Another Semester of Liberal Education

I met with the last of my portfolio-revision groups on Thursday afternoon, and now that I’ve actually slept and had a chance to reflect on this fall’s classes, I’m pleased with my efforts.  I hope I never get so stupid as to claim credit for another human being’s curiosity, but I also hope I never forget that I’ve given the curious ones an occasion to learn from and argue against a couple of really good books.  In the course of achieving their three hours of core class credit at the University of Georgia, they came in contact with privative theories of evil (the original Platonic and Boethian ones, not the C.S. Lewis version that gets filtered through youth ministers–not that I have anything against youth ministers), the contradiction (I’m sure G.K. Chesterton would call it a paradox, but it’s a contradiction) of divine foreknowledge and human agency, and a vision of human community other than the neo-liberal Capitalist ideal.  They’ve wrestled with what causes the differences between men and women and what the implications of those causes and effects are, and they’ve run headlong into one of history’s most ardent critics of democracy, the system of common government that I imagine they’ve always held as self-evidently superior to all comers.  They could quote me Winston Churchill’s bit about democracy being the worst system of government except for all the rest (I think the man spent his life speaking in one-liners) but couldn’t very well tell me why.  I know for a fact that some of them have been thinking hard on that one.

In other words, I think this is a semester that did what it was supposed to do, and I feel pretty good about that.  Even the folks who didn’t read much and didn’t think much more sat in proximity to folks who did for forty class hours plus some change, and although I’m skeptical about intellectual osmosis, they can’t help but be aware that some of their compatriots think about such questions; perhaps they’ll be inclined to do some more of the same later in life.  Next semester I teach my first sophomore course at UGA (I did a lit survey as an adjunct, but this one will actually be in my speciality), and I’m excited about that, and if chips happen to fall well (I wonder whether the famous Jerry every contemplated his last name’s pun), I might be headed to a new place to start a new sort of career.  If nothing else, I’ll be primed to hit the job market hard a year from now.

So this morning, as I work the public library and continue to grade papers, I’m feeling pretty good about things.  I have years of this good stuff ahead of me, and I’m ready to dig back into the dissertation as I keep trying to get there.

The End of Republic 2008

I hate to be the latest person to complain about fall break’s disappearing, but it really did throw off my Plato syllabus.  I packed entirely too much of the ending into the last day–in one session we attempted to discuss Plato’s theory of civil law and his conception of interior slavery and the reincarnation section.  And with all that on the table, I had to skip his famous refusal of poetry.

The theory of law is the most alien to my students, who were fairly fluent in the debates about how much incarceration costs and what recidivism rates were but needed a bit more coaxing to say just why a city would want to throw someone in jail.  Plato, consistent with his conviction that a reason-ordered life is ultimately happier than one ruled by apetite, holds that the reasonable should make and enforce laws so that the city can grant what internal discipline cannot.  In other words, cities can make one good.  My students, Hobbesians (not Calvin-and-Hobbesians, before someone goes there) without knowing it, thought that was preposterous and fell once again to using “idealistic” as a synonym for “naive.”  (I tried all through Republic to repeat what philosophical idealism actually entails, but ultimately one teacher is not all that powerful.)  Ultimately we came down on three conflicting theories that operate in modern debates about prison: one, close to Plato’s that says that prisons educate or “rehabilitate” people; one that says prisons are warehouses for the storage of dangerous souls; and one that says prison is revenge for a crime committed.

Because that discussion took so long, we had relatively little time to talk about Plato’s final section on reincarnation, a beautiful and sophisticated allegory that encourages the reader to think about a human lifespan as a series of reincarnations: the choices one makes in the moment shape the life one lives over a lifetime.  If one steals, one becomes a thief; if one works for the good of the weak neighbor, one becomes moral.  Even if one gets away with evil actions, one trades bits of one’s soul for the stuff that contingency could steal out of one’s hand.

Of course, that section leads wonderfully to Boethius, and after we revise this set of papers, that’s precisely where we go next.  The Boethius sections are generally shorter and, until book five, less intense than Plato, so the students should experience a nice winding-down as we head into the latter parts of the semester.

Against Democracy, 2008 Tour

I seem to get a little less fiery each time I play Plato during this lesson.  I don’t know whether I’m just going soft or whether I’ve got more genuine pedagogical motives, but even without the grand pyrotechnics, Plato’s offensive against democracy on its own was enough this year to get both classes fighting.  The raw datum that’s hard to combat (and which makes playing Plato so easy) is that so much of modern life does not trust democracy: the multitudes per se do not vote on who gets into med school, who becomes UGA’s starting quarterback, who becomes an English professor, or much of anything else, yet almost all of my students (I’ve had a couple who have doubts) hold the conviction that when it comes to justice, everybody eighteen or older should have equal say in who administers justice in human communities.  And I tell them each time that holding such convictions is fine, but they need to do some reading and some reflecting on why they think so.  Although Jeffersonian rhetoric is inspiring in the abstract, once I get students to think on it a while, they realize that not everybody has the same degree of expertise in medicine or football strategy, and the answer to the riddle of democracy is not that everyone has the same degree of expertise in justice.  The answer lies elsewhere, though for the moment, since this discussion still might continue on my WebCT site, I’m not going to say right now what I think the answer might be except to say that I’ve read a whole mess of eighteenth-century philosophy, and it’s hard work, intellectually speaking, to turn Plato on his head on this question.

