"Everything Aristotle Has Said is Wrong":

The Authority of Texts and How We Got This Way

Lecture by Grant Franks, delivered

February 6, 1998 at St. John's College, Annapolis

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In 1536, Pierre de la RamÈe (in Latin: "Petrus Ramus") stood before the Arts faculty at the University of Paris as a candidate for the degree of Master of Arts. He had come to defend a provocative thesis: "Quaecumque ab Aristotle dicta essent, commentitia esse", which is to say, "Everything Aristotle has said is wrong."

I wish I could tell you what Ramus said in defense of his reckless claim. Unfortunately, the "master's thesis" in that time was not a research paper or written essay as it is today; it was simply a proposition or statement that the candidate expounded orally. Moreover, at least one historian claims that Ramus's thesis was not as alarming as it sounds to modern ears, and that the story has been inflated and embroidered by what he calls "lovers of partisan histrionics."

But even if Ramus did not actually refute every statement of Aristotle in a single afternoon, his story still caught the imagination of the age. Ramus's thesis took on the aspect of a myth -- a new myth, a modern myth -- depicting a young, brash hero setting out alone to challenge not a dragon or a monster but the weight of entrenched authoritative tradition. As such, he was made to stand alongside other icons of early-modern rebellion: Giodorno Bruno, burned for claiming the universe to be infinite; Luther nailing his 95 theses to the church door; Galileo, browbeaten into a public confession that the earth is stationary, but whispering to himself, "Yet, it moves!"

In the sixteenth century Aristotle still appeared to many actually to be what Thomas Aquinas called him: "the Philosopher." His works had a weight that could not be lightly ignored. But with Ramus there begins a torrent of violent anti-Aristotelian sentiment. Bacon classifies both Plato and Aristotle as "Sophists" and says that their systems, "like planks of lighter and less solid material, floated on the waves of time" while the more substantial doctrines of the atomists sank and were lost. Luther calls Aristotle "that buffoon who has always misled the church." Hobbes names him "the worst teacher that ever was," and refers to his doctrines as "insignificant Speech." (I could go on and on in this vein.)

The question that the figure of Ramus presents is especially vital to us here at St. John's College. In its historical guise, it might be called "The Question of the Origins of Modernity." It asks: did something happen between 1275 (when Thomas died) and 1536 (when Ramus defended his wild thesis) that can explain the move from Thomas's acceptance of Aristotelian thought to the Moderns' dismissal of it? We at St. John's pride ourselves on paying more respect and listening with more care to Aristotle and other ancient authors than do many, perhaps any, other schools. Our decision to treat those texts with such respect began as an act of defiance against prevailing trends in education, and the St. John's College Program still stands in sharp contrast, if not hostile opposition, to the mainstream of academic institutions. Consequently, it is not surprising that the rejection of ancient authority displayed by early modern authors like Hobbes, Bacon and Galileo has concerned us almost from the moment that the first New Program students entered their Junior Year. In challenging the ancients, Ramus and the other moderns raise for us the question: how can the spirit of inquiry live in the shadow of authoritative texts?

The explanations offered for the origins of this rebellious spirit of modernity are so diverse and varied that I have found it helpful to impose upon them a little taxonomy. (Petrus Ramus, the author who provoked this whole project, was a great believer in charts, tables and classification schemes, and we might well profit from his guidance here.) To begin with, there are some historians who question whether "Modernity" really constitutes an important shift that requires explanation. Among historians of science there is an ongoing controversy known as the "Continuity Debate" concerning whether the scientific achievements of the sixteen and seventeenth centuries should be seen as an outgrowth and continuation of Medieval Science or as something revolutionary and novel. In general, if you look for precursors, you will find them: so, for example, Archimedes worked with limits long before Newton and Leibniz; Nicole Oresme had come up with "time-squared" rule for falling bodies in the fourteenth century, long before Galileo was born. Those scholars, then, who deny that the beginning of modernity constituted a fundamental shift in thought, therefore, I classify together under the name the "Shiftless."

The opponents of the Shiftless, that is, those who take more seriously the difference between the ancients and the moderns, we can call the "Shifty." The Shifty are a diverse and quarrelling group, embracing a wide variety of differing views. I have found it helpful to sort them out according to whether their fundamental allegiances lie with the Ancients or with the Moderns. This distinction gives us, not a two-fold, but a four-fold division of camps into which potential explanations either fall (or, if necessary, can be pushed). They are:

a) Those who believe there was a shift, and that the Moderns are Right ("Shifty Moderns");

b) Those who believe there was a shift, and that the Ancients were Right ("Shifty Ancients");

c) Those who believe there was a shift, and NEITHER the Ancients nor the Moderns were Right ("Shifty Exclusives"); and

d) Those who believe there was a shift, and BOTH the Ancients and the Moderns were Right ("Shifty Inclusives").

Group A: Shifty Moderns (The Ancients were Fools)

The first group, the Shifty Moderns, is the easiest to identify, for it includes the founding authors of the Modern movement themselves. Bacon, Galileo and Hobbes were plainly Shifty: they all seem to have believed that the work they were doing constituted a radical departure from what had gone before them. They conceived themselves to be innovators.

What is less clear, however, is the cause to which the Shifty Moderns attributed their own superiority over those who had gone before them. Their writings are polemical in nature and consequently do not attempt a sympathetic understanding of their Aristotelian opponents. When Galileo demolishes Aristotelian impetus theory, or mocks the idea that heavier stones fall faster in proportion to their heaviness, he doesn't pause to consider what might have led Aristotle (or his followers) to have adopted what Galileo himself considers "obvious fallacies." Nor does Hobbes seem to reflect much on why Aristotle, whose work he knew very well, should engage in "insignificant speech." All in all, the only explanation that these authors have for their own superiority is one that they seem too polite to pronounce baldly, that is, that those who came before them were fools.

