city meant to address the nuanced challenges of Glaucon and Adeimantus. Glaucon is not persuaded by Socrates’ rhetorical refutation of Thrasymachus’ argument that justice is the advantage of the strong men who rule. As a shepherd’s concern for sheep amounts to fleece and flesh, a ruler’s concern for the ruled is his private advantage, which Thrasymachus calls justice. Glaucon is all too familiar with these sorts of arguments, and although he finds them inadequate he is not able to dismiss them. “I’ve been talked deaf by Thrasymachus and countless others, while the argument on behalf of justice – that it is !1 �better than injustice – I’ve yet to hear from anyone as I want it.” 1 His inclination is not to agree with arguments like Thrasymachus’, yet he cannot quite explain why. He believes justice is actually good but he wants more than to believe it; he wants to know. So, Glaucon asks Socrates to praise justice as something good in itself, and not something practiced for the fear of punishment or lack of resources. In this spirit, Glaucon challenges Socrates with his tale of Gyges, the Lydian, who found a magical ring that made him invisible. Glaucon presents this as the ultimate image of liberation. Truly free to do what he wants without consequences, Gyges sacks the queen and kingdom. Glaucon asks Socrates to explain why someone with the impunity afforded by the power of invisibility would refrain from committing such acts. Afterall, the desire to get the better, “is what any nature naturally pursues as good, while it is law (nomos) which by force perverts it to honor equality.”2 Freed from nomos, people will do what they want, and they want other people’s property, bodies and power. This is what most people think, according to Glaucon, who challenges Socrates to explain why it would be good for such a liberated Gyges not to travel the path he chose. But how liberated is Gyges? Does his situation present an account of a man truly liberated from the nomos that Glaucon claims perverts our nature? We can learn more by comparing Glaucon’s tale to its Herodotian counterpart. Readers of Herodotus recall that his Gyges had no ring, but hiding behind a curtain at the command of his king saw the queen naked, whose bruised shame sought vengeance upon 1 358b-d All Republic citations and translations are from Bloom. 2 359c !2 �her husband for inviting Gyges into her room.3 Herodotus and also Socrates, in Book V, remark that most barbarians found public nudity to be extremely shameful; it was even a great shame for men among them to be seen naked by other men.4 We must bear this convention in mind when we recall that Glaucon’s Gyges found his ring on a naked corpse; “It had nothing on except a gold ring on its hand.”5 It must have felt quite liberating for Gyges’ Lydian forerunner to be naked around others without being seen, and it is hard to imagine that Gyges or another Lydian with such power would not like to taste the forbidden fruit of invisible nakedness absent the shame of visible nakedness. But while the bearer of the ring believes he bears all, he remains clothed by the very power that enticed him to disrobe. Though Gyges may transgress Lydian mores with impunity, his ring does not free him from them, because, cloaked by invisibility, even this ring does not enable him to be visibly naked without shame. Thus, he has not truly escaped convention. He is, like his Herodotian counterpart, merely peering out from behind a curtain. Perhaps by pointing to the superficiality of overcoming nomoi regarding nudity in this manner, Plato may suggest that Gyges’ movement to tyranny is similarly reflective of a superficial overcoming of nomos. Gyges is free from imprisonment and execution for his crimes, but is he free from shame? Herodotus’ Gyges also killed his king, but that was because the queen commanded him to do it or die himself; it was not a free choice on his 3 History I.8-12 4 452c and History I.10 5 359e !3 �part. Could Glaucon’s Gyges likewise be compelled to tyranny by forces beyond him and from which his ring’s power does not free him? Glaucon explains that one who declined to use such power in the manner of Gyges, “would seem most wretched to those who were aware of it and most foolish too.”6 Perhaps conventional opinion compels Gyges to be ashamed not to seek tyranny where he has the power to achieve it? Tyranny appears to be liberation, but it is only superficially so. Socrates describes the soul of a tyrant as the least free of all because he lives in perpetual fear of his neighbors for the wrongs committed against them.7 Yet, this depiction of tyranny in Book IX is incomplete. One could imagine a tyrant of greater power and security and so more freedom to enjoy the pleasures of his office than Socrates’ straw-tyrant who “alone of all the men in the city can’t go anywhere abroad or see all the things the other free men desire to see; but, stuck in his house for the most part, he lives like a woman, envying any of the other citizens who travels abroad and see anything good.”8 This does not accurately characterize a tyrant with the power of Gyges. So, Socrates presents a second argument, which addresses the quality of the pleasures enjoyed by those with the freedom of tyrants. The upshot of this more authoritative argument is that the tyrant’s pleasures are less enjoyable than those enjoyed by philosophers. The tyrant enjoys the finest pleasures 6 360d 7 577a-580c 8 579b !4 �painted on the cave walls, but he does not enjoy the finest pleasure, which “belongs to that part of the soul with which we learn.”9 This pleasure is as enjoyable as rare, likewise are the talents and efforts required to enjoy it. The intellectual and character prerequisites for philosophers establish a foundation from which one could leap to success in many competitive and lucrative pursuits. Courage, orderliness, grace, magnificence, an exquisite memory and possession of a mind which easily grasps the “idea” of a thing; these are fine qualities indeed.10 Philosophy demands that the best human material be developed as expertly as possible and directed towards a pursuit not simply misunderstood by the majority but held in contempt by them. The city regards men who pursue the path of philosophy as terribly strange, vicious or useless, as Adeimantus notes, echoing the criticism of Aristophanes.11 A young man with the intellectual and character prerequisites described above must overcome considerable shame in the face of the city in not employing those gifts towards the attainment of the good things as defined by the city. In order for Glaucon to comprehend a man who does not use the ring like Gyges, he must understand a pleasure greater than those of men’s liberated dreams but to do so must overcome first the shame that separates him from it. Gyges’ ring presents an image of the liberated body but chained soul. The city in speech will be the image of the liberated soul. It comes to be in part as a response to 9 583a 10 485a-487a 11 487d !5 �Glaucon’s additional demand that Socrates demonstrate justice as desirable even when “stripped” of all benefits afforded to those with the reputation for justice.12 He desires to see justice naked of rewards and punishments so that he can choose justice as a free man. He longs for a perspective outside of convention and for real liberation but can only envision tyranny with impunity as such liberation. The philosophic life is the answer to that challenge, but for Glaucon to see that life as the true liberation which he seeks, Socrates must get Glaucon to shed his own attachments to the conventions that make him unable to conceive of a life with the license of Gyges absent his licentiousness. It is Glaucon’s own shame that prevents him from seeing it. If Glaucon is to see justice stripped he must approach it naked. However, it seems that convention cannot simply be stripped away by Socrates and justice revealed in all her natural glory with one grand undressing. Socrates first responds to the challenges by constructing a city that is offensive to Glaucon. The people in this city wear clothing in the winter, but for the most part, they go naked in the summer time. In this city clothing is functional and not required by custom or law. Nothing prevents men and women from exercising and being naked together. In it there are no conventional families, yet there is sweet intercourse. Citizens are not concerned with incest, birth or beauty but only that not too many children are born. Therefore, the city of pigs, as Glaucon calls it, has two of the three challenging components addressed in Book V, which the ultimate city must posses: men and women being publicly naked together and the community of woman and children, with no very clear prohibition against incest. 12 He uses γυµνωτέος, related to γυµνόω – naked exercise. !6 �Socrates has stripped this city, this allegorical man, of convention in response to Glaucon’s desire to see justice naked. However, this city is naked without liberation - a ringed Lydian - because it lacks the third component of the ultimate city, the rule of philosophers. In fact, this city of pigs lacks rulers of any kind, except perhaps its organizing principle that each citizen practices only one art, which is accepted by the citizens without question, reason, explanation or myth. They accept it as if by instinct and live almost entirely like animals. Philosophy is absent from this city because there are no real claims regarding the good and the beautiful to evaluate, no conflict between custom and nature to resolve, no nomoi and therefore no means by which to overcome them and to be free. Glaucon’s objection to this city supplies the tensions to it that ultimately point towards philosophy. His objection is not so much for the cities lack of relishes, which Socrates readily incorporates, but that its citizens do not live according to nomos.13 With his objection he introduces nomos into the city, thereby clothing it, and yet by it also takes the first step towards uncovering the liberation of the philosophical life dedicated to examining the validity of nomoi and the conceptions of the good life presupposed by them. In Book V, Glaucon will ultimately accept a city of communal nakedness, family and the rule of philosophers. He will come a long way towards liberation from the conventional outlook that spurned his objection in Book II, and so we see that the beginning of liberation from nomos may be an impassioned defense of nomos. 13 372d !7 �If a liberal education is for liberation, The Republic should be a part of it. Its teaching that liberation from convention may begin with a dedication to and defense of convention may suggest a rather conservative approach on the part of educators, at least initially. Glaucon’s love of justice pushes him away from the cynical arguments of Thrasymachus and drives him to adorn the object of his affection by the challenge he poses to Socrates. It is this very same love that spurns him to want to know the truth about justice; the quest for which is neither propelled by existential malaise nor nihilistic affirmation of all but by a singular, myopic conviction. Glaucon’s desire to defend the goodness of justice encourages him to look critically at the naked nature of justice and this puts him on the path to philosophy. Perhaps a liberal education should initially be oriented towards kindling this kind of passion by making students more patriotic and more devout, and perhaps it should help them to care deeply enough about something important that they will want to know it fully. It is likely that serious interaction with the core texts that form the basis of the western tradition will foster these attachments and convictions. Candaules, the king in Herodotus’ tale, fell so in love with his wife that he wanted the private pleasure of her body to be recognized as the most blessed. He wanted another to relish in her unadorned beauty, but while he invited Gyges into her bedroom, he did not ask him to poke through the curtains. There is a limit on the quality and amount of love that can be shared between a given number of bodies, but the pleasures of philosophy offers many more opportunities for the gallant; liberal education should help produce suitable companions for this love affair. The Socratic life supplies for us the !8 �image of what a liberal education is all about, real liberation. Reading The Republic can help our students consider whether the whole point of their education is not a career and a paycheck but the very activity in which they are presently engaged. The superiority of the philosophical life remains the most shocking and challenging teaching of The Republic, as the lives we lead, as parents, employees, students and faculty are largely unphilosophic. The life of Socrates sets a standard that only very few people have attained. Yet, the few and fleeting moments where our discipline and diligence allow us to approach that life justify the rest of it which falls short and spurns us to seek more opportunities for the transcendent pleasure of contemplation. !9 � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 9 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 Nakedness in Plato's Republic Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr. at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hadzi-Antich, Ted 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 2014-10-16 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 Plato. Republic Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004531 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1b834bfd9347314b5694865497a6bb91.pdf faaea59b1448c4d692bfb541d53b1507 PDF Text Text Michael Ivins, Ph.D. St. Vincent College Latrobe, PA Paper delivered at the conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of St. John’s College, Santa Fe October 16th, 2014 On the Silence of Socrates in Plato’s Cleitophon The original title of this talk was: “Socratic Wisdom and the Liberal Arts.” This might imply that the subject would be the employment of Socratic method or the importance of Socratic ignorance for a Liberal Arts education, or something to that effect. However, I’m actually interested in a disparity in the aims of Socratic education and liberal education. In the following, I will try to draw out what I take to be a tension between the Liberal Arts and Socratic philosophy. A common complaint about Socrates is that conversations with him rarely, if ever, yield any sort of definitive, positive knowledge but often end in utter confusion.1 Even at his trial, he claims that he cannot be a teacher and corrupter of the youth precisely because he himself lacks wisdom. We have all heard the slogan: “All that I know is that I know nothing.” 2 But there is at least one positive claim which Socrates derives from the recognition of his ignorance, namely that, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” 3 It is the awareness of our ignorance that both motivates and justifies the life devoted to inquiry, and this way of life constitutes the Socratic education. The word “art” in Liberal Arts suggests the possibility of teaching, or at least learning, and possessing some positive knowledge. Yet this need not imply indoctrination or dogmatism in any way. These “arts” are purported to be “liberating” arts which further implies that they are in some way tools or techniques for the attainment and practice of freedom and liberty. Of course, the Socratic education promises a kind of freedom as well, but of a different sort. Socratic education offers Cf. especially Euthyphro. One often suspects Socrates knows something that he is not telling us (Cleitophon 10c6-7; cf. Cratylus 304a on irony). 22 Common paraphrase of Apology 21d and 23a-b: “I do not think I know that which I do not know;” “[H]uman wisdom is worth little or nothing [compared to divine wisdom]; and “The man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless.” 3 Apology of Socrates 38a. 1 �liberation from the invisible bonds of opinions which we all inherit involuntarily. But here we must pose a question to Socrates: “Is this sufficient?” And indeed Cleitophon will do this for us. Education in the Liberal Arts, on the other hand, offers the possibility of a “freedom to,” a freedom to act rightly in the world, or at least better than we would otherwise. This would be a freedom to speak, to choose, and to properly exercise our liberty in the society in which we participate. But we must pose the question to ourselves: “Is this possible? Can good judgment be taught, or can it even be learned through a course of study?” In Plato’s Cleitophon we find an argument for both the necessity and insufficiency of the Socratic education from someone concerned with the improvement of public life. Cleitophon had hoped that philosophizing with Socrates might help make this possible. But our interlocutor has been disappointed and believes he can show Socrates quite clearly the limits of the Socratic education. Cleitophon lodges such a devastating critique of Socrates that at the end of the dialogue he can make the incredible claim that Socrates is not only a stumbling block to the achievement of virtue but ultimately an impediment to the realization of human happiness. That is, the Socratic education could ultimately be harmful to human beings, at least according to Cleitophon. What is extraordinary about the Cleitophon as a dialogue is how abruptly it ends. Socrates apparently has nothing to say after hearing Cleitophon’s severe criticism that while Socrates can exhort us to care for virtue, he cannot at all show us how to go about this. Plato writes no response on behalf of Socrates. But should we interpret this as silence? It is possible that in reading the dialogue it is not really silence that we experience, but rather a suspension between speeches, one in which our anticipation demands that we respond. Some reasons why Socrates does not respond might include: �1. The possibility that Cleitophon is not worthy of a response. Cleitophon just won’t “get it,” so it would be a waste of time to try to correct him. This happens to be the opinion of most of my colleagues who have committed themselves to the study of philosophy. I don't think that they realize Cleitophon is actually on their side, at least those who happen to be professional educators. 2. It could be that Cleitophon’s critique is legitimate and cannot be defeated. This is not necessarily to say that he is simply right; there are such things as undecidable propositions and irreconcilable differences. Socrates does offer viable defenses elsewhere, but perhaps none are definitive or even adequate. 3. Perhaps Socrates would not want to defend himself in this particular case. Socrates may have no interest in encouraging someone like Cleitophon to turn to philosophy as a way of life. Cleitophon is someone who has spent a good deal of time with Socrates, who is competent in dialectic, who is sympathetic, and who despite being disparaging sees the value of Socrates. Cleitophon could act as a sort of public advocate of philosophy, a representative who participates actively in civic life and who may be critical of Socrates but is not hostile. So what is the nature of Cleitophon’s complaint? He says he has always marveled at the arguments Socrates makes against his fellow Athenians saying, Don’t you see you haven’t the slightest clue what you’re doing? You, whose entire concern is to make money; You don’t seem to care whether your sons who will inherit your riches will know how to use their wealth justly. You don’t even bother trying to find out if there are teachers of justice for them or even for yourselves. (407b2-6) 4 Cleitophon recognizes something important about the true value of education. He sees that an education concerned solely with making a living is inadequate. It is more important to know what to use money for than to know how to get it. This problem lies at the core of the current crisis in liberal education. Faced with the complaint that degrees in the Liberal Arts aren’t practical, we have two main arguments to make our case: We can argue that Liberal Arts students fare just as well 4 Line numbers refer to Slings’ text of the Cleitophon (Cambridge 1999). �financially as students with vocational degrees. Or, we can try to show that liberal education can offer something priceless, the betterment of one’s soul. Cleitophon is convinced of the latter and for this he thanks Socrates. Socrates has persuaded him that happiness consists in the exercise of soul in virtue both for oneself and for the sake of others, and that material goods should be placed in the service of these ends. Cleitophon believes that Socrates thinks one can learn an art of self-mastery: mastery over one’s belongings, one’s body, and ultimately one’s soul. In addition, those who learn the art of self-mastery can benefit those who can’t or don’t by directing them in their actions and in the disposal of their goods. Such people should, “hand over the rudder of their thought, as if on a ship, to another who has learned the art of piloting human beings” (408b1-3). That is, those who are capable of self-mastery are also competent leaders. Cleitophon here reminds Socrates that this is what he often calls “statesmanship” (politike) which is “the very same art as that of judging and justice [dikastiken te kai dikaiosunen]” (408b4-5). There is an art of good judgment that, like any skill, can be taught or at least learned by means of some sort of instruction. This effectively makes Cleitophon a proponent of the Liberal Arts; for is this not a presupposition of liberal education?: namely, that one can develop good judgment by means of a certain course of study. So, Socrates' exhortation to virtue has succeeded. Great.. Can Socrates do more for us or are we left only to exhort others? We should ask with Cleitophon: “What next? How do we even begin the study of justice?” (408e1-3). Cleitophon knows that he won't get a straight answer from Socrates himself, so he goes to his young associates–knowing not to call them students–asking them, “What is the art having to do with the virtue of the soul?” to which the most reputed among them replies “nothing other than justice” (409a2-6). Cleitophon inquires further asking what the “work” (in Greek, the ergon) of justice might be suggesting an analogy with the arts. Just like the art of medicine produces two things: 1) more doctors, and 2) health; and carpentry produces two things: 1) more carpenters, and 2) houses; and as it is the power of all crafts to produce some artifact in addition to more artisans, so, likewise, what does the art of justice produce? Cleitophon providing a partial answer asks: What �does the art of justice produce besides just men? But is the just man merely another artisan who can teach the art or is he the artifact? We should wonder here whether the just man is merely another teacher of justice who can teach others to be teachers, or if the just man is a product like health and houses. Cleitophon takes it that the art of justice produces teachers of justice and some artifact besides. His question then remains as to what this product could possibly be. But are the artist and the artifact necessarily separate? We need to consider Cleitophon’s understanding of the craft analogy itself. When he first suggests the analogy he mentions not only medicine but the art of gymnastic training. He then drops the art of gymnastic to focus on medicine and carpentry. These become the models for the art pertaining to the virtue of the soul. But perhaps the art of gymnastic is more suitable. If we unpack the analogy, we see that medicine is comparable to gymnastic and to carpentry in different ways. Like gymnastic training, medicine is concerned with the health of the body; like carpentry, the product (health in the body of another) is independent of the artist. In the unique case where the doctor practices medicine on himself, he does not treat himself qua doctor but rather qua patient. As Aristotle might put it, one acts on oneself as other (Metaphysics IX.1). On the other hand, someone practicing the gymnastic art practices on himself qua self. The body acts on the body qua body. Physical training is a self-sufficient activity, unlike either medicine or carpentry the products of which are always external. Here we can see an ambiguity in the Greek word ergon which Cleitophon overlooks. Ergon can mean the work of art as well as the work of the artist. The latter is the exercise of the art itself. Cleitophon is focused on the ergon as a product independent of the activity rather than the activity itself. For Cleitophon, the activity of the artist is a means to an end, not an end in itself. This is also reflected in his understanding of philosophy. He does not seem to be interested in the intrinsic value of inquiry or self-knowledge as such but more with how �philosophizing might serve as a means to an end; and a noble end at that, namely, an understanding of justice for the sake of the achievement of virtue. So, how does this analogy help us understand justice? Cleitophon may have almost answered his own question before he asked it. Earlier he had said that justice is the art of self-mastery. But perhaps the art of self-mastery is like gymnastic where the exercise of the art itself is the end; self-mastery would be the exercise of the soul qua soul on itself and for itself. As to the product or artifact of self-mastery, this may be secondary or even accidental. It may even be that the care of the self is not a matter of art at all but of the soul’s nature (cf. 410d). As it is the nature of the body to care for itself through exercise, so may it be the nature of the soul to care for itself qua soul through the exercise of self-mastery. But Cleitophon had identified and even stressed the by-product of an art of self-mastery, namely the mastery over others. The work of self-mastery amounted to the art of piloting other human beings. Perhaps here we find one key difference between Socrates and Cleitophon, and so between Socratic Education and the Liberal Arts. For Socrates self-mastery as care of the soul arguably consists in inquiry itself, regardless of whatever inquiry might produce. In the Apology, Socrates exhorts us to discuss virtue everyday not act virtuously, unless of course these are the same. Cleitophon is interested in discussing virtue precisely for the sake of acting virtuously. Can we really blame him for this? Returning to the original question, Socrates’ young associates respond that the artifact of justice is the useful (sumpheron), the fitting (deon), the beneficial (ophelimon), or the profitable (lusiteloun) (409c1-3). None of these satisfy Cleitophon because they are so vague as to apply to any art. All arts and actions intend some good, so none of these get at the particular good which justice produces. Someone soon speaks up suggesting that justice produces “friendship in the city” (409d5). Friendship is always good and is some kind of like-mindedness. The question is raised as to whether this sameness of mind is the sharing of opinion or of knowledge. Since common opinion is often wrong and can result in great harm, the product of the art of justice must be friendship among the like-minded in the city who share in knowledge (409d6-e10). �Cleitophon is prepared to leave this answer intact, but unfortunately others jump in pointing out that like-mindedness is also common to all the arts. All doctors share the same knowledge insofar as they possess the art of medicine. All carpenters share the same knowledge insofar as they possess the art of wood working. So, the argument comes full circle: though we know that the art of justice is a knowledge shared among just citizens, we don’t yet know what external good in particular such persons produce (409e10-410a6). I would like to argue that Cleitophon’s interest in friendship suggests that he is one of the good guys. It is always tempting in Plato to be suspicious of anyone who has political ambitions, especially someone who hangs out with rhetoricians and sophists. Cleitophon does in fact spend time with one of the nastiest among them, namely, Thrasymachus whom we know as Socrates’ hostile interlocutor in the Republic and who argues the position that “might makes right,” or that justice is the law of the stronger. But even though he says he will go to Thrasymachus and whomever else if he gives up on Socrates, we have no indication that Cleitophon is a follower of Thrasymachus or anyone else for that matter. I can easily imagine him arguing with Thrasymachus as we see him doing here with the best of Socrates’ associates. I noted earlier that Cleitophon knows not to call these so-called associates Socrates’ students. He doesn’t know what exactly to call them: “peers (helikioton), coenthusiasts (sunepithumeton), comrades (hetairon), or whatever!” (408c6). 5 He recognizes that Socrates is not a teacher in any normal sense. But one term that he is also careful not to apply to Socrates or his associates is “friends” (philoi), the very sort of relationship that he is interested in engendering between citizens. (There is an unfortunate issue with the translation I handed out where our translator has translated both the hetairon and philoi indiscriminately as “friends.” It is important for my argument that both Plato and Cleitophon make a distinction between philoi and hetairon, the latter of which I would translate as companions or comrades.) 5 Perhaps “cohorts” since they share the activity of exhortation? �But Cleitophon doesn’t even identify himself as one of Socrates’ associates or even as his friend. I think the care with which he speaks is evidence of some significant understanding of Socrates. In his concern for the city, Cleitophon had praised Socrates’ criticism of his fellow Athenians for setting “brother against brother, and city against city” in the pursuit of material gain. Socrates motivates them to concern themselves with virtue. But Cleitophon’s complaint stands; all he sees Socrates do is turn people toward a concern for virtue and at best teach them how to turn others. But apart from exhortation, when asked how to learn the art of justice and put it into practice, Socrates seems to have little to offer. If education in the Liberal Arts only produced teachers (or God forbid only produced philosophers) there would be a real problem. Socratic education is not enough if it can only direct us toward the life devoted to inquiry. At some point there must be students who are not teachers so that there can be considerate and educated citizens who are competent to deliberate about real world issues and who can make choices that result in action. If there really is an art of good judgment, perhaps justice and freedom can be developed through a course of study. Most institutions of higher learning do offer the means to make a good living. I think we are all here because we are of same mind in thinking that there should be more concern for living the good life. � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On the silence of Socrates in Plato's Cleitophon Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Michael Ivins at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ivins, Michael 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 2014-10-16 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 Plato. Clitophon. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004535 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e304be807775f10edd85a08225e73289.pdf 77b7f80c0bdf84d58ba425175d77dc01 PDF Text Text 1 In the Middle of a Conversation: Reflections on Ortega y Gasset’s “The Misery and Splendor of Translation” by Kathleen Longwaters I wish to thank all those who have organized this conference from those who had the first glimmer of the idea to those who put chairs in the room and water on the table. I am grateful. Whatever we study today, be it physics, economics, or philosophy, we are coming in on the middle of a conversation. The past is below our feet like a watershed we draw on. We can dig a well a right back to the source of Plato and read him in the Greek (as Ortega y Gasset did). Or we can learn something of Nietzsche as alluded to in the poetry of Allama Iqbal, like a tree drawing up buried water filtered through subsoil. I claim a deep and broad understanding of one’s own intellectual history is vital for understanding current movements in thought regardless of one’s field. Now the questions as to what comprises “one’s own intellectual history” is worth discussing, but will be set aside today in order to address more directly the question of: “What is Liberal Education for?” 1 Ultimately I will claim that Liberal Education is for understanding where we stand at the moment, for developing humility, and for encouraging courageous effort. Furthermore, that these three are connected to each other. I am indebted to Ortega y Gasset for these thoughts which in a way are but an echo of his own, which in turn are also a kind of re-sounding. It is both the content of “The Misery and Splendor of Translation” (which I will call MST) and its relation to another text, a sort of invisible interlocutor, which has brought me here today--both figuratively and literally. Where we stand The silent partner in the conversation this text is having is Plato’s Meno. And common elements in the two texts will be examined in order to illustrate the claim about a liberal education allowing us to know where we stand. These are both exquistely rich texts and in 20 minutes, I will only be able to give the broadest outline of what is happening here. Out of curiosity, how many of you have read Plato’s Meno? And how many the MST? To give a tiny bit of background, MST first appeared in a daily newspaper in Argentina in 1937. I encountered it last fall in a course called “Translating India” along side articles on the difficulties of translating Sanskrit into Burmese , double meanings in Tamil poetry, and Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 1 Liberal Education is neither narrow, nor strictly vocational and utilitarian. �2 Set in this context of secondary literature in the field of translation studies, I was perhaps slower to pick up on its fictiveness than had I encountered it in another setting. It opens in a plausibly academic manner, presenting itself as a retelling of a conversation at a colloquium, much like our gathering here today. There are philologists, scientists and art historians, and Ortega himself seems to be speaking. Yet given that the piece waxes fictive, I will call him the narrator to remind ourselves that the opinions spoken by him may or may not entirely represent this author’s point of view. Probably the place the fictiveness is strongest is near the end of the piece when a reportedly great linguist has just been talking. We get a bit of narrator comment here, Ortega y Gasset writing: “The linguist stopped talking and stood with his sharply pointed nose tilted up to a vague quadrant in the heavens. In the corners of his mouth was the hint of a possible smile” (not an impossible smile.) I have the feeling this smile is for us, and it points toward the playful almost mocking tone which weaves in and out between a more earnest almost clinical inquisitiveness. This great linguist gives puzzling and, at times, seemingly contradictory advice about translation. And it is his voice which dominates the last about 20% of the article. One bit of advice, for example, is on the proper style for translation, saying “I imagine, then, a form of translation that is ugly, as science has always been; that does not intend to wear literary garb.” What it means for the speaker who is in the most literary garb to say translation ought not dress itself in literary garb is a question worth asking. This section of the work has puzzled a number of translators such as Selby who have wondered how to read him. What has not been noticed, either by scholars in the field of translation studies or those concerning themselves with Ortega y Gasset in the realm of philosophy, is the pulse of Plato underlying this work. In structure, tone, and content MST invokes the Meno. Even Orringer who gleaned Ortega y Gasset’s life work for references to Plato in service of understanding the Spaniard’s philosophy, misses this work—in spite of the fact that Plato’s name appears directly, again, in the mouth of the linguist who says only in using his style of translation can a reader, quote, “transmigrate within poor Plato.” Perhaps because this piece is ostensibly about translation, it was ignored. Here we see (likely) evidence, therefore, of a narrow, discipline bound view obstructing our ability to understand the work. The past is left out of the picture, and this is simply read as an original and independent work. The statement by this character about the Greeks no longer being able to function as models in any kind of positive sense probably also throws one off the trail. Turning now to some of the commonalities of MST and Meno, we see both open with and revolve around a question in the format of “Can x be y-ed?” In the Meno, of course, the question is “Can virtue be taught?” whereas the action of concern in the other work is, not unexpectedly, translation-- with an ultimate question of “Can anything be �3 translated?” but appearing in initially as whether “certain German philosophers” can be. Admittedly these questions are rather different and could be argued as coincidence; nevertheless, here virtue slides in by the 7th sentence where the narrator, speaking to his colleagues, takes a jab at their morals, saying both are impossible in their very essence-translating or being virtuous. Humility and courage make their appearance a bit further on. Both Socrates and the narrator of MST try valiantly to keep the question at hand in its most broad and overarching form, and both meet resistance from those with whom they speak. In the famous example of the bees, Socrates teases Meno saying “while I am looking for one virtue, I have found you to have a whole swarm of them.” The hornet’s nest in the MST is math and science, with someone from the later field claiming his type of writing can be translated. After giving a sort of qualified agreement that in the sense that it exists as a language shared by scientists who happen to be living in various countries, it can be read by each. He points out that this has to do with the fact that these people speak the same technical language, so it is not, in this case, really translation at all. To reverse and eliminate the idea that math and science form an exception, he brings in Set Theory, describing it as “the branch of mathematics most in vogue in the last quarter century,” and indeed it was. Only two years after MST is published, Bourbaki’s work on the subject, Elements de Mathematic comes out and is called a “monumental work” in a review in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, illustrating its reception in the field. What is Set Theory? Most of us have encountered it in the form of overlapping circles in the first or second grade which illustrate members shared between the two, or not shared as the case may be. But here again we are coming in in the middle a conversation, and we glimpse it through the MST. When Ortega y Gasset writes his piece, Set Theory is well establish, but its acceptance some 60 years prior was, at best, mixed. Some critics said it was not math at all, rather philosophy. Ferreiros in his recent publication, Labyrith of Thought: A History of Set Theory and its Role in Modern Mathematics, describes what’s at stake as Cantor’s use of the “actual infinite” versus the “implicit infinite.” An open problem is the associated Continuum Theory which proposes that real numbers (ie, the continuum) is a larger infinity than the infinity of counting numbers. One does not need to be a great mathematician to get the sense of why some folks might be uncomfortable with the idea talking about one infinity being bigger than another infinity. Ortega y Gasset uses “continuum” in regard to language and translation and its impossibility, but what is most relevant here is his complaint that Menge, a term from Set Theory, has, quote, “no possibility of being translated into our language.” This is a complaint that mathematicians of his time were in actuality voicing, so here the fictiveness of the piece wanes. For Ortega y Gasset this complaint is used as a way to draw math and science back into the fold of the general question of translatability, �4 putting them along with everything else into the category of the impossible. Impossibility for Ortega is what can never be reached, just as the end of an infinite series. The narrator warns, that if you divide writing into two categories, “those that can be translated and those that cannot” that what happens is, quote, “we close the door on the real problem every translation presents.” What that real problem is is still an open question, though I have a hunch which I will come to later if there is time 2 But to come back to Liberal Education and now see where we stand, one could say we stand midstream, for the echoes of the Meno point to the importance of the past for understanding the present, but glimpses of an ongoing conversation in the field of mathematics shows that interchange is not over. We are just one point along a way that continues around us and before us. With too narrow a focus we miss out. A Liberal Education allows us to see where we stand by being both broad and deep, and where we stand is first and foremost in relation. This moves us towards humility and courage. Humility and Courage Now the kind of Mathematics, so to speak, most in vogue in Socrates time was geometry. It plays a role in the Meno, but not the same role as Set Theory in MST. Actually, Set Theory can help us visualize the overlap of these two texts. They hold in common several elements already mentioned and others as well: A central question and attempts at holding it in a general form, discussions of virtue, talk of being in a muddled, speechless state, the importance of effort, a math of the day, the importance of coming to know you don’t know, and true opinion 3. Nevertheless, the relationship between the texts is not a simple one. Neither do these shared elements appear in the same sequence, nor do they necessarily function the same way in the dialogues. Where Ortega y Gasset uses the Math as a unifier, Socrates uses the Geometry to illustrate the value of, one, reaching a muddle and, two, of learning that you don’t know what you might have thought you did. Meno complains that Socrates has made him numb and dumbstruck, and Socrates says he himself is so as well. In addition, the slave boy used to work through the geometry problem, giving Meno a chance to see the process with some distance, is also said to become “perplexed and numb” in the process of moving from thinking he knows to understanding he does not. It is just this discovery that gives him the impetus to search further for an answer. In the MST we run into a muddle as well and the cause is again the presumption that we know when we do not. Ortega y Gasset writes, “infected by the entrenched prejudice that through speech we understand each other, we make our remarks and listen in such good faith that we inevitably misunderstand each other much more than if we had remained silent and guessed.” The confusion described here is a kind of The hunch is that translating is trying to make commensurate to different infinite sets, just as in the continuum theory. This is why you get the double exposure. 