19 December 2006
Hoppin' Hegel, Batman!
I knew that next semester was going to be rough, but my professor for Hegelian and post-Hegelian literary theory just posted his reading list along with a Darth Vaderesque warning about the reading load. Yeesh!
I just ordered Eagleton's book for an early January brush-up (hopefully it'll show up while I'm out of town) and the Hegel tome to get cookin' over that. Fitzner told me this professor is a good one; I just hope my tail holds out.
All of a sudden translating two hundred lines of Beowulf a week started looking like the easy part of my semester...
I just ordered Eagleton's book for an early January brush-up (hopefully it'll show up while I'm out of town) and the Hegel tome to get cookin' over that. Fitzner told me this professor is a good one; I just hope my tail holds out.
All of a sudden translating two hundred lines of Beowulf a week started looking like the easy part of my semester...
18 December 2006
Weekly Standard's Damage Control
"Don't Cry for Pinochet"
His embrace of economic reform seems unlikely to have sprung from a commitment to freedom, given the overarching contempt for liberty that characterized the rest of his government. Rather, in order to insulate himself from the consequences of his murderous seizure of power, Pinochet sought out political allies, and his free market reforms helped him to garner support domestically on the right, and also among members of the international community. One must be careful not to fall into Pinochet's trap--accepting his brutal seizure of power and tyrannical rule as a natural accompaniment of free market reforms. Propagandists on the left lost no time in seeking to discredit economic freedom by associating it with Pinochet. To this day, we hear from Moscow that it takes a Pinochet to implement economic reforms successfully; Vladimir Putin seems all too willing to have Pinochet's uniform taken in a few sizes so he can try it on.Stalin does in fact discredit Leninism, and the Cultural Revolution does in fact discredit Maoism. Fascism was not corrupted by Hitler, and Milton Friedman's neoliberalism is not warped but embodied by Pinochet. Don't let any of the twentieth century ideologues try to bury their monsters in unmarked graves, especially not those who wound up on the winning sides of the world wars.
Back to the Classics
After a frenzy of post-Marxist theory and post-Freudian analysis--that is to say, after reading up on the last decade's scholarship for my end-of-semester papers--I've dug into Robert Fagles's translation of Homer's Iliad. To say that such a shift is a relief simply does no justice to the joy of reading old books without the nattering critics and their little academic careers. (I'm harboring no illusions--I'm certain that during my comps year I'll be sending off my own forgettable little articles to attempt to shore up my own little academic career.) I dusted off a reread of Virgil's Aeneid last Christmas, and if I have a few quiet hours this year, I'm probably going to consume another ancient epic.
Speaking of old books, my Plato course's evaluations came in today, and they were even better than the ones I got for last Spring's Hebrew Bible and/as Literature class. (Not sure if the latter link will work; I'll update it when I get access to the department page to post spring syllabi.) I could claim some sort of grand skill in teaching freshmen, but a year ago, I got some of the most wretched reviews I'd ever gotten. (That was my fourth year teaching college.) The change is not in my ability but in the texts at hand; college students know good books from mediocre ones, and when I started teaching Job and Republic instead of "Divinity and Pornography," they started reacting better to my classes. Now, as I gear up to teach Joseph in January and the Psalms in February, I know that I don't have to be a fabulous teacher to make this work, and I also know that if I do perform fabulously, I'll be leaping forth from the shoulders of great texts.
It makes one want to get back to school, no? :)
Speaking of old books, my Plato course's evaluations came in today, and they were even better than the ones I got for last Spring's Hebrew Bible and/as Literature class. (Not sure if the latter link will work; I'll update it when I get access to the department page to post spring syllabi.) I could claim some sort of grand skill in teaching freshmen, but a year ago, I got some of the most wretched reviews I'd ever gotten. (That was my fourth year teaching college.) The change is not in my ability but in the texts at hand; college students know good books from mediocre ones, and when I started teaching Job and Republic instead of "Divinity and Pornography," they started reacting better to my classes. Now, as I gear up to teach Joseph in January and the Psalms in February, I know that I don't have to be a fabulous teacher to make this work, and I also know that if I do perform fabulously, I'll be leaping forth from the shoulders of great texts.
It makes one want to get back to school, no? :)
14 December 2006
The Feminisation of Chile
The strong women of a generation ago were not the product of an evolving society, but created by events – and I don’t mean Allende’s experiment, in which women were mostly helpmeets. Mónica González, the country’s top investigative journalist, who was jailed for her human rights stories in the 1980s, credits the dictatorship for that brief awakening. ‘Since the people killed, imprisoned and disappeared were mostly men, women had to confront authority as never before. Facing up to the army and the police in search of husbands or sons, joining forces and speaking out politically, going to work for the first time.’In the wake of Pinochet's death, this article about the years since his regime lost power was pretty interesting. That feminism arose out of the ashes of neoliberalism is quite interesting; I don't spend a great deal of time thinking about gender issues (sorry to my feminist theorist and gender theorist colleagues), but this is one of those moments in which power and (bad) government and gender come together in ways that deserve some thought.
11 December 2006
Pinochet Dead
Mixed Reaction to Pinochet's Death
Another of the Cold War's monsters now faces divine judgment. May his years as dictator of Chile serve as a warning to empires--God knows with whom you ally.
School of the Americas Watch
Another of the Cold War's monsters now faces divine judgment. May his years as dictator of Chile serve as a warning to empires--God knows with whom you ally.
School of the Americas Watch
09 December 2006
Oh Dear
It seems that I've accidentally wiped out a fair bit of my blog's goodies while fiddling with BetaBlogger. I suppose I should treat this as an opportunity rather than a curse, so check back frequently for the new look of Hardly the Last Word!
We're doomed!
We're doomed!
Casting for Nativity Plays
I'm thanking the heavens as I type that I've never had to cast one of these legendary affairs, but the article is just too funny:
Come Christmas, there are always those cynics who dismiss infant nativity plays as pointless charades. What lessons, they ask, are to be learnt in the modern age from watching kids trying to work out what a "virgin's womb" is and how not to "abhor" it? The answer is many, for all concerned – not in the tale itself, but in the telling."Anyone can be a Shepherd, but there's only One Mary"
Hit Counter
I have to republish to get the hit counter to show up, so here goes...
(It's right below the "my library" bit.)
(It's right below the "my library" bit.)
