17 20 5666 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9f30d9dedce7e126628cad52c4dd947b.pdf 3f77f010c5c261f0ca471cdd8776e62b PDF Text Text SPECUIATIONS ON LIBERAL AND ILLIBERAL POLITICS BY Laurence Berns A revised version of a lecture delivered at St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland May 24, 1968 Now he [Socrates] was not eager for his companions to become able speakers, able men of affairs and able contrivers, but before these things he considered it to be necessary for them to acquire moderation. For he believed that those who are capable of these things without being moderate are both more unjust and more able to work harm. First, indeed, he tried to make his companions more moderate about gods. Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV. 3. �Speculations on Liberal and Illiberal Politics* by Laurence Berns** We live during a time of vast and rapidly moving social, political and economic changes. This most obvious fact seems to shape the back- ground and foreground of almost all academic political discussion today. To enable us to become well-informed about this most complex of societies new techniques of sununarizing, condensing, tabulating and distributing information have been developed. Corresponding habits of rapid reading and machine-like memorization, reading with a minimum of reflective thought, seem to be appropriate for the imbibing of much of this material. These changes, changes in the conditions of political and social life, are, for the most part, consequences of progress in the medical and technological sciences. They confront us with apparently unprecedented practical problems, increasingly complicated interdependence, relative affluence and overpopulation, the control of nuclear weapons, to mention only a few. causes. However, a distinction may be drawn between conditions and The conditions delimit the range of alternatives possible for human action. The primary causes decide which alternatives are chosen. They constitute what is called human nature. It is in no way evident that human nature, in the decisive respects, has changed as have the external conditions of political and social life. Among the causes which account for human behaviour are reasons, and Bcise<l on a le(;CW..:: delivered at St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, May 24, 1968. ** Tutor, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland; Ph.D.,The University of Chicago, 1957. -t �even those causes which are not reasons, like appetites, passions, and desires, are rarely unmixed with reasons. Reasons can be right or·wrong, more or less right or wrong, true and false, etc. Human behaviour cannot be understood adequately without understanding the adequacy or inadequacy of the cognitions guiding, or accompanying, the behaviour, the prejudices, or opinions, false or true, or the knowledge guiding the behaviour. An adequate social science then, one capable of distinguishing between knowlege, opinion, and prejudice, would have to be a philosophic social science. The study of human nature, of the persistent causes of human behaviour, has more to do with meditation and reflection than it has with technique and technology. One learns about it from those, regardless of when they lived, or live, who are most of all masters of reflection and meditation. It may well be that, along with misguided scientism, the habits of study and thought, formed in pursuit of solutions to our most urgent problems tend to make the reflections of those writers from whom illumination is most needed less and less accessible. sobriety is easily lost. Freedom without This attempt to articulate certain sobering re- flections, that once were much more the common property of educated men than they are today, is undertaken with some sense of urgency. Such re- flections could never be brought to light by any technique cir manipulatory skill, however sophisticated. The aim of this paper is to arrive at an adequate notion of what it means to be liberal. It is divided into five, sometimes overlapping parts: 1. Classical Liberalism, 2. Historicist Liberalism, 3. The Radicality of Classical Liberalism, 4. The Conservatism of Classical Liberalism, Liberalism. s. American �3 CLASSICAL LIBERALISM By classical liberalism we do not refer to the doctrines associated with Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, laissez-faire economics and what historians frequently call individualism. liberal as it is used in classical Greek. 1 We refer rather to the word The liberal, the e~E.U IJ{fU) $ (eleutherios), belulvwa like a free man in contradistinction to a slave • . But true slavishness is baseness, being enslaved by the baser parts of one's nature. The liberal man is liberated from control by the baser side of his nature: he is free from the love of money, free from domination by bodily desires and from domination by fear. He is free from vulgarity. Freedom from, however, is not enough, and one of the Greek words for vulgarity points to what the liberal man has been liberated for: that word is ' \ C(1t£'f" I<. «.1. <./ ci( (apeirokalia), literally, lack of experience with nobility, with beauty, lack of experience with things noble. The liberal man does what he does for the sake of the noble. a devotee of the Muses. He is a cultivated man, a liberally educated man, 2 1. On the grounds of modern, as distinct from classical, liberalism, see Laurence Berns, "Thomas Hobbes", in History of Political Philosophy, eds. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey,Rand McNally, 1963,pp.359-63. Cf. ibid.,Warren Winiarski, "Niccolo Machiavelli",pp.273-75; Stanley Rosen, "Benedict Spinoza", p.417; Robert A. Goldwin, "John Locke" ,pp.453-64; and esp. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History,u. of Chicago, 1953,pp.181-2. 2. Cf. Plato, Republic,403 C; Xenophon, Memorabilia,bk.4,ch.5; Oeconomicus, 1,17-23; Aristotle, !!.• Ethics,1099 a 11-20; Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern,Basic Books, 1968, chs. 1 and 2. �4 What has all this to do with politics? The cultivated men, for Aristotle at least, are not what one would call ae$thetes, they form a definite political class. of. virtue. They are not non-partisan, they ai:e partisans They are united not by common social origins or common eco- nornic situation, but by their common goal, the love and pursuit of excellence, of virtue. They look forward to a political order that encourages and fosters this love and this pursuit. HISTORICIST LIBERALISM This characterization might be accepted by many who call themselves liberals today, but only as partial descriptions of themselves. For the word as it is most often used today points not so much, or so directly, to the noble and the base, and therefore implicitly to the good and the bad, as it does to another set of distinctions. to conservative, or reactionary. Liberal is, of course, generally opposed We frequently speak of men and proposals as progressive or reactionary, assuming automatically that to try to go back to some older way or older idea is bad and to move towards the new is good, or that "forward looking" is good and "backward looking" bad. The conservative is thought of as incapable of appreciating changed conditions and the need for corresponding political, social and economic changes. It is as if the distinction between progressive and reactionary were to replace the distinction between good and bad. But the term progress, of course, implies not only change, but change for the better, the term reaction, as it is used in politics, usually means change for the worse. These terms often suggest that the issue of good- ness or badness has been prejudged or is trivial, the decisive consideration is the attitude towards change. The new distinctions are time- ~T hi~tory- �5 oriented. The power of the historicist assumptions underlying them, at least in the .intellectual community, can hardly be exaggerated. almost all of our discourse about practical politics. them is usually taken as a sign of lack of cultivation. They pervade Not to respond to The inadequacy of an approach that identifies rightness with change and wrongness with opposition to change would seem to be obvious as soon as it is made explicit. Its persistence, however, is a sign that perhaps some more serious concern or issue underlies it, or is reflected in it. that more serious issue later. We shall address ourselves to 3 The classical liberal, if not every reasonable man, wants to conserve what is good and to eliminate what is bad, to promote change for the better and to prevent change for the worse. He will be conservative, progressive, and even reactionary (in the sense of going back to an older policy), according to what is called for by the circumstances. From this perspective the simple opposition between liberal and conservative makes little sense. To take another approach to this problem, Book Five of Aristotle's Politics is frequently called the book on revolutions. But somehow the word revolution is too fancy for what Aristotle describes. The word rebellion, the word used in the Constitution of the United States, is probably closer to Aristotle's meaning. Rebellion is old-fashioned, common-sensical and personal. Revolution is more scientific, impersonal necessity is suggested. The term is a scientific term in mathematics, physics, and astronomy: a sphere is generated by tj_ie revolution of a semi-circle about its diameter; Copernicus writes about the revolutions of the celestial spheres, the revolutions of inanimate bodies. 3. See below, p.20. �6 The word rebel is usually associated with the image of a man who strikes out against the government, the word revolutionary with an intellectual fighting for an elaborately articulated cause. Aristotle in Book Five was, one might say, concerned primarily with rebellions, those political controversies and conflicts of beliefs and opinions, those conflicts about justice, which arise, so to speak, naturally between political men, that is, from the consideration of political and personal issues alone without any explicit or direct intervention of theory or science. When appeal to higher authority is made in non- philosophical, non-theoretical, political life, it is usually to the gods or God generally accepted by the religious conununity of the country. Aristotle articulates political arguments in a political spirit, and, as far as I know, only in his Politics introduces oaths to Zeus into his arguments. 4 The notion 4. 1281 a 17 and 1281 b 19. Cf. Abraham Lincoln, To the Voters of the Seventh Congressional District, July 31, 1846. Fellow Citizens: A charge having got into circulation in some of the neighborhoods of this District, in substance that I am an open scoffer at Christianity, I have by the advice of some friends concluded to notice the subject in this form. That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrepect of religion in general or of any denomination of Christians in particular. It is true that in early life I was inclined to believe in what I understand ts called the "Doctrine ef Necessity"-- that is, that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power,over·which the mind itself has no control; and I have sometimes (with one, two or three, but never publicly) tried to maintaift this opinion in argument-- the habit of arguing thus however, I have, entirely left off for IN:>re than five years-- And I add here, I have always understood this same opinion to be held by several of the Christian denominations. The foregoing, is the whole truth, briefly stated, in relation to myself, upon this subject. I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at religion.--Leaving the higher matter of eternal consquences between him and his Maker, I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the IN:>rals, of the community in which he may live.--If, then, I was guilty of such conduct, I should blame no man who should condemn me for it; but I do blame those, whoever they may be, who falsely put such a �7 of revolution is usually tied in, not with popular religion, but with what has come to be called ideology. Ideologies have been called, not inappropriately, secular political religions. In the post-Kantian development the distinction between progressive and reactionary usually plays a role, because the ultimate appeal of these ideologies is to . a theory, or an alleged science, of history. Revolution rather than rebellion seems more appropriate to a modern technological society, a scientific society, an enlightened society. The movement called Enlightenment could be considered as the attempt to replace revealed religion by popularized philosophy. The two most outstanding characteristics of ideologies, at the risk of further oversimplification, are: 1) as regards their theoretical foundations, history replaces nature as the standard of right and wrong and good and 2) popularized philosophy replaces revealed religion. bad~ and One way to under- stand the origins, if not the rationale, of our IOC>dern theories of history might be to see them as attempts to surIOC>unt the difficulties consequent upon the radical separation by Kant of thought about freedom from thought about nature, of the IOC>ral realm from the natural. Theoretical history aims, so to speak, at bringing the two realms back together again and at relating them within a doctrine of the whole of human life. 5 charge in circulation against me. Cf. also Winston s. Churchill, letter to Lady Randolph, 14 January 1897, in Winston~ Churchill, by Randolph s. Churchill, Companion Volume.!_,~~' 1899-1900, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1967, pp. 724-25 5. "ldee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbuergerlicher Absic1rt.• "Kants Werke, Akademie - Textausgabe, B. viii, pp. 15-32. "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View." in I<ant, 2E_ History, ed. Lewis Beck, Library of Liberal Arts, pp. 11-26 �8 The more general problem behind all this would seem to be the difficulty for a science of human nature based on modern mathematical natural science to account for morality and science. 6 A passage from Kant's "Conjectural Beginning of Human History" may serve to illustrate the spirit of the Enlightenment. Kant presents his account in that work in the form of a commentary on the book of Genesis, chapters two to six. at every point to He invites his reader to consult the Biblical text see whether the way that philosophy takes coincides with that of Holy Writ. Towards the middle of the piece he speaks about how man became aware of how nature has raised him above community with animals. "The first time he ever said to the sheep, 'nature has given you the skin you wear for my use, not for yours'; the first time he ever took that skin and put it upon himself (3:21) - that time he became aware of the way in which his nature privileged and raised him above all animals." He refers to, but does not quote, Genesis 3:21, which reads, "Unto Adam and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skin, and clothed them." What the Bible attributes to the action of God, Kant's philosophic conjectures about history have man do for himself. Ideology is supposed to incorporate Enlightenment within itself. Enlightenment looks forward to a vast expansiop of man's power to control his own destiny, a vast expansion of human ambition. relation between ideology and ambition. Let us consider the The Chorus in Oedipus declares, "I pray that god may never abolish the eager ambition (the rivalry), that keeps the city noble." 6. Ambition is a subtle passion: it can drive a "Muthmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte';ibid., pp. 107-23 cit., pp. 53-68. Sophoclei;-necrrpus Tyrannus, 11. 880-81. Trans.,~ 7. 7 �9 hardy soul like Macbeth to raging tyranny and, on the other hand, as Sophocles's Chorus says, keep a city noble. The craving for glory, for honor, is a selfish passion, yet a passion that attains its objects most readily through public service. A public man might think that he loves the people because they are loveable, but he also might think that he loves them because they have the power to bestow what he really loves more, fame, honor, or glory. Ideology and the philosophy of history tend to focus the attention of the educable away from the analysis of the lives and the souls of individual men. Nations, social, political, or economic classes, "cultures," societies, trends and movements become the individuals concentrated on. Such concentration makes it easier for political men to disguise their own personal ambition from themselves. How much demagoguery and political fanaticism might be prevented, if the politically aspiring, or their educators, were once again to be educated by those classical authors who made it their business to try to train political men to appreciate the subtlety of their own ambition, to train them to master their master passion? 8 It might be instructive in this connection to compare Jack Cade, the rebel, as Shakespeare presents him in the second part of Henry the Sixth, with the revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler. Cade, one might say, is the demagogue according to nature, Lenin and Hitler ideological demagogues. Cade is stubborn, courageous, enduring and clever. Secretly set on by the Duke of York, with pretensions to the royal title of Lord Mortimer, whom he resembles, he leads his Kentish rebels into the heart of London and almost wins the city. He seems most of all to want the title Lord, and is ready to grant a Lordship to the first man 8. Cf. Xenophon, Meioorabilia, bk. 3, chs. 6 and 7; bk. 4, chs. 2 and 3; bk. 1, ch. 2. �10 who addresses him as Your Lordship. 9 He promises his followers that "all things shall be in conmen," money will be abolished, the price of bread will be lowered by two-thirds, and that he will destroy their enemies, that is all scholars, lawyers, courtiers and gentlemen. 10 In this connection it is interesting to note that the late Senator Joseph McCarthy was relatively successful so long as he confined his attacks to government officials, lawyers and academics. He began to lose his following and to consolidate his opposition when he became so reckless as to extend his attacks to the military and to the clergy. Cade has no way of fulfilling the first promises, but enemies, or material for erunity, is always available. Henry the Sixth's Treasurer, Lord Say, for executing policies he did not initiate or even approve, has become a particular object of popular hatred. Besides, Cade charges, Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school: and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and, contrary to the King his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper mill. It will be proven to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear. Thou hast appointed justices of peace, to call poor men before them about matters they were not able to answer. Moreover, thou hast put them in prison; and because they could not read, thou hast hanged them; when, indeed, only for that cause they have been most worthy to live. Say denies the specific charges and goes on: Justice with favor have I always done; Pray'rs and tears have noved me, gifts could never. When have I aught exacted at your hands But to maintain the King, the realm, and you? Large gifts have I bestowed on learned clerks, Because my book preferred me to the King; And, seeing ignorance is the curse of God, Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to Heaven, Unless you be possessed with devilish spirits, You cannot but forbear to murder me. This tongue hath parleyed unto foreign kings For your behoof. 9. Henry the Sixth,~~' 10. Op. cit., 4.4.39. 4.7.4-5 �11 Cade replies, "Tut, when struckst thou one blow in the field?" He orders him to be beheaded. Say speaks again: Tell me wherein have I off ended most? Have I affected wealth or honor? Speak. Are my chests filled with extorted gold? Is my apparel sumptuous to behold? Whom have I injured that ye seek my death? These hands are free from guiltless bloodshedding, This breast from harboring foul deceitful thoughts. Oh, let me live!" (11) Cade is Ioc>ved by these words, but bridles the remorse that he, but not apparently his followers, feels at Say's words; and sensible that for . . . most men the most potent mark of authority is t h e power o f execution, 12 has Say put to death. However, shortly thereafter, confronted by the force of the old and clever Baron Clifford who wins away his followers by granting them pardons, invoking the name of their hero, Henry the Fifth, and appealing to their patriotic hatred of the French, Cade is forced to flee for his own life; not, however, before he observes, "Was ever feather so lightly blown to and fro as this multitude?" Where the scientific ideologist sees masses moved by necessary and scientifically determinable reactions to objective deprivations, Jack Cade sees a flighty multitude, ready to follow the man most skillful at arousing and shaping their expectations, at transforming their notions and feelings about what is tolerable and intolerable, just and unjust. He knows that the same men in the same conditions may be led to endure, or may be led to rebel - and sometimes by being made to expect by right what no one can ever provide them. His impressive final scene, the scene of his death, begins with the line, "Fie on ambitions." 11. 4.7.32-46, 69-82, 101-08. 12. Consider the implications for the question of capital punishment �12 For all his villainy, Cade can still feel remorse and he is aware of his own ambition: he wants to lord it over other men. His counter- part, the ideological demagogue, learns from a science, or pseudo-science, of history to identify the ultima~e good with the practical and necessary success, the "historical" goals of his revolution. I quote from Lenin, "The great world-wide historic service of Marx and Engels lies in the fact that they proved by scientific analysis the inevitability of the downfall of capitalism and its transition to communism under which there will be no more exploitation of man by man." 13 This seems to be some kind of corruption of what in Kant's religious philosophy and speculations on history is called rational faith, i.e., what, in the absence of knowledge, we are obliged by reason to believe, in order to strengthen our capacity to act in accordance with the moral law. It is not too difficult for a man to be misled by a doctrine, which successfully propagated would place him in a position of highest authority. The ideological demagogue consci- entiously disciplines himself to stifle and discount any remorse or scruple that might impede success. Since for him moralities are all products of history, whatever scruples he might feel can be dismissed as discardable vestiges from a discredited past. ance. He identifies his opposition with ignor- He learns, apparently, to forget about himself. ambition from himself. He disguises his He seems to combine worst parts of intellectual, demagogue, and religious fanatic. Men like Cade and men like Lenin and Hitler, share in common the natural qualities of the talented and dangerous demagogue. What distinguishes the ideological demagogues, we suggest, is the fanatic intellectuality they add to the character. 13. 2!!.!:!!!. Theory Lenin was the author of a philosophic book like of Marxism, International Publishers, New York, (1948). (cont. on foilowing page) �13 Materialism and Emperio-Criticisrn. On Contradiction. Mao Tse-Tung is the author of Hitler could say, "It's against my own inclinations that I devote myself to politics.... philosophy. I'd have chosen the arts or 1114 New communications technology and the tastelessness of the news industry have made it all too easy for too many to be seduced and carried away by their desires for fame and notoriety. The craving for distinction, however, takes on many forms. Between mere exhibitionism and the craving to be distinguished for ex- ellence alone, c but certainly closer to the latter, is the hero. There is much in modern life, not to speak of any life, antithetical to heroism. Aspirations for some form of heroic nobility would seem to be behind much of the political and moral rebellion of our times. Some, alarmed by what corrupted and perverted heroism can lead to, recormnend the elimination of heroic ation from the world altogether. ~spir- If heroic aspiration, expressed in some form or another, is ineradicably rooted in human nature, and if nature can be fulfilled, corrupted, or perverted, but not eliminated, the only course left would seem to be to direct one's efforts towards the cultivation of taste for, and understanding of, authentic heroism. Merely debunking is hardly sufficient: again the balance of classical liberalism shows itself in its ability to articulate together both the nobility and limits of the Cf. Karl Loewith, Heidegger, Denker in duerft1ger Zeit, Goettingen. 1960. chs. 2 and 4; Stanley Rosen, "Philosophy and Ideology: Reflections on Heidegger," Social Research, Summer, 1968. The common ground, from our point of view, of these doctrines can be seen in Hegel's remark: 11 For WorldHistory moves itself on a higher ground than that on which morality has its proper station •••• " "Denn die Weltgeschichte bewegt sich auf einem hoehern Boden, als der ist, auf dem die Moralitaet ihre eigentuemliche Staette hat, ••• " Vorlesungen ueber die Philosophie der Geschichte, Einleitung. 14. Hitler's Secret Conversations, 1941-1944, Signet Books, p. 252 �14 hero. There may be no better way to begin this refinement of taste than by studying Shakespeare and The Iliad and The Odyssey and by trying to understand the differences between Coriolanus, Brutus, Henry v, and Prospero; between Achilles, Agamemnon_ and Odysseus. THE RADICALITY OF CLASSICAL LIBERALISM Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his letter to fellow clergymen from the Birminghan Jail, refers to Thomas Aquinas's "T.reatise on Law, 1115 in order to justify his advocacy of disobedience for segregation laws. An unjust law, Thomas cites Augustine, seems to be no law at all. Every human law is binding as law only in so far as it is derived from the natural law, the law of reason. To the extent to which it deviates from the law it is a perversion of law. n~tural The right to rebellion enunciated by Thomas is based on the distinction between human law and natural law which is in turn an interpretation of Aristotle's distinction between natural justice, ' ' (' I or natural right, TO fUtrlt<OV olK.d..lOl or conventional justice, (to physikon dikaion) , and legal TO TOi'ot l K ~ V l/i<f!f..toi '(to noI!Ukon dikaion). 16 The highest law, higher than any law promulgated by a political legislator, is the law of living reason. In Question 96, article 4, Thomas qualifies the right to rebellion, as the Declaration of Independence does, by pointing out that the possession of a. right does not automatically license the possessor to exercise the right. Whether a right ought to be exercised or not depends upon the given circumstances of the situation. If it is likely that the evils attendant upon the exercise of a right would outweigh evils justly complained of, for the sake of avoiding the greater evil the just man yields his right. In the exercise of his rights too, man is responsible for the 15. Summa Theologica, I-II Q. 95, A. 2 16. ~· Ethics, s. 7, 1134 b 18 ,.. U35 a 15 �15 foreseeable consequences of his actions. The right to rebellion as found in Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln and others serves as a reminder that no government of men is as important as are the moral principles of good government. The beautiful balance of Thoma.s's position can be seen in a passage where, pointing out that rebellion is always a serious matter for conscience, he quotes the Apostle Paul's Letter to the Romans: "All human power is from God; Therefore, he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God." But in the middle of his quote st. Thomas adds the decisive liberal qualification, "in matters that are within its scope." The quote then with Thoma.s's addition reads, "All human power is from God: Therefore he that resisteth the power, 'in matters that are within its scope,' resisteth the ordinance of God.' ;,l 7 Why reasonable radicali ty must be accompanied by reasonable conservatism can be seen by considering the fact that he who speculates about the principles justifying all government is in that very act speculating about principles which could justify the alteration or abolition of any government that does not measure up to those principles. THE CONSERVATISM OF CLASSICAL LIBERALISM Why is government, why are human laws, laws which compel obedience through fear of punishment, thought to be necessary? Why is the natural law, which appeals to reason alone, not sufficient? Federalist fifty-one notes, "what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels no government would be necessary. If 17. Q. 96, A. 4, ad 1. Cf. John Calvin, Commentary ~ the Epistle ~ the Romans, ch. 13, secs. 1-4; Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 4, ch. 2o, esp. secs. 16ff. Cf. John Locke, ~Paraphrase and Notes ~ the Epistles of St. Paul •••• Cf. note p on Romans, 13:1, with the end of oaragraph 2 of Locke's introduction to this section, and cp. the latter �16 angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." Men who are primarily devoted to learning and to teaching, concentrating on the strengthening and development of their rational powers, are prone to exaggerate the part reason plays in the lives of most men, men not so concentrated and so dedicated. Although it leads to some squandering of forces, as a practical rule of thumb in the profession of learning and teaching, if one is likely to err, it is better to err on the side of overestimating rational capacities. In politics, however, this generous, and in that sense liberal, tendency can lead to consequences far worse than mere ineffectiveness. Those who expect too much from reason are bound to be frustrated; then, like disappointed lovers, overcome by a despair that can easily turn to contempt and hate, they are liable to begin to reject reasonable procedures altogether, to turn to pressure, intimidation, dire c t action and force, thus depriving political life of that limited but saving 'b . part that reason can contri ute to it. 18 Although it is certainly not universally true, and though it does depend upon the books, it still might be said that in general readers of books are more rational than those who do not read books. Thus, to make reason more effective and to correct their readers' characteristic error the great tradition of classical writers taught the limits of reason. Herman Melville, comnenting on More's Utopia and Plato's Republic, wrote with the tables of contents of his Two Treatises on Government. 18. Cf. Plato, Phaedo, 89 C ff. Cf. in this order Turgenev's novels Fathers and ~and Virgin Soil, and Dostoevsky's Possessed, for an account of how Russia's political intellectuals turned from populism to terrorism. �17 a small poem entitled, ~ Reasonable Constitution. What though Reason forged your scheme? 'Twas Reason dreamed the Utopia's dream: 'Tis ·dream to think that Reason can 19 Govern the reasoning creature man. Plato and Aristotle, I believe, would not disapprove of that poem. Aristotle's Metaphysics begins with the assertion: "All men by nature desire to know." This passage is frequently misunderstood. He never said that for IOC>St men the desire to know dominates the other desires. ones for whom this is so are rather rare. Those blessed In the preface to the Politics, the last chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics, he argues that while all men do desire to know, IOC>st men desire other things more. The presence and the power of those desires make political or human law necessary. We might, following Thomas and Aristotle, divide the purpose of human law, or government, into maximal and minimal purposes. The maximal purpose is to furnish man with the training, or discipline, (and perhaps the conditions), which he requires for the perfection of virtue, for excellence, that is, education. And because they are most inexperienced with it, most in need of it, and most capable of acquiring it, this discipline, or education, is primarily education of the young. For those whom Aristotle calls naturally free or liberal, that is with good and uncorrupted natural dispositions, words, arguments and discourses, especially parental admonitions, can provide the ethical part of this education. But most men, living as they do by passion, prone to vice, are not easily moved by words. 20 The minimal purpose of govern- ment is to restrain these men from evil by force and fear of punishment, to restrain them from harming themselves, and especially from harming others, from 19. The Selected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Hennig Cohen, Anchor Books, 1964, pp. 169 and 257. 20. Aristotle, N. Ethics, 1179 b 5-18. �18 disturbing the peace of others. peace. The minimal purpose of government is domestic Thomas also refers to a purpose intermediate between virtue and peace, which is coordinated with a type of character intermediate .to the types mentioned before: this would be the purpose of educating those who have been habituated by force and fear of punishment, to do willingly what before they 21 . d i.d f rom f ear, an d thus to b ecome virtuous. Human law, or government, if it is to be enlightened, does keep the end of the virtuous in view. But law must be adjusted to the capacities of those for whom the law is intended. There are limits on what one can reasonably expect from the law in the way of moral improvement. Being framed for the illiberal majority, the law, according to Thomas, should not forbid all those vices from which the liberal can abstain. The illiberal majority should not be burdened with precepts too far beyond what they can be expected to live up to. For, as they violate them, they are likely to come to despise them and law in general. Thus, from contempt they are likely to break out into transgressions worse than those they began with. Thomas quotes Proverbs (30:33): "He that too vehem- ently blows his nose brings out blood." The law should forbid only those Jl'Ore grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain. It can promote, but it cannot prescribe that men be virtuous, that is, that they not only act virtuously, but do so willingly, habitually, and for virtue's sake. 22 When the conditions presupposed by laws have changed, the laws may or 21. Swmna Theologica, I-II, Q.92, A.2,ad 4; Q.95, A.l. 22. Aristotle, N. Ethics,1105 a 26- 1105 b 1. �19 may not thereby be rendered obsolete. They might still be applicable, in whole or in part, to the new conditions; if not, they ought to be changed. As the need for new legislation to adapt to rapidly changing conditions grows, understanding the complexity of the problem of change becomes increasingly important. The conservatism of classical liberalism comes to a focus in what it has to say about change in laws, the subject of Question 97 of Thoma.s's Treatise on Law. We quote from article 2: Human law is rightly changed in so far as such change is conducive to the common interest. But to a certain extent change of law itself is detrimental to the common good. For custom has great force in the observance of laws, in as much as what is done contrary to common custom, even if it should be in itself light, seems to be grave. Thus when a law is changed the constraining force of law is diminished, in so far as custom is destroyed. Consequently, Thomas goes on, human laws should not be changed unless the good attained by the change outweighs the harm done in this respect. The first objection goes as follows: It seems that human law ought always to be changed whenever something better occurs. For human laws are devised by human reason as are the other arts. But in the other arts that which was held at first, is changed, if something better occurs. Therefore the same ought also to be done in human laws. Tho mas answers: Rules of art derive their efficacy from reason alone, and therefore whenever any improvement occurs, that which was held before ought to be changed. But laws derive very great force from custom as the Phi,losopher says in Book II of the Politics, and therefore they ought not to be readily changed. In the passage referred to Aristotle points out that the strength of law with regard to compliance, depends upon the compliance becoming habitual, and, he notes, it takes some time to form habits. 23. 1268 b 23 - 1269 a 28. 23 Unlike what goes on in the other �20 arts and in the sciences, what reason alone would dictate is not simply applicable in political matters. Reason, even wisdom, must compromise with and thereby be diluted by the requirements of compliance and consent, that is, by habit, prejudice, and custom. It is unreasonable not to make due concessions to irrationality in political affairs. What seems then, to underly the common opposition between liberal and conservative is a more fundamental difference of opinion concerning the relative strengths of rational and irrational powers in most men, in practical terms, concerning how much rationality is to be expected from most men. The distinction between conservative and what probably should be called progressive would seem to be more adequate: both make serious claims to be called liberal. This disparity between what is appropriate for the sciences and the arts, and what is appropriate for social and political life is treated more dialectically in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics. if not the fundamental theme of both books. It is a fundamental, Arguments for aristocracy and kingship, the rule of living reason, in Plato and Aristotle are accompanied . 24 b y arguments b y ana 1 ogy f rom th e arts an d sciences. The rank orders of the regimes in both books could be understood as being based on the degree to which the peoples of the respective regimes are capable or not of receiving more artistic or more scientific political forms, the degree to which they are capable of being governed in a liberal manner, the degree to which they are capable of conforming their lives to the rule of their most reasonable fellows. The idea of the rule of living reason functions as a paradigm, as a standard of improvement for politics. 24. It moves us to continue to search for governors who, E.g., Aristotle, Politics, 1273 b 10-12, where flute playing is paired with shoemaking. The former addresses itself to the soul, especially the passions, the latter protects the body. �21 as The Federalist (number fifty-seven) puts it, "possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the coilUIIOn good." It reminds us that institutions ought ultimately to be judged not by technical standards, but by the kind of human beings they encourage and tend to produce and by the kind they discourage and tend to eliminate, that is, that ethics is the architechtonic part of social and political science. The idea of the rule of living reason gratifies reasonable hopes by clarifying and articulating fully their ultimate goals. At the same time, however, it presupposes con- ditions which are so impossible, or so rare, as to preclude it as a practical political possibility. possibility.) (This would not automatically preclude it as a personal By clarifying how rare, or impossible, the pre-conditions for the perfect political order are, writers like Plato and Aristotle save idealism from fanaticism, they teach men to moderate and to civilize their hopes. They prepare men to accept the implications of the distinctions between what is best in itself, that is, what is best in the best possible circumstances, what is best in circumstances that most generally prevail, and what is best relative to any particular set of given circumstances. The chief political alternatives open to Americans and Western Europeans would seem to be the rule of reasonable law or some form of despotism, benevolent or unbenevolent. also. This seemed to be the case to Herman Melville in 1863 In July, 1863, riots protesting the draft broke out in New York City. The rioters turned to attacking Negroes and burned a Negro church and an orphanage. Melville reflected on these events, and more, in a remarkable poem called The House Top - A Night Piece - : �22 (July, 1863) No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air And binds the brain-a dense oppression, such As tawny tigers feel in matted shades, Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage. Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by. Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot. Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought, Balefully glares red Arson-there-and there • ••• All civil charms And priestly spells which late held hearts in aweFear-bound, subjected to a better sway Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve, And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature. Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead, And ponderous drag that shakes the wall. Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll Of black artillery; he comes, though late; In code corroborating Calvin's creed And cynic tyrannies of honest kings; He comes, nor parlies; and the Town, redeemed, Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied, Which holds that Man is naturally good, 25 And-more-is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged. The rule of law, it must be said, cannot by itself produce nobility of soul, but it may go far towards producing the best possible conditions for the cultivation of nobility of soul. Most informed citizens in the English-speaking world pay lip-service to the blessings of the rule of law. But those who would most directly and severely feel the loss of liberty its weakening would entail are those whose very calling presupposes freedom of speech, those for whom learning, study, teaching and serious conversation are habitual and regular occupations. How ironic it is then-- we hope it is not just--that the spirit of Draco should be receiving some of its loudest invitations today from institutions that are 25. 2E..!. cit., above, n. 19, p. 24. Cf. Acts of the Apostles, 22: 24 and 25 �23 avowedly institutions of higher learning. We cannot avoid considering the implications of Melville's words, "Wise Draco comes": suffer an unwise Draco, or to deserve a wise? Is it 'WOrse to It is altogether possible to suffer both conditions. The irony referred to, however, may not be something only peculiar to our times. It would seem that now, in the beginning, and always, science and philosophy come into the world with the awareness that a distinction can be made between nature and convention, or between the reasonable and the conventional. Wherever there are philosophers (a class which can include erring philosophers) there seem to arise imitators of philosophers, men who are aware of the distinction between nature and convention, but who never sufficiently reflect on the reasons for the conventions. Some would say that such men, sometimes called sophists, sometimes intellectuals, are more attracted by the honors of philosophers than by their true objects, or that they somehow confound political ambition with philosophic ambition, but whatever their motives, the problem is that they abuse the instruments of philosophy, they abuse the distinction between nature and convention, so as to undermine all conventions, so as to undermine ordinary decency. One permanent task of Socratic philosophy then would seem to be to defend ordinary pre-philosophic practical wisdom from sophistical attack; that is, to prepare, if necessary, a theoretical defence of ordinary decency against sophistical science. To avoid misunderstanding, it should be said that such polemical activity does not mean that one ceases to -U-y to understand or to learn from those one attacks. 26. We need only consider the Socrates of Plato and Xenophon. 26 Cf. Note 4, above, and Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963, esp. p. 199 �24 AMERICAN LIBERALISM "It has been frequently remarked," writes Hamilton in the opening paragraph of '?he Federalist, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.27 It is hard to conceive of a better solution to the problem of political stability and change than the American constitutional system. The Constitution provides a point of veneration and the fixed and stable framework within which the various departments of government are granted broad and flexible powers to deal energetically with the problems arising from changing conditions. The reasonability of the constitution itself is attested to by its ample recognition of and reliance upon the indecorous, but never failing, springs of human selfWe recur to Federalist, number fifty-one: ishness. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. Those auxiliary precautions are the check and balance system and separation of powers. Finding the right balance between the enabling powers of government and restrictions on governmental power is the permanent problem of American government. If one focuses not on the needs of liberal learning, but on the ordinary concerns of most men, it might be said without too much oversimplification that the most prevalent and persistent forms of injustice are bullying and cheating. 27. Footnote on the next page �25 The English-speaking peoples by means of the rule of law seem to have concentrated on preventing men from bullying one another. Like our Conunun- ist rivals, we have also been greatly concerned with preventing cheating, but have taken the precaution to deal with this problem in such a way as to avoid concentrating too much power in the hands of our governmental protectors, so as to avoid putting our protectors themselves in a position to bully us. The reasoning behind this choice seems to be that, although the two are often connected, injury to dignity is worse than injury to material well-being. In addition, he who is in a position to bully is usually in a position to cheat as well, whereas the converse is not true. What the right balance between enabling powers and restrictions on government is depends upon the given conditions of material life. Along with the introduction of large-scale technology, a new system of administration and ownership of peoperty developed in the West, devised to coordinate the resources of large groups of men in a manner appropriate to new technological possibilities. We refer to the rise of the depersonalized, that is ethically irres- ponsible, ownership of joint-stock companies, organized for profit and with limited liability. 28 The inequities engendered by this system might be traced, at least in part, to the fact that the system was developed under the guidance of a philosophy, or social science, that either minimized or denied the significance of ethics for political, social, and economic science. However this may be, the principle seems to be generally accepted now that the inequities resulting from the growth of large-scale non-governmental corporate and 27. Cf. George Anastaplo, Book Review, Levy: Legacy of Suppression-Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History, 39 New York University Law Review 735 (1964), esp. p. 741; Laurence Berns, "Two Old Conservatives Discuss the Anastaplo Case," 54 Cornell Law Review 920, July, 1969. 28. Cf. R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, ch. 5. �26 institutional power can be effectively remedied only by a enlargement of goverrunental powers of regulation. corres~nding In addition, the licen- sing of _ government corporations and agencies has been expanded in order to perform necessary public services that privately owned enterprises could not be relied upon to supply. The American system is peculiarly well adapted to solving the problems brought on by new conditions without sacrificing, or at least with a minimum 1oss o f , l 1'b erty. 29 New ways are continually being found to combine justice and liberty, public responsibility and private initiative. By the skillful use of tax laws an amazing proliferation of private welfare and cultural agencies has been induced, performing needed social services without concentrating power in the hands of goverrunent. Large corporations under threat of increasing regulation and taxes, and guided by an increasing awareness of the insufficiency of an unmitigated profit motive, are tending to follow more public-spirited policies and even to take on a semi-public character. Within government itself the institution of specialized relatively independent corporations and authorities, in addition to the regular constitutional separation of powers both within and between Federal, State and local governments, all enable us to address ourselves to new conditions without that concentration of power in the central government that less sophisticated structures of government cannot avoid. The principle behind the American Union and the Constitution of the United States, in Lincoln's words, "entwining itself more closely about the human heart," is the Declaration of Independence's assertion of "Liberty to all." This prin- ciple in Lincoln's mind is inextricably connected with the Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal." 30 The great and no longer tolerable failing Cf. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, ch. 5, last section~ vol. 2, bk. 2, ch. 7 30. "Fragment: The Constitution and the Union" 1860 or 1861, Collected Works 29. of Abraham Lincoln, Roy Basler, ed. Rutgers u. Press, vol. lV, PP• 168-6 9 • �27 of American political life, the failure to guarantee Negro citizens equal rights of citizenship, is not, according to Lincoln, a failure of American principles; it is rather a failure of men to act in accordance with those principles. Lincoln commented on that statement in his speech on .the Dred Scott decision: I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal--equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which could be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere. The assertion that "all men are created equal" was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despoti~m. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocatio~ they should find left for them 1 at least one hard nut to crack. The difference in nature (the Declaration speaks of the "Laws of Nature") that these natural rights are based upon, rights which all men share, is the difference between rational and irrational animals, between men, animals capable of thoughtful speech, and beasts, animals incapable of thoughtful speech. This difference both for a classical liberal like Aristotle and the Founding Fathers is elementary and fundamental. 31. fo~ Aristotle goes on to Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857, emphasis in original. f �28 divide men in terms of the different ways and degrees that they possess this capacity, but the differences of ways and degrees can never be as significant as the difference between animals lacking the capacity entirely and those having it in any degree whatever. Part of what Aristotle and the Declaration of Independence mean was spelled out by Kant in the work referred to before, where he uses the book of Genesis to speculate about the various stages man might have gone through 32 . . . in h. progress t owar d s un d erstand. is ing h. uniqueness among t h e anima 1 s. is Kant minimizes the importance of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. fig-leaf. For him the epoch-making event was the institution of the He interprets it as follows: this removal of the object of inclination from the view of the senses reflects man's first awareness of a certain degree of mastery of reason over impulse; that he is a moral creature. this was his first hint His partner's similar action, this implicit refusal, forces man, moved by sensual desire, to become aware of the moral qualities of the objects of his desire, the rational and moral qualities of his fellow human beings. Thus he becomes able to be moved not only by sensual, but also- by more inward spiritual attractions; he becomes able to move from animal desire to love, from the desire of possessive enjoyment to the simple appreciation of beauty. Through self-restraint and refusal men come to deserve and to recognize each other as worthy of the dignities befitting free men. St. Jorrn•s College, Aunapolis, Maryland May 24, 1968 32. ~cit., above, n. 6. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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. 29 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berns, Laurence, 1928- Title A name given to the resource Speculations on liberal and illiberal politics Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1968-05-24 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on May 24, 1968 by Laurence Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 53004 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 has been given permission to make this item available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3c9500e41e7010b4316d1fc6322da363.pdf ef9323fe205dcec69b722d3b996d8e66 PDF Text Text ON THE RELATION BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION* Laurence Berns St. John's College Annapolis The problem from which these reflections begin is fairly straightforward: Although philosophy came into the world by separating itself off from religion, in modern times, it seems to be trying to incorporate within itself what, in my opinion, properly belongs to religion. The representatives of moder~ philosophy I have in mind are chiefly Nietzsche and Heidegger. In order to understand better how and why this change came about I will sketch out a very general history of the relation between philosophy and religion, for ancient, medieval and modern philosophy. (It is, incidentally, clear from this that I am speaking of what some call Western Philosophy.) First, a preliminary distinction: The title of this paper is not "On the Relation between Philosophy and Theology," because there are traditionally two kinds of theology, of discourse about God, natural theology, discourse about God or gods based on natural reason and naturally acquired evidence, and revealed theology, theology based on special and supernatural divine revelation. The two kinds of theology are not always kept separate, as the famous saying of Heraclitus illustrates: "The only wise thing is one, it 9oes not wish and it does wish to be called by the name of Zeus." An illustration might be ' useful. The Declaration of Independence of the United States asserts that the laws of nature and of Nature's God entitle all men to certain natural rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What is the basis in nature of these natural rights? The traditional and correct answer, I believe, is the natural superiority of the rational animal, man, to non-rational animals, beasts. But that may be only half the story. We notice that God is referred to in the Declaration at least four times in the following order, once as legislator of the laws of nature, once as Creator 3 , again as Supreme Judge of the World and finally as the executor of Divine Providence. In the divine Governor of the world legislative, executive and judicial powers are united. The Founders of the United States, like intelligent men of all times, disagreed about many things, but if there is anything they all seemed to agree about it is the necessity to separate the powers of government. Humanly speaking, the uniting of legislative, · executive and judicial powers in the same hands, they declared, is the very definition of tyranny. Only a divine being with supreme wisdom and goodness, with no truth-obscuring and excessively selfregarding passions could rightly possess such powers. The natural 1 �theology of the Declaration is then an extrapolation from the idea of good government to the idea of perfect government, and the perfect governor. No human being can measure up to such a standard. No human being is sufficiently godlike to be entrusted . with such despotic power over other human beings. The natural rights of the Declaration then stem from human superiority with relation to the beasts and human defect with relation to ·God. All men are equal in that they are neither beasts nor gods. Does such a God exist? That might require faith to believe. But the natural theology of the Declaration, the idea of such a God, clarifies what it is meant to clarify whether one conceives of such a God as existing or not. By its reference to the Creator and His Providence, however, the Declaration brings both traditions together, it combines its natural theology with the revealed theology of the Biblical tradition. 4 I THE SEPARATION OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY FROM RELIGION--THE INCORPORATION OF RELIGION INTO MODERN PHILOSOPHY The lovers of myth, Aristotle says, like the philosophers, wonder about the first things, the things whose characters and actions govern all the rest. The first philosophers distinguished themselves from the lovers of myth by no longer speaking of the first things as gods, but as nature. Science and philosophy come into She world, Aristotle suggests, with the discovery of nature . There were and still are people who have no distinct idea of nature. The words natur5 and natural do not occur in the Hebrew Bible or in the Gospels . The prephilosophic equivalents of the word nature seem to be the words way or custom. Before the discovery of nature men spoke about the gods ordering and commanding things to go in their customary ways. The way or custom of fire is to go up and burn, for the earth to bring forth plants, for human beings to speak, for one tribe to bury its dead, for another to burn its dead. At some point a curious and thoughtful person must have noticed that some ways are always the same no matter what anyone does about them, and others vary from time to time, and still others would vary from time to time more if men did not make them happen the same way. Such a person begins to become aware of the distinctions between the necessary and the accidental or contingent, the necessary and the customary and the necessary and the artificial. The ways that vary from place to place, from city to city, from tribe to tribe, must have been most striking at first because they most contradict "our way". Herodotus tells how horror-struck Greeks and Indians were on learning of each other's diverse burial customs. (III. 38) These divergencies extend to differences about the nature of the gods themselves. The suspicion begins 2 to arise that the ways that are �everywhere the same are primary, permanent and fundamental and those that differ from town to town and from tribe to tribe are secondary, transient and derivative. The man-made things owe . their existence to forethought, the ways which are everywhere the same seem to occur by themselves automatically inside the things characterized by them. Way or custom splits up in70 nature, on the one hand, and convention or law, on the other . That human beings can speak is natural, that this tribe speaks its particular language, that tribe its particular language, is conventional. Impersonal nature replaces divine ordination. The good life is no longer determined by divine law but by the quest for what is right by nature. In Plato's Republic the torch race in honor of the goddess, which they were supposed to watch, is forgotten in favor of the discussion in quest of the life that is good according to nature. Philosophy and science come into the world by separating themselves from religion. To illustrate the other pole of our initial problem, the incorporation of religion into philosophy, we turn now to the man whom many regard as the greatest philosophic thinker of recent times, Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, philosophy, or what he would rather call Thinking, cannot be academic or isolated from the spirit of society, from the spirit of one's own times, from history. The deepest sense of what things are, he argues, depends on History, and History, in German Geschichte, he connects with the word Geschick, that which has been sent. The sender, this mysterious ground of existence, or ground of the relation between being and human thought, of human fate (Schicksal), he sometimes calls gods, sometimes god. The great danger of our time, Heidegger argues, is that we are so overwhelmed by the power of scientific, mathematical, technological thinking that we have begun to think of human beings as just one more product of scientific laws to be serviced, used and conveniently disposed of. In contrast to the focus on the depersonalized, the dehumanized, the cybernetic, he argues that the deepest truths about the world reveal themselves to thought and to thinkers that are caring, committed, concerned with what they regard as "mine" and ours, with home and homeland. Even the standard for human conduct that he erects as a replacement for ethical virtue, authenticity , reflects this emphasis on the personal and particular. The German word Eigentlichkeit has no direct English equivalent, it means "one'sownness". In working out what amounts to his replacement for ethics the notions of conscience, anxiety, guilt and "fallenness" play central roles. That our particularity, our individuality, like that of the fallen sparrow, should have ultimate significance makes sense, it seems, if we and our world are the creations of a loving, caring omnipotent God. Heidegger, an extraordinarily learned and thoughtful heir of the philosophic tradition has incorporated 3 �Christian religious ideas and sentiments into his thinking without articulating the theological presuppositions that could establish their plausibility. Through a sketch of the history of the relation between philosophy and religion I hope to show that in so doing Heidegger is fulfilling one of the deepest tendencies of modern philosophy. In fairness to Heidegger, however, it should be said that he emphatically rejects the account of the origin of philosophy out of religion and myth as a Platonic-Aristotelian prejudice. "The fall of thinking into the sciences, on the one hand, ang faith, on the other, is the evil, fateful sending of Being." Religious mythos and philosophic logos "became separated and opposed only there where neither mythes nor logos could maintain their original essential presence. This happened already with Plato . " He denies that logos could destroy mythes. "Nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic; it is destroyed only by the god's withdrawing himself." 9 THE DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN II ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL AND MODERN PHILOSOPHY For our sketch of the history of the relation between philosophy and religion we distinguish three positions, ancient, medieval and modern in terms of what each takes to be the ultimate source of meaningfulness in the world: ancient philosophy as nature-centered, or physiocentric; medieval philosophy as God-centered, or theocentric and modern philosophy as man(human)-centered, or anthropocentric. I do not imply that each is only valid for its time. They arose at different times and each late.r position presupposed the existence of the earlier positions, but they are accounted for here as permanent alternatives. how To illustrate these differences we consider representatives of each position deal with a fairly common phenomenon, the appearance of purposiveness or end-directed activity in nature. The primary prescientif ic or prephilosophic meaning of the Greek word for nature, phys1s, is growth, which includes that into which a thing grows, the end or term of growth, the state in which the thing is most capable of doing the work, or, as we say, the function, characteristic of that thing. End-directed activity is most characteristic of living things. The acorn becomes intelligible as a possible oak. The structure of the eye becomes intelligible with a view to its function of seeing. Aristotle speaks of such an end as the cause "for the sake of which," or in the later latinate form, ·final cause. (In this discussion of ancient philosophy I will concentrate on Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy, the most influential ancient philosophy.) Aristotle 4 �defines nature as a principle or cause of motion and rest in that to which it belongs primarily and not by accident. The end of natural growth is a potentiality inherent in the living thing . from the beginning, in its constitution, so to speak, in its very matter. He frequently compares natural end-directed activity to the end-directed activity of human making. The crucial differences are that in artifacts the final form of the work of art exists primarily in the mind of the artisan, both the end and the formative action hay5 their source in the artisan, external to the thing produced . The unapprehended ends of natural activities like respiration, metabolism, animal instinct, etc., do not require an external mind intending them as purposes. They are simply inherent in natural things as potentialities. For Thomas Aquinas as representative of the theocentric view there is no end or final cause that is not intended as such by some intelligence, as the artist intends the completed work of art. If the being in which the end is being actualized does not have the intelligence to apprehend it, it is apprehended by the intelligence of another, namely the intelligence of God. We quote from his discussion of natural instinct: "the sensitive appetite of dumb animals, and likewise the natural appetite of insensible things result from the apprehension of an intellect, just as the appetite of the intellectual nature ... called the will. But there is a difference, in that the will is moved by an apprehension of the intellect in the same subject; whereas the movement of the natural appetite results from the apprehension of the separate Intellect, Who is the Author of Nature; as does also the sensitive appetite of dumb animals who act from a certain natural instinct .... in the actions of irrational animals and of other natural things wci obs~rve a procedure which is similar to ... the actions of art." According to Immanuel Kant as representative of the modern anthropocentric view the necessary and universal laws which constitute objective knowledge of nature are not found in the things themselves, but, in his language, they are prescribed to nature by the human understanding. When we come across phenomena like the phenomena of living organized beings for which the laws of mechanical cause and effect do not seem adequate, the reflective judgment of the investigator should supply the phenomena with purposive laws that make sense of them ~ if some intelligent cause, a God, had produced them . Like Thomas, Kant argues that ends in nature only make sense when they are thought of as intended by some intelligence, namely God. Teleology, he argues, finds its consummation in theology. But this God cannot be assumed to have objective reality. We produce and supply the idea of such a being to ourselves in or~2r to satisfy the subjective needs of our cognitive faculties. The ultimate source of the 5 appearance of end-directed �activity fin irrational nature for the ancients is the nature of things in themselves, for the medievals the God, for the moderns the human understanding itself. inherent mind of III ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION The Platonic-Aristotelian, or Socratic, way of seeking the primary, permanent and fundamental things that are nature (among other things, by thinking through the implications of human speech) culminates in a doctrine that the truly fundamental is the intelligible. For Plato it seems to be the eternal ideas, or forms, or species; for Aristotle the thinking, or active intellection that is the life or energy constitutive of those forms or ideas, or as he sometimes calls them, the universals. If there is to be genuine knowledge, or even true opinion, of things in themselves, these intelligibles must be able to exist at one and the same time both in the things they characterize and in the mind kn~!ing them, in the things as enmattered, in the mind as thought. Corresponding to the intelligibility in things, then, is the power in all rational beings to apprehend it, the power called nous, intellectual intuition. There is another way to put this: for the classical philosophers the intelligible is the divine, and the concern for the truly divine is philosophy. The self-sufficiency of the intelligible is the standard for both theoretical and practical life; in this respect there is a harmony between theory and practice. But the intelligible is manifested in universal or general principles, or as we often say, in general laws, and every practical action is a particular action, an action of one's own. It is true that every human action is more or less permeated by the intelligible, by unde-~standing, but it is always a particular action mixed with thI accidental and the contingent, the inherently unintelligible. 4 According to this philosophy then, it is impossible for any particular or contingent event to be absolutely sacred. There seems to be a tension in our souls between the love of the good recognized by intelligence and the love of one's own that guides our spirited part. It is the natural favoritism of parents for their own children and its conflict with pure justice that leads to the unnatural family arrangements of Plato's Republic. Since both poles, the love of one's own stemming from our particularity and the love of the good stemming from our intelligence are rooted in human nature, the tension can assume tragic proportions. We have no choice about the genetic make-up with which we are endowed, the family and country in which we are born. Yet to be bereft of pride of ancestry is barely tolerable, a deficiency which~ furthermore, usually deprives its sufferers 6 �of sufficient energy to pursue the goods that intelligence might discern. As individuals also, with regard to those basic goals, virtue and knowledge, it is clear that virtue is not virtue, knowledge is not knowledge, until it becomes one's own. Both poles are ineradicable or equally primordial. On the highest level, according to what Socrates says in the Symposium, the love of one's own and the love of the good are reconciled, the true object of love is "to have the good be one's own forever." (206a) But for most of us most of the time the words of Plato's Athenian Stranger seem appropriate: "In truth the cause of every failure comes to each person each time through excessive love of oneself. For the one who loves is blinded about the beloved, so that he judges the just and the good and the noble things badly, believing that he is 1 ~ound always to honor what is his own before the truth." This consequence of our particular needs, this tendency to sacrifice the truth to the love of one's own, points to moderation as a key virtue in moral and political life, even the moderation of our highest hopes. The sublime Alenu prayer sung at the close of almost every Jewish religious service calls out: "We therefore hope in thee, O Lord our God, that we may speedily behold the glory of thy might, when the abominations will be removed from the earth when the world will be perfected under the kingdom of the Almighty, and all the children of flesh will call upon thy name and all the wicked of the earth will be turned to thee." Compare this with Socrates in the Theaetetus answering an enthusiastic Theodorus: "But it is not possible for evils to be done away with, Theodorus, for it is necessary that there always be something contrary to the good." The moderate Socrates, however, does not silence the voice of his heart; he goes on to add that of course evils cannot be established among gods, just that necessity forces the evils "to haunt mortal nature and this region here." Flight from these evils, he says, partial assimilation t9 the divine as far as possible in justice, holiness and intelligence, may 1 ~e possible for some individuals but not for society as a whole.· That moderation is the virtue of the philosopher's action, but not his thoughts is exhibited by this statement of the 10th century Arabic philosopher Alfarabi on the relation of classical philosophy to religion. "There are two ways of making a thing comprehensible: first by causing its essence to be perceived by the intellect, and second by causing it to be imagined through the similitude that imitates it. Assent, too, is brought about by one of two 7 �methods, either the method of ... demonstration or the method of persuasion .... when one acquires knowledge of the beings or receives instruction in them, if he perceives their ideas ... with his intellect, and his assent ... is by means of ... demonstration, then the science that comprises these cognitions is philosophy .... if they are known by imagining them through similitudes that imitate them, and assent to what is imagined ... is caused by persuasive methods then the ancients call what comprises these cognitions religion Therefore, according to the ancients, religion is an imitation of philosophy .... Religion sets forth images [of the ultimate principles] by ... similitudes ... taken from corporeal principles and imi~ates them by their likenesses among political offices ... " Further, to enable us to overcome the passions bred by radical selfishness and the love of one's own, counteracting law-abiding passions must be bred by the sanctification of norms, in order to enable us to live decently in society with a modicum of freedom. Such sanctifications require divinities that can address us passionately, individually and collectively, here and now. Classical philosophy never considered itself able to become a substitute for public religion. If Aristotle's treatment of religion is t~ 8 be found anywhere, I believe it is most of all in his Poetics , and in scattered remarks in the Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric and the Metaphysics. For Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, it is much clearer: religion is classified in the Summa Theologica as a part of the moral virtue of justice, religion is the worship which is properly due and paid to God. IV MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION Medieval philosophy is characterized by the attempt to reconcile classical philosophy with revealed or scriptural religion, with the religions of the Bible and the Koran. For the most influential medieval philosophers the natural world, as far as natural reason unaided by supernatural revelation could comprehend it, was to be understood through the philosophy of Aristotle. The fundamental presupposition for medieval philosophy is belief in the truth of the revealed word and in the God that is its supernatural source. This assumption entails important modifications of and deviations from Aristotelian doctrine. Aristotle evidently held that the visible universe is eternal, at least, in agreement with Plato, that its intelligible underpinnings, the forms, are eternal. All philosophers seem to have accepted what has been called 8 �the principle of causality, namely, that nothing comes into being out of nothing. The positive consequence of the principle is not: Everything comes into being out of something. It , is rather that: Everything that comes into being comes into being out of something. Those "somethings out of which" have either themselves come into being or have not come into being, that is, are unchanging. The task for scientific and - philosophic knowledge then is to discover the permanent or unchanging somethings, or principles, underlying change. As Thomas Aquinas says, "that the world did not always exis! 9 is held by faith alone, and cannot be proved by demonstration." The Bible tells us that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. If the ultimate principles are unchanging or eternal, philosophy tells us, there was no ultimate beginning. To meet the challenge of ancient philosophy, religious or scriptural philosophers declare that Almighty God super~aturally, miraculously, created everything out of nothing. The Platonic and Aristotelian forms are thoughts in the divine mind in accordance with which He creates the laws of nature. Unlike any human artisan He is not bound by the limitations of his materials, for all material limits also are grounded in his will. There is no eternal order independent of divine will, no source of principles for human guidance apart from that will. If the God of the Bible is omnipotent, He is also omniscient. Not the least action of the least of his creatures escapes his notice. In practice He is a caring God, a just and loving God. There is no necessary conflict between the love of one's own and the good, if the love of one's own is sanctified by the ultimate principle of the universe. Particularity is not disparaged: the ultimate principle of the universe reveals itself in personal address to particular men, particular families and nations, on particular occasions. If their souls are immortal, each individual is of everlasting importance. One can be fully at home in the world when the world is one's Father's house. On the other hand, one might say that the gulf between man and the God of the Bible is unbridgeable. In the Hebrew Bible the mutuality of the Covenant and the gift of the Law bridge the gulf. In Christianity the gulf itself, one is tempted to say, is overcome by the mystery of God's becoming a particular man, by the very notion that full divinity can exist in a particular man. The pain of the moral gulf between man and God is relieved by Jesus's assumption of the world's sin, for all those who are justified by believing in that sacrifice. Morality for the Bible as a whole takes on heightened importance when error and perversion become sin, an ungrateful personal affront to the loving all-powerful source of all goodness. In explaining why divine law was needed in addition to natural and human law Thomas Aquinas says that because "of the 9 �uncertainty of human judgment ... on contingent and particular matters that man may know without doubt what he ought to do and what he ought to avoid, it was necessary for man to be direc~ d by a law given by God, for ... such a law cannot err." 0 This, however, is moderated by the arguments of philosophers like Thomas that the great bulk of morality is given to men through the natural law, the law of reason. Virtues are habits that perfect natural powers in a world so designed as to allow reason to discover the ends implicit in most of nature. Something like classical moderation, the moderating of unreasonable expectations, is also preserved in the medieval distinction between this world and the kingdom of heaven, the world to come, the "other" world. How can classical and medieval philosophy deal with each other's fundamental assumptions? Thomas's harmonizing formula is that revelation goes beyond, but cannot contradict, reason. Because revelation is superior, philosophy is the handmaid of theology. That is not acceptable to Alfarabi's ancient philosopher: religion is an imitation of and therefore subordinate to philosophy. The possibility of Creation, Revelation and miracles seem to rest on the assumption that God is omnipotent and his will is unfathomable. Can reason refute that assumption? Is it self-contradictory? Can revelation refute reason? Can they even agree about what would constitute a refutation, what would constitute evidence? A rational proof demands suspension of belief, or doubt, until all the evidence is in. Revelation claims that its truth requires faith in the revealed and revealing God in order to be accepted and to be understood. From the point of view of rational philosophy, faith or belief is simply insufficient knowledge. Each can refute the other only by begging the question in dispute, presupposing its own canons for understanding. It appears that they are mutually irrefutable. Faith, Thomas Aquinas tells us, is an act of the intellect wherein the intellect is moved to assent, not by the clarity and evidence of the intellect's proper 2 ~bject, but by the command of the will, the practical faculty. This subordination of the theoretical to the practical faculty is another fundamental difference between ancient and medieval philosophy. v MODERN PHILOSOPHY The mutual irrefutability of philosophy and revelation, Leo Strauss has suggested, has created a tension that is perhaps the secret of the vitality of ~estern Civilization, a civilization that will not allow the mind to silence the voice of the heart, nor the heart to drown out the voice of the mind. This tension must trouble philosophy more than faith. If faith in the 10 �omnipotent God of Creation, Revelation and miracles cannot be refuted, does philosophy itself rest on indemonstrable premise~ just a different kind of faith, or at best, disputable opinion? 