Integrated Humanities Program: Lecture I – Introduction

Lecture Introduction

Speakers

• Dennis Quinn: Professor of English, University of Kansas.
• John Senior: Professor of Classics, University of Kansas.

Program Overview

My name is Dennis Quinn. I'm professor of English at the University of Kansas. And with me today and throughout these lectures will be Professor Senior, John Senior of the Classics Department at the University of Kansas. Mr. Senior and I and another colleague, really about 14 or 15 years ago, began teaching a course which was called, or a sequence of courses, that was called the Integrated Humanities Program. And in it, we read and talked about the Great Books of Western civilization. It was what is called a Great Books program, although quite different from typical Great Books programs of the kind that started at Chicago University, but it began with Greek authors, and that's what we intend to do here. We'll begin by reading Homer, and we will proceed to read Plato and some other Greek authors, and then we'll go on to read Latin authors and medieval authors and modern authors, reading books that are of various kinds—many of them poetry, some of them philosophical books, some of them historical or biographical books, books of various kinds.

Father Randall Payne has asked us to give these lectures for seminarians or for young men who are about to enter the seminary, as I understand it. They're rather preliminary courses or preliminary lectures for those considering entering the seminary. And this first lecture is going to be devoted to talking about the whole program, that is, what it is that we set out to do. Father Payne was in this program many years ago. When it first started, he completed the whole four-semester sequence and went on to finish college and later to enter the order. At his request, we're going to attempt to cover at least most of the material that we covered in the Integrated Humanities in a series of lectures, just Mr. Senior and I. So next time, in the next lecture, we will start our lectures on Homer, and in this particular lecture, we're going to try to explain what our approach to this subject is and why we approach it in the way that we do and why this material is important.

It might seem to some rather strange to start off talking to seminarians about books which are, for the most part—well, first two semesters, they're all pagan books. There are no Christian authors at all that we talk about until the third semester when we start talking about the Bible. And it's by way of explaining that that we intend to start today.

Main Body

Methodological Approach: Scholastic Preface vs. Poetic Mode

In some ways, we're disobeying the rule of our subject. One of the most famous phrases having to do with poetry is a Latin phrase applied to all narrative, but especially to Homer and the epic. That is that it should begin in medias res—it should begin in the middle of things. And today, for some reason, we're more awkwardly applying the scholastic method. We're writing a kind of preface, trying to point out beforehand what it is that we're going to do and to some extent the order in which it's going to be done. I suppose the reason why we're doing this is that we are speaking to students who are most likely to have been introduced to the scholastic method, either in the seminary itself or in the various studies that they've taken already in school and in college.

We thought quite a bit about this before attempting this tape today. Should we just simply plunge into a passage and start talking about Homer and fill these things in as we go along, or would it be better to say, now wait a minute, we don't want to lose our audience here. You might not understand what it is that we're trying to do. If we're going to use this scholastic method, we of course then have to talk about what always comes absolutely first. That is, we have to begin at the beginning. And that's the end, yes. That is the purpose, or the final cause of it. That is, what is the end, the bullseye at which we're shooting here?

We probably will not proceed. We won't continue in this mode of discourse, as we will explain to you. We will turn to a more poetic mode of discourse and more poetic approach to material as soon as we really embark on Homer himself.

The first problem—I suppose it's a problem, it can be solved, it's not a mystery, it's a difficulty, but it's a pretty difficult difficulty in teaching—is the problem of all rhetoricians. That is, you do have to say something to a particular audience. And if you just follow the order of the subject, leave the audience out, it's going to be a disaster. And we don't have the advantage that we usually have as teachers of seeing our students right in front of us. One of the things that teachers in the poetic mode that we follow do is watch the faces, the eyes of the students. The teacher can tell whether or not someone's listening to him, whether he's following what's being said. That's rather impossible here on the tape, so we have to imagine that someone sitting and listening to us here, and we're not at all sure whether what we say will be taken seriously.

Challenges in Modern Education: Authority and Prerequisites

There are so many difficulties that we face here. One of them is the preeminence of the scholastic method itself. That is, most students in seminaries have already assented to the notion that the best way to treat a subject is systematically. That is, in a philosophical way, in a scientific way—you talk about the end and then you back off and talk about the needs that are proportionate. Well, we have to combat that to some extent because one of the things that we want to say is that the scholastic method is appropriate to a seminary, but it presupposes another kind of education first. And what we've discovered is that that kind of education has been lost, and that seminarians are exposed to a scholastic method without the program, since I guess it comes down to that.

Well, we have found over the years in simply teaching college students here at the University of Kansas that they too have had a kind of scholastic preparation—not in the strict sense of the word scholastic with a capital S, but the secular schools have all adopted a scientific method of approaching all subjects. Now we think that the scientific method of approaching physics is, of course, the proper method of approaching physics. But once again, there is a presupposition that there is some other kind of knowledge that they are building on, but that presupposition is no longer justified, we have found. We could say that 40 or 50 years ago, a student coming to college, a student entering a seminary, would have had these prerequisites that we would call them, that have all been learned in a different way, and that they were ready to begin with a scholastic method, whether with a large S or a small S, a scientific method, we would say. But that we find is no longer true and therefore we feel we have to start somewhere else.

That's the first difficulty I think that we want to face today. There's another difficulty having to do more strictly with the church, although again I think you could apply the same thing in the secular education, too, in a way. And that is the problem of authority. That is, the church is an authority and teaches as having that authority—that is, Christ gave to the church an authority in teaching doctrine. And Catholic students develop almost throughout their lives a false idea of authority. That is, that it's the only thing that there is. That two and two is four only because a teacher told you, and that you accept everything that you learn on the authority of the teacher or on the authority of the book that the teacher is teaching.

Well, it's exactly the same, especially in the sciences and mathematics. The example from mathematics is a good choice because in the secular school, once again, science is the most dogmatically taught of all subjects. A science teacher is one who has mastered the subject of science. The textbook gives you all of the answers to all the questions. It shows you the method that you are to follow. It starts—if you take biology—they start you off with the cell and the parts of the cell and they simply teach you dogmatically that that's what it is. And there is—it is all laid down, authoritative. How those things were arrived at, you are not told. You're given really, in effect, you're given conclusions and you simply take them as being absolutely true.

That is not so true in other subjects, although still despite a greater degree of relativity in the teaching of other subjects—social sciences and the humanities and so forth—still the authority of the teacher is preeminent. Well, the relativity itself becomes the dogma. That's the only difference. What the teacher certainly teaches. And there's a canon of standard literary texts, for example, in English classes. And all students have to read those books and have to assent to the truth of those books and assent to the excellence of them.

Now, the church has commanded, for example, that the theology of St. Thomas be taught in all of its schools as the measure of whatever else might be learned. You can take a simple example of the famous five proofs for the existence of God. Now, the five proofs that St. Thomas presents are not true because he presents them, nor are they true because the church said that St. Thomas was the authority in those matters. They're true because they're true in themselves. And St. Thomas teaches them because he saw that they were true. And the church confirms that truth, but the reason why they're true is that they are true.

They begin, for example, with statements like, something moves. Now, we're supposed to stop and consider that. Is that true? That something moves. That's not to be taken on authority. What is that to be taken on? Well, that's an obvious fact. That's to be taken on fact. And facts have got to be seen and heard. We arrive, in fact, through the senses and through experience.

Now I know parenthetically that all kinds of horrible heresies have been promulgated throughout the history of the church, but especially recently in the name of experience, and Lord knows we're not going to advocate varieties of religious experience or varieties of philosophic experience. We're not talking about that—usually when people use the word experience in that sense they mean emotions, I think, or enthusiasm or something like that. We're talking about the experience of sight, for example—that is the sense that you can see something move. You don't take that on authority.

Now, if something moves, we then say, well, what is the cause of that motion? Because movement is not something given. It's a consequence. It's a result of something. Why does that thing move? What caused it to move? And so we get into the chain of reasoning that leads back to God as the cause of all motions. But that proof—the point I'm trying to make here—is not something to be taken on authority. It's something that has to begin with observation.

Now, these pursuits in elementary and intermediate education, which are prerequisite to a scholastic education—these pursuits are sometimes called trifles. They're not serious. People say, well, I don't have to—I don't have to train my senses, I can see for myself. Any dog fool could see—look, there goes a bird, something moves, let's get on with proof.

Yeah, let's say—I used the word preliminary a little bit while ago, and people are especially now—people, I say people, students, good students, and especially good students, and teachers themselves—are inclined to say, well, let's skip the preliminaries. Now, who needs the preliminaries? You know, they're trivial. You know, they're obvious, such as the idea of—obvious facts. They're obvious. And therefore, we can skip those. We don't need to stop to consider those things. We can go on to more advanced things immediately and skip the preliminaries.

That's a kind of phrase. You say, well, let's skip the preliminaries, let's get down to what's really important—meaning that the preliminaries are not important. They can't deal with it. I think that the obvious isn't important, for example. I suppose we could make up a little slogan for our course and say that really it's a course in the obvious. We pay strict attention to the obvious—and strange as it may seem, paradoxical as it is—the obvious is the least obvious thing in the world. It's the one thing that you are most inclined to overlook. Plain as the nose on your face, but you don't see your nose. It's not so plain. We tend to notice everything else.

Yeah, Jacques Maritain, to cite another scholastic philosopher, makes a very, very big point out of this. He uses the example of the purloined letter in his book on the introduction of metaphysics. I remember he has a long comparison of being—of being, and all of the first principles of philosophy—he compares them to the purloined letter. You know, the purloined letter is that letter in Edgar Allan Poe that's placed in plain sight so that it will not be found. It's put in the most obvious place, and it's overlooked by the detectives. That's the way to hide something. He wants to hide this letter so nobody will find it when the police come and search the place. So he puts it right out on the mantelpiece. And they miss it.

And Maritain says that's the case with being. Take something like this—being, take something like being—he said, well, people say, well, being is—everything is, everything exists—we can see that, you don't need to point that out. And yet, he says, well, that's all metaphysics is about—is being—and if you don't see what being is, well, you can't possibly—if you don't see what this particular object is—this cow exists—then you're not even, you can't possibly ever achieve the very difficult science of metaphysics.

And what happens is that the overwhelming majority of students in this generation and in the immediate preceding ones—I'd say this has been going on for almost a century now—with what we call the modern world or the industrialized world, the school turned into a kind of factory, turned into a kind of machine where study has become the manipulation of things—methodized and so forth. In this modern world that we live in, students are put into scholastic studies without these prerequisites.

Then what happens? Well, they learn a kind of machine metaphysics, or a kind of machine theology. That is, they memorize questions and answers on the authority of the teacher. If it's a secular school, it'll be on some secular authority—it'll be on some secular authority, and they'll come out—whatever it is—spouting the propositions of Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud. Or Thomas Aquinas. Or the Catholic education—it turns out to be Thomas Aquinas. But it's not a real education.

I know—when I was going to school, this is a long time ago now—I was in the army just after World War II and got out of the army about 1948 and started in a Catholic college where there was a scholastic education. And I remember once particularly—I was not a Catholic at the time, but I took courses in metaphysics. In my freshman year, I took a course in metaphysics with a textbook in Thomistic metaphysics and a textbook in psychology—Thomistic psychology.

And I remember once being in a class—actually there was a great books class there—and we were reading John Locke and some things from Thomas Aquinas, and there were some students in there who were advanced philosophy students. And I remember—I was very young and I didn't really know very much about anything—none of us did—but I know that I was very—I had a very bad impression of these—of these advanced philosophy students. Whatever question you brought up, they had the answer. It was all in a slogan, it was all in a phrase, and it was right out of Thomas Aquinas. They had the answer to every single question. It was undiscussable.

You were supposed to think about the book you were reading, but the minute the question was raised, they settled it and finished it off forever—and they could not really talk about it. It turned out they could never really discuss or consider the question at all because they had it all summed up in a formula. And that type goes on into more advanced studies. If he doesn't know the answer, he looks it up. That's the next one.

Yeah, they run right home and they get the index of Thomas Aquinas and they look it up in the index and they find the question—and then they say, aha, there it is. It turns a study into a dictionary. It turns all learning into an index or concordance to the collected works of somebody or other. It's either going to be St. Thomas or it's going to be somebody else.

And that is not, of course, what St. Thomas himself does, and it's not what the Church intends—it's not what Christ did, and it's not what God the Father did in creating the world. That is, the things are not true because God decided that it would go this way and not that way. God himself can't affirm contradiction.

Truth Independent of Authority

That is, freedom does not have to do with error. It has to do only with truth. The reason why things are true is that that's the way they are. That's the true thing. Two and two is four, not because God affirmed that two and two is four. God can't change his mind about that. It's because the way God is himself. God is a certain way and therefore there's no other way that two and two can be acceptable. His action follows his being and in his action of creation, what he creates follows from his own being, his own existence, from the way that he is. And he can't change his mind.