05 December 2006
04 December 2006
Crapula
The sermon went well yesterday, and in the process of researching for it, I ran into one of the most fun vice-words I've ever seen, the Latin crapula.
My Latin class ends tomorrow (exempt from the final), and my students upload their portfolios tomorrow evening. Friday is the Old English exam, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem since I've got Thursday completely off. I've got a genuinely good head of steam on my Spenser paper, and if I play my cards right I might just get it turned in this weekend.
I know the last few entries have been grocery lists, most containing the same items, but my grad student readers know that such lists, and the gradual deterioration of such lists, keep us going in these closing days of the semester.
My Latin class ends tomorrow (exempt from the final), and my students upload their portfolios tomorrow evening. Friday is the Old English exam, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem since I've got Thursday completely off. I've got a genuinely good head of steam on my Spenser paper, and if I play my cards right I might just get it turned in this weekend.
I know the last few entries have been grocery lists, most containing the same items, but my grad student readers know that such lists, and the gradual deterioration of such lists, keep us going in these closing days of the semester.
28 November 2006
December 8, here I come
The last sprint is on. I've taught my last class (we're still meeting, but it's all peer revision from here on out), Spenser class has seen its last meeting, and only four Latin and four Old English classes remain. I can't remember a semester coming to a crashing halt as fast as this one is about to, but that's probably my bad memory more than anything else.
The Spenser paper is going to get done, though it's going to kill me getting there. The final exams will come and go, and once they're in the books, they're in the books. I still have about twenty-five papers and eighty portfolios to grade, but those also eventually get done.
I'm going to make it!
The Spenser paper is going to get done, though it's going to kill me getting there. The final exams will come and go, and once they're in the books, they're in the books. I still have about twenty-five papers and eighty portfolios to grade, but those also eventually get done.
I'm going to make it!
25 November 2006
Gearing up for Final Paper
For the first semester in a long time, I'm only going to be working on one paper during the home stretch, and I've already got that half-written. I'm going to try to force myself through a Marxist history of early-modern pre-capital and use it in my analysis (just to pacify the professor), but I'm mainly going to be focusing on the virtue of temperance in Platonic and Aristotelian molds, the permutations that happen in Calvin's Institutes, and how money fits into those ethical systems in into Guyon's encounter with Mammon in book 2 of Faerie Queene. Undoubtedly my take will be a hair "conservative" for folks with (what I call) faddish tastes, but I'm to the point now that "conservative" (still not sure what that means) just has to be the way I do things. I'm good at it.
Mary's father and uncle are coming in tonight and leaving tomorrow for Mississippi. That'll cut off my access to a fair chunk of the house, but one morning won't kill me or Micah. The house is pretty much ready for company, and I know Mary is looking forward to seeing people.
Mary's father and uncle are coming in tonight and leaving tomorrow for Mississippi. That'll cut off my access to a fair chunk of the house, but one morning won't kill me or Micah. The house is pretty much ready for company, and I know Mary is looking forward to seeing people.
21 November 2006
On Education and the End of the Semester
We wrapped up the discussion part of the semester yesterday with a conversation about John Milton's treatise "On Education." As I usually do when I teach that fun little text, I started by having the class list all of the things Milton would have Englishmen learn by the time they're 21 years old. One class came up with 46 things, the other 48. Take a look at the treatise, and you'll see that these are not simple things: Milton would have us all know trigonometry, agriculture, sword-fighting, Aramaic, metaphysics, medicine, and law among others.
But the overall aim of the piece is more ambitious yet:
We talked about the significantly less-ambitious aims of our own university as an introduction to the portfolio's reflective essay, in which each student will attempt to articulate what exactly happened since August 16.
Since the part of the semester in which I lecture is over, I've been doing some thinking about the course of things. First of all, if I do freshman comp next fall, I'm almost certainly doing Plato again; the text just begs to be taught to eighteen-year-olds. Second, I'm going to do some fiddling with WebCT and write a series of quizzes to keep the little boogers honest. Requiring discussion questions assumes that I'm going to take class time to check them (which I didn't); if I set up quizzes on WebCT, the honesty check should take care of itself. Finally, I'm going to ask the class whether the reading load was too heavy. If not, I might just teach Machiavelli's Il Principe alongside Plato's Republic as an introduction to all kinds of moral questions. But I'll ask my classes first; I wouldn't want to presume a greater importance for my class than what the class warrants.
But the overall aim of the piece is more ambitious yet:
The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.That's right. Education, properly done, ought to come pretty darn close to reversing Original Sin.
We talked about the significantly less-ambitious aims of our own university as an introduction to the portfolio's reflective essay, in which each student will attempt to articulate what exactly happened since August 16.
Since the part of the semester in which I lecture is over, I've been doing some thinking about the course of things. First of all, if I do freshman comp next fall, I'm almost certainly doing Plato again; the text just begs to be taught to eighteen-year-olds. Second, I'm going to do some fiddling with WebCT and write a series of quizzes to keep the little boogers honest. Requiring discussion questions assumes that I'm going to take class time to check them (which I didn't); if I set up quizzes on WebCT, the honesty check should take care of itself. Finally, I'm going to ask the class whether the reading load was too heavy. If not, I might just teach Machiavelli's Il Principe alongside Plato's Republic as an introduction to all kinds of moral questions. But I'll ask my classes first; I wouldn't want to presume a greater importance for my class than what the class warrants.
15 November 2006
The end of Republic
It would be kind of cool if this blog post landed on some Star Wars fan's google search.
That aside, we actually finished up Monday with his bizarre section on reincarnation. I'm still not sure whether the story of Er is allegory or doctrine or some clever combination of the two, but I do think that Plato's joke at the very end is just silly.
In today's class we looked at the unapologetically empiricist first book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and I think the class got a genuine grasp on that ancient difference between idealists and inductivists. After three months of Plato, Aristotle's moral conservatism is almost jarring, and I wonder which way my classes leaned.
The rest of the semester will have to do with constructing and revising the portfolio. That disappoints me somewhat, but I know that I should be focusing on my Spenser paper anyway, so I'll not cry too much.
Now I've got roughly three hours to work until I have to talk to the composition pedagogy class about special sections. I've got a basic working idea of what I'll talk about, and I've only got to fill up eight minutes, but it's still a hair nervewracking.
That aside, we actually finished up Monday with his bizarre section on reincarnation. I'm still not sure whether the story of Er is allegory or doctrine or some clever combination of the two, but I do think that Plato's joke at the very end is just silly.
