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Music of the Republic
Convocation, August, 2011
Christopher B. Nelson, President
St. John’s College, Annapolis, MD
Welcome to the Class of 2015 and their families. To the rest of the College community,
welcome back.
There comes a time in every year when I find myself saying to a friend or a prospective
student that this is a very musical College. After 20 years of speaking this way, I thought
I should ask myself just what I mean by this statement, and so I will try to unpack that
little observation and say a few words about the music we make at St. John’s College.
Each of you has experience with music; it has lifted you up or soothed you; it has
angered or frightened you; it has lightened or burdened the spirit, distracted your
attention, moved your feet and your arms, inspired an act, or aroused a love; it has
transported you to another time or place, or moved you in some way without your quite
being aware of it. Music pervades our lives and always has. It has power. It has
sometimes taken you outside of yourselves and at other times taken you deep within.
For these reasons, it has often been associated with things divine.
Not only have you had experience of the effects of music, many of you have brought
music with you to the College because it plays an important part in your daily lives. You
carry your i-pods, MP3 players, and smart phones, playing classical music and opera,
popular tunes and rock, jazz and blues, country and western, hip hop and rap. You
hum, sing or play your favorites to yourselves or with others. Music has its place when
you are alone and in fellowship. It serves as friend and refuge.
Why is this? How can we come to understand the power that music has in our lives?
What does it mean that we are somehow all musical beings? That to be human is
somehow to be musical? That without music we would be less than human? These are
questions I suggest you will be asking yourselves in your four years at St. John’s.
�You will also be making music while you are with us. To get at the question “what is this
music that we make?” I thought it would be fruitful to explore briefly the place of music in
four republics to which we belong and by which we live: the Republic of the United
States of America, the Republic of Letters, the Republic of Plato, and the Republic of St.
John’s College. What is the place of music in these four republics of ours?
The Republic of the United States of America
I have mentioned the music that you brought with you when you arrived on campus,
much of it performed by, written by, or listened to by Americans. But there is another
kind of music that might be said to capture the spirit of the land, something I would call
more elemental, seeking to get at the heart of our nation, to comprehend the
constitution of its people, to describe what it means, or ought to mean, to be an
American. And here I will suggest two, perhaps three, examples of this music. The first
is from Walt Whitman, a quintessential American poet:
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off for work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the
steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutters song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon
intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or
washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to no one else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night, the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. (“I Hear America Singing”)One
can feel the heartbeat of a new nation, of a people building a country from the sweat of
the brow. These Americans are making their own music in the work they do, and they
are celebrating that work as something that belongs especially to them as free
individuals, free to choose their work and free to enjoy their play.
�My second example allows us to recall that music can be an aid in helping us to see
and to seek the beautiful and the good. You all know the melody for “America the
Beautiful”, so I will not ruin it for you by trying to sing it solo. While the tune is pleasing,
the lyrics of Katherine Lee Bates help it to soar. The first stanza appeals to the gifts of
the natural world:
Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain!
But it is the second stanza that captures my heart, speaking to the people that made
this nation possible, and finally to the rule of law that sustains it:
Oh beautiful for pilgrim feet whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.
Here is a hymn to those who brought the spirit of freedom to a new land, and a prayer
that we Americans dedicate ourselves to self-control and the rule of law to protect the
freedom we have won. This is a noble anthem that we would do well to call up from time
to time – a song worth making our own, as members of a community bound together by
the will to protect an idea of freedom in the pursuit of happiness. This is, after all, the
republic that has made it possible for this College, dedicated to cultivating the arts of
freedom, the liberal arts, to thrive since before the formal founding of this nation. We in
turn, as well educated and independent thinking citizens, will prove to be the necessary
guardians of this republic.
A third example, if only our voices could scale a couple of registers, might be a song
written by one of our alumni, a graduate of the class of 1796, composer of the most
sung song in this country even today, written during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of
1812. I refer of course to our National Anthem, penned by Francis Scott Key: “Then, in
that hour of deliverance, my heart spoke. Does not such a country, and such defenders
of their country, deserve a song?” he said when he composed it.
Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
What does it mean for a country to “deserve” a song? And why should a song be the
�measure of worth?
I will leave these questions hanging as I move to a second republic to which we belong.
The Republic of Letters
These are the works of literary and musical imagination that constitute the heritage of
mankind. They have sprung from many civilizations and have spanned the centuries.
We study these works because they are fundamental to understanding our humanity;
they are the building blocks and cornerstones of our edifices in the humanities, arts and
sciences. When I speak of works of musical imagination, I mean any work that might be
said to belong to the ancient Muses, works of poetry or of musical or artistic
composition, where the chief work of the author, composer, artist, or performer is the
making of powerful images or likenesses of things.
Consider, for example, the moving lines that open the Iliad, which freshmen are reading
for their first seminar tomorrow evening:
Rage --- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
Murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
Hurling down to the House of the Dead so many sturdy souls,
Great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
Feasts for the dogs and birds,
And the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the first two broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
The images are vivid, the action compelling. I want to take up my spear and shield and
go to battle where heroes are made and lost. The song has irresistible momentum that
takes hold of the listener (or reader) from its first line. It grabs us in the chest, the seat of
sentiment and magnanimity, the locus of the spirit displayed by our heroes. Such is the
power of music. Even Homer is caught up by it, as he calls upon an Olympian Muse to
tell this story, to sing the song of Achilles’ rage long before it was put to the page.
Why does Homer need a Muse to tell this story? Why sing a song about rage, about a
�consuming aspect of a man? What is this will of Zeus that is moving inexorably toward
its end? What power does this god or any other god have over the affairs of mankind?
Homer has concentrated images that beg us to ask a host of questions in these opening
lines. That is another power that music has in common with poetry: the capacity for
concentration of energy and passion! (And by the way, is my reaction to this poem a
healthy one – that I want pick up and head off to battle? What exactly has gotten hold of
me? Have I been made captive to a powerful image rather than given freedom to
explore a question and seek a truth?)
In your sophomore year, you will read of David, another warrior, another musician, but
also an instrument of God. You will read the Psalms and sing their songs. God the
Muse, man the instrument! How frustrating and depressing this must be for the wholly
self-sufficient spirit that would have mankind be the creator and ruler of our world - that
would have us become like gods? What kind of freedom comes from obedience to God,
from becoming God’s instrument? Or do men and women gain their freedom only from
disobedience – something for our juniors to consider when reading Milton’s Paradise
Lost?
But musical compositions have always had a special place in the literary tradition. Music
was among the seven liberal arts as they were studied in the Middle Ages. As you will
recall, those seven liberal arts were divided into the trivium, the arts of communication
and language: grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium, the arts of counting
and measuring: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. It turns out that music has
mathematical elements that appear to be at its root, that is, that there is a correlation
between the musical intervals in our everyday songs and the length of a string that can
be plucked to play those sounds. You will learn from your own construction of a
monochord, a one-stringed instrument, that the correlation between those very musical
intervals and the divisions of the string that makes the sounds is described by a set of
ratios consisting of small whole numbers. Lo and behold, we have physical phenomena,
musical sounds, that have a mathematical form. Thus, there may something in music
that is grounded in nature, not just in our sensibility, suggesting a model of the very
mathematical physics you will be studying in your junior and senior laboratory. Music
makes the claim that it can be studied objectively. And this causes us again to ask in
�what way nature might be as musical as we human beings are.
Consider some of the great masterpieces of musical imagination. Sophomores spend
several weeks with Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Measure by measure, the
mathematical elements are analyzed, the melodies and harmonics studied, the rhythm
and meter explored, and the lyrics and gospel text applied. If we are ever going to get a
sense of the possibility of mathematical physics to explain an emotional or spiritual
response, it will be in our study of this masterpiece. It is indeed a passionate work of art,
and it begs the question what Bach’s music has to do with the Gospel of Matthew?
Does the music have a power over the listener that the Bible does not have over the
reader? And is this good or is it downright heresy?
We spend time with Mozart and study closely one of his operas, usually Don Giovanni.
Who are these human souls that step out onto the stage and sing the music that
belongs only to each of them, songs that reveal their character - or shape it - in time,
over the course of the opera? What is the relationship between the music and the
words? Consider the words alone and they are pretty poor examples of literature. But
set them to this music and they soar! They are playful or tragic; they tug at our
heartstrings; in Mozart’s hands, they are invariably beautiful. Whatever makes them
beautiful? Are there elements of beauty as there appear to be elements of music? Are
the two related? And what about the “ugly”? Are things ugly because they do not have
the same concord with nature that beautiful things do, that they are in discord with
nature? Is the beauty of a musical composition to be found in the mathematical order of
the piece, or is it more complicated than that?
I move on to our third republic.
The Republic of Plato
This is a dialogue that freshmen will be reading in the middle of their first semester. It
has been described by some as the indispensable text that sets forth the plan of study
for what we call the "Program" at St. John's College. It provides the model of a liberal
�education at work, where music has its place in the education of the young, as an aid in
the formation of character, an habituation that is useful in the training of the soul but not
in its education. This education of the soul is better served by philosophy, a love of and
pursuit of wisdom, which Socrates in this dialogue calls the greatest music of all.
Such is the power of music to grab hold of the soul that Socrates warns us of its
dangers. “So then,” Socrates says to his young interlocutor, Glaucon, “isn’t this why
upbringing in music is most sovereign? It’s because rhythm and concord most of all sink
down to the inmost soul and cling to her most vigorously as they bring gracefulness with
them; and they make a man graceful if he’s brought up correctly, but if not, then the
opposite.” Socrates points to ‘rhythm and concord’ for the source of music’s power, not
its tones, intervals, melodies, and harmonies.Is he right in that? Do we think he is right
about the power of music for good and for ill? If this dialogue is meant to be a kind of
model for how we go about things at this College, how should we study music at St.
John’s to avoid the bad and pursue the good? Should music rather be banned from the
College as Socrates insists it ought to be in the formal program of study for the
guardians of his Republic? What is the difference between the image-making of the
poets, artists and musicians on the one hand and the image-making of the philosopher
on the other --- whose image of the Sun serves as a metaphor for the Good, of the
Cave for our everyday dwelling places, and of the Divided Line for our path to Wisdom?
It is time to move on to our next republic, but I cannot help but pause to observe that we
are not without a sense of humor about the seriousness of this or any of these other
Republics. We even have a Battle Hymn to the Republic of Letters, written by one of our
tutors, Mr. Higuera, and performed by a group of tutors on one of those long, cold winter
days in a rite of distraction and fun that we call “Be Gone Dull Care”: Let me share the
first of several clever stanzas:
My mind has seen the glory of th' Idea of the Good,
That it's not the same as pleasure I have firmly understood,
And I wouldn't take a tyrant's power even if I could,
I'm marching from The Cave!
Marching, marching towards the sunlight,
�Marching, marching towards the sunlight,
Marching, marching towards the sunlight,
I'm marching from The Cave!
It is now quite clearly time to move to our fourth and last republic.
The Republic of St. John’s College
By now, you already have a feel for some of the kinds of music you will be singing,
hearing, and reflecting upon. We have taken seriously the effort to restore music as a
liberal art to the curriculum. As a close study of musical elements and musical literature
can best be undertaken by learning to make music, we ask all of our students to use the
one musical instrument they have in common --- their voices. Freshmen will sing
together throughout the year, learning the fundamentals of melody and basic notation,
before turning to sing some of the great choral works. Sophomores investigate rhythm
in words and in notes. They study the ratios of musical intervals and consider melody,
harmony and counterpoint, all in the context of some of the finest music ever composed
by Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and others.
And then throughout the College community, there seem to be countless occasions for
playing music and singing, and for listening to the fine musical performances of your
fellow citizens of this Republic. Join the St. John’s Chorus, the Madrigal Choir, Primum
Mobile, or the College Orchestra; come and perform at our Collegiums, or just come to
hear your classmates. I don’t think there is anything quite like experiencing the Muse at
play in this community.
Our purpose both in and out of the classroom, in the words of another of our tutors, Mr.
Kalkavage, “is to improve … [our] students’ aesthetic taste: to introduce them to truly
great music in an effort to beget a love for all things graceful and well formed. [We] hope
that the study of music begets … a habit of searching for causes and details of beautiful
things, and that the love of beauty will nourish the love of knowledge and truth. [And we]
hope they will strive to imitate in their day-to-day lives the virtues of harmoniousness,
proportion, good timing, … grace, and ‘striking the right note’ in thought, speech,
feeling, and action.” (Peter Kalkavage, “The Neglected Muse”, The American Educator
�Fall 2006)
In short, we want these four years to be intensely musical years so that you may
experience the liberation of mind and the harmony of soul that is achieved when both
mind and soul are directed toward the beautiful. Go forth and sing the songs that stir
you to engage in this search for beauty and truth! Make philosophy your Muse. You’ll
find that this is a pretty friendly Republic for that kind of activity.
Let me close by inviting you to listen to one of the simplest and, to my ear, one of the
most beautiful pieces of music we make: Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus, a song familiar to all
the residents of this Republic of St. John’s College. I invite all who cannot help
themselves to join in and sing with a few of our students and faculty who agreed earlier
today to lead us in song.
SING!
Thank you one and all.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Please join us for refreshments and conversation outside the lobby immediately
following the recession.
I declare the College in session this 24th day of August, 2011.
CONVOCATUM EST!!
�
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Convocation
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St. John’s College Graduate Institute
Convocation Address
Summer 2011
What Is Graduate Liberal Education?
Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the
Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself
as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions,
and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from
time to time turn the searchlight of inquiry on ourselves. So I mean to take this occasion to ask:
what is graduate liberal education? Now as citizens of, or visitors in, a democracy dedicated not
to the achievement of happiness but to its pursuit, everything around us commands us to
preoccupy ourselves with means, with procedures, and with methods. We feel a need to
apologize for any way in which we might depart from the common run in how we live our lives.
Our danger is that an excessive self-concern will place obstacles in our path – obstacles like
seminars on seminar, conversations about conversation, questions that ask ‘what is a question?’ –
and hide from us the things themselves that ought to be the subject of our studies. My apology,
then, is that I mean my remarks this afternoon to be a temporary inoculation against this danger:
a short bout of the disease that will leave us, perhaps after some discomfort, with a clear
conscience, and in energetic good health.
So what is graduate liberal education? It suits this occasion for me to begin with the
word ‘graduate.’ This word stands for what binds together all of us here today. Students come
to the Graduate Institute at different times in their lives, from different backgrounds, and with
different goals. Some mean simply to continue their education, others mean to become better
1
�teachers, and still others mean eventually to pursue more advanced degrees elsewhere. But all
come having completed some form of undergraduate education. (The same is true, incidentally,
of the tutors, not just in the Graduate Institute, but at St. John’s as a whole.) And yet,
notwithstanding this publicly-acknowledged completion, each student and each tutor is brought
to the Graduate Institute of St. John’s College by an opposite feeling, one of incompletion: a
feeling of need, for example, or a sense that one’s education is not finished, or an anticipation of
pleasure at the thought of learning more. To give this feeling of incompletion its due, think of
this: while in many quarters it has become a matter of routine expectation that young people will
complete an undergraduate degree, this expectation has not yet been extended to the graduate
level. The feeling that brings each graduate student to St. John’s, like the sense that brings each
tutor here, is not bolstered by routine. To the contrary: many of us pursue our educations here
just when the demands of career and family are at their height, and so very much against
common expectation.
This feeling of incompletion, whatever its form, has from time to time been taken, or
rather, mistaken, for a sign that the undergraduate education that precedes it has been a failure.
This false inference has in turn even led to the allegation that the program of the Graduate
Institute is really a ‘second chance’ at the St. John’s undergraduate program – the Program, as
we sometimes call it – and that, in view of its relative brevity, the graduate program is ‘St. John’s
lite.’ But this allegation is unjust. It makes just as much sense to claim that, if a St. John’s
undergraduate were to say on graduation day that she wished that she could have had a
preceptorial on Plato’s Republic, or another chance to work through Euclid’s Elements, then her
undergraduate education was a failure. Indeed, it makes just as much sense to claim that, if a St.
John’s tutor were to be eager to reread Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for his Politics and
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�Society tutorial, because he hoped to learn something from his reading, then both his
undergraduate and his graduate educations were failures – to say nothing about the time he spent
as a tutor at the College. So in the question ‘what is graduate liberal education,’ the word
‘graduate’ does not mean ‘failed undergraduate.’ It means something more affirmative.
The best way to get at this more affirmative meaning is to infer what we at St. John’s
think ‘graduate’ means from a comparison of the graduate and undergraduate programs. The
first differences that come to sight in such a comparison are quantitative. Undergraduates attend
four classes a semester for eight semesters; graduates attend three classes a term for four terms.
The undergraduate classes are seminars, tutorials, laboratories, and preceptorials; the graduate
classes are seminars, tutorials, and preceptorials. Undergraduates have two tutorials a semester,
language and mathematics; graduates have one a term, and its content depends on the segment.
So with respect to quantity, it does appear that the graduate program is to the undergraduate as
shorter is to longer or less to more.
But here at St. John’s we know that quantitative measures are laconic, if not wholly mute,
unless they are informed by qualitative judgments. And it is the qualitative differences between
the graduate and undergraduate programs that begin to shed light on the affirmative meaning of
the word ‘graduate.’ Notice that while each of the undergraduate classes, and above all seminar,
proceeds roughly chronologically through its readings, over all four years of the program, each
of the graduate classes is roughly chronological only within its segment, and more strictly so
only within each class. Since the chronological order is the default order in the undergraduate
program, adopted when no other ordering theory is at work, the curtailed chronological order of
the graduate program is a sign that some other consideration intrudes. That consideration,
clearly, is choice. Within certain limits – not every segment is offered every term, and the
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�History segment must not be taken first – graduate students are allowed to choose the order of
their studies. Perhaps more importantly, since the master’s degree is granted after four segments
have been completed, graduate students are allowed to choose which segment to omit from their
studies. The same consideration informs the place of the preceptorial in the undergraduate and
graduate programs. While students in both programs choose their preceptorials from a list of
offerings, undergraduates can choose two, and the choice is a privilege reserved for juniors and
seniors, whereas graduates can choose four, one for each segment. This qualitative difference,
that the graduate program affords more scope for choice, indicates that by ‘graduate’ the College
means, in part, someone who can be entrusted with more choices in her education.
