“You think one must practise taking more than one’s share --
that is because you neglect geometry.”

Socrates to Callicles, Gorgias (508A)

      The title of my talk is “St. John’s College and the Spirit of Inquiry.” The goal of St. John’s is to provide the conditions for a liberal education. In what I have to say to you this evening, I shall try to be precise about what such an education means at St. John’s and how the college attempts to attain its goal. I wish to place emphasis on this phrase, “spirit of inquiry,” for although St. John’s is largely defined by its curriculum of great books, and by its so-called tutorials, seminars, laboratories and preceptorials, it is not sufficiently defined by these. What most deeply defines St. John’s is its approach to teaching and learning, its devotion to the love of learning and to the being-at-work (to use Aristotle’s term) of inquisitive conversation.

      St. John’s College has an all-required curriculum. Students are initiated into what we hope is a coherent, fully integrated program. They are deprived of the freedom of creating their own course of study -- or rather, as we would put it, they are relieved of the burden of having to be wise about the shape and sequence of an education they have yet to receive. Relieved of this burden, students can put their energies and their freedom to work where it is most appropriate for them to do so at this stage of their lives: in thought and study unencumbered by the distracting question, “What should I think about and study?” Our hope is that students at St. John’s learn not only through the reading and discussing of great books in different classes but also through the program itself -- through the order and connection of books and through the resonance of ideas and questions that bring together disciplines as diverse as poetry and mathematics. If liberal education aims at the shaping of young souls, then surely it makes sense that the students’ program of study itself be, as far as it can, a paradigm of shapeliness.

      The books of the St. John’s program were chosen in accordance with the following question in mind: What books are truly original, have played a profound role in human thinking over the centuries, and present their ideas in an especially beautiful or amazing form? What books, in other words, are those of which other books are somehow derivative, beside which other books pale in their capacity to teach and astonish with every reading? We do not claim comprehensiveness. Our list of books is a list of great works -- not the list of great works. Some first-rate books (like Rousseau’s Emile or Augustine’s City of God, not to mention any number of great novels) are not on our seminar list. Every year at St. John’s this list is reviewed by the dean and instruction committee. From time to time, a book is either removed or added, usually in the senior year, where, as we approach our own age, it becomes difficult to be sure what the really great books are. Sometimes a book keeps going off and later coming back on the list, like Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. But when someone suggests that we add a great book to the seminar list, the fatal question arises: What book would you take off the list to make room for it?

      What is a great book? It is a book that is always new and inexhaustible. Plato’s Republic, Machiavelli’s Prince, Tolstoy’s War and Peace -- now these are great books. How do we know? By what they do to us, by how they affect (and have affected) human beings who like to think about the deepest and most enduring questions. The proof of the pudding is in the reading -- and re-reading.

      All students at St. John’s undertake four years of mathematics, three years of laboratory science, two years of music, one and a half years of Greek followed by a semester devoted to a Shakespeare play, one and a half years of French followed by a semester of lyric poetry in English, and four years of seminar, in which students read and discuss great books in the Western tradition. In the first semester of their junior and senior years of seminar, students -- for the only two times during their stay at St. John’s -- choose a so-called preceptorial, in which small groups of students spend roughly two months taking up the intensive study of a single book, author or subject matter.

      The model and point of reference for the curriculum is the traditional trivium and quadrivium. The trivium, as you know, comprises the liberal arts of logic, grammar and rhetoric; the quadrivium those of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. These were the arts thought to be (and at St. John’s still thought to be) those appropriate to the free or liberally educated human being. This is the human being who is a slave to neither the necessities of life nor the trends and prejudices of his contemporary culture. He is the human being who is liberated through the cultivation of his capacity for disciplined, reflective, well-rounded thought. What is such thought mainly about in a liberal education? Elements and how these elements conspire to form meaningful, rational and beautiful wholes. Such wholes can be geometric demonstrations, poems, arguments or melodies. They are the food of thought at its most fundamental level.