I know there really is a state of mind, especially among conservative Catholics, that is today—among wild and heretical Catholics, you'll hear almost anything said—but among the more conservative Catholics, you frequently get that idea that things are true because the church says they are. That is, when the creed is recited, why do you believe the creed? Well, because the church teaches it. Well, no—the church teaches it because that is what we believe. We believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. That's what we believe, and we believe those things that the Catholic Church believes and teaches.

If you pursue this argument to the bitter end, you could see that it would be really a denial of the authority of God to put authority in anything else. That is, all authority derives from God himself. And when we study the book of nature, when we look out the window here and we see a blue sky and green woods, that is true. I don't have to turn to the church to have that affirmed. In fact, the teaching of the church is based upon those distinctions—that I can see the blue and I can see the green and I can see that the sky is not the same thing as the trees.

Sensory Basis of Knowledge

Well, this is one of the doctrines you're saying. Well, this is one of the doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas is that all knowledge comes ultimately from the senses. It's a very simple doctrine. And it seems, again, very obvious, but it's not so obvious. And it's not true because he said it—it's because it's the way it is. He said it because it's true. And he says that himself over and over again, that he doesn't want anyone to take what he says or anyone else says as true because they said it.

Now, of course, it is true that if Aristotle or St. Thomas has said something, I pay attention. If I read something that some journalist has said in a newspaper or some so-called modern theologian has said, well, I very often take it with a grain of salt. I say, oh, well, I don't waste my time listening to somebody like that or thinking about what somebody like that has said. Now, whereas if Aristotle said it, I'm going to look at it very seriously or someone else—authority does have that kind of a role, but that's to be distinguished very carefully from the role of its being true because they said it.

Yes, again, we're not attacking authority. We're not attacking St. Thomas in America. As a matter of fact, you do have to have a certain confidence in your teachers in order to learn anything. You do have to listen and you have to withhold your criticism. We certainly don't want to stimulate some kind of thing called thinking for oneself. I think that gets you in trouble. But what we are saying is that when you follow the teaching of a master, you have to follow him. That's the point. You have to be attentive to what's being said. And if the teacher, the master—whether it's St. Thomas or Aristotle or whoever it is that you're following—if that teacher or that master says, now consider this, you have to consider it. You don't just simply write it down in your notebook.

Critique of Note-Taking and Methodical Education

One of the things that we've always attacked in students, in our course now—we're not talking about a course in some other study, but in our course—we've always attacked the taking of notes because it's an outward sign of this interior indisposition that we're talking about. That is, a student who has been brought up on methodical teaching—everything is learned by method. And at the same time follows authority. A student who has been brought up in those two ways together is most likely to be a note taker.

The minute the teacher comes into class, he's got his pencil sharp and his notebook out, and he waits, of course, for what? Well, he waits for point Roman numeral one, a capital A, little one. You know, he wants to get that outline down with first things first and of course he wants to write down whatever it is the teacher says because he knows that that has to be memorized and that that will appear on the test and that that is the whole purpose of education.

Now, that's false. It's not education at all. It's not education in any sense, really. That is, as I say, I've done that and you've done that, and you realize you fill up all those notebooks during your college education or your high school education, and some people even keep them with the idea that they'll be useful sometimes. And you look at all those notes and maybe someday you even go back and you open them up and you read those notes and you realize that you didn't learn any of that at all. You don't remember any of that. You've got dates and names and names of movements and schools and treaties and all sorts of things written in there that at one time you memorized to put down on a test. You came in, you took the test, you put the things faithfully down on the test, and then you forgot them. And you forgot them permanently. Those are things mostly that you will not remember.

Difficulties in Education: Method, Authority, and Speed

Well, we're talking about difficulties, which is what a preface is supposed to do—is supposed to get rid of obstacles to the study. Of course, they're also supposed to be pleasant and they're supposed to facilitate the subject. I'm not so sure that what we're saying is pleasant. It may very well go against the grain. There may very well be uplifted eyebrows at this point because we've talked about these difficulties: One, that method itself is not appropriate to the kind of education, to the stage of learning that we're talking about in this course. Method may very well be appropriate to certain studies in science, or certain kinds of science. And the scholastic method may be appropriate to a certain kind of theological study. But method of any kind—not the scholastic method—method of any kind is not appropriate to what we're going to talk about, and so we look upon method itself as an obstacle.

And that may come as something of a shock to people, and although we all say we like to be shocked, we don't. That is another way of putting it is it may be outside the margins of our mind. When someone says something like that, we tend to say, well, that's ridiculous and I'm just not going to take that seriously. The only way to learn anything is to find the proper method. And here are these fellows saying, well, we don't believe in any method at all in order to learn the particular thing that we want to learn. Well, if that's true, then we would eliminate it. It's not learning. It's something else. It may be fun. It may be games. It may be all sorts of things, but that's not what learning is.

In other words, learning is identified with method. And when someone attacks method, it's just thrown out. Now, we're speaking from long experience of this. We know that although at first certain students may very well look upon us as authorities because we've been introduced by someone else in authority. They may sit and patiently try to follow what we say. There's a point when their mind simply begins to wander. Why? Not take notes? Then what are we to do? If we're not going to take notes, then what are we to do? Okay, we're just going to sit here and listen to a rambling kind of a conversation that doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Well, let's back up and be a little scholastic, okay? We attacked method, and then we went on to attack authority. Now, we're not attacking either method or authority in themselves, but we are trying to open the student up to learning things that need neither method nor authority. In fact, method and authority are impediments because they have to do with the obvious—something that you can only see for yourself. And if an authority comes along and tells you that you are to memorize this obvious fact, then you see to you it isn't any longer obvious. The authority is stepping between you and the observance of the thing itself.

The Obvious and Direct Experience

What does obvious mean? It's a Latin word. It means what you're bumped into on the way. Ob, as in obstacle—you know, the prefix or the preposition in Latin—ob, as an object. An object is something thrown in your way. Well, the obvious—the word via just means the road we're on. We're on the way—we're on a pilgrimage to the beatific vision. We're all on a pilgrimage to heaven, and there are certain things that are obvious. That is, they're thrown up right in front of us as plain facts.

Now, if we don't see those plain facts, we're never going to go along the way. And if somebody walks along with you and says, now, I want you to memorize this and I want you to follow this argument, then you're not going to be seeing the fact for yourself. Well, sometimes one wonders whether the best education wouldn't be no education at all—just throw students into a situation where they have to look at the blue of the sky and the green of the tree.

There are educators who have gone that far and said, why don't we, at this stage of education, which is elementary, why don't we just turn kids loose? I suppose Rousseau had something of that notion—just let the kid run loose in the fields and he learned for himself. Yeah, well, Rousseau was wrong in a great many ways, especially about education. He was wrong and he's been followed and he's misled a lot of people. But, on the other hand, he was reacting against a century in which the scientific method had come to absolutely dominate all education and nobody ever walked into a field and looked at anything.

As an old error, there's a truth in his error. The error wouldn't exist if there were a truth, and he was certainly right about that. That is, that methodical education was derived largely from Descartes, but everybody else—the whole of the century—there's a century where method had strangled the experiment. You see, if you learn only about frogs by reading about the frog and the anatomy of the frog in a textbook, and then going to the laboratory and anatomizing a frog that's been pickled, and you have never really seen a living frog out there in nature, then there's going to be something fatally wrong with your education.

Now, that's just as an example, but the fact is that almost everything that is learned in school now is learned by this textbook and laboratory method. That is, we get instruments, we get microscopes, and we look at the thing under the microscope, but we've never seen the thing macroscopically for ourselves without the aid of this instrument.

We often give it the example of looking at the stars. It turns out that, for example, at the University of Kansas—and I'm sure this is a pattern all over the country—there was for years, of course, called observational astronomy, where the first thing that students did was to go outside on a dark night to be taken out to where the lights of the city wouldn't interfere. And the professor gave a lecture on the planets, and then he gave a lecture on the constellation. Well, he didn't give a lecture. He just pointed to them. He said, well, there—you see—is Cassiopeia there. Look at that. And he would point out the stars and the planets and phases of the moon and to get people to just look at that.

That, by the way—here at the University of Kansas—was a very, very popular course. Students took that course by the hundreds. Well, the man who taught it—who was a very popular teacher and a very good teacher—died or he retired. And what happened was that that course was then eliminated. There is no course in observational astronomy at this big state university—prestigious state university. There is no course in observational astronomy. I doubt if you can find one anywhere. There's a course in introduction to astronomy. Well, it's astrophysics.

Now, what you learn is astrophysics. You see, you skip the obvious. You skip the phases of the moon. In other words, you'll have students who know all about—or seem to know all about—the methods of studying stars that are so remote that they cannot be seen by even the most powerful telescope. They'll know all about the methodology of astronomy and yet if you say to them, well, could you just explain to me the phases of the Moon? They can't do that at all. They've never really looked at the Moon. They know nothing about these things that are so close to us.

The obvious is something that's very close to us. And really, the Moon is very, very close to us. It's the astral body that's closest to us and we can look at it with our own eyes and we can see those phases of the Moon. We can look at the planets and we can notice where they are because in a way they are obvious. But the course in astrophysics skips all of that or deals with it as quickly as it possibly can so that it can get into outer space where nothing is obvious at all.

Against Speed in Learning: Dwelling on the Obvious

Isn't what we've been saying true? That's what we like to consider in your own life, in your own experience. That is, I wonder—that is, if you ask yourself—how many of you can identify the planets? Can you identify the moon, for example? Do you know right now—sitting where you are—did you notice in what phase the moon was last night? Is it an old moon, a new moon? Do you know—are you really sure what the new moon is and what the old moon is?

I went out last night and it was rather terrifying. I didn't know what it was. I really thought, well, it's a flying saucer. At last I've seen a flying saucer. Or there's some terrible thing—we're in apocalyptic times now—and there's some terrible thing that's happening in the sky because that was hanging so far over the west horizon. It was down in the trees. It looked like a fire of some sort. And as I walked, it was interrupted by the trees—the branches of the trees. So it looked sort of like a jagged thing burning there. And I was really stopped for a moment, until I said, oh, oh—that's the moon. I'm so glad that I know what the moon looks like.

But—well, we're into a third thing here, too, I think. We're against method, and we're against authority, and we're against speed. Mr. Quinn has referred a few times already to that idea of let's skip the preliminaries. Why? Well, because we want to get on as fast as we can to the more important things. Why don't we speed up education? Why waste time?

One of the things that might be occurring to some of our listeners right now is that how many minutes have gone by and what have we said? How much of what we said have we repeated over and over? I remember having smart students in class who sometimes very politely come up at the end of the class and say—you know—I kind of like what you're saying, but gee—you know—I'm too smart for this class. You must be talking to a bunch of dummies. I'm an honor student. I'm a bright fellow. I have a high IQ. I got what you said the first time you said it, and I could have—you know—walked out of class and come back 15 minutes later and you're still saying the same thing.

Well, what I've always said to students like that is—well—the fact that you're saying that means that you didn't hear us at all. Because there's something about obvious facts like the moon. What's the matter with stopping? I mean, why should we go on to something else? What's the matter with the sky? That we should say—all right—it's blue. No, let's go on. All right—trees are green. Let's go on to something red, purple.

And tonight you can—you can go duck out the front door and you can look up and you say—yeah, yeah—I got that. Okay. Close the door—come back in and say—now—now I know what phase the moon is. I'm going to do that every night. I'm going to spend two seconds every night checking out to see what phase of the moon. Then I'll know. You say—well—but that isn't—uh—you're not—you're not looking at the moon.

Useful vs. Fruitful Knowledge: Aristotle on Education

What's the purpose of an obvious fact? Well, here we are now with the great philosophers because isn't this what Aristotle says about education? In the last book of the Politics—one of the great books by the great philosopher St. Thomas says is the prince of philosophy and the greatest of them all. And the church has ratified that—so we can speak here. St. Thomas says—and Aristotle says—in order to talk about education, they have to be thought. You have to see those with the mind's eye. But one of the principles is this distinction between means and ends.

We see that we do certain things in order to arrive at certain ends. And in our experience, we discover that there are useful things, and then there are what we call fruitful things. You can use those two terms—useful and fruitful. Now, what about these obvious facts—like a crescent moon—like this particular sky? Are they useful? That is—is the purpose of an obvious fact that it can be put to some use—and then we can go on from there?