2 To free itself from this unresolvable tension and uncertainty, Strauss suggests, a new kind of philosophy, modern philosophy, comes into the world, rejecting both the idea of nature of classical philosophy and the omnipotent God of medieval philosophy -a new philosophy with a new basis, that is, man: the ultimate source of meaning for humanity's understanding of the world is the human understanding itself. "If one wished to refute Orthodoxy, no other way remained than to attempt to demonstrate that the world and life are fully understandable without the assumption of an unfathomable God. That means that the refutation of Orthodoxy depended on the success of a system. Man had to prove himself theoretically and practically the lord of the world and the lord of his life. The world he created had to make the world that was merely 'given' to him disappe~3· Then Orthodoxy was more than refuted, it was 'outlived.'" In the introduction to his Logic, Kant says that the basic questions determining the basic divisions of philosophy, "What can I know?" (Nature), "What ought I to do?" (Morality), "What may I hope?" (Religion), could all be referred to the single question, "What is man?" The classical understanding of nature is opposed by the modern idea of the conquest of nature and its practical goal, in Descartes' words, of making men "the masters and possessors of nature." The classical and medieval standard for morality, virtue, seen as natural fulfillments of natural powers, is replaced by freedom, or more precisely, autonomy. And last in our sketch of modern thought, the idea of history as a determinate process rather than a certain kind of study, becomes a secular substitute for Divine Providence. a. N~~ure, Bacon declares, cannot be conquered except by being obeyed. The nature to be conquered must be different from the nature to be obeyed. The nature to be conquered is nature as it presents itself to ordinary prescientific experience with its apparent purposivity and unpredictability due to chance. The nature to be obeyed, through which the conquest is to take place, is the nature to be discovered by methodical experimentation keyed to (following Galileo and Descartes) mathematical laws. Final causes are to be excluded from physics. To prepare the way for the new science the classical reliance on, or "idolization" of, natural experience and natural speech is to be refuted by a critique or refutation of the natural human understanding. This critique culminates in Kant's assumption that there is no intellectual intuition that permits us to gain access to the 11 �nature of things in themselves. There is no natural harmony between the natural human understanding and the natural world. Nature is not a kind mother, she must be tortured by methodical experimentation and forced to reveal her secrets. Furthermore, the ideas of chance or fortune and the subordination of art to nature must be rejected as breeding a "premature despair in human enterprises." The Aristotelian notion of unstable matter, pure potency, underlying the notion of fortune is altogether to be rejected. Matter is to be understood as acting in accordance with fixed and unwavering laws. Above all, Bacon insisted in opposition to medieval philosophy, physics must be separated from theology in order to avoid fabulous philosophy and heretical religion. With Bacon clearing the way, Descartes' "I think" becomes the exemplar of finding a beginning for thought that in no way depends upon anything outside of man. b. The new philosophy was obliged to find a new moral standard that would be compatible with a non-teleological physics. Th~$ standard, again, is freedom, autonomy, selflegislation. Rousseau was the first to define freedom as selflegislation, but it is already implicit in Hobbes's theory of sovereignty and the social contract. According to Hobbes, we must obey the sovereign because each of us through the social contract has agreed to allow his will to represent each of our wills. His legislation, because of the social contract, is, legally considered, our own self-legislation. He is our representative. Hobbes also formulated the more fundamental principle underlying this conception: there is "no Obligati~g on any man, which ariseth not from some Act of his own." This is all made even more . explicit in Rousseau's doctrine of the general will. Freedom in society consists in uniting oneself with all the rest under the general will that declares the law, while at the same time remaining free in so far as one has contributed to the making of that law. The process that makes the will general also makes it moral. Being compelled to express one's will in such form that it can become a general law, so that it can coincide with the wills of all the others, moralizes the will. If I generalize my desire not to pay taxes in a law that no one ought to pay taxes, I am compelled to see that then the police, public schools, courts, and so on, would disappear, and the irrationality of my original desire becomes manifest. The idea is fully developed as a moral principle in Kant's doctrine of the categorical imperative: So act that the maxim of your action can become a universal law. The truly free or moral person, according to Kant, bows only to the moral will or practical reason within him or her self, and not to any standard imposed from without, either by nature or by God. 12 �Hegel extends the notion of freedom as self-legislation beyond politics and morality to make it a logical and metaphysical principle. The life of the concept, the life of that Spirit or Mind that forms and informs the human mind, human History and the objects of human knowledge -the mind of Godproceeds in accordance with the principle of freedom, selflegislation. Hegel begins his "Doctrine of the Concept" with these words: . "The Concept is the principle of freedom, the power of substance self-realized." And later: " the concept is the genuine first; and things are what they are through the action of the concept dwelling in them and revealing itself in them. In our religious consciousness this comes forth in such a way that we say God created the world out of nothing, or, in other words, the world and finite things have issued from the fullness of the divine thoughts and divine decrees. Thus religion recognizes thought, more exactly the concept, to be the infinite form, or the free creative activity which can realize itself without the help of a matter that exists outside it." 27 At the same time modern ethical and especially political thought is said to be characterized by a certain Realism associated with the name of Machiavelli. Classical and medieval political thought, they argue, failed because it aimed too high. Because they based their political doctrines on exalted notions of virtue and societies devoted to the formation of virtue, they made themselves ineffective. As Bacon put it, their discourses are beautiful like the stars, which give little light because they are so high. Effectiveness can be secured by lowering one's goals, by accepting and exploiting those lower motives that move most men most of the time: pleasure, comfort, acquisitiveness, and especially that all powerful negative motive fear, fear for the loss of one's ~~fe and fear for the possible loss of what one already possesses. c. We turn next briefly to that secular substitute for divine providence, History, the meeting place of modern morality with modern realism. One of the first signposts on the way to the idea was Machiavelli's observation that the conflicts between nobles and plebians in Rome, the vicious civil strife universally deplored by the philosophers, actually led to the greater good of Rome as a whole. Adam Smith extends the notion: private vice, public benefit, to the economic sphere. Merchants intending only their own gain increase the annual income and well-being of society as a whole; led by an invisible hand they promote beneficial ends which are no part of their intentions. Kant calls for a history that will show how the antagonism of men in society, their ambition, lust for power and greed cause them to develop their talents and, consequently, their moral 13 �discrimination so as to prepare them for citi29nship in the perfectly free and moral societies of the future. Hegel, as it were, takes up Kant's call, finding Kantian freedom and reason, linked up with his own doctrine of logical opposites, operative everywhere in History, making Smith's invisible hand visible as the self-unfolding of the human spirit and Spirit in general. This self-unfolding culminates in the self-consciousness that all spiritual goods are produced not by any external source, but by Spirit itself. The idea . of History and the modern idea of freedom seem to be inextricably linked, history allegedly showing that man's freedom is basically limited only by the ideas of those limits that human consciousness has imposed on itself; man's freedom is limited by his earlier use of that inchoate freedom, and ~ot 3 By his nature or by the whole order of nature and creation. VI PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION If to want to be fully at home in the world is a religious motive, perfectly appropriate for a world governed by an omnipotent, beneficent and loving God, then perhaps we can speak of a religious motive permeating modern philosophy from its beginning, even in its anti-theological stances. If this is correct, one can say that this motive begins to become explicit with the formal acceptance of philosophy of religion as an accepted branch of philosophy. The modern scientific conception of nature, according to Kant, is incapable of supplying ethical and political standards. Morality is traced to a source independent of nature, namely, practical reason. The realm of nature and the realm of freedom or morality, according to Kant, do not contradict one another, but like parallel lines simply do not meet. This thorough-going separation becomes a special problem for Kantian philosophy. How can natural man and moral man coexist in one and the same man? How can the two realms be brought together in systematic unity? Kant experimented with a philosophy of history, but finally settled on a philosophy of religion. The Critique of Pure Reason established, according to Kant, that we have no knowledge, positive or negative, concerning the existence of God. Religion within the limits of reason alone establishes what in the absence of knowledge we are obliged to believe in order to strengthen our capacities to obey the moral law. Religion is unambiguously subordinated to morality, moral reason: "pure moral legislation, through which the will of God is primordially engraved in our hearts, is not only the unavoidable condition of · all true religion whatsoever, but is also that which really constitutes such religion." True religion, he argues, "is a purely rational affair." 31 14 �His position is brought out dramatically by his interpretation of what he calls the myth of Abraham's sacrifice: Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice that even if your voice rings down from heaven, if you order me to kill my good 3 ~on, contrary to the moral law, you cannot be the voice of God. Some might regard this as superficially rational; but would the story of Abraham's sacrifice have had the influence it has had if Abraham had indeed sacrificed Isaac? Hegel's thought aims at absolute comprehensiveness. It aims not only at comprehending and superseding all previous philosophies and theories, but also the truth not only about but within practical life and reality as a whole. It's allcomprehensiveness will allow it to supersede all finite standpoints. One most impor3~nt part of that reality is religious life and religious thought. The incorporation of religion into philosophy reaches its culmination in Hegel. "Culture has," he declares: "raised this latest era so far above the ancient antithesis of reason and faith, of philosophy and positive religion, that this opposition of faith and knowledge has acquired quite a different sense and has now been transferred into the field of philosophy itself. In earlier times philosophy was said to be the handmaid of faith. Ideas and expressions of this sort have vanished and giilosophy has irresistibly affirmed its absolute autonomy." Kant too, he argues, tried to accomplish this synthesis, but his notion of reason was too narrow. Alongside the narrowly intellectual and rational "religion has its sublime aspect as feeling, the love filled with eternal longing ... it yearns for eternal ~5auty and bliss ... it seeks ... the Absolute and the eternal." Hegel's philosophy must encompass the full range of religious experience. For Kant, Jesus was a representation of "the Idea of Humanity in its full moral perfection." For Hegel, Jesus was the epoch-making revelation that the universal divine Spirit, God, that permeates and enlivens the universe dwells in and comes to full self-consciousness in man, in the human spirit. This consciousness goes through stages,the highest of which is the conceptual. "Every philosophy sets forth nothing else but the construction of highest bliss as Idea." "The sins of him who lies against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven, a~g the lie against the Spirit is that he is not a universal .... " The expected transformation of human life, including political life, Hegel's rational kingdom of heaven on earth, according to his schedule, is long overdue. Kierkegaard, revolted by Hegelian rationalism, turned to revelation as intrinsically irrational. Nietzsche continued the modern project of finding the source of meaning in, rather than outside of, man, however no longer as reason, but as will. Heidegger urges us to be resolute without clarifying what the ends of that resolution are to be. 15 �The classical and medieval dependence of morality on nature and natural law is replaced by an exaltation of human "creativity" coupled with despair of finding a rational source of ends to guide that creativity. However, even if modern thought should have proved an inadequate candidate for articulating the meaning of human life, there is one area in which its success seems indubitable. I refer to the natural sciences. The question for those who lean toward the classical or medieval alternatives is: Can modern natural science be integrated into those allegedly more comprehensive frameworks? One indication, certainly no proof, of this possibility is Werner Heisenberg's turning to Aristotle's concept of potency and Plato's Timaeyf when he tries to make philosophic sense out of quantum theory. The unanswered questions raised by this broad survey might seem overwhelming, but it does seem to be clear that we are faced by three fundamental alternatives, and that the attempt to dispense with or transcend the ancient and medieval alternatives is highly questionable. If, as Heidegger says, questioning is the piety of thoughtfulness, the piety of thoughtfulness requires that we do justice both to philosophy open to the claims of faith and to faith open to the claims of philosophy. NOTES *A revised version of a lecture delivered at St. John's October 28, 1988. College, 1. Heidegger has been discussed in greater detail with a brief discussion of the relation of modern scientific philosophy (Husserl) to religion in my "The Prescientific World and Historicism: Some Reflections on Strauss, Heidegger and Husserl," forthcoming in The Humanistic Legacy of Leo Strauss, ed. Alan Udoff, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). 2. Diels, 32. 3. The reference to God as Creator follows closely on the reference to "the laws of nature and of nature's God", suggesting that the Creation is carried on in accordance with those natural laws. 4. Cf. Harry V . .Jaffa, "What is Equality? The Declaration Independence Revisited," The Conditions of Freedom: Essays 16 of in �Political Philosophy, (Baltimore: The 3ohns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 149-160; and George Anastaplo, "The Declaration of Independence," St. Louis University Law Journal (Spring, 1965), 390. 5. Metaphysics, 981b 27-29, 982b 11-983a 11, 983b 7-984a 2, 1014b 16-1015a 19, 1074b 1-14, 1091a 29-1091b 20. 6. In Homer the word nature occurs only once, in the Odyssey. (X. 303) The first and only man to use the word is Odysseus who had seen the cities and learned the minds of many men, who had learned how men's thoughts differ from place to place and from tribe to tribe. He uses the divinely given gift of natural knowledge to defeat the baneful magic of a goddess. 7. Aristotle, Physics, II; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 78-97; 3ohn Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1892), Introduction. 8. Holzwege, (Ff. am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950), 325. 9. Was Heisst Denken?, (Ttibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1954}, 6-7. 10. Nicomachean Ethics, 1140a 1-23; Metaphysics, 1032a 12 ff. 11. Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 40, A.3. Cf. also Q. 1, A.2. 12. Kritik der Urteilskraft, Einleitung. IV, ## 75 and 76. 13. Plato, Meno, 72c 6-d 1. 14. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1027a 14, 1036a 9. 15. La~'ls, 731e-732a. 16. Theaetetus, 176a-b. 17. Alfarabi, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, translated and edited by Muhsin Mahdi, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), Part I, sec. 55. Cf. Aristotle, Politics, 1252b 24-27. 18. Laurence Berns, "Aristotle's Poetics", Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss, ed. 3oseph Cropsey, (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 7478, and 81. (The last section, p. 82, should be marked "Epilogue".} 19. Aristotle, De caelo, 298b Theologica, I, Q. 46, A.2. 20. Ibid., I-II, Q. 91, A.4. 17 14-25; Thomas Aquinas, Summa �21. Ibid., II-II, Q. 1, AA.4 and 5; Q. 2, AA.1, 2 and 9; Q. 4, AA.1 and 8. The will, in turn, is moved by hope and charity: hope of attaining the ultimate happiness of a supernatural vision of God, and charity (friendship for God) in the desire to honor God by the acceptance of his authority. Ibid. Q. 2, A.3, A.9 ad 2, A.10; Q. 4, AA.3 and 7; Q. 23, AA.1 and 6. 22. Leo Strauss, "Progress or Return? The Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization," Modern Judaism I, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 17~45; "The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy", The Independent Journal of Philosophy, ed. George Elliott Tucker, (Vienna: 1979), 111-118. (Those lectures [in 1952] provided a most important impetus and inspiration for these reflections.) Aristotle,Topics, lOOa 30100b 23 and especially lOla 36-lOlb 4. 23. Leo Strauss, Philosophie und Gesetz: Beitrage zum Verstandnis Maimunis und Seiner Vorlaufer, (Berlin: Schocken, 1935), Einleitung, and especially 21; translation by Fred Baumann, Philosophy and Law: Essays toward the Understanding of Maimonides and his Predecessors, (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1987), Introduction and especially 13; Spinoza's Critique of Religion, (New York: Schocken, 1965), Preface to the English Translation, 28-31; History of Political Philosophy, eds. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 296 and 297. Note that on 297 Strauss does not say modern political philosophy. 24. Novum "conquered" Part VI. Organum, I, aphorism 3 (Spedding mistranslates as "commanded".); Descartes, Discourse on Method, 25. Cf. Sophocles, Antigone, l. 821. 26. Leviathan, chap. 21. 27. Enzyklopadie, I, ## 160 and 163; translation by W. The Logic of Hegel, (Oxford: 1892), ## 160 and 163. Wallace, 28. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 178-183; Laurence Berns, "Aristotle and the Moderns on Freedom and Equality", The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective, eds. Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), Corrected Edition, 148-151. 29. Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht, Idea of a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent 30. Leo Strauss, "Progress or Return?", n. 22, above, 32-33. 31. DJe RelJgion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Akademie-Textausgabe, VI, 104; Religion within the Limits of 18 �Reason Alone, translation by T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 95; Der Streit der Fakultaten, Akademie-Textausgabe, VII, 67; The Conflict of the Faculties, translation by Mary J. Gregor, (dual language), (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), 123. 32. Ibid., note, 63 (German); 115 (English). Cf. Emil L. Fackenheim, Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, (New York: Schocken, 1980), chap. 2, "Abraham and the Kantians: Moral Duties and Divine Commandments." 33. Cf. Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension Thought, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 15-23. in Hegel's 34. Glauben und Wissen, (Jenaer Schriften), (Ff. am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), beginning; Faith and Knowledge, translation by Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), 55. 35. Ibid., 290-291 (German); 58 (English). 36. Der Streit der Fakultaten, 39; The Conflict of the Faculties, 67; Glauben und Wissen, 292; Faith and Knowledge, 59; Vorlesungen uber die Geschichte der Philosophie, (Ff. am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), I, 95; The History of Philosophy, Introduction. 37. "Planck's Discovery and the Philosophical Problems of Atomic Physics," Lecture, Sept. 4, 1958, On Modern Physics, W. Heisenberg, M. Born, E. Schrodinger, and P. Auger, (New York: Collier Books, 1962). 19 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis 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. 19 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berns, Laurence, 1928- Title A name given to the resource On the relation between philosophy and religion Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1988-10-28 Description An account of the resource Revised version of a lecture delivered on October 28, 1988 by Laurence Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 57330 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 has been given permission to make this item available online. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/74ae5b8767d2a23385d811ecb911ae28.mp3 6e09049577776d180579fd2565fdb39f 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/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audiocassette Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:25:27 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 Francis Bacon and the Conquest of Nature Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 25, 1975, by Laurence Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berns, Laurence, 1928- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1975-04-25 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LEC_Berns_Laurence_1975-04-25_ac Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1091" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Subject The topic of the resource Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626 Philosophy, Modern Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b08689c3501ed1e265583e5667da31c2.jpg e51f4e0a99c1fc7adca0deb819e48614 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource <p>The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials.  The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. </p> To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection 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 Image Collection—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 imagecollectionannapolis 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 8.5 x 11.5 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-0018 Title A name given to the resource Gisela Berns Seated in Rocking Chair Holding Daughter, Anna, as Infant in the Home of Samuel S. Kutler, 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 1970-07 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berns, Laurence, 1928- Subject The topic of the resource St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.). -- Faculty Berns, Gisela N. Berns, Anna. 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. Honorary Alumni Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1fb83bf2a53a715ee9dcb3680f0a9a9d.jpg 790b6a1940801a8a8865760af1dda724 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource <p>The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials.  The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. </p> To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection 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 Image Collection—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 imagecollectionannapolis 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 8.5 x 11.5 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-0019 Title A name given to the resource Gisela Berns and Laurence Berns with Daughter, Anna, as Infant, in the Home of Samuel S. Kutler, 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 1970-07 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berns, Laurence, 1928- Subject The topic of the resource St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.). -- Faculty Berns, Gisela N. Berns, Laurence, 1928- Berns, Anna 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. Honorary Alumni Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/adc40e1a6e9a1a62bd1cd5ef23c35a89.mp3 281a99dfb222373e54847971bf9dc63f 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/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp3 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 51:05 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 Dialectic, virtue and recollection in Plato's Meno Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 24, 2010 by Laurence Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berns, Laurence, 1928- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-09-24 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/6850" target="_blank" title="Typescript" rel="noreferrer noopener">Typescript</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8554b921ed71d496c39adc83bf5d8afd.pdf 1409eee1facf648e3bb718a057e29258 PDF Text Text Dialectic, Virtue and Recollection in Plato's Meno* Laurence Berns The first thing that confronts the reader of a Platonic dialogue is its strange form. Philosophic writings, since Aristotle, usually take the form of treatises or essays. But dialogues present themselves as dramas, where actions are equally, or even sometimes more, important than what has been presented as spoken, where what is said must be understood in the light o·f what is done, and what is done must be understood in the light of what is said. Thus, the validity and meaning of the arguments presented in a dialogue must be worked out and qualified by the imaginative and logical exercise of working out the arguments implicit in the action. I. Opening Questions Plato's Meno opens with Meno confronting Socrates with what appears to be a fundamental question about virtue, that is, human excellence. The usual Socratic or Platonic preparation or context for the question is absent. That is, we are not told why Meno asks that question or why it is asked of Socrates. It does, however, appear that Meno is very interested in the question of how to acquire virtue, or at least how to acquire the benefits that a reputation for virtue might supply. But the latter question, why it is asked of Socrates, is not too difficult: Socrates does have a reputation for being exceptionally knowledgeable about the question of virtue: in Plato's, Republic, (358A ff.) Glaucon is speaking to Socrates: But the argument for justice, that it is better than injustice, I have never heard from anyone, as I would like to hear it. And I would like to hear it praised, itself for its very self. And I think that I can learn it from you, most of all. *The Anastaplo Works of the Mind Lecture, University of Chicago, 11 /15/2009, revised for the Homecoming Lecture at St. John's College, Annapolis, 9/24/201 O �Meno, from Thessaly visits the sophisticated metropolis Athens and asks the expert on virtue a "learned" question about the subject of his expertise. Socrates's response to the question is, on its face, outrageous. To Meno's surprise, he answers that wisdom must have emigrated from Athens to Thessaly, because if anyone in Athens should be asked such a question he would laugh about being thought capable of answering it, and would insist that, "I happen not to know at all what that thing virtue itself is." The truth of that assertion by Socrates would seem to depend on the acceptance of his supremely high standard for what "to know" might be. At any rate, he does seem to be very knowledgeable about everything that has been said about virtue, e.g. Justice-Republic, Courage-Laches, Moderation-Charmides, Knowledge-Theaetetus, et al. Socrates claims to share the poverty of the rest of the Athenians: "How could I know what sort of thing something is [for example, whether virtue is teachable], if I do not know what [virtue] is?" Socrates turns Meno's more practical question, about how something is acquired, into a theoretical inquiry about what the thing Meno is asking about is. What is it about Meno's question that could provoke such a response? Does Socrates already know that Meno's character is as questionable, as Xenophon reports it to be in his Anabasis? 1 This dialogue tells us nothing about Meno's later history. We are left by Plato to deduce Meno's character from what he says and does in this dialogue. The opening question is: Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is something teachable? Or is it not teachable, but something that comes from practice? Or is it something neither from practice nor from learning, but comes to human beings by nature, or in some other way? 1 Xenophon, Anabasis, II. vi. 21-29. 2 �If "learning" in this question is only considered as the other side of teaching we are given three distinct alternatives as to what the source of virtue might be. If they can be separated, we have four, with one indeterminate possibility: teaching, or practice, or learning, or nature; they all exhibit themselves throughout the dialogue, either by their presence or by their conspicuous absence. The "some other way" may be an anticipation of the answer, "by divine dispensation", with which the dialogue ends. If, as it seems to me, Socrates knew that, as far as human character is concerned, nature provides the capacities, teaching and/or learning set forth the ends, the goals, implicit in the natural capacities, and practice develops the habits that enable one to actualize or defeat those goals. Divine dispensation could be a replacement for nature as the source of the original capacities. Meno's question, then, erroneously disjoins, as separated alternatives, factors that can only be properly understood as interrelated parts functioning together in the unified whole of human development. Socrates' seemingly outrageous response could then be seen as the beginning of an attempt to help Meno get sight of the whole that he has unwittingly dismantled. The vast question of the relations of parts to the wholes that they are parts of manifests itself, but not explicitly, at the very beginning and throughout the whole of this dialogue. II. Dialectic Since this dialogue is a dramatic dialogue and not a narrated dialogue like the Republic, our only access to the action of the dialogue is through the mode of the discussion itself. We are not altogether at a loss, however, in this matter, for Socrates has explicitly characterized that mode as dialectical. But if, being friends as both I and you are now, ... [we] should want to have a discussion with one another, then surely a somehow more gentle and more dialectical way of answering is required. And it is perhaps more dialectical to answer not only �with the truth, but also through those things which he who is being questioned could agree that he knows. (Speech 82 2 [75C-D]) But dialectical means a variety of interrelated things in the Platonic writings. The word is derived from the Greek dialegein, to converse, to discuss. The word dia, connected to the word for two, duo, in composite words like this, signifies connections between two or more separated things. It is a linking prefix. Consider the Greek word diabainein. The word bainein means to walk. When you prefix dia to it, it means to cross a bridge. The dia links the two sides of a bridge. The word logos, part of the word dialoqos (dialogue, a noun connected with the adjective dialectical) means a number of things: some primary meanings are speech, meaning and reckoning. Dialectical then does often mean gentle and friendly conversation, where the interlocutors accommodate themselves to, and try to understand each other's views, in contrast to unfriendly and contentious conversation. Dialectic in this personal sense suggests that the meaning of what is being said is to be understood primarily with reference to the characters and capacities of the speakers including their limitations or talents. If the situation, or the character, or capacity of an interlocutor makes theoretical questioning no longer appropriate, the conscientious dialectician can aim at furthering some salutary opinion or belief, some communal agreement that could be beneficial for society as a whole. This form of dialectic frequently appears, as in the case of the Meno, near the end of a dialogue. Aristotle, in his discussion of dialectical reasoning, in the first chapter of his Topics, distinguishes dialectical reasoning from the most perfect form of reasoning, demonstrative reasoning. Demonstration reasons from premises that are "true and primary". The types of persons holding those premises need not be mentioned 2 The translations, notes and speech numbers referred to are those to be found in Plato's Meno, translated with annotations by George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns, (Focus Publishing, R. Pullins Co., Newburyport, MA: 2004). 4 �because the premises produce conviction or belief "through themselves". But dialectical premises, it seems, require reference to those holding them. Dialectical premises are generally accepted opinions (endoxa) "held by all people, most people, or by the wise, and of these, all of the wise, or most of the wise, or the most notable and illustrious of the wise. " 3 Here, in dialectic, where even true and primary premises might be subject to question, reference to the kind of people holding the premises is appropriate. In this personal sense, for example, Plato's treatment of moderation in the Republic can be called dialectical. 4 It ascends from how moderation exists in all, or rather most, people, as control over one's desires, pleasures and pains with respect to food, drink and sexual satisfaction, to its highest and most rare form as a beautiful harmony of cooperating and interpenetrating powers of the soul, each power functioning smoothly as it was naturally meant to function. It should not come as a surprise that Plato's treatment of dialectic is itself dialectical: it is certainly spoken about in a number of different ways in the dialogues. In the Republic, dialegesthai and dialektike, both usually translated as dialectic, refer to that highest form of inquiry by which reason (logos) ascends from sense perception, experience, opinion and what is changeable and opinable, to seek what is purely intelligible, knowable and unchangeable, that is, the forms, or ideas, what each thing is, its very being (ousia), and finally to the governing principle of the whole (literally, of the fil!, to pan. 5118). Aristotle, Plato's foremost student, put this last point as follows: "Dialectic . . . being investigative, has a way to the principles of all pursuits, (all methods, methodon). " 5 3 One is almost tempted to add, "or by all of the most notable, or most of the most notable, or the very most notable of the most notable; or ... etc." 4 See the note on Speeches 26 and 28 [73A-B], and Republic, 3890-E and 4300-4328. 5 Topics, 101 b2-4 �These two meanings of dialectical, the personal and the theoretical, come together when two or more friends are genuinely disposed through discussion to seek an adequate response to a serious "What is ... ?" question, like, "What is virtue?" 6 Or, if a response is not forthcoming, they can search for a better understanding of the question itself, by refining it. 7 In Plato's Cratylus (390C) the dialectician is referred to as one who knows how to ask and to answer questions. But sometimes these two modes of dialectic can be at cross purposes. Socrates, from the beginning of the dialogue up to Speech 354 [86C], has been trying to get Meno to seriously address the question, "What is virtue?". Meno, in Speech 355 [86C-D], reverts, as if nothing had happened during the intervening discussion, to his opening question (with two important omissions). 8 At this point, Socrates, by dialectically accommodating himself to being "ruled" by Meno, gives up trying to engage Meno in the ways of the higher dialectic, adopting instead what he calls a "hypothetical" approach. Something similar happened earlier in the discussions of shape and color. Socrates seeks definitions rooted in our primary experience of the things defined, but Meno finds such definitions too simple. 9 Socrates dialectically accommodates himself to Meno by producing an overgeneral, fancy, materialist ("Empedoclean") definition of color that undialectically ignores the primary experience, the primary cognition, from which any definition of color, or definition of the object of sight, would have to begin, that is, looking. Just before giving up on Meno, Socrates invites him to join with him in putting into practice what has just been exhibited in the Slave Boy scene 10 But, one might 6 See note for Speech 194 [81 E]. Leo Strauss uses the word "zetetic", seeking or searching (from the Greek verb, zetein), to describe the fundamental characteristic of Socratic philosophizing. On Tyranny, Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, eds. (New York: The Free Press/Macmillan, 1991), p. 196. 8 To use Biblical language, this speech, an important turning point, could be regarded as Meno's Fall. He repeats his opening question leaving out the two things he needs most: learning and practice. 9 See Plato's Sophist, 243A-B. 10 Speech 354, [86C]. 