      Whereas the seminar tends to take up large issues, questions and ideas from great authors from Homer and Aristotle to Tolstoy, Hegel and Freud, the work of the tutorial and laboratory focuses on a detailed examination of a specific subject matter through a close reading of original works in mathematics, music, poetry and physical science. In the freshman year, for example, students in their mathematics tutorial work their way through a substantial portion of Euclid’s Elements before turning to Ptolemy’s Almagest; in the sophomore year, students in their music tutorial, after working through the elements of counterpoint and tonal harmony, analyze and discuss portions of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion ; juniors, in their language class, translate and discuss Racine’s Phèdre ; seniors, in laboratory, explore, through experiment and the reading of original papers, the unfolding of quantum physics.

      In all these classes, students are expected to do the bulk of the technical work in class. They go to the board and do mathematical demonstrations; they translate the sentences of Sophocles’ Antigonê or those of Pascal’s Pensées ; they re-create pivotal scientific experiments; and they analyze pieces of music. And while the seminar (which we consider to be the heart of the program) is entirely devoted to the activity of discussion, the tutorials and laboratories are characterized by this same mode. In practice what this means is that a close, technical scrutiny of a mathematical demonstration leads, naturally and inevitably, to questions about the nature and purpose of mathematical proof; or an experiment in gene-mapping to questions about the nature of organic life; or the analysis of a measure of Mozart to a reflection on the uncanny power music has over our emotions; or the translation of a fragment by Heraclitus to the relation the human soul has to the whole of being.

      Here I must emphasize an important point. It has to do with the central role of mathematics and the mathematical sciences generally in the St. John’s program. The word “mathematics” comes from the Greek verb manthánô, which means both to learn and to understand. The suggestion here (and it is really a fact more than a suggestion) is that of all the studies a human being can take up, mathematics is the one that deals with what is preeminently learnable and understandable. The objects of mathematics are, so to speak, especially friendly to our faculty of thought. If you want good food, either learn to cook or go to a really good restaurant; if what you crave is delicious intelligibility, then read Euclid. Euclid’s intellectual lovableness is attested to year after year by the experience of teachers and students alike in their reading of Euclid’s Elements in freshman mathematics. We do not merely study this book -- we relish it.

      The study of the Elements is perhaps the very best paradigm of what we hope for in the cultivation of a liberally educated human being. Here opinion, right opinion and posturing simply won’t do: The mode of demonstrability, accountability, reigns supreme. Students do proofs at the board from memory; they thus develop and test their ability to present an argument clearly and persuasively. Those who remain seated are also at work in a way that is equally important to their education: They must find effective ways of asking questions and sometimes offering help to the student at the board. There are many other benefits here. Students realize, usually for the first time in their lives, that mathematics doesn’t necessarily mean algebra, that a whole other way of mathematical thinking is not only possible but unusually accessible, extremely beguiling and powerful. Then there is the benefit of the student’s habit of striving to be attentive and precise in both thought and expression.

      Finally, mathematics addresses, more powerfully perhaps than anything else in life, the community of man as grounded in his rational faculty. As Socrates reminds us in the Euthyphro, when it’s a matter of the just and the unjust, we dispute; but when it’s a matter of the odd and the even, we calculate, that is, we use the intellect to reach a demonstrable and therefore shared truth. When studied as a liberal art, mathematics, at least in its geometric guise, thus touches on our moral as well as intellectual being. If studied aright, it conduces to the love and the habit of clarity, order, rigor and nobility of mind. Euclid’s geometry reminds us, especially in its theory of ratio and proportion, that justice is ultimately a kind of just-rightness, a correctness in matters of moral action, perception and judgement.

      Having sung the praises of Euclid’s Elements, I now proceed to the praise of French, in particular, French poetry. Why French, and why not, for example, German? It is a question that some members of our faculty also ask. I must be all too brief on this point. As you listen to my remarks, please bear in mind that I not only love the German language (my philosophic debt to it is incalculable) but also happen to like the sound of German, especially when it is sung.

