Applying Aristotle
I have been inspired by may courageous idealists along the way who have helped me and others to see and to reach our potentials. But none were more dear to me than my mentor, the political philosopher Charles W. Anderson, who taught me that a good teacher could also be a good friend. In his book entitled Prescribing the Life of the Mind, Charlie takes a fresh look at our ideals of education, using the method of pragmatic liberalism developed in his earlier works.[1] Anderson dares to seek excellence in education, first by questioning our authority to make the assumptions we make with regard to it, and then by arguing toward our responsibility and ability to identify the fundamental purpose of education, and this, in order to recover our perception of the point of the endeavor, and thus to more intelligently deliberate with our natural skill of practical reason.
There is perhaps no ideal more closely associated with our classic origins than practical reason, but it has been curiously neglected in our practice of what we call Philosophy.
Zeus is said to have swallowed his pregnant wife to make “'practical wisdom' part of himself."[2] Athena, the goddess born from the head of Zeus, had "the practical know-how that separates man from the beasts"[3] as her province. Aristotle considered this the highest form of knowledge, since "to be happy is to be good."[4]
In Anderson's view, practical reason:
"is largely a matter of being acutely self-conscious about our ideals of the purpose of a human enterprise and the practice we institute to achieve them."[5]
"This capacity to create purposes, to define good and evil, excellence and error, is essential to what we call free will and moral agency. It is also what is generally meant by human dignity. It is the only evidence we have that we are, perhaps, a little different, somewhat special, in the order of the world.[6]
Anderson turns this method on the assumptions underlying our conception of university in order to postulate an ideal, a conception of the essential purpose of education that can be used as a guide for practical reason, in keeping with Socrates' own purpose.
Anderson points out that the university has remained relatively exempt from either self or public criticism. "[W]e are probably too close to the subject for proper perspective. We take as given what was in face an extraordinary recasting of historic predispositions."[7] The assumption has been that the university reflects the order of nature, and there was little inclination to reexamine the design once it was accepted at the turn of the century.
Examining the process by which American universities became knowledge factories by using a method which treats everything as a subject for rational analysis and everyone a rational analyst, Anderson concludes that:
"Our concern then is primarily with the problems that are rooted in our conception of the university itself."[8] "The American university represents a radical transformation of longstanding [ancient] views of the purposes of this institution, of the life of the mind, of reason itself."[9] "The classic understanding was that the life of philosophy, of self-conscious reflection, was the highest of human attainments, and reserved for the very few."[10]
The Greeks saw this as a natural aristocracy, a view which served as a push to excellence, since one can earn distinction in a democracy only by personal honor. In our modern system of education, individuality is discouraged while individualism is encouraged: a subtle but important difference, making all the difference in whether we learn to compete with our best selves, or with others. This in turn makes the critical difference in how many of us can actually become winners. We can all 'win'...if winning means achieving our personal best, our ideal potential. But only a few of us can 'win' if winning means being better than others, for this kind of motivation necessitates that we make losers of others in order to elevate our self.
In the last paper of my undergraduate education (an education which has spanned a decade and taken me all the way from blind ignorance to--at times--deep insight, not to mention from the Midwest to this enchanted land where it all began) I felt compelled to complain that true education is made especially difficult by methods which disintegrate self-knowledge, social relations, and disempower true self-actualization. The fact that this sounds like a lot of 'liberal rhetoric' only reflects, I think, the frequency with which we hear students complain about the same problems in education. While I feel I have had a wonderful undergraduate education, perhaps the most comprehensive of anyone I know of, I cannot deny that it was, sometimes, in spite of the system of education itself, not because of it. Institutions, no matter how influential in our lives, can only constrain, but not determine us (and thanks to T.F.H. Allen, now we can explain why). On the other hand, we can determine it--and Anderson shows us how.