But why can graduates be entrusted with more choices? And more importantly, to what
end is their greater scope for choice? Another qualitative difference between our two programs
is helpful here. Notice that, in the place of the undergraduates’ four mathematics tutorials and
three labs, the graduates have a mathematics and natural science segment, with a seminar,
tutorial, and preceptorial. Only in the tutorial is the liberal art of mathematics cultivated through
regular demonstration; the preceptorials for this segment only occasionally involve
demonstration or practica. Instead, our graduate students study mathematics and natural science
chiefly by reading and discussing great books. Harvey, Newton, and Darwin are read in the
undergraduate tutorial or laboratory, but in the graduate seminar. Likewise, in the place of the
undergraduates’ four language tutorials and one music tutorial, the graduates have a literature
segment, with a seminar, tutorial, and preceptorial. Only in the tutorial, again, are the liberal arts
of grammar, rhetoric, and logic cultivated through the study of poetry and prose. Instead, our
graduate students study literature chiefly by reading and discussing great books. More tellingly,
in the place of translation, which is the central activity of many semesters of the four language
4
�tutorials of the undergraduate program, our graduate students can choose to take a Greek
preceptorial that is ancillary to reading a great book in its original language.
More so than in the undergraduate program, in the graduate program most of the classes
are centered on the reading and discussion of great books, as distinguished from the cultivation
of the liberal arts. The tutorial schedules in each of the five segments show that only in the
literature tutorial is there latitude for variations in scheduling and content – variations associated
with the cultivation of the liberal arts in the undergraduate tutorials. The strict schedules and
settled content of the other four graduate tutorials make them resemble seminars and
preceptorials in the graduate, and undergraduate, programs. Indeed, only one of the five segment
titles even names a liberal art; the others name fields of study, such as are often used to order
books in a bookstore. (I will say something about the dangerousness of our segment titles in a
subsequent convocation address.)
This comparison of the two programs that express the Program, each of which combines
in its own way the study of the great books with the cultivation of the liberal arts, makes the
qualitative meaning of their quantitative differences clear. Graduate students at St. John’s
College cultivate the liberal arts less than do their undergraduate colleagues, but they can thereby
devote proportionately more of their time to a more focused study of the great books of the
western tradition. By ‘graduate’ the College means someone who can be entrusted with more
choices in his education, because he can be presumed to have cultivated the liberal arts enough in
his life to study at the graduate level, and to make good choices of subjects for his study. This,
then, is the end of the greater scope of choice afforded to graduate students by the Program: to
permit them to focus on a few great books of a few kinds, so as to study them in greater depth,
with greater intensity. It is no accident that, while the seminar, as the class in which the liberal
5
�arts are exercised on the great books, is the heart of the undergraduate program, the heart of the
graduate program is the preceptorial, as the class in which one or a few great books are read with
the greatest focus.
So the conclusion, for the moment, of my inquiry – the answer I suggest to my question
‘what is graduate liberal education?’ – is the following: graduate liberal education is not so much
the continued cultivation of the liberal arts, as the more focused study of the great books of the
western tradition. Of course, like so many other answers to ‘what is?’ questions, this answer is
itself a riddle that poses another question: ‘what does it mean to study a great book?’ Common
sense tells us, after all, that we study not the books themselves but the things that the books are
about, human being and the world. Perhaps it would be better if we could get the books out of
our way, and go straight to the things themselves. As an epilogue to my inquiry today, I would
like to suggest a solution to this riddle – one that takes seriously the thought that the great books
are the things themselves.
When we at St. John’s College say that we study books, we mean that we study what is
essential about them, rather than what is accidental. In part, this means that we are not primarily
concerned with accidents of translation, or edition, or substantiation. The ways in which two
translations of the Republic or two editions of the Federalist Papers might differ are only
interesting to us insofar as they illuminate what is essential about these books. And it makes no
difference to us whether the books are written on parchment, printed on paper, or displayed on an
iPad, provided that what is essential shines through. But we are concerned to spend our limited
time on certain books, those whose essential content is great. What, then, do we mean by ‘great,’
with respect to books?
6
�At first it might seem that by ‘great’ we mean ‘the cause of great effects.’ This is not a
bad way to begin. For how else would we first suspect that a book is great, if not by hearing,
among everyone or among all those whom we admire, the opinion ‘this book is great’? And to
produce such an opinion among so many or such admirable people is surely to cause a great
effect. But it doesn’t take much reflection to see the problem with this view. How do we know
that the book in question is really the cause of, that is, really responsible for, this great effect?
The difference between the accidental and the essential is helpful here too. We are not interested
in books that have great effects by accident – for example, by being misunderstood. Such things
are in the territory of the intellectual historian. Rather, we are interested in books that essentially
cause great effects. For the same reason, we are not interested in books that fail to have great
effects by accident – again, for example, by being misunderstood. Rather, we are interested in
books that essentially intend to cause great effects.
The objection that books do not strictly speaking have intentions should not confute us.
Like every product of human art, a book has an intention only to the extent that the human being
who authored it had an intention: the rest is accident. (If your thoughts have just strayed to
numberless monkeys and the works of Shakespeare, I encourage you to try the experiment.) If
we are interested in books that essentially intend great effects, we are necessarily interested in
books whose authors also intended such effects. What we encounter in these great books is their
authors preserved and perfected, made young and beautiful.
But what is the greatest effect an author can intend? For surely there are effects greater
than merely spreading the opinion ‘this book is great.’ Here we are at the heart of the matter. To
foster and educate human beings, to help a human type become actual from among those
potentials that compose human nature; and, concomitantly, to take what is given to us in some
7
�disorder and illuminate a world, ordered in terms of first and last, foreground and background –
this is the greatest effect an author can intend. This, too, is what it means for the great books to
be the things themselves: that in the light of the human types they foster and the worlds they
illuminate, the things themselves also emerge. The traditional subjects of the liberal arts – the
words that are the fundamental beings in grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the magnitudes and
multitudes that are the fundamental beings in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy – are
first illuminated by the more comprehensive relation of human being and world articulated in a
great book. Such books furnish the minds of whole epochs of humankind. Such books,
regardless of the genre in which history has shelved them, are all products of their author’s love
of wisdom. And so they are worthy of our focused study, here in the Graduate Institute at St.
John’s College.
I would like to conclude this epilogue by announcing that there will be a study group this
term on Machiavelli’s Prince, held on Tuesday afternoons at 2:30 in the Hartle Room, beginning
on July 5th. I would also like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the
back of the Great Hall, before going to class.
The summer 2011 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est.
Jeff Black
Annapolis, Maryland
June 20, 2011
8
�
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is Graduate Liberal Education?"
Convocation
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Tutors
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Annapolis Convocation, Spring
2011
Welcome. Welcome especially to our new, select group of
Graduate Institute students. Welcome also to returning students
and colleagues.
Last summer, for one of our Wednesday evening "Life of the
Mind" events (these rather informal events take the place of the
more formal Friday evening lectures that occur during the regular
academic year), I put together a panel of tutors to discuss the
question, "What is Philosophy?" For that occasion, I asked each
tutor to select a program author and give a 10-minute
interpretation of what that author thought constituted the activity of
philosophy. The presentations were so thought-provoking that, in
the intense question period that followed, we never got around to
what we ourselves think philosophy is. But here at St. John's—
where we aim at living the examined life, where questions
regarding truth are welcomed in classes on Euclidean geometry,
Chaucer's tales, or the Bible, where the questions persist whether
in the classroom or the Coffee Shop, at an After Seminar
Gathering or at home—it seems only right to press ourselves to
tackle that question. Today, in honor of your joining our
community, I am going to put myself on the spot and venture to
define philosophy.
Let me beat a hasty retreat. I will try today to say what I think
philosophy is, as practiced here and as I have gleaned from my
32 years of experience at St. John's. This version should not be
considered what "we" think philosophy is—for, as you will soon
discover, each tutor and each student is continually articulating,
questioning, re-evaluating, and re-articulating what it is that we
practice here, what constitutes the program, and virtually every
�other element of the best life as well. None of us would say the
exact same things and we surely have some radical
disagreements.
Furthermore, I have real trepidations about making the attempt to
say even what I think philosophy is. Last year, when one of my
colleagues was relating an anecdote to me, she recounted in
passing that she had identified herself as a philosopher—and I
found myself doing a double-take. I realized that I would never
identify myself as a philosopher to anyone. Of course, I have no
degree in philosophy, as she does. But I also would never identify
myself as a mathematician even though I do have degrees in that
field. As a tutor, I am clearly not an expert—not even in "my" field.
Though I have some skills, I suppose, and I definitely possess
arcane information that not everyone has, I do not spend my time
considering abstract entities invented just yesterday nor struggling
to prove claims about those entities. I simply don't feel that I am
pursuing the authentic activity.
On the other hand, am I not authentically doing philosophy here at
the College? What am I doing if not philosophy as I examine the
profoundest ideas both in great books and in our own lives?
Having reflected to this point on my colleague's open assumption
of the mantle of philosophy, I realize I quite admire it and begin to
wonder. Shouldn't I too claim to be a philosopher?
As you may know, the etymology of the word "philosophy" is
Greek: philos—meaning lover, and sophia—meaning wisdom.
Can I not claim to be a lover of wisdom? Who wouldn't claim to be
a lover of wisdom? Well, during a seminar oral examination last
term, one of my students described people she knew who claimed
knowledge was unimportant, indeed that made decisions on the
basis of that claim. But such people reveal their desire to "know
better" than others around them, don't they? Aren't they claiming
they have superior wisdom about the best way to live—even as
�they scorn the reading of books and the raising of questions? As
Aristotle claims in the Metaphysics, "All men by nature desire to
know." (980a) But neither Aristotle nor I would claim those people
my student described are living the philosophic life; indeed, they
themselves are trying very hard to reject the philosophic life. What
do I think characterizes a person who loves wisdom? What is the
essence of the philosophic activity?
One common claim of the participants in the summer panel on
philosophy was that each author considered philosophy to be a
"way of life." I immediately agreed. But I have learned to be
suspicious of easy agreement. So I have since been prodding
myself to examine what I mean when I say that "philosophy is a
way of life."
As is often the case, it's easier to say what I don't mean.
Sometimes when we refer to "philosophy" we simply mean that
someone studied philosophy at some university and got a degree.
Certainly, this is not what I mean. To allow someone else to
determine a set of books and ideas which are labeled
"philosophy" and become conversant and knowledgeable about
what they contain is too empty for me to want to make a life of it.
Even the deeper version—where the expert is genuinely weighing
various arguments against each other—seems more a valuable
skill than a true identity.
Sometimes we speak of someone's "philosophy of life," by which
we mean a set of beliefs, a creed—or at least a system, by which
the person lives. This also is not what I intend by "philosophy."
Though most days I long achingly for such a creed (one that
would guarantee the best decisions), I don't see how
unquestioning adherence to a code (no matter how hard-won nor
how profound) could really constitute the activity of philosophy
itself. Moreover, reading Don Quixote for my preceptorial last term
has reminded me that every interaction with the world challenges
�such a code, requires—at a minimum—re-examination but usually
re-interpretation and sometimes abandonment. What we see as
giants often reveal themselves to be mere windmills. And
meanwhile the too, too solid windmills of life resist one's lance
and sometimes break it.
In the republic of letters, "philosophy" sometimes refers to the
study of the truths and principles underlying all knowledge and
being. This concept of philosophy seems a worthier candidate
than the other two, but it does not, at least on the surface, appear
to be a way of life. This formulation obscures the vexed character
of the philosopher's relation to truths and principles.
At this College, we are keenly conscious of the difficulty of
knowing the truth. Let me, in my perplexity, turn toward one of our
profound original sources for help. In the inception of our Great
Books program, the Socratic life as depicted by Plato provided
much inspiration and guidance for our activities in this community.
Many of my own ideas about the philosophic life stem from the
picture I have constructed through reading the Republic, the
Apology, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, and, of course, the Meno.
As you yourself saw in Socrates' interactions with Meno, Socrates
resists the glib answer—whether it be a secondhand speech of
the professional rhetorician Gorgias or an overhasty dismissal of
mundane matters. He lingers over even the most basic questions:
What is a bee? What is a figure? How do I form a double square?
During my years at St. John's I've learned to allow these
questions to bring me up short, to pause and reflect on each
word, to check the momentum impelling me to leap over the
simple-sounding. In the process of so doing, the familiar becomes
unfamiliar. We see with fresh eyes both the diagonal of a square
and ourselves. Suddenly we do not quite recognize the square
root of 8; we begin to wonder whether we should really call
square root of 8 a number; whether we know what virtue is;
�whether we, like Meno, are asking questions only to find out what
other people say and not because we really want to know, really
love wisdom.
But how do I tell whether I "really" love wisdom? Once a doubt
creeps in regarding my unexamined, unconscious motives, it's
difficult to judge whether I'm directing myself toward wisdom or
wandering, lost among shadowy opinions. My own touchstone
necessarily derives from experiences akin to those of the
slaveboy, moments that not only feel like the lifting of a veil
between my eyes and some object of thought but that also are
accompanied by a sense that a previously dormant part of myself
has suddenly quickened with life and activity. Life lived in the
absence of this invigoration feels, if not dead, at least empty. Or
perhaps more accurately, that other life lacks a vital dimension.
As Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader, "On Not Knowing
Greek" p. 32) has put it:
... all can feel the indomitable honesty, the courage, the love of truth which
draw Socrates and us in his wake to the summit where, if we too may stand
for a moment, it is to enjoy the greatest felicity of which we are capable.
I don't think I, or Woolf, can persuade someone that this
dimension exists. But I do think experience has engendered in me
a passion to think, to endure the struggle toward clarity. But how
do these momentary glimpses of felicity constitute a way of life?
I'm not satisfied that I've focused on the key element yet.
Love of wisdom, as manifest in Socrates and cultivated at St.
John's, requires absolute honesty. Socrates is unafraid to admit
ignorance publicly. And he frequently adjures his interlocutor to
speak "just what he thinks" rather than what someone else has
said; he demands of Meno, "What is your own account of virtue?"
(71d) One reason we eschew secondary sources here at the
College is that the din of other voices tends to drown out one's
own thought. It sounds an easy matter to "say what you think," but
�it's actually much easier to know what someone else has said or
to guess what others want to hear. And secondary sources are
not the only danger to developing one's own honest thought.
Even if others can ask just the right question to shake us out of
complacent judgments, provide us with a well-chosen instance of
a general claim that illuminates an otherwise dark and puzzling
construction of the world, surprise us out of a deeply satisfying
interpretation with a carefully crafted formulation, or refute one of
our claims with a reasoned analysis, no one can have the "Aha!"
moment for us. So a philosopher doesn't let Plato or Aristotle or a
tutor or another student simply tell him/her what to think. But what
does the philosopher do? How does the philosopher free the
voice inside struggling to be heard?
To look within and evaluate the structure, quality, and range of
one's experience, the integrity of the conclusions drawn from that
experience, and the consistency of the complex web of those
conclusions—that demands rigor, humility, suffering, submission,
courage, tirelessness. If one dwells with this kind of love of
wisdom, nothing is so cherished or so private that it is not to be
held up to scrutiny. The supreme challenge of this kind of honesty
is a lifetime project. Perhaps this is what I mean by making
philosophy a way of life?
But many, perhaps most, people think they are being honest with
themselves and others. Is there some special way for a
philosopher to scrutinize his opinions, debunk his own illusions,
penetrate his own defenses? All too often in the past, I have
wrongly thought I understood. Just as the slaveboy was fooled by
the resonant sound and delightful simplicity of a "double area"
arising from a "double length," I have been seduced by mere
words. Just as Meno was only able to accept a definition in the
"high, poetic style" (76e) of Gorgias and could not "hear" the
better, perhaps truer, definition, I too have exhibited a weakness
�for the lofty adjective, the idealistic phrase, the neat dichotomy. Is
there some characteristic other than the only partially reliable
ability to analyze one's own claims that sets the philosophic life
apart?
In Plato's dialogue Phaedo, as Socrates spends his last day on
earth in prison waiting for the fatal cup of hemlock, he depicts a
mode of existence for the philosopher that is thoroughgoing and
quite stark. This topic of conversation is launched by Socrates'
claim to his friends that he is willing and indeed even eager to die
(62c). In response to his friends' incredulous reactions, he makes
the yet more astounding claim that "philosophy, practiced in the
right way," is "one thing only, namely training ....for dying and to
be dead." (64a) He explains that pleasures of food, drink, sight,
and all pleasures of the body distract a person from pursuing the
full truth of the being of things in general (64c-66c). So "real
philosophers train for dying, and to be dead is for them less
terrible than for all other men." (67e) For they have purified their
soul—"in separating so far as may be the soul from the body, and
habituating it to assemble and gather itself together from every
region of the body, so as to dwell alone and apart, so far as
possible, both in this present life and in the life to come, released
from the body's fetters." (67c)
Now, here indeed is a version of philosophy that is a way of life—
but a highly problematic one. Not only does it not echo very much
our own way of life here at the College (we do rather enjoy the
wine and food as well as the conversation at our after-seminar
gatherings), but it presents itself as a way of death at least as
much as a way of life. As one of Socrates' interlocutors puts it,
"[the many] would say [such a person] has one foot in the grave."
(65a)
�To think that the body is simply a hindrance to truth is probably
not in my capacity, not least because it seems also to undermine
the power of music and poetry. Worse yet, this version of
philosophy, where private cares must be set aside, normal
obligations disdained, and connections to family and friends
attenuated, seems almost inhuman. In the Phaedo, this
indifference to earthly concerns is admitted to be inhuman, in the
sense that it is described as divine. And I am inspired by talk of
the soul longing for its own eternal ground of the truth; I'm even
more moved by the picture Plato paints of the dying Socrates. He
never once weeps; he never even trembles; he continues calmly
discoursing about various subjects—not only philosophy, but also
the various possibilities of life after death, or no life after death; he
is a rock for his grieving friends. I truly hope that I can confront my
hour of death as nobly and with as much equanimity as this
Socrates.
Nonetheless, I cannot live this life. I'm probably too weak an
individual to be an ascetic, even if I believed this was in fact the
philosophic life. But the truth is: I can't believe such asceticism is
the way to wisdom. Even Socrates' admissions that the goal of
philosophy is, strictly speaking, unachievable in this life and that
the philosopher is only cultivating a certain attitude towards the
body, even these admissions do not salvage this version of
philosophy for me. I suspect truth of being various, of descending
on us in a multitude of shapes, of being grasped through the
imagination as well as the intellect, of residing in friendships and
society as well as in the individual.
But perhaps Socrates intends something more subtle than his
conversation in the Phaedo superficially indicates. Though
Socrates does, at the beginning of the dialogue, send his family
away in order to converse with his friends, we are first allowed to
see the 70-year old Socrates not only with his wife but also with
�his toddler son. Then we see him reflecting on the inextricably
linked natures of pleasure and pain as his shackles are removed
and we hear him connecting his own immediate bodily experience
to his conclusions about the nature of pleasure and pain. Then we
learn that he has been composing songs in case dialectical
conversation did not properly fulfill his vocation. Music, poetry,
friends, family, pleasure, pain, conversation—these still engage
the nobly dying Socrates.
Perhaps being philosophic is more about holding a certain
posture towards all of life—an attentiveness toward the world,
toward oneself, and toward others; a readiness to act on the basis
of thought and not merely on the basis of custom or pleasure; a
critical observation—to be sure of opinions and ideas but also of
life, awake to the timeless within the temporal. I still don't think I
will be able any time soon to say, "I am a philosopher." But I will
say that I am working toward being a philosopher. And I hope
you'll work with me as well.