3 Some of which we do not have time to discuss more fully 2 �5 paralysis that leaves one speechless. There is not time here to go further into Ortega’s thoughts on silence, but it does strike me that it may well be meaningful that the Meno is a silent partner in this conversation. What is important is that in this dialogue we, like the slave boy in the other, might come to see that we do not know what we assumed we did. The linguist suggests that, quote, “we need to approach the Greek and Roman again, but not as models –on the contrary, as exemplary errors,” claiming that: “to acquire a historical consciousness of oneself and to learn to see oneself as an error are the same thing.” 4 This is another way of expressing that we keep discovering, in retrospect, that we didn’t know all we thought we did. A Liberal Education, in so far as it gives us a “historical consciousness,” therefore offers us this knowledge that we do not know all that we think we do. Acceptance of this is tantamount to taking on humility, a trait which the narrator in MST finds translators to have in abundance. Our state of being in ignorance is driven home by the narrator who focuses on the past as progenitor. He says: “Modern man is too proud of the sciences he has created. Certainly through them the world takes on a new shape. But, relatively speaking, this innovation is not very profound. Its substance is a delicate film stretched over other shapes developed in other ages of humanity, which we project as our innovation. We draw from this gigantic wealth at every opportunity, but we don’t realize it, because we haven’t produced it; rather we have inherited it.” 5 Again, a Liberal Education allows us to view ourselves in the present in relation to wider thought and in relation to our inheritances from the past. The MST begins to look a bit like this delicate film stretched over shapes developed in other ages, for the past pokes through here and there bearing a shape reminiscent of the Meno. But as previously intimated, it is not quite the same shape. If it were a face, the nose would be moved to the place of the ear, and the ear tucked under the chin. Where are we left? Ortega y Gasset describes synonyms across languages as being like a blurred photo, saying: “The shapes of the meanings of the two fail to coincide as do those of a person in a doubled-exposed photograph.” He goes on to speak of the dizzying consternation of the person trying to bring the two into focus. We have a similar problem, it seems, in trying to bring the common elements in these two texts into some kind of clear focus where everything lines up smoothly. This brings us to effort. Courageous Effort My final claim for Liberal Education is that it encourages courageous effort as a result of having shown us where we stand which is followed by a realization of our ignorance. I would also suggest that this is the ultimate port of arrival in the two texts we have been examining. Not ultimate in the sense of the final item in a sequence, but as in the 4 5 MST 110 Ibid. 105 �6 highest aspiration or result. This only became clear to me reading these two texts side by side because they each reach this destination coming from entirely opposite directions. Another function of the Geometry in the Meno brings us to the question of the possibility or impossibility of finding any answers at all. Meno expresses doubts about the possibility, and Socrates says insistently: “We must, {...}, not believe that debater’s argument, for it would make us idle-- and fainthearted men like to hear it, whereas my argument makes them energetic and keen on the search.” 6 So learning is not for the cowardly. It is an act here linked to courage and to effort. Learning is tied to virtue. However, while for Socrates, on the one hand, possibility is absolutely necessary for stimulating effort, for the narrator of MST, on the other, it is precisely impossibility which encourages it. He argues that achieving something that was categorized as possible would make you feel that you had achieved nothing at all. He argues in regard to translation that: because it would be desirable to free men from the divisions imposed by languages, there is little probablity that it can be attained; therefore, it can only be achieved to an approximate measure. But this approximation can be greater or lesser, to an infinite degree, and the efforts at execution are not limited, for there always exists the possibility of bettering, refining, perfecting. He goes on to say that all human activities are like this. But what makes this effort courageous? In the MST, courage is initially tied into the definition of good writing and is said to be what translators lack. The narrator defines good writing thus: “To write well is to make continual incursions into grammar, into established usage, and into accepted linguistic norms. It is an act of permanent rebellion.” For Ortega y Gasset, true opinion, which in his work has no finite, attainable, counterpart in firm knowledge, is set in opposition to public opinion. Given that true opinion is as close as one can get to Truth and squarely stands in opposition to the public, hence wrong opinion, it acts as a key when the narrator, in the last few words in the dialogue, agrees with the linguist that his style of translation is just what the public wishes. It puts the linguist’s suggestion of a style of translation that is “ugly, as science has always been” rather squarely in the wrong camp. In summary, Liberal Education shows us where we stand by showing us to be in relation. By assuming connections across time and across fields , it encourages us to look for those relations rather taking things at face value. Because we do not settle on a face value reading, we are nudged to look more, to keep looking, yielding a more a 6 M 81e. p. 14 �7 nuanced picture. In order to wish to look beyond what is simply at hand, an understanding that we do not already know all there is to know is necessary –and that grows out of seeing ourselves in relation. Effort is always laced with courage as it means moving away the pool of general, unreflective thought and the gesturing toward authorities for confirmation; it brings one rather to stand on one’s own feet. To me “The Misery and Splendor of Translation” looks like a brave and humble attempt which allow us to “transmigrate” into the mind Plato, at the same time as being much more than just that. It is anything but secondary literature. � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. 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Title A name given to the resource In the middle of a conversation : reflections on Ortega y Gasset's "The misery and splendor of translation" Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Kathleen Longwaters at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Longwaters, Kathleen 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 2014-10-16 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 Ortega y Gasset, José, 1883-1955. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004543 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fb4cbf6899760e49f0841759ee36cac2.pdf 80439c004b82f8ee1de2442864ff5f50 PDF Text Text “Teaching  Philosophy  in  College:    The  Effectual  Truth”   Daniel  P.  Maher   16  October  2014   Conference:    What  Is  Liberal  Education  For?     A  Conference  at  St.  John’s  College  on  the  50th  Anniversary  of  the  Santa  Fe  Campus   Panel:    Underpinnings  of  an  Education  in  the  Classics     Abstract:    Philosophical  education  at  the  collegiate  level  has  become  increasingly  difficult  in  recent   years.    Obstacles  arise  due  to  the  preparedness  of  the  students,  the  composition  of  the  faculty,  and  the   character  of  American  academic  institutions.    A  decisive  shift  has  made  it  reasonable  to  regard   institutions  of  higher  learning  as  primarily  devoted  to  preparing  students  for  gainful  employment  rather   than  to  cultivating  their  minds.    In  schools  where  philosophy  courses  are  still  required  and  teachers  try  to   communicate  to  their  students  and  their  colleagues  the  centrality  of  philosophy  within  education,  there  is   a  danger  that  we  overlook  the  permanent  obstacles  to  philosophy  within  human  nature.    In  what  sense  is   philosophy  both  a  peak  achievement  of  human  intelligence  and  something  to  be  required  for  and   beneficial  to  every  student?    Classical  philosophy  (paradigmatically  Plato)  identifies  a  certain  disharmony   between  philosophy  and  the  city;  Descartes  (Enlightenment  philosophy  generally)  suggests  that   philosophy  can  be  universally  beneficial  and  harmonious  with  the  concerns  of  ordinary  life.    Can   philosophy  in  the  classical  tradition  be  presented  in  an  Enlightenment  mode?       Part  One:    Our  Context       Teaching  philosophy  in  college  today  is  impossible.    This  thesis  can  be  proved  through  at  least   eight  middle  terms.1    I  take  some  solace  from  the  fact  it  has  always  been  impossible,  and  yet  it  has   happened.    So  teaching  philosophy  is  almost  always  impossible.    Insofar  as  this  is  a  practical  problem,   our  goal  is  not  the  best  education  simply,  but  the  best  we  can  reasonably  aim  at  in  our  circumstances.     By  “our  circumstances”  I  mean,  first,  the  smallish,  Catholic  liberal  arts  college,  within  which  there   yet  remains  something  of  the  Catholic  emphasis  on  philosophy,  tenuously  allied  now  with  other  concerns   like  providing  job  credentials  and  de-­‐‑occidentalizing  the  curriculum  as  far  as  possible,  except  in  science.    I                                                                                                                             1  One  can  find  insuperable  obstacles  in  our  regime,  our  schools,  and  our  students  themselves.    Here  is  one   list  of  eight  obstacles.     1.  Self-­‐‑esteem  and  the  death  of  eros.     2.  Functional  illiteracy  of  the  students.     3.  Relativism,  post-­‐‑modernism,  race-­‐‑class-­‐‑genderism.     4.  Opposition  from  colleagues,  who  are  not  liberally  educated.     5.  Commercialization  and  professionalization  of  colleges.     6.  Scientism.     7.  Shrunken  curriculum.     8.  American  anti-­‐‑philosophical  character.   �speak  not  of  unusual  places  like  St.  John’s,  but  of  schools  like  my  own  Assumption  College,  schools  more   or  less  devoted  to  the  liberal  arts,  more  or  less  Catholic,  and  more  or  less  tending  from  the  more  to  the   less.    I  am  eager  to  learn  how  the  matters  about  which  I  speak  appear  to  this  audience.     Teaching  philosophy  in  these  circumstances  has  a  horizontal  and  a  vertical  trajectory.    We  require   philosophy  of  all  students  as  essential  to  their  education,  and  yet  we  try  to  preserve  openness  to  the   highest  peak  made  possible  by  the  pursuit  of  philosophy.    Needless  to  say,  such  a  peak  is  reserved  for  the   rarest  of  students.    And  nevertheless,  if  we  lose  sight  of  that  vertical  trajectory,  we  popularize  philosophy   so  that  it  becomes  something  else.    Without  wisdom  in  the  highest  sense  as  its  goal,  philosophical   education  easily  becomes  subordinated  to  goals  defined  by  citizenship  or  some  similarly  parochial  bias   the  institution  finds  it  reasonable  to  pursue.     When  I  say  teaching  philosophy  is  impossible,  I  adapt  a  thesis  defended  by  John  Haldane,  who   distinguishes  an  instrumentalized  education  from  one  where  “an  essential  aspect  of  the  value  of   education  is  intrinsic  to  it.”    He  associates  the  former  with  utilitarian  progressives  like  Bentham  and   Spencer,  and  to  them  he  opposes  first  Matthew  Arnold,  alongside  whom  he  lines  up  John  Stuart  Mill,   John  Henry  Newman,  Plato,  Aristotle,  Augustine,  and  Aquinas,  all  of  whom  agree  that  the  point  of  an   education  is  the  cultivation  of  the  mind  as  distinct  from  training  for  what  we  now  call  professional  work.2     Arnold  prizes  intellectual  perfection  as  more  important  for  modern  democracy  than  are  economic   successes  or  the  empowerment  of  voters.     According  to  Haldane,  the  goal  of  education,  as  understood  by  Plato,  Newman,  and  the  rest,  was   this  noble  idea  of  perfection,  but  it                                                                                                                             2  “[T]he  idea  which  culture  sets  before  us  of  perfection  .  .  .  is  an  idea  which  the  new  democracy  needs  far   more  than  the  idea  of  the  blessedness  of  the  franchise,  or  the  wonderfulness  of  their  own  industrial   performances,”  (Matthew  Arnold,  Culture  and  Anarchy:    An  Essay  in  Political  and  Social  Criticism  (1869;   Oxford:    Oxford  University  Press,  2009),  49).    Arnold’s  “perfection”  is  distinguished  not  only  from   Philistinism  (which  he  equates  with  coarseness  of  soul  and  especially  the  pursuit  of  material   advancement)  from  the  pursuit  of  knowledge  for  its  own  sake.    His  “perfection”  includes  a  kind  of  moral   and  religious  cultivation.     2   �can  only  be  effectively  pursued  through  the  kind  of  intensive  education  and  formation  that   involves  a  relatively  small  number  of  students  in  each  class  tutored  by  a  widely  read  and   committed  teacher.  .  .  .    This  combination  is  impossible  in  a  mass  higher  education  system;  and,   the  possibility  of  continuing  to  fund  such  a  system  even  with  lower  educational  ambitions  is   proving  too  much  for  the  states  and  populations  of  Western  Europe  and  for  parts  of  North   America.3     To  be  precise  here,  Haldane  says  the  combination  of  means  necessary  to  pursue  this  goal  effectively—or   perhaps  efficiently—is  impossible.         Why?    The  obstacles  are  legion;  dozens  of  recent  books  and  articles  analyze  and  lament  the  decay   of  higher  education.    I  limit  myself  to  two  points:    Haldane’s  observation  about  the  condition  of  our   educational  institutions  and  a  more  complicated  set  of  observations  about  our  colleagues,  which  I  borrow   from  another  essay  by  Haldane,4  in  which  he  identifies  philosophy  as  the  source  of  much  trouble.     Haldane  attaches  the  impossibility  of  effectively  teaching  philosophy  mainly  to  the  fact  that   institutions  are  not  and  no  longer  can  be  devoted  to  the  cultivation  of  the  mind.    Instead,  they  have  come   to  be  dominated  by  the  function  of  training  students  for  employment  and  by  the  pursuit  of  prestige   through  research.    To  be  clear,  he  distinguishes  research,  understood  as  the  acquisition  of  new  knowledge   in  a  quasi-­‐‑Weberian  sense,  from  scholarship,  where  teachers  deeply  appropriate  the  universal  and   permanent  significance  of  the  tradition  they  transmit.    Because  even  colleges  tend  to  be  dominated  by  the   goals  of  training  for  employment  and  of  pursuing  research,  “there  is  no  going  back  in  general  to  the   conception  of  Arnold,  Newman,  and  Mill.”5  (740).    Haldane  seems  to  regard  this  as  an  immovable   sociological  fact,  and  I  see  no  reason  to  doubt  him.     With  respect  to  our  colleagues,  the  situation  is  more  complicated.    Let  us  stipulate  that  they  are   exceptionally  competent  in  their  respective  fields.    Nevertheless,  many  of  them  not  only  do  not  have  the   kind  of  education  they  are  responsible  to  help  transmit,  they  actively  aim  at  the  destruction  of  what                                                                                                                             3  John  Haldane,  “The  Future  of  the  University:    Philosophy,  Education,  and  the  Catholic  Tradition,”   American  Catholic  Philosophical  Quarterly  87:4  (2013),  736.   4  John  Haldane,  “Educational  Studies  and  the  Map  of  Philosophy,”  British  Journal  of  Educational  Studies   60:1  (March  2012):    3–15.   5  Haldane,  “Future,”  740.     3   �would  need  to  be  preserved.    According  to  John  Agresto,6  a  liberal  arts  education  does  two  things  well:     preserve  the  great  thoughts  and  question  the  contemporary  culture.    These  two  activities  are  now  under   assault  within  the  academy.    Haldane  shows  how  that  attack  is  itself  the  product  of  educators’  uncritical   allegiance  to  recent  philosophical  thinking.    On  Haldane’s  view,  during  the  past  one  hundred  years  or  so,   the  “map  of  philosophy”  has  been  dominated  by  two  streams  of  thought:    continental  postmodernism  on   the  one  hand  and  analytic  naturalism  on  the  other.    Teachers  have  absorbed  vulgarized  forms  of  these   traditions  as  if  they  held  the  saving  truth  or,  at  least,  as  providing  the  certainty  prerequisite  to  open   contempt  for  the  philosophical  discipline  of  asking  whether  one’s  guiding  opinions  are  actually  true.     Some  teachers  are  the  victims  of  a  little  philosophy,  which  they  do  not  recognize  as  philosophy  and  on   the  basis  of  which  they  deliver  denunciations  of  philosophy,  thereby  exhibiting  open  and  disdainful   pride  balanced  by  unwitting  folly.       If  I  sound  harsh  here,  I  don’t  exempt  myself  from  the  kind  of  mistake  at  issue:    blindness  to  the   gaps  in  one’s  own  education  and  in  one’s  grasp  of  the  nature  of  education,  that  is  to  say,  not  knowing   that  one  does  not  know  and  not  knowing  what  one  needs  to  know  are  the  permanent  obstacles  to   philosophy.    Haldane  describes  one  form  of  this  in  contemporary  academics,  but  this  kind  of  problem   afflicts  almost  all  of  us  almost  all  of  the  time.    We  all  feel  wise  sometimes,  and  we  are  normally  most   tiresome  to  others  in  those  moments.     According  to  Haldane,  the  humanities  side  of  the  academy  tends  to  be  inhabited  by   postmodernists,  who  descend  from  one  response  to  what  they  recognized  as  the  failure  of  Kantianism.     That  response  was  to  question  the  presuppositions  of  the  tradition,  which,  they  argued,  failed  to  see  that   our  finitude  and  contingency  enervate  us;  what  we  most  need  is  not  to  contemplate  the  truth,  but  to                                                                                                                             6  See  his  “Are  the  Liberal  Arts  a  Universal  Good,  or  Are  They  Simply  Something  Western?    Bringing  the   Liberal  Arts  to  Iraq.”    This  lecture  was  delivered  at  a  Wilson  Center  Symposium  entitled  “The  Liberal   Arts  and  the  Human  Condition:    Collegiate  Education  and  the  Challenge  of  Modernity”  on  19  November   2013,  at  Hampden-­‐‑Sydney  in  Virginia.     4   �understand  our  “experience  and  the  possibilities  for  action.”7    According  to  the  descendants  of  this  view,   education  empowers  us  to  expose  false  consciousness,  to  delegitimize  the  artificial  categories  of  race,   class,  and  gender,  and  to  open  the  way  to  politicized  re-­‐‑appropriation  of  the  tradition.    Thus,  education   becomes  a  form  of  socialization  or  training  for  practical  involvement  in  a  culturally  diverse  world.8       The  scientific  side  of  the  academy  tends  to  be  inhabited  by  people  influenced  by  analytic   philosophy.    This  tradition,  Haldane  says,  with  its  emphasis  on  logic,  language,  and  mathematics,   excelled  first  at  debunking  intellectual  pretensions,  exposing  fallacies,  and  eliminating  confusions  and   empty  verbiage.    It  has  more  recently  allied  itself  with  the  reductive  naturalism  of  scientistic  neuro-­‐‑ thinking.    Philosophy  is  tolerated  in  the  limited  role  of  sweeping  up  after  the  sciences,  but  these  people   do  not  see  the  extent  to  which  they  are  in  the  grip  of  philosophical  commitments,  broadly  of  Cartesian   ancestry,  which  they  do  not  understand.9                                                                                                                             7  Haldane,  “Educational  Studies,”  11.   8  Michael  Oakeshott  provides  a  somewhat  different  analysis,  according  to  which  European  rulers  first   promoted  “apprenticeship  to  adult  life”  for  the  poor  as  an  alternative  to  the  education  that  was   unavailable  to  them.    The  goal  was  to  make  these  people  more  productive  and  more  useful  to  the  nation.     Gradually  and  deliberately,  this  goal,  commonly  identified  as  socialization,  was  substituted  for  the  goal  of   education  understood  as  initiation  into  the  inheritance  of  human  understanding.    See  Michael  Oakeshott,   The  Voice  of  Liberal  Learning  (New  Haven:    Yale  University  Press,  1989,  repr.  Indianapolis:    Liberty  Fund,   2001),  esp.  77-­‐‑104.    Oakeshott  identifies  political  causes,  and  Haldane  identifies  philosophical  causes.    It   seems  to  me  possible  that  these  amount  to  two  sides  of  one  coin.    Incidentally,  this  socialization  may  be   what  Nietzsche  complained  against:    “Men  are  to  be  trained  for  the  purposes  of  the  age  to  lend  a  hand  as   soon  as  possible:    they  are  to  labour  in  the  factory  of  common  utility  before  they  are  ripe,  or  rather  to   prevent  their  ever  becoming  ripe––because  that  would  be  a  luxury  which  would  draw  a  lot  of  strength   from  ‘the  labour  market’”  (On  the  Advantage  and  Disadvantage  of  History  for  Life,  trans.  Peter  Preuss   (Indianapolis  and  Cambridge:    Hackett  Publishing,  1980),  41.   9  The  inability  of  scientistic  thinking  to  account  for  the  activity  of  the  scientists  themselves  should  be  but   is  not  plain  to  those  who  celebrate  scientism.    Jerry  Coyne  exemplifies  this  problem  by  mocking  the   incompetence  of  philosophers  to  address  the  matter  of  free  will  in  comparison  to  the  scientists  who  have   finally  or  almost  finally  settled  the  issue.    In  doing  so,  he  denies  that  he  exists  as  a  speaker,  and  he  invites   us  to  contemplate  that  consciousness  is  an  illusion.  “There’s  not  much  downside  to  abandoning  the   notion  of  free  will.  It’s  impossible,  anyway,  to  act  as  though  we  don’t  have  it:  you'ʹll  pretend  to  choose   your  New  Year’s  resolutions,  and  the  laws  of  physics  will  determine  whether  you  keep  them.  And  there   are  two  upsides.  The  first  is  realizing  the  great  wonder  and  mystery  of  our  evolved  brains,  and   contemplating  the  notion  that  things  like  consciousness,  free  choice,  and  even  the  idea  of  “me”  are  but   convincing  illusions  fashioned  by  natural  selection.    Further,  by  losing  free  will  we  gain  empathy,  for  we   realize  that  in  the  end  all  of  us,  whether  Bernie  Madoffs  or  Nelson  Mandelas,  are  victims  of  circumstance     5   �   In  both  cases  the  problem  arises  from  philosophical  thinking  received  in  the  mode  of   unquestionable  opinion.    Our  situation  involves  trying  to  teach  amidst  teachers  who  propagate  dogmas   that  close  off  the  opportunity  to  think.    The  irony  here  is  that  the  dissemination  of  philosophy  in  a   popularized  mode  has  contributed  mightily  to  the  difficulty  of  teaching  philosophy  in  college.    My  point   is  that  opinion-­‐‑induced  blindness  is  the  permanent  human  obstacle  to  philosophy.    Even  if  all  of  the  other   obstacles  to  education  were  removed,  this  one  would  remain,  and  it  does  remain  in  all  of  us  in  the   illusion  that  we  know  what  we  do  not  know.     Part  Two:    So  What  Do  We  Do?       Let  me  return  to  the  distinction  between  the  horizontal  and  the  vertical  trajectories  of  our  efforts.     On  the  horizontal  plane,  we  are  committed  to  holding  that  philosophy  is,  in  some  sense,  essential  for   everybody  and  central  to  a  liberal  education.    Among  other  benefits,  philosophy  helps  students   appreciate  and  learn  to  achieve  clarity  of  conceptual  thinking,  precision  in  drawing  distinctions,  and  rigor   in  argumentation.    Philosophy  helps  students  overcome  the  tendency  of  their  education  to  fragment  into   separate  disciplines  and  competing  methodologies.    Philosophy  draws  attention  to  fundamental   questions  not  addressed  by  the  several  academic  disciplines,  and  it  forces  the  student  to  be  mindful  of   himself  as  the  being  for  whom  education  is  desirable.    Whereas  the  other  disciplines  train  the  student   how  to  read  actuarial  tables  or  how  to  examine  microorganisms,  philosophy  draws  attention  to  the  more   necessary  concern  with  the  being  on  this  end  of  microscope  and  this  side  of  the  green  eye  shades.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           —  of  the  genes  we’re  bequeathed  and  the  environments  we  encounter.    With  that  under  our  belts,  we  can   go  about  building  a  kinder  world.”  Jerry  A.  Coyne,  “Why  You  Don’t  Really  Have  Free  Will,”  USA  Today  1   January  2012,  accessed  8  April  2014,  http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-­‐‑01-­‐‑ 01/free-­‐‑will-­‐‑science-­‐‑religion/52317624/1.    Coyne  condescends  to  us  at  the  same  moment  that  he   disqualifies  himself  as  a  speaker.    As  Aristotle  says  of  the  person  who  so  undercuts  himself,  he  is  no   better  than  a  plant;  one  does  not  argue  with  a  plant.    See  Metaphysics  IV.4.1006a13–15.    Incidentally,  recent   biological  studies  suggest  that  comparing  Jerry  Coyne  to  a  plant  may  be  unfair  to  plants.    See  Michael   Pollan,  “The  Intelligent  Plant,”  The  New  Yorker  89:42  (23  and  30  December  2013):    92–105.    Pollan  describes   especially  the  work  of  Stefano  Mancuso,  but  there  are  other  scientists  investigating  similar  lines  of   research.    See  Oliver  Sacks,  “The  Mental  Life  of  Plants  and  Worms,  Among  Others”  The  New  York  Review   of  Books  LXI:7  (24  April  2014):    4–8.     6   �   This  approach  protects  some  intrinsic  value  to  education,  but  it  still  tends  to  instrumentalize  it   and  to  subordinate  philosophy  to  intellectual  skills  needed  in  all  walks  of  life  and  for  making  people   capable  of  governing  themselves  and  living  well  in  a  republic.10    Success  in  those  goals  is  not  yet  the   perfection  of  the  human  soul  in  wisdom,  which  is  not  by  any  plausible  stretch  the  fruit  of  two  or  three   required  courses  in  a  gen  ed  curriculum.     So  how  do  we  understand  undergraduate  philosophy  courses?    Do  we  abandon  wisdom  or  the   pursuit  of  wisdom  as  a  telos  while  we  cater  to  the  capacities  of  most  students,  or  do  we  go  through  the   motions  with  the  majority  while  we  sift  through  them  for  the  rare  person  who  has  the  gift  and  the   appetite  for  a  philosophical  life?    Can  we  try  to  do  justice  to  both  concerns  simultaneously?    Are  we   willing  to  say  out  loud  that  we  have  one  very  modest  goal  with  most  students  and  another  more  serious   goal  with  the  very  few?    What  do  we  hope  to  accomplish  with  most  students?    Perhaps  we  aim  to  foster   in  them  an  opinion  that  philosophy  is  good  and  valuable.    We  want  them  to  recognize  that  fundamental   opinions  or  commitments  structure  our  personal  and  political  lives  and  that  philosophical  thinking   shapes  our  science,  our  politics,  and  every  aspect  of  our  thinking  lives.    We  may  tell  them  that  philosophy   can  help  them  live  better.   Harmony  between  the  ordinary  concerns  of  human  life  and  philosophy  is  presupposed  in  the   notion  that  all  human  beings  should  be  educated  and  education  should  include  philosophy.      But   philosophy  has  not  always  been  so  conceived.    Plato’s  Apology  of  Socrates  in  particular  seems  to  invite  or   even  require  us  to  recognize  that  the  tension  between  philosophy  and  the  city  is  not  accidental.     Philosophy  teaches  people  to  question  what  the  family  and  the  city  tell  them  is  good  and  true.    If  we   genuinely  awaken  the  power  to  question,  there  is  little  telling  where  it  will  lead.    Averroes  and  Aquinas                                                                                                                             10  Jacob  Klein  identifies  the  “most  serious”  obstacle  to  liberal  education  as  arising  from  the  relation  to  the   political  community.    On  the  one  hand,  preservation  of  political  form  requires  attention  to  education,  and   yet  education  “conceived  as  a  means  to  an  end,  a  political  end”  cannot  be  the  same  as  an  education   ordered  to  “genuine  searching  and  questioning.”    See  Jacob  Klein,  “The  Idea  of  Liberal  Education,”  in   Jacob  Klein:    Lectures  and  Essays,  ed.  Robert  Williamson  and  Elliott  Zuckerman  (Annapolis,  MD:    St.  John’s   College  Press,  1985),  168–70.     7   �both  studied  Aristotle.    Perhaps  the  emancipation  of  young  people  necessitates  that  they  question   whether  their  parents  have  been  adequate  guides  to  what  is  good  and  true,  and  thus  the  threat  of   destabilizing  society  may  be  unavoidable.11    However  that  may  be,  there  is  a  big  difference  in  how  we   understand  our  relation  to  these  students:    are  we  seeking  to  inculcate  an  opinion  about  the  nature  of   education  and  the  place  of  philosophy  in  it,  or  are  we  seeking  to  awaken  the  power  to  question?     If  we  aim  at  cultivating  inquiry  in  the  deepest  sense,  we  have  limited  ourselves  as  a  matter  of  fact   to  very  few  students.    But  when  we  do  this,  we  do  what  philosophy  alone  can  do.    I  presume  we  are  up  to   the  task,  but  I  may  be  too  optimistic.    Nietzsche  suggests  that  capable  teachers  are  like  major  league   pitchers:    there  are  not  enough  to  go  around.12    A  student  with  great  natural  gifts  has  probably  more   opportunity  now  than  ever  before  to  find  a  seat  in  college,  but  will  he  or  she  find  there  a  guide  suited  and   able  to  open  the  door  to  a  genuinely  philosophical  life?     If  we  assume  that  we  are  up  to  the  task  and  that  we  can  spot  the  appropriate  students,  we  stand   to  provide  them  with  an  opportunity  to  enter  upon  what  has  been  classically  identified  as  the  best  life   available.    That  sounds  dramatic,  but  it  is  the  way  of  philosophy.    The  other  goals  of  philosophy  classes,   the  goals  that  are  the  concern  of  the  horizontal  trajectory,  might  be  well  pursued  by  a  philosophically   inclined  history  or  literature  professor.    So,  when  we  are  dealing  with  the  students  who  take  only  two  or   three  philosophy  classes,  what  are  we  really  accomplishing  that  could  not  also  be  accomplished  in  other   courses?    Perhaps  we  generate  in  them  a  better  opinion  of  philosophy  than  many  of  our  colleagues  hold.     And  thus  we  secure  for  ourselves  a  continued  seat  at  the  table,  a  guaranteed  slice  of  the  curriculum.    For                                                                                                                             11  “For  education  among  all  kinds  of  men  always  has  had,  and  always  will  haven  an  element  of  danger   and  revolution,  of  dissatisfaction  and  discontent.”    W.  E.  B.  DuBois,  The  Souls  of  Black  Folk  (New  York:     Tribeca  Books,  2013),  19.    Quoted  by  Michael  S.  Roth,  Beyond  the  University:    Why  Liberal  Education  Matters   (New  Haven  and  London:    Yale  University  Press,  2014),  65–66.   12  “There  exists  now  almost  all  over  such  an  exaggeratedly  great  number  of  higher  educational   institutions  that  incessantly,  endlessly  many  more  teachers  are  needed  for  the  same  than  the  nature  of  a   people,  even  with  rich  aptitudes,  is  able  to  beget;  and  thus  an  excess  of  the  unfit  comes  into  these   institutions,  but  who  gradually,  through  their  overwhelming  head  count  and  with  the  instinct  of  ‘similis   simili  gaudet,’  determine  the  spirit  of  those  institutions.”    