In today's class we looked at the unapologetically empiricist first book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and I think the class got a genuine grasp on that ancient difference between idealists and inductivists. After three months of Plato, Aristotle's moral conservatism is almost jarring, and I wonder which way my classes leaned.
The rest of the semester will have to do with constructing and revising the portfolio. That disappoints me somewhat, but I know that I should be focusing on my Spenser paper anyway, so I'll not cry too much.
Now I've got roughly three hours to work until I have to talk to the composition pedagogy class about special sections. I've got a basic working idea of what I'll talk about, and I've only got to fill up eight minutes, but it's still a hair nervewracking.
11 November 2006
09 November 2006
Better Ways
We finished what I would call the ethical part of Republic in class yesterday, and I'm pleased with the bulk of the semester's discussions. Even if some (or most) of the folks in my classes never pick up a copy of Plato again (I hope they do), they've been exposed to and had to think about questions of goodness, justice, human community, idealism, and half a dozen other things.
And now that we've covered what we covered yesterday, they all know that morality is not only better than immorality but 729 times better than immorality! (Republic section 587e) The next time my freshmen are tempted to immorality, and their WWJD bracelets are out of morality-batteries (moratteries?), they can remember what Plato told them, and they'll say, "Why would I want to do that? To do the good thing would be 729 times better!"
Perhaps not.
Plato finished up this section with quite a vivid metaphor: the one who is satisfied with apetite-pleasing pleasure is as one who climbs halfway up a mountain and congratulates himself on reaching the top, only to return to the bottom, then go up halfway, and so on. The one whose pleasures are philosophic reach the height of the mountain. We had some good times discussing why Plato thinks philosophy is better than sex, but I think that everyone present could appreciate this image.
This Friday we're discussing Plato's famous attack on poetry, and Monday, in addition to the semester's customer satisfaction surveys, we're talking about Plato's funky reincarnation chapter. Both ought to be fun.
In other realms, I finished up Chesterton's Orthodoxy during my office hours today. I hate to alienate any readers who love the Inklings and their ilk, but I wasn't all that impressed. The book itself just did not live up to the glowing recommendations that came before. In one chapter, I found myself thinking, paragraph by paragraph, "Okay. He's a Humean empiricist. He's surprised every time the door opens to the same street outside, and he thinks it's foolish to assume that the same door will do the same thing tomorrow. He can get on to the next chapter." In another, I thought, "Okay, he's a moral relativist. He thinks that Enlightenment wars are awful but that Christian wars are great. Next chapter, please." None of the chapters left me speechless in the ways that Augustine or Dante or even Barth leaves me speechless; I just wanted to get past his logical-fallacy-for-this-chapter and finish. But I suppose now I can say that I've read Chesterton and found him wanting rather than admitting that I've never read Chesterton. That's a little bit better.
And now that we've covered what we covered yesterday, they all know that morality is not only better than immorality but 729 times better than immorality! (Republic section 587e) The next time my freshmen are tempted to immorality, and their WWJD bracelets are out of morality-batteries (moratteries?), they can remember what Plato told them, and they'll say, "Why would I want to do that? To do the good thing would be 729 times better!"
Perhaps not.
Plato finished up this section with quite a vivid metaphor: the one who is satisfied with apetite-pleasing pleasure is as one who climbs halfway up a mountain and congratulates himself on reaching the top, only to return to the bottom, then go up halfway, and so on. The one whose pleasures are philosophic reach the height of the mountain. We had some good times discussing why Plato thinks philosophy is better than sex, but I think that everyone present could appreciate this image.
This Friday we're discussing Plato's famous attack on poetry, and Monday, in addition to the semester's customer satisfaction surveys, we're talking about Plato's funky reincarnation chapter. Both ought to be fun.
In other realms, I finished up Chesterton's Orthodoxy during my office hours today. I hate to alienate any readers who love the Inklings and their ilk, but I wasn't all that impressed. The book itself just did not live up to the glowing recommendations that came before. In one chapter, I found myself thinking, paragraph by paragraph, "Okay. He's a Humean empiricist. He's surprised every time the door opens to the same street outside, and he thinks it's foolish to assume that the same door will do the same thing tomorrow. He can get on to the next chapter." In another, I thought, "Okay, he's a moral relativist. He thinks that Enlightenment wars are awful but that Christian wars are great. Next chapter, please." None of the chapters left me speechless in the ways that Augustine or Dante or even Barth leaves me speechless; I just wanted to get past his logical-fallacy-for-this-chapter and finish. But I suppose now I can say that I've read Chesterton and found him wanting rather than admitting that I've never read Chesterton. That's a little bit better.
07 November 2006
Tyranny
We had some pretty good discussions yesterday in class. Plato finally got to the dictatorial personality and the dictatorial community. The contrast between the two is sharp: in a dictatorial society, the dictator is the most fearsome person Plato describes. In a dictatorial psyche, the picture is more like Beavis than like Stalin. The insight is wonderful: any community, in the Platonic imagination, exists sub specie aeternitatis. Thus the best sorts of communities exist knowing and submitting to the Good, while those that deny or defy the Good are the worst, the tyrannies.
I hope that my students take this section well in mind as they work on their papers; a philosophy of the good, be that philosophy theological (as it is when I do politics) or Marxist-historical or Nietzschean or consumeristically relativistic, is going to determine to some extent what freedom looks like. I'm curious to see what this round of papers will look like.
I hope that my students take this section well in mind as they work on their papers; a philosophy of the good, be that philosophy theological (as it is when I do politics) or Marxist-historical or Nietzschean or consumeristically relativistic, is going to determine to some extent what freedom looks like. I'm curious to see what this round of papers will look like.
04 November 2006
Freedom and choice
I've got my routine down for teaching academic writing, but teaching philosophy is still before me.
I tried to teach the philosophical distinctions between positive freedom/freedom-for and negative freedom/freedom-from yesterday, and I'm not sure I was clear at all. The context for the conversation was Plato's comparison between democracy on one hand and true aristocracy on the other--his contention seems to be that democracy offers more raw choices in any given moment and thus might seem freer but that, given the undisciplined soul's tendency to seek pleasure even in spite of goodness, such "freedom" actually enslaves the better parts of our communities and our souls to the worse parts. My students seemed to get Plato's logic, but I still had trouble breaking down the iron bond that connects freedom as abstraction with autonomous choice as action. My students still seemed to regard Plato's option as not-freedom rather than a different sort of freedom. That's not necessarily bad; perhaps my grasp on the English word "free" is too tenuous and lets in too many sorts of connotations. All the same, I'm still wondering whether I could have taught it better.