Allegory of the Cave Day

We finally got to the most famous passage in Plato today, and I drew my now-well-rehearsed version of the Allegory of the Cave on the board for each group.  (It didn’t look nearly as cool as this picture.)  In 8:00 section we spent far more time on the theoretical principles, namely the relationships betwen the by-definition-unseeable (I got to rehearse my quick and dirty version of Heisenberg) and the empirical and how modern science education in many ways would strike Plato as spot on for the citizens of a good city.  In 9:30 our focus was ethics, namely to what extent duty was a category that means anything in the modern world.  Some students had a sense that they should serve a larger community, while others articulated something closer to a commercial relationship: I paid to come here, so I don’t owe anybody anything.  I tried, as much as I could, to lay back and let them talk these important things over.

I always like to teach this section because I know that these folks will likely run across somebody who misunderstands the passage (rendering it as some sort of mystical journey or escape from “the man” or from homicidal robots who want to use them as batteries), and my hope is that such encounters will allow them to have conversations about reality and education and duty and such.

Now I’ve got to do my duty and grade these papers.  I told my students I’d shoot for Thursday morning, and I’m already regretting that promise.  Ah, well.  Back to work for me.

War, Sex, Women’s Nature, and Other Fun Stuff

I forgot to write about yesterday’s class yesterday–I suppose I must have had too much on my mind.

At the point in the dialogue that we read yesterday, Socrates’s interlocutors break off the big-picture argument and demand that he expand on some of the particulars about his ideal city that he mentioned in passing.  Among the big issues are shared women and children, the education of women, and conduct in war.  In other words, this is a section that’s all kinds of fun to teach.

In 8:00 section yesteray we spent most of our time on the question of children, noting that in Plato’s city, a fair number of the children would be changelings, swapped among merchant and military families based on their innate abilities.  Not surprisingly, the discussion quickly turned to the universe of Star wars and the education of Jedi from a young age.  One especially sharp student said that if he caught wind that acting greedy would get him raised by a wealthy family, he’d start exhibiting the greed right away.  “Problem solved,” I told him, “You’re not Jedi material.  You’ll be transferred tomorrow.”  The class enjoyed that.

In 9:30 section our longest discussion was on Plato’s division of natures according to abilities rather than gender.  Some of my students started out the discussion asserting that women have a distinct nature that is not a result of cultural expectations or education, and since they were the most vocal element, I argued the other end, noting all the historical contingencies that have in fact determined what little girls are made of.  (Had the room been full of people who denied gender difference entirely, I would have argued the other end–I think students should have to fight for their assertions.)  By the end, one particularly honest student said, “I still have a feeling that women’s nature is different, but now we’ve negated all the reasons I had for saying so.  But I still think it’s true.”

“Good!” I replied.  “That means you might think on these things after the class period ends.”

The same student and some others stuck around for a few minutes after 9:30 class, and I encouraged them to continue to consider these things and to take some electives that engaged those questions.  I have no doubt at this point that I’m teaching a bright group of students, and today I rose to my vocation, giving them something to wrap their gifted minds around and perhaps even encouraging some sustained thought.  The honest student above also tried to apologize after class for getting “aggravated” in the discussion today.

My response?  “That’s good.  If ideas are really bad, they should aggravate you.”

I Want to Be This Sort of Professor

The Thinker

I ran into this little piece on ALDaily, and it reminded me once more that what I’m doing, if I stick to doing it, is a worthwhile way to spend what years I’ve got left breathing air.  The best thing about this report is the end, in which Kelly Jolley, the philosophy professor in question, reveals that he’s far more of a Platonist than this amateur teacher of Plato could ever imagine becoming:

Perhaps the dispute between Jolley and his critics boils down to how you define great teachers. You typically think about them as being devoted, above all, to their students. Jolley says his first priority is to philosophy itself. “I care about the discipline of philosophy more than the academic fate of any individual student — and I think I should,” he said. “Otherwise I’m just a baby sitter who occasionally breaks into syllogism.”

At first, I thought, “Wow!  That’s great!”  Then I realized that I’m not sure I agree with it.  (Leave it to a philosopher.)  While I don’t think that I should be a babysitter who does syllogisms, I do think that I should take into account students’ levels of ability and make my classes fit them.

On the other hand, I’m not omniscient, and I shouldn’t presume to know whether a student lacks the ability or just hasn’t pushed hard enough, and thus I should keep things difficult and let the students who drop out write their own fates.

Yet effort and ability are not everything in intellectual endeavors.  Sometimes, if a student discovers that she can lift the small intellectual weights, she goes on to take on bigger questions and rises philosophy rather than starting out on its level.

