Tea with Bill D., or Thoughts on Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep

Bill D. came and had tea with me...and a bunch of other people, mainly students from the school where I teach History, English, and Rhetoric; based on his essay published in 2008 on the failures of elite education and his subsequent book Excellent Sheep: , William Deresiewicz , or "Bill D.," shares a commitment with our community: to return to education for its own sake, to eschew--at least for the undergraduate--the ultilitarian ends of a college education in favor of a true search for meaning, for the self, for truth, a return to the "liberal arts" tradition which, he says, teaches students how to think, how to speak, and teaches them about building the self. He has some beautiful, wonderful quotes in his book about the irreducible complexity of the world, the self, and that to reduce oneself and one's education to a utility is tragic.

With a gentle, friendly, intense look straight into my look, he shook my hand, and I liked him immediately; I felt that I could have many cups of tea with Bill D. and that the time would fly away and leave us in a long, delightful present of open conversation. As he began to speak, this impression was confirmed. He was apt to answer a question from a student with another question--in fact, a series of questions--in the way I imagine Socrates might ask--not as weapons but honestly looking for the filling of ignorance. He asked, "Why do you want to be a nurse? Have you had any experience?" And then he would listen carefully and respond with an honest assessment, but always with the caveat, "I don't want to presume, though--maybe I'm not understanding you?" This was a man willing to dialogue, even debate, but not the kind of debate that runs on disconnected factoids like little flaming arrows, or rhetorically powerful enthymemes like Greek fire erupting impossibly out of the water; he is open to other arguments, seems to desire genuine understanding, yet is honest about conclusions of which he feels certain.

Yet, in some ways, as a classical educator, I am almost diametrically opposed to Bill D.'s most basic premises, and to his definition of the liberal arts--more particularly "art." We live in a world Joseph Pieper predicted in Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, a world in which simple, settled terms morph and become, simply not what they were, become more or less weaponized. When a word like "truth" becomes "subjective feeling," all of a sudden, centuries of culture and depth around a word, the meaning built with extreme care by the likes of Socrates and Aristotle, confirmed and embodied by Christ, and built upon by Aquinas, the meaning behind this little collection of symbols, the Object to the sign-word, becomes an inverse to the original. It becomes a weapon stolen from the hands of those who understood it, and used against them, against the young minds that Bill D. obviously, genuinely cares about. He is, in my view, a kind of tragic irony that only the modern world could produce.

In Chapter 8 of Excellent Sheep, Bill defines the liberal arts first as an education which is about forming the student, which I agree with; then, he began to define, implicitly, "art" in the modern sense of the word--literature, perhaps visual art, like painting or sculpture. This was the first clue that Bill D. and I were not speaking, in a sense, the same language in terms of the classical, liberal arts. He then seems to define the liberal arts as "humanities" like English and History classes, or works of literature, fiction, or perhaps poetry; none of it was very precise, but I caught the load of cultural 'common' assumptions--I got the feeling from the chapter that he simply expected me "to get it." But I have lived too long between the pages of Aristotle and Plato, with Aquinas and Augustine, and later liberal arts experts like Sr. Miriam and Fr. Ashley to accept the wide brush strokes Bill D. uses to define "liberal arts." Furthermore, the pages of this book seemed to cloud over and take on an ominous feel. I felt I was dealing with a nuclear submarine instead of the natural, familiar creature I was expecting.

