29 20 5655 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7783016c724315e931f4607002bf4825.pdf 45080cfba30b21b6ed39e7f5d3123987 PDF Text Text Do the Liberal Arts Today Serve any Useful Public Function? John Agresto I picked this somewhat provocative title because I think that the liberal arts and liberal education, if they are to survive, have to take more seriously than they do this question of their usefulness, especially their public usefulness. The liberal arts are dying in America, and they are dying in large measure because the public is unconvinced that any attention to these subjects, especially the humanities, are worth the cost, the effort, or the time. If you have any doubt regarding the decline of liberal arts education, just look at what students study in college these days. We all know a time when it was assumed that when students went off to college that a goodly number of them would study the liberal arts. We knew that many of them would major in English – which seemed always a preferred concentration – while others would study History or Mathematics or one of the hard sciences. There was, as well, always a serious handful who gravitated towards Foreign Languages or Philosophy or the Classics. So, where do things stand today in higher education? Well, today four of the top majors – Business Studies, Education, the Health Professions, and Engineering – account for 41% of all Bachelors degrees, while English and Literature accounts for a mere 3% of all such degrees. Today, just over 1% of our students major in any of the Physical Sciences, and Philosophy accounts for less than one half of one percent of the whole total. In fact, there are more Bachelor degrees given in 1 �something called “Parks, Recreation, Fitness and Leisure Studies” than are awarded in all the fields of History put together. Why is this the case? Let me give the most general answer first and then make it more specific in a bit. The liberal arts are dying because most Americans don’t see the point of them. They don’t get why a person should study literature or history or the classics -- or, more contemporarily, feminist criticism, whiteness studies, or the literature of post-colonial states -- when their son can study engineering or their daughter get a business degree. It’s not only that they and their children want to get a good job and make lots of money – they often also want to make a contribution more generally to the world, do something useful for themselves and their neighbors, even their country, and they don’t see what “use” the liberal arts (in either their more traditional or especially in their newer formulations) are either to themselves or to society. Now we all know that talking about “usefulness” gives most liberal artists the willies. We in the liberal arts are always more comfortable with divorcing ourselves from utility, with seeing our enterprise as something higher than training people in the more useful arts or helping people gain a living. Now, my point is not to try to convince you of the worthiness of other forms of education, though I know I tend to see them as more worthy than many of my colleagues do. And my point is definitely not to tell you that today liberal education needs to adopt a rhetoric of usefulness deceive the public into thinking we’re something we are not. My point 2 �is simply that the liberal arts are, when at their best, not only of immense value – let’s even say of “use” -- not only for each of us as individuals but I think also and especially of use to society at large. Let me go back to the first years of this country. I’m reminded of the famous phrase of John Witherspoon, an early president of what would later become Princeton University, who said to his students that they should not “live useless and die contemptible.” To Witherspoon, to go to college and not draw from it some things – many things – of use to one’s self and to the world at large would have surely seemed quite strange. And, recognizing that among those who went to Princeton and listened to President Witherspoon were 9 future cabinet members, 12 governors, 21 senators, 39 congressmen, 3 Supreme Court justices, a vice president, and a president, James Madison, who was also one of 5 of Witherspoon’s students at the Constitutional Convention, I can only assume that the good Mr. Witherspoon thought it was particularly contemptible to be useless in the public realm, not just ineffectual in our private lives. Now, part of the reason why I’m troubled by the way liberal education seems always ready to denigrate other forms of education or to criticize society at large for our problems is that, in trying to shunt the blame elsewhere, we absolve ourselves too easily for our own decline. We have worn what we saw as our purity and inutility as a badge. When students turned away from us, we too often said it was their fault – that they were more interested in jobs and money-making than in education. We blamed pushy parents, or the materialism of modern life, or the rise 3 �(as this conference’s brochure mentions) of “consumerism.” Yes, we should be furious over the coming death of the liberal arts in America – but we should examine ourselves (and by “ourselves” I do not mean St. John’s in particular but the enterprise of liberal education at large) and be honest with ourselves. And, having come to grips with all the causes of our recent decline, we might begin to see that the death of the liberal arts is less a murder than a suicide. We all know how the liberal arts have marginalized themselves out of existence: Read the course catalogues of so many college and see how, for instance, departments of literature have become shells of their former selves. With the rise of graduate school analyses and specialization that is now so much a part of the undergraduate curriculum, how much vitality has been lost from literature. Gone today in too many places are all the stories that showed us the world with its joys and sorrows, gone all our marveling over the varieties of human types or stories of honor and treachery, of hopes ascendant and hopes dashed. All replaced by more ideologically-driven studies; all replaced with our contemporary infatuation with race and class and politics. Too many History departments stopped trying to show us all we could learn from the past and began to think it best to show us all we couldn’t learn from the past. After all, to take just one example, if the Founders of this country of ours were little more than white racist slaveholders who set up a government to in order to line their pockets and protect their interests, who in his right mind would want to waste his time and his parents money to study the Founding period seriously? 4 �Looking over the liberal arts, I’m not sure which of the many ‘isms’ of today has done the most damage. Is it the relativism and postmodernism that we fought over so furiously in the ‘80’s? Or is it the ideology of multiculturalism, which promised to expand greatly our worldview, but instead narrowed it mortally by making us ashamed to take so seriously the works of dead white European males? Is it the remnants of a kind of pop-Marxism, which always has us look for economic and material causes as the source of human motivation and thus diminishes what used to be seen as the sovereign power of arguments, thoughts, and ideas? Is it the rise of an ideology of “critical thinking” that passes itself off as the core of the liberal activity, but, sadly, spends more of its time in being critical than being thoughtful? Or is it, as I just mentioned before, the rise of the specialization of the graduate schools, which specialization has been the engine of progress in many of the advanced sciences and technology, but the cause of so much smallness of both mind and vision in the humanities? Let me stay on specialization for a second. How clearly I remember teaching at other reputable liberal arts colleges where the best undergraduates would tell me they wanted to double major… triple major if they could. Why? Because even they knew that what they were getting was too narrow, too small, too particularized and specialized to satisfy them. Maybe if they double majored they could see more. (Sadly, as too many of them found out, only rarely did double majoring expand anything. Often it meant closing oneself off from all else that should be learned.) 5 �Nevertheless, you see, students are generally not the problem. The best of them do want, in what I heard that Eudora Welty once said, “to see the world and see it whole.” Not see it “all.” Even they know no one can ever see it all. But so many do want to see it “whole.” See its interconnections, see the relationship between causes and effects; thought and act, act and consequences; between love and jealousy, jealousy and revenge, revenge and justice, justice and all other human goods. They have the vague sense that the universe is actually a cosmos – not a jumble of isolated and discrete, unrelated items but a web of relationships, where one insight leads to another, where one answer leads to another answer. Again, it’s not the students who are the problem. They have the same questions they have always had. Some have questions that revolve around culture and art; others have questions about why the natural world or the animal kingdom are they way they are. Almost all have moral questions -- – What is just? What makes something worthy? What do I owe others? What do others owe me? Now, that said, I do not believe that students are necessarily interested in having questions piled on top of questions in some endless stream of doubt. (“You think you have questions?! Wait till you see how many questions I have for you!” the tutor intimates. “And wait till this Socrates guy confronts you…then they’ll be a million questions!”) If all you have are questions, intriguing as they may be, not many students will be interested. Even Socrates, with all his questioning, still wanted to know the answers. 6 �Still, I admit, the opposite is worse. To say that the liberal arts and we ever so humane humanists have not only all the questions but all the answers -- answers that we will preach to you on every topic from the evils of capitalism to the foolishness of religious beliefs to the meaning of social justice -- well, having all the answers into which we “instruct” our students may well be the most corrupting and prevalent of contemporary academic evils. On many campuses how often is it the non-liberal studies that open up students’ minds while the humanities and their practitioners seem more intent on preaching and converting than in opening and liberating. And what parents in their right minds want to spend 50k a year for that? So, where does liberal education go from here? I’m especially interested in the issue I raised at the start, the question I so inelegantly framed in terms of use. Where do we go to show once again that the liberal arts can be of use for us as individuals and of benefit again to society as a whole? First, as I’ve already said too often, let’s stop denigrating the non-liberal arts and stop questioning the motives of those who look to pursue them. We do not build ourselves up by tearing down other worthy modes of education. Was Jefferson any less intelligent, less human or less “humane,” for having been an architect and farmer as well as a philosopher and political scientist? Second, let’s do what we can to help our students see what the important questions are and what the variety of important answers might be. Not what our answer is; not what the answer of the 7 �supposedly most just or sensitive or socially aware people are, but what the range and scope of all serious answers might be. Third, let’s put aside all the overblown platitudes and flowery banalities about ourselves – how we educate “the Whole Man” or how we feed the spirit and elevate the soul, or how we are the ones who really teach people how to think, or how we are the source and font of ever so much humane and ethical instruction. OK, if overblown hoo-ha isn’t what we should be chasing, what should we be doing? What actually IS the peculiar excellence of the liberal arts that we should present to prospective students and their parents? Let me cite a modest statement by John Henry Newman: The liberal arts are that “great but ordinary means to a great but ordinary end.” What ordinary but great things might he be talking about? How about learning how to read. Read? What an ordinary thing you say. Yes, but when you read carefully and sympathetically (again, not exactly “critically” but sympathetically) you open the door to an amazing thing – You open the door to another person’s mind. You have the ability to do a truly great thing – you now have the ability to possess another’s thoughts. It’s truly marvellous: We humans may want someone else’s beauty or strength; we may want something physical and bodily. But we can’t. We can never really possess someone else’s material body even with the best of medical science at our disposal. But we can have the part of him or her that’s not material. We can possess someone else’s mind. Jefferson’s body may be mouldering in the grave; but his 8 �mind can still live in ours. His mind, his ideas and reasons, can live forever in us because he wrote and we have learned how to read. What else? Well, as I said before, among the best thing about adolescents is that most of them are looking for answers to their deepest questions – questions about love and justice, happiness and desire, nature and its workings. Again, great but ordinary matters. But this means, I believe, that so long as we can reinvigorate real literature, real philosophy, real historical and biographical studies that truly try to understand rather than debunk the past, real inquiry into the fine arts with serious inquiries into the beautiful and the sublime, and solid mathematics and science, all might yet be well. But this means reviving an older view of liberal education. I was reminded recently – not by Cardinal Newman but by Josef Pieper – of a sentence in Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “The Philosopher and the Poet have this in common – they both begin by marvelling.” The liberal arts do not begin in doubt, not even exactly in questioning, but simply in wonder, in marvelling. We begin as Miranda, the marvelling one, did – not with being critics of the world but with simply being overwhelmed with the wonder of the world. From there, all our questions flow -- Why are things as they are; why is the universe as it is? What are people really like? What am I to do? Again, all great but, in a real way, ordinary matters. To begin here, with wonder, is perhaps a start in answering the first part of what we seek – What is the use of a liberal education for me, for the individual. In this account, the first benefit is that it begins to satisfy 9 �the human craving to know, to have insight into serious answers to our most serious questions, perhaps even “to see the world and see it whole,” when that longing in us is most alive. Does this education have any other more outwardly useful or practical import for us as individuals? Yes, it does. Again to refer to Newman, such an education gives us a clearer and more conscious view of our own opinions and refines them. It helps us “to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what’s sophistical, and discard what’s irrelevant.” It shows us “how to influence others, how to come to an understanding with them, and how to bear with them.” In overcoming our ignorance of the past through history and our ignorance of human nature through philosophy and literature, we are less likely to be ruled by slogans or unexamined opinions, less likely to be moved by emotion simply or demagogues, less easily duped because we lack a conception of the evil possibilities of our natures. I’m reminded of Abraham Lincoln, who, while he hardly went to school at all, was by any and every measure “educated,” liberally educated. He read, as we know, biographies and histories, he read the Bible and Shakespeare, and he read literature, especially poetry. He did this for a kind of highest use. He did all this, as one of his biographers said, not just to know how better to write or speak but “to learn what the patterns of a man’s life might be like.” Still, if all his education did was make Lincoln into a private man useful to himself in his everyday life, none of would notice, none of us really care. What we remember was that Lincoln – and before him all 10 �the great men of the American Founding – knew that what was good for them as private intellects might also be of great value, of great use, to creating and then re-creating a whole nation, perhaps a whole world. Jefferson learned from the study of modern moral and political philosophy the self-evident truths that lay behind the writing of his (and our) Declaration of Independence. Or consider James Madison: Without the study of the history of all prior democracies or his inquiries into all confederacies, both classical and modern, coupled with his deep reflection on what we were once bold to call “human nature,” Madison could not have become the Father of the Constitution. Without their philosophical, political, and historical studies of the preconditions of popular governments and the nature of tyrannical rule, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay could not have written the Federalist Papers, nor could the populace have read them. It was hardly modern political science that was behind the making of America – it was the liberal arts. Remember what John Witherspoon told so many of that early generation – do not live useless and die contemptible. I think I’m right to say they followed this admonition. But let me go beyond talking about the liberal arts and high statesmanship and spend a minute just on the liberal arts and the rest of us. What else might the liberal arts do that’s of use, of value, for all society? Again, from Newman: Our studies aim “at raising the intellectual tone of society, cultivating the public mind, supplying true principles to popular enthusiasms and fixed aim to popular aspirations, giving 11 �enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, and refining the intercourse of private life.” While we might spend five more talks on each of these seemingly ordinary but truly great aims, let me spend a minute on just one that has always struck me – the cultivation of the public and the public mind. Indeed, while I know it’s unfashionable these days to say this, I also know that the liberal arts once gave a lovely gift to society: It transmitted the great heights of culture, this culture, to everyone. While other parts of a university education might be progressive and forwardlooking, the liberal arts had no hesitation in looking backwards. It understood it had a conserving function to play. It preserved for everyone, not just the elites, beautiful music, fine art, high culture, fabulous literature, good poetry. In this regard it wasn’t ashamed to be Western, or even Eurocentric. Indeed, it had a kind of honest pride in being the caretakers of such wonderful treasures, our treasures. Liberal education once knew that its keeping the culture alive was actually one of the most publicly useful thing it could do. It gave beauty and intelligence, tone and cultivation, as Newman says, to the whole society. In this way the liberal arts were for more than the simply the enjoyment of a few lucky students or the domain of the rich and wellborn – they were the gift the liberal arts gave to everyone. Back then, the liberal arts didn’t feel bad that Dante and Homer were dead white males. Nor did we, the children of working men and the grand children of immigrant women, feel bad about it either. In fact, back then 12 �humanists actually thought, and rightly so, that keeping Shakespeare alive was a universal gift, not an ethnocentric act. Having been given such treasures, it is now our turn to repay Shakespeare and Milton, Aristotle and Madison. So, we repay them as best we can – by keeping them alive. Their bodies, as I said before, may be dead, but they aren’t. And keeping the words and thoughts and works of great men and women alive is not only of the highest use for us both individually and as a society, but an act of repayment, of justice, to each of them. 13 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 13 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Do the liberal arts today serve any useful public function? Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by John Agresto at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Agresto, John Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004517 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/dbedae9f79c0e8da02a00ff737cf40cb.pdf 14603695335a729ddd0ab22eebf856d0 PDF Text Text LIBERAL EDUCATION AND THE QUESTION OF TRUTH David Arndt Saint Mary’s College of California We’re here to talk about a simple question: What is the point of liberal education? What does it aim at? What is the good we try to move toward through the liberal arts? Let me venture a simple answer: liberal education aims at truth. For liberal learning, truth is the highest good. The point of liberal education is to learn to move--through dialogue with others and through our own thinking--towards the light of truth. But this answer raises other questions: What are we looking for when we look for truth? What kinds of truth are proper to the liberal arts? In what sense can the liberal arts make claims to truth? What is truth? If we want to think seriously about these questions, ! think, we have to come to terms with the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger worked out a distinctive understanding of truth, and also a history of concepts of truth in the West. This history of truth can help to illuminate the history of liberal education, and to clarify in what sense liberal education aims at truth. Let me try to sketch this story, starting from the beginning. What were the origins of liberal education? How was the end of liberal education originally understood? And what notion of truth was implicit in this original understanding? " The Traditional Ends of Liberal Education We know there has actually never been any consensus on the final end of liberal education. Ideas about liberal education have been divided between two traditions. In one tradition, liberal education aims to prepare students for a life of political freedom, by training them in the arts they needed to be active and responsible citizens. This is explicit in Cicero, who defined the liberal arts as “the arts that are proper to a free citizen.”1 The emphasis in this tradition was on the arts of grammar and rhetoric. And the ultimate aim liberal education was #$ό&'()*--judgment, prudence, the ability to see singularities for what they are, to understand what kind of action is called for by each singular situation. 1 �In another tradition, liberal education prepares students for a life of intellectual freedom by training them in the arts they needed to liberate themselves from thoughtless adherence to inherited opinions. The emphasis in this tradition was on the arts of logic and dialectic, as well as the forms of mathematics that were paradigms of clear thought. The ultimate aim of liberal education was (+#ί---wisdom, an understanding of what is essential to a good life. This is explicit in Seneca, who wrote: “there is only one really liberal study,--that which gives a man his liberty. It is the study of wisdom.”2 Despite their differences, both traditions shared a common assumption: scientific knowledge was only one form of understanding among others. In addition to science, or ./)(0ή2', they distinguished opinion, know-how, judgement, and wisdom (3ό4-, 0έ6&', #$ό&'()* and (+#ί-). Each form of understanding was a distinct path to truth. Heidegger knew that truth has been conceived in different ways. In the allegory of the cave, Plato thought of truth primarily as a matter or likeness (ὁ2+ί8()*) or correctness (ὀ$:ό0'*). For Aristotle the locus of truth was not between beings and their ideas but between what we think and what is: “The false and the true are not in things (themselves)...but in the intellect.”3 For Aquinas the primary locus of truth was the intellect of God: “Truth is properly encountered in the human or in the divine intellect.”4 With Descartes truth became a matter of representation and certainty--the locus of truth is the representation of an object in the mind of a subject: “I am certain that I can have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I have within me.”5 While Kant distinguished the objects of experience from things in themselves, he retained the traditional concept of truth as a kind of correspondence: “What is truth? The nominal definition of truth, that it is the agreement of knowledge with its object, is assumed as granted.”6 But Heidegger argued all these concepts assume truth is a matter of correspondence between thought and reality. In his view, this view of truth as correspondence has dominated most of the philosophical tradition. " The Challenge of Modern Science Heidegger thought this traditional concept of truth shifted with the emergence of modern science. Modern science was founded on different understanding of truth, and this understanding of truth underlies the institutions of the modern research university. Modern philosophers accepted the traditional concept of truth as a matter of correspondence between thought and reality. But they altered this concept of truth in two decisive ways: they assumed that the test of truth is certainty, i.e. that no belief can 2 �be considered true unless it is known for certain; and they assumed that certainty could be established only on the basis of evidence so clear and distinct that it is indubitable to any rational mind. These two new assumptions were most clearly articulated by Descartes in the first rule of scientific method laid down in his Discourse on Method: The first [rule] was never to accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid hasty judgment and prejudice; and to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it into doubt.7 This intrication of truth and certainty is still commonly taken for granted today, even by the most skeptical thinkers; skeptics tend to deny that truth is attainable precisely because they assume knowledge must be certain in order to be true. Modern scientists are cautious about claiming to have final and definitive truth precisely because they know most scientific findings are never certain and always provisional. The power of this concept of truth is undeniable. The world in which we live has been shaped by the scientific methods it grounds and guides. Here we have to distinguish between science and scientism. Science is a search for universally valid knowledge. Scientism is the belief that modern science is the only genuine form of knowledge. A scientist is a practitioner of science, not a believer in scientism. To be critical of scientism is not in any way to denigrate science itself. The challenge to the traditional liberal arts came not from modern science, understood as a universally valid yet distinct and limited form of knowledge. The challenge came instead from scientism, the uncritical belief that modern science is the only genuine form of understanding, and that scientific truth is the only genuine form of truth. This belief was articulated with exemplary clarity in 1880 by Thomas Huxley, who argued that “liberal education” should be re-founded on “an unhesitating faith that the free employment of reason, in accordance with the scientific method, is the sole method of reaching truth.”8 This scientism challenged the notion of truth underlying the traditions of liberal education. The intrication of truth and certainty reversed the traditional hierarchy of forms of understanding. The highest form of understanding was no longer either judgment or wisdom but scientific knowledge; the highest kind of truth was not a clear understanding of how to act in our particular situation, or how to live well in general, but quantitative knowledge based on factual evidence.9 " 3 �One effect of this reversal was that the search for wisdom was delegitimated as unscientific. Many thinkers dismissed as sophistry or illusion any claim to nonscientific truth, and consigned whole disciplines of thought to oblivion. This de-legitimation was expressed with exemplary clarity by the philosopher David Hume: When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity and number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.10 Scientism had an especially powerful effect on the humanities. Once scientific truth was held to be the only real form of truth, the humanities could no longer be approached as sources of truth. Humanists generally responded to this challenge in one of two ways. On the one hand, there have been attempts to cast the humanities into the mold of the modern sciences. Philosophers have tried to remake their discipline into “a rigorous science.” Historians have tried to model their discipline on the natural sciences, and to find universal laws governing the phenomena of history. Classicists have come to think of their discipline not as part of a living tradition but as the study of dead languages. Humanistic study was re-conceived as quasi-scientific research.11 On the other hand, there have been attempts to re-conceive the humanities as disciplines aimed at something other than truth. Some humanists have claimed the goal of humanistic education is primarily aesthetic--the formation of an aesthetic sensibility. Others have claimed the point of humanistic education is primarily ethical--the cultivation of the virtues proper to a given ethos. Others have claimed the aim of the humanities is ultimately political--to promote justice by raising consciousness and demystifying the ideologies that support injustice. While both responses have produced valuable work in the humanities, they have distorted the traditional aims of liberal education insofar as they no longer approach the humanities as a way to wisdom or a search for truths higher than scientific truth. " Liberal Education and Truth We have to retrieve and refine the traditional ends of liberal education. And to do so we have to offer a clear critique of prevailing models of higher education today. We have to 4 �explain how liberal education has been distorted by the assumptions underlying the modern research university. We have to be able to explain both the legitimacy and the limits of the view of education embodied by the research university. We have to respond to the challenge of the research university by drawing on the resources of the liberal intellectual tradition in order to retrieve, refine, and rethink the assumptions that sustained the traditional liberal arts college. The first task is to rethink traditional concepts of truth. We need a critique of scientism that shows both the legitimacy and the limits of scientific truth. And we need to explain in what sense one can speak of non-scientific truths--truths of art, history, interpretation, and scripture. To do this we have to retrieve an understanding of truth that runs through the Western traditions without ever being fully grasped in conceptual thought--the understanding of truth as the kind of illumination or disclosure that Heidegger called “unconcealment.” We already have a rough understanding of truth in this sense when we speak of a “moment of truth”--an instant when something that has been obscure suddenly comes to light and becomes clearly apparent. In this idiom, “the moment of truth,” truth is implicitly understood not as a correspondence between thought and reality, but as the illumination or disclosure that underlies truth in the traditional sense--that first makes possible any correspondence or non-correspondence between thought and reality. This sense of truth as unconcealment is implicit but unnoticed in many classic works. It is already legible in Plato’s allegory of the cave, where the movement of the prisoners is not simply from semblance to reality, or from a less correct to a more correct vision, but from a place from which the sun is hidden to a place where the sunlit landscape is disclosed and illuminated. This sense of truth as unconcealment is also implicit but not grasped conceptually in a certain Christian understanding of the revelatory power of language; it is legible in the notion that the truth of the Gospel parables lies in their power to unearth and disclose what--like a treasure hidden in a field--has been hidden since the foundations of the world.12 " The aim of Heidegger’s thought was not to return us to a Greek concept of truth, but to clarify an understanding of truth we already have without knowing it, to grasp explicitly what we already understand in a thoughtless and inarticulate way. " The implications of Heidegger’s concept of truth cannot be summarized in a few pages. Let me just emphasize two basic points: " 5 �First, the concept of unconcealment helps to clarify the truth of judgment (#$ό&'()*). A judgment may be perfectly correct, in the sense it accurately corresponds to certain facts of a matter, and yet may be profoundly untrue, in the sense that it focuses on what is inessential and utterly fails to illuminate the heart of the matter. A judgment is true not when it adequately represents what is superficial and inessential, but when it reveals and brings to light the essential. So the truth of judgment is not ultimately a matter of correspondence but of revelation, illumination, unconcealment. Heidegger made this point in a lecture on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: “#$ό&'()*...eminently illustrates the meaning of ἀ-<:.ύ.)&, i.e. the uncovering of something concealed.”13 Second, the concept of unconcealment also helps to clarify the truth of wisdom ((+#ί-). Even at the crudest level of everyday understanding, we have a sense that wisdom cannot be contained in propositions, and that the truth of wisdom cannot be understood as a correspondence of thought with reality. Instead, we sense that to be wise means to have a clear vision of what is essential to a good life. The truth of this vision is not a matter of correctness, but of its power to disclose and illuminate what really matters. So Heidegger also understood the truth of wisdom as unconcealment: “(+#ί- is the other highest possibility of ἀ<':.ύ.)&.” 14 The concept of truth as unconcealment helps to distinguish three dimensions of thought, and three movements we have to make in order to move toward truth. In one dimension we move from ignorance to knowledge. Knowledge can be directly transmitted from professor to student. So this movement occurs as a progressive accumulation of facts and skills conveyed to the student by textbooks and lectures. The truth of this kind of knowledge is a matter of correspondence and certainty--a correspondence between thought and reality, which is certain only if it is grounded on absolutely clear and distinct evidence. In a second dimension we move from average towards genuine understanding--from an understanding that is more or less shallow, confused, vague, simplistic, and crude, towards an understanding that is deep, clear, precise, complex, and refined. This kind of understanding is essential to both judgement and wisdom, #$ό&'()* and (+#ί-. The truth of this understanding is a matter of unconcealment--the disclosure and illumination of what things are. This kind of truth cannot be directly transmitted from professor to student. It is a kind of truth students have to reach through their own thought and experience. This is why students have to make a third movement: In a third dimension we move from an inauthentic towards authentic understanding-from an understanding that is not really our own (one that we have simply because we 6 �share it in common with others) towards an understanding that is truly our own in the sense that it is based on our own experience, reading, discussion, and thought. So to look for truth we have to make three movements: We have to move from ignorance to knowledge. We have to move from an average to a genuine understanding of things. But in order to make this movement we also have to move from an inauthentic to a more authentic understanding, that is, we have to take on ourselves the responsibility to read closely, to listen carefully, to try to find the grains of truth in different points of view, and then, in light of our own experience and on the basis of our own thoughts, to work out our own understanding of what is true. This is why--in a liberal education-students are asked not to learn the thoughts of others, but to give their own thoughts. How do we make these three movements of thought? What are the disciplines that enable us to move toward knowledge, toward genuine understanding, and towards authenticity? What art the arts proper to this search for truth? They are the arts proper to liberal education: not just the seven classic liberal arts; but also the arts practiced here at Saint John’s: reading, listening, questioning, discussing, writing, thinking, and of meditation. The aim of these arts is truth--not just the truth of knowledge but the truth of judgement and wisdom. The point of a liberal arts education is to enable students to move--in dialogue with the tradition and with other people--toward the light of truth. " Conclusion Let me sum up. Liberal education was originally guided by traditional assumptions about the nature of truth. These assumptions supported the distinctive institutions of the liberal arts college: its curricula; pedagogies; disciplinary divisions; the roles of faculty and students; and the discourse in which education was understood. These institutions were challenged with the emergence of modern science, whose founders radically reconceived the nature of truth. These new concepts of truth laid the foundations of the modern scientific research university and its distinctive institutions: the library, the laboratory, the lecture hall, autonomous departments, and the elective system. But the research university did not simply replace the liberal arts college. Instead, liberal arts colleges were largely uprooted from their underlying assumptions, and incorporated into the modern research university. In the process, the liberal arts were re-cast in the mold of the modern sciences, and were reinterpreted in light of the assumptions about truth underlying the research university. These new concepts of truth have distorted and concealed the traditional meaning of liberal education. 7 �Liberal arts colleges have to clarify in what sense liberal education aims at truth. And to do so we have to offer a clear critique of prevailing models of higher education today. We have to explain how liberal education has been distorted by the assumptions underlying the modern research university. We have to be able to explain both the legitimacy and the limits of the view of education embodied by the research university. We have to respond to the challenge of the research university by drawing on the resources of the liberal intellectual tradition in order to retrieve, refine, and rethink the ends of liberal education. 8 �Notes Cicero, De Oratore, 1.72. Quoted in Bruce Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: The College Entrance Examination Board, 1995) 36. 1 Seneca, Letter LXXXVIII. On Liberal and Vocational Studies” in Letter from a Stoic, tr. Robin Campbell (New York: Penguin Books, 1969) 159. 2 3 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredenick (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 307 (1027b25). 4 Aquinas, quoted in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 178. 5 René Descartes, “From the Letter to Gibieuf, 19 January 1642,” in Descartes: Philosophical Letters, trans. and ed. by Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 123. 6 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965) 97. René Descartes, The Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998) 11. 7 Thomas Huxley, “Science and Culture,” quoted in Bruce A. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995) 171 (italics added). 8 This reversal is most clearly expressed by the words carved in stone on the façade of the Social Science Research Building at the University of Chicago: “If you cannot measure, your knowledge is meagre and unsatisfactory.” This inscription is a paraphrase of Lord Kelvin’s dictum: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.” Kelvin’s words are quoted at zapatopi.net/kelvin/quotes/. The inscription is discussed by Thomas Kuhn in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) 178. 9 David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) 165. 10 9 �Classics for example became largely a branch of philology. One still studied Greek and Roman texts, not as sources of a living tradition but as one set of objects among others. This approach obliterated the original rationale for the study of classics. Hence the proliferation of spurious rationales, such as the theory of "mental discipline." 11 There were also attempts to remake history on the model of the new sciences. There was, for example, a search for laws of history analogous to the laws of nature. This analogy was explicit in Marxism; Engels wrote that "Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history." (Friedrich Engels, quoted in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994, p. 388) There were also attempts to make philosophy a science in the modern sense, and to reject all previous philosophy as "metaphysical," that is, unscientific nonsense. Matthew 13:34-5 and 13:44. “Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden [>.>$?22έ&-] since the foundation of the world.” “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden [>.>$?22έ&8] in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” (New Revised Standard Version.) 12 Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 36. 13 14 Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 42. 10 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 10 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberal education and the question of truth Description An account of the resource Paper delivered on October 18, 2014 by David Arndt at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Arndt, David D. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004518 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6f4f4d6e9d4220eb763b33f24aaddf92.pdf 6c3ebd78ca9f132013dbc5b0911f60ae PDF Text Text Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu Fame and the Solitary Life: Rethinking the Liberal Arts through the Paradoxes of Petrarchan Humanism Steve Baker Columbia University “When we are free from necessary business and other concerns we are eager to see or to hear or to learn.”1 – Cicero, De Officiis, I, 13 (trans. M. T. Griffin) Much has been made of Petrarch’s momentous discovery of Cicero’s collection of familiar letters to his friend Atticus, the so-called Ad Atticum.2 Uncovered in 1345 in Verona, it marked a decisive turning point in the development of Petrarch’s work.3 Yet, relatively little has been made of Petrarch’s analogous discovery in 1333 of Cicero’s Pro Archia.4 Its importance 1 “Cum sumus necessariis negotiis, curisque vacui, tum avemus aliquid videre, audire, discere.” 2 On Petrarch’s discovery of Ad Atticum in 1345, see Kirkham, “A Life’s Work” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, p. 21 ff.: “As a ‘born-again’ ancient, Petrarch made his greatest manuscript discovery in the Verona cathedral library, the sixteen books of Cicero’s Ad Atticum along with two minor collections, to the Roman orator’s brother Quintus and to Brutus. From these, which the classics detective excitedly transcribed over several weeks in the spring of 1345 (a period when he also came to know Dante’s son Pietro Alighieri), Petrarch took the tremendous idea of collecting his own letters.” See also Billanovich, “Dall’Epystolarum mearum ad diversos liber ai Rerum familiarium libri XXIV,” pp. 1-55. 3 On the influence of the Ad Atticum on Petrarch and Renaissance letters, see Witt, “Medieval Ars Dictaminis and the Beginnings of Humanism: A New Construction of the Problem”; Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, pp. 49 ff.; and Fantazzi, “General Introduction” in Vives, De conscribendis epistolis. 4 On Petrarch’s discovery of the Pro Archia, see Seniles XVI, 1. During a grand northern European tour he took under the aegis of his Colonna patronage in 1333, Petrarch made a detour to visit a monastery in Liege (Belgium) reputed to be rich in manuscripts. It was there that he found and quickly copied two hitherto unknown Ciceronian orations, the Pro Archia and the apocryphal Ad milites romanae, one of which he quickly copied and had a friend copy the other. Since Petrarch’s travel expenses were covered by the Colonna, Wilkins (Studies in the Life and Work of Petrarch, pp. 5-8) assumes that he probably also served in some kind of official way, either as messenger or cultural attaché or diplomat. Regarding Petrarch’s service as “capellanus continuus commensalis” to the Colonna family, see Dotti, Vita di Petrarca, pp. 28-47. 1 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu cannot be overstated.5 Stumbling upon the neglected manuscript in a monastery library in Liège, the twenty-nine-year-old recent law school drop-out struck on not only an impassioned validation of his decision to pursue a life in letters but also a platform from which to launch the cultural revolution that would become Renaissance humanism.6 In just the first few pages of the Roman orator’s defense of the poet Archias, Petrarch found what would become the blueprint for much of his long and illustrious career.7 With its themes of the “elevating influence of poetry” (III, 6), the role of friendship and patronage in the professional poet’s life (III, 6), the question of pan-Italian Roman citizenship under the Lex Iulia (IV, 6-7), and its praise of literary studies (VI, 12-14), the Pro Archia resonates in far-ranging ways through Petrarch’s humanistic project: from his literary works to his epistolary politics, from his neo-Latin epic, the Africa, to his support for Cola di Rienzo’s quixotic attempt to resurrect the Roman republic and unify Italy. 5 See Pastore Stocchi, Petrarca e i potenti della terra, pp. 49-50; Pastore Stocchi, Introduzione in Petrarca, Opere latine, pp. 15-17; and Guglielminetti, Petrarca e il petrarchismo, pp. 33. 6 See Cicero, Pro Archia, II, 4: “Nam ut primum ex pueris excessit Archias atque ab eis artibus quibus aetas puerilis ad humanitatem informari solet, se ad scribendi studium contulit.” (”As soon as Archias had left behind him his boyhood, and those influences which mould and elevate his boyish mind, he applied himself to the pursuit of a literary career.”) All translations of the Pro Archia are from the Loeb edition translated by Watts. On the origins of humanism, see also Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism”; Weiss, The Dawn of Italian Humanism; Witt, “Medieval Italian Cutlure and the Origins of Humanism as a Stylistic Ideal,” pp. 29-70. 7 The symphonic opening sentence of the oration validates the value of literary pursuits in the legal profession (Cicero, Pro Archia, I, 1): “Si quid est in me ingeni, iudices, quod sentio quam sit exiguum, aut si qua exercitatio dicendi, in qua me non infitior mediocriter esse versatum, aut si huiusce rei ratio aliqua ab optimarum artium studiis ac disciplina profecta, a qua ego nullum confiteor aetatis meae tempus abhorruisse, earum rerum omnium vel in primis hic A. Licinius fructum a me repetere prope suo iure debet” (“Whatever talent I possess (and I realize its limitations), whatever be my oratorical experience (and I do not deny that my practice herein has been not inconsiderable), whatever knowledge of the theoretical side of my profession I may have derived from a devoted literary apprenticeship (and I admit that at no period of my life has the acquisition of such knowledge been repellent to me), – to any advantage that may be derived from all these my friend Aulus Licinius has a pre-eminent claim, which belongs to him almost of right”). 2 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu The Pro Archia is not so much a defense of an individual poet as it is a panegyric on the importance of the liberal arts and those who cultivate them.8 The value of humanistic studies, according to Cicero,9 lies in their usefulness in matters of state and the expansion of its sphere of influence: “literature exalts the nation whose high deeds it sings.”10 In praising poets for the benefit they bring to the life of the republic and its citizens by incentivizing them with the promise of immortality for their noteworthy deeds, Cicero’s Pro Archia presents the deep 8 Cicero, Pro Archia, I, 2: “Etenim omnes artes quae ad humanitatem pertinent habent quoddam commune vinculum et quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur.” (”Indeed, the subtle bond of a mutual relationship links together all arts which have any bearing upon the common life of mankind.”) The way Cicero phrases the common bond that all arts have with each other is richer than Watts’ English translation here suggests. In the original: “quasi cognatione quadam,” in English literally means: “as though by a kind of kindred relationship,” or “by a sort of, as it were, blood relationship.” Cicero qualifies cognatione with both quasi and quadam because he is using the term, which technically describes a familial, blood relationship, metaphorically (see, also, quoddam commune above and quasi divino quodam spiritu, further down in the passage). These are the exaggerated signposts he is deploying in order to make it clear that he is asking his audience to indulge him as he uses in his defense a new style of speaking (“novum genus dicendi”), one suited more to the nature of his client, a poet, than to a court of law. On the usefulness of literary studies, see also, Cicero, Pro Archia, VI, 13: “[...] ex his studiis haec quoque crescit oratio et facultas, quae quantacumque in me est, numquam amicorum periculis defuit” (”[...] my devotion to letters strengthens my oratorical powers, and these, such as they are, have never failed my friends in their hour of peril”). 9 Cicero, Pro Archia, VI, 12: “Ego vero fateor me his studiis esse deditum: ceteros pudeat, si qui se ita litteris abdiderunt ut nihil possint ex eis neque ad communem adferre fructum, neque in aspectum lucemque proferre” (“I am a votary of literature, and make the confession unashamed; shame belongs rather to the bookish recluse, who knows not how to apply his reading to the good of his fellows, or to manifest its fruits to the eyes of all”). 10 See Cicero, Pro Archia, X, 23: “Propterea quod Graeca leguntur in omnibus fere gentibus, Latina suis finibus, exiguis sane, continentur. Qua re si res eae quas gessimus orbis terrae regionibus definiuntur, cupere debemus, quo manuum nostrarum tela pervenerint, eodem gloriam famamque penetrare: quod cum ipsis populis de quorum rebus scribitur, haec ampla sunt, tum eis certe, qui de vita gloriae causa dimicant, hoc maximum et periculorum incitamentum est et laborum” (“Greek literature is read in nearly every nation under heaven, while the vogue of Latin is confined to its own boundaries, and they are, we must grant, narrow. Seeing therefore, that the activities of our race know no barrier save the limits of the round earth, we ought to be ambitious that whithersoever our arms have penetrated there also our fame and glory should extend; literature exalts the nation whose high deeds it sings, and at the same time there can be no doubt that those who stake their lives to fight in honor's cause find therein a lofty incentive to peril and endeavor”). 3 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu affiliation between politics and literary or artistic production.11 Petrarch’s encounter with the poet Archias through Cicero will forever assure a place for poetry at the center of the vocation of the humanist. It played, for example, a decisive role at this early stage in his life seeing that it also inspired the address he delivered eight years later when he was crowned poet laureate on the Capitoline Hill in Rome on Easter Sunday in 1341.12 Deemed the “first manifesto of the Renaissance” by Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Petrarch’s Coronation Oration is a classically inspired treatise that valorizes the role of the poet in society.13 Like Cicero in the Pro Archia,14 and as Ennius did before him, Petrarch places poets in 11 See Pastore Stocchi, Petrarca e i potenti della terra, pp. 49-50: “Ma un’esaltazione della poesia come quella che il Petrarca scoperse e divulgò, a partire dal 1333, con l’orazione ciceroniana Pro Archia, ammetteva appunto un’accezione più ampia, per la quale la persona stessa del poeta era esaltata e consacrata come augusta e influente. D’altro canto, le biografie di Orazio o di Virgilio, ma anche, per esempio, di Aristotele, rilette in questa luce, apparivano confermare una speciale attitudine del poeta e del filosofo a definirsi quale amicus principis per eccellenza, potenzialmente affiancabile ai potenti terreni in una sorta di diarchia: illusione carezzata ancora, fino alla morte di Lorenzo de Medici, dal Poliziano e da altri intellettuali della cerchia medicea. Ma se mai questa illusione egemonica, che a un certo numero di umanisti affermati non accordò mai se non qualche cancellierato e molte cadute in disgrazia, poté sembrare vicina a realizzarsi per davvero, questo avvenne con il Petrarca: primo e probabilmente unico letterato moderno cui sia stato così universalmente riconosciuto un primato anche sociale, non per la ‘gratia Dei’ che incoraggiava Dante a parlare, ma per il carisma della sua intelligenza e del suo sapere.” 12 See Fam. IV, 8 to Barbato da Sulmona: “Idibus Aprilis, anno etatis huius ultime millesimo trecentesimo quadragesimo primo, in Capitolio Romano, magna populi frequentia et ingenti gaudio, peractum est quod nudiustertius de me rex apud Neapolim decreverat: Ursus Anguillarie, comes ac senator, prealti vir ingenii, regio iudicio probatum laureis frondibus insignivit” (“On the Ides of April, and in the 1,341st year of this age, on the Roman Capitoline, in the presence of a large multitude and with great joy, there occurred what the King of Naples had decreed for me the day before yesterday; Orso dell’Anguillara, a friend and senator, a man of lofty talents, honored me with the laurel crown as approved by the King’s judgment”). A majority of book IV of the Familiares is dedicated to recounting the vicissitudes surrounding the coronation though he never describes many of the specific details of the event itself. 13 For the manifesto pronouncement, see Wilkins, “Petrarch’s Coronation Oration,” p. 300. For a reconstruction of the events surrounding the coronation, see Tatham, Francesco Petrarca: The First Modern Man of Letters (His Life and Correspondence: A Study of the Early Fourteenth Century 13041347), II, pp. 104-52; Wilkins, “The Coronation of Petrarch.” See also Pastore Stocchi, Petrarca e i potenti della terra, pp. 50: “Il riconoscimento, cioè, dell’umanista quale titolare di uno status eccezionale, che delle sue competenze trae vantaggio per collocarlo ai vertici del corpo sociale. Era, certo, un’utopia effimera, nutrita a sua volta di altre più antiche utopie accreditate dalla tradizione classica con argomenti più or meno speciosi.” 