% LaTeX generated by Torsten Seemann
\documentclass[notitlepage,oneside,a4paper,10pt,twocolumn]{book} 

%\usepackage{a4wide}

% the paragraph settings
%\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
%\setlength{\parskip}{2.5ex plus1.5ex minus1.5ex}
%\setlength{\parskip}{1.7ex plus1.0ex minus1.0ex}

\hyphenation{school-teacher}

\begin{document}

\pagestyle{headings}

\frontmatter

\title{\Huge \bfseries The Gift of Fire}
\author{\huge Richard Mitchell}
\date{~}
\maketitle
% NO page numbers on title page!
%\thispagestyle{empty}                      

%{\setlength{\parskip}{0.1ex}\tableofcontents}
%\newpage      

``Richard Mitchell is a superb shatterer of icons. In {\itshape The Gift
of Fire,} passion, commitment, exquisite reasoning and Mitchell's unique
sense of humor are trained on the vital question: How do we use and, more
commonly, misuse our minds? An important work.'' --- Thomas H. Middleton

``There exists in every age, in every society, a small, still choir
of reason emanating from a few scattered thinkers ignored by the mainstream.
Their collective voices, when duly discovered a century or so too late,
reveal what was wrong with that society and age, and how it could have been
corrected if only people had listened and acted accordingly. {\itshape Richard
Mitchell's is such a voice.} It could help make a better life for you
or, if it is too late for that, at least for your children. Ignore it at
your and their peril.'' --- John Simon

The Underground Grammarian is back with the most important book of his career.
Richard Mitchell, author of the classics {\itshape Less Than Words Can Say, The
Graves of Academe,} and{\itshape  The Leaning Tower of Babel,} delivers in
{\itshape The Gift of Fire} a series of fiercely witty, brilliantly considered
``sermons'' on an issue as old as Socrates but still controversial
today: What is the role of morality in education, and therefore in our daily
responsibilities? And how do we decide  {\bfseries what} morality should be taught,
and why?

Those familiar with Mitchell's legendary {\itshape Underground Grammarian} will
recognize the sound of Mitchell's voice crying in the wilderness --- with
considerable humor --- as he uses telling examples and wicked, witty parables
to illustrate his belief that the American education establishment and society
itself have failed to teach us mental discipline, independence of thought,
individual responsibility, or even the right books. From {\itshape The Gift of
Fire's} first chapter, ``Who Is Socrates, Now That We Need Him?''
to the book's stunning, emotionally moving conclusion, Mitchell decries
``feel good,'' ``I'm OK, You're OK'' American public education--based
on teaching to the lowest common denominator--and argues for a return to
studies based on the work of thinkers like Socrates, Aquinas, and Ben Franklin.
In this way,  {\bfseries all} of us learn to think for ourselves, not just the
privileged.

Here, too, are Mitchell's beautifully written, exquisitely argued explorations
of not what but  {\bfseries how} to think about the knotty moral issues that face
us every day: ambition, violence, nuclear weapons, political conflict, patience,
duty, love, and even child-rearing. In the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Mitchell considers the world around him in a manner that is thought-provoking,
fascinating and entertaining,

Thousands of enlightened readers know Richard Mitchell as one of our most
brilliant, passionate, funny, and quintessentially American thinkers. Join
them in reading {\itshape The Gift of Fire.} It will change your life ---
or at least how you think about it.

About the Author: Richard Mitchell is editor and publisher of The Underground
Grammarian and a professor of classics at Glassboro State College. He is
the author of {\itshape Less Than Words Can Say}, 
{\itshape The Graves of Academe}, and {\itshape The Leaning Tower of Babel}.


\tableofcontents


\chapter{Introduction}

I SUSPECT THAT THOSE WHO have read some of my other works will be a little
surprised by this one. I am a little surprised by this one.

That, in itself, is nothing new. I have never yet written anything, long
or short, that did not surprise me. That is, for me at least, the greatest
worth of writing, which is only incidentally a way of telling others what
you think. Its first use is for the  {\bfseries making} of what you think, for
the discovery of understanding, an act that happens only in language.

I have habitually found it convenient, and perhaps just a little too easy,
to look for understanding by paying close attention to failures of understanding,
which always take the form of bad language. Just as there is nothing but
language in which to make sense, there is nothing but language in which
to make nonsense. So, in my works, at least, the examination of sense and
nonsense has ordinarily been a sometimes clever and amusing castigation
of fools, who can be shown to imagine that they make sense when they don't.

The castigation of fools is, of course, an ancient and honorable task of
writers and, unless very poorly done, an enterprise that will usually entertain
those who behold it. No matter what else we imagine that we believe about
the propriety of compassion for the unfortunate, we do like to see fools
exposed. It's funny. And it is not only funny; it is the great theme of
Comedy, and a mild, domestic counterpart of the great theme of Tragedy,
in which we rejoice, however sadly, to see villains brought down.

So it is that the habitual contemplation of folly, which does not seem to
be the worst thing in the world, leads little by little to some consideration
of vice, which does seem to be the worst thing in the world. It is troubling
to notice that when we are foolish or ``only foolish,'' as we easily
deem it, we find ourselves all the more likely to do bad things. And when
we can see, as I think I have so often managed to demonstrate, that some
very foolish people are in a position to bring the consequences of their
folly not only on themselves but on others, we do have the suspicion that
something bad is going on. Surely, if we could certainly pronounce certain
persons wise, we would think it a good thing to fall under their influence,
and it seems only natural and inescapably right to expect some badness from
the influence of fools. So it was that I gradually found, in my own considerations
of nonsense, less play and more brooding, less glee and more melancholy,
and the growing conviction that the silly mind, just as much as the wicked
mind, if there is such a thing, makes bad things happen. And my meditations
on foolish language, my own included, grew somber and satirical.

Satire is a cunning, landless opportunist who poaches along the borders
of the two great realms of Tragedy and Comedy. The hunting is good, no doubt,
for the satirist is nourished by folly and vice, of which there is said
to be never any shortage. But, perhaps because I was reared in Comedy's
fair land, I am not convinced of that. Folly is thick on the ground, no
doubt, but where is vice? I know, I truly do know and can demonstrate, just
as surely as one can provide a proof in geometry, that certain influential
persons, especially in the schools, do bad things to other people. But they
are not villains. They do not will badness. On the contrary, probably far
more than most of us, they deliberately intend to do good things. And I
am certain that they would do good things, if only they could make sense.

But all of that, obviously, could be said of any one of us. Outside of the
pages of fantastic fiction, there is no one who says in the heart, I will
do evil. We all intend the good, and would, at least often, do it if we
could. But we don't always understand what the good is.

That is hardly a new idea. But, while I have known  {\bfseries about} it for a
long time, heard it with the hearing of the ear, as it were, I haven't truly
 {\bfseries known} it. Between those conditions -- knowing about, and knowing
-- I think there is a very big difference. The point of this book was, for
me, the discovery of that understanding. True education is not knowing about,
but knowing. It is the cure of folly and the curb of vice, and our only
hope of escaping what Socrates once called ``the greatest peril of this
our life'' -- not sickness or death, as most of us would say, but the
failure to make sense about the better and the worse, and thus to choose
the wrong one, thinking it the other.

This is, I'm afraid, a presumptuous book. It is a book about how to live
by a man who doesn't know how to live, but who has begun to learn that he
doesn't know how.



\mainmatter

\chapter{Who Is Socrates, Now That We Need Him?}



WHEN BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was hardly more than a boy, but clearly a comer,
he decided to achieve moral perfection. As guides in this enterprise, he
chose Jesus and Socrates. One of his self-assigned rules for daily behavior
was nothing more than this: ``Imitate Jesus and Socrates.''

I suspect that few would disagree. Even most militant atheists admire Jesus,
while assuming, of course, that  {\bfseries they} admire him for the right reasons.
Even those who have no philosophy and want none admire Socrates, although
exactly why, they can not say. And very few, I think, would tell the young
Franklin that he ought to have made some different choices: Alexander, for
instance, or Francis Bacon.

Jesus, just now, has no shortage of would-be imitators, although they do
seem to disagree among themselves as to how he ought to be imitated. But
the imitators of Socrates, if any there be, are hard to find. For one thing,
if they are more or less accurately imitating him, they will not organize
themselves into Socrates clubs and pronounce their views. If we want to
talk with them, we will have to seek them out; and, unless we ourselves
become, to some degree at least, imitators of Socrates, we will  {\bfseries not} know
enough to want to seek them out. Indeed, unless we are sufficiently his
imitators, we might only know enough not to want to seek him out, for some
of those who sought Socrates out found reason to wish that they hadn't.
Unlike Jesus, or, to be more accurate, unlike the Jesus whom many imagine,
Socrates often brought not the Good News, but the Bad.

Nevertheless, people do from time to time come to know enough about Socrates
to be drawn into his company, and to agree, with rare exceptions, that it
would indeed be a good thing to imitate him. The stern poet-philosopher
Nietzsche was one of those exceptions, for he believed, and quite correctly,
that reasonable discourse was the weapon with which the weak might defeat
the strong, but most of us often do think of ourselves as weak rather than
strong, and what seemed a bad thing to Nietzsche seems a good thing to us.
However, when we  {\bfseries do} try to imitate Socrates, we discover that it
isn't as easy, and as readily possible to millions, as the imitation of
Jesus is said to be.

So we make this interesting distinction: We decide that the imitation of
Jesus lies in one Realm, and the imitation of Socrates in quite another,
The name of the first, we can not easily say, but the name of the second
is pretty obviously ``mind.'' Even the most ardent imitators of
Jesus seldom think of themselves as imitating the work of his mind, but
of, well, something else, the spirit, perhaps, or the feelings, or some
other faculty hard to name. But those who would imitate Socrates know that
they must do some work in the mind, in the understanding, in the intellect,
perhaps even in the formidable ``intelligence'' of the educational
psychologists, beyond whose boundaries we can no more go than we can teach
ourselves to jump tall buildings. We may apparently follow Jesus simply
by feeling one thing rather than another, but the yoke of Socrates is not
easy, and his burden not light, nor does he suffer little children to come
unto him.

And we say that, while it would be truly splendid to imitate his example,
it really can't be done as a general rule for ordinary life. Very few of
us are as smart as Socrates, after all, and the smartest of us are already
very busy in computers and astrophysics. Socrates appeared once and only
once among us, and the chances of his coming again are very slim. We may
hold him up as a shining example, of course, but as a distant star, not
a candle in the window of home. He is one in billions. So we must, it seems,
resign ourselves to living not the examined life but the unexamined life,
responding to the suggestions of environment and the inescapable power of
genetic endowment and toilet training.

Nevertheless, millions and millions of us contemplate no serious difficulty
at all in imitating the example of Jesus, who, as it happens, is also held
to be one in billions. We do  {\bfseries not} say, Ah well, a Jesus comes but
once among us, and we lesser folk must content ourselves with remembering,
once in a while, some word or deed of his, and trying, although without
any hope of truly and fully succeeding, to speak as he might have spoken,
to think as he might have thought, and to do as he might have done. Sometimes,
to be sure, provided that we do in fact understand him correctly, which
is by no means always certain, we might come near the mark. But it is childish
and idealistic to imagine that we can, especially in this busiest and most
technically demanding of worlds, plainly and simply live as Jesus lived.
No, we do not make those reservations, but suppose rather that, in the case
of  {\bfseries this} one life among billions, we can launch ourselves, all at
once, and as if by magic, into the Way in which he walked. And this is because
we imagine that the Way of Socrates is barricaded by the wall of an intelligence
test, and the Way of Jesus is not, that the regularly examined life requires
a lot of hard mental labor, and that the good life is as natural and automatic
as the singing of the birds.

But there was at least one man who held, and who seems to have demonstrated
in a very convincing fashion, that Socrates was not at all special, that
he was, indeed, just as ignorant as the rest of us. We can not dismiss him
as a political enemy or an envious detractor, or even as a more ``advanced''
philosopher who had the advantage of modern information to which Socrates
had no access. It was Socrates himself who made that demonstration. And,
although Plato is surely the most humorous and ironic of philosophers, it
is just not possible to read Socrates' {\itshape Apology} as a witty trick at
the jury's expense. It is a sober autobiography. Socrates explains that
he has simply spent his life in trying to discover what the god could have
meant in saying, by an astonishing oracle, that Socrates of Athens was the
wisest of men. Socrates had discovered, as he had expected, that he knew
nothing, but also that the same was true of everybody else. The oracle meant,
in effect, that the wisest of men was just as unwise as all other men. But
we seem to be fundamentalists about the oracle. There is a curious contradiction
in us when we say that Socrates is an inimitable one in billions because
of the power of his mind, and thus deny the power of his mind to judge truly
as to whether he was an inimitable one in billions. Our minds, which are
not up to the work of imitating him, are nevertheless quite strong enough
to overrule him. Strange.

In old age, Franklin admitted that his plan for the achievement of moral
perfection had not entirely succeeded, and that he had not, after all, been
able perfectly to imitate either Jesus or Socrates. But he did not say that
such imitations would have been impossible, or excuse himself from them
on the grounds that they would have been impractical or unrealistic, or
even, as the modern mind seems very likely to say, that they would have
been counterproductive and little conducive to success. He says that, all
in all, while he was but an occasional imitator, even so he had thus lived
a better and a happier life than he would have otherwise had. And I do suspect
that Socrates himself might have said much the same, for he, too, was surely
an occasional imitator of Socrates.

The Socrates we have in the dialogues of Plato simply must be a ``perfected''
Socrates, a masterpiece every bit as much artistic as philosophical. I have
lived, and so have you, in this world, which is the very same world in which
Socrates lived. Only its temporary particulars have changed. He did, if
only when Plato wasn't around, or perhaps before Plato was around, worry
about money. He quarreled with his wife, and fell out of patience with his
children. He spoke, and even acted, without considering the full meaning
and probable consequences of his words and deeds. He even, if only once
or twice, saw Reason clearly and completely, and went ahead and listened
to Appetite instead. And once in a while, from time to time, he lost his
grip on that ``cheerful and temperate disposition'' without which
neither the young nor the old, neither the rich nor the poor, can hope for
that decent and thoughtful life of self-government that is properly called
Happiness. And such outrageous and unconventional charges I can bring --
as can you -- against Socrates or anyone, with calm assurance, for Socrates
was just a man. To do such things, as he himself very well knew, was merely
human.

So now I can see before me one of those persons whom I call, in a very strange
manner of speaking, ``my'' students. There she sits, as close to
the back of the classroom as possible. She is blowing bubbles with her gum,
and not without skill. She intends to be a schoolteacher. She has read,
in their entirety, two books, one about some very frightening and mysterious
happenings in a modest suburban house on Long Island, and the other about
excellence. I now have reason to hope that she has been reading Emerson,
and she probably has. She is not a shirker, but, at least usually, as much
a person of serious intent as one should be at her age and in her condition.
Her understanding of Emerson is not perfect, but neither is mine. The essay
she has been reading, I have read many times, and every time with the realization
that my understanding of it, up to now, of course, has not been perfect.

I know this as surely as I know that Socrates was once exasperated by a
yapping dog: Someday, perhaps this day, when I have explained some difficult
proposition's exploration by Emerson, that young woman, or somebody else
very much like her, will raise her hand and ask  {\bfseries the} question, and
ask it just as Socrates asked, out of what she knows to be her ignorance,
and her desire not to be ignorant. And her question will remind me that
I am ignorant, and that I didn't know it, and that I do not want to be.

I probably give less thought than I should to the question of whether the
world exists, but I often consider the question of  {\bfseries when} it exists.
When I am there in class, considering that young woman's question before
me, that is the world. Socrates exists. As though she were Socrates, this
blower of bubbles asks the question. She has never thought out or named
``undefined terms,'' ``unbounded categories,'' or ``unexamined
propositions.'' She can not  {\bfseries say} that a likeness should be noted
where only difference was presumed, or a difference where only a likeness.
But she can ask as though she had considered such things. And in that moment,
in the world that then and there exists, who is the teacher and who the
student? Who is Socrates?

If I have any good sense at all, will I not give  {\bfseries her} question as
much thoughtful consideration as I would have given to the same question
had it come from Socrates himself? And for two reasons, both of them splendid?

Rather than effectively dismissing Socrates when we suppose that we praise
him as ``one in billions,'' we might do better to attend to our
words as though we were poets, looking always deeper into and through them.
We could thus also say that Socrates is one who is truly  {\bfseries in} billions,
the most powerful confirmation that we have of what is, after all, not merely
an individual but a generally human possibility -- the mind's ability to
behold and consider itself and its works. That power is probably unavailable
to infants and lunatics, but, in the absence of some such special impediment,
who can be without it? Can it be that some of us are empty, and without
that power which is the sign of humanity? My bubble-blower certainly is
not, and she is real. I have seen her often. And in that moment when she
is Socrates, I may well be seeing the first moment of thoughtfulness in
her life. Education, real education, and not just the elaborate contraption
that is better understood as ``schooling,'' can be nothing but the
nourishment of such moments.


I imagine some well-informed and largely wise visitor from another world
who comes to Earth to study us. He begins by choosing two people at random,
and, since time and place are of no importance to him, but only the single
fact of humanity, he chooses Socrates and me, leaving aside for the moment
every other human being. He begins with an understanding of the single but
tremendous attribute that distinguishes us both from all other creatures
of Earth. We are  {\bfseries capable} of Reason. Capable. We  {\bfseries can} know ourselves,
unlike the foxes and the oaks, and can know that we know ourselves. He knows
that while we have appetites and urges just like all the other creatures,
we have the astonishing power of seeing them not simply as the necessary
attributes of what we are, but as separate from us in a strange way, so
that we can hold them at arm's length, turning them this way and that, and
make judgment of them, and even put them aside, saying, Yes, that is ``me,''
in a way, but, when I choose, it is just a thing, not truly  {\bfseries me},  but
only  {\bfseries mine}. He sees, in short, what ``human'' means in ``human
beings.''

And then he considers the specimens he has chosen, Socrates and me. He measures
that degree to which they conform to what ``human'' means in ``human
beings.'' With those superior extraterrestrial powers that imagination
grants him, he will easily discover:

That I have notions, certain ``sayings'' in my mind, that flatly
contradict one another; believing, for instance, that I can choose for myself
the path of my life while blaming other people for the difficulty of the
path. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That my mind is full of ideas that are truly nothing more than words, and
that as to the meaning of the words I have no clear and constant idea, behaving
today as though ``justice'' were one thing, and tomorrow as though
it were another. That, while wanting to be happy and good, I have no clear
ideas by which I might distinguish, or might even  {\bfseries want} to distinguish,
happiness from pleasure, and goodness from social acceptability. With Socrates,
this is not the case.