I've finished grading the class's research papers. Some really stepped up and articulated intelligent analyses and argued theoretical and ethical points. Others gave me catalogues of observations. I suppose I should expect that from a class of freshman writers; not everyone is going to get it now, and not everyone is going to get it when I'm teaching it. That some have encourages me.
Monday we finish up Plato's chapter on corrupt communities with his discussion of madman's rule. Waterfield, our translator, calls it dictatorship, but it reminds me more of Animal from the Muppets running the city--whatever whim strikes the madman, he chases after it. There's really neither past nor future for this leader; there's only his whims. Such is the embodiment of absolute immorality in Plato's imagination. And in the same imagination, such atemporality is just one step further down the road from democracy.
I tried to teach the philosophical distinctions between positive freedom/freedom-for and negative freedom/freedom-from yesterday, and I'm not sure I was clear at all. The context for the conversation was Plato's comparison between democracy on one hand and true aristocracy on the other--his contention seems to be that democracy offers more raw choices in any given moment and thus might seem freer but that, given the undisciplined soul's tendency to seek pleasure even in spite of goodness, such "freedom" actually enslaves the better parts of our communities and our souls to the worse parts. My students seemed to get Plato's logic, but I still had trouble breaking down the iron bond that connects freedom as abstraction with autonomous choice as action. My students still seemed to regard Plato's option as not-freedom rather than a different sort of freedom. That's not necessarily bad; perhaps my grasp on the English word "free" is too tenuous and lets in too many sorts of connotations. All the same, I'm still wondering whether I could have taught it better.
I've finished grading the class's research papers. Some really stepped up and articulated intelligent analyses and argued theoretical and ethical points. Others gave me catalogues of observations. I suppose I should expect that from a class of freshman writers; not everyone is going to get it now, and not everyone is going to get it when I'm teaching it. That some have encourages me.
Monday we finish up Plato's chapter on corrupt communities with his discussion of madman's rule. Waterfield, our translator, calls it dictatorship, but it reminds me more of Animal from the Muppets running the city--whatever whim strikes the madman, he chases after it. There's really neither past nor future for this leader; there's only his whims. Such is the embodiment of absolute immorality in Plato's imagination. And in the same imagination, such atemporality is just one step further down the road from democracy.
02 November 2006
My Anti-Democratic Rant
No, I've not become a Republican. At least not the kind that wears elephant pins.
Yesterday in class I made up for my lost Thoreau time and took on the role of Plato, arguing with some force that for the really important things in life, people didn't trust democracy. Nobody wants to admit and deny medical students based on a county-wide popular vote, and no college is going to let the students vote for the office of English teacher. I railed at the class, telling them that their insistence that the less able have an equal say in who governs indicates an apathy towards justice. Some were amused by my bad acting, but some got genuinely mad. I like that.
Of course, there are good and intelligible reasons to prefer popular elections for political officers. But I wasn't going to give them those reasons; part of the challenge of being an American college student ought to be the struggle to articulate the good, not just to jot down the teacher's definition of the good for the sake of reproducing it on the final exam.
Yesterday in class I made up for my lost Thoreau time and took on the role of Plato, arguing with some force that for the really important things in life, people didn't trust democracy. Nobody wants to admit and deny medical students based on a county-wide popular vote, and no college is going to let the students vote for the office of English teacher. I railed at the class, telling them that their insistence that the less able have an equal say in who governs indicates an apathy towards justice. Some were amused by my bad acting, but some got genuinely mad. I like that.
Of course, there are good and intelligible reasons to prefer popular elections for political officers. But I wasn't going to give them those reasons; part of the challenge of being an American college student ought to be the struggle to articulate the good, not just to jot down the teacher's definition of the good for the sake of reproducing it on the final exam.
31 October 2006
Library Thing
My lovely readers might have noticed yet another toy on the sidebar. I discovered LibraryThing.com on Julie Clawson's blog, and I've been fiddling with it intermittently since. Right now I've got the blog gizmo set to random because I don't particularly like the "most recently added" setting. Anyway, check out the site--it's easy to use and doesn't involve coughing up any personal information beyond the contents of one's bookshelves.
30 October 2006
Educating the Guardians
I love talking with freshmen about what the heck they're in college for. That was the subject today, and as usual, Plato provided us a clear, theory-heavy model against which students could push.
Without much effort at all I got both classes thinking about atoms and electrons and the fact that, even though none of us has actually seen an electron, we all believe in them and in fact live electricity-powered lives, secure within a theory no less theory-laden than Plato's theory of justice.
My hope is that we'll get some good freedom papers cooking. We finish up the education section Wednesday, then get into Plato's exploration of false justice/freedom/goodness.
Without much effort at all I got both classes thinking about atoms and electrons and the fact that, even though none of us has actually seen an electron, we all believe in them and in fact live electricity-powered lives, secure within a theory no less theory-laden than Plato's theory of justice.
My hope is that we'll get some good freedom papers cooking. We finish up the education section Wednesday, then get into Plato's exploration of false justice/freedom/goodness.
26 October 2006
Resistance to Civil Government
I stayed away from my standard manner of teaching Thoreau's anti-government essay, and my delivery suffered. In the past I've spent the whole period "playing Thoreau," taking what I take to be his position and answering students' questions in-character.
This semester, because we've spent so much time with Plato, I decided instead to focus the discussion on how Thoreau agrees with and departs from Plato. I think the intellectual content might have been better, but I fear that I took the sting out of Thoreau, and to take the sting out of Thoreau rather negates the primary benefit of reading it as a class.
Tomorrow I'm going to try to get all thirty-five remaining essays graded and marked. If I can manage four an hour, that's a work day. Then, in November, I can devote my time almost exclusively to finishing my own semester's projects. Here's hoping...
This semester, because we've spent so much time with Plato, I decided instead to focus the discussion on how Thoreau agrees with and departs from Plato. I think the intellectual content might have been better, but I fear that I took the sting out of Thoreau, and to take the sting out of Thoreau rather negates the primary benefit of reading it as a class.
