1 20 41 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a67525033fdd515f7aaed7c4d2ae8784.pdf 6cd17aca9ac7ee90eae0a8194469afe4 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Fall 2011 What Is a Community of Learning? Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time turn the searchlight of inquiry on ourselves. So I mean to take this occasion to ask: what is a community of learning? My suspicion is that the phrase involves a latent but fundamental tension between its component terms, ‘community’ and ‘learning.’ To expose this tension, I propose to begin by investigating the meaning of each term in turn, under the guidance of Plato’s Socrates. Let us put learning first, as we ought to do here at St. John’s. What, then, is learning? One answer, and I think a true and beautiful answer, is found in the Meno, part of which every incoming Graduate Institute student reads in the course of our new student orientation. Responding to Meno’s paralyzing claim that it is impossible to seek anything – because either one knows what one is seeking, and so has no need to seek it, or one does not know what one is seeking, and so does not know how to seek it – Socrates raises a third possibility: we know what we are seeking, but we have forgotten it. Learning, therefore, is recollection, remembering what we once knew but have forgotten. The human soul, Socrates explains to the enthralled Meno, is immortal, and death and birth are only apparent changes that do not entail the soul’s destruction. Since the immortal soul has therefore seen all things, both on the earth and in the underworld, 1 �there is nothing that it has not learned. And since the whole of nature is akin, it suffices for a human being to recollect one thing, in order for him to be able to recall everything else for himself. It is not hard to see that Socrates’ story does not in fact allege that learning is recollection, as Socrates claims, and Meno concludes it does. If what we call learning is recollection, and we recollect what we once knew but have forgotten, then recollection presupposes knowledge. So where did this knowledge come from? The answer, according to Socrates’ story, is that it came from seeing: knowing is primarily having seen, and so learning is primarily seeing. And indeed, this is what we see in the subsequent geometry lesson with Meno’s slave. All Socrates needs to do, for the slave to learn to find the side of the double square, is to make the slave see that the square drawn on the so-called diagonal is in fact twice as big as the square drawn on the original side. The slave’s opinions about the name of the side of the double square – for example, that this name must, in order to be speakable, contain some mention of a numerical ratio with the original side – are reasonable, but they are obstacles to his seeing what Socrates wants him to see, obstacles that Socrates must clear away by refutation if the slave is to see clearly. If the slave were to go through the same lesson repeatedly and in various ways, Socrates concludes, he would end up having knowledge about such things no less precisely than anyone. That is, he would know such things as well as it is possible for a human being to know them. Now if learning is primarily nothing other than seeing, it seems to me to follow that it is an essentially private activity, one that takes place entirely in the one who sees. This is not to deny that it can be pursued in a community, with friends or colleagues; it is only to deny that it must be pursued in common. The same thing follows, I think, even when the seeing involved is 2 �metaphorical, and the thing seen is seen in the speeches uttered in our common life. Even when the thing learned is common, the learning is not essentially in common. Now it is true that the slave boy needs Socrates to help him to clear away the incorrect opinions he has about the side of the double square. But if these obstacles to seeing are due, not to what the slave has seen, but to what he has heard from his community – as the Meno implies, and the Republic’s cave story states outright – then it follows nonetheless that learning requires community only as a source of things to see, and not as a means to seeing. But I have gotten ahead of myself. For what is a community? Once again, a Platonic dialogue is helpful. For human beings to be in a community, they must hold things in common. As Socrates and Glaucon agree in the Republic, the greatest good in the organization of a city, the common good at which the legislator aims, is what binds it together and makes it one: the community of pleasure and pain, which leads the citizens to say ‘my own’ and ‘not my own’ about the same things, and in the same way. More generally, we can say that any community extends just as far as does this sense of a common good, marked by these opinions about what is and is not its own. But much earlier in their long conversation, Socrates and Glaucon also agree that, at least in the case of the citizens of the city in speech, these opinions about ‘my own’ and ‘not my own,’ about who is a citizen and who a stranger, are founded on a lie: namely, a story that all the citizens are brothers, born of and nursed by the land that they inhabit. More generally, we can say that the sense of the common good in every community is marked by correct opinions that are, if not lies, at least not held because they have been seen to be true. Since each community is founded and maintained by the promulgation of such correct opinions, it is absolutely forbidden to call these opinions into question, whether by laughing at them, or by inquiring into their truth. To do so is to call the community itself into question. 3 �By now it should be clear what I have in mind by the latent but fundamental tension that I suspect in the phrase ‘community of learning.’ Learning, according to the Meno and the Republic, is an essentially private activity that does not require a community for its completion. And every community, according to the Republic and the Meno, is founded on correct opinions that are resistant to inquiry, and that therefore pose particularly recalcitrant obstacles to community members seeing what is – that is, to their learning. This latent but fundamental tension between community and learning is made vivid by Socrates’ image of the cave in the Republic. We are like prisoners confined to a deep cave, Socrates says, whose necks and legs are bound so that what we can see is limited to what is right before us. Above and behind us, where we cannot look, unbound denizens of the cave carry artifacts back and forth in front of a fire, so that shadows are cast by these artifacts on the cave wall that we face. The cave wall also reflects sounds made by some of these puppeteers, so that we take them for sounds made by the shadows. We take the shadows themselves for real beings, and the ones that seem to speak for real human beings. Socrates makes it clear that the cave is an image of the community by remarking that, while it is an image of our nature in its education and want of education, we find ourselves in it not from birth but from childhood. Our first education must have amounted to an induction into the cave; a second, deeper education is needed for us to escape it. Moreover, the image suggests that while a kind of learning is possible within the cave – some of the prisoners get very good at discerning, naming, and predicting the shadows – this so-called learning is based on a fundamental falsehood: never having seen either the source of the shadows or any other kind of being, the prisoners take the effects for causes, and artifacts for natures. (We should note that 4 �this would be the case even if there were no world beyond the cave.) What is learned in the cave is correct opinion rather than truth, though it bears some intelligible relationship to truth. It is conventional, in edifying addresses of this kind, that the speaker, having identified some apparently intractable problem, go on to offer a surprising solution. I am sorry to say that I have no such solution to offer with respect to the phrase ‘community of learning.’ To repeat: learning, understood as seeing, does not require a community for its completion; and every community poses barriers, in the form of correct opinions, to learning. Unless learning is something other than literal or metaphorical seeing, or unless there are communities that do not depend on correct opinion for their sense of the common good, it seems that the phrase ‘community of learning’ must involve a contradiction: in the respect that there is learning, there is no community, and in the respect that there is a community, there is no learning. But both the image of the cave in the Republic and the scene with the slave in the Meno do suggest one way in which the consistency of the phrase might be saved. According to Socrates, while the release and healing of the prisoners in the cave can happen by nature, it helps to have a free human being in the cave, one who can release the prisoners, compel them to stand up, walk, and turn toward the light, and even drag them by force out of the cave. This releasing, compelling, and dragging is the closest one can come to helping to see, and so the one who does this is the closest thing to a teacher. Similarly, while Socrates quite reasonably claims that he is not teaching Meno’s slave when he sets the latter’s opinions against one another – after all, he does not tell the slave the correct opinion – he does help him to see that he does not know the side of the double square. This compulsion, this setting of opinion against opinion, has more in common with the means used by the community than it does with seeing, but it can lead to seeing. 5 �This conclusion points to a more consistent meaning for the phrase ‘community of learning.’ Since we all always already find ourselves in a community, with our necks and legs bound, and our heads pointed in a fixed direction, it would be very helpful to us if we could find and join another community, one whose correct opinions oppose and counteract those that constitute and maintain the broader community in which we find ourselves. Such a ‘remedial community’ would have orthodoxies of its own, of course, and these would necessarily stand as obstacles to learning. But if these orthodoxies were well-chosen, they could also contradict the orthodoxies of the broader community, call them into question, and help us to loosen the bonds that limit our field of view. Such a remedial community, though an obstacle to learning when seen from the highest perspective, when seen from our perspective could help us to learn. This, I submit, is the best true answer to the question ‘what is a community of learning’; and it is by being such a remedial community that St John’s College earns the right to call itself a community of learning. More particularly, it is by means of this notion that the several practices of the College that seem unnecessary to learning when seen from the highest perspective – practices like our largely-required graduate program, our requirement of attendance and participation in the conversation, our imposition of due dates for essays, and our determination of class lists and teaching assignments – are justified. The notion of a remedial community helps us to see, for example, that it is a lie in the soul to justify turning in a late paper on grounds of learning. It is true that the thought comes when it wants to, and not when we want it to; so it is true that due dates make no sense from the highest perspective. But we have no right to this highest perspective. We are prisoners in a cave. The due date of an essay protects learning by giving it a standing in the world of the cave equal to the standing of the important shadows that 6 �parade before our eyes. It protects learning by opposing compulsion to compulsion, correct opinion to correct opinion. Similarly, it is a lie in the soul to justify skipping a class, or sitting silently in one, on grounds of learning. It is true that we might learn more reading by ourselves in our rooms, or by coming to class just to listen, than by coming to class and saying what we think; so it is true that the requirements of attendance and participation make no sense from the highest perspective. But we are prisoners in a cave. We have no right to this highest perspective. These requirements protect learning by giving it a standing in the world of the cave equal to that of flat tires and doctor’s appointments. It should not escape our notice that this notion of a community of learning as a remedial community also supplies us with a helpful standard to judge the College. If the orthodoxies of St. John’s do not oppose and counteract those of the broader community, if they instead echo and magnify the latter, then the College is a community of learning in name only. St. John’s and its Graduate Institute ought to be a shelter from the ever-increasing busyness and prevailing shortterm fearfulness that characterize the current mood of the surrounding community. This does not mean that we should expect serenity within these walls; the image of the cave suggests that if we are not kicking and screaming, if we do not feel ourselves to be under compulsion, if we are not temporarily blinded, we are not being prepared for learning. But we should expect that the mood of our studies here will not be the mood of the surrounding community. If it is, we can only struggle by ourselves, or hope for the assistance of a wise, and free, friend. So come to class, and speak in class, and turn your essays in on time, even if, or especially if, you must struggle to do so. Your struggles are not a sufficient sign of learning, but if it is true that we all find ourselves prisoners in a cave, they are a necessary sign. 7 �I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be a study group this term on Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. Please watch your email for an announcement of the place and time. I would also like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial. The summer 2011 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland August 25, 2011 8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2011 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-08-25 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Fall_2011_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Fall 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Community of Learning?" Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e3ef1384606bf90653eebe10214becb2.pdf b2a0f3e2bc82eae6245a9b8f64aae653 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Fall 2012 What Is Liberal Education? Part II Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by asking ‘what is liberal education?’ As I reassured the audience of my summer convocation address, let me reassure you too: I don’t mean to try to answer this question in the next fifteen minutes. My only somewhat more modest goal involves dividing the question into two parts. Last term, I asked the question ‘what is liberal?’, and with the assistance of the College’s motto, offered the following answer in the case of education: Liberal education is bookish education, freeing education, childlike education. As education through conversation with the great books, it is the consummation of practice and a courageous confrontation with what is most real. It is the education of the free who know they are not free into a freedom they do not desire. It is an education that forgets and begins again, that plays at the most serious things, and that thereby gives us a world in which to live. But this answer is obviously preliminary, because it depends in turn on the answer to a deeper question. ‘That’s all very well, Mr. Black,” someone might say, “but what is education?” To begin to answer this question, I propose to pose it to three great books, two of which are on the reading list of our graduate Program. These books are Rousseau’s Emile, whose subtitle is On 1 �Education; Plato’s Republic, whose subtitle is On the Just; and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, whose subtitle is Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. If we understand what is asked in the question ‘what is education?’ it must be because we think that there is such a thing. So why do we think this? Let’s confine ourselves to human beings: the beings whose education is most interesting to us. When we observe the human beings around us, we cannot help but be struck by the differences between them in their activities and capacities. Some of them are capable of much, some of little; some need much, some need little. Perhaps most strikingly, some human beings are largely capable of providing for their own needs, and some are not. Once we are able to judge the ages of human beings, we might make the following generalization: that human beings are born weak, because unable to care for themselves; that as they age they sometimes flourish and become strong; and that if they live long enough, the strong eventually decline and become weak again. These changes, these differences between human beings at different ages, might even be more striking to us than those underlying qualities that all human beings share. And the cause of these changes, Rousseau tells us near the beginning of Emile, the cause that shapes human beings over the course of their lives, is education.1 Education is the answer to the question of why human beings differ so much, not just from one another, but each of them from one time to another. But there is something puzzling about this first attempt at a definition of education, which takes education as the cause in general of change in human beings. For we tend to want to think of education as the cause, and so by extension as the process, of good change in human beings: education, we think, changes us for the better. Rousseau acknowledges as much when he writes, “[e]verything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.” Education, we are likely to insist, is change in human beings in a certain direction: 2 �toward some completion, toward being grown, toward some good. It is odd to think of the changes that, even in the best case, follow the completion of growth – that is, our inevitable decline – as part of our education. Rousseau takes this difficulty into account as he develops his argument in Emile. This education, the one that gives us what we lack at birth but need when grown, comes from three sources: nature, men, and things. “The internal development of our faculties and our organs,” he explains, “is the education of nature. The use that we are taught to make of this development is the education of men. And what we acquire from our own experience about the objects which affect us is the education of things.” What we ordinarily think of as the content of our education – the opinions we are taught about how things are and what we ought to do – is really only part of our education, according to this account. And the expansion of the definition of education to include internal developments and experiences, as well as opinions, makes it possible to distinguish growth from decline, and good education both from bad and from no education at all. Since each of the three educations must tend to the same end, Rousseau tells us, and the education of nature “is in no way in our control,” a good education, an education properly speaking, is one in which the educations of things and of men are directed to the end imposed by the education of nature. And since we could not bring ourselves knowingly to pursue a consistently harmful education – even if such an education is better than a contradictory one – our supposition must be that the end imposed by the education of nature is good. Here, then, is a second definition of education, one that seems closer to what we mean by the word: education is the cause of good changes in human beings, because it is oriented by nature. Or, to put the same point differently, for education to be the cause of good changes in human beings, there must be such a thing as nature. 3 �This definition, which we arrived at with the assistance of Rousseau’s Emile, is shared by a second great book, Plato’s Republic. At the beginning of Book Seven of that work, Plato has his Socrates present an image of “our nature in its education and want of education.” Picture human beings as if they were bound head and foot in a cave underground, such that they are all forced to face a wall. Far above and behind them, a fire burns. Nearer, but still above and behind them, other human beings stand along a road behind a partition, and carry artifacts that they raise up above the partition, into the light of the fire, such that the artifacts cast shadows on the wall that the prisoners face. While they do this, some of the puppeteers make sounds that bounce off the wall, and so seem to come from the shadows. Socrates asks whether such human beings, bound as they are, can see anything other than the shadows cast by themselves and by the artifacts raised above the partition. His young interlocutor, Glaucon, says that they cannot. And so Socrates concludes, with Glaucon’s agreement, that these human beings will take the shadows of artificial things for the truth – when in fact the truth is only fully available to those who free themselves or are freed from their bonds, who make the painful climb toward the dazzling light at the mouth of the cave, and who emerge to look at and eventually to see the things themselves, which are not artifacts, in the light of the sun. The horror and the beauty of this image, the horror of our imprisonment and the beauty of the promise of our liberation, are so striking that it is easy to pass over Socrates’ remark that this is an image of our nature “in its education and want of education.” Is it clear which part of the image represents which condition of our nature? Socrates tells us that we are in the cave “from childhood,” not from birth: so there must be a point early in our lives when each of us, in the language of the image, is brought down into the cave – by someone who is able to exit it, of course – and placed in our bonds, facing the wall with its shadows. Could this point be when we 4 �are first able to understand and articulate speech: that is, at the beginning of what we ordinarily call our education? Later in his conversation with Glaucon, Socrates does call the condition in the cave one of “greater lack of learning,” but this hardly settles the question, since he also notes that “education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be”: it is not the art of putting knowledge into a soul that lacks it, but the art of turning the whole soul from that which is coming into being to that which is, and finally to the brightest part of that which is, the good. Socrates’ image teaches us that it is a question of education against education, then: there are those who claim that education happens only inside the cave, and those who claim that education happens only outside, in the light of the sun. And the difference between these two views, certainly within the cave but perhaps also outside it, is a matter of life or death. It is tempting, and perhaps also easy, to accept Socrates’ encouragement and side with Glaucon in the view that education is the noble and painful struggle against artifice on behalf of nature, against appearance on behalf of the truth, against becoming on behalf of being, and against evil on behalf of the good itself. It is very tempting to believe that the peak of education is a kind of emigration to the Isles of the Blessed: the achievement of heaven on earth. But this would be to ignore Socrates’ remark that education is the art of turning the whole soul from becoming to being. This remark implies that education, even as Socrates understands it, takes place chiefly, and perhaps even entirely, within the cave. According to Socrates’ image, the need for compulsion – another term for this art of turning – ceases once the soul has been forced to stand up, to turn around, to walk, to look at the light, to climb the rough, steep, upward way, and at last to emerge from the cave. Once outside of the cave, the soul only needs to become accustomed to the light, in order to see everything that can be seen. 5 �Let’s turn to the last of our three great books, Beyond Good and Evil, for help in thinking through some further implications of Socrates’ definition of education as an art of turning. In the Preface to that work, Nietzsche claims that the good itself – the pole star of the Socratic art of turning, by whose light education is to be distinguished from indoctrination – is an invention, an error, and a piece of philosophic dogma. And throughout the work he opposes to this Platonic dogma a series of painful questions. If there is such a thing as nature, is it good for human beings? To the extent that we have access to the truth, it is good for us, and is it better for us than appearance? Is there such a thing as being, and can it concern us more, or be worth more to us, than becoming? And is there such a thing as evil, or is it really a distorted view of something that is properly called good? If education as Socrates understands it takes place entirely within the cave, then it seems better to understand education in terms of fundamental questions like these than in terms of philosophers’ predetermined, dogmatic answers to such questions. This does not mean, however, that these questions lack answers. Roughly speaking, for example, Nietzsche seems to think that the answer to each of these fundamental questions is ‘no.’ But it is in asking these painful questions, in discovering how matters stand for oneself with regard to these questions, that education understood as the art of turning primarily consists. What follows from these questions – insight into which answers are given to us as predetermined, and which answers can be changed – teaches us about the limits to our learning, and so educates us about what education can be for us. In other words, despite the great foreground differences between Nietzsche and Plato’s Socrates, they agree that education understood as the cause of good changes in human beings now must mean the pursuit of self-knowledge: obedience to the Delphic command, ‘know thyself.’ They agree that obedience to this command is painful, though they both hint that it is 6 �not only painful. And they agree that obedience to this command is not the matter of a moment, nor of a few months or years, but of a lifetime. As Socrates’ image implies, each human being who succeeds in escaping the cave also gains the power to be a puppeteer, or worse, one who draws down the young and binds them in a cave of his own making. On the basis of these brief reflections on three great books, I can now hazard an answer to my opening question. What is liberal education? For education to be possible, for there to be a cause of good changes in human beings, there must be a nature of human beings that can be known, and a good of this nature in each case. If there is such a nature and such a good, then education requires the pursuit of self-knowledge, the pursuit of knowledge of this nature and this good. So education in the true sense must therefore above all be the repeated reopening of the question of whether there is such a nature, one that can be known, and that has its corresponding good. Education in this sense is intrinsically liberal: for it is with the assistance of great books that we best seek to know ourselves, it is through self-knowledge that we find the freedom that suits us, and it is in this freedom that we become childlike, ready to begin again asking with playful seriousness our fundamental questions about nature, truth, being, and the good. I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be two study groups this term, one on the French language, meeting on Monday afternoons, from 3:30 to 5:00, in the Hartle Room, beginning on September 10th, and the other on Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human, meeting on Thursday afternoons, also from 3:30 to 5:00 in the Hartle Room, beginning on August 30th. Schedules will be circulated by email. Also, I would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial. The fall 2012 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. 7 �Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 22 August 2012 Delivered 23 August 2012 Notes 1 In this address, I draw chiefly on the beginning of Book One of Emile, page 38 in the Bloom translation; on Republic 514a-518c; and on Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, and sections 9, 230, and 231. 8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2012 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012-08-23 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Fall_2012_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Fall 2012 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is Liberal Education? Part II" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/82dd63ea7a68a03ed89dd0e8e16484dd.pdf 01a66f9046c9040420fc8b46d19c14ad PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Fall 2013 On the Mathematics & Natural Science Segment Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining the readings of the Mathematics & Natural Science segment. The subject of this convocation address – the second of five, each treating one of the segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address, delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names that determine the distinct subject matter treated by the readings in each segment. Now I hope to make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title ‘Mathematics & Natural Science’? And before I proceed to answer my own question, I should caution that the threads that I mean to follow for the next few minutes – threads that run through the tutorial and seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected to threads that run through other segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I only insist that these threads are present in the segment readings, and that they are truly worth 1 �following. So again, what are the wonderful questions raised by ‘Mathematics & Natural Science’? At the risk of becoming predictable, let’s begin once again with the least promising word in the segment title: the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ – or, more precisely, the ampersand. As it did in the Philosophy & Theology segment title, the ampersand implies that there is something double about the subject matter of the Mathematics & Natural Science segment. And once again, this implication is borne out by a cursory glance at the reading lists of the segment’s seminar and tutorial. In seminar, we begin with Lucretius’ bittersweet poem about atoms, On the Nature of Things; then we turn to Plato’s dialogue about the musical making of the world, the Timaeus, followed by Aristotle’s discussion of the four causes of natural things – things that have a principle of rest and motion in themselves – in the Physics. In tutorial, by contrast, we begin with the definitions, postulates and common notions found in Book I of Euclid’s Elements; and we continue by demonstrating and discussing each of the forty-eight propositions in Book I. So in what we might mischievously call the ‘Natural Science’ seminar, we begin by considering the principles – which is to say, the causes – of natural things: whether they be atoms, the Same and the Other, or form and matter. In what we might call the ‘Mathematics’ tutorial, by contrast, we begin by considering points, lines, and figures – magnitudes and their parts – and by convincing ourselves that if some truths be given, other truths must follow by necessity. What, then, is the meaning of the ampersand that joins these two inquiries, into causes and into magnitudes, in our segment title? It will help to consider here the meaning of the two parts of the title ‘Mathematics & Natural Science.’ ‘Natural Science’ seems easy enough: ‘science’ is another word for ‘knowledge’ – it consists of the things we know – and as for ‘nature,’ well, let’s leap over an 2 �abyss and just agree with Aristotle that it consists of the things that have a principle of rest and motion in themselves, and so come to be and pass away. ‘Natural Science,’ then, amounts to what we know of such things, especially concerning their causes. ‘Mathematics,’ on the other hand, is a little trickier. Our English word is related to the ancient Greek noun ta mathēmata, which in turn is related to the ancient Greek verb manthanō, meaning ‘I learn,’ ‘I perceive,’ or ‘I understand.’ So ta mathēmata are the characteristically learnable, perceptible, understandable things. We can see the bearing of this etymology if we consider the chief content of mathematics, according to our ordinary understanding: namely, proofs about magnitudes and multitudes, figures and numbers. Such proofs are characteristically learnable because they bring with them the certainty of logical necessity, and because they hold for all time and place. For example, once we have learned how to demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem – proposition 47 from Book I of the Elements – we know that it will prove true on Earth and on Mars and in the Andromeda galaxy, and that it will hold true for all future time as it did for all past. This characteristically knowable quality leads some to translate the ancient Greek word for the knowable things, ta mathēmata, with the English word ‘science.’ Now before we rush to conclude that our segment title, ‘Mathematics & Natural Science,’ really just means ‘Science & More Science,’ let’s recall that abysmal word ‘natural.’ We said, following Aristotle, that natural science in particular consists of knowledge about the causes of things that change in time and place. But mathematics, by contrast, consists of characteristically knowable things that do not change in time and place. And with this contrast, a wonderful question hidden inside the ampersand of our segment title comes to light. Is it possible that the characteristically knowable things, namely magnitude and number, are the causes of the natural things? Is it possible that the things that do not change in time and place are the causes of the 3 �things that do? Let’s pause for a moment to savor and shudder at the magnitude of this question. If the answer is yes, then natural science deserves the name ‘science,’ because the causes of natural things are fully knowable. If the answer is no, on the other hand – if we mean by ‘cause’ something other than magnitude or multitude – then either this thing must prove as knowable as the objects of mathematics, or we must resign ourselves to a nature that is to some degree unknown and unknowable. Some of you might have noticed that, in describing the readings of the Mathematics & Natural Science seminar and tutorial, in each case I stopped after the first few readings. It turns out that our first wonderful question in the segment readings – the question of whether the mathematical things are the natural causes – equips us to understand a change that happens in the middle of each reading list. In the seminar, this change is marked by the triumphant title of Francis Bacon’s New Organon. The newness of Bacon’s organon comes from his sense that neither the natural causes nor the natural things themselves are what ancient philosophers – like Aristotle, author of the old organon – thought they were. It is a mistake, Bacon argues, to try to deduce the causes from the things themselves, because nature loves to hide: neither the causes nor the things themselves are apparent. The organic – which is to say instrumental or methodical – character of the New Organon follows from this claim: if there are natures and natural causes, but they are hidden, what is needed is a reliable way to force them into the open. This forceful way is the method of experiment. After Bacon’s New Organon, we turn in seminar to a work by René Descartes with the deceptively sober and technical title of Discourse on Method. Among many other interesting things, Descartes suggests in that work a standard by which to measure the certainty of knowledge, such as the knowledge gained from scientific experiment. This 4 �standard is clarity and distinctness; and it is brought over to natural science from – you guessed it – mathematics. So if we take the New Organon and the Discourse on Method together, they seem to announce not just a break with the ancient study of natural science, in their self-consciously new focus on method, but an answer to our question about whether the mathematical things are the natural causes. Yes, Bacon and Descartes say, the natural causes can be known; and yes, they can be known with the clarity and distinctness of mathematics; which is almost the same thing as saying that yes, the mathematical things – and especially number – are the causes. The color red, we might explain in this Baconian-Cartesian spirit, is nothing more than light with a wavelength of 700 nanometers, while violet is nothing more than the same with a wavelength of 400. To make red violet, indeed to make any color into any other, is merely a matter of changing a number – proof that in this case, as in every case, number is the cause. Whatever ancient philosophers like Lucretius might have known about the causes of natural things, the proof of the superior knowledge available through the modern experimental, methodical, mathematical natural science is the superior power of that science – power exercised, unlike the paltry power of ancient natural science, for “the relief of man’s estate.” Isaac Newton’s Principia makes its own new beginning to display what can be achieved in the field of mechanics by this modern natural science, and in so doing argues that the natural world extends infinitely further than Aristotle admits – that the natural world is in fact the world simply, and natural science, science simply. Darwin and Jung follow the Baconian-Cartesian path, each in his own, sometimes questionable way, extending modern science from what we now call physics to the fields of biology and psychology. And with each new advance in knowledge comes an increase in power: 5 �modern physics can put human beings on the Moon; modern biology can shape living things to our needs; and modern psychology can make human beings more useful. Let’s turn away from this vision of a secular heaven on earth to look at the readings of the ‘Mathematics’ tutorial, and the change that happens from Euclid’s geometry to that of Lobachevski. It does not diminish the signal knowability of mathematics, nor that of Euclid’s geometry in particular, to notice that it is founded on a handful of postulates; but this does raise some questions. While definitions isolate and name certain geometrical possibilities – or even, if you wish, certain geometrical impossibilities – and common notions spell out the necessary logic of mathematical proof, postulates set the limits of geometrical possibility itself. But the word ‘postulate’ comes from the Latin verb postulare, which means ‘to demand’; and the corresponding word in Euclid’s Greek, aitēmaton, means much the same: a thing asked for, begged, or demanded. A postulate, then, is precisely not a name, nor something that must be granted for logical proof to be possible; rather, it is something would not jeopardize the possibility of logical proof if it were otherwise. But if mathematical proofs would be possible even if one of the postulates were not granted, or if a different postulate were granted in its place, then mustn’t ta mathēmata, the mathematical or characteristically knowable things, include the conclusions demonstrated by such proofs? This question puts us on the road to different, non-Euclidean geometries, including the geometry of Lobachevsky – not to mention different arithmetics, such as the arithmetic of imaginary numbers. And this road leads to a mathematics that consists of a set, perhaps a limitless set, of alternative geometries and arithmetics, each corresponding to postulates that there might be good reason to grant. Moreover, if the knowable things consist of sets of such geometries and arithmetics, and the knowable things are the causes of the natural things, then 6 �mustn’t these alternative geometries also be causes? This question puts us on the road to discovering the use of non-Euclidean geometry in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the use of imaginary numbers in Feynman’s account of quantum electrodynamics. Now the discovery of such correspondences should not make us Pollyannaish. It would be terribly useful, and a great boon for the prospect of knowledge in the fullest sense, if it should turn out that the things we are most suited to know are also the things themselves. But the very utility and appeal of this situation should make us suspicious. Could the correspondences we have discovered, between the knowable things and the causes of the natural things, instead be due to the form our mind necessarily gives to everything it perceives and knows? Have we merely discovered a gift that we have made for ourselves, and hidden from ourselves, without knowing it? If so, perhaps we should expect a correspondence between every possible arithmetic or geometry and some possible being, but at the cost of suspecting that behind every being for us could lie a being in itself, to which we have no access. The very perfection of our knowledge of the beings for us would rule out our knowing the beings in themselves – presuming that the beings in themselves are any concern of ours. It could also be the case that the Baconian-Cartesian equation of knowledge with power is incorrect, and that in fact we only know things to the extent we do not have power over them. Take the limit case of the modern scientific project, in which human beings acquire the power to turn anything into anything else. What would remain of knowledge about the objects of these transformations, if nothing about them were durable, let alone unchanging in time and place? If the miraculous power of a god, which must be ruled out for both mathematics and natural science to be possible, reappears as the goal of the modern scientific project to relieve man’s estate, then this project seems to aim at its own self-destruction. Here we see the questions we 7 �have been following through the Mathematics & Natural Science segment touch on the themes of Philosophy & Theology. Finally, there is the more present and clear danger of treating the mathematical things, and especially numbers, as the only knowable things just because they are the easiest things to know. For the same reason that 700 nanometers is not equivalent to the color red, and eightyfive percent is not equivalent to learning, knowing the magnitude and multitude of a thing might not be enough to know it, or even its causes, fully. Every science requires that one be able to count its objects, but to determine the unit in each case needs more than skill at counting. This danger should especially be heeded in an egalitarian democracy: the regime that most of all seeks to reduce questions of justice to problems of arithmetic. Here we see the questions that we have been following through the Mathematics & Natural Science segment touch on the themes of Politics & Society. In conclusion, I would like to announce that there will be three Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term. One group will study Plato’s Laws, while another will study T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Both of these groups will meet on Thursday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:00, beginning on August 29. A third group will meet to learn Italian, and to read Machiavelli’s Prince. Schedules and meeting places for all three of these groups will be circulated by email. Lastly, I would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial. The fall 2013 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 20 August 2013 Delivered 22 August 2013 8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2013 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-08-22 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Fall_2013_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Fall 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the Mathematics & Natural Sciences Segment" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9addb39da8d3b915d3f8861f52972969.pdf a43b6a10b0032bcf1dd9db4512dd7e2c PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Fall 2014 On the Literature Segment Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time inquire into ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining the Literature segment. The subject of this convocation address – the last of five, each treating one of the segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address, delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names announcing that each segment treats a distinct subject matter. Now I hope to make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title ‘Literature’? I pondered this question for a long time, in the dim cave of my office in the BBC, during the hot and muggy summer of 2014. And those of you who know me will understand the despair I was reduced to, because I could see no way forward. There is no ampersand in the segment title ‘Literature’ – so how was I to begin? My mind twisted and turned, trying to answer this 1 �question, and my body twisted and turned too as a result: now sitting in my office chair, now standing to think, now throwing myself into one of my soft and easy chairs, fit only for soft and easy people. And then, late one Friday afternoon, while trying to figure out how to put my feet up on my desk without kicking my laptop, I kicked instead an open drawer of my desk. In a puff of dust, several folded sheets of paper fell loose from where they had been Scotch taped to the underside of the desk drawer. I took up these pages, and began to read. “Fall 1985 Graduate Institute Convocation Address. On the Literature Segment. “I went down from the dim cave of my office into the hot summer sun, to the new coffee shop on Maryland Avenue, alone with my thoughts, to purchase a cappuccino – because I needed some coffee, and because I heard they were making this new drink there for the first time. The coffee shop was crowded and noisy, and there was a line, so I purchased my cappuccino to go in a Styrofoam cup, and began to make for the door, the sun, and my office. But just then, someone took hold of my seersucker sleeve from behind and said, ‘Hey, you’re the Director of the Graduate Institute, right?’ “I turned to see a student seated at a table, hunched over a much-annotated copy of what looked like the Iliad while fixing me with an angry glare. ‘I am,’ I said, hesitating. ‘Mr…?’ “‘Ms.,’ she corrected, rolling her eyes. Then she pushed what was indeed the Iliad across the table, toward me, with both hands. ‘Why do we read this stuff?’ “I sat down in the vacant chair, setting my cappuccino on the table. ‘You mean the Iliad?’ I asked. “All of it: Homer, the Greek tragedies and comedies, the Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, poetry. Literature,’ she intoned, in a plummy Masterpiece Theatre accent. ‘I came here, to St. John’s, to study the greatest ideas in philosophy, in math and science, in politics. I came here to 2 �study what’s most true – not some stories made up by some dead Greek whose name may or may not have been Homer.’ “I glanced at the doorway, and the bright world beyond it. ‘Aristotle says in the Poetics that poetry is more philosophic than history,’ I ventured weakly, ‘because it speaks about general rather than particular things, about what is likely or necessary rather than just about what happened. And by poetry he means making, in the sense of making things up. He’s talking about everything we read in the Literature segment, in a book that we read in the Literature segment.’ “This earned me a derisive snort. ‘Did Mr. Aristotle write the Graduate Institute curriculum? Is he available to answer my questions? And in any case, Mr. Director, you’ve missed my point. Let’s grant that poetry is more philosophic than history. Are you or Mr. Aristotle able to say that it’s more philosophic than philosophy? Besides, everybody knows that what we call history here in the Graduate Institute is really philosophy. And it’s not even true that poetry speaks of general rather than particular things. Open Thucydides, and read that in such-and-such a year, Alcibiades got on a trireme and sailed to Sicily. Now open Chaucer, and read in the Franklin’s Tale that Arveragus got on a boat and sailed to Brittany. The only thing missing is the date! Both history and literature are full of pointless details that only obscure the philosophic truth. At least the pointless details of history actually happened. Who cares that Niraeus, the second most beautiful Greek after Achilles, only brought three ships to Troy?’ “I thought about the slow cooling of my coffee, despite the Styrofoam. ‘Maybe these details are useful ways of clothing philosophic truth,’ I responded. ‘Doesn’t Lucretius say something in De Rerum Natura about doctors putting honey on cups of bitter wormwood, and about their patients being tricked but not betrayed? Maybe a beautiful story, full of imagined 3 �details, makes it more pleasant to read about painful philosophic truths. For example, take that detail about Niraeus. Isn’t that Homer’s way of saying that beauty doesn’t bring military might, and that Achilles doesn’t have his fifty ships at Troy because he’s the most beautiful? A literary form could also make it more pleasant for authors to write painful truths,’ I added. ‘In a philosophic treatise, everything an author writes is in his own name. In a literary work, he can put a painful truth in the mouth of one of his characters, and blame it on the character if he needs to.’ “The coffee shop had been noisy, but it suddenly went silent, and I felt a moment’s shame for what I had just said – straining to make myself heard – too loudly. The student stared levelly at me for a moment. ‘Lucretius is cool,’ she said at last, ‘and you get brownie points for using Latin. But don’t you see that your esoteric argument is totally lame? First, if you can see through it, and I can see through it, then everyone can see through it. Lucretius even tells you that he’s doing it – and he tells you twice, three books apart, like he thinks you’ll forget. Second, if everybody sees through the beautiful clothing, then no one’s going to buy it when an author blames something on one of his characters. You’ll have to do a lot better than that, Mr. Director, to convince me that there’s something to esotericism. Everybody knows that literature is seductive. Read the second preface to Julie – you know,’ she responded to my raised eyebrow, ‘by Rousseau. They knew it in the eighteenth century. There was a whole debate about whether too many people were reading novels, and about whether novels drive people mad. Novels were, like, the Walkmans of the eighteenth century. And no one was letting their authors off the hook.’ “I started to say something to this, but the student was on a roll, and interrupted me. ‘And third, what’s wrong with you? Every time you say something to me, you repeat something that you read in some book. You’re like that guy Montaigne writes about, in “Of pedantry,” who 4 �won’t say that he has an itchy backside until he looks up what itchy means and what a backside is. I ask you a question, and you give me great books. Well, I want great ideas. So tell me straight up, Mr. Director, because life is short. Why should I waste my time on literature?’ “The student had been speaking more and more angrily, and as she posed this last question she slammed her Iliad shut. The coffee shop fell silent again. I reached for my drink, snapped open the plastic lid, and drank deeply of cold foam and lukewarm, bitter coffee. Clearly this cappuccino fad was going nowhere. But as the stimulant raced through my veins and the fog cleared from my vision, I looked the student in the eye and asked, ‘you’ve read Julie? That’s not on the Graduate Institute reading list.’ “And then I saw what I did not expect to see: the student blushed. I glanced away, reflected for a moment, and then began again to speak. “‘So you want a philosophic argument for why literature is as philosophically serious as philosophy?’ I asked. “The student nodded. “‘Okay. Remember how in Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes between five intellectual virtues: art, science, prudence, wisdom, and intellect? “‘Kind of,’ she replied. ‘What I remember is that art has to do with making things, science with knowing things that can’t be otherwise, and prudence with acting in matters that can be otherwise. But I don’t remember so much about wisdom or intellect.’ “‘You’re on the right track,’ I said. ‘Wisdom has to do with knowing first principles, and Aristotle confusingly calls it a combination of science and intellect. This makes more sense when he says later that intellect is concerned with the ultimates in both directions: ultimate general principles, and ultimate particulars. It’s a kind of perception.’ 5 �“‘Let’s see if I’m following you,’ the student ventured. “An example of art is writing, an example of science is physics, an example of prudence is tactics, and an example of both wisdom and intellect is… philosophy?’ “I reflected again, and then said, ‘Let’s leave wisdom out of it for now. I find it easier to think about single judgments, rather than bodies of knowledge. If we were to say that “avoid comma splices” is part of the art of writing, Newton’s second law part of the science of physics, and “Athens should not invade Sicily” is a judgment of prudence, then what would be a judgment of the intellect?’ “‘Well,’ the student replied, ‘if Aristotle is right that the intellect concerns the ultimates, both principles and particulars, then the principle of non-contradiction would have to be one of its judgments, and others ought to have the form “this is a comma,” or “this is force, this mass, and this acceleration,” or “this is Athens, and this Sicily.” These judgments would be a little like definitions, but also different: they wouldn’t say “a comma is a punctuation mark indicating a brief phrase,” or something like that, because that kind of definition is part of the art of writing. Instead, they would be like a cross between definitions and perceptions. The “this” part of “this is a comma” would indicate a sense perception, but the “is a comma” part would be a perception of the intellect.’ “‘Great,’ I said, starting to enjoy myself. Even my cappuccino was tasting better. ‘So let’s agree that we’ve got Aristotle’s meaning right, for the sake of argument. We might think differently if we were to look at the text, but we don’t want to fetch a book and run the risk of being called pedants, do we?’ “This earned me another eye roll. 6 �“‘So now consider this,’ I continued. ‘Aristotle also tells us in the Ethics that the moral virtues come to us through habituation, but the intellectual virtues through teaching. This seems straightforward in the cases of art and science. If you want to learn the art of writing, you visit the writing assistant, or read a style manual, or best of all, read and emulate an excellent writer. If you want to learn the science of physics, then you take a physics class, or do experiments on your own, or read a textbook.’ “‘I can do the next one,’ my student broke in excitedly. ‘If you want to learn prudence, then you hang out with prudent people, or read histories about prudent people, if you can’t find any of them around.’ “‘Aristotle says as much in the Ethics,’ I agreed, after swallowing the last of my coffee. ‘But tell me this. How do we learn intellect? And I’m not thinking now of the ultimates in the sense of first principles, like the principle of non-contradiction – which is discussed in the Metaphysics. How do we learn the ultimate particulars, and get better at knowing them, so as to know better that we’re using them correctly in the judgments made by art, science, and prudence?’ “The student’s expression, which had been open and hopeful since we began talking about Aristotle, began to cloud over. After a pause, she said quietly, ‘I bet you’re going to tell me that the answer is’ – and she said the last word with the same accent – ‘Literature.’ “‘Why not?’ I pressed on. ‘We all probably get our first instruction in the ultimate particulars from the opinions of the people around us – this is a human being, that one is a hero, this one is a valet – but the particulars that we learn this way must be pretty narrow. And we can broaden them by reading history, sure, but the historian is expected to keep to what did happen. Only the poet in Aristotle’s sense can instead write about what could happen, or must have 7 �happened. The poet can purify events so that every detail reflects the philosophic truth; he can write about the rare, extreme cases; and he can supply the internal details that no one has access to, but that must have happened – like the speeches in Thucydides. And by doing all this he can improve our intellects by enriching our sense of the ultimate particulars, to the benefit of all the other intellectual virtues. Maybe this is what people mean when they say – I mean no one says it now, but they’ll probably say it someday – that reading novels makes us more empathetic. Not just that novels make us better disposed toward others, though they can do that, but that they give us a richer sense of others’ inner lives, and make us more nuanced in our judgments about them. And maybe this is why Aristotle says that wisdom is a combination of science and intellect. It’s a combination of philosophy proper and literature.’ “I trailed off, and the student rewarded me with some brief, sardonic applause. ‘Not bad, Mr. Director. I won’t even hold it against you that you mostly talked about what Aristotle thinks. That’s the more dialectical way, isn’t it – to make use of what your opponent acknowledges? But there’s one problem you haven’t addressed, one question that you won’t be able to answer.’ This was the last line on the last page, and there were no more pages to be found. I kicked every other drawer in my desk, to no avail. Then, noting the lateness of the hour, I snatched up the pages that I did have, and went down, out of the cool dark cave of my office, into the hot Maryland sun. There will be three Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: one on Homer’s Iliad, one on Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and The World as Will and Representation, and one on Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. Schedules and meeting places for these groups will be circulated by email soon. Let me encourage you all to 8 �attend the Dean’s Lecture tomorrow night, on another work of literature, titled “Moments in Time: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1,” at 8:00 in the FSK Auditorium. And let me also invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class. The fall 2014 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 2 August 2014 Delivered on 21 August 2014 Note For those philosophic souls who want to investigate what itchy means, and need to look up what a backside is, I offer the following guidance. For the meaning of going down and blushing, see Books 1 and 7 of Plato’s Republic. Aristotle makes his claims about poetry and history at the beginning of Chapter 9 of his Poetics. For beautiful Niraeus, see Iliad Book 2, lines 671-675. The honey and wormwood image is found in On the Nature of Things, Book 1, lines 934-948, and Book 4, lines 10-25. The full title of Rousseau’s Julie is Julie, or the New Héloïse, Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps. “Of pedantry” is the twenty-fifth essay in Book 1 of Montaigne’s Essays. The discussion of art, science, prudence, wisdom and intellect may be found chiefly in Chapters 3 through 8 of Book 6 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle discusses the principle of noncontradiction in his Metaphysics, in Book 4, Chapters 3 through 8, and Book 11, Chapters 5 and 6. Finally, there is a coffee shop on Maryland Avenue. I first met my future wife there, and later her son, to both of whom I dedicate this address. 9 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2014 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-08-21 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Fall_2014_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Fall 2014 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the Literature Segment" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2360a121283e202cb270d9377317f930.pdf a0170f3d4a7e008a94f53c1d2ba848f2 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Summer 2011 What Is Graduate Liberal Education? Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time turn the searchlight of inquiry on ourselves. So I mean to take this occasion to ask: what is graduate liberal education? Now as citizens of, or visitors in, a democracy dedicated not to the achievement of happiness but to its pursuit, everything around us commands us to preoccupy ourselves with means, with procedures, and with methods. We feel a need to apologize for any way in which we might depart from the common run in how we live our lives. Our danger is that an excessive self-concern will place obstacles in our path – obstacles like seminars on seminar, conversations about conversation, questions that ask ‘what is a question?’ – and hide from us the things themselves that ought to be the subject of our studies. My apology, then, is that I mean my remarks this afternoon to be a temporary inoculation against this danger: a short bout of the disease that will leave us, perhaps after some discomfort, with a clear conscience, and in energetic good health. So what is graduate liberal education? It suits this occasion for me to begin with the word ‘graduate.’ This word stands for what binds together all of us here today. Students come to the Graduate Institute at different times in their lives, from different backgrounds, and with different goals. Some mean simply to continue their education, others mean to become better 1 �teachers, and still others mean eventually to pursue more advanced degrees elsewhere. But all come having completed some form of undergraduate education. (The same is true, incidentally, of the tutors, not just in the Graduate Institute, but at St. John’s as a whole.) And yet, notwithstanding this publicly-acknowledged completion, each student and each tutor is brought to the Graduate Institute of St. John’s College by an opposite feeling, one of incompletion: a feeling of need, for example, or a sense that one’s education is not finished, or an anticipation of pleasure at the thought of learning more. To give this feeling of incompletion its due, think of this: while in many quarters it has become a matter of routine expectation that young people will complete an undergraduate degree, this expectation has not yet been extended to the graduate level. The feeling that brings each graduate student to St. John’s, like the sense that brings each tutor here, is not bolstered by routine. To the contrary: many of us pursue our educations here just when the demands of career and family are at their height, and so very much against common expectation. This feeling of incompletion, whatever its form, has from time to time been taken, or rather, mistaken, for a sign that the undergraduate education that precedes it has been a failure. This false inference has in turn even led to the allegation that the program of the Graduate Institute is really a ‘second chance’ at the St. John’s undergraduate program – the Program, as we sometimes call it – and that, in view of its relative brevity, the graduate program is ‘St. John’s lite.’ But this allegation is unjust. It makes just as much sense to claim that, if a St. John’s undergraduate were to say on graduation day that she wished that she could have had a preceptorial on Plato’s Republic, or another chance to work through Euclid’s Elements, then her undergraduate education was a failure. Indeed, it makes just as much sense to claim that, if a St. John’s tutor were to be eager to reread Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for his Politics and 2 �Society tutorial, because he hoped to learn something from his reading, then both his undergraduate and his graduate educations were failures – to say nothing about the time he spent as a tutor at the College. So in the question ‘what is graduate liberal education,’ the word ‘graduate’ does not mean ‘failed undergraduate.’ It means something more affirmative. The best way to get at this more affirmative meaning is to infer what we at St. John’s think ‘graduate’ means from a comparison of the graduate and undergraduate programs. The first differences that come to sight in such a comparison are quantitative. Undergraduates attend four classes a semester for eight semesters; graduates attend three classes a term for four terms. The undergraduate classes are seminars, tutorials, laboratories, and preceptorials; the graduate classes are seminars, tutorials, and preceptorials. Undergraduates have two tutorials a semester, language and mathematics; graduates have one a term, and its content depends on the segment. So with respect to quantity, it does appear that the graduate program is to the undergraduate as shorter is to longer or less to more. But here at St. John’s we know that quantitative measures are laconic, if not wholly mute, unless they are informed by qualitative judgments. And it is the qualitative differences between the graduate and undergraduate programs that begin to shed light on the affirmative meaning of the word ‘graduate.’ Notice that while each of the undergraduate classes, and above all seminar, proceeds roughly chronologically through its readings, over all four years of the program, each of the graduate classes is roughly chronological only within its segment, and more strictly so only within each class. Since the chronological order is the default order in the undergraduate program, adopted when no other ordering theory is at work, the curtailed chronological order of the graduate program is a sign that some other consideration intrudes. That consideration, clearly, is choice. Within certain limits – not every segment is offered every term, and the 3 �History segment must not be taken first – graduate students are allowed to choose the order of their studies. Perhaps more importantly, since the master’s degree is granted after four segments have been completed, graduate students are allowed to choose which segment to omit from their studies. The same consideration informs the place of the preceptorial in the undergraduate and graduate programs. While students in both programs choose their preceptorials from a list of offerings, undergraduates can choose two, and the choice is a privilege reserved for juniors and seniors, whereas graduates can choose four, one for each segment. This qualitative difference, that the graduate program affords more scope for choice, indicates that by ‘graduate’ the College means, in part, someone who can be entrusted with more choices in her education. But why can graduates be entrusted with more choices? And more importantly, to what end is their greater scope for choice? Another qualitative difference between our two programs is helpful here. Notice that, in the place of the undergraduates’ four mathematics tutorials and three labs, the graduates have a mathematics and natural science segment, with a seminar, tutorial, and preceptorial. Only in the tutorial is the liberal art of mathematics cultivated through regular demonstration; the preceptorials for this segment only occasionally involve demonstration or practica. Instead, our graduate students study mathematics and natural science chiefly by reading and discussing great books. Harvey, Newton, and Darwin are read in the undergraduate tutorial or laboratory, but in the graduate seminar. Likewise, in the place of the undergraduates’ four language tutorials and one music tutorial, the graduates have a literature segment, with a seminar, tutorial, and preceptorial. Only in the tutorial, again, are the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic cultivated through the study of poetry and prose. Instead, our graduate students study literature chiefly by reading and discussing great books. More tellingly, in the place of translation, which is the central activity of many semesters of the four language 4 �tutorials of the undergraduate program, our graduate students can choose to take a Greek preceptorial that is ancillary to reading a great book in its original language. More so than in the undergraduate program, in the graduate program most of the classes are centered on the reading and discussion of great books, as distinguished from the cultivation of the liberal arts. The tutorial schedules in each of the five segments show that only in the literature tutorial is there latitude for variations in scheduling and content – variations associated with the cultivation of the liberal arts in the undergraduate tutorials. The strict schedules and settled content of the other four graduate tutorials make them resemble seminars and preceptorials in the graduate, and undergraduate, programs. Indeed, only one of the five segment titles even names a liberal art; the others name fields of study, such as are often used to order books in a bookstore. (I will say something about the dangerousness of our segment titles in a subsequent convocation address.) This comparison of the two programs that express the Program, each of which combines in its own way the study of the great books with the cultivation of the liberal arts, makes the qualitative meaning of their quantitative differences clear. Graduate students at St. John’s College cultivate the liberal arts less than do their undergraduate colleagues, but they can thereby devote proportionately more of their time to a more focused study of the great books of the western tradition. By ‘graduate’ the College means someone who can be entrusted with more choices in his education, because he can be presumed to have cultivated the liberal arts enough in his life to study at the graduate level, and to make good choices of subjects for his study. This, then, is the end of the greater scope of choice afforded to graduate students by the Program: to permit them to focus on a few great books of a few kinds, so as to study them in greater depth, with greater intensity. It is no accident that, while the seminar, as the class in which the liberal 5 �arts are exercised on the great books, is the heart of the undergraduate program, the heart of the graduate program is the preceptorial, as the class in which one or a few great books are read with the greatest focus. So the conclusion, for the moment, of my inquiry – the answer I suggest to my question ‘what is graduate liberal education?’ – is the following: graduate liberal education is not so much the continued cultivation of the liberal arts, as the more focused study of the great books of the western tradition. Of course, like so many other answers to ‘what is?’ questions, this answer is itself a riddle that poses another question: ‘what does it mean to study a great book?’ Common sense tells us, after all, that we study not the books themselves but the things that the books are about, human being and the world. Perhaps it would be better if we could get the books out of our way, and go straight to the things themselves. As an epilogue to my inquiry today, I would like to suggest a solution to this riddle – one that takes seriously the thought that the great books are the things themselves. When we at St. John’s College say that we study books, we mean that we study what is essential about them, rather than what is accidental. In part, this means that we are not primarily concerned with accidents of translation, or edition, or substantiation. The ways in which two translations of the Republic or two editions of the Federalist Papers might differ are only interesting to us insofar as they illuminate what is essential about these books. And it makes no difference to us whether the books are written on parchment, printed on paper, or displayed on an iPad, provided that what is essential shines through. But we are concerned to spend our limited time on certain books, those whose essential content is great. What, then, do we mean by ‘great,’ with respect to books? 6 �At first it might seem that by ‘great’ we mean ‘the cause of great effects.’ This is not a bad way to begin. For how else would we first suspect that a book is great, if not by hearing, among everyone or among all those whom we admire, the opinion ‘this book is great’? And to produce such an opinion among so many or such admirable people is surely to cause a great effect. But it doesn’t take much reflection to see the problem with this view. How do we know that the book in question is really the cause of, that is, really responsible for, this great effect? The difference between the accidental and the essential is helpful here too. We are not interested in books that have great effects by accident – for example, by being misunderstood. Such things are in the territory of the intellectual historian. Rather, we are interested in books that essentially cause great effects. For the same reason, we are not interested in books that fail to have great effects by accident – again, for example, by being misunderstood. Rather, we are interested in books that essentially intend to cause great effects. The objection that books do not strictly speaking have intentions should not confute us. Like every product of human art, a book has an intention only to the extent that the human being who authored it had an intention: the rest is accident. (If your thoughts have just strayed to numberless monkeys and the works of Shakespeare, I encourage you to try the experiment.) If we are interested in books that essentially intend great effects, we are necessarily interested in books whose authors also intended such effects. What we encounter in these great books is their authors preserved and perfected, made young and beautiful. But what is the greatest effect an author can intend? For surely there are effects greater than merely spreading the opinion ‘this book is great.’ Here we are at the heart of the matter. To foster and educate human beings, to help a human type become actual from among those potentials that compose human nature; and, concomitantly, to take what is given to us in some 7 �disorder and illuminate a world, ordered in terms of first and last, foreground and background – this is the greatest effect an author can intend. This, too, is what it means for the great books to be the things themselves: that in the light of the human types they foster and the worlds they illuminate, the things themselves also emerge. The traditional subjects of the liberal arts – the words that are the fundamental beings in grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the magnitudes and multitudes that are the fundamental beings in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy – are first illuminated by the more comprehensive relation of human being and world articulated in a great book. Such books furnish the minds of whole epochs of humankind. Such books, regardless of the genre in which history has shelved them, are all products of their author’s love of wisdom. And so they are worthy of our focused study, here in the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College. I would like to conclude this epilogue by announcing that there will be a study group this term on Machiavelli’s Prince, held on Tuesday afternoons at 2:30 in the Hartle Room, beginning on July 5th. I would also like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class. The summer 2011 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff Black Annapolis, Maryland June 20, 2011 8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2011 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-06-20 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Summer_2011_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is Graduate Liberal Education?" Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/34b284da6cb16649780fc36ca6e13d0b.pdf c2fa92f258e68f6fa862d03d5a63038a PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Summer 2012 What Is Liberal Education? Part I Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by asking ‘what is liberal education?’ Now let me reassure you that I don’t mean to try to answer this question in the next fifteen minutes. My somewhat more modest goal is to divide the question into two parts, and today to ask only ‘what is liberal?’ I mean to save the second part of the question, ‘what is education?,’ for my next convocation address, in the fall 2012 term. Still, this modesty doesn’t get me entirely out of difficulty. For now I find myself asking a ‘what is?’ question about an adjective, ‘liberal’ – as if a quality of beings could itself be a being. Perhaps there is a noun that gives meaning to this adjective? It turns out there could be as many as three. There is a tradition here at St. John’s about this word, ‘liberal,’ that is a helpful place to begin. It dates from the foundation of the New Program in 1937, when Scott Buchanan, the new dean of the College, outlined its Program in a document titled “In Search of a Liberal College.” To introduce his reader to the liberal arts, Buchanan begins with the etymology of ‘liberal,’ which he traces to three different Latin nouns: liber, or book; liberi, or free human beings;1 and liberi, or children. Add a fourth Latin noun – libra, or balance – and a dash of alliterative 1 �whimsy, and you get the College’s motto: facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque, “I fashion free human beings out of children by means of books and a balance.” Let’s leave aside libra, the balance, which stands for laboratory science and which does not have a prominent place in the graduate Program here at the College, and inquire instead into the meaning of ‘liberal’ through the other three words. First: liber, or book. If ‘liberal’ means ‘bookish,’ then the education we pursue here is indeed liberal education, for perhaps even more than those who pursue the undergraduate version of the Program – as I claimed in my convocation address last summer – we in the Graduate Institute learn together chiefly by reading great books and discussing the questions that arise from our reading. Before we congratulate ourselves on our bookish education, though, we should acknowledge that the term ‘bookish’ is pejorative to some. You may have heard the disapproving phrase ‘book smart,’ which is sometimes contrasted to a more approving phrase, like ‘street smart.’ The thought behind these phrases and this contrast is that a bookish education is concerned with things that are unreal, because abstract, or theoretical, or fictional. ‘Street smarts,’ on the other hand, come from lived experience with things that are real, because concrete or practical. The people who use these phrases and make this contrast are probably thinking that only the ‘school of hard knocks’ can equip us for a life well-lived; a liberal, bookish education only equips us for a life well-read. If ‘liberal’ means ‘bookish,’ then, we are compelled by their disapproval to wonder whether a liberal education is what we want. It is fitting to grant in reply that the content of the books we read is abstract, or theoretical, or fictional. We might even be tempted to sharpen the criticism: since we read the great books, what we read about is most abstract, most theoretical, the greatest of fictions. But we should also ask these critics what they mean by ‘real.’ The concrete or practical content of 2 �the real experiences they advocate are deeds, rather than thoughts; ‘put down your books and live a little’ could be their motto. But deeds are accompanied by thoughts, guided by thoughts, and even magnified by thoughts. When we act we often begin by thinking; when we are kept from acting we often argue; and when we are asked why we act, we often give reasons. When we want to act with the assistance of others, we give them reasons. Moreover, every deed aims at a state that is not yet achieved, which is to say, at a fiction. It turns out that the real, if it is characterized by deeds, is shot through both with thought and with fiction. All ‘street smart’ human beings, we might say with a twinkle in our eyes, stretch out toward ‘book smarts.’ Their stretching out is an inadvertent desire for liberal, bookish education. Now we may have convinced our critics that deeds are embroiled with thoughts, and reality with fiction. But isn’t it still the case that a bookish education is somehow more pallid than real life experience? Don’t people read to escape the real world, to evade their responsibilities? We can find a kind of reply to these questions near the end of Plato’s Phaedrus. Having just invented a myth claiming that written speeches are good only as reminders to those who already know – which is to say, that learning cannot come from books – Socrates imagines a different kind of speech, one that is “written with knowledge in the soul of him who understands, with power to defend itself, and knowing how to speak and to keep silent toward those it ought” [276a-b]. He envisions, in other words, a writing that behaves like a living being, a writing the reading of which is like interacting with a living being. The great books that are also our teachers are such writings. Because they are written with knowledge, each time we turn to them they speak to us in a way commensurate with our capacities. If conversation with a living being is a real life experience – as our critics of bookish education would claim – then so too is reading such a writing. Indeed, since they are purged of the mute, the everyday, and the accidental, 3 �reading the great books is more vivid than much of real life experience. Far from being an evasion of the real world and its responsibilities, our liberal, bookish education confronts this world directly and courageously. Let’s turn to the second noun behind the adjective ‘liberal’: liberi, or free human beings. It points to the meaning of liberal education that is perhaps most congenial to us, as participants in a modern liberal democracy: liberal education as education of the free, as education to freedom, as the education that most supports our political regime. But there are complications to this meaning of ‘liberal’ that demand our attention; and it is a principle of education to be most suspicious of what is congenial. First, is liberal education an education of the free, or an education of the unfree to freedom? The great documents of our democracy tell us the former: that we are endowed by our creator with an unalienable right to liberty, which government must secure for us. But our motto tells us the latter: that the College, not the government, makes free human beings – presumably out of those who are not free, despite being citizens of this great republic. The government tells us that we are free to do what we want; but the College tells us that we are not free until we know what we should want. Now St. John’s is supported in this bold claim by one of the greatest of the great books that we read: the Republic of Plato. In that dialogue Plato has his Socrates depict “our nature in its education and want of education” through the image of a cave in which human beings are imprisoned “from childhood” [514a-b]. Human beings may be born free, Socrates’ image tells us, but most or perhaps all of us become unfree as children, and we then need education if we are to become free again. If Socrates’ depiction is right, then a liberal education begins with the realization that we are not free; and the belief that we are free is an obstacle to such an education. 4 �But this complication goes further. In Plato’s dialogue Meno, as we all know, Socrates spends a lot of time trying to get a recalcitrant Meno to offer a satisfying definition of virtue. At one point near the middle of the dialogue, after Meno has evaded Socrates’ demand in a variety of ways, Socrates says that he will let himself be ruled by Meno, “since you don’t even attempt to rule yourself – so that you can be free, I suppose” [86d-e]. By the end of the dialogue, the freedom-loving Meno has learned nothing; the one who has learned the most from Socrates is Meno’s obedient, nameless slave. If Socrates’ diagnosis is right, then liberal education not only requires that we grant that we are not free; it also requires that we give up our desire for freedom. We must become slaves of the speeches, following wherever they lead. Can this be right, though? According to still another meaning of ‘liberal,’ liberal education is education for free human beings, as distinguished from slaves, because it begins by requiring that we have the leisure, the freedom from necessity, to pursue it. This freedom makes liberal education an end in itself; to the extent that education is not an end in itself, to the extent that it is not free from necessity, it is not liberal. This sense of ‘liberal’ reminds us that we diminish liberal education when we talk only about the skills that accompany it, or the careers for which it prepares us. But Socrates’ warning from the Meno about the desire to be free, and about the need for us to rule ourselves, also reminds us that even activities for their own sake are subject to rules, and not simply free from necessity. So how can it be that liberal education, the education that is fitting for free human beings because it alone is for its own sake, nonetheless requires that we acknowledge and accept that we are not free? This brings me to the last of our Latin nouns: liberi, or children. According to our motto, children are the raw material on which the College works, out of which to fashion free human beings. This claim makes some sense for the undergraduate Program, but not for the Graduate 5 �Institute: since we require our students to have earned bachelor’s degrees, we cannot say that they begin with us as children. But there is another respect in which the word liberi, or children, could be applied to graduate students – and perhaps more so than to undergraduates. There is an ancient accusation leveled against inquiry into fundamental questions, one that is at least as old as Plato’s Gorgias: that such inquiry is childish. In that dialogue a young Athenian named Callicles, angered by the claims Socrates makes about justice and punishment, bursts into the conversation with a long speech, during which he tells Socrates that he feels about philosophy the same way he feels about mumbling and playing around childishly: For seeing philosophy in a young lad, I admire it, and it seems to me fitting, and I consider this human being to be a free man, whereas the one who does not philosophize I consider illiberal, someone who will never deem himself worthy of any fine and noble affair. But whenever I see an older man still philosophizing and not released from it, this man, Socrates, surely seems to me to need a beating [485c-d]. We find an echo of the same view in Paul, who writes in his first Letter to the Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” [I Cor. 13:11]. Knowledge or faith about fundamental matters is fitting for an adult; inquiry into fundamental matters is childish. So what are we doing, inquiring at our age? The best response to this accusation of childishness comes from a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It tells of a man named Zarathustra who wants to give his happiness meaning by giving humankind a gift, and so descends from his mountain to the valley and the town below. There he speaks to the townspeople, but he fails to convince them of the value of his gift; so he begins to travel in search of companions, and while travelling he makes a series of speeches. The first of these, spoken during his stay in a town called ‘The Motley Cow,’ is titled “On the Three Metamorphoses.” In it Zarathustra describes three changes 6 �of shape in what he calls “the spirit”: “how the spirit becomes a camel, and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child” [ASZ, 137]. The first metamorphosis, into a camel, occurs when the spirit first wants to bear the most difficult burdens; the second, into a lion, occurs when these burdens force the camel into the loneliest desert, and it must oppose the command ‘thou shalt’ with the demand ‘I will.’ If its opposition is successful, the lion wins freedom for itself, and it can undergo the third metamorphosis, into a child. About this final form of the spirit Zarathustra says: “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’” [ASZ, 139]. With Nietzsche’s help, then, we can correct those who accuse liberal education of being childish, by saying that in its highest form it is instead childlike. Continuing inquiry into fundamental questions is innocent, because it asks ‘what is?’ without regard for the practical consequences, and because it is deaf to the adult demand that its questions be settled for the sake of action. It is forgetting because it sets aside the authoritative answers to its questions. It is a new beginning because it seeks to ask about what is first for human beings, what is given. And perhaps most importantly, childlike education is a game in the highest sense. It combines the freedom from necessity that distinguishes play from work with the willing subjection to necessity that distinguishes play from rest. It combines the camel’s readiness to shoulder the greatest burdens with the lion’s fierce demand that the burdens be of his own choosing. The result is a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’: something that is for its own sake, but that can be yoked to other things, and so give rise to a world. Let this be the conclusion, for now, of this inquiry into ‘what is liberal?’ Liberal education is bookish education, freeing education, childlike education. As education through conversation with the great books, it is the consummation of practice and a courageous 7 �confrontation with what is most real. It is the education of the free who know they are not free into a freedom they do not desire. It is an education that forgets and begins again, that plays at the most serious things, and that thereby gives us a world in which to live. This is liberal; so what, then, is education? I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be a study group this term on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which will meet on Tuesday afternoons, from 3:00 to 4:30, in the Hartle Room, beginning on June 26th. We will read and discuss one act at each meeting. Also, tomorrow at 2:00 there will be a writing workshop, also in the Hartle Room. Lastly, I would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to preceptorial. The summer 2012 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 17 June 2012 Delivered 18 June 2012 Notes 1 Actually, Buchanan wrote liberus, free human being; but I can find no evidence of this substantive form of the adjective liber, or free. 8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2012 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012-06-18 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Summer_2012_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2012 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is Liberal Education? Part I" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fb859f114184725ba710853e19c3fe66.pdf ebc6e86a5bf7a2e7b4950c64f3cfe7e7 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Summer 2014 On the Politics & Society Segment Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time inquire into ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining the readings of the Politics & Society segment. The subject of this convocation address – the fourth of five, each treating one of the segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address, delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names announcing that each segment treats a distinct subject matter. Now I hope to make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title ‘Politics & Society? Before I proceed to answer my own question, I should caution you that the threads I mean to follow for the next few minutes – threads that run through the tutorial and seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected to threads that run through other segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I only insist that these threads are present in the 1 �segment readings, and that they are truly worth following. So again, what are the wonderful questions raised by ‘Politics & Society?’ I hope that you will humor me as I begin, one last time, with what at first looks like the least meaningful element of our segment title: the twisted and enigmatic ampersand. For what brand of ‘and’ does this old-fashioned symbol stand? Does it stand for the ‘and’ of a hendiadys, making ‘Politics & Society’ like ‘might and main’ – a phrase composed of two elements that mean one thing, a phrase that is therefore superfluous and redundant? Or does the ampersand stand for a genuinely additive, and therefore divisive, conjunction – one that links two things perhaps ordinarily found together, like ‘flotsam and jetsam’: the one present by nature, the other by art? Are ‘politics’ and ‘society’ one thing or two? Let’s try to say what each of these words means. ‘Politics’ comes first, and is perhaps the easier of the two. The English word comes to us from the Greek politikē, meaning ‘the things of the polis’: that is, the things of the city, understanding the city as the body of the citizens. One form of this word appears as the title of one of the books that we read in the Politics & Society seminar: Aristotle’s Politics. At the beginning of that book, Aristotle tells us that every city is some sort of community, and every community aims at some apparent good. The community that aims at the most authoritative and comprehensive good, he continues, is called “the city or the political community” [1252a1-6]. In the next chapter, Aristotle clarifies his point. The city is the complete or self-sufficient community, so to speak, such that while it comes into being “for the sake of living,” out of need and fear, “it exists for the sake of living well,” without need and without fear. If the other incomplete and insufficient communities are by nature, like the family, the household, and the village, then this complete and self-sufficient community is also by 2 �nature, as the first to achieve their ends. Evidently, Aristotle concludes, the city exists by nature, and man is by nature a political animal [1252b25-1253a5]. Aristotle picks up this thread at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, which we read first in the Politics & Society tutorial. If politics concerns the partnership whose end is the most comprehensive and authoritative good – presuming that there is such a good – then if there is a science of politics, it will be a science of this most comprehensive and authoritative good [1094a15-1094b]. Everyone agrees that this good is happiness, Aristotle continues [1095a1520], but not everyone agrees on what leads to happiness: some say pleasure, some say political activity, some say contemplation [1095b15-20]. These claims launch him on the main project of the Ethics: to examine pleasure, moral virtue, and intellectual virtue to see to what extent each of these merits the title of comprehensive and authoritative good – and so to what extent each of them is of concern to politics. We find a similar pattern near the beginning of the other Politics & Society seminar text that has a word related to politikē in its title: Plato’s Politeia, better known to us by its Latin title as the Republic. In this book, Socrates’ long defense of the goodness of the virtue of justice begins with the construction of a city in speech, within which he and his companions hope to see both justice and the good that comes of it writ large [369a]. This city begins as a “city of utmost necessity,” composed of four or five men [369e], but under pressure first of the principle of specialization and then of the desire for luxuries, the “city of utmost necessity” balloons, according to Socrates, first into a “healthy city” and then into a “feverish city” [372e]. In the eyes of Glaucon, one of Socrates’ young companions, by contrast, the healthy city is a “city of sows” [372d], and only the feverish city is fit for people “nowadays” [372e]. Socrates and his companions end up seeking justice and its consequences in this feverish city. Once again we see 3 �an investigation of virtue, as a candidate for the comprehensive and authoritative good, against the backdrop of a complete and self-sufficient association, as opposed to an incomplete and insufficient one. (That Socrates and Glaucon seem to disagree about what constitutes sufficiency is only one of the interesting details I’m passing over.) The more familiar Latin translation of politeia, or ‘regime,’ as res publica, or ‘public things,’ helps by reminding us that the regime, constituted by a claim about the authoritative and comprehensive good, is the animating principle of all things public and political, as opposed to private and pre-political. The political realm, we can conclude, is the public realm of authoritative claims about the comprehensive human good. There are several such claims, and politics is their contest with one another for the right to rule. But what, then, is society? The English word ‘society’ comes from the Latin socius, meaning ‘companion.’ Any group of companions, this etymology suggests, constitutes an association, and so a society. Society seems, then, to be the genus of which politics is a species. But the first use of this Latin term in the Politics & Society segment comes in one of the tutorial readings: Aquinas’ “Treatise on Law,” questions 90 through 97 of the first part of the second part of the mammoth Summa Theologica. One occurrence of the term is particularly striking for our purposes. In question 95 article 4, Aquinas asks “Is Isidore’s Division of Human Laws Appropriate?” In his answer he remarks in passing that it is proved, in Book I Chapter 1 of the Politics, that “man is by nature a social animal [animal sociale; emphasis added].” Lest we think that Aquinas takes the political and the social to be synonymous, he continues: “But those things which are derived from the law of nature by way of particular determination belong to the civil right [ius civile] according as each political community [civitas] decides on what is best for itself.” Though Aquinas does not use Latin terms etymologically related to politikē, other than to refer to Aristotle’s Politics, he 4 �does not lack a term to distinguish politics from society: politics is the realm of the civitas, and of civil right. And for someone as familiar with Aristotle as Aquinas clearly was, it’s easy to detect in Aquinas’ distinction between the social and the civil something like Aristotle’s famous distinction in the Ethics between what is just by nature and what is just by convention [1134b171135a5]. By this distinction, Aquinas suggests that the social is the sphere of natural human association, and is governed by natural law, which is the same everywhere. The civil or political, by contrast, is the sphere of conventional associations, and is governed by civil right, which differs from place to place. Two other passages from the Treatise on Law support this interpretation of Aquinas’ meaning. In question 94 article 2, Aquinas asks “Does the Natural Law Contain Several Precepts or One Only?” His answer is that it contains several, and because human beings have “a natural inclination to know the truth about God and to live in society,” two of these precepts are “to shun ignorance, [and] to avoid offending those among whom one has to live.” Later, in question 96 article 2, he asks “Does It Belong to Human Law” – the source of civil right, remember – “to Repress All Vices?” And he answers: human laws do not forbid all vices from which the virtuous abstain but only the more grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained; thus human law prohibits murder, theft, and suchlike. In introducing the idea of society into the Politics & Society readings, and distinguishing this idea from the idea of politics, Aquinas thus redefines the political. It is no longer the public realm of authoritative claims about the comprehensive human good. Rather, it is the realm of conventional legal prohibitions against offense, also known as civil rights, which vary in their particular character from place to place. Instead, society is the realm of authoritative claims about the comprehensive good, based on the natural law. This law is comprehensive because it 5 �pertains to human beings as rational; it is good because all law aims at the common good of those it rules; and it is authoritative because it comes from God. By distinguishing society from politics in this way, Aquinas refounds, and so reorients, the fundamental political question. No longer does the determination of the best regime depend on the adjudication of claims about the best way of life, and so on the investigation of pleasure and the moral and intellectual virtues. Now reason discovers the best way of life in the social dictates of natural law, and politics need only determine which civil rights are required for us to obey these dictates in each case. To a great extent, the political thinkers who come after Aquinas accept this reorientation of the fundamental question. Among the readings in the Politics & Society segment, for example, the first occurrence of the word ‘society’ in English comes, unsurprisingly, in Hobbes’s Leviathan. But listen to how he uses it, in a famous passage that demands to be read in full: Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the Earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short [XIII.9]. Hobbes lists society among those commodious things that only a commonwealth, with its common power, can secure. As his argument develops in subsequent chapters of Leviathan, we learn, as in Aquinas, that reason can discover the best way of life in the social dictates of natural law – dictates such as “seek peace,” and “defend ourselves” [XIV.4] – and that politics need only determine which civil rights are required for us to obey these dictates in each case. But notice Hobbes’s striking innovation on Aquinas. The natural human state is the original human state, 6 �and the original human state is a state of war. Man is not naturally social according to Hobbes; rather, society is always and everywhere the artificial product of the science of politics. The tremendous gravity of the state of war requires a draconian allocation of rights to resist its downward pull: all for the sovereign, and next to none for the subjects. And there is no ground for disagreement with this allocation of rights, since there is no other comprehensive and authoritative human good whose provision will guarantee peace [XI.1]. Though the political thinkers who follow Hobbes, like Locke, Rousseau, and the American founders, disagree about the precise allocation of rights needed to constitute society, they agree that this is the goal of politics: to make naturally asocial human beings social through the political art. In the words of our Declaration of Independence, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.” Time does not permit me to wonder whether one seminar author I have not yet mentioned, Friedrich Nietzsche, also falls into this Thomistic-Hobbesian scheme. Instead, let me close by pointing out some of the implications of the thread I have just followed. First, the difference marked by the ampersand between ‘politics’ and ‘society’ does not correspond to the difference between the readings in the segment’s seminar and tutorial. We do not have a ‘Politics seminar’ and a ‘Society tutorial,’ for example. Instead, the difference between ‘politics’ and ‘society’ in each class seems primarily chronological, corresponding roughly to the difference between the ancient and the modern readings, or perhaps more accurately, to that between the polytheistic and the monotheistic ones. Second, we can now see, I think, some of 7 �the wonderful, terrible questions the segment raises. Is the political realm comprehensive and self-sufficient? If so, are the alternative claims whose contest constitutes that realm – claims on behalf of pleasure, or moral virtue, or intellectual virtue – irreducible alternatives? Or is the political partial and derivative, because it is dependent on some higher social principle, like the natural law, or some more fundamental social principle, like the fear of death? If so, is there one such principle, or many? Finally, if the political is comprehensive but plural, or if it is not comprehensive but depends on plural extra-political principles, does this herald nothing for humanity but ceaseless war? And if, on the other hand, the political is dependent on a single social principle, does this dependence promise peace – and how can we distinguish it from universal tyranny? There will be not one but four Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, on Rousseau’s Social Contract, on the short plays of Samuel Beckett, and on Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Schedules and meeting places for all four of these groups will be circulated by email when they become available. Let me also invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class. And new students are reminded to visit the IT department in the basement of Randall Hall between preceptorial and tutorial to set up their email accounts. The summer 2014 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 16 June 2014 Note For my citations from Aristotle’s Politics, I have used the Second Edition of Carnes Lord’s translation. Citations from his Nicomachean Ethics are from Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins’s translation. My citations from Plato’s Republic are from Allan Bloom’s translation, also in its Second Edition. For Aquinas I used the translation found in the Hackett collection titled On Law, Morality, and Politics. And for Hobbes’s Leviathan, I used the Curley edition, also published by Hackett, which modernizes Hobbes’s spelling and punctuation. 