7 6 �object, in the entire Slave Boy episode no "What is ... ?" question is ever raised. How then does the Slave Boy scene relate to the higher dialectic? Both the mode of presentation and the subject-matter of the Slave Boy scene put a premium on looking, looking inside one's self and looking outside at what one can learn only by looking. The Slave Boy scene is an exhibition for Meno's sake of how one can be prepared --here with the aid of a master teacher-- for higher dialectic. The preparation consists of an honest, careful and critical review of what one thinks one knows, in order to come to understand what one does not know. One cannot understand that one does not know without understanding what one does not know. Mathematical illustrations have been traditionally, and are here, models of clarity and precision. The Boy enthusiastically swears when he fully realizes that he does not know from "what sort of line" the eight-foot squared area comes to be. 11 Socrates remarks to Meno and even more to us: "For now he, not knowing, can even carry on the search gladly ... do you think that before he would have tried to seek for or to learn that which he thought he knew while he did not know --before he fell down into perplexity and want and came to believe that he did not know, and longed to know?" 12 - But Meno, although he acquiesces politely, does not seem to see what Socrates is getting at. His vanity may not allow him to become a slave of learning. Ill. Eidos Socrates' major complaint with Meno's different accounts of virtue is that Meno continually gives him swarms of many different virtues, and not that "one and the same form (eidos) through which they are virtues, and upon which one would somehow do well to focus one's gaze." 13 After Meno introduces the ability to acquire 11 Speech 275 [84A] Speeches 282 and 284 [848-C] 13 Speech 16 [72C].Eidos is often translated as "form" or "idea". It is also sometimes translated as "class", as "character" and as "pattern". The elementary meaning of the word is "looks", that by which someone or something is recognized as being who or what he, she or it is. It is connected to the verb eidenai, "to know", the original meaning of which is "to have seen". 12 7 �wealth into the virtues, Socrates characterizes Meno's enumerations of the different virtues, like justice, moderation and piety, as breaking up or changing the whole of virtue into small coin, pieces of small change. This whole, as eidos, as class character, constitutes the whole class of virtues, and each virtue as what it is, according to Socrates; but what kind of whole are we being urged to think of? The old tried and true, natural, if not even childlike, method would be to try to reason to the less known from what seems to be better known. Are justice, moderation, courage, piety and wisdom related to virtue as small change is to gold coin; or as two, three, four and five, are related to number; or as the different kinds of bees are related to their hive; or as the different classes of human beings are related to political society as a whole; or as the organs of a living body are related to the whole living body? Is "virtue" by itself the organism of the different virtues? There is one passage in the dialogue that seems to favor the organismic model. In Speech 112 [77A-B] Socrates urges Meno to tell him what virtue is, "leaving it whole and healthy." While "health" as an analogous term can apply to a number of things, its primary reference is to an animal organism. Aristotle, who appears to be more practical than Plato, approves of Gorgias' and Meno's way of enumerating the virtues. 14 But Aristotle too indicates, near the end of his treatment of courage in the Nicomachean Ethics, (1117b9-13), that no particular virtue possessed in isolation from the other virtues fully deserves the name "virtue": "the more a man possesses virtue in its entirety (ten areten pasan), and the more happy he is, the more will he be pained by death; for life is most worth living for such a man." How does the elementary notion of "sensible looks" become transmuted by Plato and Aristotle into the idea of "intelligible (noetic) looks"? It has something to do with the fact that that by virtue of which a being is what it is, is also that by virtue of which it belongs to a class. When we say, "This is a dog.", we also mean, "This belongs to the class of dogs." What gives a being its character has the attribute of a class character. See Republic, Books VI and VII. 14 See Politics, 1259b21 .-1260b 7, especially 1260a25-28. �There are Platonic dialogues devoted to different virtues, such as Justice-the Republic, Moderation-the Charmides, Courage-the Laches, and Piety-the Euthyphro,. The organismic hypothesis might help account for why none of these inquiries by itself is said to be successful. IV. Cloaking Unknowns As Knowns In Speech 172 [798-C] Socrates tells Meno that "when you were requested by me to talk about virtue as a whole, you fell far short of saying what it is, but you declared that every action is a virtue whenever it is done with some piece of virtue, just as if you had said what the whole, virtue, is and it was immediately recognized by me, even if you were to change it into pieces of small change. " 15 But, Jacob Klein argues, in commenting on these passages, 16 that what Meno is charged with doing (see italics in the previous sentence) is what we all do every time we express an opinion about someone possessing or not possessing some particular virtue. To hold an opinion about that which is under consideration means to take-or, at worst, to pretend to take-the zetoumenon [the thing sought], the "unknown," as if it were "known." To test an opinion means to follow it up through necessary consequences until a patent absurdity (a "contradiction") or something incontrovertibly true comes int6 sight. 17 Klein's use of the mathematical term "unknown" alludes to what he has described (on p. 83 of the same text) as the "analytic" tradition of ancient mathematics, where 15 See Speeches 152-166 [78C-79A (especially Speeches 161 [78E] and 164 and165 [78E79A]. 16 Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno,. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 84. 17 Klein adds, "Depending on whether the former or the latter happens, the opinion is either refuted or vindicated. To vindicate (or verify) an opinion means to transform a zetoumenon into an homologoumenon, into something one has to agree to, to transform the hitherto 'unknown' into a truth now indeed 'known.' However seldom, if ever, such vindicating occurs in a Platonic dialogue, the 'dialectical' process, which is 'analytical' in its very conception and structure, tends toward that end." 9 �proofs begin by assuming that one already has the unknown being sought, the zetoumenon, and then, by following up the necessary consequences of that assumption, one either arrives at a contradiction, proving the impossibility of the assumption, or one arrives at some agreed upon truth which establishes the truth of the assumption. "All mathematics today is an outgrowth of this ['analytic'] tradition," Klein says. He alludes to, among other things, the ubiquitous x of algebra. A very simple example: What is the number that multiplied by two equals six? Let us assume that we have it and call it x. Therefore 2x = 3. = 6. Divide both sides by 2, then x Three is the number. But not only modern mathematics, the argument goes, but all testing of opinions, including the testing of opinions in the dialectical process of a Platonic dialogue, follows some such analytic procedure. This bears on the consideration of wholes and their parts as follows: Generally, any opinion on any subject can be understood to catch some "partially" true aspect of the subject under investigation. This means that, however mistaken each of us may be about that subject as a "whole," we are talking together about "the same thing" or, at least, are making an effort to talk about "the same thing." ... But that, in turn, indicates a common, if usually hidden, ground along which the conversation proceeds and where the "whole" is really "located." This "back-ground" is the zetoumenon [thing sought] and its continuing presence manifests itself in our ability to opine, that is, to cloak what remains "unknown" with the guise of the "known." The dialectical-analytic process thus tends indeed through "parts" toward a "whole." That is why it is not at all impossible to talk about "properties" of something of which we do not know what it is. 18 The continuing presence, then, often inexplicit, of a background idea of "the same thing" holding the conversation together manifests itself in dialectical differences of opinion, each interlocutor is arguing about that which he or she does not fully know, assuming the "unknown" as if it were known. If those who converse are genuinely 18 See Speech 2 (71 B) of Plato's Meno, and Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, p. 85. 10 �interested in getting to the truth of the matter, and if each presents evidence and arguments that make sense, they may come to see that the oppositions they find indicate that they have not been talking about the same thing. The "cloaking" process of opining had at first kept them from seeing, but then made it possible for them to see, that they had been talking about different things. Through the saving grace of the principle of non-contradiction, the oppositions are resolved by distinctions, and opinions move closer to knowledge. 19 If, as Klein argues, Socrates misrepresents, in this and other dialogues, the illegitimacy of our ordinary use of "cloaked" eidetic unknown wholes in order to talk about properties of particulars participating in them, his primary motive would seem to be to open up the question "as to what underlies our ordinary speaking and thinking" on any subject, "as a precondition for looking at the 'wholeness' of things." Does the Slave Boy scene exhibit what it purports to exhibit, that all so-called teaching is really recollecting? It appears that Socrates simply gives, or "teaches," the Boy the sought-for line. The scene does exhibit a perfectly natural series of errors, brought out and clarified by a master teacher. The clarification of those natural errors, as errors, also exhibits how one can come to learn, and to benefit from learning, what one does not know. In this simpler case, at least, the question is answered: the Boy does move from false opinions to a true opinion about the soughtfor line. 20 Meno had complained before the Slave Boy episode (Speech 179 [79 E-80 B]) that Socrates, unlike anyone he has ever spoken with, numbs him both in soul and mouth, so that he is not able to join him in his search for whatever virtue is. Meno, to forestall being recruited into the search, presents in the form of questions an argument that he thinks is beautiful which would undermine any such Socratic 19 See Plato's Republic, 430E-431A, especially 436B-441C. · 20 See Speeches 322-332 [858-D]. 11 �search. 21 To rescue his kind of searching from Menonic oblivion, Socrates introduces his recollection story. V. The Whole and the Surface He claims to have heard -Meno is much more attentive to things heard than to things seen- the story "from both men and women wise about things divine," from priests and priestesses and divine poets "able to give an account (loqon) of those things they have taken in hand." What they say is that the human soul is immortal, it appears to die and be born again many times, but is never destroyed. Because it is immortal, has been born many times and "has seen all things ... there is nothing it has not learned and therefore is able to recollect 22 , about virtue and about other things, which it already knew before." Since part of that time it was without a body and sense organs, that seeing cannot simply be seeing in the normal sense; presumably it was some kind of seeing with the mind's eye. "Inasmuch as all nature is akin (or, connected in kinship, synqenous) and the soul has learned all things, there is nothing to prevent someone who recollects (which people call learning) one thing only from discovering all other things, so long as he is brave and does not grow tired of seeking." Since all nature is connected (syn-) -in kinship (-genous) "every bit the soul recollects can be understood as a 'part' of a 'whole'."23 The implication is that that whole is an ordered and knowable whole, the knowable whole. We spoke earlier of the description, in the Republic, of the ultimate or highest object of dialectic being knowledge of the governing principle (archen) of the whole: the recollection story of the Meno, then, points to the ultimate object of, the ultimate zetoumenon. thing sought, by, our natural inclination to know. To know a whole means to know its parts, and to know how those parts fit together to make a whole. 21 • See Speeches 185-188 [80D-81A]. 22 "Remembering", mnesis, is distinguished from "reminding", or "recollecting", anamnesis. Prefixing ana- to the ordinary word for memory or remembering suggests setting out to recall, or to bring something back up to memory. 23 Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, p. 96. 12 �But if the whole of any particular subject is only a part of the all-comprehensive whole, one cannot have full and perfect knowledge of any particular subject without knowledge of the all-comprehensive whole that it fits into. In any literal sense this is not possible. What then could Plato mean by philosophy, and what is he recommending to us upon reading the Meno? Do not opinions, different opinions, about the ultimate thing sought, zetoumenon, shape or influence the ways we go about seeking knowledge of those parts of the whole that we think we can learn, the different "sciences?" Is the governing principle of the whole corporeal, mathematical, noetic (an object of intellect), organic, or something else ---or all or a few of these together? Seeking to understand fundamental problems, or alternatives, is not solely a theoretical matter. Theory and practice come together as one seeks to understand the principles shaping one's own most cherished opinions. One simple and straightforward consequence of holding to the recollection doctrine is that anyone seeking to discover what virtue is should first look inside oneself, to examine just what it is that one thinks one knows. It may seem immodest, Leo Strauss once remarked, to speak about "all objects of human knowledge," but "we all really have opinions -and sometimes very strong opinions-- about all objects of human knowledge, and it is perhaps better to confess that to oneself and to try to clarify that than just to leave it at the amiable appearance of modesty." Socratic philosophy, then, would be zetetic, 24 ready to seek; openly skeptical in the original sense of the word skeptical: that original sense is derived from the words skopein and skeptesthai, to look carefully, which occur many times in this dialogue. To be a skeptic in this sense of the word is to be a thoughtful "looker." A zetetic skeptic, then, is a thoughtful "looker" seeking and searching for the truth, including the truth about the unavoidable, but elusive, principle or principles governing the whole. 24 See Plato's Meno, cited in note 1, the notes for speeches 12 [72A] and 194 [81 E], pp. 50 and 61. �Speaking generally from what relates to human cognition, the whole and its parts becomes accessible to us through sense experience as sensible heterogeneity: its intelligible (or noetic) underpinnings through intellection as noetic heterogeneity and through counting and mathematics as noetic or dianoetic homogeneity. Sensible heterogeneity refers to the things we all know, dogs, cats, trees, tables, human beings, men women, etc.: they come in different kinds. Noetic or dianoetic homogeneity refers to numbers, that is, multitudes of units or monads of the same kind: if we want to count seats, or humans, or men, or women in this room, we have to specify first the kind of unit we are using in our count. Both of these modes of cognition, sensible heterogeneity and dianoetic heterogeneity, presuppose divisions into, and relations between, different kinds, or classes, or to use the Platonic Greek term, different eide, that is, they presuppose noetic heterogeneity. I will quote Leo Strauss to sum this up: The "what is" questions point to "essences," to "essential" differences -to the fact that the whole consists of parts which are heterogeneous, not merely sensibly (like fire, air, water and earth) but noetically: to understand the whole means to understand the "What" of each of these parts, of these classes of beings, and how they are linked with one another. Such understanding cannot be the reduction of one heterogeneous class to others or to any cause or causes other than the class itself; the class, or the class character, is the cause par excellence. Socrates conceived of his turn to the "what is" questions as a turn, or return, to sanity, to "common sense": while the roots of the whole are hidden, the whole manifestly consists of heterogeneous parts. One may say, that according to Socrates the things which are "first in themselves" are somehow "first for us"; the things which are "first in themselves" are in a manner, but necessarily, revealed in men's opinions. 25 25 Leo Strauss, The City And Man,(Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1964), p. 19, and Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, (Cambridge & London: The M. I. T. Press, 1968), pp. 89-91. 14 �I find it comforting, comforting, but also puzzling, that with all these unusual expressions we have been talking about the "surface" of things. What might be called the sentence of Leo Strauss is about that surface. It goes as follows: "The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things." 26 I have found it instructive to think about how Strauss leads up to that sentence. It is from his book Thoughts on Machiavelli27: We shall not shock anyone, we shall merely expose ourselves to good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule, if we profess ourselves inclined to the old-fashioned and simple opinion according to which Machiavelli was a teacher of evil. Strauss then lists nine examples of Machiavelli's "maxims of public and private gangsterism." The central one is: "not virtue, but the prudent use of virtue and vice leads to happiness". Such maxims were said to be devilish. Strauss goes on: To recognize the diabolical character of Machiavelli's thought would mean to recognize in it a perverted nobility of a very high order. [He refers to Marlowe's remark that according to Machiavelli, 'there is no sin but ignorance.' and then goes on:] Not the contempt for the simple opinion, nor the disregard of it, but the considerate ascent from it leads to the core of Machiavelli's thought. There is no surer protection against the understanding of anything than taking for granted or otherwise despising the obvious and the surface. I leave you repeating once again, the final sentence of that statement: "The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things." 26 27 Thoughts on Machiavelli, (The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois: 1958), p. 13. The Introduction, p. 9. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 15 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Dialectic, virtue and recollection in Plato's Meno Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 24, 2010 by Laurence Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berns, Laurence, 1928- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-09-24 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/6849" target="_blank" title="Audio Recording" rel="noreferrer noopener">Audio Recording</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 78947 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/89939714668cf7f2c032c11f3cc8f894.pdf 9d6510c0d7df45dd44b3741e3012001f 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XL, Issue 07 Description An account of the resource Volume XL, Issue 07 of The Gadfly. Published April 21, 2019. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Pelham, Rose (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-04-21 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 student publication, Gadfly Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bc64fc32f195eb9bd5e77790cad33994.pdf 3860529b60ba05c679d0af4812203891 PDF Text Text ����� 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XL, Issue 9 Description An account of the resource Volume XL, Issue 9 of the Gadfly. Published May 7, 2019. Special Issue: Badfly II. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Pelham, Rose (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-05-07 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly Vol XL Issue 09 Badfly https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bcb2dc19e337d4540b0958acf5322a03.pdf 3578524a7f4422c2de06e6b051328076 PDF Text Text GADFLY Rose's Rager 4 • 02 A Fundamental Question? • 04 Joker Reveiw • 06 St. John’s College • 60 College Ave, Annapolis, MD 21401 • October 16, 2019 • Vol. XLI • Issue 03 Photo by Rose Pelham �The Gadfly 02 Rose's Rager 4: The student newspaper of St. John’s College 60 College Avenue Annapolis, Maryland 21401 sjca.gadfly@gmail.com Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the student newsmagazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus. Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gadfly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way necessary to publish a professional, informative, and thought-provoking newsmagazine. Submissions sent to the Gadfly should either be in Micrsoft Word or JPEG format. The deadline for submissions is the Friday prior to publication. The Gadfly meets every other Sunday at 7 PM in the BBC. We always need editors, layout designers, illustrators, and organizers. Contact us at sjca.gadfly@gmail.com for more information. Staff Athena Berreles-Luna • Co-Editor-inChief Rose Pelham • Co-Editor-in-Chief Mira Kobylski • Staff Rediet Worku • Staff Alayna Raymond • Staff Contributors Lynn Christian Jean Hogan Dimple Kaul Mira Kobylski Marielle Morley Kyla Murphy Rose Pelham Alayna Raymond Hope Taglich Tatum From the Editors: The Gadfly is banning all pretentious writings from publication. All submissions must henceforth be mortified least any lofty airs escape notice of the editors and enter publication! Authors guilty of submitting pretensious works will be required to self-flagillate and repent! This decision is final. - The Gadfly The Last Rager Rose Pelham A '20 It has been a long time since I began this series, the first of which marked my entrance into this college, and the last of which now marks my senior year. I have been through a great deal to keep it going this long. It seems uncanny in hindsight, but it was only two years ago when the second addition of this satire was met with public outrage for its reversal of trans/ homophobic logic. I mention this because I hope, with the intervening time, we may have grown enough as a polity to cringe with some embarrassment at the recollection. There was no need, after all, to be outraged by a satire mocking homophobia. Satire, at least as I have used it, is the great litmus test for prejudice. The transphobe and homophobe may pass me in the street every day without revealing themselves, but when I act out the absurdity of their arguments, I know the prejudiced by their reactions. There is no need to be outraged by the fact that transphobia and homophobia are absurd, but then, the question whether or not one is outraged has always been the litmus test. Now, I will administer it one last time… -1 The loss of the Patroclus Pre-Party was announced by email, much to everyone’s consternation, leaving me with no other recourse than to spend more quality time with my future wife––which was, as a general rule, very pleasant. That the pre-party should be called off for “budget cuts” at a moment when the D.C. runs an unprecedented budget surplus, however, bodes ill for clubs. Clearly, the D.C. has decided to subject us all to severe austerity in anticipation of the coming recession––or, perhaps, to do its part in bringing it about all the sooner. Either way, it seems we can look forward to one of those periods in which capitalism seemingly ceases functioning for all but the rich––its more or less usual condition––and more rapidly redistributes the wealth to those who already possess far more of it than they need, depriving those in need of what little they have. I wonder if this time we’ll realize it’s a pyramid scheme… The economy notwithstanding, the D.C. seems uninclined to part with students’ money, even when holding onto it jeopardizes its possession. Alas, the great surplus nourishes mold at the back of the refrigerator, having been left utterly untouched while it was ripe for consumption. But what other outcome were we expecting from the ad nauseum fetishization of fiscal conservatism? For all the schemes imagining how we might use this money “saved” from past years of students, it seems it will bear no orchards and no fruit––and no metal workshops either. But, if I had $30,000 in my pocket that I could actually use, and as much means of hiding it from public attention, I would not buy myself with scheming about it. Instead, I would make campaign contributions to members of Congress! After all, the Supreme Court says money is protected free speech, and it certainly �The Gadfly 03 speaks louder than the emails of constituents, since money, unlike constituents’ emails, tends to deposit the listener into the speaker’s pocket. So it is that a few very deep pockets hold a considerable amount of government, which has become increasingly cozy inside of them, and has vowed never to go outside again. (Woe be to the politician who has no pocket in which to make their home, for they shall be exposed to the wrath of their rivals in selling-out.) So it is that I would take up my civic duty and make my pocket a home to a politician, who I anticipate shall be grateful and willing to return me many favors––if not proper responses to my emails. But alas, this has become irrelevant to the Rager. -2 Rest assured, there came a point in the night at which I did, in fact, attend the Rager, so that I might convincingly write something about it, despite my tendency to become sidetracked. That point came sometime around ten in the evening, when I reluctantly departed from my partner’s side, and marched off to meet the inevitable head on. Walking up from back campus, I thought I was slightly late, but the freshmen––seemingly all men––remained by the observatory, giving the impression that they too had missed the moment of their departure and were waiting without end. I wondered for a moment if they would become sensible of their error. They never did, but if all events occurred in synchronized lateness, or if I were just earlier than I thought, it made no difference. The party proceeded according to its own time, which was sufficiently congruent with itself, if not the rotation of the Earth, the arbitrary contrivance of hours, or the desire to wake up early the next morning without a hangover. I was curious to know the freshmen’s thoughts about the Rager, but like any woman who generally prefers the companionship of the nominally same gender, not nearly so curious as to stay and hear them. The quad presented itself to me as a territory possessing a lower population of exposed male nipples, as if it knew that this were a persuasive enticement to emigrate. I did so, counting it lucky not to spot armed fascists in red hats at the border, and found myself in gayer environs, where I was informed––for the first time this year––that I am a middle-aged mom who drinks wine. About a week later I would be informed of this fact for a second time, and in about a week from now I anticipate I will be informed for a third. Perhaps then I shall adopt a child and age twenty years in one day. It would be, after all, consistent with the zeitgeist of a moment in which “alternative facts” exist and are treated as if they became truer the more they are repeated. The quad was, both in theory and practice, the place to be to observe events without the risk of taking part in them, and this brought a great many people there, since certain rumors had not yet proven themselves false. Tentatively, the original population of the quad approached the Rager behind the main force of freshmen, who were ambushed with balloons and speeches. The latter I cannot recall, not because how long it has taken me to write this, but because I forgot them as I heard them. In many ways, the balloons proved themselves one of the most fascinating elements of the party without ever possessing the requisite permission to be so. They popped off, frequently in large number and quick succession, emitting a machine gun rattle that reverberated out from the great hall and across the quad, echoing off nearby dorms. It was in this way that they projected their presence in Leibnizianly minute units of hyper-bombastic oration the summation of which would require counting to some indefinite number. They never quite became true white noise, being much too loud and infrequent, like ill-concealed sex in the middle of the day, which is private only to its participants. These intermittent bursts of explosive noise did not, however, anticipate the context they were broadcast into, in which guns possess more protections than people. This peculiar imbalance of priorities that grants murder weapons greater protections than their victims is frequently termed “freedom,” which its most vehement supporters say they would die to defend, though usually they are on the side of the killing, if not by direct involvement, then by complicity. -3 Sometime not long after the freshmen’s’ entrance, the balloon drop, and the subsequent speechifying, I remembered that I am 21, proceeded to the bar, and procured slightly less than a glass of wine. This I did for no other reason than to prove to myself that I could, and to experience the novelty of it. Around the same time, I encountered Mr. Doherty, spoke with him for a moment, and to my horror may have been mistaken for a heterosexual by an unknown passerby, who I had to forcibly restrain myself from correcting. I then left the building and was informed by Mr. Harrington that I had missed the senior class meeting, for which reason I discovered I was in imminent mortal peril, as I was in ignorance as to the truth of being a senior. Ms. Evans was at no point present in either of these conversations, but asked that I include her around this point, since she would not be in attendance at the Rager. After I did not have the chance to speak to Ms. Evans, I spent my time having conversations with other people––because I have resolved never to dance at parties, and to always do whatever loud music makes the hardest. This may appear to be a strange principle, but it is no less strange than any number of those upon which modern society is founded, as I have demonstrated already in propositions 1 and 2. This was, in truth, how virtually all the substance of my night passed. There were, however, other things that happened for which I was not present. For instance, I have heard a rumor, hopefully untrue, that one freshman decided to take a trip down the rabbit hole into wonderland, only to discover that his particular method of entering it led not to Alice but an ambulance. If this did occur, it was sometime after I left, and that night I slept all the better for my ignorance. As it is, the overly masochistic culture of last year’s freshmen, who seemed uniquely obsessed with cultivating cases of alcohol poisoning and accidental arson, has given me cause to be more anxious every time I hear sirens. (I will mention here in passing, though, that I do possess a surefire way of preventing the latter type of incident. It involves the threat of a trebuchet and has, I have been told, become infamous amongst this year's freshmen.) -4 I lingered on the quad, between clouds of those toxic fumes that are still so popular to consume here, waiting for one of those transcendentally strange moments that is the lifeblood of this series. None presented themselves, the novelty of my own experience having worn thin. I was left with an echo three times removed from the source, with all its rough edges smoothed by the loss of the distinct initial impressions. The great trial was two years over, and was now assimilated into my narrative, but for that reason could not be rediscovered, for to travel backwards is only to measure how far you have come. I left for my dorm room, to return to the comfort of home and homosexuality, where the warm embrace of Lynn’s arms awaited me. On the way back, I remembered the essence of my old “doom prophesy” and the not wholly untruthful quality of its hyperbole: “Repent: the end of gender (as we know it) is nigh! The great heterosexual phase of history has ended! There shall no more be cisgender man and woman! The spell is to be cast that shall make us all become trans! The straight agenda shall be rebuked! The gay agenda shall come to fruition! No more heterosexuality, no more opposite-sex marriage, no more gender reveal parties! It shall be glorious, wonderful, liberating––and all shall come to pass by 2050!” This time, if you take me too literally, or not literally enough, I have op-ed in the Georgia Voice waiting for you.u �The Gadfly 04 What is a Fundamental Question? Alayna Raymond A’23 There has been a consistent predicament in my life where I didn’t know quite how to tackle deep issues with relevance to myself. In simpler terms, I didn’t know how to perceive the world around me without being told what I should see because of who I am. I’ve decided to start a series that I hope will aid in parsing through my personal conundrums with the world and how our inherent human conditions plays into that. The Great Books Curriculum already does much of this for me, but I want to extend it beyond the classroom and not only develop a deeper internal thought process’, but also discuss topics with my peers that go beyond ourselves. I believe the Gadfly is intended for increasing volume in the student voice. I want to understand others thoughts with the selfish ambition of my own personal growth. I am also extremely curious, but aren’t we all? Moreover, I'd like to make this initial publication in my series entitled “Conundrums of the Human Condition” by first introducing the kinds of questions I want to ask. A tutor of mine referred to this particular type of inquiry as a ‘fundamental question’. His definition was not necessarily concerned with what it was, but what effect it has when you answer it. In slightly paraphrased form, a fundamental question is a question such that when you answer it “you will change the way you think or live”. How does thinking about something differ from it influencing the way you live? I propose that they’re not very different at all, since maintaining a particular mindset in effect tends to extend itself into the decisions one makes and thus the way we live. Though if answering such a question can change the way we think or live, what is the journey we must take in order to reach that point? Are there credentials, or is that too confining? Does the effect of reading through what I call the ‘fundamental answer’ bring about a universal epiphany for anyone whoever graces their eyes over the words? How do we know the question has been fully answered? That’s the funny thing about this: I don’t think we’ll ever know when we’ve answered the question. If you attend St John’s you probably knew this would happen. Socrates is in no position to tell us what virtue is so I am certainly unable to answer any sort of fundamental question to its greatest extent. The wonderful thing about work- ing toward answering a question is that it only induces growth within those who dare to take a chance. Settling on a finite answer may be the greatest injustice you can commit, because these questions have so much potential! You can allow the question to creep into daily life and enable you to change the way you live. Exploring options and changing habits is integral to going through life’s turbulence, so why not add another tool to your personal cache about working through difficult questions? This column is a communal effort to understand some of the many issues we endure with the human condition. Relieve the mind of some of these burdens by opening up to new paths of thought. It would bring me great joy if you contacted me about having a conversation about a fundamental question you have. u Reasons to Visit the Mitchell Gallery this month: Jean Hogan A’20 • The second quietest place on campus (Right after any given seminar room at 9:59) • Impressionism is a tremendous way to view of the majesty of nature while pondering Lucretius • Great place to hang in that awkward pre-lecture period (6:45-7:45!) • SJC can be a small school – you’ll get tired of the back campus landscapes • St John’s is a place to explore various patina’s, try a different vintage. • Patrons hot takes on the art are informative and scalding • Remember how gorgeous spring can be before snow descends on our little town • It’s much easier to look smart at a gallery than in class - the occasional “hm” will take you far The Gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12-5 pm, in addition it is open from 6:45 to 7:45 on Friday night.u �05 Music as a Spiritual Journey The following is a short piece I wrote for Mr. Townsend’s Sophomore Music class two years ago, and is to date the most memorable assignment I have had at St. John’s. It is an example of a musical experience we cannot anticipate but is novel in how we are affected. In this case it was a gauntlet to which I was initially subjected, but from which I emerged more whole and free. I hope that by sharing it, others will be encouraged to discuss their own profound musical moments. Specifically, not simply the way a song makes you feel, but how a distinct musical event caused a movement within you demarcating a before and after in your life. I hope you enjoy. Brahms Piano Quartet No. 2 in A Major, August 6, 2017, St. Francis Auditorium, Santa Fe, NM: As the soft melody of the third movement began, I was struck by a wave of melancholy. I was reminded of my recent shortcomings in personal discipline and compassion towards others. While I felt satisfaction in the quality of the performance, I couldn’t help scowling as a knot tightened in my chest. My mind wandered from the music as the prickly feelings stewed. The musicians continued to strain at their work, but I was removed from the setting, deaf to their notes. I reminisced on the times people had dismissed my approaches for friendship. I felt unwanted, unloved. Without realizing that the The Gadfly Morgan Ballard-Wheeler third had ended, the fourth movement began. The melody quick and light, the instruments played in unison, driving forward with a powerful momentum. I was immediately drawn from my shell of despair, listening intently to each note. I took a sudden, involuntary inhale and felt empowered to detach myself from unwarranted negative emotions. For despite intellectually telling myself to release these emotions every day for the past few months, somehow this music — and this performance in particular — finally gave me emotional permission to do so. My applause to the musicians was out of gratitude for their healing work, and to Brahms, wherever he may be.t The Blue Light Dies First Marielle Morley she dies to find life again but only manages to make faces at the indigestible licorice soul each piece as repulsively aged as a crunchy chewed up cigarette blowing clouds of shadows and smoke, crushing herself with weight on her shoulders, following her breath how did she expect to feel after all the travels through muck and soot, never to be clean again attempting to bathe but she will never be clean again the wet sunrise she tastes with the bitterness of an overripe melon, pungent and fermented to dry herself she finds a blanket but it only soaked each sadness as it highlighted the dirty and after hours of attack it turns in on itself retreating back into the floor and wall touching burned incense sticks lit to cover the smell of gooey sadness black and reeking like melted tar falling greedily into the crustacean pit the well that’s been digging since the first ever primordial rhyme holding out for each thing lost and forgotten as ancient as her thirst, drinking with lips pressed the white and pink meet each memory, a parasite the well water wells as she unravels her grievances it doesn’t matter what she’s seen in the sage of her oblivion there is a resurgence and the ringing doesn’t stop t �06 The Gadfly Musings of a Senior It is quite funny, and appropriate, perhaps, that through some four years of association with Mx. Johnnie at the college, I have watched them become more beautiful (handsome, perhaps) in proportion that I have become less so. Beauty befits them, I think, and I mean no belittling in this. Their comments are so oft well composed, and indeed come so seldom that they may well have been composed, that with the flowering of their handsomeness, the image of a wizening, maturing human, comes one of a mind doing the same. It is funny, then, for what wilting I see in myself comes too with a great and continuous shaking of my confidence that I, of all people, have the authority to speak beautifully of the program books, so often things so beautiful. Tatum It is as though beauty comes to those who claim it, that in this to strive is to succeed, and perhaps, to not strive is to be rejected. spirit in me that insists Although Mx. Johnnie’s example is eminent, four years have been an exercise in repetition, to watch the same follow suit for my peers about me. the last of a lineage with no equal in itself, As they are (or seem to be) subsumed to their own degree in thought and style, the dregs I brought with me have seemingly multiplied! making a coat of my past, and my reconsiderations of the same. A’20 I am the only ambassador of my past, a sole survivor of a world not quite another. If then I am lesser in my own heart’s evaluation, I think that I might yet be fortunate, On gloomy Sunday nights, I sometimes find myself daydreaming of other selves, as though from the image of beauty I could find for myself the secret of a soul saddled with it; to rise to the greatest height of my station— but it is a belligerent and persistent as my sister, my brother. t and if lacking in feeling the heart of another to count on myself A Beloaned Student’s Guide to Dining in Annapolis Maybe you’re off the meal plan. Maybe it’s 7 o’clock, and you don’t like eating dinner at the hyperbolic asscrack of dawn. Maybe you’ve grown tired of hotdog pizza. Whatever the circumstances that led to your predicament, you now find yourself standing on Main Street with $5 in your pocket and a need for an unreasonably priced meal. Without further ado, I present to you A Beloaned Student’s Guide to Dining in Annapolis. To save you the trouble and embarrassment, I have shamelessly slithered into many local restaurants and composed a list of the meals that can be purchased for less than $5 (keep in mind this does NOT include a tip. Tip your servers, Goddammit!) Let’s start with a timeless classic: Chick & Ruth’s. I will note that many items can be purchased at this establishment for under our meager allotment of $5, so for the sake of ef- ficiency, I will list my top five. 1. Colossal Fries - $4.99 (They offer a non-colossal version for $2.99) 2. Mac & Cheese - $3.29 (Found in the Side category) 3. Deli Potatoes w/ Chili & Cheese - 4.99 (Found on the All Day Breakfast menu) 4. Eggel Deluxe - $4.79 (bagel with egg and your choice of meat) 5. One Egg Platter - $4.79 Looking for something a little less eggy? Look no further than Vida Taco Bar. The following tacos are available for $5 or under. 