Friedrich  Nietzsche,  On  the  Future  of  Our   Educational  Institutions,  trans.  Michael  W.  Grenke  (South  Bend,  IN:    St.  Augustine’s  Press,  2004),  64–65.     8   �what?    To  perpetuate  our  careers?    What  are  we  and  our  careers  for?    Inculcating  an  opinion  that   philosophy  is  good  or,  at  least,  not  that  bad?    Is  that  not  the  Cartesian  project  of  disseminating  the   opinion  that  philosophy  is  good  for  the  city?     Precisely  that  thesis,  the  belief  in  the  easy  harmony  of  philosophy  and  the  concerns  of  ordinary   life,  seems  to  be  the  problem.    I  quote  now  from  Richard  Velkley’s  analysis  of  the  work  of  Richard   Kennington.   In  aiming  at  universalizable  benefits,  philosophy  as  “Enlightenment”  must  remove  from  the   center  of  philosophy  the  sustained  openness  to  the  wondrous  which  cannot  be  universalized.    Yet   if  the  modern  founders  are  seeking  to  overcome  the  alienness  or  strangeness  of  philosophy,  they   must  first  be  aware  of  it.    They  must  admit  that  the  philosopher’s  passion  is  somehow  unusual.     In  this  awareness  they  still  are  linked  with  the  ancients.    Their  success  in  overcoming  the  rift   between  philosophy  and  non-­‐‑philosophy  would  mean,  however,  the  demise  of  that  awareness.     They  would  found  a  condition,  therefore,  in  which  their  act  of  founding  would  not  be  possible.     The  success  of  modernity  renders  its  origin  unintelligible  to  its  beneficiaries.    This  is  the  heart  of   the  present  crisis.13     The  present  crisis  is  the  “crisis  of  European  civilization”  spoken  about  by  Husserl,  Heidegger,  and   Strauss.    Velkley  explains  that,  while  modern  philosophy  was  founded  by  genuine  philosophers,  their   “new  kind  of  thinking  endangered  the  existence  of  philosophy.    Relativism,  scientism,  nihilism  are   consequences  of  modern  philosophy’s  self-­‐‑subordination  to  the  spheres  of  ‘practice’  and  history,”  which   are  the  non-­‐‑philosophic  offspring  of  modern  philosophy.14    Kennington  understood  these  issues  to  be   encapsulated  in  the  question,  now  mostly  unasked,  “Who  is  the  philosopher?”    I  am  suggesting  that  the   same  swarm  of  problems  is  implicated  in  determining  what  we  think  it  means  to  teach  philosophy  to   undergraduates.     Let  me  restate  the  problem  on  the  horizontal  plain.    As  Tocqueville  indicated,  what  Descartes  did   Americans  have  absorbed.    “If  I  go  further,”  Tocqueville  wrote,  “and  seek  amongst  these  characteristics   of  the  human  mind  the  principal  one  which  includes  almost  all  the  rest,  I  discover  that  in  most  of  the                                                                                                                             13  Richard  L.  Velkley,  “Masks  of  Mastery:    Richard  Kennington  on  Modern  Origins,”  Political  Science   Reviewer  31  (2002):    9.   14  Ibid.,  6–7.     9   �operations  of  mind,  each  American  appeals  only  to  the  individual  effort  of  his  own  understanding.”15     Eva  Brann  calls  this  rationality,  which  is  a  mode  of  thinking  distinct  from  reason  itself.    Reason  is  a  power   of  the  mind,  which  is  cultivated  by  inquiry,  by  questioning,  which  is  directed  intellectual  desire.16    Reason  is   stifled  by  methodology,  by  Kantian  critique,  and  similar  techniques  that  artificially  limit  inquiry  before  it   can  begin.    Rationality,  by  contrast,  is  the  name  for  what  Tocqueville  describes  as  the  peculiarly  American   turn  of  mind.    She  appeals  to  William  James  as  capturing  the  “sentiment  of  rationality”  as  the  feeling  of   my  own  intellectual  sufficiency,  my  confidence  that  no  one  may  impose  his  ideas  on  me.    I  don’t  have  to   know  anything  of  importance  or,  indeed,  anything  in  particular  in  order  to  think  and  decide  for  myself.     Descartes’s  demand  for  certainty  and  the  consequent  doubt  of  all  authority  and  of  ordinary  experience   have  been  received  as  the  right  to  make  up  my  own  mind.    “Who  is  the  philosopher?”  gives  way  to  “Why   do  I  have  to  take  philosophy?”     Now  this  is  a  very  different  question  that  arises  without  a  desire  to  know.    It  is  an  expression   rather  of  a  right  not  to  need  to  know.    How  we  answer  this  question  says  much  about  who  we  are.     Conclusion       When  we  admit  as  the  telos  of  our  teaching  wisdom  in  the  highest  sense,  it  is  difficult  to  claim   that  philosophy  is  for  everyone.    Should  we  settle  into  the  moderate  goal  of  improving  the  perspicacity  of   all,  for  which  philosophy  proper  becomes  non-­‐‑essential,  or  should  we  abandon  the  ordinary  student,   preserve  purity  of  heart,  and  pursue  without  apology  the  rarefied  and  classical  goal  of  wisdom  to  the  best   of  our  ability  with  only  the  fewest  of  our  very  best  students?     I  doubt  we  can  eliminate  the  tension  between  these  two  poles  of  education.    As  interesting  as  the   philosophical  problem  at  the  root  of  our  practical  problem  is,  our  problem  remains  practical.    I  see  no                                                                                                                             15  Alexis  de  Tocqueville,  Democracy  in  America  vol.  II,  bk.  1,  ch.  1;  as  quoted  in  Eva  T.  H.  Brann,  Paradoxes   of  Education  in  a  Republic  (Chicago  and  London:    University  of  Chicago  Press,  1979),  121.   16  Brann  describes  reason  pregnantly  as  she  describes  as  “the  deliberate,  self-­‐‑conscious  activity  of  the   original,  personal  activity  of  thought.”       10   �reason  to  expect  that  some  new  plan  will  suddenly  amend  our  institutions,  alter  our  colleagues  and   ourselves,  and  endow  our  students  with  all  the  intellectual  qualities  we  might  dream  of.    Nor  do  I  think   there  is  a  philosophical  insight  that  solves  the  problem,  as  if  some  particular  thesis  that  diagnoses   modernity  or  unravels  it  would  provide  a  pedagogical  solution.    That  approach,  I  think,  has  been   interestingly  deflated  by  Haldane.    Part  of  our  problem  is  the  presence  of  too  much  sophisticated   philosophy  in  education.    He  recommends  adapting  Tip  O’Neill’s  thesis  that  all  politics  is  local  to  this   formula:    “most  worthwhile  educational  theory  is  contextual  and  practical.”17    No  philosophic  insight  and   no  institutional  scheme  can  solve  the  difficulty.    Those  teachers  do  best  who  are  alert  to  the  possibilities   and  the  obstacles  and  pragmatic  enough  to  do  whatever  can  benefit  a  student  who  is  open  to  learning.     This  inclines  me  to  do  Haldane  and  O’Neill  one  better  and  say  that  all  education,  whenever  it  happens,  is   individual.    Eva  Brann  writes,  “The  effort  of  the  single  teacher  is  the  ultimate  resort  of  excellence  in   education.”    She  continues,  “I  think,  teachers  should  laboriously  form  an  opinion  concerning  the   foundations  of  learning  and  then  teach  accordingly—alone,  if  necessary,  and  in  a  community  of  like-­‐‑ minded  colleagues,  if  they  are  so  fortunate.”18    If  this  captures  the  situation  at  St.  John’s,  her  advice  is  all   the  more  compelling  for  those  of  us  who  teach  in  more  ordinary  schools.       Selected  Bibliography     Agresto,  John.    “Are  the  Liberal  Arts  a  Universal  Good,  or  Are  They  Simply  Something  Western?     Bringing  the  Liberal  Arts  to  Iraq.”    Lecture  delivered  at  a  Wilson  Center  Symposium  entitled  “The  Liberal   Arts  and  the  Human  Condition:    Collegiate  Education  and  the  Challenge  of  Modernity,”  19  November   2013,  Hampden-­‐‑Sydney  in  Virginia.     Arnold,  Matthew.    Culture  and  Anarchy:    An  Essay  in  Political  and  Social  Criticism.    Oxford:    Oxford   University  Press,  2009.     Brann,  Eva  T.  H.    Paradoxes  of  Education  in  a  Republic.    Chicago  and  London:    University  of  Chicago  Press,   1979.                                                                                                                             17  Haldane,  “Educational  Theory,”  14.   18  Eva  T.  H.  Brann,  Paradoxes  of  Education  in  a  Republic  (Chicago  and  London:    University  of  Chicago  Press,   1979),  5.     11   �   Haldane,  John.    “Educational  Studies  and  the  Map  of  Philosophy,”  British  Journal  of  Educational  Studies   60:1  (March  2012):    3–15.     ———.    “The  Future  of  the  University:    Philosophy,  Education,  and  the  Catholic  Tradition,”  American   Catholic  Philosophical  Quarterly  87:4  (2013):  731–49.     Klein,  Jacob.    “The  Idea  of  Liberal  Education.”    In  Jacob  Klein:    Lectures  and  Essays,  edited  by  Robert   Williamson  and  Elliott  Zuckerman,  157–70.    Annapolis,  MD:    St.  John’s  College  Press,  1985.     MacIntyre,  Alasdair.    God,  Philosophy,  Universities:    A  Selective  History  of  the  Catholic  Philosophical  Tradition.     Lanham,  MD:    Rowman  &  Littlefield,  2009.     Nietzsche,  Friedrich.    On  the  Advantage  and  Disadvantage  of  History  for  Life.    Translated  by  Peter  Preuss.     Indianapolis  and  Cambridge:    Hackett  Publishing,  1980.     ———.    On  the  Future  of  Our  Educational  Institutions.    Translated  by  Michael  W.  Grenke.    South  Bend,  IN:     St.  Augustine’s  Press,  2004.     Oakeshott,  Michael.    The  Voice  of  Liberal  Learning.    New  Haven:    Yale  University  Press;  reprinted   Indianapolis:    Liberty  Fund,  2001.     Roth,  Michael  S.    Beyond  the  University:    Why  Liberal  Education  Matters.    New  Haven  and  London:    Yale   University  Press,  2014.     Tocqueville,  Alexis  de.    Democracy  in  America.    Translated,  edited,  and  with  an  introduction  by  Harvey  C.   Mansfield  and  Delba  Winthrop.    Chicago  and  London:    University  of  Chicago  Press,  2000.     Velkley,  Richard.    “Masks  of  Mastery:    Richard  Kennington  on  Modern  Origins,”  Political  Science  Reviewer   31  (2002):    6–28.     Weiss,  Bari.    “Camille  Paglia:    A  Feminist  Defense  of  Masculine  Virtues,”  WSJ   http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579240022857012920   Accessed  28  December  2013                   12   � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 12 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 Teaching philosophy in college : the effectual truth Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Daniel Maher at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Maher, Daniel P. (Daniel Patrick), 1964- 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 2014-10-16 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 24004544 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2b6b534fe7ea70bbf705a399bf4d8fdc.pdf aeca03cc2d9227151d528f6721fe5fc9 PDF Text Text 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 � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 6 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 Piety, knowledge, and critical inquiry in Plato's Euthyphro (with reference to Plato's Apology) Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by David Shiner at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Shiner, David 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 2014-10-16 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 Plato. Euthyphro. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004550 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1950d523541969ed2aef2756f4752090.pdf 800f6639b536df1554a723429c7b6ce7 PDF Text Text 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. � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 11 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 Liberty and authority : religious dogma and liberal education in Tocqueville and Newman Description An account of the resource 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. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Walker, Austin 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 2014-10-16 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 Newman, John Henry, 1801-1890. Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805-1859. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004554 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7783016c724315e931f4607002bf4825.pdf 45080cfba30b21b6ed39e7f5d3123987 PDF Text Text Do the Liberal Arts Today Serve any Useful Public Function? John Agresto I picked this somewhat provocative title because I think that the liberal arts and liberal education, if they are to survive, have to take more seriously than they do this question of their usefulness, especially their public usefulness. The liberal arts are dying in America, and they are dying in large measure because the public is unconvinced that any attention to these subjects, especially the humanities, are worth the cost, the effort, or the time. If you have any doubt regarding the decline of liberal arts education, just look at what students study in college these days. We all know a time when it was assumed that when students went off to college that a goodly number of them would study the liberal arts. We knew that many of them would major in English – which seemed always a preferred concentration – while others would study History or Mathematics or one of the hard sciences. There was, as well, always a serious handful who gravitated towards Foreign Languages or Philosophy or the Classics. So, where do things stand today in higher education? Well, today four of the top majors – Business Studies, Education, the Health Professions, and Engineering – account for 41% of all Bachelors degrees, while English and Literature accounts for a mere 3% of all such degrees. Today, just over 1% of our students major in any of the Physical Sciences, and Philosophy accounts for less than one half of one percent of the whole total. In fact, there are more Bachelor degrees given in 1 �something called “Parks, Recreation, Fitness and Leisure Studies” than are awarded in all the fields of History put together. Why is this the case? Let me give the most general answer first and then make it more specific in a bit. The liberal arts are dying because most Americans don’t see the point of them. They don’t get why a person should study literature or history or the classics -- or, more contemporarily, feminist criticism, whiteness studies, or the literature of post-colonial states -- when their son can study engineering or their daughter get a business degree. It’s not only that they and their children want to get a good job and make lots of money – they often also want to make a contribution more generally to the world, do something useful for themselves and their neighbors, even their country, and they don’t see what “use” the liberal arts (in either their more traditional or especially in their newer formulations) are either to themselves or to society. Now we all know that talking about “usefulness” gives most liberal artists the willies. We in the liberal arts are always more comfortable with divorcing ourselves from utility, with seeing our enterprise as something higher than training people in the more useful arts or helping people gain a living. Now, my point is not to try to convince you of the worthiness of other forms of education, though I know I tend to see them as more worthy than many of my colleagues do. And my point is definitely not to tell you that today liberal education needs to adopt a rhetoric of usefulness deceive the public into thinking we’re something we are not. My point 2 �is simply that the liberal arts are, when at their best, not only of immense value – let’s even say of “use” -- not only for each of us as individuals but I think also and especially of use to society at large. Let me go back to the first years of this country. I’m reminded of the famous phrase of John Witherspoon, an early president of what would later become Princeton University, who said to his students that they should not “live useless and die contemptible.” To Witherspoon, to go to college and not draw from it some things – many things – of use to one’s self and to the world at large would have surely seemed quite strange. And, recognizing that among those who went to Princeton and listened to President Witherspoon were 9 future cabinet members, 12 governors, 21 senators, 39 congressmen, 3 Supreme Court justices, a vice president, and a president, James Madison, who was also one of 5 of Witherspoon’s students at the Constitutional Convention, I can only assume that the good Mr. Witherspoon thought it was particularly contemptible to be useless in the public realm, not just ineffectual in our private lives. Now, part of the reason why I’m troubled by the way liberal education seems always ready to denigrate other forms of education or to criticize society at large for our problems is that, in trying to shunt the blame elsewhere, we absolve ourselves too easily for our own decline. We have worn what we saw as our purity and inutility as a badge. When students turned away from us, we too often said it was their fault – that they were more interested in jobs and money-making than in education. We blamed pushy parents, or the materialism of modern life, or the rise 3 �(as this conference’s brochure mentions) of “consumerism.” Yes, we should be furious over the coming death of the liberal arts in America – but we should examine ourselves (and by “ourselves” I do not mean St. John’s in particular but the enterprise of liberal education at large) and be honest with ourselves. And, having come to grips with all the causes of our recent decline, we might begin to see that the death of the liberal arts is less a murder than a suicide. We all know how the liberal arts have marginalized themselves out of existence: Read the course catalogues of so many college and see how, for instance, departments of literature have become shells of their former selves. With the rise of graduate school analyses and specialization that is now so much a part of the undergraduate curriculum, how much vitality has been lost from literature. Gone today in too many places are all the stories that showed us the world with its joys and sorrows, gone all our marveling over the varieties of human types or stories of honor and treachery, of hopes ascendant and hopes dashed. All replaced by more ideologically-driven studies; all replaced with our contemporary infatuation with race and class and politics. Too many History departments stopped trying to show us all we could learn from the past and began to think it best to show us all we couldn’t learn from the past. After all, to take just one example, if the Founders of this country of ours were little more than white racist slaveholders who set up a government to in order to line their pockets and protect their interests, who in his right mind would want to waste his time and his parents money to study the Founding period seriously? 4 �Looking over the liberal arts, I’m not sure which of the many ‘isms’ of today has done the most damage. Is it the relativism and postmodernism that we fought over so furiously in the ‘80’s? Or is it the ideology of multiculturalism, which promised to expand greatly our worldview, but instead narrowed it mortally by making us ashamed to take so seriously the works of dead white European males? Is it the remnants of a kind of pop-Marxism, which always has us look for economic and material causes as the source of human motivation and thus diminishes what used to be seen as the sovereign power of arguments, thoughts, and ideas? Is it the rise of an ideology of “critical thinking” that passes itself off as the core of the liberal activity, but, sadly, spends more of its time in being critical than being thoughtful? Or is it, as I just mentioned before, the rise of the specialization of the graduate schools, which specialization has been the engine of progress in many of the advanced sciences and technology, but the cause of so much smallness of both mind and vision in the humanities? Let me stay on specialization for a second. How clearly I remember teaching at other reputable liberal arts colleges where the best undergraduates would tell me they wanted to double major… triple major if they could. Why? Because even they knew that what they were getting was too narrow, too small, too particularized and specialized to satisfy them. Maybe if they double majored they could see more. (Sadly, as too many of them found out, only rarely did double majoring expand anything. Often it meant closing oneself off from all else that should be learned.) 5 �Nevertheless, you see, students are generally not the problem. The best of them do want, in what I heard that Eudora Welty once said, “to see the world and see it whole.” Not see it “all.” Even they know no one can ever see it all. But so many do want to see it “whole.” See its interconnections, see the relationship between causes and effects; thought and act, act and consequences; between love and jealousy, jealousy and revenge, revenge and justice, justice and all other human goods. They have the vague sense that the universe is actually a cosmos – not a jumble of isolated and discrete, unrelated items but a web of relationships, where one insight leads to another, where one answer leads to another answer. Again, it’s not the students who are the problem. They have the same questions they have always had. Some have questions that revolve around culture and art; others have questions about why the natural world or the animal kingdom are they way they are. Almost all have moral questions -- – What is just? What makes something worthy? What do I owe others? What do others owe me? Now, that said, I do not believe that students are necessarily interested in having questions piled on top of questions in some endless stream of doubt. (“You think you have questions?! Wait till you see how many questions I have for you!” the tutor intimates. “And wait till this Socrates guy confronts you…then they’ll be a million questions!”) If all you have are questions, intriguing as they may be, not many students will be interested. Even Socrates, with all his questioning, still wanted to know the answers. 6 �Still, I admit, the opposite is worse. To say that the liberal arts and we ever so humane humanists have not only all the questions but all the answers -- answers that we will preach to you on every topic from the evils of capitalism to the foolishness of religious beliefs to the meaning of social justice -- well, having all the answers into which we “instruct” our students may well be the most corrupting and prevalent of contemporary academic evils. On many campuses how often is it the non-liberal studies that open up students’ minds while the humanities and their practitioners seem more intent on preaching and converting than in opening and liberating. And what parents in their right minds want to spend 50k a year for that? So, where does liberal education go from here? I’m especially interested in the issue I raised at the start, the question I so inelegantly framed in terms of use. Where do we go to show once again that the liberal arts can be of use for us as individuals and of benefit again to society as a whole? First, as I’ve already said too often, let’s stop denigrating the non-liberal arts and stop questioning the motives of those who look to pursue them. We do not build ourselves up by tearing down other worthy modes of education. Was Jefferson any less intelligent, less human or less “humane,” for having been an architect and farmer as well as a philosopher and political scientist? Second, let’s do what we can to help our students see what the important questions are and what the variety of important answers might be. Not what our answer is; not what the answer of the 7 �supposedly most just or sensitive or socially aware people are, but what the range and scope of all serious answers might be. Third, let’s put aside all the overblown platitudes and flowery banalities about ourselves – how we educate “the Whole Man” or how we feed the spirit and elevate the soul, or how we are the ones who really teach people how to think, or how we are the source and font of ever so much humane and ethical instruction. OK, if overblown hoo-ha isn’t what we should be chasing, what should we be doing? What actually IS the peculiar excellence of the liberal arts that we should present to prospective students and their parents? Let me cite a modest statement by John Henry Newman: The liberal arts are that “great but ordinary means to a great but ordinary end.” What ordinary but great things might he be talking about? How about learning how to read. Read? What an ordinary thing you say. Yes, but when you read carefully and sympathetically (again, not exactly “critically” but sympathetically) you open the door to an amazing thing – You open the door to another person’s mind. You have the ability to do a truly great thing – you now have the ability to possess another’s thoughts. It’s truly marvellous: We humans may want someone else’s beauty or strength; we may want something physical and bodily. But we can’t. We can never really possess someone else’s material body even with the best of medical science at our disposal. But we can have the part of him or her that’s not material. We can possess someone else’s mind. Jefferson’s body may be mouldering in the grave; but his 8 �mind can still live in ours. His mind, his ideas and reasons, can live forever in us because he wrote and we have learned how to read. What else? Well, as I said before, among the best thing about adolescents is that most of them are looking for answers to their deepest questions – questions about love and justice, happiness and desire, nature and its workings. Again, great but ordinary matters. But this means, I believe, that so long as we can reinvigorate real literature, real philosophy, real historical and biographical studies that truly try to understand rather than debunk the past, real inquiry into the fine arts with serious inquiries into the beautiful and the sublime, and solid mathematics and science, all might yet be well. But this means reviving an older view of liberal education. I was reminded recently – not by Cardinal Newman but by Josef Pieper – of a sentence in Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “The Philosopher and the Poet have this in common – they both begin by marvelling.” The liberal arts do not begin in doubt, not even exactly in questioning, but simply in wonder, in marvelling. We begin as Miranda, the marvelling one, did – not with being critics of the world but with simply being overwhelmed with the wonder of the world. From there, all our questions flow -- Why are things as they are; why is the universe as it is? What are people really like? What am I to do? Again, all great but, in a real way, ordinary matters. To begin here, with wonder, is perhaps a start in answering the first part of what we seek – What is the use of a liberal education for me, for the individual. In this account, the first benefit is that it begins to satisfy 9 �the human craving to know, to have insight into serious answers to our most serious questions, perhaps even “to see the world and see it whole,” when that longing in us is most alive. Does this education have any other more outwardly useful or practical import for us as individuals? Yes, it does. Again to refer to Newman, such an education gives us a clearer and more conscious view of our own opinions and refines them. It helps us “to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what’s sophistical, and discard what’s irrelevant.” It shows us “how to influence others, how to come to an understanding with them, and how to bear with them.” In overcoming our ignorance of the past through history and our ignorance of human nature through philosophy and literature, we are less likely to be ruled by slogans or unexamined opinions, less likely to be moved by emotion simply or demagogues, less easily duped because we lack a conception of the evil possibilities of our natures. I’m reminded of Abraham Lincoln, who, while he hardly went to school at all, was by any and every measure “educated,” liberally educated. He read, as we know, biographies and histories, he read the Bible and Shakespeare, and he read literature, especially poetry. He did this for a kind of highest use. He did all this, as one of his biographers said, not just to know how better to write or speak but “to learn what the patterns of a man’s life might be like.” Still, if all his education did was make Lincoln into a private man useful to himself in his everyday life, none of would notice, none of us really care. What we remember was that Lincoln – and before him all 10 �the great men of the American Founding – knew that what was good for them as private intellects might also be of great value, of great use, to creating and then re-creating a whole nation, perhaps a whole world. Jefferson learned from the study of modern moral and political philosophy the self-evident truths that lay behind the writing of his (and our) Declaration of Independence. Or consider James Madison: Without the study of the history of all prior democracies or his inquiries into all confederacies, both classical and modern, coupled with his deep reflection on what we were once bold to call “human nature,” Madison could not have become the Father of the Constitution. Without their philosophical, political, and historical studies of the preconditions of popular governments and the nature of tyrannical rule, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay could not have written the Federalist Papers, nor could the populace have read them. It was hardly modern political science that was behind the making of America – it was the liberal arts. Remember what John Witherspoon told so many of that early generation – do not live useless and die contemptible. I think I’m right to say they followed this admonition. But let me go beyond talking about the liberal arts and high statesmanship and spend a minute just on the liberal arts and the rest of us. What else might the liberal arts do that’s of use, of value, for all society? Again, from Newman: Our studies aim “at raising the intellectual tone of society, cultivating the public mind, supplying true principles to popular enthusiasms and fixed aim to popular aspirations, giving 11 �enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, and refining the intercourse of private life.” While we might spend five more talks on each of these seemingly ordinary but truly great aims, let me spend a minute on just one that has always struck me – the cultivation of the public and the public mind. Indeed, while I know it’s unfashionable these days to say this, I also know that the liberal arts once gave a lovely gift to society: It transmitted the great heights of culture, this culture, to everyone. While other parts of a university education might be progressive and forwardlooking, the liberal arts had no hesitation in looking backwards. It understood it had a conserving function to play. It preserved for everyone, not just the elites, beautiful music, fine art, high culture, fabulous literature, good poetry. In this regard it wasn’t ashamed to be Western, or even Eurocentric. Indeed, it had a kind of honest pride in being the caretakers of such wonderful treasures, our treasures. Liberal education once knew that its keeping the culture alive was actually one of the most publicly useful thing it could do. It gave beauty and intelligence, tone and cultivation, as Newman says, to the whole society. In this way the liberal arts were for more than the simply the enjoyment of a few lucky students or the domain of the rich and wellborn – they were the gift the liberal arts gave to everyone. Back then, the liberal arts didn’t feel bad that Dante and Homer were dead white males. Nor did we, the children of working men and the grand children of immigrant women, feel bad about it either. In fact, back then 12 �humanists actually thought, and rightly so, that keeping Shakespeare alive was a universal gift, not an ethnocentric act. Having been given such treasures, it is now our turn to repay Shakespeare and Milton, Aristotle and Madison. So, we repay them as best we can – by keeping them alive. Their bodies, as I said before, may be dead, but they aren’t. And keeping the words and thoughts and works of great men and women alive is not only of the highest use for us both individually and as a society, but an act of repayment, of justice, to each of them. 13 � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 13 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 Do the liberal arts today serve any useful public function? Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by John Agresto at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Agresto, John 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 2014-10-17 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 24004517 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6f4f4d6e9d4220eb763b33f24aaddf92.pdf 6c3ebd78ca9f132013dbc5b0911f60ae PDF Text Text Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu Fame and the Solitary Life: Rethinking the Liberal Arts through the Paradoxes of Petrarchan Humanism Steve Baker Columbia University “When we are free from necessary business and other concerns we are eager to see or to hear or to learn.”1 – Cicero, De Officiis, I, 13 (trans. M. T. Griffin) Much has been made of Petrarch’s momentous discovery of Cicero’s collection of familiar letters to his friend Atticus, the so-called Ad Atticum.2 Uncovered in 1345 in Verona, it marked a decisive turning point in the development of Petrarch’s work.3 Yet, relatively little has been made of Petrarch’s analogous discovery in 1333 of Cicero’s Pro Archia.4 Its importance 1 “Cum sumus necessariis negotiis, curisque vacui, tum avemus aliquid videre, audire, discere.” 2 On Petrarch’s discovery of Ad Atticum in 1345, see Kirkham, “A Life’s Work” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, p. 21 ff.: “As a ‘born-again’ ancient, Petrarch made his greatest manuscript discovery in the Verona cathedral library, the sixteen books of Cicero’s Ad Atticum along with two minor collections, to the Roman orator’s brother Quintus and to Brutus. From these, which the classics detective excitedly transcribed over several weeks in the spring of 1345 (a period when he also came to know Dante’s son Pietro Alighieri), Petrarch took the tremendous idea of collecting his own letters.” See also Billanovich, “Dall’Epystolarum mearum ad diversos liber ai Rerum familiarium libri XXIV,” pp. 1-55. 3 On the influence of the Ad Atticum on Petrarch and Renaissance letters, see Witt, “Medieval Ars Dictaminis and the Beginnings of Humanism: A New Construction of the Problem”; Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, pp. 49 ff.; and Fantazzi, “General Introduction” in Vives, De conscribendis epistolis. 4 On Petrarch’s discovery of the Pro Archia, see Seniles XVI, 1. During a grand northern European tour he took under the aegis of his Colonna patronage in 1333, Petrarch made a detour to visit a monastery in Liege (Belgium) reputed to be rich in manuscripts. It was there that he found and quickly copied two hitherto unknown Ciceronian orations, the Pro Archia and the apocryphal Ad milites romanae, one of which he quickly copied and had a friend copy the other. Since Petrarch’s travel expenses were covered by the Colonna, Wilkins (Studies in the Life and Work of Petrarch, pp. 5-8) assumes that he probably also served in some kind of official way, either as messenger or cultural attaché or diplomat. Regarding Petrarch’s service as “capellanus continuus commensalis” to the Colonna family, see Dotti, Vita di Petrarca, pp. 28-47. 1 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu cannot be overstated.5 Stumbling upon the neglected manuscript in a monastery library in Liège, the twenty-nine-year-old recent law school drop-out struck on not only an impassioned validation of his decision to pursue a life in letters but also a platform from which to launch the cultural revolution that would become Renaissance humanism.6 In just the first few pages of the Roman orator’s defense of the poet Archias, Petrarch found what would become the blueprint for much of his long and illustrious career.7 With its themes of the “elevating influence of poetry” (III, 6), the role of friendship and patronage in the professional poet’s life (III, 6), the question of pan-Italian Roman citizenship under the Lex Iulia (IV, 6-7), and its praise of literary studies (VI, 12-14), the Pro Archia resonates in far-ranging ways through Petrarch’s humanistic project: from his literary works to his epistolary politics, from his neo-Latin epic, the Africa, to his support for Cola di Rienzo’s quixotic attempt to resurrect the Roman republic and unify Italy. 5 See Pastore Stocchi, Petrarca e i potenti della terra, pp. 49-50; Pastore Stocchi, Introduzione in Petrarca, Opere latine, pp. 15-17; and Guglielminetti, Petrarca e il petrarchismo, pp. 33. 6 See Cicero, Pro Archia, II, 4: “Nam ut primum ex pueris excessit Archias atque ab eis artibus quibus aetas puerilis ad humanitatem informari solet, se ad scribendi studium contulit.” (”As soon as Archias had left behind him his boyhood, and those influences which mould and elevate his boyish mind, he applied himself to the pursuit of a literary career.”) All translations of the Pro Archia are from the Loeb edition translated by Watts. On the origins of humanism, see also Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism”; Weiss, The Dawn of Italian Humanism; Witt, “Medieval Italian Cutlure and the Origins of Humanism as a Stylistic Ideal,” pp. 29-70. 