Marilyn Higuera
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2011
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Spring 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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Graduate Institute
Tutors
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Annapolis Convocation, Fall
2010
Welcome to new and returning Graduate Institute students,
friends, family, and colleagues.
Today you new students are beginning a program of study in
which the books you read will challenge you to confront
fundamental questions, to re-examine cherished opinions, and to
analyze the very structure of your world. You are beginning this
program in either the Literature or the Mathematics and Natural
Science segment. Perhaps you see a vast gulf between the world
of mathematics and the world of literature. No doubt, these
categories reflect our sense of two radically different human
possibilities. However, we at St. John's hesitate to pigeonhole our
texts and we often prefer to leave it to you to disentangle the
various threads of knowledge. Euclid's Elements is a constructed
work of art and rhetoric as well as a progressive development of
the logical consequences of certain axioms. Characters in
Sophocles' Antigone propound reasoned arguments for and
against the primacy of the state even as they embody the raging
passions, flawed insecurities, and irrational loyalties of all-toohuman individuals. So, in the Graduate Institute, the organization
of "great books" into categories for our segments is done with a
bit of a bad conscience; it is knowingly done more for the sake of
practical considerations than as a serious claim regarding the
boundaries of either the books or the issues therein.
In this spirit of modest challenge regarding the
compartmentalization of learning, I would like today to reflect
�upon an underlying shared motif in our Mathematics and Natural
Science and Literature segments: namely, imagination.
The role of imagination in literature—both on the part of the
author and as necessitated in the reader—is universally
acknowledged. Whether we view it with suspicion ("oh, that could
only happen in your imagination") or with reverence ("in metaphor
the imagination is life"—Wallace Stevens, Three Academic
Pieces), we all experience a particular sort of consciousness
when we open a novel or play or epic and begin to read.
Immediately, we envision a scrawny knight on a skeletal steed
accompanied by a rotund peasant, charging a giant/windmill with
lance atilt. Or, guided by the well-turned phrase, we conjure up a
gory battlefield littered with corpses where Greek and Trojan
antagonists pause to exchange personal histories before swinging
the bludgeon or thrusting the spear. Literature works upon our
minds, quickening our productive powers and prompting us to
construct a world, usually a little bit alien, populated with vivid,
captivating images.
You may, on the other hand, be only beginning to appreciate the
role of imagination in mathematics—as you linger over the
definitions and postulates of Euclid's geometry. Unlike the austere
equations of algebra that you will have experienced in a prior
educational life, Euclid's formulations prompt, indeed demand,
active visualization. True, the first definition, "A point is that which
has no part" resists easy visualization. Nonetheless, in order to
understand this definition, very quickly we begin trying to picture
something which has no part. Usually, someone draws a dot on
the chalkboard. However, we can literally see the specks (or
parts) of chalk dust, so instead we represent the dot in our mind's
eye; we strip away the specks of chalk dust; we isolate a speck;
we zoom in with our mind's eye microscope and attempt to
examine whether we have stripped away all parts and are left with
�a single, ultimate unity. Surely we are exercising our imagination
in this process—a process we repeat with the second definition,
"A line is breadthless length." Again, we must picture something,
some stretching forth through the inner space of the mind; again,
we must strip away any visible width from this image; we must
repeat this process so long as any width is "visible"; we must try
to isolate the direction until it is all but invisible.
This peculiar constructing of an image of Euclid's definitions
certainly involves the imagination. Drawn images are, we infer,
not the ones that Euclid intends. Why then does Euclid formulate
his first postulate as: "to draw a straight line from any point to any
point"
It is a puzzle. However, I might note that the Greek word
translated as "draw" also means "lead" as in "lead the troops into
battle." So perhaps this verb conveys more the sense of an
energetic activity required of the student of geometry than a
physical drawing. We must be able to summon forth, to "lead" a
line out of one point to another. But what translators generally fail
to capture is that Euclid uses not only an infinitive (which already
mutes the sense of activity), but a perfect infinitive—something
like "to have drawn." So, though Euclid points us to activity, he
places us in an odd temporal relation to such activity. The activity
has already been accomplished. Moreover, the infinitive is not a
direct command to us, nor even a permission to us to perform this
activity.
Taking into account Euclid's prefatory clause, "Let the following
be postulated," we may construe Euclid to be begging for our
permission. But again, translators have trouble rendering Euclid's
exact grammar: he uses a third person perfect passive
imperative. No wonder they have trouble. We have little
experience of the third person imperative in English; the St.
John's Greek text suggests that the playwright's "Enter the king"
�is an equivalent. Such an imperative does not directly address the
reader, but instead some other, hidden being who presumably
can implement the command. The passivity of Euclid's imperative
further weakens any sense of our participation in the process. I
too am inadequate to yield a faithful translation, but perhaps "Let
it have been begged: to have led out a line from any point to any
point."
What then does Euclid want us to do? His text is filled with action
verbs such as "describe," "apply," "construct," as well as "draw."
These verbs are almost universally governed by the
aforementioned perfect passive imperative; nevertheless, they are
powerful incitements to temporal processes. What is our relation
to these processes and to the objects they animate?
Speusippus, Plato's nephew and his successor as head of his
Academy, is reputed to have commented on Euclid's geometrical
objects:
...it is better to assert that all these things are and that we observe the
coming-into-being of these not in the manner of making, but of
recognizing, treating the timeless beings as though they were presently
coming into being....
The language Speusippus chooses, "as though they were
presently coming into being," highlights, I think, the opposing
aspects I've noted in Euclid's treatment. This phrase, "as though"
also captures the imaginative aspect of his entire enterprise.
While Euclid is not telling us that we must create a line, ex nihilo,
out of nothing, he is encouraging us to reflect upon, to imagine, its
having come into being, its genesis, its nature.
Similarly, every Euclidean proof launches us on a discursive and
imaginative journey. First, the proposition states a universal truth,
such as: "In isosceles triangles, the angles at the base are equal
to one another." Next, some particular figure, here a definite
isosceles triangle ABC, is called up for inspection—using the
�perfect passive imperative that lets us know the triangle
connecting those points has previously been constructed. What
follows is a step-by-step unfolding of a discovery of the relations
establishing the truth. These relations permeate the object
already—an object whose existence is antecedent to the proof
itself. But we are presumably only now revealing them to
ourselves. If someone goes to the board to reiterate the relevant
steps, you begin to appreciate how integral the imagination is to
understanding the proposition. Should the person at the board
make the mistake of drawing first the entire finished diagram with
all the enhancements to be added by the various steps, rather
than allowing the drawing to take shape gradually, you will find it
nearly impossible to understand, to see, to grasp the
interconnected relations that exhibit the general truth proposed.
As we present each relation to ourselves in embodied form, i.e.,
drawn on the board, we use double vision of a sort to see through
the drawn diagram to the perfected vision in our mind's eye (we
do this almost effortlessly); simultaneously, we subject this
perfected vision to the crucible of our critical reasoning (this
requires some real effort and the assistance of Euclid's prose).
Thus, our activity while doing proofs mediates between
thoughtless receptivity of facts or sensations and timeless
apprehension of timeless truths. And this mediation relies crucially
upon imagination. Only through an imaginative encounter with the
unfolding proof are we roused from mere passive sensation,
inspired to an examination of the architecture of our inner space,
and pushed forward and beyond our initial survey.
Certainly, unrestrained imagination cannot achieve the desired
moment of dawning recognition that the proposition must
necessarily be true. Imaginative constructions must be
challenged, questioned, articulated, limited by the requirements of
reason. But I would like to point out that reason needs some
�regulation also; Meno's slave boy is seduced by the attractive,
echoing sound of the words, when he leaps to the notion that
"double the line will produce double the square." Socrates uses a
drawn image to help him correct his own mistake.
Here, I am speaking as though imagination and reason perform
their functions in some clearly separated, disjunct fashion. But I
think the case is much more complex. Even the perfected vision
necessary to "see" a point or line or triangle is not clearly the
domain of imagination alone. Can imagination truly achieve a
depiction of partlessness or breadthlessness? Does imagination
achieve the final leap from a dot to a point? We intuit that the
repetitive visualization process, stripping away breadth from a
ruler, say, could proceed ad infinitum; and this understanding
gives rise to some shaped idea in us. But the understanding must
partner with imagination to give us access to such an idea—an
idea we are fairly confident is identical for each of us, a specific,
articulable, unambiguous, and essentially spatial idea. An idea we
access through spatial, visualizable images. Trying to understand
geometry without the imagination may be like a blind person
reasoning about colors.
This partnership between imagination and reason functions in the
proof activity I described before as well. As we bring the diagram
itself into being in front of us, we are simultaneously bringing our
own understanding of the proposition into being. Here too, it is
difficult to disentangle the vision of the understanding as it grasps
the truth of each step and of the whole from the vision of the
imagination as it peers into the diagram to see the claims
themselves. Speusippus articulated this vision as a "recognizing";
the Greek word there is different from the one Plato uses in the
Meno regarding recollection. However, I think both words strive to
capture the aspect of the experience of knowing that feels as
though it is a looking, a looking at something at once separate
�and other, yet immediately appropriated. I note that Socrates
chose a geometrical example to illustrate his notion of
recollection. No doubt there are many reasons for his choice, but I
think one reason is that such an example highlights the
indispensable role of images in coming to know.
Perhaps it seems extravagant to claim that images are necessary
for knowledge. We at St. John's stress that reason is the arbiter in
our discussions, and I certainly don't want to minimize reason's
importance. But I am in good company when I emphasize images
in our search for a glimpse of unchangeable, immutable truths. In
De Anima, Aristotle asserts that "without imagination, there can
be no thought." (427b16) One of Descartes' rules is "not to
recognize those metaphysical entities which really cannot be
presented to the imagination." (Rules for the Direction of the
Mind, Rule XIV, p. 57) For Kant, imagination is called upon to put
together even space and time, as well as every appearance of an
object in space and time. He says:
Synthesis in general... is the mere result of the power of imagination, a
blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have
no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious.
(Critique of Pure Reason, B103)
To focus more intently on the power of the imagination as
encompassing both our story-making capacity and our
mathematical activity, I'm going finally to turn toward Plato. In fact,
I'm going to turn toward an image that Plato uses in a book we've
placed in neither Literature nor Mathematics/Natural Science but
in the Politics and Society segment, namely the Republic. It is,
however, a book that speaks to us as complete human beings.
Somewhere near the heart of that enormous work (509d-511e),
Socrates proposes an image of a divided line as a representation
of the entire cosmos, both the sensible world and the intellectual
world. He uses the image to depict the relationships of various
�categories of things, to chart an ascent through these categories
up to the idea of the good, and to discuss the human powers
correlate to each stage of the journey. I'm going to isolate one
layer of this rich and complicated image: the image is itself about
images.
Socrates divides the line first to represent visible and intelligible
things; then he divides each of those segments similarly. The
visibles are further separated into images (shadows, reflections in
water, mirror appearances) and the objects of which those things
are images (animals, plants, artifacts). The intelligibles are divided
into ideas approached deductively—for example, geometrical
ideas—and ideas grasped without hypotheses. Socrates
proposes (517b) that the visibles themselves reflect the same
relationship to the intelligibles that the first subdivision does:
visible objects are images of the intelligible objects. Note the
reversal of our usual interpretation of the material world as the
real thing from which we abstract vapory concepts.
Socrates uses the divided line to discuss four different human
relations to the four categories of objects (comparison, trust,
deductive thinking, understanding). Though an unmediated
knowledge of ideas is held out as the proper intellectual
engagement with the very highest category, the divided line itself
is a result of Socrates' reluctance to speak "about what one
doesn't know as though one knew." (506c) Socrates presents his
interlocutors with the poetic/mathematical metaphor of the divided
line when they press him to reveal his own (mere) opinions about
the good and knowledge (506b). Apparently, at least this instance
of image-making allows him to speak appropriately about what he
does not know. Of course, the divided line has a patent character
as an image; we are in no danger of being seduced into thinking
the visible things actually are a line. But why is this image the
right kind of speech for communicating Socrates' opinions (even if
�he must warn us to guard against any unwilling deception
therein—507a)? It helps to remember that, for Socrates, opinions
are never mere opinions; images are never mere images; they
are waystations on the path toward truth.
I conjecture that the line itself reveals something even more
general than Socrates elucidates; it elicits a fifth mode of thinking.
The relationship each part of the line possesses to its neighbor is
that of being an image. The philosophic ascent up the line
involves understanding—seeing—the imaging relationship, seeing
each image as an image (rather than imbibing it as a complete
and finished story).
Inspection of an image, whether poetic or geometric, whether a
living organism or a painting, is a proper activity of the
philosopher. The realization that an animal or a poem or a circle is
an image—both manifesting and hiding reality—is what moves us
as thinkers up the divided line, what puts us at least at the point
between two parts of the divided line. We become fully engaged
with what's in front of us, asking questions, making judgments,
winnowing claims—even making helpful images. Only thus do we
reveal to ourselves the potential for something we might call
recollection or recognition or learning.
Marilyn Higuera
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Fall 2010 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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Graduate Institute
Annapolis
Convocation, Summer 2010
Welcome to new and returning Graduate Institute students,
friends, family, and colleagues.
Aristotle says in the Ethics that, “all knowledge and every
intention desire[s] some good.” (1095a15) I propose to try today
to articulate the good at which we are aiming in our discussions
here at St. John’s. Though you have, no doubt, seen various
statements of the College’s goals in our literature and on our
website, I would like to approach this question from the inside,
and ask what we experience as fulfillment in our best class
conversations.
This is a difficult, perhaps hubristic, project for two reasons. First,
as you know, we aim at no particular result in our
conversations. To be sure, we limit ourselves to one particular
author, one particular shared reading, in each class. But it can
truly be said that we set off on uncharted waters (at least
uncharted by us), with no real captain on the ship, and propose to
meet whatever adventures befall us with only our native wit, our
general goodwill toward each other, the courage we are able to
summon in the face of the unknown, and whatever guidance we
can coax from the otherwise static words before us. I do not
believe I am overstating the situation. Tutors are not professors;
we have no fixed interpretation to which you must subscribe. The
questions we pose are as sincere—and as puzzling—as we can
discover. And the eccentric idea of a conversation among 20
�people with no agenda and no authority resists any simple
characterization of its form and spirit.
The second difficulty is that even tutors have varied
interpretations of our own activity. Each of us individually and
repeatedly examines our ends and means. In this endeavor, we
must set aside our idiosyncratic desires and goals: both the
questions most urgent to us (whether they be “What is virtue?” or
“Is language merely conventional?” or “Is God good?”) and also
any personal ambitions we may have. We each must try to
discern the common goals of the common activity. For the
experience of a shared project is definite and incontrovertible.
Now, often when we state our joint purpose, we—like many other
liberal arts institutions—speak of the cultivation of various
skills. Active learning in the public context of a classroom does
indeed hone one’s ability to reason, improve one’s recognition of
cogent arguments, develop clear and forceful communication,
train one in careful listening, and stimulate one to probe beneath
surface claims. These are many goods that arise from and are
necessary for our mode of learning. We set high standards for
each other with respect to these arts of apprehending, knowing,
and understanding. I feel sure you will be aware of your own
progress in these regards, and I have no doubt you will benefit
from acquiring these skills, universally acknowledged as useful.
But, when I said I wanted to ascertain the good we aim at “from
the inside,” I intended to ask whether the act of conversing has its
own good. To say we converse in order to acquire skills is to treat
conversation as merely a means to an end. Now, I do not
minimize its usefulness as a means for these purposes. But
Aristotle has persuaded me to set a higher standard than the
useful. He says, “that which is pursued for its own sake is more
perfect than that which is pursued for the sake of something
else.” (Ethics 1097a32) Now this thought may be a bit foreign to
�some of you. We’re all inured to encountering the question,
“What will you do with that?”—especially when people discover
our involvement with St. John’s. This question betrays a supreme
emphasis on usefulness—often the crudest sort of usefulness,
that guaranteeing career advancement or a significant increase in
earning power. But surely money itself is the paradigmatic
means, only useful to assist one towards some other end. The
really fascinating question, the question anyone truly interested in
us ought to ask, is: “What do you think fulfills you, what is your
end?”
Apparently, learning is not an activity people generally think of as
fulfilling. I find this attitude hard to understand. Surely, learning is
often difficult; it requires energy, attention, discipline, selfawareness, and openness to change. But many fulfilling activities
are difficult (playing piano, running a marathon, cooking a
gourmet meal). And, unlike those activities, our classes provide
occasions to clarify important issues such as: what priority to
place on family or philanthropy, whether love requires selfsacrifice, how to identify a friend. Seeking answers to such
questions is a noble pursuit. At least one of the goals of learning
is the ability to live and act well; and we can glean much wisdom
from the deepest thinkers of the Western tradition and from our
joint inquiries into their profound thoughts. Learning in this way
can help us discern the principles most conducive to a good life
and can help us to deliberate well about the “proper object and
the proper manner and the proper time” (Aristotle’s Ethics,
1142b28) consequent to such principles. Moreover, this end, of
acting so as to lead the best life, seems to be an end in itself,
simply choiceworthy.
However, once again the good I’ve descried is not really the good
inherent in the conversation. Whatever clarity we achieve may be
provoked by discussion, and certainly the proposed actions
�themselves would not be complete without this clarity of
purpose. But if action is the goal of our conversations, then the
real good is external to the classroom. And those of you about to
study the Ethics will be reminded forcefully by Aristotle of the
crucial role of habit and character in such action (1095b6,
1103a25-b22, 1152a31-33); intellectually grasping what virtue is
may not even amount to “half the battle.” So, if we do learn in
order to act, the value of the learning itself only fully manifests
through yet more effort of a different kind. Even more importantly
for my purpose here today, our conversations at St. John’s do not
necessarily result in shared conclusions about such matters.
Is there any good we strive for together as we engage in our
communal activity? Earlier I found the acquisition of arts
inadequate as a candidate; perhaps the other half of the phrase
“liberal arts” helps. Our education intends to be liberating; our
mission statement formulates this purpose as “...seek[ing] to free
human beings from the tyrannies of unexamined opinions, current
fashions, and inherited prejudices.” (Liberal Education in a
Community of Learning, Annapolis, St. John’s College, 2003,
p.1) To this end, we follow Montaigne’s advice:
Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve
and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust...he will
choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are
certain and assured....For if he embraces Xenophon’s and Plato’s
opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they
will be his.” (“On the Education of Children” from The Complete
Essays, translated by Donald Frame, p. 111.)
