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Every year the dean who is
serving as chairman of the instruction committee of the College
is charged by the Polity with writing a "Statement
of Educational Policy and Program." The Statement is to be
submitted to the faculty as a whole. The presidents then are to
present the Statement to the Board of Visitors and Governors,
along with an account of the faculty discussion of it, as a report
for the Board's consideration. In this way the Board is kept apprised
of developments in the instructional life of the College. In recent
years the visiting committee has discussed the Statement of Educational
Policy with small groups of faculty and also with students. Occasionally,
it has become a topic of discussion among alumni as well. Consideration
of the Statement by the faculty as a whole, the Board of Visitors
and Governors, Students, and Alumni makes it very much a document
for the entire College community, although it is written by only
one of the two deans, and may speak to issues that are more pertinent
to one half of the faculty than to the other.
In recent years Statements
of Educational Policy have treated important issues of faculty
development, intercampus unity, challenges to the program from
the outside, the quality of student life, and the size of the
College. Various aspects of the curriculum have been addressed
as well, such as the language curriculum, writing, and the laboratory.
But it is has been a while since a Statement of Educational Policy
has attempted to articulate the basic principles and presuppositions
of the program taken as a whole. In my last statement I wrote
that "the College does have an intellectual center and one
that accommodates a wide range of opinions about what the development
and cultivation of the intellectual powers should entail."
Without elaboration, I referred to the intellectual center of
the College as "well defined and clearly understood."
Conversations I have had with colleagues since then have led to
me believe that it might be useful to try to articulate exactly
what the intellectual center of the College is, and to locate
it relative to the basic aims of the program.
The principles of our program
have already been articulated by the founders of the program,
and by previous deans, eloquently, forcefully, and with as much
clarity as one could wish for. Still, for several reasons, revisiting
the principles and presuppositions of the program is timely, and
might be of particular benefit to newer members of the faculty.
Among other things, the program has undergone significant transformations
since its founding. Limited electives have been introduced in
the form of preceptorials. Four years of laboratory have been
reduced to three. A graduate liberal arts program now parallels
the undergraduate program. Visual arts are a component of the
undergraduate program in Santa Fe, where a masters program in
Eastern classics has also been introduced. History is now one
of the segments of the liberal arts program in the Graduate Institute.
In addition to these conspicuous changes that have been effected
by formal instructional proposals, changes of a more subtle character
have taken place. (For the most part, I confine my observations
here to the Santa Fe campus, to which my experience over the last
fifteen years has been limited.) Figures who used not to be given
much consideration at St. John's, such as Vico, Husserl, Heidegger,
and Maimonides have recently come to prominence in the curriculum
and in study groups. Others who have always held at least a token
spot on the seminar reading lists, such as Machiavelli, Dostoyevsky,
and Nietzsche, are now generally recognized as major, and formidable,
presences in the program. Regarding preceptorials, literature
offerings are more popular these days than philosophy offerings,
with the exception of preceptorials on Nietzsche, much the most
popular preceptorial author in Santa Fe. There are fewer preceptorials
on Plato and Aristotle than formerly, and fewer students pick
them as their first choices. Senior essay topics, not surprisingly,
reflect preceptorial preferences. This year in Santa Fe more senior
essays were written on the Bible than on any other work or author.
The runner up? Nietzsche. The occasional appearance of an Eastern
book on the preceptorial list generates immediate and substantial
interest. In spite of a recent intercampus tutor visit devoted
to the place of logic in the curriculum, most sophomore language
tutors have come to devote only a minimal amount of attention
to it. Last year in Santa Fe not a single section of sophomore
language undertook a study of logic. The time previously set aside
for logic is now devoted primarily to Chaucer, occasionally Dante,
or, significantly, Nietzsche. On the whole, the Bible is read
sympathetically by a larger number of tutors and students than
twenty five years ago. Not so Thomas Aquinas, who loomed large
in the early intellectual life of the College, but is now widely
held to be tedious and beside the point.
It is not difficult to discern
a prevailing tendency in these developments, along with some conspicuous
exceptions. It would be not only harsh but false as well to call
this tendency "misology." What one sees is not so much
a hatred of reason as a slowly emerging suspicion that reason
is not an altogether trustworthy guide in the pursuit of truth.