That I usually believe what I believe not because I have tested and found
it coherent and consistent, and harmonious with evidence, but because it
is also believed by the right people, people like me, and because it pleases
me. And that furthermore, I live and act and speak as though my believing
were no different from my knowing. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That I put myself forth as one who can direct and govern the minds, the
inner lives, of others, that, in fact, I make my living as one who can do
that, but that my own actions are governed, more often than not, by desire
or whim. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That I seem to have a great need for things, and think myself somehow treated
unjustly by an insufficiency of them, and that this insufficiency, which
seems strangely to persist even after I get hold of the thing whose necessity
I have most recently noted, prevents in me that cheerful and temperate disposition
to which I deem myself entitled. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That I seem to know what I want, but that I have no way of figuring out
whether I  {\bfseries should} want what I want, and that, indeed, it does not
occur to me that I  {\bfseries should} be able to figure that out. With Socrates,
this is not the case.

And that, in short and in general, my mind, the thing that most makes us
human, is not doing the steering of this life, but is usually being hustled
along on a wild ride by the disorderly and conflicting commands of whole
hosts of notions, appetites, hopes, and fears. With Socrates, this is not
the case.

How could the alien enquirer help concluding that there is something ``wrong''
with me, and that the humanness that is indeed in me has been somehow ``broken,''
which he can clearly see by comparing me with Socrates? Must he not decide
that Socrates is the normal human, and I the freak, the distortion of human
nature?

When he pronounces me the freak, and Socrates the perfectly ordinary, normal
human being, living quite obviously, as perhaps only an ``alien''
can see, by the power of that which most makes a human a human, shall I
defend myself by appeal to the principle of majority rule? Shall I say:
Well, after all, Socrates is only one human being, and all the others are
more like me. Would I not prove myself all the more the freak by my dependence
on such a preposterously irrelevant principle? If that visitor were rude,
he might well point out that my ability to see, on the one hand, what is
natural to human beings, and to claim, on the other, that its absence is
only natural, and thus normal, is just the sort of reasoning that he would
expect of a freak, whose very freakishness is seen in his inability to do
what is simply natural to his species -- that is, to make sense.

But Socrates would defend me. He would say, for this he said very often:

No, my young friend is not truly a freak. All that I can do, he can do;
he just doesn't do it. And if he doesn't do it, it is because of something
else that is natural to human beings, and just as human as the powers that
you rightly find human in me. Before we awaken, we must sleep, and some
of us sleep deeper and longer than others. It may be, that unless we are
awakened by some help from other human beings, we sleep our lives away,
and never come into those powers. But we can be awakened.

In that respect, my friend is not a freak. He might better be thought a
sleepwalker, moving about in the world, and getting all sorts of things
done, often on time, and sometimes very effectively indeed. But the very
power of routine habit by which he can do all that has become the only government
that he knows. And the voices of his desires are loud. He is just now not
in a condition to give his full attention to any meaning that might be found
in all that he does, or to consider carefully how to distinguish between
the better and the worse. He might be thought a child, and a perfectly natural
child, who lives still in that curious, glorious haze of youth, when only
desire seems worthy of obedience, and when the mighty fact of the world
that is so very ``there'' looms immeasurably larger than the fact
of the self that is in that world. He might grow up, and it is the ``mightness''
in him that makes him truly human, however he may look like a freak just
now. From time to time, we are all just such freaks, and mindless, for mindlessness
is the great background of noise out of which some few certain sounds can
be brought forth and harmonized as music.


I am often worried and vexed about the colossal social institution of ``schooling,''
of which I am a paid agent. My quarrels and complaint with schooling are
beyond my counting, and also, I must admit, valid but trivial. Looming behind
all of the silly things that we do in schools, and pass off as an ``education''
that would have startled Socrates, there is nothing less than a great, pervading
spirit of dullness and tedium, of irksome but necessary labors directed
completely toward the consolidation of the mundane through the accumulation
of the trivial. In school, there is no solemnity, no reverence, no awe,
no wonder. We not only fail to claim, but refuse to claim, and would be
ashamed to claim that our proper business was with the Good, the True, and
the Beautiful, and that this business can be conducted not through arousing
pleasant feelings, but through working the mind. Thus it is that education
is exceedingly rare in schooling, and when it breaks out, it is as the result
of some happy accident, an accident that might have befallen a prepared
mind, or maybe any mind at all, just as readily in the streets as in the
schools.

Education makes music out of the noise that fills life. And from the random
and incessant background noise of what we suppose the ``mind,''
meaning really the appetites and sentiments, education weighs and considers,
draws forth and arranges, unites the distant with the near, the familiar
with the strange, and makes, by Reason, the harmonious music that  {\bfseries is} 
Reason. If we can know anything at all about How to Live, it is in Reason
that we must seek it, for the only other possibility is to seek it outside
of Reason, in the disorder of noise. I am convinced that Socrates is right,
that anyone can make that search and decide, not what the Meaning and Purpose
of Life is, but what the meaning and purpose of the searcher's life  {\bfseries should} 
be, and thus to live better. 




\chapter{The Square of the Hypotenuse}



WHO FIRST CALLED REASON sweet, I don't know. I suspect that he was a
man with very few responsibilities, no children to rear, and no payroll
to meet. An anchorite with heretical tendencies, maybe, or the idle youngest
son of a wealthy Athenian. The dictates of Reason are often difficult to
figure out, rarely to my liking, and profitable only by what seems a happy
but remarkably unusual accident. Mostly, Reason brings bad news, and bad
news of the worst sort, for, if it is truly the word of Reason, there is
no denying it or weaseling out of its demands without simply deciding to
be irrational. Thus it is that I have discovered, and many others, I notice,
have also discovered, all sorts of clever ways to convince myself that Reason
is ``mere'' Reason, powerful and right, of course, but infinitely
outnumbered by  {\bfseries reasons},  my reasons.

Let me give an example. Socrates often considered with his friends a familiar
but still vexing question: Which is better, to suffer an injustice or to
commit one? He brought them -- and me too -- to consider the question in
some new ways. Which, for instance, is uglier, the person who suffers or
the person who commits? Which person has surrendered himself to the  {\bfseries rule} 
of injustice, and which person might still be able to avoid it? Which might
still be free to choose between the better and the worse, and which not?
Out of the consideration of such questions, and countless others that flow
from them, I know that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit
one just as purely and absolutely as I know about the square of the hypotenuse.
If there were some acts possible to me, some ways of living and doing, that
could be based in principle on my knowledge of the square of the hypotenuse,
what a splendid fellow I would be. In all my dealing with you, and with
everybody, I would be strictly on the square. I would no more cut a corner
than a right angle would decide, well, just for this once, to enlarge itself
by just a little degree or two, which the other angles could surely do without,
and which, after all, they might not even notice. Nevertheless, as certain
as I am by Reason that suffering injustice is better than doing it, my first
reaction to what I consider an injustice done to me is probably just the
same as yours. I hate it. I just can't wait to get even. And sometimes,
much to my satisfaction, I do. When I do, I call it Justice, not omitting
the capital.

So, for some reason with a small ``r,'' I actually find it possible
to hate the conclusions of Reason, which would show me that I am all the
better off, as well as all the better, for keeping strictly on the receiving
end of injustice. From the point of view of Socrates, I guess, I might just
as wisely and sanely decide not to go along with the square of the hypotenuse.

I doubt that I could get around Socrates, although I would give it a try,
by pointing out that circumstances alter cases, to which he would probably
reply, perhaps even with passing reference to that exasperating square of
the hypotenuse, that cases don't seem to alter principles, but that, on
the contrary, it is precisely because we can detect some underlying principle
that we can recognize a case. Nor would I be able to convince him that,
in getting even, I had actually done my persecutor a big favor, bringing
him to his senses and making him a wiser and better person, which outcome
was not really my intention at all. If he had, in fact, been made a better
person by my revenge, the credit would not be mine but his, for having managed
to find the better in spite of having been dealt the worse. Therefore, on
those all-too-rare occasions when I do manage to take a swift and sweet
revenge, I don't mention it to Socrates.

Now that is strange behavior, and it is even stranger that it is generally
called nothing but ``normal'' behavior, out of the same presumption,
no doubt, that brings us to think Socrates a freak. But lots of people will
do just as I do where they find themselves treated, as they see it, unjustly.
Lots of those people know every bit as well as I do that Reason does indeed
show that it is better to suffer than to do an injustice. 

So here we are, they and I, whoever they might be, not only doing what we
know to be contrary to the perfectly demonstrable conclusions of Reason,
bad enough, but then going on to call that ``normal,'' a lot worse.
It is as though we were willing to say that it is normal for human beings,
in whom the power of Reason is the quintessential attribute, not only to
reject its conclusions but even to despise them. We might just as well say
that sanity is, of course, a fine and wholesome condition, but that insanity
is normal.

I can not speak for others, but in my own case I find this a vexing conclusion,
for when I say that everyone is a little bit crazy, I am surely including
myself, a member in standing -- ``good standing'' seems inappropriate
at the moment -- of the numerous company called ``everyone.'' I
do go around in the world putting myself forth as an ``educated man,''
whatever that means. And what can it mean, indeed, if an educated man has
to admit, and gladly takes the strange satisfaction that goes with the admission,
that he is at least a little bit crazy and just as normal as anyone else
who sees Reason but doesn't like it?

It would be one thing if I alone called myself educated, out of some profound
misunderstanding of the meaning of education. Then, I could either be set
right, or left to my own special craziness. But the fact is that the world
also calls me, and countless other people just like me, educated. The world
says, in other words: Here is a man who can see some truth and choose not
to live by it, a man who excuses himself as normal for giving his feelings
and appetites domination over his mind, a man who might actually hate the
square of the hypotenuse should it occur to him that his behavior might
be circumscribed by the principle it reveals. All of which is to say, here
is an educated man.

That already seems to be approaching the preposterous, but the world goes
even farther. Here we have one educated man cunningly devising the discomfiture
and destruction of his enemies, another cleverly contriving to take possession
of the goods of others by force or fraud, and yet another passing out one-way
tickets for long rides in boxcars. What sort of definition of education
must we have, that we suppose it neither in impediment to immoral behavior
nor an imperative to rational behavior?

I am driven, in search of some answer to that question, to compare myself
with my unlucky counterpart, the uneducated man. Here he stands, the poor
ignoramus, knowing neither Dante nor Debussy. He has never heard of Socrates
or of syllogisms. He can neither write a grammatical sentence nor read one.
He is not impelled to meditation by the square of the hypotenuse, and he
wouldn't for a minute swallow any of that nonsense about putting up with
injustice. Ah, how different we are. He watches reruns of ``Laverne
and Shirley,'' and I stick to ``Masterpiece Theater'' and ``Nova.''
He and his pals, furthermore, outnumber me and mine enormously. No wonder
the world is always in such a mess.

I find myself feeling sorry for him, and imagining how much better a person
he might have been had he only spent more of his life paying close attention,
and some fees, to people like me. I am, after all, a teacher. Have I not
pledged myself to make people better? What a pity it is that this poor slob
never put himself under my instruction and learned to be better, like me.
Ah, well, we can't all be that lucky, and, after all, somebody does have
to do all the hard and messy work that I am too educated to do.

And how lucky I am that he is probably rather inarticulate. And I do hope
that he remains inarticulate, lest he say what I should hear:

So, I would be better would I, if I were more like you, eh? Do you mean
that I too would then be able to recognize and coherently describe the conclusions
of Reason before I reject them and decide to do as I please? Is that what
you teach in your school -- how to go beyond an unknowing obedience to appetite
into a fully conscious and willful obedience to appetite? Do you have the
brass, Jack, to tell me that it is better to know the good and to refuse
it than to be ignorant of the good -- as you suppose me -- and to miss it?
The important differences between us that I can see are that you choose
to be irrational and I can't help being irrational, and that you have been
rewarded for the cleverness out of which you do that choosing with a handsome
collection of diplomas.

Yes, diplomas. About that, at least, he's surely right. I do have all sorts
of information that he lacks. I know the kings of England, and I quote the
fights historical, although I must admit that I'm no longer sure of the
cheerfulness of those many facts about the square of the hypotenuse. Of
course, he might also have lots of information that I lack, but the kind
of information he has is\ldots well\ldots a different kind of information, you
know. Not quite as classy. It's about how to do some sort of work, perhaps,
or maybe about baseball statistics or something. It's not that  {\bfseries educated
} kind of information that I have.

Still, the difference does seem to be a matter of information, and, of course,
diplomas, which are testimonials to the fact that some other people with
lots of the ``educated kind'' of information were willing to concede
that I had acquired some sufficient amount of that too. And, thinking of
that, a strange and unnerving thought strikes me. It's not as easy as I
thought to define that educated kind of information. Socrates and Aquinas
were also utterly ignorant of Dante and Debussy, and they didn't watch any
television at all, not even ``Masterpiece Theater.'' They never
read Dostoyevski or Kant, and they never even heard of calculus or quantum
mechanics. (I, of course, am informed about those two mysteries, which is
to say, needless to say, that I  {\bfseries have} heard of them.) And Socrates
never read Aquinas, who did, at least, read Plato, and especially Aristotle,
whom Socrates also never read. But it would be very hard, even for me, educated
as I am, to deny such minds the rank, if rank it is, of ``educated.
''

On the other hand, I suspect, no, I know, that they would not admit me to
that rank. They shared, across many centuries, an idea about education,
and about its absolute dependence on Reason rather than information, that
we do not share. I'm not so sure about Aquinas, for he was a schoolman,
after all, but Socrates cared nothing for schools or diplomas. Both, however,
understood that education had no necessary relationship to schools or diplomas,
and both held that the true goal of education was to make people able to
be good.

I think it's important to put it just that way --  {\bfseries able} to be good.
That phrase contains some remarkable suggestions. We do suppose that the
aim of education is to make people able to do some sort of work, to be engineers
or physicians or social workers or something else, and we do hope that as
many of them as possible will be good at what they do. But by that, we mean
``effective.'' And we are pretty clear about what it is that will
make them effective -- some combination of talent, information, and practice,
producing, of course, some visible and measurable results in the world that
we all can see. But Socrates and Aquinas would not want us to confuse any
person's effectiveness, his skill in his calling, with his Goodness, quite
another thing.

But that's a fairly elementary suggestion of ``able to be good.''
It also suggests that being good is not, as it often seems, and as it surely
pleases us to believe, a matter of temperament and character, combined with
suitable feelings, and maybe a little bit of luck. It is, rather than a
skill, a power and a propensity, both of which can be learned and consciously
applied.

I do have some practical experience of the fact that lots of people find
that notion either just plain silly or astonishing. I often ask my students
to read at least some parts of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, and there,
as I intended, they soon come to that passage in which Franklin describes
his youthful ambition to achieve moral perfection. So how hard could it
be? He knew, after all, the roots of moral failure, a mix of custom, bad
company, and his own weaknesses, and felt that, by knowing them for what
they were, and by a deliberate act of will, he would certainly be able to
pay them strict attention and to keep them all under control.

He made a little chart, the sort of thing on which my earliest piano teacher,
and yours too, I imagine, used to stick little stars in recognition of some
slight improvement in arpeggios. Franklin's chart was a list of virtues
to be practiced every day, and every evening he gave himself grades. It
is a bit Eagle Scoutish, and the whole idea seems bizarre to my students,
and that for at least two very important reasons. First, they do not see
any reason to call patience ``better'' than impatience, but only
different, and second, because even if patience were for some unaccountable
reason to be thought the better, those who don't have it, just don't have
it, and that's the way it is. To them, an impatient person is impatient
in the same way that a left-handed person is left-handed, and trying to
make some change in the first case might be, for all they know, as dangerous
and disabling as enforcing change in the second. They don't see, at first,
that patience, even if it can be understood as a virtue, is something that
anyone can  {\bfseries do} anything about.

Socrates, and Franklin too, would have remarked on the extraordinary convenience
of that belief. But, in fairness to my students, it is not because of its
convenience that they have come into that belief, nor did they choose it.
It was, in fact, thrust upon them, like so many other ideas that they don't
notice that they have. Indeed, it doesn't take more than a little discussion,
salted with just the right questions, to bring them -- well, quite a few
of them -- to see just how convenient a belief it is, and to wonder, a bit
suspiciously, just how they came to believe it in the first place. And then,
the conscious and deliberate practice of patience seems less bizarre, and
not dangerous. Perhaps, even, ``good,'' whatever that means.

This invariable result -- it truly never fails -- convinces me that an ancient
idea of the meaning of education is a better one than whatever it is we
now assume. It says first that if we can know the Good, it is by the power
of Reason; and second, that there is in all of us a hunger for the Good,
so that, as Reason little by little seems to reveal it, we are delighted
and enthralled. It is as though we were hearing, at last, what we have always
longed to hear, without having any idea at all what it was. My students
still see Franklin's chart as -- well, overoptimistic, to say the least,
as Franklin himself saw it from the distance of many years, but they also
see that it is based on an idea that makes some sense, and that can be known.
They see, furthermore, that to this idea they were, for some strange reason,
simply blind. They just hadn't thought of it, nor had anyone proposed it
for them.

They see, too, and I think this a terribly important realization, that they
are perfectly capable of understanding it, and that their understanding
has nothing to do with having taken the right courses and having gotten
good grades, and nothing to do, either, with the so-called lessons of experience.
Experiences they have surely had, but it is only now, in the light of some
hitherto unsuspected principle, that those experiences can suddenly be construed
as lessons.

My students do, I'm sure, put all of that out of their minds the next day.
And why shouldn't they? So does their teacher. Having discussed Franklin's
ideas about the practice of patience on Tuesday, their teacher gets in his
car on Wednesday and rushes across the nearest bridge, carefully switching
from lane to lane lest he find himself in any tollbooth line but the shortest.
Then, ending up behind some woman driver who  {\bfseries thought} she had exact
change, he curses the inexorable destiny that seems to follow him everywhere,
and the folly of a government that gives driving licenses to women.

But they do not forget forever. Someday, somewhere, the idea reappears,
at least in many of them. It has a quality that schoolwork often lacks.
It is seductive, enticing, it will not leave the mind alone. I know this
not only from their testimony, but from my own experience, when I do happen
to consider experience in the light of principle. From time to time, while
fuming in the tollbooth line, I do think of Franklin's chart. I am, to be
sure, rebuked, but also enticed; troubled, but also consoled.

Those are attributes of true education, but the enticement and the consolation
do not begin to appear until the rebuke has been delivered and the troubling
begun. Socrates was well acquainted with that unpleasant onset, the first
stirring not unlike a small and suspiciously unfamiliar pain in the belly
that tells you that you may be in for big trouble. He was speaking of people
who had no philosophy and wanted none, meaning by ``philosophy''
not the elaborate and esoteric discipline that we have instituted in our
schools, but only a certain way of the mind, a certain habitual resort to
Reason, and a certain propensity to talk about Goodness. Such people, he
said, if only they will stay around and hear an argument out, begin to get
a little twitchy. They are vexed by something that they know they don't
like, but without knowing why they don't like it. They want to object, but
they know not how.