This explanation for the shortcomings of the ancients is not limited to sixteenth and seventeenth century authors. Many recent writers have adopted the early Moderns' air of breezy dismissal toward Aristotle. Some of you have seen little introductory paragraphs in science textbooks that treat early philosophers with either contempt or patronizing condescension. One example of this sort of thing that happened to be sitting on my bookshelves is Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World, which scoffs at Aristotle for "seriously consider[ing] the contention that dreams are scripted by demons." The impression that Sagan leaves us is that Aristotle was benighted, gullible, superstitious, in short, a fool.

Group B: Shifty Ancients (The Moderns are Heretics)

Next, there are the Shifty Ancients, that is, those who acknowledge that there was a radical change in thought sometime in or around the sixteenth century, but who believe that the Ancients were right and that abandoning their teaching was a mistake. A shining example of this view can be found in Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo XIII's 1879 encyclical urging Catholic scholars to the study of Thomas Aquinas. This document recognizes -- and deplores -- the widespread shift away from the truths of Thomism. In the old days -- that is, in the thirteenth century -- "Thomas reigned supreme; and ä the minds of all, of teachers as well as of taught, rested in wonderful harmony under the shield and authority of the Angelic Doctor." By contrast to the peace of those times, the present (that is, the nineteenth century) is wracked by "bitter strifes" which result from the "false conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have now crept into all the orders of the State, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses."

The encyclical lays the blame for this degeneration on the Moderns' unhealthy taste for innovation. Beginning in the sixteenth century, reckless philosophers -- the encyclical names no names, but presumably the Moderns such as Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes are meant -- have undertaken "to build up a new edifice." However, because their "conclusions differ[ed] and clash[ed] one with another," their "multiform system" was "open to change, and consequently ä not firm, and stable, and robust like that of old, but tottering and feeble." In likening the Moderns' writings to a tottering edifice, the encyclical evokes the image of the Tower of Babel and broadly implies that the motive for Moderns' misguided actions was pride and a particularly vicious outburst of Original Sin.

Aeterni Patris is not alone in its condemnation of the Moderns as sinful deviants from the faith. There is no shortage of twentieth century theologians, and not only Catholics, who consider what they often call "the Enlightenment" or "the Enlightenment project", with shades of suspicion ranging from distrust to loathing.  Alasdair MacIntyre, a well-known 20th century philosopher, declares that "one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place." Indeed, the Shifty Ancients are a fairly populous group, and we will come back later to consider their role in the creation of the New Program at St. John's College.

Group C: Shifty Exclusive (Puppets Of History).

The next group, the Shifty Exclusives, is perhaps the most fun. It includes those who acknowledge that there was a radical shift between the Ancients and the Moderns, but who claim to have no essential allegiance to either the Ancient or the Modern party. In this category fall all those forms of explanation that set aside, disbelieve or simply ignore the truth or falsity of the claims made by the Ancients and Moderns alike and which look instead at collateral factors to explain the shift from one to another. Here is where we find all manner of social, economic, and technological determinists. Among the Shifty Exclusives one finds, for example, Marxists with various strains of economic determinism. Another interesting Shifty Exclusive argument is the so-called "Merton Hypothesis," which begins with the observation that religious puritans are statistically over-represented in the membership rolls of the English Royal Society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and proceeds to argue that religious non-conformism promotes scientific innovation.

My personal favorite among the Shifty Exclusive theories is the technological determinism deriving from the work of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was a pop-icon in the late 1960's -- he has a cameo role in Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall -- but he was also a professor of English literature and the author of a very influential and peculiar book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he argues -- sort of -- that the tremendous shift in sixteenth century European consciousness came about as a result of the introduction of movable-type printing. This new technology not only made available cheap and plentiful books, but also introduced forms of visual regimentation -- straight lines of mechanically reproduced type -- that McLuhan claims were wholly foreign to the preceding, predominantly oral, medieval culture and which led to (among other things) Ramism, i.e., the pedagogic methods of Petrus Ramus, including the sort of categorizing and diagrammatic dissection that I am performing right now. McLuhan's whole enterprise is especially interesting because his thesis -- that the media of communication crucially affect the content of what is communicated -- can be shifted forward four hundred years and applied to the present times, when the printed word is being joined -- or supplanted -- by radio, telephone, television, tape-cassettes, compact-discs, answering machines, pagers, e-mail, video-tape, computers, virtual-reality and the internet.

The appeal of these Shifty Exclusive arguments, and the reason they are so much fun to read, is the feeling they provide of esoteric superiority. They give the reader the impression that he or she knows what happened in a given period of history better than the people who actually took part in it. If you have read a book that explains that the advent of the printing press, or the decline of guild monopolies, or some change in trade or financial practices, or the Protestant Reformation was what "actually" motivated the shift from Ancient to Modern thought, you are in a position to understand that shift better than did Galileo or Descartes or any of the other participants in the events themselves, since all they were doing was innocently trying to describe the world as it appeared to them.

Group D: Shifty Inclusive (Channeling The Zeitgeist).

Last among the groups of the shifty are those who believe that a radical change took place with the advent of modernity and who want to say that both the Ancients and the Moderns were right.

The most famous resident of this category is, of course, Hegel. Although Hegel understands there to be a radical break between Ancient (or Medieval) and Modern thought, he does not claim that either the Ancients or the Moderns are "wrong." To his way of thinking, "ä no philosophy has ever been refuted." The history of philosophy turns out to be philosophy itself, the unfolding of Truth in ever more concrete forms. Earlier expressions are not lost but dialectically incorporated and transformed in what follows them.