Tomorrow I'm going to try to get all thirty-five remaining essays graded and marked. If I can manage four an hour, that's a work day. Then, in November, I can devote my time almost exclusively to finishing my own semester's projects. Here's hoping...
24 October 2006
How many of you are there?
I've been Googling about, and I think the other one lives in Washington state.
Revsion and Such
No new Plato material until next Monday, so I get to ramble a bit. (I don't think anyone would stop me were I to ramble anyway, but I need to give myself an excuse on occasion.)
I'm genuinely pleased with what I've seen on this third paper. Last year I had my classes do some research in their potential major or career fields, and the results were miserably spotty. Half a dozen or so wrote genuinely good papers, some didn't have any idea what they wanted to do and thus wrote mediocre papers, and the majority picked the hottest on-every-evening's-news-broadcast topic and wrote that up. Boring overall.
I shouldn't count my chickens before they hatch, but from the buzz I've overheard, this year's papers ought to be both better to read and better for initiating four (or five or six) years of college-level thinking. This year, since I'm teaching Plato rather than an anthology, I'm having them take Republic and one other premodern text (my rough cutoff line is John Milton) and write a paper on some social division, be between teacher and student, domestic and foreign, old and young, men and women, parents and children, or whatever. To develop some rudimentary research skills I'm also requiring that they integrate into their arguments two scholarly sources.
A number of my students have picked biblical texts, and I'm satisfied if that means they've spent a couple weeks thinking rigorously about how the Bible differs from Plato, arguably one of the other great influences on Western thought. Others have picked some protomodern stuff along the lines of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Again, the cross-genre potential means they've had to do some thinking. Still others have gone to Erasmus, Hammurabi, other Plato dialogues, Boethius, and others. I realize that few if any will go to the effort of reading other folks' papers, but at minimum they've done some thinking about two texts that existed before 1700 and that differ from one another. That they can see some historical complexity means that they've done some thinking that otherwise they wouldn't have done.
I hope they've started thinking about the final paper--the assignment for paper four is thus:
What is freedom, and are you free?
For this one we're going to be mixing some Thoreau and some Milton and some Aristotle in with the Plato, and within a week the ones who read are going to have to read Thoreau's case that governments necessarily impede conscience and then Plato's that only a properly aristocratic government can develop conscience. This ought to be fun.
Thoreau's tomorrow. I suppose I ought to plan that lesson.
I'm genuinely pleased with what I've seen on this third paper. Last year I had my classes do some research in their potential major or career fields, and the results were miserably spotty. Half a dozen or so wrote genuinely good papers, some didn't have any idea what they wanted to do and thus wrote mediocre papers, and the majority picked the hottest on-every-evening's-news-broadcast topic and wrote that up. Boring overall.
I shouldn't count my chickens before they hatch, but from the buzz I've overheard, this year's papers ought to be both better to read and better for initiating four (or five or six) years of college-level thinking. This year, since I'm teaching Plato rather than an anthology, I'm having them take Republic and one other premodern text (my rough cutoff line is John Milton) and write a paper on some social division, be between teacher and student, domestic and foreign, old and young, men and women, parents and children, or whatever. To develop some rudimentary research skills I'm also requiring that they integrate into their arguments two scholarly sources.
A number of my students have picked biblical texts, and I'm satisfied if that means they've spent a couple weeks thinking rigorously about how the Bible differs from Plato, arguably one of the other great influences on Western thought. Others have picked some protomodern stuff along the lines of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Again, the cross-genre potential means they've had to do some thinking. Still others have gone to Erasmus, Hammurabi, other Plato dialogues, Boethius, and others. I realize that few if any will go to the effort of reading other folks' papers, but at minimum they've done some thinking about two texts that existed before 1700 and that differ from one another. That they can see some historical complexity means that they've done some thinking that otherwise they wouldn't have done.
I hope they've started thinking about the final paper--the assignment for paper four is thus:
What is freedom, and are you free?
For this one we're going to be mixing some Thoreau and some Milton and some Aristotle in with the Plato, and within a week the ones who read are going to have to read Thoreau's case that governments necessarily impede conscience and then Plato's that only a properly aristocratic government can develop conscience. This ought to be fun.
Thoreau's tomorrow. I suppose I ought to plan that lesson.
20 October 2006
Plato's cave
Just my luck--the day comes to teach Plato's allegory of the cave, and my voice is failing because of a cold. Ah, well. I think that most famous bit of Plato will serve nicely to introduce paper 4, the most philosophical of the papers and thus the hardest. The assignment is to say what freedom is and whether or to what extent each paper's writer is free. Last time I assigned this paper, some fell predictably into high school civics essays, and others couldn't pull together their thoughts on education and responsibility and money, but some rose to the occasion and really did some good thinking on paper. I imagine I'll get the same in this paper.
We also talked a bit about The Matrix and C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair and their connections to this most famous episode, and we talked at some length about the allegory's place in the larger argument. All the while, though, I was fighting my throat, so what could have been a great moment in the class rather fizzled.
Monday is revision day, but on Wednesday those who come to class are going to discuss Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government." That ought to provide a radical enough departure from Plato's live-for-the-city ethos that the class can do some good thinking about freedom and what it means.
We also talked a bit about The Matrix and C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair and their connections to this most famous episode, and we talked at some length about the allegory's place in the larger argument. All the while, though, I was fighting my throat, so what could have been a great moment in the class rather fizzled.
Monday is revision day, but on Wednesday those who come to class are going to discuss Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government." That ought to provide a radical enough departure from Plato's live-for-the-city ethos that the class can do some good thinking about freedom and what it means.
16 October 2006
Human Nature, Empiricism, and Idealism
Today I was far more articulate in 10:00 than in 9:00. I'm trying to use our class's online discussion board to alleviate my ineptitude early, but I'm going to have to do some serious recovering in class Wednesday.
The discussion was supposed to be about Plato's critique of the sophists as moral empiricists, folks who look at the ways people live together and conclude that the best way of living must be the seizure of power within those groups. Plato, contrasting strongly, argues for a moral idealism, the evaluation of good or bad cities and people based on their proximity to or distance from a reasoned ideal of conduct.
So on our WebCT board, I posted this question for them:
What is human nature?
I don't think many of them read this blog (though I've posted a link to it on WebCT), so I'll go ahead and start some thinking on the question.
