Lehrman American Studies Center

Your post brings R.J. Snell's musings on Wendell Berry, sloth, and the uprooted teacher into contact with the question of the relationship between cultural traditions and the philosophic act. Methinks it is slightly coy to treat this question with regard to the aesthetic rather than the "cultic" proper. Corinne jumps right in with two feet in asking about how to treat Islam in the classroom; could one teach in a Nation of Islam public school if you are not Nation of Islam--an issue some of my students looking for jobs face; can I take a professorial position at a Christian college if I am not a professing Christian? Would I be willing to participate in the celebratory acts of my university? Must I refuse to attend graduation because I object to the speaker? Can I not in good conscience advise students to take other courses in my department?

A teacher cannot teach a student with whom they do not share a single first principle. You cannot lead them from here to there if you do not think they are anywhere on the map of truth. Getting to know students is finding them on the map--an enormous challenge in the multi-cultural, multi-versity. But there has to be something: there has to be some value to some element of their local, political, familial, cultural tradition--this is the hook. They are human; there has to be a divine spark left. Socrates could not even unteach students if students had no attachment to non-contradiction or sentences that make sense rather than nonsense, some attachment to logos, to reason rather than unreason. One cannot even challenge the contradictions in a student's mind if they hold nothing in their mind; or if one holds nothing in one's own. There has to be something there and it is the task of the teacher to find it. One cannot be purely dismissive--Socrates was not--probing, questioning, wondering but not disdainful or dismissive. One has to be willing, not to pretend, but to engage with their traditions and their efforts to find coherence. One has to profess one's own attachment to rational coherence, to logos, and hold it up as a touchstone for finding the same attachment in the student. Are there religious, cultural, intellectual traditions which disallow precisely that basis for education or which resist demands for non-contradiction? If so, then "school," "university" is not possible there. One cannot practice "Ketman" (pretence of acceptance of fundamental contradiction) in such places or else one becomes a "Captive Mind" oneself (quoth Czeslaw Milosz in justification of his defection from Communist controlled Poland).

I think, for example, of the difference approach of the Catholic Church with regard to native, natural religions and that of the British missionaries generally: Christmas trees, Easter eggs, feast days, All Hallows Eve...Our Lady of Lourdes, of Knock, of Canterbury, of Guadalupe...Irish-Catholics, Italian-Catholics, Polish-Catholics. One starts teaching from somewhere. It is highly ineffective as pedagogy to demand tabula rasa and the creation ex nihilo of British tea-drinkers reading the King James version of the Bible. The Catholic Church, whether it is liturgical repetition or finding that local place from which to build, has proved to have quite a magisterial knack. That pedagogy is predicated on there being some primordial goodness, some cult of the harmony in the cosmos, left in the world to be educated.

Is there something in your students' attachment to Frank Lloyd Wright which has some value--can they voice any genuine aesthetic appreciation for it? Or is there anything valuable to their cult of the famous? As Henry Adams says of funeral monument he had built for his wife, "The interest of the figure was not in its meaning, but in the response of the observer." In your student's attachment might there not be the seeds of something more human than inhuman--untutored awe at nature, untutored filial piety, untutored beief that all men are created equal and the vox populi is vox Dei? Or is Wisconsin the dark forest from whence only diabolical spirits come? Ought you, can you stay, teach, and become their proto-martyr or flee? Behold the god you worship under this title of the unknown god is the God I preach, quoth Paul in the Areopagus.

Your suggestion that Socrates has something important to say on the matter is absolutely correct, but, as the first commenter points out, the "unteaching" Socrates practiced was by no means a subtractive process. I think you'd agree that although Socrates often revealed to his interlocutors their ignorance, his intention was never to empty their heads of what they'd learned from their parents—even if education could fill the void.

If Socrates is to be helpful as we consider your question—a timeless one to be sure—I think it would be helpful to look at how Socrates related to his own inherited opinions, the opinions of his own culture. For example, was Socrates was really guilty of the charge of atheism? And most importantly: if he was not an atheist, what was the reason or grounding for his belief in the existence and goodness of the gods? Book X of the Laws is very interesting on this point. Plato has "the Athenian" (the philosopher) castigate atheists in the strongest terms for dismissing out of hand the stories they had been told as children. He heaps scorn on those who demand justification of the gods' existence beyond children's stories, and suggests that it takes an especially destructive kind of ignorance to mistake skepticism of that sort for reason. When he finally does give a proof for the existence of a god and another proof for the goodness of that god, he makes it clear that he thinks it a therapeutic move for a pathology that ideally would be dealt with by other means. Belief in the gods ought not to be grounded by an ahistorical, cultureless reason—i.e., what modern thinkers would call objectivity.

My point is simply this: while teachers certainly have an obligation to undermine false and wicked opinions (even about Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps), the path to knowledge rarely runs through the land of radical doubt. Socrates is not Descartes, and I think that's to his credit. Rather, I think Plato rightly advocates an education that aims at the Good and lets the inadequacy of thoughtless opinion be revealed along the way. Teach your students to think and to appreciate real beauty, and they'll reject what's ugly on their own.

This post will touch on the main issues of the previous comments in a way that may be described as tangential at best. I apologize, and I hope you will forgive me for bringing up another issue that struck me when I read the first few sentences of Rick's post. I think that FLW's architecture is aesthetically interesting, but I am wary of the theoretical underpinnings of his project. What's more, however, is that in his personal life he was known to be a selfish and sometimes devious and cruel character. If his art is intended in any way to express some truths about how one should live his life, what lessons are we to learn from studying and/or revering his art? My question then is how we should approach the theoretical implications of a "thinker's"--and I use the term loosely--character in the classroom? Certainly, we should not dismiss the thought of the author of the Declaration of Independence because he, say, was a slaveowner. But inevitably the question will arise about the moral worth of a thinker's thought that contradicts the way that same thinker has led his life. Another example is Heidegger. What can we learn about morality from someone who was a member of the Nazi party? Or to put the question another way, does the work of good or bad men deserve more attention? I can see the answer going both ways, and I would like to know how you have addressed this with your students. Do we try to examine the argument on its own terms? If so, how do we teach students about the practical and eternal relevance of philosophy to the way we should live our own lives?