But then one can’t wait forever, in a fifteen-week semester, for everyone to rise to the basic competencies that dialectic requires.  If one waits until week five for some students, others have missed out on four weeks of more advanced stuff.

I’ll have to do more dialogue with myself on this one.  No, that doesn’t make one go blind.

I like the fact that Jolley came out of a Church of Christ background, and I love that he carries his instruction out of the classroom into the world.  I admire that he engages in non-credit reading groups with students (I’m trying to get one going with the Dawg Cogitans group), and I nearly said Amen out loud when I found out that his introductory syllabi are filled with primary texts.  In other words, if I have the time and strength, I will strive to become this.

Division of Labor and Trigger-Happy Freshmen

We reached the end of this unit’s Plato reading today with one of the clearest articulations of dikaiosyne in the book.  I could tell that I was tired today, both from the late night at the circus Tuesday and the late night at church last night.  I was taking longer than usual to process questions, fumbling more than usual when I moved between topics, and generally acting tired.  Fortunately, the classes were both relatively well-prepared, and they kept the conversation going where I faltered.

I always get the impression (accurate or not) that some of the students are hoping that, if they just stay invisible long enough, I’ll call class off early.  I try to give ample chances to participate, but when class lags even for a moment in the closing fifteen minutes or so, I’ve got half a dozen reaching for their backpacks like Johnny Ringo just drew.  It’s funny that a recent editorial in the Red and Black gripes about teachers who fill up class sessions with lectures.  The joke is that all of us know that, in the absence of noise from the front, certain itchy individuals think the show’s over.  I realize that I’m not always at my entertaining best, but neither is my class, and I don’t go running off with fifteen minutes to go.

Crud.  This has devolved into a “kids these days” post.  I’ll have to update the categories.

At any rate, we did have good discussions in both classes irrespective of my fatigue and students’ itchy trigger fingers, and our main point of discussion in both sections was how communities decide who does what.  Plato seems to think that everyone has certain natural aptitudes and that the happiest community with the happiest people is that in which everyone does what she or he is best at.  As I’ve noted before, I can’t help but think that Paul used this kind of structure when he wrote about the various functions of Christians in Ephesians and Corinthians.  Obviously the content differs–sophia and agape are two very different organizing principles.  But nonetheless, I have to think that the abandonment of genealogy in favor of giftedness is a carryover.

I also offered my supplement to Plato (who does not spend much time at all talking about the workers, focusing some time on the auxilliary fighers and the most time on the guardians proper), a suggestion that Plato doesn’t likely think that there are people whose existence revolves around making shoes the way a career soldier’s does around the military life or an intellectual’s does on contemplation.  More likely, I suggested, Plato has in mind those people whose moneymaking jobs are simply ways to make a living, not ways of life.  I know full well that leisure time was far more limited in the ancient world than in the modern, but certainly among free workers there must have been a sense of town life, folk music, and other ways of being-together than work.  I really should take a gander at that possibility, for Plato does not.

We had to have the sex talk, or Prostitutes and Pastries, 2008

Ah, the history of marriage and sex.  We talked about the sexual scene in classical Athens today, a place and time when one educated man of means might have a wife and children at home, a prostitute or two he liked to visit, and a boyfriend at the Agora.  We had to, because when Plato talks about what happens when a community gives up a simple life of simple foods, simple, dwellings, and monogamy, he lists among the consumer goods (I’m quoting from Robin Waterfield’s translation) “all sorts of furniture like couches and tables, and a wide selection of savouries, perfumes, incense, prostitutes, and pastries” (373a).  That, and Glaucon, one of the participants in the dialogue, apparently fought well at the battle of Megara, spurring his man-lover to write a poem about him.  Both of those entities gave us occasion to talk about the economies of sex that arise in systems where women are legally inferior and to note the assumptions that we moderns usually make about the inherent dignity of those entities with human bodies.

Sex is by no means the main subject of my class or even one of the really important ones, but I think it does help us read texts like Plato and Paul and Epictetus well if we know the different sexual expectations of an ancient Athens or Corinth or Rome, and it at least opens the possibility that smart people at some time might have thought of sex and marriage in terms other than the biological-deterministic ones that talking heads of the right and the left seem to assume in 2008.  That, and it’s just fun dropping that kind of stuff on eighteen-year-olds.  I have to admit that.

I’ve given the class their comments, and now tonight I release the grades to them.  I did lay out my policies for challenging marks, so I imagine that we can continue to learn and talk philosophy together with a minimum of bitterness.  This is a good group I’m teaching this semester, already willing to fight for philosophical points and hear other folks do the same.  I imagine our continued exploration of Plato and Boethius and the big questions that those writers bring to the mind will be some good times.

Into the Republic

I’ve already stepped into character and become Socrates at least once per class, which means I’m going to have some fun this semester.  With one group I answered their objections that idealism, as a philosophy, is useless and their further objection that Socrates assumes that nobody is selfish.  With the other I went after democracy (why they started in on that so early I’m not sure), performing a version of my anti-democracy rant that both classes, I’m sure, will see in all its glory before we’re done reading this book.  And I did so, in both cases, with long strings of questions punctuated by observations that bordered on declarations of their surrender.  It’s good to be Socrates. 🙂

Now I’ve got to grade some papers.  The first twenty-five or so have been pretty good, and I don’t anticipate too many clunkers in the second half.  Paper two, after all, is when the fur starts flying.

