In light of the introductory post to this series, I will here engage with the first of the three questions I posed. Arising directly from Aristotle’s discussion of the topic that all human beings desire by nature to know, the question I posed is: What content do all men by nature want to know?

The importance of this question – along with the fact that I have rarely ever seen any classical educator either pose it or significantly engage with it – has been pressed home to me for some years by the weight of much less-than-stellar pedagogical experiences in real classical schools in real classrooms with real students really engaging with classical materials. Multiple complex factors converge, of course, and there is surely plenty of “blame” to spread around in evaluating the implications of such negative experiences, but it is not my purpose to do so here. 

Rather, having acknowledged the backdrop of a great variance between the overly rosy picture one tends to get from classical education promotional materials and the actual experiences of classroom teachers, I want to approach the problem by drawing from Aristotle’s dictum and asking, What content do all men by nature want to know?  

Being a good classicist, knowing my rhetoric, I begin by saying that a division of the matter is critical for clarity.  In my judgment, dividing the question into parts in reverse order of the terms is the best way to proceed. Thus, to begin, what does it mean, precisely, to say that human beings “want to know”?

Though I’m talking Aristotle, allow me to borrow from Socrates, who presciently argued many times that a want is based on a lack, and that no one goes looking for what he already has. If you want something, it’s because you don’t have it. If you don’t want something, it’s because you do have it. Simple enough, right?

But let’s not let apparent simplicity divert us from examination, for already, even with so simple an observation we have stumbled upon a gold mine of principles and applications. For the Philosopher plainly says that “an indication” of the truth of his principle is “the delight we take in our senses,” most particularly sight. For sight “brings to light many differences between things.” Sight, that is, generates knowledge of distinctiveness, and, though Aristotle does not say it in so many words, knowledge of distinctiveness can provoke desire. 

Consider, if you will, that with respect to sight, wants can arise from recognizing something lacking in oneself that seems to be present in the object of sight.  Now consider, if you will, the radical notion (at least to our jaded era) that not all wants are created equal. A want is not good simply because it is, nor is a thing wanted good simply because it is wanted, nor has good been achieved merely because a thing wanted has been obtained. 

At every stage of this human wanting to know, then, we must beware of what Eve (and Pandora) discovered to the great detriment of all. Some things appear beautiful but aren’t, and immoderate or disordered wants have the power to ruin entire lives.

To bring this seemingly abstract discourse around to education, let’s go with Aristotle as he tells us that the major difference between animals and humans, both of whom have the sensation of sight, consists in the fact that “The animals other than man live by appearances and memories, and have but little of connected experience; but the human race lives also by art and reasonings.”

Now art and reasonings is just code for what makes the Liberal Arts even possible: the ability of the human mind to make judgments about the objects of sensory experience (especially sight). Unlike (mere) animals, the human animal (made in the image of God) doesn’t only perceive differences between things, but also discriminates between them, retaining and then drawing upon “connected experience” in order to advance in actual knowledge of the world.

This discrimination and reflection upon connected experiences gives rise to the arts, or skills, each of which in a particular domain sees and judges and organizes and extends human understanding such that again, unlike the (mere) animals, we do not only have our first and most rudimentary perceptions to live by. We have more: the considered reflections of active reason, plumbing the depths of cause-and-effect, searching out connections, rejecting fallacies, creating by the power art – what Dante called “God’s grandchild,” born of human subcreative work on created Nature – real bodies of insight into the world and human life in it.

(This is, by the way, why the adjective Liberal, Free, has been historically paired with the noun Arts: these bodies of insight into the world and human life in it are precisely the sorts of things that free the human being from mere brutish perceptions and reactions to those perceptions. By implication, there are also Servile, Slavish, arts that may, if not ordered to Virtue, aggrandize rather than civilize mere brutish perceptions.)

Aristotle goes on: “But yet we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than to experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience (which implies that Wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge); and this because the former know the cause, but the latter do not.” Here we see (!) the elementary distinction between people who just experience the world (like animals) and people who pursue arts and reasonings in order to “know the cause” of what they observe.

The distinction is critical for what it is we as classical educators should be expecting to occur in our real schools in real classrooms with real students. Of course – a thousand times of course! – we should treat all students as equal in legal status, in human dignity, in educational opportunity. No student should be a priori written off as undeserving of our best efforts at all times to ennoble and inspire toward a higher, non-brutish mode of living.  As the Declaration of Independence puts it of all human beings, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

“All men want to know.” Nevertheless, acknowledging the equal legal status, human dignity, and entitlement to educational opportunity of all does not in any way entail romantic idealisms about either ongoing progress or eventual outcomes. If a portrait of a classical education program looks too good to be true, it likely is too good to be true. If it’s pushing off criticisms of its current state by appealing to an epic vision of a future state, it’s resisting the call to lasting Wisdom and preferring changing mundanities. Sight is our primary sense, says Aristotle, the one that brings us the most delight. But that is precisely why we should not take it for granted. 