      Now French was, for a considerable length of time, the language of the civilized world, the language of diplomacy and culture. It is also the case that great French literature stretches all the way from the Middle Ages to our own century. The sheer number of unquestionably great authors in French is simply staggering. But none of this is what I want to talk about. What I want to point to is the typically French obsession with, and self-conscious cultivation of, formal perfection. Only a French author, it seems to me, could have worshipped at the altar of le mot juste. For the past few years I have immersed myself in the teaching of French poetry. I must tell you that never before have I seen so much stunning formal perfection, such extreme mathematical-like attention to details of word choice and word order, rhythm, punctuation, euphony and images. This formal perfection is especially evident in the poetry of Racine, Baudelaire and Paul Valèry, where extaordinary care for formal expression goes hand in hand with deep (and often troubling) reflections on human experience and the passions of the soul. If our goal at St. John’s is to study the elements of language and the beautiful wholes that these elements can form -- if, furthermore, we are to gain from such study a deeper and more acute self-knowledge -- then, in my opinion, we cannot do better than to study French. Pascal is a superb example of prose at its best, and the poetry of Baudelaire is a superb example of poetry (and therefore language) at its best. If what you crave is delicious intelligibility, then read Euclid; if what you crave is the delicious formation of crafted and rhythmic sentences about certain terrible extremes of human experience, then read Baudelaire.

      Writing occupies a central place in the student’s four years of study. Toward the end of each year, students write an essay on some idea or question they wish to explore by plunging into a great book. The essay must be well-written and must take up a work from that year’s course of study. In the essay, the student must raise important questions, attempt some answers supported by textual evidence, and in general say something substantial about a great work. Annual essays in the first three years are followed by an oral examination with the student’s seminar tutors. The senior essay represents the crowning moment of the student’s work at the college. Seniors are given a month off from classes in order to work on their essays with a faculty advisor of their choice. The senior essay can take up a book or author from any of the four years. If the essay is accepted by a designated committee of three faculty members (none of whom is the advisor), the senior must then pass a public, hour-long oral examination conducted in academic attire.

      Writing at St. John’s is not limited to these annual essays. During the year students are required to write papers for their tutorials and laboratories. These papers vary in length and purpose. In laboratory, for example, students might be asked to write a brief description of an experiment and the argument it embodies. In a language tutorial, they are usually asked to turn in a polished translations of, say, a brief passage from Aristotle’s Ethics with a brief commentary. In short, the length, frequency and purpose of these papers is dictated by the needs of the class and the tutor’s imagination. Often it is the most modest assigments, those in which the student is asked not to delve into a deep question but only to get something straight, that prove most helpful to the student’s learning. Much more can be said about the function of writing in the St. John’s program, but I shall stop with this.

      By and large, our curriculum is in chronological or historical order. We do the ancient Greek authors in the freshman year, the Roman and Medieval ones in the sophomore year, various Enlightenment authors in the junior year, and nineteenth and twentieth century authors in the senior year. The motive behind this order, however, is anything but historical. We read the books in the order we do for the simple reason that that is the best way to read them, the way that makes the most sense. If Hobbes refers to Aristotle, then it is just plain common sense to read Aristotle first and Hobbes later. So too, in order to understand the Copernican Revolution in astronomy, it just makes sense to read Ptolemy before Copernicus. At St. John’s College we neither intend nor pretend to study history. We do not, strictly speaking, study “the Greeks” or “the Middle Ages” or “the Enlightenment,” although what we study is excellent preparation for a serious study of history. We do not regard the great authors as representative of an epoch. Indeed, we regard them as representing nothing but their glorious selves.

      Related to this scrupulous avoidance of historical categorization is the avoidance of genres. For us, Homer, a Greek, is not defined by his Greekness, nor is the Iliad an example of something called “the epic,” nor are Homer’s gods thought of as the product of something called “Greek religion.” Homer, for us, is simply a great author, the Iliad a great poem, and the gods characters. Also related to our avoidance of the historical approach is our avoidance of what might be called culturedness or edification. The study of music at St. John’s is thus not for the sake of “music appreciation” or the refinement of sensibility but for the sake of discursive thinking about the elements of which great musical works are composed. The primary goal is not refinement of taste but understanding. If the student’s taste is developed and improved during his study of music (as it often is), why, then we are very happy. And while we do not aim at the refinement of taste, we do hope that students, in the course of their music studies, will take seriously the classical notion that a very deep connection exists between music and the order or disorder of the soul.