They are like people who discover, on first hearing about the square of
the hypotenuse, that something or other about it does not please them. But
they can hardly say, No, no, it isn't that way at all! So they brood. They
go away at last, discontented, and unable, at least for a while, to return
to their former states of well-being. Some, of course, will never come back
for another session of the mental equivalent of root canal. But some will.

Nevertheless, even those who come back also go away again. And that is why
I am always so ready to take revenge. I know better, but I don't do better.
That is not a good condition, not a condition of Goodness. However, there
is a yet worse condition. I would be in worse condition if I did not know
that I am in bad condition. That worse condition, whatever its proper name,
must be  {\bfseries the} condition out of which education can lead us.

The word ``education'' does suggest some process that leads outward,
and its best opposite would be a word we don't have, ``inducation,''
a leading inward. The idea of liberation suggests a great metaphor, a picture
of a place, the Waiting Room of the Mind, perhaps even the Prison Camp of
the Mind, out of which, someday, somehow, the mind might be led, or in which
it might languish, or even, worst of all, in which it might be forever held
captive.

I must see myself, then, as one at the door of the waiting room, one in
whom the enterprise worthy of the name of education has only begun. I have
come out of something, but I haven't come very far out of it. There is more
outing to be done. How shall I do it? How shall I even learn to  {\bfseries want} 
to do it, for I am, I must confess, very reluctant to give up the delicious
pleasures (as I now find them) of such things as revenge and just complaint
against women who imagine, contrary to all experience and common sense,
that they can find three quarters in their purses.

I would like to say, of course, since that would at least make the enterprise
seem easier, that ``mere'' Reason, by itself, will not lead me out.
That, after all, is what the world says, and it is, like my students' automatic
belief that nothing can or should be done about perfectly natural endowments
like patience or impatience, a remarkably convenient belief. I often wish
that I could share that convenient belief but to do so would be to conclude,
and to claim, that I have already done everything that the power of reason
permits, which I haven't. I have done only enough to see, but from a distance,
some better condition into which reason might yet bring me. I can not yet
say, therefore, that Reason will not lead me out. I don't know that. I have
heard others saying it, as we all have, but that is not the same as knowing
it, knowing it for and in myself.

Education, I am convinced, must be nothing more than this: The journey toward
the limits of Reason, if any there be. And if any there be, so that some
other and even better condition than education may lie beyond them, we can
hardly hope to enter into the greater mystery without passing through the
lesser.

If I have come but a short way on that journey, diplomas notwithstanding,
I would like to pass at least some of the blame for that to inducation,
a vast and diverse condition of life, ordinarily as impalpable to us as
air was to our ancient ancestors. Inducation, in terms probably much too
simple to be entirely accurate, but good enough, I hope, for now, includes
all the forces and influences that, whether by accident or design, make
it difficult for us to think clearly. There is no counting of them. Some
of them are in us, and some outside, in the very air we breathe, as it were,
and those inside we exhale into the world where they afflict others with
clouded thinking, thus making the air we breathe what it is. All of those
forces and influences, we made, for there is in the whole universe, as far
as we can tell, no other thinking creature, and thus, happily, I suppose,
no other misthinking creature.

We are all born in captivity. That is no disgrace, for there is no other
place in which to be born. Without the nurture of all the rest of our kind,
we do not become our kind. We need captivity. But, unlike the other animals,
whose original endowment is also their ultimate endowment, we can be born,
as it were, in one world, and come at last to live in quite another. By
our nature we can do something that no other creature we know of is able
to do. The equivalent act in an oyster would be to discover that it lives
in the sea, and not in the jungle; and that it  {\bfseries is} an oyster, and
not some other creature; and that it is only  {\bfseries the} oyster that it is,
and unique; and that its countless and complicated natural functions, taken
all together, do not quite add up to its  {\bfseries self}.




When we make the equivalent discoveries, we see that there is one world
of We and another of I. From the latter, an ``I'' can behold and
consider the former, but it doesn't work the other way around.



\chapter{The Land of We All}




One of the first facts about thinking seems too obvious to be worth mentioning,
but, it isn't always obvious, and we often behave as though it weren't a
fact. Only a person can think. I don't mean by that to point out that trees
and rocks can't think, but to say, rather, that even if trees and rocks
could think, only  {\bfseries a} tree or  {\bfseries a} rock could think. Thinking can
not be done corporately. Nations and committees can't think. That is not
only because they have no brains, but because they have no selves, no centers,
no souls, if you like. Millions and millions of persons may hold the same
thought, or conviction or suspicion, but each and every person of those
millions must hold it all alone. And that it truly is the same thought in
all of them, the very same thought, each must guess of all the others, for
into each other's minds we can not get. All I can ever know of what you
think is your testimony, which may well be as inexpert or self-interested
as mine often is. Every thinker is unique, since every person is unique.


From a certain point of view, thinking is preposterous behavior, and astonishing.
If its appearance among us is truly the result of some evolutionary ``save-the-species''
development, it is clearly one of Nature's great mistakes, for it, and it
alone, has made of us the only species not only able to destroy itself,
but very likely to destroy itself. Of course, I might have that wrong if
it is really in Nature's great plan to save all the other species by planting
in the most dangerous one a lethal seed, but that requires in Nature a low
cunning which seems beneath her. In any case, however, it is perfectly clear
that other creatures do very well indeed without thinking, without seeking
the meaning of their deeds, without making and testing propositions, and
without reading or writing. All such acts, and countless related ones, from
the point of view of all the rest of the universe that we know of, must
be accounted nothing but ``unnatural.'' 

In thinking about thinking, and in thinking about anything, for that matter,
it is always useful to think about something else instead. Give some thought
to the playing of the violin. Imagine that some great team of skilled researchers
has given itself to, and at last accomplished, a study of violin-playing,
a detailed and comprehensive description of absolutely everything that is
happening in a human being who is playing the violin. Their work has been
tremendous, and their findings occupy a whole shelf, maybe a whole wing,
for their considerations begin at least at the submolecular level of neural
signals, and reach, at the far end of some unimaginably long line, all those
things that we vaguely point to when we talk about the imagination and understanding
of the artist. And all such things the researchers have weighed and measure
and counted. 

Imagine now the immensely distant future, when we have ceased on the Earth,
and when there are no singers, no songs, and no violin-playing. Visitors
from another world arrive, and find some few remnants, among them, the great
exhaustive study of violin-playing, complete with pictures and charts and
tables of figures, to say nothing of ear-witness accounts of the feat itself.
Will they not be astonished and reach pretty much the same conclusion that
even you and I would reach should we be able to read such a study? Will
they not say: This is too much. Any fool can see that the playing of the
violin is simply impossible. 

When such a task is seen in all of its details, it takes on the look not
only of the impossible, but even of the unnatural. To one who considers
all of the great and harmonious workings of Nature, the deep and continual
principles that inform them, all that might be called not only Order but
even The Order, nothing could seem more contrary and unlikely than that
a person should bring forth ravishing beauty from a dinky wooden box. 

But in fact, as anyone can see, that is only one of countless unlikely things
that persons do. And thinking is another such. If the great study of violin-playing
would fill a whole wing, the great study of thinking would need a few libraries
all to itself. But it can be done. And -- an even more startling fact --
it can be done by a person who can also play the violin. 

Playing the violin or writing a poem are special ways of paying attention.
They are acts at once small and great. Although only one person can commit
them, they require orderly marshallings of countless and diverse forces,
something like the great landing of armies in Normandy, but incalculably
bigger and more complicated. And such a comparison leads to another important
clue in thinking about thinking. Playing the violin, and thinking, and landing
in Normandy are indubitably human accomplishments, for better or worse,
in either case. But they are accomplishments very different in nature, for
while human beings, and only human beings, can achieve them all, only an
individual person can achieve the playing and the thinking, both of which
are the more difficult, and complicated, and unlikely. The great study of
the invasion can in fact be written, and even read. It was. But the great
study of violin-playing will never be done. 

It is an obvious but simple distinction -- though rarely made -- that there
are some things that we can do because we are humanity, and some things
that we can do because we are persons, and that there is some radical and
absolute difference between the two classes of things. They do not overlap.
A person can no more invade Normandy than an army can play the violin. Furthermore,
while the deeds that pertain to humanity are frequently very large and very
visible, so that we can all see just how stupendous they are, and the deeds
that pertain to persons seem very small and are often utterly invisible;
it takes only a little redirection to conclude that the latter are far greater
accomplishments than the former, beggaring description and final analysis,
and, at last, unlikely. 

But the deeds of humanity are given, in our minds, a superiority over the
deeds of persons. By contrast with the waging of war, the playing of the
violin seems immensely less important, a trifle, in fact. It is an interesting
opinion, for its validity depends entirely on what meaning we are to take
from the word ``important.'' It isn't true, of course, that Nero
fiddled while Rome burned, and I don't know what meaning I would take from
the fact if he had, but if Oistrakh had fiddled through the siege of Leningrad,
as Dame Myra played Mozart through the Blitz, I would see a person doing
one sort of thing and humanity doing another sort of thing, and I would
wonder about what I might learn to mean by the word important. 

About this I don't have to wonder: Dame Myra, or Oistrakh, or perhaps even
Nero, for all I know, could also have wondered about what they might mean
by the word important, but humanity could not. Humanity does not wonder.
Only a person can wonder. And the list is very long of verbs that can be
added to the words ``Only a person\ldots '' If you will make yourself
such a list of verbs, and then another of the verbs that go with ``Only
humanity can\ldots '' you will discover a lot of things to wonder about,
and one of the more important ones will be the meaning that you might learn
to assign to the word important. 

While it may well be that few persons ever happen to notice and consider
the strange and unique powers that they have as persons, and not as humanity,
including the power to decide what important should mean, I suspect that
we all have some inkling of that strange state of affairs. That is why we
are warned in schools -- well, maybe in some schools -- against what is
generally called ``generalization.'' Generalizations often name
many minds and then go on to speak as though they were a mind. Right from
the start, they speak of what is not, for the Italians can not believe one
thing and the Belgians another. Only a person can believe or think -- or
feel, for that matter. And when we undertake to talk about what is not,
we are in danger of falling into nonsense and talking rubbish. 

But the warning against generalization is ordinarily provided not for intellectual
reasons but for social reasons. It is certainly true that vague generalization
provides an easy way to insult lots of people all at once without having
to prove anything, but it also provides an easy way to praise or flatter
lots of people all at once without having to prove anything. If I say that
Jews are stingy, I will be accused first of some social depravity, and only
thereafter, and rarely, too, of intellectual disorder. Furthermore, my intellectual
disorder, speaking as though Jews were an agent who could  {\bfseries be} stingy,
will be at least partially excused should I back off a bit and say, to what
will surely be general assent, Well, some Jews are stingy. Who can deny
it? Some Eskimos are also stingy. I will not be required to specify a percentage.


Having corrected myself socially, I will not be required to correct myself
intellectually. And I will suffer no correction at all if I say that Jews
are diligent and productive. Now, I am OK, and listeners will nod approvingly.
Nor will I be required to say, even approximately, how many Jews are diligent
and productive, or which ones. 

In one of the worlds in which I live, the World of We All, the first assertion
is a Bad Thing, and the second a Good Thing. But in another world in which
I also live, the world where the mind does its work, the two statements
are perfectly equal in value, and their value is zero. They are worthless
statements. It is not sufficient to condemn them as generalizations, for
that condemnation is really an exoneration as well. The most we require
of a generalization is that it be toned down. Come on, now, they can't  {\bfseries all} 
be stingy. And when we declaw our generalizations, we suppose that we have
come out of the Wrong and into the Right. But we have only come out of one
worthlessness and into another. 

There are several ways by which to detect a worthless statement. One of
them is making it into its opposite, and considering the statement and its
supposed negation side by side. The opposite of a worthless statement is
always worthless. If we test the proposition that fat men are jolly by asserting
also that fat men are morose, we do not notice that light has been shed
on the ordinarily expectable disposition of fat men. Neither proposition
suggests any possibility of verification or of falsification. We can not
ask, If the first were true, what else would be true? We can not look for
evidence for the support of the one or the other, because we can not find,
in the world, the real  {\bfseries subject} of either sentence, as we could if
the subject were something like a cannonball dropped from a leaning tower,
or a certain fat man well known to us. We can not find ``fat men.''
At what weight will we set our definition? Will we omit some men who fall
short by three ounces? Will we include those who were three ounces too skinny
in the morning but somehow manage to satisfy us as fat after lunch? And
what will we do about jolly, and morose? Or stingy and productive, for that
matter? Where will we set their limits? How closely will we be able to measure
them? 

Worthless statements can thus be understood as propositions that we simply
can not use for thinking. They just don't work. It is not because they are
mysteries or concepts that transcend thought, like the nature and substance
of the Holy Ghost, or circularity in the absence of circles, but because
they do not rise to the level of thought, in which we find that we need
to make meaningful statements about meaningful statements. 

Worthless statements are a kind of social grace, except, of course, when
they are a social disgrace. They have, in the work of the mind, the same
value as, Well, it's good to see you. How have you been? But, at their worst,
which is where they usually roost, they are dangerous deceptions of the
mind. They leave us, if we are not attentive, with the vague impression
that we know something, when we don't, thus providing us with the chance
of going on to suppose that we know something else as a consequence of something
that we don't know. No good is likely to come of that, except by the happiest
accident, and for harm to come of it requires no accident at all. This is
especially true in that part of life which is social, for it is exactly
there, where great masses of people are made into the subjects of propositions,
that the worthless statement most flourishes, with predictable consequences.


I have been reading, over and over for a few years now, a piece I tore out
of a newspaper. It is a quotation from a book, and it was printed alongside
a review of the book, as an example of good work. The reviewer did not like
the book. The author seems to be a decent and energetic woman who gave up
a successful career as a physician to devote herself to what is perhaps
an even higher calling. She is dismayed, as I am too, by the prospect, perhaps
the likelihood, of an unimaginably destructive nuclear war. She now devotes
her life to arousing others to the danger of the threat, and the book in
question is part of her work to that end. 

I am on her side. I suspect that I would like her. She is, in principle,
saying a very fine thing: Come, let us reason together. This represents
exactly that sort of education I think is the only true one, an education
in Reason -- that work of the mind by which we can, if it can be known,
know the Good. And know the evil too, and see it for what it is, and turn
away from it. If we can not save ourselves from nuclear destruction by the
work of the mind, then our future will be just a matter of luck, and where
war is concerned, we seem little likely to be lucky. But if it is the work
of the mind that will save us, then the work of the mind badly done will
destroy us, unless, again, we are lucky. Read now what she says and consider
whether the mind's work in this case be done well or ill: 

``It is true that we have the secret of atomic energy locked in our
brains forever. But this does not mean that we can't alter our behavior.
Once we practiced slavery, cannibalism, and dueling; as we became more civilized,
we learned that these forms of behavior were antithetical to society, so
we stopped. Similarly, we can easily stop making nuclear weapons, and we
can also stop fighting and killing each other.''

In trying to keep your mind clear, it is always a good idea to be on the
lookout for the pronoun ``we.'' If ``fat men'' make up a
category too big and shapeless for us to say anything accurate about, we
is clearly much larger, and, unfortunately, not at all shapeless. Except
where some defined context limits it to exactly these or those of us, we
has to be all of us. Every one. And people who make moral propositions have
a way of talking about we, and making thus the same kind of worthless statement
that I can make by talking about fat men. 

And, because we is everybody, it is nobody. It is simply not a person, not
a center of consciousness that can think and feel and do, and is therefore
capable of no one of those acts named by the verbs that go with the statement
``Only a person can\ldots '' 

I am a  {\bfseries bona fide} member of we. So are you. About you I can not speak,
but for myself I can say, and not at all to my shame, that I have never
given up slavery. I have never even dreamed of it. If you are depending,
for the sake of the survival of our species, on the fact that I have learned
to alter my behavior and have thus forsworn slavery, then you are leaning
on a weak reed, and the future of our species is not bright. Nor do I suspect
for a minute that I am just one of the die-hards, still holding fast to
the practice of slavery when almost everyone else has learned better. I
rather suspect that, among we, there are actually billions like me, who
have never given up slavery, having had, like me, no reason to do so, having
never, just like me, practiced it in the first place. I suspect, furthermore,
and the history of an especially bloody war leads me to that suspicion,
that many who did give up slavery, did it not out of some moral reawakening,
but under duress -- that is to say, not as a result of what a person can
do, but as a result of what humanity can do. Their giving up was an outer
event, and not an inner act. And I have to wonder about the author of that
passage. Did she have some inner reason to give up slavery? And did she
proceed, by a conscious and supremely important act of the will, to give
it up? 

If we now look around at all of our species, and flatter ourselves as persons
who have learned at least enough goodness to grant our slaves their freedom,
we say what is not so. Somewhere in North Africa or the deep jungles of
Borneo, it may be possible to find a chieftain or two who has in fact done
exactly that, but I think it unlikely that we can depend on them to save
us from war. 

I will have to say the same about dueling and cannibalism. I have never
given them up. In those respects, I am not the better person implied in
that we. And there is very probably hardly anyone who is. Where will we
find all of those people who, having learned better how to order society
and become better persons, will now be the better persons who stop fighting
and killing each other? 

Any proposition has two sides. It always says, in its simplest form, that
A is B. The A of those propositions simply doesn't exist. There surely have
been people who did once give up those wicked practices, but they are gone
from us. Could they hear us boasting that  {\bfseries we} made those decisions,
they might be a bit put out. Perlman might do little more than raise an
eyebrow if I were to claim that we had learned to play the violin, but the
heroes of Marathon might actually turn nasty if I were to boast that we
found on that little beach the strength and determination to turn back the
stronger force of tyranny. The B's of those propositions, however, do indeed
exist. And, if we can understand them not just by their titles but by their
principles, it may become clear that practically  {\bfseries no one} has ever
given them up. 

Here is another way in which our language can trick us into imagining that
we are thinking. The names of things are not the things, and we have many
names that point to no things at all, but to ideas. What is slavery? In
one sense, it is easily identified. Where one person is allowed to have,
by law, possession of another person, ownership, with all the rights that
traditionally go with ownership, that is slavery. In our own nation, that
law was changed, but not by those who owned the slaves. As to whether those
who made the change sought the moral betterment of those who resisted it,
or something else, there is at least room for speculation. 

But what is the root of slavery? What is it  {\bfseries in principle},  rather
than in detail? How did such a practice come to be established by humanity,
and, apparently, universally established at that? Here, there is room for
both speculation and introspection. Which of us can say that he has never
used another person as though that person were an object? Which of us has
resisted every impulse to control or govern another? Which of us has never
deemed himself better and more valuable than another? Which of us has never
sought to put some fence around the mind of another? Is there one of us
who has not thought what even Plato thought, that there are certain people
who are -- well, just inferior, by nature, just not capable of living under
their own direction, and that we are actually doing them a favor by directing
their lives for them, in some way or another? 

I will plead guilty to all of those charges, and I would be very eager to
meet a person who is innocent of them all, for then I might best study Goodness.
But, thinking not in terms of laws and social conventions, which are always
changing, and for reasons that have nothing to do with Goodness, but only
with Necessity, I will have to admit again, but for a very different reason,
that I have not given up slavery, for indeed, I still practice it. 