4 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu league with princes – not least of all because the same laurel wreath adorns both poets, when crowned with literary glory, and princes, in a triumphal military procession.15 The prince needs the poet in order to ensure that the glory of his deeds will endure long into the collective memory of posterity.16 The poet needs the prince for such favors and privileges patronage can provide, namely, the protection of the very otium or leisure necessary to produce such timeless works of commemorative art.17 14 The Pro Archia is first mentioned by name in Petrarch’s “The Coronation Oration,” p. 301: “Take not my word for this, but Cicero’s, who in his oration for Aulus Licinius Archias has this to say of poets: ‘We have it upon the authority of the most learned men that whereas the poet attains through his very nature, is moved by the energy that is within his mind, and is as it were inspired by a divine inbreathing – so that Ennius fairly calls poets sacred in their own right, since they appear to be commended to us by the possession of a divine gift.’” And again toward the end at Petrarch, “The Coronation Oration,” p. 308: “Certain illustrious men, foreseeing such a possibility, have kept poets with them and held them in high honor, so that there might be someone who would hand down their praises to posterity – a matter carefully set forth by Cicero in his oration for Aulus Licinius Archias, to which I have already referred.” See Petrarch, “The Coronation Oration,” p. 309, where the full Ciceronian passage with the anecdote itself is quoted verbatim. 15 On Petrarch’s linking of poets to princes by means of the honor of the laurel crown, see Wilkins, “The Coronation of Petrarch,” pp. 155-97; for an analysis of his oration, see especially pp. 172-9. See also Petrarca, Rvf. 321 and 322 and the companion piece by Giacomo Colonna congratulating him on the coronation cited in the notes of most editions of Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Rvf. 322), “Se le parti del mio destrutte.” See also Petrarca, Collatio inter Scipionem Alexandrum Hanibalem et Pyrrum in Martellotti, Scritti petrarcheschi, pp. 321-46. 16 Petrarch, “The Coronation Oration,” p. 308: “Many mighty men and warriors, and others who have deserved eternal memory have passed into oblivion simply because they had not the good fortune to be recorded by capable authors, as Horace says so well in his Odes: “Many mighty men lived before Agamemnon, but all are buried in a tearless night,” and the reason follows: “since they lack an inspired bard” (Horace, IV 9, 25-28). Certain illustrious men, foreseeing such a possibility, have kept poets with them and held them in high honor, so that there might be someone who would hand down their praises to posterity – a matter carefully set forth by Cicero in his oration for Aulus Licinius Archias, to which I have already referred.” 17 As Luisa Secchi Tarugi rightly emphasizes, Petrarch wavers between otium and negotium, between withdrawn study and political and social passion, fully aware of the fundamental role of the intellectual in society. The idealized image of his humanist hero is a paradoxical mix of seemingly contradictory qualities, action and contemplation, public virtue and private diligence. Just such a figure makes an appearance in texts as early as his coronation oration of 1341. See Secchi Tarugi, Petrarca e l’umanesimo. 5 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu Yet the value of solitude is not reserved for the poet in this ancient formulation of the equation. Solitude was seen as a precious resource even for the statesman. The very first exemplum from classical antiquity Petrarch places under the first subheading of the first book of his Rerum memorandarum libri, the one dedicated to the virtue of solitude, is none other than the great “solitudinis amator,” Scipio Africanus, who is not necessarily the first person you would associate to a life of withdrawal and studious leisure. The great general and man of action who worked to defeat Hannibal in the time of the Carthaginian threat was remembered even in antiquity as someone who cherished every precious moment he could spend some time alone with his thoughts as well as with his most trusted friends.18 This is what made him great. This is what makes him the paragon of Petrarch’s ideal humanist hero: someone who strikes the kind of balance between the active and the contemplative, the private and the public, that nevertheless leads him to great achievement on the stage of history. As it turns out, contrary to popular belief, Petrarch was much more than a sylvan love poet, the self-proclaimed solitary singer of Laura whose authorship of a tract on the virtues of the life of solitude is more nuanced and complex than a superficial reading might suggest. In fact, if we take a closer look at what Petrarch's De vita solitaria is all about I think we'll see just how idiosyncratic his early modern brand of humanism really is. Book II of the work opens with a long list of hermits. He tells us just enough about each of them to find out that they all have something paradoxical in common. Despite their withdrawal from the world of human affairs, they all earned great recognition and even fame in society. Some are more “famous” than others, but he ends his list with a slightly longer description of St. Anthony,19 the religious recluse par 18 Valerius Maximus, Chap. VIII, 8: “Since leisure appears to be diametrically opposed to diligence and study, it has the best claim to be subjoined to them, not leisure by which efficiency loses strength but by which it is revived. For the former is to be avoided even by the lazy, the latter is sometimes to be sought even by the energetic, so that as to the first they do not lead a life of perpetual inactivity, and as to the second that by timely intermission of work they may come the brisker to its resumption. / That illustrious pair of true friends, Scipio and Laelius, joined one to another by the bond of affection and also by partnership in all virtues, just as they followed the path of active life with equal tread, so did they find relief together in mental relaxations. For it is agreed that they used to pick up shells and pebbles wandering on the beaches of Caieta and Laurentum, and P. Crassus often declared that he had learned this from his his father-in-law Scaevola, who was Laelius’ son-in-law.” 19 Granted, some are more “famous” than others, but he ends his list with a longer biographical sketch of one of the most famous hermits of all Antonio, about whom he writes to Boccaccio in Sen. XVII, 2 in a 6 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu excellence who cultivated such a reputation for wisdom and restraint – earning for himself so much admiration and respect –, that he was even sought out by the emperors of Rome and invited into relationships of “amicitia” with them for the sage advice he could lavish on them. To anyone familiar with Petrarch's career not only as the solitary singer of Laura, but also as public intellectual, court advisor and diplomat, this might ring a bell. So much of this minihagiography resonates with Petrarch’s own biography right down to the word choice and focus on his relations with those in positions of power. In fact, he even goes on to emphasize the fact that Anthony found himself in such intimate interaction with the emperor that he exchanged “familiar” letters with them on a regular basis, as Petrarch himself did with dozens of the powerful figures not only in the papal court at Avignon, but also in the centers of power throughout Italy and across Europe.20 And so, as early as this late medieval moment of cultural transition and intellectual rebirth, the study of eloquence and philosophy – in short, the foundations of a liberal education – was intended for the betterment of society. The binary of contemplative and active was not a mutually exclusive one. And as we can see from his choice of examples, even the religious was not excluded from the realm of human concerns. It is no mystery then that Petrarch’s cultivation of the solitary life was never meant to be taken as an end in itself. As it was in antiquity and would be in the later tradition of Renaissance humanism, the studia humanitatis were always meant to bolster an individual’s participation and accomplishment in other areas of life. Time outside the fray spent learning in quiet contemplation, cultivating the self, is what gives the Petrarchan humanist the personal fortitude necessary for productive engagement with the world of human affairs. Petrarchan humanism synthesized the contemplative and the active lives. comparison between their humble friendship and the one cultivated between Anthony and St. Paul of Thebes (Paul the Theban). Theirs is another exemplary case of intimacy between hermits, humble men dedicated to learning and letters, with little in the way of earthly goods to their name. As if the two had anything to do with each other: riches and friendship. 20 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, II, i, chapter 2, p. 192: “I might go on to tell [...] how Roman Emperors, attracted by the miracle of his fame, addressed letters to him with the reverence due to a father and were immensely delighted when they were accorded the honor of a reply.” 7 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu Petrarch's panegyric On the Solitary Life opens with an exhortation to the reader to cultivate their soul at least as much as they might busy themselves with a myriad other trifles in their daily lives. But what is the solitary life good for?21 First on the list is to serve God, which he deems the only truly free and happy occupation of our souls; next is to cultivate our ingegno, namely, our intellect, our creativity, our mind; lastly, it is for meditation and writing, for planning and creating something to leave behind for posterity to remember us by, and thus to stop the fleeing of time and lengthen our all too brief lives through creative output. And so he prescribes a venue for this brand of solitude that is conducive not only to introspection but also to culture. It should be a place friendly to books, since literary concerns should also be at the forefront of ones leisurely activities. He also makes it clear that by solitude he does not necessarily mean being always strictly alone, that kind of extreme solitude he calls inhuman. Further layering paradox upon paradox, for Petrarch, one should populate their solitude with choice company.22 “Besides,” he says, “I never persuaded those for whom I said solitude was advantageous that in their desire for solitude they should despise the laws of friendship. I bade them fly from crowds and not from friends. [...] Let his leisure be modest and gentle, not rude; let his solitude be tranquil, not savage; in short, let it be solitude and not barbarism.”23 Inhuman solitude is missing its “participe,” its companion, its friend. “It will never be my view,” he continues, “that solitude is disturbed by the presence of a friend, but that it is enriched. […] I would share my solitude like everything else with my friends, believing that Seneca spoke with true humanity when he said that ‘no good thing is pleasant to possess without friends to share it’ (Epistles, 6). Solitude is a great and sweet possession.”24 21 Petrarch, De vita solitaria, p. 327 22 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 24: “As is well known the ancients thought friends indispensable to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really worth living. In holding this view they gave little consideration to the idea that we need the help of friends in misfortune; on the contrary, they rather thought that there can be no happiness or good fortune for anyone unless a friend shares in the joy of it.” 23 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, I, v, chapter 4, 162. 24 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, I, v, chapter 4, 163-5. 8 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu What is solitude with friends, this state of being “alone together,” but another of the classic oxymorons of Petrarchan poetics like the famous “icy fire,” “sugared grief” and “sour delight” of his love lyrics. The difference between extreme and inhuman solitude that desires only pure withdrawal and the more humane version that seeks not only to be alone but also to be in company, that wants to learn but also teach, to listen as well as speak, represents in the broadest sense one of the differences between Epicureanism and Stoicism. It’s a two-way road and which is where Seneca’s “humanius dictum,” his most human saying comes in: there is nothing worth having unless you have a friend (to enjoy it with you). By now it should be apparent that Petrarch has a very specific genealogy in mind when he extols the virtues of a life of solitary leisure. Never does it imply complete withdrawal from the activities of civic life. Instead, it implies the balanced approach one should take to the affairs of the society of man.25 Petrarch transforms retired leisure into a valuable life devoted to liberal studies and friendship. He says that he has yet to see any of his contemporaries (322, 326, 328) make a successful contribution to the public welfare. Those who devote themselves exclusively to public service risk losing control of their own lives, passions and minds. Hence his praise for Scipio Afrianus, the statesman who perfectly embodies, in Petrarch's view, the right balance of the active and the contemplative. With Petrarch the ethos of otium begins to transform the goal of everyday life into one involving self-knowledge and the cultivation of individual talents, a life populated by good friends and good books. 25 Sen. XVII, 3; Bernardo, p. 655: “[…] et occupatio mea maior et tempus angustum erat, idque ipsum, ut nosti, bellicis undique motibus inquietum, a quibus etsi animo procul absim, nequeo tamen fluctuante republica non moveri.” (Sen. XVII, 3, 1). He puts it rather poignantly in one of the Seniles he addresses to Boccaccio towards the end of his life. He sums up his attitude towards the balance between withdrawal and involvement thus: “[…] and at that, as you know, I was disturbed by war breaking our on all sides. Though I am far from sympathizing with it, I still cannot avoid being disturbed by the ups and downs of the republic.” Moments like this – and there are many, particularly as one delves deeper into his corpus of letters – show any picture of a happily withdrawn hermit Petrarch, quietly whittling away his days over his studies and at peace, to be overly optimistic. Instead, he was subject to all the fluctuations, upheavals and disorder that plagued Italy in the mid-fourteenth century. The contingencies of the historical moment in which he lived incessantly impinged on his living, no matter how much in his writings he is able to transcend to the timelessness that so much of what his writing has achieved, which is what made those precious moments of solitary peace and quiet all the more valuable. It is perhaps also fitting that these remarks regarding the patience required in order to maintain one’s soul at peace even in the face of adversity, in this case threats of violence and destruction with the outbreak of war menacing from all sides, are found in the prefatory remarks to the letter in which Petrarch’s Latin translation of Boccaccio’s Griselda is found. In some ways it could also give us some clues as to how Petrarch read the story of the steadfastness of Boccaccio’s “insigna uxor.” 9 �Steve Baker sjb2009@columbia.edu “Whoever invades him in this retreat should have occasion to marvel that humanity, which is exiled from the cities, inhabits the wilderness and that while he has found bears and lions in populous places, in solitude he has discovered angelic man. Such is my feeling in the matter, and this I hold to be the middle of the road between the two extremes.”26 In the oasis of our universities these are the kind of qualities that we as liberal arts educators instill in our students, they are what will ultimately make our students more responsible citizens, pave the way to them becoming empowered leaders and lead them to live more rewarding richer lives. And so with Petrarch I say, “read the classics and be free.” It is the imaginative venture of Petrarchan leisure to allow private individuals, who are not necessarily religious contemplatives or philosophers, time to cultivate the virtues of a higher life of the mind and spirit. And that's what a liberal education is for: a socially mandated four years of retreat from the tempest of the world to do just this, so that no matter what they go on to do in life they will have the tools succeed when the tempest comes a calling as it always inevitably does. 26 Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, I, v, chapter 4, 162. 10 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 10 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Fame and the solitary life : rethinking the liberal arts through the paradoxes of Petrarchan humanism Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Steve Baker at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Baker, Steve J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004519 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/58327ef63a881a099ebe0ddfec8b19e3.pdf ac758fb288887aab1b980d06b08575d3 PDF Text Text Bennett 1 The Periodic Appeal of Friedrich Hölderlin by Kelsey L. Bennett I first encountered the works of the romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) at St. John’s College here in Santa Fe, when the tutor Frank Hunt was offering a preceptorial on the poet. We read poems with titles such as “Diotima” (many of these), “At the Source of the Danube,” “The Fettered River,” “Homecoming”; we pondered the similarities between poetic metaphor and wordless music, man’s nearness to and separation from God, the significance of the poet’s profound Hellenism....These topics were inviting, as was the thought of a poet who made it his habit to cross the Alps on foot in the middle of winter. But more arresting than anything else was Hölderlin’s ability to locate and write about an unnamable source (or Quelle) which, for him, so memorably emanates from the places in which some of Europe’s great rivers first arise. Since that time, these qualities, particularly notions of ‘home’ and ‘source,’ have compelled a return to his works. If only, he once lamented, “if only one weren’t so periodical!” Periodicity always suggests a return—but to what? What is the nature of this place? The elegy “Homecoming,” dedicated to his relatives, was written in 1801 when Hölderlin was thirty one, about a year before an accumulation of circumstances culminated in his breakdown and estrangement from his family [here in Michael Hamburger’s translation1]: There in the Alps a gleaming night still delays and, composing Portents of gladness, the cloud covers a valley agape. This way, that way roars and rushes the breeze of the mountains, Teasing, sheer through the firs falls a bright beam, and is lost. 1 Hölderlin, Friedrich. Selected Poems and Fragments. Trans. and intro. Michael Hamburger. New York: Penguin, 1998. 1 �Bennett 2 Slowly it hurries and wars, this Chaos trembling with pleasure, Young in appearance, but strong, celebrates here amid rocks Loving discord, and seethes, shakes in its bounds that are timeless, For more bacchantically now morning approaches within. The lines, full with contradictions, beautifully animate the experience of return, the ways in which things long familiar take on another aspect, as here in the phrase “gleaming night,” the way the valley is doubly concealed in darkness and in cloud until the “bright beam” appears, and disappears once again. The arrival, for the poet, is a celebration of “loving discord” filled with haste (recognition) and slowness (reluctance, perhaps); “Chaos” itself is subject to fatalistic “bounds” that define it. The poet’s thoughts continue their ascent to the whitened peaks and surpass them: “Even higher, beyond the light, does the pure, never clouded / God have his dwelling, whom beams, holy, make glad with their play.” The God, from “beyond the light” acts upon “us mortals grown sad,” as he brings forth the rivers from within the furthermost reaches of the mountains, he “works on the lowest depths to open them up and to brighten / All” and “beauty abounds, as before, and spirit is present, returned now, / And a joyful zest urges furled wings to unfold.” We find that the poet is returning by boat and observing the opening morning from the waters below. As the village emerges from the morning shadows, the opening confusion seems to dispel with it. Now, he comments, “All seems familiar.....And no wonder! Your native country and soil you are walking, / What you seek, it is near, now comes to meet you halfway.” The nearness here speaks on several levels. As he moves across Lake Constance, he approaches the political boundary of his homeland and at the same time, and more importantly, draws near to the sources of rivers such as the Rhine and the Danube. To his German readers, Lindau serves as “not the least of our land’s many hospitable doors, / Urging men to go out allured by the promise of distance.” This is the typical 2 �Bennett 3 understanding of a frontier, the portal through which the young adventurer passes to move on to “Go where the wonders are.” The poet, however, turns from these indeterminate “wonders” and addresses the portal from the other side: “you door that are hallowed, me much more strongly you urge to / Make for home where I know blossoming pathways and lanes,” where he hears once more the voice of his mother, about which he exclaims, “How to your sound respond things that I learned long ago! / Yet they are still themselves!” The nearness here encompasses the past and the present moments of awareness. Somehow this relatively familiar experience is necessary for the poet to approach the thing that he seeks above all else (it is reminiscent of the distinction Kant makes between the beautiful and the sublime), that is, a nearness to the God he names who dwells “beyond the light,” in silence and alone. Now, even as the poem carefully creates a topography of desire for return and nearness, he brings us to the moment that surpasses all sense of place. To measure distance to and from a ubiquitous presence becomes meaningless; this last silent expanse the poet generates proximity through the necessary act of naming. He asks, When we bless the meal, whose name may I speak, and when late we Rest from the life of each day, tell me, to whom give my thanks? Him, the most High, should I name then? A god does not love what’s unseemly, Him to embrace and to hold our joy is too small. Silence often behoves us: deficient in names that are holy, Hearts may beat high, while the lips hesitate, wary of speech? This troubling paradox, shared by many romantic poets, is a necessary condition to the nearness the poet seeks. Travel alone is not enough, willingness or temperament is not enough: the experience of silence peculiar to poetry is the thing that makes the poetry possible. About this moment in the poem Heidegger says, “Silence—does this merely mean: to say nothing, to remain speechless? Or 3 �Bennett 4 can only he who has something to say be truly silent? ...he who would be capable of letting the unsaid appear in his speech...would, precisely though this alone, be capable of silence in the highest degree” (“The Poem” 216).2 Just as Semele could not look straight upon her god without immolation, to avoid this fate, the poet’s path home must be indirect, must make use of language and the act of naming to speak the unnamable. The wisdom of this poem finds its source in the idea that while certain places are more hospitable than others to the development of creativity, the work itself must be the home, full with the contradictions of familiarity constantly shifting into the unfamiliar and back again. And it was well for Hölderlin to come to this conclusion at a time when increasing misfortune would soon impress itself upon his life and work. Before this, however, as Michael Hamburger succinctly presents in the introduction to his translations, the poet’s future was promising. Despite the fact that he lost both his father and stepfather when he was a boy and remained financially tied to his mother for much of his life, he was acquainted with some of the most influential intellectual lights of the time. Among them were Hegel and Schelling, whom he met in Tübingen during his time at the Theological Seminary. Though he passed his examinations, he resisted repeated pressure from his family to become a Lutheran minister. The alternative was, in Hamburger’s words, “the humble drudgery, but relative independence, of a private tutor,” and Schiller himself arranged for Hölderlin’s position with the children of the well-connected Charlotte von Kalb. While under her employment, Hölderlin was able to work on his novel, Hyperion, as well as travel to Jena to listen to Fichte’s lectures and meet Goethe at Weimar. When he was twenty five, Hölderlin found appointment with another wealthy family in Frankfurt. There he entered into a life-altering affair with the mother of his pupils, Susette, and 2 Heidegger, Martin. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Trans. Keith Hoeller. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. 4 �Bennett 5 she appeared transformed into Diotima in his poetry. Unlike the only woman whom Socrates revered as a teacher, she who revealed love’s great and cosmic order as he recounts it in the Symposium, Hölderlin’s Diotima reveals a tenuous presence. In the poems, her fragility is often likened to a blossom in winter, with the attendant feelings of solitude, suffering, and misplacement in the world: “You noble being, silently earthward gaze / At brightest noon, for it’s in vain that / Here in the sunlight you seek your kindred.” The relationship was ended forcibly, along with his position, in 1798, and the poet was soon confronted with his own failure, in spite of his connections, to achieve widespread success through his work, and his own isolation increased. And yet the Diotima poems mirror how, into the new century, Hölderlin would continue his preoccupation with these questions but transpose them into another key entirely. Some of the most powerful instances appear in his poetic meditations on the sources among Europe’s great rivers. In the hymn “Der Rhein,” from its genesis the great river is itself subject to forces alien to its nature. From within the Alpine heights “where, determined in secret / Much even now reaches men,” the poet hears “A destiny.”3 The destiny concerns the river and its Promethian struggles: “There in the coldest chasm / I heard the youth implore / Release.” From the beginning, the “freeborn Rhine” parted and longed to roam, and impatiently His regal soul drove him on towards Asia. Yet in the face of fate Imprudent it is to wish. 3 Anachronistic though it may be, since the advent of CERN, I cannot help thinking about how these ideas have carried over into the present. How are we to take it that modern physicists have penetrated and established their laboratories, sublime in scope, in such close proximity to the places for which the romantic poets held the highest metaphysical regard? 5 �Bennett 6 The “crooked banks” that are “greedily entwining” move the river’s course, instead, to the northwest. However shaped it is to human purposes once it parts from its source, is diverted and channeled to found and maintain cities, even so the poem insists that the river preserves its original character throughout. And from these tensions, some violence necessarily accompanies its compelled course, for “like lightening he [the Rhine] / Must rend the earth.” Similarly, in the lines concluding “Der Ister,” the Greek name for the Danube, Hölderlin writes, “But the rock needs incisions, /And the earth needs furrows, / Would be desolate else, unabiding; / Yet what that one does, the river, / Nobody knows.” The Danube, of course, unlike its north-wending counterpart, succeeds in its eastern course toward “mother Asia” until it disperses itself in the Black Sea. In both cases, not only does the land affect the river, but also the river provides the land with a character, perhaps it is not too much to say that it provides it with a soul. The earth is not significant merely as a smooth surface, featureless—it needs to be split, cracked, and rent for any growth to be possible (in this vein one is reminded of a letter Keats would soon write to his siblings in which he asks, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”). Which leads the reader to the parallels between the phenomena in the poem and the purpose of the poet. “Der Rhein” eventually concludes with the idea that the poets are needed precisely to make people aware of these correspondences, indeed the forces themselves require their voices, for “The most Blessed in themselves feel nothing / Another .... must, I suppose, / Vicariously feel in the name of the gods, / And him they need.” But the ability to do so demands extreme acts of defiance as well: an aspirant, the poem announces, must bury in the rubble of his house both his father and his child. The image provides a dark counterpart to Wordsworth’s aphorism, to be sure, and shadows forth what was to come. At the beginning of 1802, Hölderlin set out for Bordeaux and what would be his last and short-lived tutoring position. His return to Germany included a long journey through France, and 6 �Bennett 7 included a stop in Paris, about which little is known. The time spent as an alien in a country enthralled by empire, the continuing difficulties with his work and, finally, the devastating news of Susette’s death that summer together altered the poet in such a way that he became estranged from his family and some, though not all, began to suspect the poet of insanity. Finally, Hölderlin had to be moved, against his will, to a mental hospital in Tübingen known for its “treatments” of patients that included a combination of drugs and the use of straitjackets, the silencing Autenrieth mask, and forced cold-water immersion techniques. Unlike others who died of these therapies, Hölderlin survived there for about a year before he was discharged, Hamburger reports, as an “incurable case” and given no more than three years to live. While he was there a local carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, visited the poet and offered to care for him upon his release. Zimmer’s generosity proved to be the best option for Hölderlin, who lived with the family in Tübingen for the rest of his life (it is now a picturesque museum, known as the Hölderlinturm, which stands upon the Neckar river). His mother never visited him there and Zimmer was able to procure funds for Hölderlin’s modest maintenance with difficulty. Worse yet, the family demanded that Hölderlin’s manuscripts containing the poems he was revising be taken from him and sent into their keeping. From 1807 on, as his biographer David Constantine notes, perhaps the least eventful period in the poet’s life is most prolifically documented by visitors more interested in his purported insanity than in his literary achievements.4 Much of the poetry from this period through the end of his life in 1843, reflects simplicity and longing for the past, with occasional gleams from earlier insights. The short poem “To Zimmer,” for instance, speaks to a certain repose the poet seems to have reached: The lines of life are various; they diverge and cease Like footpaths and the mountains’ utmost ends. 4 Constantine, David. Hölderlin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. 7 �Bennett 8 What here we are, elsewhere a God amends With harmonies, eternal recompense and peace. The monumental themes Hölderlin engaged in poems such as “Homecoming” are still present, but scaled in miniature. “What here we are” has a pathetic modesty about it, but still it connects, albeit from a distance, to the world-governing harmonies that, the poet hopes, provide recompense beyond the many things withheld from him on earth. The spiritual and aesthetic tensions between “here” and “elsewhere” inevitably bring me back to the ideas I found when I first turned to the poetry of Hölderlin. In addition to the elusive “Homecoming,” the hymn “As on a holiday...”, for which its first phrase serves as title, again captures this feeling of nearness and separation, and the creative act of naming with exceptional vividness. The poem opens with the experience of a farmer who goes out to observe his land after a deluge to find the river once more returned to its place and new growth beginning to rise. The poet goes on to record what he sees: “the hallowed, my word shall convey, / For she, she herself, who is older than the ages / And higher than the gods of the Orient and Occident, / Nature has now awoken amid the clang of arms” and begets “on holy Chaos” “Delight, the all-creative”; and she (here Nature) “delights in self-renewal.” In harmony with this pantheistic vision, the hymn is filled with the nearness of the gods, the intimation that they, as in the cosmos of the Iliad and the Odyssey, mingle with the living at their pleasure. Semele appears, and the speaker praises her for her selfsacrificing birth to “The thunder-storm’s fruit, to holy Bacchus.” Upon her ashes, mankind may now partake of these fruits “without danger.” The hymn concludes with an exhortation to poets to realize something similar—they should “stand / Bareheaded beneath God’s thunder-storms, / To grasp the Father’s ray, no less, with our own two hands / And, wrapping in song the heavenly gift, / To offer it to the people.” The confidence of these lines radiate romantic idealism—with the 8 �Bennett 9 implied social hierarchy in which the poets are the ones made to stand closest to the gods, the extraordinary purity, recklessness, and visionary capacity that gives them the right to this position, and so on. And yet from here, the poem begins to fragment and the silence again marks its presence on the page, and we are once again back to the uncertainties of “Homecoming” and the paradoxical necessity of silence to this enterprise. Unlike the Landmann, who rejoices in the new growth following the storm’s destruction, the poet concludes That I approached to see the Heavenly, And they themselves cast me down, deep down Below the living, into the dark cast down The false priest that I am, to sing, For those who have ears to hear, a warning song. There And that is all. The fragmentary nature of the closing could be read easily enough as another variation on romantic themes, or again as a foreshadowing of events in Hölderlin’s life, or as an expression not very far from Milton’s Satan or Goethe’s Faust. It is precisely the allusive richness here, and in the other poems, that invites one’s return. One returns to the compelling presence of another “capable of silence in the highest degree.” It is a homecoming that invites one into the idea of “home” as something related to, but not entirely dependent upon, geography or individual desire. It is the intimation that the creative act of naming is not something one does to “fill” the silent spaces, to force familiarity upon the unfamiliar, but that it complements those moments which open themselves only through silence. 9 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The periodic appeal of Friedrich Hölderlin Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Kelsey Bennett at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bennett, Kelsey L. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Hölderlin, Friedrich, 1770-1843. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004520 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/cebe853ff705d8fe27c8b1fd31725645.pdf 44a308b18780a14db7f1e108cc42fd9a PDF Text Text Blumenthal 1 The Role of Mathematics in Advancing the Goals of a Liberal Education by Robert Blumenthal Mathematics appears in some form or other in the core or general education requirements of most colleges and universities, and a lot of energy is often expended regarding the specific form this requirement should take. For example, one thorny issue is just what level of mathematics should be required. Should it be sufficient merely to demonstrate proficiency in algebra thus basically requiring of students no more than they were supposed to learn in high school? Or should every student be required to take a bona fide college level course like calculus? Furthermore, what do we want the students to take away from the required course? Is our goal to demonstrate just how useful mathematics is in dealing with worldly matters and how indispensable it is with regard to understanding and interpreting real-world data and solving realworld problems? With regard to the first question, namely, is proficiency at the high school level sufficient for meeting the core math requirement at a university, the answer has to be no. Certainly, we would hope to provide students with content and approaches which do more than merely replicate the high school experience. A student who has had four years of high school mathematics and who, therefore, has taken geometry, algebra, and in most cases a course covering standard precalculus topics should be offered an opportunity for intellectual growth which goes beyond a mere rehash of techniques studied in high school. Which leads to the question: just what type of intellectual growth are we talking about? Yes, mathematics is useful. Yes, it solves all sorts of technical problems. Yes, it enables us to analyze and interpret various kinds of real-world data. Yes, it enables us to model real-world situations and to understand and �Blumenthal 2 address a large variety of real-world issues. Is this the focus which we wish to emphasize in our core mathematics experience, or is there perhaps another direction we might take with regard to intellectual growth and development, particularly in a liberal arts institution? I have repeated the phrase real-world because I think we do our students a disservice by focusing exclusively on the worldly aspects of mathematics. As Wordsworth reminds us, “The world is too much with us…” And he concludes: For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. (Appelbaum 28) It is that phrase, glimpses that would make me less forlorn, which is the key. At its heart, mathematics has nothing to do with the world. Its efficacy in understanding the world and in solving real-world problems is a fact, but this utility is a by-product rather than the central motivation behind the creation of mathematics. Mathematics offers glimpses - glimpses of the reality which underlies the physical realm, glimpses of the way in which our minds function and the ways in which we process ideas and the relationships between those ideas, glimpses of the role and limitations of language as vehicles for thought and the expression of ideas, glimpses of a beauty unlike any other leading to an aesthetic experience which rivals that of anything offered by the other fine arts. �Blumenthal 3 What do we mean when we say that mathematics has nothing to do with the world? This requires some attention. First, what is mathematics? Definitions can be tricky things. A colleague once suggested to me that “mathematics is what mathematicians do.” The English biologist T.H. Huxley offers a definition which is a bit more enlightening by noting that “[mathematics] is that [subject] which knows nothing of observation, nothing of experiment, nothing of induction, nothing of causation” (qtd. in Moritz 26). Notice that this definition describes mathematics by telling us what it is not. Observation, experiment, inductive reasoning (drawing general conclusions from specific cases) -- these play no role in mathematics. In a word, mathematics is not science. The truth claims of mathematics in no way depend on observations of the world. Rather, the reasoning involved is deductive (reasoning from the general to the specific) and depends only on our rational faculties. This leads to a very provocative definition formulated by the English mathematician J.J. Sylvester who, in contrasting mathematics and science, states that “the object of pure Physic is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure Mathematic that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence” (qtd. in Moritz 7). In other words, mathematical knowledge is self-knowledge. It tells us something of how we as human beings think, how our minds work, how we process ideas, and it demonstrates our natural propensity for finding connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. At its root, mathematics deals with the most basic of human propensities, namely, collecting things and thereby forming a collection. Mathematics is about collections, and the mathematical term for this is set. A set is a collection of objects, and we can then think of the set as a single entity. Forming a single entity out of a disparate collection of objects is the essential mathematical act. E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. Every mathematical concept, including �Blumenthal 4 numbers, rests upon the notion of a set. There are two kinds of sets: finite sets and infinite sets, and infinite sets are central to just about every important mathematical theory. The simplest infinite set to grasp of the set of all positive whole numbers, what mathematicians call the natural numbers, N = {1, 2, 3, …}. In a series of papers published in 1874, the German mathematician Georg Cantor undertook the first serious attempt to understand the nature of infinite sets. In particular, he wanted to understand whether or not we could meaningfully talk about the size of an infinite set and whether it is possible to compare the sizes two infinite sets. He asks whether all infinite sets have the same size, and, as a first step in addressing this question, he looks at the natural numbers and the seemingly larger set of all whole numbers (positive, negative and 0), known as the set of integers. Via a very simple and elegant argument, Cantor demonstrates that the set of integers is no larger than the set of natural numbers. It appears to be a larger set, but that is an illusion. In fact, these two sets have the same size. Cantor then turns his attention to the set of rational numbers, namely, the set that consists of all whole numbers together with all fractions. This appears to be an incredibly huge set and one which certainly dwarfs the set of natural numbers. However, in one of most remarkable proofs in all of mathematics, Cantor shows that this apparent disparity in size is again an illusion and that the set of rational numbers has the same size as the natural numbers. This result and proof is one of the most famous and beautiful results in all of mathematics. At this point, it is beginning to look as if the answer to Cantor’s question is yes, all infinite sets have the same size. However, Cantor’s most celebrated result, and the one which has deep implications for mathematics and philosophy, is that the answer is in fact no. He exhibits a set, namely the set of real numbers, which is so large that it no longer has the same size as the natural �Blumenthal 5 numbers. Infinite sets come in different sizes. There is not a single undifferentiated notion of infinity since some infinite sets are truly larger than others. This result completely changed theory of sets and, since sets lie at the heart of mathematics, all of mathematics as well. Prior to Cantor, going as far back as Aristotle, the very idea of an infinite set was rejected. The idea was rejected because it led to various unpleasant consequences, like the fact that a part can be equivalent to the whole. This is nonsense and so the very idea of the existence of infinite sets must be nonsense. However for Cantor, infinite sets exist. The set of natural numbers exists as an actually, not just potentially, infinite set, and we can hold in our minds in a single instant of time the collection (i.e., set) of all natural numbers. Yes, this leads to certain startling consequences like the fact that a part can be equivalent to the whole. But the reason we are startled is because we are expecting infinite sets to behave the same as finite sets. This is an unreasonable expectation. Infinite sets are fundamentally different from finite sets and we can’t expect them to behave in the same way. We are in a brave new world where a part can be equivalent to the whole and where some infinite sets are truly larger than others. This is not unlike the situation ushered in by the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics where we are confronted with behavior which runs contrary to common sense and everyday experience. Having proved that the set of real numbers is of a truly larger size than the natural numbers, Cantor wondered just how much larger it is. Is the set of real numbers the next largest set after the natural numbers or is there something in between? In other words, is there a set which fits in between the natural numbers and the real numbers in the sense that it is of a larger size than the natural numbers and of a smaller size than the real numbers? Cantor spent the rest of his life looking for the answer to this question. He felt strongly that the answer is no, but he was unable �Blumenthal 6 to prove this conjecture. This question, which is known as the Continuum Hypothesis, was singled out by the German mathematician David Hilbert at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Paris in 1900 as the most important question which mathematicians must address in the new century (413). And address it they did, although the eventual outcome of this endeavor was something which no one had expected or even considered. Results proved by Kurt Gödel in 1940 and Paul Cohen in 1963, taken together, show that the Continuum Hypothesis can neither be proved nor disproved. In other words, the Continuum Hypothesis is undecideable within the present axiomatic foundation of mathematics. Thus, while opening up whole new areas of human thought with his theory of infinite sets, Cantor’s work forces us to confront the fact that there are certain fundamental limitations on our capacity for understanding and that the answers to compelling foundational questions are simply unknowable by the human mind. One of the weaknesses of many of the courses aimed at the general student is that all too often they morph into either a math appreciation course or a math history course thereby transforming the experience into something other than a course in mathematics. Even if this situation is avoided, another pitfall is that many such courses are survey courses organized around a multitude of topics. As such, each topic receives only superficial treatment and the student misses the essential experience of delving deeply into an important mathematical theory. I have sought to avoid both of these situations and have taught for many years a course organized around a few (at most three) selected topics in advanced mathematics. These topics must be chosen carefully and, in my experience, need to meet several criteria. Each topic must be one which the students have not encountered before and must represent a truly important mathematical idea. Each topic should be modern in the sense that it originated �Blumenthal 7 relatively recently and is an active area of continuing research. Finally, each topic must be able to be presented to the general student without loss of mathematical rigor. This last point is particularly important since the whole point is to convey a meaningful sense of the mathematical experience. I have had considerable success in this course with topics chosen from number theory, group theory, and Cantor’s theory of infinite sets. Most of the students react very well to this course for two reasons. First, it is so unlike anything they expected from a mathematics course (this comment appears often on the course evaluations), and secondly they realize, especially from the discussion of infinite sets, where they are challenged to abandon certain of their preconceived ideas about reality, that mathematics has profound things to say about questions which have been raised for thousands of years by various important thinkers. Works Cited Appelbaum, Stanley, ed. Great Sonnets. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. Cantor, Georg. Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers. New York: Dover Publications, 1955. Cohen, Paul J. Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis. New York: W.A. Benjamin, 1966. Godel, Kurt. The Consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940. Hilbert, David. "Mathematical Problems." Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 37 (2000): 407-36. Moritz, Robert Edouard. On Mathematics. New York: Dover Publications, 1958. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 7 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The role of mathematics in advancing the goals of a liberal education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Robert Blumenthal at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Blumenthal, Robert Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Mathematics -- Study and teaching Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004521 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e2c3cad1d2acb56339e8d81ff65f8e90.pdf 8e6ff50fd31b3c0deb9821aac9c39574 PDF Text Text Liberal Education and STEM Education St. John’s College 50th Anniversary Conference Presentation Michael J. Bolin, Wyoming Catholic College September 15, 2014 Abstract: One of the single biggest obstacles to the proliferation of liberal education is the modern tendency to consider STEM fields as the most or only important fields of study. I argue, to the contrary, that the beneficial cultural effects of progress in the natural sciences and related fields depend in part on a foundation of liberal learning both in scientists themselves and in the broader populace. In a post-Baconian scientific world, scientific progress has both a technological/practical aspect and a philosophical/theoretical aspect. Success with regard to the first aspect is necessarily defined in terms of one's conception of human flourishing, the philosophical debate over which is behind disputes over, e.g., energy, nuclear, and agricultural policy. Interpretations of the second aspect inevitably influence the first, as is seen in the tendency of physicists to extrapolate from their scientific research to broader conclusions about its implications for human nature and existence. It is not a foregone conclusion, then, that education in STEM fields will achieve the goods at which it aims, unless the resulting knowledge is first recognized as fundamentally human and therefore necessarily understood in the broader context of the human good. Establishing this context is one of the fundamental tasks of liberal education, upon which the good of specialization thus depends. Presentation: In a 1944 letter to Robert Thornton, then a new professor of physics at the University of Puerto Rico, Albert Einstein wrote the following in response to Thornton’s desire to introduce the philosophy of science into his classroom: I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.1 1 Einstein to Thornton, December 7, 1944 (EA 61-574). 1 �The generational prejudice, the seeing of the trees but not the forest that Einstein described seems to me to be a common consequence of contemporary education, in large part because of our society’s focus on STEM education and corresponding disinterest in liberal education. My intention in this talk is to show how the task of fully reaping the fruits of STEM education cannot be separated from the project of liberal education, and that the latter is essential both on the part of scientists themselves and on the part of the broader populace if the former is to be achieved. In the interests of time, I shall focus primarily on the “science” part of STEM education. After the early modern era in which Francis Bacon declared that knowledge and power are really the same thing, science came to be seen by many as fundamentally oriented toward technological and practical application. In the modern era, this idea has taken such strong root that scientists have had to deal with politicians wishing to restrict public funding of scientific enterprise to areas that will have a significant practical application, as if this could always be known in advance. Disciplines in the humanities, such as philosophy, or liberal education in general, are ridiculed as a waste of time, their critics saying such things as “If it’s not producing food, I’m not interested.” Higher education has come to be seen as just being vocational training, with programs such as the St. John’s College liberal arts program considered outdated at best, almost a relic of a pre-scientific age. These sentiments lead us into the first issue I shall discuss. What such critics are really saying is that one ought not devote one’s life to activities that are not in some way conducive to human flourishing. Supposing that this is true, the conclusion that one ought not devote one’s life to the humanities or to liberal education does not immediately follow, since we cannot know whether this is conducive to human flourishing until we have established what human flourishing 2 �is. For example, the only we reason we care whether a discipline is producing food is because we care about food. But why do we care about food? Unless we are hedonists, it is principally (though not only) because we need food to live. But why do we care about living? Presumably because we wish to do something with our lives that goes beyond eating. Thus, it is clear that whatever this “something” is, it is worth doing even if it is not producing food. This example is an instance of a more general observation, namely that the extreme position that maintains that only what is useful is good is implicitly a contradiction in terms. For the useful is by definition useful for something, for the sake of another good; and the ultimate good, also by definition, cannot be for the sake of another good. In the human sphere, the ultimate good is the human good, human flourishing. Thus, again, it is pointless to criticize some branch of learning for not being useful unless we first know what human flourishing is. This issue arises in many concrete contexts, not just in abstract philosophical discussions. It lies behind the desire of some public figures to reduce funding for NASA, on the grounds that much of NASA’s research is not useful, or at least not obviously so. In a similar vein, sometimes people object to the production of GMO crops not just because they believe them unhealthy but also because they maintain a particular view of the human race’s relationship to nature and what constitutes the good of this relationship. The foregoing may give the impression that I see the role of liberal education to be restricted to the study of ethics and politics, in which the notions of human flourishing and the common good are considered. But the debate over human flourishing itself depends on prior theoretical philosophical questions, such as what it means to be human in the first place, and what the relationship of human beings to the rest of nature is. These questions cannot be escaped if one is to have a complete account of reality. And if one assumes from the start that one’s own 3 �discipline ought to yield such an account, one will naturally attempt to answer these questions from the perspective of that discipline. Thus we have the phenomenon of physicists, biologists, and other practitioners of the sciences lecturing the public on the “meaning” of their discoveries for human nature, the nature of the universe, and of existence itself. I do not mean to suggest that scientific inquiry never has relevance to these questions. Rather, I mean that the kind of relevance it has is subtle and difficult to discover, and one cannot hope to judge well of it without much learning and practice. The learning required, however, is not training in the hard sciences but rather liberal learning, which teaches one to consider human knowledge as a unified whole and to distinguish accurately the scope, nature, and limitations of each of its parts. This is why interpretation of the results of scientific inquiry is naturally posterior to liberal education. Here is a concrete example of what I mean. Physicist Sean Carroll, in a thoughtprovoking article entitled “Abortion and the Architecture of Reality,” writes about the types of issues that arise in debates over abortion, such as the notions of life and personhood, and argues that it would be foolish to think that scientific knowledge of the world cannot bear on questions such as these. Regarding this general claim, I think Carroll is quite right. But, as is typical in such cases, when he attempts to apply the general principle to specific cases, he mistakes his philosophical presuppositions for the conclusions of science. Science, he writes, tells us that there is no magical moment at which an incorporeal soul takes up residence in a body. Indeed, the concept of a “person” is not to be found anywhere 4 �in the natural world; it’s a category that is convenient to appeal to as we try to make sense of the world.2 Now, physical science does strongly suggest something relevant to the concept of soul, which is that (as Carroll himself points out) however closely one inspects the matter of living things, one will not find it following physical laws different from those followed by inanimate matter. But soul is a fairly nebulous concept, and there is still a long way from the claims of physics to Carroll’s interpretation of them. Likewise, that “person” is not a concept in physics is not much more significant for debates over abortion legislation than the fact that the same could be said of “tax return” is significant for economic policy debates. The general point is that it is actually very difficult to delineate precisely what philosophical, ethical, or otherwise humanitarian implications the scientific worldview ought to have for our broader human worldview. And it is exceedingly unlikely that one will be able to do this well if one has never even studied that broader worldview and the writings of the thinkers who formed and influenced it. Yet this is implicitly what we expect when we encourage students to pursue careers in STEM fields without first exposing them to the liberal education that will allow them to understand what they are actually doing in those fields and how it relates to their lives as human lives and not merely as employees. What does all of this mean concretely? I am aware, of course, that universal liberal education is not in the cards for the foreseeable future. A more plausible first step is the recognition of disciplinary boundaries. Someone need not be an expert in physics to recognize 2 Sean Carroll, “Abortion and the Architecture of Reality,” Discover Magazine, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/06/04/abortion-and-the-architecture-ofreality/#.VBeNaBagv-o (accessed September 15, 2014). 