Well, yes. We can say that on the basis of obvious facts, we can learn things that are not obvious. By the visible things of this world, we can learn about the invisible things of the next, for example—that we can therefore look upon this world as a useful tool—as a way in which we can come to know things that are not obvious. However, obvious facts also may be looked at from a point of view of their very fruitfulness—because God created them—and they have about them not only the possibility of the means to an end—but they have about them something of the quality—that it's something of the being of the end in itself—because they're creatures.

Do you understand the distinction? That is, you can look at a tree as a tree—as a thing—and it can be made use of as lumber and furthermore it can be analyzed and you can get all the way to the idea of substance simply by examining a tree. But you also can look at a tree as a creature—that is—as a created thing. God created. I believe in God the Father Almighty Creator of heaven and earth. Now the heaven we don't know much about, but the earth is here before our very eyes, and when we consider the earth as a creature—when we consider things not as things but as creatures—we move into this dimension of these things as having the quality—even beyond the quality—having the very being of God himself in them—that is—the emblems of the being of God. Because they have being—and God is being.

God Hidden in the Obvious

That's that approach to that mystery of being that Maritain was talking about. That purloined letter is a brilliant metaphor, isn't it? God is indeed a hidden God with me. We can't see him and yet he's everywhere. There's nothing closer to us than God. Nothing really more obvious. I mean, God himself—to push that metaphor to the ultimate—God himself is in purloined letter again. He's hiding in the obvious, and therefore, there is a kind of sacrilege in this abuse of things—not the proper use of them, but the abuse of them.

Against Speed: Dwelling on Obvious Facts

That is, in that speed, that hurrying on. Well, so much for the crescent moon—now we'll go on to a full moon or now we'll go on to the next thing that we want to learn—that is, we'll squeeze that moon dry like a lemon and throw it away because now we have the juice and the juice is in my notebook there and this is the study—now we go on to bigger and better things—we can go on to the galaxies, you know, that are bigger and more remarkable than everything else, and more obscure, really. Things that are less known have a kind of fascination for us, and the smarter you are, the more you have—I don't know whether we have time, because here we are involved in speed. Even in a conversation which is ours today, we realize that there's a certain number of feet in this tape that we're using here, and we'd have to go a little bit faster, but let's at least get in a little bit to what Aristotle says here, using a translation here in the Loeb Library edition, which is one of the most easily accessible ones to students. Again, I'm not going to follow some kind of super scholarly text here, but just one that an ordinary reader might read.

Aristotle on Education: Useful and Fruitful Studies

Now this is from the last book of Politics. The branches of study at present established fall into both classes—as was said before. Now the both classes he's talking about are the useful things and the fruitful things. Now, let me repeat that again. The branches of study at present were Spanish—do you know how Aristotle always proceeds from the given? He doesn't make up some kind of ideal education. He says let's take a look at what people actually do in education, and he says if you look at what people do, they fall into both of these classes. There are perhaps—he says—four customary subjects of education: reading and writing, gymnastics, music, and fourth—with some people—drawing.

Now you have to stop there and laugh—it's quite—we have to quit this laugh at that one because how Aristotle does no rhetoric, doesn't he? That is, he knows we're going to be absolutely explosive at that. You're going to divide all learning into reading, writing, gymnastics, music, and drawing pictures? Is that part of the Great Books? Indeed it is. But he does admit that it's only with some people, because that has been questioned. But let's go on a little bit. Reading and writing and drawing being taught as being useful for the purpose of life and very serviceable—that is, you have to learn how to read and how to write in order to open a can of beans or in order to write a letter to somebody—in order to get a job done. You have to know drawing if you're going to build houses and make blueprints and communicate and go on with the advertising business. And gymnastics as contributing to manly courage. And it's gymnastic—which is not entirely to be identified with athletics—but something like it has to do with teaching students to learn how to bear and to endure. If you go in for running a race, for example, you learn how not to quit. You learn the elements of courage.

Leisure (Scholē) vs. Business

But as to music—here one might raise a question. For at present, most people take part in it for the sake of pleasure. But those who originally included it in education did so because—as has often been said—nature itself seeks to be able not only to engage rightly in business, but also to occupy leisure nobly—for (to speak about it yet again) this is the first principle of all things. Now we suddenly jumped up into a pretty serious study here—the first principle of all things. Why? Well, this distinction between business and leisure. The passage of Mr. Senior's reading translation says business and leisure—in the Greek, it says, really—literally—it says leisure and non-leisure. And the word for leisure is scholē—from which scholastic derived? From which the word school and scholastic itself derived.

That's a very strange thing. The Greek word for what we call business—which we think of as being the most important thing—business—as compared to leisure. The Greeks have a negative word. They say a-schole—not leisurely. That should suggest to you that somehow in the Greek mind, there is something fundamental about the idea of leisure and something rather secondary about the matter of business. Business is for the sake of leisure. Yeah—that one of them is more primary, more fundamental, more obvious than the other—and it's leisure. Scholē is the more fundamental thing. And then there's the lack of it—which is business. Or in Latin—we say neg-otium—which means business. And it's exactly the same thing. It means non-idleness—or otium—leisure.

Play as Medicine, Not Leisure

It's kind of funny—in this very text that I'm reading from here—the editor has marginal notes. They're useful. It says here in the margin: the four normal studies—so when you're paging through the book, you can see that little note and then go across and read what Aristotle has to say about it. In other words, there's a method that's been applied here to Aristotle's text—but it's very funny down at the bottom of the page. You know what it says? The use of leisure. You completely missed the point of what Aristotle said—that is—the use of leisure. See—now Aristotle is going to tell us how useful leisure is—but the whole point is that leisure is not useful at all. That the useful is not the reasonable. And we've got the whole thing turned around.

I suppose the world always has. We in the United States tend to blame it on the Puritans. We blame it on the Protestant work ethic. But it's been around a lot longer than the Protestants. That is—there is an unnatural tendency in man—we know—since the fall. And it is so much of a tendency that what is unnatural by habit—and it's a habit of the human race—it's a habit we're born with—by habit, it becomes second nature to us—and therefore we think it's natural. And this thing that is natural to us is that the purpose of life is work. We are—that is what we are—we are creatures of work. And that everything—therefore—you see—no matter what we do—everything that we do is ordered toward work.

No—we confuse leisure with recreation. Aristotle takes that up. In other words—he talks about play—and he says play has a certain use in that it's a form of rest. That is—it goes along with sleep and eating—and that we should do those things in order to be able to work. But what he means by scholē—what he means by leisure here—is not something useful for the purpose of getting back to work again. That is—we don't take Sunday off as a holiday in order that we can go back with refreshed bodies and minds on Monday. That's not the purpose of Sundays. No—Sunday is—of course—the Christian holiday of the week. It's the day of leisure. We're commanded by God to do no work on Sunday—to refrain from work on Sunday because that is God's day. And the reason why we work the other six days is so that we can afford to take that day off.

Since the fall—we can't afford it seven days a week. So we have to take it now. I don't know about that—the theologians will have to correct me. Was God in the Garden of Eden every day a Sunday? I don't know. Certainly there was no—you see—the penalty that goes with work—that is the sweat of the brow—that is the labor. It now is penal. There is a penalty attached to work—and so it's onerous—it's a burden—and so if it so—we turn more readily to play now as a diversion—simply to be free from the burden of work—and so we always see it in connection with work as just a way of being free.

But the work—I mean—Adam worked in the garden. He worked in another sense. He didn't labor. Yeah—but he worked. He did have a work. It was taken care of. He was a gardener—as Saint Benedict says—he was a gardener. And he worked—but there was no sweat of the brow—there was no labor involved in it at all—so that it was a kind of leisurely work—so to speak. They were divine.

The reason why I stress that word labor is that—again—in words themselves—in the etymology—in the very history of the word itself—there's frequently a profound meaning—and labor is connected with the Latin word lapsus—fall. We talk about lapse. And the labor pains—the childbirth thing—God says that these are the—these are two punishments: Death follows from sin and labor follows. And labor means what? Two things: By the sweat of Adam's brow and by the pain of travail. And now Mary had no pain—she had no labor in the birth of Christ. And I suppose Eve would have had no labor in the bearing of children. And Adam would have had no labor in taking care of the garden.

But we—so we see that there is a moral dimension—a mysterious dimension—a religious dimension to these ideas. Now Aristotle's not getting into all that. He's just simply—from a purely natural point of view—looking at these two things in our lives. Our lives are divided into things we do because they lead to something else—and then there are things that we do because they are—there's something—we say we do them for their own sake—there's another way of putting it: There are things that we do for the sake of something else—and there are things that we do for their own sake.

Aristotle on Leisure and Happiness

He says—for if although both business and leisure are necessary—yet leisure is more desirable and more fully an end than business. We could translate business as work here. We must inquire what is the proper occupation of leisure? For assuredly it should not be employed in play—since it would follow that play would be the end of our lives. But if this is impossible—and sports should rather be employed in our times of business—for a man who is at work needs rest—and rest is the object of play—while business is accompanied by toil and exertion. It follows that in introducing sports—we must watch the right opportunity for their employment—since we are applying them to serve as a kind of medicine. For the activity of play is a relaxation of the soul—and serves as recreation because of its pleasantness.

Now we can stop again—that's what we've been talking about. Play—in that sense—is not leisure—is it? I mean—we have here work and play as complementary—but now leisure is not in the order of either one. So that the athletic pursuit—or the gymnastic pursuit—doing your exercises—why do you do them? Well—they're a kind of medicine for health. You see people out running every morning and they're killing themselves out there. That's not leisure—even though they're not getting paid for it.

Sometimes we identify business as simply whatever we do for a living—but we do a lot of other things for the sake of doing a living—and among those things is recreation. But that's not what leisure is. Leisure—Aristotle goes on—leisure seems itself to contain pleasure and happiness and felicity in life. See—it's not a medicine. It's not something you do in order to be happy. It's happiness itself. It has more of the nature of an end—as he said—rather than a means to an end. Of course—happiness is the end of life. That's what we all desire—is happiness.

And this is not possessed by the busy—nor by the leisurely? For the busy man busies himself for the sake of some end—as not being in his possession—but happiness is an end already achieved—which all men think is accompanied by pleasure and not by pain. But all men do not go on to define this pleasure in the same way—but according to their various natures and to their own character. And the pleasure with which the best man thinks that happiness is conjoined is the best pleasure and the one arising from the noblest sources.

So that it is clear that some subjects must be learnt and acquired merely with a view to the pleasure in their pursuit—and that these studies—these branches of learning—are ends in themselves—while the forms of learning related to business are studied as necessary and as means to other things. Hence—our predecessors included music in education—not as a necessity—for there is nothing necessary about music—nor as useful in the way in which reading and writing are useful for business—and for household management—and for acquiring learning—and for many pursuits in civil life—while drawing also seems to be useful in making us better judges of the works of artists—for example. And he means by that architects and engineers and everything else.

Nor yet again—as we pursue gymnastics—for the sake of health and strength—for we do not see either of these things produced as a result of music. It remains—therefore—that it is useful as a pastime in leisure—which is evidently the purpose for which people truly introduce it. For they rank it as a form of pastime that they think proper for free—that is—liberal—noble men.

Leisure and the Poetic Experience: Homer’s Odyssey

And for this reason Homer wrote thus, and of course he quotes music. Now music is used here in the Wyeth sense to include poetry. But him alone tis meet to summon to the festal banquet that after these words over speaks of certain others who call the bond that he may gladden on and also in other verses Odysseus says that this is the best of all pastimes, when, as men are enjoying good cheer, the banqueters seated in due order throughout the hall may hear of its draw.

And that's this man's translation of Aristotle's quotation of some lines at the beginning of one of the books of the Odyssey. How does that passage go? Well, the whole passage is at the beginning of Book Nine. And it's Odysseus who's speaking, as Aristotle says. This is at the point where Odysseus is going to begin to tell his story. He's in the palace of King Sinai.

And the king implores Odysseus, now that he knows who he is, he's discovered that he's Odysseus and he's having a feast. And he implores Odysseus to tell his story. And so at that point, not quite halfway about, not about a third of the way through the Odyssey, Odysseus begins to tell the story of his adventures. But before he begins, he looks around him there in the banquet hall and he says these lines that Eris these lines that Aristotle quoted from. I'm reading a different translation. This is a prose translation by E.B. Rood. Odysseus says, Lord Elsinus, my most worshipful most worshipful prince, it is indeed a lovely thing to hear a barge such as yours with a voice like the gods. I myself feel that there is nothing more delightful than when the festive Then, when the festive mood reigns in all people's hearts, and the banqueters listen to a minstrel from their seats in the hall, while the tables before them are laden with bread and meat, and a steward carries round the wine he has drawn the wine is drawn from the bowl and fills their cups. This, to my way of thinking, is something very like perfection." And then he goes on to tell his own tale.