What I call in class "pop culture" meanings for words are often our launching-points for discussions. When I present the above question to the classes, my hunch is that their answers are going to come either from some sort of evangelical Protestant theology (Calvin lite, if you will) or from some sort of basic understanding of economics or Freudian psychology. What's going to bind them together (I'm guessing, of course) is that all of them will assume that "human nature" is a limiting factor on political possibilities, an insurmountable selfishness that makes sustained communal living impossible.
Plato, of course (along with the book of Acts, if I'm reading it right), denies the absoluteness of that determination, claiming instead that education (in Plato's system) or conversion (in Acts) makes a more real sort of community possible. In other words, what we see when we look at embodied communities is not human nature but human-nature-corrupted.
I'm not sure where I stand on this question, which will make leading the discussion easier. I've been just as influenced as anyone by the American project, a system of rules and checks that limits the ability of any one person to act too autonomously in matters of government. But I also think that genuinely good people can be genuinely good leaders, defying claims that human greed is insurmountable. I hope this discussion runs better than this morning's did.
The discussion was supposed to be about Plato's critique of the sophists as moral empiricists, folks who look at the ways people live together and conclude that the best way of living must be the seizure of power within those groups. Plato, contrasting strongly, argues for a moral idealism, the evaluation of good or bad cities and people based on their proximity to or distance from a reasoned ideal of conduct.
So on our WebCT board, I posted this question for them:
What is human nature?
I don't think many of them read this blog (though I've posted a link to it on WebCT), so I'll go ahead and start some thinking on the question.
What I call in class "pop culture" meanings for words are often our launching-points for discussions. When I present the above question to the classes, my hunch is that their answers are going to come either from some sort of evangelical Protestant theology (Calvin lite, if you will) or from some sort of basic understanding of economics or Freudian psychology. What's going to bind them together (I'm guessing, of course) is that all of them will assume that "human nature" is a limiting factor on political possibilities, an insurmountable selfishness that makes sustained communal living impossible.
Plato, of course (along with the book of Acts, if I'm reading it right), denies the absoluteness of that determination, claiming instead that education (in Plato's system) or conversion (in Acts) makes a more real sort of community possible. In other words, what we see when we look at embodied communities is not human nature but human-nature-corrupted.
I'm not sure where I stand on this question, which will make leading the discussion easier. I've been just as influenced as anyone by the American project, a system of rules and checks that limits the ability of any one person to act too autonomously in matters of government. But I also think that genuinely good people can be genuinely good leaders, defying claims that human greed is insurmountable. I hope this discussion runs better than this morning's did.
12 October 2006
Particular Plato
My discussions over sex and child-rearing in Plato were less than satisfactory; I could not keep together the disparate elements and form them into coherent discussions. Plato's jumps from new ways of marriage to child-rearing practices to the use of sex to motivate soldiers to the culture of hero-worship to the treatment of Greek captives and corpses in war to the control of the community's population levels outjumped me, and we lacked a center the last couple days.
When I go in Friday, I'm going to emphasize that with those discussions, we get Plato actually working out in detail the theory that he took so long to set up beforehand and that we as readers must engage the general theory even if the particulars fall short. I pointed to that with an exercise I had the students do (they were to formulate a thesis that critiques Plato's general project), but I never explicitly stated it.
Midterms are still kicking my butt. The Latin and Old English exams are out of the way, but I still have several pages to write on my Spenser paper, and I've only marked up a third or so of my freshmen's papers. I've still miles to go before I sleep.
When I go in Friday, I'm going to emphasize that with those discussions, we get Plato actually working out in detail the theory that he took so long to set up beforehand and that we as readers must engage the general theory even if the particulars fall short. I pointed to that with an exercise I had the students do (they were to formulate a thesis that critiques Plato's general project), but I never explicitly stated it.
Midterms are still kicking my butt. The Latin and Old English exams are out of the way, but I still have several pages to write on my Spenser paper, and I've only marked up a third or so of my freshmen's papers. I've still miles to go before I sleep.
06 October 2006
Moral education and levels of engagement
The weather report this morning called for highs in the seventies and partly-cloudy skies, so I decided to take my classes outside. 10:00 really is just a quiet group of people; even outside of the tunnel that is Park 123, they didn't talk much. I can deal with that; it just means that I'm going to have to structure discussions differently.
Today's reading was the culmination of Plato's definition of morality. We rehearsed the argument, namely that morality consists of the reason's governing the apetites with the help of the passions, and the students seemed to follow the logic. We talked about modern suspicions about reason and the distinction English still maintains in the words "rational" and "rationalize." Overall we had a good class.
At the end of each class I asked them what they thought about UGA's occasional desire to incorporate moral learning into the curriculum. Almost all agreed that the "alcohol meetings" under which fraternities and sororities suffer are infantilizing and resemble what Plato prescribes for pre-rational children. The verdict was split with regards to instruction in what Plato and Aristotle would call moral reasoning. Some said that what capacity for moral reasoning we might develop has already developed before we arrive on campus. Others thought that we could still develop morally.
If this looks like I'm lobbying for that job should it appear, perhaps I am. If indeed the university gets serious about some sort of moral education into the undergrad experience, I'd probably put my resume in for the job. I suppose I'd treat it in Platonic terms: I wouldn't necessarily want that responsibility, but I'd be afraid that some idjit would get the job and really muck things up.
Today's reading was the culmination of Plato's definition of morality. We rehearsed the argument, namely that morality consists of the reason's governing the apetites with the help of the passions, and the students seemed to follow the logic. We talked about modern suspicions about reason and the distinction English still maintains in the words "rational" and "rationalize." Overall we had a good class.
At the end of each class I asked them what they thought about UGA's occasional desire to incorporate moral learning into the curriculum. Almost all agreed that the "alcohol meetings" under which fraternities and sororities suffer are infantilizing and resemble what Plato prescribes for pre-rational children. The verdict was split with regards to instruction in what Plato and Aristotle would call moral reasoning. Some said that what capacity for moral reasoning we might develop has already developed before we arrive on campus. Others thought that we could still develop morally.
If this looks like I'm lobbying for that job should it appear, perhaps I am. If indeed the university gets serious about some sort of moral education into the undergrad experience, I'd probably put my resume in for the job. I suppose I'd treat it in Platonic terms: I wouldn't necessarily want that responsibility, but I'd be afraid that some idjit would get the job and really muck things up.