This suspicion is rooted, in some cases, in an even deeper suspicion
regarding truth itself. Among other things, we are less confident
now than we used to be that there is such a thing as the truth,
which locution seems to point to an ostensibly discredited metaphysics
or, worse, to theology. These developments do not constitute a
crisis. On the contrary, they are a sign of life. But they
need, I think, to be recognized and reflected on.
At this point it is worth reminding ourselves of what most obviously unites us as a faculty, namely, our common dedication to liberal education, our dedication to the acquisition of the liberal arts and to habits of thoughtfulness gained through the reading and discussion of the best books we can lay our hands on, the great books. We may not be able to agree about the nature of truth, but do we not agree about the value of reading great books? Indeed we do, but what is the basis of this agreement? It is, I suspect, the realization that the authors of these books raise, and in some cases even proffer answers to, the fundamental human questions. It is our agreement about the enduring significance of these questions that leads us to the books, and so to take liberal education seriously in the first place.
We should not be misled by
a formulation that the College has adverted to over the years
to the effect that St. John's aims at educating thoughtful citizens,
at producing reflective participants in democratic self-government.
This formulation is innocuous enough inasmuch as it leaves it
open whether such citizens will be liberal or conservative. St.
John's has no interest in, much less allegiance to, any political
ideology. We do not aim at producing partisan ideologues. Anyone
who has participated in a seminar with St. John's faculty, students,
or alumni on a matter of pressing political importance has to
be struck by the even handed treatment it gets, the balanced tone
of the contributions, the consideration the participants display
toward one another, and the general willingness to entertain and
think through uncongenial opinions. Such occasions reassure those
who are uncomfortable with the thought that liberal education
is just[!] an end in itself, an "ivory tower" enterprise.
Still, it is not quite correct to say that even an uncommonly
lofty form of citizenship is what the College aims at.
It is unlikely that many entering freshmen come to St. John's
exclusively or even primarily for the sake of becoming good citizens.
They come here, instead, in hopes of becoming deeper and more
fully alive human beings. They find plausible our claim that liberal
education is singularly conducive to depth and vitality. Good
citizenship is a by- product of liberal education, a most impressive
by-product, to be sure, but a by-product nonetheless. It is, after
all, from the great political philosophers we read at the College
that we learn that politics is not everything, that it is not
even the most important thing.
The most important thing,
it seems, is the examined life. And one way, perhaps the best
way, in which life gets examined is by raising the fundamental
questions of enduring significance, the questions that bear most
heavily on human existence. If, then, it is concern with the fundamental
questions that leads us to the liberal arts and to the great books
in the first place, these questions can be said both to provoke
and to sustain our endeavor at the College. A sensitivity to
these questions is the chief precondition of liberal education,
and a liberally educated human being is one who does not underestimate
their weight. Accordingly, one might design a liberal arts curriculum,
or evaluate one already in place, by attempting to determine how
successfully it keeps these questions in sight. In rethinking
the undergraduate curriculum here, we need to ask anew what the
basic presuppositions of the program are, and how adequately
the curriculum actually reflects these presuppositions. To be
sure, we tell ourselves that we are engaged in liberal education:
seven books and balance; the quadrivium and trivium, plus natural
science; making free human beings out of children. It is unlikely
that any College in the country has given more sustained reflection
to the principles of its academic enterprise than St. John's has.
But have we given enough? The loftiness of our conception of what
we are aiming at, namely, human freedom at its acme, requires
a vigilance of thought that is hard to sustain. We run the risk
of turning radical enquiry itself into a catchword. Newcomers
to the faculty sense a certain staleness in our formulations.
No one doubts the richness of the program. Almost everything we
study here is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, interesting, even
exciting. Still, are all parts of the program equally liberating?
How detailed an understanding of, say, the elementary constitution
of matter must one have in order to be liberally educated? Not
to pick on the laboratory, similar questions could be asked about
other parts of the program. After all, our laboratory program
may be the finest undergraduate science program in the country.
And the entire undergraduate program is probably the finest undergraduate
program in the country. Could it be better?
