1 20 41 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ee81d6f16398ad2f4fa092945f866699.pdf fea21ca4a91585a6317c493d39fdf59a PDF Text Text Homer and the Power of Men That Have Chests Convocation Address August 27, 2003 Christopher B. Nelson President, St. John’s College in Annapolis Welcome to the class of 2007, to those beginning their studies in the Graduate Institute, to parents and friends, and all members of the college community. One of the many things I love about this college is that everyone must begin with Homer — and not only Homer, but the Iliad. It’s not just that this happens to have been my favorite book for most of my life. It is a collection of things, all of which have something to do with your initiation into this community of learning, something to do with the liberal education you are about to begin here. Homer is arguably both the first and the best of poets and we want you to read the best and most original of books at this college. Montaigne, another author you will meet here in your sophomore year, wrote this about Homer: “It was against the order of nature that he created the most excellent production that can be. For things at birth are ordinarily imperfect; they gain size and strength as they grow. He made the infancy of poetry and of several sciences mature, perfect and accomplished. For this reason he may be called the first and last of poets . . .” (Of the Most Outstanding Men) There is also something glorious about undertaking your studies at this particular beginning, because the Iliad takes hold of the imagination from its first line, when it sweeps the reader into the Achaean camps, to face the towering figure of Achilles: “Rage --- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses…” The images and the pace of the poetry appear to be artless, yet commanding. The Iliad has a kind of immediacy you will find nowhere else. It has irresistible momentum. It grabs you in the middle, somewhere in the vicinity of the chest or the heart, and it demands the attention of your sensibility. Consider the size of the heroes and the size of the themes. Who is this godlike Achilles and what is his glory? What is the rage that has power over him? Where does it come from? What are the consequences of unleashing it upon others? Is it purely a destructive force? Can it be directed or controlled? What does it take to dissolve this rage? Why are these men fighting? Who or what drove them to it? What is the price of defending illicit love? Can one ever exercise control over the forces of nature, change fate, or fight the gods? Look at the great battle-armies. What propels these heroes to action, especially when they have knowledge of the risks, dangers and dreadful consequences of battle? What is courage? What good is honor, and what does it mean to die honorably? What is virtue and excellence of character, and can you find these in the poem? �Well, here is your chance to read about the bold and to talk about the question of character. C. S. Lewis wrote a little book that perhaps you have read, The Abolition of Man, in which he argued that modern education (he was writing in 1955) was failing to help the young develop a sense of morality. In man, Lewis said, “[the head rules the belly through the chest – the seat ... of magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The chest – magnanimity – sentiment – these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.” What Lewis feared from modern education was that it would stamp out the spirited element in the young, causing the atrophy of magnanimity and sentiment. And all the while, we clamor for more drive, or more self-sacrifice: “... {We} remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” C. S. Lewis may have had cause to complain, but you do not — not now. Surely there is not a more powerful book anywhere than the Iliad with which to examine the virtues and vices, the beauty and terrible power for good or ill, of men with chests. So the Iliad, and later, the Odyssey form a good beginning to philosophy; they ask you to confront powerful aspects of your nature on your first day at the college — aspects that often function independently of your rational capacity. You are asked to face the spirited element within you and to wonder whether it can or should be shaped and tempered by your reason. I’ve been referring to a “spirited” element within man. You’ll be reading a lot about this in your freshman year, first in Homer, then in Herodotus and Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle. The Greek word is 2b:`l. It is variously used to mean the breath of life, the principle that animates life, the soul, the heart, the spirit, an attitude that inspires action, a capacity for vigor, courage, mettle, liveliness, indignation, anger, righteousness or pride. It is a word used of men and women both; it is what moves individual men and women from thought to action. So, while the Iliad is a stage for the display and destruction of 2b:`l among warrior men, you will have ample opportunity during the years for recognizing its place in the breasts of women too. If you look hard, you may even find it used to describe Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey. Now back to the Iliad, where you are also asked to consider the power of community, the bonds of friendship, the call of duty toward one’s own people, all abandoned by Achilles very early in the poem. Achilles becomes both a lesser, meaner man and a distant, godlike emblem because of this. He must learn to take responsibility for the awful consequences of his withdrawal from battle; he must suffer a terrible personal loss and rise up above himself before he can again stand beside his fellow Achaeans. He must also learn compassion before reentering the community of men. �Why is community important? What is friendship, and what does it require? Where does the sense of self belong in a community? These are the same questions you must ask when trying to learn the best way to live with others. You will read about the power of civil discourse as battle plans are shaped and reshaped, about the path to wisdom through suffering and re-commitment, the power of human empathy, and the need for magnanimity and generosity in dealing with others. And always in the shadows are the fates, spinning and inevitably shortening the thread of life. We are, in the end, mortals and we must come to accept this fact. How do we do this? We all want to know. How does one come to terms with death when everything in our being screams with life and the will to live? Who are the gods and what is our relation to them? What of honor, glory, mercy, forgiveness, and the possibility for heroism? What is the authority of law and custom, and how should we behave when this authority threatens the bonds of family? What do we make of Helen who strangely serves as a kind of prime mover in the whole drama, but also as an object of spoil. Name a theme in the realm of human activity that is not dealt with in the Iliad and you are likely to find it in the Odyssey. There, our hero learns what it means to trade the offer of immortality for the possibility of returning home, the need to face one’s demons and overcome one’s weaknesses before deserving the right to return, the importance of taking life’s journey and facing its dangers and temptations in order to grow, the necessity for leaving home in order to discover the bedrock that was there all along. There, we find wisdom in survival, truth in lies, and strength in weakness. And always is our hero’s happiness bound up with the need to search — to search at any price. This too sounds a lot like the kind of question that you might need to examine to understand why you even decided to come to St. John’s. We meet the glorious Penelope, Odysseus’ match in every sense. How well has she raised their son to manhood in his father’s 20-year absence? How has she maintained home, family and kingdom all on her own? How should she treat her returning husband and gain mastery over this wayward stranger of a man, to test his love and confirm that he is fit to return to his place beside her and his seat of power in Ithaca? It is in the Odyssey that we see the strength of Homer’s women and goddesses who serve as Odysseus’ protectors and saviors as well as his reason for returning — they become both the means and the end of his journey from the world of Troy to home in Ithaca. Last, you get the experience of beauty in Homer’s unforgettable images. I still wake up to dawn’s rosy fingers stretching across the waters of the Chesapeake. I see the father’s unbound joy as he tosses his young boy about in his arms, kissing him lovingly, before heading back out to the field of honor for his final battle. I watch the wise and lovely Penelope at her spinning wheel, weaving the web that makes Odysseus’s homecoming possible. Consider now this new beginning to your education: you get the beautiful, the great, the first and the last; you get to start with the issues of the heart and the spirit, those things that move you to action. You will talk about honor and courage, beauty and glory, gods’ laws and man’s, mortality and death, community and friendship, family and love, and the inevitable longing for the next challenge, the search for an answer, the way to human happiness. �With these first two books, you are diving into the greatest project of your education, which is to consider how to compose your character, to figure out what is necessary to live life well — your life — the one you are building for yourselves. In other words, you are not being told to love or admire Achilles or Odysseus or Helen or Penelope — only to let them into your lives so that you may engage with them. Incidentally, it is another fine quality of these poems that Homer doesn’t try to tell you what to think; he lets the story act upon you without intervention. You get to think for yourselves about what is fitting and what is not. But please listen to your classmates too; you might actually learn something from them. Our job, your tutors’ job, is to listen and to ask; yours is to read the books and wrestle with the questions. You will experience no more liberating an activity than this, for a question is a door opening wide, inviting you to explore and discover what’s inside. Trust yourselves to take advantage of this invitation; we do. We believe in the power of your rational capacity. We believe in your power to become your own teachers. Walk through this door, and you will soon find yourselves exercising those intellectual muscles that will allow you to transform a little of what you read here and something of what you hear there into a work that is all your own. We call this work “your judgment.” And we suspect strongly that you’ll find that a little injection of the spirited element right at the beginning will be just what you need to get your project going. If you are now worried, however, that the classroom is the only place you may exercise the spirited element within you, have no fear. There are many other opportunities around this campus, among your friends or on your own, on the playing fields or upon the stage, in community activities or choral groups, in competing for glory or singing to the gods: “Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles . . .” May the poet inspire each and every one of you to love your learning with us and move you to shape a life that is worthy of living. Thank you. And enjoy! ggghggg I declare the college in session for the entering class. Convocatum Est (Revised version of a talk given in January 2000, and again in June 2002.) �� 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. 5 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Fall 2003 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2003-08-27 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2003 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Homer and the Power of Men That Have Chests." Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Convocation, Fall 2003 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 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nelson, Christopher B. Convocation Presidents Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6618f9a57427de4770324cdee521ef72.pdf 993c456273f6f04eb51e13a356a867c4 PDF Text Text Of Bees, Fish and Cannibals Convocation Address Annapolis, Maryland January 14, 2004 Christopher B. Nelson President Welcome to the newest members of the class of 2007, to the new members of the Graduate Institute, and to their families and friends. And welcome back to the rest of the college community. By way of introducing you to St. John's, I want to say a few words about cannibals and cannibalism. I spent some time over the holidays with one of my favorite essays of Montaigne, On the Education of Children. Montaigne is, incidentally, one of the authors you will be reading in your sophomore year. It happens that he also wrote a little essay on cannibalism, but that has little to do with my object today. In his Education of Children, Montaigne offers loads of good advice. To parent he suggests that they send their children away from home to be tutored. To students, he counsels that they should be silent and modest for social intercourse, but fastidious in choosing and sorting their arguments, and fond of pertinence, and consequently of brevity --above all to surrender and throw their arms before the truth, wherever they encounter it. Montaigne also has a wonderful understanding of what learning is all about, and it has to do with grasping something the student may call his own her own. Let me quote from two of his passages: Let [the student] be asked for an account not merely of the words of his lesson, but of its sense and substance, and let him judge the profit he has made by the testimony not of his memory, but of his life, let him be made to show what he has learned in a hundred aspects, and apply it to as many different subjects, to see if he has yet properly grasped it and made it his own . . . It is a sign of rawness and indigestion to disgorge food just as we swallowed it. The stomach has not done its work if he has not changed the condition and form of what has been given it to cook. And later: Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later . . . The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this. As I was chewing on this essay, I recalled how I was used to receiving copies of speeches written �by your Marshall here, Miss Brann, with a little note saying that they were “for cannibalistic use.” Now, those who know Miss Brann will readily recognize that such talks would be veritable gold mines, filled with things a college president might want to use in talking about liberal education. Let us call these things a “banquet” so as not to mix metaphors. I had been invited to remove parts of