Just as we can lead a horse to water, we can make a student decline a Latin noun, parse a Greek verb, sit around a Harkness table trading “What it means to me” first impressions about Herodotus’ Histories, answer comprehension questions on Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, write a progymnasmata on the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, memorize the first ten lines of Fitzgerald’s translation of The Aeneid, and expound a 20-page senior thesis on what the Biblical Worldview has to say about tattoos, and not one bit of any of it may ever constitute real knowledge, let alone a “classical education.”

“All men want to know.”  But want isn’t a neutral category, for it is already pregnant with a complex array of anthropological and epistemological and ethical habits that may be undermining all the work being done as fast as it can be done. (In this connection, wants might be thought of as Jesus’ types of ground in the parable of the sower – a metaphor no classical educator should imagine he has ever adequately grasped and applied to its fullest.)

“All men want to know.” But if Aristotle is correct – and he just simply is – that the human animal can live like a mere animal, subsisting on “appearances and memories, and hav[ing] but little of connected experience,” it simply does follow that not all students “want by nature to know” in precisely the same way – which means that no classical / Liberal Arts education worthy of the name ought ever to portray itself as “for everyone” in precisely the same way.

“All men want to know.”  Indeed, but there are frequently worlds of difference wrapped up in that seemingly simple word want. As classical educators, we should be far more invested than we are (as a rule) in discerning and disciplining not only the wants of our students, but of ourselves as well. Before we can even discuss what we want to know – a discussion that easily draws our minds to curriculum and lesson plans and grades and classroom management skills and the like – we first need to ponder for a while the very nature of this want that directs the phrase “want to know.”

For if we do not want the right things, we will go looking for the wrong ones to supply the lack implied by the want – and to sort of fuse a bit of Socrates with a bit of Dante, on a misbegotten quest like that, we will invariably find that desire isn’t only the root of every good thing in life, but also of every evil thing.

In the next installment, I’ll move further back in the question What contentdo all men by nature want to know? by focusing on the phrase “by nature.”

Aristotle opens his Metaphysics with the famous line, “All men by nature desire to know.” What better teleological hope could a classical educator adopt than this? Of course, we will adopt it in the context of the necessary confession that ultimately, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Christ (Col. 2:3) – but still, in terms of what kind of creature the human being is, surely Aristotle the pagan has precisely hit the God-made nail with the God-made hammer. All human beings by nature desire to know.”

But several important questions immediately arise, not just for specifically classical educators, but for anyone, really, pursuing education in the mode of the the Liberal Arts (whether the old or modern idea of such).

First, arising directly from Aristotle’s discussion, what content do all men by nature want to know?

Second, also arising from that milieu, what does it mean and entail to say that they by nature want to know content?

And third, arising directly from the fact that contemporary classical / Liberal Arts education is being done within the vastly different cultural context of an aspiration for universal literacy driving the production of a public mass culture, who exactly should be expected to thoroughly profit from exposure to such an education?

Allow me to briefly (I hope!) expand on each of these questions in subsequent entries.

The world of classical education today lives within a curious dialectic. One major reason many embrace it is because they are deeply pessimistic about other kinds of education, even to the point, often, of believing other kinds to be lost causes. Yet having embraced classical education, many of the same people swing wildly over to boundless optimism about not just the enterprise of classical education as they are experiencing it, but about that enterprise’s prospects for the future. And having swung over to boundless optimism, they tend to be quite miffed when a less bouyant view comes around.

It’s understandable, of course, that gadflies and jeremiads tend to be looked on with disfavor. Part of this is just Americanitas – in the “land of the free, home of the brave,” which is, of course, “the greatest country on earth,” the ethos of exceptionalism is nearly a religion all its own, powerfully urging everyone to perpetually look on the bright side. People who come around dressed in shabby Socrates costumes and raining on the parade do seem rather pretentious. No one likes a party-pooper.

But there is often a theological aspect to the dialectic, too. In Christian circles, an appreciable percentage of advocacy of classical education coincides with acceptance of an eschatological triumphalism. On this view, since in and through Christ’s victory on the cross we are redemptively moving forward, aiming at the new creation, there’s little room for anything but exultant calls to laugh long, deep belly-laughs and sing and dance and feast and thank God for how splendidly we’re getting along rebuilding, in just a few short decades, the ruins of the ages.

The irony is pretty thick.

Consider that the classical education movement itself was born from Evangelical naysaying about the then-current educational situation. Had there been no annoying gadflies buzzing “Dorothy Sayers! The Trivium! The biblical worldview! Culture war! Fight! Win!” in the ears of practically anyone who would listen, the movement itself would never have gotten started. Sayers’ essay is quite pessimistic (!) about the prospects of her proposed reforms ever being implemented, and indeed, it took almost half a century for anyone of sufficient personal charisma to be able to launch a successful movement based on them.