By way of addressing this issue, let us return to the fundamental questions. In all our rhetoric about these questions do we have any agreement as to exactly what they are? At the risk of raising eyebrows, without any pretense of comprehensiveness, and placing them in no particular order, I would suggest the following as at least among the fundamental questions. What is truth? What is the character of knowledge, and what are its limits? What is being? What is nature? How is mathematics related to the world? What is history? What is the best regime? What is the human? Does God exist, and if so what is His relation to human beings? What is language, and how is it related to reason? Can the imagination disclose important dimensions of reality that are inaccessible to reason? What is beauty, and what connection if any does it have with the true, the morally good, and the merely pleasant? One could go on, but I suspect that most of us would agree that questions of such weight as these, however one stands on the answers that can be given to them, are fundamental. They provide a kind of definition by example of what we at the College mean by fundamental questions. They are not, however, opening questions. The questions we begin classes with are more circumscribed, and spring directly out of the particular text that is under consideration. But the text itself is under consideration only because of the light we think it sheds on one or more of the fundamental questions. When questions of such weight are not in the foreground of our discussions they are still in the background. We never entirely lose sight of them. Without making the fundamental questions come alive for ourselves and our students the program would consist of the "history of ideas" merely. The presence of a fair amount of mathematics and "hard" science would not, by itself, improve things much. It is the centrality of wakeful questioning about the most important things that keeps St. John's College from becoming Motley Cow Tech.
Now, granted that the list
of fundamental questions that I have presented is incomplete,
is there a question, or an answer to a question that has
a priority for the College, one that underlies the way we address
all the others? We indeed say that liberal education is the best
education. If we thought otherwise, would we not be moving toward
a better form of education? Surely we are not just dutifully filling
a niche in the contemporary educational scene. Do we not, rather,
hold to the view that, in taking a stand on behalf of liberal
education, the College takes a stand on behalf of education construed
as an end in itself, holding the other forms of education
to be mere means to ends other than knowledge? And does the College
not hold that it is better to be educated than to be uneducated?
Consider the following passage from Jacob Klein's essay, "The
Idea of Liberal Education."
The history of education is
the history of the meaning of the term "school." Let
me quote from Aristotle's Politics (VIII,2): "Nature
herself, as has often been said, requires that we should be able
not only to work well, but to use leisure [ ] well;
for, as I must repeat once again, the first principle of all action
[that is the end for the sake of which any action is undertaken]
is leisure... and therefore the question must be asked in earnest,
What ought we to do when at leisure? Clearly we ought not to be
amusing ourselves, for then amusement would be the end of life."
And Aristotle goes on: "It is clear, then, that there are
branches of learning and education which we must study with a
view to the enjoyment of leisure, and these are to be valued for
their own sake." To study for the enjoyment of leisure and
in leisure means to be engaged in liberal education. It is an
arduous task. This kind of education does not look for some goal
or good beyond itself. It is in itself its own end. Long
before Aristotle and long after him, even under totally different
social conditions, this statement defined liberal learning and
liberal education. What this understanding of liberal education
assumes is that man's most proper and specific character
is his desire to know. Only in pursuing this goal is man really
man and really free." (Lectures and Essays, pp.165-166;
italics mine).
Some of these observations
hearken back to Aristotle's claim in the Nichomachean Ethics
that the intellect is the best part of us (1177a13 ff.), and that
the intellect most of all is man (1178a8). In keeping
with this sentiment, spokesmen for the College have from time
to time, both tacitly and expressly, claimed that the life of
thoughtful reflection is the best life. Of course, the expression,
"the best life," generates certain disagreeable moral
overtones today. But this was not always so. For, among other
things, one of the fundamental questions raised by the books we
read is whether the good and the moral, or the just, are equivalent.
An alternative is at least thinkable, namely, that the good is
not the moral at all but, rather, the pleasant: the best life
is the most pleasant life, the happiest life, and best for this
reason and no other. However that may be, the moral bias in the
question of what the best life is can be avoided by reformulating
this question. What is the most choiceworthy life? We note
in this connection that Socrates' claim that the unexamined life
is not worth living has been offered more than once as a justification
for what the College is up to. Of course, it does not follow from
this and similar claims about liberal education that the most
choiceworthy life is the life of a tutor or of any other
professional academician. What does follow from such claims is
that the habits of questioning and thoughtful reflection that
we attempt to inculcate in our students should be habits that
continue to shape their lives after they leave the College, i.e.,
that the liberal education our students have begun here should
not be construed as complete upon receipt of a St. John's diploma.