what was contained in a paper that I might use them in my own talks from time to time — parts of a talk that was not of my own making. Often, we quote from others to add ornament to our own words. But cannibalistic use is not ornamental use. Somehow, I was meant to consume the talk before making use of it. Just as the stomach must change the condition and form of the meal it has just eaten in order that the body may receive nutrition, so must the mind transform the written matter it has taken in, in order that it may be nourished and its judgment improved. I figured I was being invited to plunder in order to make a work of my own, after I'd sifted through the material, considered it carefully, judged for myself what was worthy and for what purpose, and transformed it somehow to fit me. In this reflection, I was beginning to understand Montaigne, I think. But I was also getting an insight into the heart of liberal education — that the students themselves must learn to become their own guardians, that in the end they must use their own reason to find their way. So, I asked myself whether it mattered what food was served up and how it was served to our students. Well, I know I am preaching to the choir here. You would not have come to St. John's College in the first place — if you had not had at least an intuitive grasp that it matters deeply that the food we serve up for thought is the best we know for the nourishment of the mind and soul, for the development of their faculties. And you know just as well that it matters deeply how it is served. You want a banquet set before you and you need the time to taste everything served, to test it and question it before forming a judgment and rejecting it, doubting it, or making it your own. You understand that the authority of teachers can become an obstacle to learning precisely because their authority belongs to them and is not your own. So you want the teacher to listen to you before responding in turn. You want the liberty to chew on your own questions, not just take in someone else's gospel. You want to be the arbiter of your own opinions, but you need the tools to judge your own questions fairly, with your eye on the truth. I think that is why you are here at St. John's. We offer you tools for working with questions. We offer you opportunities for extended conversation and leisure for reflection about the questions that will help you shape the person you will become. We offer you rich reading material as food for thought, and a faculty modest enough to know that the books themselves make better teachers than the more ordinary mortals sitting on the other side of the aisle. We want you to plunder the ideas these many books have to offer, but afterward make of them honey which is all yours. We want you to digest what you read and hear, and change what you take in to make it a work you can call your own. This means that purely bookish competence is not what we seek (even though competence in all the books in this program would take many lifetimes to achieve). Instead, we hope to help you build a kind of “honest curiosity to inquire into all things,” to help you exercise the habit of shared inquiry, where you will learn to listen well to others, speak when you have something pertinent to say, and build a kind of confidence in yourselves that comes from exercising your reason freely for your own purposes. We want �you to learn the freedom that is required to make wise choices for yourselves so that you may live better lives. There is a rather wonderful image for all this in another book you will be reading before long — an image I was reminded of another generously spirited tutor. I am referring to Dante's Divine Comedy, a poem written in three parts, where our hero Dante is guided on a journey through the Inferno, the place of despair, Purgatorio, the place of hope, and Paradiso, the heavenly place of fulfillment. As Dante, a mortal man and visitor, is led into the second realm of Paradiso, which is inhabited by shades in a blessed spirit world, he is swarmed upon as if by fish to their food. Dante puts it this way: As in a fish-pool that is calm and clear the fish draw to that which comes from the outside, taking it to be their food, so I saw plainly more than a thousand splendors draw towards us, and in each I heard: “Lo, one who will increase our loves!” And as each shade came near it appeared to be full of happiness, by the bright effulgence that came forth from it. The simile suggests that even in the heavenly sphere the human spirit is fed by fellowship. The eagerness for human company and the conversation (which follows) is seen as food for the spirit, and is made apparent by an increase in the heavenly light permeating them. These spirits rush to their new visitor for the increase of their love, which for Dante seems to follow from a knowledge and understanding of the way the world works and the heavens move. I close with this image to remind you that you are not only here to feed. You are food for the rest of your classmates and friends. Fellowship and friendship come from learning like this in a community where each of its members flocks eagerly to the newest arrivals, its freshmen, to share and to learn for the sake of learning itself — and for the happiness that follows from the activity of learning together. We bid you to come to the table. The banquet set before you has more variety and depth than the imagination can capture. Eat generously. Chew it all carefully and thoughtfully, taking in what you come to know is right, placing in doubt what seems uncertain, and rejecting what you know to be wrong, what you know can never be used cannibalistically, because it simply is not something you can call your own. I welcome the cannibal in each of you, and encourage you to make cannibalistic use of the fouryear program of instruction we will be setting before you. And in that spirit, may you learn to love the project you are embarked upon and the fellowship of your classmates. May you succeed in taking in our program, and making of it something beautiful which is also something you may call your own. Thank you. * * * * * I declare the college in session this 14rd day of January 2004. �Convocatum Est! � 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. 4 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2004 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2004-01-14 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given by Chris Nelson on January 14, 2004 in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Of Bees, Fish and Cannibals." Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Convocation, Spring 2004 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 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nelson, Christopher B. Convocation Graduate Institute Presidents Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/74e87058a4d45e2af27295065f734dd3.pdf cc5e8735ac5e13ef23ef3d1d085ad952 PDF Text Text August 23, 2006 (edited October 2, 2006) The Sting of the Torpedo Fish Convocation Address to the Class of 2010 Christopher B. Nelson President  Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught? [to continue] Or if not teachable, is it acquired by practice, or if neither, whether men possess it by nature or in some other way?” So begins Plato’s dialogue, Meno, opening as abruptly upon the reader as my remarks have upon you this afternoon. You freshmen will spend a good part of this year with Plato, his frustrating protagonist, Socrates, and this very dialogue, Meno, in both English translation and the original Greek. I think I am on relatively safe ground in saying that the reason we spend so much time on the Meno is that this dialogue belongs peculiarly to this college; it is deeply rooted here. I hope to expose a few of those roots this afternoon --but let me first return to the beginning. “Tell me, Socrates, if you can, whether human excellence can be taught? If not, whether we can acquire it by practice? Or if neither of these, whether we are born with it or it comes to us in some other way?” Meno’s question is interesting, for it appears to go to the heart of some very big questions all of us share: what does it mean to be human, and how can we be better human beings? Parents would love to know how to raise children who are improvements on themselves; all parents want what is best for their children. Teachers would be happy and honored above all others if they could teach their students human virtue. As for students --- why else are you here but that you believe that some answer might be given to Meno’s question: What is the right path to virtue? How might I acquire human excellence? But Meno’s question has its flaws. For one, it comes out of the blue and without context. We are supposed to know, somehow, what Meno is talking about. We’re assumed to have a common vocabulary and even a common understanding of basic concepts. Speaking of vocabulary, some of you will have noted that I translated the Greek in two different ways when I repeated Meno’s question in English --- an exercise you freshmen will undertake as you try first to discover what is being said and what it means, before asking whether it is true. Such attempts at translation will be first steps to get at the root of Meno’s question.   �Socrates appreciates what is at stake in Meno’s question. He thus goes straight to the heart of it with a response that would confound any student hoping to receive the almighty truth from a teacher. Socrates in effect says: how can I say how virtue is acquired when I don’t even know what it is? And worse, Socrates then says that he’s never met any other person who knows what virtue is. He entreats Meno to help him understand what Meno thinks it to be. Meno makes the attempt, responding confidently with what he has heard from other teachers, repeating their opinions as his own. Yet, under Socrates’ questioning, Meno finds himself disowning the opinion he began with. After two false starts, Meno begins to get uncomfortable with Socrates’ examination. When Socrates begs him to start over yet a third time, Meno tries to divert the conversation from the question of virtue to the problem with Socrates: Socrates, I certainly used to hear, even before meeting you, that you never do anything else than exist in a state of perplexity yourself and put others in a state of perplexity. And now you seem to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and simply subduing me with incantations, so that I come to be full of perplexity. And you seem to me, if it is even appropriate to make something of a joke, to be altogether, both in looks and in other respects, like the flat torpedofish of the sea. For, indeed, it always makes anyone who approaches and touches it grow numb, and you seem to me now to have done that very sort of thing to me, making me numb. For truly, both in soul and in mouth, I am numb and have nothing with which I can answer you. And yet thousands of times I have made a great many speeches about virtue, and before many people, and done very well, in my own opinion anyway; yet now I’m altogether unable to say what it is. It is beginning to look as if Meno has no interest in the answer to the question and is more concerned with his image or reputation than with the truth. On the other hand, Socrates is not satisfied; he still wants to proceed with the search for an answer. He is also willing to conduct the search with Meno, a man who seems to have no thoughts of his own. Socrates, in wishing to proceed, has done two things; he’s told Meno that he’ll serve as Meno’s teacher if Meno will let him --- that is, that he will join Meno in the search; and he’s told the reader that he is willing to do so because he might actually learn something from Meno. He is truly open to the possibility that the teacher may learn from the student – any student, even Meno. So, Meno, what is virtue? Meno now tries a sting of his own, challenging Socrates with a classic learner’s paradox: either we know something or we don’t. If we know it, we don’t need to search for it. But if we don’t already know what we’re looking for, how will we ever recognize it when we see it? Socrates will not be deterred by Meno’s attempt to bring the conversation to an abrupt halt. Instead, he takes Meno’s problem seriously and answers in two ways. First, he repeats a myth he has heard which suggests that learning is a kind of recollection, which requires an exercise of responsibility for learning by the one doing the learning; learning does not occur when someone else, a teacher for example, tries to put knowledge into a student. Instead, it is an act of recovery, in some way, of something already known to us. When Meno demonstrates that he doesn’t get it, Socrates resolves upon a way to show Meno what he means, asking Meno to observe carefully as he examines one of Meno’s slave boys about a problem in geometry which is new to him --- a problem which can be demonstrated by a drawing in the earth -- a problem, not incidentally, that you will be working on in your mathematics tutorial with Euclid. The slave boy reaches a point where he expresses with confidence an answer which is false --- an answer which he, himself, a few moments later comes to understand is wrong under Socrates’ questioning. The slave boy tries again with the same result. Socrates asks him to start over, just as he   �did with Meno a little earlier. He asks the boy to produce another answer, and the slave boy says: “Indeed, Socrates, I do not know”. Socrates turns to Meno, and by extension to us, and says: Do you see, Meno, what advances he has made in his power of recollection? He did not know at first, and he does not know now, what is the [answer]: but then he thought that he knew, and answered confidently as if he knew, and had no difficulty; now he has difficulty, and neither knows nor fancies that he knows. Meno: True Socrates: Is he not better off knowing his ignorance? Meno: I think that he is. Socrates: If we have made him doubt, and given him the “torpedo’s shock,” have we done him any harm? Meno: I think not. Socrates: We have certainly, it would seem, assisted him in some degree to the discovery of the truth; and now he will wish to remedy his ignorance, but then he would have been ready to tell all the world again and again [the answer he gave at first?]