As we read the books which have been the original source of
many of our opinions, we become more self-aware. Seemingly
self-evident ideas often appear strange and unfamiliar when
confronted directly in their unmediated state; their shadowy nature
as opinion accepted on mere authority is revealed. Sometimes,
�as we consciously evaluate the integrity of our ideas, we also
become conscious of “having been wrong.” This experience is
not always pleasant, but discomfort at the disagreeableness of
truth may nevertheless be good. In the world outside the college,
being wrong is condemned; there we’re taught to be ashamed at
it, and a posture of confident, all-knowingness is cultivated. Here,
instead, we cultivate a pleasure in “having been wrong.” (It takes
some time to develop this pleasure.) We recognize this moment
of “having been wrong” as learning.
The Greek word Plato uses for this moment is “aporia.” Often
translated as “perplexity,” its etymology reveals a connotation of
placelessness. We see this unrooted state in Meno’s slave boy
when he realizes his assumption that he could easily name the
line that forms double a square is unjustified
(Meno, 84a). Naturally, a certain discomfort attends the
moment—the kind of discomfort that has Meno calling Socrates
names and trying to block every line of inquiry with his “captious
argument” (80a, 80d). To the extent that we agree with Socrates
that it is better to “feel the difficulty [we] are in,” (84a), we at the
College actively pursue such discomfort as a good. We
encourage the open and honest “Well, by Zeus, Socrates, I for
one do not know” of the slave boy rather than Meno’s
obstructionism. Of course, the slave boy has little status to lose,
and perhaps his opinions about geometry are not as deeply held
as the ones we need most to be liberated from.
Deeply held opinions can require a mighty convulsion in order to
be overthrown. Such a convulsion may not derive only from
conversation. When Achilles’ advice at the general council of
Greeks in Book I of the Iliad is spurned, he is shocked and
wounded. They refuse to heed him, not because his advice is
unwise, but because Agamemnon’s status (he is the titular
authority of the whole Greek army) trumps Achilles’ (I.281). Until
�that moment, Achilles seems to have assumed that his
recognition by all as the best warrior warrants also the honor due
the best man. The council’s violation of his assumption provokes
not only volcanic wrath in Achilles, but also a retreat away from
the battle and into extended meditation about his realization that
the world is not as he had perceived: What has he
accomplished? Why is his excellence seemingly not honored? Is
there a better way of life? Why should he care about other
Greeks? (IX. 315-343, 393-409, 608-619)
Perhaps such cataclysmic events are more effective than
conversation in freeing us from whatever opinion fetters
us. However, I think it is no accident that Achilles experiences his
revelation during deliberation in council rather than during the
press and urgency of hand-to-hand combat. No question about
first principles can truly be entertained as one is facing “invincible
hands spattered with bloody filth.” (XX. 504) And some version
of this problem of capitulation to urgent concerns and accepted
societal orders faces us all. As Montaigne points out in his essay
“Of Custom,”
The principal effect of the power of custom is to seize and
ensnare us in such a way that it is hardly within our power to get
ourselves back out of its grip and return into ourselves to reflect
and reason about its ordinances.
Life requires action; action requires choice; choice requires a
principle; custom supplies the requisite principle. The needed
perspective for questioning the community of opinion to which we
belong comes only when we are forcibly removed (as cavedwellers in Plato’s Republic must be) from that community or
when we voluntarily withdraw from it (and enroll in the Graduate
Institute). Rather than be at the mercy of chance events that may
or may not liberate us, if we are to improve our ability to judge
wisely, we need to withdraw ourselves from the crowd, consult
�our best selves, and begin a process of winnowing the contents of
our understanding.
To this extent St. John’s is something of a “magic mountain”—like
the retreat referred to in the title of the Thomas Mann novel some
of you will be studying in preceptorial. The novel takes place in a
sanatorium in Switzerland. People are there to undergo a cure for
tuberculosis. But their struggle with sickness removes them from
the everyday struggle for existence and frees them to engage in
conversations about intellectual, human, emotional, political,
moral, and philosophical matters. The main character Hans
Castorp, while visiting his cousin, decides he wants to be ill, is
attracted to the liberating, holiday atmosphere. There is also a
pleasing rigor to the curative regimen, but more importantly there
is time to cultivate an examination of the meaning of life in this
retreat from the everyday world of capitalism.
Now, I’m disturbed by the analogy just sketched between St.
John’s and a sanatorium; the connotation of illness implies the
need for a cure. Unfortunately, I suppose that the way I’ve
depicted the liberation of a liberal education corresponds with this
idea. For I’ve analyzed the process, I think consistently with
Socrates’ depiction, as a freeing from falsity and illusion. Such
liberation is more a negation, the destruction of an undesired
state, than a positive, healthy activity to be pursued. Even if this
“freedom from” is still a goal worth pursuing, when put in terms of
health, it seems incomplete in a radical way. Not surprisingly, the
self-aware, self-searching characters of
Mann’s Magic Mountain address this issue. At a certain point,
Naphta, one of Hans Castorp’s mentors and a fellow inmate,
defends illness as follows: “Disease was very human indeed. For
to be man was to be ailing. Man was essentially ailing, his state
of unhealthiness was what made him man...” (Magic Mountain, p.
465, Vintage International).
�This justification gives insight into the possibility that the mountain
is in fact a way of life. But don’t we all long to walk upright,
breathe deeply without coughing, stride boldly with no shortness
of breath? I cannot turn Naphta’s defense into an inspiring
affirmation of a positive good—only a cheerless attempt to make
a virtue of necessity. Of course, to the extent that we feel delight
in the very process of being cured, of being liberated from an
opinion masquerading as truth, the magic mountain is positively
good. But, to the extent that the falsity cries out to be replaced by
the healthy and true, our conversations, like those of Socrates
himself, often remain inconclusive and bereft of the particular
intellectual satisfaction attendant on clear and pure
knowledge. Such unimpeded vision more properly belongs to the
act of contemplation as depicted by Aristotle in Book X of
the Ethics, an act which depends least of all on other people
(1177a28-33) and which is most self-sufficient in the sense that it
can be carried on quite apart from conversation.
Is there a positive good, a real health, achieved through
conversation? It seems to me that a kind of intermediate state
exists between the self-sufficient, positively good state Aristotle
describes as political or communal (a state that is an end and not
merely a means, a state achieved through ethical action in
accordance with reason 1097b8-11, 1098a16-19) and the almost
divine but isolated self-sufficient state he describes as achieved
through true knowing (a state that seems more appropriate to Mt.
Olympus than it does to the Magic Mountain—1141b8). I claim a
third kind of self-sufficiency exists which is a hybrid of the
communal and individual. The best conversation forces us
simultaneously to live well with others—to practice the forms of
courage, justice, moderation appropriate to conversation—and
also to exercise what Aristotle calls the highest, most divine part
of our individual nature (1177a20, 1177b28)—namely,
reason. When, in the course of a conversation, we feel ourselves
�guided by some principle external to us even while we are most
vitally awake to our own thoughts, then a kind of austere and
noble harmony (both interpersonal and intrapersonal) comes into
being. I suppose this harmony depends upon the acknowledged
incompleteness of our wisdom, but the negative aspect is
alchemically transformed through our energetic, dynamic
activity. The completeness of attention involved, the fullness of
self which must be brought, the purification of extraneous goals
and motives necessary for such a moment—all produce an
independently choiceworthy activity. So, while many useful goods
may be aimed at in our conversation, I think I am willing to argue
that THIS is the good proper to conversation, the one we really
want to experience inside the classroom. I’m even willing to say
that it is an end in itself, for I myself feel truly alive, truly fulfilled at
such moments.
Marilyn Higuera
�
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Convocation Addresses
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Higuera, Marilyn
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2010
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2010-06
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Annapolis_GI_Summer_2010_Convocation
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Annapolis, MD
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Summer 2010 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online.
Convocation
Deans
Graduate Institute
Tutors
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Annapolis Convocation, Spring
2010
Welcome. Welcome especially to our new Graduate Institute
students; welcome also to returning students and colleagues.
On this your first day at the Graduate Institute, I want to address
you on the subject not of great books and the profound thoughts
you will encounter therein nor on the subject of the rigors and
delights of independent thinking, a skill you will be honing here—
at least I will not be speaking of those things directly. These are
the obvious attractions of the program at St. John's. Today I
would like to reflect on one of its less conspicuous charms:
friendship.
My guess is you haven't really come here seeking friendship. You
have already had an undergraduate experience where you
probably formed lifelong attachments. And here you will not be
living together in dorms...nor sharing the trauma of ill-advised
unions and cruel breakups (thank goodness for that)...nor helping
each other to cope with groceries, laundry, time management,
etc. Some of you are long past those days, and you may even
have committed yourselves to the joys and trials of that particular
and demanding friendship found in family life. Nonetheless, you
are going to find friendship here, for I'm pretty sure it's impossible
to engage properly in our activity without experiencing a certain
kind of relationship to other students (and tutors) which is properly
called friendship.
The topic of friendship seems to be in the air this year. President
Nelson used his fall undergraduate convocation address to
consider the famous Greek phrase that "the things of friends are
common"; tutor Gary Borjesson gave a Friday night lecture
�concerning the friendship of dogs and men as a paradigm; and
friendship was one of the themes of the faculty NEH study group.
But my concern with this issue antedates those events. For a
while now, I have wanted to use the word friendship to
characterize my relations with students and colleagues, but have
been at a loss to subsume these relations under the existing
categories I have of friendship. So I'm going to use this
opportunity to try to better formulate the particular, special kind of
friendship that forms the bonds holding together this community—
at least insofar as it is a community of learners.
What do we normally mean by friendship? We use, perhaps
overuse, that word to characterize a broad array of relationships.
People with whom we share activities, whether poker or bowling
or moviegoing or Church, become our friends. A certain class of
friends comes with networking: work relationships, former
colleagues, potential bosses. Modern life even has us "friends"
with people we've never actually met—through Facebook or
LinkedIn or Twitter.
But we all recognize these are friends only in some extended,
casual use of the word. Sometimes we speak instead of our "true
friends," by which we often mean the people who are loyal to us.
Certainly, I value these friends; it is rare to find someone so
committed to us as to see past our inadequacies, to endure with
us our incapacitation by suffering, to forge a personal connection
that transcends mere characteristics or shared interests. I hope
each of you already has such a friend; I hope too that you may
find another here.
However, this kind of private relationship, based on affection and
fidelity and intimacy, is clearly not the one that permeates our
community. We do, by and large, like each other. But I mean here
to uncover the essence of a more public, shared bond that arises
organically through our common activity of joint inquiry. What is it
�about exploring together the persistent questions confronting us in
our lives that cultivates, perhaps even demands a sympathy
beyond general civility?
Perhaps the example of Socrates is relevant. Surely Socrates is a
paradigm of the probing questioner searching beyond mere
opinion and holding the highest of standards for knowledge, and
he also embodies that particular way of life which critiques itself
through engaging in dialogue with others. In these ways, he
seems a kindred soul, if not a friend, to every Johnnie ("Johnnie"
is how we affectionately refer to ourselves). And Socrates does in
fact tie philosophy and friendliness together—in a strange,
puzzling, almost humorous way—in the Republic, which those of
you in the Politics and Society segment will begin reading shortly.
As he founds his "city in speech," Socrates finds himself trying to
characterize the necessary traits in the people entrusted with
guarding the republic. Such guardians must be fiercely spirited in
order to fend off threats, but gentle towards their friends, their
fellow citizens (375c). We at St. John's also desire these
seemingly incompatible characteristics in the members of our
republic. If you don't have the spirited courage to venture your
interpretations, to fend off the allure of easy answers, to risk being
wrong, to face the loss of cherished opinions, our classes will fail.
On the other hand, if you don't respect each others' insights,
cultivate each others' potential, collaborate constructively with
each other, our classes will also fail.
Socrates and his interlocutors overcome their initial suspicion that
these qualities are impossible to unite when Socrates recollects
that there is an exemplar combining them; dogs, he says, have a
truly "philosophic" nature. "When [a dog] sees someone it doesn't
know, it's angry, although it never had any bad experience with
him. And when it sees someone it knows, it greets him warmly,
even if it never had a good experience with him." (376a) "How can
�the love of learning be denied to a creature whose criterion of the
friendly and the alien is intelligence and ignorance?" (376b)
Now, as a direct analogy for your relations with each other and
the outside world, this model fails. We at the College want to help
you develop your ability to interact with one another, but we leave
it to you to determine the character of your interactions with the
outside world. However, after your initial double-take at the notion
of a philosophic dog and in light of a certain respect for Socrates'
skill with images, you may begin to penetrate more deeply into
this humble metaphor. Real love of wisdom may indeed require
this black-and-white attitude toward truth. In fact, we at the
College hope you have a genuine passion for the truth and
eschew falsity in all its forms, not only lies, but also hypocrisy and
ignorance—even ignorance of your own ignorance. Moreover,
insofar as the right reaction to one's own ignorance is to stamp it
out, we even want you to engage in a spirited war (against
yourself). This much of the controlled fierceness of the guardian
dogs seems apt and desirable.
What the image fails to highlight, and what we at St. John's (as
well as Socrates in other circumstances) emphasize, is the
difficulty in distinguishing what it is we know. Dogs don't seem to
have this problem. But a few Meno-like experiences trying to
clarify the essence of virtue make one painfully aware that one's
opinions often masquerade as knowledge, thereby making one
friendly toward falsity and hostile toward truth. Recognizing this
possibility, we ought harbor a healthy suspicion of our immediate
judgments. Unlike the guard dog in Socrates' image, we must
open ourselves up to the unfamiliar and be ready to abandon the
familiar. We must be willing to be vulnerable. And we must feel
secure baring our very souls to one another. So I find myself
needing a very different model tying together friendship and
�philosophy—preferably one where I am not reduced to thinking
about friendliness toward truth rather than toward another person.
Aristotle's more explicit analysis of friendship may help. You may
be surprised to learn that Aristotle devotes two whole books to
this subject in the Nicomachean Ethics, the first text read in the
Politics and Society tutorial. He turns to friendship after he treats
of the ethical life in general and the various virtues specifically,
remarking that friendship is "a virtue or something with virtue."
(1155a4) In your classes, you will no doubt assess the truth of this
claim and investigate the role friendship plays in the ethical life.
Here, I want to see if Aristotle's analysis of friendship can help me
characterize the special rapport immanent in a classroom full of
people bound only by their passion to understand.
Characteristically, Aristotle begins from what is first (or most
clear) to us, analyzing the various ways we commonly use the
word "friend" –for people we invite on hikes and co-workers as
well as our intimates. After stressing the necessity and nobility of
friendship in the fully human life (1155a29), Aristotle, again
characteristically, proceeds to make distinctions which will allow
him to sift through our loose conceptions and isolate the essence
of friendship. He identifies three species of friendship: friendships
of utility, pleasure, and virtue (1156a6-8). Although he notes that
all friendships involve reciprocal goodwill (1155b34), he singles
out the last type, the friendship based on character, as the most
perfect (1156b8). Such friends are in fact both useful and
pleasant to each other, but this friendship is more noble in that
they are not friends for the sake of usefulness or pleasure, but for
the sake of the good. These friends are engaged in helping each
other to live the best and happiest life (1169b20-22)
No doubt you're willing to believe that here at the College you too
will assist each other to live the best life, but you probably would
identify that assistance as an accidental side-effect of your desire
�to improve yourself. It remains to be seen whether Aristotle will
account for a necessary connection between philosophy and a
friendly commitment to the welfare of another.
Aristotle's conception of the paradigmatic friendship embraces
three primary characteristics: disinterestedness, like-mindedness,
and activity. We can probably all agree that the best friends show
a disinterested concern for one another. We genuinely wish a true
friend well because of who the friend is and for his own sake
(1156b9-11) rather than because of the job he can bring us (even
if we are grateful for the job as well). Unself-interested regard for
another and action on his behalf are at the core of the best
friendships.
Initially, we might hesitate to posit like-mindedness as a
necessary component of friendship. We tend to identify likemindedness as a common world view, and we all have friends
with whom we profoundly disagree. Aristotle rightly, I think,
dismisses this interpretation; he points out that "it is not sameness
of opinion, for the latter might belong also to those who do not
know each other" (1167a21-22). Instead, Aristotle traces the
harmonious interdependence of friends to their agreement about
matters to be acted on, to having the same intentions regarding
what is of common interest (1167a28). Insofar as we admire our
friends, we must indeed be appreciating their virtues, their
conception of the good (a conception we affirm and subscribe to
ourselves). I think this is why Aristotle's characterization of the
friend as "another self" (1166a33) resonates so powerfully. It
captures our sense of the special union of sameness and
otherness we find in our most satisfying relationships.
The third element Aristotle claims as essential is that friends
participate in common activities, especially those activities
directed toward a good life. Indeed, he claims true companionship
entails "living with" the other person (1171b29). Only then can we
�rejoice in the observation of a friend's accomplishment of morally
praiseworthy acts; only in close and regular contact can we find
sustenance and indispensable support in his advice and counsel
as we try to discern our own moral path. The best friends not only
stimulate each other to action but also encourage each other to
develop, assist each other to grow in wisdom. This realization of a
practical, ethical element in friendship is the fruit of Aristotle's
insight that happiness is an activity in accordance with virtue
(rather than a mood or emotion).
Now Aristotle's treatment of friendship, as I mentioned, is
embedded in a book on ethics. His portrait of the perfect,
unqualified friendship depicts virtuous activity as the necessary
basis for mutual respect and joint pleasure. But we here at St.
John's do not intend to be answering the question of what virtue is
for you; in fact, we intend to raise that question in sharply
provocative ways. While versions of justice and courage and
temperance all are requisite in the classroom discussions, they
appear as modes of speech and thought rather than action as
such.
But Aristotle does link his perfect friendship with discussion,
noting that above all"living with" one's friend means:
"shar[ing] in discussion and thought—for this is what living together
would seem to mean for human beings, and not feeding in the same place,
as with cattle" (1170b10-14).
Further, Aristotle broaches the topic of friendship only after a full
treatment of the intellectual virtues, upon which he realizes true
ethical virtue must depend. Now, the commitment you have made
to attend the Graduate Institute emanates from a certain kind of
intellectual virtue. You have signed up for more than a degree
program; you're exploring a way of life. The twelve of you have
set a high standard for what you want to count as wisdom and
you have refused to be mere passive recipients of such wisdom.
�You will rejoice to see these virtues shining forth in the "other
selves" surrounding you here.
And while the activity you all engage in here is one of thought
rather than philanthropy or politics, it will be shared in the fullest
sense of that word. You will collaborate with every ounce of your
energy in order to successfully think another's thought, formulate
a reaction, and use the text to constructively criticize that reaction.
Even though we don't share common histories, backgrounds, or
creeds, you will feel the presence of a common goal, the quest for
truth, and a common standard, reasoned argument, guiding every
discussion.