05 October 2006
Upcoming sermon
Amos 5:6-15:
6Seek the Lord and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire, and it will devour Bethel, with no one to quench it. 7Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground! 8The one who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name, 9who makes destruction flash out against the strong, so that destruction comes upon the fortress. 10They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. 11Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. 12For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins— you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. 13Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time. 14Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said. 15Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.
There's my text for October 15. I'll preach about a seven-minute homily on that, then Ben will do the same for Mark 10:17-31. Then I'll do a brief (one-minute, roughly) improvisational oration based on his sermon, then he'll do one based on my response, and so on. It went over very well the first time, and I imagine it will again this time.
Once again I find myself taking Erasmus's side over Luther's; the presence of these strong imperatives, and the absence of hand-wringing appeals to "the fall" simply do not allow room for Luther's sin-awareness-turned-cynicism that one sees when the Peasants' Revolt goes down. YHWH expects Israel to be just because YHWH said so, and there will be no excuses for the exploitation that characterizes their life together. There will, however, be punishment. Just as the poor build houses for the rich, so the rich have paid for houses for the invaders (or, more likely, for the rats).
The bit that strikes me most about this passage in Amos is the assumed correspondence between God's orderly and good creation and the expectation that Israel's life together will be orderly and good. There's no sense of inevitability there, no hedging of bets because of "human nature" or "economic forces." I don't see how I can avoid setting up that tone in my part of the sermon on October 15, but I also don't see how I can avoid hitting Ben's strong Lutheran reading of the Mark passage as a truck hits a deer.
I suppose we'll have to see...
6Seek the Lord and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire, and it will devour Bethel, with no one to quench it. 7Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground! 8The one who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name, 9who makes destruction flash out against the strong, so that destruction comes upon the fortress. 10They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. 11Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. 12For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins— you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. 13Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time. 14Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said. 15Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.
There's my text for October 15. I'll preach about a seven-minute homily on that, then Ben will do the same for Mark 10:17-31. Then I'll do a brief (one-minute, roughly) improvisational oration based on his sermon, then he'll do one based on my response, and so on. It went over very well the first time, and I imagine it will again this time.
Once again I find myself taking Erasmus's side over Luther's; the presence of these strong imperatives, and the absence of hand-wringing appeals to "the fall" simply do not allow room for Luther's sin-awareness-turned-cynicism that one sees when the Peasants' Revolt goes down. YHWH expects Israel to be just because YHWH said so, and there will be no excuses for the exploitation that characterizes their life together. There will, however, be punishment. Just as the poor build houses for the rich, so the rich have paid for houses for the invaders (or, more likely, for the rats).
The bit that strikes me most about this passage in Amos is the assumed correspondence between God's orderly and good creation and the expectation that Israel's life together will be orderly and good. There's no sense of inevitability there, no hedging of bets because of "human nature" or "economic forces." I don't see how I can avoid setting up that tone in my part of the sermon on October 15, but I also don't see how I can avoid hitting Ben's strong Lutheran reading of the Mark passage as a truck hits a deer.
I suppose we'll have to see...
04 October 2006
Common Good and indoctrination
The last couple days' discussion haven't left a consistent impression upon my memory. In the afternoon I remember them going well, yet by evening, I can't articulate whether or not I taught anything, much less what I might have taught.
Monday we dug into the question of community size and common good in 9:00. Plato insists that a community that becomes too large is not a community any more. My students seemed to think that UGA is still a community, despite its size, but I don't think I led the conversation down too many roads helpful for answering that. My impression is that UGA is less a community, dedicated to an intelligible common good, and more a shopping mall of sorts. One picks up staple credit-hours from mine and others' required classes, invests in skill-set-stock in one's major classes, and buys overpriced drinks at clubs on weekends. Yes, the metaphor became less abstract on that last one. Deal with it.
In 10:00 our discussion dealt more with the question of Plato's noble lie. Again, students' willingness to accept a lying government shocked me. We also had a fairly fruitful discussion about why a community would want guardians rather than a democracy.
Today's discussion focused more on indoctrination and Plato's unflinching praise of it. My students, in a way that surprised me, seemed for the most part willing to accept indoctrination as a potentially good thing. Hauerwas, I'm sure, would be pleased. I'm not. Of course, I have to blame myself for that lapsed teaching moment--had I set up the discussion better, perhaps I could have rendered a bit more of the shock of Plato's praise of brainwashing. Perhaps not.
And here I sit, having graded (but not marked up) about a third of their second papers. Back to the grind.
Monday we dug into the question of community size and common good in 9:00. Plato insists that a community that becomes too large is not a community any more. My students seemed to think that UGA is still a community, despite its size, but I don't think I led the conversation down too many roads helpful for answering that. My impression is that UGA is less a community, dedicated to an intelligible common good, and more a shopping mall of sorts. One picks up staple credit-hours from mine and others' required classes, invests in skill-set-stock in one's major classes, and buys overpriced drinks at clubs on weekends. Yes, the metaphor became less abstract on that last one. Deal with it.
In 10:00 our discussion dealt more with the question of Plato's noble lie. Again, students' willingness to accept a lying government shocked me. We also had a fairly fruitful discussion about why a community would want guardians rather than a democracy.
Today's discussion focused more on indoctrination and Plato's unflinching praise of it. My students, in a way that surprised me, seemed for the most part willing to accept indoctrination as a potentially good thing. Hauerwas, I'm sure, would be pleased. I'm not. Of course, I have to blame myself for that lapsed teaching moment--had I set up the discussion better, perhaps I could have rendered a bit more of the shock of Plato's praise of brainwashing. Perhaps not.
And here I sit, having graded (but not marked up) about a third of their second papers. Back to the grind.
28 September 2006
I suppose I am a liberal
"True, these principles sound pretty elementary -- "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" -- but in the days since the pope's sermon, I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus."
I read this call for free speech and a free press, hallmarks of those liberal Ameri-Brits of the late eighteenth century, and I agree heartily. Perhaps what they say about college teachers' being liberal is true after all.
Click on the post's title for the full article.
I read this call for free speech and a free press, hallmarks of those liberal Ameri-Brits of the late eighteenth century, and I agree heartily. Perhaps what they say about college teachers' being liberal is true after all.
Click on the post's title for the full article.
27 September 2006
Nihil sub sole novum
There is nothing new under the sun.
But you haven't been around that long, cynic.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But you haven't seen nearly as much, traditionalist.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But you stand on the earth under its light, not beside it as its brother.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But in your threescore and ten, there is plenty new before you.
