Just think: a life’s work becomes a few weeks of reading. Of course, to really understand anything you have to dwell on it, if not live it, but it’s not something you do in a vacuum—all these ideas are going to be combining and running up against one another in different ways for each person, and somehow we all convince ourselves that things make sense. The more we try to discuss anything really important, the more danger there is that we will settle for cop-outs, superficial treatments and emotional exclamations, because there is something looming behind a great truth, or a great conception—like a shadow that weighs, it’s the possibility that we really have no idea what we are talking about. It’s the suspicion that all we are doing is talking, and that words are no guarantee for shared ideas, shared ideas no guarantee for anything beyond intellectual entertainment of the idea, and even the deeply held idea no guarantee for any approach to the actual truth of things. We’re doing it right now, crying ‘Lord, Lord’ and not knowing the kingdom of Heaven.
So there is here what you might call a presupposition—that experiential knowledge is the really important kind. What then of books and the new school? Yes, it is vicarious experience; yes, it is inspiration to better life, and a sort of context in which to understand experience more richly; yes, it’s at least a better way to go about things than the way we have now—but isn’t it still second-best things?
Every institution’s ideal is that state in which institutions are rendered unnecessary. Not that a person could be naturally perfect and know everything, but that he wouldn’t need anything but natural associations to reach that quality of life the institutions safeguard, or to reach toward it. Is this the hardest lesson for the new school to teach, to point beyond itself? Or does it only seem that way to me, looking to institute it rather than coming up through it?
An entirely new side to the new school. We have seen that the fundamental misapprehension which may undo the new school is contained in its very motivation—can the essential voluntary attitude towards reading the great works be freed within a curriculum requiring those books to be read? So far we have more or less turned a blind eye to this difficulty, banking upon the invincible appeal of the books and the maverick Socratic teachers, as well as faith in the students’ natural intelligence and good will; however, and not that there is not some hope in these prospects, a completely different perspective may resolve the situation indirectly.
The thing is to make the school what it has always aspired to be: a place people gather to learn because they want to learn, not because they have to go. What if as it became more strict in certain areas—the chronological curriculum, for instance—the school loosened up in others—in the demarcation between ‘social’ conversation and ‘work-related.’ And if this informality, let us call it more precisely and idealistically, this friendliness, if it were extended even into the curriculum itself?
What I have in mind gets there via the long-overdue realization that there is something analogous between the way some people just don’t get schoolwork and other people just don’t get social relations, and so for the opposite extreme as well: some people do school effortlessly, others are never awkward with people. (Not totally effortlessly, but with a talent for it, not ashamed of it; not never awkward, but making it work.) Why should only the one count in school and determine your standing, while it is the other that is really essential in all other aspects of life? Why this dichotomy? And of the two ways to bring the two back together—either bringing books out of the classroom or bringing personal relations in—why not see that doing either fundamentally changes the nature of the whole enterprise of learning, and be courageous enough to see it through?
Books will be taught, but they will actually be read first, allowed to work their magic; social ease and the art of conversation will be taught, but it will be constantly practiced in so doing, so as to stave off that double standard, that hypocrisy which hamstrings every noble idea poorly implemented. What I am suggesting is that teaching the appreciation of books is actually as hard as teaching, what, coolness, friendliness, charm, grace. But like a foreign language, it is easier the sooner you start—like a mother tongue, it too starts out as something exterior to the child, but is eventually so completely acquired that it is impossible to say it was not inherent to begin with.
Nurture and nature, recollection and the fullness of time, genius and grace—aren’t they all different ways of looking at the same thing, and isn’t it time we knew something about all of them, rather than squinting at everything so narrowly without knowing there was any other way? When we once have in mind the new school as a place where everything contributing to the good life is taught, ideas as well as behavior, sympathy, character, athletics, creativity, we begin to see how inadequate our notion of teaching is. These are not objective quanta being transmitted—but a series—and the order is important—of pointings-toward, of invitations and directions to worthwhile experiences and the perspectives and ways by which these experiences will be recognized as worthwhile.
Plainly, the notion of testing with a scantron cannot be meaningfully applied to the lessons in taste and comportment and enjoyment being taught—the only test is in the student himself, the only question is, Is he a better human being for having spent all this time in school rather than left to his own devices? And it is for no one else to judge, ultimately, than the student himself. If he is dissatisfied it is up to him to try something new; if he is happy, we must show him how much there is yet to do—but not so as to make him despair, only to make his happiness the more balanced, more grounded, more complete.
But given this hope, this wish to be happy, to be our own best self and do all that we have imagined to do—what are we waiting for? Is it forces outside our control that are keeping us down—religion, tradition, culture, society, economics, politics? Well, it sticks in my throat, but yeah, partly it is, if only because so many people believe it is—and they can’t help what they believe, of course. But when we talk about these intractable social ills, the resolution voiced, though we have not got the resolve to see it through—is always education.