Okay. Now that's a preliminary. I think that's the kind of speech very often that people skip when they're reading. They've been reading long in the Odyssey. They say, well, let's get on to the story here. We don't need all this. That's nice, kind of. Well that's a nice kind of polite gesture that Odysseus is making there, and he's always, he's full of those polite gestures, which is absolutely true. But that's the most important thing. That's the one that Aristotle chooses. You know, what is the use of leisure? Aristotle himself hadn't had the leisure to read Homer. He never could have written this book called Politics. There is, in a paradoxical way, a kind of use to leisure. That is, you can quote Homer at the right moment, but that's right moment. But that's not the reason, of course, for reading it. It's a use to which it can be put out. It's a good use. It's a perfectly fine thing to do. But the whole point that Aristotle is making here is that Homer is absolutely right about something. And again, this is not philosophy. This is something before, this has to do with first principles. Before philosophy gets going, these are the dividends. If you don't have this to begin with, then you can't go on to any kind of scholastic study. See, here they are in this that they are in this feast. It's a feast. There has been dancing at this feast. The bard has appeared, the minstrel who comes in and begins to strum on a hardening. And he is now going, he has chanted a song. And the song is about Troy. This is what led to the revelation of the identity. to the revelation of the identity of Odysseus. They don't know who Odysseus is. His host doesn't know that he is Odysseus. And he, the bard, comes in and he's another purloined letter. They're sitting right in front of him, but they don't know it. And they don't know. They're singing a song about Odysseus. about Odysseus and they don't know that he's there. And they sing this, the bard sings the song and Odysseus breaks down and weeps at this song. He is so moved that he cries. He covers his face and then they say to him, they realize Then they say to him, they realize that they must have touched something very close to him, and so they ask him who he is, and he reveals his identity. But there they are in the midst of this banquet, and they're celebrating. They're eating and drinking. They are at leisure, we would say, and whenever you have leisure, real leisure, then one of the things that comes along is music. For poetry, the word music includes a great range of activities. In this case, of course, now Odysseus is going to tell his story, and that's part of the celebration. You'd say, well, that's his contribution to the feast, and it makes up the great central portion of this whole book, this telling of the tale of his own life.

Aristotle on Music’s Potency and Purpose

About music, Aristotle says, we have previously raised some questions in the course of our argument, but it is well to take them up again. Notice that. It is well to take them up again. Don't be ashamed of repeating and going back to the beginning. And carry them further now in order that this may give the key, so to speak, for the principles which one might advance in pronouncing about it. For it is not easy to say precisely what potency music possesses." Now that shocks us. We were talking about sleep. we were talking about sleep. Sleep doesn't tend to virtue of drink, deep drinking, drunkenness certainly doesn't. But there's something about music on the other hand, it has another quality that tends in some degree to virtue. Music being capable of producing a certain quality of character, just as gymnastics are capable of producing a certain quality of body. Music customing men to be able to rejoice rightly. That's a lot of That's the line I wanted to stop on. I've got that one on the line. What is the purpose of music? Well, it doesn't have any purpose at all. It's an end in itself. What is it that it accomplishes? Notice it. The word he uses here, the translator uses the word accustom. the word accustomed. He doesn't speak of teaching in a scholastic way, but teaching by habit, that is the word accustomed, means repeating it over and over again until you can do it yourself. It's a kind of pointing saying, well look at the sky, look at it again, well let's go back and know Well, let's go back and notice it again. What the teacher of this kind does is he points and he takes the student and points the student at the thing and says look at it, look at it, look at it, and gets him to do it over and over again. He accustoms him to it. sin to it. That's a marvelous word. To what? To be able to rejoice rightly. Well that's what a virtue comes in, isn't it? Rightly. Because we know since sin we since sin came into our lives, that we can rejoice for long, and it was what we do. And again, speaking about at the beginning of our hour here, we were speaking about obstacles to our course, one of them being method. being method. Another one being a wrong idea of authority, a kind of dogmatism. And then we spoke of being in a hurry, of speed, and here, now, And here, now, we can speak of a fourth. There are those who think that pleasure itself is sinful and that we shouldn't rejoice. Since this is a veil of tears, we simply want to be unhappy all the time. Not all, but to rejoice rightly. I just read, I think it was just yesterday, I read a passage I have never read before, although I think it's quite famous. before, although I think it's quite famous, and it was once attributed to Saint Cyprian. Probably you know it. I guess it's mistakenly attributed. It's called the... There go those methodical commentators again. They always disturb you, but they're spectacular. But it's a day spectacular, it's called, a very short little treatise in which he attacks the sinful pleasures and especially the recreations of the day, all sorts of lascivious and obscene spectacles, theatrical presentations and so forth. And he attacks it and warns Christians against participating in those in any way as being sinful and terrible things and then he has multiple and terrible things and then he has the most marvelous passage on exactly what we've been talking about he says but what we have the spectacles he says that we have are the sun and moon and stars and the trees sky and they have all those things that God has made and we can has made, and we can look at and admire those wonderful things. And that is our circus. That's certainly a right enjoyment right enjoyment of, or rightly to rejoice in those things. Who was the Roman cynic who said, was it Augustus? Who said, you know, give him bread and circus was all? Or somewhat, I can't remember. But it's a famous slogan. Well, all right, we have our bread and circuits and we have our Eucharist and we have our creation. And this is the Catholic life. Now, they cannot be taken for granted. Aristotle's talking here about education, that is there is a discipline of rejoicing because he wouldn't put it this way, he would say there's something in our nature which leads us to rejoice warmly. We would say well we know what that is, that's original sin. It's in our members and there's a rebellion. So we have to have a discipline which gets us discipline, which gets us back on the right track. Adam didn't have to study music. He didn't have to take a course in poetry. Adam didn't have to read Homer. He could look right at the stars. He could look right at the lion and the tiger and sing tiger and sing. Everything that he said was poetry. Everything that he uttered was music. Eve, every one of her utterances was a song. They were participating, in a way, in the blessing in a way in the blessed life, you see, and therefore they were rejoicing. All of this reminds me of a very famous phrase in St. Augustine. He defines the blessed life, or some people say the happy life, by saying that it consists of rejoicing It consists of rejoicing, he says, in the truth. He says, Vyata vita est gallium dei veritate. It's gallium, it's the rejoicing things. That, he says, that's the blessed light. That's the blessed life. That's the life of the blessed. That's what the angels and those who have been saved do in heaven. But Adam did that in his own sphere in the Garden of Eden. And we've lost that. And we've lost that because we do it wrong. We rejoice all over the place, but we do it wrongly. And the Puritan, again, starts with a certain truth. That is, he looks at his own life, and he looks at the world about him, and he sees only the first half of St. Cyprian's treatments. He sees only this horrid spectacle that St. Paul says I have made a spectacle to men, you know. He's on his way to martyrdom, that's what he's talking about. That is, those martyrdoms were services people came to watch. services people came to watch as a form of torture and entertainment. They threw the mortars to the lions and crucifixions and beheadings of all this. Well, and in our own time, we've seen the terrible perversion of stories version of storytelling and of music and of art. And of rejoicing itself, you see. And everybody looks at those things and they say, look at all the terrible things that are going on in what's called the entertainment industry. And we say, well, it's all terrible what we ought to be doing. We ought to shun all forms of... Make our lives a perpetual limp. Somebody in Shakespeare says that about the Puritan. He says that about the guy in Twelfth Night. Yeah. Al Volio. Al Volio. Bad Will. Bad Will. And someone says he makes up his life a perpetual win. Well, of course we need a win. Of course we have to, we have to do penance and we have to win. dependence and we have to be sad. Law is nothing more disgusting than people who are happy all the time either because we're not in heaven. And therefore every day can't be a festival. Every day is not a feast. Every day is not Sunday and we have to work and we have to sweat and we have to labor and we have to know pain and we have to face the truth of pain but we also beyond that and ultimately more important than that but we do have to learn how to rejoice to rejoice rightly. And that's the subject of elementary education. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do those four things? That is, if we could learn how to read and learn how to write, learn how to draw. I think in future hours we'll come back to some of these things. Don't underestimate that drawing. Just by parenthesis Aristotle comes back to that, I won't find the quotation, but he says that the purpose of drawing is that it trains the senses to see what's there. there. It sharpens your wits and your eye. If you go to draw something that you look at, you really look at it, and therefore he says it's useful as a preliminary to music as you enjoy music, because you enjoy it, because you can't enjoy it if you don't see it. Right, and you have to learn how to see. People think that, well, all you have to do is open your eyes and you will see, but that's not true. We have to learn everything. And that's been neglected, very seriously neglected in our time. We know that through experience that we have had with students that they do not know much to see or to hear or to listen. And it is only through the discipline of poetry or music that they must learn that. that they must learn how to do that.