Like the Shifty Exclusive arguments, Hegel's explanations have all the charms of esoteric superiority: Hegel knows the meaning of each of his predecessors better than they knew themselves. Moreover, the enormous sweep of Hegel's work gives it the additional pleasure of panoramic synopsis. This is the feeling of taking in huge, sweeping stretches of time with a single view; it resembles the sensation that one has looking down from the top of a very high mountain over a valley far below. The ability, whether genuine or imagined, to encompass centuries and millennia in a single motion of the mind brings with it an inflationary feeling of power that can be positively intoxicating for someone with the right sort of intellectual imagination.

These, then, are the Four Shifties: Ancient, Modern, Exclusive and Inclusive.

There is no doubt that Shiftiness of some sort has played a role in the design of the St. John's curriculum. Almost any student who has gotten past Sophomore Enabling and remained conscious through the first semester of the Junior year will confirm that something has changed in the books we read. I suspect that many would finger Descartes as the person responsible for the change; others might point to Bacon or Machiavelli. One or two might even think of Rabelais and his depiction of the suspiciously free-wheeling Abbey of ThÈlËme. If there were any doubt remaining, we need only look at the college catalog, which straightforwardly states, in the description of the laboratory program, that RenÈ Descartes's introduction of algebra and analytic geometry into European thought was "one of the great intellectual revolutions in recorded history." It is, the catalog says, "a focal point of the St. John's program and one which the College takes special care to emphasize." This is plainly a "shifty" description.

In fact, I believe that it represents a variety of the approach I have called "Shifty Ancient." It is pretty obvious, after all, that the College does not embrace anything like the posture I have called "Shifty Modernism": whatever else we do at St. John's, we don't simply dismiss ancient authors with contempt. Nor do we engage in the sort of scholarship characteristic of the "Shifty Exclusives." We don't look for social, political or economic determinants for intellectual changes. In fact, if we turn back to catalog for a moment we find it saying that Descartes' intellectual revolution "in part determin[ed] the other great revolutions in industry, politics, morals and religion." The catalog pointedly does not suggest that the causation might have run in the other direction. There is no room for the possibility that industry, politics and religion shape the intellect.

Further evidence of the College's Shifty Ancient leanings can be found by looking at the writings that have most directly shaped how St. John's views the shift from ancient to modern thought, namely, those of Jacob Klein and Edmund Husserl. Klein, who was dean of the College from 1949-1958, was fascinated by the gap or (it might be) chasm between ancient and modern thought. According to J. Winfree Smith's history of the New Program at St. John's, Klein seems to have been responsible for the explicit focus of our laboratory and mathematics program on the so-called "Cartesian revolution." It had been a central theme in Klein's studies before he came to St. John's. In his book, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, Klein argues that the transformation of ancient mathematics and science into modern mathematical science was made possible by the adoption of mathematical symbols. Modern physics, Klein thinks, cannot be understood apart from the mathematical formalism in which it is expressed. Klein assumes that this reliance on algebraic formalism constitutes a "problem" for physics which cannot be addressed until we have understood "the conceptual structure of this formal language" that is, algebra. Algebraic symbolism itself is the "modern mode of thought" whose origin, Klein thought, we should be questioning.

He is, in fact, a little coy in this book about just why we should be suspicious of the symbolic character of modern mathematical physics, but in later writings he says more clearly what troubled him about it. It was connected, he believed, to a more widespread and dangerous loss of meaning in the modern world that comes about because "we approach the world not directly but by means of concepts which are abstractions of abstractions." The issues at stake go beyond the realm of mathematics and physics, though Klein believed they had their origin there. He says in a 1939 lecture that "our whole social and economic system, which we term Capitalism, and which is, in its origins, closely connected to the modern idea of knowledge and science, has acquired ä symbolic unreality."

Edmund Husserl makes similar claims about the pervasive and apparently negative influence of scientific thought in the modern world. In The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl argues that Descartes and Galileo -- or more accurately the scientific enterprise they launched -- are responsible for "the most portentous upheavals" of twentieth century European civilization. This lamentable situation has come about because of a dual expansion and contraction of the domain of scientific knowledge. The realm of science has grown insofar as the new methodical natural science claims to be a mathesis universalis, encompassing all possible knowledge. On the other hand, since the scientific demand for rigor cannot be imposed on all fields of human interest, whole regions of thought and inquiry -- specifically all of metaphysics and ethics -- have been jettisoned and disregarded as being unknowable, unscientific and consequently uninteresting. As a result, modern science "has nothing to say to ä the questions ä [we] find[] most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence."

What is needed, Husserl and Klein agree, is to sweep away what they call the "sediment" of passive, superficial thought that inevitably accumulates as scientific knowledge progresses and to get back to "the original mental activity." "Sedimentation is always somehow forgetfulness," Klein tells us, and he believed it to be one of the prime rules of liberal education that it should clear away superficial understandings and return to the "true beginnings, [the] origins, the rJizwvmata pavntwn."

"Desedimentation" as a goal has in fact guided the design of the St. John's Program, especially in the laboratory. Our students may never hear the word "sediment," but they are enlisted to clear it away nonetheless when, for instance, we urge them to ponder whether it is legitimate for Galileo to make a ratio of two dissimilar quantities, time and distance, to create a measure of velocity. This question is an interesting one, but it is not at all naive: it is informed by Husserl's sophisticated argument. Similarly, when we insist that students avoid the algebraic and semi-algebraic notation when working through Euclid's theory of ratios, our insistence is informed by the reasoning of Klein's book on Greek mathematics.