7 The symphonic opening sentence of the oration validates the value of literary pursuits in the legal profession (Cicero, Pro Archia, I, 1): “Si quid est in me ingeni, iudices, quod sentio quam sit exiguum, aut si qua exercitatio dicendi, in qua me non infitior mediocriter esse versatum, aut si huiusce rei ratio aliqua ab optimarum artium studiis ac disciplina profecta, a qua ego nullum confiteor aetatis meae tempus abhorruisse, earum rerum omnium vel in primis hic A. Licinius fructum a me repetere prope suo iure debet” (“Whatever talent I possess (and I realize its limitations), whatever be my oratorical experience (and I do not deny that my practice herein has been not inconsiderable), whatever knowledge of the theoretical side of my profession I may have derived from a devoted literary apprenticeship (and I admit that at no period of my life has the acquisition of such knowledge been repellent to me), – to any advantage that may be derived from all these my friend Aulus Licinius has a pre-eminent claim, which belongs to him almost of right”). 2 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu The Pro Archia is not so much a defense of an individual poet as it is a panegyric on the importance of the liberal arts and those who cultivate them.8 The value of humanistic studies, according to Cicero,9 lies in their usefulness in matters of state and the expansion of its sphere of influence: “literature exalts the nation whose high deeds it sings.”10 In praising poets for the benefit they bring to the life of the republic and its citizens by incentivizing them with the promise of immortality for their noteworthy deeds, Cicero’s Pro Archia presents the deep 8 Cicero, Pro Archia, I, 2: “Etenim omnes artes quae ad humanitatem pertinent habent quoddam commune vinculum et quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur.” (”Indeed, the subtle bond of a mutual relationship links together all arts which have any bearing upon the common life of mankind.”) The way Cicero phrases the common bond that all arts have with each other is richer than Watts’ English translation here suggests. In the original: “quasi cognatione quadam,” in English literally means: “as though by a kind of kindred relationship,” or “by a sort of, as it were, blood relationship.” Cicero qualifies cognatione with both quasi and quadam because he is using the term, which technically describes a familial, blood relationship, metaphorically (see, also, quoddam commune above and quasi divino quodam spiritu, further down in the passage). These are the exaggerated signposts he is deploying in order to make it clear that he is asking his audience to indulge him as he uses in his defense a new style of speaking (“novum genus dicendi”), one suited more to the nature of his client, a poet, than to a court of law. On the usefulness of literary studies, see also, Cicero, Pro Archia, VI, 13: “[...] ex his studiis haec quoque crescit oratio et facultas, quae quantacumque in me est, numquam amicorum periculis defuit” (”[...] my devotion to letters strengthens my oratorical powers, and these, such as they are, have never failed my friends in their hour of peril”). 9 Cicero, Pro Archia, VI, 12: “Ego vero fateor me his studiis esse deditum: ceteros pudeat, si qui se ita litteris abdiderunt ut nihil possint ex eis neque ad communem adferre fructum, neque in aspectum lucemque proferre” (“I am a votary of literature, and make the confession unashamed; shame belongs rather to the bookish recluse, who knows not how to apply his reading to the good of his fellows, or to manifest its fruits to the eyes of all”). 10 See Cicero, Pro Archia, X, 23: “Propterea quod Graeca leguntur in omnibus fere gentibus, Latina suis finibus, exiguis sane, continentur. Qua re si res eae quas gessimus orbis terrae regionibus definiuntur, cupere debemus, quo manuum nostrarum tela pervenerint, eodem gloriam famamque penetrare: quod cum ipsis populis de quorum rebus scribitur, haec ampla sunt, tum eis certe, qui de vita gloriae causa dimicant, hoc maximum et periculorum incitamentum est et laborum” (“Greek literature is read in nearly every nation under heaven, while the vogue of Latin is confined to its own boundaries, and they are, we must grant, narrow. Seeing therefore, that the activities of our race know no barrier save the limits of the round earth, we ought to be ambitious that whithersoever our arms have penetrated there also our fame and glory should extend; literature exalts the nation whose high deeds it sings, and at the same time there can be no doubt that those who stake their lives to fight in honor's cause find therein a lofty incentive to peril and endeavor”). 3 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu affiliation between politics and literary or artistic production.11 Petrarch’s encounter with the poet Archias through Cicero will forever assure a place for poetry at the center of the vocation of the humanist. It played, for example, a decisive role at this early stage in his life seeing that it also inspired the address he delivered eight years later when he was crowned poet laureate on the Capitoline Hill in Rome on Easter Sunday in 1341.12 Deemed the “first manifesto of the Renaissance” by Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Petrarch’s Coronation Oration is a classically inspired treatise that valorizes the role of the poet in society.13 Like Cicero in the Pro Archia,14 and as Ennius did before him, Petrarch places poets in 11 See Pastore Stocchi, Petrarca e i potenti della terra, pp. 49-50: “Ma un’esaltazione della poesia come quella che il Petrarca scoperse e divulgò, a partire dal 1333, con l’orazione ciceroniana Pro Archia, ammetteva appunto un’accezione più ampia, per la quale la persona stessa del poeta era esaltata e consacrata come augusta e influente. D’altro canto, le biografie di Orazio o di Virgilio, ma anche, per esempio, di Aristotele, rilette in questa luce, apparivano confermare una speciale attitudine del poeta e del filosofo a definirsi quale amicus principis per eccellenza, potenzialmente affiancabile ai potenti terreni in una sorta di diarchia: illusione carezzata ancora, fino alla morte di Lorenzo de Medici, dal Poliziano e da altri intellettuali della cerchia medicea. Ma se mai questa illusione egemonica, che a un certo numero di umanisti affermati non accordò mai se non qualche cancellierato e molte cadute in disgrazia, poté sembrare vicina a realizzarsi per davvero, questo avvenne con il Petrarca: primo e probabilmente unico letterato moderno cui sia stato così universalmente riconosciuto un primato anche sociale, non per la ‘gratia Dei’ che incoraggiava Dante a parlare, ma per il carisma della sua intelligenza e del suo sapere.” 12 See Fam. IV, 8 to Barbato da Sulmona: “Idibus Aprilis, anno etatis huius ultime millesimo trecentesimo quadragesimo primo, in Capitolio Romano, magna populi frequentia et ingenti gaudio, peractum est quod nudiustertius de me rex apud Neapolim decreverat: Ursus Anguillarie, comes ac senator, prealti vir ingenii, regio iudicio probatum laureis frondibus insignivit” (“On the Ides of April, and in the 1,341st year of this age, on the Roman Capitoline, in the presence of a large multitude and with great joy, there occurred what the King of Naples had decreed for me the day before yesterday; Orso dell’Anguillara, a friend and senator, a man of lofty talents, honored me with the laurel crown as approved by the King’s judgment”). A majority of book IV of the Familiares is dedicated to recounting the vicissitudes surrounding the coronation though he never describes many of the specific details of the event itself. 13 For the manifesto pronouncement, see Wilkins, “Petrarch’s Coronation Oration,” p. 300. For a reconstruction of the events surrounding the coronation, see Tatham, Francesco Petrarca: The First Modern Man of Letters (His Life and Correspondence: A Study of the Early Fourteenth Century 13041347), II, pp. 104-52; Wilkins, “The Coronation of Petrarch.” See also Pastore Stocchi, Petrarca e i potenti della terra, pp. 50: “Il riconoscimento, cioè, dell’umanista quale titolare di uno status eccezionale, che delle sue competenze trae vantaggio per collocarlo ai vertici del corpo sociale. Era, certo, un’utopia effimera, nutrita a sua volta di altre più antiche utopie accreditate dalla tradizione classica con argomenti più or meno speciosi.” 4 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu league with princes – not least of all because the same laurel wreath adorns both poets, when crowned with literary glory, and princes, in a triumphal military procession.15 The prince needs the poet in order to ensure that the glory of his deeds will endure long into the collective memory of posterity.16 The poet needs the prince for such favors and privileges patronage can provide, namely, the protection of the very otium or leisure necessary to produce such timeless works of commemorative art.17 14 The Pro Archia is first mentioned by name in Petrarch’s “The Coronation Oration,” p. 301: “Take not my word for this, but Cicero’s, who in his oration for Aulus Licinius Archias has this to say of poets: ‘We have it upon the authority of the most learned men that whereas the poet attains through his very nature, is moved by the energy that is within his mind, and is as it were inspired by a divine inbreathing – so that Ennius fairly calls poets sacred in their own right, since they appear to be commended to us by the possession of a divine gift.’” And again toward the end at Petrarch, “The Coronation Oration,” p. 308: “Certain illustrious men, foreseeing such a possibility, have kept poets with them and held them in high honor, so that there might be someone who would hand down their praises to posterity – a matter carefully set forth by Cicero in his oration for Aulus Licinius Archias, to which I have already referred.” See Petrarch, “The Coronation Oration,” p. 309, where the full Ciceronian passage with the anecdote itself is quoted verbatim. 15 On Petrarch’s linking of poets to princes by means of the honor of the laurel crown, see Wilkins, “The Coronation of Petrarch,” pp. 155-97; for an analysis of his oration, see especially pp. 172-9. See also Petrarca, Rvf. 321 and 322 and the companion piece by Giacomo Colonna congratulating him on the coronation cited in the notes of most editions of Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Rvf. 322), “Se le parti del mio destrutte.” See also Petrarca, Collatio inter Scipionem Alexandrum Hanibalem et Pyrrum in Martellotti, Scritti petrarcheschi, pp. 321-46. 16 Petrarch, “The Coronation Oration,” p. 308: “Many mighty men and warriors, and others who have deserved eternal memory have passed into oblivion simply because they had not the good fortune to be recorded by capable authors, as Horace says so well in his Odes: “Many mighty men lived before Agamemnon, but all are buried in a tearless night,” and the reason follows: “since they lack an inspired bard” (Horace, IV 9, 25-28). Certain illustrious men, foreseeing such a possibility, have kept poets with them and held them in high honor, so that there might be someone who would hand down their praises to posterity – a matter carefully set forth by Cicero in his oration for Aulus Licinius Archias, to which I have already referred.” 17 As Luisa Secchi Tarugi rightly emphasizes, Petrarch wavers between otium and negotium, between withdrawn study and political and social passion, fully aware of the fundamental role of the intellectual in society. The idealized image of his humanist hero is a paradoxical mix of seemingly contradictory qualities, action and contemplation, public virtue and private diligence. Just such a figure makes an appearance in texts as early as his coronation oration of 1341. See Secchi Tarugi, Petrarca e l’umanesimo. 5 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu Yet the value of solitude is not reserved for the poet in this ancient formulation of the equation. Solitude was seen as a precious resource even for the statesman. The very first exemplum from classical antiquity Petrarch places under the first subheading of the first book of his Rerum memorandarum libri, the one dedicated to the virtue of solitude, is none other than the great “solitudinis amator,” Scipio Africanus, who is not necessarily the first person you would associate to a life of withdrawal and studious leisure. The great general and man of action who worked to defeat Hannibal in the time of the Carthaginian threat was remembered even in antiquity as someone who cherished every precious moment he could spend some time alone with his thoughts as well as with his most trusted friends.18 This is what made him great. This is what makes him the paragon of Petrarch’s ideal humanist hero: someone who strikes the kind of balance between the active and the contemplative, the private and the public, that nevertheless leads him to great achievement on the stage of history. As it turns out, contrary to popular belief, Petrarch was much more than a sylvan love poet, the self-proclaimed solitary singer of Laura whose authorship of a tract on the virtues of the life of solitude is more nuanced and complex than a superficial reading might suggest. In fact, if we take a closer look at what Petrarch's De vita solitaria is all about I think we'll see just how idiosyncratic his early modern brand of humanism really is. Book II of the work opens with a long list of hermits. He tells us just enough about each of them to find out that they all have something paradoxical in common. Despite their withdrawal from the world of human affairs, they all earned great recognition and even fame in society. Some are more “famous” than others, but he ends his list with a slightly longer description of St. Anthony,19 the religious recluse par 18 Valerius Maximus, Chap. VIII, 8: “Since leisure appears to be diametrically opposed to diligence and study, it has the best claim to be subjoined to them, not leisure by which efficiency loses strength but by which it is revived. For the former is to be avoided even by the lazy, the latter is sometimes to be sought even by the energetic, so that as to the first they do not lead a life of perpetual inactivity, and as to the second that by timely intermission of work they may come the brisker to its resumption. / That illustrious pair of true friends, Scipio and Laelius, joined one to another by the bond of affection and also by partnership in all virtues, just as they followed the path of active life with equal tread, so did they find relief together in mental relaxations. For it is agreed that they used to pick up shells and pebbles wandering on the beaches of Caieta and Laurentum, and P. Crassus often declared that he had learned this from his his father-in-law Scaevola, who was Laelius’ son-in-law.” 19 Granted, some are more “famous” than others, but he ends his list with a longer biographical sketch of one of the most famous hermits of all Antonio, about whom he writes to Boccaccio in Sen. XVII, 2 in a 6 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu excellence who cultivated such a reputation for wisdom and restraint – earning for himself so much admiration and respect –, that he was even sought out by the emperors of Rome and invited into relationships of “amicitia” with them for the sage advice he could lavish on them. To anyone familiar with Petrarch's career not only as the solitary singer of Laura, but also as public intellectual, court advisor and diplomat, this might ring a bell. So much of this minihagiography resonates with Petrarch’s own biography right down to the word choice and focus on his relations with those in positions of power. In fact, he even goes on to emphasize the fact that Anthony found himself in such intimate interaction with the emperor that he exchanged “familiar” letters with them on a regular basis, as Petrarch himself did with dozens of the powerful figures not only in the papal court at Avignon, but also in the centers of power throughout Italy and across Europe.20 And so, as early as this late medieval moment of cultural transition and intellectual rebirth, the study of eloquence and philosophy – in short, the foundations of a liberal education – was intended for the betterment of society. The binary of contemplative and active was not a mutually exclusive one. And as we can see from his choice of examples, even the religious was not excluded from the realm of human concerns. It is no mystery then that Petrarch’s cultivation of the solitary life was never meant to be taken as an end in itself. As it was in antiquity and would be in the later tradition of Renaissance humanism, the studia humanitatis were always meant to bolster an individual’s participation and accomplishment in other areas of life. Time outside the fray spent learning in quiet contemplation, cultivating the self, is what gives the Petrarchan humanist the personal fortitude necessary for productive engagement with the world of human affairs. Petrarchan humanism synthesized the contemplative and the active lives. comparison between their humble friendship and the one cultivated between Anthony and St. Paul of Thebes (Paul the Theban). Theirs is another exemplary case of intimacy between hermits, humble men dedicated to learning and letters, with little in the way of earthly goods to their name. As if the two had anything to do with each other: riches and friendship. 20 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, II, i, chapter 2, p. 192: “I might go on to tell [...] how Roman Emperors, attracted by the miracle of his fame, addressed letters to him with the reverence due to a father and were immensely delighted when they were accorded the honor of a reply.” 7 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu Petrarch's panegyric On the Solitary Life opens with an exhortation to the reader to cultivate their soul at least as much as they might busy themselves with a myriad other trifles in their daily lives. But what is the solitary life good for?21 First on the list is to serve God, which he deems the only truly free and happy occupation of our souls; next is to cultivate our ingegno, namely, our intellect, our creativity, our mind; lastly, it is for meditation and writing, for planning and creating something to leave behind for posterity to remember us by, and thus to stop the fleeing of time and lengthen our all too brief lives through creative output. And so he prescribes a venue for this brand of solitude that is conducive not only to introspection but also to culture. It should be a place friendly to books, since literary concerns should also be at the forefront of ones leisurely activities. He also makes it clear that by solitude he does not necessarily mean being always strictly alone, that kind of extreme solitude he calls inhuman. Further layering paradox upon paradox, for Petrarch, one should populate their solitude with choice company.22 “Besides,” he says, “I never persuaded those for whom I said solitude was advantageous that in their desire for solitude they should despise the laws of friendship. I bade them fly from crowds and not from friends. [...] Let his leisure be modest and gentle, not rude; let his solitude be tranquil, not savage; in short, let it be solitude and not barbarism.”23 Inhuman solitude is missing its “participe,” its companion, its friend. “It will never be my view,” he continues, “that solitude is disturbed by the presence of a friend, but that it is enriched. […] I would share my solitude like everything else with my friends, believing that Seneca spoke with true humanity when he said that ‘no good thing is pleasant to possess without friends to share it’ (Epistles, 6). Solitude is a great and sweet possession.”24 21 Petrarch, De vita solitaria, p. 327 22 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 24: “As is well known the ancients thought friends indispensable to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really worth living. In holding this view they gave little consideration to the idea that we need the help of friends in misfortune; on the contrary, they rather thought that there can be no happiness or good fortune for anyone unless a friend shares in the joy of it.” 23 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, I, v, chapter 4, 162. 24 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, I, v, chapter 4, 163-5. 8 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu What is solitude with friends, this state of being “alone together,” but another of the classic oxymorons of Petrarchan poetics like the famous “icy fire,” “sugared grief” and “sour delight” of his love lyrics. The difference between extreme and inhuman solitude that desires only pure withdrawal and the more humane version that seeks not only to be alone but also to be in company, that wants to learn but also teach, to listen as well as speak, represents in the broadest sense one of the differences between Epicureanism and Stoicism. It’s a two-way road and which is where Seneca’s “humanius dictum,” his most human saying comes in: there is nothing worth having unless you have a friend (to enjoy it with you). By now it should be apparent that Petrarch has a very specific genealogy in mind when he extols the virtues of a life of solitary leisure. Never does it imply complete withdrawal from the activities of civic life. Instead, it implies the balanced approach one should take to the affairs of the society of man.25 Petrarch transforms retired leisure into a valuable life devoted to liberal studies and friendship. He says that he has yet to see any of his contemporaries (322, 326, 328) make a successful contribution to the public welfare. Those who devote themselves exclusively to public service risk losing control of their own lives, passions and minds. Hence his praise for Scipio Afrianus, the statesman who perfectly embodies, in Petrarch's view, the right balance of the active and the contemplative. With Petrarch the ethos of otium begins to transform the goal of everyday life into one involving self-knowledge and the cultivation of individual talents, a life populated by good friends and good books. 25 Sen. XVII, 3; Bernardo, p. 655: “[…] et occupatio mea maior et tempus angustum erat, idque ipsum, ut nosti, bellicis undique motibus inquietum, a quibus etsi animo procul absim, nequeo tamen fluctuante republica non moveri.” (Sen. XVII, 3, 1). He puts it rather poignantly in one of the Seniles he addresses to Boccaccio towards the end of his life. He sums up his attitude towards the balance between withdrawal and involvement thus: “[…] and at that, as you know, I was disturbed by war breaking our on all sides. Though I am far from sympathizing with it, I still cannot avoid being disturbed by the ups and downs of the republic.” Moments like this – and there are many, particularly as one delves deeper into his corpus of letters – show any picture of a happily withdrawn hermit Petrarch, quietly whittling away his days over his studies and at peace, to be overly optimistic. Instead, he was subject to all the fluctuations, upheavals and disorder that plagued Italy in the mid-fourteenth century. The contingencies of the historical moment in which he lived incessantly impinged on his living, no matter how much in his writings he is able to transcend to the timelessness that so much of what his writing has achieved, which is what made those precious moments of solitary peace and quiet all the more valuable. It is perhaps also fitting that these remarks regarding the patience required in order to maintain one’s soul at peace even in the face of adversity, in this case threats of violence and destruction with the outbreak of war menacing from all sides, are found in the prefatory remarks to the letter in which Petrarch’s Latin translation of Boccaccio’s Griselda is found. In some ways it could also give us some clues as to how Petrarch read the story of the steadfastness of Boccaccio’s “insigna uxor.” 9 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu “Whoever invades him in this retreat should have occasion to marvel that humanity, which is exiled from the cities, inhabits the wilderness and that while he has found bears and lions in populous places, in solitude he has discovered angelic man. Such is my feeling in the matter, and this I hold to be the middle of the road between the two extremes.”26 In the oasis of our universities these are the kind of qualities that we as liberal arts educators instill in our students, they are what will ultimately make our students more responsible citizens, pave the way to them becoming empowered leaders and lead them to live more rewarding richer lives. And so with Petrarch I say, “read the classics and be free.” It is the imaginative venture of Petrarchan leisure to allow private individuals, who are not necessarily religious contemplatives or philosophers, time to cultivate the virtues of a higher life of the mind and spirit. And that's what a liberal education is for: a socially mandated four years of retreat from the tempest of the world to do just this, so that no matter what they go on to do in life they will have the tools succeed when the tempest comes a calling as it always inevitably does. 26 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, I, v, chapter 4, 162. 10 � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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 A name given to the resource Fame and the solitary life : rethinking the liberal arts through the paradoxes of Petrarchan humanism Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Steve Baker at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Baker, Steve J. 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 2014-10-17 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 24004519 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/58327ef63a881a099ebe0ddfec8b19e3.pdf ac758fb288887aab1b980d06b08575d3 PDF Text Text Bennett 1 The Periodic Appeal of Friedrich Hölderlin by Kelsey L. Bennett I first encountered the works of the romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) at St. John’s College here in Santa Fe, when the tutor Frank Hunt was offering a preceptorial on the poet. We read poems with titles such as “Diotima” (many of these), “At the Source of the Danube,” “The Fettered River,” “Homecoming”; we pondered the similarities between poetic metaphor and wordless music, man’s nearness to and separation from God, the significance of the poet’s profound Hellenism....These topics were inviting, as was the thought of a poet who made it his habit to cross the Alps on foot in the middle of winter. But more arresting than anything else was Hölderlin’s ability to locate and write about an unnamable source (or Quelle) which, for him, so memorably emanates from the places in which some of Europe’s great rivers first arise. Since that time, these qualities, particularly notions of ‘home’ and ‘source,’ have compelled a return to his works. If only, he once lamented, “if only one weren’t so periodical!” Periodicity always suggests a return—but to what? What is the nature of this place? The elegy “Homecoming,” dedicated to his relatives, was written in 1801 when Hölderlin was thirty one, about a year before an accumulation of circumstances culminated in his breakdown and estrangement from his family [here in Michael Hamburger’s translation1]: There in the Alps a gleaming night still delays and, composing Portents of gladness, the cloud covers a valley agape. This way, that way roars and rushes the breeze of the mountains, Teasing, sheer through the firs falls a bright beam, and is lost. 1 Hölderlin, Friedrich. Selected Poems and Fragments. Trans. and intro. Michael Hamburger. New York: Penguin, 1998. 1 �Bennett 2 Slowly it hurries and wars, this Chaos trembling with pleasure, Young in appearance, but strong, celebrates here amid rocks Loving discord, and seethes, shakes in its bounds that are timeless, For more bacchantically now morning approaches within. The lines, full with contradictions, beautifully animate the experience of return, the ways in which things long familiar take on another aspect, as here in the phrase “gleaming night,” the way the valley is doubly concealed in darkness and in cloud until the “bright beam” appears, and disappears once again. The arrival, for the poet, is a celebration of “loving discord” filled with haste (recognition) and slowness (reluctance, perhaps); “Chaos” itself is subject to fatalistic “bounds” that define it. The poet’s thoughts continue their ascent to the whitened peaks and surpass them: “Even higher, beyond the light, does the pure, never clouded / God have his dwelling, whom beams, holy, make glad with their play.” The God, from “beyond the light” acts upon “us mortals grown sad,” as he brings forth the rivers from within the furthermost reaches of the mountains, he “works on the lowest depths to open them up and to brighten / All” and “beauty abounds, as before, and spirit is present, returned now, / And a joyful zest urges furled wings to unfold.” We find that the poet is returning by boat and observing the opening morning from the waters below. As the village emerges from the morning shadows, the opening confusion seems to dispel with it. Now, he comments, “All seems familiar.....And no wonder! Your native country and soil you are walking, / What you seek, it is near, now comes to meet you halfway.” The nearness here speaks on several levels. As he moves across Lake Constance, he approaches the political boundary of his homeland and at the same time, and more importantly, draws near to the sources of rivers such as the Rhine and the Danube. To his German readers, Lindau serves as “not the least of our land’s many hospitable doors, / Urging men to go out allured by the promise of distance.” This is the typical 2 �Bennett 3 understanding of a frontier, the portal through which the young adventurer passes to move on to “Go where the wonders are.” The poet, however, turns from these indeterminate “wonders” and addresses the portal from the other side: “you door that are hallowed, me much more strongly you urge to / Make for home where I know blossoming pathways and lanes,” where he hears once more the voice of his mother, about which he exclaims, “How to your sound respond things that I learned long ago! / Yet they are still themselves!” The nearness here encompasses the past and the present moments of awareness. Somehow this relatively familiar experience is necessary for the poet to approach the thing that he seeks above all else (it is reminiscent of the distinction Kant makes between the beautiful and the sublime), that is, a nearness to the God he names who dwells “beyond the light,” in silence and alone. Now, even as the poem carefully creates a topography of desire for return and nearness, he brings us to the moment that surpasses all sense of place. To measure distance to and from a ubiquitous presence becomes meaningless; this last silent expanse the poet generates proximity through the necessary act of naming. He asks, When we bless the meal, whose name may I speak, and when late we Rest from the life of each day, tell me, to whom give my thanks? Him, the most High, should I name then? A god does not love what’s unseemly, Him to embrace and to hold our joy is too small. Silence often behoves us: deficient in names that are holy, Hearts may beat high, while the lips hesitate, wary of speech? This troubling paradox, shared by many romantic poets, is a necessary condition to the nearness the poet seeks. Travel alone is not enough, willingness or temperament is not enough: the experience of silence peculiar to poetry is the thing that makes the poetry possible. About this moment in the poem Heidegger says, “Silence—does this merely mean: to say nothing, to remain speechless? Or 3 �Bennett 4 can only he who has something to say be truly silent? ...he who would be capable of letting the unsaid appear in his speech...would, precisely though this alone, be capable of silence in the highest degree” (“The Poem” 216).2 Just as Semele could not look straight upon her god without immolation, to avoid this fate, the poet’s path home must be indirect, must make use of language and the act of naming to speak the unnamable. The wisdom of this poem finds its source in the idea that while certain places are more hospitable than others to the development of creativity, the work itself must be the home, full with the contradictions of familiarity constantly shifting into the unfamiliar and back again. And it was well for Hölderlin to come to this conclusion at a time when increasing misfortune would soon impress itself upon his life and work. Before this, however, as Michael Hamburger succinctly presents in the introduction to his translations, the poet’s future was promising. Despite the fact that he lost both his father and stepfather when he was a boy and remained financially tied to his mother for much of his life, he was acquainted with some of the most influential intellectual lights of the time. Among them were Hegel and Schelling, whom he met in Tübingen during his time at the Theological Seminary. Though he passed his examinations, he resisted repeated pressure from his family to become a Lutheran minister. The alternative was, in Hamburger’s words, “the humble drudgery, but relative independence, of a private tutor,” and Schiller himself arranged for Hölderlin’s position with the children of the well-connected Charlotte von Kalb. While under her employment, Hölderlin was able to work on his novel, Hyperion, as well as travel to Jena to listen to Fichte’s lectures and meet Goethe at Weimar. When he was twenty five, Hölderlin found appointment with another wealthy family in Frankfurt. There he entered into a life-altering affair with the mother of his pupils, Susette, and 2 Heidegger, Martin. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Trans. Keith Hoeller. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. 4 �Bennett 5 she appeared transformed into Diotima in his poetry. Unlike the only woman whom Socrates revered as a teacher, she who revealed love’s great and cosmic order as he recounts it in the Symposium, Hölderlin’s Diotima reveals a tenuous presence. In the poems, her fragility is often likened to a blossom in winter, with the attendant feelings of solitude, suffering, and misplacement in the world: “You noble being, silently earthward gaze / At brightest noon, for it’s in vain that / Here in the sunlight you seek your kindred.” The relationship was ended forcibly, along with his position, in 1798, and the poet was soon confronted with his own failure, in spite of his connections, to achieve widespread success through his work, and his own isolation increased. And yet the Diotima poems mirror how, into the new century, Hölderlin would continue his preoccupation with these questions but transpose them into another key entirely. Some of the most powerful instances appear in his poetic meditations on the sources among Europe’s great rivers. In the hymn “Der Rhein,” from its genesis the great river is itself subject to forces alien to its nature. From within the Alpine heights “where, determined in secret / Much even now reaches men,” the poet hears “A destiny.”3 The destiny concerns the river and its Promethian struggles: “There in the coldest chasm / I heard the youth implore / Release.” From the beginning, the “freeborn Rhine” parted and longed to roam, and impatiently His regal soul drove him on towards Asia. Yet in the face of fate Imprudent it is to wish. 3 Anachronistic though it may be, since the advent of CERN, I cannot help thinking about how these ideas have carried over into the present. How are we to take it that modern physicists have penetrated and established their laboratories, sublime in scope, in such close proximity to the places for which the romantic poets held the highest metaphysical regard? 5 �Bennett 6 The “crooked banks” that are “greedily entwining” move the river’s course, instead, to the northwest. However shaped it is to human purposes once it parts from its source, is diverted and channeled to found and maintain cities, even so the poem insists that the river preserves its original character throughout. And from these tensions, some violence necessarily accompanies its compelled course, for “like lightening he [the Rhine] / Must rend the earth.” Similarly, in the lines concluding “Der Ister,” the Greek name for the Danube, Hölderlin writes, “But the rock needs incisions, /And the earth needs furrows, / Would be desolate else, unabiding; / Yet what that one does, the river, / Nobody knows.” The Danube, of course, unlike its north-wending counterpart, succeeds in its eastern course toward “mother Asia” until it disperses itself in the Black Sea. In both cases, not only does the land affect the river, but also the river provides the land with a character, perhaps it is not too much to say that it provides it with a soul. The earth is not significant merely as a smooth surface, featureless—it needs to be split, cracked, and rent for any growth to be possible (in this vein one is reminded of a letter Keats would soon write to his siblings in which he asks, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”). Which leads the reader to the parallels between the phenomena in the poem and the purpose of the poet. “Der Rhein” eventually concludes with the idea that the poets are needed precisely to make people aware of these correspondences, indeed the forces themselves require their voices, for “The most Blessed in themselves feel nothing / Another .... must, I suppose, / Vicariously feel in the name of the gods, / And him they need.” But the ability to do so demands extreme acts of defiance as well: an aspirant, the poem announces, must bury in the rubble of his house both his father and his child. The image provides a dark counterpart to Wordsworth’s aphorism, to be sure, and shadows forth what was to come. At the beginning of 1802, Hölderlin set out for Bordeaux and what would be his last and short-lived tutoring position. His return to Germany included a long journey through France, and 6 �Bennett 7 included a stop in Paris, about which little is known. The time spent as an alien in a country enthralled by empire, the continuing difficulties with his work and, finally, the devastating news of Susette’s death that summer together altered the poet in such a way that he became estranged from his family and some, though not all, began to suspect the poet of insanity. Finally, Hölderlin had to be moved, against his will, to a mental hospital in Tübingen known for its “treatments” of patients that included a combination of drugs and the use of straitjackets, the silencing Autenrieth mask, and forced cold-water immersion techniques. Unlike others who died of these therapies, Hölderlin survived there for about a year before he was discharged, Hamburger reports, as an “incurable case” and given no more than three years to live. While he was there a local carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, visited the poet and offered to care for him upon his release. Zimmer’s generosity proved to be the best option for Hölderlin, who lived with the family in Tübingen for the rest of his life (it is now a picturesque museum, known as the Hölderlinturm, which stands upon the Neckar river). His mother never visited him there and Zimmer was able to procure funds for Hölderlin’s modest maintenance with difficulty. Worse yet, the family demanded that Hölderlin’s manuscripts containing the poems he was revising be taken from him and sent into their keeping. From 1807 on, as his biographer David Constantine notes, perhaps the least eventful period in the poet’s life is most prolifically documented by visitors more interested in his purported insanity than in his literary achievements.4 Much of the poetry from this period through the end of his life in 1843, reflects simplicity and longing for the past, with occasional gleams from earlier insights. The short poem “To Zimmer,” for instance, speaks to a certain repose the poet seems to have reached: The lines of life are various; they diverge and cease Like footpaths and the mountains’ utmost ends. 4 Constantine, David. Hölderlin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. 