I recently read an article that criticized Great Books programs because, the author claimed, they often lead students to skepticism. He wrote, "When examined carefully, the great thinkers contradict each other. The student is thus thrown into confusion because he has not the wit or experience to see the dangers of these contradictory positions. He begins to doubt if anything can be known if those said to be great prove each other wrong."

I will admit that there is some truth to this charge. During the course of PLS, I often felt this kind of tug toward skepticism. But (my first question) is a healthy dose of skepticism necessarily a bad thing? I suspect we would have fewer wars if there were more skepticism in the world.

My second question: What is the alternative? The "solution" that the author proposes seems to be to have students read the Great Books all through the lens of a "genuine philosophic understanding," by which he seems to mean one particular philosophical worldview that the students assume and take for granted in all their subsequent philosophical investigations. Where can they get this "genuine philosophical understanding" before they have even begun their study of philosophy? Well, it is passed on to the students from their "betters."

It seems to me there are two aspects of philosophy, a critical aspect and a constructive aspect. Imagine knowledge as a building in construction. (Why do I always picture knowledge as a building?) One might argue that the critical aspect comes and must tear down everything that is false and unsteady, and then the constructive aspect comes along and builds something back up, only for the critical aspect to come back again later and check for the soundness of this new structure. This process goes on indefinitely, but hopefully each time the weaknesses are taken out and a structure is built back up, it grows a little stronger and more steady, until finally a building stands which is pure, universal truth.

The author of the article I am talking about seems to have left no room for the critical aspect of philosophy; rather, a philosophical system is assumed off the bat, on the word of others - as if new building is thrown up, and before checking it for structural soundness, the crowds are ushered in, risking its collapse on their heads. The lord of this building stands on its roof and condemns nearby buildings from the vantage point of his building, but has never checked to see if his own building is wobbling underneath him.

-Joey

I turned 22 one week ago today, and this gives me the shameless right to pull the "Well, it's my birthday!" card with a narcissistic post on - you guessed it - birthdays. 

In his book The Movie-Goer, Walker Percy writes, "On this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing left to do but fall prey to desire."  Inspired, I've thought a bit about what I know on this, my 22nd birthday, and what I hope for from the years to come.

On Becoming a Palindrome
What does it mean to turn twenty-two?
In a burst rather golden, with a little of blue
With a grand lyric blast (was that a tear, too?)
Oh, the heart can still hurt when you turn twenty-two.

Your dreams on their strings may glide near at your tug
To your strange, sweet delight there's a new sort of love
And you wear your years light as a silken-cloak hug
The world's a pearl-oyster when you're at the start of

Twenty-two.

But there's a slight feeling, now that school's done -
Oh wear am I going?  And where am I from?
Abandon all hope, or after joy's red rose run?
(The choices are rife now you've passed twenty-one.)

At twenty-two, drink from life's goblet your fill
Live with abandon (at moments, be still)
Sow wide of your days and reap in a rich till
(For you can't quite forget, in the years' churning mill;)

I now have at least fifty more years to kill.


One final, slightly more cheery, thought on birthdays; specifically what I hope for mine in years to come.  In the words of Wendell Berry:

To Tanya on my Sixtieth Birthday
What wonder have you done to me?
In binding love you set me free.
These sixty years the wonder prove:
I bring you aged a young man's love.

-LC

Read this and die laughing.

- Tess

They say it's not  polite to talk politics, especially among company you know might take  offense to what you say.

So pardon my impudence.

I want to talk about the death penalty. It's been a huge topic of current events lately with audience outbursts at recent political events and today's controversial execution of Troy Davis. We can even consider the celebration of millions of Americans after the capture and execution of Osama Bin Laden.

As I see it, any discussion of the death penalty inevitably comes with an elephant in the room, and perhaps people behaving like asses (sorry, my puns aren't as witty as Conor's). This has become a hugely partisan issue, leading to political stereotyping that, like most partisan issues, stymies actual discussion of the issue. So let's leave the ideology out, and we'd probably do well to try not to mention Texas (there's the one subtle jab I'll allow myself).