The more fully you engage in this common activity, the more you
will find your goals inextricably bound to the goals of your
companions. The more the quest for truth dominates, the less
concerned you will be that you were the one to utter that selfcontradictory, absurd interpretation and the more pleased you will
be to see someone else resolve the paradox and point the way to
a new path where we can safely tread. In this way, a selfforgetting regard for the other will necessarily inhabit you. And in
this sense, you will be friends.
Now, in the Nicomachean Ethics, friendship forms a bridge
between an analysis of the ethical virtues and an account of the
most perfect and pleasant activity, namely contemplation. A
certain tension in the book arises: is the best life the more public,
etchical life or the private, almost divinely self-sufficient
contemplative life? Something like this tension probably pervades
our classes as well. As the myth of recollection emphasizes, the
experience of knowledge finally happens deep within oneself. But
I think the experience of coming to know happens amongst us
friends.
Let us go forge this new friendship then. Convocatum est.
�Marilyn Higuera
�
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2010
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“The Things of Friends Are Common”
Convocation Address, August 26, 2009
Christopher B. Nelson, President
St. John’s College, Annapolis MD
Welcome to the Class of 2013 and to your families. To the rest of our college community,
welcome back. Welcome, friends all!
I came to a rather startling realization over the summer as I was preparing to greet our
newcomers: that I had returned to this college to take the position I now hold in the year in which
most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have passed quickly, it seems to me now,
and my appreciation for the community of learning I joined back then has grown, as my
friendships within the community have deepened. I think I became a wee bit sentimental as I
ruminated upon my first year as a student at St. John’s more than 40 years ago. My Greek has
gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the things learned first are remembered best, and I
have kept with me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my first days at the
college.
and
.
The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are difficult” or “Noble things are
difficult.” The second can be translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What friends
have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my youth we used a different Greek grammar
book, so this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson Introduction to Ancient Greek
that you will be working with in your first semester of the Greek Tutorial. And there they were,
the same two sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and predicate position of the
definite article, and I rediscovered something I once must have known about the two sentences I
had carried with me all these years: that they are both nominal sentences with the article in the
predicate position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole sentences without the use of a
verb. (Grammar is a handy tool, don’t you think?) Well, I was pretty sure that I had not
committed these sentences to memory for the substantive-making power of the article . It’s
more likely that I remembered them because they were both quite short, and perhaps because
they appeared to carry a mystery and a whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if
only I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new
text that “nominal sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless character of maxims
or folk-sayings.” (Mollin and Williamson at 31)
I wanted to understand better the little maxim
“The things of friends are
common.” The sentence seemed to capture a beautiful thought, and I had the efficient notion
that if I made the effort to understand this maxim better, I also might come to see why “beautiful
things are difficult.” Two birds, one arrow --- so to speak!
So, I begin my reflection by asking whether this little maxim means that friends share what they
have, or that they ought to share what they have. Today, I give you half of the lunch I packed for
us both, and tomorrow you will share yours with me. But the sandwiches we eat are hardly
common to us both; quite the opposite, they are rationed out separately to each of us, albeit
�equally. We may each have an equal share in a good thing, but not a common good. We each
consume what the other does not and cannot consume. So it is with all sorts of goods, earthly
goods, goods that are external to us; what I give to you in the spirit of sharing with a friend is
something I will no longer have after giving it. I will have less of it after sharing it than I did
before I shared it, however good and generous my act of friendship has been, and however much
I imagine I may have gained in the improvement of my character by sharing it.
But what then are the things that could be common to friends? What kinds of things can truly be
held in common without having to be shared or meted out among friends? I suppose things of the
soul are of this nature, things that belong to the heart, the spirit, or the mind, things that belong to
our inner lives. We both may love a single object or a person without our having to share that
love as we might share the expense of a gift to the beloved one. My love doesn’t grow less
because you love too. And of course, if we should actually love one another, that love is surely
greater and stronger for it being reciprocated and reinforced over and over. So it is with the
intellect. When I learn something you have shared with me, it does not pass from you to me like
milk from a pitcher; you have lost nothing, and yet I have gained something that is now common
to us both. The sum of what is common to us has just grown; it has not been redistributed. And
should we together go about learning something new, we will each be richer for what we come to
have in common.
Why, though, do we say that these ‘things in common’ belong to ‘friends’? I think it must have
something to do with the reason we seek these common things. We are moved to love something
because it is beautiful, or to love some person because he or she is beautiful to us. We seek to
know something because we believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that this
knowledge will be good for us, perhaps even that it can be turned to good in the world about us.
These things we have in common are beautiful and good things, and we wish beautiful and good
things for our friends. If the common goods are those that increase by pursuing them together,
then the greatest acts of friendship must be the searching together for such a common good.
St. John’s College exists for this purpose: to provide a place and countless opportunities for our
students to pursue together the common goods of the intellect. We call ourselves a community of
learning, aware that the word ‘community’ in English, as in Greek, has the same root as the word
‘common’. We make many an effort to put into practice the conviction that we learn best when
we learn with others, who like us, wish to increase the common good. Such a community offers
some pretty fine opportunities for friendship.
We also have a common curriculum that has us all reading books that are worthy of our
attention, even of our love --- books written by men and women who were themselves model
fellow learners. The books and the authors may even become our friends, as can the characters in
some of those books. If you have not already met the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, you soon
will, and you will be spending a lot of time with him in your freshman year. For some of you,
this may be the beginning of a lifelong friendship with a character who would converse with you
over and over if you open yourselves to the possibility. The words on the page may remain the
same, but the reader brings a new conversationalist to the text every time he or she returns to the
dialogue. At least, so it is with me. I call Socrates a friend of mine because I know that he seeks
only my own good. He has taught me humility, at least such as I possess it at all.
�I have many such friends in the Program. Some of them are books: Homer’s Iliad has been my
companion since the seventh grade, and I never tire of returning to it. The Aeneid has become a
more recent friend who has helped me understand and better bear the responsibilities of
fatherhood and the trials of leadership. The Books of Genesis and Job have helped me
understand what it means to be human and how great is the distance between the human and the
divine; I read them to remind me of how little I really understand about the relation between the
two, which in turn serves as a spur to seeking to understand better. Euclid’s Elements may be the
finest example on the St. John’s Program of the practice of the liberal arts, and it is beautiful for
its logical, progressive movement from the elemental to the truly grand. Plato’s Republic is the
finest book about education ever written; it inspires much of what I do as I practice my vocation
at the College, reminding me that a community of learning is reshaping and refounding itself any
time a few of its members come together to engage in learning for its own sake --- and that this is
what we ought always to be encouraging at this college, even by device when necessary.
Other friends of mine are authors: Sophocles, who can evoke a human sympathy to inspire pity
in each of his dramas; George Washington, whose restraint in the use of power is evident in his
finest writings and in the mark he left on the founding of this country; Abraham Lincoln, whom I
consider this country’s finest poet, whose very words reshaped what it meant to be an American;
Jane Austen, whose every sentence can be called perfect (and so she is a beautiful author to me);
and Martin Luther King, who taught me that non-violent protest is more than a successful tactical
measure to achieve a political end, but a proper and loving response to the hateful misconduct of
fellow human souls.
Then there remain the characters whom I embrace as friends: besides Socrates, there is Hector,
Breaker of Horses, ‘Oh my Warrior’; and Penelope, who weaves the path that allows Odysseus
to return home and is far worthier of his love than he is of hers. There is Don Quixote, the
indomitable spirit, and Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooks, whose simple acts of goodness change
the whole world about her. I rather like Milton’s Eve, mother of us all, who still shines pretty
brightly in the face of his spectacular Satan. I was a teenager when I met Shakespeare’s Prince
Hal, and I grew to adulthood with him, probably following a little too closely his path to
responsibility. There’s the innocent Billy Budd, unprepared to face the force of evil in man, and
his Captain Vere, the good man who suffers to do his duty.
You will also read some reflections on friendship: this winter, Aristotle will provide freshmen
with a framework for considering different kinds of friendships and the goods they afford. You
should ask whether you think his list is complete, and whether your own experiences of
friendship are embraced by his explication. And then there are examples of friendships, pairs of
friends, in many of the books, who will also provide lessons in friendship, for better or worse:
Patroclus and Achilles, David and Jonathan, Hal and Falstaff, Huck and Jim, Emma and
Knightly, to name a few.
As you work your way through the Program, you will have the assistance of many friends, some
of whom will still be breathing while others will be living on in the pages you’ll be reading
during your years with us. They will help you as you struggle with the big questions that in turn
will help to free you to live a life that truly belongs to you. It will be these friends, who are
�outside of you but standing close by, who will help you find your own answers to the questions:
Who am I? What is my place in the world? And how ought I to live my life? One of my more
beautiful living friends, a colleague here at the college, has put it this way: “Our friends are
doubly our benefactors: They take us out of ourselves and they help us to return, to face together
with them our common human condition.” (Eva Brann, Open Secrets/Inward Prospects, at 55.)
Another of my friends, a St. John’s classmate and medical doctor, gave last year’s graduating
class in Santa Fe this reminder, that we can learn from our friendships with the books how we
might be better friends to one another. “It is the great book that is the life of every person,
regardless of station in life,” he said. “So often we make shallow and inaccurate presumptions
about people, like the cliché of telling a book by its cover, which robs you of the deeper
experience that defines us as humans in our relationship to each other. For me every patient is a
great book with a story to tell and much to teach me, and I am sometimes ashamed when my
presumptions are exposed and I then see the remarkable person within, between the covers of the
book of the story of their own lives.” This doctor has devoted himself to saving the lives of
patients suffering from cancer, and he has this to say about how he is guided by the spirit of
community and friendship within the soul of every human being: “In my own work, it is
sometimes said, we are guided … by the idea that to save a person’s life, it is considered as if
one has saved the world. To me that has always meant the life saved is much more than a single
life restored, as that person is someone’s spouse, someone’s brother or sister, someone’s parent,
or child, a member of a community, of a church, synagogue or mosque, or a friend, and as all are
affected by loss, all are restored by their return.” (Stephen J. Forman, 2009 Commencement
Address, Santa Fe) This statement is a powerful testament to the wonder of friendship at work in
the world.
In this last story, I have moved us away from the inner world of reflection and learning to the
outer world of putting what one has learned to work in a life devoted to helping others. The
second must always follow the first. By this, I mean that you owe it to yourselves and others to
take advantage of the opportunities this community offers you to learn with your classmates and
tutors what it takes to acquire a little self-understanding before you go out and put it to work in
the world. And in the process, we hope that you will make a few friends who will stay with you
for the rest of your lives, enriching your lives because ‘what friends have, they have in common.’
I wish to close with a kind of benediction. This little nominal sentence
happens to be the penultimate sentence in one of Plato’s dialogues, The Phaedrus, the only book
you will read twice for seminar, at the end of both your freshman and senior years. Phaedrus and
Socrates have engaged in the highest form of friendship as they have conversed together to try to
understand how a man or woman might achieve harmony and balance in the soul by directing
that soul to a love for the beautiful. Socrates concludes with this prayer to the gods:
Friend Pan and however many other gods are here, grant
me to become beautiful in respect to the things within. And
as to whatever things I have outside, grant that they be
friendly to the things inside me. May I believe the wise
man to be rich. May I have as big a mass of gold as no one
�other than the moderate man of sound mind could bear or
bring along.
Do we still need something else, Phaedrus? For I think I’ve
prayed in a measured fashion.
To which Phaedrus responds:
And pray also for these things for me. For friends’ things
are in common.
(Plato, Phaedrus, Nichols translation, lines 279b-279c)
May each of you, as well, learn to enjoy the benefits of such friendships in your time at this
College! (And now, in the concluding words of Socrates, “Let’s go” and get started.)
Thank you!
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
I declare the College in session this 26th day of August, 2009.
CONVOCATUM EST!
�
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Convocation Addresses
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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convocation
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5 pages
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2009 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Things of Friends Are Common."
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Nelson, Christopher B.
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Annapolis - Fall 2009
Convocation Address
Welcome especially to our new Graduate Institute students; welcome also to friends and family, returning
students, colleagues.
Today you new students become members of the St. John’s community, a community dedicated to liberal
education in its most profound sense, that is, an education truly freeing—from preconceptions and
illusions, from hasty answers to the deepest questions of human existence, from the limitations of a toonarrow perspective. Your entry into our community proceeds today through the portal of either the
Literature segment or the Mathematics and Natural Science segment. Often in our society, the liberal arts
are seen as antithetical to the technical, scientific disciplines; a chasm even wider than the ravines
separating individual academic fields separates the humanities-oriented part of liberal arts from such
“hard” sciences as physics, chemistry, even mathematics. Here at St. John’s we do not sanction such
compartmentalization of the world of study; our organization of the Graduate Institute program into
segments reflects the pressure of practical constraints rather than an assumption about valid categories
of knowledge. For that reason, I’d like to use this occasion to make a beginning toward liberating us from
a too-constricting notion of science.
As with the question “What is virtue?” in the dialogue Meno, the question “What is science?” tends to elicit
a whole “swarm” of responses. During the course of your readings in the Mathematics & Natural Science
seminar, you will encounter many interpretations of science—from Lucretius’ epic poetry distilling all
things into void and atoms, to Bacon’s reconstruction of science on experimental foundations, to
Newton’s axiomatic system. Some versions will call themselves physics, some versions will assume the
title of natural science, or natural history, or natural philosophy. These varied denominations reveal a
significant reason that we should suspend our faith in the boundary lines of academia and return to the
sources; we may thus begin to see both science and the world through clearer eyes.
As an example of this challenging activity, I will here consider Plato’s dialogue, Timaeus. In it, the title
character responds to Socrates’ expressed desire to see his utopian republic in action by telling a story of
the origin of the cosmos, a creation myth if you will, what Timaeus himself calls a “likely story.” I will leave
it to you in your seminars to figure out how a creation myth may be an animation of Socrates’ political “city
�in speech.” I would like to examine in the rest of this talk the way in which science and story might be
linked (rather than relegated to two separate segments, say).
Timaeus’ preface to his story exhibits his own trepidation and uncertainty about his task. He feels the
need to pray for the gods’ approval of a discourse concerning how the universe was created, “or perhaps
is not created” (27c). He explicitly recognizes that his task is different from the task of philosophy.
Philosophy studies that which is “apprehensible with the aid of reasoning since it is ever uniformly
existent.” But the cosmos “is visible and tangible and possessed of a body.” Thus, it is only apprehensible
through “opinion with the aid of sensation” (28c). Timaeus must explicate the world of becoming, things
which come into being and pass away, the world of change. This is a good description of the arena we
generally concede to science. Timaeus immediately makes us conscious that this world is susceptible
only of opinion. We moderns rush headlong to use the word “knowledge” for the latest chemical and
cosmological and medical theories (even if scientists themselves are sometimes more circumspect about
the hypothetical character of their assumptions); then we reserve the word “opinion” for the realms of
politics and religion and literature.
Timaeus, in the face of the instability and ephemerality of the world confronting us, does not lose heart.
Instead, he invokes ourselves as well as the gods, gathers up his courage, and begins clarifying the limits
attending the project of describing the birth of the world. These are:
1. We must assume a cause of the cosmos.
2. We must assume the cosmos has come into being, since it is material and physical and
our experience of physical things is that they are generated.
3. The cause of its coming into being, the architect, is good, and wanted the Cosmos to be
beautiful, so he kept his eye fixed upon a perfectly stable, unchanging paradigm when he
constructed this fluid, evershifting, pulsing- with-life being of the cosmos.
Now, these three assumptions are all dubious. But let me point out: though their expression may be
unfamiliar, they themselves are not wholly unfamiliar. The first is reminiscent of our own scientific trust in
the world of causes, specifically of what we call efficient causes. We need to look for a mover of anything
that is moved—a shove or a push or a force. The second emphasizes, as science usually does, the
material character of what we are studying and the perceptual way we imbibe it, even if the logic positing
a necessary beginning for the whole of such stuff transcends perception. The third, an assumption
Timaeus himself recognizes as pious, may, in its appeal to beauty and goodness, involve more than mere
�lawfulness—but science’s assertion of lawfulness can never simply be deduced (and sometimes rests on
such grounds). Timaeus’ overt appeal to piety legitimately calls such faith in lawfulness to our attention.
After his preliminary laying out of assumptions, Timaeus makes his surprising—at least to us—turn
towards story-telling. He cautions Socrates that he will be unable to give a perfectly consistent and
precise account (the Greek word is “logos”—connected to reason as well as speech). Instead we will all
have to be satisfied with something he calls a “likely story.” I suspect that, when you read it, the tale that
Timaeus subsequently recounts may strike you all as whimsical and eccentric rather than scientific.
Nonetheless, Timaeus does give an explanation of the origin and nature of the cosmos. From the motions
of the planets to the functioning of the liver, Timaeus elucidates various causes, drawing heavily on
mathematics—the ratios underpinning the musical scale, the figures constituting the geometrical solids,
and the circles used in astronomical predictions. But Timaeus depicts himself as designing a story rather
than as giving a reasoned proof.
For many years I’ve intended to formulate more precisely the meaning of his puzzling phrase “likely
story,” each word of which is provocative. The Greek word for story here is indeed “mythos.” And
Timaeus’ account is certainly a creation myth, involving a demiurge building an entire world from scratch.
But “mythos” has a broader range of meaning in Greek than we tend to give “myth.” I think we always use
that word with a soupcon of contempt—“that’s just a myth” we say; especially in the context of science,
we indicate our superiority by calling something a myth. The word “story,” unlike “myth,” evokes affection
and warmth in us. The Canterbury Tales are not myths to us; they are romances steeped in reality,
distillations of the human experience resonating within us. Would we ever allow a story to be a vehicle for
science, or even science itself?
Surely, one reason we glow at the prospect of a story is that we expect to be entertained. From the time
we cuddle in our mother’s laps, ears expectantly open, eager for adventure in thought, we associate new
worlds, new visions, and new friends with stories. We are accustomed to allowing ourselves to live and
breathe the air of some new world, to tread companionably along with strange characters, to thrill to new
horizons. I balk a bit at describing this receptivity as passive; yet, I think I must admit that part of the
pleasure of a story resides in the feeling that we need only step on board to be carried somewhere fresh
and exciting. Someone else has charted the course and will do the navigation. Even I, with degrees in
mathematics, have a very different feeling when I turn over a leaf in a book and confront a page dappled
with equations; a special summoning of energy is required.
But surely the dichotomy I’ve drawn is not precisely accurate. When reading a story, I must focus my
concentration as well. And any good story actively engages the intelligence. The reader must re-create
�the world the author has discovered in his own imagination and shine the interior light of his experience
on the winding trail marked off by the author. While Homer may, in his first twenty lines, circumscribe the
field of our vision to the problem of Achilles’ wrath, we ourselves must piece together the strange
components of this almost elemental force, must analyze Achilles’ reactions, must press toward an
understanding of the essence of this wrath. In order to understand Achilles, we must grope towards a
vision of what honor means to those indomitable warriors of the Iliad and clear an arena where Achilles
and we can meet on common ground. Are these intellectual activities so different from those employed in
understanding the physical or biological world around us?