5 �that the physicist is stepping outside of his discipline when he speaks about free will, or the soul, or the meaning of life; or to see that medical training does not automatically render a person competent to speak about ethical matters. Yet questions about these things arise perennially, and if the scientist as such is not the expert on them, someone else must be. Until we are able to distinguish between questions that the hard sciences can and cannot answer, we will be unable to see the value of the education that actually does teach one to answer the questions that STEM cannot, nor even see the true value in STEM itself. I want to conclude by saying a few words on that last topic, lest I seem to belittle or denigrate the natural sciences, which I in no way intend. Though a philosopher, not a scientist, by profession, I have an amateur’s (in the etymological sense of that word) interest in natural science and have the honor of teaching it via my own institution’s interdisciplinary program. In the process, I have come to realize that the profundity of the modern scientific worldview faces severe impoverishment if it is approached without a background in liberal education. The significance of the historical shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism simply cannot be appreciated by one who has never dwelt on the thoughts of generations to whom the evidence of heliocentrism was unavailable. I am told that something close to forty percent of Americans reject the biological theory of evolution. This is true even of many who are well-educated, which suggests that a lack of scientific training is not the root cause. For many, religious issues are at stake, but I suspect that this is only a special case of the more general problem I have been describing, which is that we have lost the habit of understanding scientific discoveries in the context of our broader worldviews. As a result, the public frequently receives ideas such as evolution alongside shallow and ill-informed explanations of their “true meaning.” Richard Dawkins is a well-known culprit in this regard. Dawkins is a fine biologist, but he is not a great 6 �philosopher—he is a scientist who suffers, as Einstein said, from the prejudices of his generation, seeing the trees but not the forest. This sort of behavior is ultimately detrimental to science itself, which is really much richer than is suggested by presentations of it stripped of human context. Though superficially science may seem to be more exalted by a culture that has lost its sense of the importance of liberal learning, in the end it cannot help but be degraded by the same. 7 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 7 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberal education and STEM education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Michael Bolin at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bolin, Michael J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Mathematics -- Study and teaching Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004522 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c694b264759a06cb579e94f61dbba204.pdf c94a2c7e51238404cb2b3130cab87ad1 PDF Text Text Liberal Education and Exemplary Ordinariness: On the Meaning of Bildung in Hegel’s Political Philosophy Andrew J. Bove—Villanova University For Presentation at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, October 18th, 2014 My aim in this paper is to understand how Hegel thinks classical education or study of the ancients participates in the transition or transformation of bourgeois society into the state, a transition that is perhaps the most distinctive moment and feature of Hegel’s political thought as a whole. According to Hegel, what makes a society of individuals into a genuine community is a process of formation through which the abstract notion of individual rights becomes embodied in the workings of the state and the hearts and minds of its citizens or members. He also claims, in a lecture written about a decade before he elaborated his formal political philosophy or philosophy of right, that the study of great literary works of antiquity—and of the ancient Greeks especially—plays a crucial part in the transformative process he describes. To what does Hegel ascribe the constitutional power of such study? Is the classical education he describes truly a liberal education? And what can we learn from him about the role of liberal education in strengthening or deepening the foundations of our own community? I aim to shed some light on these questions. The first part of the paper is a consideration of the education or Bildung of bourgeois society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft ] into or towards the state [Staat] that Hegel describes in the Philosophy of Right. In the second part of the paper I will examine a few striking figures and images in the lecture, with the intent of understanding Hegel’s conception of the worth of classical education in the modern world and, in particular, a fundamentally liberal world of individuals pursuing their separate ends and their own notions of happiness. 1 �I: The Bildung of Society: A Consideration of Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §§182-7 Hegel conceives of the modern political association as a restless, dynamic, unruly, but ultimately rational process through which a collection of individuals—aware of their rights or what Hegel calls “subjective freedom”—strive and struggle, one and all, to attain their own ends and end up constituting a new kind of ethical unity that Hegel calls the state.1 From the standpoint of the political philosopher, it is a kind of dramatic spectacle through which a new form of human community comes into being behind the backs of its members as they aim only to satisfy their private interests. Hegel looks out, Zeus-like, upon the battlefield of bürgerliche Gesellschaft and appreciates the combatants not for their heroism or warrior virtue, but rather (and somewhat ironically) for their unwitting advancement of the universal interest. What he sees with much greater clarity than the participants do is the absolute extent to which they need one another in order to realize their individual ends. He sees them becoming more and more alike and cooperative even as they think exclusively of their own purposes and projects. A passage from a Zusatz2 to the opening paragraph of the bürgerliche Gesellschaft section captures Hegel’s understanding especially well: 1 State [Staat] for Hegel has a special meaning as the ethical community in which individuals or “private persons” find themselves finally “at home.” It is, for him, something morally much greater than a juridical entity that protects individual rights. The latter sense (as will be discussed below) entails a relationship of estrangement between the individual’s purposes and desires and the means to their accomplishment and satisfaction. The genuine state only comes into being as a result of an accomplished process of overcoming that estrangement and, more broadly, the process through which individual subjectivity places its stamp on the world. In his introductory lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel famously claims that “the state is not a work of art”—that is, it does not come into being directly and intentionally through human planning and artifice, but only as the final expression of human will and action and the historical world they create. 2 The Zusätze or additions to the text of the Philosophie des Rechts are based on the notes of two of Hegel’s students who attended different series of the lectures that form the basis of work. The—necessarily selective, given their volume—inclusion of these notes in later editions of the work is controversial, but the notes themselves are reliable and I do not hesitate to make reference to them where they are helpful in making sense of Hegel’s argument. The Zusätze should not be confused with Hegel’s own Anmerkungen or remarks to many of the paragraphs in the work, the purpose of which is to unpack and elaborate on, or give broader context to, the work’s very dense and abstract main text. On these matters see H.B. Nisbet’s Translator’s Preface to the Cambridge edition of the work: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Allen Wood, ed. (Cambridge, 1991), pp. xxxv-xxxvi. I make use of the Wood-Nisbet edition throughout the paper with some modifications to the translation. 2 �Since particularity is tied to the condition of universality, the whole [of bourgeois society] is the ground [Boden] of mediation in which all individual characteristics [Einzelheiten], all aptitudes, and all accidents of birth and fortune are liberated, and where the waves of passion surge forth, governed only by the reason which shines through them. Particularity, limited by universality, is the only standard by which each particular [person] promotes his welfare.3 Hegel seems quietly to delight in the vision of an anarchic mass of liberated individuals getting straightened out as a consequence of the passionate pursuit of their own ends. They are, in a sense, defeated by their own rationality, and there is a certain charm in the beholding of this spectacle. While the individuals regard the state as merely a juridical structure that allows them to pursue their private interests, Hegel sees this whole situation as a kind of spiritual engine that generates a substantial moral community: the state in the proper sense of the term.4 The individual regards the state as the means to his own projects and satisfaction; it allows him to get what he wants and to keep it (or to do what he wants and keep doing it) without fear of invasion or violence at the hands of the others.5 But Hegel sees society as the means to or presupposition of the state—the ethical communion that comes into being only as a result of the formative process that takes place in society. His political-philosophical aim is to show how the selfdefeating structure of society leads to higher possibilities for individual satisfaction. The spirited modern individual must constantly sacrifice his particularity at the altar of the universal—the “system of all-round interdependence (§183)” in which he involves himself willy-nilly—and 3 Addition to §182. See Hegel’s rather grandiloquent (yet also quite technical) definition in Philosophie des Rechts, §257: “The state is the actuality [Wirklichkeit] of the ethical idea—the ethical spirit as the substantial will, manifest [offenbar] and clear to itself, which thinks and knows itself and implements what it knows in so far as it knows it.” 5 For Hegel, Thomas Hobbes is the philosopher of society in Hegel’s sense, not of the state. The Leviathan, despite its great power and fearsomeness, guarantees only the unstable flux of society and the sense of estrangement that accompanies it. Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Hegel’s sense is not the Hobbesian state of nature, but rather its opposite, what Hobbes calls civil society or the civil condition of mankind. 4 3 �Hegel undertakes to show how this (unintentional) sacrifice does finally bring back the gods of the city. Thus far, Hegel’s theory of modern society does not appear to differ fundamentally from the theories of many of his eighteenth-century political-philosophical predecessors. Kant, for instance, famously describes how the very antagonism of society awakens previously dormant moral powers whose activation begins the historical process of a moral regeneration of mankind.6 Both Kant and Hegel owe a lot to the works of the Scottish political thinkers—above all, Adam Smith—and their innovative accounts of how commerce and intercourse amongst essentially self-concerned human beings leads to new forms of human association and interconnectedness. In attempting to explain what is distinctive about the Hegelian understanding, I would begin with the suggestion that both Kant and Hegel are responding to Smith’s type of social and psychological analysis, but in the spirit of a radical re-founding of the modern community that they learned from reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They read Smith in the light of Rousseau and the possibility of a restoration of a genuine republic to which he aspires. One might say that Kant and Hegel are attempting a synthesis of two thinkers who take divergent approaches to the problem of how a genuine community of interests can be constituted on the basis of individual rights or “subjective freedom.” If Smith’s view is broadly that the antagonism of society produces distinct manners and sentiments and a sort of psychic or moral economy that (together with a flourishing physical economy) compensates us for the loss of genuine republican association; and if Rousseau’s view is broadly that the antagonism must be radically superseded by means of the establishment of a general will that founds a new republic—then the view of 6 See especially the essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in which Kant describes how “a pathologically enforced social union is transformed into a moral whole.” In Reiss, ed., Kant: Political Writings, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 41-53. 4 �Kant and Hegel is that the social antagonism itself contains the intellectual and moral seeds of its own regeneration. It can reasonably aim at something much higher than a thoroughly “polite” and economically productive civilization, yet without repudiating the fundamentally individualistic character of modern society. It is not, however, that Kant and Hegel are attempting to broker a compromise between two thinkers who have radically different dispositions towards modern life, but rather that they claim to have arrived at a truer and more complete understanding of the nature and consequences of individual freedom. One might say that in their view, Smith articulates the process without articulating the final result; while Rousseau articulates the result without fully accounting for the process.7 Kant and Hegel both approach the problem as one of forming or educating individual freedom or subjectivity in a profoundly transformative way, but without abandoning the foundation of individual rights. On the contrary: they aim to complete the structure to which that very foundation gives rise. The Kantian solution—an ambitious attempt to engender a progressive project that gives new moral meaning to human history—is of great interest and difficulty in its own right and I will not attempt any kind of summary here. (And Kant, too, draws on classical notions of liberal education in his understanding of how individual freedom can fully realize its own moral possibilities.) For the remainder of this section, I will attempt to draw out what is distinctive and interesting about Hegel’s understanding of the “education” of individual freedom that characterizes bourgeois society. Hegel spells out his basic claim most fully and clearly in §187 of the Philosophie des Rechts. Individuals, he claims, “can attain their end only insofar as they themselves determine their knowing, willing, and acting in a universal way, and make themselves into links in the 7 These formulations are admittedly glib and are not intended as anything remotely close to an accurate characterization of these two great modern political philosophers. My intent is simply to characterize a certain broad way of thinking about modern society that is common to both Kant and Hegel. 5 �chain of this interconnection [Zusammenhang]”—i.e., the universal element of society which appears to individuals merely as a means to their private ends and not as an end-in-itself. “The interest of the idea in all of this,” he continues, which is not present in the consciousness of these members of bourgeois society as such, is the process of raising [erheben], through natural necessity as well as their arbitrary needs, the members’ individuality and naturalness towards [zur] formal freedom and formal universality of knowing and willing—of educating [bilden] subjectivity in its particularity [besonderheit]. Active participation in the “system of needs” that characterizes bourgeois society leads to an elevation of individual judgment and action to the level of formal freedom and universality of moral and intellectual judgment. The more we pursue our private ends, the more we get to know our way around the “chain” of interdependency, and this has the effect of making us something more than mere links in this chain. We become in a more normative sense social beings, aware of the general context of our actions. And Hegel characterizes all this as a process of education or cultivation—Bildung—“of subjectivity in its particularity.”8 This key paragraph occasions a relatively lengthy Anmerkung on education in general, in which Hegel makes clear that the education or cultivation of members of bourgeois society is not an education merely by analogy, or an education only in the special sense of what might today be called “socialization.” He readily associates Bildung—a word with very lofty, including religious, connotations9—with the very ordinary and prosaic process of learning how to be a 8 The key part of the sentence reads: “…die Subjektivität in ihrer Besonderheit zu bilden.” The dative construction makes it clear that subjectivity is being educated or cultivated in (not into) its condition of particularity. The sense is similar to something like, “He learned, in his naïvete, that not everyone who makes a promise is to be trusted.” Hegel means to say that subjectivity is, in truth, being formed out of or away from its particularity, towards universality of thinking and acting. 9 The word has its origins in the word Bild—picture or image or eikon—and in particular, Martin Luther’s use of the word in his translation of Genesis 1.26-27: “Und Gott sprach: Lasset uns Menschen machen, ein Bild, das uns gleich sei…. Und Gott schuf den Menschen ihm zum Bilde, zum Bilde Gottes schuf er ihn.” (“And God said, Let us make 6 �functioning member of modern bourgeois society. The commentary is all the more remarkable in that in it, Hegel is refuting two alternative views of the worth and significance of education, and his refutation seems to proceed precisely from that lofty sense of Bildung in comparison with which Hegel’s use of the term sounds such a dissonant note. Specifically, he rejects both the Rousseauean understanding of education or culture as the corruption of natural simplicity, and the moral flipside of that understanding according to which education is nothing but a means to the ends of “needs, their satisfaction, the pleasures and comforts of particular life, etc.” Both views, he states, “show a lack of acquaintance with the nature of spirit and the goal of reason.” Hegel’s intention here seems to be to show that Bildung, in its true and proper meaning, is not something external to, or separate from, the process through which the individual discovers himself to be a member of a larger social context—but that it is that very process, grasped in its full human significance. What, then, is the “goal of reason,” if it is neither natural simplicity nor the satisfaction of individual needs and desires? Hegel states it as follows: [its goal is] for natural simplicity [Natureinfalt]—whether as passive selflessness or as the coarseness [Rohheit] of knowing and willing—that is, the immediacy and individuality in which the spirit is immersed, to be worked away [weggearbeitet] and for its externality to receive for the first time the rationality of which it is capable, namely, the form of universality, that is, understanding [Verständigkeit]. Hegel seems to equate the acquisition of rationality or understanding with the elimination of natural coarseness. Hence Bildung is simultaneously something positive and something negative, the development of new powers and the “working away” of original nature. On both man after our image, after our likeness…. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”) Bildung literally means the formation of man in the image of God, and its later humanistic use retains (or retained until relatively recently) much of the majesty of its origins. “Culture” in the sense of “man of culture” captures some, but by no means all, of Bildung’s sense of a deep inner formation and perfection of mind and soul. 7 �the individual and the general level, it involves an exchange or replacement of the immediate and particular with the mediated and universal. As in the art of sculpture, the rough exterior of the stone needs to be worked away to reveal the universal form that lies within, but which is, in truth, a result of the very process of the working away of the “natural” exterior. It is only by means of such a process that spirit finds itself “at home” in externality. To remain on the level of satisfying immediate needs and wants is to remain in a condition of self-estrangement—to be compelled to venture out into a foreign land merely to subsist. “Education [Bildung],” Hegel concludes, is therefore liberation and work towards a higher liberation; it is the absolute transition [Durchgangspunkt] to the infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life [Sittlichkeit], which is no longer immediate and natural, but spiritual and at the same time raised to the shape of universality. In practice, education is “hard work [harte Arbeit] against mere subjectivity of conduct, against the immediacy of desire, and likewise against the subjective vanity of feeling and the whim of one’s preferences.” This negative labor of opposition is, at the same time, an ascent to the level of understanding and the being-at-home-in-externality that is, for Hegel, the condition of genuine individuality. The shucking off of natural simplicity and roughness allows us recognize ourselves in external actuality and, thus, to possess ourselves fully. We are liberated from the compulsion of having constantly to “play the game” to satisfy our needs and desires; the barrier between our subjective particularity and the interplay of individual interests is effaced or eliminated through our very participation in that interplay. In a famous (or infamous) Zusatz to the foregoing passage, Hegel comments as follows: “By educated people, we may understand in the first place those who do everything as others do it and who do not flaunt their particularity, whereas it is precisely the latter that the uneducated 8 �display, since their conduct is not guided by the universal aspects of the object.” He goes so far as to claim that education “irons out” our peculiarities—like wrinkles from a shirt.10 Again, Hegel seems to go out of his way to show that Bildung is not some kind of special possession, but an exemplary kind of ordinariness—the exemplariness of neither wanting nor needing to be anything special. Hegel appears as a great defender and champion of the bourgeois at a time when the bourgeois was already an object of contempt and of all manner of political and aesthetic attacks and efforts of overcoming. The fully self-conscious participant in bourgeois society, the man who has embraced the game and made it his own, is, Hegel suggests, nothing less than the complete human being. One might say that he means to vindicate civilization against culture, the alleged antagonism between which is expressive of an approach to the problem of modern dividedness that Hegel fundamentally rejects. For Hegel, “culture” means precisely the Bildung (or Ausbildung—the working out or elaboration) of civilization’s implicit rationality and completeness. “Culture” is not a radical alternative to civilization, but a civilization that has come to understand its own finality and has thus made peace with itself. For Hegel, the “man of culture” is the bourgeois who has grasped that his is the most rational, satisfying, and contradiction-free life that can be lived on the foundation of individual freedom. Hegel implies that even in a self-consciously individualistic society, one should expect a certain human type to predominate, and that this (in the strict sense) assimilative tendency of individual-rights based societies ought to be encouraged and seen through to its best conclusion, rather than fought against in the name of human variety or diversity (as the Romantics of Hegel’s 10 This much-decried passage might be seen as simply an affirmation of the essentially classical, as opposed to Romantic or naturalistic, character of education in general. Swimming provides a useful analogy: If one wants to swim well in the “ocean” of externality—the sea of competing individuals with competing interests into which we are thrown—then it is best to master the accepted strokes and eliminate individual peculiarities of motion. Excellent swimmers all look about the same in the pool, and to see them all at once, moving together and in competition with each other, is an impressive spectacle indeed. 9 �time and, perhaps, the “multiculturalists” of ours). Indeed, it is especially in such a society that human beings tend to be or to become similar to one another, to a greater degree than in any past society. All are gebildet—formed, shaped, educated, cultivated—by and into the one universal Zusammenhang. There are no substantial social classes through which our characters are shaped, and traditional morality or natural law in a pre-modern sense is too weak to prevail over the spirit of individual freedom that animates modern societies. Moral traditions or Sitten must necessarily be reconstituted through the free actions of individuals. In this sense, modern societies, our own included, are the least “diverse” that have ever existed. Our incessant talk of “diversity” is ultimately an expression of our lack of diversity. We feel, obscurely perhaps, this lack, and we are troubled by it; but according to Hegel’s account, this is not because we truly love or long for human diversity (it is difficult to conceive how such an abstraction could be an object of human longing), but because we have not thought through and cultivated our uniformity and responded to the intellectual and moral demands that it places on us. We have a bad conscience about out failure to accept what we are, and we try to appease it by praising and exaggerating superficial differences. But this only leads to a bad kind of similarity or sameness—a generic sort of eccentricity that is, for Hegel, a sort of no-man’s-land of the spirit.11 II: Liberal Education in a Bourgeois World Does classical liberal education have any place in the bourgeois world that Hegel champions? Surprisingly, study of the ancients appears to play an essential role in the larger process of Bildung that he seems to conceive in thoroughly modern terms. What, then, is the relationship 11 Many things in our own society might be seen as examples of this tendency: “customized” consumer products that are nothing more than inputs into a computerized manufacturing system; the prevalence of tattoos and body art expressing outward difference but inner sameness; the nearly infinite variety of poetically-named colors with which to paint “accent walls”; “hipster culture” and its tendency to become entangled in ironic self-contradiction; etc. 10 �between classical learning and the Bildung of bourgeois society? What purpose does the former serve, if not to help us to ascend out of the noisy cave of modern society? How does study of the ancient Greeks and Romans belong to or participate in the process through which individuals form themselves into an ethical whole on the foundation of subjective freedom? I will address these questions by examining some key passages in the first of a series of annual addresses Hegel gave as rector of the new gymnasium established at Nuremburg in 1809. The lecture as a whole takes the form of a defense of classical learning—a defense which was by no means either expected or obligatory on Hegel’s part. Hegel wants to set the tone for the new institution, and he does so by making the case for a revival of classical education against some of the major currents of his age. “The spirit and purpose of our institution,” Hegel claims in beginning his statement about the principle [Prinzip] and fundamentals [Grundzüge] of the new school, “is preparation for learned study, a preparation which is built on the foundation [Grund] of the Greeks and Romans.”12 Their works have been, for millennia (Hegel rather oddly says), the ground or soil [Boden] “on which all culture [Kultur]13 has stood, from which it has sprung, and with which it has been in continuous connection [Zusammenhang].” It is impossible, he claims, to conceive of 12 “Rede zum Schuljahrabschluß am 29. September 1809,” in G.W.F. Hegel, Werke 4: Nürnberger und Heidelberger Schriften, 1808-1817 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 314. Part of the address is translated by Richard Kroner as “On Classical Studies,” in Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: Northwestern, 2000), pp. 291-9. I have made use of Kroner’s translation with some modifications. 13 Hegel uses the word Kultur occasionally (including twice in significant passages in this lecture) as more or less a synonym for Bildung, which has a much more important and definite (but also quite complicated and puzzling) place in his philosophy as a whole. Kultur for Hegel seems to mean a society or a people in a gebildete condition. In the second passage (discussed below), Hegel speaks of “the culture [Kultur], art, and science of a people” in a way that implies its equivalence to “the Bildung of the modern world.” The implication is that Bildung includes all three of these entities, so perhaps Kultur may be taken to refer more specifically to manners or moral culture, which would be roughly consistent with the Kantian usage of the word. (Kant makes systematic use of Kultur on account of his neo-Roman emphasis on the careful tending and cultivation of nature.) The later nineteenth-century German tendency to employ Kultur as a polemical term against—and as the antidote to—civilization or civilisation as something typically English or French is foreign to Hegel, who, as I explain above, can be understood to be an opponent of the civilization-culture distinction before it really gets political traction. 11 �an educated or enlightened society that does not somehow rest on the foundation of the ancients. Hegel then ventures the following analogy: Just as the natural organisms, plants and animals, struggle to free themselves from gravitation, but cannot escape this element of their being [Wesen], so has all art and science grown up out of that ground [Boden]. And even though the arts and sciences have attained their own self-sufficiency, they have not emancipated themselves from the recollection [Erinnerung] of that older education [Bildung]. As Antaeus renewed his forces by touching his mother earth, so has every new resurgence and invigoration of science and culture [Bildung] raised itself to the sunlight out of a return to antiquity [Altertum]. Several things are noteworthy in this complicated image. First, modern knowledge is rooted in ancient soil; it is a new growth, but it is not a radical departure from or superseding of the ancients. Second, the works of the ancients appear in the analogy as something different in kind from modern art and science. Hegel likens ancient Bildung to the soil, the inorganic element, and modern Bildung to the organic beings, plants and animals. Modern Bildung lives and dies and regenerates itself, while ancient Bildung is the permanent ground or Boden of all spiritual growth and striving. Ancient Bildung is original, modern Bildung is derivative. Third, modern Bildung, by its nature, does indeed wish to escape its ground, but is prevented from doing so by an external force, recollection, just as natural beings are prevented by gravitation from taking leave of the earth. Finally, the allusion to Antaeus implies that modern Bildung would destroy itself (or be destroyed by some Heracles) if ever it did succeed in escaping or renouncing ancient Bildung. This account of modern intellectual and artistic activity is reminiscent of Hegel’s account of the activity of the modern individual in the Philosophie des Rechts discussed above. Modern knowledge wishes to be immediately for itself and independent even though it is grounded in the element of the ancients; just as the modern individual wishes to be immediately for himself even 12 �though he depends on the universal element of society for his subsistence. The logic of development by means of self-defeating self-assertion is the same in both cases. In the case of modern individuality, what prevents lift-off is the Zusammenhang of mutually interdependent individuals. The more we strive for independence, the more we find ourselves caught up in the universal element of society. In the case of modern knowledge, the more it strives for independence, the more it “recollects” the ancient ground from whence it is sprung. In both cases, the attempt to escape the origin leads back to the origin, but the relationship to the origin is profoundly altered in the process. The ancient republic is the ethical origin of the modern constitutional state populated by an enlightened, sociable, prosperous, and mutually cooperative bourgeoisie. Similarly, ancient Bildung is the ground on which the modern arts and sciences flourish and proliferate, and enable the manifold pursuits of the modern individual. The implication is that the study of the ancients is somehow essential to the maintenance of the integrity and self-conscious universality of the modern state. The study of—or rather the modern return to the ancients, which is what Hegel was trying to effect at the new gymnasium in the new, post-Napoleonic, reformed Bavarian monarchy14—has, for Hegel, the greatest political importance. This return is deeply implicated in the Durchgangspunkt, the moment of passing over into “the infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life.” The process Hegel describes in the Philosophie des Rechts of simultaneously ridding ourselves of natural coarseness while 14 On the political background and context of Hegel’s appointment as rector, see the excellent account of Terry Pinkard in Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 7. Pinkard presents Hegel, along with his friend and patron Immanuel Niethammer, as a champion of “neo-humanism” against Catholic and Protestant traditionalism on the one hand, and modern utilitarianism on the other. While this is broadly accurate, it perhaps does not appreciate Hegel’s radical skepticism towards any kind of “cultural” palliative for modern society. Pinkard’s Hegel is an intellectual like Niethammer, but Hegel may be more accurately characterized as anti-intellectual in the strict sense of the word. Bildung, in Hegel’s view, is not primarily the formation of an enlightened class that can direct society, but rather it is the formation or education of society itself. There is a deeply republican character to Hegel’s thinking that is (ironically) often missed by interpreters who regard him as a theorist of society or community in the sense of a wise and public-spirited intellectual critic. 13 �acquiring new rational powers seems to be underwritten by a new regard for the works of the ancients as the permanent or inorganic basis, the soil, of modern ethical life. Later in the lecture, after defending the importance of the study of ancient languages as one moment in the organic whole of knowledge rather than (as it was in the old institution) the most important part of higher learning, Hegel raises an objection that prompts a stirring, and rather poetic, defense of classical education. Hegel points out that the study of ancient languages, even when their place in the whole of knowledge is properly understood, is very demanding and timeconsuming. Shouldn’t we then just leave it to a few specialists and allow the rest to devote their time to the study and cultivation of the new sciences? “It seems to be a just demand,” Hegel says, “that the culture [Kultur], art, and science of a people come to stand on its own two feet.” He then poses the following question: May we not believe, of the Bildung of the modern world, of our enlightenment and the progress of all the arts and sciences, that they have replaced their Greek and Roman children’s shoes and outgrown their leadingstrings [Gängelbande] so as to be able to walk on their own ground and soil [Grund und Boden]?15 Hegel alludes to Kant’s exhortation (in his famous essay, “What is Enlightenment?”) that we cut our leading strings and start living and thinking by our own lights. But, he continues, if we truly wish to overcome coarseness or vulgarity—“if we agree that excellence [das Vortreffliche] should be the point of departure”—then, he claims, the study of Greek and Roman literature (in that order of priority) is the indispensable basis [Grundlage] of education. “The perfection and glory of these masterworks,” Hegel says, “must be the spiritual bath, the profane baptism, which gives to the soul its first and inalienable tone and coloration [Tinktur] for taste and knowledge [Wissenschaft].” Moreover, a general familiarity with the ancients does not suffice for this 15 Werke 4, p. 317. 14 �critical preparation of soul. Rather, “we must dwell and dine with them, so that we can inhale their air, their ideas, their manners, one might say even their errors and prejudices, and become at home in this world, the most beautiful that has ever existed.” What should one make of this striking image of a rigorous classical education—one that includes mastery of Greek and Latin—as a “profane baptism”? For one thing, it implies that classical education is, or ought to be, more a radical exposure to the ancients than a scientific study of their works or way of life. We return to the ancients not primarily to know or learn about our origins, but to transport ourselves out of the modern world and back into what Hegel calls “the second, higher paradise, the paradise of the human spirit.” There is a theological understanding at work, at least metaphorically,16 that needs to be unpacked before we can understand how the works of the ancients function as a permanent standard for education. For Hegel, the ancient world is the postlapsarian peak of human existence. It is the beautiful whole assembled from the broken shards of the first, naïve paradise of human nature—like a glorious mosaic made from the pieces of a simple glass vessel that has been smashed. Its blessedness or serenity [Heiterkeit] is no child’s game, but is like a veil, “spread over the melancholy which knows the cruelty [Härte] of fate but is not thereby driven to lose its freedom and moderation.” We have, Hegel implies, fallen from this second paradise that knew how to deal beautifully with a human condition filled with suffering and strife. (Hegel seems to have Homer and Greek tragedy especially in mind here.) The post-Christian principle “of the self-sufficient and inherently infinite personality of the individual, the principle of subjective freedom”17 disrupts 16 Hegel’s understanding of paradise is in a sense necessarily metaphorical, in that paradise for him is not truly paradise, but rather a beautiful condition that was made to be broken or ruined as the means to a higher or more developed condition. The “higher” paradise of the spirit occurs in the world after the fall (!), and its beauty is owing to its sublime and poetic way of dwelling in a world of suffering and sin. The true (earthly) paradise comes at the end. And it is not truly a paradise, but a world that understands itself as final or post-historical and in which the spirit can finally come to rest and experience boredom—with all of its problems and possibilities. 17 Philosophie des Rechts §185 (Anmerkung) 15 �the tragic beauty of the ancient world. Its disruption, however, is both lamentable and inevitable—inevitable, because according to Hegel’s redemptivist understanding, we can only return to God by means of the recognition of the individual’s infinite personality which is sacrificed in the world of the ancients for the sake of the beautiful whole. Yet our souls need to “bathe” in their world if we are going to have any hope of constituting a new whole through our own harte Arbeit following our expulsion from the first paradise. We need not just a glimpse of, but a thorough immersion in the greatness of their sentiments, their statuesque [plastische] virtue free from moral ambiguity, their patriotism [Vaterlandsliebe], the grand manner of their deeds and characters, the multiplicity of their destinies, of their morals and constitutions as a preparation for the demands of modern ethical life or citizenship. The new ethical whole that we modern individuals are trying to assemble will never be as beautiful as the ancient precisely because it will never be as “holistic”; it will always be riven by the spirited striving of individuals who are all too aware of the infiniteness of their personalities. Thus, “whoever has not known the works of the ancients, has lived without knowing what beauty is.” A synopsis of the foregoing argument might be that we need to study the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans because they are the expression of the only paradise that historical human beings have ever really known. But a claim like this can easily lend itself to snobbery, philistinism, “elitism,” and a host of other vices of the intellectual (or, the general vice of being an intellectual, or at least an intellectual of a certain kind). Is there something more definite that serious exposure to the ancients does, according to Hegel, that makes it something more than just a beholding of a beautiful world (a world whose beauty is hardly self-evident to many modern people, as anyone who teaches Homer and Aristotle to college freshmen can attest)? How, 16 �exactly, does classical education function as a baptism or purification of the modern soul that orients it towards a higher kind of cooperation amongst free individuals than would otherwise be possible? Hegel addresses the question indirectly towards the end of the lecture when he treats the formal aspect of education after having discussed its substance. By what formal means or process does the study of the ancients have the effects or consequences that he claims it does? His answer, in sum, is that these works, read in their original languages, have the effect of estranging [Entfremden] us from ourselves. Genuine Bildung takes place only by means of the imagination’s straining to occupy itself with “something not given in immediate experience, something foreign, something pertaining to recollection, to memory and the thinking mind.”18 Hegel claims that “only what is strange and foreign attracts our interest and lures us to activity and effort.” Our moral and intellectual faculties are quickened by the experience of the foreign—similar, perhaps, to how one becomes more attentive and perceptive when visiting a foreign country for the first time. Hegel speaks of the pedagogical necessity of a “separation wall” [Scheidewand], and claims that “the world and language of the ancients” is best suited to this purpose. Their world appears to us as a barrier between ourselves and…ourselves; that is, between the unformed self and the self that has realized itself through a process of self-estrangement and return.19 Not just any 18 Werke 4, pp. 320-1. Alasdair MacIntyre captures something of the spirit of Hegel’s claim in the following statement: “[I]t is a primary responsibility of a university to be unresponsive, to give its students what they need, not what they want, and to do so in such a way that what they want becomes what they need and what they choose is choice-worthy.” MacIntyre, “Catholic Universities: Dangers, Hopes, Choices,” in Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions, ed. Robert E. Sullivan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), p. 15. (Cited in Liam Kavanagh, “Interview: Alasdair MacIntyre,” Expositions 6.2 (2012), p. 1.) 19 The subtitle of the Bildung section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (published two years prior to the Nuremburg lecture discussed here) is “the self-estranged spirit” or “spirit in its self-estrangement.” It is the quasihistorical account of how spirit-in-general comes to be gebildet, that is, to return to itself in a new kingdom following the break-up of its ancient paradise. A complete investigation of the questions being posed in this paper 17 �unknown subject matter encourages this process. We require a genuinely foreign world that challenges us and draws us out of ourselves through its beauty as much as its troubling strangeness. The works of the ancients possess an unmatched power to separate us from ourselves and, hence, force us to work to rebuild ourselves into something greater. They are like a beautiful, exotic stranger whom we meet outside the gates of the first paradise, and who excites in us the energy of mind and soul to build for ourselves a new home worthy of the spirit with which we are originally endowed. Conclusion For Hegel, classical education serves the purpose of reminding us of human possibilities that our world of individualistic striving tends to obscure. It draw us out of ourselves towards what is universal, and encourages the best tendencies of our type of society towards genuinely ethical cooperation. It does not, however, promise any sort of transcendence of, or ascent above, the plane of bourgeois society. Although he waxes eloquent about the study of the ancients as immersion in the truly beautiful, he comes close to conceiving of classical education as essentially the means, or an especially important part of the means, of society’s self-actualization or self-completion. It is the final stage of the modern individual’s moral work of smoothing off his rough edges and becoming an exemplary participant in bourgeois society—the type who works hard, cares about the common good while respecting others’ freedom and independence, and assiduously works to “bring people together” instead of remaining absorbed in his own private affairs. would require considerable attention to the Phenomenology, which is Hegel’s complete account of the process of spirit’s “recollection” of all its past phases that brings its historical development to completion. 18 �Is Bildung as Hegel conceives it a liberal education? In the sense that it aims to liberate us from the narrow moral horizons that modern individuality tends to encourage, then it can certainly be called liberal. And Hegel intimates another sense of the liberating power of classical education when he speaks of its power to excite in the young the desire to dwell in a foreign world and allow themselves to be transformed by the experience. But he conceives of this power in terms of an immanent social process through which the modern individual learns to recognize himself in the workings of bourgeois society. Its purpose is ultimately to make us more completely at home in bourgeois society rather than to free us in a radical way from its forces and relations (whatever such a liberation might mean or entail). Hegel’s most basic thought is that the truly liberally educated human being is the one who embodies a sort of exemplary ordinariness and derives satisfaction and serenity from being this way. He has, with the help of the ancients, learned to “own” his bourgeois existence and not to long for any kind of transcendence, at least not in this world. We may wonder at the spectacle of such a person. Whether one wonders with admiration depends, finally, on whether one thinks there are other modern possibilities for a human life well and fully lived. 19 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 19 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberal education and exemplary ordinariness : on the meaning of Bildung in Hegel's political philosophy Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Andrew Bove at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bove, Andrew J. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004523 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f5dd24448212878cb4c7eaffc4f96e5b.pdf 72de20d7f198ec7b9f7f532433dceefb PDF Text Text Education of the Regime and the Soul in The Federalist∗ Charles C. Claunch∗∗ Abstract: As a general proposition, any regime requires at least some of its citizens to think and behave in ways that, at a minimum, do not undermine the regime. That requirement points to the need for education for at least some of the regime’s citizens. In presenting arguments for ratification of the U.S. Constitution, however, the authors of The Federalist make no explicit argument for such education. Despite this omission, The Federalist provides the basis for an education in citizenship in two respects. First, The Federalist, as a work of public, reasoned advocacy, teaches it readers not only the need for the Constitution and the meanings (or possible meanings) of it provisions, but how to think about it and how to act in the constitutional regime to be created under it. The authors intended The Federalist to be a continuing basis for thought, conversation, and action after ratification. Second, by dealing explicitly with what we now call the doctrine of judicial review, the authors of The Federalist made explicit the idea of a small group of specially-selected people voiding acts of the legislative and executive branches of the government. This role of the federal judiciary may be recognized as that of teacher. The federal courts’ interpretations of the Constitution and the law are the judges’ teachings, and the officers of the political branches and the regime’s citizens are the judges’ students. The Federalist and the work of judges serve as an education for governing ourselves as individual souls and as a Constitutional regime. This essay has its origins in a master’s essay I wrote for St. John’s College in Santa Fe in 2005.1 It’s a pleasure to revisit this place with a continuation of work that I started here almost ten years ago. The title of that thesis was “State and Soul in The Federalist.” The title of my essay today reflects better terminology – “regime” instead of “state” – and a concentration on and expansion of the final section of that essay. Very briefly: in “State and Soul in The Federalist,” I explored what is required of a citizen in the conception of the U.S. Constitution held by the authors of The Federalist. ∗ Presented at “What Is Liberal Education For? A Conference at St. John’s College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe Campus” on 16 October 2014. ∗∗ Charles C. Claunch is a Ph.D. student in the Institute of Philosophic Studies of the Braniff School of Liberal Arts and in the Department of Politics, University of Dallas, Irving, Texas. He is an adjunct professor of government at Tarrant County College, Fort Worth, Texas, and at Richland College, Dallas, Texas. He is also a Texas attorney and a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law (J.D., 1998). He completed both graduate degrees offered by St. John’s College, Santa Fe, New Mexico (M.A.L.A., 2004; M.A.E.C., 2005). 