I can be very specific about that. I can, and do, so overpower the minds
of my students, those, at least, who want to pay attention, and who have
little defense, that they come to believe what I seem to believe, to judge
as I judge. When that happens, I have to start contradicting myself, and
pointing to the uncertainties of my own reasoning, until they too come around
to the new course, and the process begins again. Is the root of slavery
not in them as well as in me? Who of us has not sought to be led? Which
of us has not, from time to time, abandoned the difficult task of understanding
for ourselves, of governing ourselves, even of supporting ourselves? Which
of us has not wanted a master, so that we might be as well taken care of
as a puppy, fed and watered and cleaned up after? Why is it that my students,
when they come to be entirely of my mind, think that that is what they are
 {\bfseries supposed} to do? What taught them that, if not some cultivation and
even some encouragement in them of whatever it is in us all that fears the
perils of freedom? And the cultivators and encouragers, or even the permitters
-- have they given up slavery? 

Nor have I given up dueling. I still duel. I still seek to avenge my ``honor.''
I still incline to answer fire with fire, and injustice, whatever I mean
by that, with justice, whatever I mean by {\bfseries  that}. That I do not go
out at dawn with pistols is not enough to save me from the name of duelist.


On cannibalism, I will make a small concession. While I never did give it
up, I have also never knowingly practiced it. It is, in any case, not at
all the same sort of ``crime'' or ``depravity'' as slavery
or dueling, or even as fighting and killing, not rooted in what may well
be some permanent and universal facts about human beings. We do know that
it was usually practiced only as a religious ritual, and we also know that
our supposed innate abhorrence of cannibalism disappears quite readily under
the clear and imminent threat of starvation, as survivors of airplane crashes
in the high mountains will testify. But cannibalism, too, might well have
been ``given up'' by some person or persons who did indeed come
into some new moral understanding. Where are they now? What role will they
have to play in the moral reawakening by which we will all escape the coming
storm? 

If you were to ask the next three persons you meet in the street to give
a few reasons for the fact that so many people seem unable to think coherently,
consistently, and logically, you would hear some obvious answers. Some of
those answers would refer to what is called ``intelligence.'' Well,
some people are just smarter than others, and thus naturally capable of
more and better thought. You would hear answers about something called ``judgment,''
and very likely accompanied by the complaint that the schools just don't
teach judgment anymore, as though they always had, of course, in the good
old days when everyone was consistently able to think coherently. Your most
sophisticated informant might well point to the notorious difficulty of
strict and formal logic, which the schools also don't teach anymore. After
all, are there not dozens and dozens of those syllogisms, each with a name
of its own, and each indispensable to clear and correct thought? Just think
of all those famous fallacies, and how easily the untrained mind will stumble
into them. And then, of course, there is ignorance, in this context to be
strictly construed not as dullness of mind, but as the simple absence of
information, and thus a widespread impediment to clear thinking even in
the smartest. And just think how much information there is! Who could have
it all, or even any considerable share of it? 

There is some usefulness in all of those understandings, but they seem to
me quite unable to explain the thinking we have been considering here. The
author of those thoughts on slavery remains, whether she practices or not,
a skillful physician. She must indeed be what we call ``smart,''
and diligent as well. Her profession requires logical thought, and lots
of it, and the drawing of correct inferences from the evidence of knowable
facts, a process which must be granted the rank of judgment. I would put
the care of my body under her supervision with no misgivings at all, knowing
that where she had knowledge she would act effectively, and that where she
had not enough knowledge, she would know that she had not enough knowledge,
and send me to someone who did. 

Nor would I say, of the thoughts we have been thinking about, that she has
wandered ``out of her field.'' There are some people who do put
themselves forth as experts in the mysteries of the human heart and soul
-- all sorts, from psychiatrists and economists to preachers and politicians
-- but those mysteries are, and in fact  {\bfseries should} be, everybody's field.
Who are you, who am I, who is  {\bfseries anybody},  to be disqualified as to that
inquiry? If there is any special expertise to be had in contemplating human
mysteries and speaking what truth can be had about them, it might be in
our poets and dramatists and novelists, or even in our myths and music,
but who surely knows which? No, we are not dealing here with someone who
is just out of her depth in a highly technical subject. The impediments
to her clear thinking are not to be found in any of the answers given above.
They come from pains in her belly. 

The Greeks supposed that the belly was the nursery and dwelling place of
the appetites and desires, just as they supposed that the head was the home
of thought, and the chest the place of right feelings, a reasonable mediation
between the two. Their knowledge of anatomy would not have gotten them through
our medical schools, but their metaphor provides powers of the mind that
are not instilled in our medical schools, or any other. That metaphor has
this great virtue, that it gives us the beginning of a way to distinguish
internal and invisible events from one another by family, as it were. We
can be almost as clear in our minds about the different denizens of the
belly, the chest, and the head, as we can about animals, vegetables, and
minerals. 

(I am thinking just now, as many readers may know, about a long essay by
C. S. Lewis, ``Men Without Chests.'' It is about what seems to Lewis
a general and growing inability either to dethrone or harmonize technical
information or prowess and gut feelings. It is good to read. Once a year.)


Consider again that, even in the company of those we call ``intellectuals,''
I would suffer rebuke or disapproval in saying that Jews are stingy, and
escape both in saying that Jews are diligent and productive. As thinking,
both statements are equal. Both worthless. If I can get away with the second,
even in lofty mental company, it is because what I say probably makes every
belly in the room purr with satisfaction, while the first makes them all
growl with unease. 

Of course, it may be a bit more complicated than that. Some belly may be
in spasm, truly pleased to hear Jews called stingy, but fearful lest its
owner be revealed as bigoted. That owner will very likely permit his belly
its secret pleasure and send his head forth to do a little socially acceptable
lying. I will still get the rebuke and disapproval. To escape it, and thus
get away with an utterly worthless proposition, all I have to do is make
the bellies purr. Lots of people know that secret, and live very well by
it indeed. 

The passage cited earlier will make many bellies purr. There are probably
very few people who are looking forward to nuclear war, and thus anxious
about all the rest of us who are hoping to find some way to prevent it.
Who but a maniac out of an old-fashioned science-fiction novel would contemplate
with glee the destruction of all life, or even of lots of it? Who would
not lament the destruction of the butterflies, which is actually, and just
a little bit unfortunately, one of the hideous possibilities used by the
author in her ``argument''? 

But if it is by reasoning together that we may escape nuclear war, then
her thinking may kill us all. In that marvelously pliable land of we all,
anybody can get away with anything. Her opponents, and there must be some,
for otherwise there could be no threat, can write books claiming that we
have learned, through bitter lessons, that force succumbs only to force,
and that we have thus given up, or certainly should give up, our childish
dreams of perpetual peace. Just as cogently as she, which is to say, not
at all, but with just as much hope of making bellies purr, others can say
that we have learned that the price of freedom is supreme sacrifice, and
thus given up the belief, which might also be called ``antithetical
to civilization,'' that we can enjoy its fruits without paying its costs.


There is lots of talk these days about ``teaching children to think,''
a presumed function of the schools, which they are either executing well
or ill, depending on which expert speaks. Of what can that teaching of thinking
consist, I wonder. What exercises can be done? Are the answers in the back
of the book, or only in the teachers' manual? What would I do, if I had
to teach children to think? 

The first thing I would do, I hope, would be to get out of the land of we
all, and recognize that ``children'' do not constitute an entity
capable of thought. So I would set out to discover how to teach a  {\bfseries person} 
to think. And, since the task seems formidable, I would prefer, for my first
try at such work, to pick the person myself, one who shows some promise.
And I would pick, of course, a person who says that we have given up slavery
and dueling and cannibalism. 

And where would I begin, with a person who is already, as we understand
the term, not only ``educated,'' but ``highly educated''?
With the belly, of course, which in this case has overpowered the head.
The greatest failures of thinking do not come from any incapacities of the
mind, nor are they prevented by great skills of the mind. They come from
the interference emitted by the feelings, which can be both detected and
disarmed by the one great power of thought that is the mother of all others,
and that is self-knowledge, the beginning of all thoughtfulness. 





\chapter{The Right Little Thing}




There is a story about the importance of self-knowledge in the Fourth Gospel,
but I think it is traditionally misunderstood because of certain disorders
of the belly, some feelings that are little examined because they are generally
thought to be simply ``right.'' One of the those feelings, of course,
is that Jesus ought not to be included in the company of those who were
merely Great Teachers, such as Socrates and Confucius. They were all proponents
of self-knowledge, of course, but Jesus\ldots Well, he may have thought self-knowledge
a good thing, but he really set his sights far higher, we say, and had some
greater sort of knowledge in mind. And, since many will assert that  {\bfseries that
} knowledge is not truly a work of the mind, but of something else, you
could probably get yourself in a great deal of trouble in some company by
saying that Jesus was a supremely educated man who undertook to lead others
in the paths of education. But I will have to take that risk, and say further
that he urged an education that begins, and ends, in self-knowledge. 

He was surely a stern teacher, who knew when to rebuke the ignorance of
self. What's wrong with you people? he said. When the wind blows from the
South, you know that the day will be hot; and when it blows from the East,
you know enough to prepare for the coming storm. So how come you can't read
the signs in yourselves? And in the famous story of the woman caught in
adultery, known even to unbelievers, he can be seen setting the model for
that enterprise that we now find so necessary and so difficult: Teaching
the Children to Think. 

What a strange and wonderful story that is. Behold their dire approach,
the righteous men who have caught a naughty girl in the very act, a posse
of vigilantes, we usually think. And up to cunning tricks as well, for we
see them setting a trap for Jesus. All right, Mister Master, what about
this? You know the Law, and you know what has to be done in this case just
as well as we do. So how are you going to wriggle out of this one, with
all your sweet talk of forgiveness and mercy? What a poser. And isn't it
just like them, those unregenerate, stiff-necked Pharisees? 

But wait. Is it the mind or the belly that paints that portrait? Are they
not citizens doing what they do believe, and what all their society presumably
believes, their civic duty as well as their religious duty? Are they not
charged with the deed they intend, just as we are charged, both by law and
whatever we mean by morality, to report our knowledge of crime? And do they
not respect that charge, as we do, finding it both worthy and necessary
for the orderly life of us all? Therefore, whether adultery can be accounted
a crime or not according to  {\bfseries our} law, is not the point; it is the
obedience to law that matters. 

Do we see those men as cruel vigilantes because we are good democrats, on
the side of the woman, weak and alone against the forces of repression?
Because they are old-fashioned traditionalists, dogmatic and benighted,
and sex-ist as well, having obviously neglected to bring a certain other
culprit with them? Because we don't choose to observe our own laws against
such things as adultery, having come to consider them vestiges of a primitive
moral system that we have given up, just as we have given up slavery? Do
we think them devious, because we are on the side of Jesus, and we presume
that they are not? And, most important of all, do we try to answer such
questions by listening to our feelings, or by considering the evidence?


The only evidence we have is in the story, and there is no hint in it that
Jesus makes any such judgment of the men who ask him what they ought to
do. Nonchalantly, almost as though shrugging, he seems to say, Fine, go
ahead. I do know the Law as well as you do. But since you are men who say
that you want to know what is right, just be sure that he who throws that
first stone is one who knows that {\bfseries  he} is in the right, and that there
is no wrongness in him. I, being pedantic, and thus cagey, by profession,
talk about wrongness, but he said it right out -- without sin. 

The religionists of our time would produce so many candidates who would
fight for the privilege of throwing that first stone that they would have
to raffle it off, thus, as a happy side-effect of righteousness, raising
a substantial amount of money for the doing of God's work. But those supposed
vigilantes, those rigid dogmatists, those vindictive and self-righteous
taunters of a good man, did no such thing. They thought about it, and they
dropped their stones, and they went away. 

But that isn't exactly true. It is only a ``manner of speaking,''
and manners of speaking, of which there are more than we can count, have
a way of deluding the mind. I said that ``they'' thought about it,
but, of course, they didn't. He did. That one right there. And he did too.
The man to the left. And that one. And that one. They did not form a committee.
They did not hold a meeting. They did not discuss it, considering options
and calling for testimony as to opposing points of view, hoping to discover
some compromise more or less satisfactory to all parties concerned. 

Each one, all alone, considered himself, and nothing but himself. In an
act that has come to be thought of as selfish, each one looked into his
own goodness without any consideration for the goodness of others, or for
their badness either. Each one ``minded'' his own business, which
is to say that each one put his mind to work on himself, seeking his own
betterment. And each one found it, and became better. 

In this vexatious life, it is not at all uncommon to meet people who call
themselves ``educators.'' They swarm. There seem to be millions
and millions of them, so many, in fact, that it is nothing short of astonishing
that there is anyone left uneducated on the face of Earth. If there were
that many orthodontists, you would have to make your way deep into the jungles
of Mindanao to find buck teeth. The next time you meet a person who calls
himself an educator, ask him this: So, whom have you educated lately? Make
sure he gives you their names and addresses. 

If you had asked that question of Jesus, as the stone-carriers went their
ways, he could have answered, although he probably wouldn't have. He would
rather have seen  {\bfseries you} as the smart-alec taunter, and would have found
the ``right little thing'' to say that would cause in you what he
had caused in the departing men. If I knew what right little thing he would
have said, I would tell you, but I don't. I am not an educator. 

But I do know that those men went away educated, ``led out'' of
some captivity, and thinking. And I do know that what Jesus did that day
is True Teaching, not asserting, not arguing, not convincing, not demonstrating,
not cajoling or threatening, not role-modeling or relating. Just plain teaching.
He provided those men with what I have come to think of as an ``occasion
of education,'' an irresistible impulse to thoughtfulness, and probably
the very sort of thing suggested by the poet who said that ``the words
of the wise are as goads.'' They get you moving. And that suggests another
question that you might want to put to an educator: When do you educate?


You may have recognized the book that I quoted earlier, the one in which
we are given credit for having forsworn cannibalism. About that argument,
I can find nothing good to say, but the title of that book is a splendid
example of the occasion of education. It is called  {\bfseries Missile Envy}.
In that, the author has found one of those right little things to say. It
enforces a thought-provoking image -- ostensibly grown men, beribboned and
bedecked, panting after the bigger and better, fearful lest others have
bigger and better. It applies equally as well to missiles as to spears,
or even stones, for that title, quite unlike the silly arguments of the
passage quoted, points through and beyond particulars to a universal principle
by which we see some dark connection between war and lubriciousness, some
prurient quality in violence, and by which we are also led to examination
of ourselves and our own aggressions and desires for revenge, suddenly and
newly revealed as nasty, childish, and shameful. If we could all be impelled
to drop our stones, it would be not by the force of the book's argument,
but by its title. But that would also require, of course, that we think
about it, and about ourselves. 

If it is education that is brought about in the would-be stone-throwers,
and that might be brought about in us even by just the right little thing,
education must have some attributes that we don't ordinarily grant it. For
one thing, it is not a ``rank,'' like citizenship or captaincy.
It is an inward event, like joy or surprise. It would seem more correct
to say, education has sometimes happened to me, than, I am educated. That
would also reflect the fact that education is usually temporary, and who
is brought to it just now, and in this context, may fall out of it tomorrow,
or forget all about it when his belly growls. Thus it can be, for instance,
that a highly trained and skillful expert can also be foolish, and utterly
uneducated. 

And, by token of those same attributes, it seems reasonable to understand
education as a possible habit, or propensity, at least, maybe a leaning,
an inclination of the mind to notice what the world surely provides -- unintended
occasions of education. To such a habit, there would have to be added, of
course, the habit of looking, of paying attention, and that in itself might
well be included in an understanding of education. 

Of all the attributes of such a condition, however, there is one that easily
escapes our notice, and that will not easily win approval. The condition
of the men who chose not to throw their stones was entirely inward, personal
and private. What each had come to know, however briefly and incompletely,
was himself. And the act by which he had come to that knowledge was done
by himself, and could not have been done by another for him. The place where
that deed was done is a place where only the self can go -- the private
contemplative life of the solitary mind. The fact that it is perfectly possible
for human beings to live out life without ever going to that inner place,
and  {\bfseries not} the fact that human beings have different mental endowments,
is the single greatest impediment to a true education. To that impediment
we add another when we disapprove, as socially irresponsible, those who
turn inward rather than outward. 

Education is neither a social virtue nor a particularly sociable one. In
the case of the men in the story, in fact, it brought them to an act that
has to be called, changing whatever particulars might need changing, antisocial.
They have rejected what their society recognizes not only as a social obligation
but as an absolute requirement of religious belief, thus making themselves
heretics as well as criminals. They have walked away not only from the criminal,
of whose guilt there is no question, but from the Law. They have taken it
unto themselves to decide what is right and what is wrong, completely disregarding
the opinion of others and the supposed needs of a civilized order. So what
are they? Are they heroes or rogues, autonomous men, however briefly, or
anarchists? 

The question can be put another way: As they disappear from our sight, are
they better men or worse? Have they reached some power that they lacked,
and given themselves to its use, thus making themselves better men? And
is that power not a power of the mind, rather than the power of some other
imaginable faculty? 

I think those questions might be a bit misleading. They do imply that men
who were formerly ``bad'' became ``good'' through the use
of their minds, but if education and rationality really have the force that
I think to find in them, the case is not quite that simple. If education
is what makes us ``able to be good,'' as I have said earlier, the
change in the stone carriers must be seen not as a passage from bad to good,
but as a growth into the ability to be good. They do not come on the scene
as bad men, but only as men who don't know, not as wicked, but as ignorant.
Jesus doesn't make them good; they have to do that for themselves. He makes
them able. 

What was it, then, that had made them  {\bfseries unable} ? The power that they
discover in the story is surely wonderful, but it is neither miraculous
nor unusual. It is a power that we all nod at, when we hear of it, for we
all have it, and even use it once in a while, although often under duress.
Self-knowledge may be good to have, but whenever I get a flash of it, I
find myself hoping that no one else knows what I have just come to know.
But we do recognize it for what it is, and recognize it as essentially human,
one of the things that make us different. Surely, those men could have found
self-knowledge all by themselves? Why hadn't they? Why did they have to
come to Jesus at all? 

There is an annoying answer to that question. It has to be something like
what we call ``faith,'' a belief, or a collection of beliefs, simply
accepted as true and either left unexamined, or of such a nature as to permit
no examination, which is to say, made up of worthless statements. Faith
is not only religious, it is also social and traditional. The men who came
with stones were what we would call ``adjusted'' to the world of
ideas and understandings in which they lived. They were normal. While it
turned out that they lacked some very important knowledge, they were not
short of information. Far from it, they knew the very letter of the law.
Nor were they in any doubt as to the spirit of the law. I can not help thinking
of some character in a novel of William Dean Howells who says that it is,
of course, possible to be a Christian and still be a good man, but that
it is much harder that way. It does seem that it is because of their sincere
religiousness, which purrs in the belly, that the would-be stone-throwers
have not been able to be good. That seems a bit shocking but not really
any more shocking than a secular equivalent -- that it is because of another
purr, their public-spirited and dutiful citizenship, that they can not be
good. 