1. Chorizo - $3.50 2. Pacifica - $4.25 3. Buffalo Cauliflower - $4.50 4. Jerk Tempeh - $5 5. Sweet Potato and Black Beans $3.5 6. The Gringo - $3.75 7. Tinga Chicken - $4.75 Maybe you want a restaurant Kyla Murphy A’22_ with more of an aggressive “chain” feel. Allow me to point you to Chipotle. Useful Hack: This restaurant does not ID for the kid’s menu! 1. Cheese Quesadilla - $3.95 (Found on the Kid’s Menu) 2. Build Your Own - $4.95 (Found on the Kid’s Menu) Another restaurant that does not ID for the Kid’s Menu (and it’s Maine themed! Dirigo!): Mason’s Famous Lobster rolls! 1. Kid’s Meal Hot Dog - $3.95 2. Kid’s Meal Grilled Cheese $3.95 3. New England Clam Chowder $4.50 4. Lobster Bisque - $4.50 Finally, take advantage of the many sushi restaurants around town. Sakura, Joss, and Nano all offer rolls for $5! Best of luck to you, hungry, beloaned students. t �07 The new Joker movie is terrible. It is not endearingly terrible. It is regular terrible. It is terrible because it tries so desperately hard to be great, to be a Serious Issue Drama About Mental Illness and Class Warfare and the Decline of Polite Society, but it fails because it is utterly hollow in every way. It aspires to be something without trying to say anything. It is the kind of film that people say will win Oscars. It is, indeed, a terrible film that might win an Oscar, transcending the honors normally afforded to comic book movies. As much of a film snob as I am, I do not find that possibility inherently objectionable; one of the last big-budget films I loved was Black Panther, which wholly deserved its Best Picture nomination. Moreover, I no longer have any faith in or respect for the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences after Green Book-gate, so now that I think about it, it really makes no difference to me whether Joker wins an Oscar. I loathe Joker so much, though, because to me, it is a shallow amalgamation of every Oscar-bait movie that has been made in recent years. Directed by Todd Phillips of The Hangover (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver), the film is a portrait of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, that man being Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix, whose performance affords the character the humanity and dignity that the writing deprives him of). In the Batman comics and in the previous films in the franchise, the Joker is a criminal mastermind. He is an agent of chaos, but an undeniably witty one; his defining feature is his intelligence. Phillips, however, seems intent on making this A Serious Issue Drama About Mental Illness. That is all well and good, except for the fact that Phillips and Silver sacrifice the character’s signature intelligence to reinforce the Joker Review idea that he is mentally ill. To them, a mentally ill person is simply incapable of being intelligent. And so they make Arthur a man-child of sorts; he is an aspiring standup comedian with no sense of humor whatsoever, who carries around a notebook filled with bad puns and who does research by taking notes at standup shows (these notes include “SEX JOKES FUNNY”). He lives at home with his mother and almost robotically repeats her assertion that he was “put on this Earth to spread laughter and joy.” His eventual transformation into the Joker therefore seems inauthentic. The character does not seem developed enough to undergo an organic transformation in the first place; he is written to be a Stock Crazy Person In a Movie, the kind of Stock Crazy Person actors love playing because it will win them an Oscar. (Or an Emmy; Claire Danes’s bipolar character on Homeland twitches, for some reason. Bipolar people do not twitch). Arthur is the only mentally ill character in the movie besides his mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), who is eventually revealed to have been diagnosed with delusional psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder. During Arthur’s childhood, Penny also enabled her boyfriend’s abuse of him; furthermore, she may or may not be lying as to the precise nature of her relationship with her former employer, billionaire Thomas Wayne. As Joker fancies itself a Serious Issue Drama About Mental Illness, it is therefore obligated to portray mental illness responsibly. The fact that the only two mentally ill characters in the movie are destructive to others exemplifies the persistence of fear-mongering stereotypes about the mentally ill. In the Department of Psychiatry and National Drug Dependence Treatment Center’s 2015 essay “Violence and Mental Illness: What is the True Story?” for the All India Institute of Medical The Gadfly Hope Taglich A’21 Sciences, the authors state, “In public perception, mental illness and violence remain inextricably interwined, and much of the stigma associated with mental illness may be due to a tendency to conflate mental illness with the concept of dangerousness. This perception is further augmented by the media which sensationalises violent crimes committed by persons with mental illness….and focuses on mental illness in such reports, ignoring the fact that most of the violence in society is caused by people without mental illness. This societal bias contributes to the stigma faced by those with a psychiatric diagnosis, which in turn contributes to non-disclosure of the mental illness and decreased treatment-seeking, and also leads to discrimination against them.” Through focusing on Arthur’s mental illness and the mistreatment he receives from society because of it (his undisclosed mental illness causes him to laugh at inopportune times, which often leads to him being beaten up), the film effectively justifies his eventual murderous rampage. After all, he was a Nice Guy, but then he snapped, because We Live in a Society that turns mass murderers out of nice mentally ill people. If only we were nicer to mentally ill people, we would have fewer mass murderers. This is an implicitly problematic assumption, because: 1. It reinforces a tired deflection tactic beloved of NRA apologists. (“We need to talk about mental health!”) 2. In the aforementioned study, authors Mohit Varshney, Ananya Mahapatra, Vijay Krishnan, Rishab Gupta and Koushnik Sinha Deb noted that the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of �The Gadfly 07 violent crime than perpetrators. 3. Moreover, according to a 2018 study by the University of New South Wales, mentally ill men are 76 percent more likely to be victims of violent crime than men without mental illness, while mentally ill women were nearly three times more likely to be victimized than women without mental illness. The egregiousness of Joker stems from the fact that the film tries to position itself as sympathetic to the mentally ill. It is not sympathetic. It is, at best, patronizing. It is just as ignorant of mental illness as the society it condemns. Its attempts at tackling class conflict are similarly shallow. After Arthur, in clown makeup (he has recently been fired from his job as a party clown for attempting to bring a gun to the children’s hospital, because that’s just something mentally ill people do, apparently), kills three bankers harrassing him on a subway at night, the clown becomes a symbol of the disenfranchised, disgruntled working-class. There are mass demonstrations in the street where protestors wear clown makeup. Arthur is a proletariat hero. This $55-64 million film attempts to be sympathetic to the working-class, but insults them by painting them as celebratory of a violent crime. The working-class in the film seem even more irrational because of the lack of dimension the class struggle is given; the audience is never told what the crux of the conflict between the rich and the poor is, we are only told that it exists. In the opening scene, Arthur—while working as a party clown—is randomly assaulted by a group of teenagers of color after they steal a sign he is carrying. The working-class are portrayed as impulsive and thoughtlessly destructive; Phillips and Silver feed into classist stereotypes as much as they feed into ableist ones. Most of the black characters Arthur encounters are either cruel or dismissive; aside from the teenagers who assaulted him, his social worker doesn’t listen to him, a clerk at Arkham Asylum isn’t even aware Social Services have been cut in Gotham City, his pretty neighbor doesn’t notice him, and a woman on the train snaps at him after he playfully makes faces at her baby. It is The Fault Of Society that he is this way, we are told; the film particularly frames its black characters’ lack of empathy as almost blasphemous. Not only are they unsympathetic—they have the audacity to be unsympathetic! Aside from its deeply flawed messaging, Joker is also highly derivative. It attempts to pay homage to better movies, like Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, with some flashes of The Machinist. King of Comedy in particular is continuously referenced; Robert de Niro plays a talk show host whom Arthur idolizes, and the host ultimately meets his deranged fan, to disastrous consequences. Too much of its plot, however, hinges on that interaction, making Joker more of a remake of King of Comedy than an homage to it. And if it is a remake, it is a spectacularly disappointing one. Much has been made of the danger the film may cause. Across the country, there have been reports of armed guards at screenings. Incels have called it “our movie.” As socially irresponsible as its message is, however, I do not feel as though the film is actively provocative because I feel it is too stupid to be provocative. It is provocative because a disgruntled group of predominantly white men online have anointed it as their crowning glory, and because this same disgruntled group of predominantly white men have emerged as a growingly fearsome presence, willing to hurt themselves and others. Independent of that context, it is a film that tries desperately to be provocative, but fails because of that very desperation. It wants to be provocative because it wants to be a film that is called provocative. It wants to be provocative because it wants to be Not Another Superhero Movie. The story is told with no particular care or affection; it seems curiously formulaic. It is a film that is made to be provocative for the sake of provocation, for the sake of winning awards. It is a failure, yes, but it does not even have the decency to be an interesting failure. t Initial Reflections Dimple Kaul From science and management She’s steered me to savour On the literary firmament The brilliance of Chaucer Her scintillating discussions Invoke Metaphysics and God My tutor for Literature Erudite Ms. Axelrod Widening my horizon Is what they’ve been at That’s how this Homer virgin Birthed an Odyssey Sonnet With a summery smile Beaming like a bright omen Our seminars in style Conducts Ms. Paalman Honour, grief and rage Served with a dash of fun Keeping us all engaged Is the Socratic Mr. Tipton As I study, not just read And further explore I am, with ease, freed To, my evolution, soar t � 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly 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 pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XLI, Issue 03 Description An account of the resource Volume XLI, Issue 03 of The Gadfly. Published October 16, 2019. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Pelham, Rose (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-10-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. 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 College students--United States--Conduct of life Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly Vol XLI Issue 03 Gadfly Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2245dede91fafb15975b14900a1bc6e5.pdf e2fe3ad97bb1d47441bd1e121c7fbc6f PDF Text Text GADFLY Intramurals• 02 Does music make a Sound? • 03 First Weeks as Freshmen • 04 St. John’s College • 60 College Ave, Annapolis, MD 21401 • October 4, 2019 • Vol. XLI • Issue 03 Photo By Rose S. Pelham photo by Rose Pelham �The Gadfly 02 The student newspaper of St. John’s College 60 College Avenue Annapolis, Maryland 21401 sjca.gadfly@gmail.com Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the student newsmagazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus. Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gadfly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way necessary to publish a professional, informative, and thought-provoking newsmagazine. Submissions sent to the Gadfly should either be in Micrsoft Word or JPEG format. The deadline for submissions is the Friday prior to publication. The Gadfly meets every other Sunday at 7 PM in the BBC. We always need editors, layout designers, illustrators, and organizers. Contact us at sjca.gadfly@gmail.com for more information. Staff Athena Berreles-Luna • Co-Editor-in-Cheif Rose Pelham • Co-Editor-in-Cheif Lynn Christian • Staff Cartoonist Alayna Raymond • Staff Contributors Lynn Christian Daniel Harrell Alayna Raymond Mia Kobylski From the Editors: To the tutors I saw dancing at the rock party at 10pm on Saturday night over Homecoming: Rock the f*#k on! It’s really nice to be reminded that our tutors are people who like to have a good time and don’t just think about silly things like Plato and Homer all the time. Plato sucks! Reinstate Grace Villmow 2k19! - The Gadfly A Freshman’s Inquiry into the World of Intramural Sports One often equates St. John’s with high academic rigor, a beautiful, historic campus, and old-fashioned croquet matches. However, one doesn’t tell new students about the way time passes strangely, axolotls living happily in tanks, or the possibility of a visit from a number of rumored ghosts. But perhaps the strangest aspect of the college is the unwavering participation in intramural sports. Similar to the fictional school of Hogwarts, the polity is split into five teams: Druids, Greenwaves, Guardians, Hustlers, and Spartans who compete on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays in a variety of games. While standing on the sidelines refereeing Reasonball and soccer, the purpose of intramural sports became clear to me. The sense of community at St. John’s stems beyond the Seminar table. Athletic background or not, each student is given equal playing time to make their mark on the game. Those who are apprehensive are encouraged by the captains on the sidelines shouting plays and praises. Mia Kobylski A’23 The sports culture at St. Johns is not one of competition and intimidation. The goal is to have fun while being physically active. Johnnies, such as myself, have fallen into the trap of sitting inside reading for the entirety of the day, but getting outside for an hour or two is proven to be beneficial. Just this past weekend, I had the opportunity to play Reasonball and soccer as a member of the Guardians. Win or lose, I made new friends and became better acquainted with people who are in my classes. Johnnies unfairly get the reputation of being less than athletic. Who says you can’t be well versed in Plato and also be a beast at soccer? Even on the field, Johnnies have the nature to think critically, drawing diagrams and questioning the integrity of plays. As someone who had never touched a soccer ball in my life and definitely passed to the wrong team, I felt welcomed. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of the experience was that we called each other by first names, a rare occurrence on campus. �05 Does music make a sound? The Gadfly Daniel Harrell Tutor One must make music to the point of identifying the melody obtain silence. with its movement—when none of —Vladimir Jankélévitch the notes in it strictly moves. What we hear, we might conclude, is a Does music make a sound? movement that happens not by the The obvious answer is that it does. notes but through the notes, in what After all, if it didn’t make a sound again means a relation between notes, then what do we hear when listening making what would otherwise be a to music? mere succession of sounds into the movement we hear. Still, I want to suggest that music makes no sound, and that what Or rather “hear”: since again we hear when listening to music is a it is the notes we strictly hear, making kind of silence. One reason for the the movement through them somesuggestion is that it is not what we thing it seems we feel more than hear. hear in notes that makes for music but Related to this is the rhythm we sense rather between notes. In this sense, in music, and sometimes use our for example, we could say that the bodies to imitate, as if it were indeed notes of a melody, just on their own, more felt than heard, in another sign would not form a melody but rather that music’s sense has more to do with be a mere succession of sounds. To silence than with sound. form a melody is to be a succession, instead, of relations between sounds, There is finally the matter of whether we conceive these relations harmony in music, where we “hear” as intervals or as dynamic quantities. consonance and dissonance. But again this is a consonance or disso Or to reach the same connance not in notes but between notes; clusion about a melody through a and it is only the notes we strictly different route: we might ask why we hear. So the consonance or dissohear movement in a melody—even to nance between them seems another example of feeling rather than hearing. But suppose from this we grant that music is not a matter of its sounds but of the relations between its sounds, and that these relations are not heard but felt. Still, why call these relations between sounds a form of silence rather than simply a derived or second-order form of sound? Sound that is felt rather than heard? I leave my answer in the form of another suggestion. To think of these relations as another form of sound is perhaps to think of music more generally as a mode of creation. But it is worth considering a second possibility: that music is actually a mode of revelation. In this second way of thinking, the notes are selected rather than created, and the relations between them abide, in a realm that cannot be built but only bid into being. And what we feel in these relations would therefore have the significance, in silence, of a world past saying. �06 First Weeks as Freshmen I conducted a survey among freshmen to find out some of their current favorite things at St John’s as well as how they’re doing in their first few weeks. These answers do not fully encompass how freshman as a cohort reflect on these subjects, but do provide some unique insights. The Gadfly Alayna Raymond A’23 Favorite Class? Favorite Tutors? Favorite Activities? 38.5% - Seminar 23.1% - Language 23.1% - Laboratory 7.7% - Mathematics 7.7% - Laboratory 1) Mr. Haflidson 2) Mr. Kalkavage 3) Ms. Sitzmann 4) Ms. Lee 5) Ms. Paalman 1) St John’s Chorus 2) Intramurals 3) Board Game Club 4) Sailing 5) Crew What books are you looking forward to this year? 1) Plato’s Republic 2) Any Aristotle 3) The Odyssey 4) Herodotus’s Histories What do you wish you knew before arriving on campus? “How many clubs and activities are unique to SJC.” “Just how prevalent smoking is.” “What fast food places do and don’t deliver.” “To bring more t-shirts.” “I would’ve liked to have known what my dorm room looked like space-wise before arriving.” What’s your favorite facet of the St John’s community? “The memes that are created from only things Johnnies would understand.” “Tutor accessibility.” “The amount of academic discussions taking place outside of class. Also, the tightness of the entire community. I feel like I’ll know everyone by the end of the semester.” “Everyone panics the same amount. Also the memes.” “How conversational and interesting each individual is... It’s hard to go a day at St. John’s without saying you had a good conversation with someone.” How have you been doing in these first few weeks? “I’ve figured out how to manage my time in order to meet the course load. It’s been easy to make friends in class, as we’re basically forced to talk to each other.” “The first few weeks have been a bit rough. Acclimating with a whole new group of people is tough, but the Johnnie community is very welcoming.” “I’m pretty happy. I’ve got friendly roommates, the food is good, and the classes are fun. Not much else to ask for.” “Horrendously.” “It’s been difficult, and I’m very tired, but I’m glad I’m here.” “I’m more busy than I’ve ever been and feeling pretty burned out, but I’m having SO much fun.” What surprised you about St John’s or just college life in general? “How open people are to talk about almost any topic and how genuinely nice they are.” “How fun and social mealtimes still are. I assumed people drifting in and out would make it hard to regularly sit with friends, but nope!” “The amount of partying. It intrigues me how dedicated some people are both to partying and their coursework.” “How people completely disregard personal hygiene” “Lots of smokers.” “Campus life is much more fast paced.” It is my hope that by reading what others are also thinking it will help you feel closer to your peers in knowing that you’re not alone in your experiences. So long as we maintain the support of each others personal and academic journey, this community will continue to thrive. - Alayna Raymond, Freshman. � 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly 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 pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XLI, Issue 02 Description An account of the resource Volume XLI, Issue 02 of The Gadfly. Published October 4, 2019. Cover is misnumbered as Issue 3. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Pelham, Rose (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-10-04 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. 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 College students--United States--Conduct of life Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly Vol XLI Issue 02 Gadfly Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/42ce7d76810f82172d8d68bd6fb06228.pdf d65692350d6db25dc9b8f8ebc98eeef7 PDF Text Text GADFLY Law in Matthew • 02 Reproductive Rights • 03 When the Teacher's not There • 04 St. John’s College • 60 College Ave, Annapolis, MD 21401 • November 6, 2019 • Vol. XLI • Issue 04 Photo by Rose Pelham �The Gadfly 02 The student newspaper of St. John’s College 60 College Avenue Annapolis, Maryland 21401 sjca.gadfly@gmail.com Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the student newsmagazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus. Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gadfly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way necessary to publish a professional, informative, and thought-provoking newsmagazine. Submissions sent to the Gadfly should either be in Micrsoft Word or JPEG format. The deadline for submissions is the Friday prior to publication. The Gadfly meets every other Sunday at 7 PM in the BBC. We always need editors, layout designers, illustrators, and organizers. Contact us at sjca.gadfly@gmail.com for more information. Staff Athena Berreles-Luna • Co-Editor-inChief Rose Pelham • Co-Editor-in-Chief Mira Kobylski • Staff Contributors William Braithwaite Mira Kobylski Rose Pelham Abigaile Petrich Hope Taglich From the Editors: The Gadfly hopes you have had a sober and academically responsible parents’ weekend. We understand the extent to which the presence of one’s parents encourages wild partying and binge drinking. We hope that by drawing attention to the issue, we may support more wholsome behavior. To that end, the current leadership promises to host sober events for the next parents' weekend. - The Gadfly Law in the Gospel of Matthew William Braithwate Tutor In a passage that Sophomore Seminar conversations often touch, or dwell upon, Jesus says, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill" (Mt. 5.17). What does Jesus mean by "law"? And why does he link "the law" with "the prophets" as a source of authority for those he is speaking to ("the multitudes," 5.1)? If by "law" Jesus means authoritative command, we could say that the first law in the Bible is, "Let there be light" (Gen. 1.3). God's power of command extends over the primeval chaos out of which He creates the world as an ordered whole (Gen. 1.1-2.3). This power is akin to Jesus being able to walk on water (Mt. 14.25), to calm the stormy sea (8.23-27), even to restore the dead to life (9. 18-19, 23-25). "I am not come to destroy [the law]" seems, at the very least, to mean that Jesus is not speaking about the laws that govern the physical order of the world. The Biblical account of the world puts God's power, and Jesus' power as His Son, above the power of what we call nature (phusis). As Creator, or maker, or author of the natural order, God is superior to it, as the potter is superior to the clay he molds to form a winejar. It is He who so arranges the material of the world that the heavy tends toward center, fluid unconstrained forms a sphere, and E=m times c-squared. We call gravity, Archimedes' postulate, and Einstein's equation "laws" of nature. But the idea of Nature seems to belong not to the Biblical world, but to the Greek world. Whatever Jesus means by "law" in 5.17, it is not "law of nature" as we understand that idea. Descending from the created whole to man, and his place in it, we could say that the first human law, the first law for human beings--as distinguished from those living beings we call "plants" and "animals"--is the prohibition, "Don't eat that fruit" (Gen. 3.3). This law belongs to the Bible's account of proto-man, mankind in the most distant past, known only through those orally transmitted stories some call myths. In Jesus' understanding, is prohibition the essence of law? Does the story of The Fall suggest that man is the animal that most of all needs restraint? So far, "law" in the Bible appears as coming from the Sovereign (what rules all), in the form, first, of a command ("Let there be light", addressed to the non-living things), then, later, in the form of a prohibition ("Don't eat that fruit"), addressed to one particular species of living beings, the human kind. This prohibi- tion is about what man eats, what helps sustain his body. Is the prohibitory character of the first human law, and its being a prohibition apparently about food, consistent with "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man" (15.11)? Jesus' claim that he comes not to destroy but to fulfill the law is made in his first public speech, called "The Sermon on the Mount," Matthew, Chapters 5 through 7. In the course of Chapter 5, he refers five times to what we may for convenience call the "old" law. "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill ..." (5.21). "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery ..." (5.27). "Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself ..." (5.33)."Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth ... (5.38). "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy ..." (5.43). The first three of these examples refer, respectively, to the Sixth, Seventh, and Third Commandmants found in Exodus, Chapter 20, the prohibitions against murder, adultery, and the use, or mis-use, of oaths. The last two examples refer to the law of retaliation (Ex. 20.24 et seq.), and to Lev. 19.18: "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ...." In the next installment of this inquiry, each of these examples will be examined in detail, along with the "new" law interpretations Jesus gives. William Braithwaite, Tutor u �03 On Reproductive Rights Lately, I’ve been thinking about my eighth grade health class a lot. My eighth grade health class was taught by a man we called Coach Ryan. He was also the gym teacher. He would eventually be fired by our school after our principal, Sister Cathy, discovered that he did not have a valid teacher’s license, but this was before then, when he was just your average Long Island Catholic school gym-cum-health class teacher. I remember we discussed pregnancy and the intricacies of the reproductive process in class, once. Our health textbooks reviewed the stages of pregnancy and fetal development; they were godless textbooks, having been issued by the district instead of the diocese, and so they made no mention of the immortality of the soul or of the sanctity of life or any other concepts that we were taught were of the utmost importance. I remember Coach Ryan reviewing the concept of a zygote, or a recently fertilized egg, and then growling: “Now the book doesn’t say this, but when does life begin?” Everyone was silent. “Conception,” he said. “You’ll get a lot of people, when you grow up, telling you that it doesn’t begin at conception, but you can’t listen to them, because life begins at conception.” This was something I repeated to myself throughout my early teenage years; I had doubts on its veracity, but I managed to convince myself that my doubts were due to the Devil’s temptation. I lay awake at night, profoundly distrustful of my own thoughts. I had not known any women who had had abortions, and—having heard indictments of them in church and at school on a regular basis—I was convinced that they were, at best, horribly misled, and at worst, evil. Moreover, they were determined to mislead me, too. I had this unshakeable fear that the part of me that doubted that they were evil, that doubted that life began at conception, would eventually take over and my descent into the abyss would be complete. I would become a monstrous latter-day Medea, who watched Girls and wore pink sneakers in solidarity with Wendy Davis. I feared that I would accept sin due to a lack of resolve and succumb to the wiles of Satan. I have. Well, I don’t own a pair of pink sneakers, and I have no desire to watch Girls. But I am pro-choice, and proudly so, and I would like to preface this article with an address to my younger self: Thirteen-year-old Hope, even if Coach Ryan had a proper teacher’s license, he still would not be a viable authority on what you can do with your uterus. Your uterus is a tabula rasa. You are entitled to complete dominion over your own body. When I write these words, however, I feel increasingly discouraged. They should be empowering; however, they ring hollow in light of a reality wherein women are deprived of their bodily autonomy more and more each day. They should be true, but they aren’t. Earlier this year, Georgia passed a law prohibiting abortions after six weeks, around the time most women realize that they are pregnant; shortly afterwards, Alabama banned abortion altogether. The 2018 appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court entails the possible repeal of Roe vs. Wade, which—according to Planned Parenthood—would cause nearly 25 million women to lose access to abortion. The most heavily impacted by the repeal would be black and Hispanic women. Texas law requires that women seeking abortions be first told that abortions cause breast cancer, a scientifically baseless and intentionally misleading claim. Finally, the Title X Family Planning Program—which provides reproductive health and family planning services for low-income individuals, particularly women—is at risk. The Trump-Pence administration has proposed a prohibition of abortion referrals; a removal of objective and nonpartisan counseling regarding pregnancy options (thus depriving a woman considering abortion of her right to informed consent); The Gadfly Hope Taglich A’21 and defunding of agencies that provide abortion services, among other comprehensive changes. Yes, one has the right to believe that life begins at conception; however, it is crucial to recall that “life begins at conception” is a belief. Its justification is strictly theological; therefore, it has no place in politics. There is no solidly factual basis for it. The argument against legalized abortion is rooted in theocracy, and is thus profoundly un-American. The separation between church and state outlined in the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment is a response to the insidiousness of such theocracy; its originator, Thomas Jefferson, identified largely as a secular Deist. (Moreover, if one wants to argue theology, the Bible explicitly permits abortion; Numbers 5: 11-31 states that if a woman has become pregnant due to an extramarital affair, she must drink a potion to induce a miscarriage). Banning abortion is also inherently abusive. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, “Reproductive coercion is a form of power and control where one partner strips the other of the ability to control their own reproductive system.” On a macrocosmic level, federal and state governments are abusing women. The right to choose is a human right, one that is violated more and more with each passing day; legally infringing on it is a form of reproductive terrorism that is heralded as moral by the likes of the National Right to Life, Kay Ivey, Kanye West and Donald Trump. In the face of abuse, it is crucial that Americans write to legislators. It is crucial that Americans donate to Planned Parenthood. It is crucial that, as a collective, we accept that a woman has a right to choose; pro-life individuals must acknowledge that their beliefs cannot be legally imposed on others. Personally, we can agree to disagree; legally, it is imperative to realize we cannot. t �04 When the Teacher is Not There Biology October 23, 2019, 9:10 am I walked into the classroom and immediately I could sense something was off. I didn’t know what it was at first, but something felt strange, a kind of lingering anticipation in the air. Then I noticed that the lights were off and an unusual amount of glee was present in room 340. It came to me in a flash-- Mrs. Hannahs, our teacher, wasn’t there yet. The thing lingering in the air was hope--that neither Mrs. Hannahs, nor a substitute, would come. If you remember your high school years, then you can imagine how elated we felt as it became evident that by some mistake or other in the offices, no teacher was coming that morning. We were like a bunch of balloons someone had blown up and let go to the skies. But of course, balloons ran out of air pretty quickly, especially when there are snitches in the room. “We’re not allowed to be in a room without a teacher,” said the sophomore who hates us because we are freshman. “Yea, we should go get a teacher. I can go. I’m like a teacher magnet,” said Natalie. “No! why would we do that?” everyone exclaimed. Nobody liked Natalie or the sophomore. You probably know why already, but I’ll elaborate. Natalie always found the biggest words to express the simplest ideas, I guess to feel proud of herself, but her answers made her sound ridiculous rather than intelligent. Most of us freshman were known for being rowdy and stupid--or fun--depending on who you asked. For that reason alone the sophomore hated us. Anyway, as we were dancing in circles and singing merry tunes, Natalie picked up the classroom telephone and prepared to call the office. I stood still, mouth gaping, shocked and afraid. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a football player, a Abigail Petrich Prospie hero. He jumped over chairs, slid under tables, and sprinted to the teacher’s desk, where Natalie and the evil phone conspired. When he reached the desk he furiously and repeatedly tapped the button that ends a call. The class cheered, and Natalie went into shock. Yeh!