My mind immediately went to Aristotle's Rhetoric, because in it he speaks very clearly to an "art" in practice, and how it is intricately related to knowledge of truth gained through rigorous argument. He calls "art" techne, from which we get the word "technology." But this techne is not just about tools; it is an activity, a craft and the crafted, art and artefact. "Art" in the sense of 'craft' is a transitive activity, in that it has an objective, an end; material, power, and form come together through art to produce something. In the art of rhetoric, one is producing a kind of seeing in the audience members, a vision, an image in the mind and soul which disposes the audience member to choose in a certain way. For instance, deliberative rhetoric is the art of persuading a person to either do something or to avoid doing something; for the Greeks, this is the art of politics, which, however, in a certain respect, Socrates found dangerous to the soul;  through this caution, suspicion of rhetoric, Plato's Socrates delineates 'art' for us well in the dialogue Gorgias; he uses elegant proportional ratios, analogies, to indicate the true "art" of the politician: "as health is to the body, so justice is to the soul" and the the one who is practicing the "art" of helping the body reach its true end, health, is the artist, the physician, who has the epistome, or knowledge, of the body; likewise, the one, the metaphysician, the philosopher king, who has true knowledge of the nature of the soul can effect justice therein. In this brilliant stroke, Socrates shows simultaneously that art has an end in relation to natures, and it is founded on real knowledge--as an art, Socrates is suspicious of rhetoric as it is so easily abused if not having a "subject"--he keeps asking Gorgias, the famous rhetorician of his day, 'What is the subject of this art?" or, in other words, what body of knowledge is this art based upon? Aristotle seems to correct this lack of understanding in the aforementioned Rhetoric when he says, "Rhetoric is the counterpart [antistrophe] to dialectic." Here, he is using the language of Greek drama when he defines rhetoric as the symmetrical 'answer' or 'response' to dialectic, much the way the 'antistrophe' choral part in the drama is a refrain or response to the strophe. When I explain the relationship of rhetoric to dialectic, I ask students to imagine a line of masked, robed figures slowly, majestically dancing out from one side of the skene, chanting, and then another line emerging from the opposite side of the skene to sing their antistrophe. This is a powerful image Aristotle uses to describe the "same yet different" relationship between these two arts, dialectic and rhetoric. Dialectic is, for the Greeks, logic in the sense of discovery and testing of arguments through conversation; it is the discovery of truth in accordance with the Good, the universal principles upon which the world, material and immaterial, is formed--this is the prior art, then, to rhetoric, and only rhetoric founded upon the rigors of knowledge gained through dialectic is worthy, or good, and truly persuasive: Aristotle claims that the human mind can know essences, and can recognize Truth; in fact, Truth, what is reasonable and in accordance with the real, is the most deeply attractive to us, and a knowledge, for Aristotle, more real than the experimental demonstrations we can do in the changing particulars of a material world, or mutable matter.

Fundamentally, Aristotle takes as a self-evident principle that our minds can, in some mysterious sense, have a certain unity with the kosmos, the ordered world, that we can know essences of the things around us, and that through reason, we can ascertain relationships and make true propositions about the material world, order itself, principles derived from experience of the particular, and even a higher order of thought and reason that can grasp the fundamental laws not only of the the physical world, but of morality, virtue, and the Good. In fact, Aristotle reasons through stages and orders of being, natures, right from prime matter to the Prime Mover (who is beyond the physical and is the root of all metaphysics, and in a supplemental way, physical order).

The liberal arts, as a species of techne, are the arts that are "intransitive"--the purpose, or end of these arts is the formation of the reason, the soul, the training and expanding of the faculties particularly human that allow us to see the whole and the part, and to understand the relation between the two. Through the arts of logic, rhetoric, grammar, some pure mathematics, and poetry (which in the classical tradition includes music, drama, story, poems, dance), a human person is developed to his or her highest potential.

Bill D., especially in Chapter 8, however, seemed to have a very different definition of art, though he seems to adopt the idea that it is, somehow about 'self-building'--'liberal art'  seems to be, for him, an impression, or highly subjective conjecture, a bit the way I imagine some guy in 70s clothes having an "ah" moment in front of some Warhol piece in the MOMA. I like Warhol, actually, but I don't think seeing something about myself in giant Coke cans, or even more seriously in an Austen novel (a writer which Bill D. and I both adore), is the real deal about art, and certainly not the huge dustbin of "ah" self-realizations that Bill D. seems to think indicates the liberal arts. For him, the arts seem confused with a modern, narrow notion of poetics, though logic, dialectic, etc seem to be included in a confused way but not with any indication about what they are for beyond 'learning how to think. ' As this particular chapter progressed, the arts changed from 'thinking' to an equation with 'Humanities.' I ended up confused.

I therefore came to the tea very interested to see what he said about all this; as I listened to him, and partook in this invigorating conversation with this interlocutor who was willing to bare his thoughts to ours, and to receive and ponder ours in turn, I began to discern the structure of thought that created the scaffolding for the rhetoric of Excellent Sheep. He spoke passionately about thinking for oneself, and choosing education for self-formation, I wondered if he would begin to expound for them the beautiful organization that is the Trivium (logic/dialectic, rhetoric, and grammar) and the Quadrivium, and the Sciences upon which we use the faculties developed in the Trivium and Quadrivium. I wondered if he would explain how we can call "Metaphysics" a science because it is an enquiry into the deepest truths of the kosmos--in other words, that the whole education is for the purpose of freeing the person to find universal and material truths. However, when challenged by some young minds and hearts about seeing "truth" in the poetic images of literature and other 'arts' (in the modern sense of that word), he said clearly, 'Well, now you are making me think about this--I haven't thought of this that clearly, but I would say that, no, there's no objective, universal truth to be found in the arts." He continued, "I do think there is objective truth to be found in the sciences--empirical truth we find through science; but no, morals are culturally relative--even relative to the individual. I mean, think about it--when you read a book and then read it again ten years later, the "truths" you find in it change." A student then asked, "So the only objective knowledge we have is through material science, like modern biology?"