8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2014 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-06-16 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Summer_2014_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2014 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the Politics & Society Segment" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3f3d9ae3e993fc35d4b34a6b6d22e128.pdf df296ffba96b91cf8f796dce9d3fd303 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Spring 2012 What Is a Segment? Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time turn the searchlight of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by looking at the graduate program, and asking ‘what is a segment?’ It is easy to be at a loss in the face of such a ‘what is?’ question, since it is not clear that a segment is one of the beings. Rather, ‘segment’ is the conventional name we give to the parts of the graduate program here at St. John’s, of which there are five: Philosophy & Theology, Politics & Society, Mathematics & Natural Science, Literature, and History. These segments can be taken in almost any order, though the History segment cannot be taken first; and completing four of five segments entitles the student to a Master’s of Arts in Liberal Arts. Given that the name ‘segment’ is a convention, we might at first think that the question ‘what is a segment?’ is an empty one: couldn’t these things just as well have been called parts of the graduate program? But once we recognize that the undergraduate expression of the St. John’s Program does not have segments – its parts are either the four years, freshman to senior, or the four classes, seminar, tutorial, preceptorial, and laboratory – we see that the name ‘segment’ marks something distinctive about the graduate expression of the Program. 1 �So the question ‘what is a segment?’ becomes something like ‘what were they thinking when they called the parts of the graduate program – parts in some sense other than the sense in which the different classes are parts – segments?’ And now we are not without resources, for we can ask more generally, ‘what do people mean when they use the word segment?’ The word means ‘part,’ certainly; but more strictly it means a part which has been, or can be, cut from a whole. A segment, in other words, is not a natural part, the way a finger is part of a hand, or a hand part of a human body. Rather, a segment is a part by violence: something that, were it not for the cutting, we might not see as a part at all. The particularly geometrical meaning of the term makes the need for cutting more clear. In definition six of Book Three of his Elements, Euclid tells us that “a segment [τµῆµα: the word means a part cut off] of a circle is the figure contained by a straight line and a circumference of a circle.” From this we get our more modern geometrical uses of the term, such as in the phrase ‘line segment,’ which means a part cut off by two points from an infinite, or at least endless, straight line. These particularly geometrical uses of the word ‘segment’ have two features in common. First, the part is a segment because it must be cut off from the whole to be distinguished as a part; and this is so because the whole is a homogeneous magnitude: a finite area in the case of the circle, and an infinite length in the case of the straight line. The homogeneity of the magnitude means that it has no natural parts, and that any part of it can be distinguished as a part by cutting. Second, the segment so distinguished, because of the homogeneity of its whole, can suffice as an indication of the whole. Given a straight line segment, we can produce it in both directions, or remove its endpoints, to find the whole modern straight line. And given any segment of a circle, no matter how small, we can find the whole circle too. 2 �Could these two intimations of the geometrical meaning of ‘segment’ hold true for the term as we use it in the graduate program? In calling its parts ‘segments,’ that is, could the intention have been to intimate that the graduate program is a homogeneous whole, cut arbitrarily into parts, each of which points back to the whole? I think the answer to these questions is ‘yes.’ Despite appearances, the graduate program here at St. John’s is a homogeneous whole – as is the undergraduate program, incidentally – and its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. To be convinced of this view, we need to look into, and try to see through, several other conventional terms that stand in our way. Chief among these are the names we give to the segments and to our classes. The names of our classes are easier to overcome, so let’s begin with them. I hope it will surprise no one here to learn that our seminars are not restricted to seminarians, nor are they literally seed-plots; nor do we bring in preceptors – that is, commanders or instructors – to teach our preceptorials; nor are we called tutors – that is, watchers or guardians – because our charges have not yet reached the age of legal majority. Despite their evocative names, our classes differ mainly in size, in the number of tutors and students in each. The activity of each, the pursuit through conversation of answers to fundamental questions, is the same; and even though in some tutorials the demonstration of mathematical propositions or the analysis of poetry is the chief technique, nothing in principle prevents a preceptorial or even a seminar from reading a text closely, or attending to a demonstration at the board. Even the composition of each segment out of a seminar, a tutorial, and a preceptorial is not a matter of necessity – though it is, I hasten to add, a matter of strict policy. While there are practical reasons to entrust a smaller class with the tasks of demonstration in the Mathematics & Natural Science tutorial, and analysis in the Literature 3 �tutorial, it is not as clear that the readings of the Politics & Society, Philosophy & Theology, or History tutorials could not be assigned to a seminar, nor that the seminar readings from these segments would be ill-suited to a tutorial. There is nothing about Plato’s Republic, for example, that suits it to be discussed by twenty people, nor about Hobbes’s Leviathan that suits it to sixteen. We can even make much the same claim about preceptorials: that all of our seminar and tutorial books are worthy of the intense scrutiny of a preceptorial, and that only practical considerations should bar us from including our preceptorial books in the seminar and tutorial reading lists. The reason why our segments do in fact consist of a seminar, a tutorial, and a preceptorial seems mostly to have to do with our judgment that each segment should consist of a required and an elective component: the elective component is the preceptorial, while the required component is shared between the seminar and the tutorial, in various ways, depending on the segment. Sometimes the ampersand marks the division of labor: in the Philosophy & Theology segment we have a largely-philosophy tutorial and a largely-theology seminar; in the Mathematics & Natural Science segment it is the tutorial that takes mathematics, and the seminar natural science. But sometimes this is not the case. If there really is such a thing as society, it is not clear whether the Politics & Society seminar or tutorial treats it more fully. Where there is no ampersand in the segment title, by contrast, the division of labor between the seminar and tutorial is that the seminar in some fashion takes the ancients and the tutorial the moderns. The Literature seminar is unapologetically Hellenic, while the tutorial handles the rest of literature. The History seminar reaches as late as Gibbon among its authors, but as late as the fall of the Roman Empire among its subjects; the tutorial picks up with Augustine and the rise of Christianity. 4 �I hope this is enough to convince you that the different names we give to our classes – seminar, tutorial, and preceptorial – are no barrier to understanding the graduate program as homogeneous. The names we give to our segments, on the other hand, present more of a challenge. Everywhere we look in higher education today, we see these names and similar ones written above the majors and departments: Philosophy, Theology, Political Science, Sociology, Mathematics, Physics, Literature, and History. But we should not infer from our adoption of such titles for our segments that we agree with the thinking that leads to majors and departments. Elsewhere, the title of a major often amounts to a compressed, predetermined answer to a series of predetermined questions. It tells students what they will be studying, and sometimes even what kind of profession they will have when they are done. It asserts the existence of the kinds of beings that the discipline studies, that they are somehow knowable, and that they are worth knowing. Perhaps most importantly, it reassures students about what they will be doing when they study: physics majors can evade essays, and philosophy majors escape problem sets. For us, by contrast, the titles of our segments should stand as compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder that is the opposite of reassuring. Is there such a thing as a life lived under the sole guidance of reason, or under the authority of revelation – and ought we to think that one or the other of these lives can make us happy? Is there a distinct realm of politics, or does it always reduce to philosophy or to theology? Are there beings that are characteristically knowable, and if so, what sort of beings are they? Are the natural beings among these beings, and so knowable as well? Is there a place for poetry or music in a happy life, and do they provide something that reason and revelation cannot? Is there such a thing as history, does it involve novelty or progress, and will it end? We must not take these titles that we use merely to name the segments – numbering them would also have been confusing – as 5 �grounds for thinking that we know in advance what sort of questions and answers can be asked and given in our classes, and hence that we know in advance the limits of what we might learn. Now to say that each of our segment titles points to a fundamental question is not yet to show that the graduate program is homogeneous, nor that it is a whole. Could there not be a series of fundamental questions, perhaps even an infinite series, each of which has nothing to do with the other, and so each of which indicates and demarcates its own field of inquiry? I can almost imagine such a series; but as soon as I require that these questions have nothing to do with one another, they cease to be meaningful to me as questions. Our experience in preceptorial, the experience that some of you will soon have for the first time, gives good guidance here. Most of the preceptorials offered this term count toward all three of the term’s segments: Philosophy & Theology, Politics & Society, and History. And yet very few of the fundamental and interesting questions asked in these preceptorials will present themselves exclusively as philosophical, theological, political, or historical questions. It will occur neither to students nor to tutors, while pursuing these questions, that there are certain directions the conversation cannot take because a disciplinary boundary would be crossed. And it will not be evident which segment each student is taking, from the tendency of his or her remarks to reside in one discipline or another. To the contrary: while the interesting and fundamental questions we pursue in our classes can originate in the concerns of many, perhaps infinitely many, disciplines, as interesting they all indicate a relation between the thing asked about and us, the questioners and answerers; and as fundamental they all point to the central questions of what we are as questioning and answering beings, and how we should live. So it is precisely the interesting character of the questions indicated by our segment titles, and pursued in our classes, that indicates the wholeness of the Program in both its undergraduate and graduate expressions – and 6 �in doing so, indicates the problematic and aspirational wholeness of the human being. And similarly it is precisely the fundamental character of these questions that indicates the problem that we are, the human problem that constitutes the Program’s homogeneity. What, then, is a segment? For us, here in the Graduate Institute, a segment is three classes in which we read great books, gathered under a title which is meant to provoke interesting and fundamental questions, all of which point back to the first and characteristic question for a human being: ‘how should I live?’ I do not mean by this conclusion to deny that certain questions are more likely to be pursued in the classes of one segment than in those of another; in the Mathematics and Natural Science tutorial, for example, we would be remiss if we did not discuss Euclid’s definition of a straight line, whereas this definition is not a frequent topic of conversation in the Literature seminar. But I do mean to insist that our segment titles, and the segments themselves, ought not to be taken as signs of deep differences, natural kinds, among the books that we read and the questions that we ask. The St. John’s program is a whole, not a heap. But why this insistence? Why ask ‘what is a segment?’ Just as graduate students have a special practical need for a segmented program, since the pace and order of their studies are not as regular as those of undergraduates, they also run special risks once the segments have names, as ours do. For some of you may already have studied, may have degrees in, may even have advanced degrees in disciplines that share the names of our segments. I insist on the questionableness of these names in part to point out that no matter your previous education, you haven’t done this before. Our task in our classes is to make the most familiar books and authors unfamiliar and newly challenging. I also insist on the questionableness of our segments’ names to discourage the practice of worrying about which segments to take, and in which order. While 7 �it is respectable to have reasons to want to read particular books by particular authors, we should keep in mind that what we find in the pages of every great book is human being, and human being more wonderful, and less reassuring, than we can imagine. I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be a study group this term on Shakespeare’s Roman plays: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. We will read Titus Andronicus during the summer term. This term, the group will meet on Thursday afternoons, from 3:30 to 5:30, in the Hartle Room, beginning on January 19th. Watch your email accounts for a schedule of readings. I would also like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial. The spring 2012 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland January 4, 2012 Delivered January 9, 2012 8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2012 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012-01-09 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Spring_2012_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2012 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Segment?" Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/21728bc8e5804ac1e4ba9f33090e4138.pdf 3422446ae400052799a58cfa00cf3282 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Spring 2013 On Liberal Education as a Commodity “Education is the only commodity that people are willing to pay for and not receive.” I don’t know how this maxim strikes you, but I remember vividly how it struck me, as a young undergraduate sitting in an introductory economics lecture: with the shocking combination of strangeness and rightness that is the sign of a new truth. The circumstances which led my professor to pronounce this maxim have faded from my memory: perhaps he was peeved that his lecture was ill-attended, or perhaps he was dismayed at his students’ poor performance on a recent exam. But the force of the maxim has not faded for me, over the intervening quarter-century. It seemed then, and it still seems now, to capture almost perfectly the puzzling combination on the part of most human beings of an eagerness to be educated, and an unwillingness to do what is needed to become educated. Hence, “education is the only commodity that people are willing to pay for and not receive.” Reflecting on my professor’s maxim from the perspective of the graduate and undergraduate Programs at St. John’s, it’s easy to say that things here are different. And justice demands that we acknowledge that, with respect to this maxim, things indeed are different at the College. We have no ‘ten-minute rule,’ for example – no mythical rule that claims to determine how long students are obliged to wait after the beginning of a class for a late professor to arrive, before they are within their rights to disperse. To the contrary, one of the most concrete implications of our saying that the great books, not the tutors, are the teachers here at the College is that our classes begin on time, whether the tutor is present or not. The tutors assist students 1 �with their learning, and they witness this learning; but their presence is neither necessary nor sufficient for learning to take place. And this is as it should be: for ‘ten-minute rules’ and similar legalistic evasions are fundamentally thoughtless. From the perspective of learning, either what a professor has to say is likely to be helpful, or it is not. If the former, then one should be willing to wait as long as is reasonable, and surely longer than ten minutes; if the latter, then why wait that long – indeed, why come to class at all? So we should acknowledge that students at St. John’s, and perhaps especially graduate students at the College, become members of this community of learning because they are willing to do what is necessary to learn, and so to receive the education that they have paid for. But justice also demands that we press beyond this moment of self-congratulation, to see as clearly as we can how we relate to our education, as graduate students and as tutors here at St. John’s. Can we really say – speaking as students, for example – that we have never chosen to cut a class, nor wished that we could do so, for the sake of some other activity that, if pressed, we would acknowledge has less likelihood of educating us? Can we really say that we have never forgone the opportunity to work on an essay for the sake of some apparently more pressing or pleasant activity, in the vague hope that there will be time enough to write the essay later? Or, speculating more cautiously, from the perspective of a tutor, isn’t learning at St. John’s sometimes like being forced to consume a delicious meal at gunpoint? Sure, we all love to read Plato, or Aristotle, or Rousseau, or Nietzsche – but must we do so right now? And must we rush to be finished by 7:15, and ready with our opening question? Certainly some of the feeling of constraint that comes with education is due to our membership in a community of learning, with all the compromise and limitation that entails. But could there be something about learning 2 �itself, about education itself, that makes perhaps even the most willing and self-selecting among us seek to evade its demands? My professor’s maxim is helpful here, by framing its insight in the language of economics. It begins, “Education is the only commodity…,” and it acquires its force with the concluding image of a thoughtless consumer who pays for this commodity but neglects to receive it. But is education a commodity? My economics textbook from that same introductory class defines a commodity as “any item of use to a consumer or producer.” And though it is fashionable, especially in our circles, to say that a liberal education above all is not useful in this way – it is, rather, for its own sake – this seems to me to go too far. None of us would be here if we suspected that becoming liberally educated would make no difference to our lives, or that it would change them for the worse. Each of us hopes that education will change us for the better; this is its use. For this reason, education is a commodity: it is an item that both producer and consumer agree is of use, and that they try to price based on their mutual sense of its usefulness. But education differs from other commodities in one crucial respect: it is the only commodity about which its producer and its consumer necessarily disagree about what the commodity itself is. The reason for this disagreement is straightforward. To desire education, one must lack it, and know that one lacks it. But to lack education means to be ignorant to some extent of what it means to be educated – which also means to have opinions about education that are to some extent mistaken. Conversely, to provide education one must be educated, and know what it means to be educated. Therefore there is a necessary misunderstanding between those who would ‘produce’ education and those who would ‘consume’ it, as to exactly what is being produced and consumed. Now economists are familiar with versions of this misunderstanding that arise by accident with other commodities. Consumers might be unaware of the supply of a 3 �commodity, or of the demand for it in neighboring markets, and so they might end up paying a price that is too high or too low. Such misunderstandings are inefficiencies in the operation of the market that should be removed by better communication. But only in the case of education, I would submit – and especially the most comprehensive kind of education, liberal education – is it impossible to remove such misunderstandings in advance, because the understanding of the commodity is the commodity. This is what makes it possible for the hapless student in my professor’s maxim to pay for an education that he does not receive. The student pays for an education that he wrongly understands in terms of grades and a degree, and he fails to receive the education that his professor rightly understands in terms of the more comprehensive insight that comes only with long labor. I hope it is by now clear that the puzzle that I raised with my professor’s maxim, and pursued using the language of economics, is really the same puzzle about learning that arises in Plato’s dialogue Meno. In perhaps the most famous of his many attempts to evade the labors Socrates is trying to impose on him, Meno – the ‘poster child’ for those who pay for their education but fail to receive it – makes the following claim: it makes no sense to labor to learn what one does not know. Either one knows a thing fully, Meno reasons, in which case there is no need to learn it; or one does not know a thing at all, in which case there is no way to learn it. For how would you begin to learn, let alone finish learning, something of which you are utterly ignorant? Socrates’ solution to Meno’s evasive puzzle is to insist that there is a condition other than either knowing or not knowing: a mixed condition in which we have opinions about the things that are, some of which are true, and some false. This mixed condition is the human condition, according to Socrates: no human being ever finds himself on either horn of Meno’s dilemma, 4 �either knowing something fully, or being utterly ignorant of it. And as the dialogue continues, Socrates is able to explain on the basis of this mixed condition how it is that human beings learn: by juxtaposing our opinions with one another and with the things in the world, we first come to know in a determinate way what it is that we do not know, and then – often with the help of a teacher – we learn these things, to the extent that human beings can know them. Socrates’ name for this human kind of learning is ‘recollection.’ What I have said so far about the Socratic doctrine of recollection in the Meno is commonplace, and overlooks several interesting details. But there is a less commonplace connection between the doctrine of recollection and another famous Socratic doctrine, advanced in the Republic: the doctrine of the well-born falsehood, or the noble lie. Socrates introduces this falsehood into his conversation about the best regime because he needs it, to give all the citizens of the regime – or failing that, at all the citizens but the rulers – a natural attachment to their city and to the land on which it is built, as well as a pious attachment to the city’s caste system. Now the language of the falsehood is language that Socrates earlier calls tragic, and associates with the style of Gorgias. (Interestingly, it is also language for which Socrates’ interlocutor at the time, Glaucon, has no taste.) It replaces things that are simple and knowable with things that are complex and mysterious: the rearing and education of the citizens, for example, become their fashioning beneath the earth, and the discernment by the rulers of the virtues of the citizens becomes their discernment of metals placed within the citizens by a god. These replacements make the falsehood persuasive, and the attachment of the citizens to their regime more firm. But in the Meno, Meno himself is said to be a lover of tragic language, which is associated there too with Gorgias. Meno also prefers the complex and mysterious to the simple and knowable: a definition of color, for example, as “an emanation of shapes commensurate with sight and hence 5 �subject to perception,” rather than a definition of shape as “that which alone of the beings happens always to accompany color.” And in that dialogue, Socrates also comes up with a wellborn falsehood, one that makes use of Meno’s preferred, tragic language to describe our mixed human condition, and to claim on the basis of this condition that learning is possible. I take this connection between the falsehoods of the Republic and the Meno – their common use of tragic language – to indicate the following. First, where important matters are concerned, we are all to some degree resistant to learning. Our resistance comes from our attachment to opinions that make us feel that we know more than we do. Learning always feels to us at first like losing something; and losing something hurts. This pain marks the distance between the learner and the teacher, and explains why they necessarily misunderstand one another. But second, and more hopefully, wise teachers can use the very source of our resistance to learning – our faith that we already know what is most important for us to know – to encourage us to endure the pain of learning, and to face this pain again and again. One consequence of these claims is that our teachers and administrators should not be ashamed to speak of a liberal arts education as a commodity. Not only is this required in order to be understood in our commercial society, in which as many things as possible have their price; it is also recommended as a way of encouraging students to learn. There is something tragic in the claims that a liberal arts education will produce skills in speaking, writing and thinking; or that it will prepare students for the workplace of the future; or that it will guarantee a lucrative career; or that it will produce better citizens of a democracy; or that it will make students happy – something tragic, and so something false. But these are well-born falsehoods: they are false only because they are partial, they resemble the truth, and they do more good than harm. 6 �Lastly, the members of our community should not be ashamed to speak in this way because this is how the great books have always spoken to their readers: by knowing how to speak and how to keep silent when they ought; by knowing just what to say. In his greatest work, Emile, about the education of an imaginary child, Rousseau tells a beautiful story in this vein about one such great book: Plutarch’s Lives. A young boy who has just read the “Life of Alexander” is made by his foolish teacher to babble at a dinner party about the episode in which Alexander dares to drink a potion given him by his friend Philip – despite having just received intelligence that Philip means to poison him. This intelligence turns out to be false, and Alexander lives; but the guests at the party disagree about whether Alexander’s action is courageous, or foolhardy. “After the dinner,” Rousseau writes, suspecting, on the basis of several bits of evidence, that my young doctor had understood nothing at all of the story he had told so well, I took him by the hand and went for a turn in the park with him. Having questioned him at my ease, I found that more than anyone he admired Alexander’s much-vaunted courage. But do you know in what he found this courage to consist? Solely in having swallowed at a single gulp a bad-tasting potion, without hesitation, without the least sign of repugnance. The poor child, who has been made to take medicine not two weeks before, and who had taken it only after a mighty effort, still had its aftertaste in his mouth. Death and poisoning stood in his mind only for disagreeable sensations; and he did not conceive, for his part, of any other poison than [medicine]. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the hero’s firmness had made a great impression on the boy’s young heart, and that, at the next medicine he would have to swallow, he had resolved to be an Alexander. Without going into clarifications which were evidently out of his reach, I confirmed him in these laudable dispositions. I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be five Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term. Two will meet on Monday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:00, beginning on January 14th: one on Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and one on three of Shakespeare’s plays: All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. A third group, on the French language, will meet on Mondays from 3:30 to 5:00, but beginning on January 21st. A group will meet on Thursday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:00, beginning on January 10th, to read 7 �the last part of Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human, and the whole of Dawn. And a group will meet on Friday afternoons from 4:00 to 6:00, beginning on January 18th, to read Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures. Schedules for these groups will be circulated by email. Also, I would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial. Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. The spring 2013 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 4 January 2013 Delivered 7 January 2013 Note Those who would like to see just how many interesting details I have overlooked should consider Meno 75b-77b and 80d-81e in comparison with Republic 413a-415d. The story about Alexander taking his medicine can be found near the middle of Book Two of Emile. 8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2013 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-01-07 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Spring_2013_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On Liberal Education as a Commodity" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d7a436da44840d74aefb8bce0a66dae6.pdf 4d4a0f08bdcde0e877ae64d19889a937 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Spring 2014 On the History Segment Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time inquire into ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining the readings of the History segment. The subject of this convocation address – the third of five, each treating one of the segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address, delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names that determine the distinct subject matter treated by the readings in each segment. Now I hope to make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title ‘History’? Before I proceed to answer my own question, I should caution you that the threads I mean to follow for the next few minutes – threads that run through the tutorial and seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected to threads that run through other segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I only insist that these threads are 1 �present in the segment readings, and that they are truly worth following. So again, what are the wonderful questions raised by ‘History’? Those of you who recall my procedure in my last two convocation addresses will be relieved to see that this time, our segment title contains no ampersand, and so makes no questionable claim that two things are properly understood as one. But the required portion of the history segment is still divided into a seminar and a tutorial; so we can wonder about the principle of this division. In the History seminar, we read the Books of Samuel and Kings from the Hebrew Scriptures, Herodotus’ Histories, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, several of Plutarch’s Lives, Tacitus’ Annals, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; in the tutorial we read parts of Augustine’s City of God, Vico’s New Science, Kant’s Idea for a Universal History and Contest of Faculties, Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Marx’s German Ideology, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life by Nietzsche, Husserl’s Vienna Lecture, and Heidegger’s Age of the World Picture. Were it not for the puzzling presence of the interloper Gibbon, who wrote in the eighteenth century CE, around the same time as Kant, we could conclude that the division between the seminar and the tutorial, like the organization of many classes in our graduate and undergraduate programs, is chronological by author. But Gibbon’s membership among the History seminar authors suggests that the division between seminar and tutorial is actually chronological by subject – by time period depicted historically. In Samuel and Kings we read of events that are to have happened before the tenth century BCE, and the seminar readings extend from there to the portions of Gibbon that we read, which cover events in the first and second century CE. The tutorial readings pick up with Augustine, who wrote in the fifth century CE, and run through to Heidegger’s attempt to characterize the historical spirit of the twentieth century. 