--the gods are just after all! But our celebration was short, because the sophomore and Natalie decided to walk to the office and alert the administrators of our freedom and delights. Like traitors, they were. Eventually, a teacher arrived to restore boredom in the room until a substitute could be summoned. He seemed just as unhappy about it as we were, though he did make us do our work. He even frowned at Natalie and the sophomore while the class booed its displeasure. I began to think about things . . .like what makes a person do that? The sophomore I understand--he did it out of hate. But Natalie? What did she gain? The satisfaction of pride? Did she do it because it seemed like the right thing to do? How can something be right, if it pleases no one and blackens everyone, including the doer’s reputation? And if it is the right thing to do, while making everyone miserable, should you do it? We warned Natalie that “snitches are witches who end up in ditches” (we may not have exactly said ‘witches,’). But she snitched anyway. We have been told all our lives that we shouldn’t care about what other people think of us. But why shouldn’t we care? Aren’t our consciences formed by other people’s opinions? So if public opinion doesn’t matter, what will prevent someone from doing much worse things than snitching? My dad said none of this would have happened if we had wanted to be there learning biology, with or without a teacher. I don’t think he understands high school. --Abigail Petrich, Freshman, Severna Park High School and prospective Johnnie t The Gadfly Hustlers v. Spartans Reasonball Mia Kobylski A’23 It’s Oktoberfest weekend – kegs and pumpkins are plentiful; a cool autumn breeze blows up from college creek and the campus trees are turning shades of orange. However, despite the pit beef and the fall flavored desserts, a group of Johnnies gathers on back campus for Reasonball. The Spartans and Hustlers warm up, tie their flag belts, and talk strategy. 80’s jams, specifically a Queen medley, radiates through the air from Oktoberfest, adding to the overall vibe. The game begins with Chris’ signature, “Let’s play!” Nine Hustlers and nine Spartans take the field. Within the first two plays, Hustlers make a touchdown, as the Spartans’ butterfingers cannot quite grasp the flags. During the middle and end of the first half, the teams struggle to find their groove and play is littered incomplete passes and rule debates. A young family passes by the field, and the children exhibit a great deal of confusion while watching the game, reducing Reasonball to some sort of odd flag football where players can seemingly pass to themselves. The second half starts strong for the Spartans. The team is able to catch longer passes and move closer to the endzone each play, resulting in a touchdown. The Hustlers also have a new energy coming into the new half, twice running the ball down the majority of the field. Each of these strategies seems to work for the respective teams. By the 10th play in the second half, each team is tired due to a lack of subs, but the fighting spirit still remains. The Hustlers score a touchdown after Spartan possession is intercepted to score yet another long run to the endzone. The Hustlers take the game, and the Spartans are defeated, a rare occurrence for the team. The start of the Reasonball tournament commences the following week with the Hustlers seeded first, followed by the Spartans, Druids, Guardians, and lastly, Greenwaves. Who will be crowned victor of this quintessentially autumn and uniquely Johnnie pastime? t � 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly 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 pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XLI, Issue 04 Description An account of the resource Volume XLI, Issue 04 of The Gadfly. Published November 6, 2019. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Pelham, Rose (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-11-06 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. 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 College students--United States--Conduct of life Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly Vol XLI Issue 04 Gadfly Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/23ddb62cc72a433a5cbeedef7aaea091.pdf e94a58f824b8a8e5a111c3d3c73f5ed2 PDF Text Text THE GADFLY Radio Address • 04 Law in Matthew Part 2 • 06 The Life and Art of Mary Petty • 07 St. John’s College • 60 College Ave, Annapolis, MD 21401 • December 2, 2019 • Vol. XLI • Issue 05 Photo by Rose Pelham �The Gadfly 02 The student newspaper of St. John’s College 60 College Avenue Annapolis, Maryland 21401 sjca.gadfly@gmail.com Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the student newsmagazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus. Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gadfly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way necessary to publish a professional, informative, and thought-provoking newsmagazine. Submissions sent to the Gadfly should either be in Micrsoft Word or JPEG format. The deadline for submissions is the Friday prior to publication. The Gadfly meets every other Sunday at 7 PM in the BBC. We always need editors, layout designers, illustrators, and organizers. Contact us at sjca.gadfly@gmail.com for more information. Staff Athena Berreles-Luna • Co-Editor-inChief Rose Pelham • Co-Editor-in-Chief Contributors William Braithwaite Lucinda Edinberg Chris Krueger Yunju Park Rose Pelham From the Editors: The Gadfly hopes you have had a restless holiday full of unfulfilled yearning and ennui in the face of the desire to be productive. We wish this as a curse upon the protestants and their work ethic, who arrived at Plymouth Rock, started a series of wars with their neighbors, and plastered over their violence with this past Holiday. - The Gadfly On writing an Open Letter to my Senators Just before the week of Thanksgiving, I wrote my Senators an open letter urging them to remove Trump from office through impeachment. At the time of writing––several days later––I still have limited knowledge of whether or not this letter will be published, and as to what effect, if any, it may have. Nonetheless, it represents a rather extreme effort to communicate with my Senators as to what actions represent me as their constituent. My open letter would be the fourth letter I have sent to both my senators on the same subject since the beginning of the impeachment inquiry. Each of these letters, or rather, emails, I have written individually and with great care to make them as persuasive as possible. I could have sent pre-written emails instead, but to do so would go against my sense of individuality and pride––not to mention hubris––as a writer. For this effort, I have received a handful of responses, all pre-written, and for the most part, all perfectly identical to each other. Only one reply–– which was no less a stock response–– had any tangential relevancy to my words insofar as it was a generic statement on impeachment. None of this has amounted to anything approximating a conversation, and it would be absurd to expect that there was ever a chance it would. We generally take for granted that our representatives have no time for our communications with them, and there is no lack of truth in this. How could one be expected to maintain a thousand individual correspondences across email with any degree of real attention? Even the assistants and interns tasked with the work only engage in it part time. A friend of mine, who has interned in the offices of politicians, tells me that all communications from constituents, regardless of medium, Rose Pelham A‘20 are taken by the politician’s staff, and converted into numerical data. This is common knowledge, or not far from it, but the substitution of data for words is worth considering as if it were more novel than it has become. Data is a great homogenizer, which can convert any quantity of distinct instances, each different in innumerable ways, into a number of repetitions of the same event. A flood of emails in this way becomes a representation of the relative balance of constituents for or against a position on a given issue. The words on paper, regardless of their meaning or truthfulness, are irrelevant except insofar as they can be converted into a number. This homogenization really does strip away the individuality of one’s communications in such a way as to make them one amongst an indistinguishable mass, and consequently, eliminates their effect as words. This was why I turned to writing an open letter. Public communications with representatives, in contrast with “private,” demand specific attention. This is in no way on account of any difference in the writing, but only because of their appearing in public, where they present themselves for all to see and, at least potentially, be persuaded. The only problem is that the opportunity to speak in public, or rather, have one’s writing appear there, is uncommon. This is not the same as writing on social media, which may be visible to a large number of people, but is never exactly public or private, but virtually always social. Rather, the primary way to appear in public, in a society as large as ours and where in-person community meetings are generally impractical, is through the news. The news, regardless of the medium by which it is broadcast, is truly the most public space we have, even, �The Gadfly 03 perplexingly, more so than the internet. Specifically, the news is our space of public appearances, since it relates directly with whatever is the most immediately relevant to its audience, which is all of society. For this very reason, it is where our political debates take place and opinion pieces disseminated, and not just the location where current events are written down for posterity. It operates as the center of a polis that is too large to have a physical gathering place at the heart of it. Getting into the news, even for one who already has a partial presence there, is difficult, if one aims to write it, as opposed to being its subject. Newspapers and websites tend to prefer those who are already known to their pages, since strangers are always somewhat risky: you never know when they might say something embarrassing. At the same time, smaller newspapers are becoming less common as more and more of them are destroyed for the profit of their apathetic owners. For this reason, it seems we live in a society where speaking in the public realm, as opposed to being seen in it, really is inaccessible to the vast majority––a rather peculiar feature for a democracy, if a commonplace one. In all likelihood, my letter will not be published, since one newspaper has rejected it already, and the other has not replied. In a few days, I will probably try again with a new letter updated to reflect the changes in the political situation and, hopefully, be more appealing to newspapers where I hope it might appear in print. The fact that I have a chance at publishing an open letter, and therefore subjecting my representatives to my public speech, is itself an immense privilege. It means that I may be able to engage them as an individual whose words matter more than mere data, in distinction to being one amongst a mass of indistinct constituents, as I have been. I wonder: what does it mean to live in a society where one must commit to painstaking effort in order to ascend to a political individuality in this way?t Yunju in Places - McDowell Great Hall Now, take a moment and think about it: what is the first image that pops into your head when you think about St. John’s College? My first party at St. John’s College was The Achilles Rager, which occurred in McDowell Great Hall. At first, I was not sure if some of my dance moves would be appropriate for Great Hall since there were these great men looking at me from their portraits. Only after I found that the reality already took care of it and covered their eyes with fire shaped post-it, I felt more comfortable being myself there. Last September, I went to my last Achilles Rage, finally, as a senior. There was a change in the wall of McDowell Great Hall: we got one more portrait, another beautiful, thoughtful, and intellectual person who just happened to be a white male. Whoever met our past president, Mr. Nelson, knows that he is so much more than a mere white male. I truly appreciated his work and his care for the community. Without him or other past presidents, I would not have been able to get the education that I am getting today. However, when he is next to all the other great men in the hall, it is hard not to notice the pattern in how these great men looked like; I am not the only one who is noticing it. One of my favorite parts of working at Admissions is giving tours. It is always pleasant to share what we are doing here and meet people who are as excited as I am about the program. For my tour, the last stop is often McDowell Great Hall. For me, the hall is somewhat physically, but also emotionally, the center of our college. It is where we lined up for the first time as fellow johnnies on our convocation day. It is where we painfully endured each other’s singing every Thursday morning, not to mention the beautiful moment of singing Sicut Cervus all together at the end of the collegium. I try not to forget mentioning each of Yunju Park A‘20 these moments to prospective students. Then they (usually not the kids but their parents for some reason) say ‘Huh! Lots of white men!’ They never say it in an accusatory fashion. It is simply what they notice. I tell them how they looked like is not the point here. The important thing is what they did and the community they built. Indeed, despite some prospective students’ concern on our program being too limited in a sense it covers only the development of “western” thought and there are very few non-male authors, St. John’s College is where I learned how to articulate why “the thing you just did was sexist and why I am not allowing that is happening in my life”. We learn and grow up by questioning building our own ideas with the help of texts. At the end of four years, what we are gaining is more the mere sum of books we read. Still, what they see does not change, neither what we see. It is something to think about. Merely looking at the picture of French Fries made me go to a coffee shop and get some between my 1 pm class and 2:20 class (I am not proud of that incident). Image matters; what we see shapes our thoughts. Now, what kind of thoughts does our current image of McDowell Great Hall bring us? What do we want to see at the heart of our college? What is the core of our community and what is the value that gathered us together? What do we want our college to look like in 10 years? Does the current image of McDowell Great Hall go with your answers? Whichever answers we have for these questions, we must be mindful that those images we put in the great hall have the power of shaping our today and our future. t �04 In recent weeks, substantial changes have arisen in the structure of intercollegiate NCAA sports. What might this have to do with our small but mighty college? Read on! The principal NCAA change is that participants in NCAA sports will in the near future be eligible for financial compensation for use of their likenesses etc. Previously, this had been forbidden, and there was much controversy about the restriction. Some considered it inherently exploitative for colleges to make millions off sports programs without formally compensating the athletes. The counter-argument was often made that the reason for the compensation restriction was to preserve the amateur essence of college sports, and that this essence was important, in part, for preserving eligibility for participation in the Olympics. This amateurism argument has, for quite a while, been clearly absurd, and anyone paying attention could see significant professionalization in collegiate athletics. In fact, around this time of year in 1938, St. John’s College President Barr delivered the radio address transcribed below which cited the professionalization of collegiate athletics as one reason why the college would be withdrawing from intercollegiate sports, despite significant accomplishment—including undefeated Radio Address seasons—in both intercollegiate football and lacrosse. I submit the text below in part for its relevance to the current events described above, but also because of the context it provides regarding the early days of our present athletic program. The Gadfly Chris Krueger liberal education in a democracy. The system of intercollegiate athletics which has developed during the past twenty years will no longer support the prime purpose of a liberal college. I suppose I ought to have foreseen this, but I didn’t. CerIntercollegiate Athletics tainly, there have been enough Stringfellow Barr, President St. Carnegie reports, enough magJohn’s College azine articles by candid writers Radio Address, Nov. 20, 1938 like John Tunis to convince men of my generation that we are I propose to discuss an sheer sentimentalists and ignoraimportant step which St. John’s muses if we suppose that interCollege has taken within the past collegiate athletics are the same ten days. Many of those who are thing we remember from twenty listening to me, including alumni years back. They do things better members of the College, will by now, with Rose Bowls, Cotton now almost certainly have been Bowls, and Sugar Bowls; with told by somebody that the Colcostly equipment, transcontilege administration has abolished nental journeys, and big money; athletics. Those who believed with costly coaches and costly this statement should, it seems quarterbacks. I knew all this. to me, be gravely disturbed. I The first thing I learned about think I ought promptly to disathletics on arrival at St. John’s abuse them. To keep the record was that we were booked to play straight, I shall therefore first our unnatural rivals—Army and state the facts. Athletics have not NYU—in an effort to keep down been abolished, but the College the high cost of modern athletics has decided that after the close by earning a good “gate.” But still of the present academic session, I thought it might be possible to athletic facilities will be inadapt intercollegiate athletics to creased and at the same time will educational ends, to pare down be placed on a strictly intramural schedules, to decline with thanks basis. such games as Army and NYU, I am explaining tonight and to protect the coaches from why significant changes have criticism if they lost games by been announced in the athletic refusing to hire athletes. I was system at St. John’s, to take effect mistaken. next September; but in explain The thing that taught ing these changes I am discussing me I was mistaken was what �The Gadfly 05 happened when intercollegiate athletics collided with a curriculum that really required work. Yet I should have known this by analogy. I had known countless students who withdrew from intercollegiate athletics when they entered medical or other professional work. They withdrew because they knew, along with everybody else, that you have to study to earn an M.D. while ordinarily you don’t have to study to earn a B.A. The undergraduate fills in his idle time with athletics, which at its most professionalized is a lot better thing to fill idle time with than some other things I know. But suppose there isn’t any idle time? Suppose there is just enough leisure time for healthful outdoor games? Then every athletic trip becomes a crisis and not what is known as an “athletic excuse.” For students who are really doing serious work know without being told that you can’t “make up” for something you should have learned but didn’t, by using the magic word “excuse.” An excuse may square you with the Dean. It won’t convert ignorance into knowledge. There is no reason on this round earth why securing a liberal education in an undergraduate college should be a less serious business than acquiring a medical education in a medical school. But if it is a serious business, then it had better steer clear of another very serious business, indeed a highly organized “big” business: intercollegiate athletics. For this big business has its own exigencies: those who won’t meet them had better keep out. That big business substitutes spectator psychosis for actual participation, cheering sections for playing teams, an orgy of sports-goods equipment for costumes fit to have fun in, large business staffs with longterm schedules for the old-time impromptu challenge of natural antagonists, monotonous physical drill for learning to play by playing, pressure from fellow-students for zest to play, the exhibitionism of star performers for the satisfaction of playing well because it is more fun to play a game well than badly. The sum total of these things is hysteria, lost motion, the death of the amateur spirit, and an athletic system that competes with study instead of supplementing and strengthening it. We have all known these things for years, unless we have been ostriches or Rip Van Winkles. But I repeat, they don’t prove fatal so long as undergraduate education is run in low gear. In fact, I should insist again that, so long as education is run in low gear, these things are better than idleness. But there is something better still, and that something is amateur athletics—amateur athletics of a quality no college can achieve so long as it is meshed in with the new kind of athletics, the big-business kind. The educational program now going on at St. John’s must have the support of amateur athletics. It must have it, because amateur athletics is rich in terms of health, recreation, skill, and co-ordination. To get that support, it will expand its intramural athletics. More varieties of sport will be offered and more facilities. Our colleges are often abusively called country clubs. I want to see St. John’s offer the sort of athletic facilities a good country club offers. Every game we now play we shall continue to play, except that the six-man football we started this year will replace the standard game. In addition we want to expand water sports, with particular emphasis on sailing. The alumni have already given us one sailboat; we shall acquire five more. A tutor with wide athletic experience will be placed in charge, but he will need a number of student assistants. To secure good assistants, we propose to offer athletic scholarships. In my own limited experience, this will be the first legitimate use to which athletic scholarships have been put by an American college. I think you may rest assured there will be plenty of excellent candidates. I hope you will help me find the best candidates. Sooner or later, I hope sooner, the present system of semi-professionalized intercollegiate athletics will hang itself. When it does, the problems that caused us to take our present stand will disappear. When it does, we shall doubtless play games with other colleges as naturally as such games were once played. Meanwhile athletics at St. John’s will be for the student, not the student for athletics. t �06 LAW IN MATTHEW’S GOSPEL, Part 2 The first part of this commentary (Gadfly XLI, No. 4, Nov. 6, 2019) began with Jesus’ claim that he comes not to destroy but to “fulfill” the law, and put as a first question what He means by “law.” In this part, I begin to inquire what he means by “fulfill.” I consider here the first two of the six pairings Jesus makes in Mt. 5.21-48, comparing the new law and the old (“what was said by them of old time,” v. 21, or simply “what has been said,” vv. 31, 43). The topics addressed are murder, adultery, marriage, telling the truth, retaliation, and love of enemies. What is the principle of order of this sequence? A preliminary observation: the last injunction, love your enemies, may be the most demanding. Cain did not love Abel, nor Jacob, Esau; so, too, with Joseph and his brethren. How can Jesus suppose it possible to love our enemies when we feel murderous hatred even for those from the same womb? (Cf. Augustine, Confessions, I.6-7, on the sins of his infancy). This list begins with the harsh truth that of all God’s creatures (Gen. 1.20-28), man alone kills his own kind not for food but out of hatred. It ends with the implausible proposal to turn human nature upside down: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” We may note in passing that this last item (love of enemies) has the same number of verses of explication and examples, six, as the first (murder). As to the third, fourth, and fifth items, two verses address marriage (31-32), and five are given to each of truth-telling (33-37) and retaliation (38-42). Jesus approaches the last injunction, that we demand of ourselves what seems impossible to achieve, through the five pairs of oppositions that precede. The first is murder vs. anger without cause. Old law: “Thou shalt not kill; whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment” (v. 21). New law: “whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment” (v. 22). Is it in anger that murder begins? Is it simply happenstance that the first human crime in the Bible is Cain’s murder of Abel, and our oldest Greek poem begins with the rage of Achilles? Is thumos, in all its forms and varieties, the primeval driving force of our lives? Dante proposes that those who lack it are not even worth punishing (Inferno 3.31-51). Aristotle suggests the spirited part of the soul has to be ruled as a father rules a son, by “chastisement and encouragement” (Ethics I.13.1102 b 29 et seq., Sachs tr.). Augustine, as a grown man, has a love-hate relation with the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic he was, as a boy, beaten into learning— an experience as hateful to him as learning Greek (Confessions I.13). But “those first lessons were surer…. [For with them] I acquired the power to read what I find written and to write what I want to express ….” Anger; spiritedness; thumos; the irrational part of the soul: whatever name we give it belongs to something we have without wanting or seeking, which we cannot live fruitfully without, but which is the source of our greatest crimes and may be the source of what we need for our greatest tasks. The second pairing is adultery vs. lust in the heart. Old law: “Thou shalt not commit adultery” (v. 27). New law: “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (v.28). Cf. Job: “I made a covenant with mine eyes; Why then should I think upon a maid?” (31.1). See, also, Inferno 5.124-38, where Francesca, after it is too late for repentance, learns that the “first root” of her and Paolo’s illicit desire for one another was their reading together a story about the illicit love of Lancelot and Guinevere. The commandmant forbids the action. Jesus teaches that the action begins with a seeing, with an itching of the eyes: “and from the roof [David] saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon” The Gadfly William Braithwaite Tutor (II Sam. 11.2). In Aristotelian terms, Jesus puts thumos as the first problem, eros as the second. For Paul, though, the primary problem seems to be the body’s carnal desires rather than the hatreds that fester in our souls. Indeed his words can strike some readers as coming from a man who hates his body. “For that which I do, I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I…. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing ….” (Rom. 7.14-15, 18). James, on the other hand, suggests that restraining our speech, that is, our angry words (see, e.g., Iliad, Book I), may be as hard, or harder even, than restraining our bodily appetites: “If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain…. Behold, we put bits in the horses’ mouths, that they may obey us; and we turn about their whole body. Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm, whithersoever the governor listeth. Even so, the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire ….” (Letter of James, 1.26; 2.3-6). Both the old law and the new law address a permanent dilemma of our lives as human beings: two powerful forces contend within us, and their war with one another gives us no rest. The only escape, according to Dante, is to live “without infamy and without praise” (Inf. 3.34-36). This is the life of cowards, those who deserve nothing, neither blame nor reward, because they never risked anything, in either love or hate. Christ the Judge says to Laodicea: “because thou are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth” (Apocrypha 3.1516). (To be continued). t �The Gadfly 07 This Petty Place: The Life and Art of Mary Petty The fall exhibition in the Mitchell Gallery features New Yorker cartoonist Mary Petty (1899-1976) and her husband Alan Dunn (1900-1971). Through the watercolor magazine covers, and crayon and ink cartoons, one can see how their work exemplifies the creative and pithy humor upon which the magazine’s reputation stands. Mary Petty began cartooning for The New Yorker in 1927, shortly after her marriage to fellow artist Alan Dunn. Dunn received training at the National Academy of Design and other venerable institutions, while Petty had no formal art training. It was Dunn’s encouragement that led Petty to submit her cartoons to the magazine. Petty was extremely shy, and it was reported that Petty was not personally seen in the New Yorker offices for several years upon first hiring. As Petty became more and more preoccupied with the upper class society who inhabited the brownstones and mansions that dotted New York’s Upper East Side, the lifestyle and attitudes of wealthy, ‘old money,’ and Victorian style society provided the grist for Petty’s keen observations. The life and quirks of Petty’s fictional “Peabody” family in this exhibition brings plenty to smile about. The dowager Mrs. Peabody and her obedient and spirited maid, Fay, appear in various rooms and activities in the city brownstone mansion and the country estate. Fay is seen sneaking off to try her skills at archery, dancing undetected in another room (while Mrs. Peabody plays the French Rococo harpsichord), distorting her reflection in polished silver, and other escapades of an era gone by. A sampling of Dunn’s cartoons is included in the exhibition to provide insight and context of his influence on Petty’s illustrations. While Dunn’s work focused on architectural lampoons and political/social satire, Petty’s humor was more attuned to women’s domestic and social issues. She created about 275 cartoons and 38 covers, of which two cartoons and 30 covers are included in the exhibition. Dunn was a prolific cartoonist whose creativity focused more on cartoons—2,000 of them--with nine covers for The New Yorker. Dunn’s skillfully executed works give witness to how little the gauge in civilized behavior has moved over history. Just like the drawings created over 75 years ago, we still worry about nuclear energy, too much “screen” time, money, and unreturned love. These works give us opportunity and permission to laugh about ourselves. The Mitchell Gallery was pleased to welcome former New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff as the guest lecturer for the Petty exhibition. His inside knowledge of the cartooning process provided an interesting backstory on Petty and Dunn and how they continue to be much revered in the cartooning world. Mankoff quoted Lord Chesterfield, “The vulgar only laugh, but never smile; whereas well-bred people Lucinda Edinberg often smile, but seldom laugh.” I hope you will see the exhibition, enjoy the beautiful artistry, laugh with a full heart, and change the world. An after Seminar reception will be held on Thursday, December 5 at 10 p.m. The gallery will be open and refreshments served through the generosity of Mitchell Gallery members Peter Bungay and Deborah Coons. The exhibition, which is on loan from the Syracuse University Art Collection, remains on view through December 15. Lucinda Dukes Edinberg Art Educator, The Mitchell Gallery Postscript: For those of you who knew the late SJC tutor, Mr. Elliott Zuckerman, a 1945 volume on Mary’s Petty’s work was donated to the Greenfield Library from his personal library.” t Mary Petty, Fay Trying Archery, “The New Yorker,” cover illustration, July 15, 1950. Watercolor and ink on paper. Courtesy of the Syracuse University Art Collection. �08 The Gadfly ACROSS PTOLEMY ON HORSEBACK With his hypothesis of uniform circular motion, Ptolemy can account for all the apparent changes of speed we observe in the heavenly bodies. According to this hypothesis, the unequal length of days and nights during the course of a year, and the unequal length of the four seasons, are geometrically explainable by supposing that the sun’s daily path is parallel to the celestial equator, but that during the course of a year, these 365 movements cumulate to describe a path—the ecliptic—that is not parallel to the equator, but tilted 24 degrees to it. This tilt explains the unequal length of the seasons (III.3). Ptolemy proves that the sun’s appearances (daily and seasonal changes of speed) can be explained by one circle or by two. One has a center that is not earth; it is “ek-centric” because its center is out of, away from, the center of the celestial sphere, which is earth. The other circle is an epicycle on which the sun moves, while the epicycle itself is carried on a circle, the deferent, concentric with the celestial sphere. As for the planets, they appear to change speeds in two ways, latitude (north and south) and longitude (east and west). This fact obliges Ptolemy to combine the two models by putting the planets’ epicycles on deferents that are eccentric. The combination is found to fall short, however, of explaining where the planets, at particular times, actually are, that is, in the zodiac (taken, here, to be un-moving). Venus, for example, is several degrees away from the place Ptolemy’s epicycle on an eccentric deferent would put it. The hypothesis (uniform circular) motion thus requires a further adaptation to what appear to be “the facts.” Ptolemy proposes a third center, the equant, or equalizing, point, as the center of uniform speed. The equant center is different from the center of the eccentric deferent that carries the epicycle. Ptolemy’s application of geometry to astronomy, his effort to find a nomos, a law, for the heavenly bodies, requires us to imagine four circles (or maybe five) and their centers. First, the center of the celestial sphere; for Ptolemy, this is the earth. Second, the center of the eccentric deferent that is the center of motion; then the equant center, the center of uniform speed; and also the moving center of the epicycle that carries the planet. His hypothesis, to fit all of what we observe, requires supposing that the planets stay always the same distance from two centers (that of the eccentric deferent and that of the epicycle), but that the epicycle’s uniformity of speed on the eccentric deferent is attributable to a different eccentric deferent, the equant circle. If the center of uniform distance (i.e., radii) is different from the center of uniform speed (the equant point), what is the relation between the distances and the speeds? If the movements of the heavenly bodies are indeed uniform, or “regular” (according to a rule), should not their apparent speeds be proportional to their distances from us? But without some unit of measurement, we can number those distances only rati- William Braithwaite Tutor ometrically (diameter, 120 parts; circumference, 360). Central to Ptolemy’s astronomy, his nomos of the stars, is his correlation of speeds (greatest, least, mean) with places on the circles of revolution (apogee, perigee, opposition). This correlation, of the phenomena of speeds and places, with circles representing the spheres that carry the bodies, presents the heavens as the place of an order that is both intelligible and mathematically beautiful. Are its beauty and its mathematical intelligibility somehow one and the same? Copernicus will call what Ptolemy has presented us a “monster” (Preface). He will show us that speeds “falsify” the order of the planets (I.10). But his re-arrangement, the heliocentric hypothesis, keeps Ptolemy’s circles, almost (V.4). Then Kepler will show us that the orbits are really not circles at all, but ellipses, and that in consequence, what matters is areas, not lines (i.e., distances). Today we take for granted the truth of what Copernicus and Kepler (and Galileo and Newton) have shown about the motions of the heavenly bodies. We might ask these questions: why did these discoveries require the work of 1700 years? And does Ptolemy’s demonstration that the heavenly motions are mathematically intelligible stand on the same level with his successors who worked out the mathematics more precisely? Why do we believe precision matters so much? Does number rule all? t � 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly 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 pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XLI, Issue 05 Description An account of the resource Volume XLI, Issue 05 of The Gadfly. Published December 2, 2019. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Pelham, Rose (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-12-02 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. 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 College students--United States--Conduct of life Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly Vol XLI Issue 05 Gadfly Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/66e952f1eeb582e4b966e43a1710d820.pdf 32ad6af2e8603b0ff8e19d79389f90c3 PDF Text Text T H E G A D F LY St. John’s College Volume XLI, Issue 06 Annapolis, Maryland January 27th, 2020 Letter from the Editor Looking Back on 40 Years of the Gadfly Page 2 News New Decade, New Delegate Council Page 4 Opinion On Campus Housing Page 8 Features TEDx premiers at St. John’s Page 16 Celebrating 40 Years of Publications �Looking Back on 40 Years Of The Gadfly O Written by Rose Pelham n January 1st 2020 The Gadfly turned 40, making it comfortably more than twice the age of its average member. Though 40 is yet a half decade shy of officially middle-aged, within the perspective of a student––confined more or less to four academic years––the origins of the paper are as lost to time as the name of the editor before last. (Though I do not believe this bothers Sebastian Barajas too much.) Even five years ago has nearly slipped into time immemorial, leaving behind a partial archeological record of old issues that may nonetheless be one of the richest accounts of student life through the last four decades. (The Gadfly issue dated September 11th, 2001 is blissfully unaware of the events of that day––an instant relic.) As our luck would have it, the original issue of The Gadfly––dated January 1st, 1980––survives, perhaps not in corporeal form, but scanned and uploaded to a digital afterlife on internet advice. In it, the founding Editor-in-Chief, Rick Campbell, wrote the original letter from the editor about why he decided to found the new publication. Forty years on, I believe The Gadfly very much lives up to its founding goals, which you may read in its entirety quoted below: 2 �Raison D’Être By Rick Campbell “Why do you want to put out another paper?” I’ve been asked that question many times in the past week. I believe there is a need for a newspaper at St. John’s. A newspaper whose concern is serving the entire community, not only a part of it. Serving the community means providing it with the information it needs on a timely basis. It means addressing the problems of the community in a responsible and critical manner. There are problems within our community. Sometimes they are brought out, often they are hidden. In the spirit of the free and critical mind our program is to develop, this newspaper will practice those skills we are taught on the best subject possible––ourselves. Mr. DeMartini, the polity president, has spoken of the problems within the student body, but that is only one problem. There is also a problem with communication between students and faculty. Some students get along fine with some tutors, but for the majority of us there is something lacking in the relationship. What that is and how it can be remedied, I don’t know. I hope that this newspaper will contribute something towards identifying the problem. The community is primarily the students and faculty. It is also our alumni. THE GADFLY is being sent to local area alumni in hopes of bringing them into a more active participation in the community. They have experience in the ‘real world’ which THE GADFLY hopes to tap to help our undergraduates with the period after graduation. I also have personal reasons for starting THE GADFLY. It is where I can practice writing, editing and organizing. I am an active person, not metaphysical. THE GADFLY is where I can act and see immediate results. This newspaper is also_ for anyone who is interested in journalism, satire, parody, etc. If you have an idea for an article but don’t want to write it, or if you want to write but have no ideas, let’s get together. For those who asked ‘’why,” this is it. 3 �News New Decade, New Delegate Council Written by Sophia Heimbrock and Javier Romero A Recently inaugurated president Andrew Hill and other officers at a meeting of the Delegate Council. Photo by Rose Zheng. s the new semester and new decade begin, the polity welcomes several new officers to the Delegate Council (DC), including your president, Andrew Hill (A21). The Delegate Council is an elected body of student representatives whose primary responsibilities include “the representation of undergraduate student interests to the Dean” and “the management of funds available to the Student Polity.” 