Although many of us seem to have misunderstood, or even deliberately misconstrued,
the nature of education for a very long time, that nature is still recognized
in some corner of almost every mind. Our folklore to this day includes the
suspicion that education is disruptive, threatening, and all too likely
to drive out traditional ideas, values, and beliefs, all of which are granted
writs of righteousness by virtue not only of their longevity but equally
of their general acceptance. Education is thought the root and also the
nourishment of skepticism, the disorder that separates the child from the
parent, and even the seed of revolution, which will cancel the very writs
of righteousness as though they had never been legitimate. And it is all
true. 

So how are the stone-carriers different from any other pack of vigilantes?
The answer is easy: They have judged  {\bfseries only} themselves, and only upon
themselves have they passed sentence. Considering that, I find an extraordinary
and unexpected (and also quite unintended) power in the question of the
rebukers -- What would happen if everyone were to do as you have done? What
indeed? I do not know, but it is certainly a tantalizing thought. 

Whatever those consequences might be, however, I suspect that we do not
have to worry about them very much. The voice of the world is very loud,
and easily drowns out the small voice that is in a single person, who is,
in any case,  {\bfseries only} a person, and not humanity, which is thought so
much more significant. And the belly purrs when we heed the voice of the
world, doing our duty and playing our parts in the great scheme of what
everybody knows to be right, at least more or less. What the accusers came
to notice and consider, when a true teacher told them the right little thing,
was that their bellies  {\bfseries were} purring. And the question that they asked
of themselves was whether their bellies  {\bfseries should} be purring. Because
they  {\bfseries felt} right, doing both their civic and religious duties, did
that mean that they  {\bfseries were} right? In each case, each man must have
said something like this: As to whether the deed I contemplate is in itself
good, which question seems strangely to imply the possibility of a deed
with a doer, I am not going to judge. As to whether I am good, and should
do this deed, I can and will judge. And I'm not, and I shouldn't, and I
won't. 

As they went away, however, I think that their bellies were not purring.
I have had moments of self-knowledge that certainly made me better, but
never one that made me  {\bfseries feel} better. So much for the sweetness of
Reason. 

Now let's try a little experiment in thinking, some consideration of what
``we'' will have to do if we want to give up war. Giving up war
is not entirely unlike the truly extraordinary achievement of the men who
came to throw stones. If they did it, why can't we? 

But we, of course, are really a tremendous group of ``I's.'' If
we are to give up war, then I must be included, and that is all the more
necessary if I want to go around and urge others to give up war. My best
arguments would fall flat if it could be seen that I was willing to wage
war in order to make other people give it up. 

The heart of war, the principle by which it lives, is, of course, coercion.
It is, in {\bfseries  person},  the desire that is expressed as policy in  {\bfseries humanity}, 
for those aims that we call ``political'' rather than personal are
still desires that arise in the only place where desires can arise, in persons.
When the persons who desire ethnic purity, for instance, are especially
influential, and their followers thus numerous, we come to imagine that
it is something ``bigger'' than a merely personal desire, but that
bigness is an illusion created by numbers. 

Whatever the particular cause of this or that war, its aim is to enforce
something on others. If I don't ordinarily use tanks and artillery to coerce
others, but only those weapons at my disposal, the coercion is not mitigated
into something less than coercion. And the weapons at my disposal are, for
my purposes against you, say, just as effective as tanks and artillery.
I can wheedle and cajole, I can storm or sulk, I can turn very clever indeed,
and turn a fine phrase once in a while. And you may have some of those powers,
too, and use them, if only to coerce me into abandoning my attempt to coerce
you, for which, we should not forget, many will applaud you as a virtuous
fighter against aggression, thus using one of the most telling arguments
in favor of war. 

Ah but, you may say, that is not truly war. Hostility, aggression, conflict,
maybe, but not war. What then, I'll ask, is the essential that I have missed,
the thing that makes one aggression or conflict war, and another not war?
Violence, you may well answer, and quickly (I suspect) modify that into
``physical violence.'' That too, you will modify, when we have to
distinguish between football and such work as that of the police on the
one hand, and what you want to mean by war on the other. You will have to
move on to lethal and widespread violence against innocent and unconsenting
persons, to say nothing of the general destruction of property and even
some large portions of the face of the Earth. Thus, however, you will find
yourself defining war in such an elaborate and detailed fashion that many
of history's most famous and consequential struggles will no longer deserve
the name, and the supposed ``wars'' of prehistoric savages over
mates and hunting grounds will have to be seen as nothing more than trivial
squabbles. 

As soon as we start measuring ideas like war by numbers or size, we give
up hope of understanding them. If there is one slave, there is slavery.
It takes only one persistent cannibal to ensure the continuation of cannibalism.
Is there some number of warriors, or tanks, in whose lack war ceases to
be war? When Arthur and Mordred are the last combatants on the field, has
war given way to a family spat, or would it be better designated as a case
of dueling? 

And we also give up hope of understanding them when we try to define our
ideas by their supposed consequences. War is that which causes death, and
deaths beyond counting? What doesn't? Everyone living will die, and every
building now standing will fall down, and all that we know will pass away.
War is that which brings misery and deprivation to millions? Do not millions
live in misery and deprivation due to many things other than war? What is {\bfseries 
the} difference between war and plague, between war and the mere passage
of time that will bring an end to everything that is? 

What else can it be but something in the heart, the intention to coerce,
and the willing acceptance of coercion as a way of bringing about some result
presumed good? No one ever fomented a war, or signed up to fight it, for
what he knew to be evil purposes. Only in comic books. If the root of war
is our belief that coercion is sometimes necessary and justifiable, coupled
with the lessons of experience by which we know that coercion often succeeds
very well indeed, and if the ``good'' remains among us a matter
of one opinion as against another, one interest against another, one unverifiable
belief against another, then it is very unlikely that ``we'' can
give up war. 

But  {\bfseries you} could give up war. And so could I. And that would mean that
we would reject the use of coercion under any circumstances whatsoever,
and, accordingly, abandon all claims to any ``rightness'' that can
not be incontrovertibly demonstrated, like the square of the hypotenuse,
to others. It would mean also that we restrict ourselves to committing only
those deeds that pertain to a person, and refraining from those deeds that
can pertain only to humanity. 

I don't think that would be a bad condition, but some are sure to say of
it that it is not to the point. What good will it do, many would ask, if
I give up war, and all those other people don't? That won't bring an end
to war. Which is to say, of course,  {\bfseries I} am not the cause of war. It's
all those  {\bfseries other} people, whoever they might be, the ones who say that
they are against war, but obviously don't mean it. 

I wouldn't know what to say to that, of course, but I would have a very
interesting question for you: What would become of us all, what would happen
to civilization as we know it, if everyone did what you have decided that
it would be useless to do? 




\chapter{The Gift of Fire}




I went to talk to the Mensans. The members of Mensa are the smartest people
in America, and I was intimidated. I was afraid that they might catch me
in a circular argument or a lexigraphical fallacy. I was afraid that they
would rise up, right in the middle of the pathetic little lecture I had
thought up for them, and demolish my silly little premises, and then go,
not storming, but laughing, from the room, to hold high converse among themselves,
not even offering me any coffee and doughnuts. 

The speech was meant to be the opener of a small convention, and scheduled
to take place right after breakfast. I got there early, and was sent to
join the Mensans in a room on the fourth floor, in an upper room, where
they were standing around having coffee and doughnuts. I was relieved of
at least one of my fears. But they were all watching television, and no
one said anything to me. I stood around for a while and went back downstairs,
where the brisk young woman who had sent me upstairs told me that I would
have to understand that Mensans never did anything on schedule, and that
I would have to wait till they came down, Soon, maybe. 

I sat in the lobby and read some of the Mensan handouts that I found on
the floor near the sofa. One of them was a sample test. To become a Mensan,
you have to get high grades on some tests, and what I was reading was a
kind of prep for those tests. It had some very interesting questions. One
of them asked which diagram of a group of six would be generated by taking
diagram C and subjecting it to whatever operations had transformed diagram
A into diagram B. Or maybe it was the other way around. There was a very
good train question, whose details I can't recall, but it had all the classical
attributes of train questions -- train A and train B leaving at different
times from points C and D, moving at rates E and F, and meeting, at last,
at the mysterious point X where ships also, I suppose, pass in the night.
It really took me back. But the question I liked best of all went something
like this: 

``Bob and Carol and Alice and Ted all took the Mensa test. Bob scored
higher than Alice, who scored ten points lower than Ted. Ted's score added
to Carol's score and then divided by the difference between Bob's score
and Alice's score was either twenty points more or twelve points less than
the average of all four scores. Which of the four made it into Mensa?''

Well, I may have forgotten some of the less important details. But it was
a great question. 

I had planned to start my talk to the Mensans with some mention of Prometheus,
and to quote a little from Aeschylus. It was the passage in which Prometheus,
about to be chained down for quite a long time, makes a little recitation
of the things he has done for humanity, and in which he does not mention
at all what we usually think of -- the gift of fire. He speaks instead of
such powers as those of language and number, and, most important of all,
the mind's grasp of itself, in Locke's words. It is the ability not only
to think, but to think about thinking. Before humanity had that, Prometheus
says, humans lived a random and aimless life, ``all blindly floundering
on from day to day.'' I knew that the Mensans were people interested
in their minds, as people should be, and I thought that I might encourage
them in that interest, and, at the same time, give due praise to the great
minds of the past who understood long ago that the mind's grasp of itself
is what alone makes possible the examined life, and thus the good life.


So I imagined myself in conversation with Prometheus, who had come back
to find out what we mortals had managed to do with the astounding powers
that he had given to us alone of all creatures. 

How fortunate I am to run into you, he began, for I see by your rumpled
clothing and your knitted brow that you must be in the mind business. 

I'm honored to meet you, Sir, I replied, and I will confess that I am in
the mind business, for I do no heavy lifting. Would you care to have some
coffee and doughnuts with the Mensans? 

Not just now, thank you. I have come, I must admit, not for social reasons,
but on business. Long, long ago I gave you all the power of the mind's grasp
of itself, the fire by which you may burn and glow like no other mortal
creature. That got me into a lot of trouble at first, of course, but since
my release I've had long, long ages of time in which to wonder whether or
not I had done the right thing. I have grown so curious, in fact, that I
have now undertaken, as you see, a journey whose enormousness you can not
imagine, and only for the purpose of finding out to what good uses you have
put my gift. 

Aha, I said, you have come not only to the right man, but to the right place,
and also at the right time. There must be something to that Divine Guidance
business. As it happens, I hold here in my hand the answer that you seek.


What have we done, you ask. Just listen to this. Imagine a train leaving
point A and moving toward point B at the rate of C. Imagine now another
train moving from B to A at rate D, having set forth on its journey E minutes
after the departure of the first train. Would you believe it if I told you
that we -- well, some of us -- are able to figure out where and when those
trains will meet? So how's that for mind business? 

He looks at me steadily for a moment. He clears his throat. I begin to feel
that I have not yet fully stated our case. I rush into the silence with
six diagrams. 

And look at this, just look at this. You see these diagrams? Now this little
one over here was made by doing something or other, maybe a little twisting
or turning this way or that, to this other little diagram. Now, and this
is the beauty part, one of these six diagrams down here got to be the way
it is because the very same things, the twisting and turning stuff, you
know, were done to {\bfseries  this} little diagram. Pretty neat, eh? Now suppose
I were to tell you that we -- well, some of us -- by the power of  {\bfseries the
mind alone},  can say exactly which of these little\ldots 

At this point, Prometheus silently rises and begins to walk off. I get the
impression, probably through Divine Guidance, that he is going to go back
and chain himself to the rock for another long sentence. 

Wait, wait, I call after him, now heading through the door and out into
the street. Let me tell you about Bob and Carol and Alice and Ted! They
all took this test, you see, and\ldots and\ldots 

But Prometheus is gone. I begin to wonder whether the nature of his gift
is such that he can take it back. I begin to suspect that he  {\bfseries has} 
taken it back. My mind is losing the grasp of itself. All I can think of
is Bob and Alice and Carol and Ted drawing little diagrams while traveling
on a train from point A to point B at the rate of C. 

What should we mean by ``intelligence''? I think it is important
to ask the question in just that way -- What  {\bfseries should} we mean? This
seems to me an essential rule of thought, that when we talk about things
that do not simply appear to us as a part of the world, we take on a grave
responsibility to each other and to ourselves. Such things as intelligence
and love and patience are possible only where there is a person. We do not
find them lying around so that we can weigh and measure them, so there truly
is no such thing as deciding whether love is the ``true'' kind or
some other. We  {\bfseries can},  of course, mean anything we please by such terms,
and just as easily mean one thing today and another tomorrow. In the best
possible world, we probably would know better than to talk about such things
at all, and we probably wouldn't have to. However, if the mind is to take
the grasp of itself, and if we are to instruct ourselves in the art of taking
that grasp, we must end up talking about things like intelligence. And love.
And patience. And whatever else ``exists,'' in some strange way,
because persons exist. 

Is it by the very same power that we can, in one case, conclude that it
is better to suffer an injustice than to do one, and, on the other, discover
which of six diagrams was generated by what process? Do we use the same
faculty to consider whether patience can and should be cultivated and to
tell where the trains will meet? 

My questions, I know, seem to imply that we don't use the same power or
faculty in all of those cases, but I truly don't know that. Whatever it
is by which we do such things, it is not a fish that I can show you so that
you might check what I have said about it, and I do not want to pretend
that it is a fish, and speak of it as something that we all can see and
measure. For when people do pretend that it is a fish, some strange things
happen. 

Let me rephrase a question just a little bit. Which will be detected by
an intelligence test: the ability to make some rationally demonstrable conclusion
as to whether suffering injustice is better than inflicting it, or the ability
to tell where the trains will meet? Is it possible that we might meet some
person who does indeed give himself to consider whether patience is a fixed
or a changeable attribute, but can not for the life of him tell you which
diagram was made from which? And one more question: How did the makers of
the intelligence test come to ``know'' what intelligence is, that
they can devise ways to measure it, and then pronounce its worth in numbers?


In detail, I can not answer. In principle, I can. They made certain choices.
They made them, probably, for what they deemed very practical reasons, but
with consequences that are not best described as merely practical. They
have given the rest of us ideas, of which we may not even be thoughtfully
aware, and by which we may, and often do, make choices of our own. We choose,
for instance, every bit as much in families as in schools, how to train
the minds of children, and which children to subject to which form of training,
in accordance with some packaged and delivered ideas about intelligence.
On the basis of those decisions, we commit acts, acts that have consequences
in the very deepest centers of persons. That is a perilous business. 

And that is why I ask: What  {\bfseries should} we mean by intelligence? It is
not a question of fact, for there is no fact; it is a moral question. There
is ``shouldness'' in it. 

The word ``intelligence'' comes from two Latin words,  {\bfseries inter} and
 {\bfseries legere},  which, put together, suggest the act of one who looks around
among different things and makes choices, gathering some and leaving others.
That is a portrayal of a mental activity very different from figuring out
where the trains meet, but also an act that is a little bit like discovering
the right diagram. But only a little bit. The idea of intelligence includes
not only the choosing, but the chooser, an agent who chooses to choose.
But when you choose the right diagram, you are not truly doing your own
choosing. You are walking in someone else's footprints, and the ``rightness''
of your choice is in having done what someone else has already done. 

There is a special case of thinking that is called problem-solving. Solving
a problem is not the same thing as understanding a principle. It is, however,
the sort of thinking that we have come to accept as the mark of intelligence,
and the thinking that some people seem to like a lot. Somebody chose that
understanding. Not one somebody, of course, but many somebodies, and I deceive
myself and you if I say that ``we'' have either chosen it or that
we have come to adopt it. Certain people did all that. Haphazardly. And
now we live by it. We fashion our schools to match it, and measure their
``products'' by its yardstick. And thus we will win the disapproval
of Prometheus and then perhaps even the loss of his gift. 

I think I may lead myself into confusion if I accept without thinking Locke's
name for the gift of Prometheus -- ``the mind's grasp of itself.''
There is no such thing as  {\bfseries the} mind; where there is mind there is
 {\bfseries a} mind. It is not  {\bfseries the} mind that my mind might be able to grasp,
but only  {\bfseries my} mind. I will not be able to take the grasp of your mind,
nor you of mine, and for that we are both properly grateful. Some things
are better kept private. When I do set out to take the grasp of my mind,
I must find myself walking into unknown, and perhaps very dangerous, territory,
where no one has ever gone before. I can find models of that journey, and
accounts of other such journeys in other minds, but I can not find  {\bfseries that} 
journey. I end up doing, therefore, what is absolutely unique to me, and
what, should I not do it, can not be done. 

But when I solve Mensan problems, that is not the case. There, I will be
doing what others have done. But those are, of course, problems that seem
fake, somehow. Somebody cooked them up to  {\bfseries be} problems. They are a
kind of game, a trivial pursuit. There is something to be learned in such
a practice, of course, some habits of consistency and attentiveness, but
in those who have learned those habits from earlier problems, the industrious
solution of later problems, more of the same, seems a bit childish. The
great charm of problem-solving lies in tackling the problems that have not
been solved, which is to say, the problems that have never before arisen.


Such problems are almost always related to technology, and their solutions
seem wondrous to us not because they come from newly devised powers of the
mind, but always because they provide some new thing in the world. In that
respect, microwave relay stations and eggbeaters are similar, both wonders.
The most important difference between them is that Attila the Hun would
have given you Asia Minor for the latter, but nothing at all for the former.


There is a sense in which the unsolved problem, even the problem that has
yet to appear to us, is already ``solved.'' You can provide your
own easy example of the fact by making up your own train problem, using
whatever numbers please you. You don't have to stick to trains. Airplanes
or ox carts will do as well. What you now have is a ``new'' problem,
a never-before solved problem. But, of course, its solution does exist.
Although you can not make it just now, there is a statement that you will
be able to make once you have made the statements that lead to it. That's
how any problem is solved, however complicated, and however long. 

Problem-solving is a wonderful device, and fun, but it ought to be kept
in its place. The best way to do that is through a careful use of language.
When I say that I have a problem, my first thought should be to consider
as well as I can whether it truly is a problem. As to the meeting of the
trains, I have little doubt. When I consider the problem of rearing children
sanely and decently, or the problem of making ends meet, I become uneasy.
And when it comes to World Peace and the Brotherhood of All Mankind, I am
frightened, frightened of what will happen to us if we imagine that such
grand hopes are to be realized by the process of problem-solving. In such
matters, can the pertinent facts be known? Can anyone know when he has them
all? Can they be tested and found as ``true'' as those given in
train problems, or even in the most elaborate and complicated possible versions
of train problems? 