The idea of "desedimentation" seems to be a sort of Shifty Ancientry: the image of clearing away "sediment" assumes some original, authentic, or genuine thought or experience that has been caked over by unreflective, worthless gunk. In fact, neither Husserl nor Klein seems sympathetic with the project of modern science. Husserl's interest seems to be in unmasking or debunking the supposed accomplishments of modern science, not in appreciating them. "One must finally achieve the insight," he tells us, "that no objective science, no matter how exact, explains or ever can, explain anything in a serious sense." He refers to the "failure of the new science," and speaks of the rationalistic pretense of science as "naive" and "absurd."

This desedimenting vision troubles me insofar as it suggests an anti-modern bias that might stand in the way of our study of science here at the College. It is possible to view the modern scientific project in at least two fundamentally different ways. One can conceive of it as a movement away from some primordial, original, and authentic experience which becomes more attenuated and unreal the further it progresses; from this perspective, what is required is a sort of "intellectual archaeology" aimed at recovering buried experience, that is, desedimentation. It is also possible to think of it in the opposite way, as a progressive enterprise that is achieving ever better and more penetrating insights into the nature of the world; this view would direct us to focus attention on what is currently thought or believed in science, with the understanding that scientific theories have always been, and for the foreseeable future will always be, provisional. These are very different pictures, and it seems to me that the choice between them should be made openly, by reading and discussing Klein's and Husserl's works, for instance, and not covertly by building their presuppositions into the structure of the Program.

Moreover, the idea of desedimentation does not coexist comfortably with other rationales for reading Great Books. Our rhetoric claims that the Great Books are timeless classics, but the works studied in the laboratory and, to some extent, in the math tutorial -- Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton -- are not at all timeless. Sometimes our focus on ancient math and science can give the impression that we are not studying science or math all, but rather history of science or history of mathematics. Outside of St. John's, only antiquarians have any interest in much of the ancient and renaissance science and math that we read.  Eva Brann has said that "it is obvious that [our study of scientific works of the past] is only most accidentally 'history of science,' since the point is not to describe accurately the circumstances and works of the past but to recover inner meanings properly belonging to the present." Maybe. Nevertheless, the books that are included in the Program in the spirit of "intellectual archaeology" that desedimentation suggests will inevitably be approached differently from works for which a truly timeless value is claimed. A Great Book, we are often told, is one that bears endless re-reading, but sediment once scraped off ought not to need continual re-scraping.

The Ahistoricals -- The Great Timeless Seminar Table in the Sky.

The "timeless value" that many ascribe to the Great Books suggests that we need one final addition to the categories we have named so far, i.e. the Shiftless and four kinds of Shifty explanations for the origins of modernity. The last group is the Ahistoricals. Their basic strategy is to ignore or deny the problem of historical origins altogether. Their message is that the truly interesting and significant questions occur outside of time. Allan Bloom illustrates the gist of this view in a story about a young Chicago Great Books student who surprised his seminar leader by referring in conversation to "Mr. Aristotle." The student was apparently "unaware that [Aristotle] was not a contemporary." (According to Bloom, the professor was not appalled by the student's ignorance but rather delighted with his naive intellectual vitality.)

The Ahistoricals rise serenely above the issue of the origins of modernity. In this way of thinking, Descartes does not "follow" St. Thomas and Aristotle does not "precede" Hobbes except in an accidental and unimportant way. All of them are part of a single "Great Conversation," and the contributions of each are worthy of consideration on their own merits without regard to their placement in any historical setting or sequence. Of course, there are different positions within this "Great Conversation," but the differences do not come about because one author follows or precedes another. Since the themes of the conversation are eternal, we expect -- and we almost always find -- that later authors are restating and amplifying ideas that had already been introduced earlier in the conversation, usually by Plato, to whom all Philosophy is, after all, "a series of footnotes." 

From the Ahistorical perspective, the shift we have been discussing -- from the respectful deference to Aristotelian philosophy to the violent innovation of the early modern materialists -- should be understood as merely one instance of an archetypical discussion that has been present from the beginning of philosophy. Joe Sachs, in a wonderful lecture delivered here in April 1992, identified the difference between modern scientific methods and the views of Aristotle with the "Battle of the Gods and the Giants," the gigantomaciva, from Plato's Sophist. In that dialogue, the Eleatic stranger says that an argument that he and Theatetus have come across resembles the legendary war between the "gods" who believe that true reality consists of intelligible and bodiless forms and an opposing group of "giants," who refuse to admit the reality of anything that they cannot grasp with their hands. That interpretation of the advent of modernity as a version of a mythological, timeless debate epitomizes the Ahistorical position.

A lot of the rhetoric supporting the St. John's College curriculum invokes the idea of timelessness. The catalog speaks of the books as "both timeless and timely." Winfree Smith states flatly in his book about the origins of the new Program that we at St. John's "have no interest in studying the past as past." Jacob Klein, in a lecture entitled History and the Liberal Arts, freely acknowledges that St. John's students have a "remarkable lack of historical awareness," and offers a principled defense of the College's decision to ignore History. Our practice of deliberately ignoring the setting or context in which our books were written depends on the assumption that their real significance is ahistorical or trans-historical.