There is no reason in principle why a life governed in large measure
by habits of thoughtful reflection, even the love and pursuit
of wisdom itself, is impossible for the head of a household, or
for someone who no longer has anything to do with the professional
academic world, but continues to make good use of what leisure
he has at his disposal. It is, indeed, hardly surprising that
a high percentage of our students continue their education after
leaving St. John's, and that many of them become professional
educators of one sort or another. But, to repeat, one hardly needs
to enter the professional academic world to be true to the ideal
of liberal education.
Now, though it is true to
say that liberal education aims at cultivating habits of thoughtful
reflection, this formulation does not go far enough. According
to its original conception, and as it has been typically understood
at St. John's, liberal education aims at replacing opinions about
the most important things, even replacing right opinions about
them, with knowledge. To be sure, this end may rarely be
attained. It may in fact never yet have been attained. But liberal
education as a meaningful enterprise implies the possibility,
at least, of attaining this, its loftiest end. And yet today we
as a faculty are less confident about this possibility than our
predecessors were. Accordingly, to say that the intellectual center
of the College consists in our common dedication to liberal education
overlooks, or at least downplays, a grave difficulty. The way
out of this difficulty, however, is provided by further reflection
on liberal education itself. Liberal education, which is after
all philosophy, or at least incipient philosophy, prides itself
on its willingness to examine its own presuppositions. Indeed,
one of the fundamental questions that liberal education takes
up is what knowledge is and, more to the point, whether knowledge
about the most important things is accessible to man as man. In
confronting this question head on one encounters, in some of the
most compelling books we read, the counter claim, with arguments
in support of it, that knowledge about the most important things,
as opposed to mere opinion, is not a human possibility.
It is hardly surprising, then, that some members of the faculty
would come to be more persuaded of the truth of the counter claim
than of the claim that replacing mere opinion about the most important
things with knowledge properly so called is a genuine possibility.
That this latter claim is arguably the fundamental principle
of liberal education itself, and hence of the program of instruction
at St. John's, does not prevent doubts about it from having an
effect on the development of the program. The program is changing,
whether we like it or not. And the impetus for change comes from
within the program itself.
It is possible, I think, to
identify in the program two principal and independent sources
of doubts about the possibility of liberal education according
to its original conception. The Bible is one such source, and
Nietzsche is the other. To be sure, there are other sources, for
example, skepticism,. But in terms of present influence on the
faculty and in the program, these two are the chief sources. In
opposition to both is the official position of the College as
an institution dedicated to liberal education according
to its original conception. This position is exemplified by classical
philosophy, which ranges from Socratic questioning to considerably
more ambitious attempts to articulate "the whole." The
intellectual center of the College, then, is not our common agreement
on the possibility of replacing opinion about the most important
things with knowledge, for such agreement does not exist. The
intellectual center of the College is, in fact, not the College's
official position. The intellectual center of the College is
rather the tension between opposing views regarding the nature
of truth and the possibility of knowledge, and, consequently,
between opposing views of what constitutes the most choiceworthy
life. Classical philosophy and the Bible agree with each other,
and against what for lack of a better expression I shall call
"philosophical perspectivism," that there is objective
truth. Classical philosophy and philosophical perspectivism agree
with each other, and against the Bible, that there is no such
thing as revelation from the beyond. The Bible and philosophical
perspectivism agree with each other, and against classical philosophy,
that human reason is not adequate to objective truth. Now, admittedly
this schema is crude, even comically so. It conceals other agreements
and disagreements that exist among the parties concerned. It overlooks
a certain blurring that takes place at the margins of these positions.
And it disregards the existence of views that resist reduction
to any of the three I have specified. But these considerations
do not require a significant modification in the fundamental point
I wish to stress here, namely, that the intellectual center
of College is dialectical. In spite of this fact, or rather
because of it, the faculty can still be said to be united in their
commitment to liberal education. For liberal education necessarily
entails the most serious consideration of what its deepest critics
have to say. These critics have a prominent voice in the books
we read. It was virtually inevitable that they would come to have
a prominent voice on the faculty.