Where human beings are concerned, can we ever have all the facts? Can we
ever  {\bfseries know} that we do, or that we don't? If we imagine that human
dilemmas can be unraveled by that sort of thinking that problem-solving
represents, are we not likely to run into something more vexing than problems?


That social and moral human ``problems'' have proved insoluble for
the whole history of our species up to now, is not the least bit surprising,
and it is exactly by the gift of Prometheus that we can know that. When
we consider and question, and come to have some understanding of the process
of problem-solving and its necessary attributes, we are  {\bfseries not} solving
a problem. We are understanding. A mind is taking some grasp of itself.
Because it is a mind, its understanding will be {\bfseries  its} understanding,
not  {\bfseries the} understanding, and what it understands, however more or less,
will be itself and its work, not  {\bfseries the} mind and  {\bfseries its} work. Not
even another mind and its work. As to your mind, I do suspect that mine
can make some pretty good guesses, even theories, but they  {\bfseries are} guesses
and theories. 

Problem-solving is something that we can  {\bfseries also} do by the gift of Prometheus.
Understanding is  {\bfseries the} thing that we can do by that gift. The light
of problem-solving is like the light of the moon, a reflection of some greater
light. And when we single out the skills of problem-solving and give them
the name of intelligence, we make a choice between the moon and the sun,
and run the danger of putting out our own fires. 

There is, in all of those dilemmas and mysteries that arise from the unfathomables
of our humanity, a hauntingly familiar quality, as though we were all doing
everything again and again. Thus it was, for instance, that Freud could
conclude that Sophocles was not just right, but {\bfseries  still} right, perhaps
 {\bfseries always} right. And it is to help us understand not the quaint beliefs
of primitive and unscientific people, but, quite simply, ourselves -- at
any time, and in any place. 

As fire is given in the myth, fire is given again and again in each of us,
as it must once have been given to creatures who by its power became human.
Like the species, we have all lived out of an impenetrable antiquity into
the now. Every one of us must awaken out of sleep and come into the light
of self-mindedness. And when self-mindedness arises, when the mind first
comes to consider itself and  {\bfseries knows} that it considers itself, it is
in language. It seems that the propensity for language and the propensity
for self-mindedness are the same thing, which is, really, not sufficiently
distinguished by the word ``propensity.'' ``Destiny'' seems
better. We are the creatures who are destined to think and to know themselves,
and that is the gift of Prometheus. 

Nobody knows when all that happened, but everybody who knows anything can
see that it must have happened. Every single one of us lives again the astonishing
and utterly unaccountable history of the coming into this world of the truly
human. And we do it, for there is no other way, one by one. It is not humanity
that comes into the grasp of the mind. It is a person that comes into the
grasp of that person's mind. Information and examples I can take, in that
degree to which I am literate, curious, and attentive, from countless other
persons, most of them long dead but still speaking to me, but I must discover
thoughtfulness for and in myself and come to understand for the first time
what I have never understood before and what no one else can understand
for me, any more than he might nourish me by his eating or refresh me by
his sleep. 

Nevertheless, while no one else can nourish me, I will never be nourished
by those who are not themselves nourished, never brought into thoughtfulness
unless others have gone there before me. This is, I think, a great mystery,
and the most powerful suggestion I know that two seemingly contradictory
possibilities are both true: that the individual person is the root and
dwelling place of all that is truly human, and that society is the root
and dwelling place of all that is truly human. Unless, of course, there
really was a Prometheus, who started the whole business, out of nothing.


But if there was, he has obviously gone away and left us to what we must
call, lacking better knowledge, our own devices. And our own devices are
pretty good. As persons, we do make society, and as society, we do make
persons. The enterprise of education is entangled in that paradox, and it
is the proper business of everybody both to nourish and to be nourished,
both to take the grasp of his own mind and to provide for others the power
to do the same. It is for that reason that we properly connect the idea
of education with the rearing of children. As to which of us are truly the
children, we really have no clear idea, but we do know that there are children
among us, and that something should be done about them. If we knew exactly
what that was, and who the children were, there could be education. 




\chapter{Children and Fish}




About a century ago, a certain Edward Bellamy wrote a visionary novel about
the distant future, about our time, in fact. It was called  {\bfseries Looking Backward}, 
and it was the first of all best-sellers in this land. I find it silly and
boring, for most of it is made up of little lectures on social betterment
delivered by a wise mentor who universally and uncritically approves of
everything that his society is doing. But no matter, for in that book there
are about four pages of inestimable worth. The mentor, who is called Dr.
Leete, explains the principles upon which that society has grounded its
understanding of the term education, and proceeds to enumerate certain ``rights''
that it has granted its citizens in regard to education. 

The first of them is the right to enjoy life as fully as possible. That
means, among other things, the right to have those powers that provide some
access both to the works of the mind that can delight and illuminate, and
to the working of the mind, which does the same. Dr. Leete would say of
us that leaving people in that condition in which they can neither know
nor govern themselves is a violation of their rights, and an outrage. 

If that is the right to {\bfseries  be} educated, the second is the right to live
among  {\bfseries other} educated people, for the former is generally the root
of unhappiness in the lack of the latter. If, between the minded and the
unminded, there is the equivalent of class struggle, there will be perpetual
contempt and animosity on both sides, leaving the members of neither able
to enjoy life fully. 

The third right, and the one that most especially interests me here, is
even more shocking and portentous than the first two, for it is one of those
rights assigned specifically not to all, but only to a certain group, and
thus sounds suspiciously like a privilege rather than a right. It is the
right of children to be reared by educated parents. It is not an idea that
could ever take hold among us, for it would surely lead to riot and civic
discord, but, since we often mean by ``education'' nothing more
than some supposedly acceptable indoctrination, it seems also an idea that
should not be allowed to take hold among us. 

But it is a truly and usefully provocative idea. Can there be a greater
misfortune than to be reared by silly and self-indulgent parents, parents
who have no inklings either of self-knowledge or self-government? If children
of such parents ever reach those powers, will it not be by sheer, and unlikely,
luck? We can look around our world and identify them very easily, the children
of children. They are in a condition as desperate as that of the children
of the House of Atreus. ``Doom, like a black wave out of the West, rises
over them.'' In Dr. Leete's scheme of things, they are, while utterly
without guilt of their own, a disaster that must inevitably strike us all,
depriving us of the first two rights, and making the good life impossible
for everyone, and they are themselves incapable of finding that life. 

But ``incapable'' is not the best word. ``Incapacitated''
would be better. It is not because of what they {\bfseries  are} that they can
not hope for self-knowledge and self-government, but because of what has
been done to them. And because of what has  {\bfseries not} been done in their
presence. Education is not something that one person does to another. Like
the stone-carriers, we have to do it in ourselves, one by one. Their teacher
did not wait to measure their intelligence quotients or cognitive modalities,
or devise some test of their listening skills; he simply did what was right.
He did not excuse himself from the task of teaching them on the ground of
their ``learning disabilities.'' If we could send Jesus a new and
utterly unteachable pack of stone-carriers, it could only be because we
had incapacitated in them the native ability to seek the good. To do that
-- can it really be done? -- would be simply to make of a human being something
less than human. 

We give no noticeable thought as to how we might, deliberately and by underlying
principle rather than pragmatic detail, take the greatest possible care
to  {\bfseries avoid} making something less than human of human beings. And if
we were to make that consideration into a goal of schooling, we would engender
nothing but hosts of people who want to form a committee that will draw
up the guidelines for a tentative plan of action to be submitted for approval
to a commission that will go to work on the assignment of research grants
to institutes that will devise timetables and flowcharts to facilitate the
establishment of an agency with an agenda for the drafting of recommended
legislation to be presented to an appropriate committee. That may not help.


I, however, {\bfseries  can} help, provided that I think not of going out to make
the world a better place, but only of going in to make the world a better
place. Out there, I have little chance, I think. A number of others have
failed. Many of them were more skillful and influential than I. Like the
stone-carriers, I am a legal grown-up, and a frequent child.  {\bfseries That} 
is the child that I am given, before all others, to rear. In those terms
it is possible to reach a fairly practical, everyday understanding of what
Socrates meant by the examined life; it is nothing but the rearing of the
child that I am, and the deliberate doing, in his presence, of the right
thing. Perhaps someday I will become able to make the world a better place,
but that can hardly be expected in one who can not rear wisely that one
who is most utterly and completely his own child. 

Consider, therefore, the rearing of children. Consider it even if you imagine
that you do not have any children. Do not bother to try to count the various
current theories as to how this is best done, and don't even think of all
the old theories that we now, if only for a while, find bunk. In fact, don't
even think of ``the rearing of children.'' There is no such thing.
``Children'' can not be reared. To do some rearing, you need a child.
Everyone has at least one. Imagine that you are that parent, and that you
intend to rear that child. 

What do you want her to be like? I suspect that you want her to be good
and to be happy. I suspect also that you want her to be successful, too,
and not only because she might then be able to support you in your old age,
but because success is obviously better than failure, and more likely to
provide happiness. Thus, you will want her to be industrious, but not obsessed
with work, and effective. You might also want her to be someone who will
someday be able to rear her own child as wisely as you reared her. 

All of those aims at least  {\bfseries sound} realistic. They seem to be things
that you can do something about. Some other possible aims, however, are
not realistic. While you would surely like her to be smart and pretty, she
may be neither of those things. She may not even be tall and thin. You can,
of course, and almost certainly will, have her teeth straightened and keep
her clean, but that is about as far as you can go in making changes in what
might be called a certain and fixed portion of the endowment with which
she came into this world. It will be useful to you, in your task of wise
child-rearing, to be mindful of what can be brought about and what can't.
Let us call, for convenience, that which can not be changed by the name
of Necessity. Whatever it is, it is. The best we can do is to hope that
there isn't too much of it, and that what there is of it does not preclude
such things as goodness and happiness, or even whatever we mean by success.


So we consider what you  {\bfseries can} do. Let's start with seeing to it that
she is good. Of what does that quality consist? How does one be good? Are
certain deeds good and others bad by nature? Are we good or bad by temperament
or genetic endowment? Are good and bad relative conditions, like rich and
poor, providing some broad middle ground of the mostly OK? Don't answer
those questions. Ask this one first: Have they already been answered? 

Of course. A million times, but not in a million ways. The answers to such
questions come in just a few standard brands, but they all have certain
things in common. The answerers have traditionally imagined that goodness
itself comes in at least two standard brands. It is out of one sort of goodness
that a child refrains from throwing grapefruit around in the supermarket,
and out of another that she habitually tells the truth. You will, I am sure,
want her to have as much as possible of each, but I am just as sure that
you will prize the latter somewhat more than the former. Naturally. But
why do I suppose that preference ``natural''? Is it really? 

For just a while, forget the little girl. She will wait. Ask yourself that
question again. Is it indeed natural that the one sort of goodness is more
to be prized than the other? That question would not appear on an intelligence
test, and its answer, if it has one, would not be like the solution of a
problem, not a ``correctness'' like the meeting place of the trains.
It would lack the quality of public verifiability, which is surely an essential
attribute of solutions. That is actually good news, not bad, for even if
you haven't mastered the trick of choosing the right diagram, even if you
don't give a hoot as to the destinies of Bob and Alice and Carol and Ted,
you are nevertheless the one and only power that we know of in the universe
that can give thought to its own thought, a mind with the gift of fire.
So stop reading for a few minutes and answer the question: Is it natural
to prefer that goodness which impels truthfulness to that which impels acceptable
behavior? 


I presume that you have made your answer. (Such answers, unlike the solutions
of problems, seem best described as ``made'' rather than discovered.)
Your answer is a good one. I am perfectly safe in saying that. Any answer
to such a question is better than no answer; and one who is willing to rest
content with no answer at all, or without even asking the question, shouldn't
be allowed near children anyway. Who wants a child to be ``good''
ought to have {\bfseries  some} idea what he means by that, and some idea as to
how to  {\bfseries have} some idea. Children reared out of thoughtlessness are
in danger. 

My answer went something like this: I remembered Socrates talking about
the difference between  {\bfseries being} good and  {\bfseries seeming} good. It is
obviously possible that the outward appearance of goodness is a sign of
inward goodness, but it is just as possible that it is not. As to which
is which, experience is a remarkably poor teacher. So I imagined some rearer
of a child who actually did prefer the goodness of social acceptability
to the inner goodness of truthfulness, who said, in effect, I care not at
all what she is like inwardly, but only what the world imagines that she
must be like inwardly. I will see to it that she behaves impeccably both
in supermarkets and salons, a practice which, it must be admitted, is not
always possible to those who are truthful by habit and intent. From that,
I went to wondering what I might call such a would-be rearer of children,
asking also whether I would want to give him charge of one of mine. I decided
against it. I went further, and found in him something that I had to call
perversity, a twist, a disorder that seemed to make of him something not
entirely human, and thus, unnatural. So I concluded, roughly but readily,
that if it is unnatural to prefer the goodness of social acceptability to
the goodness of truthfulness, then the contrary condition might well be
deemed ``natural.'' My answer raises, I know, swarms of other questions,
but it is an answer, and I made it. If my answer has brought about some
revisions in your answer -- good. If it brings about, now that I can look
at it, some revisions in itself, good. If I could know yours, I would surely
be able to improve mine, and that would be good. And, so far at least, we
have not had to consult Dr. Spock. Also good. 

But what, exactly, do we know? We know this: That wanting a child to be
good is not enough to bring her to that condition, and that we had better
know what we mean by ``good.'' We even have to know which good is
the better, and, if there seem to be many sorts of good, which is the best
-- for which most parents cross their fingers and hope. 

Consider the finger-crossers, hoping for the best. It can be out of only
one condition that they do that, the very condition out of which we have
just come, a tiny step or two -- ignorance. It is because they don't know
what the best is that they have to hope for it, and can find no way to pursue
it. And they face the sad certainty that, should the best in fact come to
pass, they wouldn't be able to recognize it. They would be in like predicament
as to the worst. We do not know what the best is either, but we do know
that one ``goodness'' may be better than another goodness. That
is something. And we know also that we are able to discover whether one
goodness is better than another. And that is a big something. 

Because of what you know, you are going to have some difficulties in the
rearing of that child, difficulties perhaps never dreamed of by those who
don't know what you know. It is simply a fact that the two goodnesses at
issue do, and not infrequently, collide with each other in a terrible crash.
Which to follow, and when? How to learn that delicate art? And how -- an
even more difficult question -- how to teach it to a child in whom there
is yet no power of discourse, no familiarity with the abstract or with principle,
no mind's grasp of itself? 

When Socrates made his preposterous defense to the jury that was going to
convict him no matter what he said, he warned the jurors that, should they
make the mistake of setting him free, he intended to embark at once on a
career of recidivism. I will surely commit, every day, he said, the crime
of which I am accused, which is nothing other than talking about goodness.
We imagine, because Socrates has been rehabilitated by most of Western thought,
that the jurors who weren't vindictive must have been simply confused, and
supposed that what Socrates called ``talking about goodness'' was
really something else. How, after all, could anyone who had come to, and
rested in, his senses object to talking about goodness? 

But I suspect that those jurors who weren't out for revenge had, nevertheless,
some pretty strong reasons for finding that practice dangerous to the health
of the body politic. I suspect also that some of them -- how lucky we are
that they are gone -- might find the same of your considerations as to which
sort of goodness is the better, and why. What ordinarily masquerades as
``talking about goodness'' is really nothing more than the recitation
of precepts, perhaps with footnotes. Which precepts are recited will depend
on that party of the reciter, who is, more often than not, an ``expert''
in goodness. Usually with a license. From his party. 

Our trouble in noticing this comes from the preposition. When we talk ``about''
fish, and keep strictly to the subject, not talking at all about ourselves
and how we feel about fish, we are stuck with a reality that has nothing
to do with us. Fish are fish. About fish, we can make demonstrably true
or false statements. No matter what we say, the fish remain what they are.
When Socrates described his crime as talking about goodness, he meant a
different kind of ``about.'' It is an about not of description but
of discovery, not of prescription but of predication, whose limits are not
dictated by a reality that has nothing to do with us, but by a reality that
has {\bfseries  everything} to do with us, and is what it is only because and
when we make it. In fish there is no good or bad, no fair or foul, no right
or wrong. In us, the case is otherwise. 

Those who talk about goodness, therefore, are indeed something of a danger
to the peace and health of the body politic. They are asking what goodness
is, in spite of having been told a thousand times, and whether they might
discover and understand it for themselves, and in their own minds, in spite
of the popular belief of every body politic in our time that goodness is
not the proper business of the intellect, but of feelings and beliefs, and,
of course, the proper business of a few highly trained specialists. 

There is, in fact, some threat to the tranquility of society in talking
about anything  {\bfseries except} fish. As long as we stick to fish, or to any
of countless equivalents in the world as provided to us, we are very unlikely
to fall out with one another and come to blows. But the world as provided
to us is not  {\bfseries the} world, for there is also the mind-made world, which
is not subject to the test of hard experience that can force us to agree
as to fish. We can't even come to agreement, and probably shouldn't, as
to how far one's ``family'' extends, or as to the meaning and purpose
of banking, to say nothing of intelligence -- or goodness. That is good,
for it permits us to  {\bfseries make} such conceptions, and to remake them. But
it also permits us to make and remake them wisely or foolishly, and to be
either blessed or stuck with them. 

Goodness is not fish. In thinking how to rear a child, therefore, your talking
about goodness is truly a way of considering whether you are blessed or
burdened with the ideas about goodness that you happen to hold, for whatever
reasons. If we suppose, for instance, that intelligence is measurable by
the skill of problem-solving, are we blessed or burdened with that idea?
If intelligence were a thing that exists on its own, like a fish, there
would be no point in asking such a question. But it isn't. We do not have
to settle for it. We make it, and live with what we make. 

Children, also, are not fish. There are many ways to define children, and
the silliest possible one is the one that we usually use. Age. But, in asking
yourself how to talk about goodness with the little girl you hope to rear
wisely, and realizing that she has not yet found the grasp of her own mind,
you have already come up with a far better definition. To understand that
children are those under the age of eighteen is an idea that we are stuck
with. We do need some such arrangement for the sake of ordering affairs
in the body politic. But you need not be stuck with it. If you should prefer
to understand that children are those human beings who have not yet found
the grasp of their own minds, then the task you have given yourself, that
task of rearing a child wisely and well, is suddenly transformed from indoctrination
to education, in its truest sense, and made not only possible but even likely
-- provided, to be sure, one little prerequisite, which is that  {\bfseries you} are
not a child, that you have come into the grasp of your mind. 

Bad news, eh? I know just how you feel. 

Understanding what I  {\bfseries do} think, and  {\bfseries why} I think it, and whether
I  {\bfseries should} think it, is, at best, an occasional and fleeting condition.
I would be delighted beyond describing, but utterly astonished as well,
to meet anyone who was always secure in such understandings. I have no such
hope. But if my mind, like any operating mind, can reach that condition
once in a while, why is it that it so often doesn't? 