Since our universities no longer promote the values of excellence which integrate the soul and the community, I agree with Anderson that "We are going to have to postulate an ideal conception of the university, a notion of its essential purposes, of its distinctive excellence...of what perfectly it should become."[11] Not just any ol' ideal we please, as the positivists might worry. Rather, Anderson's goal rests on the Socratic trust that the answer to this question, like all truth, is to be found in the soul itself:
"We do entertain an idea of the university sufficiently clearcut to rule out certain possible ideas of purpose as corrupt or mistaken...if this be idealism, then make the most of it, for...we need to think this way if we are to exercise practical reason...we do it all the time."[12]
"Some might think this note of idealism incompatible with the pragmatic underpinnings of my project. The misunderstanding of philosophic pragmatism--a theory which very much influenced the American universities in their formative years--is great and general. Pragmatism, as a philosophy, is anything but the doctrine of iconoclastic relativism, or worse, brute expediency, that it is commonly supposed to be.[13] Pierce, in particular, simply assumed idealism in this sense. But all the great pragmatists saw themselves in a line of descent from the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and more proximately, Hegel. As James said, pragmatism was but 'a new name for some old ways of thinking.'"[14]
Thus, the ideal which Anderson postulates is the process or method of practical reason itself, which constitutes "a search for dike, as the Greeks would have put it." Which is to say, for ‘moral justice and order, "for right relation, balance, proportion...which is, perhaps, as close as we can come to knowing the essence of the enterprise of education."[15]
"If we think about it aright, I think we will come to realize that we are still quite new at this entire game. There is so much we haven't tried yet. So what will it be? Do we want to teach people to think more intelligently about public purpose when they act as citizens? Then we must try to find out what does happen, and what should happen, in various forums of deliberation, from the Socratic dialogue to the politics of large democratic nations. Do we want people to learn to live more in harmony with nature so as to sustain the resources and the beauties of the earth? In that case, we'd better start finding out more about our peculiar place in the order of life for...we really have no clear idea of what 'living in accord with nature' actually means... Do we need better teachers? Then we'd best think more about the mystery of teaching and learning, what it means to catch on, and to be able to go on, to discern the pattern that presumably all can learn to see."[16]
As Anderson notes, the list is unending, inviting, challenging to our ideas of both the purposes and the methods of research, and also daunting. The fact that one risks a great deal professionally by such outspoken idealism is enough to keep most so-called thinkers mute on such interdisciplinary issues as truth, justice, and freedom. "All of this is a routine part of human deliberation and argument," Anderson says, "and all of this contemporary political science, economics, sociology, psychology, and philosophy seldom acknowledge as existing at all,"[17] which has the disintegration of knowledge of as a consequent.
"If we actually tried to think through, and decide, what education should accomplish in the mind and heart of the student...matters might be different. If we really wanted to enhance the life of the mind, we might proceed differently."[18] And in all fairness, "everything we can claim to teach with integrity we must at least partially understand."[19]
Thus we are back to one of Socrates' own favorite inquires, the question of how we learn.[20] And the answer we get, once again, is a familiar Greek ideal. And as Socrates himself would have approached it, such an interdisciplinary project as applying practical reason to educational methods must "use the terms economic, political, and philosophical, in a more classical, one might say in a more essential sense than is conventional in the disciplines that are normally concerned with these questions. So what the professionals can actually contribute to this discussion is somewhat up in the air."[21]
Plato pioneered this move toward generalism and integration. According to Huntington Cairns:
"He does not treat the various topics of his discourse, such as ethics, psychology, epistemology, as meaningful in themselves, but as organic, interrelated subjects meaningful only as variations upon a single theme. In this respect he differs from scientists who see the different departments of inquiry as having their own special components."[22]
For Plato, philosophy originally meant curiosity, and in his Republic he explains how the whole truth is cumulative:
"It is curiosity, I suppose, and a delight in fresh experience that gives some people a passion for all that is to be seen and heard... "(Plato's Republic, 183) "So the philosopher, with his passion for wisdom, will be one who desires all wisdom, not only some part of it. ... Only the man who has a taste for every sort of knowledge and throws himself into acquiring it with an insatiable curiosity will deserve to be called a philosopher."[23]
"[T]he true lover of knowledge as one born to strive towards reality, who cannot linger among that multiplicity of things which men believe to be real, but holds on his way with a passion that will not faint or fail until he has laid hold upon the essential nature of each thing with that part of his soul which can apprehend reality because of its affinity therewith; and when he has by that means approached real being and entered into union with it, the offspring of this marriage is intelligence and truth; so that at last, having found knowledge and true life and nourishment, he is at rest from his travail?"[24]
"Further, I continued, this whole course of study will, I believe, contribute to the end we desire and not be labour wasted, only if it is carried to the point at which reflection can take a comprehensive view of the mutual relations and affinities which bind all these sciences together."[25]
"Here at last, then, we come to the main theme, to be developed in philosophic discussion. It ... progresses like that of the power of vision ... the summit of the intelligible world is reached in philosophic discussion by one who aspires, through the discourse of reason unaided by any of the senses, to make his way in every case to the essential reality and perseveres until he has grasped by pure intelligence the very nature of Goodness itself. This journey is what we call Dialectic."[26]
"[Children] must devote themselves especially to the discipline which will make them masters of the technique of asking and answering questions... Dialectic...study... "[27]
"[A] natural gift for Dialectic, which is the same thing as the ability to see the connexions of things."[28]
[1]see Charles W. Anderson, Pragmatic Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.)