4 A primary issue raised in the election was whether the representation of student interests to the administration should be the chief concern of the DC. Hill’s campaign centerpiece was to create an organization independent of the Delegate Council, whose proposed function would be to coordinate communication between students and the Dean, while leaving budgetary responsibilities to the DC. �H istorically, the DC has relegated the task of representing student interests to subcommittees within the Council. The Committee for Student Life (CSL), now defunct, dissolved and “quietly abandoned,” according to Polity Herald Sam Berrattini, was one such subcommittee of the DC that attempted to engage students in the political process, and to represent their concerns to school administrators. Hill suggests creating a system in which the student body would be able to directly participate “Bringing the CSL back as it [was] does not do enough. [...] What we really need is a body in which students can organize,” Hill said. To prevent a fate similar to the CSL, Hill suggests creating a system in which the student body would be able to directly participate. “Where the CSL was appointed by the DC, the student union […] would be voted on by the [student] body at large.” In short, the DC would not directly oversee the student union; rather, the union would be an autonomous organization. However, confidence among officers in Hill’s ability to fulfill his campaign promises is inconsistent. “I have some reservations about Mr. Hill not attending a lot of the meetings and not seeming to me as dedicated to the Delegate Council as Sera [Johnson] was,” DC secretary Lexi Morrill (A21) said. “And I think that goes to the fact that he was in a political position [in the Maryland General As- News sembly], which I believe he still holds.” Berrattini (A21) expressed a more favorable view of Hill’s tenure. “He’s always been more involved than the average delegate, and I respect that,” Berratini said. However, Berrattini expressed hesitance regarding Mr. Hill’s platform, saying, “His ideas seemed to me not to resonate with the general ideas of the Delegate Council.” His first step will be to create a committee to write a charter for the student union R egardless, Hill remains confident that the proposed student union will receive a stamp of approval from the Delegate Council. His first step will be to create a committee to write a charter for the student union. “I’m hoping that the people who will turn out are going to be the people who can really truly engage in the system with the best interest of creating a student union,” Hill said. “Next week I’m going to try to devote the agenda to the creation of this committee.” St. John’s College Delegate Council meetings are on Wednesdays at 11:45 A.M. in the Higgins private dining hall and are open to the polity. 5 �Features Room Inspections Planned for Over Long Weekend O ver the upcoming long weekend, St. John’s administrators will conduct room inspections. This decision is due to administration’s increased concerns about fire safety, due to the fire at Paca-Carroll House last May, and was prompted by Danielle Lico, Director of Student Wellness. “[The Room Inspections are] primarily about the fire we had last year,” Taylor Waters, Director of Student Services, said. “[Fire Safety] is the emphasis,” Robert Mueck, Director of Public Safety, echoed. Room inspections taking place over the long weekend is an attempt to limit disruption to students. “We will do a couple minute scan of the room, and make sure the power strips aren’t overloaded,” said Waters. Room inspections will maintain the current policy on looking through a student’s space. “We are going to be completely respectful to your space,” Waters said, and affirmed that students’ desks and drawers would not be searched. “It’s not about disciplining, it’s about educating,” Waters said. Waters intends to send an email communicating to students what administration will be looking for during inspection, describing the goal as to “give students the opportunity to check themselves.” “When I used to do [room inspections], I would hesitate to even enter the room. This is someone’s living space,” said Waters, laying out administration’s hesitation. 6 Written by Miles Johnstone “This is an administrative search. This is not us going in as public safety officers, as police…the goal is not for this be some invasion of privacy.” Mueck said. “This is an administrative search... the goal is not for this to be some invasion of privacy.” Room inspection of this nature would not be unique to St. John’s. “When I [worked] at George Washington University [and] the University of Maryland, that was done,” Murek said. Administration’s stated leniency does not extend to covering fire alarms.“That is really putting another student’s life at risk. That is one of the things that really gets a bee in my bonnet,” Waters said. “Thank god that sprinkler system worked,” Murek said, reflecting on the Paca-Caroll fire. Waters emphasised that students who covered fire alarms would receive fines. “It takes a lot of action to climb up there and cover (it) up,” Waters said. �R oom inspections will not be limited in scope to fire safety concerns.“The other thing we will be looking for is maintenance things,” Waters said. “Buildings “We will do it three times a year, two of them will be announced. One of them will be unannounced.” and Grounds [says to me], ‘If we had known [about maintenance issues in rooms], we could have started repairing two weeks ago.” Waters said. Features Another goal of the room searches is to take an inventory of furniture, Waters said, expressing concern that College property, like furniture, sometimes don’t remain in buildings. It is not only rooms that will be inspected. “I will be looking at hall things, like if people are storing bicycles in halls. So, I will be looking generally, in addition to individually,” Waters said. “We will do it three times a year, two of them will be announced. One of them will be unannounced, and that will probably be in the fall of next [academic] year.” said Waters on future plans for room inspections. Students will be subject to room searches over long weekend, but not to worry — drawers and desks will not be rifled through. 7 �Opinion On-Campus Housing T Written by Joe Cunningham he class of 23’ has begun reading Ethics, much is hoped for as to their moral improvement. One of the first things Aristotle let them know is to expect only as much precision as his subject matter permits. I would like to make the same appeal for the subject of on campus housing. The first big reveal is that the identity of the person with complete control of the housing situation is one Mr Noman. Power alley contains many decision makers who influence housing, but no one is all powerful. However, if it were possible for one person to be in charge of it all, it would be Taylor Waters, Director of Student Services. Here as well, St. John’s claims its metric is conversation. Ms. Waters wants the polity to know she is always listening. Based on what she hears from parents, RAs and students, she forms an overall idea of how each class is doing, and each year, the feedback informs a review of housing policy. Here as well, St. John’s claims its metric is conversation. Ms. Waters calls the backdrop to this ongoing process the “master plan,” which dictates that all students should live on campus, baring special accommodations. This plan has been realized in Santa Fe, but here the supply of housing has never been sufficient to implement it. 8 There is a ghost of a dorm that exists somewhere outside the tennis courts, which has been a part of the plan for decades. Scattered around the college, there are remnants of the historic housing capacity from the days when it was fully residential. The college used to own lovely housing donated for the use of tutors, which it sold. It used to provide student storage facilities, where now it provides a photon lab. Our small college has a big premium on space. On the maintenance of existing buildings Nathan Dugan, Assistant-Dean, refuses to paint a rosy picture of all needs being �Opinion addressed in two years, but Buildings and Grounds is performing walkthroughs to assess those needs. The concrete plan is for Randall to be refitted, and further developments have been mooted for the non-historic side of Paca-Carroll. pus housing is disproportionately expensive. There is also a note of caution to add to the argument that a community reinforces behaviours. Sometimes those behaviours aren’t positive. ow I think we’ve all heard rumors they do more hard stuff in Santa Fe. But in search of how housing policy might change the academic culture, talk to Mr. Dugan. He says that if students make it through the first two years of the Program, they are far more likely to finish it. The change in housing policy is to benefit these students. Mr. Dugan described how Junior Lab classmates have had time to figure out that they are all strugglingly horribly, but in Sophomore Language, however, students might not realize that they share a burden, if they live off-campus. Being present together supports behaviors like attendance, so there’s more immersion in the program, and the The financial reality is that most college students have to work, and on-campus housing is disproportionately expensive. N The admin … strongly believe the support of on-campus housing is necessary to lower attrition in the first years of college bonds between students grow. They get a more rounded idea of each other’s characters by spending time together outside of class. This vision of a deeper sense of campus community doesn’t feel accessible for all Johnnies. The financial reality is that most college students have to work, and on-cam- U nfortunately, there are limited possibilities for bringing the benefits of off-campus housing onto campus. Adding flexibility to the meal plan has been considered a number of times, and rejected as unfeasible, because for colleges this small food is a package deal. Ms. Waters’ conviction that the meal plan provides, in her words, “a good variety of delicious food” has been key to the housing decision. On the cheapness of off-plan food Mr. Dugan had this to say: “I don’t want to be paternalistic, but if we’re going to have people living off ramen, I’d rather it wasn’t the sophomores.” Ms. Waters added she was working to pass on the savings of triples to students, but as of now, they cost the same as doubles. The administration is aware of these challenges, but they strongly believe the support of on-campus housing is necessary to lower attrition in the first years of college, something which has its own set of financial consequences for students. Their assessment is that the supply of campus resources like 9 �Opinion work study, emergency housing and community mental health won’t be affected by the change, as the absolute numbers of students won’t change, just the proportion of upperclassmen on campus. Students are encouraged to come to student services for everything short of legal advice U pperclassmen who wish to stay on campus face a much tighter housing lottery. There is resistance to the idea of creating principles for selection that would influence the lottery. People are encouraged to come talk to the administration if they have problems with that. Those with disabilities are assured that they will continue to be accommodated . For those of you who do get the boot, Danielle Lico, Director of Student Wellness, has written a pamphlet about off-campus housing. Ms. Waters also points to resources such as a senior notice board, planned mixers and forums for rising sophomores, ranging from how to cook to how to file a tax return. For students who have problems with their landlords, there is another pamphlet on renters’ rights. Students are encouraged to come to student services for everything short of legal advice, as Ms. Waters has experience talking to tricky landlords on behalf of students. 10 I asked Ms. Waters and Mr. Dugan if they expected the sense of community they were trying to incubate to express itself in a more organised student voice, through the Delegate Council (DC) for example. Both expressed interest in the DC taking a larger role in the area of student life. They want students to take the initiative in leading the community they are trying to build on campus, but at the same time they are committed to letting this housing policy run its course. This last question was prompted by the Ethics. For if students are faced with a complex and fluid set of problems, Aristotle seems to expect them to turn toward the political science and think about the interests of their whole polity. Even if the latter can only be captured in outline. The Gadfly will be there to tell those stories. �Community Voices She Loves You, You Piece of Shit. Written by Hope Taglich She loves you, you piece of shit. She has pushed out your kids, And remained a size 6, And she has paid your bills and in darker days sustained your will to live And now we lay, having slept the night away, At 11 a.m. on a sunny day, Awaiting eternal damnation. You will go home, inevitably, In an hour or two or three And she will kiss you as you walk in through The door, and ignore that your breath bears the stench of manicotti And kush and strange pussy. She loves you as I do. They say I can do better, and that may be true; yet if I could do better, I don’t want to. I met her once. She looked at me, wordlessly, Dark eyes filled with defeat, and for a second I savored Her sense of inadequacy. I am twenty-three, and I revel in My visibility; I tell myself that one day I’ll be As invisible as she. She loves you enough to cede Piece by piece of you to me, and I love you enough to be At ease with a piece. 11 �Student Life Finally an Event That’s Not Sorta Bullshit F Written by Tamblyn Mitchell, and Elli Rees ull of eager energy, the Mellon dance studio was transformed on Friday as a mass of Johnnies came together to celebrate the student musicians assembled for the (semi) weekly untitled techno show. With the smell of cigarettes wafting in from the loading dock outside, the disorienting and mystifying light display, and a massive wall of sound provided by each performer, the individual attendees formed a sort of collective body, united in appreciation of music. The first act of the night was Last chance, lovingly referred to as “the Fe boys” by junior musician Rigel Turner, presented their “sad cowboy music” with all the passion and charm one could ask for. Their ability to move a crowd leaves no question as to why they have become regular players in the musical world of St. Johns. They were followed by the acoustic stylings of Zach Leveroni (A 20), who performed with commanding power despite his set consisting only of himself and a guitar. Ellie Gott (A 22) appeared next, playing a series of mellow original songs which managed to capture the attending polity’s attention more fully than any Friday Night Lecture. They swayed softly, seated or standing with many people in various stages of embrace. 12 Gott was followed by S.I.D.S. (Sudden Idiot Death Syndrome), the sole freshman-only act of the night. The band brought everyone back to their feet, the music radiating into the crowd, providing a hard-hitting, foot-stomping bridge to the more avant garde acts of the night. With Preswerve, Elaina Bowman (A 22) unveiled a multimedia “fever dream,” in the words of freshman Liz Dowdy, a thoughtful and impressive development from her projects’ debut and the Energeia launch party. Presiding over the whole evening were the techno party’s founders and final performers, Rigel Turner(A 21) and Noah Negri (A 23), with their own project known as “Spark.” The pair’s relationship has been entirely founded on music. They met as many Johnnies do – smoking cigarettes in the quad – and bonded over the experimentalist psych-rock group King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Turner described the live techno shows as emerging from “a certain musical quest, if you will,” but also as a natural progression of their growth as producers. In fact, their first partnership with the Fe Boys developed from their appreciation of the musicianship which Will and Kai (A 21) brought out into the quad while the weather was warm. �Student Life N “For as long as I have been at the college, all of the student-led events have been kind of by and for the purpose of continuing one certain faction of the student body,” — Rigel Turner egri and Turner have assembled an eclectic and diverse group of sounds to fill out their event, while incidentally developing a microcosm of artists who represent the mess of a polity at St. John’s. The techno shows have become some of the most well attended events in our community, perhaps because they represent, in the words of Turner, “the opportunity to get out and do a student-led event that’s not uhhh… I don’t know… sorta bullshit.” Negri “did assume it [the techno show] would take off,” after seeing the success of past musical events such as Laundry-Fest. What they couldn’t have known, however, was that they were creating an inclusive community drawing from all parts of the polity. “For as long as I have been at the college, all of the student led events have been kind of by and for the purpose of continuing one certain faction of the student body,” Turner said. “The techno show seems to have opened a space which provides for every type of Johnnie. There are no prerequisites – you only have to bring yourself.” 13 �Student Life Connecting, Fighting I Written by Silas Pillsbury, Staff Reporter didn’t feel like I had an understanding of things like courage or thumos, so I wanted to try it,” John Paul Asijah (GI) said. Asijah is an Archon of Experimental Philosophy, a club devoted to classical Greek culture in all its forms, but particularly relating to the warrior’s life. with stress. “Sometimes you know, you just get a little angry, and you can come out and you can take your anger out in a healthy way at Experimental Philosophy,” Kelly said. But beyond this, Kelly has a pitch for Every Johnnie has a different way of why you may consider joining. “When [you] grappling with the great books. Some have were younger, [you] wanted to, I don’t know, long discussions, some reread religiously, go be a knight or something, and [you] wantand others profess select ed to play with swords Sometimes you know, you and stuff. And there’s no program books as handbooks on how to live. just get a little angry, and reason why that should Whatever your method, you can come out and you have disappeared, somethe boldest of them all times you gotta learn to can take your anger out in a is to join Experimental play again, channel your healthy way at Experimental Philosophy. inner child,” Kelly said. Philosophy “Experimental philosophy was born of reading about classical virtues — specifically for me, it was the Nicomachean Ethics and reading about bravery,” Asijah said. A talkative, twinkly-eyed Graduate Institute student at St. John’s, Asijah was dissatisfied with just reading about martial virtue. So he “gathered some rudimentary equipment, and I gathered some people, and we started trying it! And people started showing up and asking ‘can we try too?’ ” Asijah said. Jack Kelly (A23), another archon of club, consistently attends. Kelly takes advantage of the physical nature of the club to deal 14 Experimental Philosophy meets weekly on Saturdays, rain or shine. They dress in historical garb, and practice historical fighting techniques. Equipped with foam swords and shields, they duke it out on the St. John’s green. Many of the members are just looking to have fun swinging foam swords at people, but according to Asijah, there are many lessons to be gleaned from the experience. “We have learned things about martial virtue I think one of the big things is — we’ve really drilled fighting as part of a phalanx; we’ve formed shield walls, we march as a unit,” Asijah said. �To an outsider, the aesthetics may seem ridiculous. Gallivanting on the lawn, they make quite a spectacle. Beneath the surface, however, there is something unavoidably serious about this activity. “We’ve learned that if you try to be a hero, if you try to charge ahead of the rest of the group, you’re going to lose — quickly. You have to work together. You have to sublimate your desire for glory into the group,” Asijah said. Asijah connects this lesson to his experience in class. “I feel like that’s also part of what happens in seminar. In my first seminar, I wanted to be like ‘everybody is going to think I’m a genius’. But that’s not really the purpose of seminar. It’s to arrive at new learning together. And what we do in experimental philosophy is just a physical manifestation of that,” said Asijah. But sparring isn’t everything they do. Experimental Philosophy has an interest in historical recreation as well. “Fighting is 51% of what we do. But a lot of what we do is we try to recreate historical clothing, we recreate historical food — you know bread and oil, I’m a big fan,” Asijah said. Asijah is so committed to historical recreation that he is attempting to grow an ancient form of wheat. Student Life “We’ve started to research historical grains — we wanted to see if you we can grow a little bit to make a more historical bread,” Asijah said. On the side, Asijah has spirits brewing. To complete the historical experience, he wants to taste the ancient wine so often mentioned in antiquity. “I’m a winemaker, I started making wine a few years back. I’ve actually started digging through and finding ancient greek wine recipes, and I’m getting grapes shipped to me from across the world, and I press them. I make it in the ancient style.” When asked as to the purpose of all this historical recreation, Asijah had a Johnnie style thesis. “I’m way more connected to [history]. It’s not just like ‘I know evolution happens, and bread is different now.’ It’s ‘this is what tastes different about the bread.’ Once you can do that, you can say, ‘Well what do I like better? Has modernity been worth it?’ And I look forward to finding out.” E xperimental Philosophy is rooted in an effort to connect with the past, to understand the trajectory of the human experience. Beneath the spectator sport lies a dialogue about the books we read, from where and whence they come, and how we combat the ideas inside. 15 �Features Lights, Camera, Λογος: TEDx premiers at St. John’s Written by Lysithia Page The first TEDx event in the history of St. John’s premiered on January eighteenth, 2020. Photo by Jordan West-Guzman. L ights dim. Cameras start rolling. Eyes stare at the stage in wonder – months of preparation had lead up to this moment. Hosts Avi Kumar, Head of Marketing (A21), and Ece Tuglu, Operations Manager (A21), began to speak. The first TEDx event in the history of St. John’s premiered on January eighteenth, 2020. Speakers were comprised of six students, three alumni and an IT manager. The endeavor was student-led and culturally diverse. 16 “Our organizing team [was] made up of six people, and [we were] representing six different countries. Somehow all of us knew about TED,” said Tuglu, who also held the title of operations manager. Andrew Hill (A21) and Rei Osmani (A22) were co-curators, Shweta Aggarwal (A23) was student speaker director and Yunju Park (A20) was the head of design. �TED is an American media organization which posts videos of speeches, or “TEDtalks,” online. The organization’s catchphrase is “Ideas worth spreading.” “The purpose of a TEDx talk isn’t to explain an idea, but to inspire using that idea,” Chris Liu (A22) said. As they were trying to decide upon a theme, the organizers emailed alumni and asked them to sum up their experiences at St. John’s. A majority cited their intellectual growth. As Tuglu put it, “The only constant is change.” In the end, the organizers chose the theme ‘On Second Thought.’ We had to make [our speeches] stop sounding like a paper, and start sounding like a conversation “Everyone in their lives at St. John’s at some point goes, ‘On second thought, I’m not sure what I said holds true,’ ” Tuglu said. In the words of Panayiotis Kanelos, president of the Annapolis campus, the event was about sharing “[a] culture of thoughtfulness and reflection with the world.” In his opening speech, Kanelos touched upon λογος, a Greek word with many translations, including “speech,” “account,” “reason” and “ratio.” Indeed, the sentiment of conversation as a means to speak about big ideas lay at the heart of the event. Features like a conversation,” Sylvie McKnight-Miles (A23) said. In her TEDtalk, McKnight-Miles spoke about the physics of time. P reparations for the event began in March of last year. Student organizers approached the administration to request usage of Francis Scott Key (FSK) auditorium. Additionally, student organizers had to make contact with TED in order to procure a license to hold the event. Tuglu noted that in previous years, students had discussed staging a TEDx event at St. John’s, but this was the first time they had been able to get the license. Next, the organizers pitched the event to the Board of Visitors and Governors (BVG) in order to fundraise, and received $13,000. In September, an email was sent out to the St. John’s polity advertising the opportunity to speak at the event. The organizers made sure to involve the Graduate Institute in this process, and also sent emails to alumni. Once they chose the speakers, each were assigned a “point person,” as Tuglu called them, to collaborate on the drafts of their speeches. While the organizers planned the timeline well in advance, everyone experienced the intensity of preparing for the big day. In the words of McKnight-Miles, “It taught me time management.” “We had to make [our speeches] stop sounding like a paper, and start sounding 17 �Features Before Winter Break, the speakers and organizers began meeting together to practice in anticipation of the day of the event. Speaker Justin Horm, who is the senior network manager at the college, would bring a loaf of home-made sourdough bread to each of these meetings. Finally, the day came. Volunteers arrived at 9:00 A.M, and audience members started trickling in around 11:00 A.M. In the lobby, Daryl Locke (A23) was commissioned to write poetry for guests on a vintage typewriter belonging to Javier Romero (A23). Reflecting on the event, Tuglu emphasized that because it was the first of its kind, Johnnies don’t just sit in their rooms and think. They go out into the world and make things happen it was bound to be a situation of trial-and-error. “No matter what you do, you’re going to fail so much. But that’s the fun of it. You learn how to fix things,” Tuglu said. Although there were mishaps with the lighting and clickers, student volunteer Aidan Durias (A23) asserted that these were all part of the process. Durias recalled how he had signed up to be a regular volunteer, but then started helping out with the projector. “I was being just as flexible and proactive backstage as I was in the lobby,” Durias said. 18 L ooking forward, the BVG has expressed interest in holding TEDxStJohnsCollege events in subsequent years. Tuglu was grateful for the amount of underclassmen who volunteered, and hopes they will continue to be involved. Liu remarked that by inviting members of the greater community of Annapolis to attend, what resulted was a celebration of how Johnnies interact with their surroundings. “Johnnies don’t just sit in their rooms and think. They go out into the world and make things happen,” Liu said. After the closing remarks, Tuglu and the four other organizers hugged each other. Audience members spilled out into the FSK atrium, and congratulated the student speakers and organizers. According to Tuglu, it was a surreal experience to meet people whom she had emailed months earlier to fundraise for the event. “It just [clicked] in my head, ‘yeah, this person gave us $2,000 out of nowhere,’” Tuglu said. The crowd soon evaporated, and the organizers, volunteers and speakers began to clean up. Elizabeth Dowdy (A23), who volunteered at the event, reckons they had been at work for eight hours. When there was nothing left to do, Tuglu took her shoes off and walked back to her dormitory in the rain. �Play At St. John’s Dear Polity, I imagine some of the Buildings and Grounds crew might have different opinions, but one of the things I love most about the winter and spring semester at St. John’s is how refreshing snow can be on campus. There’s a novel and delightful physicality to it—the soft orange glow of a snowy night, the quieting of all sounds, the satisfying shape of the first steps through freshly fallen powder. Snow smooths the world’s rough edges. These refreshing delights are not insignificant, but I don’t think they’re what makes the snow so special for me. What’s so special is what the snow does to us. Winter can seem long and dark. The buildings (and our bones) creak and groan in the cold wind. And spring semester, with its essays and plans for the future, can be an awful lot to manage. But when it snows, we slip and slide around. We become like children again, building forts and deviously crafting snowballs. We sled. We make fires and hot cocoa. We see the world like new again. When it snows, the whole world invites us to play. Psychiatrist Stuart Brown—founder of the lovely-sounding National Institute for Play—compares play to oxygen. He writes, “… it’s all around us, yet goes mostly unnoticed or unappreciated until it is missing.” One of Dr. Brown’s colleagues, Scott G. Eberle, says “play is a process, not a thing…it begins in anticipation and hopefully ends in poise, and in between you find surprise, pleasure, understanding—as skill and empathy—and strength Community Voices Written by Chris Krueger of mind, body, and spirit.” I believe that one of the finest aspects of our shared endeavors at this college is how the opportunity to play is almost always all around us. Most significantly, our academic program is quite in line with how Scott Eberle describes play: it’s a process that involves much anticipation wherein we’re often surprised, must empathize, and through which our full humanity is strengthened. Moreover, our distinctive location—the relatively spacious, open, semi-urban campus; our waterfront; our general location in tiny, strange Annapolis, with its gaggles of ghost-tour takers—these aspects of where we are invite play. And it’s the same with our lives outside of the classroom, with our wide variety of student activities and clubs, as well as in our sports programs. Here, opportunities for play abound, and what’s true in our sports programs is true in most other activities, too: you are invited and welcome to start to play whenever the spirit moves. If, this winter and spring semester, you find difficulty and heavy breath amidst the weight of the cold, the dark, or the thin air that can surround decisions about the future, remember what Dr. Brown said comparing play to oxygen, and this semester, don’t forget to get involved with something playful. Play board games. Invent your own game. Fill your lungs with a walk in the snow. Draw. Write. Come try a new sport. Just be certain to never forget how special our propensity for playfulness is, and always remember that, here, you’re always welcome to play. 19 �Student Life Working in the House where History and Charity Collide A Written by Lysithia Page day at work for Hannah Glick (A23) includes leading tours on floorboards older than the Declaration of Independence and making bean soup. Glick works at the Chase-Lloyd House, a national historical landmark and independent living facility for elderly women. Through her work at the Chase-Lloyd House, Glick has had multiple opportunities to engage hands-on with historical artifacts. Recently, for example, Glick was tasked with transporting an antique silver tea set belonging to previous resident Hester Chase Rideout. The house’s construction was completed in 1774, and not much has changed since. Chase-Lloyd house is an authentic example of American Federalist architecture and decor – complete with a grandfather clock and sword once owned by Horatio Sharpe, a colonial governor of Maryland. When asked why a mirror in the house was cracked, Glick replied: “It’s older than America” When asked why a mirror in the house was cracked, Glick replied “It’s older than America.” The history of the house even intertwines with that of St. John’s – one resident, by the name of Mary Tayloe Lloyd, became romantically involved with Francis Scott Key (A1769). “[Key] would write her poems, and she was like, ‘these are so cheesy, I’m going to make hair curlers out of them,’ ” Glick said. “And then they got married.” To this day, Lloyd’s portrait hangs in the dining room. (On the topic of any spectral residents, Glick responded, “If you believe in ghosts, most definitely.”) 20 “I had to move it the other day because the Women’s Auxiliary was like, ‘I don’t want this here,’” Glick said. G lick expressed gratitude for the variety of work she undertakes at ChaseLloyd, and additionally emphasized that the house management team is still hiring. Jobs are currently available in gardening, elderly care and historical restoration. As for Glick, she loves her work at the Chase-Lloyd house. “I get to feed my love for history, as well as serve the community and give back to women in need,” Glick said. �Student Life Hannah Glick (A23) points at a marble mantlepiece imported from England. Mary Tayloe Lloyd, wife of Francis Scott Key, lived in the Chase-Lloyd House. 21 �Student Life Featured Photos from the Energeia Launch Party Written by Lysithia Page Energeia, the St. John’s arts publication, held a party in the fishbowl on January tenth, 2020. “We wanted to give the polity the feeling that the art community is something that we can all work on. There’s no exclusivity, no prerequisites. We just want people to express themselves,” Adam Schulman (A21) said. Photos by Lysithia Page 22 �Student Life Sofe Cote (A21) designed stickers featuring mathematical propositions for the party. Daryl Locke (A23) emceed the event and published several poems in this issue. 23 �Co-Editors in Chief Athena Berreles-Luna Rose Pellham Managing Editor Lysithia Page Layout Board Cooper Ussery Shen Zhou Hong Staff Reporters Joe Cunningham Sophia Heimbrock Miles Johnstone Tamblyn Mitchell Silas Pillsbury Alayna Raymond Elli Rees Javier Romero Tessa Wild Rose Zhang Contributors Chris Krueger Jakob Stief The Student Newspaper of St. John’s College 60 College Avenue Annapolis, Maryland 21401 Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the student newsmagazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus. Opinions expressed within are the responsibility of the author(s). The Gadfly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way necessary to publish a professional, informative, and thought provoking newsmagazine. Submissions sent to the Gadfly should either be in Micrsoft Word or JPEG format. The deadline for submissions is the Friday prior to publication. The Gadfly meets every other Sunday at 7 PM in the BBC. For more information, contact us via email at: sjca.gadfly@gmail.com � 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly 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 pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 24 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XLI, Issue 06 Description An account of the resource Volume XLI, Issue 06 of The Gadfly. Published January 27, 2020. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Pelham, Rose (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-01-27 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. 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 College students--United States--Conduct of life Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly Vol XLI Issue 06 Gadfly Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7607905ff85baa1760422d8938d464a4.pdf a614349d924f3684fffdf6e80626dc3a 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XL Issue 02 Description An account of the resource Volume XL, Issue 02 of The Gadfly. Published September 18, 2018. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Pelham, Rose (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-09-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 9.18.18 v. XL Issue 02 Gadfly Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b6562d0fe4b73b796907a190e4eaf942.pdf 65aac36fa5ad49765536854b5a70d02d 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly 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. 4 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XL Issue 01 Description An account of the resource Volume XL, Issue 01 of The Gadfly. Published September 4, 2018. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Pelham, Rose (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-09-04 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 9.4.18 v. XL Issue 01 Gadfly Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/44bf6d763f2d264b87dae7f68bf395ba.pdf 68807ec5e938cd4fc633f7423499a4a8 PDF Text Text ����� 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XL Issue 8 Description An account of the resource Volume XL, Issue 8 of The Gadfly. Published April 27, 2019. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Pelham, Rose (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-04-27 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly Vol XL Issue 08 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/42d72f0c0082cdb9f9c7f7b3c3d4c063.pdf a824b47c12c21bf762e8a8d366b05a22 PDF Text Text GADFLY Freshmen Souls • 02 On the Gadfly • 03 Civility & St. John's • 04 St. John’s College • 60 College Ave, Annapolis, MD 21401 • September 3, 2019 • Vol. XLI • Issue 01 �The Gadfly 02 The student newspaper of St. John’s College 60 College Avenue Annapolis, Maryland 21401 sjca.gadfly@gmail.com Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the student newsmagazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus. Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gadfly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way necessary to publish a professional, informative, and thought-provoking newsmagazine. Submissions sent to the Gadfly should either be in Micrsoft Word or JPEG format. The deadline for submissions is the Friday prior to publication. The Gadfly meets every other Sunday at 7 PM in the BBC. We always need editors, layout designers, illustrators, and organizers. Contact us at sjca.gadfly@gmail.com for more information. Staff Athena Berreles-Luna • Co-Editor-inChief Rose Pelham • Co-Editor-in-Chief Lynn Christian • Cartoonist Contributors Kira Anderson Harrison Health Center Lynn Christian Bryan Jacobsen Rose Pelham Hope Taglich John Verdi From the Editors: Welcome back! Or, if you're a freshman, simply welcome! Don't worry, The Gadfly doesn't bite all the time. We usually just nibble a little now and then. After all, we do need a little bit of horse blood to reproduce and lay our eggs. Please enjoy these pages written by your fellow polity members––the gadflies amoung you. - The Gadfly Freshman , Freshman Souls This reprinted article first appeared in the Gadfly on September 2, 1982, and appears annually in our first issue. Without a doubt our athletic director, Mr. Krueger, is willing to stand in for the first person voice used in this article—and to answer any questions about our athletic program. -Ed. Bryce Jacobsen T A '42 he reasons, both physical and metaphysical, why everyone ought to join in our sports program are many. I list a few: 1. We have the best athletic program of any college in the country. 