Washington St., Hoboken: drove up here with the darlings yesterday to visit family and take walks amidst the beautiful brownstones. We listened to The Hobbit in the car, including the part with the riddle game between Gollum and Bilbo. An original riddle occurred to me:
Sphere am I, but with a tip,
I seek the ground or seek your lip,
I have no arms, legs have I none,
I never walk but sometimes run.
Sphere am I, but with a tip,
I seek the ground or seek your lip,
I have no arms, legs have I none,
I never walk but sometimes run.
In that rarest of things, the good used bookstore (Symposia on Washington St.), I picked up a copy of Schall's slim volume, A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning. It's as I imagined--a defense of a bygone educational ideal that eschews the false modesty of the current University. The multiplicity of perspectives does not necessarily entail the legitimacy of those perspectives: knowledge in the sense of ἐπιστήμη or scientia is neither illusory nor, when found, oppressive. Instead, the prospect of real knowledge, when combined with physical and intellectual self-mastery and access to the right classics, is genuinely liberating. Of course, you can't get at the content of this sought-for knowledge in 50 pages; Schall doesn't try and I didn't expect him to. What I most wanted to see, rather, was which passages of which classics he'd reach back on in framing his case, and which books he'd single out for his list of recommendations. There's nothing I love quite like another what-else-to-read list.
A couple points worth passing on. He suggests that (a) belief in knowledge, (b) self-discipline and (c) a classic library together form a mutually reinforcing unit, in part by indicating the shortcomings of each in isolation. Belief in knowledge without discipline or proper guides won't amount to anything. Moreover, self-discipline by itself, as an end in itself, was an error of the Stoics (others being, I would venture to add, a disembodied ideal of ethics and a Heracleitean notion of eternal recurrence).
And finally, citing Strauss's "What is Liberal Education?", he notes the paradox of the classics: the "Great Books" approach to education frequently amounts to a relativism. For if great minds conflicted, "who am I to dispute them?":
A couple points worth passing on. He suggests that (a) belief in knowledge, (b) self-discipline and (c) a classic library together form a mutually reinforcing unit, in part by indicating the shortcomings of each in isolation. Belief in knowledge without discipline or proper guides won't amount to anything. Moreover, self-discipline by itself, as an end in itself, was an error of the Stoics (others being, I would venture to add, a disembodied ideal of ethics and a Heracleitean notion of eternal recurrence).
And finally, citing Strauss's "What is Liberal Education?", he notes the paradox of the classics: the "Great Books" approach to education frequently amounts to a relativism. For if great minds conflicted, "who am I to dispute them?":
The whole point of this present essay, while in no way doubting Strauss's point about the great minds contradicting each other, is to suggest that this controversy among the great minds can lead to a false sort of humility, something that misunderstands what the mind is about. In the modern world, Chesterton said, humility is misplaced; it is thought to be located in the intellect where it does not belong, whereas it is a virtue of the will, an awareness of our own tendencies to pride. We should not doubt our minds but our motives. The condition of not knowing should not lead us to a further skepticism but to a more intense search for truth. We should see in what sense a great mind might reveal something of the truth even in its error.
Not that the classics are without inherent value:
The very existence of the great books enables us to escape from any tyranny of the present, from the idea that we only want to study what is currently "relevant" or immediately useful.
But there is, I have noted, a tendency to fetishize the classics even among their most able defenders, and I wonder if Schall, too, succumbs to this tendency. "I always tell my students that I expect them to keep the books I assign them for the rest of their lives," he says. Does this mean he only assigns classics? Don't we have to have one foot in this world, too? Is not the current crisis or aporia the very thing that reveals the burning relevance of the perennial questions? And might, conversely, our familiarity with the tradition serve us well in addressing today's problems?
Now to be fair, Schall is if anything neck deep it current events, as his never ending stream of editorials attests. But I must follow through this thought to the end. In its best expressions, conservativism sees us as involved in a dialogue with the dead and those not yet born. To exclude present and future from the great dialogue: this is head-in-the-sand antiquarianism, and we who love the deep past must be on our guard against it. A little antiquarian sentiment, on the other hand, like a row of well-preserved brownstones, is a beautiful thing.
Now to be fair, Schall is if anything neck deep it current events, as his never ending stream of editorials attests. But I must follow through this thought to the end. In its best expressions, conservativism sees us as involved in a dialogue with the dead and those not yet born. To exclude present and future from the great dialogue: this is head-in-the-sand antiquarianism, and we who love the deep past must be on our guard against it. A little antiquarian sentiment, on the other hand, like a row of well-preserved brownstones, is a beautiful thing.
By the way, the answer to my riddle is "a teardrop".