1 Charles C. Claunch, “State and Soul in The Federalist,” (M.A. Liberal Arts thesis, St. John’s College, Santa Fe, 2005). �2 Following up on the authors’ suggestion that government is “the greatest of all reflections on human nature,” I used the Constitutional regime described in The Federalist to understand both that regime and the individual “Constitutional soul.”2 In that original essay, I made the following broad points: 1. Power can be exercised legitimately by all three branches of the Constitutional regime, but the judiciary can void acts of the legislature and the executive; we call this today “judicial review.” This suggests, correspondingly, that the individual can use judgment, will, and force (to use the terms of The Federalist)3 but that judgment can exercise a certain kind of control over will and force.4 2. The necessary and proper clause5 suggests personal liberty with a necessarily broad reach and the supremacy clause6 suggests the acceptability of one’s acts, according to one’s judgment, as long as they are compatible with one’s responsibilities.7 3. The discussion of the control of faction in No. 10 of The Federalist suggests control of individual passions through (a) the development by the individual of a variety of interests, none of which motivate his actions completely but all of which engage his attention to some moderate degree, and (b) the reduction of time and energy devoted to any single interest, reducing the chances of waste or of indulging in passions with regard to any single interest.8 2 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Robert Scigliano (New York: Modern Library, 2000) (“The Federalist”), No. 51, 331. 3 Ibid., No. 78, 496. 4 Claunch, 2-6. 5 U.S. Constitution, art. 1, sec. 8, cl. 18. 6 Ibid., art. 6, cl. 2. 7 Claunch, 6-10. 8 The Federalist, No. 10, 53-61; Claunch, 11-15. �3 4. Appropriate judicial review and political acts mutually affect each other. Appropriate judicial review provides a reasoned sense of the limits of Constitutional power in various circumstances, and Constitutionally-minded deliberations, policy statements, and legal defenses justifying the political branches’ acts provide grist for the mill of a well-informed and wellreasoned judicial review. This suggests that similarly, individual judgment and one’s acts of will and force mutually affect each other. Individual judgment is used to determine the extent and responsibilities of one’s individual liberty, and in doing so it governs one’s acts of will and force; one’s acts of will and force and the reasons for them provide material on which individual judgment can operate.9 5. The actions of the Constitutional convention, the ratification of the Constitution, and the various methods of Constitutional amendment suggest the wisdom of adoption of new or revised individual standards in the presence of outmoded or inadequate standards. They should be changed greatly, however, only when necessary; generally, they should be changed only incrementally. The defense by the authors of The Federalist of Constitutional drafting, ratification, and amendment is an expression of their confidence in the capacity of the people, together and as individuals, to use judgment, will, and force to assess and change standards in a harmony that makes good use of liberty.10 6. The authors of The Federalist present the Constitution as an invitation to and a means for the people, individually and collectively, to rise above their usual selves at the same time as it tries to protect them from their failure to do so. This rise, however, requires an understanding of 9 Claunch, 15-21. 10 Ibid., 21-27. �4 the Constitution and of the individual. Both the existence and the lessons of The Federalist indicate that the authors believe that such understanding can be taught and learned.11 All of these broad points were developed to lead to the idea that The Federalist and judges play important roles in the education of the Constitutional regime and the citizen of that regime. I turn now to the final section of the thesis and my expansion of it for our conference today.12 The Constitution makes no explicit provision for, and The Federalist makes no explicit argument for, education. Despite the omission of an explicit discussion, however, The Federalist provides the basis for an education in citizenship in two respects. First, the authors of The Federalist, as a work of public, reasoned advocacy, teach their readers the need for the Constitution and the meanings or possible meanings of its provisions and how to think about it and how to act in the Constitutional regime to be created under it. With their detailed arguments, the authors ask their readers to think deeply and to assess or make cogent counterarguments concerning their government. In particular, the arguments of the authors regarding the meanings of the more contentious provisions make it clear that after ratification those provisions’ meanings and implications will have to be worked out in practice through day-to-day operation of the government. The thrust of The Federalist is that the Constitution allows its meanings and implications to unfold in time, within limits. Beyond assisting ratification, by making their arguments, they intended to shape future debates by providing a continuing basis for thought, conversation, and action after ratification. 11 Ibid., 27. 12 Ibid., 28-32. �5 Second, by dealing explicitly with what we now call the doctrine of judicial review, the authors of The Federalist made explicit the idea of a small group of specially-selected people voiding acts of the legislative and executive branches of the government, at times against the immediate will of the people but in conformance with the will of the people as expressed in the Constitution. Despite their argument that the judiciary is the “least dangerous” of the branches, the actual power of judicial review is clear enough from the authors’ discussion as a whole.13 If the judiciary’s interpretation of the law is to be called rule by an unelected elite, it is very indirect rule, practiced through decisions in cases raised by legislative and executive acts and subject to limitation and change through amendments to the Constitution. If it is to be called politics, it is an attenuated politics, filtered through the formal requirements of explaining decisions in terms of law, and again subject to limitation and change through Constitutional amendment. As an alternative to these negative characterizations, the role of the federal judiciary may be recognized positively as that of teacher. The federal courts’ interpretations of the Constitution and the law are the judges’ teachings, and the officers of the political branches and the regime’s citizens are their students. The judges and their interpretations are one source of understanding of how we, as a Constitutional regime and as individuals in it, may govern ourselves. Judges are fallible, like all other humans, and therefore their judging and their teachings are liable to fallibility. Their isolation from the political branches and from the politics of the people cannot isolate them from their own humanity. Judges must have and are expected to exercise the same qualities for which the authors of The Federalist hoped in the people’s choices as political agents—but the necessity of isolation means that they are expected to have the same 13 The Federalist, No. 78, 496. �6 weaknesses as the rest of us, too. The issue is whether judges can be expected, in their isolation from politics, to turn away from personal passions and illegitimate interests to a reasonable degree, or whether they should be expected to indulge them without adequate restraint. The mechanism described by the authors to prevent a concentration of power in one department in which “the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional right of the place,” has only limited applicability to the judiciary.14 The quality of ambition required by this competition among the branches seems incompatible with the particular quality of public-spiritedness required of judges. By participating in such institutional ambition contests, judges would risk setting themselves up as a third political branch that is concerned primarily with policy like the other two branches. In keeping with the unique nature of the role and power of the judiciary with respect to the other two governmental branches, the measures appropriate to assist judges in performing their role are different than the measures designed for politicians. To work successfully as judges and teachers, judges must exercise a self-control that is analogous to the governmental self-control that they exert on other parts of the government. Most crucially among government agents, judges must confine themselves to acts of will and force that lie within the boundaries imposed by their Constitutional positions. Their isolation improves their opportunity to internalize those constraints, but it does not give them the required means. Judges must have the will and the force to do what judgment tells them that they must do and to refrain from doing what it tells them that they must not do. They must direct and teach without dictating. If they are successful at self-control, they teach the remainder of the government and the people Constitutional self-control by exposition and example through their public, reasoned opinions and through the self-control that gives rise to those opinions. Thus, 14 Ibid., No. 51, 331. �7 well-behaved judges are also a source of our understanding of how we may govern ourselves as individuals. To illustrate well-behaved federal judges displaying such judicial self-control, I present two examples of relevant judicial teaching among many attractive candidates. The first example is Justice James Wilson’s seriatim opinion in Chisholm v. Georgia.15 The second example is the introductory part of the opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., in National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) v. Sebelius.16 Chisholm presented this question: was the State of Georgia subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court in a suit brought by two South Carolina citizens against Georgia to collect a debt? The relevant Constitutional provision stated that “[t]he Judicial Power [vested in the U.S. Supreme Court] shall extend … to Controversies … between a State and Citizens of another State ….”17 Taken literally, the Constitution granted the Court jurisdiction over states in suits like the Chisholm suit. But in answering objections to this provision in The Federalist, Publius argued that [i]t is inherent in the nature of sovereignty, not to be amenable to the suit of an individual without its consent …. [T]he exemption, as one of the several attributes of sovereignty, is now enjoyed by the government of every state in the union. Unless, therefore, there is a surrender of this immunity in the plan of the convention [the proposed Constitution], it will remain with the states, and the danger intimated must remain merely ideal…. [T]o ascribe to the federal courts, by mere implication, and in destruction of a pre-existing right of the state governments, a power which would involve such a consequence, would be altogether forced and unwarrantable.18 15 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793). 16 567 U.S. ________ (2012) (opinion of Roberts, C.J.) (slip opinion). Parts of this opinion – though not the introduction discussed here – were the opinion of the Court. 17 U.S. Constitution, art. 3, sec. 2, cl. 1. 18 The Federalist, No. 81, 521-22. �8 In seriatim opinions, four out of five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Justice Wilson, made the “forced and unwarrantable” inference dismissed by Publius, deciding that the Court had jurisdiction over Georgia, with one justice dissenting.19 Rather than starting with the relevant clause of the U.S. Constitution and its implications, Wilson started with the much broader question, “Do the people of the United States form a nation?” Wilson’s opinion in Chisholm is a rich display of learning in philosophy and law, and it can be appreciated as a lesson to the public about how to think about what ratifying the Constitution meant. Amusingly, Wilson used the wording of a toast to make a profound Constitutional point. He noted that the toast is given in the form, “[t]he United States,” instead of “[t]he People of the United States,” and that this reflects a confusion between the artificial person, the United States, and the natural person, the people of the United States, who “spoke it [the United States] into existence.”20 In adopting the Constitution, the people – including the people of Georgia speaking as part of the people of the United States – were capable of vesting and did in fact vest judicial power over states, including Georgia, in federal courts.21 Among the lines of argument that Wilson followed, I focus here on his treatment of the scope of Georgia’s sovereignty as a state of the United States. He argued that the citizens of Georgia, when “they acted upon the large scale of the Union,” acted “as a part of the ‘People of the United States’” and did not surrender their sovereign power to Georgia; rather, with respect 19 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 429-50 (seriatim opinion of Iredell, J., dissenting), 450-53 (seriatim opinion of Blair, J.), 453-66 (seriatim opinion of Wilson, J.), 466-69 (seriatim opinion of Cushing, J.), 469-79 (seriatim opinion of Jay, C.J.). 20 Wilson, James, Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793) (seriatim opinion), in Vol. 1, The Collected Works of James Wilson, eds. Kermit Hall and Mark David Hall (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 362. 21 Ibid., 362. �9 to the purposes of the Union, they retained their sovereign power to themselves.22 Consequently, the State of Georgia was not a sovereign state with regard to the Union.23 Later in his opinion, Wilson argued that the Court’s decision of the case at hand was one of purposes of the United States, so that Georgia was not sovereign for the purpose of the suit. He further argued at length that the people of the United States intended to form a national government for national purposes, complete with legislative, executive, and judicial power.24 Contrary to Publius, Wilson argues that to have allowed in this complete national scheme an exception for states to consent to be sued would “be repugnant to our very existence as a nation[.]”25 This is an instance in which Wilson’s teaching with regard to nationhood differed from that of Publius. As noted above, Publius saw nothing repugnant to the Constitutional regime for states to retain sovereign immunity. Only after following several other lines of argument to reach the conclusion that Georgia was subject to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in the suit (and I leave the others aside in the present essay) does Wilson turn to the meaning of the specific relevant text of the Constitution. “[C]ould this strict and appropriated language, describe, with more precise accuracy, the cause now depending before the tribunal?”26 The question is rhetorical, and the answer, to Wilson, obviously negative. Note that with respect the Constitutional text, Wilson and Publius taught two different but reasonable ways of reading the grant of power. Wilson read the grant strictly, requiring no additional language to deprive the states of the relevant aspect of sovereign 22 Ibid., 355 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 362-66. 25 Ibid., 365. 26 Ibid., 365-66. �10 immunity, while Publius read the grant in the context of the states’ historical powers, understanding it to be limited tacitly by the states’ sovereign immunity absent specific language denying that immunity to the states. Like the authors of The Federalist, Wilson explained the reasons for his opinion publicly and clearly, teaching the people a particular method of thinking about themselves and the Constitution that they had adopted. It was left to the people and their elected representatives to decide whether Wilson’s lessons, the lessons of The Federalist, or some other lessons would be accepted. In this particular case, the people – through their elected representatives in the Congress and in the requisite number of states – rejected his teaching and that of the Supreme Court majority. In 1794 the Congress proposed and in 1794 and 1795 the requisite number of state legislatures ratified the Eleventh Amendment to exempt a state from suits by citizens of another state or by citizens or subjects of a foreign state. This rapid response to the Court’s decision in Chisholm is itself an illustration of the capacity of the people, acting through their elected representatives, to react to federal judicial decisions. Chief Justice Roberts’s more recent opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius was a much more direct example of judicial teaching.27 In the first six pages, Roberts was obviously teaching his readers certain aspects of the judiciary’s relationship to the political branches, the people, and the Constitution. He began his lesson by pointing out that “[i]n our federal system, the National Government possesses only limited powers; the States and the people retain the remainder,” and by quoting Chief Justice Marshall’s observation that the extent of the powers granted to the federal government “will probably continue to arise, as long as our system shall exist.”28 “Resolving this controversy [the issue at hand] requires us to 27 National Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. ________ (2012) (slip opinion) (“NFIB”); NFIB, opinion of Roberts, C.J. 28 NFIB, opinion of Roberts, C.J., 2. �11 examine both the limits of the Government’s power, and our own limited role in policing those boundaries.”29 Our concern here is primarily with Roberts’s examination of the Court’s role in enforcing the limits of the federal government’s powers. Roberts argued that the Supreme Court reads Constitutional grants of power to the federal government “permissively” because it is reluctant to void acts of elected federal officials. In Roberts’s view of the Court’s role, the Court should void such an act only when the absence of Constitutional authority to pass the act (or, by extension, the absence of Constitutional authority to perform an executive act) is clearly demonstrated.30 “[Policy] decisions are entrusted to the Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”31 On the other hand, according to Roberts, “[o]ur deference in matters of policy cannot, however, become abdication on matters of law…. [T]here can be no question that it is the responsibility of this Court to enforce the limits on federal power by striking down acts of Congress that transgress those limits.”32 By logical extension, Roberts’s argument extends to voiding executive acts that transcend Constitutional limits, too. Aside from his obvious teaching of the role of the people and of elected officials in the Constitutional regime, Roberts’s argument implies that the Supreme Court and the federal courts generally have an educational role. When an issue is presented for decision by a court, that court must decide which Constitutional grants and limits on federal power are relevant to the issue, and it must explain the reasons for that decision to the public. The court must then decide whether the 29 Ibid., 2. 30 Ibid., 6. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. �12 legislative or executive act at issue is a transgression of Constitutional limits, again publicly explaining the reasons for the decision. The fact that Roberts explains the role of the Court strongly implies that he understands that for the Court to be seen to be staying out of policy decisions and to be seen as making legitimate Constitutional decisions, it must explain its decisions publicly and credibly. Going beyond such limited efforts to retain credibility, Roberts’s teaching points to the Court’s role in educating the public and government officials about the Court’s responsibilities with regard to policy judgments and Constitutional judgments. Careful delineation of the policy and Constitutional questions and careful observance by judges of their responsibilities with respect to those questions serve to teach the public Constitutional and personal self-control. It is entirely possible, of course, that the Court can make a policy judgment by mistaking it for or disguising it as a Constitutional judgment, and it has been accused of doing so (e.g., in NFIB v. Sebelius). The value of public explanations, as noted in the discussion of Wilson and Chisholm, is that they provide material that government officials and the public can use to make their own judgments in accepting or rejecting their judges’ teachings. As the authors of The Federalist point out, if judges fail in self-control, the last resort lies in the people themselves.33 Do people need to be made ready for such responsibility, and if so, how? According to the authors of The Federalist, men require government “because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.”34 Free people require more than the constraining Constitutional regime described in The Federalist; they require self-control. The authors of The Federalist appeal to a capacity among their readers to 33 The Federalist, No. 51, 331-32. 34 Ibid., No. 15, 91. �13 consider their arguments. Individuals must learn, or they must be taught, even that preliminary skill, and, as the foregoing discussion suggests, much more is required of Constitutional citizens. They must have the capacity to choose their agents well and to observe and judge them carefully. To observe and judge the behavior of political officers and judges with respect to the Constitution, an individual must understand the dynamic of legislative and executive action and judicial review as they relate to his liberty so that he may act in his rationally-directed and rationally-constrained interests. The Constitutional regime requires self-constrained citizens who are capable of establishing and maintaining a government that can constrain them when necessary and a government that in turn can exercise and demonstrate power responsibly by exercising and demonstrating self-restraint. The Constitutional regime and the Constitutional citizen must mutually shape and sustain each other. The Federalist is a significant feature of that mutual shaping and sustaining, speaking to the people for a conception of the Constitution and providing a model for some of the continuing requirements of citizenship. The judiciary, as it plays its unique role in the Constitutional regime as intermediary between the people and their legislative and executive agents, speaking for the Constitution to the people and their agents and providing examples and explanations for the continuing requirements of government, is also a significant feature of that mutual shaping and sustaining.35 The Federalist and the work of judges serve as an education for governing ourselves as individual souls and as a Constitutional regime. 35 “It is far more rational to suppose, that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and their legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.” The Federalist, No. 78, 498. �14 Works Cited Claunch, Charles C. “State and Soul in The Federalist.” M.A. Liberal Arts thesis. St. John’s College, Santa Fe, 2005. Chisholm v. Georgia. 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793). Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and James Madison. The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States. Edited by Robert Scigliano. New York: Modern Library, 2000. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. 567 U.S. _______ (2012). Slip opinion. Roberts, John R., Jr. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. 567 U.S. _______ (2012) (opinion). Slip opinion. Wilson, James. Chisholm v. Georgia. 2 U.S. (2 Dall.) 419, 453-66 (1793) (seriatim opinion). In Vol. 1, Collected Works of James Wilson. Edited by Kermit Hall and Mark David Hall. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 14 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education of the regime and the soul in The Federalist Description An account of the resource Paper presented October 16, 2014 by Charles Claunch at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Claunch, Charles C. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Federalist. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004524 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7674b113f1cc3c70ab0d4d495e314b1c.pdf 46c0db3b85d72874a00ce3a68eff3df6 PDF Text Text Helen’s Eidolon: Learning and Suffering in Euripides’ Electra A work of tragic poetry is organized by its teleology of suffering, by the sense it gives of why humans suffer. The chorus of Argive Elders in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon tells the audience that “Zeus, who brought men to think...has laid it down that learning comes alone through suffering.” (Ag. 177-8) and also “justice so inclines that those only learn who suffer” (Ag. 2501). We suffer for the sake of learning, and moreover, there is no other way to learn. The Oresteia as a whole seems to bear this out. We follow the house of Atreus through intense suffering: adultery, child murder, cannibalism, the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, a decade of war, the murder of Agamemnon, the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus and finally, the guilt of matricide. Yet in the end justice is not only done, it is established on earth for the first time in an institution, the Areopagus. Law is born from violence. The furies are transformed to Eumenides. We have learned. We have become more civilized. Euripides’ plays do not support this teleology of suffering. In fact, Euripides inverts the Aeschylean formula in his Electra. Orestes says to his sister, Electra, before she recognizes him, that “there is no pity in ignorance, but [pity is present] in the wise among men. But too wise knowledge in the wise is not harmless.” (El. 294-6) While suffering can bring learning according to Aeschylus’ chorus, learning brings new suffering born of pity for Euripides’ Orestes. In other words, we do not transcend suffering through learning, we simply acquire more of it. For Euripides, there is no threshold beyond suffering, no end to redeem it. As we will see, suffering does not educate Electra or Orestes, it harms and deludes them. I. When we meet Electra, our titular character, she bears a heavy water pot on her head and laments dramatically, “O night, black night whose breast nurses the golden stars/ I wander through your darkness,” (54-55) We know at this point that she has been cast out of the royal house and is married to a farmer. Now she seems to be reduced to menial labor and we begin to feel pity. But this pity is undermined immediately: as she says, “I am not forced, I chose this slavery myself” (57) She is soon spotted by her new husband, the farmer and he asks her why she insists on doing heavy labor. The orders do not come from him. Electra does not have to bear the heavy water jar but chooses to: the action of the play opens with a self-pitying stunt. As she says herself, she wants to make Aegisthus’ arrogance visible by making her situation look worse than it actually is. Strange logic. Electra refuses to attend the festival of Hera on account of her clothes and even refuses the chorus’ offer of loaned garments to enforce her image of suffering (167-174). Later, Electra insists on showing herself as a slave to her mother, Clytemnestra, by offering to help her out of her carriage when her own Trojan slaves are suddenly absent (1004). Electra compares herself to the Trojan women brought back as slaves. Yet her situation is actually much different. She is still on Mycaenean soil, still able to live and die there and to worship the gods of her people. She is poor, but she is as free as she was before. She freely chooses to engage in conspicuous labors. Throughout, Electra willfully refuses to see anything in her situation but misery. She takes actions to make her situation look worse, to make things appear to others as they appear to her. By contrast, Sophocles’ Electra is portrayed as a victim with great inner strength. Her hate may terrify us, but it is understandable: she is trapped in a house with her father’s killers and subject to daily abuses. Euripides’ Electra may feel exiled and trapped in her poverty but �ultimately, her complaints appear shallow and materialistic. She is removed from any ongoing abuse and allowed a simple, honest life, the sort that Socrates’ Odysseus chooses for himself in the Myth of Er. The fact that she is constantly trying to make her rustic situation look like slavery is the surest proof that it could be borne more easily. Electra’s desire for revenge springs from two places, both delusions: her sense that the loss of her royal wealth harms her and her idealized love for the father she hardly knew, Agamemnon. These two causes are similar insofar as both are what we, after Marx, might call fetishes. When Electra mentions Aegisthus, the man who deposed her father, she says “[I] cry my pain to father in the great bright air” (59) She will mention Agamemnon again and again, idealizing him and stoking her rage for Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. But always her rage strikes a hollow note. Euripides systematically withholds a good reason for her point of view. She has been forced out of her house and married to a farmer, a great indignity that seems to have no precedent in the other tellings of this story. Yet what seems like a brutal blow that might presage her inevitable revenge is in fact an oddly good turn of fortune. Her farmer husband, despite his poverty, is a thoughtful, upright man who will not touch her and cares for her like a father. In fact, he cares for her better than the father she lost and now idealizes, Agamemnon. She notes how the farmer is “equal to the gods in kindness” (67) but when alone she laments her situation in high tragic tone. This introduces us to a dissonance that runs throughout the play between the way Electra and Orestes view the situation and the circumstances themselves. Euripides steadily erodes any clear moral imperative to revenge that the two children might have. While Aeschylus presents us an Orestes who is reluctant because he understands how serious his task is, Euripides presents Orestes as confused and lacking resolve. Aeschylus’ Orestes finally acts out of a deep piety, an understanding that the will of the gods, presented in the oracle, cannot be evaded. Hard as it is, he recognizes a greater plan at work. By contrast, Euripides’ Orestes acts when he is hounded into it by his deluded sister. He doubts the oracle, insisting that no god could ask him to kill his mother (970, 981).Electra insists the oracle must be true, but not out of any piety, for we have seen none in her, but because it serves her end. Orestes is driven to act when Electra accuses him of cowardice and forces him, out of petulance, to disprove her. No line better indicates Orestes’ combination of cowardice and blind trust in Electra than when he says, “what is our action now toward our mother? Do we kill?” (967) Even when he strikes, Orestes cannot face his mother, so he covers his eyes with his cloak (1221). He demands someone else deal with the corpse, wrapping it in the same cloak he used to cover his eyes from the deed (1227). Electra then wraps the corpse. All this underlines that he is ultimately presented as a tool of Electra’s hatred which, as we have seen, is hardly justified by the events and people of the play. Whatever obvious status the matricidal revenge had within the mythic canon has been wholly dispelled: Aegisthus and Clytemnestra are presented as flawed but reasonable, the murders as unmotivated. To drive this home, Euripides has both murders appear exceedingly cruel and impious.1 Aegisthus is killed while attending to a sacrificed bull. As he leans over and sorts through the organs, Orestes smashes his spine with a sword blow from behind. Clytemnestra is lured through a false rumor that Electra is giving birth. She shows genuine maternal interest in Electra and the 1 Froma Zeitlin, explores Euripides’ inversion of religious rites throughout the play: ”Celebration has proved an illusion and ritual sacrifice has become murder.” [Zeitlin, F. “The Argive Festival of Hera and Euripides’ Electra.” In: Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. Vol. 101, (1970) p. 659.] Most readings of this strange play (Conacher, Denniston, Pohlenz, Spira, Barlow, Thury) struggle to fit it into standard ideas of tragedy and so ignore some aspect of the unforgiving portrayal Euripides offers us. �baby. She begs for her life. Both victims are vulnerable and have tried to explain themselves and their actions in reasonable terms. We do not have the intense, gloating Clytemnestra or tyrannical Aegisthus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. We know that, according to the story, they must be killed. Where both Aeschylus and Sophocles build the case for the murder slowly and build the tension so that the act becomes inevitable, Euripides slackens the dramatic tension so that the murders appear not as revenge but as horror. Several signs indicate that the murders might have been avoided, perhaps not ultimately, but at least on these terms and by these means. Had Electra recognized that her situation was not as bad as she desired it to be or had Orestes the coward not been stung by the accusation of cowardice to abandon his justified doubt in the oracle, the murders would not have happened or would have waited on better motivations and perhaps been achieved by less brutal means. Castor and Pollux, gods and Orestes’ and Electra’s uncles, appear at the end of the play to resolve the action and remark, provocatively, that Apollo “knows the truth but his oracles were lies.” (1246) and that “Justice has claimed [Clytemnestra] but you have not worked in justice.” (1244).” Euripides presents the murders more as a result of Electra’s self-deception than any greater justice. The events of the play hinge on Electra’s greedy self-pity. Here, Zeus and Apollo weave their fate through such strange means that divine necessity appears like a bizarre mistake issuing from one person’s damaged psyche. II. Euripides’ treatment of the subject confuses the effect of the tragedy considerably. August Wilhelm Schlegel called Euripides’ Electra “a singular monument of poetical, or rather unpoetical, perversity.”2 Consider how Euripides handles the Aeschylean trope of Electra recognizing Orestes from his footprint’s similarity to hers. An old man tries to convince her that Orestes has returned but she stubbornly refuses to believe it: “You make me angry. How could rocky ground receive/ the imprint of a foot? and if it could be traced,/ it would not be the same for a brother and for sister, a man’s foot and a girl’s- of course it would be bigger.” (534-537) Euripides invites us to think about the unrealistic nature of the Aeschylean trope and even to laugh at it.3 An uncomfortable comic self-awareness bursts through the tragic artifice. This and moments like it are surely the target of Schlegel’s critique. And he is right, the Electra is a perverse play and barely resembles classic tragedy. But this does not mean it fails to achieve its intended effect. Because the character portrayals erode any self-understood moral high ground which might generate clear feelings of pity and fear, it must fail to satisfy the idea of tragedy as catharsis. The play is unfulfilling when judged as catharsis. But Aristotle, in his Poetics does not rest on the idea of cleansing or purification but builds, dialectically, toward “ekplexis” astonishment by knocking away what we think we know. Euripides’ Electra does this admirably, in that we steadily watch our ideas about the story and the tragic theater crumble away. We are 2 Lectures on Dramatic Art, Lecture IX. Schlegel also notes that in the Electra Euripides initiated the decline of “not only this or that genre, but [of the Greek’s] entire existence, in all arts, in constitution and laws, in private and public customs and actions.” 3 Electra recognizes Orestes by a scar instead, a nod, perhaps, to Eurykleia’s recognition of Odysseus in the Odyssey. Homer’s world is broad enough to embrace the serious and the comic, the fated and the incidental. If Euripides rejects Aeschylus, perhaps he does not reject Homer. Perhaps he means to pick up another, neglected thread in the Mythoi. �brought to question the characters and their motives and to wonder if there was any greater reason, plan, justice or purpose driving the action at all. It is, then, no accident that at the end of the play, Castor and Pollux, Helen’s brothers, remind us: “[Helen] never went to Troy. Zeus fashioned and dispatched a Helen-image there/ to Ilium so men might die in hate and blood.” (1281-3) Beginning at least with Stesichorus, some ancient Greek authors, including Herodotus, tell the story of the Trojan War with an important variation: Helen never really went to Ilium. 4 An Eidolon, a likeness of her, went instead while she was kept in Egypt for the duration of the war. Euripides seems to be the only tragedian to take this narrative variation up. In fact, he returns to it again and again. It is a leitmotif for him. It plays center stage in his Helen but also surfaces in the Electra. Why mention Helen’s Eidolon toward the end of the Electra? It seems to me that it serves to underscore the hollowness of human action. If the whole Trojan war was undertaken for a phantom, what of the miseries that come to the royal house of Atreus? Could they also be based on a misunderstanding? All this suffering is for an image, it has no real purpose, no achievable aim. Revenge, like war, is undertaken for a shadow.5 Seen this way, the Electra is not so much tragedy as black comedy.6 In the end, we have a sinking feeling that the whole thing could have been avoided, a feeling that is completely out of place in the tragic theater. Castor and Pollux tell Orestes and Electra: “Justice has claimed her but you have not worked in justice.” (1244) In the end, justice has been done, but we cannot enjoy it. This is a cardinal sin for a playwright, to refuse us our enjoyment, and Euripides’ Electra is roundly hated by critics for it. The Dioscuri reveal what Electra and Orestes have in store for them but there is no sense of future triumph in the court decision that will liberate Orestes from the furies. It is telling that the transformation of furies to Eumenides is not mentioned at all. This transformation is the crowning moment of the Oresteia and the proof that suffering leads to a better life. Euripides just lets the furies pass without fanfare: in killing Clytemnestra there was no victory to celebrate and there is no future victory to come. There is no Helen to retrieve. The dramatic work, instead of giving us a convincing, self-enclosed world, leaves us unsure and unsatisfied. It does this, in part, by failing to be a good tragedy. The work does not 4 Plato, Phaedrus 243a-b. Herodotus argues that Homer knew this variation as well, evidenced by his mention of Paris’ detour to Egypt in Book V of the Iliad. Homer chose not to use the Phantom Helen variation, according to Herodotus, because it did not fit as well with an epic poem. Herodotus, Histories II.116. More, to Herodotus the variation seems to be as old as the event of the Trojan War itself and to have been preserved in this variant form by the Egyptians. Herodotus’ reasons for accepting the Phantom Helen story told by the Egyptian priests cluster around the fact that it would have been “insane” for the Trojans to refuse to give her back to Menelaus. Thus they must not have had her. See Histories II.120. 5 What Euripides highlights, how the particular delusions connected to a situation of violence undermine any justice or moral clarity it might have, offers an elenchus, a refutation, of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. As with the socratic elenchus the point is not to come to new knowledge but to expose ignorance. And as Socrates’ interlocuters learn, the emotions that attend being refuted are unpleasant. 6 Schlegel notes what is obvious to most readers, that the Electra seems strangely close to comedy: “I could wish that the wedding of Pylades had been celebrated on the stage, and that a good round sum of money had been paid to the peasant on the spot; then everything would have ended to the satisfaction of the spectators as in an ordinary comedy.” (Lecture IX) The blurring of comedy and tragedy was probably deliberate. Euripides undertakes it in other plays as well. �magically transmute its suffering into pleasure, its furies pass away but are not transformed. The Electra performs for the theatergoer what Euripides’ other plays indicate: there is no redeeming purpose to our suffering. This is a hard lesson for liberal education to incorporate. If Euripides is right, education will not make our lives better. It will not make us happier or more self-actualized. It will find its own way to contribute to our suffering. Suffering will not teach us or improve us but will only warp our perception of the world. We could say, looking at the concluding moments of Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae that suffering, though it has no redeeming cosmic purpose, teaches us compassion for one another. When characters at the close of those plays recognize they have all suffered immensely at the hands of inscrutable gods, they forgive one another. A human community of compassion springs up in response to the absurdity of divine power. Yet here in the Electra, we do not have such a reconciliation. Apollo is blamed, the brother and sister will be pardoned. But they have not learned anything, not even how to suffer well. We are not graced with the benediction of the Eumenides. Orestes runs off, pursued by the furies and the Dioscuri fly away to Sicily to “rescue the salt smashed prows of the fleet” (1348), a reference, perhaps, to the disastrous Sicilian Expedition which Thucydides called “a destruction so complete [the report] was not thought credible.”7 This gives a reminder to the Athenian audience of contemporary suffering and the fruitlessness of war. 8 After such a dark reminder, the hollow, programmatic words pronounced by the chorus to close the play seem more like gallows humor than good advice: “Farewell. The mortal who can fare well not broken by the trouble met on the road, leads a most blessed life.” Andy Davis Belmont University 7 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 8.1. See Richmond Lattimore’s note on the chronology of Euripides’ plays in Euripides V. 8 Aeschylus, while exploring and probing the Trojan war, gives us a trilogy that ultimately justifies war. Euripides’ Electra, on the other hand, does not. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. 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Title A name given to the resource Helen's eidolon : learning and suffering in Euripides' Electra Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Andy Davis at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Davis, Andy Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Euripides. Electra Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004525 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ac43c2ffc0e5faed93b9d3084695047d.pdf fdc2be4b1f7827002e0a875d2c004417 PDF Text Text Learning to Flourish: A Philosophical Exploration of Liberal Education Daniel R. DeNicola Gettysburg College (This paper is essentially a distillation of my recent book by the same title. This seems appropriate, not only because—judging from sales—it is unlikely you have read the book, not only because it references St. John’s College, but primarily because it addresses directly the central question of this conference: the purpose of liberal education. From lecturing about these ideas on other campuses, I have, however, learned much that will shape this presentation.) I believe it is mistake to tout liberal education as an ideal, an archetype of education that is defined by specific content (whether by component disciplines, by its curriculum, or by a list of “essentials of cultural literacy”), by distinctive pedagogical methods or techniques, or by institutional type. All these have morphed through history in response to intellectual, social/cultural, and technological changes. To elevate some particular iteration of liberal education as the Platonic ideal is to misunderstand and misdirect both our philosophical and our educational tasks. �2 Rather, liberal education should be understood as a tradition of educational theory and practice—not in the sense of a hoary set of inherited rituals that we must preserve, but as a vital and still-evolving tradition. What distinguishes this tradition from others is its supreme aim: the purpose of liberal education is the development a compelling conception of a flourishing life and the cultivation of such a life. “Flourishing” has both subjective and objective markers. I would identify the subjective markers as a general satisfaction with one’s life as it is and an identification with that life; the objective markers are the possession of the capacities and goods that conduce to and extend the subjective markers. “Flourishing” requires the ability to function with excellence and efficiency in the world. This is a eudaimonistic account developed within the Aristotelian tradition, but I do not wish to carry all of Aristotle’s intellectual baggage. Critics might claim that I am smuggling in the notion of “the good life”—an aristocratic, hegemonic, sexist, and racist view of what life is best; a prescriptive vision that arrogantly assumes the moral and intellectual authority of educators and the righteousness of their efforts. I reject these misunderstandings of my meaning. I do not mean that developing a conception of a flourishing life requires the apprehension of a pre-existing ideal; nor do I imply that there is a single, universal vision of such a life. This goal is an individual achievement, though it affects and is influenced by others, and the result is a diversity of visions. Moreover, the hard-won understanding of flourishing one achieves will likely evolve with life’s passages and later learning—it continues as an infinite task. It �3 is another deeply misconception to assume that the quest for a flourishing life, the well-springs of liberal education, arise only in situations of elite privilege and comfort. Concern for one’s life and its prospects may arise in reflective solitude, amidst crippling poverty, in despair, when resplendent ideals of the good life have been shattered, even after great horror. On the other hand, I do accept the Aristotelian claim that a flourishing life implies sources, supports, arenas, and engagement that are communal. And, as he noted, there is no guarantee that learning to flourish will guarantee a flourishing life; success is contingent on luck and other factors beyond human control. Nonetheless, adopting such an aim governs many aspects of our experience and in so doing shapes our life and identity. Taking seriously the hope of a flourishing life leads immediately to questions about the components of and effective ways to prepare for and cultivate such a life. Grappling with these large questions leads to others: What is the human condition? What are our prospects? Who am I and who might I become? What is my relationship to others and what may I learn from their experience? What can I do in the world? Understanding how we might flourish requires knowledge of what is, what might be, and what ought to be. Navigating this network of profound queries from different vantage points, theorists of liberal education developed what I will call paradigms. These comprehensive visions set polarities in the philosophy of education, establish subsidiary aims, generate forms of educational discourse, inspire curricula, and guide pedagogy. �4 There are, or so I have dscerned, five historical paradigms of liberal education. They are not ordered in revolutionary succession like Kuhnian paradigms; rather they are co-present, competing, and sometimes conflicting. Each paradigm privileges certain intellectual skills and virtues; each proffers a distinctive form of liberation and vision of the educated person; each has its own liabilities. Much of the dynamism of the tradition of liberal education is produced by their shifting dominance and blend. They are all in play today, and most institutions claim to adopt all of them in some distinctive balance. Though they present quite distinct visions of liberal education, I will argue that they ultimately require each other. Here are the five paradigms: Liberal education is for:  the transmission of culture—for the absorption of the human experience as encoded in “texts”;  self-actualization—for the identification, actualization, or creation of a normative self;  understanding the world—for comprehending the facts and forces that shape our lives;  engagement with the world—for active, normative, and effective engagement with the world; and  acquisition of the skills of learning and the disposition to use them. �5 After a brief characterization of each, I will turn to their relationships, and conclude by consideration how this analysis clarifies our task as educators. The Transmission of Culture Culture is not transmitted genetically; it can be preserved across generations only through learning. Both cultural content and its transmission were greatly enhanced by the creation of texts, durable objects that encode human experience. This paradigm harbors the wisdom that absorbing this precious legacy is the best path to a flourishing life, perhaps even a constitutive component of it. More passive interpretations of the paradigm focus on the student’s acquisition of this heritage, and therefore privilege skills of comprehension: reading (and intelligent listening and viewing); attention to detail; proficiency in languages; and the skills of explication. More active versions add the need to comment, analyze, critique, and evaluate—even to join the intertextual conversation and contribute texts in one’s own voice—and they privilege the additional requisite skills. Human finitude necessitates some principle of selection: it is not possible to assimilate all texts. Whether one rejects the label of “great works” or not, criteria of “worthiness” under some interpretation must be applied in creating a curriculum. This is the paradigm that undergirds Whewell’s “permanent studies,” Hutchins’ “Great Books,” Adler’s “Great Ideas,” and Oakeshott’s “Immortal Conversation.”