To repeat, those on the faculty
who side with the Bible or with philosophical perspectivism have
to entertain the gravest doubts about whether liberal education
as traditionally conceived, and as re-established by the founders
of our program, is able to achieve its loftiest end, that is,
the replacing of mere opinion about the most important things
with knowledge. On the other hand, if these doubting practitioners
of the liberal arts are thoughtful, they have to be impressed
at what the College accomplishes by way of at least approximating
this lofty goal. And so, if they are thoughtful, they can and
should find their existence at the College intellectually bracing,
and hence rewarding, without entertaining any hopes of subverting
the aims of the program and reshaping it to fit their own views
of truth, the possibility of knowledge, and what constitutes the
most choiceworthy life. Since, however, there can be no guarantee
of thoughtfulness, sustained efforts must be made to recruit faculty
who are unequivocally committed, in mind and heart, to liberal
education according to its traditional conception, and as the
College has conceived it from the establishment of the new program
up to the present. Of the three alternatives mentioned, the classical
one has a certain primacy. The College needs a faculty that consists
substantially of tutors whose commitment to liberal education
is rooted in their conviction that its loftiest end is attainable.
On the other hand, a faculty consisting exclusively of tutors
all more or less convinced on this score would actually inhibit
the attainment of the end in question. For, again, thoughtful
consideration of alternative views on the possibility of replacing
opinion about the most important things with knowledge is demanded
by the very idea of liberal education. And, all other things being
equal, the best case for the alternatives to liberal education,
classically conceived, will be made by those who are most struck
by the power of these alternatives. Paradoxically, the College
needs at least some faculty who think that the loftiest end of
liberal education cannot be attained, if the College is to have
a reasonable prospect of attaining this end.
In this connection it needs
to be stressed that the College is not in the business of defending
"Western values." Such a defense would be almost a
contradiction in terms given the conflict of "values"
that constitutes "the West." The College cannot be true
to itself by taking a polemical stance toward any thing except
superficiality. The faculty, constituted as described above, is
confident of its ability to sustain the tradition of liberal education.
It is confident that it can demonstrate this tradition's benefits
even to its strongest critics. This confidence, this courage,
emerges out the living dialogue that thrives here and that serves
as an example in American education.
Now, if the intellectual center
of the College is dialectical in the way I have described it,
and if adequately addressing fundamental questions is the ultimate
reason for the program we have, the tensions implied in these
questions should shape the contours of the curriculum, almost
down to the smallest particulars. Do they?
Suppose we were to take up
the following exercise. Here are four empty years to devote to
liberal education. Fill them up with a program of study that centers
on the fundamental questions of enduring significance. Take the
trivium and quadrivium as guidelines, but do not get hemmed in
by them. Forget all about accreditation for the time being, ignore
entrenched opposition from the de facto departments that
have arisen contrary to the spirit of the institution, and never
mind whose ox gets gored. What would the resultant program look
like?
It would, I suspect, look
quite similar to the program we have at present. Undoubtedly we
would have a seminar devoted to the reading and discussion of
great books, which could be virtually identified by the angle
and magnitude of light they shed on the fundamental questions.
And the seminar books would not just consist of philosophy and
theology. The old quarrel between philosophy and poetry, and the
inconclusive outcome of that quarrel, would require the presence
of the finest works of literature we could profitably study in
the seminar setting. Clarity about the essence of history would
require the reading and discussion not only of works about
history but works of history as well. Mathematics would
be studied in some depth, though for obvious reasons in a tutorial
setting rather than in seminar. It would be studied just as we
in fact study it, that is, primarily as a liberal art and only
secondarily, quite secondarily, as a tool for the solving of problems.
Such a study of mathematics, with emphasis from the outset on
questions of first principles, proof, and evidence, would provide
one with ongoing, direct experience of mere opinions giving way
to knowledge. On the other hand, the hypothetical character of
this knowledge would have to be kept in view. Changes in the conception
of the subject matter of mathematics, and the questionable character
of mathematical hypotheses, would eventually become central themes.
In other words, we would begin with Euclid. We would study Apollonius
as an extension of Euclidian geometry. We would note the increased
power gained by Descartes with the discovery, or invention, of
analytic geometry, and we would attempt to assess whether or not
this incontestable increase in power comes at the cost of a decrease
in insight. We would study the foundations of the calculus, and
we would ask questions of it similar to those we would put to
analytic geometry. We would study non-Euclidean geometry, and
we would marvel at Euclid's recognition that the fifth postulate
could be only a postulate. The relation between mathematics and
the world would be studied, preeminently in mathematical physics,
but also in music, not just because it is a member of the quadrivium,
but because of the startling fact that the pleasure we take in
music has a demonstrably mathematical, and hence rational, basis.