For an answer to that question, and for another valuable hint about the
rearing of children, we can go to Aristotle. He provides an intriguing definition
of ``children,'' a simple little idea whose implications are tremendous.
Children, he said, are those who are completely governed by their appetites.
He didn't mean to insult them, as mere brute creatures. He meant only to
name their  {\bfseries nature}. It is by  {\bfseries nature} that children are whatever
it is that they are. And it is equally by nature that they become, or can
become something other than what they were. 

He is, if he is doing any judging at all, excusing children by saying that
they are governed by their appetites. If that is so, then we can not say
of children that they are ``bad.'' To be bad requires an act of
the will, a knowing choice, and, strangely enough,  {\bfseries self-government}.
Children can't govern themselves. Not yet. By the same token, however, we
can not say of them that they are ``good.'' To be good is not simply
to refrain from being bad. It is an act, a willed and chosen act. I suppose,
therefore, that he would not have found you or me either good or bad because
of the act that we commit, but because of the  {\bfseries choosing} that informs
it. If I do refrain from throwing grapefruit in the supermarket, it does
not prove me good simply because I don't happen to want to. 

The rearing of children thus must begin at home. I mean  {\bfseries really} at
home. In me. In anyone. In those times when I am governed by my appetites,
I am the child who needs rearing. I am not able to talk about goodness,
for my appetites have already done the talking, and told me that goodness
is getting what I want. 

Imagine what sort of a teacher I must be in that condition. If it is my
appetite for admiration and self-esteem that has seized me, an appetite
which we are strangely encouraged to arouse in each other, how likely am
I to remember, as a teacher should always remember, that I am standing between
my students and the light? I am not that light, and it is my job to open
my students' eyes to the light, not to the flash of my own cleverness. But
which will I do? Would you want me, in that state, to rear your child? 

Are we any less mindless if we depend on others to tell us what is good?
How have those tellers escaped the regular recurrence of childhood that
strikes you and me? I wish they would tell us not only what is good, but
how they came to  {\bfseries know} that. If they have learned to take so firmly
the grasp of their own minds that they can always recognize and disarm the
insidious and amiable promptings of appetite, which they must have done
to become experts on the good, I wish they would just give us the secret
of that power, so that we too may become experts on the good. Then we could
understand {\bfseries  in principle} the difference between the better and the
worse, and those who now counsel us so assiduously would be spared the trouble
of rating as good or bad all of the countless particulars of human action.


And while we are asking such questions of those who would counsel us, let
us ask them as well of ourselves, who are also setting out as counselors
of others, as those who would rear this little girl to be good and happy.


Many of those who counsel us as to goodness will say that it is not by the
power of Reason that goodness can be understood. They do not agree, however,
as to what power it is by which we can understand goodness. Some will say
``character,'' in some rough sense of the word, believing that some
people are just inclined that way, others less so, and some few, in fact,
are remarkably disinclined to goodness. Some will say that it is by example,
a sort of subliminal experience, that we learn to be good or to be bad.
Some will even say that it is out of the frustration of appetite that we
do bad, and out of its satisfaction that we can afford to be good. Many
will say that goodness is known by the conscience, an invisible table of
laws that can somehow be generated in the mind, thus disputing themselves
if they also say, as they tend to, that it is not by the mind that we can
know the good. And many more will say that we can know the good by precept,
by hearing and believing some Truth that is provided for us, and not by
some power of our own, but by some power that is outside of us. And there
are lots and lots of people who say all of those things, at one time or
another, and lots more who don't say anything at all. They just live. 

I do not know which of them is right, or if any one of them is right. But
I keep thinking of the square of the hypotenuse, and a strange kind of truth
that can be known by Reason, and only by Reason. Example and experience
will never show it. No instinct or hunch or deep feeling, however sincere,
will lead me to believe it. No authority, no voice of this world or any
other, however sonorous, will convince me by force. But when my reason has
walked the path, which is the proof of it, I have pure knowledge that carries
its own license, and not the badge of any interest. It may be that goodness
can not be known by Reason, but I will be ready to accept that only after
I have done all that Reason permits and found it wanting. 

I won't be able to do that until I manage to grow up. Child-rearing is not
some special part of life, set aside for some temporary purpose and put
aside at a certain age. It is the principal business of life, the search
for the condition that is naturally promised for us by the fact of our life.
And we must do it in ourselves, one by one. 




\chapter{The Perils of Petronilla}




Here is an entertaining and instructive story about the rearing of children,
those in us as well as those out there, and about goodness and happiness,
and how they can be known. 

Saint Peter, the tale tells, had an only and much beloved daughter named
Petronilla. Peter knew all too well the wicked ways of the world, and the
terrible temptations it had to offer, especially to attractive young girls.
He wanted, as we all do, to keep his daughter safe, lest she fall into any
badness, and thus, I suppose, also to keep her happy, for badness is a notorious
provider of unhappiness. 

He was a man of considerable and very unusual powers, so he brought upon
the girl a deep slumber, almost like that of death itself. And so she slept
her young years away, safe from the world and its wickedness. Peter's friends,
however, knew only that the girl was always unconscious, like one deathly
ill. 

One day, when some of them came to visit and chat with the great man, one
of them said: 

Peter, we find one thing hard to understand. We have seen you work wonders
with the sick and even those at the very door of death. How is it then,
that you seem to be able to do nothing for your own child, your lovely daughter,
who lies as one dead in the next room, and has so lain for years? 

Ah, my friends, said Peter, you misunderstand. Petronilla is not sick at
all. She sleeps, and I have provided her the safe haven of that sleep. Thus
she will escape that which so threatens and often undoes even the best of
mortals, the corrupting influence of this world and its ways. She is far
from sick; she is well in virtue, and sleeps exactly as I want her to sleep.
Here, let me show you that what I say is true. 

And he called the girl to awaken. And she awoke. Come, said her father,
and meet my friends. Bring them food and drink, that we may be joyful together.
And she brought them food and drink, and Saint Peter's friends found the
girl just as he had said, pure and good and gracious in every way, and uncorrupted
by the world. And when she had done all that was asked of her, her father
sent her back to bed. Sleep now, Petronilla, he said. And she slept. 

That's one of my favorite stories. It provokes endless thought, all of it
fruitful, but unfortunately a bit facetious. We don't educate children that
way anymore, but we have gone to the opposite and equally ludicrous extreme.
We don't let them get any sleep at all. Even as tiny tykes, they are led
to worry about any and every great social issue from abortion to nuclear
war, and cajoled into believing that they have done something about such
matters once they have expressed themselves. Their geography books require
them to speculate as to what they would do to put an end to poverty in South
America, and their civics books call on them to imagine a solution to the
problem of toxic waste which requires nothing more than the miraculous appearance
of some currently unknown technology. They are thus led to believe first
of all that great human mysteries can be boiled down into something very
much like a train problem, and thereafter that anyone at all, whatever the
depth of his ignorance, can make the world a better place by relating well
to others and muddling through. The condition of children thus deluded is,
of course, very different from that of Petronilla, but it isn't any better.


The story of Petronilla, obviously apocryphal but once popular among the
faithful, is a clue to a great and influential event of our history that
goes unmentioned in our texts. When, exactly, it befell us all, I don't
know, but by simple logic I do know that it must have happened. 

There was a time, and we can easily see it in the five or six centuries
that run roughly from the time of Socrates to the time of Epictetus, when
the idea of education was very simple, and the supposed consequences of
education, tremendous. With us, it is the other way around. The process
of education is tremendously complicated and technical, filled with requirements
for this and that, competencies and all their presumed measurements, degrees
and diplomas, professional standards, approved and accepted bodies of information,
and whole catalogs full of other details. And, at the end of the great,
epic journey of education, in which not a few will spend as much as a quarter
of a century, you should be able to do something,  {\bfseries one} something.


Epictetus, who could neither read nor write, supposed that education was
an inner condition, easily -- if temporarily -- reached, in nothing more
than an afternoon of thoughtful discourse, but a condition by virtue of
which one could do everything that living requires, and do it well. How
naive he seems, by contrast with any college's typical summer reading list
for incoming freshmen. If so, it was because he shared the idea of education
that was destroyed in that momentous and unnoticed historical event, the
enforced separation of Goodness and Knowledge. 

The two were once understood as one and the same condition, a condition
that was also to be called Happiness. The three were held as intimately
related as the sides of the famous right triangle, whose designation as
``right'' is not an accident. Somewhere, sometime, perhaps by the
action of some joint committee, those ideas were cut apart and portioned
out. On the one side, one faction chose Knowledge for its special kingdom,
and granted Goodness to the other faction. The Knowledge people and the
Goodness people made a pact, promising not to meddle in each other's business,
and decided also to split Happiness down the middle, putting into the hands
of the Knowledge people Happiness (and success) in this world, and into
the hands of the Goodness people Happiness (and success) in another world.
The meeting probably took a long time, centuries perhaps, but its plans
and proposals were very successful. To this day, we do believe that Knowledge
and Goodness are not only separate but very different things, and that Happiness
comes in two brands, one of them easily measured, and the other, well, less
easily measured, but a really great thing, if there is such a thing. (That's
why the Knowledge people are just now way out in front of the Goodness people;
the latter can only promise, but the former can actually deliver.) 

Those important words do need some examination. Knowledge. Goodness. Happiness.
And the examination of words needs some examination itself. 

Philosophy, in our time, has become a very difficult study. There is quite
a lot of it, and much of it is very hard to understand indeed. It is surely
an important and powerful enterprise of our species -- the making of philosophy
-- and it surely has upon us all effects of which we are not aware. I stand
in awe not only of philosophers, but of professors of philosophy, for their
sheer learning is tremendous, and they are habitually attentive to many
little things that would help any one of us in the search for the mind's
grasp of itself -- the careful definition of terms, for instance. 

But I have this one complaint against them, a complaint that I finally learned
to express from C. S. Lewis, a man not accurately described as a philosopher,
but only as a thinker. He tells the story of his own youthful embarrassment
when, in conversation with friends, dons like himself, he referred to philosophy
as a ``subject.'' His friends looked away, as though pretending
not to have noticed a luncheon companion slurping his soup. One of them,
after a silence, reminded Lewis that for Plato, philosophy was not a subject,
but a ``way.'' Better yet, The Way. 

But, the technical and mechanical requirements of schooling being what they
are, the professors of philosophy, if not many of the philosophers themselves,
have brought us to the belief that philosophy is indeed a subject, and not
an easy one at that. And that leaves us in the belief that, if philosophy
is, in fact, also a way, it is a difficult path, not only to walk, but even
to find. Nowadays, it is a broad and inviting boulevard that leads us into
the kind of Goodness claimed for religious belief, and were Jesus to return
among us he would find it more appropriate to say, not of faith, but of
philosophy, that straight is the gate, and narrow the way, and few there
be that enter therein. 

That's too bad. It gives us the impression that we can not for and by ourselves
know the Good. It takes professional experts to do that. And when, and if,
we do consult the professional experts, and what a big job that is, we discover
that they do agree that the search for the Good is a highly technical enterprise
suitable only for those with great knowledge, intelligence, skill, and practice
in rigidly strict thinking and logical argumentation; but as to the Good,
they do not agree. This leads us either to abandon the search and settle,
without being certain why, on one authority rather than another, or to conclude,
comfortably and conveniently, that the Good is an illusion anyway, that
everything is relative after all, and it doesn't matter so long as you've
got your health, which is diligently being looked after by a special branch
of the very successful Knowledge faction. 

How different philosophy was in an earlier time, before it became the private
property of schools. People sat around and talked, but they talked not as
we so often talk, at random, and by recitation. They did know and use one
little trick, and that was the trick of paying attention to what is said,
and equal attention to searching out the meaning of what is said. And ``the
meaning'' of what is said they understood in a very interesting way.
The meaning of what is said is what can and must be said  {\bfseries about} what
is said. 

We have a good example of that meaning of meaning in our earlier consideration
of slavery, for instance. If we want to make sense when we talk about slavery,
we will have to know what we mean by the term. Lacking that knowledge, we
can't truly say whether we have in fact given it up, or even whether, as
the assertion held, that slavery {\bfseries  is} in fact ``antithetical to
civilization,'' whatever  {\bfseries that} may mean. So now we must talk.
That is truly the only way. We are looking for statements. We can easily
begin with the statements that we can now make, but ahead of us, as we make
statements and then make statements about our statements, there lie statements
that we are  {\bfseries not} able to make just now. We don't  {\bfseries know} them.
The path has not yet been trodden out that far. 

We can easily begin by saying things about slavery, and the laws and customs
related to it, as a political, economic, and social institution. We can
ask whether slavery as an outward and visible condition is related in any
way to inner and less visible attributes in people, people who are slaves,
people who are masters, people who want to be slaves, people who want to
be masters. And about those attributes, we can make statements. We can make
statements about the outward practice of enslavement, the enslavement of
others, and ask whether there might be some inward analogy to that practice,
some form of self-enslavement, perhaps to passions, perhaps to unquestioned
beliefs. 

We can even, by the amazing power of literacy, call upon the assistance
of others, long dead. When we come to consider whether slavery is indeed
antithetical to civilization, maybe Socrates will drop in to tell us his
wonderful story about just that consideration. He called upon his friends
to imagine a prosperous and respectable citizen living in comfort in a fine
little estate in town, well and dutifully served by a large staff of competent
and industrious slaves. How pleasant a life. How comfortable and secure
he is in all that he possesses. And now imagine, he urged his friends, that
somehow, by magic, the man and his estate, his wife and children, and all
his goods, along with his faithful staff of slaves, are all transported
into some distant and unknown land set down far, far away from all other
human beings. And there, where there are no laws, no legislature, no guardians
of the civil peace, no juries, no jails, what will come to pass with that
man and all that he possesses? What sort of master will he be there, and
who will govern whom, and according to what law? 

Having made those statements, he might ask us whether we would like to use
them in our own consideration of the true relationship of slavery to civilization.
We would begin to find some new and perhaps surprising statements that can
and must be made. 

Whether of slavery, or of Happiness, or of any other idea at all, where
will such a discussion end? Will it have what is called a bottom line? Will
we be able to use its answer in a multiple-choice question, so that we can
test whether someone has ``learned'' it? To expect such things is
to confuse the search for meaning with the solution of a problem. There
is no place where the trains cross. There is only the journey, and it has
no end. The journey itself is the answer, and the best answer we can have.


If I can not manage to solve a train problem, you can help me out and tell
me the answer. If you have the patience, you can also show me what I ought
to have done to find the answer for myself, but when a train problem is
``real,'' not just cooked up as a game but a requirement for something
that I have to {\bfseries  do} in the world, all I really need is that answer.
Then I can do something. So, while there is also a ``journey'' in
problem-solving, it is not a journey that I have to take for myself. In
total and lifelong ignorance of all of the principles that make the internal
combustion engine possible, I can drive a car. 

In a thoughtful inquiry into meaning, everything is just the other way around.
Unless I have made that journey by myself, the answer is of no use to me.
It is no more than hearsay. When someone solves the problems involved in
tunneling under a river, I can drive through the tunnel that he has built.
But when he tells me the meaning of deeds, I have only his testimony. And
even when I have inquired into the meaning of deeds, and reached some rational
understanding, there is still no guarantee that I will be empowered to do
something. I might be able, however, to be something that I was not before,
but even that depends on my will to be something that I was not before.


Furthermore, it isn't truly {\bfseries  the} journey that they have made. They
have done, I would more correctly say, some journeying. They have not come
to the end. There is no end. If there were an end to our consideration of
slavery, there would have to be, way out there, some Last Statement, some
sentence about which nothing further could be said. We have as much hope
of finding the Last Statement as of finding the largest possible number.


Everybody knows that, of course; everybody knows that there is no ``cash
value,'' as William James called it, in considering the meaning of ideas
like slavery and Happiness. There is nothing we can get out and do after
we have considered. There seems to be, therefore, nothing happening out
in the world because of our considerations. It makes speculation seem vain,
an esoteric exercise in cleverness that butters no bread. And many of us
imagine, furthermore, that we can actually point to the ``failure''
of all such undertakings. Have they not been speculating and considering
for thousands of years, those impractical thinkers, as to the Good, and
endlessly exploring the distinction between the better and the worse? And
what has come of it all? Do we now know what the Good is? Have they found
for us the secret of telling right from wrong? Have they shown me, a parent
who wants to rear a child in Knowledge, Goodness, and Happiness, what those
things are, that I may ensure them unto her? 

In other words, we complain because they have not solved any problems, and
we are out of patience with them for having failed to do that which they
never set out to do in the first place. They might stand on firmer ground
than we, should they ask us what makes us think that the distinction between
the better and the worse is in fact a ``problem,'' that they, or
anyone, might solve it, might bring home the answer and bestow it upon all
humanity. They might also ask us by what reasoning we have concluded that
we can have it both ways, that in one breath we can say that those remote
and lofty thinkers have not answered our questions as to the good, and,
in another, we can boast that ``we'' have indeed become a ``better''
species, having virtuously given up such nasty habits as slavery and dueling
and cannibalism. 

A friend came to Epictetus to complain that philosophy was not doing him
the good he had expected. How so, asked Epictetus. Well, you see, the friend
said, I have this brother-in-law, a colossal pain, and a sponger as well
as an idler. I try to put it to him that he is leading a meaningless life,
and severely injuring his own soul -- to say nothing of mine -- and that
he ought to shape up and get a job. But nothing I say convinces him. He
always has some smart-alec answer. So I think I need a few more lessons
in how to philosophize. 

Epictetus put it to him that philosophy -- and he didn't mean it as a ``subject''
in school -- was bounded by the skin. It had no power over the world. It
could bring about tremendous changes, but only inside. It was not with the
brother-in-law that his unhappy friend was failing, but only with himself.
It is not for the persuasion of others that one studies to be better, but
for the sake of being better. Indeed, as a persuader of others, the brother-in-law
was clearly the stronger, for he had easily done what the would-be improver
had failed to do. He had brought about an unpleasant and unvirtuous condition
in somebody else, and kept his own condition, whatever it might be, intact.
And would the friend prefer, then, to learn, for the sake of making his
brother-in-law better, the very arts and devices by which the brother-in-law
had so easily managed to make him worse? 

Meanwhile, back in her tiny bedroom, Petronilla sleeps. We are still determined
to rear her with an eye to Knowledge, Goodness, and Happiness. We do not
know for certain what those things are, and even if we did, we could not
tell her. First of all, because she is asleep. All children are asleep,
more or less, which suggests yet another way of defining children. But,
and far more important, we could not tell her even if she were awake. In
such matters, there is no telling. If there were, we wouldn't have to trouble
ourselves to think and consider. We could look it up. There is only the
journeying. If she is to do that journeying, under our guidance, we will
have to do it, and thus learn, not {\bfseries  the} path, or {\bfseries  the} destination,
but journeying itself. 