I’m not at all sure they are. To penetrate the mediating language of mathematical symbols is a daunting
and perhaps specialized enterprise, but the use of such symbols seems secondary to the goal of
understanding the world around us. Scientific works do often present themselves as treatises and
highlight the deductive character of the thinking involved. But stories too sometimes require us to make
arguments from premises, perhaps premises of character types rather than definitions of motion—but
arguments nonetheless.
Moreover, upon reading that most deductive of all great books, Euclid’s Elements, we tutors frequently
assign a paper at the end of Book I asking students to “tell the story of Book I.” We are not asking
students to do a creative writing piece when we make this assignment. Rather, we recognize that Euclid’s
work focuses our attention on certain themes or issues, acquaints us with the characters and qualities of
various entities, and develops relationships through surprising connections and interactions that can
ultimately be fit into a whole. On the other hand, making this assignment of re-casting Book I as a story
indicates that we recognize the need for the student to unearth an arc of events for himself. The series of
logical deductions is more patently obvious; however, the thematic connections are an integral, if subtler,
part of Euclid’s project. Deduction and story-telling may be inextricably bound up with the task of all
human understanding—receiving different emphasis in different endeavors or from different authors, but
both necessary if we are to understand at all.
I believe Timaeus aspires to this full and diverse use of intelligence when he constructs the edifice of his
“likely story.” The Greek word translated as “likely” has its origin in the word for image or likeness. Though
there is some connection to probability and likelihood, I think Plato means us to hear the connection to
imagination and similarity predominating. The true power of science as story is thus brought home, for
both the scientific account and the story ought reflect actuality. Just as Odysseus’ tales of carefree lotuseaters and lawless Cyclops convey the deepest truths about temptations to be overcome on a journey
back home to one’s most rooted self, so may Timaeus’ account of the cosmos as a living, breathing
�organism capture more essential aspects of the world around us than the most statistically verified of
equations.
Likeliness in this sense inheres in the transcendent vision provided by imagination. Now imagination is a
faculty not highly regarded by scientists today. We prefer judging our current theories by their predictive
power. But when pressed regarding the absolute truth of a theory, most scientists will characterize their
work as model-construction rather than truth-seeking. Surely this is an admission that, like Timaeus, they
live in the world of opinion and trust. Model-building is not exclusively deductive; some genius of insight
must penetrate to first principles, must extract the intelligible from perception. Experiments cannot
substitute for this mysterious but very human talent. Like good story-tellers, scientists must weave
together disparate, unpliable strands of material, hoping to achieve some precision of focus, to animate a
dramatic insight, to gain subltety of perception. You may be interested to know that the word “theory” has
its (Greek) roots in seeing/beholding—in contemplation to be sure, but also in theater. Whether we
engage in science or literature, we seek an epiphany.
But how will we judge the likeliness of a story if not, or not simply, by predictive power? I’m not sure there
is a method for discovering how much truth a story has. As with the Canterbury Tales and Homer’s epics,
we must consult ourselves. We must “recollect,” aided by the questioning and discussion of other wise
beings, whether, for example, Timaeus’ version of space as a nurse and receptacle embodies the
essential characteristics of space better than a Cartesian grid with three axes and the capacity for
measurement. We must gauge the story’s explanatory power and probe the concreteness, integrity, and
clarity of the resulting vision.
Such probing carries us beyond and out of the world of the story. The danger of stories, of course, is that
we will simply allow ourselves to be seduced and entertained by them rather than doing such probing. We
must not allow ourselves to accede to Timaeus when he pleads:
You must remember that I who speak and you my judges have human nature. So, in order to receive the
likely story about these things, it is fitting not to search beyond this. (29c4-d3)
Instead, we must press beyond the confines of each page, whether the pages are Platonic or Newtonian
or Homeric. Whether the author frankly tells us, as Timaeus does, that his imitation is merely imitation, or
presents his fictional insights as a veiled and disembodied author, we must glut our greed for the truth.
We must have a passion for wisdom. To this extent everything we do—math, science, literature,
philosophy—in the classroom or in our lives—ought be truly philosophic. Only then will our education be
liberal and liberating.
�By Marilyn Higuera, Director
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Fall 2009 semester in Annapolis, MD.
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"The Republic of St. John's College"
Convocation Remarks of Christopher B. Nelson
President of St. John's College, Annapolis
August 27, 2008
Welcome to St. John's College. A warm welcome to our entering freshmen and their
families and friends! Welcome back to our returning students, faculty and staff!
I want to tell you a story which opened up a question for me that I simply could not resist
exploring in preparing these remarks.
In the spring of 2004, a friend of mine, the president of another liberal arts college,
called to ask for a favor. He was being given a six month sabbatical and wondered
whether he might enroll at St. John's College or take some classes with us over the fall
term. We talked some about the importance of beginning at the beginning, and he got
excited about reading Homer, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus and Sophocles
with our freshmen. He ended up auditing the fall freshman seminar, reading everything
expected of him, and remaining a silent participant in the conversation. You can read all
about his sabbatical experience in a newly published book entitled Racing Odysseus,
chronicling his experience in the classroom, on the quad, in the coffee shop, and
especially at the boathouse, where he resolved to join the novice crew and take up
rowing on the Severn River in the wee hours of each morning with a good sized group
of eager, if sleepy, students. It turns out that the star of the story is our very own Mr.
Pickens, Director of Athletics at the College, but several students and tutors play lead
support roles in the education of my friend, "Rusty" Martin.
After he'd been at the college a while, and become acquainted with many of our
students, mostly freshman, he found himself observing out loud to one of his crew
mates as follows:
"Like you, Tom, so many of the freshmen I have met applied only to St. John's. They seem to
have a real sense of what it means to be a Johnnie even before they get here." (Does this sound
familiar to any of you?)
"Maybe so," Tom responds ... "But they aren't Johnnies when they arrive."
"So when does that happen?" I ask, surprised by his response.
�"When they have completed Plato's Republic! Then they become Johnnies."
End of story. But I was now hooked on thinking through what I'd just read. What would it
mean to say that one becomes a member of this college community upon completing
the six seminars we devote to Plato's Republic in the middle of the freshman fall term?
(In fact, freshmen will be halfway through it at Parents' weekend, and you parents can
return to campus to test the theory and ask your students this question.)
I have no idea whether this view of Mr. Tom's is widely shared at the college, but I
thought it was worth taking seriously. So, I'd like to play with the idea for just a bit. I
recognize that I can only begin to tease out a few possible answers with a book as
inexhaustible as the Republic. But here's a start.
If there is a principal question at the root of the many that are explored in the Republic,
it may be "What good is justice? Should we choose to live the just life or the unjust, and
why?" Indeed, the dialogue opens with a spirited argument for the good of injustice but
closes with a myth that reminds the readers of the thousand years of punishment that
awaits the man who chooses a life of injustice over one devoted to justice. The dialogue
is Plato's longest, and engages more participants than is usual. The two principal
interlocutors, however, are the young Glaucon and Adeimantus, brothers to Plato
himself, who does not appear as a character in the drama.
These two young people, particularly Glaucon, behave a lot like St. Johnnies. They
pursue Socrates; they pursue conversation to get to the bottom of things they can
hardly fathom; Glaucon at least just won't let up; he questions everything at each turn.
Socrates quickly sees that he must take Glaucon seriously because Glaucon has both
passion and ambition. He can see the good in Glaucon's soul, in his desire for
understanding, but he can also see the dangers to both Glaucon and the state if a mind
as fertile as Glaucon's is not turned to the good and is instead allowed to play with false
icons. Glaucon needs to be persuaded that it is better to do right than wrong, and he
needs to own the argument himself; it must be a case that he will not forget, filled with
images, arguments and stories that will not fail to keep him straight. Socrates has his
work cut out for him, and he puts together as beautiful a set of images and arguments
as we can find in all literature.
�Of course, to ask the question "What good is justice?" provokes the next: "What then is
justice?" To help answer the question, Socrates and his two young helpers set about to
found a city in speech which is designed to help us see what justice might look like on a
large scale, in order that we might better understand what justice would look like in the
human soul. It turns out that this city is not populated by people that Glaucon can either
recognize or respect. He calls it a city of pigs, one that satisfies the appetite of the
stomach, but not of the chest or the head. There is no place in this city to practice
leisure, enjoy the finer arts, or move beyond a life of consumption to a life more noble.
They reorganize the city at least twice more, but each of these cities seems to fail
another of Glaucon's tests that they be realizable in our political world.
So, Socrates seeks to answer this demand with one of his more memorable statements,
in the dead center of the book: "Unless the philosophers rule as kings, (he says) ...
there will be no rest from ills for the cities, ... nor I think for human kind, nor will the
regime we have now described in speech ever come forth from nature, insofar as
possible, and see the light of the sun." We can only suppose that if the earlier versions
of the city were unrealistic, this latter suggestion — that the best king must also be a
philosopher, a lover of wisdom — would be still further beyond the bounds of
imagination for Socrates' interlocutors. To their credit, Glaucon and Adeimantus push
him on to justify his claim. Socrates agrees, and goes on to give an account of the life of
the philosopher and the education appropriate to him.
In the middle of this explanation, Socrates gives us three of the most memorable
images our students will encounter in their four years at the college. First, he compares
the Good, which is the object of the philosopher's search, to the Sun which is the source
of life, of all that is, but also the illuminator of all the appearances in the world. Socrates
cannot seem to say what the Good is, but he can give us a sense of what it is like.
Second, he proposes a geometric model, a "divided line" to give us a picture of what the
ascent to the Good might require of us mortals still in this world below, a sense of the
kind of intellectual activity we must engage in, the kind of journey we must take to get
closer to that object beyond us. In the study of mathematics, we quickly come to
understand that the pictures we draw of squares and triangles, lines and proportions,
are just images or representations of the true objects of geometry, which are only
accessible by thought. Through the image of the divided line, we come to appreciate the
�need to access a world of intelligible objects in order to better understand what lies
behind, and gives order to, their appearances in the visible world.
Third, in the cave analogy, Socrates gives us a drama to describe the great difficulty
and pain we can expect in making the ascent from the world of images to the one
source of all we can see and know. He asks us to imagine that we are all prisoners in a
cave, chained so that all we can see are the shadows cast upon a wall in front of us. We
cannot, on our own, turn around and see that these shadows are not real at all, but
mere reflections of objects carried by people behind us who are passing in front of a fire
which is the source of the light that casts the shadows. He describes first the pain, then
the disbelief, and finally the wonder experienced by a prisoner who is released from his
bonds and forced to turn around and look into the light of the fire and see what the
image makers have known all along.
But that is not all. This cave has an entrance open to the light of the sun across the
whole width of the cave. Socrates now asks us to imagine that the newly released
prisoner is dragged up the steep, rocky, upward way out into the light of the sun. At first,
he'd be blinded and see less well than before, but then he would get accustomed to the
light and see all the other things the world has to show him — the waters and the land
and the starry heavens above, until he could make out the sun itself and see what it is
like. That man would be happy at his freedom from the shadows below, and would pity
those still in the cave. His education would have literally been an education in the art of
turning around, the art of seeing better, in a truer light, what is already really there, of
seeing what ought to be seen.
Around here, we sometimes call this an education in the arts of freedom, or the liberal
arts — the arts that liberate us to flee the bonds of prejudice, the false opinions, and the
shadows about us, and see things as they truly are. Every image, every opinion
expressed by the image makers and spin doctors around us, should be an occasion for
us to pull ourselves, and others with us, out of our caves and into the light of the sun.
We recognize that this sun is there for everyone in the cave to access. The entrance to
the cave is open to all who are below.
After exploring these images, Socrates then constructs the education of the
philosopher, and explores the kinds of governments that arise when the rulers are no
longer philosophers. He closes with a grand overarching myth that attempts to
�incorporate the whole, reminding us that we have a lot at stake in the choices we make
in living our lives. Just as we are meant to see the city-building exercise that occurs in
the first nine books of the Republic as an image of the education of the individual soul,
so we see the closing myth as an image of the choices available to that soul. We see
that it is literally a matter of life or death (or at least a matter of great reward or
unimaginable punishment) how we choose to live our lives, and how wise we would be
to turn ourselves now to the question of justice so that we might learn to live a life that
practices it. The well regulated soul, one that is turned to the Good, that is whole, well
integrated and balanced, is also, we imagine, the soul best fit to rule our city.
I think it is time for me now to try to give my answer to the question I opened with: What
would it mean to say that our students don't become Johnnies until they've finished
the Republic?
The dialogue probably gives us the best account we have of what learning ought to be.
It belongs to us at the college, and serves as a kind of model for our program of
instruction. The book thus gives our students an opportunity to examine the education
they are then engaged in, allows them to ask what it would be like to construct a
curriculum fit for a philosopher king, and invites them to compare it to the one they are
undertaking at St. John's.
The Republic is a beautiful book, filled with the richest of images that help us remember
that the difficult search for truth is worth all the effort. It gives us poetic, musical and
mathematical images, myths and analogies, to aid us in our search for an
understanding of our world and our place in it, images we cannot possibly forget,
images that will be available to us forever.
Like all of Plato's dialogues, the Republic engages the readers and asks them to
become participants in the dialogue that Socrates is having with his friends. It asks us to
question the answers given by Glaucon and others, to try them out and formulate better
ones. It also helps to lead us up out of our own personal caves, encouraging us, and
showing us how to find our way to a life that is better than we have experienced
heretofore.
The Republic allows our freshmen to see how integrated the whole of learning is in
relation to the singular soul. It helps explain the importance of mathematics in our
�curriculum, that it is not just a tool required for the specialist in the sciences,
engineering, or the trades, but is an indispensable aid to philosophy itself, an aid to self
understanding.
More than anything, however, I think it must be in our several seminars on
the Republic that we become aware of the republic that is shaping itself around us, the
republic of friends around the table who are searching together for answers to the
deepest of questions: how we ought to be living our lives. We, like Glaucon and
Adeimantus, find ourselves being initiated into the one republic that Socrates and his
friends have succeeded in realizing. At St. John's, we call this republic our community of
learning.
In the world, we often speak of the ties that "bind" us to a human community as healthy
things, often beautiful and reaffirming ties. It is easy to forget the dark side of this image
which is that we can be "tied" and "bound" to a community as to a cave that we fear to
escape. We can become yoked to a larger political body by a common interest, a piece
of territory, a tribal custom, a shared enemy, or a popular idea — foundations that we
may cease to question. And questioning these foundations of community can become
taboo, as the chains tighten about us.
We are fortunate, then, that the larger community most of us belong to, the United
States of America, is founded on a paradox: the ties that bind us as Americans are
rooted in human freedom, and the more we exercise the freedom to question our
institutions the stronger are our ties to the founding principal. That freedom, protected
by our laws, provides us with a very comfortable and open cave in which to live our lives
and shape our institutions.
We at St John's have taken advantage of that freedom and that cave to found a college
grounded in a very similar paradox: we find our truest sense of community in an image
of human freedom that finds us somehow "together" seeking to escape the confines of
the individual caves that imprison each of us. For lovers of wisdom, the young Glaucons
among us, the desire to see things as they are, to strive toward the source of our being
and come in to the light of the sun, is too beautiful an activity to resist — and too
wonderful not to share with others. We make this search for truth, this struggle to climb
out of our caves, our chief community endeavor.
�Perhaps, in our search for such a liberating community, and in our occasionally
achieving it, "then, we become Johnnies". Nonetheless, I will today welcome you to the
Republic of St. John's College. I'm done trying to justify why you must wait 10 weeks to
become one of us. We are happy to call you ours today, and to welcome you to our
community of learning.
Thank You.
I declare the College in session this 27th day of August, 2008.
CONVOCATUM EST!
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2008 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Republic of St. John's College."
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August 22, 2007
The Gift of the Gadfly
Convocation 2007
Christopher B. Nelson
President, St. John’s College, Annapolis, Md.
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“I was attached to this city by the god – though it seems a ridiculous
thing to say – as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat
sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred by a kind of gadfly.
It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me in
the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade
and reproach you all day long and everywhere I find myself in your
company.”
Socrates makes this claim in his own defense against charges of impiety and corruption of the
youth of Athens. It is typical of Socrates that he makes it hard for us to determine just when he
intends to deny the charges brought against him and when he would positively embrace them.
Socrates is a defense attorney’s worst nightmare and a grave digger’s delight; when in a hole, he
will take up the shovel and dig himself deeper.
Presented with one bill of particulars, Socrates adds new charges to the list against him.
Prosecuted for threatening the city’s good order, for challenging its authority figures and questioning their wisdom, he claims to be a gift to the city. Threatened with death for his behavior, he gives
no thought to himself, but instead begs to argue the case for the city. He asks the jury, for its own
sake, and the sake of the city, to avoid mistreating god’s gift to them by condemning Socrates, the
city’s greatest blessing—a blessing in the form of a gadfly, attached to the city, to stir it and rouse
each of its citizens, to persuade and reproach them, all day long and everywhere. On trial at age 70,
Socrates will not go quietly into retirement. His jury was sufficiently impressed with his defense
that it sentenced him to death. It does not take much imagination to picture what a pain in that
noble horse’s rear this gadfly, Socrates, must have been.
I apologize to our freshmen for giving away the outcome of the trial, for each of you will soon read
the account of it in Plato’s Apology. But I wanted to open my remarks with reference to it because I
think that each of us here at the college has something at stake in this trial, at least something at
stake in Socrates’ defense. Socrates certainly thinks so, and he will fight for it with all he has, comparing himself, ironically but rightly, I think, to Achilles, another hero our freshmen are encountering this week: the man of action, praised for his courage, his warrior’s excellence, and his fighting spirit. (More about this later.) Perhaps, I am also drawn to the dialogue as a former trial
lawyer. While I cringe when Socrates mocks both his accusers and his citizen jury, I find myself
�cheering his courage and willingness to embrace the claim that he may be both a threat to the
established power structure and a gift to the city. Armed only with questions and the will to question relentlessly, he threatens the status quo and the peace of mind of the city’s public opinion
shapers, and challenges the citizens’ thoughtless acceptance of whatever they are told. Socrates is
a destabilizing influence. Is he really the blessing to the city that he claims to be?
Let us first look at our city. Socrates claims that Athens is great and noble, made sluggish by its
size. What can he have meant by this? Not every city is great and noble. Indeed, we learn in a later
dialogue that Socrates would rather be put to death in Athens than be released to live anywhere
else. I can imagine a number of ways to think about the problem of this great city, but I’d like to
offer one for now. Athens is a democracy, or a kind of democracy of free male citizens; it is built
upon a respect for the individual and a trust that its citizens are capable of self-governance. Surely,
the protection of a democracy and the freedom of its citizens require that those citizens have an
education both in the traditions of the city and in the arts of freedom. The traditions of a city, its
customs, its idols, and even its laws, will frequently be at odds with the very things that encourage
the autonomy of the individual citizen---those arts that allow us to think for ourselves and to question the city fathers, popular opinion, and social custom.