      Our avoidance of historical context in the reading of great books can be summed up in the following imperative: “Let the texts speak for themselves!” Is this deliberate avoidance of history a limitation? Of course it is. A fully educated human being ought to know something about history, especially that of his own country and polity. After all, such history is the chronicle and development of the world that influences and shapes his own life. But one cannot and (I believe) should not try to do everything worth doing in a liberal arts program, especially in one such as ours that strives for interconnectedness and eschews the “broad spectrum” approach to education: a little history, a little art appreciation, a little science and human values, and so on. Very important things are bound to be left out. This is the inevitable result of having priorities. We believe, however, that on balance a liberal education owes much more to the disciplined study of elements and foundations and to the pursuit of eternal questions than to “being in the know.”

      Let me say right now that nothing tends to kill genuine learning quicker than information. Tell a student about Greek society and Greek religion and you’ve begun to turn him away from a serious encounter with Homer’s Iliad and its profound reflection on pride, love, authority, human excellence, community and death. Give him enough background material on “the Greeks” and you will begin to make him eventually incapable of thinking of Homer as anything but a Greek. You will have filled his mind and stopped his thinking. I have seen this death of the mind especially in connection with the reading of Dante, where vast scholarship on Dante’s time, place and political circumstances virtually annihilates, for some scholars, the possibility for a real encounter with the ideas in Dante’s poem. In short, the historical perspective, although at some point necessary to a full understanding of great books, can be like the Guest Who Will Not Leave. Once in the house of the mind, he is hard to get rid of.

      I once had the good fortune to hear the historian Jaroslav Pelikan give an eloquent plea for the importance of studying history. Mr. Pelikan dubbed the historian an “amnesiologist” who combats the human tendency to historical forgetfulness. We at St. John’s are also practitioners of amnesiology; we minister to the pathology of forgetfulness. But whereas the historian addresses himself to memory, to the temporal past, we devote ourselves to what Socrates calls recollection -- to the unearthing, through joint inquiry, of the non-temporal “past” of buried and “forgotten” intellectual foundations.

      At St. John’s we do not study the so-called “history of ideas,” though some people think we do. We are not interested in what people thought “then” or in how an idea changed in the course of time. The past as such is of no concern to us. We are not interested, for example, in Victor Hugo’s influence on Baudelaire. What we are interested in is what Baudelaire might be showing us right now about the human condition, or how the Bible and Kant offer radically different alternatives to the pursuit of the human good. It goes without saying that such a reading of books is, from an important perspective, naive. But this is the sort of naivete that encourages the very deepest intellectual digging, the sort of naivete that led Socrates to ask his frustratingly unsophisticated question: “What is it?”

      It is important, so we believe, never to lose track of the following question: What is an appropriate way to begin to read a great book? What approach is the best way to insure that the student’s experience with a great book will be deep, lasting and fruitful? The historically naive approach is obviously seen to be limited when one considers the importance of a mature understanding of historical events and texts in relation to those events. It is nevertheless (at least in our opinion) the best approach for where he, the student, “is,” where he makes his beginning. The history-blind approach serves to bridge the gap between the deepest possible questions and the student’s own life. It is the approach that conduces to the student’s feeling and belief that his best questions are of eternal significance and not the mere products of his temporal climate. What better education than this could one bring to the eventual study of cultural and political history? To sum up, St. John’s echoes St. Augustine when it says on behalf of its students: “Make me mindful of history, O Lord -- but not yet!”

      At the very beginning of this talk I said that St. John’s College provides the conditions for a liberal education. That is to say, it does not guarantee that the education itself is always successful. At St. John’s the student’s individual effort is decisive for whatever benefit he will derive from his studies. Everything stands or falls with that effort. We do not claim to put into the students’ souls what was not there before, just as we do not claim to teach students “how to think.” The student’s education is not a product or service. It is not a contract, in which a student pays money in exchange for something we promise to deliver. The books, the tutors, a highly coherent curriculum, a genuine community of learning, constant opportunities for inquisitive conversation in class, many occasions for conversations with one’s tutors outside of class -- all this is provided so that the student may make the effort to learn. No effort, no learning. In the end, the education that the student receives is the one that he gives himself.

      Herein lies the extreme vulnerability and the risk of liberal arts colleges and the liberal education to which they aspire. Occasional failure, one might say, is inscribed in the being of a college that aims at true liberal education.