In our attempt to get a concrete understanding of what nature
is we would study not only physics, but chemistry and biology
as well. We would not rely on textbooks, however. Instead, we
would read and discuss seminal papers in these areas, and we would
attempt to recreate in our own experience the observations and
experiments that led the greatest scientists to their conclusions.
Language as an expression of reason, or as a seducer of reason
as the case may be, would be studied at length. We would not restrict
our attention to our mother tongue, but would attempt to achieve
some distance, and hence perspective, through foreign language
study. Foreign language study would in turn permit a close reading
of a select number of texts in the original language. The cultivation
of sensibility and the imagination effected by the study of literature
would raise the fundamental question of the limits of autonomous
rationality. A four year program of study centering on the fundamental
questions would look a lot like the very program we have.
But, perhaps, not in every
respect. Before considering how a program centering on these questions
might be different from, and perhaps better than, the program
we actually have, it is necessary to undertake a digression into
the issue of how the program has taken on its present shape. Responsibility
for the organization of the program is vested in the chairman
of the instruction committee of the College. (Polity,
Art. V (1)) The position of chairman is occupied in alternate
years by the deans of the two campuses, who consult with each
other and with the instruction committee. In spite of these Polity
provisions, archons exercise considerable independence. Instructional
material, even whole topics of study, such as logic, get phased
in or out at the discretion of the archon, not subject to the
approval of the instruction committee, but rather with the consent
or at the urging of the tutors actually teaching the classes where
the changes are introduced. Manuals get written, revised, discarded,
and reinstated without consultation with the dean and instruction
committee, often without the dean and instruction committee even
being informed. Significant revisions in certain parts of the
program that got endorsed, or even initiated, by the instruction
committee, come to be ignored by succeeding archons down the road.
There is really not much that can be done about this sort of thing,
except for the dean to issue periodic reminders to the faculty
of where the Polity vests responsibility for the program.
And deans are understandably reluctant to issue such reminders.
After all, consensus is part of the tradition of the College.
If the tutors actually teaching a given class wish to try out
something that's not simply harebrained, why not? Maybe we'll
learn something important from the "experiment." The
question, however, is what the guiding principle of change
is, or rather whether there is a guiding principle. Often
we justify a change by saying simply that it "works well,"
without articulating exactly what end it works well for.
It is likely that responsibility
for the program is vested in the deans and the instruction committee,
rather than in the archons or in the whole faculty, in the expectation
that changes in the curriculum (and even small changes can accumulate
into something that is no longer small) take place with a view
to more perfectly realizing the central aims of the program. The
dean and instruction committee, at least, should be focussing
on the program as a whole. But the issue is complicated.
It is not just deference to the principle of consensus that makes
deans reluctant to supervise the program directly. The instruction
committee rarely has the time that is necessary to speculate fruitfully
about how the program can best be maintained and developed. Personnel
issues ranging from the appointment and reappointment of faculty
to preparation of the teaching slate take up most of the instruction
committee's time. Moreover, deans realize that allowing a certain
amount of discretion to the tutors regarding exactly what they
treat in their classes, and how they treat it, enables the tutors
to deepen their intellectual lives, which obviously is not to
the detriment but rather to the benefit of the College. Still,
when one looks at the program as a whole, one cannot help but
sometimes wonder who's minding the store.
The Program could be made
more coherent, could be made more of a whole, by attending more
carefully to the fundamental questions and the places in the curriculum
where they most readily come to the fore. The following changes
suggest themselves. They are not proposals. They are suggestions
merely, and are offered for faculty discussion of the program
construed as an integrated whole resting on clear and consistent
principles.
1. Sophomore seminar could
have greater coherence. Given that parts of the Bible are older
than the Homeric epics, we read texts in sophomore seminar spanning
a period of about 2,500 years. By contrast, the readings of the
freshman seminar span a period of about 800 years, and the junior
and senior seminars about 200 years each (shorter periods in those
two years partially because preceptorials replace a total of 16
weeks worth of seminars). Moreover, sophomore seminar covers a
wider range of material than anywhere else in the program, including
sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity, selections from
Greek philosophy, Roman historiography and biography, medieval
philosophy, theology, and literature, seminal texts in the origins
of modern politics and science, and Shakespeare. The disparity
of themes and outlooks is greater here than in any other seminar.