[2]Powell, p. 74.
[3]Powell, p. 182.
[4]Earnest Barker, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1946), p. xiv. In Henry B. Veatch, Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. 6.
[5]Anderson, pp.1-2.
[6]Anderson, p.3.
[7]Anderson, p. 6.
[8]Anderson, p.8.
[9]Anderson, pp.4-6.
[10]Anderson, p.6.
[11]Anderson, p.10.
[12]Anderson, p.10.
[13]This, as we will see, is T.F.H. Allen's project in Toward a Unified Ecology.
[14]Anderson, pp.10-12.
[15]Anderson, p.16.
[16]Anderson, p.196.
[17]Anderson, p.12.
[18]Anderson, p.195.
[19]Anderson, p.197.
[20]see Plato's "Meno" in Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961)]
[21]Anderson, p.8.
[22]Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xvii)
[23]Plato, The Republic of Plato, ed. Francis MacDonald Cornford (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1941), p.183.
[24]Plato, The Republic of Plato, p. 197.
[25]Plato, The Republic of Plato, p. 252.
[26]Plato, The Republic of Plato, p. 252.
[27]Plato, The Republic of Plato, p. 255.
[28]Plato, The Republic of Plato, p. 259.
I have been inspired by may courageous idealists along the way who have helped me and others to see and to reach our potentials. But none were more dear to me than my mentor, the political philosopher Charles W. Anderson, who taught me that a good teacher could also be a good friend. In his book entitled Prescribing the Life of the Mind, Charlie takes a fresh look at our ideals of education, using the method of pragmatic liberalism developed in his earlier works.[1] Anderson dares to seek excellence in education, first by questioning our authority to make the assumptions we make with regard to it, and then by arguing toward our responsibility and ability to identify the fundamental purpose of education, and this, in order to recover our perception of the point of the endeavor, and thus to more intelligently deliberate with our natural skill of practical reason.
There is perhaps no ideal more closely associated with our classic origins than practical reason, but it has been curiously neglected in our practice of what we call Philosophy.
Zeus is said to have swallowed his pregnant wife to make “'practical wisdom' part of himself."[2] Athena, the goddess born from the head of Zeus, had "the practical know-how that separates man from the beasts"[3] as her province. Aristotle considered this the highest form of knowledge, since "to be happy is to be good."[4]
In Anderson's view, practical reason:
"is largely a matter of being acutely self-conscious about our ideals of the purpose of a human enterprise and the practice we institute to achieve them."[5]
"This capacity to create purposes, to define good and evil, excellence and error, is essential to what we call free will and moral agency. It is also what is generally meant by human dignity. It is the only evidence we have that we are, perhaps, a little different, somewhat special, in the order of the world.[6]
Anderson turns this method on the assumptions underlying our conception of university in order to postulate an ideal, a conception of the essential purpose of education that can be used as a guide for practical reason, in keeping with Socrates' own purpose.
Anderson points out that the university has remained relatively exempt from either self or public criticism. "[W]e are probably too close to the subject for proper perspective. We take as given what was in face an extraordinary recasting of historic predispositions."[7] The assumption has been that the university reflects the order of nature, and there was little inclination to reexamine the design once it was accepted at the turn of the century.