The death penalty is an issue deeply rooted in political and moral philosophy. Kant believed execution of criminals to be a matter of justice; in a polis founded on mutual agreement upon laws, to not permanently dispose of an offender was akin to condoning his crime.  The other end of the spectrum, of course, contends that the death penalty is immoral in itself. It promotes the kind of barbarism that laws strive to suppress, and carries with it the tremendous burden of acting on a conviction that has been established by fallible human intellect.

These arguments are simplistic, and I would be eager to hear from those who find themselves aligned one way over the other and wish to better articulate their view. However, I ask that in our responses we consider: 

• whether the death penalty is ever politically necessary,
• whether the death penalty is ever morally necessary, and
• how our views on the death penalty are influenced by our religious views.

Let's apply that  theoretical PLS education in virtue of ours to a real issue. Respectful disagreement is very welcome; let's just try not to get personal.

[Note: I wrote this in my journal a while ago, except for the parts in brackets, which I just added. Regarding the title, I have not read Sartre's No Exit, but these reflections make me think of it anyway. They also make me think of Jim Henson's movie The Cube (has anyone seen it?).]

Where one man sees the Closing of the American Mind, another sees the Opening. Which is it, an opening or a closing? Perhaps both. Every opening is also a closing, and vice versa. You cannot open your mind to one idea without simultaneously closing it to another. [Or can you?] This has scary implications for our freedom of choice, for people are constantly planting ideas in our minds that close us off from the complementary ideas. This also has scary implications for the goodness of learning, for it means that all learning is also unlearning, in a way. Every time you “learn” something, you are changed by it, and you can never step back into the same river again. And so our lives flow on, chaotically and heedlessly, with doors invitingly swinging open and abruptly slamming shut all the time, constant revolving doors whirring into infinity! Trapdoors may open up beneath us at any given moment, or hinges above us may squeak and a monster fall through from the attic onto our heads! [I had been reading Nietzsche, can’t you tell?]

Imagine an enormous—really an infinite—house full of doors of all sorts, regular doors and trapdoors above and below and sliding doors disguised as panels in the walls and hidden revolving doors. You are dropped into the middle of this house by yourself, without any map or any idea where you are or how you got there. So you do the only thing you can and begin to proceed through the house. But in this house, all the doors are constantly opening and closing of their own volition (or at least seemingly of their own volition). Every time one door in the house opens, another closes, and vice versa, so that there are always the same number of doors open and closed. But at any given time, more of the doors are closed than open. Given this situation, you can only take a mostly heedless, random path through the house, going through whatever doors are open to you, directed by the fate of the swinging doors. Sometimes you can force open a door that you want to go through (often without any reason other than that you feel that you should go through it), but more often than not the closed doors are firmly shut to you, unless they open on their own. And waiting patiently by a door never guarantees that it will open. The house seems to have a mind of its own, but its pattern you cannot understand. If this house were smaller, you would eventually come to know its layout and boundaries, but this house is so big that you don’t even know how far it extends—it may be infinite—and you very rarely find yourself in a place that you have been before. Even if you do, it may have been so long ago that you don’t remember it. So what do you do? There are only two things you can do—continue proceeding through the restless doors on your journey of exploration and discovery, hoping against hope that someday the structure of this house might somehow come clear to you or that you might find a way out before dying (which may be the only way out). Or you can simply sit down on the floor in the spot where you are, saying, “It’s hopeless, I’ll never figure this place out, and besides, this spot is perfectly pleasant and has everything I need for a contented life, so I am just going to stay right here.” Which do you choose?

[9/13/11: I just thought of a third option, which seems to be somewhere between the two options presented above. You can allow yourself to range a little bit but not go beyond certain boundaries. This way you will get to know at least a certain area of the house very well, even if you can never know the whole house. Perhaps this can be thought of in T. S. Eliot’s terms, “The way out is the way in.” (Actually, I don’t think he actually said this; what he did say in “The Dry Salvages” was “And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.” And he attributes this to Krishna in the poem.) You cannot know the whole, but by getting to know one part or area very well, by digging down in one spot as far as you can, perhaps you can get a sense of the whole. Of course, in the house metaphor, this option assumes that the structure of the whole remains constant, that the walls and doors do not shift and warp, so that each door or passage always leads to the same place and each room remains the same every time you enter it. If the house is constantly in flux, then this option would be impossible, or would amount to virtually the same thing as option 2 (sitting down in one place). If the flux of the house has some discernible pattern, then this option might still be viable (one can figure out the patterns of the house). An example of patterned flux might be some kind of progressive evolution, or simply a regular sequence of events. But if the flux is completely random and unpredictable (or predictable, but with such minute complexity that it becomes virtually unpredictable—as is the case if one tries to predict, say, macroeconomic events or even phenomena of one individual mind using atomic physics), then this option is futile.]