We do read a few works that are thought of as "history": Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus. In Santa Fe, the Sophomores read some Livy. But typically we treat them more or less as we treat literature: we have no way to evaluate the historical validity of any of their stories, nor do we ever have occasion to compare two or more accounts of the same events in order to judge the comparative roles of fact and interpretation. We will entertain, of course, an ahistorical discussion about history: we read Hegel's work which advocates what I have called a "Shifty Inclusive" historiography, and Marx, who presents a "Shifty Exclusive" perspective. But the advocates of these views must bring them to the "Great Timeless Seminar Table in the Sky" before the conversation can begin, and that presents an interesting problem.

Historically minded Giants might try to question the posture of God-like timelessness that the St. John's program adopts towards its books, but they are faced at the outset by what a lawyer (like me) would call an awkward "choice of forum" issue. Lawyers understand that the selection of the court in which a case will be tried can sometimes be as important to the outcome as the substantive merits. The Giants' doubts whether any book can properly be treated ahistorically, divorced from its social and political context, lose much of their force as soon as they are brought into a St. John's seminar where they are expected to confront the ideas of Aristotle or of Hobbes as contemporaries. Moreover, most of the evidence that such Giants might wish to offer for their claims is deemed inadmissible in a St. John's seminar. Students here are not permitted, much less encouraged, to collect and ponder the historical factual material that might make the Giants' arguments seem plausible. At St. John's College, the possibility that social, economic or technological transformations might shape intellectual expression is never really considered except in the abstract, because the students remain almost wholly ignorant of the social, economic or technological setting of the works that they read. At St. John's, the Gods win more or less by default.

The matter would look wholly different if we were to move the question into the Giants' home court. That is, instead of asking for a timeless, ahistorical justification for taking historical context into account when reading books, we might turn the question around 180∞ and ask: what historical factors would give rise to the posture of ahistorical detachment from time that characterizes the St. John's Program? If the Giants are discomforted in the court of the timeless Gods, the Gods' pretensions of timelessness can appear equally unpersuasive when viewed from the Giants' perspective. The posture of timeless ahistoricality is not itself timeless; it arose in response to specific, identifiable social and political factors. The New Program at St. John's College came into being almost exactly sixty years ago when Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan brought to Annapolis an idea for liberal education that Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler had been trying unsuccessfully to institute at the University of Chicago, and whose roots can be traced further back to John Erskine's General Honors program at Columbia University in the years just after World War I. The historian's project is to interpret these facts.

Several historians have offered interesting perspectives on the birth of the Great Books concept of education. Joan Rubin, for instance, depicts John Erskine as responding to doubts whether "American consumer culture could sustain an adequate measure of 'civilization.'" Erskine's answer, according to Rubin, was to make the masterpieces of culture -- what Matthew Arnold had called "the best that has been thought and said in the world" -- into commodities, the "Great Books": a consumer-packaging of the essence of culture. From this perspective, the creation of the "Great Books" takes its place alongside other so-called "middlebrow" cultural programs, including Will Durant's Story of Philosophy and the Book of the Month Club.

Another historian, Lawrence Levine, places Hutchins, Adler and the advent of the New Program at St. John's College in the context of other early twentieth century efforts to create courses in "Western Civilization." Levine argues that these programs had a dual purpose. Internally they created a "unifying and assimilative force" to counteract the tensions introduced by, among other things, "massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe" and the rise of "'hyphenated' Americans." At the same time, internationally they sought to reorient American self-perception from that of a revolutionary upstart opposed to the interests of the great powers of Europe to that of a spiritual descendent and heir of a general "Western" culture, a move which was, in part, explicitly aimed at reconciling Americans to Woodrow Wilson's internationalism and the nation's involvement in the First World War.

A third historical interpretation attributes the New Program to a sequence of events that began with Nicolai Lobachevski. (I'm not making this up!) According to Edward A. Purcell, the advent of Non-Euclidean geometry profoundly undermined long-standing confidence in the ability of human reason to apprehend genuine, reliable truths. (Our seniors have some idea how profound that disillusionment might be.) Purcell marshals an impressive amount of evidence to describe how the success of non-Euclidean geometry acted as a powerful metaphor, inspiring thinkers in other fields to search for "non-Euclidean possibilities in all lines of reasoning." Liberated from the confines (or discipline) of reason's normative claims, anthropology, sociology, and economics applied the methods of the natural sciences to human studies in ways that promoted ethical relativism at best and ethical nihilism at worst, with the result that, by the the 1930's, Purcell claims, most "American intellectuals rejected the idea that any prescriptive ethical theory could possess rationally compelling authority." This attitude of moral rootlessness was troubling enough by itself and it only became more worrisome with the rise of totalitarian governments in Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union and the looming threat of a Second World War.

According to Purcell, Robert Hutchins led the principal counterattack against this perceived confusion; Mortimer Adler was his lieutenant and the Great Books were his weapon. From a strictly academic standpoint, the problem that Hutchins confronted was the elective system for undergraduate education, which seemed to strip the college curriculum as a whole of any identifiable purpose at all. In a highly publicized and much-discussed series of lectures at Yale in 1935, Hutchins declared that "[t]he free elective system ä amount[s] to a denial that there [is] content to education." Hutchins thought that the modern university needed a "principle of unity" to do for it what theology had done for the medieval universities. He was too much of a free-thinker to call for a return to a theological curriculum: "We are a faithless generation," he declared, without much seeming regret, "and take no stock in revelation." Instead, he suggested that the American university should adopt as its guide the secular principle that had ruled over Greek thought, which he described as "metaphysics." As a practical reform, Hutchins recommended that the university undergraduate curriculum should consist of "permanent studies" revolving around the timeless conversation of the Great Books. Thus, Purcell saw Hutchins' call for a Great Books education as a reaction to the educational and social chaos created by "non-Euclidean" alternatives to rational moral theory.