2 �There’s something to this interpretation of the division between seminar and tutorial, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. For as soon as we turn to examine the subjects of the tutorial authors, we discover that they don’t concern themselves with historical events later than those treated by the seminar authors, but with all historical events, with history as a whole. To steal some terms from the titles of their respective works, the seminar authors write Inquiries into particular events – the Greek word ἱστορία, whence we get the word history, means inquiry – whereas the tutorial authors write Universal Histories, or Philosophies of History. The beginnings of the first readings in each class exemplify this difference. I Samuel begins simply, artlessly, in the middle of things: “And there was a man…” [I Samuel 1:1]. The City of God, by contrast, begins: Most glorious is the City of God: whether in this passing age, where she dwells by faith as a pilgrim among the ungodly, or in the security of that eternal home which she now patiently awaits until ‘righteousness shall return unto judgment’, but which she will then possess perfectly, in final victory and perfect peace [Book 1, Preface]. The former work begins with a particular, a man; the latter by looking back to the whole passing age and forward to the perfect end of eternity. Perhaps we have discovered an ampersand in our segment title after all, and this difference between the seminar and tutorial readings ought to lead us to call the segment ‘Inquiry & Universal History,’ or just ‘History & History.’ To get a better sense of the causes and extent of this difference, let’s let more of the History segment authors speak for themselves. Here’s how Herodotus begins his book: Here is the showing-forth of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that neither what human beings have done might disappear in time, nor the deeds great and admirable, partly shown forth by the Greeks and partly by the barbarians, might be without fame: his inquiry shows forth both other things and through what cause they warred against one another [Book I, 1]. Herodotus inquires into the deeds of human beings, and in particular into the great and admirable deeds of Greeks and barbarians, for the sake of memory and fame, and for the sake of knowledge 3 �of causes. The deeds in question – which are chiefly deeds done in war – are worthy of memory and fame, and knowledge of their causes is worth possessing, because they are great and admirable, with a greatness not solely Greek, nor barbarian, but human. Likewise, Thucydides begins thus: Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation. Indeed, this was the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world – I had almost said of mankind. For though the events of remote antiquity, and even those that more immediately precede the war, could not from lapse of time be clearly ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried as far back as was practicable lead me to trust, all point to the conclusion that there was nothing on a greater scale, either in war or in other matters [I.1.1-3]. Thucydides also justifies his inquiry by the human greatness to be discovered in the event, another war, into which he inquires. This view, that history means inquiry into particular events that disclose a lasting human greatness, and so are worth remembering, runs through the readings of the History seminar. Plutarch modifies it in his “Life of Alexander,” but only to insist that lasting human greatness is not necessarily seen only in war: “For it is not histories that I am writing,” he says, “but lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities” [I.1]. And Tacitus modifies this view in his Annals, but only to insist that partisan passions distort inquiries into lasting human greatness, which must be dispassionate to be worthy of memory: The Roman people of old, however, had their successes and adversities recalled by brilliant writers; and to tell of Augustus’ times there was no dearth of deserving talents, until they were deterred by swelling sycophancy. The affairs of 4 �Tiberius and Gaius, as of Claudius and Nero, were falsified through dread while the men themselves flourished, and composed with hatred fresh after their fall. Hence my plan is the transmission of a mere few things about Augustus and of his final period, then of Tiberius’ principate and the remainder – without anger and partiality, any reasons for which I keep at a distance [I.1.2]. In the History seminar it is only with Gibbon, writing sixteen hundred years after Tacitus, but about the same events, that a deep challenge to this view of history first comes to light. In Chapter XV of the first volume of Decline and Fall, our last seminar reading, Gibbon turns to “a candid but rational inquiry into the progress of Christianity,” which he holds to be an essential part of the history of the Roman Empire. But here Gibbon confronts a problem. The Tacitean law of dispassion – what Gibbon calls “the great law of impartiality” – requires the historian to confess the imperfections of the believers in the Christian revelation; but faith in its divine origin requires the historian to profess the perfection of this revelation. “Our curiosity,” Gibbon writes, is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth. To this inquiry an obvious but satisfactory answer may be returned; that it was owing to the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its great Author. But as truth and reason seldom find so favorable a reception in the world, and as the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose, we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission, to ask, not indeed what were the first, but what were the secondary causes of the rapid growth of the Christian church [487-488]? According to Gibbon, then, the belief in divine providence poses a deep challenge to the view that history is an inquiry into the natural causes of lasting human greatness. This challenge is so deep that Gibbon is forced to invent a distinction between the first, divine causes of the growth of Christianity, and the secondary, human causes of this growth. The historian, as distinguished from the theologian, is restricted to the study of these secondary causes. But we might wonder, given the extent of divine power, whether these secondary causes are in fact necessary, and whether, if they are unnecessary, they are in fact causes. 5 �This view of history, as the record of divine providence, extends throughout the readings of the History tutorial, and distinguishes these readings from those of the seminar. It is found in explicitly religious form in Augustine, who writes, the City of God of which we speak is that to which the Scriptures bear witness: the Scriptures which, excelling all the writings of all the nations in their divine authority, have brought under their sway every kind of human genius, not by a chance motion of the soul, but clearly by the supreme disposition of providence [XI.1]; and it is found in more secular forms in the works we read by Vico, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Vico envisions a “new Science [that] must therefore be a demonstration, so to speak, of what providence has wrought in human history” [section 342], while Kant writes in his Idea for a Universal History, “the history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature” to perfect the natural capacities of mankind [Eighth Proposition], so that history thus understood is a “justification of nature – or rather perhaps of providence” [Ninth Proposition]. For his part, Hegel grandly offers a Philosophy of History that is guided by “the simple conception… that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process” [9] – a conception that consorts with the belief that “a Providence (that of God) presides over the events of the World” [13]. And Marx sees history as a necessary dialectic of material conditions, ending in a heaven on earth where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic [53]. You may already have noticed, even from these brief indications, that a strange note has crept in to these developments of the view that history is the record of divine providence. Since this view of history is based on the Christian scriptures, and these scriptures give an account of 6 �the world from its beginning in God’s creation to its end in God’s kingdom, the histories animated by this view are necessarily universal as well as providential. Accordingly, every tutorial author that we have so far mentioned takes as his subject human history as a whole. Moreover, since the Christian scriptures tell the story of the fall of man and promise his eventual redemption from sin, these universal histories are necessarily progressive: each points to an image of some perfect human end, whether in this world or in the next. But to the extent that these universal providential histories are also held to be rational, strange conclusions result. Vico, for example, struggles to preserve the eternal necessity of his science in the face of the historical contingency of providence. “Since [human] institutions have been established by divine providence,” he writes, “the course of the institutions of the nations had to be, must now be, and will have to be such as our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were born from time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case” [section 348]. In the Contest of Faculties, Kant points to the French Revolution as evidence that the human race will enjoy continual progress [section 7]. Hegel goes so far as to say that history teaches that “the real world is as it ought to be” [36], while Marx makes human nature depend on the material conditions that determine production [42]. In short, the attempt to transform the mysterious operation of providence into a rational process, visible in history, compels the universal historian to equate what is at each moment with what is best at that moment, and so to deny that there is such a thing as lasting human greatness, into which we can inquire. Of our tutorial authors, Friedrich Nietzsche is the first to call into question the aspirations of universal history, by subordinating history and its scientific truths to the standard of life. Husserl and Heidegger follow Nietzsche in this, each in his own way. But I shall pass over how these thinkers accomplish this, so that my convocation address not be as long as human history 7 �itself. I will only say that, in subordinating history to another standard – whether it be life, or the infinite task of philosophy, or the disclosure of being – it is by no means clear that these thinkers return to the ancient view of history as an inquiry into natural events that disclose a lasting human greatness. But from this conclusion to the tutorial readings, at least one of the wonderful questions raised by the history segment should be clear. Is history an inquiry into lasting human greatness, or is it the record of a necessary progress that denies the possibility of such greatness? Since the second of these alternatives especially claims the name ‘History’ for itself, this wonderful question could also be put thus: is there such a thing as ‘History’? Lastly, it should also be clear, from everything that is at stake in this question, why, of all the segments in the graduate program, Graduate Institute students are prohibited from taking the History segment first. By basing our program almost entirely on the reading and discussion of great books, we depend, perhaps more than members of any other community of learning, on the belief that there is such a thing as lasting human greatness. To conclude, let me announce that there will be five Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: on Plato’s Republic, on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, on Arabic poetry, on Greek tragedy, and on Richard Feynman’s Quantum Electrodynamics. Schedules and meeting places for all five of these groups will be circulated by email when they become available. Let me also invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class. The spring 2014 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 14 December 2013 Delivered 6 January 2014 8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2014 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-01-06 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Spring_2014_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2014 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the History Segment" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3ca114bffc2ee795a3834076ee9bc9c9.pdf 8bae7618cb3712fb8b020decca52ce6a PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Spring 2015 What Is a Tutor? (Or, On the Future of Our Educational Institution) Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. For the past eleven terms, in just as many convocation addresses, I have tried to shed light on various aspects of the graduate program here at St. John’s. But in this, my twelfth and final address as Associate Dean for the Graduate Program, I mean to shine the light of inquiry closer to home – at the risk of doing what Coriolanus refused to do, and displaying my wounds. I mean to ask: what is a tutor? This question may seem perverse. How can someone who professes himself a tutor ask, in public no less, what a tutor is? To this I reply: there is no guarantee that the names we use all the time are the correct ones. In the Theaetetus, Plato’s Socrates claims that “those who spend their lives in philosophy” are almost ignorant of whether their neighbors are human beings. This should remind us that we too run the risk of using the wrong words for the things we encounter in the world. Consider the word ‘tutor.’ While nowadays it takes some digging in the College’s website to verify the fact, here at St. John’s, faculty members are indeed called ‘tutors,’ in order to distinguish them from professors. On the Annapolis page for prospective faculty, we find this claim: “We use the title ‘tutor’ to highlight that learning is an ongoing, cooperative enterprise in which some are at different stages [from] others.” Professors, we are led to infer, downplay or even deny – by their reliance on lectures – the ongoing, cooperative, and individual character of learning. 1 �We could be forgiven for further inferring that, by calling themselves ‘tutors,’ the faculty at St. John’s means to indicate not just their difference from professors, but their superiority to them. Any such pretensions are quickly punctured, however, by none other than the Oxford English Dictionary. As it archly informs us, the particularly American meaning of ‘tutor’ is “a teacher subordinate to a professor” [my emphasis]. But it also gives us the etymology of the word, which gets us off to a helpful start. ‘Tutor’ comes from the Latin verb tueri, which means ‘to watch’ – and so, derivatively, ‘to take care of,’ ‘guard,’ or ‘protect.’ A tutor in the original sense protected a child and his estate in the absence of his father. But this purely defensive sense of the word has become obsolete. In its modern meaning, the prophylactic sense is combined with a pedagogical sense. Nowadays, a tutor is “one employed in the supervision and instruction of a youth in a private household.” Why this pedagogical addition to the work of a tutor? It must have come from the sense that for the young, protection and supervision are not enough. No lesser a defender of the sufficiency of human nature – or in his formula, “the natural goodness of man” – than Jean-Jacques Rousseau is compelled to acknowledge, in his educational treatise Emile, that nature can at most be entrusted with one-half, or perhaps only one-third, of the education of a human being who is meant to live in society. Since even the best-guarded young can turn out badly, no one should employ a supervisor who is not also an instructor, who in addition to protecting the young from malign external influences, takes care to expose them to benign ones. To be employed, then, a tutor must also be an instructor, which is to say, a teacher. Until so-called competency-based education rules the land, no student will receive a college degree for having been left to herself for four years, provided only that she has been adequately supervised and protected. Professing via lectures is not required, nor perhaps even recommended, but teaching and learning are necessary. So to be a tutor in this modern sense, one must teach. 2 �Here, then, is a first answer to our guiding question: a tutor is a teacher. How satisfying is this answer? To test it, let’s turn to one of the books we read in the Philosophy & Theology tutorial: Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche. In the first section of the fourth part of that book, a part titled “Epigrams and Interludes,” we find this warning: “Whoever is a teacher from the ground up, takes all things in earnest only in relation to his students – even his own self.” To want to teach is to want another human being to learn, which, absent an omnipotent speech, is to want to accommodate oneself to the conditions of another human being’s learning. To want to accommodate oneself wholly in this way, even in one’s own ground – to be willing to say anything, so long as it produces a change in the listener – is to take one’s own self seriously only in relation to one’s students. It is, in other words, to place a higher value on the one who does not know than on the one who knows: to judge that the student’s unknown genius has a higher value than the teacher’s known teaching. The limit of this willingness to bend oneself into whatever shape the student needs, this faith that each student has an unknown, and perhaps unknowable genius, is an education that stresses form rather than content, and that judges, not what a student has learned, but only that she has learned – which is to say, changed. What is worse, this subordination involves the thoroughgoing teacher in a contradiction, since one has a right to teach only if knowing is more valuable than not knowing. So Nietzsche hints that we cannot be wholly satisfied with the thought that a tutor is simply a teacher. But he has much more to say on the question. While this playful epigram is his first mention of teachers [Lehrer] in Beyond Good and Evil, and his only substantial one, he devotes the whole of Part Six of the book to those who, literally, have been taught: “We Scholars [Wir Gelehrten].” Though as a former philologist Nietzsche identifies himself as a scholar, experience has given him access to a higher ideal than the scholarly, and to a ground from which to criticize scholars, those who are wholly what they have been taught. Objectivity is the scholarly ideal, 3 �Nietzsche writes, and to the extent that a scholar achieves this ideal he becomes a precious instrument, like a mirror: he lives to submit before everything that wants to be known, without any other desire than for that which knowing, “mirroring,” gives, – he waits, until something comes, and then spreads himself delicately out, so that even light footsteps and the slipping over of ghostly beings not be lost on his surface and skin. In the light of his ideal the scholar squints at the subjective aspects of his person; he has time for the objects of his study, but none for himself, and he demands of others the same submission. He is industrious and patient, measured and even in his capacities and needs, dependent on the approval of others, familiar, egalitarian, mediocre, and envious. As a thoroughgoing learner, he is the ideal match for the thoroughgoing teacher. Like a mirror, his face remains empty until something like a book – any book – is put in front of it. Nietzsche grants that scholars have very serious reasons for pursuing this objective ideal. The extent of human knowledge is vast and growing, all the more so now than in Nietzsche’s day. To want to learn everything is to risk exhaustion; to want to learn only some things, before one knows everything, is to risk either dilettantism or an arbitrary, ignorant choice. None of us wants to be deceived in the things that are most important to us to know; and this intellectual conscience demands that if we learn anything, we should learn it well. So we succumb to specialization, for the sake of our self-respect, and the respect of others. The ideal of objectivity recasts this necessity as a virtue, by dignifying our careful submission before anything that wants to be known, our careful cultivation of our scholarly patch of grass. But the price of the objective ideal is high, for we scholars become skeptical and envious of everything that is not objective: of everything that can judge with a clear conscience for personal, subjective reasons. Indeed, we must be skeptical of philosophy in particular, wherever we detect that it is not objective – that is, not scholarly. So through a combination of intellectual conscience and exhaustion, we scholars end by putting ourselves in the place of philosophers. Those who are skeptical about the possibility of judgment 4 �displace those responsible for making the most comprehensive judgments. This, in Nietzsche’s account in Part Six of Beyond Good and Evil, is the consequence for students of learning from those who are teachers from the ground up. Wholly selfless teachers produce students wholly lacking in selves. It’s time for a brief summary: a step backward for the sake of a leap forward. A tutor cannot simply be a guardian, since this presumes that the young need nothing but protection to turn out well. But a tutor cannot simply be a teacher, either, since wholehearted teachers educate young who are nothing for themselves. What meaning of ‘tutor’ remains, on which we can wholeheartedly pride ourselves? I once overheard a colleague of mine say something on this score that I find helpful: “a tutor is someone who deserves a sabbatical.” Lest I be suspected of just now having taken my leap too far into the subjective and personal, let me explain what I take this colleague to mean. When times are good, and circumstances ordinary, each faculty member at St. John’s College receives a sabbatical every seventh year of her tenure. We say that this respite from teaching is for the sake of study, rest, and renewal of spirit, in anticipation of future teaching. But we require from tutors neither a plan for a proposed sabbatical, detailing the studies to be pursued and the rest to be taken, nor a report on a completed sabbatical. We do not test the spirits of our returning tutors, to see whether they truly have been renewed. All that we require of a tutor returning from sabbatical is that she resume teaching, for at least two more years. Now a practice designed and described in this way, as a matter of instruction and not of compensation, rests on two presuppositions. First, it presupposes that a tutor’s teaching will be benefited by study that is not dictated by teaching. It acknowledges that, however much we may learn while we teach, the learning that is incidental to teaching is not enough – even from the perspective of the demands of teaching. Second, and more importantly in my view, by requiring neither a plan nor a report for a 5 �sabbatical, our practice acknowledges that the tutor, and not the College, is the best judge of what counts as study, rest, and renewal of spirit – and that allowing tutors to exercise this judgment will benefit their teaching. Our practice acknowledges that tutors are not teachers from the ground up; we could say, with a wink at our modern arithmomania, that they are six parts teachers, and one part something else. But this one part is the important part, for it is the ground of the rest. And here is where the aptness of my colleague’s dictum becomes clear. A tutor is someone who deserves a sabbatical, because a tutor, in the precise sense, is someone who can be trusted to make independent judgments about the ground of her teaching. A tutor is someone whose own work is the work of the College, not because she pursues it always with an eye to the needs of the College, but because she knows that the activity of her own intellect and imagination is the source of the life in her teaching. The College depends on such tutors to constitute its community of learning – to make it more than a community of teaching. No array of scholarly specialists, however wisely selected, can take their place. To add some detail to this vision of what a tutor is, we can turn back to Part Six of Beyond Good and Evil, to the ideal that Nietzsche opposes to the scholarly. “In the face of a world of ‘modern ideas,’ which would banish everybody into a nook and ‘specialty,’” Nietzsche writes – and we should interject here that this is our world, to an even greater degree than it was Nietzsche’s – a philosopher – supposing that today there could be philosophers – would be compelled to place the greatness of the human being, the concept of ‘greatness,’ precisely in his comprehensiveness and multiplicity, in his wholeness in manifoldness. He would even determine worth and rank from this, how much and how many things one could bear and take upon oneself, how far one could stretch his responsibility. Let’s heed Nietzsche’s warning that what a philosopher is cannot be taught [nicht zu lehren], and give the anti-scholarly ideal a more modest name, one more suited to saying what a tutor is. Let’s call this the comprehensive ideal. Far from being scholarly mirrors who submit themselves before every thought that comes along, who wish to do nothing more than understand each author as 6 �he understood himself, who are Platonists because it is Monday afternoon, and monotheists because it is Monday night, devotees of the comprehensive ideal seek to place everything they comprehend into an ordered whole in which they can live. They are skeptics, not in the sense that they try to bend every exclamation point into a question mark, but in the sense that they test every thought to see whether it is solid and shapely enough to be of use. They are courageous, deft, and methodical critics, not in order to anatomize every idea they touch, but in order to be able, when called on, to stand alone and give an account of themselves, and of the world they are trying to be. Seen in the light of the comprehensive ideal, it is clear why a tutor is someone who deserves a sabbatical. A sabbatical is the appropriate conclusion to the creation of a world. But what can a tutor striving for the comprehensive ideal be for her students? At the root of the German word for teacher, Lehrer, is the word Lehre, or ‘instruction’ – a word closely related to Lehr, or ‘model.’ We see something similar in the etymology of ‘to teach,’ which can be traced back to the Greek word δείκνυµι, meaning ‘to show.’ We are accustomed to say here at the College that tutors are model learners, but we should remember that they are also models of having learned, of living with learning. Tutors who aspire to the comprehensive ideal model this ideal for their students, and show them that it can be lived. They show them that their learning is neither for its own sake, in that morally humble but metaphysically proud phrase, nor for the sake of some job, family, institution, or community to which they must subordinate themselves, or into which they must fit. Rather, their learning is for the sake of the wholeness in manifoldness of the being that longs to comprehend a world – the wholeness in manifoldness that is the true end of liberal education. It is by protecting this possibility, in tutors, staff, and students alike, that our remedial community earns the right to be called a community of learning. It is through this wholeness in manifoldness of the human being, in the highest sense of the term, that our two programs of instruction, the graduate and the undergraduate, win the right to consider themselves wholes. And it 7 �is in pursuit of this wholeness in manifoldness that liberal education, our bookish, freeing, childlike education, becomes what it is: the consummation of practice and a courageous confrontation with what is most real… the education of the free who know they are not free into a freedom that they do not desire… an education that forgets and begins again, that plays at the most serious things, and that thereby gives us a world in which to live. There will be five Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: one on Homer’s Odyssey, one on Euclid’s Elements, one on Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, one on Shakespeare’s Henry plays, and one on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Schedules and meeting places for these groups will be circulated by email soon. By way of conclusion, let me invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class. The spring 2015 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 5 January 2015 Note In my beginning, I have Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in mind, but also the beginning of section 204, in Part Six of Beyond Good and Evil. Socrates’ remark can be found at Theaetetus, 174B. For “the natural goodness of man,” see Rousseau’s note for philosophers in the Final Reply; the passage of Emile to which I refer is on page 38 of Bloom’s edition. Nietzsche’s epigram about the teacher from the ground up is section 63 of Beyond Good and Evil; the translation is my own. Part Six of that book had a strong influence on the whole argument of this address: I quote from sections 207 and 212, making my own translations there too; but the aspects of Nietzsche’s argument that I do not mention are more interesting. The final quotation is from my Summer 2012 convocation address, “What Is Liberal Education? Part I.” 8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2015 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-01-05 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Spring_2015_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2015 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Tutor? Or, On the Future of Our Educational Institution" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/350132b48541f427adc9feda526aa114.pdf e5856f46705cedf725c5519c1d01d75c PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Summer 2013 On the Philosophy & Theology Segment Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by examining the readings of the Philosophy & Theology segment. The subject of this convocation address – which I mean to be the first of five, each treating one of the segments of the Graduate Institute – follows from a claim that I made in an earlier address, delivered in Spring 2012, titled “What is a Segment?” I said then that the program of the Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names for the distinct subject matter treated by the readings in each. Now I hope to make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title “Philosophy & Theology”? And before I proceed to answer my own question, I should caution that the threads that I mean to follow for the next few minutes – threads that run through the tutorial and seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected to threads that run through other segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I 1 �only insist that these threads are present in the segment readings, and truly worth following. So again, what are the wonderful questions raised by “Philosophy & Theology”? Let’s begin with the ampersand. It suggests that there is something dual about the segment, and prompts us to wonder what this duality is. The things joined together by the ampersand, of course, are philosophy, which any good dictionary will tell you comes from the Greek for ‘love of wisdom,’ and theology, which comes from the Greek for ‘an account about the god.’ In what way, then, are the ‘love of wisdom’ and ‘an account about the god’ two? It’s tempting to answer this question summarily, by noting that three of our segment titles have ampersands in them, and that each segment has two classes whose readings are required: the seminar and the tutorial. Could it be, then, that the dual segment titles reflect the duality of the seminar and tutorial readings? Not every segment title has an ampersand, admittedly, whereas every segment has a seminar and a tutorial. But we could attribute the exceptions, the one-word segment titles, to exhausted imaginations on the part of the graduate Program’s architects. We could then correct the title of the Literature segment, calling it the Greek & English Literature segment. The History segment would become the Ancient & Modern History segment, and our work would be done. At first glance, there seems to be something to this somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘division of labor’ theory. For if we survey the readings of the tutorial and the seminar, we see that the former is full of great books ordinarily taken to be works of philosophy – Plato’s Meno, Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and On the Soul, Descartes’ Meditations, Hume’s Enquiry, Kant’s Prolegomena, and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil – whereas the latter is full of great books ordinarily taken to be works of theology: the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures, and Augustine’s Confessions. The presence of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica on the seminar reading 2 �list could be taken as conclusive evidence in favor of the division of labor between seminar and tutorial, were it not for the disappointing fact that Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments is also among the readings of the so-called ‘theology seminar’ – not to mention that, with the Prolegomena in tutorial and the Groundwork in seminar, Kant seems to be playing for both teams. Indeed, the more one thinks about this division of labor theory, the more problems appear. Take the very first reading from the so-called ‘philosophy tutorial’: Plato’s Meno. It begins, as we all know, with Meno challenging Socrates to say whether virtue comes to be in human beings by teaching, by practice, by learning, by nature, or in some other way [70a]; and it ends, as most of us know, with Socrates claiming that virtue comes to be by “divine allotment” [100b]. In between, we find an account (logos) about divine matters (ta theia), one that claims that “what we call learning is recollection” [81a-81e]. Is the Meno not in some way, then, a theological dialogue? If we are tempted to dismiss this thought, on the ground that Socrates is being playful when he speaks about the gods, what should we say about Aristotle’s account of the unmoved mover, or about Descartes’ proof of the existence of God, or about Hume’s discussion of miracles, or Kant’s theological Idea, or Nietzsche’s reintroduction of Dionysus? Are these really not accounts about the god? What is worse, if we consult Aristotle’s discussion of wisdom (sophia), found in the Nicomachean Ethics – which we read, alarmingly, in the Politics & Society tutorial – we find that it is “the science of the things that are valued most highly” [1141a20-21]. How could the love of such a science not include an account about the god? How could philosophy not include theology? From the perspective of the so-called ‘philosophy tutorial,’ then, it seems that the ampersand in the Philosophy & Theology segment title only marks and apparent duality, a hendiadys, a two that is really one. 3 �Problems arise from the perspective of a so-called ‘theology seminar’ too; but they are more grave, and more interesting. Should we seek a definition of theology, we can find one, but unfortunately, it is also in Aristotle. In two passages in the Metaphysics that we don’t read for tutorial, Aristotle calls theology the kind of contemplative philosophy that concerns things that are eternal, separate, and motionless [1026a10-20; 1064a30-b5] – should such things exist. By contrast, the term is not found in the Hebrew or Christian scriptures. It first appears among the seminar authors in Augustine’s City of God – parts of which we read in the History tutorial – and then among the seminar readings, most obviously in the title of Aquinas’ magnum opus. So the Greek term ‘theology’ seems applicable to at best half of the so-called ‘theology seminar’ readings, in the sense that the authors of roughly half of these readings were aware of, or made use of the term. Since the authors of the other half of these readings had a different name for, or a different understanding of, what they were doing, it seems like the so-called ‘theology seminar’ is in fact composed of theology, understood as a branch of philosophy, and something else. What, then, is this something else? Another look at the first readings for tutorial and seminar will be helpful here. In one of the most memorable passages in the Meno, Socrates says that while he will not insist very much on the other parts of his argument, he would do battle, if he could, for the view that it is better, more courageous, and less lazy to inquire into the things we don’t know, rather than supposing that it is impossible to discover them, or that we ought not to inquire into them [86b-c]. (By the way, I take Socrates’ conditional here not to imply that he can’t battle for this view, but to provide an opening for Meno, who is very interested in what Socrates can and can’t do, to ask him to battle for this view. It’s an opening Meno fails to exploit.) Socrates does not outright say 4 �that we can know all the things we don’t know; but he does imply that he has reason to think that we should try – that the attempt will be neither fruitless nor dangerous. Now contrast this beginning with the beginning in the first Genesis reading from the Philosophy & Theology seminar, where we learn that God created heaven and earth, and what he created was “very good” [1:30]; but Adam and Eve nonetheless ate of the prohibited tree of good and evil knowledge, and were punished for it [3:1-24]. Leaving aside the more sophisticated – we might say, more theological – interpretations of these events, which try to interpret this punishment in accordance with the presumed characteristics of God, the serpent, Eve, and Adam, the naïve message is clear: we ought not to inquire into at least some of the things we don’t know, namely the prohibited things, as the attempt to do so could be both fruitless and dangerous. The first readings of the Philosophy & Theology tutorial and seminar thus make opposite claims. And we should not let our prejudices in favor of one or the other of these claims muddy the wonderful, terrifying question that wants to rise to the surface through this opposition. There are things that we don’t know. It is good to try to know them? Is knowledge possible, and is it good? With these questions we have at last gripped two threads that run, in my view at least, throughout the segment’s tutorial and seminar readings. In the tutorial, the Meno is followed by Aristotle, who in the Metaphysics practices theology as the science of the intrinsically most knowable and best things; by Descartes and Hume, whose reasoning about God is calculated to protect the possibility of knowledge; and by Kant, whose reasoning about knowledge is calculated to protect the possibility of God. This tutorial thread terminates, after its brief Kantian crossing into the seminar, in Beyond Good and Evil, with Nietzsche’s alarming claims that knowledge in the Aristotelian theological sense is neither simply possible, nor simply good. 5 �The seminar thread, by contrast, runs through the Hebrew scriptures, with the examples of Abraham’s exemplary fear [Genesis 22:12], which makes him a worthy father of multitudes and a blessing for nations [22:17-18]; the Israelites’ exemplary law, obedience to which is wisdom and understanding in the eyes of peoples [Deuteronomy 4:6]; and Job’s exemplary ignorance, which in the end confesses that knowledge of God is impossible, and so speaks rightly [Job 42:2-8]. It is found also in the Christian scriptures, for example in Jesus’ claim that the most needful knowledge depends solely on revelation – “no one knows the son except the father,” he says; “and no one knows the father except the son, and anyone to whom the son wishes to reveal it” [Matthew 11:27]. But with the rise of theology, starting with the writings of Paul, this thread becomes tangled. Paul, who confesses himself a debtor just as much to the Greeks as to the barbarians, to the wise as to the unwise [Romans 1:14], is willing to claim that “the invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” [2:20]. And Augustine and Aquinas both find themselves in the same boat, using the philosophical arguments of theology as paths to belief in the Christian God, all the while denying the sufficiency and even doubting the necessity of these paths. In Book Ten of his Confessions, for example, Augustine laments the soul’s “vain and inquisitive greed” for experience, which “cloaks itself in the name of ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’” [10.35.54]; but soon thereafter he qualifies his lament, saying that he has been able to curb his “curiosity for superfluous knowledge” [10.37.60; emphasis added]. For his part, Aquinas begins the Summa by insisting that sacred doctrine is a science in the Aristotelian sense, even though it is beyond human knowledge and may not be sought by human reason [q.1 a.1]. This seminar thread finally becomes untangled, and then terminates, with Kierkegaard, who asserts in the Philosophical Fragments that thought wants to discover something that thought 6 �cannot think [IV.204]: namely, the, eternal historical moment of god become man [IV.227], the faith that is different in kind from, and infinitely more needful than, any knowledge. Having traced these threads in this way, what can we say about the meaning of the ampersand, and the duality of the Philosophy & Theology readings? The apparent duality of the love of wisdom and an account about the god is only apparent: every lover of wisdom, every lover of the science of the most valuable things, will seek an account about the god. But behind this apparent duality is a real duality, between the love of knowledge – with all the sometimes irrational attachment that the word ‘love’ can connote – and doubt about knowledge. The drama of this duality comes from the encounter between these two views. Since doubt about knowledge nonetheless wants to insist that its doubt is grounded in knowledge, it is easily seduced by the appeal of love of knowledge, tries to incorporate it, and is corrupted by it. Once this corruption is understood, attempts are made to recover the original insight, the original tension between love of knowledge and doubt about knowledge. Beyond Good and Evil, with its consideration of “The Religious Being,” its assertion of the necessity of religion to a flourishing society [61-62], and its Dionysian conclusion, and the Philosophical Fragments, with its radical rethinking of the meaning of Christian faith, are two attempts to restate the original questions – is knowledge possible? Is knowledge good? – in their originally wonderful and terrifying force. I hasten to repeat that the story I have told here about the readings of the Philosophy & Theology tutorial is not a history, and certainly not a Hegelian one. There’s no necessity, to my mind, that Kant follow Hume, nor that Jesus follow Moses; there’s no necessity that the threads I’ve tried to grasp begin and end untangled. (Indeed, they seem quite tangled to me in our contemporary, everyday world.) But there is a necessity that the authors of the great books that we read confront, in more or less clearsighted ways, what it means to be the kinds of beings that 7 �we are: beings that both stretch out, and stretch out toward knowing. It is this durable necessity that ensures the connection of these threads to the threads that run through the readings of the other Graduate Institute segments. The scope and character of political and social life depend, for example, on our answers to the questions of whether knowledge is possible and good, as do the scope and character of mathematics and natural science. And the durable basis of this durable necessity is human nature itself, that homogeneous though multiple subject matter that is the true content and concern of the graduate Program here at St. John’s. Without some account of the whole that lies behind the graduate Program, without some attempt to follow the threads that run through and between its segments, the education we are all pursuing in the Graduate Institute will not acquire its full value. I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be two Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term. One group will meet on Tuesdays, from 3:00 to 4:30, beginning on June 25, to read Xenophon’s Memorabilia – his recollections of Socrates. The other will hold an organizational meeting in the Hartle Room this Tuesday, June 18, from 2:00 to 3:00. The purpose of the group is to study techniques useful for the math section of the GRE. Schedules for these groups will be circulated by email. Lastly, I would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to preceptorial. The summer 2013 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 13 June 2013 Delivered 17 June 2013 Note The numbers cited in the text refer in each case to the standard divisions of the work in question, never to page numbers. 8 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2013 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the Philosophy & Theology Segment". Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-06-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College 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 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Summer_2013_Convocation Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/891db612ec5a97d63d9bd29c870a520b.pdf 62fae5eaf7a18a6017a42a91917753e5 PDF Text Text Annapolis - Fall 2009 Convocation Address Welcome especially to our new Graduate Institute students; welcome also to friends and family, returning students, colleagues. Today you new students become members of the St. John’s community, a community dedicated to liberal education in its most profound sense, that is, an education truly freeing—from preconceptions and illusions, from hasty answers to the deepest questions of human existence, from the limitations of a toonarrow perspective. Your entry into our community proceeds today through the portal of either the Literature segment or the Mathematics and Natural Science segment. Often in our society, the liberal arts are seen as antithetical to the technical, scientific disciplines; a chasm even wider than the ravines separating individual academic fields separates the humanities-oriented part of liberal arts from such “hard” sciences as physics, chemistry, even mathematics. Here at St. John’s we do not sanction such compartmentalization of the world of study; our organization of the Graduate Institute program into segments reflects the pressure of practical constraints rather than an assumption about valid categories of knowledge. For that reason, I’d like to use this occasion to make a beginning toward liberating us from a too-constricting notion of science. As with the question “What is virtue?” in the dialogue Meno, the question “What is science?” tends to elicit a whole “swarm” of responses. During the course of your readings in the Mathematics & Natural Science seminar, you will encounter many interpretations of science—from Lucretius’ epic poetry distilling all things into void and atoms, to Bacon’s reconstruction of science on experimental foundations, to Newton’s axiomatic system. Some versions will call themselves physics, some versions will assume the title of natural science, or natural history, or natural philosophy. These varied denominations reveal a significant reason that we should suspend our faith in the boundary lines of academia and return to the sources; we may thus begin to see both science and the world through clearer eyes. As an example of this challenging activity, I will here consider Plato’s dialogue, Timaeus. In it, the title character responds to Socrates’ expressed desire to see his utopian republic in action by telling a story of the origin of the cosmos, a creation myth if you will, what Timaeus himself calls a “likely story.” I will leave it to you in your seminars to figure out how a creation myth may be an animation of Socrates’ political “city �in speech.” I would like to examine in the rest of this talk the way in which science and story might be linked (rather than relegated to two separate segments, say). Timaeus’ preface to his story exhibits his own trepidation and uncertainty about his task. He feels the need to pray for the gods’ approval of a discourse concerning how the universe was created, “or perhaps is not created” (27c). He explicitly recognizes that his task is different from the task of philosophy. Philosophy studies that which is “apprehensible with the aid of reasoning since it is ever uniformly existent.” But the cosmos “is visible and tangible and possessed of a body.” Thus, it is only apprehensible through “opinion with the aid of sensation” (28c). Timaeus must explicate the world of becoming, things which come into being and pass away, the world of change. This is a good description of the arena we generally concede to science. Timaeus immediately makes us conscious that this world is susceptible only of opinion. We moderns rush headlong to use the word “knowledge” for the latest chemical and cosmological and medical theories (even if scientists themselves are sometimes more circumspect about the hypothetical character of their assumptions); then we reserve the word “opinion” for the realms of politics and religion and literature. Timaeus, in the face of the instability and ephemerality of the world confronting us, does not lose heart. Instead, he invokes ourselves as well as the gods, gathers up his courage, and begins clarifying the limits attending the project of describing the birth of the world. These are: 1. We must assume a cause of the cosmos. 2. We must assume the cosmos has come into being, since it is material and physical and our experience of physical things is that they are generated. 3. The cause of its coming into being, the architect, is good, and wanted the Cosmos to be beautiful, so he kept his eye fixed upon a perfectly stable, unchanging paradigm when he constructed this fluid, evershifting, pulsing- with-life being of the cosmos. Now, these three assumptions are all dubious. But let me point out: though their expression may be unfamiliar, they themselves are not wholly unfamiliar. The first is reminiscent of our own scientific trust in the world of causes, specifically of what we call efficient causes. We need to look for a mover of anything that is moved—a shove or a push or a force. The second emphasizes, as science usually does, the material character of what we are studying and the perceptual way we imbibe it, even if the logic positing a necessary beginning for the whole of such stuff transcends perception. The third, an assumption Timaeus himself recognizes as pious, may, in its appeal to beauty and goodness, involve more than mere �lawfulness—but science’s assertion of lawfulness can never simply be deduced (and sometimes rests on such grounds). Timaeus’ overt appeal to piety legitimately calls such faith in lawfulness to our attention. After his preliminary laying out of assumptions, Timaeus makes his surprising—at least to us—turn towards story-telling. He cautions Socrates that he will be unable to give a perfectly consistent and precise account (the Greek word is “logos”—connected to reason as well as speech). Instead we will all have to be satisfied with something he calls a “likely story.” I suspect that, when you read it, the tale that Timaeus subsequently recounts may strike you all as whimsical and eccentric rather than scientific. Nonetheless, Timaeus does give an explanation of the origin and nature of the cosmos. From the motions of the planets to the functioning of the liver, Timaeus elucidates various causes, drawing heavily on mathematics—the ratios underpinning the musical scale, the figures constituting the geometrical solids, and the circles used in astronomical predictions. But Timaeus depicts himself as designing a story rather than as giving a reasoned proof. For many years I’ve intended to formulate more precisely the meaning of his puzzling phrase “likely story,” each word of which is provocative. The Greek word for story here is indeed “mythos.” And Timaeus’ account is certainly a creation myth, involving a demiurge building an entire world from scratch. But “mythos” has a broader range of meaning in Greek than we tend to give “myth.” I think we always use that word with a soupcon of contempt—“that’s just a myth” we say; especially in the context of science, we indicate our superiority by calling something a myth. The word “story,” unlike “myth,” evokes affection and warmth in us. The Canterbury Tales are not myths to us; they are romances steeped in reality, distillations of the human experience resonating within us. Would we ever allow a story to be a vehicle for science, or even science itself? Surely, one reason we glow at the prospect of a story is that we expect to be entertained. From the time we cuddle in our mother’s laps, ears expectantly open, eager for adventure in thought, we associate new worlds, new visions, and new friends with stories. We are accustomed to allowing ourselves to live and breathe the air of some new world, to tread companionably along with strange characters, to thrill to new horizons. I balk a bit at describing this receptivity as passive; yet, I think I must admit that part of the pleasure of a story resides in the feeling that we need only step on board to be carried somewhere fresh and exciting. Someone else has charted the course and will do the navigation. Even I, with degrees in mathematics, have a very different feeling when I turn over a leaf in a book and confront a page dappled with equations; a special summoning of energy is required. But surely the dichotomy I’ve drawn is not precisely accurate. When reading a story, I must focus my concentration as well. And any good story actively engages the intelligence. The reader must re-create �the world the author has discovered in his own imagination and shine the interior light of his experience on the winding trail marked off by the author. While Homer may, in his first twenty lines, circumscribe the field of our vision to the problem of Achilles’ wrath, we ourselves must piece together the strange components of this almost elemental force, must analyze Achilles’ reactions, must press toward an understanding of the essence of this wrath. In order to understand Achilles, we must grope towards a vision of what honor means to those indomitable warriors of the Iliad and clear an arena where Achilles and we can meet on common ground. Are these intellectual activities so different from those employed in understanding the physical or biological world around us? I’m not at all sure they are. To penetrate the mediating language of mathematical symbols is a daunting and perhaps specialized enterprise, but the use of such symbols seems secondary to the goal of understanding the world around us. Scientific works do often present themselves as treatises and highlight the deductive character of the thinking involved. But stories too sometimes require us to make arguments from premises, perhaps premises of character types rather than definitions of motion—but arguments nonetheless. Moreover, upon reading that most deductive of all great books, Euclid’s Elements, we tutors frequently assign a paper at the end of Book I asking students to “tell the story of Book I.” We are not asking students to do a creative writing piece when we make this assignment. Rather, we recognize that Euclid’s work focuses our attention on certain themes or issues, acquaints us with the characters and qualities of various entities, and develops relationships through surprising connections and interactions that can ultimately be fit into a whole. On the other hand, making this assignment of re-casting Book I as a story indicates that we recognize the need for the student to unearth an arc of events for himself. The series of logical deductions is more patently obvious; however, the thematic connections are an integral, if subtler, part of Euclid’s project. Deduction and story-telling may be inextricably bound up with the task of all human understanding—receiving different emphasis in different endeavors or from different authors, but both necessary if we are to understand at all. I believe Timaeus aspires to this full and diverse use of intelligence when he constructs the edifice of his “likely story.” The Greek word translated as “likely” has its origin in the word for image or likeness. Though there is some connection to probability and likelihood, I think Plato means us to hear the connection to imagination and similarity predominating. The true power of science as story is thus brought home, for both the scientific account and the story ought reflect actuality. Just as Odysseus’ tales of carefree lotuseaters and lawless Cyclops convey the deepest truths about temptations to be overcome on a journey back home to one’s most rooted self, so may Timaeus’ account of the cosmos as a living, breathing �organism capture more essential aspects of the world around us than the most statistically verified of equations. Likeliness in this sense inheres in the transcendent vision provided by imagination. Now imagination is a faculty not highly regarded by scientists today. We prefer judging our current theories by their predictive power. But when pressed regarding the absolute truth of a theory, most scientists will characterize their work as model-construction rather than truth-seeking. Surely this is an admission that, like Timaeus, they live in the world of opinion and trust. Model-building is not exclusively deductive; some genius of insight must penetrate to first principles, must extract the intelligible from perception. Experiments cannot substitute for this mysterious but very human talent. Like good story-tellers, scientists must weave together disparate, unpliable strands of material, hoping to achieve some precision of focus, to animate a dramatic insight, to gain subltety of perception. You may be interested to know that the word “theory” has its (Greek) roots in seeing/beholding—in contemplation to be sure, but also in theater. Whether we engage in science or literature, we seek an epiphany. But how will we judge the likeliness of a story if not, or not simply, by predictive power? I’m not sure there is a method for discovering how much truth a story has. As with the Canterbury Tales and Homer’s epics, we must consult ourselves. We must “recollect,” aided by the questioning and discussion of other wise beings, whether, for example, Timaeus’ version of space as a nurse and receptacle embodies the essential characteristics of space better than a Cartesian grid with three axes and the capacity for measurement. We must gauge the story’s explanatory power and probe the concreteness, integrity, and clarity of the resulting vision. Such probing carries us beyond and out of the world of the story. The danger of stories, of course, is that we will simply allow ourselves to be seduced and entertained by them rather than doing such probing. We must not allow ourselves to accede to Timaeus when he pleads: You must remember that I who speak and you my judges have human nature. So, in order to receive the likely story about these things, it is fitting not to search beyond this. (29c4-d3) Instead, we must press beyond the confines of each page, whether the pages are Platonic or Newtonian or Homeric. Whether the author frankly tells us, as Timaeus does, that his imitation is merely imitation, or presents his fictional insights as a veiled and disembodied author, we must glut our greed for the truth. We must have a passion for wisdom. To this extent everything we do—math, science, literature, philosophy—in the classroom or in our lives—ought be truly philosophic. Only then will our education be liberal and liberating. �By Marilyn Higuera, Director � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 6 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Higuera, Marilyn Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2009 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-08 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Fall_2009_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Fall 2009 semester in Annapolis, MD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b753c2d9a528bc362476d85f9f5a41d9.pdf 18706246535f214f635866f605fe98eb PDF Text Text Annapolis Convocation, Fall 2010 Welcome to new and returning Graduate Institute students, friends, family, and colleagues. Today you new students are beginning a program of study in which the books you read will challenge you to confront fundamental questions, to re-examine cherished opinions, and to analyze the very structure of your world. You are beginning this program in either the Literature or the Mathematics and Natural Science segment. Perhaps you see a vast gulf between the world of mathematics and the world of literature. No doubt, these categories reflect our sense of two radically different human possibilities. However, we at St. John's hesitate to pigeonhole our texts and we often prefer to leave it to you to disentangle the various threads of knowledge. Euclid's Elements is a constructed work of art and rhetoric as well as a progressive development of the logical consequences of certain axioms. Characters in Sophocles' Antigone propound reasoned arguments for and against the primacy of the state even as they embody the raging passions, flawed insecurities, and irrational loyalties of all-toohuman individuals. So, in the Graduate Institute, the organization of "great books" into categories for our segments is done with a bit of a bad conscience; it is knowingly done more for the sake of practical considerations than as a serious claim regarding the boundaries of either the books or the issues therein. In this spirit of modest challenge regarding the compartmentalization of learning, I would like today to reflect �upon an underlying shared motif in our Mathematics and Natural Science and Literature segments: namely, imagination. The role of imagination in literature—both on the part of the author and as necessitated in the reader—is universally acknowledged. Whether we view it with suspicion ("oh, that could only happen in your imagination") or with reverence ("in metaphor the imagination is life"—Wallace Stevens, Three Academic Pieces), we all experience a particular sort of consciousness when we open a novel or play or epic and begin to read. Immediately, we envision a scrawny knight on a skeletal steed accompanied by a rotund peasant, charging a giant/windmill with lance atilt. Or, guided by the well-turned phrase, we conjure up a gory battlefield littered with corpses where Greek and Trojan antagonists pause to exchange personal histories before swinging the bludgeon or thrusting the spear. Literature works upon our minds, quickening our productive powers and prompting us to construct a world, usually a little bit alien, populated with vivid, captivating images. You may, on the other hand, be only beginning to appreciate the role of imagination in mathematics—as you linger over the definitions and postulates of Euclid's geometry. Unlike the austere equations of algebra that you will have experienced in a prior educational life, Euclid's formulations prompt, indeed demand, active visualization. True, the first definition, "A point is that which has no part" resists easy visualization. Nonetheless, in order to understand this definition, very quickly we begin trying to picture something which has no part. Usually, someone draws a dot on the chalkboard. However, we can literally see the specks (or parts) of chalk dust, so instead we represent the dot in our mind's eye; we strip away the specks of chalk dust; we isolate a speck; we zoom in with our mind's eye microscope and attempt to examine whether we have stripped away all parts and are left with �a single, ultimate unity. Surely we are exercising our imagination in this process—a process we repeat with the second definition, "A line is breadthless length." Again, we must picture something, some stretching forth through the inner space of the mind; again, we must strip away any visible width from this image; we must repeat this process so long as any width is "visible"; we must try to isolate the direction until it is all but invisible. This peculiar constructing of an image of Euclid's definitions certainly involves the imagination. Drawn images are, we infer, not the ones that Euclid intends. Why then does Euclid formulate his first postulate as: "to draw a straight line from any point to any point" It is a puzzle. However, I might note that the Greek word translated as "draw" also means "lead" as in "lead the troops into battle." So perhaps this verb conveys more the sense of an energetic activity required of the student of geometry than a physical drawing. We must be able to summon forth, to "lead" a line out of one point to another. But what translators generally fail to capture is that Euclid uses not only an infinitive (which already mutes the sense of activity), but a perfect infinitive—something like "to have drawn." So, though Euclid points us to activity, he places us in an odd temporal relation to such activity. The activity has already been accomplished. Moreover, the infinitive is not a direct command to us, nor even a permission to us to perform this activity. Taking into account Euclid's prefatory clause, "Let the following be postulated," we may construe Euclid to be begging for our permission. But again, translators have trouble rendering Euclid's exact grammar: he uses a third person perfect passive imperative. No wonder they have trouble. We have little experience of the third person imperative in English; the St. John's Greek text suggests that the playwright's "Enter the king" �is an equivalent. Such an imperative does not directly address the reader, but instead some other, hidden being who presumably can implement the command. The passivity of Euclid's imperative further weakens any sense of our participation in the process. I too am inadequate to yield a faithful translation, but perhaps "Let it have been begged: to have led out a line from any point to any point." What then does Euclid want us to do? His text is filled with action verbs such as "describe," "apply," "construct," as well as "draw." These verbs are almost universally governed by the aforementioned perfect passive imperative; nevertheless, they are powerful incitements to temporal processes. What is our relation to these processes and to the objects they animate? Speusippus, Plato's nephew and his successor as head of his Academy, is reputed to have commented on Euclid's geometrical objects: ...it is better to assert that all these things are and that we observe the coming-into-being of these not in the manner of making, but of recognizing, treating the timeless beings as though they were presently coming into being.... The language Speusippus chooses, "as though they were presently coming into being," highlights, I think, the opposing aspects I've noted in Euclid's treatment. This phrase, "as though" also captures the imaginative aspect of his entire enterprise. While Euclid is not telling us that we must create a line, ex nihilo, out of nothing, he is encouraging us to reflect upon, to imagine, its having come into being, its genesis, its nature. Similarly, every Euclidean proof launches us on a discursive and imaginative journey. First, the proposition states a universal truth, such as: "In isosceles triangles, the angles at the base are equal to one another." Next, some particular figure, here a definite isosceles triangle ABC, is called up for inspection—using the �perfect passive imperative that lets us know the triangle connecting those points has previously been constructed. What follows is a step-by-step unfolding of a discovery of the relations establishing the truth. These relations permeate the object already—an object whose existence is antecedent to the proof itself. But we are presumably only now revealing them to ourselves. If someone goes to the board to reiterate the relevant steps, you begin to appreciate how integral the imagination is to understanding the proposition. Should the person at the board make the mistake of drawing first the entire finished diagram with all the enhancements to be added by the various steps, rather than allowing the drawing to take shape gradually, you will find it nearly impossible to understand, to see, to grasp the interconnected relations that exhibit the general truth proposed. As we present each relation to ourselves in embodied form, i.e., drawn on the board, we use double vision of a sort to see through the drawn diagram to the perfected vision in our mind's eye (we do this almost effortlessly); simultaneously, we subject this perfected vision to the crucible of our critical reasoning (this requires some real effort and the assistance of Euclid's prose). Thus, our activity while doing proofs mediates between thoughtless receptivity of facts or sensations and timeless apprehension of timeless truths. And this mediation relies crucially upon imagination. Only through an imaginative encounter with the unfolding proof are we roused from mere passive sensation, inspired to an examination of the architecture of our inner space, and pushed forward and beyond our initial survey. Certainly, unrestrained imagination cannot achieve the desired moment of dawning recognition that the proposition must necessarily be true. Imaginative constructions must be challenged, questioned, articulated, limited by the requirements of reason. But I would like to point out that reason needs some �regulation also; Meno's slave boy is seduced by the attractive, echoing sound of the words, when he leaps to the notion that "double the line will produce double the square." Socrates uses a drawn image to help him correct his own mistake. Here, I am speaking as though imagination and reason perform their functions in some clearly separated, disjunct fashion. But I think the case is much more complex. Even the perfected vision necessary to "see" a point or line or triangle is not clearly the domain of imagination alone. Can imagination truly achieve a depiction of partlessness or breadthlessness? Does imagination achieve the final leap from a dot to a point? We intuit that the repetitive visualization process, stripping away breadth from a ruler, say, could proceed ad infinitum; and this understanding gives rise to some shaped idea in us. But the understanding must partner with imagination to give us access to such an idea—an idea we are fairly confident is identical