7 �Bennett 8 What here we are, elsewhere a God amends With harmonies, eternal recompense and peace. The monumental themes Hölderlin engaged in poems such as “Homecoming” are still present, but scaled in miniature. “What here we are” has a pathetic modesty about it, but still it connects, albeit from a distance, to the world-governing harmonies that, the poet hopes, provide recompense beyond the many things withheld from him on earth. The spiritual and aesthetic tensions between “here” and “elsewhere” inevitably bring me back to the ideas I found when I first turned to the poetry of Hölderlin. In addition to the elusive “Homecoming,” the hymn “As on a holiday...”, for which its first phrase serves as title, again captures this feeling of nearness and separation, and the creative act of naming with exceptional vividness. The poem opens with the experience of a farmer who goes out to observe his land after a deluge to find the river once more returned to its place and new growth beginning to rise. The poet goes on to record what he sees: “the hallowed, my word shall convey, / For she, she herself, who is older than the ages / And higher than the gods of the Orient and Occident, / Nature has now awoken amid the clang of arms” and begets “on holy Chaos” “Delight, the all-creative”; and she (here Nature) “delights in self-renewal.” In harmony with this pantheistic vision, the hymn is filled with the nearness of the gods, the intimation that they, as in the cosmos of the Iliad and the Odyssey, mingle with the living at their pleasure. Semele appears, and the speaker praises her for her selfsacrificing birth to “The thunder-storm’s fruit, to holy Bacchus.” Upon her ashes, mankind may now partake of these fruits “without danger.” The hymn concludes with an exhortation to poets to realize something similar—they should “stand / Bareheaded beneath God’s thunder-storms, / To grasp the Father’s ray, no less, with our own two hands / And, wrapping in song the heavenly gift, / To offer it to the people.” The confidence of these lines radiate romantic idealism—with the 8 �Bennett 9 implied social hierarchy in which the poets are the ones made to stand closest to the gods, the extraordinary purity, recklessness, and visionary capacity that gives them the right to this position, and so on. And yet from here, the poem begins to fragment and the silence again marks its presence on the page, and we are once again back to the uncertainties of “Homecoming” and the paradoxical necessity of silence to this enterprise. Unlike the Landmann, who rejoices in the new growth following the storm’s destruction, the poet concludes That I approached to see the Heavenly, And they themselves cast me down, deep down Below the living, into the dark cast down The false priest that I am, to sing, For those who have ears to hear, a warning song. There And that is all. The fragmentary nature of the closing could be read easily enough as another variation on romantic themes, or again as a foreshadowing of events in Hölderlin’s life, or as an expression not very far from Milton’s Satan or Goethe’s Faust. It is precisely the allusive richness here, and in the other poems, that invites one’s return. One returns to the compelling presence of another “capable of silence in the highest degree.” It is a homecoming that invites one into the idea of “home” as something related to, but not entirely dependent upon, geography or individual desire. It is the intimation that the creative act of naming is not something one does to “fill” the silent spaces, to force familiarity upon the unfamiliar, but that it complements those moments which open themselves only through silence. 9 � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 9 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 periodic appeal of Friedrich Hölderlin Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Kelsey Bennett at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bennett, Kelsey L. 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 2014-10-17 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 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004520 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/cebe853ff705d8fe27c8b1fd31725645.pdf 44a308b18780a14db7f1e108cc42fd9a PDF Text Text Blumenthal 1 The Role of Mathematics in Advancing the Goals of a Liberal Education by Robert Blumenthal Mathematics appears in some form or other in the core or general education requirements of most colleges and universities, and a lot of energy is often expended regarding the specific form this requirement should take. For example, one thorny issue is just what level of mathematics should be required. Should it be sufficient merely to demonstrate proficiency in algebra thus basically requiring of students no more than they were supposed to learn in high school? Or should every student be required to take a bona fide college level course like calculus? Furthermore, what do we want the students to take away from the required course? Is our goal to demonstrate just how useful mathematics is in dealing with worldly matters and how indispensable it is with regard to understanding and interpreting real-world data and solving realworld problems? With regard to the first question, namely, is proficiency at the high school level sufficient for meeting the core math requirement at a university, the answer has to be no. Certainly, we would hope to provide students with content and approaches which do more than merely replicate the high school experience. A student who has had four years of high school mathematics and who, therefore, has taken geometry, algebra, and in most cases a course covering standard precalculus topics should be offered an opportunity for intellectual growth which goes beyond a mere rehash of techniques studied in high school. Which leads to the question: just what type of intellectual growth are we talking about? Yes, mathematics is useful. Yes, it solves all sorts of technical problems. Yes, it enables us to analyze and interpret various kinds of real-world data. Yes, it enables us to model real-world situations and to understand and �Blumenthal 2 address a large variety of real-world issues. Is this the focus which we wish to emphasize in our core mathematics experience, or is there perhaps another direction we might take with regard to intellectual growth and development, particularly in a liberal arts institution? I have repeated the phrase real-world because I think we do our students a disservice by focusing exclusively on the worldly aspects of mathematics. As Wordsworth reminds us, “The world is too much with us…” And he concludes: For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. (Appelbaum 28) It is that phrase, glimpses that would make me less forlorn, which is the key. At its heart, mathematics has nothing to do with the world. Its efficacy in understanding the world and in solving real-world problems is a fact, but this utility is a by-product rather than the central motivation behind the creation of mathematics. Mathematics offers glimpses - glimpses of the reality which underlies the physical realm, glimpses of the way in which our minds function and the ways in which we process ideas and the relationships between those ideas, glimpses of the role and limitations of language as vehicles for thought and the expression of ideas, glimpses of a beauty unlike any other leading to an aesthetic experience which rivals that of anything offered by the other fine arts. �Blumenthal 3 What do we mean when we say that mathematics has nothing to do with the world? This requires some attention. First, what is mathematics? Definitions can be tricky things. A colleague once suggested to me that “mathematics is what mathematicians do.” The English biologist T.H. Huxley offers a definition which is a bit more enlightening by noting that “[mathematics] is that [subject] which knows nothing of observation, nothing of experiment, nothing of induction, nothing of causation” (qtd. in Moritz 26). Notice that this definition describes mathematics by telling us what it is not. Observation, experiment, inductive reasoning (drawing general conclusions from specific cases) -- these play no role in mathematics. In a word, mathematics is not science. The truth claims of mathematics in no way depend on observations of the world. Rather, the reasoning involved is deductive (reasoning from the general to the specific) and depends only on our rational faculties. This leads to a very provocative definition formulated by the English mathematician J.J. Sylvester who, in contrasting mathematics and science, states that “the object of pure Physic is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure Mathematic that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence” (qtd. in Moritz 7). In other words, mathematical knowledge is self-knowledge. It tells us something of how we as human beings think, how our minds work, how we process ideas, and it demonstrates our natural propensity for finding connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. At its root, mathematics deals with the most basic of human propensities, namely, collecting things and thereby forming a collection. Mathematics is about collections, and the mathematical term for this is set. A set is a collection of objects, and we can then think of the set as a single entity. Forming a single entity out of a disparate collection of objects is the essential mathematical act. E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. Every mathematical concept, including �Blumenthal 4 numbers, rests upon the notion of a set. There are two kinds of sets: finite sets and infinite sets, and infinite sets are central to just about every important mathematical theory. The simplest infinite set to grasp of the set of all positive whole numbers, what mathematicians call the natural numbers, N = {1, 2, 3, …}. In a series of papers published in 1874, the German mathematician Georg Cantor undertook the first serious attempt to understand the nature of infinite sets. In particular, he wanted to understand whether or not we could meaningfully talk about the size of an infinite set and whether it is possible to compare the sizes two infinite sets. He asks whether all infinite sets have the same size, and, as a first step in addressing this question, he looks at the natural numbers and the seemingly larger set of all whole numbers (positive, negative and 0), known as the set of integers. Via a very simple and elegant argument, Cantor demonstrates that the set of integers is no larger than the set of natural numbers. It appears to be a larger set, but that is an illusion. In fact, these two sets have the same size. Cantor then turns his attention to the set of rational numbers, namely, the set that consists of all whole numbers together with all fractions. This appears to be an incredibly huge set and one which certainly dwarfs the set of natural numbers. However, in one of most remarkable proofs in all of mathematics, Cantor shows that this apparent disparity in size is again an illusion and that the set of rational numbers has the same size as the natural numbers. This result and proof is one of the most famous and beautiful results in all of mathematics. At this point, it is beginning to look as if the answer to Cantor’s question is yes, all infinite sets have the same size. However, Cantor’s most celebrated result, and the one which has deep implications for mathematics and philosophy, is that the answer is in fact no. He exhibits a set, namely the set of real numbers, which is so large that it no longer has the same size as the natural �Blumenthal 5 numbers. Infinite sets come in different sizes. There is not a single undifferentiated notion of infinity since some infinite sets are truly larger than others. This result completely changed theory of sets and, since sets lie at the heart of mathematics, all of mathematics as well. Prior to Cantor, going as far back as Aristotle, the very idea of an infinite set was rejected. The idea was rejected because it led to various unpleasant consequences, like the fact that a part can be equivalent to the whole. This is nonsense and so the very idea of the existence of infinite sets must be nonsense. However for Cantor, infinite sets exist. The set of natural numbers exists as an actually, not just potentially, infinite set, and we can hold in our minds in a single instant of time the collection (i.e., set) of all natural numbers. Yes, this leads to certain startling consequences like the fact that a part can be equivalent to the whole. But the reason we are startled is because we are expecting infinite sets to behave the same as finite sets. This is an unreasonable expectation. Infinite sets are fundamentally different from finite sets and we can’t expect them to behave in the same way. We are in a brave new world where a part can be equivalent to the whole and where some infinite sets are truly larger than others. This is not unlike the situation ushered in by the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics where we are confronted with behavior which runs contrary to common sense and everyday experience. Having proved that the set of real numbers is of a truly larger size than the natural numbers, Cantor wondered just how much larger it is. Is the set of real numbers the next largest set after the natural numbers or is there something in between? In other words, is there a set which fits in between the natural numbers and the real numbers in the sense that it is of a larger size than the natural numbers and of a smaller size than the real numbers? Cantor spent the rest of his life looking for the answer to this question. He felt strongly that the answer is no, but he was unable �Blumenthal 6 to prove this conjecture. This question, which is known as the Continuum Hypothesis, was singled out by the German mathematician David Hilbert at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Paris in 1900 as the most important question which mathematicians must address in the new century (413). And address it they did, although the eventual outcome of this endeavor was something which no one had expected or even considered. Results proved by Kurt Gödel in 1940 and Paul Cohen in 1963, taken together, show that the Continuum Hypothesis can neither be proved nor disproved. In other words, the Continuum Hypothesis is undecideable within the present axiomatic foundation of mathematics. Thus, while opening up whole new areas of human thought with his theory of infinite sets, Cantor’s work forces us to confront the fact that there are certain fundamental limitations on our capacity for understanding and that the answers to compelling foundational questions are simply unknowable by the human mind. One of the weaknesses of many of the courses aimed at the general student is that all too often they morph into either a math appreciation course or a math history course thereby transforming the experience into something other than a course in mathematics. Even if this situation is avoided, another pitfall is that many such courses are survey courses organized around a multitude of topics. As such, each topic receives only superficial treatment and the student misses the essential experience of delving deeply into an important mathematical theory. I have sought to avoid both of these situations and have taught for many years a course organized around a few (at most three) selected topics in advanced mathematics. These topics must be chosen carefully and, in my experience, need to meet several criteria. Each topic must be one which the students have not encountered before and must represent a truly important mathematical idea. Each topic should be modern in the sense that it originated �Blumenthal 7 relatively recently and is an active area of continuing research. Finally, each topic must be able to be presented to the general student without loss of mathematical rigor. This last point is particularly important since the whole point is to convey a meaningful sense of the mathematical experience. I have had considerable success in this course with topics chosen from number theory, group theory, and Cantor’s theory of infinite sets. Most of the students react very well to this course for two reasons. First, it is so unlike anything they expected from a mathematics course (this comment appears often on the course evaluations), and secondly they realize, especially from the discussion of infinite sets, where they are challenged to abandon certain of their preconceived ideas about reality, that mathematics has profound things to say about questions which have been raised for thousands of years by various important thinkers. Works Cited Appelbaum, Stanley, ed. Great Sonnets. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. Cantor, Georg. Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers. New York: Dover Publications, 1955. Cohen, Paul J. Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis. New York: W.A. Benjamin, 1966. Godel, Kurt. The Consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940. Hilbert, David. "Mathematical Problems." Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 37 (2000): 407-36. Moritz, Robert Edouard. On Mathematics. New York: Dover Publications, 1958. � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. 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Title A name given to the resource The role of mathematics in advancing the goals of a liberal education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Robert Blumenthal at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Blumenthal, Robert 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 2014-10-17 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 Mathematics -- Study and teaching Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004521 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e2c3cad1d2acb56339e8d81ff65f8e90.pdf 8e6ff50fd31b3c0deb9821aac9c39574 PDF Text Text Liberal Education and STEM Education St. John’s College 50th Anniversary Conference Presentation Michael J. Bolin, Wyoming Catholic College September 15, 2014 Abstract: One of the single biggest obstacles to the proliferation of liberal education is the modern tendency to consider STEM fields as the most or only important fields of study. I argue, to the contrary, that the beneficial cultural effects of progress in the natural sciences and related fields depend in part on a foundation of liberal learning both in scientists themselves and in the broader populace. In a post-Baconian scientific world, scientific progress has both a technological/practical aspect and a philosophical/theoretical aspect. Success with regard to the first aspect is necessarily defined in terms of one's conception of human flourishing, the philosophical debate over which is behind disputes over, e.g., energy, nuclear, and agricultural policy. Interpretations of the second aspect inevitably influence the first, as is seen in the tendency of physicists to extrapolate from their scientific research to broader conclusions about its implications for human nature and existence. It is not a foregone conclusion, then, that education in STEM fields will achieve the goods at which it aims, unless the resulting knowledge is first recognized as fundamentally human and therefore necessarily understood in the broader context of the human good. Establishing this context is one of the fundamental tasks of liberal education, upon which the good of specialization thus depends. Presentation: In a 1944 letter to Robert Thornton, then a new professor of physics at the University of Puerto Rico, Albert Einstein wrote the following in response to Thornton’s desire to introduce the philosophy of science into his classroom: I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.1 1 Einstein to Thornton, December 7, 1944 (EA 61-574). 1 �The generational prejudice, the seeing of the trees but not the forest that Einstein described seems to me to be a common consequence of contemporary education, in large part because of our society’s focus on STEM education and corresponding disinterest in liberal education. My intention in this talk is to show how the task of fully reaping the fruits of STEM education cannot be separated from the project of liberal education, and that the latter is essential both on the part of scientists themselves and on the part of the broader populace if the former is to be achieved. In the interests of time, I shall focus primarily on the “science” part of STEM education. After the early modern era in which Francis Bacon declared that knowledge and power are really the same thing, science came to be seen by many as fundamentally oriented toward technological and practical application. In the modern era, this idea has taken such strong root that scientists have had to deal with politicians wishing to restrict public funding of scientific enterprise to areas that will have a significant practical application, as if this could always be known in advance. Disciplines in the humanities, such as philosophy, or liberal education in general, are ridiculed as a waste of time, their critics saying such things as “If it’s not producing food, I’m not interested.” Higher education has come to be seen as just being vocational training, with programs such as the St. John’s College liberal arts program considered outdated at best, almost a relic of a pre-scientific age. These sentiments lead us into the first issue I shall discuss. What such critics are really saying is that one ought not devote one’s life to activities that are not in some way conducive to human flourishing. Supposing that this is true, the conclusion that one ought not devote one’s life to the humanities or to liberal education does not immediately follow, since we cannot know whether this is conducive to human flourishing until we have established what human flourishing 2 �is. For example, the only we reason we care whether a discipline is producing food is because we care about food. But why do we care about food? Unless we are hedonists, it is principally (though not only) because we need food to live. But why do we care about living? Presumably because we wish to do something with our lives that goes beyond eating. Thus, it is clear that whatever this “something” is, it is worth doing even if it is not producing food. This example is an instance of a more general observation, namely that the extreme position that maintains that only what is useful is good is implicitly a contradiction in terms. For the useful is by definition useful for something, for the sake of another good; and the ultimate good, also by definition, cannot be for the sake of another good. In the human sphere, the ultimate good is the human good, human flourishing. Thus, again, it is pointless to criticize some branch of learning for not being useful unless we first know what human flourishing is. This issue arises in many concrete contexts, not just in abstract philosophical discussions. It lies behind the desire of some public figures to reduce funding for NASA, on the grounds that much of NASA’s research is not useful, or at least not obviously so. In a similar vein, sometimes people object to the production of GMO crops not just because they believe them unhealthy but also because they maintain a particular view of the human race’s relationship to nature and what constitutes the good of this relationship. The foregoing may give the impression that I see the role of liberal education to be restricted to the study of ethics and politics, in which the notions of human flourishing and the common good are considered. But the debate over human flourishing itself depends on prior theoretical philosophical questions, such as what it means to be human in the first place, and what the relationship of human beings to the rest of nature is. These questions cannot be escaped if one is to have a complete account of reality. And if one assumes from the start that one’s own 3 �discipline ought to yield such an account, one will naturally attempt to answer these questions from the perspective of that discipline. Thus we have the phenomenon of physicists, biologists, and other practitioners of the sciences lecturing the public on the “meaning” of their discoveries for human nature, the nature of the universe, and of existence itself. I do not mean to suggest that scientific inquiry never has relevance to these questions. Rather, I mean that the kind of relevance it has is subtle and difficult to discover, and one cannot hope to judge well of it without much learning and practice. The learning required, however, is not training in the hard sciences but rather liberal learning, which teaches one to consider human knowledge as a unified whole and to distinguish accurately the scope, nature, and limitations of each of its parts. This is why interpretation of the results of scientific inquiry is naturally posterior to liberal education. Here is a concrete example of what I mean. Physicist Sean Carroll, in a thoughtprovoking article entitled “Abortion and the Architecture of Reality,” writes about the types of issues that arise in debates over abortion, such as the notions of life and personhood, and argues that it would be foolish to think that scientific knowledge of the world cannot bear on questions such as these. Regarding this general claim, I think Carroll is quite right. But, as is typical in such cases, when he attempts to apply the general principle to specific cases, he mistakes his philosophical presuppositions for the conclusions of science. Science, he writes, tells us that there is no magical moment at which an incorporeal soul takes up residence in a body. Indeed, the concept of a “person” is not to be found anywhere 4 �in the natural world; it’s a category that is convenient to appeal to as we try to make sense of the world.2 Now, physical science does strongly suggest something relevant to the concept of soul, which is that (as Carroll himself points out) however closely one inspects the matter of living things, one will not find it following physical laws different from those followed by inanimate matter. But soul is a fairly nebulous concept, and there is still a long way from the claims of physics to Carroll’s interpretation of them. Likewise, that “person” is not a concept in physics is not much more significant for debates over abortion legislation than the fact that the same could be said of “tax return” is significant for economic policy debates. The general point is that it is actually very difficult to delineate precisely what philosophical, ethical, or otherwise humanitarian implications the scientific worldview ought to have for our broader human worldview. And it is exceedingly unlikely that one will be able to do this well if one has never even studied that broader worldview and the writings of the thinkers who formed and influenced it. Yet this is implicitly what we expect when we encourage students to pursue careers in STEM fields without first exposing them to the liberal education that will allow them to understand what they are actually doing in those fields and how it relates to their lives as human lives and not merely as employees. What does all of this mean concretely? I am aware, of course, that universal liberal education is not in the cards for the foreseeable future. A more plausible first step is the recognition of disciplinary boundaries. Someone need not be an expert in physics to recognize 2 Sean Carroll, “Abortion and the Architecture of Reality,” Discover Magazine, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/06/04/abortion-and-the-architecture-ofreality/#.VBeNaBagv-o (accessed September 15, 2014). 5 �that the physicist is stepping outside of his discipline when he speaks about free will, or the soul, or the meaning of life; or to see that medical training does not automatically render a person competent to speak about ethical matters. Yet questions about these things arise perennially, and if the scientist as such is not the expert on them, someone else must be. Until we are able to distinguish between questions that the hard sciences can and cannot answer, we will be unable to see the value of the education that actually does teach one to answer the questions that STEM cannot, nor even see the true value in STEM itself. I want to conclude by saying a few words on that last topic, lest I seem to belittle or denigrate the natural sciences, which I in no way intend. Though a philosopher, not a scientist, by profession, I have an amateur’s (in the etymological sense of that word) interest in natural science and have the honor of teaching it via my own institution’s interdisciplinary program. In the process, I have come to realize that the profundity of the modern scientific worldview faces severe impoverishment if it is approached without a background in liberal education. The significance of the historical shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism simply cannot be appreciated by one who has never dwelt on the thoughts of generations to whom the evidence of heliocentrism was unavailable. I am told that something close to forty percent of Americans reject the biological theory of evolution. This is true even of many who are well-educated, which suggests that a lack of scientific training is not the root cause. For many, religious issues are at stake, but I suspect that this is only a special case of the more general problem I have been describing, which is that we have lost the habit of understanding scientific discoveries in the context of our broader worldviews. As a result, the public frequently receives ideas such as evolution alongside shallow and ill-informed explanations of their “true meaning.” Richard Dawkins is a well-known culprit in this regard. Dawkins is a fine biologist, but he is not a great 6 �philosopher—he is a scientist who suffers, as Einstein said, from the prejudices of his generation, seeing the trees but not the forest. This sort of behavior is ultimately detrimental to science itself, which is really much richer than is suggested by presentations of it stripped of human context. Though superficially science may seem to be more exalted by a culture that has lost its sense of the importance of liberal learning, in the end it cannot help but be degraded by the same. 7 � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 7 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberal education and STEM education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Michael Bolin at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolin, Michael J. 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 2014-10-17 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 Mathematics -- Study and teaching Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004522 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7674b113f1cc3c70ab0d4d495e314b1c.pdf 46c0db3b85d72874a00ce3a68eff3df6 PDF Text Text Helen’s Eidolon: Learning and Suffering in Euripides’ Electra A work of tragic poetry is organized by its teleology of suffering, by the sense it gives of why humans suffer. The chorus of Argive Elders in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon tells the audience that “Zeus, who brought men to think...has laid it down that learning comes alone through suffering.” (Ag. 177-8) and also “justice so inclines that those only learn who suffer” (Ag. 2501). We suffer for the sake of learning, and moreover, there is no other way to learn. The Oresteia as a whole seems to bear this out. We follow the house of Atreus through intense suffering: adultery, child murder, cannibalism, the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, a decade of war, the murder of Agamemnon, the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus and finally, the guilt of matricide. Yet in the end justice is not only done, it is established on earth for the first time in an institution, the Areopagus. Law is born from violence. The furies are transformed to Eumenides. We have learned. We have become more civilized. Euripides’ plays do not support this teleology of suffering. In fact, Euripides inverts the Aeschylean formula in his Electra. Orestes says to his sister, Electra, before she recognizes him, that “there is no pity in ignorance, but [pity is present] in the wise among men. But too wise knowledge in the wise is not harmless.” (El. 294-6) While suffering can bring learning according to Aeschylus’ chorus, learning brings new suffering born of pity for Euripides’ Orestes. In other words, we do not transcend suffering through learning, we simply acquire more of it. For Euripides, there is no threshold beyond suffering, no end to redeem it. As we will see, suffering does not educate Electra or Orestes, it harms and deludes them. I. When we meet Electra, our titular character, she bears a heavy water pot on her head and laments dramatically, “O night, black night whose breast nurses the golden stars/ I wander through your darkness,” (54-55) We know at this point that she has been cast out of the royal house and is married to a farmer. Now she seems to be reduced to menial labor and we begin to feel pity. But this pity is undermined immediately: as she says, “I am not forced, I chose this slavery myself” (57) She is soon spotted by her new husband, the farmer and he asks her why she insists on doing heavy labor. The orders do not come from him. Electra does not have to bear the heavy water jar but chooses to: the action of the play opens with a self-pitying stunt. As she says herself, she wants to make Aegisthus’ arrogance visible by making her situation look worse than it actually is. Strange logic. Electra refuses to attend the festival of Hera on account of her clothes and even refuses the chorus’ offer of loaned garments to enforce her image of suffering (167-174). Later, Electra insists on showing herself as a slave to her mother, Clytemnestra, by offering to help her out of her carriage when her own Trojan slaves are suddenly absent (1004). Electra compares herself to the Trojan women brought back as slaves. Yet her situation is actually much different. She is still on Mycaenean soil, still able to live and die there and to worship the gods of her people. She is poor, but she is as free as she was before. She freely chooses to engage in conspicuous labors. Throughout, Electra willfully refuses to see anything in her situation but misery. She takes actions to make her situation look worse, to make things appear to others as they appear to her. By contrast, Sophocles’ Electra is portrayed as a victim with great inner strength. Her hate may terrify us, but it is understandable: she is trapped in a house with her father’s killers and subject to daily abuses. Euripides’ Electra may feel exiled and trapped in her poverty but �ultimately, her complaints appear shallow and materialistic. She is removed from any ongoing abuse and allowed a simple, honest life, the sort that Socrates’ Odysseus chooses for himself in the Myth of Er. The fact that she is constantly trying to make her rustic situation look like slavery is the surest proof that it could be borne more easily. Electra’s desire for revenge springs from two places, both delusions: her sense that the loss of her royal wealth harms her and her idealized love for the father she hardly knew, Agamemnon. These two causes are similar insofar as both are what we, after Marx, might call fetishes. When Electra mentions Aegisthus, the man who deposed her father, she says “[I] cry my pain to father in the great bright air” (59) She will mention Agamemnon again and again, idealizing him and stoking her rage for Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. But always her rage strikes a hollow note. Euripides systematically withholds a good reason for her point of view. She has been forced out of her house and married to a farmer, a great indignity that seems to have no precedent in the other tellings of this story. Yet what seems like a brutal blow that might presage her inevitable revenge is in fact an oddly good turn of fortune. Her farmer husband, despite his poverty, is a thoughtful, upright man who will not touch her and cares for her like a father. In fact, he cares for her better than the father she lost and now idealizes, Agamemnon. She notes how the farmer is “equal to the gods in kindness” (67) but when alone she laments her situation in high tragic tone. This introduces us to a dissonance that runs throughout the play between the way Electra and Orestes view the situation and the circumstances themselves. Euripides steadily erodes any clear moral imperative to revenge that the two children might have. While Aeschylus presents us an Orestes who is reluctant because he understands how serious his task is, Euripides presents Orestes as confused and lacking resolve. Aeschylus’ Orestes finally acts out of a deep piety, an understanding that the will of the gods, presented in the oracle, cannot be evaded. Hard as it is, he recognizes a greater plan at work. By contrast, Euripides’ Orestes acts when he is hounded into it by his deluded sister. He doubts the oracle, insisting that no god could ask him to kill his mother (970, 981).Electra insists the oracle must be true, but not out of any piety, for we have seen none in her, but because it serves her end. Orestes is driven to act when Electra accuses him of cowardice and forces him, out of petulance, to disprove her. No line better indicates Orestes’ combination of cowardice and blind trust in Electra than when he says, “what is our action now toward our mother? Do we kill?” (967) Even when he strikes, Orestes cannot face his mother, so he covers his eyes with his cloak (1221). He demands someone else deal with the corpse, wrapping it in the same cloak he used to cover his eyes from the deed (1227). Electra then wraps the corpse. All this underlines that he is ultimately presented as a tool of Electra’s hatred which, as we have seen, is hardly justified by the events and people of the play. Whatever obvious status the matricidal revenge had within the mythic canon has been wholly dispelled: Aegisthus and Clytemnestra are presented as flawed but reasonable, the murders as unmotivated. To drive this home, Euripides has both murders appear exceedingly cruel and impious.1 Aegisthus is killed while attending to a sacrificed bull. As he leans over and sorts through the organs, Orestes smashes his spine with a sword blow from behind. Clytemnestra is lured through a false rumor that Electra is giving birth. She shows genuine maternal interest in Electra and the 1 Froma Zeitlin, explores Euripides’ inversion of religious rites throughout the play: ”Celebration has proved an illusion and ritual sacrifice has become murder.” [Zeitlin, F. “The Argive Festival of Hera and Euripides’ Electra.” In: Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. Vol. 101, (1970) p. 659.] Most readings of this strange play (Conacher, Denniston, Pohlenz, Spira, Barlow, Thury) struggle to fit it into standard ideas of tragedy and so ignore some aspect of the unforgiving portrayal Euripides offers us. �baby. She begs for her life. Both victims are vulnerable and have tried to explain themselves and their actions in reasonable terms. We do not have the intense, gloating Clytemnestra or tyrannical Aegisthus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. We know that, according to the story, they must be killed. Where both Aeschylus and Sophocles build the case for the murder slowly and build the tension so that the act becomes inevitable, Euripides slackens the dramatic tension so that the murders appear not as revenge but as horror. Several signs indicate that the murders might have been avoided, perhaps not ultimately, but at least on these terms and by these means. Had Electra recognized that her situation was not as bad as she desired it to be or had Orestes the coward not been stung by the accusation of cowardice to abandon his justified doubt in the oracle, the murders would not have happened or would have waited on better motivations and perhaps been achieved by less brutal means. Castor and Pollux, gods and Orestes’ and Electra’s uncles, appear at the end of the play to resolve the action and remark, provocatively, that Apollo “knows the truth but his oracles were lies.” (1246) and that “Justice has claimed [Clytemnestra] but you have not worked in justice.” (1244).” Euripides presents the murders more as a result of Electra’s self-deception than any greater justice. The events of the play hinge on Electra’s greedy self-pity. Here, Zeus and Apollo weave their fate through such strange means that divine necessity appears like a bizarre mistake issuing from one person’s damaged psyche. II. Euripides’ treatment of the subject confuses the effect of the tragedy considerably. August Wilhelm Schlegel called Euripides’ Electra “a singular monument of poetical, or rather unpoetical, perversity.”2 Consider how Euripides handles the Aeschylean trope of Electra recognizing Orestes from his footprint’s similarity to hers. An old man tries to convince her that Orestes has returned but she stubbornly refuses to believe it: “You make me angry. How could rocky ground receive/ the imprint of a foot? and if it could be traced,/ it would not be the same for a brother and for sister, a man’s foot and a girl’s- of course it would be bigger.” (534-537) Euripides invites us to think about the unrealistic nature of the Aeschylean trope and even to laugh at it.3 An uncomfortable comic self-awareness bursts through the tragic artifice. This and moments like it are surely the target of Schlegel’s critique. And he is right, the Electra is a perverse play and barely resembles classic tragedy. But this does not mean it fails to achieve its intended effect. Because the character portrayals erode any self-understood moral high ground which might generate clear feelings of pity and fear, it must fail to satisfy the idea of tragedy as catharsis. The play is unfulfilling when judged as catharsis. But Aristotle, in his Poetics does not rest on the idea of cleansing or purification but builds, dialectically, toward “ekplexis” astonishment by knocking away what we think we know. Euripides’ Electra does this admirably, in that we steadily watch our ideas about the story and the tragic theater crumble away. We are 2 Lectures on Dramatic Art, Lecture IX. Schlegel also notes that in the Electra Euripides initiated the decline of “not only this or that genre, but [of the Greek’s] entire existence, in all arts, in constitution and laws, in private and public customs and actions.” 