Finally, two other historians, Gerald Graff and Raymond Williams place Hutchins' call for a restoration of educational "unity" in a slightly different context: that of a centuries-old line of culturally conservative exhortations whose classic expression is Matthew Arnold's 1869 book, Culture and Anarchy. It was in this work that Arnold articulated his oft-quoted definition of culture as "the best that has been thought and said in the world."  Arnold shares with Hutchins the desire to find some intellectual ideal that will replace theology as the stabilizing center for general education. Arnold's name for this unifying principle was "culture." Culture, Arnold said, directed its followers toward greater perfection. It strives ever for "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light."

Hutchins's ideal of liberal education echoes Arnold's "culture" in every important respect. Both Hutchins and Arnold thought of their ideals as Hellenic in origin. Both show disregard or contempt for the interests of the commercial and mercantile segments of the population, whom Arnold referred to as "Philistines." More importantly, Arnold and Hutchins stand together against a common foe: anarchy. To Hutchins, anarchy appeared generally in the form of "blind and unthinking empiricism," and specifically as the directionless freedom of the elective system. Arnold saw it in the threat posed by the political agitation of the English middle class, who maintained that the ancestral liberty of the Englishman consists of the freedom to "do what he likes." Arnold thought this idea was a regrettable mistake, caused by the decay of earlier, feudal institutions that had given freedom its real meaning.

Arnold understood the ideal of culture to be frankly authoritarian. Its purpose was to provide a reliable standard of "right reason" that might direct and control the discordant desires of what he calls the "raw" person. "Everyday selves," he tells us, are "separate, personal, at war"; they have no refuge from anarchy. Our "best self", however, the one "which culture, or the study of perfection, seeks to develop in us," is altogether different. By means of it "we are united, impersonal, at harmony." We can entrust it with authority without fearing tyranny because "it is the truest friend we all of us can have." In practice, Arnold argued strenuously for the maintenance of public order -- riots were especially deplorable, but he disapproved of all form of unruly demonstration, even in support of desirable causes -- because in his mind culture meant harmony, harmony required stability and stability required authority.

Hutchins did not view his own proposals as authoritarian, but others certainly saw them that way. His Yale lectures brought a firestorm of protest from all quarters, denouncing them as unAmerican if not totalitarian and fascist. The faculty of Hutchins's own university issued a manifesto calling his proposals "a reactionary course of accepting one system of ancient or medieval metaphysics and dialectic," whose adoption would "spell disaster." American philosopher John Dewey condemned Hutchins' ideas as a form of philosophical absolutism that implies political authoritarianism.

These four historical interpretations of our "Ahistorical" perspective on the books are just a sampling for what is available. Rubin relates the Great Books to the commercialization of culture; Levine derives them from a need to assimilate immigrants and move America away from isolationism; Purcell finds the origins of the Program in a search for stability and traditional meaning in the face of new scientific disciplines on the one hand and totalitarian political threats on the other; Graff and Williams place us in the tradition of cultural conservatism alongside Matthew Arnold. Each of these narratives is in the style I have characterized as "Shifty Exclusive," that is, they look for correlations and trends between social, economic and intellectual phenomena without attempting to evaluate the validity of the positions expressed. That the timeless or Ahistorical posture might be proper, right or correct never enters the discussion because the participants -- the "Giants" of the gigantomaciva -- are not looking for "truth" but for influences, causes, effects and contributing factors. Nevertheless, I find that I cannot simply ignore them because they raise, for me, serious questions: is our collection of books too neat, too packaged, too much a "commodity?" Are we inherently committed to a picture of Western ascendency, popular at the time of Woodrow Wilson but now open to question? Last, and most troubling to me, does our claim of timelessness for the Great Conversation among the authors of our Program align the College, for better or worse, with authoritarian cultural conservatives like Matthew Arnold?

Books

The issue of "authorities" at St. John's may be resolved into two questions: the authority of the Great Books and that of Reason. As for the books, of course, the College denies that the Great Books are "authoritative" in the ordinary sense of the word. Although we prescribe what our students are to read, we place no limits at all on what they think about their reading. We do, for instance, require all of our students to study Newton's Principia and the elementary techniques of the calculus; but it is the pride of the school, I believe, that you can find more students here who understand but do not believe in the calculus than exist anywhere else in the country.

However, although the Great Books are not "authorities," they obviously enjoy a special status here. (Let any student who doubts it try to write a Senior Essay out of his own head without any citations to a book!) Eva Brann has described the proper attitude of a student toward the texts that he or she studies as "reverence." "Scriptural reverence ought," she believes, "to be an essential part of a properly republican education." Perhaps any book should be given the benefit of the doubt on first reading, but that is simply a matter of courtesy. Reverence is more than courtesy. Brann says that "each text is to be approached as if it might contain truth; the students are asked to ask themselves whether what they are reading is true." In fact, "reverence" is more, too, than entertaining the mere possibility that what an author says is true. It comes closer, I think, to theologian Karl Barth's description of his "Biblicism." He says: "I am prejudiced in supposing the Bible to be a good book, and ä I hold it to be profitable for men to take its conceptions at least as seriously as they take their own." This is the degree of respect that we ask our students to accord the Great Books: they should hold the author's thought alongside their own and consider seriously the possibility that the students' own assumptions, preconceptions and thoughts might be wrong and those of the author might be right.