Overplanned Again

Once again I pushed both sections right up to dismissal time, largely because my EMMA demo took longer than I had anticipated.  Next Tuesday will be a relatively easy day, as my only preparatory task will be to design some exercises for early-finishing groups, but once we dig in to Republic, I need to be more mindful of how much time we do and do not have.

We finished out the trial of Socrates today, working through Apology and Crito and talking about different pictures of corruption, different modes of duty, and why Socrates, at seventy or older, seems still to have young children.  (Eww.)  We talked about America’s Selective Service program and that, whether we think much about it or not, our own “city” has paperwork indicating our consent to fight if the government deems it necessary.  We also dug into some of the problems with democracy that Plato is already articulating, including the obvious one that a democracy has just executed Plato’s beloved teacher.  I threw this bone to them and let them chew on it before we left:

If you put 100 people in a room and let the 51 dumbest make every important decision, that’s democracy.

I could tell some of them didn’t much like it, and I look forward to moving forward into Republic.  By then we’ll be into matters of citizenship, family, the afterlife, and education–in other words, more chips on the table.

I love teaching this class!

Euthyphro in Fast Forward and Other Notes

I overplanned for today.  I put into my lesson plan a 20-minute lecture on clause structure and the grammatical concept of agreement; a lengthy get-to-know-each-other activity now that final rosters are set; and a discussion of (Platonic) dialectic reasoning in the context of Euthyphro.  That’s just too much stuff for seventy-five minutes.  I don’t think I’ll run into the same obstacle too often this semester, but I will have to be careful.  I treated the dialectic structure fairly well, but neither section got a good treatment of the content of the dialogue.

I tried out the Middlebrow podcast from Scriptorium Daily, and although I’m not nearly as enthusiastic as the Biola boys about Capitalism and the Republican party, the podcast is a fun little trip for educated listeners.  I hope they make more of ’em.

I met with Dr. Teague today and feel pretty good about proceeding with the dissertation that I proposed.  The experience of writing a thirteen-page book review of a book that doesn’t yet exist was an interesting one, but now I’m starting to think that such a book should exist and that I might be the one to write it.  Perhaps that’s the aim of a prospectus.

Tomorrow I imagine Mary will have me drive her to work.  It doesn’t look like things are going to dry out enough that I can work outside at Fort Yargo, but I suppose Dacula Public Library isn’t all bad.

Euthyphro and the Problem with Polytheism

I made brief mention that I might add Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro to my syllabus this fall in the comments section about Allan Bloom, and after some deliberation, I’ve done so. This little post is mainly some brief reflections on that dialogue and on teaching in a state university.

You can read the relatively brief dialogue in English translation here:

Euthyphro

First of all, I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve never read this little gem before this summer. I have, after all, been teaching Plato for three years now, and this dialogue comes up in conversation about as much as any. Many editions of Plato put this with the “trial of Socrates” dialogues, and indeed in the opening lines Socrates reveals that a youngster named Meletus (the main bad guy from the dialogue Apology) has charged Socrates with corrupting the youth of Athens (the main philosophical question of Apology). Socrates, talking with his friend, the theologian Euthyphro (you wondered about the name, didn’t you?), finds out that Euthyphro is also headed for court, but his docket involves a murder charge against Euthyphro’s own father, brought by Euthyphro.

The boastful Euthyphro tells Socrates that, despite popular disapproval over bringing one’s own father to trial over the murder of a servant, such an act of stark justice is the heart of piety. Socrates begins to question why, and the philosophical part of the dialogue is under way.

What many passing references to this dialogue miss is the next section, Socrates’ first negation of a wise man’s assertion. The main difficulty with defining piety is that common usage calls pious that which pleases the gods, but if the gods fight with one another as much as Homer and Hesiod say they do, then what pleases Zeus will necessarily displease Kronos, and vice versa. In other words, the questioning that takes up most of the dialogue has to do not with all kinds of theology but with polytheistic theology particularly.

The most famous assertion Socrates makes is that whatever piety is, the goodness of pious act must be prior to the gods’ approval, because to assert otherwise is to ignore the struggles in the heavens.

I bring this little point in this little dialogue up because, in a world that treats “religion” basically as a subset of psychology, Euthyphro’s dilemma does indeed seem valid. After all, the popular line of questioning goes, if everyone’s “religion” holds that adherents of all the rest of the “religions” are “going to Hell,” then whatever measures we have of good and evil in civic and national and even international society must come not from the content of “religious” commitments but from some other sort of deliberation. Modern ethics, in other words, is at its rots, in some sense, polytheistic in the ways that Greek and Roman ethics were polytheistic: the realms of “religion” were for private well-being, but when people get together, legislators and philosophers and not priests must be the arbiters between people.