. Meno: True. Socrates persuades Meno that the slave boy simply would not have been ready to inquire and learn the truth without first being reduced to perplexity. The torpedo’s shock not only didn’t hurt, it positively helped; it was the condition for the learning that did occur (and the slave boy did go on, with Socrates’ help, to find the solution to the geometry problem). Socrates has shown us, the readers (and Meno, if he were listening), that understanding our own ignorance is necessary for learning to take place – especially understanding our ignorance of the everyday common things we thought we knew well. When we can look at the familiar and suddenly realize that we really don’t understand it, when we can look at what we always thought we knew, and ask “what is this thing?” then we are ready to learn and well along the path to better understanding. In that state we are truly torpid, just as the slave boy was, and we bring a sense of “wonder” to our search. This wonder comes not from something we understand, but rather from our desire to understand --- what we sometimes call a love of learning, born not in understanding but in ignorance. Socrates has done something else in his demonstration. He has also shown us the power of discovering what something is NOT, and helped us see that knowing what something is not is much more than knowing nothing; it is a kind of “knowing ignorance,” an “intelligent perplexity” that comes from trying out and discarding false notions. He has also helped us see that we not only don’t know what virtue is, we don’t even know what learning is.   �We now look at Meno and see that he is a slave … a slave to his pride, a slave to the opinions of others, unwilling to examine what he clearly doesn’t understand. Meno’s problem is not that he’s ignorant, but that he has no desire to be free from the shackles of that ignorance. We look at the slave boy and see that he is free --- free from the false notions he’s been carrying around with him, free from barriers to learning. This freedom, strangely, comes not from the certainty of knowledge but from the recognition of his ignorance. Let me return to the place where I began, when I said that this dialogue of Plato’s is deeply rooted at the college. We want you to acquire the freedom of Meno’s slave boy, the freedom that allows you to acknowledge the one certainty in life: “Indeed, Socrates, I do not know.” Recognition of that certainty is the pathway to learning --- learning things that will belong to you, not just repeating things that belong to others. We also want you to have practice with the tools you will need to acquire this freedom --- tools that will help you to listen and to read attentively and deeply, to express yourselves intelligibly and precisely, and to measure and reckon the world in which you live accurately and comprehensively --- tools that will help give shape to your understanding who you are and where you live, and what your responsibility is toward others and the world you together inhabit, the world of the body and the world of the spirit. We live with a deep paradox at the college --- one that you will confront right at the outset. We have made very deliberate choices about what should and should not be included in this all required curriculum (and there are many, many excellent works that are not on the program list simply because there’s no room for them in just four years). Yet we tell you that, for all the conviction we might have that these choices constitute the best undergraduate curriculum we can devise, this conviction is not grounded in the answers these books purport to give but in the questions they raise. When we say that this college is committed to radical inquiry, we mean inquiry into the very traditions and books that have shaped the world we’re born into. This is why we are not ashamed to admit that though we are called an institution of higher learning, we really do not know what learning is. We share the conviction, nonetheless, that it is worth the search to find out. When we welcome you to St. John’s College, we are welcoming you to join us in a search that we imagine will sustain all of us for all of our lives --- a search for origins and foundations that will be firm enough to support the good life we each wish to live. We call on you to join us as fellow lovers of learning, not as a would-be scholars. One of the things you will discover as you read the several platonic dialogues on the program is that they demand your engagement. They ask for you to reflect on how you might respond to Socrates. So, let me venture into the conversation of the Meno with a small, tentative reflection on the question Socrates puts to Meno: “what is virtue?” My thoughts, at least for now, are these: the way to virtue may require that we come to know our great weakness, our own ignorance. This ignorance is common to all who are less than divine; it is something we share with one another in our humanity. If there is a connection between knowledge and right conduct, it is likely to be found in our ignorance and in the humility it inspires, in seeing that every single one of us has a long, long way to go toward understanding, in the endless search for truth. I suspect that human virtue lies somehow coterminous with this strange path toward knowledge, a path through ignorance and therefore available to us all. As we are not likely to attain great heights of knowledge, it is more likely that we can share with each other the great peaks of desire. It may be that the love of learning, more than the attainment of understanding, is what binds us together most tightly. It may also be this love of learning which impels us to great acts of virtue, like the virtue we will be asking you to exhibit every day in class: helping your classmates to experience the loving sting of the torpedo fish, helping them see that you   �too have a lot of baggage to unload, and coming to see that learning is best pursued in a community of lovers of learning, each seeking what is best for the others. And now I see that I’ve found my way to a typical difficulty experienced by all Socratic interlocutors. I’ve tried to say something about the nature of virtue, in terms of loving and learning, when I’m not sure I know what these are. So, let me leave you with this question: Tell me, freshmen, what is this love of learning that has brought you to our door, and where does it come from? --- for I do not know, though I am happy in the thought that we have this much to share with each other for four full glorious years. Welcome to St. John’s College! May you experience the sting of the torpedo fish early and often. May the sting never hurt, but help you along the path toward understanding and freedom. Thank you. ***** I declare the college in session this 23rd day of August, 2006. Convocatum Est!   � 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. 5 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Fall 2006 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2006-08-23 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2006 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Sting of the Torpedo Fish." Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Convocation, Fall 2006 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 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nelson, Christopher B. Convocation Presidents Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/dbfa132df1f280f5c7236df5b9aab1ee.pdf 60f67bba718fcd7fad8e9ed417956930 PDF Text Text August 22, 2007 The Gift of the Gadfly Convocation 2007 Christopher B. Nelson President, St. John’s College, Annapolis, Md. h “I was attached to this city by the god – though it seems a ridiculous thing to say – as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred by a kind of gadfly. It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me in the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade and reproach you all day long and everywhere I find myself in your company.” Socrates makes this claim in his own defense against charges of impiety and corruption of the youth of Athens. It is typical of Socrates that he makes it hard for us to determine just when he intends to deny the charges brought against him and when he would positively embrace them. Socrates is a defense attorney’s worst nightmare and a grave digger’s delight; when in a hole, he will take up the shovel and dig himself deeper. Presented with one bill of particulars, Socrates adds new charges to the list against him. Prosecuted for threatening the city’s good order, for challenging its authority figures and questioning their wisdom, he claims to be a gift to the city. Threatened with death for his behavior, he gives no thought to himself, but instead begs to argue the case for the city. He asks the jury, for its own sake, and the sake of the city, to avoid mistreating god’s gift to them by condemning Socrates, the city’s greatest blessing—a blessing in the form of a gadfly, attached to the city, to stir it and rouse each of its citizens, to persuade and reproach them, all day long and everywhere. On trial at age 70, Socrates will not go quietly into retirement. His jury was sufficiently impressed with his defense that it sentenced him to death. It does not take much imagination to picture what a pain in that noble horse’s rear this gadfly, Socrates, must have been. I apologize to our freshmen for giving away the outcome of the trial, for each of you will soon read the account of it in Plato’s Apology. But I wanted to open my remarks with reference to it because I think that each of us here at the college has something at stake in this trial, at least something at stake in Socrates’ defense. Socrates certainly thinks so, and he will fight for it with all he has, comparing himself, ironically but rightly, I think, to Achilles, another hero our freshmen are encountering this week: the man of action, praised for his courage, his warrior’s excellence, and his fighting spirit. (More about this later.) Perhaps, I am also drawn to the dialogue as a former trial lawyer. While I cringe when Socrates mocks both his accusers and his citizen jury, I find myself �cheering his courage and willingness to embrace the claim that he may be both a threat to the established power structure and a gift to the city. Armed only with questions and the will to question relentlessly, he threatens the status quo and the peace of mind of the city’s public opinion shapers, and challenges the citizens’ thoughtless acceptance of whatever they are told. Socrates is a destabilizing influence. Is he really the blessing to the city that he claims to be? Let us first look at our city. Socrates claims that Athens is great and noble, made sluggish by its size. What can he have meant by this? Not every city is great and noble. Indeed, we learn in a later dialogue that Socrates would rather be put to death in Athens than be released to live anywhere else. I can imagine a number of ways to think about the problem of this great city, but I’d like to offer one for now. Athens is a democracy, or a kind of democracy of free male citizens; it is built upon a respect for the individual and a trust that its citizens are capable of self-governance. Surely, the protection of a democracy and the freedom of its citizens require that those citizens have an education both in the traditions of the city and in the arts of freedom. The traditions of a city, its customs, its idols, and even its laws, will frequently be at odds with the very things that encourage the autonomy of the individual citizen---those arts that allow us to think for ourselves and to question the city fathers, popular opinion, and social custom. One might say that a democracy of any size can only work well if its citizens agree on the need to hold on to this tension between the needs of an ordered society and the needs of a free people. I imagine that only in such societies can a Socrates have a home. Athens may be the best hope for home for the free individual. But it may also be that in any well-ordered and relatively happy society there will always be a tendency for the people to fall asleep, to become comfortable in their prosperity, to follow without much reflection the will of the many, and to ignore, resent or repress the individual voice that would challenge custom and the comfort of its citizens. Let me call this tendency to sleep a form of decay or corruption of a democratic society, which can only be countered by the wakeful vigilance of its citizens and the persistent effort to find ways of renewing the city’s spirit, recalling it to its purposes. If the city’s business is justice, the citizen leadership must always be alert to signs of corruption and open to correction; it must encourage in its citizens a respect for justice which will require the people to think about what is right and wrong, not just what is comfortable or expedient---to think about building a better tomorrow, not just protecting their inheritance. It is probably the case that even the good city is more likely to tolerate its gladflies than to learn from them. Socrates seems to understand this; he argues and reproaches, to be sure. But it is never clear that he has a particular lesson to teach. He would convince us of our ignorance, without finding for us an answer. His chief work would seem to consist in prodding us to wakefulness, to keep us from the smug self-satisfaction that comes from sleeping through life without examining who we are and what we ought to become. He seems to take it as an unqualified good that we should be kept awake to this examination even if we can’t resolve the questions that such examination requires us to ask. How does Socrates prod us to wakefulness? Certainly not by giving us life’s answers. We’ve all slept through those lectures. He does it by asking questions which open us up to the world. These are not the questions you need to know to pass your multiple-choice or true-false exams; they are not the questions designed to test your knowledge. Instead, they are questions that should help you understand how much you still need to learn, and how little you really understand what you thought you knew or were told by others. They are questions that will reduce you to a state of perplexity so that you may wonder at your ignorance and search hard for a better understanding. �For Socrates, it is human to want to know, and the prod to encourage the human desire to know something is the prod to be human. We all recognize that the desire to know something is grounded in what we don’t know. Therefore, the best preparation for life, for becoming more fully human, is less the acquisition of knowledge than the understanding of our ignorance. This in turn will help us find the questions we need to ask to bring us to a better understanding. For a question to help us, something must be at stake for us; it must make a real difference to us how we answer the question. When Socrates tells the reader toward the end of the Apology that the unexamined life is not worth living, he is telling us that we might as well be dead (or never born) as live a life that is unexamined—a life without questions, the answers to which really matter to us. For Socrates, what is at stake is literally greater than life or death. Here is where he compares himself to Achilles who, knowing he will soon be killed after he slays the royal Hector, nonetheless despises death: “ ‘Let me die at once,’ he said, ‘when once I have given the wrongdoer his desserts, rather than remain here, a laughing-stock by the curved ships, a burden upon the earth.’ ” Like Achilles, Socrates is not just willing to risk death for something he believes in; he is without thought of death, as he faces danger rather than the disgrace of withdrawing from the search for self-knowledge, the pursuit of which is Socrates’ only reason for living. The disgrace for Socrates would be all the greater for backing away out of fear of the unknown. “To fear death, gentlemen,” he says “is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No man knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man…” True to his search for self knowledge, mere death is no barrier. Socrates and Achilles live the lives that belong to them, fully and completely, because they have some understanding of who they are and what they are meant to do. You will discover that Socrates is a local hero to many at this college. I know there are other such heroes here; some are unyielding, bulwarks, upright (take Ajax or Antigone), while others are survivors, with a kind of practical wisdom that will see them through a changing world (Odysseus and Penelope). In the literature throughout the Program, you will find examples of men and women who will invite imitation. The question we must ask of each such character is this: who is this man or woman, and what is at stake for me that I need to understand what moves them to do what they do? The question that underlies Plato’s Apology is not the guilt or innocence of Socrates. It is something closer to this: “Who is this man, Socrates? Is he living a life worth living---the life that truly belongs to him? Does it matter to me and to the City that this man’s life should continue or come to an end? Is it perhaps, even, a life worth imitating or undertaking as my own?” We cannot judge Socrates until we know him better. And in judging him, we reveal ourselves. We had better understand what is at stake for us before we decide the fate of Socrates and either keep him with us or consign him to Hades and take up another. This is the prod to wakefulness that Socrates represents. And these persistent questions can be as annoying or inspiriting to the sleeping soul within each of us as the gadfly is to the noble horse. This whole program of instruction is designed to give you the tools to ask the question “Who are you?” The invocation here is the same as the words at the entrance to the temple of Delphi, consulted by Socrates in his youth: “Know Thyself.” It presumes that the question “Who are you?” is a real one, and that you yourselves have not answered it. It presumes that the stakes are high, that your happiness depends upon your investigation into this question. It suggests that coming to know yourself is a high and sacred duty, a task of monumental difficulty, requiring courage, and worthy of being called “heroic.” And it suggests that the way each of you will choose to live your life after St. John’s may depend on how you go about exploring the answer to the question: “Who are you?” �Nearly every book we read together will help you consider who you are and what your place is in the world. What makes you a featherless biped, a rational being, a lover of wisdom, a son of Adam, a child of God, a collection of molecules and a product of genes, an evolved kind of ape, an acquisitive animal, a noble savage with a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights? Those are just a few of the possible answers you will consider in your four years with us. In reading these books and asking of them whether they speak any truths to you, you will be participating in an education appropriate to a great and noble democracy—an education in the traditions of society, the arts of freedom, and the tension between the two. You will come to ask yourself whether answering these questions will help you shape your character. I cannot begin to imagine how each of you will find your own answer to that question. But I think I can say with some confidence that your pursuit of these answers, and your wakefulness to the things that matter, will be worthy of the humanity that lies within each of you. We will ask each of you to remember the gift of the gadfly, prompting you to remain wakeful---and ask each of you to serve as a prompt to the rest of the college community whenever we appear to be sleeping. (Now, I ask you not to take this last injunction too literally but to allow yourselves, your classmates and your tutors those hours of repose required for us all to remain alert and fit for daylight classes.) On behalf of the entire college community, I welcome our newcomers to St. John’s College, welcome back the returning members of our community, and invite one and all to participate together in this search for our humanity. Thank you. Following the recessional, I invite everyone to a reception behind the Mitchell Art Gallery. I declare the College in session this 22nd day of August, 2007. CONVOCATUM EST! � 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. 4 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Fall 2007 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2007-08-22 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2007 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Gift of the Gadfly." Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Convocation, Fall 2007 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 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nelson, Christopher B. Convocation Presidents Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/24f1e182da66bfc18903ee749a235fdc.pdf 9d43a2ecc4abf5407cc30feeb348ce04 PDF Text Text "The Republic of St. John's College" Convocation Remarks of Christopher B. Nelson President of St. John's College, Annapolis August 27, 2008 Welcome to St. John's College. A warm welcome to our entering freshmen and their families and friends! Welcome back to our returning students, faculty and staff! I want to tell you a story which opened up a question for me that I simply could not resist exploring in preparing these remarks. In the spring of 2004, a friend of mine, the president of another liberal arts college, called to ask for a favor. He was being given a six month sabbatical and wondered whether he might enroll at St. John's College or take some classes with us over the fall term. We talked some about the importance of beginning at the beginning, and he got excited about reading Homer, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus and Sophocles with our freshmen. He ended up auditing the fall freshman seminar, reading everything expected of him, and remaining a silent participant in the conversation. You can read all about his sabbatical experience in a newly published book entitled Racing Odysseus, chronicling his experience in the classroom, on the quad, in the coffee shop, and especially at the boathouse, where he resolved to join the novice crew and take up rowing on the Severn River in the wee hours of each morning with a good sized group of eager, if sleepy, students. It turns out that the star of the story is our very own Mr. Pickens, Director of Athletics at the College, but several students and tutors play lead support roles in the education of my friend, "Rusty" Martin. After he'd been at the college a while, and become acquainted with many of our students, mostly freshman, he found himself observing out loud to one of his crew mates as follows: "Like you, Tom, so many of the freshmen I have met applied only to St. John's. They seem to have a real sense of what it means to be a Johnnie even before they get here." (Does this sound familiar to any of you?) "Maybe so," Tom responds ... "But they aren't Johnnies when they arrive." "So when does that happen?" I ask, surprised by his response. �"When they have completed Plato's Republic! Then they become Johnnies." End of story. But I was now hooked on thinking through what I'd just read. What would it mean to say that one becomes a member of this college community upon completing the six seminars we devote to Plato's Republic in the middle of the freshman fall term? (In fact, freshmen will be halfway through it at Parents' weekend, and you parents can return to campus to test the theory and ask your students this question.) I have no idea whether this view of Mr. Tom's is widely shared at the college, but I thought it was worth taking seriously. So, I'd like to play with the idea for just a bit. I recognize that I can only begin to tease out a few possible answers with a book as inexhaustible as the Republic. But here's a start. If there is a principal question at the root of the many that are explored in the Republic, it may be "What good is justice? Should we choose to live the just life or the unjust, and why?" Indeed, the dialogue opens with a spirited argument for the good of injustice but closes with a myth that reminds the readers of the thousand years of punishment that awaits the man who chooses a life of injustice over one devoted to justice. The dialogue is Plato's longest, and engages more participants than is usual. The two principal interlocutors, however, are the young Glaucon and Adeimantus, brothers to Plato himself, who does not appear as a character in the drama. These two young people, particularly Glaucon, behave a lot like St. Johnnies. They pursue Socrates; they pursue conversation to get to the bottom of things they can hardly fathom; Glaucon at least just won't let up; he questions everything at each turn. Socrates quickly sees that he must take Glaucon seriously because Glaucon has both passion and ambition. He can see the good in Glaucon's soul, in his desire for understanding, but he can also see the dangers to both Glaucon and the state if a mind as fertile as Glaucon's is not turned to the good and is instead allowed to play with false icons. Glaucon needs to be persuaded that it is better to do right than wrong, and he needs to own the argument himself; it must be a case that he will not forget, filled with images, arguments and stories that will not fail to keep him straight. Socrates has his work cut out for him, and he puts together as beautiful a set of images and arguments as we can find in all literature. �Of course, to ask the question "What good is justice?" provokes the next: "What then is justice?" To help answer the question, Socrates and his two young helpers set about to found a city in speech which is designed to help us see what justice might look like on a large scale, in order that we might better understand what justice would look like in the human soul. It turns out that this city is not populated by people that Glaucon can either recognize or respect. He calls it a city of pigs, one that satisfies the appetite of the stomach, but not of the chest or the head. There is no place in this city to practice leisure, enjoy the finer arts, or move beyond a life of consumption to a life more noble. They reorganize the city at least twice more, but each of these cities seems to fail another of Glaucon's tests that they be realizable in our political world. So, Socrates seeks to answer this demand with one of his more memorable statements, in the dead center of the book: "Unless the philosophers rule as kings, (he says) ... there will be no rest from ills for the cities, ... nor I think for human kind, nor will the regime we have now described in speech ever come forth from nature, insofar as possible, and see the light of the sun." We can only suppose that if the earlier versions of the city were unrealistic, this latter suggestion — that the best king must also be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom — would be still further beyond the bounds of imagination for Socrates' interlocutors. To their credit, Glaucon and Adeimantus push him on to justify his claim. Socrates agrees, and goes on to give an account of the life of the philosopher and the education appropriate to him. In the middle of this explanation, Socrates gives us three of the most memorable images our students will encounter in their four years at the college. First, he compares the Good, which is the object of the philosopher's search, to the Sun which is the source of life, of all that is, but also the illuminator of all the appearances in the world. Socrates cannot seem to say what the Good is, but he can give us a sense of what it is like. Second, he proposes a geometric model, a "divided line" to give us a picture of what the ascent to the Good might require of us mortals still in this world below, a sense of the kind of intellectual activity we must engage in, the kind of journey we must take to get closer to that object beyond us. In the study of mathematics, we quickly come to understand that the pictures we draw of squares and triangles, lines and proportions, are just images or representations of the true objects of geometry, which are only accessible by thought. Through the image of the divided line, we come to appreciate the �need to access a world of intelligible objects in order to better understand what lies behind, and gives order to, their appearances in the visible world. Third, in the cave analogy, Socrates gives us a drama to describe the great difficulty and pain we can expect in making the ascent from the world of images to the one source of all we can see and know. He asks us to imagine that we are all prisoners in a cave, chained so that all we can see are the shadows cast upon a wall in front of us. We cannot, on our own, turn around and see that these shadows are not real at all, but mere reflections of objects carried by people behind us who are passing in front of a fire which is the source of the light that casts the shadows. He describes first the pain, then the disbelief, and finally the wonder experienced by a prisoner who is released from his bonds and forced to turn around and look into the light of the fire and see what the image makers have known all along. But that is not all. This cave has an entrance open to the light of the sun across the whole width of the cave. Socrates now asks us to imagine that the newly released prisoner is dragged up the steep, rocky, upward way out into the light of the sun. At first, he'd be blinded and see less well than before, but then he would get accustomed to the light and see all the other things the world has to show him — the waters and the land and the starry heavens above, until he could make out the sun itself and see what it is like. That man would be happy at his freedom from the shadows below, and would pity those still in the cave. His education would have literally been an education in the art of turning around, the art of seeing better, in a truer light, what is already