Examining the process by which American universities became knowledge factories by using a method which treats everything as a subject for rational analysis and everyone a rational analyst, Anderson concludes that:
"Our concern then is primarily with the problems that are rooted in our conception of the university itself."[8] "The American university represents a radical transformation of longstanding [ancient] views of the purposes of this institution, of the life of the mind, of reason itself."[9] "The classic understanding was that the life of philosophy, of self-conscious reflection, was the highest of human attainments, and reserved for the very few."[10]
The Greeks saw this as a natural aristocracy, a view which served as a push to excellence, since one can earn distinction in a democracy only by personal honor. In our modern system of education, individuality is discouraged while individualism is encouraged: a subtle but important difference, making all the difference in whether we learn to compete with our best selves, or with others. This in turn makes the critical difference in how many of us can actually become winners. We can all 'win'...if winning means achieving our personal best, our ideal potential. But only a few of us can 'win' if winning means being better than others, for this kind of motivation necessitates that we make losers of others in order to elevate our self.
In the last paper of my undergraduate education (an education which has spanned a decade and taken me all the way from blind ignorance to--at times--deep insight, not to mention from the Midwest to this enchanted land where it all began) I felt compelled to complain that true education is made especially difficult by methods which disintegrate self-knowledge, social relations, and disempower true self-actualization. The fact that this sounds like a lot of 'liberal rhetoric' only reflects, I think, the frequency with which we hear students complain about the same problems in education. While I feel I have had a wonderful undergraduate education, perhaps the most comprehensive of anyone I know of, I cannot deny that it was, sometimes, in spite of the system of education itself, not because of it. Institutions, no matter how influential in our lives, can only constrain, but not determine us (and thanks to T.F.H. Allen, now we can explain why). On the other hand, we can determine it--and Anderson shows us how.
Since our universities no longer promote the values of excellence which integrate the soul and the community, I agree with Anderson that "We are going to have to postulate an ideal conception of the university, a notion of its essential purposes, of its distinctive excellence...of what perfectly it should become."[11] Not just any ol' ideal we please, as the positivists might worry. Rather, Anderson's goal rests on the Socratic trust that the answer to this question, like all truth, is to be found in the soul itself:
"We do entertain an idea of the university sufficiently clearcut to rule out certain possible ideas of purpose as corrupt or mistaken...if this be idealism, then make the most of it, for...we need to think this way if we are to exercise practical reason...we do it all the time."[12]
"Some might think this note of idealism incompatible with the pragmatic underpinnings of my project. The misunderstanding of philosophic pragmatism--a theory which very much influenced the American universities in their formative years--is great and general. Pragmatism, as a philosophy, is anything but the doctrine of iconoclastic relativism, or worse, brute expediency, that it is commonly supposed to be.[13] Pierce, in particular, simply assumed idealism in this sense. But all the great pragmatists saw themselves in a line of descent from the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and more proximately, Hegel. As James said, pragmatism was but 'a new name for some old ways of thinking.'"[14]
Thus, the ideal which Anderson postulates is the process or method of practical reason itself, which constitutes "a search for dike, as the Greeks would have put it." Which is to say, for ‘moral justice and order, "for right relation, balance, proportion...which is, perhaps, as close as we can come to knowing the essence of the enterprise of education."[15]
"If we think about it aright, I think we will come to realize that we are still quite new at this entire game. There is so much we haven't tried yet. So what will it be? Do we want to teach people to think more intelligently about public purpose when they act as citizens? Then we must try to find out what does happen, and what should happen, in various forums of deliberation, from the Socratic dialogue to the politics of large democratic nations. Do we want people to learn to live more in harmony with nature so as to sustain the resources and the beauties of the earth? In that case, we'd better start finding out more about our peculiar place in the order of life for...we really have no clear idea of what 'living in accord with nature' actually means... Do we need better teachers? Then we'd best think more about the mystery of teaching and learning, what it means to catch on, and to be able to go on, to discern the pattern that presumably all can learn to see."[16]
As Anderson notes, the list is unending, inviting, challenging to our ideas of both the purposes and the methods of research, and also daunting. The fact that one risks a great deal professionally by such outspoken idealism is enough to keep most so-called thinkers mute on such interdisciplinary issues as truth, justice, and freedom. "All of this is a routine part of human deliberation and argument," Anderson says, "and all of this contemporary political science, economics, sociology, psychology, and philosophy seldom acknowledge as existing at all,"[17] which has the disintegration of knowledge of as a consequent.