"Yes. There are "truths" you see in terms of recognizing something analogically about your own experience, your own life, but I do not believe in The Truth. I was religious as a child, and 'The Truth' was given to me through dogma. I don't see truth in that anymore, and I don't think there is universal truth about anything other than material science."

Pondering and picturing, mapping his premises backwards from these statements, I began to see the world the way he saw it, which seems to me to be quintessentially modern, a la Kant, or rather, Hume, the empiricist. Bill D. is a modern materialist, locked inside his own mind except for the moments when he can conclude with someone about the reaction of germs after 1000 experiments have been done, with multi-permutations of variable scenarios and control subjects. The 'truths' he enjoins young people to search for via the 'liberal arts' are simply self-actualization tools, and no more than that. They are again nothing but utilitarian because they have no higher end than toothpicks in a toothpick castle that becomes the 'authentic self.' C.S. Lewis had a name for these selves: Men Without Chests, people without anchor to anything solid, the abolishing of the human soul as having an end, a place, responsibility, purpose. If there is no possible connection to Truth, or anything transcendental forming and united with a rational, purposeful kosmos, then the human person is no more than self-conscious grass withering with the first onslaught of heat.

His arguments about cultural norms or evidence of natural law are the typical "he said, she said" tropes. Yes, I cannot empirically, scientifically demonstrate the moral order, because this order is not of the same kind of being as material experimentation; therefore, if one only accepts a narrow view of epistemology, then one effectively ostracizes any other form of knowing. It is like a child claiming that only the things he sees at the moment, in his vision, are real, and nothing else is. One looking at something else cannot argue with the child, because the rules have been set against his seeing anything else. It becomes a self-fulfilling reality, a self-justified inner circle.

 I cannot therefore prove to him, or hope to have true dialectic about the moral law, the soul, even thoughts, because he lives in another universe, a Cartesian, Kantian, Humian one; yet he cannot prove to me through his own form of empirical, materialist model that thoughts, moral laws, universal principles, the soul, justice do not exist. In fact, a la Occam's Razor, the simplest answer built on our self-evident, collective experience, is that they do, in fact, exist.

In his world, he can define the liberal arts as he sees fit, because in the end, definitions don't really matter, just like the Christian, Aristotelian principles Jane Austen builds her novels upon, principles she saw as True, universals found through the particulars of her own time and place, particulars that repeated, like the antistrophe, the strophe of Truth about virtue and human nature, can now, for Bill D., become "ah" moments of "truths" he discovers about himself that will, and can change, as he does. He and I can't even share Austen in any way that matters.

Therefore, his "liberal arts" are dilettante-ish virtual realities that aid us in "self-creation," not the arts that are intransitive and yet allow us to ascend the ladder of Beauty, Truth, Goodness towards that moment when we, with Augustine can say, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."

I would still like to have more tea with Bill D., though, because I think he can dialogue without recourse to "discomfort" or "offense."

Origin(s)

I can't show you the Creation, those kairos not chronos "molecules" of the Presence and Fathering of God through the Son, the dance of the Holy Spirit on the face of the deep; you can't show me the moment when a chance variation was burped out of other chance existences: we are both left looking at a mystery, a spiraling beyond, behind, effectively infinite.

So what?

Well, it matters, doesn't it? I mean, in all forms of human understanding--not data accumulation, but understanding--the truth of Origin matters; more than that, the Origin drives, grounds, completes any system of thought, any belief system. So where are we if we cannot understand the Origin of that worldview we hold? How do we understand Euclid without knowing that "the point is that which has no part"? How do we account for all if we limit ourselves to our own mind, or to a model? What is the hope of finding truth without sure knowledge of it? It seems to me that all understanding of Origin demands faith and inquiry simultaneously. Simplicus, writing in the 6th century AD a commentary on Aristotle's Physics, summarizes Anaximander, one of the "Presocratics":

Of those who say that [the first principle] is one and moving and indefinite, Anaximander, son of Praxiades, a Milesian who became successor and pupil to Thales, said that the indefinite (to apeiron) is both principle (archē) and element (stoicheion) of the things that are, and he was the first to introduce this name of the principle. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some other indefinite (apeiron) nature, from which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them; and those things, from which there is coming-to-be for the things that are, are also those into which is their passing-away, in accordance with what must be. For they give penalty (dikê) and recompense to one another for their injustice (adikia) in accordance with the ordering of time—speaking of them in rather poetical terms. It is clear that having seen the change of the four elements into each other, he did not think it fit to make some one of these underlying subject, but something else, apart from these. (Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics 24, lines 13ff. = 12A9 and B1)