— and the vision of St. John’s College. It portrays the liberally educated person as one �6 who is culturally literate, who knows masterworks and a body of literature, who has facility in multiple languages (symbol systems)—who is, in short, a scholar. This sort of study, its advocates claim, furnishes the mind; its pursuit enlivens the intellect and expands the moral imagination; it is the best strategy for a flourishing life. It offers the student liberation: liberation from a timeless, meaningless, unconstructed present; from parochial prejudice and narrowness of vision; from a solipsistic life. Self-actualization Under this paradigm, liberal education is about the awakening and nurturance of latent capacities and qualities with each student that conduce to a normative self. It is a form of perfectionism. It exhibits subtle variations that intimate metaphysical differences in the conception of the self: its aim may be conceived variously as finding or discovering oneself, as self-definition, self-realization, self-actualization, self-formation, or even self-creation. It all begins, of course, with knowing thyself. What does one get from a liberal education? One gets one’s self, transformed. As Pindar once wrote, “Become who you are.” Thus, liberal learning shapes identity. Self-actualization offers us liberation from confused and imposed identities, from alienation and inauthenticity, from the disappointment of stifled, untested, or suppressed potential. In a flourishing life, one shapes and achieves one’s ownmost possibilities. �7 The curriculum, for this paradigm, is derived not from a canon of treasured works, but from the potential and promise of one’s students. In its most elaborated form, the self and its potential are individuated; in simpler (and more practicable) forms, some more generic notion of the self, of human potential, predominates. It is, nonetheless, a view that recognizes, even celebrates, difference and diversity; the desired educational outcomes are suitably particular. It privileges reflection, selfawareness, and the willingness to go beyond one’s current comfort zone. What may seem to be self-absorption likely gives way as liberal education reveals the social, communal dimensions of self-actualization, of dependence on others—and their selfactualization—for a flourishing life. An educated person is, therefore, one who is accomplished and authentic, continually engaged in explorations of self-development. This is the paradigm of Froebel and Montessori, of institutions like Summerhill and colleges like Bennington, Hampshire, and Evergreen. Understanding the World The focus moves now from the inner life to the outer world: liberal education is aimed at gaining understanding the world in which we live and the forces that shape our lives. It urges us to grasp the world as it is, on its own terms, and not as a projection of our fears and needs; this is a task that has what philosophers call a “mind-to-world direction of fit.” We cannot attempt to create a flourishing life if we are ignorant of how the world works, of the natural and social forces that affect our �8 lives. From our own bodies to the operations of influential institutions, we face the things of this world with wonder, curiosity, care in observation, respect for evidence, perceptivity in theorizing and knowledge-construction—these are among the virtues and skills this paradigm privileges. Success requires far more than the acquisition of facts; we must learn methods of inquiry and acquire cognitive frameworks—and multiples of these are far better than one. The paradigm thus suggests a curriculum that features a breadth of disciplines and seeks integration. The liberation offered here is from superstition, ignorance, and error; and such understanding can have an emotional impact as well, freeing us from reflexive fear and hostility. The vision of the educated person, now idealized as a polymath, is a person with a supple intellect, with broad interest in and knowledge of the ways of the world, the disciplines, and with currency in the natural and social sciences. Engagement with the World The fourth paradigm construes liberal education as a preparation for engagement with and action in the world. (Historically, “the world” has meant the public domain, not often the domestic.) The aim is personal effectiveness—and so it idealizes the educated person as one a committed agent, one who can act effectively and ethically to persuade others, to serve and advance worthy causes—to change the world or to labor in that hope. Civic engagement, social reform, political activism, public service, cultural critique—these and more are activities that are anticipated or �9 often embodied in the educational program. Curricular content devolves from a knowledge and critique of the state of the world in light of one’s values, along with the requisite capacities for personal effectiveness. To become liberally educated is to be liberated from powerlessness, false constraints, and social entropy; from helpless by-standing; to gain freedom of agency, the capacity to shape one’s will to the fulfillment of one’s best judgment, to take a stand and act on behalf of one’s values. This paradigm is exemplified in Isocrates’ school, but also in Antioch College and in the motto of “Princeton in the nation’s service.” Acquiring the Skills of Learning This last paradigm emphasizes the “arts” of “liberal arts” (the artes of artes liberalis; the technai of technai eleutheriai). Here there is less concern with content, more with acquisition of the transferable skills that are useful in learning anything. An educated person is one who has learned how to learn and who has the disposition to use relevant skills in learning throughout a lifetime. Of course, the relevant skills change with technology, but in today’s world we are likely to focus on reading comprehension, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, information literacy, critical thinking, communication and social skills, and related skills. �10 What motivates this paradigm is the recognition that the world is constantly changing, knowledge evolves, memory fades, and we cannot carry the knowledge from the past confidently into the future. We can, however, respond by equipping ourselves with the skills to learn whatever might be salient to a flourishing life. Acquisition of these skills holds out the promise of liberation from becoming outmoded, from cognitive entropy, and the ignorance and uselessness that may follow. The student gains the freedom of self-directed learning. I hope I have conveyed these paradigms as quite distinct, but comprehensive and coherent, visions of liberal education, differing in the skills and virtues they elevate, the locus of the curriculum, their ideals of the educated person, and the form of liberation they offer. Each is attractive, even compelling, but “thin”; they require instantiation, so they each can be a fertile matrix to spawn curricula, to influence pedagogy, even to shape institutions. Many familiar educational controversies arise out of their competition, but conflicts may also arise within a paradigm—for example, disputes over the contents of the canon in the Transmission of Culture paradigm, or disputes about the comparative value of different disciplines in the Understanding the World paradigm. As I said, the tradition of liberal education displays many iterations of theory and practice that reflect their competition, their shifting prominence, and the relationships drawn among them. �11 But they are not simply competitors. Ultimately, they seek the same end. It is perhaps easy to forget that these paradigms arise from the same supreme purpose: the development of a conception of a flourishing life and the cultivation of such a life. And they are intertwined: a vigorous champion of the assimilation of culture through an agonistic encounter with great texts might conclude (as Oakeshott did) by asserting that such study is the pathway to self-actualization. Similarly, an advocate of the skills of learning model may ultimate justify their position by the need for such skills in engaging the world. Beyond this, however, they seem to require each other: the questions each asks leads to the questions of others. How could one engage with the world without understanding it? How could one assimilate great works without the skills of learning? The distinctive liabilities and dangers that each paradigm carries are ameliorated by the strengths of others. For example, the temptation to selfabsorption of the self-actualization paradigm is corrected by the outward and more objective requirements of explicating the texts of others, or of understanding or engaging with the world. The hypnotism of the past that is perhaps a liability of a life devoted to masterworks is countered by the future orientation that undergirds efforts to engage, change, or reform the world. And so on. Most institutions today seem to claim a blend of most if not all these five paradigms; even those that elevate one usually imply that their signature paradigm is a gateway to the benefits of the others. �12 Finally, I want to claim that this account entails that liberal education is a deeply moral enterprise. First, the process of liberal education must meet ethical criteria, such as avoiding indoctrination and valuing the student’s integrity. Second, the supreme aim—a flourishing life—incorporates moral virtues and values. A flourishing life is, however, larger in scope than a moral life; it incorporates more than moral virtues and values. And finally, it is indirectly moral in that success in its subsidiary aims is relevant to, often essential for, moral activity. Expanding the moral imagination, knowing how the world works, seeing the larger picture and broader implications, developing one’s capacities and knowing how to learn, and having the skills of worldly engagement—surely these are components of moral education and enlightened moral agency. An emphasis on objectives and outcomes is meaningful only when our activities remain tethered to our aim. But this brings us to our educational task: each of us—each institution, each academic department, each faculty—carries the responsibility of regularly reinterpreting our vision of liberal education, of continuing the evolution and vitality of the tradition. What is educational quality, what serves the living of a flourishing life today? Each paradigm comprehends a plethora of further specification. Our work is to craft a blended version of these paradigms that suits our our intellectual, social, and technological context. This task itself reflects—and may embody—the process of crafting and cultivating a flourishing life. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 12 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Learning to flourish : a philosophical exploration of liberal education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Daniel DeNicola at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource DeNicola, Daniel R. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004526 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f18c6ec3677799e518ad0bac92c54268.pdf fca3565912f5ab3287e95c0343e60aef PDF Text Text “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue: Discussing Anselm’s Proslogion in the Religiously Pluralist Classroom” Christopher Denny, Associate Professor, St. John’s University—NY 1. Introduction I begin by asking for the inspiration of Anselm of Canterbury, taking a cue from the meditative prayer in chapter one of his Proslogion. If I was fortunate enough to have Anselm speak in my place this morning, I can imagine him saying, “Come now, conference participants! Let us flee for a while from the cares of academic specializations and research and publication protocols, casting aside these burdensome pursuits. Let us set aside time to enter the inner chambers of our classrooms and particular institutions, and there seek a pedagogical rationale for reading, discussing, and teaching religious texts within a liberal arts curriculum. For if we cannot offer a sustained and principled defense of the value of studying religion and theology in colleges and universities dedicated to free inquiry about fundamental existential questions, where will such intellectual practices occur?” “But alas! wretched as we are, those of us intent on preserving a place for theological inquiries in higher education are bowed down in the current educational context. For both vocal secular critics of religion and pious caretakers of religion have replaced the search for ‘that than which-nothing greater can be conceived’ with the conviction that religion and piety are primarily reified markers of personal and collective identity. Be it our goal to look past these assumptions and set our sights upon the search for the truth, wherever truth leads us.” �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 2 The secularization of American higher education, and the accompanying marginalization of theological study in college and university curricula, is a process that has been occurring for centuries, as George Marsden noted in his book The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.1 The causes for this marginalization begin with the desire of Protestant denominations in the colonial and Federal periods to downplay creedal disagreements among themselves. They continue during Americanized Romanticera attempts to locate the essence of Christian religion in interiorized piety and whiggish notions of progress, and reach a culmination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century initiatives to situate the university within a scientific paradigm in which achievement is gauged in terms of empirical measurement and technological ability. Marsden and other commentators have rehearsed this history in detail, and for many it may be a cause for commiseration. My purpose, however, is neither to bemoan these changes nor to praise them as the acme of modern liberalism. Rather I intend to argue that the secularization of Christian colleges and universities opens up new opportunities for reintroducing theology into the liberal arts curriculum in a religiously pluralist rather than in a confessionalist context. To illustrate these possibilities, I employ Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion as a test case, relying both on the text itself and also upon the historical environment within which the Proslogion was written, for Anselm too faced a profound shift in educational ideals during his day, and his writings indicate a need to confront a new See George Marsden, The Soul of the University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); James T. Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). 1 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 3 audience in the emerging scholastic classroom and a new method of doing theology. Rather than denouncing the transformation that theology underwent as it expanded beyond the monasteries, Anselm retooled theology. Liberal-arts practitioners and theologians would do well to follow his example. 2. Increasing Professional and Religious Pluralism in Anselm’s Context Recent scholarship in medieval educational history has supplemented an earlier focus on the role of Benedictine monasticism with greater attention to the importance of cathedral schools and the Ottonian and Salian imperial courts in fostering an approach to philosophy centered upon the study of Cicero’s oratory and service to the state. Stephen Jaeger’s recent study of primary source documents from the tenth and eleventh centuries challenges medieval histories of the liberal arts that marginalize contributions from outside the sphere of monastic education.2 A figure such as the monk-scholar Gerbert of Aurillac, for example, straddles the boundary between religious and secular education. Having left his position as abbot of the monastery of Bobbio, Gerbert spent his days teaching arts and rhetoric, until receiving the patronage of Emperor Otto III, with whose support Gerbert became Pope Sylvester II in the year 999. In his work On the Rational and the Use of Reason, Gerbert promoted a so-called “imperial philosophy” (imperialis philosophia), in which the logic and dialectic of Aristotle and Boethius were placed at the service of Otto’s court. While Gerbert had learned grammar at the monastery of Aurillac, his 2 See C. Stephen Jaeger, “Philosophy, ca. 950—ca. 1050, Viator 40/1 (2009): 17-40. �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 4 own introduction to logic came during his time at the imperial court and at the cathedral school at Reims studying with the teacher Gerannus.3 Although logic in these decades remained subordinate to a practical understanding of the liberal arts as a benefit for a career in secular administration, over time the influence of the cathedral schools filtered back into monastic settings, including the monastery at Bec where Anselm taught. Anselm’s teacher Lanfranc was a key figure in this development. Having come to this new monastery after studies in the liberal arts and law, as prior Lanfranc began to admit students who were not planning to enter a monastery, either at Bec or elsewhere, in order to raise money for the abbey.4 By the late eleventh century, a number of these students at Bec had entered administrative careers, bolstered by their studies in history and law.5 Anselm’s resuscitation of the literary dialogue in medieval Latin literature needs to be interpreted against this shift in the student population at Bec. Even though Anselm eventually reversed Lanfranc’s decision to admit external students at Bec, the use of dialogue manifest in Anselm’s early work De Grammatico (On See Richer of Saint-Rémi, Histories [3.45], vol. 2, ed. and trans. Justin Lake (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 66—71. 4 See Alex J. Novikoff, “Anselm, Dialogue, and the Rise of Scholastic Disputation,” Speculum 86 (2011): 387—418. The primary sources dealing with Lanfranc’s education, including the biographical material from Milo Crispin and Gilbert Crispin, are surveyed in H. E. J. Cowdrey, Lanfranc: Scholar, Monk, and Archbishop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5—10. 5 See Sally N. Vaughn, “Anselm, Lanfranc, and the School of Bec: Searching for the Students of Bec,” in The Culture of Christendom: Essays in Commemoration of Denis L. T. Bethell, ed. Marc A. Meyer (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 155—81. Also, see Novikoff, The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 3 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 5 Grammar) endured in his later theological dialogues, most notably Cur Deus Homo [Why God became Human?]6 Even an early work of Anselm’s such as the Proslogion, which is not composed in the genre of a formal dialogue with different literary characters, displays the transition from soliloquy towards dialogue and argument in the response that it generated and Anselm’s rejoinder. In the preface to this work, Anselm describes it as an alloquium, an address or allocution. In his later response to Gaunilo, however, Anselm appeals to those who have knowledge of disputandi argumentandique (debating, discussing, proving, arguing) to come to his defense against Gaunilo’s objections.7 Indeed Anselm’s entire literary output displays an evolution in the direction of debate, and there are for Anselm culpable and praiseworthy debaters. For example, in the beginning of his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word, Anselm distinguishes between the arguments of those who proudly deny what their intellects cannot grasp and the arguments of those who humbly live the Christian faith.8 By the time Anselm wrote the later Cur Deus Homo [Why God became Human], he no longer waits for the response from the likes of Gaunilo as he explicitly anticipates debate and organizes the first part of the dialogue around meeting the “objections of unbelievers.”9 Novikoff criticizes Richard Southern’s lack of appreciation of Anselm’s debt to Lanfranc on this point. See Novikoff, “Anselm, Dialogue, and the Rise of Scholastic Disputation,” 405. 7 See Anselm, Reply to Gaunilo 7. 8 See Anselm, On the Incarnation of the Word 1. 9 See Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, preface and 1. 6 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 6 3. Reading the Proslogion with Awareness of Religious Pluralism Interpretive awareness of Anselm’s transitional educational context helps to balance understandings of the Proslogion that reduce this work to an exercise in a completely interiorized version of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. The Proslogion certainly qualifies as such a search but one that is neither solipsistic nor exclusivist. Rather, once we know more about Anselm’s historical context, we can appreciate that Anselm’s search in the Proslogion is marked by an environment of religious pluralism and debates, but not debates that mirror our contemporary polemics between religious believers and skeptics. First, Anselm wrote this treatise against the background of the intra-Christian schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople that occurred in 1054, and the result of that schism continued to influence Anselm’s theological career, as he gave an address at the Council of Bari in 1098 crafted to convince Eastern Christians of the Latin doctrine of the trinitarian filioque, the procession of the Son from the Holy Spirit as well as from the Father. Second, Anselm was part of a generation of Christian theologians who were coming into increased contact with anti-Christian polemical works by non-Christian authors, much of which was in dialogue form. The Account of the Disputation of the Priest, a ninth-century Jewish text, is an example of this genre. The Account attacks the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation on the grounds that the divine nature is incompatible with such a religious teaching. At the beginning of his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word, Anselm refers to the writings of his fellow scholastic Roscelin, who at the Council of Soissons in 1092 was accused by Anselm and others of teaching tritheism. Roscelin’s nominalist �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 7 contention that the persons of the Trinity must be separate substances in order to avoid admitting that the Father and the Spirit would also have had to become incarnate alongside the Son is found in a work attributed to one of his contemporaries, the Islamic theologian al-Ghazālī. A dialogue format was precluded in On the Incarnation of the Word, as the work was addressed directly to Pope Urban II, but later in the dialogue Cur Deus Homo Anselm’s interlocutor Boso praises Anselm’s arguments for the Incarnation, claiming that it should serve as proof for Jews and pagans.10 Twentieth-century philosophers and theologians have split much ink and typeface over the issue of whether the Proslogion is an exercise in natural theology or, as twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth held, a priori theological support for those already initiated.11 One contemporary interpreter outlines such a dichotomous choice as follows: Loyalty to Christian identity remained for Anselm the first responsibility of theological interpretation and the only authentic basis for theological reasoning. Anselm would not have shared the belief that a progressive and sure epistemological foundation was at hand, immanently accessible, to which he could lead the unbeliever and from which they could share common assumptions.12 See Daniel J. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics against Christianity in the Middle Ages (New York: Ktav, 1977), 121—25; al-Ghazālī, Réfutation Excellente de la Divinité de Jesus-Christ d’après les Évangiles, ed. and trans. Robert Chidiac (Paris: E. Leroux, 1939); Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 2.22. 11 See Karl Barth, Fides Quaerens Intellectum, trans. I. W. Robertson (London: SCM, 1960). 12 Jeffrey C. Pugh, “Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselm as Contemporary,” Theology Today 55/1 (April 1998): 35—45, at 43. Later in the article Pugh writes, “Seeking to justify itself within its cultural context, it [theology] runs the risk of connecting its theology so strongly to the culture that its construals of God will diminish when the cultural forms it arose within pass into yet another” (44). By contrast, I hold with Catholic theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904—84) that “A theology mediates between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of a religion in that matrix.” 10 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 8 I must simply disagree. For Anselm, the criterion of theology is first and foremost the truth of God rather than the maintenance of religious identity, which is a derivative issue. Moreover, the narrator’s self-understanding shifts in the course of the Proslogion’s first chapter, as I will argue momentarily. Debates over the role of reason versus faith in the Proslogion would assume a helpful new guise if Anselm’s original audience was taken into account. Anselm was not addressing a group of eighteenth-century deists. Theology and philosophy, and the accompanying distinction between natural and supernatural knowledge, were not as clearly distinct as they would become some two centuries after his time. The fool he references from Psalms 14 and 53 does not provide a clear-cut case of religious atheism but according to the psalmist, an example of moral corruption. The pressing concern in the opening chapters of the Proslogion is what kind of god God is, a more intelligible concern given the religious differences in Anselm’s context. Let’s see what a reading of the opening chapters of the Proslogion can look like through an interreligiously informed hermeneutic. Anselm concludes chapter one with a quotation from Isaiah: “unless I believe, I will not understand” (nisi credidero, non intelligam; Is 7:9). This well-known verse is also included in Anselm’s letter to Pope Urban II at the beginning of his work On the Incarnation of the Word and clearly served as a guiding principle in his writings; it is often used as support for a fideist approach to the Proslogion.13 Yet there are Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), xi. 13 See Anselm, On the Incarnation of the Word 1. �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 9 too many other passages in Anselm’s writings that appeal to rational persuasion of non-Christians for readers to stretch Anselm’s citation of this verse into a global epistemological principle that would hold good for all persons.14 Anselm himself may begin reasoning from a position of religious faith, but many of his readers have not. The second chapter’s famous definition of God as “that-than-which-a-greatercannot-be-thought” acquires a different cast when it is accepted as a premise about God than as a self-evident proof or, as Kant held, an exercise in trying to derive existence from reasoning, a charge that would be better leveled against the argument for God in Descartes’s Third Meditation.15 As Katherin Rogers notes, Anselm’s theological premises are intended to achieve two goals at the same time: first, deepening the religious belief of insider participants, and second, persuading outsiders.16 While this definition of God is not separable from the religious belief of insiders, neither is it a neutral lowest common denominator. Since the definition is at its root apophatic, God as “that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought” by itself In addition to Cur Deus Homo 2.22, for another example see On the Incarnation of the Word 6. 15 Anselm, Proslogion 2, trans. M. J. Charlesworth, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, eds. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans, Oxford World’s Classics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87; see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A592/B620— A602/B630. A critique of Kant’s rejection of the “ontological argument” is given by Pugh, “Fides Quaerens Intellectum.” 16 See Katherin Rogers, “Can Christianity Be Proven? St. Anselm of Canterbury on Faith and Reason,” in Anselm Studies 2, eds. Joseph C. Schnaubelt et al. (Kraus International, 1988), 459-479, at 466. Also, note Brian Davies, “Anselm and the Ontological Argument,” in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, eds. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 157—77, at 174— 76. 14 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 10 reveals no positive content about God or about the image of God.17 The premise is analogous to the limit of a convergent mathematical sequence, especially given Anselm’s further assertion in chapter fifteen that God is “something greater than can be thought.”18 Human thoughts can approach God by way of comparison in the manner of a geometric asymptote, tending toward but never attaining identity with the divine. This apophatic claim therefore is also comparative, as the existence of God is only indirectly revealed by comparison with other thoughts. While the thoughts of Anselm and other religious participants are in large part determined by the specific content of their respective traditions, exemplified in the opening chapter of the Proslogion, the advantage of Anselm’s premise in chapter two for interreligious dialogue and debate is that this apophatic definition of God is not confined within any particular network of signs, symbols, or doctrines. Critics can rightly note that this apophatic approach means that the question of God’s existence is not one of evidence or of ontology, as pace many subsequent interpreters Anselm does not equate God with Being or with Existence. This is true, but this is precisely what lends Anselm’s misleadingly called ontological argument strength in a religiously pluralistic context. If the issue of God’s existence were to be settled by evidence empirical or metaphysical in nature, then the argument would necessarily acquire an esoteric character. If God were the same type of being as the hypothetical island that Anselm’s interlocutor Gaunilo posited in his short treatise On Behalf of the Fool, then the Proslogion could only be convincing to readers who Readers of Anselm’s Proslogion know that after chapter five there are several chapters characterizing God’s qualities, although these are followed by chapter fifteen’s assertion that God is greater than can be thought. 18 Anselm, Proslogion, 15, in Anselm of Canterbury, 96. 17 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 11 shared Anselm’s esoteric knowledge, a functional example here of what Gotthold Lessing termed “the accidental truths of history.”19 This would be the case with any knowledge received solely from scripture, tradition, or ecclesiastical authority. In assessing Anselm’s argument, Gaunilo was searching for categorical evidence to correspond to the idea of “that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought.” Finding no such correspondence, Gaunilo rejected the argument. In the Proslogion’s opening soliloquy, Anselm himself had pursued this course before shifting his focus. In chapter one, Anselm laments that visual confirmation of God’s existence is not forthcoming, writing: “By what signs, under what aspect, shall I seek you? Never have I seen you, Lord my God, I do not know Your face. . . . What shall Your servant do, tormented by love of You and cast off ‘far from Your face’ [Ps. 31:22]?”20 Unlike Gaunilo, however, Anselm’s consciousness of his wretched state moves him from seeking a vision towards recognizing his desire to encounter God, and Clive Barrett notes how the language in the opening chapter of Proslogion shifts from vision to conception as the prayer proceeds.21 Anselm prays, “I do not try, Lord, to attain Your lofty heights, because my understanding is in no way equal to it. But I do desire to understand Your truth a little, that truth that my heart believes and loves.”22 Colin Grant noted that for Anselm “the existence of God is a question of meaning, not of evidence”; this opening prayer marks a shift towards interiority and fixes meaning within the speaker’s desire for God, a desire See Gotthold Lessing, On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power, trans. Henry Chadwick (London: A. & C. Black, 1956), 51—53. 20 Anselm, Proslogion 1, in Anselm of Canterbury, 85. 21 See Clive Barrett, “A Careful Reading of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument,” Philosophy and Theology 23/2 (2011): 217—30, at 220. 22 Anselm Proslogion 1, in Anselm of Canterbury, 87, 19 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 12 that impels Anselm to think in a comparative manner that aims at constant transcendence of particular entities.23 Interpreted in this light, chapters one and two of Proslogion represent Anselm’s own liberation from what we can call the “epistemology of the fool” as defended by the likes of Gaunilo. The fool is one who does not make the transformation from exterior images to recognition of one’s internal neediness and desire for God, one who does not enter “into the chamber of your soul (in cubiculum mentis tuae)” to which Anselm alludes in chapter one of the Proslogion. The meaning that the idea of God holds for the thinker, however, is not to be equated with a subjectivist frame of reference, as if Anselm’s assertion in chapter two that to exist jointly in the mind and in reality is greater than merely mental existence specifically because of the power of the human mind. That would be to mistake Anselm for a modern philosophical idealist in the manner of someone like J. G. Fichte. Nor is meaning in Anselm’s sense of that word defined by a constructivist epistemological paradigm in which individual choice is the root variable that determines meaning. At the beginning of chapter three, Anselm claims “that-thanwhich-a-greater-cannot-be-thought” “cannot even be thought not to exist.”24 To his thinking the very process of thought compels the thinker and directs the mind towards a definite conclusion. In a contemporary world in which religious belief and unbelief hide behind terms of values and identity in order to avoid intellectual scrutiny, Anselm’s assertion relativizes without homogenizing the starting points of See Colin Grant, “Anselm’s Argument Today,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57/4 (Winter 1989): 791—806, at 794. 24 Anselm, Proslogion, 3 in Anselm of Canterbury, 88. 23 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 13 the Proslogion’s stakeholders in light of an external standard of measurement that the author regards as self-evident. This is the mirror image of much contemporary religious agnosticism, in which believers and unbelievers homogenize their differences by subsuming them beneath a functional antinomy of sorts, a socialized framework of tolerance in which each side agrees that it must disagree with the other side because no rational conclusion can be reached. 4. Conclusion The possibility for a discussion about the Proslogion among Christians and non-Christians and among religious believers, religious non-believers, and religiously uncommitted students hinges upon mutual willingness to embrace what Gyula Klima has called “constitutive reference” as opposed to “parasitic reference.” The latter option is a staple in the methodological naturalism that reigns in the social sciences and the humanities in the contemporary academy. When we refer to an entity parasitically, we do so by reference to what others think about that entity without sharing in their conceptions about it. Constitutive reference by contrast is the act by which we intentionally refer to an entity by the mental description that we ourselves have of that entity, without such a description being determined by reference to other people’s thoughts.25 Much could be said about the logical and epistemological consequences of this distinction in reading Anselm. For my purposes, I would like to call attention to the implications of this distinction for a religiously pluralist classroom. To read Anselm “constitutively” rather than See Gyuma Klima, “Saint Anselm’s Proof: A Problem of Reference, Intentional Identity and Mutual Understanding,” in Medieval Philosophy and Modern Times, ed. Ghita Holmström-Hintikka (Boston: Kluwer, 2000), 69—87, at 77—83. 25 �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 14 “parasitically” in this case means that teachers and students engage Anselm’s argument directly rather than burying it beneath historicist and theological assumptions that exemplify parasitic references. Examples of such parasitic references would be shoehorning the Proslogion into a mold of medieval thought or a mold of exclusively Christian philosophy or theology. Parasitic references can also be determined not by the text itself but by the academic setting in which we read Anselm, when for example the Proslogion is characterized predominantly as part of the Great Books heritage or the Roman Catholic tradition, or as a medieval classic. The Proslogion is part of all these groupings, but to leave off at that point marks a failure to address Anselm’s claims on their own merits. Some may fault my thesis as paying short shrift to the communal context within which books are read. That is a point worthy of further discussion. While the communal and ecclesial presumptions with which we read Anselm are important and inevitably influence our reading of his texts, I think that those assumptions become debilitating when they are determinative of our readings, especially in educational contexts in which formerly confessional or religiously orthodox institutions have transformed themselves into more pluralist and secular schools. I do not claim that this development has been a positive one on balance, but as Marsden notes, it has happened whether religious believers like it or not. Given his willingness to engage religious outsiders real and imagined in his own era, Anselm provides twenty-first century students with a model for how creedal belief �Denny, “From Doubt and Decline towards Dialogue,” page 15 and sincere dialogue can coexist in the university classroom nine centuries after his time.26 26 I give thanks to Mr. Paul Rezkalla for research assistance with this paper. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 15 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From doubt and decline towards dialogue : discussing Anselm's Proslogion in the religiously pluralist classroom Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Christopher Denny at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Denny, Christopher D. (Christopher Douglas) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Anselm, Saint, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1033-1109. Proslogion. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004527 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/30d21c3c382fd6b78fb316aebfad6ed5.pdf b989951906f76e2a8bb13e241321076b PDF Text Text DRAFT The Mutual Involvement of Modern Science and Modern Philosophy and Its Implications for Liberal Education by Michael Dink I. The Philosophic Interpretation of Liberal Education, Socratically understood In his magisterial historical study, Orators and Philosophers,1 Bruce Kimball argues that the tradition of liberal education is not a unified one, but rather is divided into two opposing interpretations, that of the orators and that of the philosophers, each of which has prevailed in certain periods at the expense of the other. The oratorical interpretation, traceable to Isocrates, sees the goal as the development of virtuous and effective citizens, public servants, and even statesmen and the means as learning the arts of language, particularly of rhetoric, or persuasive speech. The philosophical interpretation, traceable, at least as an ideal, to Plato’s dialogues, sees the goal as the pursuit of knowledge and the means as the learning of the arts of logic, mathematics and dialectic. Kimball argues that the so-called seven liberal arts of the trivium and quadrivium never formed a unitary program, but the primary, almost exclusive, focus was on rhetoric in one tradition and logic and mathematics in the other. To put my cards on the table, I am an unabashed advocate of the philosophic interpretation of liberal education over the oratorical one, although I understand the true sense of that tradition somewhat differently than Kimball does. My reasons for rejecting the oratorical tradition are all present, implicitly or explicitly, in Plato’s Gorgias and never answered adequately by any of the advocates of that tradition. First, the proposed end is contingent and dubious. It is not clear, prior to some amount of inquiry, that citizenship is necessarily a good or the most important good for human beings. Second, it is not clear what the virtue of a good citizen consists in. An oratorical education must dogmatically presuppose answers to these questions, as Kimball acknowledges, since it does not engage in inquiry into them. Third, no argument is offered for the unlikely claim that mere training in persuasive speech constitutes an education in civic virtue. Fourth, it is not clear that there is a genuine art of persuasive speech. If the philosophic interpretation of liberal education merely makes knowledge its goal, then it is to some degree open to analogous objections: 1) knowledge might be regarded as a contingent and dubious good; 2) it may not be clear what knowledge is or even if it exists; 3) however one might conduct a philosophic liberal education, it is not clear that it can lead to knowledge; 4) it is not clear that there is any learnable art or technique to philosophy. Hence, if the philosophic interpretation of liberal education is not to fall prey to the same critique as the rhetorical interpretation, it must be based on a different understanding of the aim of a philosophical liberal education. I find such an understanding in certain aspects of Plato’s presentation of Socrates. 1 Kimball, Bruce. Orators and Philosophers:A History of the Idea of Liberal Education. New York, 1986. 1 �Socrates supposes, correctly I believe, that all human beings care about guiding their lives by a correct understanding of their own good. More often than not, however, they act as if they had an adequate of understanding of that good. When he questions them, however, they invariably show that they do not have such an understanding. He then asks them to join with him in a common inquiry in search of such a correct understanding. This common inquiry into a correct understanding of one’s own good is precisely what constitutes a genuine liberal education. It need not presuppose that knowledge is possible or good, only that the lack of an adequate understanding of our own good is not good. In his youth, Socrates famously cherished a hope that the teaching of Anaxagoras might reveal why it was best that everything was as it is. When that hope was disappointed, he turned away from the inquiry into nature to examine the truth of things in speeches. In the Apology, we see at least one version of this inquiry through speeches, in which he takes upon himself, in response to an enigmatic reply from the Delphic oracle, the cross-examination of those who claim to know [about the human good]2. This makes sense as a place to start in the inquiry into the correct understanding of one’s own good. This is precisely the basis of the form of liberal education that focuses on the reading of great books. Those great books are read because they put forward the most significant claims to know about the human good that are available to us. They are read because we want to understand and to evaluate their claims to know, so as either to find something that will contribute to the correct understanding of our own good or at least to have reasonable grounds for rejecting their claims. The claims that they make are significant and worthy of examination for two reasons. First, the fact that they have been found worthy of reading and study by many people over a long time gives them a prima facie claim to be taken seriously as possible sources of wisdom. Second, the same fact also suggests, what further reading and reflection confirm, that they are the sources, acknowledged and unacknowledged, of many of our own beliefs about the human good, which need to be examined to determine how reliable they are. That examination is facilitated by tracing these beliefs to their sources, where they are often most powerfully and cogently articulated. Thus, contrary to Kimball’s claim, the reading of great books is not merely an accommodation of the “liberal free” ideal of critical thinking to the rhetorical tradition’s interest in inherited texts, but is an intrinsic part of the Socratically understood philosophical interpretation of liberal education. II. The Place of Modern Science in Liberal Education, in its Socratic interpretation So far, it may seem that modern science would have no place in a liberal education Socratically understood. After all, the young Socrates, disappointed in Anaxagoras’s failure to address the human 2 This specification of the content of the claims to know is not made in the text of the Apology. Nonetheless, it is suggested both by Socrates’ choice of those to be examined about their claims to know (politicians, poets, and craftsmen) and by his strenuous disavowal of any interest in “the things in the heavens and beneath the earth.” 2 �good, turned away from the inquiry into nature. In the Apology, the claims to know he examines are those of the politicians, poets, and craftsmen, not those who claim to have knowledge of nature or the cosmos. Yet it is not clear from the text of the Phaedo that Socrates regarded his turn away from the inquiry into nature as final or definitive. Rather, he describes his turn to speeches as a “second sailing” in search of cause and compares it to studying something by examining its reflection rather than by looking at it directly. Moreover, the desire to achieve a correct understanding of one’s own good inevitably leads to a concern with the distinction between knowledge and opinion and to the consideration of whether opinions about one’s own good can be replaced by knowledge. This concern in turn leads inevitably to a broader concern about the nature of knowledge and how it might be achieved. Hence any serious claim to knowledge, about any subject, becomes relevant to the Socratic inquiry into one’s own good. In today’s world, moreover, it is modern science that makes the most prominent claim to know, so prominent that its very name is an appropriation to itself of the Latin word for knowledge, an appropriation which seems to mark an implicit claim to be the only legitimate kind of knowledge, a claim made explicit by many of its advocates. One might object, however, that modern science does not claim to know about the human good, and thus does not belong in a liberal education conceived as an inquiry into the human good. To this, it must be replied that the claims to know of modern science are relevant to the inquiry into the human good in a number of ways. First, those who do interpret modern science as the only legitimate claim to know and as eschewing claims to know about the human good, thereby declare knowledge of the human good to be impossible. This is a claim highly relevant to the inquiry into the human good. Second, even if modern science is not interpreted as excluding other avenues to knowledge of the human good, it is nevertheless hard to deny that the claims it does make, under many interpretations, alter the landscape of that inquiry in fundamental ways, threatening to undermine appeals to, for example, the human soul, teleology, freedom, and human superiority to or even distinctiveness from other animals. Third, by its great success in increasing human power over nature, including perhaps even over human nature, modern science intensifies the urgency of the questions about what understanding of the human good can guide and restrain the use of that power. III. Modern science requires interpretation It has been a presupposition of my remarks so far that there is such a thing as “modern science,” which is significantly distinct from earlier forms of the inquiry into nature. This is a presupposition widely, but perhaps not universally, shared. It is shared both by those who think modern science has replaced the darkness of superstition and vain philosophy with the light of empirical reason and by those who think that modern science threatens to strip the world of any support for a meaningful human existence. An alternative is to see the inquiry into nature as a long standing human practice that has undergone continuous change and development in the course of human history with varying degrees, not necessarily monotonically increasing, of cognitive success. Attention to this diachronic continuity, however, should not induce us to neglect the question of synchronic discreteness. In other words, how discrete and distinct 3 �is the thread identified as “the inquiry into nature” at any one time in relation to other inquiries, beliefs, and cultural practices? There is a plausible case to be made, though no doubt not a definitive one, that the following cluster of ideas emerged roughly at the same time in the Greek speaking region of the eastern Mediterannean: the idea of demonstrative mathematics, the making of a clear distinction between nature and convention, as well as between knowledge and opinion, the attempt to gain knowledge of nature, and the quest for knowledge that comprehended both non-human nature and the human things, i.e., philosophy,. From this time forwards, there were debates about, and rival answers to the question, of how knowledge of nature might relate to other kinds of human knowledge, beliefs, political arrangements, and practices. One set of answers, originally given by Aristotle, kept alive by Islamic and Jewish thinkers, and reconciled with their religious texts, traditions and practices in various ways, was reassimilated in the 12th and 13th centuries by Christian thinkers, who incorporated them into a theoretical synthesis with their religious beliefs. This scholastic synthesis contained a version of Aristotelian natural philosophy as the widely accepted framework for any ongoing inquiries into nature. No doubt, there were some practitioners of inquiry into nature who either ignored this framework or were beginning, more or less consciously, to chafe against and start to wriggle free of it. Some thinkers, however, notably Descartes and Bacon, thought that radically new modes of pursuing the inquiry into nature were desirable, and that the old framework was, on many levels, an intolerable obstacle to the introduction and success of these new modes. They therefore undertook the task, correspondingly multi-layered, of articulating the new modes of inquiry, critiquing the old framework, providing a new framework, and persuading many different kinds of audiences of the feasibility and desirability of abandoning the old framework, permitting and even supporting the new modes of inquiry, and accepting the new framework. It is, of course, a complex historical question as to what the actual effects of these efforts by Descartes and Bacon were, and to what extent the modes of inquiry now practiced by modern science were influenced by their proposed articulation, and to what extent the various competing frameworks by which we still seek to understand these modes of inquiry and how they fit into our lives, were influenced by the frameworks proposed by Descartes and Bacon. While I am myself inclined to think that their influence in both respects is quite important, albeit not simply governing, the main point I want to insist upon is that the activity of inquiry into nature, in spite of, and perhaps to some degree because of, its tendency to claim to be comprehensive, has always stirred up questions about its proper place in relation to the rest of human activity, belief, and aspiration to know. In other words, modern science, no less, and perhaps more than its ancestors, stands in need of, and has had no lack of, interpretations, in which attempts are made to address the questions it provokes. A liberal arts study of the modern science version of the inquiry into nature must concern itself with these questions and with the interpretations that seek to answer them. To study modern science apart from them is no less fatally illiberal than the failure to study modern science at all. IV. Some interpretative traditions in making philosophical sense of modern science 4 �While I have acknowledged that there is room for doubt about the importance of Descartes and Bacon for the development of the practice of modern science, it seems to me that there is much less room for doubt about their importance for the tradition of the interpretation of modern science. I would therefore like to sketch the roots in Descartes and Bacon of three strands of that interpretative tradition: epistemological, ontological, and political. Embedded in the methodological account of the new modes of inquiry that they advocate are a number of epistemological claims. First, inquiry cannot begin from the everyday common sense interpretation of the world, and especially not from the Aristotelian philosophical codification/transformation (corruption?) of this interpretation. Some of the things that need to be rejected include: the reality of sensory qualities (color, warmth, hardness, softness, etc.), the articulation of objects into readily recognizable natural kinds, and as things with properties (explained as composites of matter and form), the explanatory priority of life to non-life, and the explanatory power of ends in relation to living things. Second, the form which knowledge must take is that of a law of action, and, in Descartes’s case, a mathematical law of motion. Third, the method for arriving at these laws will be primarily experimental, that is, questions must be posed to nature such that experiments can be contrived whose observable results will answer the questions, negatively or positively. Fourth, there is some methodological divergence between Descartes and Bacon, the former asserting the possibility of deduction from self-evident principles down to a certain point after which experiments then become necessary, the latter insisting on extensive and methodical induction before any ascent to axioms is attempted. The subsequent history of modern epistemology seems to flow primarily from this point of divergence, centering on the relative contribution of a priori, formal, deductive reason, on the one hand, and observation through the senses of experimental results, on the other. Emphasis on the former put one in the “rationalist” camp, on the latter, in the “empiricist.” Kant made an attempt at a grand synthesis, attributing the possibility of coherent experience of a law-governed world, and hence of science itself, to a priori principles of the human understanding as the synthesizers of a manifold of sensory input under the a priori forms of space and time. Kant’s grand synthesis was in part undermined by particular results of modern physics, i.e., challenges to causality and locality in quantum physics and challenges to the independence and uniformity of space and time in relativity. This epistemological divide had an even more dramatic version on the ontological level, but not without the mediation of more particular Cartesian claims that went beyond the methodological ones cited above. From methodological skepticism about the categories and content of ordinary experience as the starting point of science, inevitably arise questions about the character of the objects known by modern science and the relationship of these objects to the objects of ordinary experience. Descartes’ answer to this question was clearer, more radical, and more influential than Bacon’s. In order to secure certainty and clarity for his new science, Descartes stipulated that its object must be that which we conceive clearly and distinctly about body, i.e., extension, figure and motion. This excluded from the object of Cartesian physics both soul and form, while reconceiving matter as nothing but extension. But since Cartesian science required a knower, as well as a known, he claimed to demonstrate the existence of a thinking substance, utterly distinct from body as extended substance. Descartes drew the explicit consequence that plants and animals, and humans insofar as their motions do not differ from animal motions, must be understood as machines, i.e., as complexes of matter in motion completely understandable on the basis of 5 �the laws of motion. Meanwhile, the sensory perceptions that were formerly understood as receptions of form from external objects, resembling and hence conveying information about those objects, were reconceived as modes of the thinking subject, bearing no resemblance to external objects, and only problematically understandable as effects of those objects. The ontological upshot was the separation of being into two self-contained and independent realms: one of bodies, as nothing but extended shapes, causing motion in one another according to certain laws, the other of “ideas” or “mental contents” which might also have causal relations among themselves. While Descartes himself proposed that there was interaction between these two realms at a single site within the human brain, most in the subsequent tradition abandoned this claim because of the great difficulties in giving an account of this alleged interaction. Those, like Hume, who followed Descartes in regarding the “ideas” as the source of all evidence, found, when thinking consistently, that it was impossible to make any inference beyond the realm of ideas to the existence of a realm of bodies. Taking this bull by the horns, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl all elaborated forms of “transcendental idealism” in which all knowing ultimately became a knowing, by a transcendental, or non-worldly, self, of a “world” constituted by itself. The alternative path was to take some version of the Cartesian science of body as the starting point and to pursue the task of accounting for everything else as merely complicated consequences of the interactions of bodies moving according to the laws of motion, where everything else includes human behavior, consciousness, and knowing. This path can be called “materialist reductionism,” although the conception of what constitutes the “matter” to which everything is to be reduced, has been subject to constant revision due to developments within modern physics. There is even a question as to whether there remains any intelligible content to the notion of matter other than the object of the equations of physics. The advocates of “materialist reductionism” have included some philosophers, e.g., Hobbes, many practicing scientists, and many popularizing advocates of science. Since it is hard for most of us, who are not bent on drawing out the logical consequences of prima facie untenable positions, to find any of these three alternatives (dualism, idealism, materialism) acceptable, many have turned to some version of what I would call an “anti-realist” solution. What these various versions have in common is an epistemological starting point that denies that it is possible, or perhaps even meaningful, for human beings to know “the way things are” or “what kinds of beings there are” or “what the world is really like.” One well-known advocate of the anti-realist standpoint, Richard Rorty, has famously debunked the realist tradition under the rubric: “Philosophy: the Mirror of Nature.”3 Here’s a rough catalogue of some of the more prominent forms of anti-realism.4 Logical positivism, a slightly cleaned up version of Hume, presumes that there are entities called “sense data” which are the only true “givens,” and that science simply consists in the development of procedures for reliably predicting which sense data will follow certain others. Instrumentalism is a more general version of this, one not committed to interpreting the field of prediction as consisting of sense data. Pragmatism 3 Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, 1979. 4 I am indebted to the following book for assistance in articulating this catalogue. Laudan, Larry. Science and Relativism: Some Key Controversies in the Philosophy of Science. Chicago, 1990. 