A Timeless Course of Study, Part II
The first part of this essay can be found here: A Timeless Course of Study, Part 1 (substack.com)
Long recognized as one of the classics of political philosophy, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is also a masterpiece of conceptual analysis. From the very first pages of the work, Burke subjects the concepts at the heart of the Revolutionists’ rhetoric to a thorough reconsideration, and reveals that none of them truly mean what the Revolutionists’ say they mean. “Liberte!” cries the sans-culotte of Paris, and expects a sudden deference to his political designs because of his appeal to this great principle. But, retorts Burke, liberty is not a good in and of itself, but only insofar as circumstances render it so: “Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty?” “The Rights of Man!” thunders the representative of the Mountain, but, says Burke, natural rights are distinct from the rights of civil society, so that any direct appeal to the “rights of man” only serves to confuse the complicated demands of ordering human needs appropriately in a frame of civilized life: “the moment you abate any thing from the full rights of men, each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience.” Over and over again, Burke wrests the vocabulary that the Revolutionists have invested with a kind of daemonic magic, and exorcises its mischievous aura under the compulsion of his rigorous logic.
Burke undoubtedly owed this remarkable capacity for conceptual analysis in part to his own classical education. The intellectual tradition which formed his mind is one that traces its lineage to a thinker for whom getting words right was the highest imperative. The Socratic dialectic bequeaths to the student of the West an everlasting model of clear thought, which consists in the pursuit of satisfactory definitions for the ideals by which we live our lives. The greatest of the Platonic dialogues is no more than an extended disquisition on the meaning of the word “justice;” other texts in that corpus subject the concepts of piety, courage, or knowledge to profoundly incisive examination. From Socrates, the Western thinker receives his most fundamental injunction: “you shall know what your words mean.” The practice of wielding words like weapons – blunt, purposely vague, and connotative weapons – which is such a habitual contrivance of the politician is henceforth banished from the realm of honest argumentation. To the classical educator, the steward of the tradition to which Socrates helps give birth, descends the obligation to ensure his students know what it means to use words well.
I have often thought that a complete and satisfactory education could be provided to young people simply by teaching them the proper use of the word “love.” There is no word more misused and abused in common talk, particularly in our own cultural environment; there is no word, truly understood, which could ramify so consequentially through a young person’s entire budding worldview. As part of this tutelage in the meaning of love, I imagine students reading and discussing a select number of texts in which the nature of love is explored and refined: significant portions of Scripture – Psalm 42, the Gospel of John, Chapter 13 of First Corinthians – alongside the “Symposium” and the “Vita Nova;” the poems of Petrarch and Traherne; the myths of Ishtar and Psyche. The culmination of this study would simply require students to articulate the conception of love they have derived from the accumulated reflection and discussion that emerged out of such a course of reading. Whatever else students might gain from such an experience, they would certainly gain some resistance to the relentless nonsense that gets spread through the customarily vapid usage of this word in our own day and age.
In the first half of this essay, I claimed that the practice of presenting students with their reading framed exclusively by historical contexts – a practice more or less standard in classical education - can tend to dampen the impact that this reading might have on students. I suggested that alternative frameworks for the presentation of texts were desirable and could counterbalance the historical approach. One such alternative framework would be provided to us by the task of conceptual analysis; by organizing texts around reflection on central concepts like freedom, or justice, or beauty, classical educators can cultivate a rich, mature understanding of these words, in a way that can fundamentally alter their students’ general worldview. A consideration of the word “virtue” might entail the study of The Odyssey, the Nicomachean Ethics, A Tale of Two Cities, Machiavelli’s The Prince and Lord Jim. What if a student concluded her study of the humanities in high school by considering the meaning of words central to her understanding of the world in light of the tradition she spent her previous years examining. Her first three years could provide her with a chronological presentation of Western cultural history; during her senior year, her reading could prescind from that chronology in order to reflect in a more focused manner on certain concepts and ideals at the heart of that tradition. In this way, the culminating act of her education would inhere in an explicit invitation to appropriate the tradition which she has been taught, and make it applicable to her own experience and development.
This is one way in which texts can be presented to students in other-than-historical contexts. There are additional approaches. I have reflected a great deal about what a proper writing program would look like at the high school level, and have written at times here about some of my thoughts on this topic. To my mind, such a program would encompass elements of rhetoric, logic, debate, and public speaking, along with grammar and sentence instruction, so that it would provide a complete training in the kind of thinking that takes place through language. One necessary component of this sort of training would be providing students with effective models of the linguistic patterns they are learning: King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as a model of refutation, Johnson’s Rambler essays as models of parallelism. In an extremely well-designed course of study, the reading prescribed by cultural history can coincide with that prescribed by writing instruction: so the class can read Pericles’ Funeral Oration in the course of their study of Ancient history, while they are simultaneously learning about the forms of argument through their course on rhetoric; the work can provide insight into the Peloponnesian War, while supplying the class with argumentative strategies to employ in their own writing. Again, the presentation brings the text alive, demonstrating to students its actual and vital relevance in the here and now.
Of course, a Humanities class need not be the only place where texts might provide models to students. In a Poetry or Creative Writing class, a sonnet or a short story can introduce students to techniques that they can emulate in their own creations. In such a context, the students effectively become peers of Shakespeare or Hawthorne or Faulkner, engaged in the same practice as those illustrious forbears, learning from their achievements what it is they themselves can apply to their own writing. In a Drama class, the performances which students “stage” for the class will be preceded by discussions about characters’ motives and emotions, the symbolic weight of certain lines, or the kinds of gestures most likely to accompany the text. In either case, the framework through which the students approach these texts is an aesthetic one, a framework that allows the students to encounter texts in their full and immediate freshness.
I want to reiterate the point I made in the first half of this essay: none of these approaches need entirely replace the presentation of Humanities texts in a historical framework. As I mentioned there, I consider the teaching of cultural history to be an indispensable part of classical education, and do not want to seem to denigrate that practice at all. But for the reasons I stated in that section, I am convinced that the historical framework needs to be augmented by other modes of presentation, in order to ensure that our students encounter their reading as – to borrow a phrase from Boswell – true, evident, and actual wisdom. I have suggested alternative frameworks here; I am certain that talented classical educators could extend this repertoire considerably.