Anaximander and the other Presocratics like Heraclitus, Xenophanes, and others would not have considered science as distinct from philosophy and theology; in fact, philosophy, or "love of wisdom" would have been the activity, a desiring of truth; in reading the almost mystical love-poems to God or the gods of some Prescratics interspersed with logical deductions about fire and water, one begins to understand how the desire for understanding is truly personal, a longing, an adoration. And these lover-thinkers, writing about a thousand years before Simplicus was building a bridge between them and the sharp and clear focus of Aristotle on the Prime Mover, focused upon origin. Was it one of the four elements, or an archē (principle) and stoicheion (element) that has a nature and indicates thus a kosmos, an ordered creation, with laws and purpose that allows for a criteria for all things: natural laws, moral laws, a justice that is based not on human will or the super-wills, the will to power of Hesiod's Theogony, but rather flowing from this "must be," this Esse?

In the foundations of Western thought, here between the philosophers and the poets, one sees three streams begin to develop: the inquiry into order, the indwelling of personified forces, and the unity of both. The Presocratics are astounding because they see Origin as fundamentally ordered, discernable, and yet also mystical and poetic. Xenophanes says: “And she whom they call Iris, this too is by nature cloud / purple, red, and greeny yellow to behold.” He references the poetic and does not parse the cloud into separate drops. Socrates and Plato follow this unified inquiry and indwelling via the Socratic method of defining, questioning, and the doctrine of recollection, a kind of indwelling of the Forms; Hesiod and Homer are not scientific in any way but are those possessed by nature as super-persons, willing servants of the Muses; conversely, Aristotle begins, in a sense, the almost total focus on logical inquiry, and though he unites the physical and meta-physical realities into one great pyramid resulting in a Prime Mover as Origin and End, he seems to turn away from the poetic as anything more than "medicine" for the emotional pressures of the human polity, writing treatises and manuals, not mystical works (see the more medical language of the Poetics).

The search for Origin becomes thus less unified, the different foci (on inquiry or on mystical indwelling) becoming potentially different towers of worldviews built on different methodological foundations. I find these different foci somehow connected to the difference between the view of time, of the present, as kairos and sequential, as chronos. Kairos means, literally, "opportune" or "critical" moment; the best illustrations are the humble ones--kairos is that moment when Odysseus could most effectively and beautifully string and bend back his great bow, arrow poised perfectly, to shoot through the axes; kairos is the moment when Penelope's weaving shuttle can move through the loom-threads most beautifully. It is, in a sense the best activity at the present moment; the fullness of time. It also has a sense of the indwelling of the gods, the 'propitious' moment, the moment when all forces come together to produce something. Yet, if one observes Socrates, each moment has its kairos: there is the moment, always, to stop for Beauty, and his apparent "lateness" in terms of chronos, or sequential, measured time to the feasts of the Gorgias and the Symposium, respectively, is a criticism not truly of Socrates but of the focus of those around him on purely human, rational matters. For Beauty there is no chronos, only kairos. For a more purely logical inquiry or scientific 'cause and effect,' methodology, the sequence is essential.

It seems to me that Origin lies also within kairos, and is prior in nature to chronos, the sequential, the measurable on a more subjective human scale. Thus, Origin is essentially mysterious, unknowable except perhaps by the mystic or the poet. However, is it then no longer inquiry? As science and religion and poetics slowly, over history, become strangers, separate disciplines (not even activities anymore, but mountains of data and theories), is Origin now archaic? Or do we amputate the hope of it altogether, living within scientific models like Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Copernicus as one might live inside a tent and look at the stars through a special window created for viewing?

Can we have truth without being able to demonstrate through a microscope or an extrapolated theory that seems grounded in available rock samples?

As I live more on the front lines of the secular world, I see more clearly the sharp divide, and the impossibility of dialogue without knowledge of Origin--for even the more radically scientific, not poetic, Aristotle helped us to see that origin is also end, in the sense that it is the sense of everything that flows from it, and so creates the purpose via the creation of order. Aristotle's Prime Mover is removed, in a sense, from the world that flows from it, but the world is a child of that One, and only fulfills itself in the sense that it fulfills the order set in motion by the Prime Mover. Therefore, in Aristotle I also find kairos, though in a less poetic or mystical way; perhaps he does have a kind of synthesis, and this makes him a kind of bridge between the threads of pure rational inquiry (science) and the ecstatic, poetic, mystical, recollected sense of the whole in the kairos.