6 �emphasizes that what is predicted is not just observational results, but results that matter for our practical lives. Wittgenstein offers a linguistic pragmatism, claiming that language, and hence any set of beliefs expressed in language, is meaningful only insofar as it functions as a practical tool. These positions restore a certain priority to the contents of ordinary experience, even though they differ as to the status of those contents. For better or for worse, these anti-realist positions tend to weaken the claims of modern science to a special or unique authority. As a more effective tool for prediction, it stands on a continuum with other tools of prediction, such as ordinary non-methodical experience. It no longer has any critique to offer of other kinds of beliefs, except to point out that they offer less reliable predictions than science does. If there is to be such a critique, it must come from the anti-realist philosophers. To some it seems that the superior reliability of its predictive powers still gives modern science a stronger claim to the honorific name of “science,” albeit stripped of its former pretentions of incorrigibility and of ontological revelation. To others, however, this predictive power is a warrant of belief not radically different from other warrants, and that the inevitable consequence, again for better or for worse, of an anti-realist interpretation is a general relativism about claims for warranted belief. Richard Rorty is perhaps the most well-known thinker to allege this consequence. Let us now return to the third interpretive strand: the consequences of modern science for moral and political questions. This has two “sub-strands”: the political conditions and consequences of the pursuit of modern science and the consequences of the content of modern science and its ontological interpretation for the content and status of moral beliefs. Descartes and Bacon saw themselves as confronted with a situation in which political authority was connected with religious authority which was connected with theological beliefs which were connected with philosophical beliefs including beliefs about natural philosophy. They were thus understandably concerned with the consequences of seeking to promote new modes of inquiry which would require a change of prevailing beliefs about natural philosophy. These included the consequences for themselves and for others who might pursue the new modes of inquiry, as well as consequences for the stability and order of society, when beliefs understood to be foundational were questioned. They dealt with these concerns in a number of ways. First, to some extent, they attempted to conceal or to mitigate the tension between the new modes of inquiry and the current political and religious order. For example, in the Discourse on Method, Descartes claimed to be reforming only his own thoughts, he presented the world of his new physics as an imaginary one, and he claimed to provide proofs for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul on the basis of his new philosophy. Second, thinkers subsequent to Descartes and Bacon5, beginning at least with Spinoza, began to argue for the possibility and desirability of the separation of religious belief and political authority, and/or the separation of religious belief and natural philosophy. Hence new modes of natural philosophy would not be a threat to religious belief, or at least not to political authority. Third, an important feature of the new modes of inquiry advocated by Bacon and Descartes was the promise that they would confer on mankind new powers over nature for the benefit of mankind and the relief of his estate. This promise was offered as an incentive, not only to 5 Bacon himself had a somewhat different approach. 7 �tolerate the new modes of inquiry, but to support them with funds and even, perhaps, institutions for education and research. But this very promise of conferring on mankind greater power over nature made all the more urgent the question of how to arrive at an understanding of the human good that could regulate and guide the use of this power. While modern science’s promise of increased power made this question more urgent, some of the interpretations of modern science seem to make the possibility of answering it more problematic. At the very least, the rejection of Aristotelian natural philosophy entailed the rejection of a kind of bridge, however shaky, between natural philosophy and moral philosophy. If man, like other natural beings, had a form or nature which determined the character of his activities and their excellence or perfection, then knowledge of this form or nature would provide a way of coming to know his good, understood as the excellence or perfection of his natural activities. In addition, the reductionist materialist interpretation of modern science, if consistently adhered to, simply rules out any meaningful discussion of questions of the human good. To be sure, one might regard the bulk of modern moral and political philosophy as an attempt to avoid this consequence. Once again, it is Kant who gives a clear articulation of the dilemma and an impressive attempt at a solution. He sees the threatened incompatibility between the necessity and universality of causal connections demanded by science and the freedom to act one way or another required by human morality. His solution involves a sharp separation of both the self and the world into phenomenal and noumenal aspects, the former the realm of necessity, the latter the realm of moral freedom. Unfortunately the solution depends on a problematic interpretation of Kant’s already problematic epistemology. To the extent that the anti-realist interpretations of modern science weaken its epistemic distinctiveness and universalist pretensions, they might seem to open up a space in which to investigate questions concerning the human good. But insofar as the weakening of the epistemic claims of modern science tends towards a weakening and relativizing of all epistemic claims, the space opened up threatens to empty out of anything except the play of opinions. This rough survey of the philosophic interpretations of modern science reflects my own opinion that, at present, none of the available interpretations is satisfactory. Hence, in my opinion, the quest for such a satisfactory interpretation remains one of the most urgent tasks of philosophy, and hence, one of the most urgent subjects for liberal education. 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 "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The mutual involvement of modern science and modern philosophy and its implications for liberal education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Michael Dink at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dink, Michael Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004528 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/15d483e71169580f1e203bbf174b8dc4.pdf 343fe9fd9badf212c7c779dbc3d39de1 PDF Text Text The Reformation of Philosophy and the Cultivation of Taste: An Interpretation of Hume’s Essays by Derek Duplessie This paper will, by way of an examination of Hume’s Essays, endeavor to relate Hume’s critique of philosophy and his efforts to supply a new foundation for the sciences to his endorsement of the study of liberal arts. Of particular relevance here is Hume’s essay, “The Sceptic.” The title of the essay immediately confronts the reader with a difficulty: does “the sceptic” designate the topic of the essay, the posture of the author of the essay, or both? Although the essay’s title suggests that the essay itself might continue on to adumbrate the characterizing features of a particular philosophic school and its constituents—this essay does, after all, appear alongside essays entitled The Platonist, The Stoic, and The Epicurean—it is quickly made manifest that the essay will be concerned with articulating the grounds for skepticism regarding philosophy in general. What, then, are those deficiencies of philosophy which recommend a skeptical disposition towards the entire enterprise? Hume’s first and, perhaps, primary critique of the philosophers can be expressed as follows: Philosophers err in their failure to recognize the basic incongruity of the boundedness of human speculation on the one hand, and the vast multiplicity of nature’s processes on the other. In its attempt to provide an articulation of the natural whole, philosophy in fact obfuscates nature through its demand that the great variety of natural phenomena be artificially organized under a small set of rational formulae. The philosopher’s treatment of human life serves as a test case for or, perhaps, as the most conspicuous instantiation of this error. According to Hume, the philosopher fails 1 �to pay due notice to the great variety of inclinations manifest in human nature in his determined insistence that “his own pursuits are always…the most engaging, the objects of his passion the most valuable, and the road which he pursues the only one that leads to happiness” (Pg. 95). The philosopher’s failure to recognize the great diversity of human inclinations causes him to prematurely and dogmatically affirm the philosophic life as the best life, precisely because it is the life best suited to his particular temperament. According to Hume’s analysis, philosophy yields but one principle that can be considered “certain and undoubted”: “There is nothing, in itself, valuable or despicable, desirable or hateful, beautiful or deformed; but that these attributes arise from the particular constitution and fabric of human sentiment and affection” (Pg. 97). It turns out, then, that the cardinal philosophic insight is precisely that which Hume faults the philosophers for overlooking in the opening paragraphs of the essay. Hume likens the diversity of experiences of the “desirable and hateful, beautiful and deformed” to the diversity of judgments with respect to food, and to the privilege which a lover accords to his beloved, and a parent to his child. The insight into the subjectivity of such judgments—into the phenomenon of “taste”—compels us to wonder whether philosophy can make use of this insight in its onward march? Or, can philosophy as pursuit of the universal be modified so as to account for the particularity of human tastes? Hume ventures an answer to this question, noting in the first place the fundamental difference between natural science and mathematics on the one hand and the “science” of the beautiful and the ugly on the other. To illustrate the point, Hume describes the cast of mind appropriate to the study of astronomy. He writes, “If I examine 2 �the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, I endeavor to give them, in my conception, the same relations that they bear towards each other in the heavens” (Pg. 99). In the case of natural science, there is a real, if elusive, standard against which the truth or falsity of the mind’s determinations can be brought into relation. The relationship of the human spectator to the object is markedly different in the case of the beautiful and the ugly, the desirable and the odious. Unlike those natural bodies which are the object of natural science, aesthetic and moral “objects” cannot be studied with a disinterested gaze, since their very apprehension occasions pleasure and pain. The being of these objects depends upon their being a certain way for us—pleasure and pain, praise and blame always supervene with the experience of these aesthetic and moral objects. Whereas the mind can make use of a natural standard in its pursuit of natural objects, the mind in pursuit of aesthetic objects must recognize that the attribution of aesthetic and moral significance is made possible as a result of the sentiment of the subject, and that “this sentiment must depend upon the particular fabric or structure of the mind, which enables such particular forms to operate in such a particular manner, and produces a sympathy or conformity between the mind and its objects” (Pg. 100, emphasis added). The repeated invocation particularity in this discussion once again gestures towards the earlier mentioned defect of philosophy—in its clumsy effort to apply universal principles to particular instances, it fails to recognize, and therefore to account for, the particular as particular. To illustrate the insufficiency of an excessively ratiocinating or universalizing account of the beautiful—of an account which fails to collapse the sentiment of the 3 �subject and the aesthetic object—Hume describes the mathematician who reads the Aeneid and succeeds in understanding every detail of Aeneas’ voyage yet manages to remain ignorant of its beauty. Hume writes, “He knew, therefore, every thing in the poem: but he was ignorant of its beauty, because the beauty, properly speaking, lies not in the poem, but in the sentiment or taste of the reader.” The mathematician is capable of understanding everything and nothing about the poem simultaneously. The beautiful will remain forever elusive to any inquirer who seeks to locate it in the character of the object alone without considering the way in which the object, if it is in fact an aesthetic object, is conditioned by the peculiar passions of the subject who assigns the epithet, “beautiful or deformed, desirable or odious.” A turn to the passions ends up being the natural way forward in the wake of Hume’s treatment of philosophy’s shortcomings, since as Hume has already indicated, the passions are at the center of both phenomena that philosophy fails to capture: philosophy fails both to notice and to account for the phenomenon of taste, or in other words, for the multiplicity of human inclinations. Likewise, philosophy fails to account for the phenomenon of beauty because it seeks the principle of beauty in the object rather than in the subject. Philosophy’s failure on both accounts would seem to have much to do with its neglect of the passions—philosophy cannot account for the particularity of inclinations and tastes because it cannot account for the particularity of the passions, and philosophy cannot account for the beautiful, because it cannot account for the subjective passions which transform a common object into an aesthetic object. So at this point in the essay, having already indicated the bankruptcy of every universalizing, object-oriented account of beauty, Hume’s focus shifts towards “passion” 4 �and “enjoyment.” He writes, “All the difference, therefore, between one man and another, with regard to life, consists either in the passion, or in the enjoyment: and these differences are sufficient to produce the wide extremes of happiness and misery.” The character of passion and enjoyment is, then, apparently the key to understanding the very diversity of human inclinations that eludes the philosophers. Recall Hume’s earlier claim that the “infirmity” of philosophers is most conspicuous “in their reasonings concerning human life, and the methods of attaining happiness” (Pg. 95). This riddle can evidently be solved only through meditating on the play of particular passions and the objects towards which are affixed. Despite the skeptical posture that Hume assumes towards the attempt to apply universal principles to human life, he nevertheless provides a general, if “imperfect sketch” of the passions as they relate to human happiness. According to him, happiness demands that our passions be neither too violent nor too remiss. In addition to this desideratum, enjoyment requires a suitable object. Hume writes, “But where the temper is the best disposed for any enjoyment, the object is often wanting: and in this respect, the passions, which pursue external objects, contribute not so much to happiness as those which rest in ourselves; since we are neither so certain of attaining such objects, nor so secure in possessing them. A passion for learning is preferable, with regard to happiness…” (Pg. 102). Even a moderate temper cannot guarantee enjoyment if that temper is directed towards objects outside of the self—an external focus creates a space for the intervention of fortune’s capricious hand. Much of the remainder of the essay is concerned with enumerating the reasons for philosophy’s incapacity to directly bring about happiness through its instruction. Hume 5 �imagines a man naturally endowed with a “perverse frame of mind” who possesses none of the social passions, is unmoved by an affection for virtue and humanity, and has no particular desire for the applause and esteem of other men. Regarding this unfortunate human type, Hume writes, “I know not how I should address myself to such a one, or by what arguments I should endeavour to reform him…My philosophy affords no remedy in such a case…but then I ask, if any other philosophy can afford a remedy…Experience will soon convince us of the contrary” (Pg. 104). On the basis of this understanding of the utter impotence of philosophic principles to serve as a catalyst for the transformation and refinement of the passions, Hume concludes, “I will venture to affirm, that, perhaps, the chief benefit which results from philosophy, arises in an indirect manner, and proceeds more from its secret insensible influence, than from its immediate application” (Pg. 104). Philosophy’s beneficial effects can be harvested only through engaging in philosophy, not through the appropriation of any philosophic doctrine. To clarify this point, it will be necessary to say a bit more about the specific ways in which participating in philosophy can have a salutary effect upon the passions. Hume’s most explicit statement on the issue goes as follows: It is certain, that a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts softens and humanizes the temper, and cherishes those fine emotions, in which true virtue and honour consists. (Pg. 104-105) Notice, in the first place, that Hume’s discussion has for the moment substituted out philosophy for the science and liberal arts more generally. Serious study of the arts and sciences, by tempering the violent passions, reinforces the virtues that make that life possible to begin with. 6 �The discussion once again turns to address philosophy in particular. The difficulty with philosophy as a solution to the problem of human happiness is that, as beneficial as its indirect effects tend to be, philosophy rarely can rest satisfied with affecting circumstances only indirectly. Philosophy all too often transfigures itself into a set of rigid doctrines that, at best, have no effect upon the passions and, at worst, eradicate the good passions along with the bad, thereby standing in the way of the attainment of happiness. Let’s begin with the first, benign case. If philosophy turns out to be merely useless it will be on account of the paradoxical nature of all philosophical prescriptions: every theoretical insight passed along as an antidote to the tempestuous passions must be either natural and obvious, or it must be unnatural. If the insight is natural and obvious, the philosophic investigation is simply unnecessary. If the insight is unnatural, it will be useless because incapable of altering the natural affections. These sorts of philosophic reflections will prove too remote from practical life to affect any genuine and permanent transformation. Hume continues on to present a graver possibility still. Even if philosophers were able to advance insights capable of affecting human life, the general application of these principles would prove as toxic for the virtuous passions as they are for the vicious. “[Philosophic reflections] are, for the most part, general, and are applicable to all our affections. In vain do we hope to direct their influence only to one side…they will operate throughout, and spread an universal insensibility over the mind” (Pg. 107). It suffices to note that Hume’s critique of philosophy always takes the form of a critique of philosophic doctrines. 7 �It looks, therefore, as if his affirmation of philosophy as an activity distinct from the production of universal doctrines is, at bottom, an affirmation of skeptical philosophy, and, indeed, Hume’s own way of proceeding appears to instantiate this approach. Recall that Hume asks his readers at the outset of the essay to esteem his “opinion” as little as he himself does. This is precisely the opposite disposition as that of the philosophers who are at the center of Hume’s critique—those who have such confidence in their doctrines that they dogmatically attempt a universal application. In summary, Hume’s skepticism of philosophy engenders, not a wholesale rejection of philosophy, but a critical preparatory step towards the establishment (or, perhaps, reestablishing) of a different way of philosophizing; an approach that is experientially furnished and self-questioning. At this point, even despite the highly qualified character of his recommendation of the life of reflection, the reader may legitimately wonder whether Hume is guilty of reenacting the same error that he faults the philosophers for committing early on in the essay: Hasn’t Hume just endorsed his own way of life as being the most conducive to happiness in the face of ample evidence that other men are capable of living happy lives without engaging in reflective pursuits? In defense of Hume, allow me to venture a provisional response to this objection: In the first place, Hume demurs from going so far as to say that the life of study is the pleasantest for everyone. It is only so for “some tempers.” A more significant point of difference between Hume and the dogmatic philosophers is that, while the others’ endorsement of the philosophic life is premised upon an ignorance of the particular passions and their determinative role in bringing about particular enjoyment, Hume’s endorsement of the philosophic life is made on the 8 �basis of his awareness of the central importance of the passions—his recommendation of philosophy is premised on his claim that engaging in a life devoted to education can indirectly temper and refine the passions, thereby making them more conducive to happiness. A remaining issue is of course that the life characterized by learning is available only to a small few, and philosophy is of no use to those who are not actively engaged in it. How ought the greater part of humanity to go about refining the passions? It appears as though participation in the liberal arts and sciences may produce an effect similar to that produced by skeptical philosophy. Indeed, skeptical philosophy, as recognizing the significance of passion and particular humor in human life, may very well be extended to actually include the arts more generally—Hume’s essays, at very least, would appear to have much in common (at least in their aim) with other works of artistic genius which also endeavor to capture the particular and passion filled character of human experience. An extension of philosophy such that it is able to incorporate the arts also extends the way of life that philosophy represents to a wider swath of humanity—indeed it extends philosophy so far as to, at least potentially, include what Hume calls the “conversable world” which participates in the arts. Hume’s endorsement of the liberal arts more generally comes to light in relation to his emphasis on the great influence of fortune in human affairs. This point comes out most clearly in Hume’s essay, Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion, in which he draws a distinction between these two different species of delicacy. The delicacy of passion, according to Hume, makes those who possess it “extremely sensible to all the accidents of life, and gives them a lively joy upon every prosperous event, as well as a piercing 9 �grief when they meet with misfortune and adversity” (Pg. 10). This quality gives rise to a volatile temper, very much subject to the whims of particular circumstances. Hume insists that there is no one who would not rather possess a “cool and sedate temper,” since, “Good or ill fortune is very little at our disposal…Great pleasures are much less frequent than great pains” (Pg. 10). Because fortune is not under our command, it will always be well advised to hope for a moderate temper, but the acquisition of such a temper requires that those possessing delicacy of passion make efforts to pacify this peculiar sensibility. Hume presents a second sensibility, “the delicacy of taste”, as parallel to the first and yet capable of moderating the former’s pernicious effects. Just as delicacy of passion produces a sensitivity to prosperity and adversity, those who possess delicacy of taste are characterized by an acute sensitivity to “beauty and deformity.” The cultivation of delicacy of taste, according to Hume, is the best antidote to delicacy of passion. He writes, “I am persuaded that nothing is so proper to cure us of this delicacy of passion as the cultivating of that higher and more refined taste, which enables us to judge of the characters of men, of the compositions of genius, and of the productions of the nobler arts…and this is a new reason for cultivating a relish in the liberal arts” (Pg. 11). This claim recalls Hume’s statement in The Sceptic that the chief triumph of philosophy is that “it insensibly refines the temper, and it points out to us those dispositions which we should endeavour to attain, by a constant bent of mind, and by repeated habit” (Pg. 105). Cultivating delicacy of taste through engagement with the liberal arts guards men against the adversities of fortune in two slightly different ways: it tempers the extreme passions which threaten to render life intolerable in the face of misfortune, and it requires 10 �us to turn our gaze towards and find satisfaction in works of genius, which are themselves not subject to the cruel determinations of fortune. This brief digression was intended to expose the kinship between Hume’s description of the effect that engagement in the philosophic life has on the passions in The Sceptic, and his description of the effect that participation in the liberal arts more generally has upon the same in Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion. The concurrence of these two accounts suggests, to this reader at least, that if Hume does not already regard philosophy and the arts to be intimately related, he certainly appears to be engaged in a project to diminish whatever distance remains between the two. This effort is related to what appears to be a larger project to reform moral philosophy so as to equip it to be capable of addressing human life in all of its particularity. The particularity of human life owes to the particularity of the passions and the objects of those passions, and these passions are as much responsible for the experience of moral beauty as they are for the experience of any other sort of beauty. As such, ethical thinking must be brought into relation with aesthetic thinking, and towards the end of establishing this relationship, the skeptical philosophic approach to human life must become extended to include the study and practice of the arts, the mimetic representation of the very passions which set ethical life into motion. Related to this philosophic project to bridge the theoretical gap between moral philosophy and the arts is another social project that Hume undertakes to negotiate between the “learned” and “conversable” worlds. The learned world includes the solitary men who are engaged in difficult operations of the mind, while the conversable world includes those who are characterized by “a sociable disposition, and a taste for pleasure, 11 �an inclination for the easier and more gentle exercises of the understanding, for obvious reflections on human affairs” (Pg. 1). The detachment of each of these worlds from the other has a dual effect: It results in the impoverishment of the conversable world and in the utter irrelevance of the learned world, mired down as it is in a theoretical morass of its own making. In short, a conversable world insulated from learning is a world that has nothing to converse about, and a learned world that is sheltered from common life is a world in which genuine learning has either ceased or ceased to be good for life. That the elimination of the space between these two worlds is a central aim of Hume’s essays is announced in his essay, aptly titled, Of Essay Writing. Hume writes, It is to be hoped that this league betwixt the learned and conversable worlds…will be still further improved to their mutual advantage; and to that end, I know nothing more advantageous than such Essays as these with which I endeavor to entertain the public. (Pg. 2) Hume’s entertaining and accessible essays endeavor to bridge the distance separating these two worlds by stimulating intelligent conversation among the conversable. These sorts of essays can elevate the minds of those engaged in common life, thus preparing the conversable world for the cultivation of the higher arts which temper the vulgar passions and contribute to the virtuous disposition. A conversable world that is engaged with the liberal arts together with a learned world that recognizes the theoretical need—a need particularly salient for moral philosophy—to meditate on the particularity of common life establishes a fertile ground upon which a reformed, skeptical philosophy which both benefits and benefits from society might blossom and augment the enjoyment of the learned and the conversable alike. 12 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 12 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The reformation of philosophy and the cultivation of taste : an interpretation of Hume's Essays Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Derek Duplessie at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Duplessie, Derek Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Hume, David, 1711-1776. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004529 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f06e1b8dd24f8d5791b8bd16c66f21a3.pdf bf746c2f7d68cc3683810f0040071796 PDF Text Text Metaphor and Innovation: A (Reluctantly) Instrumental Case for the Liberal Arts Rob Goodman Ph.D. Student, Columbia University October 16, 2014 This is a paper about how liberal education can make a strong case for its usefulness— and, secondarily, about why it should not have to make such a case. It is generally and rightly considered unfair to begin a paper like this with the weakest and ugliest version of the argument to be criticized. But it is equally unfair to wish this version of the argument away or to understate its prevalence, especially when it will ring so familiar to anyone who has studied the liberal arts. A kind of scholarly bias in favor of the most respectable interlocutors can blind us to the contempt, and even anger, that can mark the conversation about liberal education happening all around us. With that in mind, here is a classic of the genre, a comment posted on an online article that raised the topic of art history: Your art history major was the culmination of 12 years spent in school prepping for college only to get there and realizing you’re not cognitively astute enough to actually make it through any form of program where you were graded on something other than your worthless opinion on how someone did what they did…you realized that your mental abilities amounted to the lowest rung of collegiate cop out degrees and the only prescription for your mental illness was more art classes and less of the CRITICAL THINKING classes a more scientifically polished mind could handle…when you graduate, and I need a cup of delicious fair trade organic bold roasted hipster goodness, I’ll know what coffee shop to find you as you will surely be the barista making it for me. Here’s a tip, go back to school and actually do something this time…it’s time to swallow your pride and eat some science.…Math and science. This country needs more people who can do it and not read blogs on it in between their painting sessions. 1 [Sic.] These are familiar tropes in what we can call the “contempt for the liberal arts” literature. Those of us who study the liberal arts have a unearned sense of cultural superiority. We are intellectually unqualified for more serious and lucrative fields. We will be punished for these sins by the market. Above all, the liberal arts are useless. In more presentable forms, these arguments play a dominant role in our national discourse on education. We see them in plans, like one recently proposed by the governor 1 “Swedish Art Gallery Holds First Art Auction Based on Emotions,” Gawker, July 5, 2014 (anonymous comment on article), http://goo.gl/NlekXM. 1 �of Florida, to charge higher state college tuition for fields like English and history. 2 We see them in unsubstantiated warnings of a “STEM shortage” and its imminent danger to our economy. We see them in the 21st-century version of xenophobic “Yellow Peril” rhetoric, “the idea that China and India are churning out an unstoppable army of engineers who will render the United States incapable of competing”—alongside the implication that studying the liberal arts under such conditions is vaguely disloyal. 3 We even hear them in President Obama’s remark that “folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” 4 Beneath this discourse, there are deeper currents: age-old dichotomies between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, 5 between the “useful arts” (or even “servile arts”) and the liberal arts, or the much more recent distinction between STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and every other discipline. (An entirely different paper could be written on the process by which mathematics, once supposed to be the purest and most unearthly of disciplines, was conscripted to the service of the useful arts.) In other words, both defenders and critics of the liberal arts are inheritors of an ancient argument—and I have no wish to discredit the critics by associating them with the least palatable version of their case, the version with which I began. I only want to suggest that defenders of the liberal arts do their own case a disservice when they ignore the very real public resentment of their disciplines. The ancient argument is, in large part, one about usefulness and uselessness; and at this cultural moment, the very notion of uselessness is an object of anger. I would suggest that advocates for the liberal arts confront this anger in two ways. First, there is a very strong case to be made that the dichotomy between useful and liberal is flawed: that the technical progress that so occupies critics of the liberal arts in fact relies to an unexpected degree on the metaphorical and figurative thought that the liberal arts excel in cultivating. But second, and more ambitiously, liberal studies ought to lead us to challenge many accounts of education as an instrumental good. *** 2 Alison Griswold, “Majoring in the Humanities Might Soon Cost You More in Florida,” Forbes, January 18, 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/alisongriswold/2013/01/18/majoring-in-the-humanities-might-soon-costyou-more-in-florida. 3 Freddie deBoer, “STEM: Still No Shortage,” Medium, November 27, 2013, medium.com/i-m-h-o/stemstill-no-shortage-c6f6eed505c1. 4 Scott Jaschik, “Apology from Obama,” Inside Higher Ed, February 19, 2014, www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/19/professor-art-history-receives-handwritten-apologypresident-obama. President Obama later sent an apology note to one of the art history professors who objected to the statement. 5 For a short history of this debate, see Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 271-76. In the early modern era, for instance, shunning the vita activa was described as “barbarous isolation, illiterate, inferior, fruitless, infertile, treasonous, inhuman, rotting in laziness, sterile, unjust, vain” (quoting from sources including Petrarch, Bruni, and Alberti). Of course, we get a sense of the shifting contours of this argument from the fact that those who launched such attacks were themselves humanists and would likely be the victims of similar epithets in our time. 2 �Technical innovation tends to enter the world wrapped in metaphor. As the philosopher Owen Barfield put it, “When a new thing or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing object which most closely resembles it.” 6 Barfield was describing a problem in historical linguistics: whenever old words are applied to new objects, the task of reconstructing ancient cultures from their vocabularies grows muddied. As an obvious example, he pointed out the absurdity of assuming that the ancient Celts used internal combustion engines just because they would have understood the word “car.” In reality, “car” has come to us through a chain of metaphors, from chariots to wagons to wheeled vehicles in general to our current usage. Our vocabulary for technology is suffused with metaphor: we carry miniature computers in our pockets and still call them “phones,” we “dial” them, and we “plug” them into sockets and “charge” them (in the way that wagons and cannons were once charged) with something that is electricus or amber-like (because amber rubbed with a cloth gives off static). 7 This is a story, however, of more than etymological interest. I would suggest that there is more to be learned about the ways in which change in metaphor plays a causal role in technical change—in which language does not merely describe but conditions innovation. 8 As a very brief case study, consider the metaphorical history of the hot-air balloon. In particular, I want to link two important moments in that history, those of conception and of explanation. In 1777, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier was watching clothes drying over a fire when he noticed a shirt swept up in a billow of air. Six years later, applying the same principle of fabric filled by heated air, he and his brother demonstrated their hot-air balloon and accomplished the first manned human flight. 9 In Paris, a grand monument was planned in their honor; though the project stalled in its earliest stages, a five-foot clay model still exists, sculpted by the artist Clodion soon after the first balloon demonstrations. At first glance, it is hard to see that the modeled clay depicts a balloon at all: the body of the object is encrusted with layers of tiny, winged cherubs. They appear to make the machine fly under their own power: they stoke the fire at its base, waft up in gusts of air, and propel it with their wings. Two full-sized angelic figures (perhaps Fama and Aeolus) cling to the top of the fabric shell: one blows a herald’s trumpet, and another 6 Owen Barfield, History in English Words, rev. ed. (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 1967), 24. Brian Baigrie, Electricity and Magnetism: A Historical Perspective (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 7-8. 8 There is a significant literature on metaphor as productive of new knowledge, and, more recently, on the practical applications of metaphor in computing design, a topic I discuss below. See, e.g., Pippin Barr et al., “A Semiotic Model of User Interface Metaphor,” in Virtual, Distributed and Flexible Organisations: Studies in Organisational Semiotics, ed. Kecheng Liu (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2004); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Aaron st Marcus, “Metaphors and User Interfaces in the 21 Century,” Interactions 9(2) (2002): 7-10; Christian Nill and Vishal Sikka, “Modeling Software Applications and User Interfaces Using Metaphorical Entities,” CEUR Workshop Proceedings 159 (October 2005); and Bent Sørensen, “The Concept of Metaphor According to the Philosophers C.S. Pierce and U. Eco—A Tentative Comparison,” Signs 5 (2011): 156-85. 9 Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation 1783-1784 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983), 15. 7 3 �supplies the lateral motion by puffing up his cheeks and blowing, straining himself as if it would take all of his effort to overcome the weight of the dangling babies and make the contraption move. 10 To judge by our standard categories, we have in that brief history a moment of science and a moment of art: one productive and valuable, one superfluous or at least parasitical. But consider again those cherubs and the very real problem they are solving: representing human flight to a world in which actual human flight is only months old. Imagine the model blown up to monumental size and stripped of its cherubs in the name of “realism”: to an audience that had never seen a balloon, it would most likely resemble a lopsided sphere standing incomprehensibly on a pedestal. When Clodion sculpted his model, a fire-powered, human-carrying sack of fabric was entirely new—but flying cherubs were old. Putti had been soaring across the ceilings of Europe’s churches and palaces for centuries. 11 As Barfield observed, it is often only in terms of the old that the new makes initial sense. Without the putti, the balloon monument would likely have been unintelligible; with the help of their metaphor, a flight powered by angels rather than expanding air, an object as alien as a flying machine was domesticated into a familiar visual culture. Clodion’s metaphor played the role of explaining, even justifying, Montgolfier’s balloon. More importantly, though, the processes that brought both objects into being would seem to have a great deal in common. They both demanded conceptual leaps from old to new, and from like to like: the insight that turned a balloon into a piece of Rococo art was not so different from the insight that turned a billowing shirt into a balloon. This is what I mean by innovation conditioned by metaphor, not simply described by metaphor after the fact. (Incidentally, this process can be iterative, as well, as new objects and concepts grow old and are redeployed as metaphors in their turn. In 1906, Paris finally erected a balloon monument to commemorate the flying messengers of the Franco-Prussian War. 12 By then, of course, balloons were familiar enough that no symbol of flight, angelic or otherwise, was required. Balloons, in fact, had become metaphors of their own, as in “speech balloons,” or the verb “to balloon,” which took on the meaning of swelling up in the 19th century.) But perhaps more interesting for our purpose are the negative cases: cases that demonstrate the harmful effects of metaphors that are somehow defective. By defective metaphors, I mean those so dulled by familiarity that they constrain our sense of the possible, even as we have lost sight of their artificiality: they function like Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles.” And I suggest that these cases might reward our attention the 10 For an illustration of the model, see Clodion, “Model for a Proposed Monument to Commemorate the Invention of the Balloon,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collectiononline/search/199410. 11 See Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 12 Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870-1997 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 54. 4 �most just because uncovering and exploring the implications of metaphor is an activity for which scholars and students of the liberal arts are already well prepared. Consider, in another brief case study, the birth and death of the computer “desktop.” For at least a generation, our desktops have been almost exclusively imaginary: we hardly ever use the word to refer to the surface of a desk. In the days of the earliest graphical user interfaces, though, the comparison of a computer to a piece of office furniture was unfamiliar enough that it had to be explicitly spelled out for consumers. “First of all,” read one of the earliest Macintosh print advertisements in 1984, “we made the screen layout resemble a desktop, displaying pictures of objects you’ll have no trouble recognizing. File folders. Clipboards. Even a trash can.” 13 When the image was still fresh, a computer interface resembled a desktop; now, it just is one. And yet, once interfaces were desktops, it seemed to grow progressively harder to imagine that an interface could be anything else. An image that once explained now constrained, as became clear in the commercial failure of early-generation handheld computers. As Mike Kuniavsky writes in his survey of computing design, one of the most notable failures of these early mobile operating systems came as a result of taking the desktop metaphor far too literally. The Magic Cap OS debuted on Sony and Motorola tablets in 1994. On startup, the user was confronted with an image of a desk housing a touchtone phone and a rolodex. To access other applications, the user clicked out of the “office,” navigated down a “hallway,” and poked into a variety of “rooms.” The internet browser was a further trek: down the hallway, out of the office building, down the main street to the town square, and into a diner, where the internet was represented by a poster. This largely unworkable system illustrates, Kuniavsky argues, how “the metaphor that seemed so helpful may start creating more problems than it solves.” 14 In comparison, why do so many of us find the current generation of mobile operating systems much more intuitive? As in the case of Montgolfier and Clodion, at least two categories of explanation are available to us. A kind of technological determinism would point to the development of cheap and lightweight touchscreens in the decade after Magic Cap’s debut. But an account more sensitive to the effects of language would argue for the priority of a conceptual leap that made the technological leap feasible: abandoning a worn-out metaphor. In this account, users had grown so used to the language of desktops, folders, recycling bins, and so on that they had ceased to readily call to mind objects outside of computers. The metaphor had served its purpose, and rather than being reflexively adhered to, it could be discarded. Where the designers of Magic Cap took the desktop metaphor for granted, the designers of iOS de-naturalized it: that is, recognized it as a human creation that could be manipulated or abandoned. Now, I have no desire to hold up the iPhone as the pinnacle of civilization—only to suggest that this step of de-naturalization, recognizing metaphor as metaphor, is far more demanding than it seems in retrospect. I would argue that there is a history of 13 Mike Kuniavsky, Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design (Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2010), 27. 14 Ibid., 40-42. 5 �technological failures, misfires, and dead-ends to be written as a history of metaphor: of the capacity of language to inhibit and constrain as much as it inspires. 15 And this sense of constrained possibilities has an import well beyond the details of our gadgets. For instance, as Kuniavsky observes, the metaphor of “cloud” computing suggests an amorphous vapor that “extends beyond our reach and does not have a defined shape or boundary. Events that happen in the cloud may be outside the control of any one person in it.” 16 Does the image of data stored in a cloud temper our expectations of privacy? 17 In this sense, taking a critical stance toward our technology—whether the stance of the inventor who hopes to improve on it, or of the social critic who questions the assumptions and demands it makes of us—requires a critical stance toward the language habitually used to describe it. 18 And of course, the patron saint of this criticism remains Orwell, with his admonition that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Perhaps most corrupting of all is a careless attachment to those metaphors Orwell called “dying”: not the newly vivid ones (like “desktop” in 1984), nor the truly dead ones that have ceased reminding us of images at all (like the “hands” of a clock), but those that retain a metaphor’s power to direct and constrain our thought without being immediately apparent as such. 19 Because yesterday’s object in need of explanation can 15 While it is not my goal to sketch such a history here, it might include such landmarks as the decadeslong persistence of the “horseless carriage” metaphor in car design, long after bodies resembling carriages had ceased to be necessary. (“Incredibly,” Rolf Harms and Michael Yamartino write, “engineers kept designing the whip holder into early models before realizing that it wasn’t necessary anymore.”) It might also include the persistence of seafaring metaphors for spaceflight, which arguably helped draw funding and attention away from more productive unmanned exploration. Last, such a history might one th day include a discussion of self-driving cars unnecessarily cast into the shapes 20 -century sedans and minivans, and ultimately displaced by new competitors that choose to jettison such metaphors. See Harms and Yamartino, “The Economics of the Cloud,” Microsoft, November 2010, www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/presskits/cloud/docs/the-economics-of-the-cloud.pdf. 16 Kuniavsky, Smart Things, 30. 17 Similarly, the image of a desktop is, in its way, a message about the kind of people who “ought” to use computers: our computers presume, at the very level of their language, that their users are the kind of people who spend their time at office desks. 18 The same could surely be said for metaphors in politics as well as in technology. For instance, one experiment showed that changing a single word in a news report on crime—describing crime as either a “virus” or a “beast”—led to a significant change in the anti-crime policies subjects proposed in response. “Participants who read that crime was a virus were more likely to propose treating the crime problem by investigating the root causes of the issue and instituting social reforms than participants who read that crime was a beast. Participants who read that crime was a beast were more likely to propose fighting back against the crime problem by hiring police officers and building jails—to catch and cage the criminals— than participants who read that crime was a virus.” Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky, “Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning,” PLOS ONE, February 23, 2011, 10.1371/journal.pone.0016782. For a broader discussion of the power of “framing” effects in political discourse, and the normative questions raised by this power, see Dennis Chong and James N. Druckman, “Framing Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 103-26. 19 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in A Collection of Essays (New York: Harvest, 1981), 156-71. An important predecessor in this line of thought is Jeremy Bentham: see Bentham, Handbook of Political Fallacies (New York: Crowell, 1971). Of particular interest is Bentham’s discussion of the abuse of metonymy as a “eulogistic covering,” in which the interests of concrete political actors are subsumed under more palatable abstract nouns (e.g., The Crown, The Law, The Court, Property). As Bentham writes, 6 �become today’s metaphor, and because today’s metaphor can live out a finite life-cycle, the critical task is a continuous one. In sum, there is a ready response to those critics of the liberal arts who would make technical innovation the barometer of our wellbeing: that the values prioritized in the “contempt for the liberal arts” literature cannot so easily be separated from linguistic creativity, especially a cultivated sense for the possibilities and limits of metaphor. And that sense has long been at the heart of liberal education. The sheer persuasive force of imagery is a theme rung early and often in the humanistic canon. Aristotle stresses that concepts expressed in terms of metaphor are most likely to be retained: “His acquisition of the new idea impresses him all the more. His mind seems to say, ‘Yes, to be sure; I never thought of that.’” 20 Cicero, too, agrees that an effective metaphor “has direct appeal to the senses,” and that “the most complete pictures are formed in our minds of the things that have been conveyed to them and imprinted on them by the senses.” 21 But a student of the liberal arts encounters more than just praise of metaphor’s potency over our minds. Near the beginning of his or her education is likely to be one of the most sustained and closely-investigated metaphors in the canon, the metaphor of the city as a human soul, and among the other milestones marking that education are likely to be such other master-images as the City of God, the Leviathan, and the Invisible Hand, each with their own polemical power and limitations. Perhaps that education will also include the study of key symbolism in music, religious symbolism in visual art, or the allegorical tradition in literature. Even among those philosophers whose preference for scientistic prose leads them to be highly critical of figurative language—such as Hobbes or Locke, who wrote that “all the artificial and figurative applications of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas”—the student will find the conviction that metaphor demands critical attention. Among many other things, then, liberal education is training against passivity in the face of metaphor. And there is good reason to expect that schools and colleges that excise this training from their curricula will produce graduates prone to be unaware of, and trapped in, the dominant metaphors of the day. There are real costs to separating technical and figurative skills. There should be a place for both in a common liberal system, one intended to liberate us from habitual ways of seeing. *** “the object and effect is, that…in the stead of the more or less obnoxious individual or individuals, the object present is a creature of the fancy, by the idea of which, as in poetry, the imagination is tickled—a phantom which, by means of the power with which the individual or class is clothed is constituted an object of respect and veneration.” Interestingly enough, in the same work Bentham discusses the dyslogistic use of “innovation,” a term that has since taken on a highly eulogistic connotation, which is the sense in which I use it here. 20 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Dover, 2004), 1412a17ff. In fact, Aristotle’s intuition—that audiences are more likely to retain abstract concepts when they are couched in concrete images—has found support in recent research on the effects of metaphorical language. For a survey of this research, see Britt Peterson, “The Power of Mental Pictures,” Chronicle of Higher Education Review, September 1, 2014. 21 Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E.W. Sutton (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967), 3.41.163; 2.87.357. 7 �Of course, liberal education is characterized by metaphors of its own, ones we are free to challenge or endorse, but not to ignore. The metaphor we use to describe what we do might presume (or at least might once have presumed, in an earlier stage of vividness) that liberal education liberates. But in an even older formulation, which I believe retains its value, liberal education is the course of study proper to those who are already liberated: liberal arts are the arts of a free man or woman. 22 Free in comparison to what? In the tradition from which the idea of the liberal arts derived this earlier meaning, freedom was something of an exclusive status. In this tradition, writes Philip Pettit, “liberty is always cast as the opposition between liber and servus, citizen and slave.” Study of the liberal arts was considered appropriate to the liber not only because such a person was free from certain kinds of “servile” work. More importantly, the freedom inherent in the liberal arts—their eclecticism, their resistance to narrow specialization, their stance at a remove from the pressures of economic or practical usefulness—was held to be an expression of the liber’s freedom. When we call our arts liberal, we are echoing the presumption of those who believed that these arts are just what one would choose to study if one were free. And the defining feature of this freedom, according to Pettit, is that the liber “is not subject to the arbitrary power of another.” 