One might say that a democracy of any size can only work well if its citizens agree on the need to
hold on to this tension between the needs of an ordered society and the needs of a free people. I
imagine that only in such societies can a Socrates have a home. Athens may be the best hope for
home for the free individual. But it may also be that in any well-ordered and relatively happy society there will always be a tendency for the people to fall asleep, to become comfortable in their
prosperity, to follow without much reflection the will of the many, and to ignore, resent or repress
the individual voice that would challenge custom and the comfort of its citizens. Let me call this
tendency to sleep a form of decay or corruption of a democratic society, which can only be countered by the wakeful vigilance of its citizens and the persistent effort to find ways of renewing the
city’s spirit, recalling it to its purposes. If the city’s business is justice, the citizen leadership must
always be alert to signs of corruption and open to correction; it must encourage in its citizens a
respect for justice which will require the people to think about what is right and wrong, not just
what is comfortable or expedient---to think about building a better tomorrow, not just protecting
their inheritance.
It is probably the case that even the good city is more likely to tolerate its gladflies than to learn
from them. Socrates seems to understand this; he argues and reproaches, to be sure. But it is never
clear that he has a particular lesson to teach. He would convince us of our ignorance, without finding for us an answer. His chief work would seem to consist in prodding us to wakefulness, to keep
us from the smug self-satisfaction that comes from sleeping through life without examining who
we are and what we ought to become. He seems to take it as an unqualified good that we should be
kept awake to this examination even if we can’t resolve the questions that such examination
requires us to ask.
How does Socrates prod us to wakefulness? Certainly not by giving us life’s answers. We’ve all slept
through those lectures. He does it by asking questions which open us up to the world. These are
not the questions you need to know to pass your multiple-choice or true-false exams; they are not
the questions designed to test your knowledge. Instead, they are questions that should help you
understand how much you still need to learn, and how little you really understand what you
thought you knew or were told by others. They are questions that will reduce you to a state of perplexity so that you may wonder at your ignorance and search hard for a better understanding.
�For Socrates, it is human to want to know, and the prod to encourage the human desire to know
something is the prod to be human. We all recognize that the desire to know something is
grounded in what we don’t know. Therefore, the best preparation for life, for becoming more fully
human, is less the acquisition of knowledge than the understanding of our ignorance. This in turn
will help us find the questions we need to ask to bring us to a better understanding. For a question
to help us, something must be at stake for us; it must make a real difference to us how we answer
the question. When Socrates tells the reader toward the end of the Apology that the unexamined
life is not worth living, he is telling us that we might as well be dead (or never born) as live a life
that is unexamined—a life without questions, the answers to which really matter to us.
For Socrates, what is at stake is literally greater than life or death. Here is where he compares himself to Achilles who, knowing he will soon be killed after he slays the royal Hector, nonetheless
despises death: “ ‘Let me die at once,’ he said, ‘when once I have given the wrongdoer his desserts,
rather than remain here, a laughing-stock by the curved ships, a burden upon the earth.’ ”
Like Achilles, Socrates is not just willing to risk death for something he believes in; he is without
thought of death, as he faces danger rather than the disgrace of withdrawing from the search for
self-knowledge, the pursuit of which is Socrates’ only reason for living. The disgrace for Socrates
would be all the greater for backing away out of fear of the unknown. “To fear death, gentlemen,”
he says “is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does
not know. No man knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man…” True
to his search for self knowledge, mere death is no barrier. Socrates and Achilles live the lives that
belong to them, fully and completely, because they have some understanding of who they are and
what they are meant to do.
You will discover that Socrates is a local hero to many at this college. I know there are other such
heroes here; some are unyielding, bulwarks, upright (take Ajax or Antigone), while others are survivors, with a kind of practical wisdom that will see them through a changing world (Odysseus and
Penelope). In the literature throughout the Program, you will find examples of men and women
who will invite imitation. The question we must ask of each such character is this: who is this man
or woman, and what is at stake for me that I need to understand what moves them to do what they
do? The question that underlies Plato’s Apology is not the guilt or innocence of Socrates. It is
something closer to this: “Who is this man, Socrates? Is he living a life worth living---the life that
truly belongs to him? Does it matter to me and to the City that this man’s life should continue or
come to an end? Is it perhaps, even, a life worth imitating or undertaking as my own?” We cannot
judge Socrates until we know him better. And in judging him, we reveal ourselves. We had better
understand what is at stake for us before we decide the fate of Socrates and either keep him with us
or consign him to Hades and take up another. This is the prod to wakefulness that Socrates represents. And these persistent questions can be as annoying or inspiriting to the sleeping soul within
each of us as the gadfly is to the noble horse.
This whole program of instruction is designed to give you the tools to ask the question “Who are
you?” The invocation here is the same as the words at the entrance to the temple of Delphi, consulted by Socrates in his youth: “Know Thyself.” It presumes that the question “Who are you?” is a
real one, and that you yourselves have not answered it. It presumes that the stakes are high, that
your happiness depends upon your investigation into this question. It suggests that coming to
know yourself is a high and sacred duty, a task of monumental difficulty, requiring courage, and
worthy of being called “heroic.” And it suggests that the way each of you will choose to live your
life after St. John’s may depend on how you go about exploring the answer to the question: “Who
are you?”
�Nearly every book we read together will help you consider who you are and what your place is in the
world. What makes you a featherless biped, a rational being, a lover of wisdom, a son of Adam, a
child of God, a collection of molecules and a product of genes, an evolved kind of ape, an acquisitive animal, a noble savage with a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but created
equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights? Those are just a few of the possible answers you
will consider in your four years with us. In reading these books and asking of them whether they
speak any truths to you, you will be participating in an education appropriate to a great and noble
democracy—an education in the traditions of society, the arts of freedom, and the tension between
the two.
You will come to ask yourself whether answering these questions will help you shape your character. I cannot begin to imagine how each of you will find your own answer to that question. But I
think I can say with some confidence that your pursuit of these answers, and your wakefulness to
the things that matter, will be worthy of the humanity that lies within each of you.
We will ask each of you to remember the gift of the gadfly, prompting you to remain wakeful---and
ask each of you to serve as a prompt to the rest of the college community whenever we appear to be
sleeping. (Now, I ask you not to take this last injunction too literally but to allow yourselves, your
classmates and your tutors those hours of repose required for us all to remain alert and fit for daylight classes.)
On behalf of the entire college community, I welcome our newcomers to St. John’s College, welcome back the returning members of our community, and invite one and all to participate together
in this search for our humanity.
Thank you.
Following the recessional, I invite everyone to a reception behind the Mitchell Art Gallery.
I declare the College in session this 22nd day of August, 2007.
CONVOCATUM EST!
�
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Convocation Addresses
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Fall 2007
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2007-08-22
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2007 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Gift of the Gadfly."
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Convocation, Fall 2007
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Annapolis, MD
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Convocation
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Text
August 23, 2006
(edited October 2, 2006)
The Sting of the Torpedo Fish
Convocation Address to the Class of 2010
Christopher B. Nelson
President
Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught? [to continue] Or if not
teachable, is it acquired by practice, or if neither, whether men possess it by nature or in
some other way?”
So begins Plato’s dialogue, Meno, opening as abruptly upon the reader as my remarks
have upon you this afternoon. You freshmen will spend a good part of this year with
Plato, his frustrating protagonist, Socrates, and this very dialogue, Meno, in both English
translation and the original Greek. I think I am on relatively safe ground in saying that the
reason we spend so much time on the Meno is that this dialogue belongs peculiarly to this
college; it is deeply rooted here. I hope to expose a few of those roots this afternoon --but let me first return to the beginning.
“Tell me, Socrates, if you can, whether human excellence can be taught? If not,
whether we can acquire it by practice? Or if neither of these, whether we are
born with it or it comes to us in some other way?”
Meno’s question is interesting, for it appears to go to the heart of some very big questions
all of us share: what does it mean to be human, and how can we be better human beings?
Parents would love to know how to raise children who are improvements on themselves;
all parents want what is best for their children. Teachers would be happy and honored
above all others if they could teach their students human virtue. As for students --- why
else are you here but that you believe that some answer might be given to Meno’s
question: What is the right path to virtue? How might I acquire human excellence?
But Meno’s question has its flaws. For one, it comes out of the blue and without context.
We are supposed to know, somehow, what Meno is talking about. We’re assumed to have
a common vocabulary and even a common understanding of basic concepts.
Speaking of vocabulary, some of you will have noted that I translated the Greek in two
different ways when I repeated Meno’s question in English --- an exercise you freshmen
will undertake as you try first to discover what is being said and what it means, before
asking whether it is true. Such attempts at translation will be first steps to get at the root
of Meno’s question.
�Socrates appreciates what is at stake in Meno’s question. He thus goes straight to the heart of it with a
response that would confound any student hoping to receive the almighty truth from a teacher.
Socrates in effect says: how can I say how virtue is acquired when I don’t even know what it is?
And worse, Socrates then says that he’s never met any other person who knows what virtue is. He
entreats Meno to help him understand what Meno thinks it to be. Meno makes the attempt,
responding confidently with what he has heard from other teachers, repeating their opinions as his
own. Yet, under Socrates’ questioning, Meno finds himself disowning the opinion he began with.
After two false starts, Meno begins to get uncomfortable with Socrates’ examination. When Socrates
begs him to start over yet a third time, Meno tries to divert the conversation from the question of
virtue to the problem with Socrates:
Socrates, I certainly used to hear, even before meeting you, that you never do anything else
than exist in a state of perplexity yourself and put others in a state of perplexity. And now you
seem to me to be bewitching me and drugging me and simply subduing me with incantations,
so that I come to be full of perplexity. And you seem to me, if it is even appropriate to make
something of a joke, to be altogether, both in looks and in other respects, like the flat torpedofish of the sea. For, indeed, it always makes anyone who approaches and touches it grow
numb, and you seem to me now to have done that very sort of thing to me, making me numb.
For truly, both in soul and in mouth, I am numb and have nothing with which I can answer
you. And yet thousands of times I have made a great many speeches about virtue, and before
many people, and done very well, in my own opinion anyway; yet now I’m altogether unable
to say what it is.
It is beginning to look as if Meno has no interest in the answer to the question and is more concerned
with his image or reputation than with the truth. On the other hand, Socrates is not satisfied; he still
wants to proceed with the search for an answer. He is also willing to conduct the search with Meno, a
man who seems to have no thoughts of his own. Socrates, in wishing to proceed, has done two things;
he’s told Meno that he’ll serve as Meno’s teacher if Meno will let him --- that is, that he will join
Meno in the search; and he’s told the reader that he is willing to do so because he might actually learn
something from Meno. He is truly open to the possibility that the teacher may learn from the student –
any student, even Meno. So, Meno, what is virtue?
Meno now tries a sting of his own, challenging Socrates with a classic learner’s paradox: either we
know something or we don’t. If we know it, we don’t need to search for it. But if we don’t already
know what we’re looking for, how will we ever recognize it when we see it?
Socrates will not be deterred by Meno’s attempt to bring the conversation to an abrupt halt. Instead,
he takes Meno’s problem seriously and answers in two ways. First, he repeats a myth he has heard
which suggests that learning is a kind of recollection, which requires an exercise of responsibility for
learning by the one doing the learning; learning does not occur when someone else, a teacher for
example, tries to put knowledge into a student. Instead, it is an act of recovery, in some way, of
something already known to us.
When Meno demonstrates that he doesn’t get it, Socrates resolves upon a way to show Meno what he
means, asking Meno to observe carefully as he examines one of Meno’s slave boys about a problem
in geometry which is new to him --- a problem which can be demonstrated by a drawing in the earth -- a problem, not incidentally, that you will be working on in your mathematics tutorial with Euclid.
The slave boy reaches a point where he expresses with confidence an answer which is false --- an
answer which he, himself, a few moments later comes to understand is wrong under Socrates’
questioning. The slave boy tries again with the same result. Socrates asks him to start over, just as he
�did with Meno a little earlier. He asks the boy to produce another answer, and the slave boy says:
“Indeed, Socrates, I do not know”.
Socrates turns to Meno, and by extension to us, and says:
Do you see, Meno, what advances he has made in his power of recollection? He did not
know at first, and he does not know now, what is the [answer]: but then he thought that he
knew, and answered confidently as if he knew, and had no difficulty; now he has difficulty,
and neither knows nor fancies that he knows.
Meno: True
Socrates: Is he not better off knowing his ignorance?
Meno: I think that he is.
Socrates: If we have made him doubt, and given him the “torpedo’s shock,” have we done
him any harm?
Meno: I think not.
Socrates: We have certainly, it would seem, assisted him in some degree to the discovery of
the truth; and now he will wish to remedy his ignorance, but then he would have been ready
to tell all the world again and again [the answer he gave at first?].
Meno: True.
Socrates persuades Meno that the slave boy simply would not have been ready to inquire and learn
the truth without first being reduced to perplexity. The torpedo’s shock not only didn’t hurt, it
positively helped; it was the condition for the learning that did occur (and the slave boy did go on,
with Socrates’ help, to find the solution to the geometry problem).
Socrates has shown us, the readers (and Meno, if he were listening), that understanding our own
ignorance is necessary for learning to take place – especially understanding our ignorance of the
everyday common things we thought we knew well. When we can look at the familiar and suddenly
realize that we really don’t understand it, when we can look at what we always thought we knew, and
ask “what is this thing?” then we are ready to learn and well along the path to better understanding. In
that state we are truly torpid, just as the slave boy was, and we bring a sense of “wonder” to our
search. This wonder comes not from something we understand, but rather from our desire to
understand --- what we sometimes call a love of learning, born not in understanding but in ignorance.
Socrates has done something else in his demonstration. He has also shown us the power of
discovering what something is NOT, and helped us see that knowing what something is not is much
more than knowing nothing; it is a kind of “knowing ignorance,” an “intelligent perplexity” that
comes from trying out and discarding false notions. He has also helped us see that we not only don’t
know what virtue is, we don’t even know what learning is.
�We now look at Meno and see that he is a slave … a slave to his pride, a slave to the opinions of
others, unwilling to examine what he clearly doesn’t understand. Meno’s problem is not that he’s
ignorant, but that he has no desire to be free from the shackles of that ignorance.
We look at the slave boy and see that he is free --- free from the false notions he’s been carrying
around with him, free from barriers to learning. This freedom, strangely, comes not from the certainty
of knowledge but from the recognition of his ignorance.
Let me return to the place where I began, when I said that this dialogue of Plato’s is deeply rooted at
the college. We want you to acquire the freedom of Meno’s slave boy, the freedom that allows you to
acknowledge the one certainty in life: “Indeed, Socrates, I do not know.” Recognition of that certainty
is the pathway to learning --- learning things that will belong to you, not just repeating things that
belong to others. We also want you to have practice with the tools you will need to acquire this
freedom --- tools that will help you to listen and to read attentively and deeply, to express yourselves
intelligibly and precisely, and to measure and reckon the world in which you live accurately and
comprehensively --- tools that will help give shape to your understanding who you are and where you
live, and what your responsibility is toward others and the world you together inhabit, the world of
the body and the world of the spirit.
We live with a deep paradox at the college --- one that you will confront right at the outset. We have
made very deliberate choices about what should and should not be included in this all required
curriculum (and there are many, many excellent works that are not on the program list simply because
there’s no room for them in just four years). Yet we tell you that, for all the conviction we might have
that these choices constitute the best undergraduate curriculum we can devise, this conviction is not
grounded in the answers these books purport to give but in the questions they raise. When we say that
this college is committed to radical inquiry, we mean inquiry into the very traditions and books that
have shaped the world we’re born into. This is why we are not ashamed to admit that though we are
called an institution of higher learning, we really do not know what learning is. We share the
conviction, nonetheless, that it is worth the search to find out. When we welcome you to St. John’s
College, we are welcoming you to join us in a search that we imagine will sustain all of us for all of
our lives --- a search for origins and foundations that will be firm enough to support the good life we
each wish to live. We call on you to join us as fellow lovers of learning, not as a would-be scholars.
One of the things you will discover as you read the several platonic dialogues on the program is that
they demand your engagement. They ask for you to reflect on how you might respond to Socrates. So,
let me venture into the conversation of the Meno with a small, tentative reflection on the question
Socrates puts to Meno: “what is virtue?” My thoughts, at least for now, are these: the way to virtue
may require that we come to know our great weakness, our own ignorance. This ignorance is
common to all who are less than divine; it is something we share with one another in our humanity. If
there is a connection between knowledge and right conduct, it is likely to be found in our ignorance
and in the humility it inspires, in seeing that every single one of us has a long, long way to go toward
understanding, in the endless search for truth. I suspect that human virtue lies somehow coterminous
with this strange path toward knowledge, a path through ignorance and therefore available to us all.
As we are not likely to attain great heights of knowledge, it is more likely that we can share with each
other the great peaks of desire. It may be that the love of learning, more than the attainment of
understanding, is what binds us together most tightly. It may also be this love of learning which
impels us to great acts of virtue, like the virtue we will be asking you to exhibit every day in class:
helping your classmates to experience the loving sting of the torpedo fish, helping them see that you
�too have a lot of baggage to unload, and coming to see that learning is best pursued in a community of
lovers of learning, each seeking what is best for the others.
And now I see that I’ve found my way to a typical difficulty experienced by all Socratic interlocutors.
I’ve tried to say something about the nature of virtue, in terms of loving and learning, when I’m not
sure I know what these are. So, let me leave you with this question: Tell me, freshmen, what is this
love of learning that has brought you to our door, and where does it come from? --- for I do not know,
though I am happy in the thought that we have this much to share with each other for four full
glorious years.
Welcome to St. John’s College! May you experience the sting of the torpedo fish early and often.
May the sting never hurt, but help you along the path toward understanding and freedom.
Thank you.
*****
I declare the college in session this 23rd day of August, 2006.
Convocatum Est!
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2006 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Sting of the Torpedo Fish."
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Convocation
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Of Bees, Fish and Cannibals
Convocation Address
Annapolis, Maryland
January 14, 2004
Christopher B. Nelson
President
Welcome to the newest members of the class of 2007, to the new members of the Graduate
Institute, and to their families and friends. And welcome back to the rest of the college
community.
By way of introducing you to St. John's, I want to say a few words about cannibals and
cannibalism. I spent some time over the holidays with one of my favorite essays of Montaigne,
On the Education of Children. Montaigne is, incidentally, one of the authors you will be reading
in your sophomore year. It happens that he also wrote a little essay on cannibalism, but that has
little to do with my object today. In his Education of Children, Montaigne offers loads of good
advice. To parent he suggests that they send their children away from home to be tutored. To
students, he counsels that they should be silent and modest for social intercourse, but fastidious
in choosing and sorting their arguments, and fond of pertinence, and consequently of brevity --above all to surrender and throw their arms before the truth, wherever they encounter it.