Memory and Imagination in Poetry

But that the two activities are quite closely related and you're not thinking either when you remember or when you imagine. It's not the same thing as images. Images come to your mind. Images come to your mind. You remember, you say, well, last year I went to, say, Colorado say, Colorado Mountains, all right? Let's remember, and surely images do come in your mind, so there's a connection between the two. We have the students actually memorize poems. Of course, we don't have to memorize anything. don't have to memorize anything I remember John Ruskin one of the great reflective English writers men of letters said you must be very careful what you introduce into the memory because it's easier to get something in there Because it's easier to get something in there than it is to get it out. There's some truth in that, you know. That is, he said, teachers ought to be very, very serious about whatever it is they ask their students to memorize, because it will have an effect on their whole lives. on their whole lives that is a if you're running a restaurant to use the image of food again you want to be careful to know that you don't give anybody poison it's one thing again in a in a literature class where you analyze literature you know really there's been a lot of dispute about that you know should there be some sort of censorship of the material and however you feel about those arguments of censorship I think most people would agree that analysis really doesn't do very much harm in other words you could take the worst piece of literature in the world and as long as your attitude toward it is analytic you've got your You've got your rubber gloves on, don't you know. So you're coming at it in a safe way. You can take Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and go into a literature class and talk about the symbolism of the axe. Don't you see? And you'll never go out and hack some poor old lady over the head. But you take that into your memory. And I don't know what might happen. See, I mean, the kind of teaching we do has about it an aspect of a certain danger here. And we therefore have always been super safe about the material we use. We have taken things like We've taken things like Mary had a little lamb and when they memorized that we figured that's a good one. I mean we don't have, when you say memorize, we won't understand what we want at all. Absolutely not at all. And besides that we make a distinction between what would be called artificial memory and natural memory that is this is a common distinction everyone has always made this distinction natural memory is everyone has natural memory that is everyone simply remembers things all the words that we know nearly all of the words that we know in our vocabulary are in our memory all the faces that we have that is when you recognize people by their face or by the sound of their voice it's because you remember them it's in your memory but you never tried to remember their face probably or their name or anything of a sort it's just that you met them a few times and you saw them a few times and the next time you saw them you recognized them it got into your memory they're all sophists who sell gimmicks for doing that yeah yeah then there's the guy who says you know I'll give Yeah, then there's the guy who says, you know, I'll give you a, you know, a 10-day course and you'll... I don't remember every face he remembers. Remember every... it's not only artificial, but it's funny. You remember the face, but you remember the person. It's a trick. So we don't do that at all. That kind of memorization, we don't... No, we don't do any of that. In fact, students learn the poems by listening to them rather than by reading them. It's not only more effective, that is, you learn much better that way, but it's more appropriate for poetry. Poetry is meant to be heard. Nearly everybody admits that. Poetry is meant to be heard, it's meant to be recited, and it's like learning a song. Most people don't learn a song by reading the music. They hear the tune and it just gets into their memory, that's all, and they go around humming it after that and they learn the words in the same way. What we do is have a student who already knows the poem go into a small class and simply say repeat after me and he begins. Doesn't he have a younger class student teach the freshman rather than the junior who already has been through the program come back and teach the freshman? Because I can teach the freshman that. And he'll start, he'll say, my love, it's like a red, red rose that's lately sprung in June. Repeat after me. And the whole class will repeat. And they'll go through the whole poem, and in about 30 minutes they can learn one lyric of about that length of the poem that I just started reciting. There's no strain about it. Usually people, I always resented memorization in school very much, and I never was any good at it. I never learned anything that I had to sit down and memorize it. I used to memorize my own speeches in high school, you know, and I could never remember them. I'd always forget them, right in the middle, usually, and then the day after I gave them, And then the day after I gave them, I couldn't remember them at all. But natural memory doesn't work that way. Turns out you can't forget things that are in your memory naturally. They call it learning by heart. It's a very good phrase, learning by heart. What is the heart? What do you mean by that? Mind and heart. You learn something that you want to have in your heart. It's something you take into your heart. That's why it's so important to be careful about what you do. Take into your heart or put into the memories of children. The reason why it's dangerous is that the heart is really taken to be the seat of the will that is the philosophers who study the poets will say well you know what the poets really mean by that say they begin to try to explain what the poets mean and they never get all of it but they get some of it and the sum that they certainly have is that that is the difference when people say the mind and the heart By the mind and the heart. By the mind they mean pure knowledge, but by the heart they mean putting that knowledge into action, into will. And when we say that we learn something by heart, what we're really doing is taking into ourselves material upon which we will act. We will act. In other words, it's formative. Your character is being formed by the things you memorize. Not just your intellect. It's your character. And one has to stop and say, well, now we've got to be very broad about this kind of thing. There is a body of traditional poetry that is always traditional poetry that has always been memorized, you know, year after year and generation after generation, and it has turned out to be the stuff out of which our tradition has come. It's been tried, in other words, and good people have come out of that. We know its results, and so we'll know its results and so we'll stick to that my love is like a red red rose it's newly sprung in june let's just try that see now some people say but that's so old-fashioned we say well don't worry about it being old-fashioned see it turns out that if you want to if you want to reflect on any of the subjects we're talking about that you'll need them that you need to have something in your memory to reflect on. The philosophy can't operate, the intellect can't operate unless it has something in the memory to work on. At the beginning of Plato's dialogue, the Republic, dialogue the Republic that famous dialogue there's a little kind of introduction to that where Socrates and the young men who are going to were asking him about the nature of justice talked to an old man named Cephalus most people just kind of ignore this they kind of breeze Most people just kind of ignore this, they kind of breeze through this because they say, well let's get on with the real argument, let's get down to the thing and they don't know this but they say to Cephalus, they say, Cephalus, maybe you can tell these young men what justice is and he says, well I don't really know, he's a very old man know he's a very old man and he says I don't I don't really want to engage in this conversation I've got more important things to do he's going to go out and offer a an offering to the gods as a matter of fact but he says from what I've heard the poet said and then he quotes a poem and the poem says And the poem says something like, you ought to pay your debts if you're going to be just. That's what the poem amounts to. And then he leaves. It turns out that he was right. That's the answer. That is what justice is but they go on, nobody pays any attention to what he said and they go on with their long, long, long dialogue but what you'd say is that Cephalus has reflected on that subject and in his memory you see is that poem that he can call up and he knows that the And he knows that the answer is there, not in philosophical terms, of course, in poetic terms, but it's there. And as an old man, he can rely on that. We'd like to know if we wouldn't live in an era where any new program, so long as it's unique and I put that in quotation marks or anything to be tried, would you have received sponsorship from the institution? In other words, do you think the program is something that I think the program is something that exists because of the realization that there's a need for it. No, no, our program does not exist for that reason at all. To the extent that it is recognized as being that kind of a program, the university would like to get rid of it. As you probably know, we've experienced a great deal of difficulty with the university. We came into existence more or less by accident. About eight, nine years ago, the University of Kansas received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to start colleges within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, experimental arts and sciences, experimental colleges. And I agreed to be the director of one of these colleges and I was chosen entirely by accident. That is, the dean was away and a sub-dean chose me. The dean would have never chosen me because he knows I'm a trouble kid. Not the present dean, another dean. not the present dean, another dean. But I said, yeah, I'll agree to be an administrator, that is to run this college, this sub-college, as long as I can continue to teach full-time, that was the first condition, and secondly, as long as I can start some kind of new program in it. And he said, okay, that's fine, that's what we really want. That's what we really want. Well, we devised this program, Mr. Senior and I and another colleague, pretty much along these lines. And we went around to everybody in the university and we told them what we were going to do. And they said, oh, that's all right. Sure, sure, that's okay. Everybody's experimenting now. And as an experiment, we called it an experiment in tradition. An experiment in tradition. That was the name of the program. They heard the experiment thought, but they didn't listen to the tradition. They didn't take that very seriously. And one thing we found out was that, of course, they all said we failed. They said, sure, you can do this because we know you'll fail. Nobody is interested in reading. Nobody is interested in reading Homer and talking about poetry and all that stuff. You remember, this was when they were burning down the student union and the students were only interested in politics. They said, oh well, this is ridiculous, but since it can't do any harm, that is since it won't succeed, it's perfectly all right. Some of our friends even suggested that we don't. Some of our friends even suggested that we don't call it something like an integrated humanities program, but rather call it something like a disintegrated structure of revolution or something like that, because that would pack them in. Or if you're going to teach Homer, you say the sex life you say the sex life of Helen of Troy that'll pack them in you know but we didn't do any of that we just we just talked to our students the way we've been talking to you and it turned out it was just a tremendous response the response was 300 students the second year just like that you know we started with a small experimental group of 20 and and and we never advertised or anything really it just it just went like wildfire there were large numbers of students who really were thirsty i think is the word for this you know hungry or to use our image of the meal they really wanted to sit down at a banquet like this and out of banquet like this and think about these things and read these books. And it surprised us, it surprised everyone. Well, it surprised everyone and you have to realize, again in the practical order, that when you succeed in an experiment, it has certain implications for those people who are not engaged in the experiment. That is, it suggests that maybe they ought to change in some way. And it also, of course, has another practical effect, that is that if you begin to get large numbers of students in a brand new experimental program, those students do not take courses in other departments that they might normally take. If the enrollment in your Latin program, and this was a new Latin program, which was connected with the humanities program, it's an oral Latin program, very different from the standard program, from the analytical scientific approach to Latin. If you quadruple the enrollment in Latin overnight in one year, then the French department begins to say, you know, we're short one section of French, where do you suppose that section went? And they say, well, the only language that had an increase in enrollment this year was Latin. And they say, huh, that's where it went. All right, that's where it went. And the German department says the same thing. And the English department, well, they used to give, you see, credit for English for this program. There were two full professors of English teaching in the program and we had designed it in such a way as to cover the material. Well, suddenly, you know, there were 15 fewer sections of freshman English. And you have to understand that in any institution that's found to have serious kind of political ramifications. Well, it has budgetary ramifications. Bad budgetary ramifications, which are much more serious than political ramifications. That is, if the number of sections you have is down, you get less money, and you can't hire graduate students to teach those sections. And so, as soon as we succeeded, people weren't nearly so friendly about the program. That really certainly did cause a lot of trouble, just the sheer success, which I'd say surprised everyone, including ourselves. We never intended this thing, really, when we started to be quite, you know, so boisterous and exciting as it was really. We kind of got carried away, it kind of carried us away. But it was certainly a marvelous thing to see. So many students, we've noticed this year perhaps for the first time, perhaps last year, it started last year, a change a change that is coming over the students, however. That is, the generation of the radicals, in a way, you see, found us an alternative. That generation was, for better or worse, and it was mostly for worse, interested in ideas. That is, they were seeking some kind of truth. They went to the damnedest places to find it, you know, just outrageous experiments. just outrageous experiments and so as you know but there was some sort of an urge to find out what life was all about in some way you know and I think a generation like that is profoundly teachable I really do, they are seeking they are seeking. What we're running into now, and some of you here may be in this generation, and you can think about this now, because it does sound like a pretty strong rebuke to you. We find with the freshmen now, coming up for the first time this year, coming up for the first time this year that they seem to have turned off that is their idea is I don't want to know all I want to do is find a safe job somewhere that is we find this generation of students interested not at all They're interested not at all in a university education. We wonder why they come to the university. They do better in a trade school. That is what they're seeking is just simply some kind of marketable skill and they want to get in and out as fast as possible and they don't want to learn anything. Well, and I must say, I must say... And they're very hard to teach, but we found exceptions. to teach that we found exceptions well and to you have to add to that as long as we're saying something that some some students or young people might take as a rebuke we might as well go ahead and go the whole hog and say something that might offend some parents and everyone as long as we're doing this might offend some parents who are here and that is we find that these students have the We find that these students have these attitudes toward education very often because their parents are driving them into a marketable sphere. That is, they're saying, well, I don't care what you do, but you go into the school of business. You can do anything you want to, but you go into the school of business because I you want to but you go into the school of business because you'll get something you'll come out of there with something that you can put on the market a tremendous change about this people are running scared there is a a psychology and about about not success even anymore that is you don't find the guy who wants to go out make a million we're talking about people who want to spend We're talking about people who want to play it safe. It isn't the drive, it isn't the old economic drive. It's kind of a collectivist mentality really. It's going to be very difficult to get through life. And what you've got to do is find some place where no harm will come to you. You've got to find some job where there'll be lots of security and so on. And as I say, if a person really holds that view, well, let's think about it just a minute. I know it's getting late in the afternoon, but just reflect on it. I know it's getting late in the afternoon, but just reflect on it. Why would anybody ever feel that way, don't you think? And I'm putting it in the form of question, not an answer, because we've been talking about it, we're not sure. But don't you think that this comes out of a sort of skepticism, that is a despair about ideas. about ideas say that is ah there isn't any truth there isn't any beauty you know there isn't any good I mean look at that last generation look at them they saw it all over the world we all would end up on drugs and they ended up in hospitals they ended up miserable they ended up you know wrecks moral physical mental Wrecks, moral, physical, mental wrecks. What good did their search do them, you know? You can see the younger brothers and sisters coming along and looking at them, you know, and saying, I'm not going to end up like that, see. It's sort of cynicism, really, I think. And then they turn around and say, well, what am I going to do? And the answer is, well, I'm going to have a nice fast car. A nice fast car. Boy, I'm going to be able to drive down the road at 100 miles an hour any time I want. At least I can have that, see. The hell with truth and beauty and good and all those things and seeking, you know, the way out of all this. I'm just going to get what I know I can get. So they lower their sights and they get a kind of a glint in their eye and it's a sharp sort of greedy little glint you know and they say that's what I'm going to go after and one would say oh gee you know your older brother was a slob I knew him well I taught him he was a wreck he was a mess and he failed but by golly you know his sights were higher than yours I mean I I mean, I would say you're wrong about that. Don't, whatever you do, don't become a cynic, you know. Americans are getting this way. We think we've lost. I think it may be a consequence of the Vietnamese war, partly. That is a great feeling that America is not promises anymore. Remember Carl Sandburg's poem, is it Sandburg or who wrote that? America is promises, I forget, maybe it was McLeish or someone else, but there was a famous poem written about 50 years ago about America. And you got the Kennedy and the Camelot stuff. Now that all turned out to be fake, you see, a lot of that was fake. A lot of that was fake. But are you really willing to say that life is hopeless? Are you really willing to say that America is lost? And that therefore all we can do, you see, is retreat into some nice, safe little way of life for ourselves? I would use Mr. Quinn's example when we were talking about the purposes. That is, if you work for an immediate purpose only, and you leave out the other two, it turns out you ruin the immediate one. I would say the guy that plays it safe is going to end in jail. That's the safest place there is, you know. You lower your sights, you know. You're an insane aside. You lower your sights like that, somebody else with imagination and ideas and will and love, someone else, you know, is going to run your life for you. So don't be whatever you do to hope you're sinning, but we are getting late. I ask this question because sometimes I'm accused of it. I'm looking at some of the points in Greece. And we were just talking about people who might say the program is not as dangerous because they become cynic. They become cynic. How many people are accused of elitism? Of elitism? They can't be intimidated because it's the product of the rich. Oh yeah, sure, sure, sure. Sure, sure. Well, again, that's a searching question because I suppose we have to ask what lies behind the idea. I think a question like that presupposes a misunderstanding of what you do when you have regard for things. We have been accused of that, by the way. Yeah, we were. We were accused of that. That's one of those questions very, very often raised. It turns out that our students are very close to one another, for example, and they tend to have a certain mark. And they tend to have a certain mark on them. They sometimes seem to be. From the outside, I don't blame people sometimes. They look and they see these students of ours and our students are marked by a certain kind of cliquishness, that is they do like each other and they do withdraw in many ways from activity. And a lot of people say, well these guys are swabs, you know, they think they're better than everybody else. And sometimes they do think they're better than everybody else for that matter. I mean, you know, they're not perfect, see. And sometimes it goes to their heads. I mean, there's a stage when they think, well, I really am, this is really one. I've read Plato. I've read Plato, you know, I mean, go around lording over, that's sophomores do, that's known as sophomoric people. The sophomores do, that's known as sophomoric behavior, and sometimes the freshmen are scared by it, but the sophomores do tend to be. But you're talking about something far beyond that I think. The charge of elitism would come from the idea that the contemplative is selfish. Selfish. That is that he's getting something out of it for himself, and he's got it. And that would be a very, very wicked thing. There are people like that. There are people who misunderstand the contemplative, and they become aesthetes. And they become aesthetes, they become aesthetes. That is, they have great regard for nature, but it's a selfish regard, you know, it's my experience to see those things. And I think that is the kind of a twisting or a kind of perversion of the genuinely contemplative life because the contemplative must see that when he sits before let's say the creatures of the world see like water or like or like birds he must see that he himself is a creature too see I mean if he really finds out who he is well mr. Quinn was quite He finds out who he is, when Mr. Quinn was quoting the great Greek oracle, who are you? And there's somebody up there who says, who are you? You're nothing. He says to you, you're nothing. That is really the kind of humility will grow out of this. You begin to see that you are part of something so much greater than yourself. than yourself, that what grows out of it, far from a selfish elitism, is a sort of poverty. And as a matter of fact, the other charge, we've had people accuse us of elitism one minute, and then when they find out, when they get beyond the sophomores When they get beyond the sophomores to the juniors, as it were, and they find out what the results of this, then they say, well, you people will end up dead broke if you do that. You see, you'll end up poor. And our answer to that is, well, now again, there's a mean between riches and destitution. Nobody's arguing for starvation, but poverty? Well, some students have. Some students actually have and have actually become members of contemplative orders. become members of contemplative orders and things like that although very few that's that's not perhaps I think a lot of our students for example have become lawyers but I don't think any of our students that we would call our students that is students who really have seen these things and and and sent to them and that they've become lawyers but they haven't gone down to Houston to work for some gigantic corporation. They're working and they've decided they're going to become small town lawyers and they're not going to get rich. There's a relation between the word humility and the word human. And, of course, whenever anybody talks about humility, which is the opposite of elitism, see, whenever anybody talks about... Whenever anybody talks about, I remember a story they told of T.S. Eliot the poet, he was at a cocktail party one night and someone was saying oh Mr. Eliot you're so wonderful and I'm so nothing and after he walked away Mr. Eliot said who does he think he is to be so humble, he said you know, it becomes a kind of perverse arrogance you know and so you always get a little And so you always get a little nervous when you talk about this. I don't like to say that we really do believe in being humble. Look at us, we're not humble at all. Here we are, you know, being teachers and so on, you know, telling everybody else all kinds of things. But still, I think we would say whether we are or not, we certainly would hold that insofar as you seriously But insofar as you seriously study the poets, you cannot be elite. There's no way you can be elite. It destroys the basis of elitism, which is selfishness. And arrogance. Arrogance. I'm in it for what I can get. I mean it for what I can get out of it. The contemplative says that's precisely what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to come here and get what I can take. I'm rather going to sit here and listen, which in a way is to give myself to see whatever it is that I study, so that it turns out to destroy the other kind of elitism That's a misunderstanding. The other kind of elitism is that they accuse, as they say, well you guys think you've got hold of the truth, you know, the truth, they always say it that way, that you've got hold of the truth and that it's your truth, you know, you have it. And again, it's to misunderstand. It's a basic misunderstanding, a lie to the other one, that is, it isn't our truth. the other one, that is, it isn't our truth, or your truth, or anybody else's truth, and whoever said that we had it, or that we really have hold of it, we don't make any such claims. The contrary, the farther you go, the more you get to the position of Socrates, that is, that you really don't know very much at all. It has a hold on you. It gets you rather than you getting it. And it's the hold of its attractive power. It's the hold of love, which is kind of ignorance. When you love somebody, you don't know anything about them. You've lost all knowledge. Nobody would ever get married except for that. It's a clever trick that Cupid put over on me. Better let these people go, yeah. So you want to continue the conversation, we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while. you want to continue the conversation we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while you