"It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure."
Albert Einstein

"if i had only one life to live, of course i would live it with you; and if i had only one life to give, of course i would give it to you.  But in the wide multitudes that i contain, it seems that at some point i forgot your name.   i can't regret it or think it a shame; for i've so many lives to live."
Me

-LC

[Disclaimer... while this is meant to be pleasantly provocative and inherently inflammatory, my comments are not  oriented toward one political party over another; it is not my intention to inspire any partisan bickering!  So none of that!]

What if we lived in a civilization where people cared enough about their society to be thoroughly aware of what was going on in it? (Or do we? ) Politics might consist of actual deliberation instead of mindless rhetoric dumps.  We wouldn't be satisfied with nice sound-bytes that align with our pre-established ideological views. We might have to think... collaborate...be democratic. (Or are we?) The whole "by the people for the people" thing might actually work; perhaps there wouldn't be such a harsh line between "citizens" and "politicians." We might have a more functional representative democracy - people trusting their leaders and their leaders actually making decisions based on the well-informed citizenry's will. Political debate wouldn't focus on single "issues," but on the interconnectedness of the many issues of political debate. We'd be intellectually  more unified and perhaps be able to make more positive changes for the common good.

We've read Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Machiavelli, More,  Rousseau, Locke, Mill and the rest of the gang. So have many other of our country's leaders (though perhaps not enough). We have all these models of ideal governance, but none of them ultimately work.

So what's the problem?

Human nature? OUR nature as a society?  Is there ever a perfect politics?

Probably not. "All politicians are corrupt." "The system is broken." Blahblahblah, cynicism-cynicism-cynicism.

Okay... so now what? We still have a society to hold together! What do we do? 


KS

             One of my favorite lines from War and Peace is Tolstoy’s first description of Natasha. In the midst of a stuffy adult conversation, children burst into the room playing the Russian equivalent of tag. Natasha is described as being, “just at that charming age when a girl is no longer a child, though the child is not yet a young woman.”

            This line is great because we can all remember a time when we have felt in that “in-between” state where we are too old to play games with our younger siblings and too old to converse with the “grown-ups.” The games and toys of our youth (even Playmobil, Jack) no longer appeal to us and grown-ups are just plain boring.

            This awkward “in-between” state is most evident in the typical American undergraduate student. When I entered college I was 17 years old, and according to the law (excepting the wizarding world) not an adult. When I graduated college, I was 21 years old, a legal adult in all 50 states. So what happened in college? What magical transformation took place in those four years that made me an adult and no longer a child?
          
          Perhaps a growing sense of independence. Away from Mom and Dad, the typical college student has a lot more freedom than he or she is used to. Perhaps it was the accelerated growth of critical thinking. I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I came to college I couldn’t evaluate a text at all (just memorize it). After PLS, I feel like I could critique an argument with the best of ‘em (you guys).

            I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there was a definite feeling after we graduated that we were not kids anymore. It was time for us to grow up and face the music. Get a job. Get a place. Go to grad school. These are what we were told we had to do in order to “grow up.” Now that you have done these things, do any of you feel like a “grown-up?” Do you feel like an “adult?” Have you left boyhood or girlhood behind and exchanged it for manhood or womanhood? (What makes a man, a man and a woman, a woman could be a whole ‘nother pensees)

            I only ask this because every weekday I see over 60 students who see me as just as much a “grown-up” as their other teachers. A part of me agrees with them because I have “put away childish things” like St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:11. Another part of me says no I’m still not quite a grown up yet. Perhaps this “in-between” feeling is recurring throughout life, something we feel whenever the nostalgia for things past collides with the pressure to grow up.

            So I ask you again – Are you a grown up?    
-Conor