I believe, with Socrates, and later Christian thinkers that Origin, the true Origin of all we know, of reality, is eternal kairos, meta-chronos; it is the moment of indwelling, the propitious present out of which everything else flows, takes meaning. If we cannot know it, or have hope of finding it, we are lost in a deep cave, in the dark. We can, of course, do experiments on the rocks, observe the hints in the darkness, and if our inquiries are not infected with the desire for personal gain, we can see glimpses of That for the sake of Which all else is, the Source.  The inquiry for the human person is the activity, reason working in accordance with reality, that is one side of knowing, of wisdom. But in order to know the whole--or to have a 'worldview'--one must see the Wholeness in some respect, first. And we are meant to see the Whole, made to see it, which is what sets us apart from other levels of being. Inquiry is the struggle to get out of the cave and to see, eventually, the sun itself, symbolic in Plato's Cave as the Truth, the Origin, the Beauty: Truth itself as One, as Origin and End. Yet the turn from the things we see by the light of the Sun and seeing the Sun itself, Truth itself, is like a turn from chronos to the eternal kairos, outside of, beyond chronos, and only one who participates in this eternal present, as Augustine describes it in the latter half of the Confessions, can truly have hope of a coherent and truthful worldview.

How do we then speak to each other across disciplines and cultures and 'views' if any hope of knowing the Origin is gone? How, if we are no longer working with models but rather are locked inside them? Or, after Kant, and Hume, and Descartes, we cannot even truly be outside our own minds?

Much of our world now has lost the ability to see beyond self--my ideas, my preference, my reality--and so my only hope as a teacher is to do what Socrates attempts with the proto--Nietzsche Callicles: to try to reach a young, more flexible person through the love found in questioning. And to model the search myself, as I am searching, in love and trembling, to find the Origin. Teaching is not rhetoric primarily, but a combination of many things--first, it is a realization that one is an image to a student, easily confused with the images on the wall of Plato's Cave. One does not want to become another image for a young soul to mistake for the arduous journey; thus, if one's students become addicted to the you as teacher, it means you have become too important, and the search for Truth, for Origin, will die with you, or as soon as the student is old enough and wise enough to see that you, also, struggle often in the dark.

The best metaphor for teaching is a mixed one--sorry--first, that of educare, or "leading out," and second, a kind of midwifery. How do these go together? As Socrates states in the Cave metaphor, only one who has gone on the search out of the Cave can truly lead, for as Aquinas and even Chaucer (through the mini-polis of the pilgrimage under Harry Bailey) relate, a leader cannot lead if he does not know the purpose for the human person, the telos for both the human person and for human community. A leader must have a sense of the Truth, the End. In Aquinas, this is why the state and Church must cooperate; in Chaucer, this is the clue to the failure of the pilgrimage. Harry Bailey from the first mistakes the telos of the pilgrimage itself; in fact, he goes farther and introduces a contrary end: that of pleasure in the place of penance. He cannot lead, because he cannot see Origin and End. Therefore, he cannot "lead out" and order the stories, nor can he help the pilgrims "birth" stories that will further the pilgrims toward the true end of the road; instead, disorder and division and sin are introduced almost from the end of the first tale. Perhaps it is no mistake that Chaucer never finished the Pilgrimage; perhaps as it was set up, it could have no good end, but must be re-founded.

Like any good leader, then, a teacher is not focused solely on persuasion (too tempting to self-aggrandizement and narrowing both logic and poetics to dispose towards certain judgments decided upon first by the teacher--not true inquiry, which is dialectical, not rhetorical) but rather on giving the human person the situation and tools to begin to search: for if humans are truly made by and for Origin and End, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, then as fire desires "up" and earth "down," we will naturally, with our particular human faculties, desire Origin, the fullness of Truth: and we will find ecstasy, eternal happiness, in beholding this, because it is Beautiful. And the most important truth is that the human person, in order to find, must also search, for as love is a movement towards what is True, Good, and Beautiful, so the rational struggle and search is the natural precursor, the disposition to the poetic, the mystical, the receptive. We are rational animals, not plants, capable of relationship and love on a cosmic scale. Thus, teachers work to develop reason, and like a father putting his son on his shoulders to see the view, as leaders and midwives we offer instances and images and orderings and inquiries that are themselves indwellings, the kairoi.

We then get out of the way and this, for a teacher, is the propitious moment, the moment when the student is able to bend back that Odyssean bow, or send the shuttle like a bird in flight through the loom-threads, and we shoot and weave and search alongside: this is the kairos of teaching, when God imbues the art with His love and power, and can begin to indwell, calling us both, student and teacher, to the sight of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty: the Origin.