Consider, more importantly, that many of the primary sources, both pagan and Christian, used in classical education, are far from optimistic about the situations and people they address. Whether Socrates’ frequent criticism of the masses (that’s you and me and all our friends!) as not only uneducated, but unwilling to expose themselves to true education, or Thucydides’ conviction that the evils of the Peloponnesian War function as patterns for all future human conflicts, or Aristotle’s belief that history proceeds serially through advance-fall-advance-fall, etc., or the severe difficulties with one’s own soul that Stoic ethical treatises reveal, or Augustine’s studied ambiguity about the prospects of all attempts, even Christian, to create a just social order, or the almost monotonously repetitive Medieval theme of radical contemptus mundi based on frequently repeated biblical demands to focus not on this-worldly success but on the eternal,it is very difficult to escape the overwhelmingly negativetenor of most of the primary sources used in classical education curricula.

But again, despite this essentially “dark” orientation of the sources themselves, the classical education movement is full of people who treat criticism directed at ideas and practices they advocate – presumably on the basis of the sources – as somehow out of bounds. The classical sources abound in warnings against taking appearances for realities, yet what is the not-so-subtly proud messianism of our self-talk in classical education circles if not the most gigantic appearance of all when set next to the sources we claim as our inspiration?

The classical sources assume the world as a given that is knowable by everyone who bothers to look at it, and the world they show us is quite the same sort of thing as our own. The classical authors act as if they are substantively engaging with that world when they say that wisdom is always right in front of us but we more often than not fail to see it because we prefer our own prejudices instead. Both pagan and Christian, they posit a universal human condition under heaven that they are channeling in order to pass down enduringly valid observations and or prescriptions.

At times, it is true, classical authors overmagnify the truth-value of things said by “the fathers,” as if things are true because they are old. (The Medievals, for all the many good things they do have to teach us, are pretty bad in just that way.) But it is worth asking whether we advance upon them by instead overmagnifying the truth-value of things said by ourselves, when we who are but of yesterday have scarcely begun to be tested against the standards of books we claim are more valuable because they have passed the test of millennia.

Please do not take these remarks as an assault on optimism per se. There is a legitimate, healthy, and holy place for optimism – when optimism is equivalent to “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” i.e., faith. But even biblical faith is neither a leap in the dark nor an exaggeration of short term achievements. It is, rather a virtue firmly rooted in verifiable human experiences of the world-as-the-world even as it points us beyond the world. It is not faith to act as if, “optimistically speaking” we are already pretty far down the road toward the world-as-it-will-be. Faith is not presumption.

A current leader in the classical movement, has claimed that the problem with giving a classical education today is that none of us ever received that thing ourselves. If that is true (and it is), should not we take greater care with slinging our optimism about? Herodotus was, of course, correct when he put into the Persian royal advisor Artabanus’ mouth, “God always loves to cut down those who…think big thoughts.” And while we’re on Herodotus, remember Croesus of Lydia the next time you’re tempted to enthuse about how earth-shaking, mind-blowing, culture-illuminating, and kingdom-of-God-advancing your own thoughts about and practice of “classical” education really are. Look to the end, which you don’t and can’t know, and you’ll see why unalloyed cheerfulness may just be a species of self-delusion, not wisdom.

One thing that has come to concern me in my years as a classical educator is what I see as a widespread type of intellectual emasculation of the classical texts in our circles.

What I mean is the phenomenon of reading the classical books as materials for practicing polemical defenses of what we already believe on other grounds, and have no intention of letting old books question. It’s a curious sort of attitude, since our movement loves to cite Lewis’ remark in his preface to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. There, Lewis expounds the problem with reading only recent books as the fact that they sound right to us because we inhabit the same cultural space as them: they ask only the questions we ourselves already ask, and so they come to the sorts of answers we ourselves are already predisposed to come to – and we are so easily amazed at how wise others who think just like us prove we are. Conversely, says Lewis, the value of reading really old books is that they don’t share our prejudices, don’t ask the same questions we are asking, and so are not likely to have gone astray in the exact ways we ourselves are most likely going astray – but find it difficult to see when reading only books inside our echo chamber.

Many in our movement love to cite this Lewis quote, but the real impact of it seems yet to have hit a lot us squarely in the face, to wit: as mostly unskilled (though we’re working on that) readers of the classical texts, we don’t already know, and that’s the main reason why we’re reading the classical texts in the first place. We’re already thoroughly familiar with our own time’s way of thinking about politics, economics, war, education, art, music, and so on. What we’re reading the classics for is to find out what we might be missing by ONLY being super-familiar with the insides of our own heads.

Or at least, that’s what we should be reading the classics for. It is my distinct impression that far too many of us are reading the classics for very different reasons than the one they themselves were written for, the acquisition of wisdom. It would be tedious to drag out direct quotes from classical movement authors showing this phenomenon, so instead, I’ll be devoting this space to combating it positively – by trying to show ways in which even we Christians can profit from the classical texts by trying to discern in them the wisdom God often granted even to those who denied Him.