really there, of seeing what ought to be seen. Around here, we sometimes call this an education in the arts of freedom, or the liberal arts — the arts that liberate us to flee the bonds of prejudice, the false opinions, and the shadows about us, and see things as they truly are. Every image, every opinion expressed by the image makers and spin doctors around us, should be an occasion for us to pull ourselves, and others with us, out of our caves and into the light of the sun. We recognize that this sun is there for everyone in the cave to access. The entrance to the cave is open to all who are below. After exploring these images, Socrates then constructs the education of the philosopher, and explores the kinds of governments that arise when the rulers are no longer philosophers. He closes with a grand overarching myth that attempts to �incorporate the whole, reminding us that we have a lot at stake in the choices we make in living our lives. Just as we are meant to see the city-building exercise that occurs in the first nine books of the Republic as an image of the education of the individual soul, so we see the closing myth as an image of the choices available to that soul. We see that it is literally a matter of life or death (or at least a matter of great reward or unimaginable punishment) how we choose to live our lives, and how wise we would be to turn ourselves now to the question of justice so that we might learn to live a life that practices it. The well regulated soul, one that is turned to the Good, that is whole, well integrated and balanced, is also, we imagine, the soul best fit to rule our city. I think it is time for me now to try to give my answer to the question I opened with: What would it mean to say that our students don't become Johnnies until they've finished the Republic? The dialogue probably gives us the best account we have of what learning ought to be. It belongs to us at the college, and serves as a kind of model for our program of instruction. The book thus gives our students an opportunity to examine the education they are then engaged in, allows them to ask what it would be like to construct a curriculum fit for a philosopher king, and invites them to compare it to the one they are undertaking at St. John's. The Republic is a beautiful book, filled with the richest of images that help us remember that the difficult search for truth is worth all the effort. It gives us poetic, musical and mathematical images, myths and analogies, to aid us in our search for an understanding of our world and our place in it, images we cannot possibly forget, images that will be available to us forever. Like all of Plato's dialogues, the Republic engages the readers and asks them to become participants in the dialogue that Socrates is having with his friends. It asks us to question the answers given by Glaucon and others, to try them out and formulate better ones. It also helps to lead us up out of our own personal caves, encouraging us, and showing us how to find our way to a life that is better than we have experienced heretofore. The Republic allows our freshmen to see how integrated the whole of learning is in relation to the singular soul. It helps explain the importance of mathematics in our �curriculum, that it is not just a tool required for the specialist in the sciences, engineering, or the trades, but is an indispensable aid to philosophy itself, an aid to self understanding. More than anything, however, I think it must be in our several seminars on the Republic that we become aware of the republic that is shaping itself around us, the republic of friends around the table who are searching together for answers to the deepest of questions: how we ought to be living our lives. We, like Glaucon and Adeimantus, find ourselves being initiated into the one republic that Socrates and his friends have succeeded in realizing. At St. John's, we call this republic our community of learning. In the world, we often speak of the ties that "bind" us to a human community as healthy things, often beautiful and reaffirming ties. It is easy to forget the dark side of this image which is that we can be "tied" and "bound" to a community as to a cave that we fear to escape. We can become yoked to a larger political body by a common interest, a piece of territory, a tribal custom, a shared enemy, or a popular idea — foundations that we may cease to question. And questioning these foundations of community can become taboo, as the chains tighten about us. We are fortunate, then, that the larger community most of us belong to, the United States of America, is founded on a paradox: the ties that bind us as Americans are rooted in human freedom, and the more we exercise the freedom to question our institutions the stronger are our ties to the founding principal. That freedom, protected by our laws, provides us with a very comfortable and open cave in which to live our lives and shape our institutions. We at St John's have taken advantage of that freedom and that cave to found a college grounded in a very similar paradox: we find our truest sense of community in an image of human freedom that finds us somehow "together" seeking to escape the confines of the individual caves that imprison each of us. For lovers of wisdom, the young Glaucons among us, the desire to see things as they are, to strive toward the source of our being and come in to the light of the sun, is too beautiful an activity to resist — and too wonderful not to share with others. We make this search for truth, this struggle to climb out of our caves, our chief community endeavor. �Perhaps, in our search for such a liberating community, and in our occasionally achieving it, "then, we become Johnnies". Nonetheless, I will today welcome you to the Republic of St. John's College. I'm done trying to justify why you must wait 10 weeks to become one of us. We are happy to call you ours today, and to welcome you to our community of learning. Thank You. I declare the College in session this 27th day of August, 2008. CONVOCATUM EST! � 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. 7 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Fall 2008 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008-08-27 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2008 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Republic of St. John's College." Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Convocation, Fall 2008 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 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nelson, Christopher B. Convocation Presidents 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/0137e6eff052aca69b1086ad92139697.pdf 82431f85e9ff2a12202ef3e2fabd0c4e PDF Text Text “The Things of Friends Are Common” Convocation Address, August 26, 2009 Christopher B. Nelson, President St. John’s College, Annapolis MD Welcome to the Class of 2013 and to your families. To the rest of our college community, welcome back. Welcome, friends all! I came to a rather startling realization over the summer as I was preparing to greet our newcomers: that I had returned to this college to take the position I now hold in the year in which most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have passed quickly, it seems to me now, and my appreciation for the community of learning I joined back then has grown, as my friendships within the community have deepened. I think I became a wee bit sentimental as I ruminated upon my first year as a student at St. John’s more than 40 years ago. My Greek has gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the things learned first are remembered best, and I have kept with me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my first days at the college. and . The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are difficult” or “Noble things are difficult.” The second can be translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What friends have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my youth we used a different Greek grammar book, so this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson Introduction to Ancient Greek that you will be working with in your first semester of the Greek Tutorial. And there they were, the same two sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and predicate position of the definite article, and I rediscovered something I once must have known about the two sentences I had carried with me all these years: that they are both nominal sentences with the article in the predicate position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole sentences without the use of a verb. (Grammar is a handy tool, don’t you think?) Well, I was pretty sure that I had not committed these sentences to memory for the substantive-making power of the article . It’s more likely that I remembered them because they were both quite short, and perhaps because they appeared to carry a mystery and a whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if only I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new text that “nominal sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless character of maxims or folk-sayings.” (Mollin and Williamson at 31) I wanted to understand better the little maxim “The things of friends are common.” The sentence seemed to capture a beautiful thought, and I had the efficient notion that if I made the effort to understand this maxim better, I also might come to see why “beautiful things are difficult.” Two birds, one arrow --- so to speak! So, I begin my reflection by asking whether this little maxim means that friends share what they have, or that they ought to share what they have. Today, I give you half of the lunch I packed for us both, and tomorrow you will share yours with me. But the sandwiches we eat are hardly common to us both; quite the opposite, they are rationed out separately to each of us, albeit �equally. We may each have an equal share in a good thing, but not a common good. We each consume what the other does not and cannot consume. So it is with all sorts of goods, earthly goods, goods that are external to us; what I give to you in the spirit of sharing with a friend is something I will no longer have after giving it. I will have less of it after sharing it than I did before I shared it, however good and generous my act of friendship has been, and however much I imagine I may have gained in the improvement of my character by sharing it. But what then are the things that could be common to friends? What kinds of things can truly be held in common without having to be shared or meted out among friends? I suppose things of the soul are of this nature, things that belong to the heart, the spirit, or the mind, things that belong to our inner lives. We both may love a single object or a person without our having to share that love as we might share the expense of a gift to the beloved one. My love doesn’t grow less because you love too. And of course, if we should actually love one another, that love is surely greater and stronger for it being reciprocated and reinforced over and over. So it is with the intellect. When I learn something you have shared with me, it does not pass from you to me like milk from a pitcher; you have lost nothing, and yet I have gained something that is now common to us both. The sum of what is common to us has just grown; it has not been redistributed. And should we together go about learning something new, we will each be richer for what we come to have in common. Why, though, do we say that these ‘things in common’ belong to ‘friends’? I think it must have something to do with the reason we seek these common things. We are moved to love something because it is beautiful, or to love some person because he or she is beautiful to us. We seek to know something because we believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that this knowledge will be good for us, perhaps even that it can be turned to good in the world about us. These things we have in common are beautiful and good things, and we wish beautiful and good things for our friends. If the common goods are those that increase by pursuing them together, then the greatest acts of friendship must be the searching together for such a common good. St. John’s College exists for this purpose: to provide a place and countless opportunities for our students to pursue together the common goods of the intellect. We call ourselves a community of learning, aware that the word ‘community’ in English, as in Greek, has the same root as the word ‘common’. We make many an effort to put into practice the conviction that we learn best when we learn with others, who like us, wish to increase the common good. Such a community offers some pretty fine opportunities for friendship. We also have a common curriculum that has us all reading books that are worthy of our attention, even of our love --- books written by men and women who were themselves model fellow learners. The books and the authors may even become our friends, as can the characters in some of those books. If you have not already met the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, you soon will, and you will be spending a lot of time with him in your freshman year. For some of you, this may be the beginning of a lifelong friendship with a character who would converse with you over and over if you open yourselves to the possibility. The words on the page may remain the same, but the reader brings a new conversationalist to the text every time he or she returns to the dialogue. At least, so it is with me. I call Socrates a friend of mine because I know that he seeks only my own good. He has taught me humility, at least such as I possess it at all. �I have many such friends in the Program. Some of them are books: Homer’s Iliad has been my companion since the seventh grade, and I never tire of returning to it. The Aeneid has become a more recent friend who has helped me understand and better bear the responsibilities of fatherhood and the trials of leadership. The Books of Genesis and Job have helped me understand what it means to be human and how great is the distance between the human and the divine; I read them to remind me of how little I really understand about the relation between the two, which in turn serves as a spur to seeking to understand better. Euclid’s Elements may be the finest example on the St. John’s Program of the practice of the liberal arts, and it is beautiful for its logical, progressive movement from the elemental to the truly grand. Plato’s Republic is the finest book about education ever written; it inspires much of what I do as I practice my vocation at the College, reminding me that a community of learning is reshaping and refounding itself any time a few of its members come together to engage in learning for