Program's Success and Institutional Challenges

We kind of got carried away, it kind of carried us away. But it was certainly a marvelous thing to see. So many students, we've noticed this year perhaps for the first time, perhaps last year, it started last year, a change a change that is coming over the students, however. That is, the generation of the radicals, in a way, you see, found us an alternative. That generation was, for better or worse, and it was mostly for worse, interested in ideas. That is, they were seeking some kind of truth. They went to the damnedest places to find it, you know, just outrageous experiments. just outrageous experiments and so as you know but there was some sort of an urge to find out what life was all about in some way you know and I think a generation like that is profoundly teachable I really do, they are seeking they are seeking. What we're running into now, and some of you here may be in this generation, and you can think about this now, because it does sound like a pretty strong rebuke to you. We find with the freshmen now, coming up for the first time this year, coming up for the first time this year that they seem to have turned off that is their idea is I don't want to know all I want to do is find a safe job somewhere that is we find this generation of students interested not at all They're interested not at all in a university education. We wonder why they come to the university. They do better in a trade school. That is what they're seeking is just simply some kind of marketable skill and they want to get in and out as fast as possible and they don't want to learn anything. Well, and I must say, I must say... And they're very hard to teach, but we found exceptions. to teach that we found exceptions well and to you have to add to that as long as we're saying something that some some students or young people might take as a rebuke we might as well go ahead and go the whole hog and say something that might offend some parents and everyone as long as we're doing this might offend some parents who are here and that is we find that these students have the We find that these students have these attitudes toward education very often because their parents are driving them into a marketable sphere. That is, they're saying, well, I don't care what you do, but you go into the school of business. You can do anything you want to, but you go into the school of business because I you want to but you go into the school of business because you'll get something you'll come out of there with something that you can put on the market a tremendous change about this people are running scared there is a a psychology and about about not success even anymore that is you don't find the guy who wants to go out make a million we're talking about people who want to spend We're talking about people who want to play it safe. It isn't the drive, it isn't the old economic drive. It's kind of a collectivist mentality really. It's going to be very difficult to get through life. And what you've got to do is find some place where no harm will come to you. You've got to find some job where there'll be lots of security and so on. And as I say, if a person really holds that view, well, let's think about it just a minute. I know it's getting late in the afternoon, but just reflect on it. I know it's getting late in the afternoon, but just reflect on it. Why would anybody ever feel that way, don't you think? And I'm putting it in the form of question, not an answer, because we've been talking about it, we're not sure. But don't you think that this comes out of a sort of skepticism, that is a despair about ideas. about ideas say that is ah there isn't any truth there isn't any beauty you know there isn't any good I mean look at that last generation look at them they saw it all over the world we all would end up on drugs and they ended up in hospitals they ended up miserable they ended up you know wrecks moral physical mental Wrecks, moral, physical, mental wrecks. What good did their search do them, you know? You can see the younger brothers and sisters coming along and looking at them, you know, and saying, I'm not going to end up like that, see. It's sort of cynicism, really, I think. And then they turn around and say, well, what am I going to do? And the answer is, well, I'm going to have a nice fast car. A nice fast car. Boy, I'm going to be able to drive down the road at 100 miles an hour any time I want. At least I can have that, see. The hell with truth and beauty and good and all those things and seeking, you know, the way out of all this. I'm just going to get what I know I can get. So they lower their sights and they get a kind of a glint in their eye and it's a sharp sort of greedy little glint you know and they say that's what I'm going to go after and one would say oh gee you know your older brother was a slob I knew him well I taught him he was a wreck he was a mess and he failed but by golly you know his sights were higher than yours I mean I I mean, I would say you're wrong about that. Don't, whatever you do, don't become a cynic, you know. Americans are getting this way. We think we've lost. I think it may be a consequence of the Vietnamese war, partly. That is a great feeling that America is not promises anymore. Remember Carl Sandburg's poem, is it Sandburg or who wrote that? America is promises, I forget, maybe it was McLeish or someone else, but there was a famous poem written about 50 years ago about America. And you got the Kennedy and the Camelot stuff. Now that all turned out to be fake, you see, a lot of that was fake. A lot of that was fake. But are you really willing to say that life is hopeless? Are you really willing to say that America is lost? And that therefore all we can do, you see, is retreat into some nice, safe little way of life for ourselves? I would use Mr. Quinn's example when we were talking about the purposes. That is, if you work for an immediate purpose only, and you leave out the other two, it turns out you ruin the immediate one. I would say the guy that plays it safe is going to end in jail. That's the safest place there is, you know. You lower your sights, you know. You're an insane aside. You lower your sights like that, somebody else with imagination and ideas and will and love, someone else, you know, is going to run your life for you. So don't be whatever you do to hope you're sinning, but we are getting late. I ask this question because sometimes I'm accused of it. I'm looking at some of the points in Greece. And we were just talking about people who might say the program is not as dangerous because they become cynic. They become cynic. How many people are accused of elitism? Of elitism? They can't be intimidated because it's the product of the rich. Oh yeah, sure, sure, sure. Sure, sure. Well, again, that's a searching question because I suppose we have to ask what lies behind the idea. I think a question like that presupposes a misunderstanding of what you do when you have regard for things. We have been accused of that, by the way. Yeah, we were. We were accused of that. That's one of those questions very, very often raised. It turns out that our students are very close to one another, for example, and they tend to have a certain mark. And they tend to have a certain mark on them. They sometimes seem to be. From the outside, I don't blame people sometimes. They look and they see these students of ours and our students are marked by a certain kind of cliquishness, that is they do like each other and they do withdraw in many ways from activity. And a lot of people say, well these guys are swabs, you know, they think they're better than everybody else. And sometimes they do think they're better than everybody else for that matter. I mean, you know, they're not perfect, see. And sometimes it goes to their heads. I mean, there's a stage when they think, well, I really am, this is really one. I've read Plato. I've read Plato, you know, I mean, go around lording over, that's sophomores do, that's known as sophomoric people. The sophomores do, that's known as sophomoric behavior, and sometimes the freshmen are scared by it, but the sophomores do tend to be. But you're talking about something far beyond that I think. The charge of elitism would come from the idea that the contemplative is selfish. Selfish. That is that he's getting something out of it for himself, and he's got it. And that would be a very, very wicked thing. There are people like that. There are people who misunderstand the contemplative, and they become aesthetes. And they become aesthetes, they become aesthetes. That is, they have great regard for nature, but it's a selfish regard, you know, it's my experience to see those things. And I think that is the kind of a twisting or a kind of perversion of the genuinely contemplative life because the contemplative must see that when he sits before let's say the creatures of the world see like water or like or like birds he must see that he himself is a creature too see I mean if he really finds out who he is well mr. Quinn was quite He finds out who he is, when Mr. Quinn was quoting the great Greek oracle, who are you? And there's somebody up there who says, who are you? You're nothing. He says to you, you're nothing. That is really the kind of humility will grow out of this. You begin to see that you are part of something so much greater than yourself. than yourself, that what grows out of it, far from a selfish elitism, is a sort of poverty. And as a matter of fact, the other charge, we've had people accuse us of elitism one minute, and then when they find out, when they get beyond the sophomores When they get beyond the sophomores to the juniors, as it were, and they find out what the results of this, then they say, well, you people will end up dead broke if you do that. You see, you'll end up poor. And our answer to that is, well, now again, there's a mean between riches and destitution. Nobody's arguing for starvation, but poverty? Well, some students have. Some students actually have and have actually become members of contemplative orders. become members of contemplative orders and things like that although very few that's that's not perhaps I think a lot of our students for example have become lawyers but I don't think any of our students that we would call our students that is students who really have seen these things and and and sent to them and that they've become lawyers but they haven't gone down to Houston to work for some gigantic corporation. They're working and they've decided they're going to become small town lawyers and they're not going to get rich. There's a relation between the word humility and the word human. And, of course, whenever anybody talks about humility, which is the opposite of elitism, see, whenever anybody talks about... Whenever anybody talks about, I remember a story they told of T.S. Eliot the poet, he was at a cocktail party one night and someone was saying oh Mr. Eliot you're so wonderful and I'm so nothing and after he walked away Mr. Eliot said who does he think he is to be so humble, he said you know, it becomes a kind of perverse arrogance you know and so you always get a little And so you always get a little nervous when you talk about this. I don't like to say that we really do believe in being humble. Look at us, we're not humble at all. Here we are, you know, being teachers and so on, you know, telling everybody else all kinds of things. But still, I think we would say whether we are or not, we certainly would hold that insofar as you seriously But insofar as you seriously study the poets, you cannot be elite. There's no way you can be elite. It destroys the basis of elitism, which is selfishness. And arrogance. Arrogance. I'm in it for what I can get. I mean it for what I can get out of it. The contemplative says that's precisely what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to come here and get what I can take. I'm rather going to sit here and listen, which in a way is to give myself to see whatever it is that I study, so that it turns out to destroy the other kind of elitism That's a misunderstanding. The other kind of elitism is that they accuse, as they say, well you guys think you've got hold of the truth, you know, the truth, they always say it that way, that you've got hold of the truth and that it's your truth, you know, you have it. And again, it's to misunderstand. It's a basic misunderstanding, a lie to the other one, that is, it isn't our truth. the other one, that is, it isn't our truth, or your truth, or anybody else's truth, and whoever said that we had it, or that we really have hold of it, we don't make any such claims. The contrary, the farther you go, the more you get to the position of Socrates, that is, that you really don't know very much at all. It has a hold on you. It gets you rather than you getting it. And it's the hold of its attractive power. It's the hold of love, which is kind of ignorance. When you love somebody, you don't know anything about them. You've lost all knowledge. Nobody would ever get married except for that. It's a clever trick that Cupid put over on me. Better let these people go, yeah. So you want to continue the conversation, we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while. you want to continue the conversation we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while you