"If we actually tried to think through, and decide, what education should accomplish in the mind and heart of the student...matters might be different. If we really wanted to enhance the life of the mind, we might proceed differently."[18] And in all fairness, "everything we can claim to teach with integrity we must at least partially understand."[19]
Thus we are back to one of Socrates' own favorite inquires, the question of how we learn.[20] And the answer we get, once again, is a familiar Greek ideal. And as Socrates himself would have approached it, such an interdisciplinary project as applying practical reason to educational methods must "use the terms economic, political, and philosophical, in a more classical, one might say in a more essential sense than is conventional in the disciplines that are normally concerned with these questions. So what the professionals can actually contribute to this discussion is somewhat up in the air."[21]
Plato pioneered this move toward generalism and integration. According to Huntington Cairns:
"He does not treat the various topics of his discourse, such as ethics, psychology, epistemology, as meaningful in themselves, but as organic, interrelated subjects meaningful only as variations upon a single theme. In this respect he differs from scientists who see the different departments of inquiry as having their own special components."[22]
For Plato, philosophy originally meant curiosity, and in his Republic he explains how the whole truth is cumulative:
"It is curiosity, I suppose, and a delight in fresh experience that gives some people a passion for all that is to be seen and heard... "(Plato's Republic, 183) "So the philosopher, with his passion for wisdom, will be one who desires all wisdom, not only some part of it. ... Only the man who has a taste for every sort of knowledge and throws himself into acquiring it with an insatiable curiosity will deserve to be called a philosopher."[23]
"[T]he true lover of knowledge as one born to strive towards reality, who cannot linger among that multiplicity of things which men believe to be real, but holds on his way with a passion that will not faint or fail until he has laid hold upon the essential nature of each thing with that part of his soul which can apprehend reality because of its affinity therewith; and when he has by that means approached real being and entered into union with it, the offspring of this marriage is intelligence and truth; so that at last, having found knowledge and true life and nourishment, he is at rest from his travail?"[24]
"Further, I continued, this whole course of study will, I believe, contribute to the end we desire and not be labour wasted, only if it is carried to the point at which reflection can take a comprehensive view of the mutual relations and affinities which bind all these sciences together."[25]
"Here at last, then, we come to the main theme, to be developed in philosophic discussion. It ... progresses like that of the power of vision ... the summit of the intelligible world is reached in philosophic discussion by one who aspires, through the discourse of reason unaided by any of the senses, to make his way in every case to the essential reality and perseveres until he has grasped by pure intelligence the very nature of Goodness itself. This journey is what we call Dialectic."[26]
"[Children] must devote themselves especially to the discipline which will make them masters of the technique of asking and answering questions... Dialectic...study... "[27]
"[A] natural gift for Dialectic, which is the same thing as the ability to see the connexions of things."[28]
[1]see Charles W. Anderson, Pragmatic Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.)
[2]Powell, p. 74.
[3]Powell, p. 182.
[4]Earnest Barker, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1946), p. xiv. In Henry B. Veatch, Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. 6.
[5]Anderson, pp.1-2.
[6]Anderson, p.3.
[7]Anderson, p. 6.
[8]Anderson, p.8.
[9]Anderson, pp.4-6.
[10]Anderson, p.6.
[11]Anderson, p.10.
[12]Anderson, p.10.
[13]This, as we will see, is T.F.H. Allen's project in Toward a Unified Ecology.
[14]Anderson, pp.10-12.
[15]Anderson, p.16.
[16]Anderson, p.196.
[17]Anderson, p.12.
[18]Anderson, p.195.
[19]Anderson, p.197.
[20]see Plato's "Meno" in Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961)]
[21]Anderson, p.8.
[22]Plato, Collected Dialogues, p. xvii)
[23]Plato, The Republic of Plato, ed. Francis MacDonald Cornford (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1941), p.183.
[24]Plato, The Republic of Plato, p. 197.
[25]Plato, The Republic of Plato, p. 252.
[26]Plato, The Republic of Plato, p. 252.
[27]Plato, The Republic of Plato, p. 255.
[28]Plato, The Republic of Plato, p. 259.