Whereas one could say, in a nutshell, and hence inadequately though
not altogether inaccurately, that the freshman year treats the
most impressive intellectual achievements of Greek antiquity,
and that the junior and senior years treat the origins and breakdown
of modernity respectively, there is no way of summing up, even
crudely, what sophomore seminar treats. And yet it is in the sophomore
year that the tension between the rival claims of philosophy and
piety really comes to the fore. However individual tutors end
up weighing these claims, the rivalry between them should be one
of the great themes of the College. This end could be achieved
by modifying the seminar reading lists. I am not suggesting that
we should add more Christian theology. We have plenty of that
already. Rather, the way the relation between reason and revelation
is understood in the great Muslim and Jewish philosophers of the
Middle Ages should get more of hearing. Some Maimonides and Averroes
is already included in the sophomore seminar on the Santa Fe campus.
We could be reading Al Farabi and Judah Halevy also, and probably
Avicenna as well. These are not Eastern authors. They are,
rather, classics of the West, a vital part of the great dialogue
that constitutes Western intellectual history, though a part of
the dialogue hitherto virtually ignored by the College. Adding
works of these authors could be achieved, up to a point, simply
by dropping other works on the sophomore seminar reading list,
or rotating certain works in and out on alternate years. The suggestion
that follows would allow for a better solution.
2. Descartes' Discourse
on Method and the readings by Bacon need not be done in sophomore
seminar (where they are distributed over four seminar nights).
Rather, they could be included in the junior year. They would
be included in junior seminar, I suspect, if there were room for
them. But room is not there. The readings of Junior seminar, in
Santa Fe at least, are about as stable as those of Freshman seminar.
The best place to include these readings by Bacon and Descartes
would be near the beginning of junior laboratory. Their presence
in that class would contribute to a deeper understanding of what
is at issue in the founding of modern science. This would also
be a good place to look back at certain parts of Aristotle's Physics
in order to see what modern science understands itself to be taking
issue with. And while we are at it, why not study Galileo's
Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems in junior laboratory
as well, not in place of his Two New Sciences, but as an
introduction to this work? The foundations of modern science would
get about as full an exposure in such a sequence of readings as
one could reasonably hope for. And, four seminar spaces would
open up in the sophomore year, which would facilitate the first
suggestion. The objection, of course, concerns what would have
to be taken out of the program to make room for these additions
to junior laboratory. The only way they could be accommodated,
as far as I can see, would be by ending junior laboratory with
Faraday and beginning senior laboratory with Maxwell. Distributing
the electricity and magnetism sequence across the junior and senior
years could be managed if the manuals kept the phenomena that
the Faraday sequence had disclosed to the juniors in view for
the seniors beginning their study of Maxwell. Postponing Maxwell
to the senior year would not have an adverse effect on the study
of Einstein if the latter were moved from the first semester to
the second semester, where it already exists in Annapolis (a difference
between the two campuses that makes life miserable for the occasional
senior who needs to transfer mid-year for emergency reasons).
Senior mathematics in Santa Fe would begin, as it does in Annapolis,
with the study of non-Euclidean geometry. Of course, something
would have to come out of the study of quantum mechanics, or perhaps
genetics, to pull this change off. Perhaps everything we are presently
doing in these segments is absolutely indispensable, but I doubt
it. It seems that the project of the upper level physics sequence,
which is distributed across the mathematics tutorial and the laboratory,
is to see the preparation and realization of the Newtonian synthesis,
and the unravelling of that synthesis. Clearly we need to study
both relativity and quantum mechanics, in addition to electricity
and magnetism, in order to have an insight into the post-Newtonian
world. The question is how comprehensive such insight has to be
at this stage of a liberal education, which is, after all, a life
long project, and one that the College only begins. We need to
ask ourselves what should count as the more important task of
the upper level physics sequence. Is it to gain a fairly deep
understanding of the contemporary state of mathematical physics,
or is it to gain a fairly deep understanding of the foundations
of mathematical physics, its presuppositions and first tentative
moves? The question is important because we cannot perform both
tasks well.
3. Returning to the
sophomore year, we need to come to some kind of consensus on the
teaching of logic at St. John's. It is clear that, rightly or
wrongly, there is nothing resembling a consensus to the effect
that we should study formal logic in any sustained fashion here
at the College, in spite of the fact that this subject matter
is established as a special area of systematic (I, for
one, do not use this word as a pejorative) enquiry by Aristotle.