We can clarify the meaning of "reverence" by contrasting it to its opposite: irreverence, disrespect or condescension. We disrespect a book when we do not take its position seriously. We act condescendingly toward an author when we treat his work as so many symptoms to be diagnosed rather than as arguments to be answered. This sort of disrespect is characteristic of the Shifty Exclusive Giants, whose pretense of "esoteric superiority" -- the very feature that makes them so appealing -- is a form of condescension. Reason and Reverence walk together: we have respect or reverence for a work -- or for another person, for that matter -- when we treat it (or him or her) rationally, that is, as something or someone who addresses our reason, to whom questions can be put and from whom rational answers might be expected. I cannot ask questions of an earthquake; it is irrational. I do not reason with a flu virus. I can sometimes use argument and persuasion with my six-year old son, but at other times I treat his very loud, very forceful protests and assertions -- some of which claim to be arguments -- as symptoms of fatigue or hunger or something else. When I do so, I hope I am showing love and sympathy, but in any case I am temporarily suspending my respect for his opinions.

On the other hand, we must always remember that our reverence for a text is a supremely questionable act. A text is, after all, an artifact, a thing. Even Plato paused to question the wisdom of committing thought to writing, and in the Phaedrus expressed serious reservations on that issue. Reverence for Plato (or for Socrates) -- or even for Plato's thought or Socrates' thought -- might be well and good, but we don't have Plato, Socrates, or their thought. All we have is Plato's book. It is at best a mystery how rational thought exists in the world at all; it verges on idolatry to imagine that it can be captured on wood-pulp and bound with glue, cardboard and buckram. To recover from these mere objects something like the thought of the authors who shaped them -- long ago, far away and most often in languages foreign to us -- requires skill or art. We might be tempted to call this the work of the liberal arts -- of grammar, rhetoric and logic -- but at most this task can only occupy a portion of those arts. The art of interpreting texts is, properly speaking, hermeneutics. The liberal arts may concern themselves partially with hermeneutics, but that cannot be their only or even their principal work, since hermeneutics by its very nature aims only to interpret the writings and discover the thoughts of others, while the liberal arts ought to enable their possessor to think for herself or himself.

In a school dedicated to the liberal arts, then, books cannot finally be authorities.

Reason and Radical Inquiry

Besides the books, at St. John's we have Reason. Dean Brann says that the "one working assumption [that is] most necessary and most binding" at the College is "that there is rational speech, logos." The college catalog claims that "reason is the only recognized authority" in the St. John's seminar. But what sort of thing is reason?

Matthew Arnold thought of reason -- at least, right reason -- as a foundation of authority and a bulwark against anarchy. In his view, the purpose of culture is to show us that "there is nothing so very blessed in merely doing as [we] like, ä that the really blessed thing is to like what right reason ordains." In this way, right reason and our "best selves" will come to stand as "a principle of authority, to counteract the tendency to anarchy that threatens us."

It is not at all clear, though, that reason is like that. Even Arnold's use of the phrase "right reason" begs all sorts of questions, in that it implicitly rejects something that I suppose he would have to call "wrong reason." There is necessarily a certain awkwardness entailed in defending "wrong reason"; it is embarrassing to make a case in favor of error, or to stand up for evil. But the point is that we can't necessarily tell in advance -- or we necessarily can't tell in advance -- what reasoning is right and what is wrong. "We are none of us referees in this; we are all in the game, and playing in one or other direction." Calm and dispassionate discrimination of "right reason" from "wrong reason" can happen only in retrospect, when all the passions and interests of argument have been thoroughly embalmed. Even then the appearance of calm is often, perhaps always, illusory: at the Episcopal Seminary where I took some classes during my recent sabbatical, the debates of the Protestant Reformation still arouse passions. (Well, Episcopal passions, anyway; of course; they are all very polite.) I can also testify from a little experience among Civil War buffs that the issues of that conflict, now over 130 years old, are far from dead.

Reason is not necessarily orderly or well-behaved. It may manifest itself in disorder and strife. Our own tradition as expressed in the Great Books is internally dissonant: you may think that Aristotle sits contentedly next to Hobbes on the bookshelves, but just read Jonathan Swift's Full And True Account Of The Terrible Fight That Happened On Friday Last Between The Ancient And Modern Books In The King's Library, and the full epic scale of that conflict will become clear.

No one has praised the vital importance of books more highly than John Milton in the Areopagitica, a classic defense of freedom of the press against censorship. The benefit that he sees in books, however, is not a static contemplation of "sweetness and light," but something dynamic. In Milton's view, no doctrine, no expression, no creed capable of being written in a book is by itself the capital-t Truth. If truth were a formula, we might believe it by rote, but such a thing is impossible. "Truth," Milton tells us, "is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain, if her water[s] flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition." Truth may involve quarrels, bickering and conflict, for "where there is much desire to learn," he tells us, "there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making." He continues: "What some lament of" -- namely, the existence of sect and schism -- "we rather should rejoice at." Multiplicity of opinion, quarrelling, sect, schism, in short the very tumult that Matthew Arnold distrusted as "anarchy," is good. On the other hand, a passive possession even of a true opinion is worthless: "A man may be a heretic in the truth;" says Milton, "and if he believe things only because his Pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie."

What sort of thing is truth? Milton tells us that truth flows like a river; a frozen truth is a heresy. Nietzsche asks us to suppose that Truth is a woman -- which, to him, seems to have meant something like, "suppose that Truth is fickle, dangerous and altogether dubious." These ideas are part of our tradition. So, too, is the idea of Vico or Marx -- completely antithetical to the Ahistorical vision of the Great Timeless Seminar Table in the Sky -- that non-intellectual factors play a role in the shaping of thought itself. Reverence for our tradition requires that we take seriously the reasoning that claims our reason itself may be inadequate. Just as I dismiss some of son's arguments as symptoms of this or that extraneous cause, I sometimes also notice the motives of my own behaviors, moods and even thoughts. When I was a lawyer, for instance, I found that it was really easier to see the force of an argument that supported the interests of a paying client than of one that was indifferent or opposed to them. I remember a very senior partner at a law firm where I was a very junior associate telling me once as a half-joke, half-confession that as attorneys we were, in his picturesque phrase, "all whores." (The moment was especially poignant since this man, who had spent a lot of his professional time and effort defending tobacco companies, was just then dying of emphysema.)