      Seminar is the most vulnerable, difficult and demanding of all classes at St. John’s. Seminars are led by two tutors -- a precaution against “tutor-takeover.” Tutors (as we are called) are not professors. We are not experts endowed with authoritative opinions on which the students are to thrive. In seminar we may speak up, put forth an insight, argue a point, even fairly strongly -- but, like anyone else in the seminar, we can be disagreed with and even ignored. (By the way, sometimes it is not such a bad thing that we are ignored.) The conversation is supposed to take on a life of its own. This life is sustained not by our wise pronouncements or lecturing or constant corrections of error, but through the students’ own intelligent involvement in joint inquiry -- through their continued questioning and testing of each other’s opinions and their effort to penetrate the meaning of a book.

      Kant tells us that there are two general sources of human knowledge: spontaneity and receptivity. It is just this combination that we try to encourage in our students, especially in seminar. Students must be adventurous and as articulate as they can manage to be in raising their own questions and putting forth their own ideas: They must be spontaneous. But they must also be intelligently receptive, that is, they must practise the art of listening -- an art which, like patience, is singularly undramatic but which is absolutely essential to intelligent conversation. Naturally, teachers wish to correct what they perceive to be their students’ errors. But this mode of teaching, when allowed to rule, can stifle and even kill the learning it intends to promote by dampening spontaneity and by reducing receptivity to the mere “soaking it in” or “taking notes.” Even a preoccupation with learning something efficiently can impede its being learned well. It is far better, we believe, to let students get out of a muddle by themselves or sometimes even to let them stew in the juices of their own misconceptions. Now, how long to let a muddle go on, how to help restore health to an ailing conversation without playing the role of the all-wise doctor who cures all ills and smooths all paths, how, in short, to get a conversation back on track without tutor-takeover -- that, of course, is the tough “judgement call” that tutors continually must face. It is one of many reasons why the job of tutor is so daunting and so beset with the prospect of failure.

      I have said that tutors at St. John’s are not professors, not experts who teach by putting forth the authoritative opinions. What, then, are we?

      We are midwives, to use Socrates’ image from the Theaetetus. That is, we do not put knowledge into the students’ souls but draw out their opinions and encourage the critical examination of these opinions. We “teach” for the most part by asking questions, knowing full well that sometimes -- sometimes, mind you -- the tutor can best draw out students by making some astonishing claim or insightful suggestion. Right now seniors in my mathematics tutorial are struggling with Gödel’s incompleteness proofs. One question I want to keep asking them is this: What are the advantages and disadvantages of formalism in mathematics and in thinking generally? They are sure to respond in various ways. Most of what they say will be extremely interesting, some of which I am sure not to have thought of before. Some students may come up with questions more interesting than mine. In any case, opinions will lead to further questions and further attempts to answer these questions. Sometimes the students will ask me questions, challenge my views, put me on the spot. This is a good opportunity for me to learn something. Any given discussion may end in bewilderment or unresolved disagreement. The important thing is that together we grabbed hold of something worth learning and took it as far as we could that day. As tutor, I will have tried (and perhaps failed) to draw out their opinions and their inquisitiveness, to tempt them, so to speak, into self-sufficient inquiry and a critical reassessment of their opinions. The offspring of learning and understanding is in any case theirs, not mine. I will simply have been, like a midwife, a necessary assistant to a natural (though at times painful) process.

      Now the word “tutor” derives from the Latin verb tutor, which means watch, make safe, guard, protect or defend. A tutor is a guardian. In his political work entitled Monarchy, Dante refers to Cato the Younger as severissimus libertatis tutor, “the strictest guardian (or tutor) of liberty.” This is yet another way of saying what a tutor is at St. John’s. The tutor is the guardian of the student’s path to freedom through inquiry. He is the one whose job it is to do all he can to help the individual student and the class as a whole get beyond intellectual inertia, unclarity, opinionatedness and superficial answers -- all of which constitute the condition of unfreedom.