for each of us, a specific, articulable, unambiguous, and essentially spatial idea. An idea we access through spatial, visualizable images. Trying to understand geometry without the imagination may be like a blind person reasoning about colors. This partnership between imagination and reason functions in the proof activity I described before as well. As we bring the diagram itself into being in front of us, we are simultaneously bringing our own understanding of the proposition into being. Here too, it is difficult to disentangle the vision of the understanding as it grasps the truth of each step and of the whole from the vision of the imagination as it peers into the diagram to see the claims themselves. Speusippus articulated this vision as a "recognizing"; the Greek word there is different from the one Plato uses in the Meno regarding recollection. However, I think both words strive to capture the aspect of the experience of knowing that feels as though it is a looking, a looking at something at once separate �and other, yet immediately appropriated. I note that Socrates chose a geometrical example to illustrate his notion of recollection. No doubt there are many reasons for his choice, but I think one reason is that such an example highlights the indispensable role of images in coming to know. Perhaps it seems extravagant to claim that images are necessary for knowledge. We at St. John's stress that reason is the arbiter in our discussions, and I certainly don't want to minimize reason's importance. But I am in good company when I emphasize images in our search for a glimpse of unchangeable, immutable truths. In De Anima, Aristotle asserts that "without imagination, there can be no thought." (427b16) One of Descartes' rules is "not to recognize those metaphysical entities which really cannot be presented to the imagination." (Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule XIV, p. 57) For Kant, imagination is called upon to put together even space and time, as well as every appearance of an object in space and time. He says: Synthesis in general... is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious. (Critique of Pure Reason, B103) To focus more intently on the power of the imagination as encompassing both our story-making capacity and our mathematical activity, I'm going finally to turn toward Plato. In fact, I'm going to turn toward an image that Plato uses in a book we've placed in neither Literature nor Mathematics/Natural Science but in the Politics and Society segment, namely the Republic. It is, however, a book that speaks to us as complete human beings. Somewhere near the heart of that enormous work (509d-511e), Socrates proposes an image of a divided line as a representation of the entire cosmos, both the sensible world and the intellectual world. He uses the image to depict the relationships of various �categories of things, to chart an ascent through these categories up to the idea of the good, and to discuss the human powers correlate to each stage of the journey. I'm going to isolate one layer of this rich and complicated image: the image is itself about images. Socrates divides the line first to represent visible and intelligible things; then he divides each of those segments similarly. The visibles are further separated into images (shadows, reflections in water, mirror appearances) and the objects of which those things are images (animals, plants, artifacts). The intelligibles are divided into ideas approached deductively—for example, geometrical ideas—and ideas grasped without hypotheses. Socrates proposes (517b) that the visibles themselves reflect the same relationship to the intelligibles that the first subdivision does: visible objects are images of the intelligible objects. Note the reversal of our usual interpretation of the material world as the real thing from which we abstract vapory concepts. Socrates uses the divided line to discuss four different human relations to the four categories of objects (comparison, trust, deductive thinking, understanding). Though an unmediated knowledge of ideas is held out as the proper intellectual engagement with the very highest category, the divided line itself is a result of Socrates' reluctance to speak "about what one doesn't know as though one knew." (506c) Socrates presents his interlocutors with the poetic/mathematical metaphor of the divided line when they press him to reveal his own (mere) opinions about the good and knowledge (506b). Apparently, at least this instance of image-making allows him to speak appropriately about what he does not know. Of course, the divided line has a patent character as an image; we are in no danger of being seduced into thinking the visible things actually are a line. But why is this image the right kind of speech for communicating Socrates' opinions (even if �he must warn us to guard against any unwilling deception therein—507a)? It helps to remember that, for Socrates, opinions are never mere opinions; images are never mere images; they are waystations on the path toward truth. I conjecture that the line itself reveals something even more general than Socrates elucidates; it elicits a fifth mode of thinking. The relationship each part of the line possesses to its neighbor is that of being an image. The philosophic ascent up the line involves understanding—seeing—the imaging relationship, seeing each image as an image (rather than imbibing it as a complete and finished story). Inspection of an image, whether poetic or geometric, whether a living organism or a painting, is a proper activity of the philosopher. The realization that an animal or a poem or a circle is an image—both manifesting and hiding reality—is what moves us as thinkers up the divided line, what puts us at least at the point between two parts of the divided line. We become fully engaged with what's in front of us, asking questions, making judgments, winnowing claims—even making helpful images. Only thus do we reveal to ourselves the potential for something we might call recollection or recognition or learning. Marilyn Higuera � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Higuera, Marilyn Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Fall 2010 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-08 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Fall_2010_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Fall 2010 semester in Annapolis, MD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/dfaf8e411c395552c4443bc9d1f26e2e.pdf cdb1035d5d4d4994b961bfc47e6e30c2 PDF Text Text Graduate Institute Annapolis Convocation, Summer 2010 Welcome to new and returning Graduate Institute students, friends, family, and colleagues. Aristotle says in the Ethics that, “all knowledge and every intention desire[s] some good.” (1095a15) I propose to try today to articulate the good at which we are aiming in our discussions here at St. John’s. Though you have, no doubt, seen various statements of the College’s goals in our literature and on our website, I would like to approach this question from the inside, and ask what we experience as fulfillment in our best class conversations. This is a difficult, perhaps hubristic, project for two reasons. First, as you know, we aim at no particular result in our conversations. To be sure, we limit ourselves to one particular author, one particular shared reading, in each class. But it can truly be said that we set off on uncharted waters (at least uncharted by us), with no real captain on the ship, and propose to meet whatever adventures befall us with only our native wit, our general goodwill toward each other, the courage we are able to summon in the face of the unknown, and whatever guidance we can coax from the otherwise static words before us. I do not believe I am overstating the situation. Tutors are not professors; we have no fixed interpretation to which you must subscribe. The questions we pose are as sincere—and as puzzling—as we can discover. And the eccentric idea of a conversation among 20 �people with no agenda and no authority resists any simple characterization of its form and spirit. The second difficulty is that even tutors have varied interpretations of our own activity. Each of us individually and repeatedly examines our ends and means. In this endeavor, we must set aside our idiosyncratic desires and goals: both the questions most urgent to us (whether they be “What is virtue?” or “Is language merely conventional?” or “Is God good?”) and also any personal ambitions we may have. We each must try to discern the common goals of the common activity. For the experience of a shared project is definite and incontrovertible. Now, often when we state our joint purpose, we—like many other liberal arts institutions—speak of the cultivation of various skills. Active learning in the public context of a classroom does indeed hone one’s ability to reason, improve one’s recognition of cogent arguments, develop clear and forceful communication, train one in careful listening, and stimulate one to probe beneath surface claims. These are many goods that arise from and are necessary for our mode of learning. We set high standards for each other with respect to these arts of apprehending, knowing, and understanding. I feel sure you will be aware of your own progress in these regards, and I have no doubt you will benefit from acquiring these skills, universally acknowledged as useful. But, when I said I wanted to ascertain the good we aim at “from the inside,” I intended to ask whether the act of conversing has its own good. To say we converse in order to acquire skills is to treat conversation as merely a means to an end. Now, I do not minimize its usefulness as a means for these purposes. But Aristotle has persuaded me to set a higher standard than the useful. He says, “that which is pursued for its own sake is more perfect than that which is pursued for the sake of something else.” (Ethics 1097a32) Now this thought may be a bit foreign to �some of you. We’re all inured to encountering the question, “What will you do with that?”—especially when people discover our involvement with St. John’s. This question betrays a supreme emphasis on usefulness—often the crudest sort of usefulness, that guaranteeing career advancement or a significant increase in earning power. But surely money itself is the paradigmatic means, only useful to assist one towards some other end. The really fascinating question, the question anyone truly interested in us ought to ask, is: “What do you think fulfills you, what is your end?” Apparently, learning is not an activity people generally think of as fulfilling. I find this attitude hard to understand. Surely, learning is often difficult; it requires energy, attention, discipline, selfawareness, and openness to change. But many fulfilling activities are difficult (playing piano, running a marathon, cooking a gourmet meal). And, unlike those activities, our classes provide occasions to clarify important issues such as: what priority to place on family or philanthropy, whether love requires selfsacrifice, how to identify a friend. Seeking answers to such questions is a noble pursuit. At least one of the goals of learning is the ability to live and act well; and we can glean much wisdom from the deepest thinkers of the Western tradition and from our joint inquiries into their profound thoughts. Learning in this way can help us discern the principles most conducive to a good life and can help us to deliberate well about the “proper object and the proper manner and the proper time” (Aristotle’s Ethics, 1142b28) consequent to such principles. Moreover, this end, of acting so as to lead the best life, seems to be an end in itself, simply choiceworthy. However, once again the good I’ve descried is not really the good inherent in the conversation. Whatever clarity we achieve may be provoked by discussion, and certainly the proposed actions �themselves would not be complete without this clarity of purpose. But if action is the goal of our conversations, then the real good is external to the classroom. And those of you about to study the Ethics will be reminded forcefully by Aristotle of the crucial role of habit and character in such action (1095b6, 1103a25-b22, 1152a31-33); intellectually grasping what virtue is may not even amount to “half the battle.” So, if we do learn in order to act, the value of the learning itself only fully manifests through yet more effort of a different kind. Even more importantly for my purpose here today, our conversations at St. John’s do not necessarily result in shared conclusions about such matters. Is there any good we strive for together as we engage in our communal activity? Earlier I found the acquisition of arts inadequate as a candidate; perhaps the other half of the phrase “liberal arts” helps. Our education intends to be liberating; our mission statement formulates this purpose as “...seek[ing] to free human beings from the tyrannies of unexamined opinions, current fashions, and inherited prejudices.” (Liberal Education in a Community of Learning, Annapolis, St. John’s College, 2003, p.1) To this end, we follow Montaigne’s advice: Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust...he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured....For if he embraces Xenophon’s and Plato’s opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his.” (“On the Education of Children” from The Complete Essays, translated by Donald Frame, p. 111.) As we read the books which have been the original source of many of our opinions, we become more self-aware. Seemingly self-evident ideas often appear strange and unfamiliar when confronted directly in their unmediated state; their shadowy nature as opinion accepted on mere authority is revealed. Sometimes, �as we consciously evaluate the integrity of our ideas, we also become conscious of “having been wrong.” This experience is not always pleasant, but discomfort at the disagreeableness of truth may nevertheless be good. In the world outside the college, being wrong is condemned; there we’re taught to be ashamed at it, and a posture of confident, all-knowingness is cultivated. Here, instead, we cultivate a pleasure in “having been wrong.” (It takes some time to develop this pleasure.) We recognize this moment of “having been wrong” as learning. The Greek word Plato uses for this moment is “aporia.” Often translated as “perplexity,” its etymology reveals a connotation of placelessness. We see this unrooted state in Meno’s slave boy when he realizes his assumption that he could easily name the line that forms double a square is unjustified (Meno, 84a). Naturally, a certain discomfort attends the moment—the kind of discomfort that has Meno calling Socrates names and trying to block every line of inquiry with his “captious argument” (80a, 80d). To the extent that we agree with Socrates that it is better to “feel the difficulty [we] are in,” (84a), we at the College actively pursue such discomfort as a good. We encourage the open and honest “Well, by Zeus, Socrates, I for one do not know” of the slave boy rather than Meno’s obstructionism. Of course, the slave boy has little status to lose, and perhaps his opinions about geometry are not as deeply held as the ones we need most to be liberated from. Deeply held opinions can require a mighty convulsion in order to be overthrown. Such a convulsion may not derive only from conversation. When Achilles’ advice at the general council of Greeks in Book I of the Iliad is spurned, he is shocked and wounded. They refuse to heed him, not because his advice is unwise, but because Agamemnon’s status (he is the titular authority of the whole Greek army) trumps Achilles’ (I.281). Until �that moment, Achilles seems to have assumed that his recognition by all as the best warrior warrants also the honor due the best man. The council’s violation of his assumption provokes not only volcanic wrath in Achilles, but also a retreat away from the battle and into extended meditation about his realization that the world is not as he had perceived: What has he accomplished? Why is his excellence seemingly not honored? Is there a better way of life? Why should he care about other Greeks? (IX. 315-343, 393-409, 608-619) Perhaps such cataclysmic events are more effective than conversation in freeing us from whatever opinion fetters us. However, I think it is no accident that Achilles experiences his revelation during deliberation in council rather than during the press and urgency of hand-to-hand combat. No question about first principles can truly be entertained as one is facing “invincible hands spattered with bloody filth.” (XX. 504) And some version of this problem of capitulation to urgent concerns and accepted societal orders faces us all. As Montaigne points out in his essay “Of Custom,” The principal effect of the power of custom is to seize and ensnare us in such a way that it is hardly within our power to get ourselves back out of its grip and return into ourselves to reflect and reason about its ordinances. Life requires action; action requires choice; choice requires a principle; custom supplies the requisite principle. The needed perspective for questioning the community of opinion to which we belong comes only when we are forcibly removed (as cavedwellers in Plato’s Republic must be) from that community or when we voluntarily withdraw from it (and enroll in the Graduate Institute). Rather than be at the mercy of chance events that may or may not liberate us, if we are to improve our ability to judge wisely, we need to withdraw ourselves from the crowd, consult �our best selves, and begin a process of winnowing the contents of our understanding. To this extent St. John’s is something of a “magic mountain”—like the retreat referred to in the title of the Thomas Mann novel some of you will be studying in preceptorial. The novel takes place in a sanatorium in Switzerland. People are there to undergo a cure for tuberculosis. But their struggle with sickness removes them from the everyday struggle for existence and frees them to engage in conversations about intellectual, human, emotional, political, moral, and philosophical matters. The main character Hans Castorp, while visiting his cousin, decides he wants to be ill, is attracted to the liberating, holiday atmosphere. There is also a pleasing rigor to the curative regimen, but more importantly there is time to cultivate an examination of the meaning of life in this retreat from the everyday world of capitalism. Now, I’m disturbed by the analogy just sketched between St. John’s and a sanatorium; the connotation of illness implies the need for a cure. Unfortunately, I suppose that the way I’ve depicted the liberation of a liberal education corresponds with this idea. For I’ve analyzed the process, I think consistently with Socrates’ depiction, as a freeing from falsity and illusion. Such liberation is more a negation, the destruction of an undesired state, than a positive, healthy activity to be pursued. Even if this “freedom from” is still a goal worth pursuing, when put in terms of health, it seems incomplete in a radical way. Not surprisingly, the self-aware, self-searching characters of Mann’s Magic Mountain address this issue. At a certain point, Naphta, one of Hans Castorp’s mentors and a fellow inmate, defends illness as follows: “Disease was very human indeed. For to be man was to be ailing. Man was essentially ailing, his state of unhealthiness was what made him man...” (Magic Mountain, p. 465, Vintage International). �This justification gives insight into the possibility that the mountain is in fact a way of life. But don’t we all long to walk upright, breathe deeply without coughing, stride boldly with no shortness of breath? I cannot turn Naphta’s defense into an inspiring affirmation of a positive good—only a cheerless attempt to make a virtue of necessity. Of course, to the extent that we feel delight in the very process of being cured, of being liberated from an opinion masquerading as truth, the magic mountain is positively good. But, to the extent that the falsity cries out to be replaced by the healthy and true, our conversations, like those of Socrates himself, often remain inconclusive and bereft of the particular intellectual satisfaction attendant on clear and pure knowledge. Such unimpeded vision more properly belongs to the act of contemplation as depicted by Aristotle in Book X of the Ethics, an act which depends least of all on other people (1177a28-33) and which is most self-sufficient in the sense that it can be carried on quite apart from conversation. Is there a positive good, a real health, achieved through conversation? It seems to me that a kind of intermediate state exists between the self-sufficient, positively good state Aristotle describes as political or communal (a state that is an end and not merely a means, a state achieved through ethical action in accordance with reason 1097b8-11, 1098a16-19) and the almost divine but isolated self-sufficient state he describes as achieved through true knowing (a state that seems more appropriate to Mt. Olympus than it does to the Magic Mountain—1141b8). I claim a third kind of self-sufficiency exists which is a hybrid of the communal and individual. The best conversation forces us simultaneously to live well with others—to practice the forms of courage, justice, moderation appropriate to conversation—and also to exercise what Aristotle calls the highest, most divine part of our individual nature (1177a20, 1177b28)—namely, reason. When, in the course of a conversation, we feel ourselves �guided by some principle external to us even while we are most vitally awake to our own thoughts, then a kind of austere and noble harmony (both interpersonal and intrapersonal) comes into being. I suppose this harmony depends upon the acknowledged incompleteness of our wisdom, but the negative aspect is alchemically transformed through our energetic, dynamic activity. The completeness of attention involved, the fullness of self which must be brought, the purification of extraneous goals and motives necessary for such a moment—all produce an independently choiceworthy activity. So, while many useful goods may be aimed at in our conversation, I think I am willing to argue that THIS is the good proper to conversation, the one we really want to experience inside the classroom. I’m even willing to say that it is an end in itself, for I myself feel truly alive, truly fulfilled at such moments. Marilyn Higuera � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Higuera, Marilyn Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2010 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-06 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Summer_2010_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Summer 2010 semester in Annapolis, MD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/54b633363ca946100c1a8f25d51c3f61.pdf 56badd9148e10b390bd670aa378f961c PDF Text Text Annapolis Convocation, Spring 2010 Welcome. Welcome especially to our new Graduate Institute students; welcome also to returning students and colleagues. On this your first day at the Graduate Institute, I want to address you on the subject not of great books and the profound thoughts you will encounter therein nor on the subject of the rigors and delights of independent thinking, a skill you will be honing here— at least I will not be speaking of those things directly. These are the obvious attractions of the program at St. John's. Today I would like to reflect on one of its less conspicuous charms: friendship. My guess is you haven't really come here seeking friendship. You have already had an undergraduate experience where you probably formed lifelong attachments. And here you will not be living together in dorms...nor sharing the trauma of ill-advised unions and cruel breakups (thank goodness for that)...nor helping each other to cope with groceries, laundry, time management, etc. Some of you are long past those days, and you may even have committed yourselves to the joys and trials of that particular and demanding friendship found in family life. Nonetheless, you are going to find friendship here, for I'm pretty sure it's impossible to engage properly in our activity without experiencing a certain kind of relationship to other students (and tutors) which is properly called friendship. The topic of friendship seems to be in the air this year. President Nelson used his fall undergraduate convocation address to consider the famous Greek phrase that "the things of friends are common"; tutor Gary Borjesson gave a Friday night lecture �concerning the friendship of dogs and men as a paradigm; and friendship was one of the themes of the faculty NEH study group. But my concern with this issue antedates those events. For a while now, I have wanted to use the word friendship to characterize my relations with students and colleagues, but have been at a loss to subsume these relations under the existing categories I have of friendship. So I'm going to use this opportunity to try to better formulate the particular, special kind of friendship that forms the bonds holding together this community— at least insofar as it is a community of learners. What do we normally mean by friendship? We use, perhaps overuse, that word to characterize a broad array of relationships. People with whom we share activities, whether poker or bowling or moviegoing or Church, become our friends. A certain class of friends comes with networking: work relationships, former colleagues, potential bosses. Modern life even has us "friends" with people we've never actually met—through Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter. But we all recognize these are friends only in some extended, casual use of the word. Sometimes we speak instead of our "true friends," by which we often mean the people who are loyal to us. Certainly, I value these friends; it is rare to find someone so committed to us as to see past our inadequacies, to endure with us our incapacitation by suffering, to forge a personal connection that transcends mere characteristics or shared interests. I hope each of you already has such a friend; I hope too that you may find another here. However, this kind of private relationship, based on affection and fidelity and intimacy, is clearly not the one that permeates our community. We do, by and large, like each other. But I mean here to uncover the essence of a more public, shared bond that arises organically through our common activity of joint inquiry. What is it �about exploring together the persistent questions confronting us in our lives that cultivates, perhaps even demands a sympathy beyond general civility? Perhaps the example of Socrates is relevant. Surely Socrates is a paradigm of the probing questioner searching beyond mere opinion and holding the highest of standards for knowledge, and he also embodies that particular way of life which critiques itself through engaging in dialogue with others. In these ways, he seems a kindred soul, if not a friend, to every Johnnie ("Johnnie" is how we affectionately refer to ourselves). And Socrates does in fact tie philosophy and friendliness together—in a strange, puzzling, almost humorous way—in the Republic, which those of you in the Politics and Society segment will begin reading shortly. As he founds his "city in speech," Socrates finds himself trying to characterize the necessary traits in the people entrusted with guarding the republic. Such guardians must be fiercely spirited in order to fend off threats, but gentle towards their friends, their fellow citizens (375c). We at St. John's also desire these seemingly incompatible characteristics in the members of our republic. If you don't have the spirited courage to venture your interpretations, to fend off the allure of easy answers, to risk being wrong, to face the loss of cherished opinions, our classes will fail. On the other hand, if you don't respect each others' insights, cultivate each others' potential, collaborate constructively with each other, our classes will also fail. Socrates and his interlocutors overcome their initial suspicion that these qualities are impossible to unite when Socrates recollects that there is an exemplar combining them; dogs, he says, have a truly "philosophic" nature. "When [a dog] sees someone it doesn't know, it's angry, although it never had any bad experience with him. And when it sees someone it knows, it greets him warmly, even if it never had a good experience with him." (376a) "How can �the love of learning be denied to a creature whose criterion of the friendly and the alien is intelligence and ignorance?" (376b) Now, as a direct analogy for your relations with each other and the outside world, this model fails. We at the College want to help you develop your ability to interact with one another, but we leave it to you to determine the character of your interactions with the outside world. However, after your initial double-take at the notion of a philosophic dog and in light of a certain respect for Socrates' skill with images, you may begin to penetrate more deeply into this humble metaphor. Real love of wisdom may indeed require this black-and-white attitude toward truth. In fact, we at the College hope you have a genuine passion for the truth and eschew falsity in all its forms, not only lies, but also hypocrisy and ignorance—even ignorance of your own ignorance. Moreover, insofar as the right reaction to one's own ignorance is to stamp it out, we even want you to engage in a spirited war (against yourself). This much of the controlled fierceness of the guardian dogs seems apt and desirable. What the image fails to highlight, and what we at St. John's (as well as Socrates in other circumstances) emphasize, is the difficulty in distinguishing what it is we know. Dogs don't seem to have this problem. But a few Meno-like experiences trying to clarify the essence of virtue make one painfully aware that one's opinions often masquerade as knowledge, thereby making one friendly toward falsity and hostile toward truth. Recognizing this possibility, we ought harbor a healthy suspicion of our immediate judgments. Unlike the guard dog in Socrates' image, we must open ourselves up to the unfamiliar and be ready to abandon the familiar. We must be willing to be vulnerable. And we must feel secure baring our very souls to one another. So I find myself needing a very different model tying together friendship and �philosophy—preferably one where I am not reduced to thinking about friendliness toward truth rather than toward another person. Aristotle's more explicit analysis of friendship may help. You may be surprised to learn that Aristotle devotes two whole books to this subject in the Nicomachean Ethics, the first text read in the Politics and Society tutorial. He turns to friendship after he treats of the ethical life in general and the various virtues specifically, remarking that friendship is "a virtue or something with virtue." (1155a4) In your classes, you will no doubt assess the truth of this claim and investigate the role friendship plays in the ethical life. Here, I want to see if Aristotle's analysis of friendship can help me characterize the special rapport immanent in a classroom full of people bound only by their passion to understand. Characteristically, Aristotle begins from what is first (or most clear) to us, analyzing the various ways we commonly use the word "friend" –for people we invite on hikes and co-workers as well as our intimates. After stressing the necessity and nobility of friendship in the fully human life (1155a29), Aristotle, again characteristically, proceeds to make distinctions which will allow him to sift through our loose conceptions and isolate the essence of friendship. He identifies three species of friendship: friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue (1156a6-8). Although he notes that all friendships involve reciprocal goodwill (1155b34), he singles out the last type, the friendship based on character, as the most perfect (1156b8). Such friends are in fact both useful and pleasant to each other, but this friendship is more noble in that they are not friends for the sake of usefulness or pleasure, but for the sake of the good. These friends are engaged in helping each other to live the best and happiest life (1169b20-22) No doubt you're willing to believe that here at the College you too will assist each other to live the best life, but you probably would identify that assistance as an accidental side-effect of your desire �to improve yourself. It remains to be seen whether Aristotle will account for a necessary connection between philosophy and a friendly commitment to the welfare of another. Aristotle's conception of the paradigmatic friendship embraces three primary characteristics: disinterestedness, like-mindedness, and activity. We can probably all agree that the best friends show a disinterested concern for one another. We genuinely wish a true friend well because of who the friend is and for his own sake (1156b9-11) rather than because of the job he can bring us (even if we are grateful for the job as well). Unself-interested regard for another and action on his behalf are at the core of the best friendships. Initially, we might hesitate to posit like-mindedness as a necessary component of friendship. We tend to identify likemindedness as a common world view, and we all have friends with whom we profoundly disagree. Aristotle rightly, I think, dismisses this interpretation; he points out that "it is not sameness of opinion, for the latter might belong also to those who do not know each other" (1167a21-22). Instead, Aristotle traces the harmonious interdependence of friends to their agreement about matters to be acted on, to having the same intentions regarding what is of common interest (1167a28). Insofar as we admire our friends, we must indeed be appreciating their virtues, their conception of the good (a conception we affirm and subscribe to ourselves). I think this is why Aristotle's characterization of the friend as "another self" (1166a33) resonates so powerfully. It captures our sense of the special union of sameness and otherness we find in our most satisfying relationships. The third element Aristotle claims as essential is that friends participate in common activities, especially those activities directed toward a good life. Indeed, he claims true companionship entails "living with" the other person (1171b29). Only then can we �rejoice in the observation of a friend's accomplishment of morally praiseworthy acts; only in close and regular contact can we find sustenance and indispensable support in his advice and counsel as we try to discern our own moral path. The best friends not only stimulate each other to action but also encourage each other to develop, assist each other to grow in wisdom. This realization of a practical, ethical element in friendship is the fruit of Aristotle's insight that happiness is an activity in accordance with virtue (rather than a mood or emotion). Now Aristotle's treatment of friendship, as I mentioned, is embedded in a book on ethics. His portrait of the perfect, unqualified friendship depicts virtuous activity as the necessary basis for mutual respect and joint pleasure. But we here at St. John's do not intend to be answering the question of what virtue