2. Exercise is good for the body...unless you sprain an ankle or something like that. 3. Most of us feel better, are more alert, and can get more work done if our bodies are healthy and our souls are relaxed. 4. Friendly competition is one of the really fun things in life. It is good for your soul. 5. Your circle of acquaintances will be greatly enlarged. This is good for the soul, provided you can separate the wheat from the chaff. 6. You will learn to accept, and bear with, thousands of split-second decisions from the officials, a few of which are wrong. This is very good for the soul. 7. Do you like to strive for, and achieve, specific goals? If so, consider our college blazers. They are much sought after, and the pathway is clearly laid out. Striving for goals is good for your soul. 8. It is probably true that the more pure fun occurs in the athletic program than in any other area of the college. Fun is good for your soul. 9. If you get involved in team sports, and become a “good team player,” you have realized that there are things in the universe that are more important than your own ego. This is a great good for your soul. 10. The benefits of exercise and friendly competition, learned while one is young, should be maintained for the rest of your life...i.e, they should become habitual. For virtue, as the Philosopher said, is a habit. 11. You will get to know numerous alumni, tutors, and staff members who participate in the program. This is good for your soul, or ought to be...provided that they are the proper sort of role models. 12. Our showers are the best at the college; always plenty of hot water. 13. Are you bothered by, or worried by, tobacco fumes in the air? Come to the gym. The whole building is a nicotine-free zone. 14. If you perform some sort of heroic deed on the athletic field, your name will be mentioned in our weekly column. Heroes are always acclaimed. But do not be carried away by this. Remember that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” 15. A high percentage of our best students are active participants in our program. 16. Those who play, stay. 17. The gym is not particularly well-equipped, as gyms go. But it has washers and dryers, and a coke machine...and I will explain to you, if you ask me, how you can get yourself in tip-top physical shape, without any equipment at all. 18. You can sit in an old-time barber’s chair in my office...you can pump yourself up and down, and adjust the slope high or low. Where else can you do that? 19. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. 20. It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. So there you have it: twenty good reasons why you should participate in our athletic program. If you are not convinced by all of this, come and talk to me. I can probably think of some more good reasons. Or better yet, talk with the upperclassmen. They will tell you all sorts of strange, interesting, and wondrous things. u �The Gadfly 03 On the Gadfly Rose Pelham A’20 Dear Polity Members, At the beginning of each academic year, we publish the first issue of the Gadfly with the following excerpt from Plato’s Apology on the cover: I was attached to the 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 up by some 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. (Apology 30e-31a) The tradition serves two functions. The first is to introduce the paper to anyone who is new to campus by explaining the origins of our name. The second is to renew our commitment as a publication to live up to that name insofar as we are capable. It is this latter purpose that is the more important, as it situates us within a historic tradition of critical dissent. The tradition of challenging authority and questioning the ideas taken for granted within public opinion (that is to say: of challenging δοχα) is something we should regard as essential to living freely. Today, we typically think of this as an element of freedom of the press, though, in truth, it is much more fundamental. The expression of dissent or critical social commentary is key both to social change (be it reform or revolution) and the maintenance of an equitable society. It is a principal means by which oppression and injustice may be challenged. Last, the way in which we go about it, drawing upon the example Plato gives us of Socrates, makes the Gadfly an intrinsically Johnny institution. The Gadfly is open to, and to a large extent relies upon, articles submitted to us by members of the polity––readers like you. We welcome the writing of anyone who wants to share news and new ideas with the polity: anything from student journalism and essays, to short stories and even poetry. There are relatively few restrictions on what can be published in the paper. Naturally, we will not publish hate speech, or articles that defame individuals. We also require that articles be sent to us either as Word or Google documents for ease of editing. That said, we publish the vast majority of student and tutor submissions, and generally want to facilitate the ability of polity members to share their ideas publicly. The Gadfly changes every year with the changes of the polity and the polity members who run the publication. Our readers have a substantial effect on our work as a publication, both through the feedback we receive and the articles you submit. If you want to change some aspect of the publication, the best way to do so is to work with us on it. In that respect, we can always be yours––our reader’s––the polity’s publication. Sincerely, Rose Pelham Co-Editor-in-Chief A’20 u An Appeal to Freshman Kira Anderson A’18 Freshman, St. John’s has no guidebook. We have a handbook, yes, but that exists to tell you what is or is not appropriate behavior in our polity. A guidebook, however, tells you what things are of interest and how you may reach these interesting sites. St. John’s has no guidebook, because truly everything here has a facet that will interest you. You may not yet know of your burning passion for improvisational acting or of your fiery dedication to your intramural basketball team. What interests you have now are limited to your experience outside of the college. Therefore, I am here to encourage you as a senior who knows that she has not experienced enough of the college in her three-going-on-four years; I address you as a student and as a club leader myself, as a lab assistant, and as someone who wants to see you succeed. Coming to St. John’s is a transformatory experience. You will learn many things here (and forget just as many perhaps), but I wish to impress upon you that this is a place of change. When you graduate, diploma in one hand and champagne in another, you will be a different person from the one who set foot at convocation and received a copy of Euclid. Of course, you will be older, because time waits for no one, but there will be a change of spirit as well. What you know and think you know before St. John’s are merely stepping stones. Thusly, I encourage you to take a full survey of what St. John’s has to offer, detailed to you by someone who has in fact already started panicking about a life outside of the Johnnie Bubble. I will present my solicitation in the form of a list, as pleases me and the average reader. “Listicles,” though universally despised, should be given the commendation of at least being succinct. 1. Join a club. In fact, join four or five, and when you realize you can’t balance them all with your class work and your burgeoning friend group and need for down-time away from people, drop your least favourite or least favourites. 2. Explore every building on campus (when they are open of course, not after hours.) I have personally discovered many of my favourite hiding spots by taking a Johnnie safari and trekking about for a while. Your dorm is interesting, I’m sure, but I dare you to try to find the illusive Gadfly office or determine the age of Temple Iglehart (the gym, for the uninitiated.) 3. Make friends with people who are different from yourself and your normal group of friends. This may be self-explanatory, but often the best friendships are forged in the celebration of differences. 4. Know your tutors. I did not have a meeting with a tutor of my own volition until the summer after my junior, perhaps sophomore year, and I know that now that was a mistake. I feared that tutors would think me stupid; I thought that I didn’t deserve their time. I learned, however, that I could not been more wrong. Tutors work at St. John’s because they love discussion and teaching, and every tutor that I have asked to meet with has accepted the offer with grace and kindness. 5. Know your administration and do not be afraid to speak up. This is a lesson I learned only after much experience at the college, and I fear it may be the most important that I relay to you. Know who you can report things to. Get to know who the Title IX coordinator is. Get to know the assistant dean. Meet our new President. Know your RA, and if you don’t feel comfortable with an RA, make sure to get to know one of our several (FREE) school counselors. If something occurs that you are uncomfortable with, report the incidents as soon as possible. College is a time for learning, and that cannot be done in an unsafe situation. 6. Enjoy yourself. You will hear from many upperclassman that freshman year is the easiest year at St. John’s. It is, however, the hardest. Coursework is different from anything you have experienced in highschool, and adjusting will be tough. Balancing and managing one’s life is also incredibly difficult. If someone belittles your problems with school work, saying that the year is easy, feel free to spit back some sort of biting comment like “Did you feel like being a freshman was easy when you were a freshman?” Or perhaps ask in a nice manner. My biased concept of communication is already quite evident. Along with this article worthy of a mediocre buzzfeed link, I also extend something else to you: words by which to live perhaps. This quote is now on t-shirts, and bags, and leather bracelets (which I will neither confirm nor deny that I own,) but I feel that it is nonetheless relevant. “Not all those who wander are lost,” JRR Tolkien reminds us. Freshman year is a year to wander, to discover and adventure. Ask questions and look stupid sometimes. Everyone does, even if they pretend they don’t. So, go out and wander, budding Johnnies. Try clubs and meet people and talk to leadership figures. Go and pour forth much. u �Civility and St. John's John Verdi Tutor In any community, but especially in a small one such as ours, a concern for civility, broadly conceived, ought from time to time to occupy a prominent place in thought and conversation. By civility I mean not merely a kind of public politeness (though I intend this, too), but also all the ways of twelve guidelines, principles or rules of civility, of civil discourse in particular. I think of these as beginnings to what I hope will become an extended public discussion of the forms civil behavior can take at St. John’s. (In fact, I’ll end these remarks with an opening question.) There should also be op- possible. The intrusion of authority into a discussion separates at least one member from the others, and thereby threatens the commonality of the enterprise. being a citizen in something analogous to a civis or polis. Civility at work is equivalent to good citizenship. Whether we think the College community is succeeding or failing in promoting civil behavior, it behooves us to reflect on exactly how civility and its opposite manifest themselves here. Our hope should be that with heightened awareness and dialogue about the very notion of civility, we shall find ourselves behaving in ways that further our common endeavor, that is, our own ongoing education in the liberal arts. Much of what I’m about to say will seem obvious, perhaps even platitudinous; but sometimes “the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 129) portunity to investigate whether or not civility is even all that important to our living together. I for one think that it is, but the forms it takes in practice may be perceived as varying widely, and some discussion of these manifestations could be enlightening. conversation (at least usually!). In this article I would like to propose—with little comment— 3) Civil discourse shuns reliance on authority as much as 1) Civil behavior is an essential component of good citizenship, and may even be equivalent to it. Civil behavior is an acknowledgement that the concerns of others have a proper place alongside my own. 2) Civil discourse is bounded. Participants agree, either explicitly or implicitly, to limit the scope of what may be said in a discussion. This is most in evidence in our classes. 4) Formal modes of address help maintain an attitude of respect and dispassion in civil 5) Civil discourse requires that we be prepared to put ourselves and our ideas at risk. In order for this to be possible community members must feel that they and their ideas and their questions will be taken seriously at all times. 6) In a genuine discussion participants attempt to find the maximum amount of common ground with one another. It is often the case that the continuing of the conversation takes precedence over the drawing of conclusions, however tempting such closure may be. 7) Civil discourse requires both sympathetic listening and engaged speaking. The former, which might also be called civil listening, demands that we listen with our ears, not our mouths. That is, we listen to find what is �best in what someone is saying; we thereby acknowledge that the other is someone like me. Engaged speaking is carried on with broad vision and with an eye on common purposes. 8) Such civil discourse opens up spaces for disagreements to be aired without bringing the conversation to a halt. 9) It demands that when we disagree, we not become offensive, cynical or silent. 10) To discuss civilly—and perhaps to be civil in general—I must be willing to place the goals of the community above my own comfort. For a student this might mean speaking in class when he or she would rather not. For all community members it means not insisting on being left alone when by participating I can improve the community, no matter how uncomfortable participation may be for me. 11) Self-governance is a mode of civility. At St. John’s the faculty tries to govern itself in many different ways. The Dean, Assistant Dean and Associate Dean for Graduate Programs are chosen from the faculty itself, and they serve for limited terms. At faculty meetings we try to discuss all manner of College concerns, from the Program and our teaching in it, to the plans for the new dorm and the place athletics has here. We try to remain vigilant about not allowing self-governance to erode, but we often fail to achieve our ideal. 12) Civility, as it manifests itself in discussion, requires that I recognize the possibility that what someone might say has the power to change the way I see. After this long introduction, I can now ask my opening question: How goes it with civility at St. John’s? John Verdi, Tutor u �What I Did Over the Summer Hope Taglich Over the summer, I worked orexia. A'21 eyes that flash when she gets excited as an intern in the compliance reg- My eating disorder began ulation department for a regional during the summer of 2013. I was bones. She seemed blind to the fact. home healthcare company in New about to begin high school and Through my observations of her, York City. I scanned files. I called had begun internalizing the idea of I learned to associate femininity patients and asked if their medical What I Was Supposed to Be. I was with self-loathing. To be a woman equipment was delivered on time. supposed to have twiggy arms and is a sort of cardinal sin, one that I was cursed out in five different a flat stomach and a thigh gap and must be atoned for through periods languages (English, Mandarin, to make myself small and inof- of fasting, fad diets and relentless Cantonese, Spanish, Russian and fensive and palatable and hot. My exercise. And so that is what I did. French). I befriended my supervi- mother never actively projected sor, a wonderful woman named Jo- her own insecurities onto me; I high school, I swam every day for selin. She was Dominican and from never remember her calling me fat, an hour and began calorie-counting Long Island (we grew up a couple really. I grew up hearing her voice compulsively. I lost 20 pounds. towns away from one another), as her own feelings of disgust over her Over the course of the year, I lost well as a passionate Francophile. body. I remember being nine years about 10 more pounds. It was never (She gave me a copy of Shari Ben- old and joking that, at holidays enough. My memories of high stock’s Women of the Left Bank, and family gatherings, the men school are memories of standing which I devoured). I stayed with always talked about politics and the in front of the mirror, pressing my my grandparents, which was im- women always talked about losing legs and feet together to check the mensely helpful as it spared me the weight. size of my thigh gap. I remember agony of having to pay New York rent and groceries. I performed at her murmur, pinching anything she one point, I was only eating about poetry slams at the Bowery Po- could pinch. Sometimes she would 700 calories a day. etry Club. I read Don Quixote and call me over. Death in Venice. I started kickboxing. I began a brief romance with a boy named Kwai, with whom I was stuck on West 34th Street on one midsummer night, during the city’s largest power outage since 1977. I cooked for the first time in my life (grilled chicken with paprika and pesto sauce, with some steamed lentils). I also recovered from an- “Look at how fat I am.” told me. I would compliment her, “I’m so fat,” I would hear about something and great cheek- The summer before I began weighing myself every morning. At “You look sick,” my mother I would turn my face away and she would respond with, to hide my smile. “You’re sweet.” My mother very seldom says “Thank you,” when came over and devoted much someone compliments her. She of their visit to urge me to gain seems to think each compliment is weight. “You’re losing your beauty,” nothing more than an act of charity. my grandfather said. My mother is a beautiful woman. She has honey-colored skin and sense of pleasure. I felt beautiful the rich hair and almond-shaped dark more I limited myself. Self-loathing Once my grandparents That brought a rebellious �brough a sense of catharsis for me. Beauty, I felt, was a reward. I would ment. After several weeks, I realized became that one thing a day. punish myself for existing by de- I did have a problem. I didn’t know creasing inch by inch of my surface if I wanted to recover, though, and the world did not implode. I area. It was like cutting, except because I was comfortable the way I did gain weight. I don’t know how that it would enable me to fit into a was. I wasn’t happy, really, but I had much I weigh now. I recently talked size 2, and a size 2 was skinny, and learned to dissociate pleasure from to a friend who told me I looked skinny was beautiful. I felt isolated eating during that fateful summer “plumper,” and for a second, it felt at school, and it became a repose of 2013, and I was afraid of the like I could barely breathe. He was for me. It was a source of self-as- weight gain that would result from a friend I had been open about surance. Even if I was unpopular, I recovery. recovery with. was worthy and beautiful. I became more worthy and more beautiful ing and feel instantly more deter- said. with each pound I lost. As I began mined. I gradually began to stick to to stress more and more about what the meal plan that had been as- a size 2 anymore, but my body is was going on at home (which was a signed to me. I was shocked at how mine. My high school mantra was lot), I restricted more and more. much energy I had; I no longer had a quote from Kate Moss—Nothing It continued in college. I worked midday energy crashes. I had been out even when injured. I ate very, struggling with depression over the very little. I neurotically calorie- previous year, and, with each pass- counted. ing day, began to feel endorphins come creeping back. It reminded tastes as good as skinny feels. Ms. Moss’s principle is incorrect. Emilie du Chatelet, the author of one of the first modern self-help books, On Happiness, states that in order to be happy, one must be without prejudice, passionate about various arts and subjects, virtuous, healthy and loving of oneself. In fact, Chatelet states, “One of the great secrets of happiness is to moderate one’s desires and to love the things already in one’s possession.” Moreover, in Descartes’s Meditations, the essence of human self is reduced to the purely intellectual: “I think, therefore I am.” The human body exists as a vehicle for the soul; the soul is the key to the human person. It is the source of its ousia. My body, therefore, does not define me. Society might care what size jeans I wear, but Descartes does not. u Over the summer of 2019, I Reluctantly, I started treat- I didn’t wake up one morn- began my first treatment program me of an unthawing. I had crip- (three days a week after work from pling episodes of dysmorphia, but I 6 to 9, Saturday mornings from stopped weighing myself. I began to 8:30 to 1:30). This was essentially want to get better. It was a terrifying thing to want, because I could not imagine myself without my eating disorder. My skinniness had been a cornerstone of my identity since I was 14. It is terrifying, but then you just do it. And it sucks, because it’s extremely stressful to eat three full meals a day. I hadn’t had three full meals a day in six years, and my meal plan also required me to have three snacks. However, a very wise refrigerator magnet once told me to do one thing a day that scares the result of an intervention. “I don’t have a problem,” I told Alethia, my case manager at the clinic, one afternoon in May. Alethia is a trained professional; she is not supposed to cast visible judgement on patients. However, I could tell that she smelled bullshit. “Seriously, I don’t.” She asked me to describe my eating habits to her, and I told her. It was apparent, then, that according to Alethia, I definitely had a problem. me, and being meal plan-compliant I had three meals a day, “It looks good on you,” he And so it does. I am not �The Gadfly 04 Is it Time to QUIT? The Harrison Health Center is here for you. We offer 1:1 nicotine cessation services and FREE nicotine patches, gum, and lozenges. Call the Health Center at (410)626-2553 or email healthcenter@sjc.edu to take the first step toward a healthier you. � 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly 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 pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, Vol. XLI, Issue 01 Description An account of the resource Volume XLI, Issue 01 of The Gadfly. Published September 3, 2019. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Pelham, Rose (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-09-03 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly Vol XLI Issue 01 09-03-2019 Gadfly Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b55e3b53a71a230c68232ee5a688288b.pdf 20848ef762e13b8b7fe3d591cef0ebdc PDF Text Text Photo by Rose Pelham �The BAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaadfly 02 The Dreams of Drumpland I began compiling other people’s dreams in late 2019, as the slide into the historical era we have just exited was becoming inevitable due to the discovery––by certain politicians–– that even things which are blatantly true can be contested, if only one bands together with enough fellow deniers of reality. With this discovery, it became possible to justify eliminating the ultimate check against the abuse of power, by transforming a trial into a political contest. Consequently, the only check that remained was that of the following election, which was to have its integrity defended by an entirely depopulated Federal Election Commission, and utterly no protection against hacking to speak of, since this, too, proved politically inconvenient. What necessarily followed could be easily guessed at by any careful observer of the times, but nonetheless looked too much like something out of dystopian fiction for us to believe what we were seeing. I compiled dreams until 2023, when I had to flee the country. With the recent collapse of the regime, I have finally been able to publish my collection to be read in its country of origin, where it should appear early next year. The following is a set of dreams excerpted from The Dreams of Drumpfland in chronological order, which my publisher, AK Press, hopes will stimulate interest in my book. -- The dream of a conscripted soldier: I was in the conference room [of the army base] and “the Miller” ––as we called him––had come from the WH to give a very important lecture. A fellow private leaned over and said to me: “I’m very shy, but could you ask for me how many wives does he have?” Incredulous and a little nervous, I repeated, “How many wives?” “Yes, that’s the right question.” At this point, “the Miller,” carefully feeding wheat into the left ear of a soldier, which was excreted as a white powder from the right, overheard us, and turned to address me, saying, “I have twelve wives to protect against the threat of replacement! Do you not have twelve wives!?” “I have no wives,” I said, feeling the snickering gaze of the other conscripts upon me, as if I alone were ignorant of some essential fact. To this he replied: “you are supposed to have as many wives as possible! Everyone knows we must be able to out reproduce our enemies! It is the destiny of our nation that we emerge from the deep mines with the largest population so we may conquer the Earth!! If you don’t have enough wives, I can’t guarantee you a place in the mineshaft when the war comes! Don’t you want us to out reproduce our enemies!? DO YOU STAND BETWEEN US AND OUR NATIONAL DESTINY!?” At this point, I woke up, terrified I may have shouted in my sleep. -- A college student’s nightmare: I was about to take my final exam, which would decide whether or not I graduated. I was certain I was ready for it. After the customary anti-cheating precautions/rituals (including all manner of searches and warnings against even so much as using your own watch or seeing with the aid of your own, non-standard testing-center issued, glasses) we were told that the test would begin. But first, we each had to swear allegiance to the flag, individually, to make sure we were loyal citizens. One by one, each of my classmates pledged allegiance to the flag, our leader’s twelve fertile wives, and the great, heterosexual Marlon Bundo––but when the proctor reached me, I couldn’t speak. Gasping, she shouted: “WE FOUND THE WITCH!” The testing room was full of security guards, who each immediately pledged allegiance to our national trinity, lest they be suspected of my heresy. I was then taken down the hall to another room, sat down in a chair, and given a test on my knowledge of alternative facts. The first question asked: “which is truer: a) 2 + 2 = 4, or b) 1 + 1 + 1 = 3?” -- An office worker’s dream: The desert militiamen wore nothing but leather and red hats and drove around in spiky dune buggies that kicked up clouds of dust. I could hear them shouting “PEACE ON EARTH! PURTY OF ESSENCE!” in the distance. It was their purpose to guard the nationally important deep mineshafts from boarder infiltration. All along the way to the mineshafts, I left bottles of water on the trail behind me, so I could find my way back by the spaces they were no longer in once other people took them. It was very important to leave bottles of water on the trail, but I could not remember why, until I was stopped and interrogated by a block of very cold salt. Then I remembered and used the warm water to dissolve the salt and run away. But the militiamen saw me, for the salt signaled my location to them in the agony of its dissolution. But just then, I caught sight of my friends, who would help me escape! (How did I know they were my friends?!) I was on the cusp of reaching them when the militiamen in leather and red hats caught me. I was taken down into the mineshafts to be interrogated. A strange machine with many wires was attached to my head, so they could see what I was thinking. They saw that I was dreaming, and that in my dream I was being interrogated by them with just this machine. They said that was good, and that I could wake up now, but I kept on dreaming, which they said was bad, because I meant I was disobedient. Then I woke up. �20 The BaRdfly largest New report concludes Johnnies to be TAM O’SHANTER, ts ha er pp da STAFF REPORTER consumer of The results are in – a new report by the Annapolis Headgear Society concludes that Johnnies form the core consumer group for dapper hats. Local hat vendors described a significant increase in sales directly proportional to the tuition drop. As one student noted, “less debt, more hats.” Economics aside, however, hat enthusiasts have described an almost spiritual connection to the cranial attire of the community. brimless, felt cap worn in Illyria, Etruria, Ancient Greece, Pannonia and surrounding regions. “Welcome to the only place on Earth where nineteen year-olds know that,” sophomore Ray Goolar-Guy said. “Also, I’ve stopped keeping count of the fedoras.” Both students and administrators remarked that hats are at the core of the campus culture. “We really celebrate diversity,” director Jess Sayin said. “There are pork pies, bowlers, berets, tricorns and even a coonskin or two.” “I saw someone walk around wearing basketball shorts and a Greek helmet,” This point of pride even holds significance local hat historian Costard Coverage in the playful competition between students said. “I knew I had found home.” Dr. Cov- at St. John’s and the Naval Academy. “A miderage is the author of The Phenomenology of Cephalic Apparel, to be released by Harvard University Press in Fall 2020. “We’re intellectuals,” sophomore Prett Enshis said. “What more is there to say?” Enshis then launched into a ten minute oration on the virtues of the pileus, a Gadfly Publishes News Article for Once Spector Cockroach FINALLY Graduates!!! Clad in top hat and festive scarf, Freshman Leo Brooks ponders the epistemological meaning of Book 1 of Euclid’s Elements whilst smoking a cigarette. �Johnnies Anger Gods After Not Pouring Libations From Last Mint Pod On Campus 52 Tutor Spends Entire Class Defending Lifestyle as Straussian The BangFly �The BOOMfly 00 This Actor Had Their Shirt On Wrong the Whole Play! Here Are 10 Other Mishaps You Missed in The Shape of Things. sks Johnnie chairs to be dethroned by standing de Students vying for a seat at the table need not fret– soon there won’t be any to covet. Citing budget cuts and health concerns about sedentary lifestyles, college administrators have decided to do away with the time-honored Johnnie chair in favor of…nothing. Or rather, as the marketing team has begun to advertise the substitution, ‘standing desks’. Johnnie Air.” The Student Committee on Instruction has scheduled a meeting to discuss possible uses for the repurposed chair materials. According to several students, there is a movement to indulge the Annapolis Ghost Tour employees by building a big bonfire and dancing around it while singing “Sicut Cervus.” ASS PERCH, STAFF REPORTER “More likely, we’ll probably just save the wood for a rainy day – or the next time a dorm burns down,” administrator Sitzfleisch Holder said. “As for the wicker, an underwater basket-weaving preceptorial could be in the works.” “It’s likely we’ll raise the tables to standing height by stacking old books from the library underneath the legs,” financial aid advisor Penny Cheep-Skeight said. Proponents of the move to repurpose Johnnie chairs have also referred to Program readings. “This is what joining the tradition of questioning tradition looks like,” freshman Angus T. Yoothe said. “It’s been on my mind ever since we read The Upright Posture in Lab.” Even a few tutors have publicly endorsed the standing desks. “I mean, Socrates said it first: ‘The children now love luxury.’ ” Tutor O’Kay Boomer said. “And what screams luxury more than a curved back chair carved from aged cherry wood?” Regardless of the widespread approval of the decision, it is clear that removal of the Johnnie chairs will have significant cultural impact. “We’re brainstorming what to rename the student blog,” junior Ba Tumzup said. “A current favorite is the Students and the administration are in communication over how to repurpose wood from Johnnie chairs. According to several students, there is a movement to indulge the Annapolis Ghost Tour employees by building a big bonfire and dancing around it while singing “Sicut Cervus.” �The Bastardfly --- Johnnie Bubble Ruptured After City of Annapolis Realizes It Exists “Hey, is anyone reading this?” “I didn’t know it would end like this”: Don Rags as Leading Cause of Death at the End of the Semester Me mb er o Exp e f r i m Clu ent b al It’s that time of year! The weather is crisp, the chocolate is hot, and the christmas carols mingle beautifully with the sobs coming from Mellon. CONTINUED ON PG. 24 Phi lo sop Someone Played hy archon was spotted hurriedWhat’s New Pussy- This ly shutting locking the doors of McDowell on Saturday mid-party. cat 10 Times at Sources say that flashing green lights and the heavy coat of fog were acnicely affected by the mellow the Reality Event! tually mellow tones of Tom Jones. In fact, some people found that they wantArchons Have ed to attend a reality party for the first time. A member of the delegate was overheard saying, “ FiPlaced the Party council nally, the school’s money is going to into Severe Lock- something fucking worthwhile”. CONTINUED ON PG. 31 down �The BoopboOp 1 Which Johnnie Aesthetic Are You? All Johnnies fit into one of four categories. Take the quiz and find out which Johnnie you are. This is about as accurate as the Myers-Briggs Test. 1. Do you come to class? a. In your pajamas 30 minutes late? b. In your lace cravat 30 minutes early? c. Drunk/High d. Only if I have my Fjall-Raven Kanken on hand 2. How do you meet people? a. On the quad b. During class c. In the coffee shop at 3am d. On Tumblr 3. When do you cry? a. After every tutorial. b. Once in the middle of seminar c. Twice coming down from ketamine d. Watching 500 Days of Summer 4. Which Book describes you most? a. The Stranger by Albert Camus b. The Bible c. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson d. Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur 5. Which Item describes you most? a. Chipped black nail-polish b. Chastity ring c. My Custom Dab Rig d. Polaroid camera 6. Thoughts on a higher power? a. God is dead b. I teach Sunday School c. I thought I saw God on a trip d. I don’t know if there is one, but the closest I have is Jonathan Van Ness If you got... 1. mostly A’s, you’re ~edgy~ as heck 2. mostly B’s, you probably know how to waltz and you came to St. John’s because of the sophomore reading list 3. mostly C’s, congratulations we’ll be seeing you on Paca-quad! 4. mostly D’s, your VSCO feed is excellent, and you probably own too many plants �The BAaAAaa :// Prospies Accept Offer of Admission under Assumption that Great Books Program Refers to YA Novels SCI Forums Start Servin g Alcohol in Bid to Inc rease Attend a nce The meeting last Wednesday got heated when one student (two Natty Bo’s in, started yelling at the Committee members about how “We Shouldn’t read Plato! We Shouln’t READ PLATO! WE SHOULD NOT READ---” ra, u c s b O a r e m a C uilds B t p e c e r P s c i t p n u Student in O S e h t o t n i s k o Immediately Lo CONTINUED ON PG. 4 “Well, I just wanted to see if I could see the Forms as Plato talked about them,” said the student. “I guess the universe just wanted to punish my hubris”. Keep an eye out for this bandaged student, and try to help out your fellow egotistical johnnie! CONTINUED ON PG. 209 DID YOU FIND THE SECRET MESSAGE? HERE’S A HINT:KEEP AN EYE ON ALL THE CAPITAL LETTERS IN THIS ISSUE! THE FIRST PERSON TO FIND THE MESSAGE WILL WIN A PRIZE. SEND THE COMPLETED MESSAGE THRU CAMPUS MAIL TO THE ONE OF THE EDITORS TO CLAIM YOUR SPECIAL PRESSENT! � 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 <em>The Gadfly</em> Description An account of the resource Founded in 1980, <em>The </em><em>Gadfly</em> is a weekly student publication distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Gadfly" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=16&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the <em>The Gadfly</em> Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. 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 thegadfly 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 pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gadfly, December 2019 [The Badfly] Description An account of the resource December 2019 issue of The Gadfly. Special issue: The Badfly. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Page, Lysithia (Editor-in-Chief) Berreles-Luna, Athena (Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-12 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. 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 College students--United States--Conduct of life Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Gadfly Winter 2019 Badfly Gadfly Student publication https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/939c1d2cface0795abba1788d3212413.pdf 123449ba08923c625409f106623ecca3 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 Yearbooks Description An account of the resource This collection contains yearbooks from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. Yearbooks are sometimes referred to as the "Rat Tat", "Cicerone", or "Canvas". This collection includes all published yearbooks since 1896.  Please note that yearbooks were not published every year.<br /><br />Holdings: <br />1896 v. 1<br />1898 v. 2 - 1899 v. 3<br />1901 v. 4 – 1912 v. 15<br />1914 v. 17 – 1918 v. 21<br />1920 v. 22 – 1945/1946<br />1947 – 1951/1953<br />1957<br />1982<br />1986 – 1990/1991<br />1992 – 2001/2002<br />2015/2016 – 2017/2018<br />2021/2022 - 2024/2025<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Yearbooks" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=21">Items in the Yearbooks 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 yearbooks 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 (bound book) Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 240 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 1915 Rat-Tat Description An account of the resource Rat-Tat 1915 Key Edition, Volume XVIII. Published annually by the Junior Class - St. John's College. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Moon, Orville M. (Editor-in-Chief) Bielaski, Fred L. (Assistant Editor-in-Chief) Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available The Horn-Shafer Co. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Baltimore, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1915 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1915