The Program's Success and Institutional Challenges

We kind of got carried away, it kind of carried us away. But it was certainly a marvelous thing to see. So many students, we've noticed this year perhaps for the first time, perhaps last year, it started last year, a change a change that is coming over the students, however. That is, the generation of the radicals, in a way, you see, found us an alternative. That generation was, for better or worse, and it was mostly for worse, interested in ideas. That is, they were seeking some kind of truth. They went to the damnedest places to find it, you know, just outrageous experiments. just outrageous experiments and so as you know but there was some sort of an urge to find out what life was all about in some way you know and I think a generation like that is profoundly teachable I really do, they are seeking they are seeking. What we're running into now, and some of you here may be in this generation, and you can think about this now, because it does sound like a pretty strong rebuke to you. We find with the freshmen now, coming up for the first time this year, coming up for the first time this year that they seem to have turned off that is their idea is I don't want to know all I want to do is find a safe job somewhere that is we find this generation of students interested not at all They're interested not at all in a university education. We wonder why they come to the university. They do better in a trade school. That is what they're seeking is just simply some kind of marketable skill and they want to get in and out as fast as possible and they don't want to learn anything. Well, and I must say, I must say... And they're very hard to teach, but we found exceptions. to teach that we found exceptions well and to you have to add to that as long as we're saying something that some some students or young people might take as a rebuke we might as well go ahead and go the whole hog and say something that might offend some parents and everyone as long as we're doing this might offend some parents who are here and that is we find that these students have the We find that these students have these attitudes toward education very often because their parents are driving them into a marketable sphere. That is, they're saying, well, I don't care what you do, but you go into the school of business. You can do anything you want to, but you go into the school of business because I you want to but you go into the school of business because you'll get something you'll come out of there with something that you can put on the market a tremendous change about this people are running scared there is a a psychology and about about not success even anymore that is you don't find the guy who wants to go out make a million we're talking about people who want to spend We're talking about people who want to play it safe. It isn't the drive, it isn't the old economic drive. It's kind of a collectivist mentality really. It's going to be very difficult to get through life. And what you've got to do is find some place where no harm will come to you. You've got to find some job where there'll be lots of security and so on. And as I say, if a person really holds that view, well, let's think about it just a minute. I know it's getting late in the afternoon, but just reflect on it. I know it's getting late in the afternoon, but just reflect on it. Why would anybody ever feel that way, don't you think? And I'm putting it in the form of question, not an answer, because we've been talking about it, we're not sure. But don't you think that this comes out of a sort of skepticism, that is a despair about ideas. about ideas say that is ah there isn't any truth there isn't any beauty you know there isn't any good I mean look at that last generation look at them they saw it all over the world we all would end up on drugs and they ended up in hospitals they ended up miserable they ended up you know wrecks moral physical mental Wrecks, moral, physical, mental wrecks. What good did their search do them, you know? You can see the younger brothers and sisters coming along and looking at them, you know, and saying, I'm not going to end up like that, see. It's sort of cynicism, really, I think. And then they turn around and say, well, what am I going to do? And the answer is, well, I'm going to have a nice fast car. A nice fast car. Boy, I'm going to be able to drive down the road at 100 miles an hour any time I want. At least I can have that, see. The hell with truth and beauty and good and all those things and seeking, you know, the way out of all this. I'm just going to get what I know I can get. So they lower their sights and they get a kind of a glint in their eye and it's a sharp sort of greedy little glint you know and they say that's what I'm going to go after and one would say oh gee you know your older brother was a slob I knew him well I taught him he was a wreck he was a mess and he failed but by golly you know his sights were higher than yours I mean I I mean, I would say you're wrong about that. Don't, whatever you do, don't become a cynic, you know. Americans are getting this way. We think we've lost. I think it may be a consequence of the Vietnamese war, partly. That is a great feeling that America is not promises anymore. Remember Carl Sandburg's poem, is it Sandburg or who wrote that? America is promises, I forget, maybe it was McLeish or someone else, but there was a famous poem written about 50 years ago about America. And you got the Kennedy and the Camelot stuff. Now that all turned out to be fake, you see, a lot of that was fake. A lot of that was fake. But are you really willing to say that life is hopeless? Are you really willing to say that America is lost? And that therefore all we can do, you see, is retreat into some nice, safe little way of life for ourselves? I would use Mr. Quinn's example when we were talking about the purposes. That is, if you work for an immediate purpose only, and you leave out the other two, it turns out you ruin the immediate one. I would say the guy that plays it safe is going to end in jail. That's the safest place there is, you know. You lower your sights, you know. You're an insane aside. You lower your sights like that, somebody else with imagination and ideas and will and love, someone else, you know, is going to run your life for you. So don't be whatever you do to hope you're sinning, but we are getting late. I ask this question because sometimes I'm accused of it. I'm looking at some of the points in Greece. And we were just talking about people who might say the program is not as dangerous because they become cynic. They become cynic. How many people are accused of elitism? Of elitism? They can't be intimidated because it's the product of the rich. Oh yeah, sure, sure, sure. Sure, sure. Well, again, that's a searching question because I suppose we have to ask what lies behind the idea. I think a question like that presupposes a misunderstanding of what you do when you have regard for things. We have been accused of that, by the way. Yeah, we were. We were accused of that. That's one of those questions very, very often raised. It turns out that our students are very close to one another, for example, and they tend to have a certain mark. And they tend to have a certain mark on them. They sometimes seem to be. From the outside, I don't blame people sometimes. They look and they see these students of ours and our students are marked by a certain kind of cliquishness, that is they do like each other and they do withdraw in many ways from activity. And a lot of people say, well these guys are swabs, you know, they think they're better than everybody else. And sometimes they do think they're better than everybody else for that matter. I mean, you know, they're not perfect, see. And sometimes it goes to their heads. I mean, there's a stage when they think, well, I really am, this is really one. I've read Plato. I've read Plato, you know, I mean, go around lording over, that's sophomores do, that's known as sophomoric people. The sophomores do, that's known as sophomoric behavior, and sometimes the freshmen are scared by it, but the sophomores do tend to be. But you're talking about something far beyond that I think. The charge of elitism would come from the idea that the contemplative is selfish. Selfish. That is that he's getting something out of it for himself, and he's got it. And that would be a very, very wicked thing. There are people like that. There are people who misunderstand the contemplative, and they become aesthetes. And they become aesthetes, they become aesthetes. That is, they have great regard for nature, but it's a selfish regard, you know, it's my experience to see those things. And I think that is the kind of a twisting or a kind of perversion of the genuinely contemplative life because the contemplative must see that when he sits before let's say the creatures of the world see like water or like or like birds he must see that he himself is a creature too see I mean if he really finds out who he is well mr. Quinn was quite He finds out who he is, when Mr. Quinn was quoting the great Greek oracle, who are you? And there's somebody up there who says, who are you? You're nothing. He says to you, you're nothing. That is really the kind of humility will grow out of this. You begin to see that you are part of something so much greater than yourself. than yourself, that what grows out of it, far from a selfish elitism, is a sort of poverty. And as a matter of fact, the other charge, we've had people accuse us of elitism one minute, and then when they find out, when they get beyond the sophomores When they get beyond the sophomores to the juniors, as it were, and they find out what the results of this, then they say, well, you people will end up dead broke if you do that. You see, you'll end up poor. And our answer to that is, well, now again, there's a mean between riches and destitution. Nobody's arguing for starvation, but poverty? Well, some students have. Some students actually have and have actually become members of contemplative orders. become members of contemplative orders and things like that although very few that's that's not perhaps I think a lot of our students for example have become lawyers but I don't think any of our students that we would call our students that is students who really have seen these things and and and sent to them and that they've become lawyers but they haven't gone down to Houston to work for some gigantic corporation. They're working and they've decided they're going to become small town lawyers and they're not going to get rich. There's a relation between the word humility and the word human. And, of course, whenever anybody talks about humility, which is the opposite of elitism, see, whenever anybody talks about... Whenever anybody talks about, I remember a story they told of T.S. Eliot the poet, he was at a cocktail party one night and someone was saying oh Mr. Eliot you're so wonderful and I'm so nothing and after he walked away Mr. Eliot said who does he think he is to be so humble, he said you know, it becomes a kind of perverse arrogance you know and so you always get a little And so you always get a little nervous when you talk about this. I don't like to say that we really do believe in being humble. Look at us, we're not humble at all. Here we are, you know, being teachers and so on, you know, telling everybody else all kinds of things. But still, I think we would say whether we are or not, we certainly would hold that insofar as you seriously But insofar as you seriously study the poets, you cannot be elite. There's no way you can be elite. It destroys the basis of elitism, which is selfishness. And arrogance. Arrogance. I'm in it for what I can get. I mean it for what I can get out of it. The contemplative says that's precisely what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to come here and get what I can take. I'm rather going to sit here and listen, which in a way is to give myself to see whatever it is that I study, so that it turns out to destroy the other kind of elitism That's a misunderstanding. The other kind of elitism is that they accuse, as they say, well you guys think you've got hold of the truth, you know, the truth, they always say it that way, that you've got hold of the truth and that it's your truth, you know, you have it. And again, it's to misunderstand. It's a basic misunderstanding, a lie to the other one, that is, it isn't our truth. the other one, that is, it isn't our truth, or your truth, or anybody else's truth, and whoever said that we had it, or that we really have hold of it, we don't make any such claims. The contrary, the farther you go, the more you get to the position of Socrates, that is, that you really don't know very much at all. It has a hold on you. It gets you rather than you getting it. And it's the hold of its attractive power. It's the hold of love, which is kind of ignorance. When you love somebody, you don't know anything about them. You've lost all knowledge. Nobody would ever get married except for that. It's a clever trick that Cupid put over on me. Better let these people go, yeah. So you want to continue the conversation, we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while. you want to continue the conversation we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while you