Reason sometimes reveals herself to be rationalization. We feel the creeping dread that maybe the subterranean motives that peek out from a few thoughts now and then and that occasionally embarrass the pretense of disinterested reason might be like cockroaches: for every one that you see, there are ten thousand lurking behind the wall.

It's not a happy thought, but it is one we need to take seriously, because reason -- if it is not to ossify into "right reason" and become a mere disguise for custom, tradition or sentiment -- must be free to turn its attention to its own grounds and become radical inquiry. Hutchins does not talk about this possibility in his Yale lectures, but it is this spirit of radical inquiry, and not any particular doctrine contained in any of the books, that is essential to the College's mission as described by J. Winfree Smith:

What St. John's College means to be engaged in is radical inquiry. This means a readiness to pursue Socrates' questions, but equal readiness to question the presuppositions of Socrates' questions, to ask, for example, with Nietzsche, 'Why the will to truth?' And to ask, in turn, about the presupposition behind Nietzsche's question." (A Search for the Liberal College, pp. 3-4)

The Athenians may have been right to kill Socrates: once his sort of questioning gets started, you can't tell where it will lead and nothing is safe. Martha Nussbaum points out that the education that the solid citizens of Athens wanted for their children was none of this unsettling Socratic stuff, but one in which "young men ä marched to school in rows to sing 'Athena, dread sacker of cities'" again and again in unison until they "internaliz[ed] these time-honored words and ideas." To their way of thinking, Socrates's critical questioning was not what would make the city strong and safe. They may have been right.

Radical inquiry is a dangerous thing. Socrates discovered that it can lead to execution. It doesn't have any definable end: it is a thing without telos. It might lead to moral relativism; anarchy is a distinct possibility. It can spiral us into asking whether we are able naively to read and understand the very books, the naive reading of which prompted us to ask our question. Again, Winfree Smith notes that here at St. John's College, despite the rigidly defined shape of the Program, the spirit of inquiry has license to attack everything, including the Program that fostered it. "Questioning what is within the bounds," he says, "often leads to questioning the bounds." Radical inquiry is a corrosive acid, and we cannot know in advance whether any container, even our own Program, is strong enough to hold it.

Conclusion

Now, in conclusion, it would be nice to deliver a soaring and self-congratulatory peroration in praise of the St. John's Program. Such an ending would be easy to compose and you, the audience, would almost certainly enjoy it. However, it wouldn't really be consistent with my central point, which is that the St. John's Program is a questionable enterprise, both in the sense of being one that asks questions and about which questions should continually be asked.

Beginning with Ramus's challenge to Aristotle, I have tried to think about how the spirit of inquiry can live in the shadow of authoritative texts. The College seems to have at least two different approaches to two different kinds of texts. Both of them raise problems in my mind. Some texts, particularly in the laboratory program, are approached in a spirit I have labeled "shifty": they are part of a cumulative enterprise and we cannot ignore their chronological sequence. The Program comes to these texts as exercises in desedimentation: we expect to read through them and to use them to unmask and reveal our own modern epistemological prejudices. I am concerned whether our quasi-historical approach to these texts might not conceal an anti-modern bias whose grounding should be subject to more open disclosure and reflection.

Most seminar texts, by contrast, are approached ahistorically. Although we read our books in more-or-less chronological sequence, we do not admit that their setting or sequence touches them in any essential way. But here, too, I wonder whether our approach to our texts conceals a bias of which we should be aware. In positing that some authors and some books are capable of rising above the flux of time and entering a timeless conversation, are we subscribing to an Arnoldian vision of cultural conservatism, a doctrine of "sweetness and light," that has in the past been deployed again and again in opposition to progressive social and political change? Or is it the case -- a suggestion that I find appealing -- that nothing at St. John's, or in human possession generally, is genuinely timeless except, possibly, reason itself. But reason itself is not "sweetness and light": it is, or might be (because nothing about it is fixed or certain) a spirit of restless questioning and radical inquiry which might appear divine at times but might just as easily manifest itself in the figure of Satan.

In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake recounts, among many other peculiar matters and "Memorable Fancies," a quarrel between an angel and a devil concerning Christ's interpretation of the Ten Commandments. At the end of the dispute, the angel "stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire & he was consumed and arose as Elijah." Then Blake gives us the following note:

This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense which the world shall have if they behave well (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 24)

This image, like many of Blake's symbols, is obscure, yet it haunts me. Nothing could be more canonical than the Bible. The reverence that it receives from its followers is even more fervent than our Program books command here at the College. Nothing could be more irreverent than a devil. In Job, Satan is the questioner who challenges God. In later tradition he is Lucifer, the bringer of light. His pride mirrors that of the early modern innovators, and some have called the figure of Satan emblematic of modernity and the Enlightenment.  Thus, the scene that Blake describes seems to mirror the College as I have tried to describe it: a reader who brings to a canonical text the aid of an all-too-clever but none-too-trustworthy diabolical assistant.

Blake's image is not an answer to the questions I have been discussing, but it gives us something to look at while we think and talk about them. As we work with our own canonical texts, let us consider what it might mean to read them with a Devil.