As folks who know me know, I tend to be suspicious of such “secular” modes of ethical inquiry (the word has such a wonderful meaning in Augustine that I put scare quotes on it when I’m using some definition other than Augustine’s). Because part of our confession as Christians (not all of it by any means) is that the one God-Pater who created heaven and earth is also the God-Filius who walked among us and also the God-Spiritus who intercedes in our behalf, we cannot think of ourselves as parts of another “religion” but rather those to whom that Triune God has revealed something more real than simple psychological succor. (Again, I do not deny the psychological goods that come from right relation with God, but that cannot be the sum total of what’s going on.) In terms of Plato’s dialogue, we Christians deny that the heavens are the site of struggle, confessing instead that the struggles between Creator and creature and among creatures are instead the ultimate responsibility of creatures and that ultimately redemption, whatever else is entailed, must involve a reconciliation of Creator and creature.

One of the papers from my first semester of graduate studies in English was an examination of W.H. Auden’s “New Year Letter.” Although I do not care to reread it now, I do remember that it involved a theological critique of Auden’s liberal Protestantism. The teacher, a first-year professor with a freshly-minted Harvard Ph.D, whom I respect deeply (largely because of the incident I’m about to narrate), invited me to his office early the next semester to talk about the paper. He told me that I had assumed too much history of WWII-era Protestantism as common knowledge (I probably did) but that the argument held up otherwise. Then, however, he leaned back in his chair and asked, “But Nathan, why should anyone give a damn about these questions?” Being too young and foolish to back down from a fight, I fired back, “Do you ask your Marxists and feminist critics the same question?” He nodded for a moment, smiled, and said, “You have a point.”

I bring up this incident not because I’m impressed with how plucky I was (though I am) but to note that, at least among the big universities that I’ve visited, the prevailing intellectual environment is not the DNC love-fest that David Horowitz seems to fear, but one can point to a functional Sophism (in the historical sense) that pervades the humanities and social sciences: the working assumptions are Enlightenment-liberal, Lockean ones, and whatever “religion” is, it’s not the queen of the sciences that Thomas Aquinas would make it. In that environment, a Euthyphro-style priority of philosophy over piety makes perfect sense. My contention this morning is that, in Christian circles, we probably should be about the project of reclaiming Anselm’s famous formula, Faith Seeking Understanding. (Pardon my weak Latin; I fear trying to recollect the inflections on those words.) Part of evangelicals’ intellectual project should be to demonstrate in practice a philosophy that begins not from polytheistic but from Trinitarian starting points, a philosophy that makes Euthyphro’s dilemma a non-issue.

Am I going there with my freshmen next month? Probably in a descriptive mode, perhaps even a description that demonstrates the inadequacy that necessitates a line of inquiry like Socrates’. But as usual, I might just have to keep my distance without looking like I’m keeping my distance.

I don’t know. Teach casual.

Cross-posted from Conservative Reformed Mafia.

Fall calendar and paper assignments done

When August rolls around, all I’m going to have to do is to get photocopies run and add students to my database. I’ve already got the class calendar done, and I’m going to update paper assignments and plan the first couple days’ classes later today at the library. Teaching is never auto-pilot, but this semester at the very least I’m not going to be scrambling around getting the clerical nonsense done.

It felt good to pull my well-worn copy of Robin Waterfield’s translation of Plato’s Republic off the shelf this morning and look at my teaching notes. If there was any doubt before that Republic was my favorite book to teach, this morning has dispelled it. Wherever I land in years to come, I imagine I’ll do what I can to get it in my rotation again.

[edit: I just found out that Oxford World’s Classics has published a new edition of the book. I’ll be looking at some new covers this semester, I imagine. Unfortunately, the only image I could find was the silly Amazon “search inside” image. So it goes.  I did write the first Amazon review for this edition, so that’s something.]

Book Review: The Closing of the American Mind

I finally finished this book this morning, having started mere days after I finished my comprehensive exams. For about three hundred sixty of its three hundred eighty pages, I wasn’t sure what its thesis was going to be, and frankly, the place that Bloom lands in the end is hardly a satisfactory solution to the grand pessimistic labyrinth that he lays out. I also found that the sweeping range of meanings contained in Bloom’s designation “The Left” did not leave much for the word not to mean, and thus it took some doing to imagine that “The Left” was any sort of real entity, much less a threat. But first some summary.

The famous opening sentence of the book struck me as somehow off. For the sake of precision, here it goes: “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative” (25). I don’t have trouble imagining that this was true in 1987 in elite private universities, but twenty years later, at least in the schools where I’ve taught, most of my students have not themselves been relativists, though they’ve heard that all of their teachers will be. (When I come after them with Plato in my hand, they find out pretty quickly that absolutism is far scarier. But I’ll talk more about Plato later.) The first act of Bloom’s book then sketches a profile of the American university student in 1987, and not much has changed since then. The students aren’t out to cause trouble but don’t necessarily defer to their teachers for admiration of their wisdom but rather humor us while in their “core” classes until they get to the real business of college, namely learning a trade. Most of the students aren’t all that interested in reading as self-exploration but listen obsessively to recorded pop music as an act of self-expression. They assume that women have capabilities and potential roughly the same as men’s, and ethnic background is more a hobby than an identity; Polish students and Italian, Scots-Irish and German, mingle without much ado. I think he overplays the extent to which every ethnicity but black mingles; twenty years later in a state university, the Indians and Chinese and Koreans tend to have their corners in the UGA mess halls as much as do blacks. More about that in a moment. But he does peg the fact that for the most part, college students are consumers first, and they seem to think of their classmates as potential sources of enjoyment.