Generational Shifts and Critique of Cynicism

We kind of got carried away, it kind of carried us away. But it was certainly a marvelous thing to see. So many students, we've noticed this year perhaps for the first time, perhaps last year, it started last year, a change a change that is coming over the students, however. That is, the generation of the radicals, in a way, you see, found us an alternative. That generation was, for better or worse, and it was mostly for worse, interested in ideas. That is, they were seeking some kind of truth. They went to the damnedest places to find it, you know, just outrageous experiments. just outrageous experiments and so as you know but there was some sort of an urge to find out what life was all about in some way you know and I think a generation like that is profoundly teachable I really do, they are seeking they are seeking. What we're running into now, and some of you here may be in this generation, and you can think about this now, because it does sound like a pretty strong rebuke to you. We find with the freshmen now, coming up for the first time this year, coming up for the first time this year that they seem to have turned off that is their idea is I don't want to know all I want to do is find a safe job somewhere that is we find this generation of students interested not at all They're interested not at all in a university education. We wonder why they come to the university. They do better in a trade school. That is what they're seeking is just simply some kind of marketable skill and they want to get in and out as fast as possible and they don't want to learn anything. Well, and I must say, I must say... And they're very hard to teach, but we found exceptions. to teach that we found exceptions well and to you have to add to that as long as we're saying something that some some students or young people might take as a rebuke we might as well go ahead and go the whole hog and say something that might offend some parents and everyone as long as we're doing this might offend some parents who are here and that is we find that these students have the We find that these students have these attitudes toward education very often because their parents are driving them into a marketable sphere. That is, they're saying, well, I don't care what you do, but you go into the school of business. You can do anything you want to, but you go into the school of business because I you want to but you go into the school of business because you'll get something you'll come out of there with something that you can put on the market a tremendous change about this people are running scared there is a a psychology and about about not success even anymore that is you don't find the guy who wants to go out make a million we're talking about people who want to spend We're talking about people who want to play it safe. It isn't the drive, it isn't the old economic drive. It's kind of a collectivist mentality really. It's going to be very difficult to get through life. And what you've got to do is find some place where no harm will come to you. You've got to find some job where there'll be lots of security and so on. And as I say, if a person really holds that view, well, let's think about it just a minute. I know it's getting late in the afternoon, but just reflect on it. I know it's getting late in the afternoon, but just reflect on it. Why would anybody ever feel that way, don't you think? And I'm putting it in the form of question, not an answer, because we've been talking about it, we're not sure. But don't you think that this comes out of a sort of skepticism, that is a despair about ideas. about ideas say that is ah there isn't any truth there isn't any beauty you know there isn't any good I mean look at that last generation look at them they saw it all over the world we all would end up on drugs and they ended up in hospitals they ended up miserable they ended up you know wrecks moral physical mental Wrecks, moral, physical, mental wrecks. What good did their search do them, you know? You can see the younger brothers and sisters coming along and looking at them, you know, and saying, I'm not going to end up like that, see. It's sort of cynicism, really, I think. And then they turn around and say, well, what am I going to do? And the answer is, well, I'm going to have a nice fast car. A nice fast car. Boy, I'm going to be able to drive down the road at 100 miles an hour any time I want. At least I can have that, see. The hell with truth and beauty and good and all those things and seeking, you know, the way out of all this. I'm just going to get what I know I can get. So they lower their sights and they get a kind of a glint in their eye and it's a sharp sort of greedy little glint you know and they say that's what I'm going to go after and one would say oh gee you know your older brother was a slob I knew him well I taught him he was a wreck he was a mess and he failed but by golly you know his sights were higher than yours I mean I I mean, I would say you're wrong about that. Don't, whatever you do, don't become a cynic, you know. Americans are getting this way. We think we've lost. I think it may be a consequence of the Vietnamese war, partly. That is a great feeling that America is not promises anymore. Remember Carl Sandburg's poem, is it Sandburg or who wrote that? America is promises, I forget, maybe it was McLeish or someone else, but there was a famous poem written about 50 years ago about America. And you got the Kennedy and the Camelot stuff. Now that all turned out to be fake, you see, a lot of that was fake. A lot of that was fake. But are you really willing to say that life is hopeless? Are you really willing to say that America is lost? And that therefore all we can do, you see, is retreat into some nice, safe little way of life for ourselves? I would use Mr. Quinn's example when we were talking about the purposes. That is, if you work for an immediate purpose only, and you leave out the other two, it turns out you ruin the immediate one. I would say the guy that plays it safe is going to end in jail. That's the safest place there is, you know. You lower your sights, you know. You're an insane aside. You lower your sights like that, somebody else with imagination and ideas and will and love, someone else, you know, is going to run your life for you. So don't be whatever you do to hope you're sinning, but we are getting late. I ask this question because sometimes I'm accused of it. I'm looking at some of the points in Greece. And we were just talking about people who might say the program is not as dangerous because they become cynic. They become cynic. How many people are accused of elitism? Of elitism? They can't be intimidated because it's the product of the rich. Oh yeah, sure, sure, sure. Sure, sure. Well, again, that's a searching question because I suppose we have to ask what lies behind the idea. I think a question like that presupposes a misunderstanding of what you do when you have regard for things. We have been accused of that, by the way. Yeah, we were. We were accused of that. That's one of those questions very, very often raised. It turns out that our students are very close to one another, for example, and they tend to have a certain mark. And they tend to have a certain mark on them. They sometimes seem to be. From the outside, I don't blame people sometimes. They look and they see these students of ours and our students are marked by a certain kind of cliquishness, that is they do like each other and they do withdraw in many ways from activity. And a lot of people say, well these guys are swabs, you know, they think they're better than everybody else. And sometimes they do think they're better than everybody else for that matter. I mean, you know, they're not perfect, see. And sometimes it goes to their heads. I mean, there's a stage when they think, well, I really am, this is really one. I've read Plato. I've read Plato, you know, I mean, go around lording over, that's sophomores do, that's known as sophomoric people. The sophomores do, that's known as sophomoric behavior, and sometimes the freshmen are scared by it, but the sophomores do tend to be. But you're talking about something far beyond that I think. The charge of elitism would come from the idea that the contemplative is selfish. Selfish. That is that he's getting something out of it for himself, and he's got it. And that would be a very, very wicked thing. There are people like that. There are people who misunderstand the contemplative, and they become aesthetes. And they become aesthetes, they become aesthetes. That is, they have great regard for nature, but it's a selfish regard, you know, it's my experience to see those things. And I think that is the kind of a twisting or a kind of perversion of the genuinely contemplative life because the contemplative must see that when he sits before let's say the creatures of the world see like water or like or like birds he must see that he himself is a creature too see I mean if he really finds out who he is well mr. Quinn was quite He finds out who he is, when Mr. Quinn was quoting the great Greek oracle, who are you? And there's somebody up there who says, who are you? You're nothing. He says to you, you're nothing. That is really the kind of humility will grow out of this. You begin to see that you are part of something so much greater than yourself. than yourself, that what grows out of it, far from a selfish elitism, is a sort of poverty. And as a matter of fact, the other charge, we've had people accuse us of elitism one minute, and then when they find out, when they get beyond the sophomores When they get beyond the sophomores to the juniors, as it were, and they find out what the results of this, then they say, well, you people will end up dead broke if you do that. You see, you'll end up poor. And our answer to that is, well, now again, there's a mean between riches and destitution. Nobody's arguing for starvation, but poverty? Well, some students have. Some students actually have and have actually become members of contemplative orders. become members of contemplative orders and things like that although very few that's that's not perhaps I think a lot of our students for example have become lawyers but I don't think any of our students that we would call our students that is students who really have seen these things and and and sent to them and that they've become lawyers but they haven't gone down to Houston to work for some gigantic corporation. They're working and they've decided they're going to become small town lawyers and they're not going to get rich. There's a relation between the word humility and the word human. And, of course, whenever anybody talks about humility, which is the opposite of elitism, see, whenever anybody talks about... Whenever anybody talks about, I remember a story they told of T.S. Eliot the poet, he was at a cocktail party one night and someone was saying oh Mr. Eliot you're so wonderful and I'm so nothing and after he walked away Mr. Eliot said who does he think he is to be so humble, he said you know, it becomes a kind of perverse arrogance you know and so you always get a little And so you always get a little nervous when you talk about this. I don't like to say that we really do believe in being humble. Look at us, we're not humble at all. Here we are, you know, being teachers and so on, you know, telling everybody else all kinds of things. But still, I think we would say whether we are or not, we certainly would hold that insofar as you seriously But insofar as you seriously study the poets, you cannot be elite. There's no way you can be elite. It destroys the basis of elitism, which is selfishness. And arrogance. Arrogance. I'm in it for what I can get. I mean it for what I can get out of it. The contemplative says that's precisely what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to come here and get what I can take. I'm rather going to sit here and listen, which in a way is to give myself to see whatever it is that I study, so that it turns out to destroy the other kind of elitism That's a misunderstanding. The other kind of elitism is that they accuse, as they say, well you guys think you've got hold of the truth, you know, the truth, they always say it that way, that you've got hold of the truth and that it's your truth, you know, you have it. And again, it's to misunderstand. It's a basic misunderstanding, a lie to the other one, that is, it isn't our truth. the other one, that is, it isn't our truth, or your truth, or anybody else's truth, and whoever said that we had it, or that we really have hold of it, we don't make any such claims. The contrary, the farther you go, the more you get to the position of Socrates, that is, that you really don't know very much at all. It has a hold on you. It gets you rather than you getting it. And it's the hold of its attractive power. It's the hold of love, which is kind of ignorance. When you love somebody, you don't know anything about them. You've lost all knowledge. Nobody would ever get married except for that. It's a clever trick that Cupid put over on me. Better let these people go, yeah. So you want to continue the conversation, we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while. you want to continue the conversation we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while you

Accusations of Elitism and Responses

I ask this question because sometimes I'm accused of it. I'm looking at some of the points in Greece. And we were just talking about people who might say the program is not as dangerous because they become cynic. They become cynic. How many people are accused of elitism? Of elitism? They can't be intimidated because it's the product of the rich. Oh yeah, sure, sure, sure. Sure, sure. Well, again, that's a searching question because I suppose we have to ask what lies behind the idea. I think a question like that presupposes a misunderstanding of what you do when you have regard for things. We have been accused of that, by the way. Yeah, we were. We were accused of that. That's one of those questions very, very often raised. It turns out that our students are very close to one another, for example, and they tend to have a certain mark. And they tend to have a certain mark on them. They sometimes seem to be. From the outside, I don't blame people sometimes. They look and they see these students of ours and our students are marked by a certain kind of cliquishness, that is they do like each other and they do withdraw in many ways from activity. And a lot of people say, well these guys are swabs, you know, they think they're better than everybody else. And sometimes they do think they're better than everybody else for that matter. I mean, you know, they're not perfect, see. And sometimes it goes to their heads. I mean, there's a stage when they think, well, I really am, this is really one. I've read Plato. I've read Plato, you know, I mean, go around lording over, that's sophomores do, that's known as sophomoric people. The sophomores do, that's known as sophomoric behavior, and sometimes the freshmen are scared by it, but the sophomores do tend to be. But you're talking about something far beyond that I think. The charge of elitism would come from the idea that the contemplative is selfish. Selfish. That is that he's getting something out of it for himself, and he's got it. And that would be a very, very wicked thing. There are people like that. There are people who misunderstand the contemplative, and they become aesthetes. And they become aesthetes, they become aesthetes. That is, they have great regard for nature, but it's a selfish regard, you know, it's my experience to see those things. And I think that is the kind of a twisting or a kind of perversion of the genuinely contemplative life because the contemplative must see that when he sits before let's say the creatures of the world see like water or like or like birds he must see that he himself is a creature too see I mean if he really finds out who he is well mr. Quinn was quite He finds out who he is, when Mr. Quinn was quoting the great Greek oracle, who are you? And there's somebody up there who says, who are you? You're nothing. He says to you, you're nothing. That is really the kind of humility will grow out of this. You begin to see that you are part of something so much greater than yourself. than yourself, that what grows out of it, far from a selfish elitism, is a sort of poverty. And as a matter of fact, the other charge, we've had people accuse us of elitism one minute, and then when they find out, when they get beyond the sophomores When they get beyond the sophomores to the juniors, as it were, and they find out what the results of this, then they say, well, you people will end up dead broke if you do that. You see, you'll end up poor. And our answer to that is, well, now again, there's a mean between riches and destitution. Nobody's arguing for starvation, but poverty? Well, some students have. Some students actually have and have actually become members of contemplative orders. become members of contemplative orders and things like that although very few that's that's not perhaps I think a lot of our students for example have become lawyers but I don't think any of our students that we would call our students that is students who really have seen these things and and and sent to them and that they've become lawyers but they haven't gone down to Houston to work for some gigantic corporation. They're working and they've decided they're going to become small town lawyers and they're not going to get rich. There's a relation between the word humility and the word human. And, of course, whenever anybody talks about humility, which is the opposite of elitism, see, whenever anybody talks about... Whenever anybody talks about, I remember a story they told of T.S. Eliot the poet, he was at a cocktail party one night and someone was saying oh Mr. Eliot you're so wonderful and I'm so nothing and after he walked away Mr. Eliot said who does he think he is to be so humble, he said you know, it becomes a kind of perverse arrogance you know and so you always get a little And so you always get a little nervous when you talk about this. I don't like to say that we really do believe in being humble. Look at us, we're not humble at all. Here we are, you know, being teachers and so on, you know, telling everybody else all kinds of things. But still, I think we would say whether we are or not, we certainly would hold that insofar as you seriously But insofar as you seriously study the poets, you cannot be elite. There's no way you can be elite. It destroys the basis of elitism, which is selfishness. And arrogance. Arrogance. I'm in it for what I can get. I mean it for what I can get out of it. The contemplative says that's precisely what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to come here and get what I can take. I'm rather going to sit here and listen, which in a way is to give myself to see whatever it is that I study, so that it turns out to destroy the other kind of elitism That's a misunderstanding. The other kind of elitism is that they accuse, as they say, well you guys think you've got hold of the truth, you know, the truth, they always say it that way, that you've got hold of the truth and that it's your truth, you know, you have it. And again, it's to misunderstand. It's a basic misunderstanding, a lie to the other one, that is, it isn't our truth. the other one, that is, it isn't our truth, or your truth, or anybody else's truth, and whoever said that we had it, or that we really have hold of it, we don't make any such claims. The contrary, the farther you go, the more you get to the position of Socrates, that is, that you really don't know very much at all. It has a hold on you. It gets you rather than you getting it. And it's the hold of its attractive power. It's the hold of love, which is kind of ignorance. When you love somebody, you don't know anything about them. You've lost all knowledge. Nobody would ever get married except for that. It's a clever trick that Cupid put over on me. Better let these people go, yeah. So you want to continue the conversation, we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while. you want to continue the conversation we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while you

Lecture Conclusion

Closing Remarks

Better let these people go, yeah. So you want to continue the conversation, we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while you want to continue the conversation we'll... We'll stay up and stick around for a while you