Montaigne also has a wonderful understanding of what learning is all about, and it has to do with
grasping something the student may call his own her own. Let me quote from two of his
passages:
Let [the student] be asked for an account not merely of the words of his lesson,
but of its sense and substance, and let him judge the profit he has made by the
testimony not of his memory, but of his life, let him be made to show what he has
learned in a hundred aspects, and apply it to as many different subjects, to see if
he has yet properly grasped it and made it his own . . . It is a sign of rawness and
indigestion to disgorge food just as we swallowed it. The stomach has not done its
work if he has not changed the condition and form of what has been given it to
cook.
And later:
Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who
first spoke them than to the man who says them later . . . The bees plunder the
flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all
theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from
others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to
wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.
As I was chewing on this essay, I recalled how I was used to receiving copies of speeches written
�by your Marshall here, Miss Brann, with a little note saying that they were “for cannibalistic
use.” Now, those who know Miss Brann will readily recognize that such talks would be
veritable gold mines, filled with things a college president might want to use in talking about
liberal education. Let us call these things a “banquet” so as not to mix metaphors. I had been
invited to remove parts of what was contained in a paper that I might use them in my own talks
from time to time — parts of a talk that was not of my own making.
Often, we quote from others to add ornament to our own words. But cannibalistic use is not
ornamental use. Somehow, I was meant to consume the talk before making use of it. Just as the
stomach must change the condition and form of the meal it has just eaten in order that the body
may receive nutrition, so must the mind transform the written matter it has taken in, in order that
it may be nourished and its judgment improved. I figured I was being invited to plunder in order
to make a work of my own, after I'd sifted through the material, considered it carefully, judged
for myself what was worthy and for what purpose, and transformed it somehow to fit me.
In this reflection, I was beginning to understand Montaigne, I think. But I was also getting an
insight into the heart of liberal education — that the students themselves must learn to become
their own guardians, that in the end they must use their own reason to find their way. So, I asked
myself whether it mattered what food was served up and how it was served to our students.
Well, I know I am preaching to the choir here. You would not have come to St. John's College in
the first place — if you had not had at least an intuitive grasp that it matters deeply that the food
we serve up for thought is the best we know for the nourishment of the mind and soul, for the
development of their faculties. And you know just as well that it matters deeply how it is served.
You want a banquet set before you and you need the time to taste everything served, to test it and
question it before forming a judgment and rejecting it, doubting it, or making it your own. You
understand that the authority of teachers can become an obstacle to learning precisely because
their authority belongs to them and is not your own. So you want the teacher to listen to you
before responding in turn. You want the liberty to chew on your own questions, not just take in
someone else's gospel. You want to be the arbiter of your own opinions, but you need the tools to
judge your own questions fairly, with your eye on the truth.
I think that is why you are here at St. John's. We offer you tools for working with questions. We
offer you opportunities for extended conversation and leisure for reflection about the questions
that will help you shape the person you will become. We offer you rich reading material as food
for thought, and a faculty modest enough to know that the books themselves make better teachers
than the more ordinary mortals sitting on the other side of the aisle.
We want you to plunder the ideas these many books have to offer, but afterward make of them
honey which is all yours. We want you to digest what you read and hear, and change what you
take in to make it a work you can call your own. This means that purely bookish competence is
not what we seek (even though competence in all the books in this program would take many
lifetimes to achieve). Instead, we hope to help you build a kind of “honest curiosity to inquire
into all things,” to help you exercise the habit of shared inquiry, where you will learn to listen
well to others, speak when you have something pertinent to say, and build a kind of confidence
in yourselves that comes from exercising your reason freely for your own purposes. We want
�you to learn the freedom that is required to make wise choices for yourselves so that you may
live better lives.
There is a rather wonderful image for all this in another book you will be reading before long —
an image I was reminded of another generously spirited tutor. I am referring to Dante's Divine
Comedy, a poem written in three parts, where our hero Dante is guided on a journey through the
Inferno, the place of despair, Purgatorio, the place of hope, and Paradiso, the heavenly place of
fulfillment. As Dante, a mortal man and visitor, is led into the second realm of Paradiso, which is
inhabited by shades in a blessed spirit world, he is swarmed upon as if by fish to their food.
Dante puts it this way:
As in a fish-pool that is calm and clear the fish draw to that which comes from the
outside, taking it to be their food, so I saw plainly more than a thousand
splendors draw towards us, and in each I heard: “Lo, one who will increase our
loves!” And as each shade came near it appeared to be full of happiness, by the
bright effulgence that came forth from it.
The simile suggests that even in the heavenly sphere the human spirit is fed by fellowship. The
eagerness for human company and the conversation (which follows) is seen as food for the spirit,
and is made apparent by an increase in the heavenly light permeating them. These spirits rush to
their new visitor for the increase of their love, which for Dante seems to follow from a
knowledge and understanding of the way the world works and the heavens move.
I close with this image to remind you that you are not only here to feed. You are food for the rest
of your classmates and friends. Fellowship and friendship come from learning like this in a
community where each of its members flocks eagerly to the newest arrivals, its freshmen, to
share and to learn for the sake of learning itself — and for the happiness that follows from the
activity of learning together.
We bid you to come to the table. The banquet set before you has more variety and depth than the
imagination can capture. Eat generously. Chew it all carefully and thoughtfully, taking in what
you come to know is right, placing in doubt what seems uncertain, and rejecting what you know
to be wrong, what you know can never be used cannibalistically, because it simply is not
something you can call your own.
I welcome the cannibal in each of you, and encourage you to make cannibalistic use of the fouryear program of instruction we will be setting before you.
And in that spirit, may you learn to love the project you are embarked upon and the fellowship of
your classmates. May you succeed in taking in our program, and making of it something
beautiful which is also something you may call your own.
Thank you.
* * * * *
I declare the college in session this 14rd day of January 2004.
�Convocatum Est!
�
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2004
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2004-01-14
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Typescript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given by Chris Nelson on January 14, 2004 in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Of Bees, Fish and Cannibals."
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Convocation, Spring 2004
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Homer and the Power of Men That Have Chests
Convocation Address
August 27, 2003
Christopher B. Nelson
President, St. John’s College in Annapolis
Welcome to the class of 2007, to those beginning their studies in the Graduate Institute,
to parents and friends, and all members of the college community.
One of the many things I love about this college is that everyone must begin with Homer
— and not only Homer, but the Iliad. It’s not just that this happens to have been my
favorite book for most of my life. It is a collection of things, all of which have something
to do with your initiation into this community of learning, something to do with the
liberal education you are about to begin here.
Homer is arguably both the first and the best of poets and we want you to read the best
and most original of books at this college. Montaigne, another author you will meet here
in your sophomore year, wrote this about Homer:
“It was against the order of nature that he created the most excellent
production that can be. For things at birth are ordinarily imperfect; they
gain size and strength as they grow. He made the infancy of poetry and
of several sciences mature, perfect and accomplished. For this reason he
may be called the first and last of poets . . .” (Of the Most Outstanding
Men)
There is also something glorious about undertaking your studies at this particular
beginning, because the Iliad takes hold of the imagination from its first line, when it
sweeps the reader into the Achaean camps, to face the towering figure of Achilles: “Rage
--- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the
Achaeans countless losses…” The images and the pace of the poetry appear to be artless,
yet commanding.
The Iliad has a kind of immediacy you will find nowhere else. It has irresistible
momentum. It grabs you in the middle, somewhere in the vicinity of the chest or the
heart, and it demands the attention of your sensibility.
Consider the size of the heroes and the size of the themes. Who is this godlike Achilles
and what is his glory? What is the rage that has power over him? Where does it come
from? What are the consequences of unleashing it upon others? Is it purely a destructive
force? Can it be directed or controlled? What does it take to dissolve this rage?
Why are these men fighting? Who or what drove them to it? What is the price of
defending illicit love? Can one ever exercise control over the forces of nature, change
fate, or fight the gods?
Look at the great battle-armies. What propels these heroes to action, especially when they
have knowledge of the risks, dangers and dreadful consequences of battle? What is
courage? What good is honor, and what does it mean to die honorably? What is virtue
and excellence of character, and can you find these in the poem?
�Well, here is your chance to read about the bold and to talk about the question of character.
C. S. Lewis wrote a little book that perhaps you have read, The Abolition of Man, in which he argued
that modern education (he was writing in 1955) was failing to help the young develop a sense of
morality. In man, Lewis said,
“[the head rules the belly through the chest – the seat ... of magnanimity, of emotions
organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The chest – magnanimity –
sentiment – these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and
visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man:
for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”
What Lewis feared from modern education was that it would stamp out the spirited element in the
young, causing the atrophy of magnanimity and sentiment. And all the while, we clamor for more
drive, or more self-sacrifice:
“... {We} remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests
and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find
traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
C. S. Lewis may have had cause to complain, but you do not — not now. Surely there is not a more
powerful book anywhere than the Iliad with which to examine the virtues and vices, the beauty and
terrible power for good or ill, of men with chests. So the Iliad, and later, the Odyssey form a good
beginning to philosophy; they ask you to confront powerful aspects of your nature on your first day at
the college — aspects that often function independently of your rational capacity. You are asked to
face the spirited element within you and to wonder whether it can or should be shaped and tempered
by your reason.
I’ve been referring to a “spirited” element within man. You’ll be reading a lot about this in your
freshman year, first in Homer, then in Herodotus and Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle. The Greek word
is 2b:`l. It is variously used to mean the breath of life, the principle that animates life, the soul, the
heart, the spirit, an attitude that inspires action, a capacity for vigor, courage, mettle, liveliness,
indignation, anger, righteousness or pride. It is a word used of men and women both; it is what moves
individual men and women from thought to action. So, while the Iliad is a stage for the display and
destruction of 2b:`l among warrior men, you will have ample opportunity during the years for
recognizing its place in the breasts of women too. If you look hard, you may even find it used to
describe Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey.
Now back to the Iliad, where you are also asked to consider the power of community, the bonds of
friendship, the call of duty toward one’s own people, all abandoned by Achilles very early in the
poem. Achilles becomes both a lesser, meaner man and a distant, godlike emblem because of this. He
must learn to take responsibility for the awful consequences of his withdrawal from battle; he must
suffer a terrible personal loss and rise up above himself before he can again stand beside his fellow
Achaeans. He must also learn compassion before reentering the community of men.
�Why is community important? What is friendship, and what does it require? Where does the sense of
self belong in a community? These are the same questions you must ask when trying to learn the best
way to live with others.
You will read about the power of civil discourse as battle plans are shaped and reshaped, about the
path to wisdom through suffering and re-commitment, the power of human empathy, and the need for
magnanimity and generosity in dealing with others. And always in the shadows are the fates, spinning
and inevitably shortening the thread of life. We are, in the end, mortals and we must come to accept
this fact. How do we do this? We all want to know. How does one come to terms with death when
everything in our being screams with life and the will to live?
Who are the gods and what is our relation to them? What of honor, glory, mercy, forgiveness, and the
possibility for heroism? What is the authority of law and custom, and how should we behave when
this authority threatens the bonds of family? What do we make of Helen who strangely serves as a
kind of prime mover in the whole drama, but also as an object of spoil.
Name a theme in the realm of human activity that is not dealt with in the Iliad and you are likely to
find it in the Odyssey. There, our hero learns what it means to trade the offer of immortality for the
possibility of returning home, the need to face one’s demons and overcome one’s weaknesses before
deserving the right to return, the importance of taking life’s journey and facing its dangers and
temptations in order to grow, the necessity for leaving home in order to discover the bedrock that was
there all along. There, we find wisdom in survival, truth in lies, and strength in weakness. And always
is our hero’s happiness bound up with the need to search — to search at any price. This too sounds a
lot like the kind of question that you might need to examine to understand why you even decided to
come to St. John’s.
We meet the glorious Penelope, Odysseus’ match in every sense. How well has she raised their son to
manhood in his father’s 20-year absence? How has she maintained home, family and kingdom all on
her own? How should she treat her returning husband and gain mastery over this wayward stranger of
a man, to test his love and confirm that he is fit to return to his place beside her and his seat of power
in Ithaca? It is in the Odyssey that we see the strength of Homer’s women and goddesses who serve
as Odysseus’ protectors and saviors as well as his reason for returning — they become both the means
and the end of his journey from the world of Troy to home in Ithaca.
Last, you get the experience of beauty in Homer’s unforgettable images. I still wake up to dawn’s
rosy fingers stretching across the waters of the Chesapeake. I see the father’s unbound joy as he
tosses his young boy about in his arms, kissing him lovingly, before heading back out to the field of
honor for his final battle. I watch the wise and lovely Penelope at her spinning wheel, weaving the
web that makes Odysseus’s homecoming possible.
Consider now this new beginning to your education: you get the beautiful, the great, the first and the
last; you get to start with the issues of the heart and the spirit, those things that move you to action.
You will talk about honor and courage, beauty and glory, gods’ laws and man’s, mortality and death,
community and friendship, family and love, and the inevitable longing for the next challenge, the
search for an answer, the way to human happiness.
�With these first two books, you are diving into the greatest project of your education, which is to
consider how to compose your character, to figure out what is necessary to live life well — your life
— the one you are building for yourselves. In other words, you are not being told to love or admire
Achilles or Odysseus or Helen or Penelope — only to let them into your lives so that you may engage
with them. Incidentally, it is another fine quality of these poems that Homer doesn’t try to tell you
what to think; he lets the story act upon you without intervention. You get to think for yourselves
about what is fitting and what is not. But please listen to your classmates too; you might actually
learn something from them.
Our job, your tutors’ job, is to listen and to ask; yours is to read the books and wrestle with the
questions. You will experience no more liberating an activity than this, for a question is a door
opening wide, inviting you to explore and discover what’s inside. Trust yourselves to take advantage
of this invitation; we do. We believe in the power of your rational capacity. We believe in your power
to become your own teachers. Walk through this door, and you will soon find yourselves exercising
those intellectual muscles that will allow you to transform a little of what you read here and
something of what you hear there into a work that is all your own. We call this work “your
judgment.” And we suspect strongly that you’ll find that a little injection of the spirited element right
at the beginning will be just what you need to get your project going.
If you are now worried, however, that the classroom is the only place you may exercise the spirited
element within you, have no fear. There are many other opportunities around this campus, among
your friends or on your own, on the playing fields or upon the stage, in community activities or choral
groups, in competing for glory or singing to the gods:
“Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles . . .”
May the poet inspire each and every one of you to love your learning with us and move you to shape
a life that is worthy of living.
Thank you. And enjoy!
ggghggg
I declare the college in session for the entering class.
Convocatum Est
(Revised version of a talk given in January 2000, and again in June 2002.)
��
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Convocation Addresses
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Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Convocation Address, Fall 2003
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2003-08-27
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An account of the resource
Typescript of the convocation address given by Chris Nelson for the Fall 2003 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Homer and the Power of Men That Have Chests."
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Convocation, Fall 2003
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Annapolis, MD
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����������
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Speeches, presentations, and other lectures
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Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span>
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10 pages
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From the virtual to the actual : the painful prospect of liberal education
Description
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Transcript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given on June 18, 2000 by David Levine in Santa Fe, NM.
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Levine, David Lawrence
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St. John's College
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Santa Fe, NM
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2000-06-18
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Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
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text
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pdf
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Education, Humanistic
Learning and scholarship
Language
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English
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24003176
Convocation
Graduate Institute
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Speeches, presentations, and other lectures
Description
An account of the resource
Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span>
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
speechespresentationsotherlectures
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
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
A world of worldless truths, an invitation to philosophy
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given on June 20, 1999 by David Levine in Santa Fe, NM.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Levine, David Lawrence
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1999-06-20
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
Philosophy
Learning and scholarship
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24003175
Convocation
Graduate Institute
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PDF Text
Text
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Speeches, presentations, and other lectures
Description
An account of the resource
Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span>
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
speechespresentationsotherlectures
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
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
Hand-me-downs : or the traditionalization of thought
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given on June 14, 1998 by David Levine in Santa Fe, NM.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Levine, David Lawrence
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1998-06-14
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
Learning and scholarship
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24003174
Convocation
Graduate Institute
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PDF Text
Text
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Speeches, presentations, and other lectures
Description
An account of the resource
Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span>
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
speechespresentationsotherlectures
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
5 pages
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
"I hate books" or making room for learning
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given on June 15, 1997 by David Levine in Santa Fe, NM.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Levine, David Lawrence
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1997-06-15
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
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778. Emile.
Education
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
24000406
Convocation
Graduate Institute
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Photographic Archive—Annapolis
Description
An account of the resource
<p>The Greenfield Library photographic archive houses over 5,000 photographs. The photographs in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. The Library’s mission is to organize and preserve these unique visual materials, and to provide access to this collection. </p>
To learn more about our photographic use policy or to obtain high resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Photographic Archive Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Photographic Archive Use Policy</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Photographic Archive—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
photographicarchiveannapolis
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Physical Dimensions
The actual physical size of the original image
22 x 13.5 cm.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Photograph
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/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SJC-P-1089
Title
A name given to the resource
Freshmen Bow and Curtsie before Richard D. Weigle at Convocation, Annapolis, Maryland
Description
An account of the resource
1 photographic print : b&w
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1978-09
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Unknown
Subject
The topic of the resource
Weigle, Richard Daniel 1912-
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Still Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
jpeg
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph.
Convocation
Honorary Alumni
Presidents
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Playbills & Programs
Description
An account of the resource
Playbills and programs from various St. John's College events. Many of these items are from productions by The King William Players, the St. John's student theater troupe.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Playbills & Programs" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=20">Items in the Playbills & Programs Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
playbillsprograms
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
7 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
275th Anniversary Convocation
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College 275th Anniversary Convocation
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1971-10-16
Description
An account of the resource
The program of the 275th Anniversary Convocation of St. John's College.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Subject
The topic of the resource
convocation
Convocation
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Photographic Archive—Annapolis
Description
An account of the resource
<p>The Greenfield Library photographic archive houses over 5,000 photographs. The photographs in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. The Library’s mission is to organize and preserve these unique visual materials, and to provide access to this collection. </p>
To learn more about our photographic use policy or to obtain high resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Photographic Archive Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Photographic Archive Use Policy</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Photographic Archive—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
photographicarchiveannapolis
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Physical Dimensions
The actual physical size of the original image
25.5 x 20.5 cm.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Photograph
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/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SJC-P-0926
Title
A name given to the resource
Richard D. Weigle in Academic Robe and Student at Convocation, Annapolis, Maryland
Description
An account of the resource
1 photographic print : b&w
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1949-08 [circa]
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Unknown
Subject
The topic of the resource
St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.). -- Presidents.
St. John's College (Santa Fe, N. M.). -- Presidents.
Weigle, Richard Daniel 1912-
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Still Image
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
jpeg
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph.
Convocation
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