Education alone will break the vicious cycle of poverty, racism, violence—but in the meantime our money and resources are still needed to patch the leaks, giving fish while teaching to fish. Of course, then you look at the people who have been lucky enough to receive enough food and security and an education, and you have to wonder if we are better off after all, in any essential way. Is it too much of a stretch to wind up here and say, education of hope is required? In the sense both of suggesting what people hope for and that they then know their hope in such a way that they can follow it out, a thread through the labyrinth. And never suggesting that the people born into poverty are responsible for staying there, but always asserting the educated, really educated individual as above any social constraints or wiles.
Another quaint ‘critique of pure reason’ for my pupils. (I haven’t read that; who am I to talk? Maybe to be so crazy as to want to is enough.)
‘Okay, settle down. I’ll accept the homework tomorrow if you don’t have it; we can talk after class. Now, remember at the beginning of this class I asked, what is philosophy?—rather, what does it mean, what do you think it means? As I said then, I can’t tell you: because I’m still answering that question for myself, and I don’t believe that the answer as I’ve arrived at it so far will be a substitute for you doing the same. But then we shared what we thought, and this is a perfectly legitimate step in answering that question—hearing others’ ideas, articulating your own, debating, compromising or being stubborn—even saying No, there is an answer, just tell us what it is, we’ll find out eventually. I would agree with that up to a point—philosophy is something, for sure, and there are some things it definitely isn’t; it isn’t just whatever we say it is, or else there would be no point in calling it its own thing. There must be some value in calling it its own thing, distinguishing it from games, or cooking, or carpentry, though in some sense they may overlap, particularly if we think of philosophy as a perspective, a way of doing things rather than something done.
But anyway, today I wanted to try to summarize some of the ways we’ve heard our authors talk about philosophy—not in that subtle sense only, as we infer it from the way they go about their writing, but as they explicitly describe philosophy itself. (So Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Lucretius, Augustine, Descartes—statements of theirs are quoted, or however many of them have been read. Certain threads are perhaps brought out—the ascetic, the encyclopedic, the political, the spiritual, the artistic; the stress on knowledge, the ideal, and wisdom, the return to the real.)
My bias is plain, but I won’t try to force it upon anyone. I know its flaws, and my own as far as living up to it. But that’s more than enough for one day. Read those statements over and over again, memorize some of them if you can or care to, think of both the content, what they say, and the style, how they say it—and the context in the philosopher’s times, his surroundings, the rest of his writing and the tradition he draws upon. And then, when you get tired of that, get back to the heart of philosophy. It isn’t memorization, but learning; not reading, but thinking and feeling.
The word itself is another thing I mentioned—do you remember? (love of wisdom.) The two roots of philosophy, they say, are wonder and doubt. Engage yourself in one or both once you’ve read these over, while you read them over. I hope you feel that shiver of understanding, the hairs physically shivering; that is part of what led me to set aside any notion of disembodied, ‘pure’ reason.
Here is a little math problem we might do. It requires a diagram: ‘Here you are; the x represents you. And here’s your classmate, who we’ll draw as a y. You’re right next to each other when we start the observation; obviously you’ve had to walk to get there, too, and from different paths, but we aren’t interested in that right now. We’re taking just that situation, between when you’re right here, to when you get to class, over here. C marks the spot. The squares are all buildings; you can go into them, or you can walk around them. Everyone come up to the board, up, make a line, and draw some of the different paths you could take from where you are to C. (They draw, some straight, some looping.)
Okay, lots of different ways. Which are the fastest, do you think, and the slowest? Remember, they’re only the best in this situation if that’s what the question’s asking for, the fastest. (Erases all but two after the discussion). So let’s say x—that’s you—goes this way; y, your classmate, she goes this way. Which one gets to class first? (Same.) What if I said, you walk at 3mph and she walks at 5mph? (y). But what if I want to know exactly how long it takes each of you, how much sooner she arrives? Do we need to know something else? (the distance, if only in terms of units). What relationships do we know between distance, speed and time? (m/h; v=d/t, rearrange, convert units)
Now, what does this tell us? It gives us some useful information, right? We know what time class starts, and we don’t want to be late—maybe we also don’t want to be too early; since you and your classmate decide not to walk together, you probably won’t talk sitting waiting for the teacher, either. But what doesn’t this tell us? Well, we can imagine some more things to add to the problem, like weather, and hills, that we could factor in. It doesn’t tell us why x walks slower—is it cause you’re sad and drag your feet? Is it cause you’re happy and enjoy the walk? Of course no one goes exactly 5mph, either—that’s an average, an approximation—what do these words mean again? (it takes a generalization of moments; it is close to reality.)
Now, I’m basing this problem on an experience of mine, when I would walk to class this way and see someone else go this way, and the reason I bring it up is because there is something else that happened that we could in one sense factor in but that, again, would only tell us part of the story. I saw my friend because he was coming out of the building and walking up this way (b). Even though we didn’t stop to talk, and I didn’t slow or speed up or swerve enough to affect the problem, it made me smile. Isn’t that important? And who or what did I miss by not going another way?