its own sake --- and that this is what we ought always to be encouraging at this college, even by device when necessary. Other friends of mine are authors: Sophocles, who can evoke a human sympathy to inspire pity in each of his dramas; George Washington, whose restraint in the use of power is evident in his finest writings and in the mark he left on the founding of this country; Abraham Lincoln, whom I consider this country’s finest poet, whose very words reshaped what it meant to be an American; Jane Austen, whose every sentence can be called perfect (and so she is a beautiful author to me); and Martin Luther King, who taught me that non-violent protest is more than a successful tactical measure to achieve a political end, but a proper and loving response to the hateful misconduct of fellow human souls. Then there remain the characters whom I embrace as friends: besides Socrates, there is Hector, Breaker of Horses, ‘Oh my Warrior’; and Penelope, who weaves the path that allows Odysseus to return home and is far worthier of his love than he is of hers. There is Don Quixote, the indomitable spirit, and Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooks, whose simple acts of goodness change the whole world about her. I rather like Milton’s Eve, mother of us all, who still shines pretty brightly in the face of his spectacular Satan. I was a teenager when I met Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, and I grew to adulthood with him, probably following a little too closely his path to responsibility. There’s the innocent Billy Budd, unprepared to face the force of evil in man, and his Captain Vere, the good man who suffers to do his duty. You will also read some reflections on friendship: this winter, Aristotle will provide freshmen with a framework for considering different kinds of friendships and the goods they afford. You should ask whether you think his list is complete, and whether your own experiences of friendship are embraced by his explication. And then there are examples of friendships, pairs of friends, in many of the books, who will also provide lessons in friendship, for better or worse: Patroclus and Achilles, David and Jonathan, Hal and Falstaff, Huck and Jim, Emma and Knightly, to name a few. As you work your way through the Program, you will have the assistance of many friends, some of whom will still be breathing while others will be living on in the pages you’ll be reading during your years with us. They will help you as you struggle with the big questions that in turn will help to free you to live a life that truly belongs to you. It will be these friends, who are �outside of you but standing close by, who will help you find your own answers to the questions: Who am I? What is my place in the world? And how ought I to live my life? One of my more beautiful living friends, a colleague here at the college, has put it this way: “Our friends are doubly our benefactors: They take us out of ourselves and they help us to return, to face together with them our common human condition.” (Eva Brann, Open Secrets/Inward Prospects, at 55.) Another of my friends, a St. John’s classmate and medical doctor, gave last year’s graduating class in Santa Fe this reminder, that we can learn from our friendships with the books how we might be better friends to one another. “It is the great book that is the life of every person, regardless of station in life,” he said. “So often we make shallow and inaccurate presumptions about people, like the cliché of telling a book by its cover, which robs you of the deeper experience that defines us as humans in our relationship to each other. For me every patient is a great book with a story to tell and much to teach me, and I am sometimes ashamed when my presumptions are exposed and I then see the remarkable person within, between the covers of the book of the story of their own lives.” This doctor has devoted himself to saving the lives of patients suffering from cancer, and he has this to say about how he is guided by the spirit of community and friendship within the soul of every human being: “In my own work, it is sometimes said, we are guided … by the idea that to save a person’s life, it is considered as if one has saved the world. To me that has always meant the life saved is much more than a single life restored, as that person is someone’s spouse, someone’s brother or sister, someone’s parent, or child, a member of a community, of a church, synagogue or mosque, or a friend, and as all are affected by loss, all are restored by their return.” (Stephen J. Forman, 2009 Commencement Address, Santa Fe) This statement is a powerful testament to the wonder of friendship at work in the world. In this last story, I have moved us away from the inner world of reflection and learning to the outer world of putting what one has learned to work in a life devoted to helping others. The second must always follow the first. By this, I mean that you owe it to yourselves and others to take advantage of the opportunities this community offers you to learn with your classmates and tutors what it takes to acquire a little self-understanding before you go out and put it to work in the world. And in the process, we hope that you will make a few friends who will stay with you for the rest of your lives, enriching your lives because ‘what friends have, they have in common.’ I wish to close with a kind of benediction. This little nominal sentence happens to be the penultimate sentence in one of Plato’s dialogues, The Phaedrus, the only book you will read twice for seminar, at the end of both your freshman and senior years. Phaedrus and Socrates have engaged in the highest form of friendship as they have conversed together to try to understand how a man or woman might achieve harmony and balance in the soul by directing that soul to a love for the beautiful. Socrates concludes with this prayer to the gods: Friend Pan and however many other gods are here, grant me to become beautiful in respect to the things within. And as to whatever things I have outside, grant that they be friendly to the things inside me. May I believe the wise man to be rich. May I have as big a mass of gold as no one �other than the moderate man of sound mind could bear or bring along. Do we still need something else, Phaedrus? For I think I’ve prayed in a measured fashion. To which Phaedrus responds: And pray also for these things for me. For friends’ things are in common. (Plato, Phaedrus, Nichols translation, lines 279b-279c) May each of you, as well, learn to enjoy the benefits of such friendships in your time at this College! (And now, in the concluding words of Socrates, “Let’s go” and get started.) Thank you! XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX I declare the College in session this 26th day of August, 2009. CONVOCATUM EST! � 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. 5 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Fall 2009 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-08-26 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2009 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Things of Friends Are Common." Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Convocation, Fall 2009 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 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nelson, Christopher B. Convocation Presidents 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/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/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/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/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/cbd160876c982b9651fff1d679f48622.pdf cb057fb4fb7000c2575f9d688f328cce PDF Text Text Music of the Republic Convocation, August, 2011 Christopher B. Nelson, President St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD Welcome to the Class of 2015 and their families. To the rest of the College community, welcome back. There comes a time in every year when I find myself saying to a friend or a prospective student that this is a very musical College. After 20 years of speaking this way, I thought I should ask myself just what I mean by this statement, and so I will try to unpack that little observation and say a few words about the music we make at St. John’s College. Each of you has experience with music; it has lifted you up or soothed you; it has angered or frightened you; it has lightened or burdened the spirit, distracted your attention, moved your feet and your arms, inspired an act, or aroused a love; it has transported you to another time or place, or moved you in some way without your quite being aware of it. Music pervades our lives and always has. It has power. It has sometimes taken you outside of yourselves and at other times taken you deep within. For these reasons, it has often been associated with things divine. Not only have you had experience of the effects of music, many of you have brought music with you to the College because it plays an important part in your daily lives. You carry your i-pods, MP3 players, and smart phones, playing classical music and opera, popular tunes and rock, jazz and blues, country and western, hip hop and rap. You hum, sing or play your favorites to yourselves or with others. Music has its place when you are alone and in fellowship. It serves as friend and refuge. Why is this? How can we come to understand the power that music has in our lives? What does it mean that we are somehow all musical beings? That to be human is somehow to be musical? That without music we would be less than human? These are questions I suggest you will be asking yourselves in your four years at St. John’s. �You will also be making music while you are with us. To get at the question “what is this music that we make?” I thought it would be fruitful to explore briefly the place of music in four republics to which we belong and by which we live: the Republic of the United States of America, the Republic of Letters, the Republic of Plato, and the Republic of St. John’s College. What is the place of music in these four republics of ours? The Republic of the United States of America I have mentioned the music that you brought with you when you arrived on campus, much of it performed by, written by, or listened to by Americans. But there is another kind of music that might be said to capture the spirit of the land, something I would call more elemental, seeking to get at the heart of our nation, to comprehend the constitution of its people, to describe what it means, or ought to mean, to be an American. And here I will suggest two, perhaps three, examples of this music. The first is from Walt Whitman, a quintessential American poet: I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off for work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutters song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to no one else, The day what belongs to the day—at night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. (“I Hear America Singing”)One can feel the heartbeat of a new nation, of a people building a country from the sweat of the brow. These Americans are making their own music in the work they do, and they are celebrating that work as something that belongs especially to them as free individuals, free to choose their work and free to enjoy their play. �My second example allows us to recall that music can be an aid in helping us to see and to seek the beautiful and the good. You all know the melody for “America the Beautiful”, so I will not ruin it for you by trying to sing it solo. While the tune is pleasing, the lyrics of Katherine Lee Bates help it to soar. The first stanza appeals to the gifts of the natural world: Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain! But it is the second stanza that captures my heart, speaking to the people that made this nation possible, and finally to the rule of law that sustains it: Oh beautiful for pilgrim feet whose stern, impassioned stress A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law. Here is a hymn to those who brought the spirit of freedom to a new land, and a prayer that we Americans dedicate ourselves to self-control and the rule of law to protect the freedom we have won. This is a noble anthem that we would do well to call up from time to time – a song worth making our own, as members of a community bound together by the will to protect an idea of freedom in the pursuit of happiness. This is, after all, the republic that has made it possible for this College, dedicated to cultivating the arts of freedom, the liberal arts, to thrive since before the formal founding of this nation. We in turn, as well educated and independent thinking citizens, will prove to be the necessary guardians of this republic. A third example, if only our voices could scale a couple of registers, might be a song written by one of our alumni, a graduate of the class of 1796, composer of the most sung song in this country even today, written during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812. I refer of course to our National Anthem, penned by Francis Scott Key: “Then, in that hour of deliverance, my heart spoke. Does not such a country, and such defenders of their country, deserve a song?” he said when he composed it. Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. What does it mean for a country to “deserve” a song? And why should a song be the �measure of worth? I will leave these questions hanging as I move to a second republic to which we belong. The Republic of Letters These are the works of literary and musical imagination that constitute the heritage of mankind. They have sprung from many civilizations and have spanned the centuries. We study these works because they are fundamental to understanding our humanity; they are the building blocks and cornerstones of our edifices in the humanities, arts and sciences. When I speak of works of musical imagination, I mean any work that might be said to belong to the ancient Muses, works of poetry or of musical or artistic composition, where the chief work of the author, composer, artist, or performer is the making of powerful images or likenesses of things. Consider, for example, the moving lines that open the Iliad, which freshmen are reading for their first seminar tomorrow evening: Rage --- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, Murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, Hurling down to the House of the Dead so many sturdy souls, Great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion, Feasts for the dogs and birds, And the will of Zeus was moving toward its end. Begin, Muse, when the first two broke and clashed, Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles. The images are vivid, the action compelling. I want to take up my spear and shield and go to battle where heroes are made and lost. The song has irresistible momentum that takes hold of the listener (or reader) from its first line. It grabs us in the chest, the seat of sentiment and magnanimity, the locus of the spirit displayed by our heroes. Such is the power of music. Even Homer is caught up by it, as he calls upon an Olympian Muse to tell this story, to sing the song of Achilles’ rage long before it was put to the page. Why does Homer need a Muse to tell this story? Why sing a song about rage, about a �consuming aspect of a man? What is this will of Zeus that is moving inexorably toward its end? What power does this god or any other god have over the affairs of mankind? Homer has concentrated images that beg us to ask a host of questions in these opening lines. That is another power that music has in common with poetry: the capacity for concentration of energy and passion! (And by the way, is my reaction to this poem a healthy one – that I want pick up and head off to battle? What exactly has gotten hold of me? Have I been made captive to a powerful image rather than given freedom to explore a question and seek a truth?) In your sophomore year, you will read of David, another warrior, another musician, but also an instrument of God. You will read the Psalms and sing their songs. God the Muse, man the instrument! How frustrating and depressing this must be for the wholly self-sufficient spirit that would have mankind be the creator and ruler of our world - that would have us become like gods? What kind of freedom comes from obedience to God, from becoming God’s instrument? Or do men and women gain their freedom only from disobedience – something for our juniors to consider when reading Milton’s Paradise Lost? But musical compositions have always had a special place in the literary tradition. Music was among the seven liberal arts as they were studied in the Middle Ages. As you will recall, those seven liberal arts were divided into the trivium, the arts of communication and language: grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium, the arts of counting and measuring: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. It turns out that music has mathematical elements that appear to be at its root, that is, that there is a correlation between the musical intervals in our everyday songs and the length of a string that can be plucked to play those sounds. You will learn from your own construction of a monochord, a one-stringed instrument, that the correlation between those very musical intervals and the divisions of the string that makes the sounds is described by a set of ratios consisting of small whole numbers. Lo and behold, we have physical phenomena, musical sounds, that have a mathematical form. Thus, there may something in music that is grounded in nature, not just in our sensibility, suggesting a model of the very mathematical physics you will be studying in your junior and senior laboratory. Music makes the claim that it can be studied objectively. And this causes us again to ask in �what way nature might be as musical as we human beings are. Consider some of the great masterpieces of musical imagination. Sophomores spend several weeks with Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Measure by measure, the mathematical elements are analyzed, the melodies and harmonics studied, the rhythm and meter explored, and the lyrics and gospel text applied. If we are ever going to get a sense of the possibility of mathematical physics to explain an emotional or spiritual response, it will be in our study of this masterpiece. It is indeed a passionate work of art, and it begs the question what Bach’s music has to do with the Gospel of Matthew? Does the music have a power over the listener that the Bible does not have over the reader? And is this good or is it downright heresy? We spend time with Mozart and study closely one of his operas, usually Don Giovanni. Who are these human souls that step out onto the stage and sing the music that belongs only to each of them, songs that reveal their character - or shape it - in time, over the course of the opera? What is the relationship between the music and the words? Consider the words alone and they are pretty poor examples of literature. But set them to this music and they soar! They are playful or tragic; they tug at our heartstrings; in Mozart’s hands, they are invariably beautiful. Whatever makes them beautiful? Are there elements of beauty as there appear to be elements of music? Are the two related? And what about the “ugly”? Are things ugly because they do not have the same concord with nature that beautiful things do, that they are in discord with nature? Is the beauty of a musical composition to be found in the mathematical order of the piece, or is it more complicated than that? I move on to our third republic. The Republic of Plato This is a dialogue that freshmen will be reading in the middle of their first semester. It has been described by some as the indispensable text that sets forth the plan of study for what we call the "Program" at St. John's College. It provides the model of a liberal �education at work, where music has its place in the education of the young, as an aid in the formation of character, an habituation that is useful in the training of the soul but not in its education. This education of the soul is better served by philosophy, a love of and pursuit of wisdom, which Socrates in this dialogue calls the greatest music of all. Such is the power of music to grab hold of the soul that Socrates warns us of its dangers. “So then,” Socrates says to his young interlocutor, Glaucon, “isn’t this why upbringing in music is most sovereign? It’s because rhythm and concord most of all sink down to the inmost soul and cling to her most vigorously as they bring gracefulness with them; and they make a man graceful if he’s brought up correctly, but if not, then the opposite.” Socrates points to ‘rhythm and concord’ for the source of music’s power, not its tones, intervals, melodies, and harmonies.Is he right in that? Do we think he is right about the power of music for good and for ill? If this dialogue is meant to be a kind of model for how we go about things at this College, how should we study music at St. John’s to avoid the bad and pursue the good? Should music rather be banned from the College as Socrates insists it ought to be in the formal program of study for the guardians of his Republic? What is the difference between the image-making of the poets, artists and musicians on the one hand and the image-making of the philosopher on the other --- whose image of the Sun serves as a metaphor for the Good, of the Cave for our everyday dwelling places, and of the Divided Line for our path to Wisdom? It is time to move on to our next republic, but I cannot help but pause to observe that we are not without a sense of humor about the seriousness of this or any of these other Republics. We even have a Battle Hymn to the Republic of Letters, written by one of our tutors, Mr. Higuera, and performed by a group of tutors on one of those long, cold winter days in a rite of distraction and fun that we call “Be Gone Dull Care”: Let me share the first of several clever stanzas: My mind has seen the glory of th' Idea of the Good, That it's not the same as pleasure I have firmly understood, And I wouldn't take a tyrant's power even if I could, I'm marching from The Cave! Marching, marching towards the sunlight, �Marching, marching towards the sunlight, Marching, marching towards the sunlight, I'm marching from The Cave! It is now quite clearly time to move to our fourth and last republic. The Republic of St. John’s College By now, you already have a feel for some of the kinds of music you will be singing, hearing, and reflecting upon. We have taken seriously the effort to restore music as a liberal art to the curriculum. As a close study of musical elements and musical literature can best be undertaken by learning to make music, we ask all of our students to use the one musical instrument they have in common --- their voices. Freshmen will sing together throughout the year, learning the fundamentals of melody and basic notation, before turning to sing some of the great choral works. Sophomores investigate rhythm in words and in notes. They study the ratios of musical intervals and consider melody, harmony and counterpoint, all in the context of some of the finest music ever composed by Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and others. And then throughout the College community, there seem to be countless occasions for playing music and singing, and for listening to the fine musical performances of your fellow citizens of this Republic. Join the St. John’s Chorus, the Madrigal Choir, Primum Mobile, or the College Orchestra; come and perform at our Collegiums, or just come to hear your classmates. I don’t think there is anything quite like experiencing the Muse at play in this community. Our purpose both in and out of the classroom, in the words of another of our tutors, Mr. Kalkavage, “is to improve … [our] students’ aesthetic taste: to introduce them to truly great music in an effort to beget a love for all things graceful and well formed. [We] hope that the study of music begets … a habit of searching for causes and details of beautiful things, and that the love of beauty will nourish the love of knowledge and truth. [And we] hope they will strive to imitate in their day-to-day lives the virtues of harmoniousness, proportion, good timing, … grace, and ‘striking the right note’ in thought, speech, feeling, and action.” (Peter Kalkavage, “The Neglected Muse”, The American Educator �Fall 2006) In short, we want these four years to be intensely musical years so that you may experience the liberation of mind and the harmony of soul that is achieved when both mind and soul are directed toward the beautiful. Go forth and sing the songs that stir you to engage in this search for beauty and truth! Make philosophy your Muse. You’ll find that this is a pretty friendly Republic for that kind of activity. Let me close by inviting you to listen to one of the simplest and, to my ear, one of the most beautiful pieces of music we make: Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus, a song familiar to all the residents of this Republic of St. John’s College. I invite all who cannot help themselves to join in and sing with a few of our students and faculty who agreed earlier today to lead us in song. SING! Thank you one and all. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Please join us for refreshments and conversation outside the lobby immediately following the recession. I declare the College in session this 24th day of August, 2011. CONVOCATUM EST!! � 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 9 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Fall 2011 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Music and the Republic." 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 2011-08-24 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 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nelson, Christopher B. Convocation Presidents Tutors 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/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/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/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/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/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/f8b7eb9057ea802627e547b72c817b4d.pdf c206e3fe2cf05952eff82d4562bc1f89 PDF Text Text Welcome to Wonderland St. John's College, Annapolis Convocation Address 8/21/13 Christopher B. Nelson, President Welcome to St. John's College! Welcome to our freshman class, their families and friends! Welcome back to the rest of the College community! Most of you know something of the springtime lawn sport at which this College is said to excel. And many of you have attended more than a few of our annual contests with the US Naval Academy. Honor and Glory are at stake in the match of wits that characterizes croquet in Annapolis. But costume and dance are every bit as much a part of the day as is watching the grass grow. This last year, our Student Committee on Instruction added a Saturday morning seminar to precede the big match. The reading was from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the timeless classic about a little girl drifting off to sleep on a river bank when a White Rabbit ran by, saying to itself in remarkably good English “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” But when Alice saw the Rabbit pull a watch from its waistcoat pocket, she leapt to her feet “burning with curiosity” and followed the Rabbit down the rabbit hole, tumbling into Wonderland, a strange new world filled with yet more strange little worlds. (Alice at 3-6) The Croquet seminar selections were, appropriately, the chapters on the Mad Tea-Partyand the Queen’s Croquet Ground. You may remember that the croquet court was all ridges and furrows, the balls live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the wickets were playing-card soldiers doubled up over themselves to make arches. The only rule to the game was that the Queen of Hearts must win; the price of failure and the Queen’s displeasure: “Off with their heads!” The game came to a halt when the Queen ordered the executioner to cut off the head of the Cheshire Cat. But as the Cat was all head, face, and smile, detached from a body, the players took to arguing whether the head could be cut off from a body that wasn’t. It’s a question we might leave to our own Imperial Wicket, as our croquet team captain is called. The seminar got me to wondering about Wonderland and all the things that could be learned from wandering through it, and so I reread Alice in Wonderland over the summer. From beginning to end, Alice was moved by curiosity to open each closed door to explore a new room, a new garden, new occupants, new societies, new manners and mores, new grammars, new arguments, new logical—or not so logical—constructs. After each exploration, she would discover a bottle that read "DRINK ME!" or a morsel that read "EAT ME!" to which she would respond: "I know something interesting is sure to happen whenever I eat or drink anything." And so she would drink or eat, finding herself growing or shrinking to meet the terrors or confusions of whatever she would encounter on the other side of the next door. (Alice at 29) With each new encounter, she experienced something both familiar and unfamiliar: rabbits were familiar, but talking rabbits were not; a deck of playing cards was familiar but having each card play out a role in the Queen's Courtyard was new; a cat was familiar but a smiling cat without a body was unfamiliar. When asked by a talking caterpillar "Who