23 We ourselves are free to reject this entire line of thought—as we should, I would quickly add, if it were still tied to such an exclusive notion of who might qualify as free. But it need not be tied to such a notion. As Pettit notes, the originators of this line of thought “only ever imagined that it was an ideal for an élite of propertied, mainstream males; they were all men, after all, and men of their times. But there is every reason why we should reappropriate their ideal and reintroduce it as a universal ideal for the members of a contemporary society.” 24 Contemporary democracy is not simply an experiment in selfgovernment, but an experiment—though surely challenged and incomplete—in status. Democratic culture is our ongoing attempt to universalize the status of liber. We see the attempt in democratic manners, in which anyone can in principle lay claim to the formerly exclusive titles of “sir” and “ma’am,” and in which we do not order one another, but ask: “[If it] please [you].” 25 More broadly, we testify to this experiment in status when, as Tocqueville wrote, we treat “every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea [as] a germ of power placed within the reach of the people.” He went on: Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the graces of the mind, the fire of imagination, depth of thought, and all the gifts which Heaven scatters at a venture turned to the advantage of democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by throwing 22 See e.g., Seneca, Epistle 88: “You see why ‘liberal studies’ are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman.” Seneca, Moral Epistles, vol. 2., trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1917-25). 23 Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 31. 24 Ibid., 6. 25 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 122. 8 �into bold relief the natural greatness of man. Its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilization and knowledge; and literature became an arsenal open to all, where the poor and the weak daily resorted for arms. 26 These “graces of the mind” are not only valuable up to the point at which they free us; they are also the way in which we enjoy and express our freedom. If they have a telos, perhaps it is to finish the instrumental work and arrive at the expressive work. 27 It is for just this reason that any instrumental case for the liberal arts—including the one I have offered in this paper—should be made with reluctance. Among the varieties of arbitrary power that compromise our freedom, an especially common form in our times is being made to spontaneously justify one’s usefulness under threat of nebulous penalties. That is especially the case when the standards of utility are themselves arbitrary and constantly shifting. 28 But this is the demand—prove your utility or face the amorphous consequences—that is so often placed on the liberal arts and those who would study them. It is entirely fair to ask, then: does an account founded on the liberal arts’ utility, such as this paper’s, only legitimize this demand? Perhaps it does. But we cannot wish away the dominant strain of thought that we have to persuade: one that values education largely in terms of its instrumental returns. I have granted premises here that, in a more perfect world, I would not grant. I have proposed an answer to our critics in their own terms: that the ends they valorize when criticizing the liberal arts are actually best attained through the liberal arts. Those critics would surely add that any view of education as a non-instrumental good is merely the view of privilege. It is: but our very practice of liberal education in a democratic culture commits us to expand the circle of that privilege as widely as possible, rather than acceding to its current dimensions. There is such a thing as an argument made under protest. To value liberal education is often to live under protest. And advocates of this education have long understood that they can do so honestly as long as they are clear about premises: as long as they know and speak the difference between arguments that are, and are not, of the moment. As John Henry Newman put it: Just as in morals, honesty is the best policy, as being profitable in a secular aspect, though such profit is not the measure of its worth, so too as regards 26 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Revere (Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2003), 14-15. 27 This is not to imply that the liberal arts will inevitably work in such a way in a democracy; Tocqueville’s well-known concern with “leveling” offers ways in which they may not. 28 As deBoer puts it, “Trying to predict what particular set of discrete and limited skills will be useful in the future is a mug’s game. It’s a fundamentally risky way for an individual to behave, and for policy decisions that are supposed to be based on the most good for the most people, it’s incoherent strategy….Individuals can navigate the markets, if they’re smart, privileged, and lucky. But great masses of people never can.” DeBoer, “Chasing Skills Is a Bad Bet and Bad Policy,” July 9, 2014, fredrikdeboer.com/2014/07/09/chasing-skills-is-a-bad-bet-and-bad-policy. 9 �what may be called the virtues of the Intellect, their very possession indeed is a substantial good, and is enough, yet still that substance has a shadow, inseparable from it, viz., its social and political usefulness. 29 This is a good metaphor on which to end. Some things are substance, and some shadow. 29 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated (London: Longmans, 1905), 180. 10 �Works Cited Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. New York: Dover, 2004. Baigrie, Brian. Electricity and Magnetism: A Historical Perspective. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Rev. ed. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 1967. Barr, Pippin, et al. “A Semiotic Model of User Interface Metaphor.” In Virtual, Distributed and Flexible Organisations: Studies in Organisational Semiotics. Ed. Kecheng Liu. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2004. Bentham, Jeremy. Handbook of Political Fallacies. New York: Crowell, 1971. Chong, Dennis and James N. Druckman. “Framing Theory.” Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 103-26. Cicero. De Oratore. Trans. E.W. Sutton. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967. Clodion. “Model for a Proposed Monument to Commemorate the Invention of the Balloon.” Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/collection/thecollection-online/search/199410. DeBoer, Freddie. “Chasing Skills Is a Bad Bet and Bad Policy.” July 9, 2014. fredrikdeboer.com/2014/07/09/chasing-skills-is-a-bad-bet-and-bad-policy. —. “STEM: Still No Shortage.” Medium. November 27, 2013. medium.com/i-m-ho/stem-still-no-shortage-c6f6eed505c1. Dempsey, Charles. Inventing the Renaissance Putto. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Gillispie, Charles Coulston. The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation 1783-1784. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House, 2011. Griswold, Alison. “Majoring in the Humanities Might Soon Cost You More in Florida.” Forbes. January 18, 2013. www.forbes.com/sites/alisongriswold/2013/01/18/majoring-in-the-humanitiesmight-soon-cost-you-more-in-florida. Harms, Rolf and Michael Yamartino. “The Economics of the Cloud.” Microsoft. November 2010. www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/presskits/cloud/docs/theeconomics-of-the-cloud.pdf Jaschik, Scott. “Apology from Obama.” Inside Higher Ed. February 19, 2014. www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/19/professor-art-history-receiveshandwritten-apology-president-obama. Kuniavsky, Mike. Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2010. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Marcus, Aaron. “Metaphors and User Interfaces in the 21st Century.” Interactions 9(2) (2002): 7-10. Michalski, Sergiusz. Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870-1997. London: Reaktion Books, 1998. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated. London: Longmans, 1905. 11 �Nill, Christian and Vishal Sikka. “Modeling Software Applications and User Interfaces Using Metaphorical Entities.” CEUR Workshop Proceedings 159 (October 2005). Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” In A Collection of Essays. New York: Harvest, 1981. Peterson, Britt. “The Power of Mental Pictures.” Chronicle of Higher Education Review. September 1, 2014. Pettit, Philip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Thibodeau, Paul H. and Lera Boroditsky. “Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning.” PLOS ONE. February 23, 2011. 10.1371/journal.pone.0016782. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Trans. Henry Revere. Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2003. Seneca. Moral Epistles. Vol. 2. Trans. Richard M. Gummere. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1917-25. Sørensen, Bent. “The Concept of Metaphor According to the Philosophers C.S. Pierce and U. Eco—A Tentative Comparison.” Signs 5 (2011): 156-85. “Swedish Art Gallery Holds First Art Auction Based on Emotions.” Gawker. July 5, 2014. http://goo.gl/NlekXM. Vickers, Brian. In Defense of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. 12 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 12 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Metaphor and innovation : a (reluctantly) instrumental case for the liberal arts Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Rob Goodman at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Goodman, Rob Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004530 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/55446f0b23e3e2a81fe1d3d6d80ed78f.pdf 26f17eaf2cdea869619a7cf7767bce09 PDF Text Text Nakedness in Plato’s Republic Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr. Austin Community College The Republic is a book of liberation. Its central teaching, that philosophy should rule city and soul, spurns readers to pull off the adornments of convention. As such, the experience of reading The Republic is an undressing. The Republic challenges us to disrobe the conventions that cover our nature by confronting the shame that prevents us from seeing it. In support of this central teaching, there are many images and allusions of nakedness. I will begin to explore nakedness and its significance in The Republic by focusing on a part of Glaucon’s challenge in Book II and its relationship to the later elaboration of the ideal city in Book V. Drawing from these passages, I will discuss the role nakedness plays in the quest for truth, concluding with some reflections on The Republic’s place in a liberal education. The majority of dialogue of The Republic focuses on an elaboration of an ideal city meant to address the nuanced challenges of Glaucon and Adeimantus. Glaucon is not persuaded by Socrates’ rhetorical refutation of Thrasymachus’ argument that justice is the advantage of the strong men who rule. As a shepherd’s concern for sheep amounts to fleece and flesh, a ruler’s concern for the ruled is his private advantage, which Thrasymachus calls justice. Glaucon is all too familiar with these sorts of arguments, and although he finds them inadequate he is not able to dismiss them. “I’ve been talked deaf by Thrasymachus and countless others, while the argument on behalf of justice – that it is !1 �better than injustice – I’ve yet to hear from anyone as I want it.” 1 His inclination is not to agree with arguments like Thrasymachus’, yet he cannot quite explain why. He believes justice is actually good but he wants more than to believe it; he wants to know. So, Glaucon asks Socrates to praise justice as something good in itself, and not something practiced for the fear of punishment or lack of resources. In this spirit, Glaucon challenges Socrates with his tale of Gyges, the Lydian, who found a magical ring that made him invisible. Glaucon presents this as the ultimate image of liberation. Truly free to do what he wants without consequences, Gyges sacks the queen and kingdom. Glaucon asks Socrates to explain why someone with the impunity afforded by the power of invisibility would refrain from committing such acts. Afterall, the desire to get the better, “is what any nature naturally pursues as good, while it is law (nomos) which by force perverts it to honor equality.”2 Freed from nomos, people will do what they want, and they want other people’s property, bodies and power. This is what most people think, according to Glaucon, who challenges Socrates to explain why it would be good for such a liberated Gyges not to travel the path he chose. But how liberated is Gyges? Does his situation present an account of a man truly liberated from the nomos that Glaucon claims perverts our nature? We can learn more by comparing Glaucon’s tale to its Herodotian counterpart. Readers of Herodotus recall that his Gyges had no ring, but hiding behind a curtain at the command of his king saw the queen naked, whose bruised shame sought vengeance upon 1 358b-d All Republic citations and translations are from Bloom. 2 359c !2 �her husband for inviting Gyges into her room.3 Herodotus and also Socrates, in Book V, remark that most barbarians found public nudity to be extremely shameful; it was even a great shame for men among them to be seen naked by other men.4 We must bear this convention in mind when we recall that Glaucon’s Gyges found his ring on a naked corpse; “It had nothing on except a gold ring on its hand.”5 It must have felt quite liberating for Gyges’ Lydian forerunner to be naked around others without being seen, and it is hard to imagine that Gyges or another Lydian with such power would not like to taste the forbidden fruit of invisible nakedness absent the shame of visible nakedness. But while the bearer of the ring believes he bears all, he remains clothed by the very power that enticed him to disrobe. Though Gyges may transgress Lydian mores with impunity, his ring does not free him from them, because, cloaked by invisibility, even this ring does not enable him to be visibly naked without shame. Thus, he has not truly escaped convention. He is, like his Herodotian counterpart, merely peering out from behind a curtain. Perhaps by pointing to the superficiality of overcoming nomoi regarding nudity in this manner, Plato may suggest that Gyges’ movement to tyranny is similarly reflective of a superficial overcoming of nomos. Gyges is free from imprisonment and execution for his crimes, but is he free from shame? Herodotus’ Gyges also killed his king, but that was because the queen commanded him to do it or die himself; it was not a free choice on his 3 History I.8-12 4 452c and History I.10 5 359e !3 �part. Could Glaucon’s Gyges likewise be compelled to tyranny by forces beyond him and from which his ring’s power does not free him? Glaucon explains that one who declined to use such power in the manner of Gyges, “would seem most wretched to those who were aware of it and most foolish too.”6 Perhaps conventional opinion compels Gyges to be ashamed not to seek tyranny where he has the power to achieve it? Tyranny appears to be liberation, but it is only superficially so. Socrates describes the soul of a tyrant as the least free of all because he lives in perpetual fear of his neighbors for the wrongs committed against them.7 Yet, this depiction of tyranny in Book IX is incomplete. One could imagine a tyrant of greater power and security and so more freedom to enjoy the pleasures of his office than Socrates’ straw-tyrant who “alone of all the men in the city can’t go anywhere abroad or see all the things the other free men desire to see; but, stuck in his house for the most part, he lives like a woman, envying any of the other citizens who travels abroad and see anything good.”8 This does not accurately characterize a tyrant with the power of Gyges. So, Socrates presents a second argument, which addresses the quality of the pleasures enjoyed by those with the freedom of tyrants. The upshot of this more authoritative argument is that the tyrant’s pleasures are less enjoyable than those enjoyed by philosophers. The tyrant enjoys the finest pleasures 6 360d 7 577a-580c 8 579b !4 �painted on the cave walls, but he does not enjoy the finest pleasure, which “belongs to that part of the soul with which we learn.”9 This pleasure is as enjoyable as rare, likewise are the talents and efforts required to enjoy it. The intellectual and character prerequisites for philosophers establish a foundation from which one could leap to success in many competitive and lucrative pursuits. Courage, orderliness, grace, magnificence, an exquisite memory and possession of a mind which easily grasps the “idea” of a thing; these are fine qualities indeed.10 Philosophy demands that the best human material be developed as expertly as possible and directed towards a pursuit not simply misunderstood by the majority but held in contempt by them. The city regards men who pursue the path of philosophy as terribly strange, vicious or useless, as Adeimantus notes, echoing the criticism of Aristophanes.11 A young man with the intellectual and character prerequisites described above must overcome considerable shame in the face of the city in not employing those gifts towards the attainment of the good things as defined by the city. In order for Glaucon to comprehend a man who does not use the ring like Gyges, he must understand a pleasure greater than those of men’s liberated dreams but to do so must overcome first the shame that separates him from it. Gyges’ ring presents an image of the liberated body but chained soul. The city in speech will be the image of the liberated soul. It comes to be in part as a response to 9 583a 10 485a-487a 11 487d !5 �Glaucon’s additional demand that Socrates demonstrate justice as desirable even when “stripped” of all benefits afforded to those with the reputation for justice.12 He desires to see justice naked of rewards and punishments so that he can choose justice as a free man. He longs for a perspective outside of convention and for real liberation but can only envision tyranny with impunity as such liberation. The philosophic life is the answer to that challenge, but for Glaucon to see that life as the true liberation which he seeks, Socrates must get Glaucon to shed his own attachments to the conventions that make him unable to conceive of a life with the license of Gyges absent his licentiousness. It is Glaucon’s own shame that prevents him from seeing it. If Glaucon is to see justice stripped he must approach it naked. However, it seems that convention cannot simply be stripped away by Socrates and justice revealed in all her natural glory with one grand undressing. Socrates first responds to the challenges by constructing a city that is offensive to Glaucon. The people in this city wear clothing in the winter, but for the most part, they go naked in the summer time. In this city clothing is functional and not required by custom or law. Nothing prevents men and women from exercising and being naked together. In it there are no conventional families, yet there is sweet intercourse. Citizens are not concerned with incest, birth or beauty but only that not too many children are born. Therefore, the city of pigs, as Glaucon calls it, has two of the three challenging components addressed in Book V, which the ultimate city must posses: men and women being publicly naked together and the community of woman and children, with no very clear prohibition against incest. 12 He uses γυµνωτέος, related to γυµνόω – naked exercise. !6 �Socrates has stripped this city, this allegorical man, of convention in response to Glaucon’s desire to see justice naked. However, this city is naked without liberation - a ringed Lydian - because it lacks the third component of the ultimate city, the rule of philosophers. In fact, this city of pigs lacks rulers of any kind, except perhaps its organizing principle that each citizen practices only one art, which is accepted by the citizens without question, reason, explanation or myth. They accept it as if by instinct and live almost entirely like animals. Philosophy is absent from this city because there are no real claims regarding the good and the beautiful to evaluate, no conflict between custom and nature to resolve, no nomoi and therefore no means by which to overcome them and to be free. Glaucon’s objection to this city supplies the tensions to it that ultimately point towards philosophy. His objection is not so much for the cities lack of relishes, which Socrates readily incorporates, but that its citizens do not live according to nomos.13 With his objection he introduces nomos into the city, thereby clothing it, and yet by it also takes the first step towards uncovering the liberation of the philosophical life dedicated to examining the validity of nomoi and the conceptions of the good life presupposed by them. In Book V, Glaucon will ultimately accept a city of communal nakedness, family and the rule of philosophers. He will come a long way towards liberation from the conventional outlook that spurned his objection in Book II, and so we see that the beginning of liberation from nomos may be an impassioned defense of nomos. 13 372d !7 �If a liberal education is for liberation, The Republic should be a part of it. Its teaching that liberation from convention may begin with a dedication to and defense of convention may suggest a rather conservative approach on the part of educators, at least initially. Glaucon’s love of justice pushes him away from the cynical arguments of Thrasymachus and drives him to adorn the object of his affection by the challenge he poses to Socrates. It is this very same love that spurns him to want to know the truth about justice; the quest for which is neither propelled by existential malaise nor nihilistic affirmation of all but by a singular, myopic conviction. Glaucon’s desire to defend the goodness of justice encourages him to look critically at the naked nature of justice and this puts him on the path to philosophy. Perhaps a liberal education should initially be oriented towards kindling this kind of passion by making students more patriotic and more devout, and perhaps it should help them to care deeply enough about something important that they will want to know it fully. It is likely that serious interaction with the core texts that form the basis of the western tradition will foster these attachments and convictions. Candaules, the king in Herodotus’ tale, fell so in love with his wife that he wanted the private pleasure of her body to be recognized as the most blessed. He wanted another to relish in her unadorned beauty, but while he invited Gyges into her bedroom, he did not ask him to poke through the curtains. There is a limit on the quality and amount of love that can be shared between a given number of bodies, but the pleasures of philosophy offers many more opportunities for the gallant; liberal education should help produce suitable companions for this love affair. The Socratic life supplies for us the !8 �image of what a liberal education is all about, real liberation. Reading The Republic can help our students consider whether the whole point of their education is not a career and a paycheck but the very activity in which they are presently engaged. The superiority of the philosophical life remains the most shocking and challenging teaching of The Republic, as the lives we lead, as parents, employees, students and faculty are largely unphilosophic. The life of Socrates sets a standard that only very few people have attained. Yet, the few and fleeting moments where our discipline and diligence allow us to approach that life justify the rest of it which falls short and spurns us to seek more opportunities for the transcendent pleasure of contemplation. !9 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nakedness in Plato's Republic Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr. at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hadzi-Antich, Ted Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Plato. Republic Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004531 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a5e2c8e5411cda408bc5ae2ea3707f34.pdf 8ac49eac88a8ce8a34508f445db5a40d PDF Text Text 1    Liberal Education as Preparation for Interdisciplinary Science  Geoffrey M. Henebry PhD CSE (SF ’82), South Dakota State University  As this talk is a witnessing for the efficacy of liberal education as preparation for  interdisciplinary science, let me begin with a personal prologue to provide context. I am  tenured full professor of Natural Resource Management at South Dakota State  University, and Co‐Director of the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence, an  interdisciplinary research group of 45 with an annual budget of over $5 million.   I earned my B.A. from St. John’s in 1982, attending Annapolis for two years and  finishing in Santa Fe. My graduate degrees (M.S. and Ph.D.) are in environmental  sciences. I met my wife, Ana who is from Brazil, in graduate school in Texas. We have  seven children (aged 14 to 27) whom we have homeschooled while living the  peripatetic academic lifestyle: a post‐doctoral position at Kansas State University, a  Fulbright Research Fellowship in Brazil, and faculty positions at Rutgers‐Newark,  University of Nebraska‐Lincoln, and South Dakota State University.   I serve on the editorial boards of three scientific journals, on the NASA Land Cover  Land Use Change Science Team, and as Chair of the Advisory Committee of the USA‐ National Phenology Network. In short, I have been able to leverage my liberal  education into a successful career as a research scientist and professor.   ~~ */\* ~~  We are witness to increasing globalization of technophilic cultures that value the  instrumentality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics or STEM. While  the reinforcement of disciplinary boundaries within STEM remains strong, there is  increasing recognition of need for interdisciplinary engagement to address myriad  complex problems of health, environments, and governance that arise from our  socioeconomic activities.   Major federal funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, the  National Institutes of Health, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,  have established in recent years programs to sponsor research that explicitly bridges  across disciplinary boundaries. Such projects are considered higher risk than traditional  disciplinary research due to the “boundary work” required to enable scientists and  �2    engineers from different—often contrasting—intellectual lineages to communicate their  expertise in mutually intelligible ways.  I propose that liberal education can provide valuable solid preparation for  “boundary workers” to craft practices of interdisciplinary science.  Of the trivium  grammar and logic enable the establishment of conceptual frameworks and disciplinary  practice; whereas; rhetoric stands out as solvent for disciplinary borders.  Rhetoric in  scientific narrative is key to spanning assumptions and reconciling viewpoints.    What I offer here is not a disquisition. I am not a scholar of teaching and learning.  Nor do I study the history or philosophy of science. I am just a professional scientist.  So  I can offer a report from the front lines about practicing interdisciplinary science,  training Ph.D. students, and mentoring post‐docs and young faculty to succeed as  professional scientists.   My primary field is ecology, the study of how living and non‐living things interact  to shape the biosphere, that thin layer of habitable space mostly on the surface of this  planet. Key to my investigations are datastreams from the constellation of earth‐ observing sensors orbiting this planet that sense the various kinds of electromagnetic  radiation rising from the surface—from the visible part of the spectrum through the  near, middle, and thermal infrared regions all the way into the microwaves.  (Did you  realize that you emit photons of microwaves?) And I do a lot of international work with  past and present projects in European Russia, Central Asia, Hungary, Costa Rica, Brazil,  Ethiopia, and recently at the continental scale.    Imagine more than 20,000 scientists converging on San Francisco for a week each  December for the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). With  attendance growing by 85% in the past decade, the AGU is a truly global meeting with  participants from every continent. It is a union in the literal sense of the word: diverse  disciplines banding together to achieve economies of scale and thereby enabling  interactions that span across and between scientific disciplines.   We walk into Moscone Center’s South exhibition hall. Across the 300,000 square feet  are arranged aisle after aisle of boards displaying posters describing the latest in  scientific research about the earth system, from earthquakes to electrical phenomena in  the upper atmosphere, from measuring the various ways that water flows above and  below the land to observing how vegetation grows and changes in and next to  �3    megacities and in the far‐flung reaches of cloud‐obscured tropical rainforests, among  thousands of other topics.    As we walk down one of those aisles we see text and pictures on the posters and the  key words being exchanged that are mostly in an alien tongue. But once we close our  eyes to listen to the form and character of the interactions rather than the content— interactions between questioner and respondent, between student and mentor, between  the striving post‐docs and eminent graybeards—what we discover is that these, too, are  from a tribe of science, just not ours.   But what are the tribes of science?   In 2012, according to a recent Census Bureau study [1], 42 million in the workforce  between 25 and 64 held at least a bachelor’s degree. Of these 12% were in STEM  occupations and another 11% in STEM‐related jobs (architecture and health care). Of  those with a STEM degree, just over one‐quarter are in STEM occupations and another  11% are in STEM‐related occupations, leaving 63% in non‐STEM jobs.  Of those with a  non‐STEM degree, 92% are in non‐STEM occupations.   Figure 1 comes from that Census Bureau report [1] and shows where STEM majors  work.  I want to emphasize two things evident in this graph. First, STEM is really  TESM. “T” for technology dominates – these are the “computer workers”. Engineering  is a strong second, and all the sciences—physical, life, and social comprise but 16% of  the STEM workforce. “Math workers” account for a modest yet important 3%. The  second important thing the graph shows is that many STEM majors do not end up  working in STEM fields.    Figure 2 shows the meager flow of non‐STEM majors into STEM occupations [1]. If  we lump the literature and languages and liberal arts and history major groups, we find  that just 5.4% end up in STEM occupations. If we restrict our focus to the sciences, then  just 1.1% of these majors become science workers in the physical, life, and social  sciences.         �4      Figure 1:  Where STEM majors end up in the general workforce. Graphic captured from  http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem‐html/        �5       Figure 2:  Where non‐STEM majors end up in the general workforce. Graphic captured  from http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem‐html/    Let’s ask again: what are the tribes of science? One answer is that there are as many  tribes of science as there as recognizable disciplines. Within a tribe members share  conceptual schemata full of technical terms that refer precisely to things of interest, but  which sound like jargon to the uninitiated. Yet disciplinary specialization proliferates as  the bodies of knowledge grow. Sometimes disciplines converge and fuse, but far more  often they subdivide messily. So can scientists from different tribes collaborate? And if  so, then how do they work together? Over the past two decades or so there has been a  re‐orientation of science and, importantly, science funding agencies toward seeking  �6    understanding about complex problems that involve interactions between human  settlements and their supporting ecosystems.   ~~ */\* ~~  Scientists tell stories—highly structured, tightly condensed—but stories nonetheless.  Liberal education, too, revels in stories and in the great conversation. It is the great  conversation, the connecting of ideas spanning space and time, which teaches and  hones rhetoric. Listening is a critical aspect of rhetoric because persuasive speech  requires engagement with others.  Seminar simulates sitting around a table with  scientists from diverse disciplines. I propose that the liberal art of rhetoric enables the  bridging across disciplines: the liberally educated boundary worker can identify the key  elements of the story above the particularities of the jargon that enforces disciplinary  borders.   I would like to share briefly three of the several interdisciplinary projects in which I  have played a key role.   The first project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was about sand,  water, and grass. It asked a simple question: why does the largest dune field in the  western hemisphere, the Sandhills of Nebraska, tend to stay vegetated in the face of  environmental stresses like drought and grazing? After all, the grass cover is mostly  sparse and can be grazed down to nothing within several days. Why are they not bare  moving dunes like we see at White Sands in New Mexico or the Sahara desert in North  Africa?    To address this question we assembled a team of ecologists, hydrologists,  climatologists, and geologists, mostly from the same university. Now this sounds like a  rather harmless bunch of “ologists” but how these four disciplines conduct their science  is radically different because of the kinds of evidence or data they collect to construct  their stories. It took a full year of frequent meetings before we were able to bridge the  differences in narrative structure and quality of evidence to develop a successful  proposal for a four‐year study that included a large landscape manipulative experiment  to test our hypotheses. We were able to answer the question and learn to pose many  other interesting questions besides! And this is the hallmark of science – to ask  questions, albeit in a particular manner.   �7    The second project, sponsored by NASA, is still underway. It asks how urban areas  influence the behavior of severe storms. In particular it seeks to understand how the  size and shape of the city and the pollution state of the urban air affects the interaction  of storm and city. The project involves satellite imagery and derived products, weather  radar data, and computer models of weather. So the team includes mesoscale  meteorologists to run the models that simulate the storms, radar meteorologists to  analyze the weather radar time series, atmospheric chemists to make sense of the  interactions between the differently polluted rural and urban air, landscape ecologists  to track how cities affect the growing season of vegetation, remote sensing scientists  specializing in cities to character size and shape, and a professor of landscape and  urban planning to help formulate findings from the science community into the  language of the design community.  The project involves scientists at six universities  and the National Severe Storms Laboratory, a government agency located in Norman,  Oklahoma. In addition to the logistical challenges of having project meetings, there is  again the challenge of learning the differences in scientific narrative across fields.   The last project I will highlight is the most ambitious and potentially the most far‐ reaching. It involves epidemiologists, ecologists, software engineers, and public health  officials. The National Institutes of Health, specifically the National Institute of Allergy  and Infectious Disease, has been funding us since 2009 to develop a forecasting system  to warn public health officials and early responders, such as non‐governmental  organizations (NGOs), about when environmental conditions are ripe for the outbreak  of epidemic malaria in the Amhara highlands of Ethiopia.   Malaria is one of the great scourges of humanity. Millions in the tropics live in areas  where malaria is endemic, it is always around and so its threat is well known. In  highland areas malaria is not endemic, its transmission is unstable, and mortality is  rare. But sometimes conditions are favorable for a generalized outbreak, an epidemic.  The public and private health systems are then rapidly overwhelmed and mortality  rates are very high.  What are those environmental conditions that set the stage for an  epidemic? Can they be monitored and then predicted? How to communicate useful  information to the public health officials?  Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa at about 95 million. It is a  mountainous country, with more than three‐quarters of peaks on African continent. The  population is overwhelming rural—more than 80% live outside of cities—and it is poor.  �8    The literacy rate is among the lowest in the world. It is estimated that fewer than half  the males and fewer than 30% of the females aged 15 and older can read. Thus, once we  can forecast increased risk of an epidemic communicating it is a challenge, both  technological and cultural.   Let me mention just one example. To write the code to build a computer system that  interacts both with scientists and public health officials requires eliciting from each  group their requirements for the system. Discerning what is important from what is  desirable and reconciling different requirements is surprisingly difficult task! However,  rhetorical skills are once again crucial to the process: listening, synthesizing, and  repeating in different words to build consensus. And coffee helps, too.      ~~ */\* ~~  To conclude, I want to speak to the question of “What is liberal education for?”  There is an answer in the motto of St. John’s College: Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque.  Google Translate renders it as “I do have children with free books debtor appealed”,  which points to the need for Latinists to improve the Technologists’ grasp of grammar!  A proper translation of the motto reads ʺI make free men out of children by means of  books and a balance.” This process of making free men and women is a preparing for  the rest of life – a transforming of children into adults. Liberal education provides the  foundation for choosing, intelligently, what is next and provides the awareness and  skills to excel at that next stage. Liberal education is, indeed, preparation for  interdisciplinary science, and countless other paths as well.     Reference   [1] Liana Christin Landivar, 2013, “The Relationship between Science and Engineering  Education and Employment in STEM Occupations,” American Community Survey  Reports, ACS‐23, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC.     Thursday, December 04, 2014  Brookings, SD  � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Liberal education as preparation for the interdisciplinary science Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Geoffrey Henebry at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Henebry, Geoffrey M. (Geoffrey Michael), 1960- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004532 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6cd1f60a0d50b44eef0433aaac820fb0.pdf 9f914055ab8d7308b2bade4f00f570ee PDF Text Text "Low-Tech Studies in a High-Tech World: Teaching the Great Books in Silicon Valley" Lisa Hicks and Elizabeth Coggeshall Stanford University When we were conceptualizing how our paper might fit into a panel on the relationship between the sciences and the liberal arts, Lisa and I realized that there are two opposing sets of assumptions each argument could take. On the one hand, papers could assume an audience of humanists who are perhaps disinclined to include the sciences under the heading “liberal arts” (this was/appeared to be the basic assumption of the first paper). On the other, papers could begin from the opposite point of view: speaking to a culture that emphasizes the STEM fields, how do we, as humanists, justify the pursuit of non-instrumental, non-vocational, non-goal-oriented learning? How do we create a space in which humanistic inquiry can be valued as highly as those fields that have more immediately apparent and measurable outcomes: correct answers, material products, financial gains? Our paper comes from this latter perspective. Lisa and I teach in a voluntary, residential Great Books program for freshmen at Stanford University, along the model of something like Directed Studies at Yale. The major difference between a Directed Studies and our program, called Structured Liberal Education or SLE, is the broader culture in which each program is embedded, and from which the program distinguishes itself. In what follows, we will describe in broad strokes Stanford’s “techie”-dominant culture (I borrow the undergraduates’ term here, “techie” being the opposite of what they call “fuzzy,” in other words, anything tending toward the humanities fields. And I should take a second to point out that “fuzzy” is almost exclusively a pejorative term, as in “I would take that class, but I don’t want them to think that I am a fuzzy or something!”). Second, we will discuss the ways our program sets itself apart from the culture at large, and in doing so, we will present SLE’s answer to the conference question: “What is Liberal Education for?” �I’ll begin with an anecdote. Most often, conversations on the first day of class end with students exchanging email addresses or phone numbers, “friending” one another on Facebook, or making plans to meet in the dining hall or over coffee. But I had a peculiar experience on the first day of an interdisciplinary freshman course I taught at Stanford University in 2013 called “Networks: Ecological, Revolutionary, Digital.” The course had attracted many students from the STEM fields, particularly Computer Science, and on the first day of class I noticed them checking out each other’s profiles not on Facebook, but on LinkedIn. They swapped information about their summer research projects and internships, which were already carefully lined up in March. Over the course of the quarter, their in-class presentations (designed as “lightning talks” on any aspect of network theory that interested them) became elevator pitches for their various start-ups, which dealt with green energy, BitCoin, and big data analysis. The course satisfied the brand new freshman requirement in “Thinking Matters,” inaugurated in the 2012-2013 school year. The “Thinking Matters” courses are designed to encourage free exploration and interdisciplinary experimentation. They replaced the older Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) requirement, which had built such a bad reputation among Stanford undergraduates that first-year students would begin complaining about them during New Student Orientation, before classes had even begun. “I hate my IHUM” became such a refrain that one senior described it to me as a bonding experience for freshmen. Thinking Matters means to quell some of the vitriol that had built up around freshmen requirements, providing students with options like “Networks” which may be closer to their interests but still serve to introduce breadth to the freshman experience. These courses mean to provide a space for free play, in the spirit of the liberal education. Although it is one of the most fascinating courses I have ever been a part of, “Networks” was despised by the students. What we had conceived as a theoretical exploration of network theory from the perspective of a variety of disciplines, students saw as a waste of their time, as we “forced” them to pursue two projects, a biological experiment on ant societies and a historical analysis of social �networks in the Enlightenment. The students were frustrated by the lectures, which were effectively essays that sought to illuminate the connections between three very different disciplinary approaches to network theory: in history, computer science, and biology. Instead, the students wished to focus on satisfying requirements in their majors, developing their research grants, and marketing their startups. The disconnect between our push toward breadth and their desire for depth produced clashes that the section leaders had to mitigate in our small seminars. I use this anecdote as an illustration of the rampant entrepreneurialism that characterizes Stanford undergraduate culture. One of the most striking features of the first-year student at Stanford is her entrepreneurial spirit. This is true of nearly all entering students, pervasive as it is in campus culture, and it continues in certain sectors of the university throughout the students’ college experience. Engendering the entrepreneurial spirit begins with New Student Orientation, where incoming freshmen quickly learn that if they do not sign up for the engineering prerequisites their first quarter, they will effectively be unable to complete the major in four years. Nearly a quarter of Stanford students also pursue a co-terminal degree, which is a combined bachelor’s-master’s degree begun in the student’s senior year. The co-term program also requires a great deal of early specialization and curricular organization, so that students can complete their major requirements (one, two, or even three majors), prerequisites for the co-term, and their general education courses in a timely fashion. Curricular exploration – even if such courses fulfill general education requirements – is seen as at best a luxury and at worst an imposition. The academic mission of the university is explicitly concerned with “usefulness.” This has been true of Stanford since its founding in 1891. Stanford was, in fact, among the first institutions of higher learning in the US to introduce the major system as opposed to a standardized liberal arts curriculum, a move which the first university president David Starr Jordan saw as coming from the university’s commitment to practicality, the fixed curriculum being an “affront” to the student, productive “dim-eyed monk[s]” and “stoop-shouldered grammarian[s]” instead of “leader[s] of �enterprise” (SUES Report, p. 18). Nicholas Thompson, editor of newyorker.com, founder of the Silicon Valley-backed startup The Atavist, and a Stanford alum, raised a series of questions about Stanford’s affiliation with Silicon Valley in three blogposts on the New Yorker’s website in 2013. Provocatively asking where the Valley ends and the University begins, Thompson cited the case of a dozen students who dropped out of school to work on Clinkle, a start-up supported by investments from, among others, their own professors. Two of my students in “Networks” had shared with our class that they were also being encouraged – by one of their professors – to drop out of the university to work on their BitCoin start-up. In September 2013, Stanford announced a new university initiative called StartX, a start-up incubator that will advise current students on their startup projects. The university itself will invest in the most successful of this elite group of startups. The university has a strict policy for dealing with professors entering romantic relationships with their graduate students, but we could probably stand to lay down some policies for investment relationships as well. On a less ethically fraught front, Stanford has opened an office under the supervision of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education for Undergraduate Advising and Research, which boasts that the university invests between $4-5 million annually in undergraduate research projects, overseen by faculty across all departments of the university (SUES Report, p. 56). The obvious ethical issues of professors investing in their students’ start-ups aside, I don’t mean to suggest that an entrepreneurial spirit is somehow bad for the university or for the individual student. On the contrary, it drives Stanford students in all fields to pursue exceptional projects, and to prepare themselves for careers both inside and outside the academy. There are clear benefits to students specializing early, pursuing independent and original research, and cultivating close advising relationships with supervising faculty. But I would like to suggest that this kind of hyperspecialization is antithetical to the goals of the liberal education, which is explorative and meandering, rather than directional. The entrepreneurial drive of Stanford students compels them to acquire a dizzying degree of depth within their majors, but it simultaneously convinces them that �breadth is a distraction, a requirement thrust upon them by the powers-that-be, that may well derail them from the primary projects that will guarantee their success at Stanford and beyond: their startups, their independent research grants, their archival work. One of the primary antidotes to this entrepreneurial thinking at Stanford is the Structured Liberal Education program, of which Lisa and I are here as representatives. As I have already mentioned, Structured Liberal Education (or SLE) is a Great Books program available only to incoming freshmen, who apply to the program after accepting their offers of admission to Stanford. Each year, we consistently receive between 140-150 applications for the 90 spots of the program (this is about 5% of the total incoming freshmen class). The 90 students live in a single residence, and we hold both plenary lectures and discussion sections in the common spaces of their dorm. We use a flexible but fairly consistent curriculum that varies only slightly from year to year. At breakneck speed, students cover the great works of (primarily) Western culture, listening to lectures given by experts from around the university, and then working through the texts in small seminars led by the SLE teaching staff. In the meantime, the students submit papers that are written in multiple drafts, that they discuss extensively in one-on-one meetings with their seminar leaders and a dedicated staff of writing tutors, all of whom are alumni of the program. In the time that remains, Lisa will speak about the ways in which SLE works to disrupt the entrepreneurial paradigm that Stanford has cultivated, and the challenges and rewards faced by the students in our program as a result. ----------Beth has just presented a picture of the overall Stanford undergraduate culture as instrumentalist, entrepreneurial, and more focused on depth than on breadth. But the culture of SLE is different, and the differences sometimes push directly against the dominant trends of the overall culture. �In part, SLE pushes against instrumentalism simply by being Great-Books-based humanities program: reading The Republic and The Inferno are not obvious and necessary steps in most career paths. And, unlike students from the much-hated IHUM classes, SLE students do not seem to want the SLE program to be anything other than what it is. The move from IHUM to Thinking Matters was driven, in part, by students’ desires for general education requirements that felt, to use one of the contemporary education buzzwords, “relevant.” Students who signed up for the “Networks” class that Beth worked in thought that they were signing up for a general education class that was closely related to their career interests, and the elements of the class that they disliked were the elements that didn’t address those career interests. But SLE students sign up for SLE in part because they don’t want a narrowly focused, career-based general education class. Some of our SLE students plan to major in Engineering and Computer Science and other STEM fields, and, when we ask them why they chose SLE, they are nearly unanimous in saying that they wanted something different from their general ed experience: they want the breadth; they want big ideas that have nothing to do with computers; they want serious engagement with texts that lets them develop skills that do not directly link up with their career paths. In short, they want a humanities education that is separate from their career-related studies. And they say that they want this non-career-focused experience at the beginning of their studies. They say things like, “I want to read these books while I still have the chance, before I get overwhelmed with Engineering requirements.” They see their SLE reading as both separate and foundational, as an experience that will shape and change the way that they engage with the rest of their education. Further, this widespread interest in humanistic enquiry as something other than a means to a career-focused end creates different social pressures for SLE students. A lot of Stanford undergraduates who do not take SLE describe the overall student culture as "anti-intellectual." When Stanford was considering the move from IHUM to Thinking Matters, a committee of faculty and staff conducted interviews and surveys with many Stanford students who had gone through the �IHUM program, and one story that they heard over and over was the "IHUM kid" story. Students would say, "If I tried to talk bring up ideas or concepts from my IHUM class in a group of friends, people would tell me to be quiet and call me 'IHUM kid.'" Students were quickly acclimated into a culture in which IHUM ideas were only to be discussed in IHUM class. But SLE students expect their peers to discuss texts and ideas outside of class, and the social dynamics in the SLE dorm tend to reward engagement with texts and ideas. SLE’s class spaces are in the dorm, including several dorm lounges, and, when I hold office hours in a lounge, the conversations that I overhear are often about this week’s texts, or about ways that a key theme from this week’s readings relates to other texts from the course or to books or themes from students’ other courses. (I also hear enough random conversations about movies and roommates and weekend plans to know that these class-related conversations aren’t being performed for the benefit of the teacher in the corner; a lot of the time, the students who are talking about this week’s text haven’t noticed that I’m there.) Further, the student who draws connections between the themes of a SLE text and ideas from other courses tends to draw those connections in a non-instrumentalist way. They tend to frame the connection as, “Here is a cool thing that I noticed, and I’m mentioning it because it’s interesting” rather than as, “Here is a cool thing that I noticed, and it’s interesting because it shows me that this book that I’m reading is relevant to my career interests.” I’m thinking in particular of some students who were taking a political science course during the Spring term, which is when we read Marx in SLE. Whenever those students drew parallels between Marx’s analysis of labor power relations and their PolySci professor’s analysis of the history of power relations in Israel, I always got a sense that they were bringing in the outside material because they thought it was interesting and illuminating in its own right and not because that information made Marx useful to their prospective careers as lawyers or international business executives. I think our students would see talking and thinking about SLE texts in a careerist or instrumentalist way as wrong, as breaking the rules; it wouldn’t fit �with their sense of how SLE is supposed to work. And students who acculturate to this sense of how SLE is supposed to work will not buy into an instrumentalist model that claims that every text and every idea and every class is meant to forward their career goals. The ways that SLE students push against an instrumentalist educational model is closely related to the ways that they do not fit the entrepreneurial mold of the dominant Stanford culture. When Beth and I were working on this paper, we talked a lot about what “entrepreneurial” means, and we figured out that, for us, the difference between “entrepreneurial” and “enterprising” has to do with motivation. You’re entrepreneurial for the sake of the external end that you’re aiming at: if you’re founding a start-up out of an entrepreneurial spirit, then your main concern is the startup. The success of the external end is what motivates you. But if you’re doing something out of an enterprising spirit, maybe your main concern is your own development; you’re more concerned about what the success or failure of the venture says about you and the kind of person you are and the kind of capacities that you have. And the SLE students tend to be much more enterprising than entrepreneurial. They might not frame it in these terms, but they tend to be concerned with selffashioning, with mastering a text or a skill in order to become the sort of person who knows that text or possesses that skill, with becoming multi-faceted. They tend to have a sense that the kind of person that they become is more important than the particular ends that they choose to pursue--and, in particular, more important than the career that they choose. By providing students with a space that emphasizes the process of learning rather than a particular end or product of that learning, SLE gives its students permission to be enterprising rather than entrepreneurial--permission that, for the students, may push against the entrepreneurialist strain in the larger Stanford culture. SLE’s emphasis on the process rather than the product of learning also ties into its focus on breadth--a focus that runs counter to an overall culture that privileges depth and narrow specialization. SLE operates at an exceptionally fast pace, which is one of the perennial complaints of our students. We devote no more than two days to any text, and most texts only get one day, so �we cover no text in depth. The first three weeks of the winter term last year, for example, had students read and discuss Augustine’s Confessions, Aquinas’s Summa, al-Ghazali’s Path to Sufism, and Dante’s Inferno, which they read in its entirety in Week 3. Students often see this as a detriment to real engagement with the text at hand, but we console them by reminding them that SLE’s focus is not depth (which they will enjoy as they pursue their individual majors), but breadth. The benefits of this kind of breadth – while probably obvious to the audience here today – are worth being articulated, not only because they may be obscure to other students who do not opt-in to this sort of program, but because they answer the stated question of this conference: What is Liberal Education For? SLE’s short answer to this question would be breadth. Breadth of material allows the students to focus on skills development over content management. We do not test them on what they retain of their material, but on how they process it, what connections they draw, what debates they foresee. It matters less to programs like SLE that the students can recall information readily available at a tap of their fingers; rather, we would give them as many instances to choose from as they could, and ask them to synthesize a few of those instances to address one of the Great Questions. The depth model, by contrast, asks students to narrow in a question until it is answerable by a single algorithm, by changing a single variable, or by some other means of reducing the problem to its smallest constituent parts. When students disregard breadth, as many Stanford undergraduates do, broad questions are swallowed by narrow ones, or set aside as unanswerable or meaningless, because they appear too big to handle. When students embrace the breadth model, they find that freedom to attempt answers at these questions, the freedom that gives the liberal education its name (and, for that matter, the freedom that gave Stanford University its motto: “The wind of freedom blows”!). � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Low-tech studies in a high-tech world : teaching the Great Books in Silicon Valley Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 17, 2014 by Lisa Hicks and Elizabeth Coggeshall at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hicks, Lisa Coggeshall, Elizabeth Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004533 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1b834bfd9347314b5694865497a6bb91.pdf faaea59b1448c4d692bfb541d53b1507 PDF Text Text Michael Ivins, Ph.D. St. Vincent College Latrobe, PA Paper delivered at the conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of St. John’s College, Santa Fe October 16th, 2014 On the Silence of Socrates in Plato’s Cleitophon The original title of this talk was: “Socratic Wisdom and the Liberal Arts.” This might imply that the subject would be the employment of Socratic method or the importance of Socratic ignorance for a Liberal Arts education, or something to that effect. However, I’m actually interested in a disparity in the aims of Socratic education and liberal education. In the following, I will try to draw out what I take to be a tension between the Liberal Arts and Socratic philosophy. A common complaint about Socrates is that conversations with him rarely, if ever, yield any sort of definitive, positive knowledge but often end in utter confusion.1 Even at his trial, he claims that he cannot be a teacher and corrupter of the youth precisely because he himself lacks wisdom. We have all heard the slogan: “All that I know is that I know nothing.” 