      The most important thing about a tutor at St. John’s is that he is also a student. Indeed, he is, like the students in his classes, a student of the St. John’s program, for he is expected to teach broadly in all aspects of the program, regardless of his academic background. Just as the students are encouraged to learn from the books, from the program and from conversation, so the tutor is expected to learn, and to continue learning, from his close and constant association with these things. The tutor is thus the student’s paradigm for a lover of learning, for a human being who does not claim to know but who passionately and actively seeks to know. Given the sheer breadth and rigor of the St. John’s program, it is no surprise that those who apply to be tutors do so primarily because they want to continue (and in some cases even refound) their own education and only secondarily because they want to teach.

      So a tutor is a midwife, a guardian and a paradigm student. He is the leader of the class but not the authority for its opinions.

      Another central assumption of our approach to learning at St. John’s is that learning proceeds best when it is done in common. St. John’s has an extremely lively “coffee shop life.” This, the coffee shop, is where most tutors meet and converse with their students and advisees; where students meet in small groups to go over their French translations or laboratory assignments before class; where a tutor and student might meet regularly to read something outside of class. The coffee shop scene, more than other aspects of the college, shows the extent to which we take seriously the notion of a community of learning. Our learning, our interest in one another’s ideas and questions, is not confined to the classroom but spills over into every aspect of college life.

      One of the most striking facts of our community of learning is that tutors constantly talk with, and learn from, each other. There are weekly meetings for tutors teaching the same tutorial or laboratory; and there are regular faculty seminars and study groups. We are constantly engaging each other in conversation informally as well -- about how our classes are going, about how best to get our students to learn Greek or the calculus, about whether Socrates really does believe that the soul is deathless. We also constantly seek out help from colleagues who are more knowledgeable on a particular topic or in some part of the St. John’s program.

      Is this emphasis on communal learning an expression of our belief that the individual exists for the sake of the community, the larger whole? Not necessarily. One could say that it is only by means of such communal learning that the individual’s learning is best evoked, sustained and fed. When I make the effort to learn in the company of others, I am exposed to perspectives other than my own, perspectives that cannot help but shed an always new light on my own thoughts and concerns. Fellow learners “keep me honest,” that is, their critical response to things I say reminds me of the need to be self-critical. Then there is the fact that, as Diomedes says to Odysseus in the Iliad, “When two go together, one always sees before the other.” I learn from others who see more, and also more quickly, than I do on any given occasion, and I cultivate my own powers of leading others to new discoveries and questions. It is one thing to see something, another to get somebody else to see what I see. In trying to get somebody else to see what I see, I often come to see it better. My helping another helps me. And so it goes: Communal learning benefits the individual, and the individual benefits the community of learning. This is the dance of St. John’s College.

      I hasten to add that a community of learning, rooted in the centrality of conversation, is a mighty inducement to the cultivation of our moral skills and our attentiveness to human diversity and to our humanity in general. A group can advance together, can learn together, only if its members learn to get along with and respect each other. Good will is essential. If I want to be effective in a group of fellow learners, if I want to get the most out of the experience for myself, then I must learn, among other things, how to enter a conversation in a way that is timely, helpful to others and inviting to continued discussion. I should not bend others to my will or demand that my questions and concerns be addressed, any more than I should sit there passively and “take notes.” I must use and develop my powers of judgement, be intellectually alive to what is going on at any given moment. This is difficult, and it takes practise. When a teacher is totally in control of the conversation, when he calls all the shots and fields all the questions, the human dimension to learning, although present, is diminished. It is as though a god has descended among mere mortals. But when a real conversation is going on, when the teacher’s job is to draw the students out and get them to interact with and learn from each other -- well, you can imagine the consequences. Then students must learn to work with, and within, the whole crazy, unpredictable realm of their passions: bruised ego, ego gone wild, dejection, the love of controversy, the love of victory, the obsession with a single question or idea. There is a positive side: Learning through conversation produces the pleasure in discovering things in company with other human beings, the celebration of wit, occasional silliness and the sheer will to have fun with a thought. It promotes that strange mix of seriousness and play that has a way of attending the most sublime moments of our lives.

      All this is the curse and the blessing of learning in common without the dominating influence of an expert. To learn in common is to be constantly reminded of the fact that, although our intellects and our intellectual strivings may be semi-divine, our being is unavoidably human. This humanness, although sometimes an obstacle to inquiry, forges a strong bond between our love of knowledge and our desire for friendship. Learning in common is thus not just a means to a deeper understanding of texts, ideas and questions -- it is also a practical education in human nature and the constant opportunity for self-knowledge.