are you?" Alice responded that she hardly knew: "At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then." "What do you mean by that?" said the Caterpillar sternly. "Explain yourself!" "I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir" said Alice, "because I'm not myself, you see." (Alice at 37) Alice had become detached from herself and was looking back at herself in wonderment. When the caterpillar didn't understand what she meant, Alice replied: "[W]hen you have to turn into a chrysalis—you know some �day, you will—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel a little queer, won't you?" (Alice at 38) Now this exchange is quite remarkable. Alice has turned from wondering about the world outside her, with all of its familiar and unfamiliar elements, to wondering about herself and who she is, and then to trying to help another creature become detached enough to wonder at its own evolution and state of being. This is exactly the process, and these exactly the sort of questions, that can liberate us and others from the limitations of what we think we know, from our everyday unexamined assumptions about our everyday lives. This activity lies at the heart of liberal education. It involves the exercise of imagination. We must imagine that we can step outside ourselves and outside our habitual assumptions in order to ask the truly fundamental questions that undergird all other questions, whether those questions lead to the discovery of something new and unknown before (like the discovery of a new planet, a previously unknown subatomic particle, or the cure for polio), or the recovery of something once known and now forgotten (like the recurrent need to rediscover an understanding of the American Civil War), or the reexamination of something not sufficiently understood (like the need to better understand the meaning of justice or of right and wrong—concepts we use daily but understand imperfectly). Some of you may be wondering why I am bothering with the dreams of a fictional little girl when there are so many more important things, so many new things to discover, so much new knowledge to acquire. So let us consider another example, this time a physicist. As it happens, this summer I was also reading a couple of books by Richard Feynman, the Nobelprize-winning theoretical physicist known for his work on the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium. He may be best remembered for his testimony in a televised Congressional hearing explaining the failure of the O-rings of the space shuttle Challenger. It was Feynman’s curiosity, his incessant need to know, his puzzlement and wonder at the world around him, his joy in the study of physics, that led him to become one of the world's great physicists. Once, when Feynman was a student at MIT, he was expected to write a paper for a philosophy class in which he had paid no attention. So he decided to tackle a problem his father had given him as a child: Suppose some Martians were to come to Earth, and Martians never slept. They didn't have any idea of this thing we call sleep. So, they ask you: “How does it feel to go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop? How does the mind actually turn off?” Being the careful observer that he was, Feynman went about studying himself. He proceeded to watch himself very carefully each day and each night for four weeks to see what happened. He noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas in your head continue but they become less and less logically connected. But you don't notice that they are less well connected until you ask yourself "What made me think of that?" and you try to work your way back, often unsuccessfully. In the end, he wrote up his observations, noting that he didn't really know what it's like to fall asleep, only what it's like while watching himself enter the state. He concluded his paper with a little poem that pointed out the problem with introspection: I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder! (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! at 46-48) �Once again, we find our subject, this time Mr. Feynman, stepping outside of himself to try to understand something within. This escape from the self is an act of liberation, freeing the mind to look inward and study itself as if it were unfamiliar. This act of imagination is necessary for the most fruitful kind of learning. In Alice and in Feynman we see wonder first operating as a kind of curiosity: "I wonder what is on the other side of that door? Let me open it and see." Or "I wonder how the mind shuts down when it is going to sleep. Let me study it and see." In each case, the wonder turns to something like awe when the question turns back on itself: "I cannot tell you who I am because I am not myself. Then who am I?" Or "I cannot explain what it’s like to fall asleep because I am no longer conscious to study it. I wonder why I still wonder." These latter expressions require that we take the self that we think we know and call it into question: "Of course I knew who I was, but now I wonder who I really am." "Of course I am a curious person, but now I wonder why." The ability to wonder at yourself requires suspension of disbelief: you must be able to withstand the pressure to return to your default setting of thinking that you know who you are. This same ability to suspend disbelief is critical in creating both art and knowledge. In last month's New Republic magazine, Judith Shulevitz argues that there is no science without fancy, wonder and the exercise of the imagination. Suspension of disbelief, she says, is required for the "world building" behind all good science fiction. And what is suspension of disbelief but the freedom to imagine something out of the ordinary, the possibility of a future that you may lay claim to one day. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea made the possibility of the submarine seem a little more accessible to a later generation. His Clipper of the Clouds prefigured the helicopter. AndStar Trek’s hand-held communication device directly influenced the invention of the flip-flop cell phone. (The New Republic, July9, 2013.) I hasten to add that suspension of disbelief is necessary for the "world building" you are undertaking as you build a life for yourselves, a life worthy of your hopes and dreams. Now what do you imagine you need to learn to free yourself to ask the questions and shape the life that would belong to you? I imagine that it is the encouragement to wonder about the world around you and the world within you. How will you free your imagination to do that? This will probably require a lot of practice, something we encourage you to do at this College. Preparing for your seminar on the Iliad, you freshmen may wonder what these men are fighting about. What makes a man a hero? What is the role of the gods, and what is the will of Zeus? Why should we imagine that the will of Zeus is being accomplished in this book? Who is the Muse who is speaking through Homer? Why do we care more about the risks taken by our heroic humans than the accomplishments of the Olympian gods? In reading Euclid’s Elements, you will surely wonder how anything may be something that has no part, or what breadthless length can be? In what sense can we say that mathematical objects exist, that they have both meaning and being? Why do we imagine that mathematics may be the language of nature? Or that when we describe something mathematically it has a correlation with things we can see and touch? Why do we trust mathematical truths at all? In your language tutorial, you may wonder why you are reading a dead language with an unfamiliar alphabet. How can this help you understand the English language better? You may wonder, after several efforts, whether any sentence written in another language can be properly translated at all. What does this say about language and our ability to communicate with one another? How do we make the best of such a precarious exercise? And will you wonder, as I once did, about the ability to write intelligible sentences in Greek without the use of a verb? Ah, the substantive-making power of the article τά in the predicate position! In your laboratory, you will be observing plants and animals. You may wonder why you can prune a plant to make it healthier but should not prune an animal and expect the same. How does it happen �that a whole carrot can grow from a small scratch of tissue from another carrot’s tap root? What are the principles of the plant’s organization contained in that tap root? What can you learn about the Magnolia tree from studying one of its leaves? But when you wonder what the meaning of life is, you will find that the laboratory will only help you find a part of the answer. Sophomores are reading Genesis, wondering what it might mean that light and day were created before the sun was formed. Why are there two different stories explaining the creation of man and woman? Why did God forbid Adam and Eve to eat of the tree in the middle of the garden? Why is it right that we are made in the image of God but not right that we might want to be like God or to reach God, as we learn from the story of the Tower of Babel? Why does God destroy most of life on Earth in the great flood and then repent? And who are we to question the Almighty? Juniors are reading Don Quixote, wondering what kind of madness can move us to love. What is the connection between the love of a Knight for his Lady, the Knight’s desire for glory, and his love of the Divine? What does Quixote see in Dulcinea that moves him to take on a whole world? Is this knight like me, fighting seemingly hopeless battles for causes we simply must believe in? How is it that some of us see a hum-drum world with hum-drum eyes while others possess enough imagination to see the possibility of a world worthy of the striving that belongs to a knight-errant? Seniors are reading Tolstoy's magnificent War and Peace, wondering how Napoleon ever imagined he could conquer the Russian spirit. What is the spirit tapped by General Kutuzov that makes Russian victory inevitable? How does Napoleon inspire his troops? Why is it that war can be described as fearful and merry? What is Pierre searching for that will bring peace to his soul? What does it mean that the love of death is a virtue? Why do we fall in love with the lively Natasha? What is the happiness of self-sacrifice that characterizes Princess Marya? Are there laws of history that govern the movement of peoples, as we say there are laws of physics governing the movement of bodies? St. John's College exists to help you develop the capacity for wonder at ever-deepening levels. At first, you will wonder why something strange and new to you is what it is or doeswhat it does. Soon you will be confronted with the things you thought you understood perfectly well and find that you did not know them as well as you thought you did. The familiar will become unfamiliar. That is when you will become free of the preconceived and unexamined opinions you have carried with you for years. You will then have the opportunity to examine those opinions anew and either own them for yourself or discard them as false because you will have acquired a knowledge of what you know and why you know, and hopefully also of the limits and provisional nature of the knowledge you possess and of the need to examine such things over and over as you recover and rediscover the truths about the world about you and the world within you. Along the way, you will likely find yourself in some rabbit hole and may discover a whole new world beneath you that you will have never imagined before. It is this exercise of the imagination and this recovery of the power of wonder that will set you free. I am reminded of this daily from personal experience. Joyce and I have sixteen grandchildren, all of whom are themselves reminders of the richness of imagination in the young. Nathaniel, a six-year old grandson sought out his Grandmother: “Nana, Do you ever wonder about Nurse Sharks?” he asked. She replied, without having ever heard of nurse sharks: “Oh, I do wonder about Nurse Sharks and would love to learn more about them!” Last weekend, eight-year-old Masayda discovered an old brass key to an antique desk and wondered whether, if she used it, the desk would open into a Secret Garden as she had seen in the movie of that name! She and her Nana went on that adventure together and their story remains a secret today. Joyce and I have been made younger by our grandchildren, not because they are young in age, loud, raucous and hard to keep up with—as of course they are!—but because they have the lively imaginations necessary for exploration, discovery, and recovery of the world that is there to be �known! They include us enthusiastically in their explorations, and this requires suspension of disbelief on our part, and courage on their part, to open the next door to—who-knows-where? I parked my car in one of those big plain BWI asphalt parking lots the other day, only to hear a little boy say to his mother, just getting out of a car nearby: “Mommy, did we park next to a volcano?” To her negative response, he said “Oh good! Because volcanoes can be pretty bad for us!” Every venture into the imagination has its risks and can be perilous, as Alice discovered. But consider the rewards! St. John's has a Latin pun for its motto: Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque.“ I make free adults from children by means of books and a balance.” I often think this means that an education in freedom is not possible without the would-be adult first becoming like a child, capable of the kind of wonder experienced by our Alice. Oh Dear! Oh Dear! I worry I have kept you too late! Off with you to the Wonderland that is St. John's College! May you discover and never cease to wonder at the beauty of the world around you, at the richness and depth of the books before you, and at the devotion of this community to the learning of each and every one of you! Thank you. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I declare the College in session this 21st day of August, 2013. Convocatum Est! * Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, The Folio Society, St. Edmundsbury Press, 1998 * Richard P. Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character, W.W. Norton, 1985 � 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. 5 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Fall 2013 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-08-21 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Welcome to Wonderland." Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Convocation, Fall 2013 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 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nelson, Christopher B. Convocation Presidents Tutors