I have to admit that at first I did not understand Bloom’s antipathy towards black students, and now that I’ve finished, it’s more intelligible but still unacceptable. Towards the end of the book Bloom recounts a hostage situation instigated by black radicals at Cornell, where he was a professor, and if his account of things was right, then the humanities faculty did indeed react without any of the courage or clarity that should become professors of the humanities. Nonetheless, Bloom attacks the very presence of black students at Cornell while leaving alone the Vietnamese, Japanese, and rural white students who, in my experience, need just as much help learning to think in the idioms of university intellectuals, and I expected more than such tunnel-vision from a fellow teacher of Plato.

The bulk of the book is an examination of philosophy from Machiavelli roughly to Heidegger, and his approach is inconsistent though interesting. Sometimes I got the impression that Bloom was a Neil Postman-style Enlightenment devotee, but then other times I thought he was a latter-day Platonist not happy at all with the legacy of Locke. (I’ll admit that on some days I’m one of the latter myself.) Not one to defer to famous writers, I will say that none of his analyses of Spinoza, Locke, or Rousseau struck me as particularly wrong-headed; on the contrary, he gives treatments to Marx and Nietzsche that leave no doubt in my mind that he has not only read them (not many who gripe about “Marxism” and “nihilism” exhibit the same) but given them serious and respectful consideration as thinkers. His style is just so contrarian that, in the maze of critiques of these figures (who themselves disagreed violently among themselves), a Bloom-position was hard to discern.

In the brief chapter simply called “The Sixties,” my confusion about “The Left” reached its apex. On one hand, Bloom opposes people who would intrude upon the university’s life by means of intimidation, finds consumer culture’s abandonment of reason in favor of raw option philosophically untenable, scoffs at kids who think that simple hedonism is “liberal” or even “revolutionary,” and thinks that televised protests are worthless politically and make celebrities out of those without the spirit to become heroes. As far as that goes, I’m with him. On the other hand, Bloom criticizes historicism at every turn, and I consider myself a thoroughgoing historicist. This complaint of mine is not isolated to Bloom; more often than not, people who talk about “The Left” as monolithic leave me wondering whether I’m among the enemy.

I will say again that, if Bloom’s accounts of his colleagues’ reactions to the intimidation of faculty and administration by Black Power agents is true, then he deserves a moment of contempt for them. He is absolutely right that intimidation by Right or Left is simply unacceptable, a species of the tyrant’s appeal to the masses over against the learned, and I would hope that he would think the same of phenomena such as Horowitz’s attacks on university professors by means of state legislatures. Since Bloom has no love for Joe McCarthy (unlike some self-appointed conservative pundits), I imagine he would take the side of the university on that one as well.

Eventually Bloom lands on Great Books curriculum as the best way out of the consumerism that characterizes the post-sixties university. Now I’m no foe of Great Books. My own alma mater, Milligan, takes pride in its humanities program (instituted in the same span of time as the rise of Black Power), a curriculum spanning every student’s first four semesters and forming a kernel of common reading that makes Milligan a community in a sense that other schools where I’ve taught simply aren’t. That said, I’m going to take issue with the last bit of this essay not with Bloom’s “conservatism” (I’m rarely clear on what that word means) but with his secularism.

Bloom is no doubt aware of Christianity; he has no doubt read his Augustine and Aquinas. Nonetheless, he treats Christianity not as the revolutionary intellectual and spiritual shift that it is in Hegel’s history of philosophy but simply as one more thing that happened in the world surrounding the philosophers. In Bloom’s account of things, philosophy’s goodness comes from its uselessness, its refusal to make things happen. As far as this book goes, that refusal is a common thread that holds true in pagan and Constantinian contexts, irrespective of “religion,” all the way to the Enlightenment, where philosophy became democratic, when conceptions of “human nature” began to shift. As a Thomist (in the Aquinas sense this time, not in the Jefferson sense), I think that the grander shift came not with Locke’s abandonment of Plato’s elitism but with Augustine’s grand fulfillment of classical philosophy when he integrated it into the grander schema of Christian revelation. That move, which makes faithfulness and charity rather than family situation and Roman-style heroism the core of political organization, does not do away with the old aristocracies but nonetheless renders them empty, shells which Locke all too easily discards. That development, which Bloom handily ignores, is fully available to a historicist (especially a Christian one), but someone who thinks that “human nature” is a category largely unaffected by the rise of Christian theology could not be expected to grab onto that.