      “Knowledge for What?” That is the title of the lecture series to which you have invited me. I now throw all caution to the wind as I try to answer this all-important question.

      It has been said many times but must always be said again: Whereas non-liberal education, professional training in a field, shapes us for our chosen business of life, liberal education shapes us for our leisure. As you know, the word “school” derives from scholê , the Greek word for leisure. In a lecture on liberal education, Jacob Klein refers us to Aristotle’s Politics for an important insight into leisure. “Nature herself,” writes Aristotle, “requires that we should be able not only to work well, but to use leisure well; for, as I must repeat once again, the first principle of all action is leisure … and therefore the question must be asked in good earnest: What ought we to do when at leisure?” Aristotle goes on to say that there are some studies that are to be valued for their own sake. These are the ones that are to be pursued and enjoyed in our leisure. Now it is precisely the role of the liberal arts to prepare us for the properly pleasurable use of leisure. They comprise those things that are inherently interesting and pleasant to think about. Such studies are an end in themselves. In other words, the answer to the question, “Knowledge for what?”, at least as far as Aristotle is concerned, is “For itself.”

      Toward the end of the Apology Socrates describes what he hopes for after death. It is a life of unimpeded conversation and inquiry. In the afterlife, as he playfully depicts it, Socrates can go around questioning famous people and not get killed for it. So too in the strange myth at the end of the Phaedo, Socrates depicts a reward for the philosophic life that consists in an endless, leisurely “looking” at the way things are. Inside the earth all sorts of swooshings, purgings and reconciliations are going on, but at the surface all is sweetness and light -- all is the happy fruit of an accomplished orderliness of soul. Both images of “philosopher heaven” represent the rising above politics and moral seriousness. (There are no cities on the surface of what Socrates calls “the true earth.”) The images convey the notion that the ultimate goal of education (here, philosophic education) is not moral virtue but contemplation. The images do not show us how moral seriousness as a necessary goal of human life can itself be reconciled with contemplation as the highest good, how politics can be reconciled with philosophy, duty with eros. They merely proclaim, in image-fashion, that the highest life is the life of inquiry and intellectual “looking.”

      The erosion of moral life and a moral “center” in the world at large, together with the erosion of our faith in politics, makes it more important than ever for human beings everywhere to care for moral virtue and to pursue it in their daily lives. It is more important than ever to instill a love and admiration for virtue in the young. The question is whether it is the main business of liberal education to do this. The question is very real and very difficult. It may be that there are some, perhaps many, problems with the education of the young that liberal education is not able to correct, at least not without ceasing to be what it most is and ought to be. St. John’s has made its decision. We hope and believe that the education we seek to promote in our students will indeed enable them to be virtuous men and women, and responsible citizens of our republic. But this is not our primary goal. Our primary goal is to promote the spirit of inquiry and to arouse and guide the love of knowledge for its own sake. We believe that this pursuit of knowledge is ennobling. For my part, I cannot help thinking and believing that such a pursuit plays an important role in making human beings sane and good, that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is not simply noble but also beneficial.

      As I mentioned earlier, learning in common obliges the learner to practise virtues of character as well as virtues of intellect. A community of learning like the one at St. John’s will necessitate and evoke a certain spirit of communalness, an esprit de corps, in accordance with which tutors and students must act with respect for one another and for the community to which they belong: We must be good citizens. Perhaps it is in this way that St. John’s, while aiming at knowledge for its own sake, nevertheless pursues its goal -- at least ideally -- in a virtuous and humanizing way, especially, as I have suggested, when it turns to the study of mathematics, that most learnable and shareable of studies in which the intelligible is wedded to the beautiful.

      Does St. John’s have a motto -- I mean besides its official one about books and a balance? I believe it does. We find it in the justly famous conclusion to Plato’s Phaedrus: koina gar ta tôn philôn, “The things of friends are held in common.” Perhaps the recovery of moral virtue in our world depends more than we think on the virtue of friendship. And perhaps true friendship, like true freedom, depends more than we think on the spirit of inquiry.