The character and status of logic should be one of the great themes
of the College inasmuch as it is directly relevant to question
of the adequacy, or inadequacy, of reason to the truth. I would
suggest simply eliminating all attempts to teach the Prior
Analytics and the theory of the syllogism, not to mention
later developments in symbolic logic, from the sophomore language
tutorial. It is after the all the formal dimension of logic
that, rightly or wrongly (I think wrongly), turns many faculty
off. I would, however, advocate devoting no less than six weeks
to the study of logic in the sophomore language tutorial. I would
recommend that this study consist of, first, some very short readings
from Book IV of the Metaphysics and from the Posterior
Analytic on the nature and presuppositions of demonstrative
science, and, second, a collection of arguments extracted from
the books we read in seminar, to be inspected closely with a view
to determining whether or not they are valid and how evident their
premises are. A logic manual could be prepared containing the
relevant sections of the Posterior Analytics and the extracts
to be examined for logical coherence. The study of logic is too
important to be simply ignored. In my opinion, we are deceiving
ourselves if we think that the seminar conversation does real
justice to the serious questions that the study of logic raises
thematically.
4. Exactly how much do students
need to know about music at this stage of a liberal education?
The chief objection to putting art in the sophomore year, at least
my chief objection, has been that a fifth class in the
sophomore year would have the effect of diluting the music program.
But this need not happen. Putting art into the sophomore year
need not dilute the music program at all. It could, instead, just
shorten it. At present, in Santa Fe, after the study of
harmony, three large scale works are studied, typically, Mozart's
Magic Flute, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and the
first movement of Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony. All
of these works are great, but so are a lot of other works. We
could restrict our attention to just one of them, and give the
remaining time in the spring semester to the study of visual art,
adopting, with a few revisions, the program we presently have
in the spring semester of the senior year, and leaving it to the
music tutors to teach it. True, the art classes would no longer
be co-led by two tutors the way they are at present. These co-led
classes were particularly important in the early years of the
art program, when we had little experience as a faculty in teaching
the visual arts. But we have gained considerable experience over
the last eight years. At this point we should be able to rely
on the tutors' meetings to help out tutors teaching art for the
first time, as we do with the other tutorials in the program.
On my suggestion, the art tutorial would just replace the music
tutorial, and the latter would end at spring break. Nothing would
be changed in the first semester of sophomore music. All the properly
theoretical questions we presently treat would continue to be
treated. We would just curtail, rather drastically to be sure,
the amount of time allotted to the study of individual masterpieces
in the second semester. Regaining lost ground in senior language
especially, but in senior mathematics also, would be, I have finally
come to believe, worth it.
5. Among the better received
events at the College, at least here in Santa Fe, is the informal
Wednesday afternoon lecture. These lectures have been particularly
well attended by students when they have treated some topic specifically
connected to what they have been studying in their classes. I
suggest that there could be more such lectures, with attendance
expected of students who are at that time studying material related
to the lecture topic. For example, a lecture on formal logic,
including an overview of the syllogism and the rudiments of propositional
logic, could be given every year for sophomores just as they begin
their study of logic. Of course, there would be a question period
afterwards, attendance also expected, which would reduce the danger
of passive acceptance of what the expert has to say. Similar lectures
could be given, every year, on other topics that we would like
our students to at least be aware of, but which we cannot devote
time to in our classes. I could imagine treating a variety of
topics this way, including but not limited to mathematical formalism,
the physiology of perception, and developments in contemporary
quantum physics and genetics (see # 2 above). Such lectures would
be an occasion for introducing students to topics the familiarly
with which is a desideratum, but not a necessity at this
point their education. There is no reason why the same tutor could
not give the same lecture on one of these topics every year. To
be sure, such a change presupposes that we can make the distinction
between what is desirable and what it is necessary for our students
to devote their attention to while they are at the College. Agreement
should be obtainable. It can hardly be presupposed.
As is obvious, the suggestions
I have made are interrelated. It is likely that putting one into
effect would lead to putting the others, or variations on them,
into effect as well. We may well decide that we do not wish to
entertain changes of the magnitude I have suggested. My chief
hope, in placing these suggestions before the faculty, is that
by addressing them we will be led to reflect again on what we
mean by "the program."
Respectfully submitted,
James Carey
Dean, Santa Fe
Chairman of the Instruction Committee of the College, 1998-1999