All in all, I found the book interesting, and it’s not a bad introduction to the history of philosophical anthropology. The attacks on “The Left” leave something to be desired (as do most attacks on “The Right”), but in the end he advocates the teaching of Plato, and I can’t quibble with that. In fact, I started planning this fall’s lessons on Republic just the other day.

When I think about teaching Republic, I realize that in doing so I join a company of teachers that includes not only Bloom but also C.S. Lewis and Alfred North Whitehead and perhaps even Saint Ambrose. It’s a heady realization. Perhaps that’s why I look forward to it every fall.

Cross-posted at Conservative Reformed Mafia.

Plato Therapy

We jumped a thousand years into the future today, landing squarely in the sixth century AD.  A class that lives, so to speak, in ancient Greece can make those sorts of jumps.

We found at the end of our jump a man who did not so much contemplate Plato’s thought experiment about morality and consequences but lived it. Boethius foud himself exiled, awaiting execution, because he uncovered a conspiracy to blackmail the Roman Senate.  The political enemies he made in that endeavor brought false charges against him, and he found himself in the shoes of Socrates and of Jesus, about to die for being good.

Steeping in tragic poetry to alleviate the suffering, Boethius finds himself entertaining Philosophy embodied.  The Consolation of Philosophy is a record of the conversation that ensued.

I think both classes got into the appropriation of Plato today.  Both groups seemed interested in seeing how a Christian-era intellectual uses Republic both to narrate his own career and to craft a new perspective from which to see his own situation.

Along with light doses of Boethius (about a third of a normal Plato reading assignment), the classes have been doing some philosophical freewriting, and my hope is that their final papers, brief philosophies of liberty, will turn out compelling for it.

The end of the Republic, 2007 tour

I think I named this post the same thing last year.  Ah, well.  If the name is a good one, why not stick with it?

My brave students finished up with Plato’s baffling reincarnation chapter yesterday.   I was sure to wrap up each group’s discussion with an explication of the allegorical import: every day of one’s life is a choice of a future life.  To study now is to choose a life of wisdom later.  To choose courage now is to choose a brave life later.  To choose vice now is to choose a vicious life later.

Beyond that, the classes wanted to go in very different directions.  8:00 wanted to talk about the reincarnation section in detail, and we had quite a nice discussion about how Plato’s sense of duty extends even into his story about the afterlife (good people have a duty to make living communities good, so they’re reincarnated after experiencing bliss only for a short season) and about the differences between versions of reincarnation (Hindu and Buddhist and Platonist specifically).  In 11:00 we talked a fair bit about Plato’s attitude towards Homer, and I told the class that I’m still disturbed that the Iliad, perhaps literature’s finest story about standing one’s ground in the face of unkind fate, was Plato’s enemy.  One of my students noted well that for Plato theology was too important to have the gods declare themselves brave men’s enemies, showing that she had internalized Plato nicely (even though she doesn’t much like him).  I still think that Diomedes and Socrates have too much in common to make them enemies.

Tomorrow we do peer revision, and with my Tuesday skeleton classes (they’re always skeletal the day before Georgia-Florida break), I’m going to be teaching Milton’s On Education as a sort of a coda to Plato’s great treatise about educating guardians.  Then, after the world’s largest outdoor don’t-call-it-a-cocktail-party, we dig into Boethius.  Life is good.

I found out today that the Romance Languages department is offering a class on Dante’s Comedy in English next semester.  I’ve emailed the professor, and if my Anglo-Saxon bretheren give their blessing for me to bail out of their seminar, I might be taking a graduate course in Dante as my final graduate literature class.

Turning to the Dark Side

Yesterday we covered that bit of Plato that always makes me check the book’s cover and make sure it’s Plato and not somebody far more modern.  (I also tend to think, upon reading it, that Freud plagiarized it.)  Plato, having detailed how cities and people governed by intellect, by passion, and by productiveness operate, sets himself to the task of describing those tyrannies that seem governed by nothing good at all.

Plato begins by noting that everyone, even the most moral, have within an unspeakable and largely unknowable set of desires, desires that might (paraphrasing Plato) include having sex with parents, eating human flesh, and murdering even the gods.  He never goes on to assign it a neuter pronoun (as Freud did), but he does say that a properly disciplined life can rein in those unspeakables but that in a life or a city in which unlimited, undisciplined option rather than some intelligible common pursuit reigns, those unspeakable desires and criminal elements are just as much “parts” as the intellect and passion and thus stand a chance of taking over.  When they do, one gets not only dictatorial cities, terrorized from within by bodyguards from outside, but dictatorial personalities, people whose worst parts reign and whose intellects are terrorized by pseudo-arguments pulled from inhuman places.

Notable yesterday were my students’ reactions to Freud’s and to Plato’s versions.  At this point nothing Plato says surprises them, so they just wrote it off as more crazy Platonism.  On the other hand, more than one student set out to “debunk” Freud, a precaution that never occurred to them with Plato.  I don’t have much  to say about that other than the obvious, namely that for these thoroughly modern students, Plato’s philosophy is “opinion” that one can hold or not hold, but Freud’s analysis is “science” which requires experimentation lest it become fact.