is for you; in fact, we intend to raise that question in sharply provocative ways. While versions of justice and courage and temperance all are requisite in the classroom discussions, they appear as modes of speech and thought rather than action as such. But Aristotle does link his perfect friendship with discussion, noting that above all"living with" one's friend means: "shar[ing] in discussion and thought—for this is what living together would seem to mean for human beings, and not feeding in the same place, as with cattle" (1170b10-14). Further, Aristotle broaches the topic of friendship only after a full treatment of the intellectual virtues, upon which he realizes true ethical virtue must depend. Now, the commitment you have made to attend the Graduate Institute emanates from a certain kind of intellectual virtue. You have signed up for more than a degree program; you're exploring a way of life. The twelve of you have set a high standard for what you want to count as wisdom and you have refused to be mere passive recipients of such wisdom. �You will rejoice to see these virtues shining forth in the "other selves" surrounding you here. And while the activity you all engage in here is one of thought rather than philanthropy or politics, it will be shared in the fullest sense of that word. You will collaborate with every ounce of your energy in order to successfully think another's thought, formulate a reaction, and use the text to constructively criticize that reaction. Even though we don't share common histories, backgrounds, or creeds, you will feel the presence of a common goal, the quest for truth, and a common standard, reasoned argument, guiding every discussion. The more fully you engage in this common activity, the more you will find your goals inextricably bound to the goals of your companions. The more the quest for truth dominates, the less concerned you will be that you were the one to utter that selfcontradictory, absurd interpretation and the more pleased you will be to see someone else resolve the paradox and point the way to a new path where we can safely tread. In this way, a selfforgetting regard for the other will necessarily inhabit you. And in this sense, you will be friends. Now, in the Nicomachean Ethics, friendship forms a bridge between an analysis of the ethical virtues and an account of the most perfect and pleasant activity, namely contemplation. A certain tension in the book arises: is the best life the more public, etchical life or the private, almost divinely self-sufficient contemplative life? Something like this tension probably pervades our classes as well. As the myth of recollection emphasizes, the experience of knowledge finally happens deep within oneself. But I think the experience of coming to know happens amongst us friends. Let us go forge this new friendship then. Convocatum est. �Marilyn Higuera � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Higuera, Marilyn Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2010 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-01 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Spring_2010_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Spring 2010 semester in Annapolis, MD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9bdece0aef4ce06574d807a30190fb02.pdf ccbdcccecb80c4924c9b02c46c75c351 PDF Text Text Annapolis Convocation, Spring 2011 Welcome. Welcome especially to our new, select group of Graduate Institute students. Welcome also to returning students and colleagues. Last summer, for one of our Wednesday evening "Life of the Mind" events (these rather informal events take the place of the more formal Friday evening lectures that occur during the regular academic year), I put together a panel of tutors to discuss the question, "What is Philosophy?" For that occasion, I asked each tutor to select a program author and give a 10-minute interpretation of what that author thought constituted the activity of philosophy. The presentations were so thought-provoking that, in the intense question period that followed, we never got around to what we ourselves think philosophy is. But here at St. John's— where we aim at living the examined life, where questions regarding truth are welcomed in classes on Euclidean geometry, Chaucer's tales, or the Bible, where the questions persist whether in the classroom or the Coffee Shop, at an After Seminar Gathering or at home—it seems only right to press ourselves to tackle that question. Today, in honor of your joining our community, I am going to put myself on the spot and venture to define philosophy. Let me beat a hasty retreat. I will try today to say what I think philosophy is, as practiced here and as I have gleaned from my 32 years of experience at St. John's. This version should not be considered what "we" think philosophy is—for, as you will soon discover, each tutor and each student is continually articulating, questioning, re-evaluating, and re-articulating what it is that we practice here, what constitutes the program, and virtually every �other element of the best life as well. None of us would say the exact same things and we surely have some radical disagreements. Furthermore, I have real trepidations about making the attempt to say even what I think philosophy is. Last year, when one of my colleagues was relating an anecdote to me, she recounted in passing that she had identified herself as a philosopher—and I found myself doing a double-take. I realized that I would never identify myself as a philosopher to anyone. Of course, I have no degree in philosophy, as she does. But I also would never identify myself as a mathematician even though I do have degrees in that field. As a tutor, I am clearly not an expert—not even in "my" field. Though I have some skills, I suppose, and I definitely possess arcane information that not everyone has, I do not spend my time considering abstract entities invented just yesterday nor struggling to prove claims about those entities. I simply don't feel that I am pursuing the authentic activity. On the other hand, am I not authentically doing philosophy here at the College? What am I doing if not philosophy as I examine the profoundest ideas both in great books and in our own lives? Having reflected to this point on my colleague's open assumption of the mantle of philosophy, I realize I quite admire it and begin to wonder. Shouldn't I too claim to be a philosopher? As you may know, the etymology of the word "philosophy" is Greek: philos—meaning lover, and sophia—meaning wisdom. Can I not claim to be a lover of wisdom? Who wouldn't claim to be a lover of wisdom? Well, during a seminar oral examination last term, one of my students described people she knew who claimed knowledge was unimportant, indeed that made decisions on the basis of that claim. But such people reveal their desire to "know better" than others around them, don't they? Aren't they claiming they have superior wisdom about the best way to live—even as �they scorn the reading of books and the raising of questions? As Aristotle claims in the Metaphysics, "All men by nature desire to know." (980a) But neither Aristotle nor I would claim those people my student described are living the philosophic life; indeed, they themselves are trying very hard to reject the philosophic life. What do I think characterizes a person who loves wisdom? What is the essence of the philosophic activity? One common claim of the participants in the summer panel on philosophy was that each author considered philosophy to be a "way of life." I immediately agreed. But I have learned to be suspicious of easy agreement. So I have since been prodding myself to examine what I mean when I say that "philosophy is a way of life." As is often the case, it's easier to say what I don't mean. Sometimes when we refer to "philosophy" we simply mean that someone studied philosophy at some university and got a degree. Certainly, this is not what I mean. To allow someone else to determine a set of books and ideas which are labeled "philosophy" and become conversant and knowledgeable about what they contain is too empty for me to want to make a life of it. Even the deeper version—where the expert is genuinely weighing various arguments against each other—seems more a valuable skill than a true identity. Sometimes we speak of someone's "philosophy of life," by which we mean a set of beliefs, a creed—or at least a system, by which the person lives. This also is not what I intend by "philosophy." Though most days I long achingly for such a creed (one that would guarantee the best decisions), I don't see how unquestioning adherence to a code (no matter how hard-won nor how profound) could really constitute the activity of philosophy itself. Moreover, reading Don Quixote for my preceptorial last term has reminded me that every interaction with the world challenges �such a code, requires—at a minimum—re-examination but usually re-interpretation and sometimes abandonment. What we see as giants often reveal themselves to be mere windmills. And meanwhile the too, too solid windmills of life resist one's lance and sometimes break it. In the republic of letters, "philosophy" sometimes refers to the study of the truths and principles underlying all knowledge and being. This concept of philosophy seems a worthier candidate than the other two, but it does not, at least on the surface, appear to be a way of life. This formulation obscures the vexed character of the philosopher's relation to truths and principles. At this College, we are keenly conscious of the difficulty of knowing the truth. Let me, in my perplexity, turn toward one of our profound original sources for help. In the inception of our Great Books program, the Socratic life as depicted by Plato provided much inspiration and guidance for our activities in this community. Many of my own ideas about the philosophic life stem from the picture I have constructed through reading the Republic, the Apology, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, and, of course, the Meno. As you yourself saw in Socrates' interactions with Meno, Socrates resists the glib answer—whether it be a secondhand speech of the professional rhetorician Gorgias or an overhasty dismissal of mundane matters. He lingers over even the most basic questions: What is a bee? What is a figure? How do I form a double square? During my years at St. John's I've learned to allow these questions to bring me up short, to pause and reflect on each word, to check the momentum impelling me to leap over the simple-sounding. In the process of so doing, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. We see with fresh eyes both the diagonal of a square and ourselves. Suddenly we do not quite recognize the square root of 8; we begin to wonder whether we should really call square root of 8 a number; whether we know what virtue is; �whether we, like Meno, are asking questions only to find out what other people say and not because we really want to know, really love wisdom. But how do I tell whether I "really" love wisdom? Once a doubt creeps in regarding my unexamined, unconscious motives, it's difficult to judge whether I'm directing myself toward wisdom or wandering, lost among shadowy opinions. My own touchstone necessarily derives from experiences akin to those of the slaveboy, moments that not only feel like the lifting of a veil between my eyes and some object of thought but that also are accompanied by a sense that a previously dormant part of myself has suddenly quickened with life and activity. Life lived in the absence of this invigoration feels, if not dead, at least empty. Or perhaps more accurately, that other life lacks a vital dimension. As Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader, "On Not Knowing Greek" p. 32) has put it: ... all can feel the indomitable honesty, the courage, the love of truth which draw Socrates and us in his wake to the summit where, if we too may stand for a moment, it is to enjoy the greatest felicity of which we are capable. I don't think I, or Woolf, can persuade someone that this dimension exists. But I do think experience has engendered in me a passion to think, to endure the struggle toward clarity. But how do these momentary glimpses of felicity constitute a way of life? I'm not satisfied that I've focused on the key element yet. Love of wisdom, as manifest in Socrates and cultivated at St. John's, requires absolute honesty. Socrates is unafraid to admit ignorance publicly. And he frequently adjures his interlocutor to speak "just what he thinks" rather than what someone else has said; he demands of Meno, "What is your own account of virtue?" (71d) One reason we eschew secondary sources here at the College is that the din of other voices tends to drown out one's own thought. It sounds an easy matter to "say what you think," but �it's actually much easier to know what someone else has said or to guess what others want to hear. And secondary sources are not the only danger to developing one's own honest thought. Even if others can ask just the right question to shake us out of complacent judgments, provide us with a well-chosen instance of a general claim that illuminates an otherwise dark and puzzling construction of the world, surprise us out of a deeply satisfying interpretation with a carefully crafted formulation, or refute one of our claims with a reasoned analysis, no one can have the "Aha!" moment for us. So a philosopher doesn't let Plato or Aristotle or a tutor or another student simply tell him/her what to think. But what does the philosopher do? How does the philosopher free the voice inside struggling to be heard? To look within and evaluate the structure, quality, and range of one's experience, the integrity of the conclusions drawn from that experience, and the consistency of the complex web of those conclusions—that demands rigor, humility, suffering, submission, courage, tirelessness. If one dwells with this kind of love of wisdom, nothing is so cherished or so private that it is not to be held up to scrutiny. The supreme challenge of this kind of honesty is a lifetime project. Perhaps this is what I mean by making philosophy a way of life? But many, perhaps most, people think they are being honest with themselves and others. Is there some special way for a philosopher to scrutinize his opinions, debunk his own illusions, penetrate his own defenses? All too often in the past, I have wrongly thought I understood. Just as the slaveboy was fooled by the resonant sound and delightful simplicity of a "double area" arising from a "double length," I have been seduced by mere words. Just as Meno was only able to accept a definition in the "high, poetic style" (76e) of Gorgias and could not "hear" the better, perhaps truer, definition, I too have exhibited a weakness �for the lofty adjective, the idealistic phrase, the neat dichotomy. Is there some characteristic other than the only partially reliable ability to analyze one's own claims that sets the philosophic life apart? In Plato's dialogue Phaedo, as Socrates spends his last day on earth in prison waiting for the fatal cup of hemlock, he depicts a mode of existence for the philosopher that is thoroughgoing and quite stark. This topic of conversation is launched by Socrates' claim to his friends that he is willing and indeed even eager to die (62c). In response to his friends' incredulous reactions, he makes the yet more astounding claim that "philosophy, practiced in the right way," is "one thing only, namely training ....for dying and to be dead." (64a) He explains that pleasures of food, drink, sight, and all pleasures of the body distract a person from pursuing the full truth of the being of things in general (64c-66c). So "real philosophers train for dying, and to be dead is for them less terrible than for all other men." (67e) For they have purified their soul—"in separating so far as may be the soul from the body, and habituating it to assemble and gather itself together from every region of the body, so as to dwell alone and apart, so far as possible, both in this present life and in the life to come, released from the body's fetters." (67c) Now, here indeed is a version of philosophy that is a way of life— but a highly problematic one. Not only does it not echo very much our own way of life here at the College (we do rather enjoy the wine and food as well as the conversation at our after-seminar gatherings), but it presents itself as a way of death at least as much as a way of life. As one of Socrates' interlocutors puts it, "[the many] would say [such a person] has one foot in the grave." (65a) �To think that the body is simply a hindrance to truth is probably not in my capacity, not least because it seems also to undermine the power of music and poetry. Worse yet, this version of philosophy, where private cares must be set aside, normal obligations disdained, and connections to family and friends attenuated, seems almost inhuman. In the Phaedo, this indifference to earthly concerns is admitted to be inhuman, in the sense that it is described as divine. And I am inspired by talk of the soul longing for its own eternal ground of the truth; I'm even more moved by the picture Plato paints of the dying Socrates. He never once weeps; he never even trembles; he continues calmly discoursing about various subjects—not only philosophy, but also the various possibilities of life after death, or no life after death; he is a rock for his grieving friends. I truly hope that I can confront my hour of death as nobly and with as much equanimity as this Socrates. Nonetheless, I cannot live this life. I'm probably too weak an individual to be an ascetic, even if I believed this was in fact the philosophic life. But the truth is: I can't believe such asceticism is the way to wisdom. Even Socrates' admissions that the goal of philosophy is, strictly speaking, unachievable in this life and that the philosopher is only cultivating a certain attitude towards the body, even these admissions do not salvage this version of philosophy for me. I suspect truth of being various, of descending on us in a multitude of shapes, of being grasped through the imagination as well as the intellect, of residing in friendships and society as well as in the individual. But perhaps Socrates intends something more subtle than his conversation in the Phaedo superficially indicates. Though Socrates does, at the beginning of the dialogue, send his family away in order to converse with his friends, we are first allowed to see the 70-year old Socrates not only with his wife but also with �his toddler son. Then we see him reflecting on the inextricably linked natures of pleasure and pain as his shackles are removed and we hear him connecting his own immediate bodily experience to his conclusions about the nature of pleasure and pain. Then we learn that he has been composing songs in case dialectical conversation did not properly fulfill his vocation. Music, poetry, friends, family, pleasure, pain, conversation—these still engage the nobly dying Socrates. Perhaps being philosophic is more about holding a certain posture towards all of life—an attentiveness toward the world, toward oneself, and toward others; a readiness to act on the basis of thought and not merely on the basis of custom or pleasure; a critical observation—to be sure of opinions and ideas but also of life, awake to the timeless within the temporal. I still don't think I will be able any time soon to say, "I am a philosopher." But I will say that I am working toward being a philosopher. And I hope you'll work with me as well. Marilyn Higuera � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Higuera, Marilyn Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2011 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-01 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Spring_2011_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Spring 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/92d31ffa84b0722fdb4c1f53ec357402.mp3 81e30dbfd4b24d4cd0d39642b10cf693 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:25:30 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Fall 2017 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of the convocation address given by Pano Kanelos for the Fall 2017 semester in Annapolis, MD. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kanelos, Panayiotis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-08-23 Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Relation A related resource <a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3108">Typsecript</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Convocation Kanelos, Pano 8-28-17 Convocation Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/edf9e1a14b22fcdc7db36edbc4f253a3.pdf a4f1775be350508f1bc1f14afe6df144 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Convocation August 23, 2017 Pano Kanelos It is with great pleasure that I would like to welcome the Class of 2021 and our entering Graduate Institute students into our St. John’s community. We are honored to have you here. I would like to welcome as well all family and friends who are joining us today – thank you for all the support you give these wonderful young people. And to the returning students, faculty and staff – I would like to thank you personally for allowing me to join this community. Just like our first-year students, I feel like I’ve entered a place of a garden of delight and wonder. It was customary in the nineteenth century, at American colleges such as St. John’s, for the college president to offer a capstone course to graduating seniors. This class, generally titled “Moral Philosophy”, was meant to be the culmination of one’s college experience. “Moral philosophy” was the end towards which all the separate courses of study pointed. It represented the telos of one’s education. Those nineteenth-century presidents must have been made of sterner stuff than this twentyfirst century president. I am certain, were I to presume to offer instruction in moral philosophy at the end of your St. John’s experience, I would could only do more harm than good. Let us leave the end of your studies in more qualified hands, those of your tutors, those of the texts you encounter, and most critically, your very own. Yet here we are at a beginning, called together in assembly, which is the meaning of convocation, a radical beginning for those of you who are joining us in your first year, and an only slight less profound beginning for those of us who have already been resident in this community. And at this beginning, I would like to draw inspiration from those past presidents and have us take a look at our end. In fact, what I would like to do this afternoon is provide a framework for you to think about the arc of your education at St. John’s College. To this end, I would like to fix in your mind a tableau, an evocative image provided by one of your teachers, the great lover of wisdom, Plato. My hope is that this image will remain with you during your time here in the college, and that it will be one that you will return to again and again in the years that follow. �The endpoint of the experience of the Program of Instruction is a text, Plato’s Phaedrus. This is the final work on our four-year long seminar reading list in Annapolis. This may seem anomalous to some, given that all the other readings in seminar are roughly chronological in sequence. Why, at the end of the arc, after having marched resolutely from the classical world to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, are we circling back around to this ancient work? And to strike yet another seemingly discordant note, those of you who study the seminar reading list with any attention, will mark another peculiarity – there is only one text over our four-year course of study, that we read not once, but twice – Plato’s Phaedrus. The Phaedrus marks the end point of our first undergraduate year of study; it also marks the endpoint of the Program of Instruction. Thus when we reach the end of the Program we are both at an end, yet also circling back around to an earlier point. We complete a circuit, a coming again, a revolution. The end is, and is not, the end. Which brings us to the image that I would like to fix in your mind as you charge forth into this year and those to come. Picture a chariot. This chariot, pulled by two winged steeds, is traversing the sky. The driver, sweating, straining, struggles to maintain control. One of the horses, white, noble in bearing, heaves upward, wrenching the chariot towards the heavens. The other horse, black, disfigured, drags the craft perilously towards the earth. Their journey is an erratic one, a dangerous one. This dynamic image is taken from the Phaedrus. It is an image of the human soul. In the Phaedrus, Plato describes the chariots of the gods, each harnessed to two white, noble horses, parading one after the other into the heavens. Led by Zeus, the gods ascend effortlessly into the ether, where they contemplate the Forms: " What is in this place is without color and without shape and without solidity, a reality that really is what it is, the subject of all true knowledge, visible only to intelligence, the soul's steersman. Now a god's mind is nourished by intelligence and pure knowledge, as is the mind of any soul that is concerned to take in what is appropriate to it, and so it is delighted at last to be seeing what is real and watching what is true, feeding on all this and feeling wonderful, until the circular motion brings it around to where it started. On the way around it has a view of Justice as it is; it has a view of Self-control; it has a view of Truth. And when the soul has seen all the things that are as they are and feasted on them, it sinks back inside heaven and goes home. On its arrival, the charioteer stables the horses by the manger, throws in ambrosia, and gives them nectar to drink besides. Now that is the life of the gods.” �The life of mortals, however, is not quite so serene. The chariot represents for Plato the tripartite human soul. The driver of the chariot signifies the intellect, our ratiocinative powers. The white horse represents what the Greeks termed our “thumos” or spiritedness. Our thumos seeks glory, honor, and recognition. It goads us towards excellence and pricks us when we act shamefully. The black horse embodies our appetites, which are drawn towards earthly pleasures, material gain and comfort. Human reason, in the figure of the charioteer, aims for enlightenment. But it is yoked to these other human drives. Thus, trailing the gods, desperately following in their wake, the human soul invariably falters. Again, from the Phaedrus: "As for the other souls, one that follows a god most closely, making itself most like that god, raises the head of its charioteer up to the place outside and is carried around in the circular motion with the others. Although distracted by the horses, this soul does have a view of Reality, just barely. Another soul rises at one time and falls at another, and because its horses pull it violently in different directions, it sees some real things and misses others. The remaining souls are all eagerly straining to keep up, but are unable to rise; they are carried around below the surface, trampling and striking one another as each tries to get ahead of the others...” Such is the fate of human souls. What comes without effort to the gods, possessed of pure intellect, is attained only fleetingly by mortals, and even then, only by a select few. Depending upon on how extensive a glimpse of the Forms they achieve, determines their human identity. Those who have steered their chariots above the rim of the sky and who have glimpsed Reality in its authentic form are compelled by an overwhelming desire to return that exalted station. The longer the soul has spent among the universals, the stronger the memory of what it has witnessed. Souls whose experience of the heavens was most sustained, return to earth as philosophers. Their compulsion to return to an unalloyed Reality manifests itself in desire, in a passion for truth – hence they are denominated lovers of wisdom. Other souls return to earth in descending order, each having seen and understood less and less of Reality, from law-abiding kings, to merchants, physicians, prophets, poets, craftsmen or farmers, sophists, and finally, the least enlightened, tyrants. You may read that final category as you will… This is neither the time nor place to offer an extended exegesis on Plato’s Allegory of the Chariot. Instead, I would like to offer a set of six brief observations. Then I would like to address how this allegory may be applied to your education. 1. The soul described by Plato is dynamic. It is in motion. Its path is not predetermined, but is rather the result of effort. We are creatures that change and develop. �2. The soul is multifaceted, composite. We are not simply rational creatures, but creatures of passion. We are driven by desires, both edifying and destructive. The intellect may try to steer these desires, yet it is also dependent upon them for forward motion. 3. We cannot simply cut the black horse loose – without its strength, we cannot ascend into the heavens. Yet our earthly desires must be informed by our reason and aligned with our spiritedness to propel us in the right direction. 4. The white horse may also present dangers. Thumos properly directed can lead to noble action. But thumos unbridled, like the anger of Achilles, can lead to rage and the loss of control. 5. As mortals, even our greatest efforts to seek Truth ultimately falter. Yet what marks us most is the desire for Truth, rather than its attainment. In this we are more glorious than even the gods. 6. It is the memory of what they have seen that draws souls back into the heavens. To know something is to return to it. To love something is to desire to return to it. So what do these unruly steeds and frantic charioteer have to do with your experience at St. John’s? To answer this question, we must first ask ourselves others: Is this thing we call education the formation of the intellect or the formation of the soul? Is knowledge dependent upon powers of the mind, or habits of character? Are these things separable? For Plato, they clearly are not. To seek truth, one must cultivate one’s character, one must allow the passion for what is honorable to rein in and lead the passion for baser things. In fact, one must train the passions to act in accord with the Good. As Aristotle says, “To be always seeking after the useful, does not become free and exalted souls.” Liberal education is an education that liberates – this is the root implication of liberal. Plato’s chariot is an image of free and exalted souls, those souls that soar as best they can towards the heavens. The course of that flight for those of you joining St. John’s, as well as for those of you currently mid-air, is the course of your experience in the Program. Yours are minds traversing a set of texts, a constellation of intensified human experience. Yet the Program is not the end itself. It is an opportunity for you to strive for higher things. And your striving will be animated by your thumos. Let me provide an example. Recently, I ran into a couple of Johnnies at a restaurant on Main Street in Annapolis. Our conversation turned towards the coming semester. I mentioned that I would be leading a preceptorial, but was still mulling over the topic. I asked them what they would be interested in taking. One of the young women immediately responded, “Anything! �As long as it’s really difficult.” That right there, that impulse that rose in this young woman to seek the challenging path, was an expression of her thumos. You could practically feel the white horse lifting her upwards. As you make your way through St. John’s, the black horse will be at work as well, tugging you in the other direction. It will be most obviously evident in simple, base distractions: when Netflix calls more loudly than Plato. When your confidence is shaken and you question the utility of your education. Most perniciously, you may also find yourself subject to the cynicism that seems to pervade the general culture about the pursuit of truth itself. To resist these impulses, you must have courage. This is not to say that you should only read books. Dancing, sports, conversation, and courtship are all arenas for thumos, where the passions quicken and where one may strive for excellence. We are composite beings, not disembodied minds. Live your life robustly while you are here. Be engaged. Be active. Be open to other remarkable souls that share this journey with you. Like the arc of Plato’s chariot, your pathway through St. John’s will come to its end. This may feel to you like a falling from the heavens to the earth. Yet as Plato instructs us, the end is not the end. Your future will be nourished by the memory of what you encounter here. The higher you soar, the longer you sustain your flight, the more potent your memory will be of the finer things. We are not gods – what we apprehend we apprehend only fleetingly. Yet you will continue to be free and exalted souls as you continue to be propelled by what is honorable, what is excellent and what is good. This will be fed by your love for wisdom. Remember, to know something is to return to it. To love something is to desire to return to it. The end is not the end. In Plato’s account, the wings of the both horses are nourished by beauty, enabling us to soar. At this moment, at the beginning of this journey, I would like to invite Mr. Stoltzfus to lead our students in a particular offering of beauty to sustain us as we move forward into this academic year. Mr. Stoltzfus! Thank you all for that truly inspiring rendition of Sicut Cervus. Immediately following the ceremony today, please join us for a reception in the FSK lobby. I will ask all guest to remain in your places until the platform party freshmen, new GI students and faculty have processed out. With great pleasure, “I officially declare the College in session. CONVOCATUM EST.” � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Word doc 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 Convocation Address, Fall 2017 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address given by Pano Kanelos for the Fall 2017 semester in Annapolis, MD. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kanelos, Panayiotis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-08-23 Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Convocation Kanelos, Pano 8-23-17 Relation A related resource <a title="Sound recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3107">Sound recording</a> Convocation Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/dff5c37d2c4c457135e36fb85d492f28.mp3 a1ec23d743d446e4273db33d0e3bc16c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:21:33 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Fall 2018 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of the convocation address given by Pano Kanelos for the Fall 2018 semester in Annapolis, Maryland. Includes students singing Sicut Cervus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kanelos, Panayiotis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-08-22 Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Convocation Kanleos, Pano 8-22-18 Convocation Presidents