3 Electra recognizes Orestes by a scar instead, a nod, perhaps, to Eurykleia’s recognition of Odysseus in the Odyssey. Homer’s world is broad enough to embrace the serious and the comic, the fated and the incidental. If Euripides rejects Aeschylus, perhaps he does not reject Homer. Perhaps he means to pick up another, neglected thread in the Mythoi. �brought to question the characters and their motives and to wonder if there was any greater reason, plan, justice or purpose driving the action at all. It is, then, no accident that at the end of the play, Castor and Pollux, Helen’s brothers, remind us: “[Helen] never went to Troy. Zeus fashioned and dispatched a Helen-image there/ to Ilium so men might die in hate and blood.” (1281-3) Beginning at least with Stesichorus, some ancient Greek authors, including Herodotus, tell the story of the Trojan War with an important variation: Helen never really went to Ilium. 4 An Eidolon, a likeness of her, went instead while she was kept in Egypt for the duration of the war. Euripides seems to be the only tragedian to take this narrative variation up. In fact, he returns to it again and again. It is a leitmotif for him. It plays center stage in his Helen but also surfaces in the Electra. Why mention Helen’s Eidolon toward the end of the Electra? It seems to me that it serves to underscore the hollowness of human action. If the whole Trojan war was undertaken for a phantom, what of the miseries that come to the royal house of Atreus? Could they also be based on a misunderstanding? All this suffering is for an image, it has no real purpose, no achievable aim. Revenge, like war, is undertaken for a shadow.5 Seen this way, the Electra is not so much tragedy as black comedy.6 In the end, we have a sinking feeling that the whole thing could have been avoided, a feeling that is completely out of place in the tragic theater. Castor and Pollux tell Orestes and Electra: “Justice has claimed her but you have not worked in justice.” (1244) In the end, justice has been done, but we cannot enjoy it. This is a cardinal sin for a playwright, to refuse us our enjoyment, and Euripides’ Electra is roundly hated by critics for it. The Dioscuri reveal what Electra and Orestes have in store for them but there is no sense of future triumph in the court decision that will liberate Orestes from the furies. It is telling that the transformation of furies to Eumenides is not mentioned at all. This transformation is the crowning moment of the Oresteia and the proof that suffering leads to a better life. Euripides just lets the furies pass without fanfare: in killing Clytemnestra there was no victory to celebrate and there is no future victory to come. There is no Helen to retrieve. The dramatic work, instead of giving us a convincing, self-enclosed world, leaves us unsure and unsatisfied. It does this, in part, by failing to be a good tragedy. The work does not 4 Plato, Phaedrus 243a-b. Herodotus argues that Homer knew this variation as well, evidenced by his mention of Paris’ detour to Egypt in Book V of the Iliad. Homer chose not to use the Phantom Helen variation, according to Herodotus, because it did not fit as well with an epic poem. Herodotus, Histories II.116. More, to Herodotus the variation seems to be as old as the event of the Trojan War itself and to have been preserved in this variant form by the Egyptians. Herodotus’ reasons for accepting the Phantom Helen story told by the Egyptian priests cluster around the fact that it would have been “insane” for the Trojans to refuse to give her back to Menelaus. Thus they must not have had her. See Histories II.120. 5 What Euripides highlights, how the particular delusions connected to a situation of violence undermine any justice or moral clarity it might have, offers an elenchus, a refutation, of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. As with the socratic elenchus the point is not to come to new knowledge but to expose ignorance. And as Socrates’ interlocuters learn, the emotions that attend being refuted are unpleasant. 6 Schlegel notes what is obvious to most readers, that the Electra seems strangely close to comedy: “I could wish that the wedding of Pylades had been celebrated on the stage, and that a good round sum of money had been paid to the peasant on the spot; then everything would have ended to the satisfaction of the spectators as in an ordinary comedy.” (Lecture IX) The blurring of comedy and tragedy was probably deliberate. Euripides undertakes it in other plays as well. �magically transmute its suffering into pleasure, its furies pass away but are not transformed. The Electra performs for the theatergoer what Euripides’ other plays indicate: there is no redeeming purpose to our suffering. This is a hard lesson for liberal education to incorporate. If Euripides is right, education will not make our lives better. It will not make us happier or more self-actualized. It will find its own way to contribute to our suffering. Suffering will not teach us or improve us but will only warp our perception of the world. We could say, looking at the concluding moments of Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae that suffering, though it has no redeeming cosmic purpose, teaches us compassion for one another. When characters at the close of those plays recognize they have all suffered immensely at the hands of inscrutable gods, they forgive one another. A human community of compassion springs up in response to the absurdity of divine power. Yet here in the Electra, we do not have such a reconciliation. Apollo is blamed, the brother and sister will be pardoned. But they have not learned anything, not even how to suffer well. We are not graced with the benediction of the Eumenides. Orestes runs off, pursued by the furies and the Dioscuri fly away to Sicily to “rescue the salt smashed prows of the fleet” (1348), a reference, perhaps, to the disastrous Sicilian Expedition which Thucydides called “a destruction so complete [the report] was not thought credible.”7 This gives a reminder to the Athenian audience of contemporary suffering and the fruitlessness of war. 8 After such a dark reminder, the hollow, programmatic words pronounced by the chorus to close the play seem more like gallows humor than good advice: “Farewell. The mortal who can fare well not broken by the trouble met on the road, leads a most blessed life.” Andy Davis Belmont University 7 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 8.1. See Richmond Lattimore’s note on the chronology of Euripides’ plays in Euripides V. 8 Aeschylus, while exploring and probing the Trojan war, gives us a trilogy that ultimately justifies war. Euripides’ Electra, on the other hand, does not. � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 5 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 Helen's eidolon : learning and suffering in Euripides' Electra Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Andy Davis at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Davis, Andy 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 2014-10-17 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 Euripides. Electra Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004525 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ac43c2ffc0e5faed93b9d3084695047d.pdf fdc2be4b1f7827002e0a875d2c004417 PDF Text Text Learning to Flourish: A Philosophical Exploration of Liberal Education Daniel R. DeNicola Gettysburg College (This paper is essentially a distillation of my recent book by the same title. This seems appropriate, not only because—judging from sales—it is unlikely you have read the book, not only because it references St. John’s College, but primarily because it addresses directly the central question of this conference: the purpose of liberal education. From lecturing about these ideas on other campuses, I have, however, learned much that will shape this presentation.) I believe it is mistake to tout liberal education as an ideal, an archetype of education that is defined by specific content (whether by component disciplines, by its curriculum, or by a list of “essentials of cultural literacy”), by distinctive pedagogical methods or techniques, or by institutional type. All these have morphed through history in response to intellectual, social/cultural, and technological changes. To elevate some particular iteration of liberal education as the Platonic ideal is to misunderstand and misdirect both our philosophical and our educational tasks. �2 Rather, liberal education should be understood as a tradition of educational theory and practice—not in the sense of a hoary set of inherited rituals that we must preserve, but as a vital and still-evolving tradition. What distinguishes this tradition from others is its supreme aim: the purpose of liberal education is the development a compelling conception of a flourishing life and the cultivation of such a life. “Flourishing” has both subjective and objective markers. I would identify the subjective markers as a general satisfaction with one’s life as it is and an identification with that life; the objective markers are the possession of the capacities and goods that conduce to and extend the subjective markers. “Flourishing” requires the ability to function with excellence and efficiency in the world. This is a eudaimonistic account developed within the Aristotelian tradition, but I do not wish to carry all of Aristotle’s intellectual baggage. Critics might claim that I am smuggling in the notion of “the good life”—an aristocratic, hegemonic, sexist, and racist view of what life is best; a prescriptive vision that arrogantly assumes the moral and intellectual authority of educators and the righteousness of their efforts. I reject these misunderstandings of my meaning. I do not mean that developing a conception of a flourishing life requires the apprehension of a pre-existing ideal; nor do I imply that there is a single, universal vision of such a life. This goal is an individual achievement, though it affects and is influenced by others, and the result is a diversity of visions. Moreover, the hard-won understanding of flourishing one achieves will likely evolve with life’s passages and later learning—it continues as an infinite task. It �3 is another deeply misconception to assume that the quest for a flourishing life, the well-springs of liberal education, arise only in situations of elite privilege and comfort. Concern for one’s life and its prospects may arise in reflective solitude, amidst crippling poverty, in despair, when resplendent ideals of the good life have been shattered, even after great horror. On the other hand, I do accept the Aristotelian claim that a flourishing life implies sources, supports, arenas, and engagement that are communal. And, as he noted, there is no guarantee that learning to flourish will guarantee a flourishing life; success is contingent on luck and other factors beyond human control. Nonetheless, adopting such an aim governs many aspects of our experience and in so doing shapes our life and identity. Taking seriously the hope of a flourishing life leads immediately to questions about the components of and effective ways to prepare for and cultivate such a life. Grappling with these large questions leads to others: What is the human condition? What are our prospects? Who am I and who might I become? What is my relationship to others and what may I learn from their experience? What can I do in the world? Understanding how we might flourish requires knowledge of what is, what might be, and what ought to be. Navigating this network of profound queries from different vantage points, theorists of liberal education developed what I will call paradigms. These comprehensive visions set polarities in the philosophy of education, establish subsidiary aims, generate forms of educational discourse, inspire curricula, and guide pedagogy. �4 There are, or so I have dscerned, five historical paradigms of liberal education. They are not ordered in revolutionary succession like Kuhnian paradigms; rather they are co-present, competing, and sometimes conflicting. Each paradigm privileges certain intellectual skills and virtues; each proffers a distinctive form of liberation and vision of the educated person; each has its own liabilities. Much of the dynamism of the tradition of liberal education is produced by their shifting dominance and blend. They are all in play today, and most institutions claim to adopt all of them in some distinctive balance. Though they present quite distinct visions of liberal education, I will argue that they ultimately require each other. Here are the five paradigms: Liberal education is for:  the transmission of culture—for the absorption of the human experience as encoded in “texts”;  self-actualization—for the identification, actualization, or creation of a normative self;  understanding the world—for comprehending the facts and forces that shape our lives;  engagement with the world—for active, normative, and effective engagement with the world; and  acquisition of the skills of learning and the disposition to use them. �5 After a brief characterization of each, I will turn to their relationships, and conclude by consideration how this analysis clarifies our task as educators. The Transmission of Culture Culture is not transmitted genetically; it can be preserved across generations only through learning. Both cultural content and its transmission were greatly enhanced by the creation of texts, durable objects that encode human experience. This paradigm harbors the wisdom that absorbing this precious legacy is the best path to a flourishing life, perhaps even a constitutive component of it. More passive interpretations of the paradigm focus on the student’s acquisition of this heritage, and therefore privilege skills of comprehension: reading (and intelligent listening and viewing); attention to detail; proficiency in languages; and the skills of explication. More active versions add the need to comment, analyze, critique, and evaluate—even to join the intertextual conversation and contribute texts in one’s own voice—and they privilege the additional requisite skills. Human finitude necessitates some principle of selection: it is not possible to assimilate all texts. Whether one rejects the label of “great works” or not, criteria of “worthiness” under some interpretation must be applied in creating a curriculum. This is the paradigm that undergirds Whewell’s “permanent studies,” Hutchins’ “Great Books,” Adler’s “Great Ideas,” and Oakeshott’s “Immortal Conversation.”— and the vision of St. John’s College. It portrays the liberally educated person as one �6 who is culturally literate, who knows masterworks and a body of literature, who has facility in multiple languages (symbol systems)—who is, in short, a scholar. This sort of study, its advocates claim, furnishes the mind; its pursuit enlivens the intellect and expands the moral imagination; it is the best strategy for a flourishing life. It offers the student liberation: liberation from a timeless, meaningless, unconstructed present; from parochial prejudice and narrowness of vision; from a solipsistic life. Self-actualization Under this paradigm, liberal education is about the awakening and nurturance of latent capacities and qualities with each student that conduce to a normative self. It is a form of perfectionism. It exhibits subtle variations that intimate metaphysical differences in the conception of the self: its aim may be conceived variously as finding or discovering oneself, as self-definition, self-realization, self-actualization, self-formation, or even self-creation. It all begins, of course, with knowing thyself. What does one get from a liberal education? One gets one’s self, transformed. As Pindar once wrote, “Become who you are.” Thus, liberal learning shapes identity. Self-actualization offers us liberation from confused and imposed identities, from alienation and inauthenticity, from the disappointment of stifled, untested, or suppressed potential. In a flourishing life, one shapes and achieves one’s ownmost possibilities. �7 The curriculum, for this paradigm, is derived not from a canon of treasured works, but from the potential and promise of one’s students. In its most elaborated form, the self and its potential are individuated; in simpler (and more practicable) forms, some more generic notion of the self, of human potential, predominates. It is, nonetheless, a view that recognizes, even celebrates, difference and diversity; the desired educational outcomes are suitably particular. It privileges reflection, selfawareness, and the willingness to go beyond one’s current comfort zone. What may seem to be self-absorption likely gives way as liberal education reveals the social, communal dimensions of self-actualization, of dependence on others—and their selfactualization—for a flourishing life. An educated person is, therefore, one who is accomplished and authentic, continually engaged in explorations of self-development. This is the paradigm of Froebel and Montessori, of institutions like Summerhill and colleges like Bennington, Hampshire, and Evergreen. Understanding the World The focus moves now from the inner life to the outer world: liberal education is aimed at gaining understanding the world in which we live and the forces that shape our lives. It urges us to grasp the world as it is, on its own terms, and not as a projection of our fears and needs; this is a task that has what philosophers call a “mind-to-world direction of fit.” We cannot attempt to create a flourishing life if we are ignorant of how the world works, of the natural and social forces that affect our �8 lives. From our own bodies to the operations of influential institutions, we face the things of this world with wonder, curiosity, care in observation, respect for evidence, perceptivity in theorizing and knowledge-construction—these are among the virtues and skills this paradigm privileges. Success requires far more than the acquisition of facts; we must learn methods of inquiry and acquire cognitive frameworks—and multiples of these are far better than one. The paradigm thus suggests a curriculum that features a breadth of disciplines and seeks integration. The liberation offered here is from superstition, ignorance, and error; and such understanding can have an emotional impact as well, freeing us from reflexive fear and hostility. The vision of the educated person, now idealized as a polymath, is a person with a supple intellect, with broad interest in and knowledge of the ways of the world, the disciplines, and with currency in the natural and social sciences. Engagement with the World The fourth paradigm construes liberal education as a preparation for engagement with and action in the world. (Historically, “the world” has meant the public domain, not often the domestic.) The aim is personal effectiveness—and so it idealizes the educated person as one a committed agent, one who can act effectively and ethically to persuade others, to serve and advance worthy causes—to change the world or to labor in that hope. Civic engagement, social reform, political activism, public service, cultural critique—these and more are activities that are anticipated or �9 often embodied in the educational program. Curricular content devolves from a knowledge and critique of the state of the world in light of one’s values, along with the requisite capacities for personal effectiveness. To become liberally educated is to be liberated from powerlessness, false constraints, and social entropy; from helpless by-standing; to gain freedom of agency, the capacity to shape one’s will to the fulfillment of one’s best judgment, to take a stand and act on behalf of one’s values. This paradigm is exemplified in Isocrates’ school, but also in Antioch College and in the motto of “Princeton in the nation’s service.” Acquiring the Skills of Learning This last paradigm emphasizes the “arts” of “liberal arts” (the artes of artes liberalis; the technai of technai eleutheriai). Here there is less concern with content, more with acquisition of the transferable skills that are useful in learning anything. An educated person is one who has learned how to learn and who has the disposition to use relevant skills in learning throughout a lifetime. Of course, the relevant skills change with technology, but in today’s world we are likely to focus on reading comprehension, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, information literacy, critical thinking, communication and social skills, and related skills. �10 What motivates this paradigm is the recognition that the world is constantly changing, knowledge evolves, memory fades, and we cannot carry the knowledge from the past confidently into the future. We can, however, respond by equipping ourselves with the skills to learn whatever might be salient to a flourishing life. Acquisition of these skills holds out the promise of liberation from becoming outmoded, from cognitive entropy, and the ignorance and uselessness that may follow. The student gains the freedom of self-directed learning. I hope I have conveyed these paradigms as quite distinct, but comprehensive and coherent, visions of liberal education, differing in the skills and virtues they elevate, the locus of the curriculum, their ideals of the educated person, and the form of liberation they offer. Each is attractive, even compelling, but “thin”; they require instantiation, so they each can be a fertile matrix to spawn curricula, to influence pedagogy, even to shape institutions. Many familiar educational controversies arise out of their competition, but conflicts may also arise within a paradigm—for example, disputes over the contents of the canon in the Transmission of Culture paradigm, or disputes about the comparative value of different disciplines in the Understanding the World paradigm. As I said, the tradition of liberal education displays many iterations of theory and practice that reflect their competition, their shifting prominence, and the relationships drawn among them. �11 But they are not simply competitors. Ultimately, they seek the same end. It is perhaps easy to forget that these paradigms arise from the same supreme purpose: the development of a conception of a flourishing life and the cultivation of such a life. And they are intertwined: a vigorous champion of the assimilation of culture through an agonistic encounter with great texts might conclude (as Oakeshott did) by asserting that such study is the pathway to self-actualization. Similarly, an advocate of the skills of learning model may ultimate justify their position by the need for such skills in engaging the world. Beyond this, however, they seem to require each other: the questions each asks leads to the questions of others. How could one engage with the world without understanding it? How could one assimilate great works without the skills of learning? The distinctive liabilities and dangers that each paradigm carries are ameliorated by the strengths of others. For example, the temptation to selfabsorption of the self-actualization paradigm is corrected by the outward and more objective requirements of explicating the texts of others, or of understanding or engaging with the world. The hypnotism of the past that is perhaps a liability of a life devoted to masterworks is countered by the future orientation that undergirds efforts to engage, change, or reform the world. And so on. Most institutions today seem to claim a blend of most if not all these five paradigms; even those that elevate one usually imply that their signature paradigm is a gateway to the benefits of the others. �12 Finally, I want to claim that this account entails that liberal education is a deeply moral enterprise. First, the process of liberal education must meet ethical criteria, such as avoiding indoctrination and valuing the student’s integrity. Second, the supreme aim—a flourishing life—incorporates moral virtues and values. A flourishing life is, however, larger in scope than a moral life; it incorporates more than moral virtues and values. And finally, it is indirectly moral in that success in its subsidiary aims is relevant to, often essential for, moral activity. Expanding the moral imagination, knowing how the world works, seeing the larger picture and broader implications, developing one’s capacities and knowing how to learn, and having the skills of worldly engagement—surely these are components of moral education and enlightened moral agency. An emphasis on objectives and outcomes is meaningful only when our activities remain tethered to our aim. But this brings us to our educational task: each of us—each institution, each academic department, each faculty—carries the responsibility of regularly reinterpreting our vision of liberal education, of continuing the evolution and vitality of the tradition. What is educational quality, what serves the living of a flourishing life today? Each paradigm comprehends a plethora of further specification. Our work is to craft a blended version of these paradigms that suits our our intellectual, social, and technological context. This task itself reflects—and may embody—the process of crafting and cultivating a flourishing life. � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 12 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 Learning to flourish : a philosophical exploration of liberal education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Daniel DeNicola at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource DeNicola, Daniel R. 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 2014-10-17 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 24004526 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f18c6ec3677799e518ad0bac92c54268.pdf fca3565912f5ab3287e95c0343e60aef PDF Text Text “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue: Discussing Anselm’s Proslogion in the Religiously Pluralist Classroom” Christopher Denny, Associate Professor, St. John’s University—NY 1. Introduction I begin by asking for the inspiration of Anselm of Canterbury, taking a cue from the meditative prayer in chapter one of his Proslogion. If I was fortunate enough to have Anselm speak in my place this morning, I can imagine him saying, “Come now, conference participants! Let us flee for a while from the cares of academic specializations and research and publication protocols, casting aside these burdensome pursuits. Let us set aside time to enter the inner chambers of our classrooms and particular institutions, and there seek a pedagogical rationale for reading, discussing, and teaching religious texts within a liberal arts curriculum. For if we cannot offer a sustained and principled defense of the value of studying religion and theology in colleges and universities dedicated to free inquiry about fundamental existential questions, where will such intellectual practices occur?” “But alas! wretched as we are, those of us intent on preserving a place for theological inquiries in higher education are bowed down in the current educational context. For both vocal secular critics of religion and pious caretakers of religion have replaced the search for ‘that than which-nothing greater can be conceived’ with the conviction that religion and piety are primarily reified markers of personal and collective identity. Be it our goal to look past these assumptions and set our sights upon the search for the truth, wherever truth leads us.” �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 2 The secularization of American higher education, and the accompanying marginalization of theological study in college and university curricula, is a process that has been occurring for centuries, as George Marsden noted in his book The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.1 The causes for this marginalization begin with the desire of Protestant denominations in the colonial and Federal periods to downplay creedal disagreements among themselves. They continue during Americanized Romanticera attempts to locate the essence of Christian religion in interiorized piety and whiggish notions of progress, and reach a culmination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century initiatives to situate the university within a scientific paradigm in which achievement is gauged in terms of empirical measurement and technological ability. Marsden and other commentators have rehearsed this history in detail, and for many it may be a cause for commiseration. My purpose, however, is neither to bemoan these changes nor to praise them as the acme of modern liberalism. Rather I intend to argue that the secularization of Christian colleges and universities opens up new opportunities for reintroducing theology into the liberal arts curriculum in a religiously pluralist rather than in a confessionalist context. To illustrate these possibilities, I employ Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion as a test case, relying both on the text itself and also upon the historical environment within which the Proslogion was written, for Anselm too faced a profound shift in educational ideals during his day, and his writings indicate a need to confront a new See George Marsden, The Soul of the University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); James T. Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). 1 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 3 audience in the emerging scholastic classroom and a new method of doing theology. Rather than denouncing the transformation that theology underwent as it expanded beyond the monasteries, Anselm retooled theology. Liberal-arts practitioners and theologians would do well to follow his example. 2. Increasing Professional and Religious Pluralism in Anselm’s Context Recent scholarship in medieval educational history has supplemented an earlier focus on the role of Benedictine monasticism with greater attention to the importance of cathedral schools and the Ottonian and Salian imperial courts in fostering an approach to philosophy centered upon the study of Cicero’s oratory and service to the state. Stephen Jaeger’s recent study of primary source documents from the tenth and eleventh centuries challenges medieval histories of the liberal arts that marginalize contributions from outside the sphere of monastic education.2 A figure such as the monk-scholar Gerbert of Aurillac, for example, straddles the boundary between religious and secular education. Having left his position as abbot of the monastery of Bobbio, Gerbert spent his days teaching arts and rhetoric, until receiving the patronage of Emperor Otto III, with whose support Gerbert became Pope Sylvester II in the year 999. In his work On the Rational and the Use of Reason, Gerbert promoted a so-called “imperial philosophy” (imperialis philosophia), in which the logic and dialectic of Aristotle and Boethius were placed at the service of Otto’s court. While Gerbert had learned grammar at the monastery of Aurillac, his 2 See C. Stephen Jaeger, “Philosophy, ca. 950—ca. 1050, Viator 40/1 (2009): 17-40. �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 4 own introduction to logic came during his time at the imperial court and at the cathedral school at Reims studying with the teacher Gerannus.3 Although logic in these decades remained subordinate to a practical understanding of the liberal arts as a benefit for a career in secular administration, over time the influence of the cathedral schools filtered back into monastic settings, including the monastery at Bec where Anselm taught. Anselm’s teacher Lanfranc was a key figure in this development. Having come to this new monastery after studies in the liberal arts and law, as prior Lanfranc began to admit students who were not planning to enter a monastery, either at Bec or elsewhere, in order to raise money for the abbey.4 By the late eleventh century, a number of these students at Bec had entered administrative careers, bolstered by their studies in history and law.5 Anselm’s resuscitation of the literary dialogue in medieval Latin literature needs to be interpreted against this shift in the student population at Bec. Even though Anselm eventually reversed Lanfranc’s decision to admit external students at Bec, the use of dialogue manifest in Anselm’s early work De Grammatico (On See Richer of Saint-Rémi, Histories [3.45], vol. 2, ed. and trans. Justin Lake (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 66—71. 4 See Alex J. Novikoff, “Anselm, Dialogue, and the Rise of Scholastic Disputation,” Speculum 86 (2011): 387—418. The primary sources dealing with Lanfranc’s education, including the biographical material from Milo Crispin and Gilbert Crispin, are surveyed in H. E. J. Cowdrey, Lanfranc: Scholar, Monk, and Archbishop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5—10. 