But you haven't been around that long, cynic.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But you haven't seen nearly as much, traditionalist.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But you stand on the earth under its light, not beside it as its brother.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But in your threescore and ten, there is plenty new before you.
26 September 2006
An Extra in Bartholomew Fair
I'm about to head upstairs to play the Puritan for my office mate's surprise classroom production of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair. Typecasting? Probably. No matter; one has to love a play in which a Puritan loses a theological debate to a puppet, even if one doesn't entirely dislike Puritans.
I'm looking forward to digging back into Republic with my classes. These conferences have been valuable, I think, but Plato is just more fun. I think we're coming up on the wives and children passage--if they don't get riled about that, they're just not reading.
I'm looking forward to digging back into Republic with my classes. These conferences have been valuable, I think, but Plato is just more fun. I think we're coming up on the wives and children passage--if they don't get riled about that, they're just not reading.
22 September 2006
Plato's Guardians and UGA's... what?
We finished up our second Plato "unit" (actually just read enough pages to get to paper 2's revision days) with a haphazard discussion of whether or not UGA students are somehow analogous to Plato's guardians. Some folks seem pretty comfortable with the assertion that college students are there for self-improvement primarily, while others have some idea that they (we) ought to benefit "society" but have trouble articulating who counts as "society" and what concrete benefit college-educated folks confer that high-school-educated folks couldn't.
At Milligan the answers were much clearer. From our opening-week Matriculation ceremony to the commencement ceremony, Milligan let us know that we are indeed the next generation's guardians and that our intellectual pursuits ought to serve the Church make meaning out of God's fallen world even as our vocations, be they education or business or preaching, ought to seek justice, the corrollary of God's good ordering of the world. The "we" was clear, and the expectations were clear.
There are days when I wish I could give the same sort of clarity to my students here at the University, but every time I try, I fade into some fuzzy sentimental idea about "universal humanity" or "local community" or some such. There's nothing wrong with either of those, but without a clearer sense of who "we" are and whom "we" serve, concrete action is hard to imagine. Like my students, I'm not quite sure why we're here. I think that Plato's basic idea of morality, the strong working to benefit the weak, ought to apply, but I'm not sure how.
I think this is at least partly why my students want to return to a sort of omission-model when they talk about morality. UGA students must not be a guardian class, because they don't refrain from smoking, drinking, chewing, and screwing. Plato names those vices as well (along with pastries), but in his treatise, to abstain from such things would not itself be morality but would open up more space in which morality could take place.
To bring this back to the particular, my students look at me as if I were from another planet when I tell them that Milligan had no football team and that a significant hunk of the students, from majors as diverse as business and television communications and Bible and nursing, would consider as a viable option for a Friday night a long night at the coffee house talking philosophy and theology. I'm not making that up--I can think of a number of nights and a wide swath of people who indulged in just that on a regular basis. We also played games and watched movies and took in local bands on other nights, but there was no sense that the weekend necessarily had to involve turning off one's brain for three days.
Admittedly, I'm not as familiar with undergrad culture here as someone ought to be before making these kinds of statements. There might be pockets of weekend intellectuals I just haven't encountered. But in the absence of a clear guardian-vocation, I do see that there's a massive business of turning these four (or six) years of students' lives into one long spring break--do whatcha needs to do to graduate, but certainly don't order your life around intellectual activity.
That's not to say that Milligan is necessarily superior in every way. But in these ways, it is clearer.
At Milligan the answers were much clearer. From our opening-week Matriculation ceremony to the commencement ceremony, Milligan let us know that we are indeed the next generation's guardians and that our intellectual pursuits ought to serve the Church make meaning out of God's fallen world even as our vocations, be they education or business or preaching, ought to seek justice, the corrollary of God's good ordering of the world. The "we" was clear, and the expectations were clear.
There are days when I wish I could give the same sort of clarity to my students here at the University, but every time I try, I fade into some fuzzy sentimental idea about "universal humanity" or "local community" or some such. There's nothing wrong with either of those, but without a clearer sense of who "we" are and whom "we" serve, concrete action is hard to imagine. Like my students, I'm not quite sure why we're here. I think that Plato's basic idea of morality, the strong working to benefit the weak, ought to apply, but I'm not sure how.
I think this is at least partly why my students want to return to a sort of omission-model when they talk about morality. UGA students must not be a guardian class, because they don't refrain from smoking, drinking, chewing, and screwing. Plato names those vices as well (along with pastries), but in his treatise, to abstain from such things would not itself be morality but would open up more space in which morality could take place.
To bring this back to the particular, my students look at me as if I were from another planet when I tell them that Milligan had no football team and that a significant hunk of the students, from majors as diverse as business and television communications and Bible and nursing, would consider as a viable option for a Friday night a long night at the coffee house talking philosophy and theology. I'm not making that up--I can think of a number of nights and a wide swath of people who indulged in just that on a regular basis. We also played games and watched movies and took in local bands on other nights, but there was no sense that the weekend necessarily had to involve turning off one's brain for three days.
Admittedly, I'm not as familiar with undergrad culture here as someone ought to be before making these kinds of statements. There might be pockets of weekend intellectuals I just haven't encountered. But in the absence of a clear guardian-vocation, I do see that there's a massive business of turning these four (or six) years of students' lives into one long spring break--do whatcha needs to do to graduate, but certainly don't order your life around intellectual activity.
That's not to say that Milligan is necessarily superior in every way. But in these ways, it is clearer.
19 September 2006
Censorship
Discussion went well yesterday, though I should have planned better in both cases. We established that censorship can happen in all kinds of contexts and all kinds of reasons but did not have enough time in the end to explore the possibility of evaluating those acts of censorship.
Ah, well. At least we got to think about it.
Tomorrow we finish the section on the city-guardians' education and take a week's break from reading to do revision groups, so no Plato for a little while.
On October 15 I'll be doing another team-sermon with Ben, this time on Amos and Mark, so I suppose the respite from Plato reading won't leave me with nothing to read.
Ah, well. At least we got to think about it.
Tomorrow we finish the section on the city-guardians' education and take a week's break from reading to do revision groups, so no Plato for a little while.
On October 15 I'll be doing another team-sermon with Ben, this time on Amos and Mark, so I suppose the respite from Plato reading won't leave me with nothing to read.
16 September 2006
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