2 But there is at least one positive claim which Socrates derives from the recognition of his ignorance, namely that, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” 3 It is the awareness of our ignorance that both motivates and justifies the life devoted to inquiry, and this way of life constitutes the Socratic education. The word “art” in Liberal Arts suggests the possibility of teaching, or at least learning, and possessing some positive knowledge. Yet this need not imply indoctrination or dogmatism in any way. These “arts” are purported to be “liberating” arts which further implies that they are in some way tools or techniques for the attainment and practice of freedom and liberty. Of course, the Socratic education promises a kind of freedom as well, but of a different sort. Socratic education offers Cf. especially Euthyphro. One often suspects Socrates knows something that he is not telling us (Cleitophon 10c6-7; cf. Cratylus 304a on irony). 22 Common paraphrase of Apology 21d and 23a-b: “I do not think I know that which I do not know;” “[H]uman wisdom is worth little or nothing [compared to divine wisdom]; and “The man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless.” 3 Apology of Socrates 38a. 1 �liberation from the invisible bonds of opinions which we all inherit involuntarily. But here we must pose a question to Socrates: “Is this sufficient?” And indeed Cleitophon will do this for us. Education in the Liberal Arts, on the other hand, offers the possibility of a “freedom to,” a freedom to act rightly in the world, or at least better than we would otherwise. This would be a freedom to speak, to choose, and to properly exercise our liberty in the society in which we participate. But we must pose the question to ourselves: “Is this possible? Can good judgment be taught, or can it even be learned through a course of study?” In Plato’s Cleitophon we find an argument for both the necessity and insufficiency of the Socratic education from someone concerned with the improvement of public life. Cleitophon had hoped that philosophizing with Socrates might help make this possible. But our interlocutor has been disappointed and believes he can show Socrates quite clearly the limits of the Socratic education. Cleitophon lodges such a devastating critique of Socrates that at the end of the dialogue he can make the incredible claim that Socrates is not only a stumbling block to the achievement of virtue but ultimately an impediment to the realization of human happiness. That is, the Socratic education could ultimately be harmful to human beings, at least according to Cleitophon. What is extraordinary about the Cleitophon as a dialogue is how abruptly it ends. Socrates apparently has nothing to say after hearing Cleitophon’s severe criticism that while Socrates can exhort us to care for virtue, he cannot at all show us how to go about this. Plato writes no response on behalf of Socrates. But should we interpret this as silence? It is possible that in reading the dialogue it is not really silence that we experience, but rather a suspension between speeches, one in which our anticipation demands that we respond. Some reasons why Socrates does not respond might include: �1. The possibility that Cleitophon is not worthy of a response. Cleitophon just won’t “get it,” so it would be a waste of time to try to correct him. This happens to be the opinion of most of my colleagues who have committed themselves to the study of philosophy. I don't think that they realize Cleitophon is actually on their side, at least those who happen to be professional educators. 2. It could be that Cleitophon’s critique is legitimate and cannot be defeated. This is not necessarily to say that he is simply right; there are such things as undecidable propositions and irreconcilable differences. Socrates does offer viable defenses elsewhere, but perhaps none are definitive or even adequate. 3. Perhaps Socrates would not want to defend himself in this particular case. Socrates may have no interest in encouraging someone like Cleitophon to turn to philosophy as a way of life. Cleitophon is someone who has spent a good deal of time with Socrates, who is competent in dialectic, who is sympathetic, and who despite being disparaging sees the value of Socrates. Cleitophon could act as a sort of public advocate of philosophy, a representative who participates actively in civic life and who may be critical of Socrates but is not hostile. So what is the nature of Cleitophon’s complaint? He says he has always marveled at the arguments Socrates makes against his fellow Athenians saying, Don’t you see you haven’t the slightest clue what you’re doing? You, whose entire concern is to make money; You don’t seem to care whether your sons who will inherit your riches will know how to use their wealth justly. You don’t even bother trying to find out if there are teachers of justice for them or even for yourselves. (407b2-6) 4 Cleitophon recognizes something important about the true value of education. He sees that an education concerned solely with making a living is inadequate. It is more important to know what to use money for than to know how to get it. This problem lies at the core of the current crisis in liberal education. Faced with the complaint that degrees in the Liberal Arts aren’t practical, we have two main arguments to make our case: We can argue that Liberal Arts students fare just as well 4 Line numbers refer to Slings’ text of the Cleitophon (Cambridge 1999). �financially as students with vocational degrees. Or, we can try to show that liberal education can offer something priceless, the betterment of one’s soul. Cleitophon is convinced of the latter and for this he thanks Socrates. Socrates has persuaded him that happiness consists in the exercise of soul in virtue both for oneself and for the sake of others, and that material goods should be placed in the service of these ends. Cleitophon believes that Socrates thinks one can learn an art of self-mastery: mastery over one’s belongings, one’s body, and ultimately one’s soul. In addition, those who learn the art of self-mastery can benefit those who can’t or don’t by directing them in their actions and in the disposal of their goods. Such people should, “hand over the rudder of their thought, as if on a ship, to another who has learned the art of piloting human beings” (408b1-3). That is, those who are capable of self-mastery are also competent leaders. Cleitophon here reminds Socrates that this is what he often calls “statesmanship” (politike) which is “the very same art as that of judging and justice [dikastiken te kai dikaiosunen]” (408b4-5). There is an art of good judgment that, like any skill, can be taught or at least learned by means of some sort of instruction. This effectively makes Cleitophon a proponent of the Liberal Arts; for is this not a presupposition of liberal education?: namely, that one can develop good judgment by means of a certain course of study. So, Socrates' exhortation to virtue has succeeded. Great.. Can Socrates do more for us or are we left only to exhort others? We should ask with Cleitophon: “What next? How do we even begin the study of justice?” (408e1-3). Cleitophon knows that he won't get a straight answer from Socrates himself, so he goes to his young associates–knowing not to call them students–asking them, “What is the art having to do with the virtue of the soul?” to which the most reputed among them replies “nothing other than justice” (409a2-6). Cleitophon inquires further asking what the “work” (in Greek, the ergon) of justice might be suggesting an analogy with the arts. Just like the art of medicine produces two things: 1) more doctors, and 2) health; and carpentry produces two things: 1) more carpenters, and 2) houses; and as it is the power of all crafts to produce some artifact in addition to more artisans, so, likewise, what does the art of justice produce? Cleitophon providing a partial answer asks: What �does the art of justice produce besides just men? But is the just man merely another artisan who can teach the art or is he the artifact? We should wonder here whether the just man is merely another teacher of justice who can teach others to be teachers, or if the just man is a product like health and houses. Cleitophon takes it that the art of justice produces teachers of justice and some artifact besides. His question then remains as to what this product could possibly be. But are the artist and the artifact necessarily separate? We need to consider Cleitophon’s understanding of the craft analogy itself. When he first suggests the analogy he mentions not only medicine but the art of gymnastic training. He then drops the art of gymnastic to focus on medicine and carpentry. These become the models for the art pertaining to the virtue of the soul. But perhaps the art of gymnastic is more suitable. If we unpack the analogy, we see that medicine is comparable to gymnastic and to carpentry in different ways. Like gymnastic training, medicine is concerned with the health of the body; like carpentry, the product (health in the body of another) is independent of the artist. In the unique case where the doctor practices medicine on himself, he does not treat himself qua doctor but rather qua patient. As Aristotle might put it, one acts on oneself as other (Metaphysics IX.1). On the other hand, someone practicing the gymnastic art practices on himself qua self. The body acts on the body qua body. Physical training is a self-sufficient activity, unlike either medicine or carpentry the products of which are always external. Here we can see an ambiguity in the Greek word ergon which Cleitophon overlooks. Ergon can mean the work of art as well as the work of the artist. The latter is the exercise of the art itself. Cleitophon is focused on the ergon as a product independent of the activity rather than the activity itself. For Cleitophon, the activity of the artist is a means to an end, not an end in itself. This is also reflected in his understanding of philosophy. He does not seem to be interested in the intrinsic value of inquiry or self-knowledge as such but more with how �philosophizing might serve as a means to an end; and a noble end at that, namely, an understanding of justice for the sake of the achievement of virtue. So, how does this analogy help us understand justice? Cleitophon may have almost answered his own question before he asked it. Earlier he had said that justice is the art of self-mastery. But perhaps the art of self-mastery is like gymnastic where the exercise of the art itself is the end; self-mastery would be the exercise of the soul qua soul on itself and for itself. As to the product or artifact of self-mastery, this may be secondary or even accidental. It may even be that the care of the self is not a matter of art at all but of the soul’s nature (cf. 410d). As it is the nature of the body to care for itself through exercise, so may it be the nature of the soul to care for itself qua soul through the exercise of self-mastery. But Cleitophon had identified and even stressed the by-product of an art of self-mastery, namely the mastery over others. The work of self-mastery amounted to the art of piloting other human beings. Perhaps here we find one key difference between Socrates and Cleitophon, and so between Socratic Education and the Liberal Arts. For Socrates self-mastery as care of the soul arguably consists in inquiry itself, regardless of whatever inquiry might produce. In the Apology, Socrates exhorts us to discuss virtue everyday not act virtuously, unless of course these are the same. Cleitophon is interested in discussing virtue precisely for the sake of acting virtuously. Can we really blame him for this? Returning to the original question, Socrates’ young associates respond that the artifact of justice is the useful (sumpheron), the fitting (deon), the beneficial (ophelimon), or the profitable (lusiteloun) (409c1-3). None of these satisfy Cleitophon because they are so vague as to apply to any art. All arts and actions intend some good, so none of these get at the particular good which justice produces. Someone soon speaks up suggesting that justice produces “friendship in the city” (409d5). Friendship is always good and is some kind of like-mindedness. The question is raised as to whether this sameness of mind is the sharing of opinion or of knowledge. Since common opinion is often wrong and can result in great harm, the product of the art of justice must be friendship among the like-minded in the city who share in knowledge (409d6-e10). �Cleitophon is prepared to leave this answer intact, but unfortunately others jump in pointing out that like-mindedness is also common to all the arts. All doctors share the same knowledge insofar as they possess the art of medicine. All carpenters share the same knowledge insofar as they possess the art of wood working. So, the argument comes full circle: though we know that the art of justice is a knowledge shared among just citizens, we don’t yet know what external good in particular such persons produce (409e10-410a6). I would like to argue that Cleitophon’s interest in friendship suggests that he is one of the good guys. It is always tempting in Plato to be suspicious of anyone who has political ambitions, especially someone who hangs out with rhetoricians and sophists. Cleitophon does in fact spend time with one of the nastiest among them, namely, Thrasymachus whom we know as Socrates’ hostile interlocutor in the Republic and who argues the position that “might makes right,” or that justice is the law of the stronger. But even though he says he will go to Thrasymachus and whomever else if he gives up on Socrates, we have no indication that Cleitophon is a follower of Thrasymachus or anyone else for that matter. I can easily imagine him arguing with Thrasymachus as we see him doing here with the best of Socrates’ associates. I noted earlier that Cleitophon knows not to call these so-called associates Socrates’ students. He doesn’t know what exactly to call them: “peers (helikioton), coenthusiasts (sunepithumeton), comrades (hetairon), or whatever!” (408c6). 5 He recognizes that Socrates is not a teacher in any normal sense. But one term that he is also careful not to apply to Socrates or his associates is “friends” (philoi), the very sort of relationship that he is interested in engendering between citizens. (There is an unfortunate issue with the translation I handed out where our translator has translated both the hetairon and philoi indiscriminately as “friends.” It is important for my argument that both Plato and Cleitophon make a distinction between philoi and hetairon, the latter of which I would translate as companions or comrades.) 5 Perhaps “cohorts” since they share the activity of exhortation? �But Cleitophon doesn’t even identify himself as one of Socrates’ associates or even as his friend. I think the care with which he speaks is evidence of some significant understanding of Socrates. In his concern for the city, Cleitophon had praised Socrates’ criticism of his fellow Athenians for setting “brother against brother, and city against city” in the pursuit of material gain. Socrates motivates them to concern themselves with virtue. But Cleitophon’s complaint stands; all he sees Socrates do is turn people toward a concern for virtue and at best teach them how to turn others. But apart from exhortation, when asked how to learn the art of justice and put it into practice, Socrates seems to have little to offer. If education in the Liberal Arts only produced teachers (or God forbid only produced philosophers) there would be a real problem. Socratic education is not enough if it can only direct us toward the life devoted to inquiry. At some point there must be students who are not teachers so that there can be considerate and educated citizens who are competent to deliberate about real world issues and who can make choices that result in action. If there really is an art of good judgment, perhaps justice and freedom can be developed through a course of study. Most institutions of higher learning do offer the means to make a good living. I think we are all here because we are of same mind in thinking that there should be more concern for living the good life. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On the silence of Socrates in Plato's Cleitophon Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 16, 2014 by Michael Ivins at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ivins, Michael Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Plato. Clitophon. Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004535 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/71540757a06ff9371bb2c2ade4af4ff8.pdf 61e047c88dc6bce75c822d7595c868f9 PDF Text Text Adventures in Second Sailing (or, Hands-On Learning as Central to a Liberal Arts Education) Kirsten Jacobson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Maine Rainer Maria Rilke once reflected: “Our greatest task is this: to find a written language which can withstand our tears and re-create before us—clear, pure, precise—the beautiful goodbyes of those who sailed the seas” (The Inner Sky, p. 41). Even if you have never gone to sea, I believe that, should you take a moment to imagine a sailor’s parting words to family, friends, a child, or a lover, you will be able to feel at least a hint of the earth-shattering and, alternatingly, exhilarating force of a goodbye that can know no secure promise of a homecoming, a goodbye that juxtaposes the certainty of the now and how one has come to this present with the utter unfathomability of what is to come. What might Rilke be suggesting when he makes the bold and intriguing suggestion that our ultimate task is to find a way to write this goodbye? If such writing is our ultimate task, surely we must no longer be talking about something that only matters to sailors. We must be talking about a goodbye that we all share. I will come back to Rilke’s challenge later, but for the moment, I will turn away from it, for it was only by doing so in my own life that I became able to face the core of such a question more directly. For many years, I have wondered over the vital questions of how we connect with others through language, as well as how our intimate use of language is deeply embedded in our explicit or implicit awareness of our vulnerability and, ultimately, our mortality. And, I have been particularly interested in how meaning is lived and experienced by us in spatially thick terms. My research has focused on the nature of home and dwelling, “disturbed” spatial experiences (such as those found in agoraphobia, anorexia, hypochondria, and spatial neglect), the significance of space in political life, and the spatial roots of memory and identity. 1 �About a decade ago, these interests took on a seemingly idiosyncratic character: I began to wonder after the intensity of a ship’s spatial reality. After nine years of relatively disembodied and meandering nautical musings, I dove head on into this fascination by signing on as a trainee crewmember of the three-masted, square-rigged, sail-training vessel the Picton Castle. Before describing anything specific about this hands-on education into sailing, I want first to paint a fuller picture of what drew me into this fascination. As unsophisticated as it may sound, I was lured into the seafaring world by the Hollywood blockbuster “Master and Commander.” More than any aspect of the film’s plot, its characters, its scenery, or Russell Crowe, I was struck by its emotionally-rich portrayal of the way in which a ship must become a self-sustaining world-untoitself when it cuts its umbilical lines to any given port. Being at port is pointedly not where a ship belongs or is at home; it belongs at sea, cut off, one might think, from the stability, safety, and regularity of terrestrial life. Yet, neither “Master and Commander” nor, more significantly, real life reports of ship-life tend to depict a frightened or cut-off crew; instead, they reveal a functioning microcosmic reality. A ship offers an exceptionally focused model of people working together with one another, their available resources, the elements of nature around them and the predicted as well as chance situations that arise. It was especially fascinating to me that sailors are able not only to work and survive, but also to be at home and often to thrive in an environment—the wide open and often wildly difficult sea—that can seem and often be unfathomable and terrifying. Perhaps as intriguing to me were the notions that such a small space serves as a home to so many people; carries cargo and missives and ideas between places at “opposite ends of the earth”; and has for so much of human history been the platform by which some of the greatest and grandest adventures, explorations, and business ventures have been undertaken. 2 �As my sabbatical year from teaching at the University of Maine approached in 2012, I knew I wanted to continue my phenomenological studies of spatiality and its ability to reveal significant aspects of our existential reality and health, and to do so through an immersive research experience that would help bring to the fore issues that often remain concealed to us owing to their familiarity in our lives. After taking a trial two-week passage up the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada as a sailor-in-training, I determined that the experience of voyaging on a working square-rigged ship would provide an excellent observation ground for continuing my research into spatial experience, the nature of home, existential health, and interpersonal relations. And, so, with only a twinge of academic qualm, I signed onto the Picton Castle for an additional four-month journey throughout the South Pacific as an integral part of my sabbatical research plan. At the start of this adventure, I was quite a competent person: I had been driving a car for over half my life, been living on my own for twenty years, had both a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate, had been teaching philosophy at the university level for eight years, and was very recently tenured at my university. These were and are signs, I believe, of being able to understand and do many significant things. And, yet suddenly, when I stepped aboard the ship, I was a true novice again: never since I was a child had I been in a situation that returned me to such a state of not-knowing, of needing to start at the beginning. I had to learn anew nearly every move I made—from walking on a swell-shifting and often slippery surface to tackling sail setting and the 175-plus lines that must be mastered to do so; from considering the significance of the sky and its multitudinous signs of weather and wind to how to moderate one’s voice on a ship that sometimes required the quietness befitting a workplace with three shifts and sometimes required the bellowing voice required to reach from rigging ten stories aloft down to the deck 3 �below; from how to bathe, wash dishes, and clean clothes using an endless supply of salt water, but limited fresh water to steering a 180 foot-long vessel according to the compass, the wind, or the “landmarks” of the sky above; from moving about at night with the aid of only moon and starlight and the occasional red lamp to fitting into a rigid chain of authority; from sleeping in odd temporal rhythms and physical positions to any dozen upon dozen techniques of ship’s maintenance. In the four months I spent learning the ways and insights of sailors of centuries past, my body and soul and habits of moving about in the world were indelibly changed: I began to become a sailor. This education was not one of books or even of much lengthy discussion: it was an education from doing and being, an education of the hands, limbs, and their successful (and quite regularly mistake-ridden) engagement with the surrounding world. Accustomed in my life as a professor and scholar to learning through the intellectual endeavors of reason and description, I learned aboard the ship that there is nothing like feeling the resistance of the helm under one’s hand, the flow of telltales aloft, the wind upon one’s face and the fill of the sail to help one learn—deep in one’s body—when one has taken a right or a wrong turn. Amongst other practical lessons, at sea, it came palpably home to me that wind and water are indisputably partners, perhaps even closer than that: a system whose parts can never be held apart from one another and still make sense. The human challenge, then, was to discover how to successfully introduce the sailing vessel into this system, and, on a grander scale, how we are to navigate our way through this elemental and human world. Many of Joseph Conrad’s words in The Mirror of the Sea finally came home to me during this adventure; he writes: “Of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretenses, that will not put up with bad art from their masters.” Later, he connects this lesson to the deepest matters of humanity: “All vessels are handled in the same way as far as theory goes, 4 �just as you may deal with all men on broad and rigid principles. But if you want that success in life which comes from the affection and confidence of your fellows, then with no two men, however similar they may appear in their nature, will you deal in the same way. There may be a rule of conduct; there is no rule of human fellowship. To deal with men is as fine an art as it is to deal with ships” (Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, VIII). Conrad’s insights here and in his many great books are not speculations made at arm’s length, but rather the fruit-filled outpourings of someone who was first a sailor and only much later an author. So, how does this relate to the liberal arts and, given my own launching point today, to the ability to say a “proper goodbye”? Well, to begin, I’ll note that in my experience, it is an understatement to say that the liberal arts are under attack these days. At the University of Maine, I spoke on a panel just this past week about the value of liberal arts in higher education. This topic was not, however, poised as a celebration as it largely is here this week; rather, the topic was one of vital necessity for my university: local financial stakeholders are increasingly seeing the liberal arts as “optional” and as “luxuries.” So, I felt a pressing need on that panel to advocate for the essential role of the living value of the liberal arts. While I’ve never had a moment’s doubt about the value of my relationship with the liberal arts, I’ve noticed that my ability to articulate their significance in “real world terms” was radically amplified by my own move to temporarily leave behind my formal studies in order to head to sea as a sailor—not immediately the place one would imagine the liberal arts to be enacted or celebrated. And yet, there aboard my ship, I felt more palpably than ever that the liberal arts must never be seen merely as matters of dinner party conversation or even classroom discussion, as engaging and enriching as such conversations may be for our lives. The liberal arts are not topics reserved for 5 �conferences, formal studies, or moments of self-reflection; indeed, they are not mere “topics” at all. The liberal arts are practices of action, of deciding upon and making commitments within our everyday lives. If these practices have been developed into fields for study and private or social reflection, it is because they arise from the issues, questions, and activities of our very real and very demanding human lives. I felt this reality every day aboard the ship—whether I was working on the mathematics and celestial navigation involved in charting our course; the physics of setting and trimming sail; the psychology of interpersonal dynamics and chains of authority in tight and demanding quarters; the history, literature, and music of sailors’ adventures gone by; or, the philosophical reflections and wonderment opened up by the wide open sea and the questions it can prompt in us regarding mortality, our hopes, ethics, and what truly matters to us. The ship inspired me daily to livingly engage with such aspects of human reality as the significance and nature of privacy, community, hierarchy, equilibrium, wonder, apprenticeship, eros, work, loneliness, the elements, boredom, communication, becoming, unfathomability, adventure, nature, learning, clothing, skill, beauty, tradition, death, music, embodiment, disappointment, hope, fear, ritual, space, property, responsibility, home, and, truly, so much more. While these themes are wide ranging, they share in common the fact that they are matters of deep human concern; and also that my awareness of and relationship to these living issues were directly and significantly developed through my sailing experience. I was in each case brought to see anew these significant dimensions of everyday human life, and to be able to articulate something I deem important about human life through this unique, and yet utterly relatable undertaking. 6 �I see my nautical adventure and its lessons as a sort of second sailing in my personal, interpersonal, and intellectual life. While Socrates’ second sailing is one that ostensibly turns him toward the intelligible realm, I would equally argue that his turn was not one of leaving “this” palpable world behind. Far from this, we see Socrates again and again moving up the ladder of truth from a deeply engaged and erotic situation within this human world. Socrates does not model for us the life of a disembodied philosopher, a life of an education of the mind alone. Rather, he takes up questions of what seemingly lies beyond from the vantage point of the here and now; he is inspired by his situation, what it demands of its participants, and what, with his guidance, they can open themselves to seeing anew. The image of a “second sailing” comes, as you may already know, from a practical situation sometimes faced in the undertaking of sailing—namely, the loss of wind that can carry a ship forward on its path. If winds cannot fill a ship’s sails adequately enough, sailors may be called upon to use their own bodies and resources to row the ship along its course, and this is their “second sailing.” This is certainly not an act of turning away from one’s embodiment or one’s situation in the world; rather, it is one of facing the fact that to get to one’s destination, one cannot always rely on an external force—whether the wind or free-floating rationality—to get where one aims; instead, one must recognize one’s own determination and work to be integral to achieving a new position—whether physical or intellectual—beyond one’s present situation. Further, we are challenged to acknowledge that former approaches and even areas of expertise can secure neither our relationship to the truth nor to our future; indeed, we may very well need to let go of past competencies and situations of comfort in order to venture insightfully into something new. In going to sea, I most certainly left behind my competencies and comforts, and in doing so, I arrived somewhere quite different than where I began. While further details of that 7 �transformation belong to another writing, I will speak briefly now to changes I experienced in my sense of what it means to say goodbye. Most straightforwardly, I began my trip thinking, quite reasonably, that a goodbye is most fundamentally the marker of some sort of ending. Yet, without claiming to be speaking to the entirety of Rilke’s challenge to us to learn to write the sailor’s goodbye, I’d now propose that the sailor’s goodbye is a goodbye that is pointedly not a closure or a move away from life, but rather the undertaking of learning how to make an authentic opening to life. The sailor’s goodbye, like a second sailing, is one, I would argue, that brings us home to the key existential recognitions that 1) without our effort, nothing will be accomplished: there simply will be no sailing without our sense of personal responsibility and our participation; 2) as much as a new venture makes a break with former ways of being, to be a successful sailor, you must not forget the land from which you came even when you leave its sight; you must remember that when you’re sailing away, you are only able to do so because you are also always sailing from some specific here; 3) it is only by saying goodbye to our former positions of comfort and certainty that we can say our next hellos; and, I would argue that this reflective leave-taking and vista-opening is the very activity of our never-ending, alwaysdemanding adventure of pursuing an examined life; 4) we forever require the push and pull of others as well as of new and unsettling experiences to continue to prompt us to the practice of reflective and engaged living; I also only learn how to engage life with both commitment and openness through companionship with others who are also engaged in the practice of caring for our shared world and for another; and, finally, 5) pursuing the examined life is necessarily a journey of uncertainty; just as the sailor faces in her voyage, the person living the examined life must go out into the unknown, with the only certainty being that she will arrive at her next destination a different person than when she departed. If she makes landfall, she will do so with 8 �such pressing questions as: Will those ashore be ready to greet me anew? Will they have waited for me, and, if so, will they, too, have traveled in such a way that they can resume being active companions for me in this life’s journey? Who have I become? Who should or must I become to arrive where next I ought to go? Is death my final destination, and if so, how ought I prepare for it? These questions return me once again and in conclusion to the significance of the liberal arts: for whether in conversation around a seminar table or working with others aloft in the rigging of the Picton Castle, I have found throughout my life that it is the liberal arts that provide us with both the grounding and the unsettling experiences that bring us humanely together in the activity of pursuing an examined life, and that prompt us to think, talk, and ultimately write about this undertaking. If I identify the sailor’s goodbye as one that acknowledges that we can never say enough to secure our relationships and their meaning once and for all, and one that also recognizes that we are not thereby excused from attempting to do so, the liberal arts can be seen as the practice and living testaments of our attempts of enacting this unending meaning making. Whether aboard a ship or collected in a classroom, may we heed the call, addressed to both our bodies and our minds, to keep alive and well this practice of “writing our existence”, and in so doing, never cease trying to figure out how to say a living goodbye. Said again, may we sail onwards, under second sail, towards our always-still-to-come homecoming. 9 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Adventures in second sailing, or, Hands-on learning as central to a liberal arts education Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Kirsten Jacobson at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Jacobson, Kirsten Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004536 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/04b82ed69dcf2a8b801b2d769c82b98a.pdf 90ac7b08d6fdc8573691fbde53207d7a PDF Text Text Drew Leder – I want to focus on lifelong learning not for myself alone, but primarily for men and women I have met along the way – many of whom were lifers. This story begins in 1992 at the Maryland Penitentiary. I had decided to step outside of the pirvileged environment of Loyola University to bring my skill-set, limited as it was – philosopher, educator – to students whose access to these things was limited. I started volunteer teaching in what was the oldest continuously operating penitentiary in the Western world, situated in downtown Baltimore. At the time it served as the men’s maximum security prison for all of the state of Maryland. It is the oldest continuously operating prison in the Western World – having opened its doors – or maybe I should say shut them – first in 1811. I started with 15-20 of the most motivated men from the inmate population. We read about Socrates’ trial in The Apology, the stoicism of Epictetus, -- a crippled Roman slave -- and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, call for justice in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Most of the inmates were serving life, or double-life, or life plus 20, strange concepts unless you’re a believer in reincarnation. They weren’t going anywhere so neither was I. That class continued some 18 months, a luxury you don’t have inside a university setting. There was also a passion you don’t always see at a place like Loyola. We there, faculty and students alike, are used to taking the liberal arts for granted.. To study history, literature, philosophy, theology, and on and on, ho-hum. It can seem not a privilege to be deeply valued, but at least for our Loyola students, almost a prison sentence to be served. Four years of hard labor finishing the core curriculum, and major-requirements, until release is finally won in the form of a diploma. 1 �How very different was the attitude of the inmates! For them the liberal arts was their release. Even while under severe bodily confinement, the spirit could take flight, soaring and sweeping through the heavens. Dwelling in a world of ideas, the inmates were better able to disconnect from the harshness around them – the bars and barbed wire of a maximum security prison. But finally, our work was not primarily about disconnecting, but reconnecting. The inmates needed to reconnect with all those things within themselves that life in the inner city, and in prison, had obscured. Who am I, beyond my identity as a drug dealer, a criminal, a tough guy? What happened to that innocent child I once was – is he still in there somewhere, and dare I let him out? What is life all about now that I’m serving a life sentence? What went wrong in my past? How can my future be different? How can I be useful? How can I be happy? How can I control my inner demons and contact my inner angels? Such questions were not merely intellectual (though intellectual they were). Your very life was riding on the answers adopted – your emotional, social, and spiritual life, and on the streets, and in prison, sometimes your physical life. Our class conversations proved so powerful that I began to tape and transcribe them, and they formed the basis for a book, The Soul Knows No Bars: Inmates Reflect on Life, Death, and Hope (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). I want to quote a little from a letter I received a letter from Donald Thompson, Sr., one of the participants in that project, and serving life plus 100 years for armed robbery, attempted murder, and murder in the first degree. Its important that not just I get to speak hear today, but the voices, even the images of the prisoners, so that they can escape all the bars and barbed wire, the endless prison time, and circulate a little among us in freedom. Donald writes: 2 �As I am wont, I commence this missive by evoking the peace and blessing of God on both you and your entire family. I, myself am well despite my present plight. God is good. Out of that goodness he has blessed me with the mental and spiritual fortitude to cope; however, when I do have my moments of pain, I remember that the grave-yards are teeming with folks who would gladly have this cell and all the time too. To be honest, most of my depression derives from thinking about the victim in my case. Sometimes I just do not feel worthy of God’s grace because I took that man’s life. Long ago I went to God and begged for forgiveness: and he blessed me. Yet I have been unable to forgive myself....I truly appreciate you affording me a nonjudgmental shoulder on which to lean.... We are at present under a lock-down because two officers were stabbed two weeks ago. It is very unfortunate that these officers were injured. My heart goes out to them and their respective families, for I do not condone violence. I am, nonetheless, not tripping off about the lock-down. It gave birth to this mail you are perusing. Plus, it forced me to meditate, rest, and reflect. So I have embraced this situation. I would be blessed if I could somehow incorporate that philosophy in other aspects of my life. When I went to God – twenty two years ago – for grace, I made a covenant to not perpetrate violence again. The fact that I have been able to honor that commitment is not mere hocus pocus....The thing that deterred me from violence was a structured environment which was comprised of social programs, therapeutic programs, educational programs, and the like. These institutions 3 �armed me with the empowering information I needed to honor my covenant. I was also able to network and bond with folks such as you. And you my friend have played an integral role in my edification. This is what we need now to curb violence in and outside the walls. That is, institutions that educate, socialize and heal. In addition we need ordinary people to attach themselves to these structured environments. No gang-banger can withstand this transformation juggernaut. Drew, I do not know how many acts of violence I have prevented by employing the information I gleaned from these programs and folks like you.…Many of these programs no longer exist. Donald’s right: he’s experienced an inward transformation assisted by outward supports. He’s also right in his last statement: many of the programs to which he refers no longer exist. Shortly after our course together, a federal anti-crime bill in the closed down college extension programs in prisons around the country. The 1994 bill rendered inmates ineligible for Pell Grants, the funds that assist low-income Americans to pay for higher education. To me, this is not an anti-crime bill, but pro-crime in its effects. Our gettough-on-the-criminal politics has led us to turn away from the very concept of rehabilitation. Instead, we stuff the prisons ever fuller with what we regard as unredeemable social refuse. America now locks up over 2.3 million inmates, some 64% of whom are Hispanic or black. We hold fully one-fourth of the entire world’s prison population, jailing people at six to eight times the rate of comparable Western countries. For example, we hold more prisoners in a single state, the state of Texas, than do the nations of France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Japan, and Singapore all 4 �combined. Some 72% of these prisoners are in for non-violent crimes. It costs over $30,000 a year to house each one. We conduct this under the aegis of the Department of Corrections, but do we truly seek to correct? We lock people in penitentiaries, but do we work to assist them in a penitential process of self-reflection and change? In most cases, the answer is a resounding no. In Plato’s allegory of the cave he portrays prisoners chained so all they can see are shadows cast on a wall which they take to be real, having no object of comparison. This is an apt description of many a prison. Those who might bring light in from the outside world are often sadly absent, with the inmates left to contemplate shadows on a wall – the contempt of authorities, the society of other criminals, and the memories of a failed life. Not surprisingly, upon release inmates are often poorly equipped psychologically, educationally, and occupationally. They also are branded as ex-cons, which takes away jobs, even housing and voting rights. It has been said the prison system serves an expensive way of increasing criminal behavior, or at least keeping under surveillance and restriction large segments of our minority populations. But there remain the many inmates who also see the prison as a place for exploration and self-transformation. One of the men I worked with, Charles Baxter, a Muslim imam, compared the prison not to Plato’s cave, but a “prophet’s” cave. He says, “Man is created from one cell, right, and as man grows he adapts into another cell, and that cell’s also a place for growth and evelopment. When you read the Koran and the Bible, you’ll see that different prophents went to the cave for comfort and iolations. And cell’s like that cave.” I asked him the size of the kind of cell he was referring to, and to 5 �which he was confined for decades. He said “It’s about the size of a small bathroom in an old house.” How do we on the outside support such men in their quest for lifelong learning and growth? Here are a few things we have done at Loyola over the years. We have run a book drive to support the prison library system. The funds to purchase books for the Maryland prison library system has recently been zeroed out by the state – that’s right, zero. We have helped produce a brochure to support inmates in developing a meditation practice in prison – over ten thousand have been distributed. We have supported prisoner writing and research – here, for example, is an autobiographical memoir by a prison, Arlando Jones, III, who I know as Tray – that has been published by Loyola’s Apprentice House Press. Perhaps most importantly, we have continued to run classes in philosophy and the liberal arts, now at the Jessup Correctional Institution, a newer maximum-security facility. For a number of years, I have taken in with me service-learning students from courses I teach at Loyola. The prisoners love the infusion of new energy, and the Loyola students, participating as co-learners alongside the prisoners, have an experience that explodes their stereotypes and impresses them deeply. It’s a win-win situation. As word has gotten out, more and more area faculty have become interested in volunteering, until this has expanded into a real college-level program, though we give no credits or degrees. It is called the JCI Scholars Program. We have a menu of about seven courses offered a semester, with 130 inmates participating. These include many natural leaders within the prison so I like to think what they learn, and who they become, ripples through the prison, affecting others and the institution. I know this has all had profound effects on me, and on my Loyola students. We have been moved by the prisoners’ own 6 �fierce dedication to, and application of, the liberal arts. I too have become a lifelong learner, educated by lifers. But I don’t want to end by painting too bright a picture, especially given the cruelty of our prison sytem. Tray, the author I mentioned, now in his mid-40s, serving life plus twenty for crimes commited when he was 16 years old, recently wrote me the following. “I feel that I often fall into moments of despair when I can’t shake my dark thoughts…I believe I told you in a previous letter that I was beginning to regret my decision to grow intellectually. Knowledge doesn’t bring the comfort that ignorance does. If you recall a famous philosopher said, “In life, you get one of two things, knowledge or tranquility…No one can have both.” Knowledge, at times, can be a hard thing to live with, when you’re serving endless time with little chance of release. You’ve built a “new you” – but are stuck with the crimes the “old you” committed – even if they happened when you were very young. You live in a culture, which especially for people of color, seems to demand endless punishment, which many people, communities, and corporations, are profiting from. It is unlikely that your educational accomplishments will win you early release,. Still, the liberal arts can free us from inner jails of ignorance and self-defeating rage. It can help build supportive communities of learning and positive empowerment. It can help us connect with the greatest minds and spirits who have ever lived. It can prepare us for life, whether that unfolds inside or outside prison walls. I’m reminded of all this every other Monday, the day I go to prison. 7 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "What is Liberal Education For?" 2014 Conference Papers Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-10 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make these items available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 7 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Seeing bars, hearing voices Description An account of the resource Paper presented on October 18, 2014 by Drew Leder at What is Liberal Education For? : a conference at St. John's College on the 50th Anniversary of the Santa Fe campus. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Leder, Drew Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-10-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource Education, Humanistic Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 24004537