5 See Sally N. Vaughn, “Anselm, Lanfranc, and the School of Bec: Searching for the Students of Bec,” in The Culture of Christendom: Essays in Commemoration of Denis L. T. Bethell, ed. Marc A. Meyer (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 155—81. Also, see Novikoff, The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 3 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 5 Grammar) endured in his later theological dialogues, most notably Cur Deus Homo [Why God became Human?]6 Even an early work of Anselm’s such as the Proslogion, which is not composed in the genre of a formal dialogue with different literary characters, displays the transition from soliloquy towards dialogue and argument in the response that it generated and Anselm’s rejoinder. In the preface to this work, Anselm describes it as an alloquium, an address or allocution. In his later response to Gaunilo, however, Anselm appeals to those who have knowledge of disputandi argumentandique (debating, discussing, proving, arguing) to come to his defense against Gaunilo’s objections.7 Indeed Anselm’s entire literary output displays an evolution in the direction of debate, and there are for Anselm culpable and praiseworthy debaters. For example, in the beginning of his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word, Anselm distinguishes between the arguments of those who proudly deny what their intellects cannot grasp and the arguments of those who humbly live the Christian faith.8 By the time Anselm wrote the later Cur Deus Homo [Why God became Human], he no longer waits for the response from the likes of Gaunilo as he explicitly anticipates debate and organizes the first part of the dialogue around meeting the “objections of unbelievers.”9 Novikoff criticizes Richard Southern’s lack of appreciation of Anselm’s debt to Lanfranc on this point. See Novikoff, “Anselm, Dialogue, and the Rise of Scholastic Disputation,” 405. 7 See Anselm, Reply to Gaunilo 7. 8 See Anselm, On the Incarnation of the Word 1. 9 See Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, preface and 1. 6 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 6 3. Reading the Proslogion with Awareness of Religious Pluralism Interpretive awareness of Anselm’s transitional educational context helps to balance understandings of the Proslogion that reduce this work to an exercise in a completely interiorized version of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. The Proslogion certainly qualifies as such a search but one that is neither solipsistic nor exclusivist. Rather, once we know more about Anselm’s historical context, we can appreciate that Anselm’s search in the Proslogion is marked by an environment of religious pluralism and debates, but not debates that mirror our contemporary polemics between religious believers and skeptics. First, Anselm wrote this treatise against the background of the intra-Christian schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople that occurred in 1054, and the result of that schism continued to influence Anselm’s theological career, as he gave an address at the Council of Bari in 1098 crafted to convince Eastern Christians of the Latin doctrine of the trinitarian filioque, the procession of the Son from the Holy Spirit as well as from the Father. Second, Anselm was part of a generation of Christian theologians who were coming into increased contact with anti-Christian polemical works by non-Christian authors, much of which was in dialogue form. The Account of the Disputation of the Priest, a ninth-century Jewish text, is an example of this genre. The Account attacks the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation on the grounds that the divine nature is incompatible with such a religious teaching. At the beginning of his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word, Anselm refers to the writings of his fellow scholastic Roscelin, who at the Council of Soissons in 1092 was accused by Anselm and others of teaching tritheism. Roscelin’s nominalist �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 7 contention that the persons of the Trinity must be separate substances in order to avoid admitting that the Father and the Spirit would also have had to become incarnate alongside the Son is found in a work attributed to one of his contemporaries, the Islamic theologian al-Ghazālī. A dialogue format was precluded in On the Incarnation of the Word, as the work was addressed directly to Pope Urban II, but later in the dialogue Cur Deus Homo Anselm’s interlocutor Boso praises Anselm’s arguments for the Incarnation, claiming that it should serve as proof for Jews and pagans.10 Twentieth-century philosophers and theologians have split much ink and typeface over the issue of whether the Proslogion is an exercise in natural theology or, as twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth held, a priori theological support for those already initiated.11 One contemporary interpreter outlines such a dichotomous choice as follows: Loyalty to Christian identity remained for Anselm the first responsibility of theological interpretation and the only authentic basis for theological reasoning. Anselm would not have shared the belief that a progressive and sure epistemological foundation was at hand, immanently accessible, to which he could lead the unbeliever and from which they could share common assumptions.12 See Daniel J. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics against Christianity in the Middle Ages (New York: Ktav, 1977), 121—25; al-Ghazālī, Réfutation Excellente de la Divinité de Jesus-Christ d’après les Évangiles, ed. and trans. Robert Chidiac (Paris: E. Leroux, 1939); Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 2.22. 11 See Karl Barth, Fides Quaerens Intellectum, trans. I. W. Robertson (London: SCM, 1960). 12 Jeffrey C. Pugh, “Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselm as Contemporary,” Theology Today 55/1 (April 1998): 35—45, at 43. Later in the article Pugh writes, “Seeking to justify itself within its cultural context, it [theology] runs the risk of connecting its theology so strongly to the culture that its construals of God will diminish when the cultural forms it arose within pass into yet another” (44). By contrast, I hold with Catholic theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904—84) that “A theology mediates between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of a religion in that matrix.” 10 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 8 I must simply disagree. For Anselm, the criterion of theology is first and foremost the truth of God rather than the maintenance of religious identity, which is a derivative issue. Moreover, the narrator’s self-understanding shifts in the course of the Proslogion’s first chapter, as I will argue momentarily. Debates over the role of reason versus faith in the Proslogion would assume a helpful new guise if Anselm’s original audience was taken into account. Anselm was not addressing a group of eighteenth-century deists. Theology and philosophy, and the accompanying distinction between natural and supernatural knowledge, were not as clearly distinct as they would become some two centuries after his time. The fool he references from Psalms 14 and 53 does not provide a clear-cut case of religious atheism but according to the psalmist, an example of moral corruption. The pressing concern in the opening chapters of the Proslogion is what kind of god God is, a more intelligible concern given the religious differences in Anselm’s context. Let’s see what a reading of the opening chapters of the Proslogion can look like through an interreligiously informed hermeneutic. Anselm concludes chapter one with a quotation from Isaiah: “unless I believe, I will not understand” (nisi credidero, non intelligam; Is 7:9). This well-known verse is also included in Anselm’s letter to Pope Urban II at the beginning of his work On the Incarnation of the Word and clearly served as a guiding principle in his writings; it is often used as support for a fideist approach to the Proslogion.13 Yet there are Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), xi. 13 See Anselm, On the Incarnation of the Word 1. �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 9 too many other passages in Anselm’s writings that appeal to rational persuasion of non-Christians for readers to stretch Anselm’s citation of this verse into a global epistemological principle that would hold good for all persons.14 Anselm himself may begin reasoning from a position of religious faith, but many of his readers have not. The second chapter’s famous definition of God as “that-than-which-a-greatercannot-be-thought” acquires a different cast when it is accepted as a premise about God than as a self-evident proof or, as Kant held, an exercise in trying to derive existence from reasoning, a charge that would be better leveled against the argument for God in Descartes’s Third Meditation.15 As Katherin Rogers notes, Anselm’s theological premises are intended to achieve two goals at the same time: first, deepening the religious belief of insider participants, and second, persuading outsiders.16 While this definition of God is not separable from the religious belief of insiders, neither is it a neutral lowest common denominator. Since the definition is at its root apophatic, God as “that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought” by itself In addition to Cur Deus Homo 2.22, for another example see On the Incarnation of the Word 6. 15 Anselm, Proslogion 2, trans. M. J. Charlesworth, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, eds. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans, Oxford World’s Classics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87; see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A592/B620— A602/B630. A critique of Kant’s rejection of the “ontological argument” is given by Pugh, “Fides Quaerens Intellectum.” 16 See Katherin Rogers, “Can Christianity Be Proven? St. Anselm of Canterbury on Faith and Reason,” in Anselm Studies 2, eds. Joseph C. Schnaubelt et al. (Kraus International, 1988), 459-479, at 466. Also, note Brian Davies, “Anselm and the Ontological Argument,” in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, eds. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 157—77, at 174— 76. 14 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 10 reveals no positive content about God or about the image of God.17 The premise is analogous to the limit of a convergent mathematical sequence, especially given Anselm’s further assertion in chapter fifteen that God is “something greater than can be thought.”18 Human thoughts can approach God by way of comparison in the manner of a geometric asymptote, tending toward but never attaining identity with the divine. This apophatic claim therefore is also comparative, as the existence of God is only indirectly revealed by comparison with other thoughts. While the thoughts of Anselm and other religious participants are in large part determined by the specific content of their respective traditions, exemplified in the opening chapter of the Proslogion, the advantage of Anselm’s premise in chapter two for interreligious dialogue and debate is that this apophatic definition of God is not confined within any particular network of signs, symbols, or doctrines. Critics can rightly note that this apophatic approach means that the question of God’s existence is not one of evidence or of ontology, as pace many subsequent interpreters Anselm does not equate God with Being or with Existence. This is true, but this is precisely what lends Anselm’s misleadingly called ontological argument strength in a religiously pluralistic context. If the issue of God’s existence were to be settled by evidence empirical or metaphysical in nature, then the argument would necessarily acquire an esoteric character. If God were the same type of being as the hypothetical island that Anselm’s interlocutor Gaunilo posited in his short treatise On Behalf of the Fool, then the Proslogion could only be convincing to readers who Readers of Anselm’s Proslogion know that after chapter five there are several chapters characterizing God’s qualities, although these are followed by chapter fifteen’s assertion that God is greater than can be thought. 18 Anselm, Proslogion, 15, in Anselm of Canterbury, 96. 17 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 11 shared Anselm’s esoteric knowledge, a functional example here of what Gotthold Lessing termed “the accidental truths of history.”19 This would be the case with any knowledge received solely from scripture, tradition, or ecclesiastical authority. In assessing Anselm’s argument, Gaunilo was searching for categorical evidence to correspond to the idea of “that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought.” Finding no such correspondence, Gaunilo rejected the argument. In the Proslogion’s opening soliloquy, Anselm himself had pursued this course before shifting his focus. In chapter one, Anselm laments that visual confirmation of God’s existence is not forthcoming, writing: “By what signs, under what aspect, shall I seek you? Never have I seen you, Lord my God, I do not know Your face. . . . What shall Your servant do, tormented by love of You and cast off ‘far from Your face’ [Ps. 31:22]?”20 Unlike Gaunilo, however, Anselm’s consciousness of his wretched state moves him from seeking a vision towards recognizing his desire to encounter God, and Clive Barrett notes how the language in the opening chapter of Proslogion shifts from vision to conception as the prayer proceeds.21 Anselm prays, “I do not try, Lord, to attain Your lofty heights, because my understanding is in no way equal to it. But I do desire to understand Your truth a little, that truth that my heart believes and loves.”22 Colin Grant noted that for Anselm “the existence of God is a question of meaning, not of evidence”; this opening prayer marks a shift towards interiority and fixes meaning within the speaker’s desire for God, a desire See Gotthold Lessing, On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power, trans. Henry Chadwick (London: A. & C. Black, 1956), 51—53. 20 Anselm, Proslogion 1, in Anselm of Canterbury, 85. 21 See Clive Barrett, “A Careful Reading of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument,” Philosophy and Theology 23/2 (2011): 217—30, at 220. 22 Anselm Proslogion 1, in Anselm of Canterbury, 87, 19 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 12 that impels Anselm to think in a comparative manner that aims at constant transcendence of particular entities.23 Interpreted in this light, chapters one and two of Proslogion represent Anselm’s own liberation from what we can call the “epistemology of the fool” as defended by the likes of Gaunilo. The fool is one who does not make the transformation from exterior images to recognition of one’s internal neediness and desire for God, one who does not enter “into the chamber of your soul (in cubiculum mentis tuae)” to which Anselm alludes in chapter one of the Proslogion. The meaning that the idea of God holds for the thinker, however, is not to be equated with a subjectivist frame of reference, as if Anselm’s assertion in chapter two that to exist jointly in the mind and in reality is greater than merely mental existence specifically because of the power of the human mind. That would be to mistake Anselm for a modern philosophical idealist in the manner of someone like J. G. Fichte. Nor is meaning in Anselm’s sense of that word defined by a constructivist epistemological paradigm in which individual choice is the root variable that determines meaning. At the beginning of chapter three, Anselm claims “that-thanwhich-a-greater-cannot-be-thought” “cannot even be thought not to exist.”24 To his thinking the very process of thought compels the thinker and directs the mind towards a definite conclusion. In a contemporary world in which religious belief and unbelief hide behind terms of values and identity in order to avoid intellectual scrutiny, Anselm’s assertion relativizes without homogenizing the starting points of See Colin Grant, “Anselm’s Argument Today,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57/4 (Winter 1989): 791—806, at 794. 24 Anselm, Proslogion, 3 in Anselm of Canterbury, 88. 23 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 13 the Proslogion’s stakeholders in light of an external standard of measurement that the author regards as self-evident. This is the mirror image of much contemporary religious agnosticism, in which believers and unbelievers homogenize their differences by subsuming them beneath a functional antinomy of sorts, a socialized framework of tolerance in which each side agrees that it must disagree with the other side because no rational conclusion can be reached. 4. Conclusion The possibility for a discussion about the Proslogion among Christians and non-Christians and among religious believers, religious non-believers, and religiously uncommitted students hinges upon mutual willingness to embrace what Gyula Klima has called “constitutive reference” as opposed to “parasitic reference.” The latter option is a staple in the methodological naturalism that reigns in the social sciences and the humanities in the contemporary academy. When we refer to an entity parasitically, we do so by reference to what others think about that entity without sharing in their conceptions about it. Constitutive reference by contrast is the act by which we intentionally refer to an entity by the mental description that we ourselves have of that entity, without such a description being determined by reference to other people’s thoughts.25 Much could be said about the logical and epistemological consequences of this distinction in reading Anselm. For my purposes, I would like to call attention to the implications of this distinction for a religiously pluralist classroom. To read Anselm “constitutively” rather than See Gyuma Klima, “Saint Anselm’s Proof: A Problem of Reference, Intentional Identity and Mutual Understanding,” in Medieval Philosophy and Modern Times, ed. Ghita Holmström-Hintikka (Boston: Kluwer, 2000), 69—87, at 77—83. 25 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 14 “parasitically” in this case means that teachers and students engage Anselm’s argument directly rather than burying it beneath historicist and theological assumptions that exemplify parasitic references. Examples of such parasitic references would be shoehorning the Proslogion into a mold of medieval thought or a mold of exclusively Christian philosophy or theology. Parasitic references can also be determined not by the text itself but by the academic setting in which we read Anselm, when for example the Proslogion is characterized predominantly as part of the Great Books heritage or the Roman Catholic tradition, or as a medieval classic. The Proslogion is part of all these groupings, but to leave off at that point marks a failure to address Anselm’s claims on their own merits. Some may fault my thesis as paying short shrift to the communal context within which books are read. That is a point worthy of further discussion. While the communal and ecclesial presumptions with which we read Anselm are important and inevitably influence our reading of his texts, I think that those assumptions become debilitating when they are determinative of our readings, especially in educational contexts in which formerly confessional or religiously orthodox institutions have transformed themselves into more pluralist and secular schools. I do not claim that this development has been a positive one on balance, but as Marsden notes, it has happened whether religious believers like it or not. Given his willingness to engage religious outsiders real and imagined in his own era, Anselm provides twenty-first century students with a model for how creedal belief �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 15 and sincere dialogue can coexist in the university classroom nine centuries after his time.26 26 I give thanks to Mr. Paul Rezkalla for research assistance with this paper. � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 15 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 From doubt and decline towards dialogue : discussing Anselm's Proslogion in the religiously pluralist classroom Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Christopher Denny at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Denny, Christopher D. (Christopher Douglas) 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 2014-10-17 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 Anselm, Saint, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1033-1109. Proslogion. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004527 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a5e2c8e5411cda408bc5ae2ea3707f34.pdf 8ac49eac88a8ce8a34508f445db5a40d PDF Text Text 1    Liberal Education as Preparation for Interdisciplinary Science  Geoffrey M. Henebry PhD CSE (SF ’82), South Dakota State University  As this talk is a witnessing for the efficacy of liberal education as preparation for  interdisciplinary science, let me begin with a personal prologue to provide context. I am  tenured full professor of Natural Resource Management at South Dakota State  University, and Co‐Director of the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence, an  interdisciplinary research group of 45 with an annual budget of over $5 million.   I earned my B.A. from St. John’s in 1982, attending Annapolis for two years and  finishing in Santa Fe. My graduate degrees (M.S. and Ph.D.) are in environmental  sciences. I met my wife, Ana who is from Brazil, in graduate school in Texas. We have  seven children (aged 14 to 27) whom we have homeschooled while living the  peripatetic academic lifestyle: a post‐doctoral position at Kansas State University, a  Fulbright Research Fellowship in Brazil, and faculty positions at Rutgers‐Newark,  University of Nebraska‐Lincoln, and South Dakota State University.   I serve on the editorial boards of three scientific journals, on the NASA Land Cover  Land Use Change Science Team, and as Chair of the Advisory Committee of the USA‐ National Phenology Network. In short, I have been able to leverage my liberal  education into a successful career as a research scientist and professor.   ~~ */\* ~~  We are witness to increasing globalization of technophilic cultures that value the  instrumentality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics or STEM. While  the reinforcement of disciplinary boundaries within STEM remains strong, there is  increasing recognition of need for interdisciplinary engagement to address myriad  complex problems of health, environments, and governance that arise from our  socioeconomic activities.   Major federal funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, the  National Institutes of Health, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,  have established in recent years programs to sponsor research that explicitly bridges  across disciplinary boundaries. Such projects are considered higher risk than traditional  disciplinary research due to the “boundary work” required to enable scientists and  �2    engineers from different—often contrasting—intellectual lineages to communicate their  expertise in mutually intelligible ways.  I propose that liberal education can provide valuable solid preparation for  “boundary workers” to craft practices of interdisciplinary science.  Of the trivium  grammar and logic enable the establishment of conceptual frameworks and disciplinary  practice; whereas; rhetoric stands out as solvent for disciplinary borders.  Rhetoric in  scientific narrative is key to spanning assumptions and reconciling viewpoints.    What I offer here is not a disquisition. I am not a scholar of teaching and learning.  Nor do I study the history or philosophy of science. I am just a professional scientist.  So  I can offer a report from the front lines about practicing interdisciplinary science,  training Ph.D. students, and mentoring post‐docs and young faculty to succeed as  professional scientists.   My primary field is ecology, the study of how living and non‐living things interact  to shape the biosphere, that thin layer of habitable space mostly on the surface of this  planet. Key to my investigations are datastreams from the constellation of earth‐ observing sensors orbiting this planet that sense the various kinds of electromagnetic  radiation rising from the surface—from the visible part of the spectrum through the  near, middle, and thermal infrared regions all the way into the microwaves.  (Did you  realize that you emit photons of microwaves?) And I do a lot of international work with  past and present projects in European Russia, Central Asia, Hungary, Costa Rica, Brazil,  Ethiopia, and recently at the continental scale.    Imagine more than 20,000 scientists converging on San Francisco for a week each  December for the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). With  attendance growing by 85% in the past decade, the AGU is a truly global meeting with  participants from every continent. It is a union in the literal sense of the word: diverse  disciplines banding together to achieve economies of scale and thereby enabling  interactions that span across and between scientific disciplines.   We walk into Moscone Center’s South exhibition hall. Across the 300,000 square feet  are arranged aisle after aisle of boards displaying posters describing the latest in  scientific research about the earth system, from earthquakes to electrical phenomena in  the upper atmosphere, from measuring the various ways that water flows above and  below the land to observing how vegetation grows and changes in and next to  �3    megacities and in the far‐flung reaches of cloud‐obscured tropical rainforests, among  thousands of other topics.    As we walk down one of those aisles we see text and pictures on the posters and the  key words being exchanged that are mostly in an alien tongue. But once we close our  eyes to listen to the form and character of the interactions rather than the content— interactions between questioner and respondent, between student and mentor, between  the striving post‐docs and eminent graybeards—what we discover is that these, too, are  from a tribe of science, just not ours.   But what are the tribes of science?   In 2012, according to a recent Census Bureau study [1], 42 million in the workforce  between 25 and 64 held at least a bachelor’s degree. Of these 12% were in STEM  occupations and another 11% in STEM‐related jobs (architecture and health care). Of  those with a STEM degree, just over one‐quarter are in STEM occupations and another  11% are in STEM‐related occupations, leaving 63% in non‐STEM jobs.  Of those with a  non‐STEM degree, 92% are in non‐STEM occupations.   Figure 1 comes from that Census Bureau report [1] and shows where STEM majors  work.  I want to emphasize two things evident in this graph. First, STEM is really  TESM. “T” for technology dominates – these are the “computer workers”. Engineering  is a strong second, and all the sciences—physical, life, and social comprise but 16% of  the STEM workforce. “Math workers” account for a modest yet important 3%. The  second important thing the graph shows is that many STEM majors do not end up  working in STEM fields.    Figure 2 shows the meager flow of non‐STEM majors into STEM occupations [1]. If  we lump the literature and languages and liberal arts and history major groups, we find  that just 5.4% end up in STEM occupations. If we restrict our focus to the sciences, then  just 1.1% of these majors become science workers in the physical, life, and social  sciences.         �4      Figure 1:  Where STEM majors end up in the general workforce. Graphic captured from  http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem‐html/        �5       Figure 2:  Where non‐STEM majors end up in the general workforce. Graphic captured  from http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem‐html/    Let’s ask again: what are the tribes of science? One answer is that there are as many  tribes of science as there as recognizable disciplines. Within a tribe members share  conceptual schemata full of technical terms that refer precisely to things of interest, but  which sound like jargon to the uninitiated. Yet disciplinary specialization proliferates as  the bodies of knowledge grow. Sometimes disciplines converge and fuse, but far more  often they subdivide messily. So can scientists from different tribes collaborate? And if  so, then how do they work together? Over the past two decades or so there has been a  re‐orientation of science and, importantly, science funding agencies toward seeking  �6    understanding about complex problems that involve interactions between human  settlements and their supporting ecosystems.   ~~ */\* ~~  Scientists tell stories—highly structured, tightly condensed—but stories nonetheless.  Liberal education, too, revels in stories and in the great conversation. It is the great  conversation, the connecting of ideas spanning space and time, which teaches and  hones rhetoric. Listening is a critical aspect of rhetoric because persuasive speech  requires engagement with others.  Seminar simulates sitting around a table with  scientists from diverse disciplines. I propose that the liberal art of rhetoric enables the  bridging across disciplines: the liberally educated boundary worker can identify the key  elements of the story above the particularities of the jargon that enforces disciplinary  borders.   I would like to share briefly three of the several interdisciplinary projects in which I  have played a key role.   The first project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was about sand,  water, and grass. It asked a simple question: why does the largest dune field in the  western hemisphere, the Sandhills of Nebraska, tend to stay vegetated in the face of  environmental stresses like drought and grazing? After all, the grass cover is mostly  sparse and can be grazed down to nothing within several days. Why are they not bare  moving dunes like we see at White Sands in New Mexico or the Sahara desert in North  Africa?    To address this question we assembled a team of ecologists, hydrologists,  climatologists, and geologists, mostly from the same university. Now this sounds like a  rather harmless bunch of “ologists” but how these four disciplines conduct their science  is radically different because of the kinds of evidence or data they collect to construct  their stories. It took a full year of frequent meetings before we were able to bridge the  differences in narrative structure and quality of evidence to develop a successful  proposal for a four‐year study that included a large landscape manipulative experiment  to test our hypotheses. We were able to answer the question and learn to pose many  other interesting questions besides! And this is the hallmark of science – to ask  questions, albeit in a particular manner.   �7    The second project, sponsored by NASA, is still underway. It asks how urban areas  influence the behavior of severe storms. In particular it seeks to understand how the  size and shape of the city and the pollution state of the urban air affects the interaction  of storm and city. The project involves satellite imagery and derived products, weather  radar data, and computer models of weather. So the team includes mesoscale  meteorologists to run the models that simulate the storms, radar meteorologists to  analyze the weather radar time series, atmospheric chemists to make sense of the  interactions between the differently polluted rural and urban air, landscape ecologists  to track how cities affect the growing season of vegetation, remote sensing scientists  specializing in cities to character size and shape, and a professor of landscape and  urban planning to help formulate findings from the science community into the  language of the design community.  The project involves scientists at six universities  and the National Severe Storms Laboratory, a government agency located in Norman,  Oklahoma. In addition to the logistical challenges of having project meetings, there is  again the challenge of learning the differences in scientific narrative across fields.   The last project I will highlight is the most ambitious and potentially the most far‐ reaching. It involves epidemiologists, ecologists, software engineers, and public health  officials. The National Institutes of Health, specifically the National Institute of Allergy  and Infectious Disease, has been funding us since 2009 to develop a forecasting system  to warn public health officials and early responders, such as non‐governmental  organizations (NGOs), about when environmental conditions are ripe for the outbreak  of epidemic malaria in the Amhara highlands of Ethiopia.   Malaria is one of the great scourges of humanity. Millions in the tropics live in areas  where malaria is endemic, it is always around and so its threat is well known. In  highland areas malaria is not endemic, its transmission is unstable, and mortality is  rare. But sometimes conditions are favorable for a generalized outbreak, an epidemic.  The public and private health systems are then rapidly overwhelmed and mortality  rates are very high.  What are those environmental conditions that set the stage for an  epidemic? Can they be monitored and then predicted? How to communicate useful  information to the public health officials?  Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa at about 95 million. It is a  mountainous country, with more than three‐quarters of peaks on African continent. The  population is overwhelming rural—more than 80% live outside of cities—and it is poor.  �8    The literacy rate is among the lowest in the world. It is estimated that fewer than half  the males and fewer than 30% of the females aged 15 and older can read. Thus, once we  can forecast increased risk of an epidemic communicating it is a challenge, both  technological and cultural.   Let me mention just one example. To write the code to build a computer system that  interacts both with scientists and public health officials requires eliciting from each  group their requirements for the system. Discerning what is important from what is  desirable and reconciling different requirements is surprisingly difficult task! However,  rhetorical skills are once again crucial to the process: listening, synthesizing, and  repeating in different words to build consensus. And coffee helps, too.      ~~ */\* ~~  To conclude, I want to speak to the question of “What is liberal education for?”  There is an answer in the motto of St. John’s College: Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque.  Google Translate renders it as “I do have children with free books debtor appealed”,  which points to the need for Latinists to improve the Technologists’ grasp of grammar!  A proper translation of the motto reads ʺI make free men out of children by means of  books and a balance.” This process of making free men and women is a preparing for  the rest of life – a transforming of children into adults. Liberal education provides the  foundation for choosing, intelligently, what is next and provides the awareness and  skills to excel at that next stage. Liberal education is, indeed, preparation for  interdisciplinary science, and countless other paths as well.     Reference   [1] Liana Christin Landivar, 2013, “The Relationship between Science and Engineering  Education and Employment in STEM Occupations,” American Community Survey  Reports, ACS‐23, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC.     