Now I’m working on my  second draft of my proposal for theology and literature comprehensive examinations.  The first draft they rejected with an insult to my intellectual capabilities, so rather than being the bigger man, I’ve already generated four single-spaced pages and plan to produce at least a couple more before I turn six copies of it in for the grad committee’s scrutiny.

If they want to call me a lightweight, I’ll make them read, by grab.

Math and Morals

We covered some safer ground, relatively speaking, in today’s classes.  First up was the single most famous bit of Republic, the allegory of the cave.  I’ve got my cave talk (and chalkboard diagram) down so solidly that it felt like second nature.  We talked about the principle of analogy not only between the cave and Plato’s ideals of education but also among the elements within the allegory itself–the shadow shapes relate to the inside-forms by analogy, as do the inside-forms to the outside-forms.  We also talked about various religious appropriations of Plato’s illumination theory of truth and of his ontology.  We spent a fair bit of time talking about the resonance that ancient Jews and Christians saw between Plato’s good that precedes being and Genesis’s God that precedes creation.

We then spent some time talking about Plato’s ethical/political project, namely the application of mathematic reasoning to political and moral projects.  In both classes I ran too long, and there wasn’t much time in either class to generate their own particular discussions.  Thursday we take on Plato’s examination of other city-organizations, then Tuesday we do the poetry chapter and the reincarnation chapter, and then we’re done.  I can scarcely believe that we’re nearly done with a round of Plato.

Against Democracy, 2007 Tour

I got to teach perhaps my favorite Republic lesson today, the one in which I take on the persona of Plato and go after democracy.  And as in previous classes, the reactions varied from students who got mad, students who looked betrayed, and students who started to think that perhaps democracy wasn’t so great.

As I tend to do at the end of those classes (weakling that I am), I assured both classes at class’s end that I in fact prefer American-style democracy and that Tom Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and all the other Founding Philosophers of the American Republic knew Plato and his arguments and still preferred democracy.  I also issued my standard challenge to the students, that if they claimed to be proponents of democracy, they should be able to stand nose-to-nose with Plato and explain intelligibly why American democracy is a viable system.

Because some of them get this blog through Facebook feed, I’m going to hold off right now on articulating my own account.

Tuesday we take on the allegory of the cave, the most famous bit of Plato, and after that, we only have two more classes on this great book.  In November we take on Boethius, and that should be fun, but I always get a little sad when we get towards the end of Republic, the same kind of sad that I get when we reach the ends of Job and 2 Samuel.  I suppose the good news for me is that, if God allows me to continue teaching college, I’ll have more opportunities to teach good books to smart people.  When I think on that, I’m not sad at all that I’ve devoted the years to study and teaching that I have.

Women, Children, and Others

I typed this post once, but the UGA main library’s shady Internet connection lost it forever.  Ugh.

I didn’t post about Tuesday’s classes because I was grading, and I think that was a mistake.  I’m going to try reconstructing some of the things we talked about even though I’ve already taught my 8:00 section today.

First, Plato is flying by.  I feel like we just started the book yesterday, and we’re already up to the allegory of the cave for Tuesday.  In two weeks’ time we will have finished the entire book.  (I realize that survey of philosophy classes can take the whole thing down in a week, but this isn’t one of those.)  I’ll be glad to move on to Boethius, but at the same time, I do fear that we’ve spent inadequate time really digging into Republic.

Tuesday, to my surprise, neither class wanted all that badly to talk about the strange spouse-and-children-sharing system that Plato elaborates.  Perhaps it was just too alien even to speak of.  On the other hand, 8:00 class had a really good discussion of the gods and Plato.  They hit the nail right on the head: Plato’s unscrupulous admonitions to manipulate heavenly piety is unnerving, even to moderns who are used to ceremonial deism layered over a secular government.  He seems to see nothing wrong with telling soldiers that they’ll be made war-gods in the afterlife,  telling the community in general that the gods have instituted his ideas (he even calls it the Noble Lie), and telling educators simply not to use parts of Homer that aren’t moral.  By contrast, that class noted, Biblical traditions see nothing wrong with a Bible that leads off, four chapters in, with a story in which Cain murders his brother and God protects him from the just consequences of the murder.  I can just imagine Plato spitting his barley cakes across the table if he heard that.

In 11:00 class we talked more about the place of children in Plato’s community.  We noted the strangeness of protecting them from stories of Achilles’ bad behavior but the exposure of children to actual warfare so that they can see what they’ll be doing as adults.

In other news, UGA president Michael Adams granted an interview at yesterday’s CFF meeting.  He seems a genuinely good man, and once more I wonder at North Georgia’s hatred for him.  And although this might draw ire, I couldn’t help but remember when Mark Richt, UGA’s head football coach, granted a similar interview last year and noting the stark difference between Richt’s presidential-press-conference style (not answering any questions straight) and Adams’s Socratic-dialogue style (really attempting to get to the truth of things).

If I had to buy a used car from one of ’em, I’d buy from Adams.