Thursday, December 04, 2014  Brookings, SD  � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberal education as preparation for the interdisciplinary science Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Geoffrey Henebry at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Henebry, Geoffrey M. (Geoffrey Michael), 1960- 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 2014-10-17 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 24004532 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6cd1f60a0d50b44eef0433aaac820fb0.pdf 9f914055ab8d7308b2bade4f00f570ee PDF Text Text "Low-Tech Studies in a High-Tech World: Teaching the Great Books in Silicon Valley" Lisa Hicks and Elizabeth Coggeshall Stanford University When we were conceptualizing how our paper might fit into a panel on the relationship between the sciences and the liberal arts, Lisa and I realized that there are two opposing sets of assumptions each argument could take. On the one hand, papers could assume an audience of humanists who are perhaps disinclined to include the sciences under the heading “liberal arts” (this was/appeared to be the basic assumption of the first paper). On the other, papers could begin from the opposite point of view: speaking to a culture that emphasizes the STEM fields, how do we, as humanists, justify the pursuit of non-instrumental, non-vocational, non-goal-oriented learning? How do we create a space in which humanistic inquiry can be valued as highly as those fields that have more immediately apparent and measurable outcomes: correct answers, material products, financial gains? Our paper comes from this latter perspective. Lisa and I teach in a voluntary, residential Great Books program for freshmen at Stanford University, along the model of something like Directed Studies at Yale. The major difference between a Directed Studies and our program, called Structured Liberal Education or SLE, is the broader culture in which each program is embedded, and from which the program distinguishes itself. In what follows, we will describe in broad strokes Stanford’s “techie”-dominant culture (I borrow the undergraduates’ term here, “techie” being the opposite of what they call “fuzzy,” in other words, anything tending toward the humanities fields. And I should take a second to point out that “fuzzy” is almost exclusively a pejorative term, as in “I would take that class, but I don’t want them to think that I am a fuzzy or something!”). Second, we will discuss the ways our program sets itself apart from the culture at large, and in doing so, we will present SLE’s answer to the conference question: “What is Liberal Education for?” �I’ll begin with an anecdote. Most often, conversations on the first day of class end with students exchanging email addresses or phone numbers, “friending” one another on Facebook, or making plans to meet in the dining hall or over coffee. But I had a peculiar experience on the first day of an interdisciplinary freshman course I taught at Stanford University in 2013 called “Networks: Ecological, Revolutionary, Digital.” The course had attracted many students from the STEM fields, particularly Computer Science, and on the first day of class I noticed them checking out each other’s profiles not on Facebook, but on LinkedIn. They swapped information about their summer research projects and internships, which were already carefully lined up in March. Over the course of the quarter, their in-class presentations (designed as “lightning talks” on any aspect of network theory that interested them) became elevator pitches for their various start-ups, which dealt with green energy, BitCoin, and big data analysis. The course satisfied the brand new freshman requirement in “Thinking Matters,” inaugurated in the 2012-2013 school year. The “Thinking Matters” courses are designed to encourage free exploration and interdisciplinary experimentation. They replaced the older Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) requirement, which had built such a bad reputation among Stanford undergraduates that first-year students would begin complaining about them during New Student Orientation, before classes had even begun. “I hate my IHUM” became such a refrain that one senior described it to me as a bonding experience for freshmen. Thinking Matters means to quell some of the vitriol that had built up around freshmen requirements, providing students with options like “Networks” which may be closer to their interests but still serve to introduce breadth to the freshman experience. These courses mean to provide a space for free play, in the spirit of the liberal education. Although it is one of the most fascinating courses I have ever been a part of, “Networks” was despised by the students. What we had conceived as a theoretical exploration of network theory from the perspective of a variety of disciplines, students saw as a waste of their time, as we “forced” them to pursue two projects, a biological experiment on ant societies and a historical analysis of social �networks in the Enlightenment. The students were frustrated by the lectures, which were effectively essays that sought to illuminate the connections between three very different disciplinary approaches to network theory: in history, computer science, and biology. Instead, the students wished to focus on satisfying requirements in their majors, developing their research grants, and marketing their startups. The disconnect between our push toward breadth and their desire for depth produced clashes that the section leaders had to mitigate in our small seminars. I use this anecdote as an illustration of the rampant entrepreneurialism that characterizes Stanford undergraduate culture. One of the most striking features of the first-year student at Stanford is her entrepreneurial spirit. This is true of nearly all entering students, pervasive as it is in campus culture, and it continues in certain sectors of the university throughout the students’ college experience. Engendering the entrepreneurial spirit begins with New Student Orientation, where incoming freshmen quickly learn that if they do not sign up for the engineering prerequisites their first quarter, they will effectively be unable to complete the major in four years. Nearly a quarter of Stanford students also pursue a co-terminal degree, which is a combined bachelor’s-master’s degree begun in the student’s senior year. The co-term program also requires a great deal of early specialization and curricular organization, so that students can complete their major requirements (one, two, or even three majors), prerequisites for the co-term, and their general education courses in a timely fashion. Curricular exploration – even if such courses fulfill general education requirements – is seen as at best a luxury and at worst an imposition. The academic mission of the university is explicitly concerned with “usefulness.” This has been true of Stanford since its founding in 1891. Stanford was, in fact, among the first institutions of higher learning in the US to introduce the major system as opposed to a standardized liberal arts curriculum, a move which the first university president David Starr Jordan saw as coming from the university’s commitment to practicality, the fixed curriculum being an “affront” to the student, productive “dim-eyed monk[s]” and “stoop-shouldered grammarian[s]” instead of “leader[s] of �enterprise” (SUES Report, p. 18). Nicholas Thompson, editor of newyorker.com, founder of the Silicon Valley-backed startup The Atavist, and a Stanford alum, raised a series of questions about Stanford’s affiliation with Silicon Valley in three blogposts on the New Yorker’s website in 2013. Provocatively asking where the Valley ends and the University begins, Thompson cited the case of a dozen students who dropped out of school to work on Clinkle, a start-up supported by investments from, among others, their own professors. Two of my students in “Networks” had shared with our class that they were also being encouraged – by one of their professors – to drop out of the university to work on their BitCoin start-up. In September 2013, Stanford announced a new university initiative called StartX, a start-up incubator that will advise current students on their startup projects. The university itself will invest in the most successful of this elite group of startups. The university has a strict policy for dealing with professors entering romantic relationships with their graduate students, but we could probably stand to lay down some policies for investment relationships as well. On a less ethically fraught front, Stanford has opened an office under the supervision of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education for Undergraduate Advising and Research, which boasts that the university invests between $4-5 million annually in undergraduate research projects, overseen by faculty across all departments of the university (SUES Report, p. 56). The obvious ethical issues of professors investing in their students’ start-ups aside, I don’t mean to suggest that an entrepreneurial spirit is somehow bad for the university or for the individual student. On the contrary, it drives Stanford students in all fields to pursue exceptional projects, and to prepare themselves for careers both inside and outside the academy. There are clear benefits to students specializing early, pursuing independent and original research, and cultivating close advising relationships with supervising faculty. But I would like to suggest that this kind of hyperspecialization is antithetical to the goals of the liberal education, which is explorative and meandering, rather than directional. The entrepreneurial drive of Stanford students compels them to acquire a dizzying degree of depth within their majors, but it simultaneously convinces them that �breadth is a distraction, a requirement thrust upon them by the powers-that-be, that may well derail them from the primary projects that will guarantee their success at Stanford and beyond: their startups, their independent research grants, their archival work. One of the primary antidotes to this entrepreneurial thinking at Stanford is the Structured Liberal Education program, of which Lisa and I are here as representatives. As I have already mentioned, Structured Liberal Education (or SLE) is a Great Books program available only to incoming freshmen, who apply to the program after accepting their offers of admission to Stanford. Each year, we consistently receive between 140-150 applications for the 90 spots of the program (this is about 5% of the total incoming freshmen class). The 90 students live in a single residence, and we hold both plenary lectures and discussion sections in the common spaces of their dorm. We use a flexible but fairly consistent curriculum that varies only slightly from year to year. At breakneck speed, students cover the great works of (primarily) Western culture, listening to lectures given by experts from around the university, and then working through the texts in small seminars led by the SLE teaching staff. In the meantime, the students submit papers that are written in multiple drafts, that they discuss extensively in one-on-one meetings with their seminar leaders and a dedicated staff of writing tutors, all of whom are alumni of the program. In the time that remains, Lisa will speak about the ways in which SLE works to disrupt the entrepreneurial paradigm that Stanford has cultivated, and the challenges and rewards faced by the students in our program as a result. ----------Beth has just presented a picture of the overall Stanford undergraduate culture as instrumentalist, entrepreneurial, and more focused on depth than on breadth. But the culture of SLE is different, and the differences sometimes push directly against the dominant trends of the overall culture. �In part, SLE pushes against instrumentalism simply by being Great-Books-based humanities program: reading The Republic and The Inferno are not obvious and necessary steps in most career paths. And, unlike students from the much-hated IHUM classes, SLE students do not seem to want the SLE program to be anything other than what it is. The move from IHUM to Thinking Matters was driven, in part, by students’ desires for general education requirements that felt, to use one of the contemporary education buzzwords, “relevant.” Students who signed up for the “Networks” class that Beth worked in thought that they were signing up for a general education class that was closely related to their career interests, and the elements of the class that they disliked were the elements that didn’t address those career interests. But SLE students sign up for SLE in part because they don’t want a narrowly focused, career-based general education class. Some of our SLE students plan to major in Engineering and Computer Science and other STEM fields, and, when we ask them why they chose SLE, they are nearly unanimous in saying that they wanted something different from their general ed experience: they want the breadth; they want big ideas that have nothing to do with computers; they want serious engagement with texts that lets them develop skills that do not directly link up with their career paths. In short, they want a humanities education that is separate from their career-related studies. And they say that they want this non-career-focused experience at the beginning of their studies. They say things like, “I want to read these books while I still have the chance, before I get overwhelmed with Engineering requirements.” They see their SLE reading as both separate and foundational, as an experience that will shape and change the way that they engage with the rest of their education. Further, this widespread interest in humanistic enquiry as something other than a means to a career-focused end creates different social pressures for SLE students. A lot of Stanford undergraduates who do not take SLE describe the overall student culture as "anti-intellectual." When Stanford was considering the move from IHUM to Thinking Matters, a committee of faculty and staff conducted interviews and surveys with many Stanford students who had gone through the �IHUM program, and one story that they heard over and over was the "IHUM kid" story. Students would say, "If I tried to talk bring up ideas or concepts from my IHUM class in a group of friends, people would tell me to be quiet and call me 'IHUM kid.'" Students were quickly acclimated into a culture in which IHUM ideas were only to be discussed in IHUM class. But SLE students expect their peers to discuss texts and ideas outside of class, and the social dynamics in the SLE dorm tend to reward engagement with texts and ideas. SLE’s class spaces are in the dorm, including several dorm lounges, and, when I hold office hours in a lounge, the conversations that I overhear are often about this week’s texts, or about ways that a key theme from this week’s readings relates to other texts from the course or to books or themes from students’ other courses. (I also hear enough random conversations about movies and roommates and weekend plans to know that these class-related conversations aren’t being performed for the benefit of the teacher in the corner; a lot of the time, the students who are talking about this week’s text haven’t noticed that I’m there.) Further, the student who draws connections between the themes of a SLE text and ideas from other courses tends to draw those connections in a non-instrumentalist way. They tend to frame the connection as, “Here is a cool thing that I noticed, and I’m mentioning it because it’s interesting” rather than as, “Here is a cool thing that I noticed, and it’s interesting because it shows me that this book that I’m reading is relevant to my career interests.” I’m thinking in particular of some students who were taking a political science course during the Spring term, which is when we read Marx in SLE. Whenever those students drew parallels between Marx’s analysis of labor power relations and their PolySci professor’s analysis of the history of power relations in Israel, I always got a sense that they were bringing in the outside material because they thought it was interesting and illuminating in its own right and not because that information made Marx useful to their prospective careers as lawyers or international business executives. I think our students would see talking and thinking about SLE texts in a careerist or instrumentalist way as wrong, as breaking the rules; it wouldn’t fit �with their sense of how SLE is supposed to work. And students who acculturate to this sense of how SLE is supposed to work will not buy into an instrumentalist model that claims that every text and every idea and every class is meant to forward their career goals. The ways that SLE students push against an instrumentalist educational model is closely related to the ways that they do not fit the entrepreneurial mold of the dominant Stanford culture. When Beth and I were working on this paper, we talked a lot about what “entrepreneurial” means, and we figured out that, for us, the difference between “entrepreneurial” and “enterprising” has to do with motivation. You’re entrepreneurial for the sake of the external end that you’re aiming at: if you’re founding a start-up out of an entrepreneurial spirit, then your main concern is the startup. The success of the external end is what motivates you. But if you’re doing something out of an enterprising spirit, maybe your main concern is your own development; you’re more concerned about what the success or failure of the venture says about you and the kind of person you are and the kind of capacities that you have. And the SLE students tend to be much more enterprising than entrepreneurial. They might not frame it in these terms, but they tend to be concerned with selffashioning, with mastering a text or a skill in order to become the sort of person who knows that text or possesses that skill, with becoming multi-faceted. They tend to have a sense that the kind of person that they become is more important than the particular ends that they choose to pursue--and, in particular, more important than the career that they choose. By providing students with a space that emphasizes the process of learning rather than a particular end or product of that learning, SLE gives its students permission to be enterprising rather than entrepreneurial--permission that, for the students, may push against the entrepreneurialist strain in the larger Stanford culture. SLE’s emphasis on the process rather than the product of learning also ties into its focus on breadth--a focus that runs counter to an overall culture that privileges depth and narrow specialization. SLE operates at an exceptionally fast pace, which is one of the perennial complaints of our students. We devote no more than two days to any text, and most texts only get one day, so �we cover no text in depth. The first three weeks of the winter term last year, for example, had students read and discuss Augustine’s Confessions, Aquinas’s Summa, al-Ghazali’s Path to Sufism, and Dante’s Inferno, which they read in its entirety in Week 3. Students often see this as a detriment to real engagement with the text at hand, but we console them by reminding them that SLE’s focus is not depth (which they will enjoy as they pursue their individual majors), but breadth. The benefits of this kind of breadth – while probably obvious to the audience here today – are worth being articulated, not only because they may be obscure to other students who do not opt-in to this sort of program, but because they answer the stated question of this conference: What is Liberal Education For? SLE’s short answer to this question would be breadth. Breadth of material allows the students to focus on skills development over content management. We do not test them on what they retain of their material, but on how they process it, what connections they draw, what debates they foresee. It matters less to programs like SLE that the students can recall information readily available at a tap of their fingers; rather, we would give them as many instances to choose from as they could, and ask them to synthesize a few of those instances to address one of the Great Questions. The depth model, by contrast, asks students to narrow in a question until it is answerable by a single algorithm, by changing a single variable, or by some other means of reducing the problem to its smallest constituent parts. When students disregard breadth, as many Stanford undergraduates do, broad questions are swallowed by narrow ones, or set aside as unanswerable or meaningless, because they appear too big to handle. When students embrace the breadth model, they find that freedom to attempt answers at these questions, the freedom that gives the liberal education its name (and, for that matter, the freedom that gave Stanford University its motto: “The wind of freedom blows”!). � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 9 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 Low-tech studies in a high-tech world : teaching the Great Books in Silicon Valley Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Lisa Hicks and Elizabeth Coggeshall at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hicks, Lisa Coggeshall, Elizabeth 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 2014-10-17 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 24004533 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a359dd431dbd45f260d2f27ff19b749a.pdf 02dd3cbd780e5be420fcadb9b7a53f58 PDF Text Text Why the Case for the Liberal Arts is Stronger than Ever Wilfred M. McClay University of Oklahoma If we are to make a persuasive case for the liberal arts, we must first have a reasonably coherent notion of what the liberal arts are, and what they are for. That means clearing away some persistent misconceptions. To begin with, the term “liberal arts” shouldn’t be understood as a synonym for “the humanities,” or for those “soft” disciplines that are offered as complements to the “hard” disciplines of science and mathematics. In fact, the serious study of science and mathematics forms just as essential a part of a liberal education. And teaching the liberal arts is not just a matter of imparting certain analytical techniques, even if the liberal arts do impart those skills extremely well as a byproduct of their work, skills that are readily transferable to other areas of human endeavor. The “liberal arts” do not refer to a particular content area or a particular body of knowledge, although their exercise may well involve the acquisition of such a body of knowledge. They are not reducible to a lengthy list of books that must be read, or to languages that must be mastered, or to concepts with which one must be demonstrably conversant— 1 �although all those things will contribute in indispensable ways to the pursuit of a liberal education. Instead, the mark of a genuinely liberal education is that it aims at instilling a set of paradoxical qualities, which are often quite fiercely at odds with one another. Those qualities can be grouped under two broad rubrics: the capacity for inquiry, and the capacity for membership. Let me illuminate what I am saying by providing a specific example. A number of years ago, when I was still a fairly junior professor on the faculty at Tulane, I went to an academic conference in San Francisco whose subject was the purpose of the modern university. It was well-attended, and featured two outstanding plenary speakers, both of whom were received very warmly by their audiences. The first was the historian C. Vann Woodward, who was receiving a luncheon award for his long and illustrious career, and particularly for his commitment to free speech and free investigation. In his remarks, Woodward put forward a bold and uncompromising view of what the university’s appropriate work consisted in. “The university,” he declared, “is the place where the unthinkable can be thought, the unspeakable can be said, the inconceivable can be conceptualized, and the 2 �unfashionable can be entertained.” (I quote from memory here, which may be unreliable in particulars but is entirely reliable in capturing the thrust of Woodward’s remarks.) The university, and it alone, offered the world a place consecrated to the most precious and most imperiled aspect of human freedom: our freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry, and freedom of expression. Without strong institutional protections for such freedoms against the forces that always seemed to spring up against them, we would lose the benefit of them, including the benefits that come of a culture that is bent upon seeking and finding the truth, without fear or favor. Visibly stirred by these words, and by the distinguished career of the man who uttered them, the audience applauded loud and long, and I joined them. Then later in the day came an address by the political scientist James Q. Wilson, also speaking on the theme of the university’s purpose. In his speech, Wilson argued that the modern university was best understood as the chief conservator of the rich but fragile civilization of the Western world, the keeper of our chief intellectual, moral, and artistic treasures and our collective historical memory. That heritage had made us what, and who, we are; but our dynamic commercial and progressive culture was all too likely to toss that heritage aside, in the pell-mell pursuit of the next big thing. If the university did not take care to look after the older things, he asked, who else would? Without a strong institutional commitment to the conservation and propagation of that cultural inheritance, we would lose the benefit of it, including the 3 �benefits that come of sustaining a vital connection to the past, and to the best that has been thought and expressed in the human experience. For these words, too, the audience applauded loud and long, and again I joined them enthusiastically, though by now experiencing a bit of puzzlement at them, and at myself. Puzzlement, because it struck me that the audience, and I myself, seemed to be applauding, with equal enthusiasm, two entirely different, and seemingly incompatible, ideals of the university. Woodward seemed to be holding up the university as a place of constant unsettlement, even creative destruction, in which everything that is taken for truth today is open at every moment to being rethought, reframed, and reconstituted, and even discarded, a place in which no dogma is safe and no complacency is tolerated—a place in which ideas and ideals can have validity only so long as they can stand up to the intense and uninhibited refining fire of today’s most impertinent questions and searing criticisms. Wilson, on the other hand, was pushing for an ideal of the university which stood precisely against the arrogant and self-absorbed tendency of the modern world to appoint itself the plenipotentiary judge of all things, to deny and disparage the authority of all that has come before it, and in so doing, to ensure that those who come after it will accord it the same treatment, in the fullness of time. Wilson’s university was instead a place where the young would be educated to take up the 4 �fullness of their cultural inheritance, to become literate and conversant in its many features, and to fully appropriate all that it has to offer them. These are two very different-sounding ideas about the nature of higher education. And yet we applauded them both with roughly equivalent fervor. Were we, the audience, being mindless fools, or emotional pushovers, or merely being polite to a fault, in doing so? Or might there be a deeper logic linking them, one that neither speaker sought to illuminate, but that we need to take to heart in our own attempt to understand what the value of a college education, and particularly one in the liberal arts, ought to be in the present day? I think there is, in fact, a deeper sense in which these two different accounts of the university are merely different aspects of the same vision: a vision of education as a preparation for freedom, in the fullest sense of the term—freedom not as mere license, nor as a life lived unfettered by constraints or coercions or traditions, nor for that matter as a life lived in the easy-going, conflict-free adjustment of one’s wants and expectations to the world as one finds it, but freedom as rational self-government, as a regimen of risks and rewards, a freedom grounded in a fruitful combination of membership and inquiry, of reverence and criticism—a freedom that releases us from the unquestioned tutelage of the past, but in a way that enables us to draw sustenance from the past rather than aiming at making us wantonly disdainful of it. Wilson’s 5 �university would bring to its charges the blessings of a more fully conscious and informed membership in the society of which they are already a part; while Woodward’s university would give them space for skeptical inquiry, the ability to engage in the acts of radical questioning and criticism, including civilizational selfcriticism, which represent one of the chief means by which that society has been induced to improve itself, and redress its deficiencies. The best university, the one that teaches the liberal arts, is the one that does both of these things at the same time. Hence we were right to applaud both speakers at that convention, for we need both messages. Membership without inquiry is stale traditionalism; inquiry without membership is captiousness or kibitzing, living like the poker player who doesn’t take a stake in the game. The end in view is that of substituting informed loyalties for blind ones, and substituting conscious reasonableness, and uncoerced love, for fear and dependency and superstition and reflex action. It is a freedom that comes of seeing all that one has formerly known in a larger arena, within a larger frame, as a part of a larger reality—not to reject it, but to see it all in, as we say, a new and wondrous light. That image, of seeing all things freshly when they have been freshly illuminated by the emergence of profounder sources of light, will make many of us think of one of the greatest and most imperishable parables of education: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in the seventh book of the Republic. You all know the story, a strange, even weird tale 6 �of people who have been compelled since birth to view images cast upon a wall as if they were the only real things in existence, and of the disturbing revelations that come to them when they are released from their bondage, and brought into the blinding light of day—brought to see things as they really are. The same parable has been related in various ways: in the various understandings of the veil of Maya in Hinduism and Buddhism, or of the “evil demon” in Descartes’s Meditations, who so orders the world as to deceive us, or the 1999 science-fiction movie called The Matrix, in which the mass of humanity has been constrained to experience only a simulation of reality created by all-controlling life-devouring computers. Or even in something as familiar to all Americans as the movie The Wizard of Oz, in which the title character turns out to be a purveyor of trickery. What all these narratives reinforce is a powerful, and sometimes haunting, apprehension that we might be living our lives under the spell of a complete illusion, whether imposed by others or by ourselves; that the process of freeing ourselves from that illusion is likely to be painful and unsettling, that it can involve a complete transformation of all that was familiar, and a complete redescription of reality itself, in the name of the search for truth. And the stakes are very high. Those illuminati who return to the cave, Plato warns us, are likely to be killed by those who have never left the cave, who prefer not to have their illusions disturbed. 7 �But our experience is rarely as dramatic and extreme as that. And Plato’s great allegory, and the other versions of this theme, do not tell the whole story about education, which is just as often a tale of delight and discovery and enchantment as it is one of painful displacement. I fear that Plato’s allegory may mislead us by emphasizing only one part of the effort of liberal education, the process of disabusing and disillusioning, of weakening the stranglehold of the present and the past on us, for the sake of better apprehending the possibilities that beckon from beyond. An argument I find more helpful and reliable comes from a small book by the late historian Jaroslav Pelikan, called The Vindication of Tradition. Drawing upon an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pelikan offers up a distinction between “tradition” and “insight,” and then goes on to show how unsustainable that distinction actually is: A “leap of progress” is not a standing broad jump, which begins at the line of where we are now; it is a running broad jump through where we have been to where we go next. The growth of insight—in science, in the arts, in philosophy and theology—has not come through progressively sloughing off more and more of tradition, as though insight would be purest and deepest when it has finally freed itself of the dead past. It simply has not worked that way in the history of the tradition, and it does not work that way now. By including the dead in the circle of discourse, we enrich the quality of the conversation. Of 8 �course we do not listen only to the dead, nor are we a tape recording of the tradition….But we do acquire the insight for which Emerson was pleading when we learn to interact creatively with the tradition which he was denouncing. And Pelikan concludes his examination with a charge to the reader, taken from Goethe’s Faust: What you have as heritage, Take now as task; For thus you will make it your own. In this view, the point of studying the tradition is not to absolve us of the need to think for ourselves, or relieve us of the responsibility to build things of our own. On the contrary. The tradition helps us to recognize the work we are meant to do. Our heritage is our task. It gives our world its defining contours, its horizons, and its specific possibilities, its problems to be solved. We cannot know or undertake our task without the benefit of our heritage. But it is by doing our task that we can come into the full possession of that heritage—thereby perpetuating the tradition as something living, rather than something moribund—and thereby making it possible for us to have a free and full relationship with that heritage, like that of children who 9 �have fully grown up, and can at last see and embrace their parents and forebears for the people they actually are, and can come into fully adult possession of their inheritance. So the Platonic allegory is not fully adequate to the task of description here. But then neither is Woodward’s description of the university as a relentless and unsparing critique, or Wilson’s of the university as an agency of reverent cultural transmission. What might fit Pelikan’s description best is the idea of education as a Bildungsroman or narrative journey, but only if one adds the qualification that it is a narrative journey that culminates in a homecoming, the kind of story that we call an odyssey. “We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote T. S. Eliot, in “Little Gidding,” “And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.” Such is the task of a liberal education, rightly understood, as a liberating exploration that results, not in our being made permanently uprooted and alienated, but in our becoming more fully at home in the world that we already inhabit, and more fully able to enhance it, beautify it, ennoble it, and sustain it. An inquiry that draws upon, challenges, but ultimately affirms and strengthens, our sense of membership in that world. In fact, an inquiry whose pursuit is part and parcel of our belonging, and which makes tradition and insight into partners, rather than foes. The truly wise cosmopolitan knows, as Dorothy told us, that there’s no place like home. 10 �I think the contribution of liberal education to our public life ought to be clear enough from what I have said so far. Of course, I recognize, as does everyone at this conference, that the educational institutions that are the principal venue for liberal education are imperiled on all sides by problems of excessive cost and uncertain results, and that there are hard questions to be asked about questions of access and economic feasibility and practicality. I don’t mean to brush those questions aside. But I think that before we make a potentially fatal decision to change forever what we do, and adapt the end to the means, or the perceived means, we need to think very hard about what the end of liberal education really is. We should also consider the fact that we live at what is arguably the most prosperous moment in the entire history of the human race. The standard of living that even the most common among us enjoys today would be the envy of kings and queens in ages past. Is it really credible then to say—at precisely this moment—that the pursuit of the highest and best kind of education is something that much poorer peoples and times were right to seek, but that we can no longer afford? Can we hear how absurd it sounds for us to be saying such things? The chief public benefit of liberal education, when it is functioning successfully, is the formation of a particular kind of person, someone who is also capable of being a particular kind of citizen, who robustly embodies the virtues of both inquiry and 11 �membership, and therefore is equipped for the work of truth-seeking deliberation and responsible action that a democratic form of government requires. Such a person has an ability to draw back from the flow of events and reflect upon them, the ability to consult the voice of reason and the wise testimony of the past. Such a person has the cognitive and moral strength to see the world as it is, and not be fooled into mistaking a succession of images projected onto the walls of caves, or conjured on screens, for reality, no matter how large the images or how pervasive their presence. And no matter how many others around them have been gulled or deceived into believing in those images. Which is a way of acknowledging that Plato’s great allegorical image of liberation remains at the core of education, even if it does not constitute the whole of it. Before we can do anything truly magnificent and lasting, we must be drawn out of our various caves. We must be liberated from the sirens of propaganda, or the enchantments of virtual experience, before we can accomplish anything worthwhile. It is probably too extreme to argue that we are inhabiting our own soft-core version of the Matrix. But it is not at all extreme to believe that an unhealthy proportion of our experience, and particularly the experience of the young, has come to be mediated and directed and channeled and simulated by the artificial instrumentalities we use to apprehend the world, instrumentalities that compel our imaginations to believe in a world that they—and not we—conjure into being. Such a tendency carries with it 12 �great dangers, both for our ability to think clearly and attentively, and our ability to draw on our own imaginations with vividness, intensity, and independence, not to mention its undercutting the patterns of restrained and civil public deliberation that a genuinely democratic society requires. In the years to come, it will be a greater and greater part of a genuine liberal education to counteract these less benign effects of our ghostly electronic cave, and restore us to ourselves—restore our ability to hear and see and touch the earth for ourselves, to gaze at the night sky for ourselves, and bring us back into contact with the exhilarating, wind-swept heights of our human freedom, in which the game of life is being played for keeps. And give us, through hard study of old books and the hard but delightful work of conversation, an enduring and unsimulated participation in human excellence, a drink of our own, drawn from that deep reservoir of shared wisdom of which Herman Melville was speaking, when he wrote that “Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.” That study, that drink—that shock—usher us into a profoundly public world, a shared world, the highest common denominator—a world beyond all caves and matrices, and yet a world to which we can belong fully, if we wish to. #### 13 � 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers 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 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library 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. 13 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 Why the case for liberal arts is stronger than ever Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Wilfred McClay at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource McClay, Wilfred M. 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 2014-10-17 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 24004545