Listen now to the voices of three possible parents of Petronilla, any one
of whom is also probable: 

First Parent: I am in favor of Knowledge, Goodness, and Happiness, and I
certainly do want them for my child. I am aware, however, that no one has
been able to say exactly what those things are, and that by now it seems
clear that no one ever will. It would be a waste of time and effort for
me to pretend to bring all those considerations to a conclusion, so I will
just have to hope for the best, and look around for some good examples or
ideas that seem to work for somebody, and, of course, whenever possible,
urge her to be good and learn things. I'll also see what makes her happy
and try to provide as much of it as possible, provided, of course, that
it won't also have the effect of making her bad, or, come to think of it,
of keeping her in ignorance. Hmm. Maybe that won't always be so easy. It
looks as though I may have to do some guessing as I go along. Well, I am
going to be very sincere, and I am going to try very hard to do the right
thing, and maybe it will all work out for the best. There. That's my plan.


Second Parent: I know what Goodness consists of, and I know that Happiness
comes from being good. Frankly, I'm not at all sure that Knowledge has much
to do with either. I know lots of very smart and well-informed people who
seem to be less good than they ought to be just {\bfseries  because} of all that
Knowledge, and who, furthermore, do not agree with me as to the nature of
Goodness. I will simply see to it that this child does agree with me. I
will just tell her. 

Third Parent: Now that I think about it for a minute, I'm not at all sure
that I have ever made any distinctions between Happiness and Pleasure, for
instance. Or between Knowledge and Information. Should I rear this child
as though there were no differences? And what about Goodness? Is that the
same thing as Obedience? Or as Conformity? Wouldn't that depend on what
was to be obeyed, or conformed to? I suspect that I can never know for certain
what any of those things actually  {\bfseries are},  but I do have to do something
about deciding what, in this case, they ought to be. It's a good thing the
child is still asleep, because it looks as though I have some work to do
before she wakes up and starts asking questions. I think I had better begin
with talking to myself for a while. Maybe I'll start with something that
sounds particularly intriguing. Pleasure. I wonder, do {\bfseries  I} mean the
same thing by Pleasure as I do by Happiness? Is Pleasure good, or is some
Pleasure good and another bad? If I could decide which is which, what would
I have, Knowledge or Information? Well, I can see that this is going to
take a while. I'd better get to it. 

It is not difficult to choose which parent you would prefer if you happened
to be Petronilla. Is it any more difficult to choose which parent you would
like to be? 

Petronilla is in some danger. How will it come to pass with her if she has
drawn the wrong parent? How likely is she to come some day into the grasp
of her own mind, to wake up, if she is the child of the second parent, or
even of the first parent? Will she not have to depend on luck alone? 

Well, that's the way it is, we all know. Lots of people just have to depend
on luck. We can't save them all. For one thing, we can't even find them
all. How can we know the hearts of all parents, and the measure of every
child's peril? Who are we to judge, and say of this one that he is the first
parent, and of that one that he is the second parent? There is only one
case in which you have the resources to make such a judgment. In yourself.
If you have chosen the parent that you would rather be, consider now the
parent that you are. If some of the details don't exactly fit, change them.
And, having done that, look around and see if you can find Petronilla. Unless
you are astonishingly unusual, Petronilla is somewhere in you, sleeping
soundly. Of  {\bfseries that} Petronilla, you can not say that she will just have
to take her chances along with everybody else. If she never comes to take
the grasp of her own mind, it will not be for lack of luck, but because
you, who could have provided a design where the world can provide only happenstance,
chose not to do that. You know her, and you know her parent, and you know
what ought to be done.




\chapter{Sad Stories of the Death of Kings}




The strange power that we call imagination is at once a form of thinking
and a useful aid to more thinking. Imagination can be understood as at once
a kind of intelligence and a kind of poetry, which we ordinarily think of
as something not at all intellectual but ``creative.'' A bad mistake.
Poetry and intelligence have one tremendous power in common. Each is a way
of discovering, and of revealing, that things very different from each other
are also like each other, and that similar things are very different from
each other. Metaphor is in the heart of each, some way of language that
can treat a city seen at dawn in the distance as though it were a sleeping
creature and a girl as though she were a rose. 

It is mind that does such things, of course, and if that way of understanding
is to be called creative, then we might better understand human ``creativity''
not as some unaccountable and maybe emotional urge within, but as thinking.
As such, it is remarkably useful in the mind's work of knowing itself. 

My mind to me, a kingdom is, says the poet. Well, that's nice. It is hardly
one of the great, sonorous lines of mighty verse, but it does stay in the
mind. And we can think about it, which might be better than ``appreciating''
it, whatever that might mean. It would be fun to have the poet here, to
ask him some questions about his curious assertion, and even to consider
whether or not he has gone a bit too far. Can it be that what he says is
simply a truthful description of some might and majesty, or is he perhaps
boasting a little about his independent, sensitive, poetic mind? And, an
even more important question: Is he doing his proper duty as a poet, and
casting light on some universal by example of the particular, or is he just
``expressing himself''? 

So, your mind is a kingdom, eh? What sort of a kingdom is it? Are the borders
open or jealously guarded? Do the citizens rejoice in their king, his just
laws, and his kind governance, or do they have to console themselves with
the thought that someday they will get to die and escape all this? Are the
king's officers arrogant or cordial in the execution of their duties? Do
they take bribes? 

And how about the politics of your little kingdom? Is there a perpetual
feud going on between the conservatives and the liberals? Is the king himself
the king of all, or is he the leader of one of the factions? Is he in secure
possession of his throne, or is he beset by pretenders? Is there any danger
of revolution? Which side would you be on? 

A poet, of course, would probably find such questions diverting, and worth
some playful consideration. No, no, this one would probably say, the borders
of my land are welcoming and open. Merchants and princes and sages bring
treasures from afar. The land is thus full of beauty and light, which the
king loves more than power and might. And I do suspect that he meant, by
the word ``kingdom,'' some immense combination of a well-tended
park and a well-stocked museum, probably not caring much about that one
essential which makes one kingdom one sort of place, and another, quite
a different sort of place. And that is Politics. 

Aristotle held, and Plato too, and many others, that the highest and most
important study to which we could devote ourselves is the thoughtful consideration
of politics. An extraordinarily dreary prospect for most of us, who suppose
that it is Politics that we see in action in election campaigns, and in
all the unseemly scramble for office and power. But that is not at all what
ancient thinkers meant by the word. For them, Politics, this time with the
capital, was the study of ``polity,'' the consideration of questions
about the art and nature of virtuous governing, and the inquiry into the
possibility of a just state. It was not really about what we call  {\bfseries the
government},  except insofar as this or that government might serve as
an example, but about  {\bfseries governing},  and it was not confined to considerations
of the state and its workings, but gave itself also to considering the just
governing of anything or anyone. It was thus yet another way of self-knowledge,
for the self is, just as much as the state, a place, and even a community,
and it may, just like the state, be governed well or ill. 

While it looks tame, a schoolteacher's work can also be dangerous. A professor
is, supposedly, one who ``professes'' something, who holds something
both true and worthy, not merely correct and useful. The act of professing,
therefore, arises at least partly from a condition that might correctly
be called ``loyalty,'' and it is presumably out of the recognition
that something  {\bfseries deserves} loyalty that a professor has chosen to profess.
Thus, the special sin that always lies in wait for those who profess is
treachery, the withdrawal of loyalty from that to which it had once been
freely granted, and granted neither out of sentiment nor practicality, but
out of recognition of merit. 

None of that is mentioned, of course, in the oath taken by professors as
they enter into their callings, because there is no such oath. Professors
do not even, like physicians, promise aloud and in public that they will
``first of all, do no harm.'' Thus it is that there is not, among
professors, a great central theme to which all, whatever their special corners
of interest, have given thoughtful and willing assent, as there is among
physicians the great theme of healing. In the lack of any public oath, it
seems only decent for a professor to devise and utter a private one, and
its first clause might well be, for it will apply equally to professors
of philosophy and professors of media management, {\itshape ``Primum, non mentior.}''
First of all, to tell no lies. For just as surely as harm is the very opposite
of healing, and thus the physician's veriest adversary, the lie is the very
opposite of what the professor is given to seek. Truth. Of course, for those
who do not admit the existence of Truth, there is no lying, and they would
have to devise some other oath. Or do without. 

I do hold, for instance, that in the readings that I study and consider
with my students, there is Truth, the continual search for the truest possible
understandings of how it is with us humans. All good books are, whatever
else they may be, the recorded work of some mind trying to take the grasp
of itself, trying to bring into order the random and accidental universe
of experience, and thus to find meaning. And to tell it, but to tell it
not as a problem's solution may be told, not as a ``moral'' or a
bottom line, but as a grand metaphor, whose very boundaries are marked not
by barriers but by signposts pointing outward and beyond. 

Any truthful literature will admit: No, this is not life itself, it is only
a serious sort of game, but it is like life, and the mind that plays here
is like yours, and this vision is what you too can see, and consider, and
find worthy, and by which you may know yourself better. For this book is
about you. Every truthful and thoughtful book is about you, every story
is yours. 

My outbursts of treachery occur when I come to believe, or pretend that
I believe, that literature is all a lie. Those so-called Great Books come
to seem the highly specialized productions of exceedingly few people, elegant
exercises of the elite, having nothing to do with humanity in general. I
begin to imagine the little-suspected existence among us of the Great Mind
Club, an outfit even more exclusive than Mensa, whose members are truly
a race apart, not like us and whose conversations we can, at best, overhear,
but into whose lives and minds, integrally united in a way that mine seems
never to be, we can not truly enter. And their quaint notions of the Good,
the True, and the Beautiful seem the stuff of elfin fantasies and dreams,
charming whimsies for the idle hour between productive labor and sleep.


In those times, my students, although entirely innocent, seem to provide
some new evidence to contradict the deepest theme not only of all literature
but of all concerted and deliberate thoughtfulness, which is that the temporary
and particular are always outward and visible signs of whatever is permanent
and universal. There are times -- I suspect every teacher knows them --
when I can not for the life of me detect in some of my students any hint
whatsoever of the permanent and universal. They seem to me not what they
truly are, the legitimate sons and daughters -- and heirs as well -- of
all the great and nourishing spirits from the time of the astonishing painters
of the walls of caves right down to yesterday. They seem, rather, some new
life form, with no past, recently come among us, and utterly without those
qualities that humanity has always supposed to be its essentials, the unique
qualities by which a person is a person, not only {\bfseries  not another} sort
of creature, but not any other person either. 

They seem to find no beauty in the Beautiful, and Truth and Goodness do
not especially interest them. They give no sign of a desire to know. They
seem not to have dreamed of even the  {\bfseries possibility} of actually examining
and judging the life that they live. And, should they glimpse it, the prospect
does not please them. It is as though they were synthetic, the dish-cultured
product of some secret laboratory operated by demented bioengineers. 

Straightaway I grow cynical and negligent, thinking of Saint Anthony preaching
to the fishes, and pitying myself all the more to remember that the fishes
did at least listen to the Saint, and even approve his words, for a while.
It is a disgusting and childish condition, and I have, at last, learned
to recover from it and do better work by bringing my students into some
consideration of the topic that seems so dreary, stale, and even tacky --
Politics. Thus, I recover my loyalty through seeking in them the permanent
and universal, and always finding it. They truly are, and by nature, it
seems, political, carrying in the minds that seem so empty the very ideas
of good and virtuous government to which the ancients urged us all to attend.


Plato seems to have concluded that the idea of Justice is not one that we
have to learn, but that we have it by Nature. As evidence, we can cite the
fact that even little children can tell the difference between fairness
and unfairness, and are quick to point it out, however privately. I'm not
entirely convinced by that fact, because I'm not sure that it  {\bfseries is} 
a fact. It seems to me rather that little children, just like you and me,
are very good at detecting only certain cases of Injustice, and have a way
of not noticing it when they don't happen to think themselves its victims.
If there is something innate in us, therefore, I am inclined to suspect
that it is not our recognition of Justice for what it is, but our incessant
wanting, which is very quiet when satisfied but noisy when thwarted. No
matter. I do not, in order to do my work, have to answer that ancient question
as to whether anything at all can be innate in us. By the time I look for
the idea of Justice in my students, it is there. That will do. 

Even a mistaken complaint against Injustice is an appeal to principle. No
one says, Your treatment of me is wrong  {\bfseries because} I don't like it.
Everyone calls upon some ``higher power,'' which finds that treatment
wrong {\bfseries  in itself} ; whether anyone likes it or not. Someday, someone
will say, What you propose to do in my case is surely well-intended and
would please me a lot, but I must ask you to refrain, for it would not be
just. Diogenes will blow out his lamp and go home to bed. Nevertheless,
the latter complaint is alive and well in the former, and who makes the
one can be led to see Reason in the other. When my students notice unfairness
I notice that they are human, and hope returns, and loyalty with it, for
I know that any one of them could, just  {\bfseries could},  send Diogenes home
someday. 

I do not mean by that the fact that they have adopted, willy-nilly, this
or that party affiliation, although they usually have. I mean something
deeper, the impulse that perhaps brings us all so naturally to join this
or that party of opinion, by which we intend, however inarticulately or
ineffectively, or even mistakenly, to serve nothing less than Justice. And
my students, even the most lazy and self-indulgent -- I might better say
 {\bfseries especially} the most lazy and self-indulgent -- are interested in
Justice. They are more than interested; they are {\bfseries  for} it. They know
that it is good, and Injustice, bad. That knowledge is the root of Politics
and of our concerns with goodness in government, both the outer government
of the state and the inner government of the mind. 

All I have to do so that they will  {\bfseries know} themselves as inquirers into
Justice, is to have them read  {\bfseries Antigone}. When they have done that,
I ask them whether they remember especially any certain line or passage.
It's a gamble, but I usually win, and not by luck, but because I know that
they are interested in Justice, and {\bfseries  for} it. And the passage that
someone can always be counted on to choose is the one in which Haemon is
dismissed by his father, Creon the king, as too young to question the wisdom
of his elders. But if I happen to be right, answers the son, what does my
age matter? That, every student, of whatever persuasion, or color, or I.Q.,
or previous condition of ignorance, understands. That may be only a first
step, but it is  {\bfseries the} step that must be taken first. Refinements can
come later. 

Literature is always about Justice, about truth and falsehood, about harm
and healing. It is always about the transactions between persons, which
are the only possible dwelling places of Justice and Injustice. There is
no more Injustice in earthquakes than there is Justice in sunny skies, for
Justice comes of choosing, and there must be a chooser. Literature is about
persons choosing, or failing to choose, or not knowing how or why to choose,
and about the world that such persons make, and in which other persons must
live. Every book is a portrayal of a kingdom, a system of related persons
living in a land whose borders are the first and last pages. That land has
its Politics. 

That is why some wandering around in the kingdoms of literature is essential
to a true education. It has nothing to do with ``culture,'' with
the presumed social advantages that accrue to those who can recognize, or
even use in just the right place, a line from {\bfseries } {\itshape The Taming of the
Shrew}. And it is not for the sake of ``appreciating'' the great
works, which, in practice, can mean nothing more than feeling, or claiming
to feel, some traditionally approved sentiment in the presence of Goethe
and Flaubert. And it is useful as a ticket of admission to our ``common
heritage'' only if that common heritage is understood not as the library
of this or that historical tradition or culture, but as the permanent reservoir
of everything that makes us {\bfseries  all} human, in all times, and in all places.


The difference between that literature most suitable for ``children,''
whatever that might mean, and that most suitable for ``grown-ups,''
whom we will be able to identify once we have identified the children, is
this: Children learn what they most need to know from happy stories of the
birth of kings, and grown-ups learn again and again what they most need
to remember from sad stories of the death of kings. The birth of the king
is the coming into the world of Justice, and the death of the king is its
passing. In the birth of the king, children recognize the Right, and in
his death, grown-ups recognize the Wrong, and, having been children, know
where to look for the return of the Right. 

Everybody remembers the famous story of the Princess and the Frog, and its
happy outcome. Give yourself a little test on that story. It is not a test
of ``intelligence.'' Who was it that brought about that happy outcome,
and how? It was not the frog, who is, after all, strictly speaking, a monster,
a monster  {\bfseries pro tem},  to be sure, but still a monster. It was not the
princess, who is, after all, a child, a child  {\bfseries pro tem},  to be sure,
but still a child. It was the only grown-up in the tale, who is not only
the father of the princess, but the king. And a just king. 

When the princess returns to the table, saying that there was no one at
the door, her father knows that she is lying. He requires of her the truth,
and then says: 

Listen, young lady, your rank gives you not privileges but responsibilities.
To be royal is to be ``right.'' A false princess is no princess
at all. We do not break our given word. We do not abandon those who helped
us in our need. Do you now go down to the door and let that frog in and
treat him as you ought. 

And the result is that on the very next day, the princess, now a queen,
goes off with a king, newly reborn out of unnatural monstrosity, to rule
in her own land. And that, all the stories tell us, the stories for children
and the stories for grown-ups as well, is the goal of this life -- to rule
in one's own land. It is the goal of education as well, and equally the
goal set for us by Prometheus, for to rule in one's own land can mean, for
each and every one of us, nothing different from the mind's grasp of itself
as the informer and the director of the will. 

There is an important difference between that story and a story that we
looked at earlier. The king assumes that the princess is nothing but a child,
and must be taught by precept; Jesus assumes that the accusers are the strangely
double creatures that most of us are, children here and there and now and
then, but also, if in moments only, grown-ups who can be taught by a very
different process, and a process that has, significantly, no convenient
name among us, and which I have had to call, for lack of a more descriptive
term, the ``occasion of education.'' 

What a risk he took. Suppose that those accusers had been completely and
only children. Suppose they had been utterly under the control of their
appetites, and incapable of self-government by any means; with no thoughtful
grasp of their own minds, and unable to ``talk about goodness,''
to give thoughtful consideration as to what they believed, and as to whether
they ought to believe it. Stones would have been thrown that day. 

He sent them into their minds, each into his own kingdom, and told them
to learn to bring it into order and to rule it, and not to be ruled by any
foreign power. And each one declared independence. Each declaration of independence
was a political act, committed after having asked and answered certain familiar
questions. Who is competent to rule, and by virtue of what? How shall the
realm live, by the force of feelings, or by the dictation of beliefs that
can never rise to the rank of Knowledge, but take their strength from custom
and tradition, and not from Reason? Who is to decide, in this land, what
is the Good, and to live by it without regard to comfort or profit or the
approval of the emissaries of other lands? Those are the questions that
lead to the drawing up of a constitution, or the coronation of a just king,
if one of those can be found. 

In a person, there is a community, a society. There are many voices. They
are all parts of the self, some immigrants from the world out there, and
some the native-born, the remnants of earlier selves, which never go away.
The little child I once was, I still may be at any moment, either delighting
in some fresh wonder as though Beauty had appeared in the world for the
first time, or whining for favor and pleasure. And then there's that teenager,
and his only slightly older alter ego who knows everything. The {\bfseries } {\itshape dramatis
personae} are countless, and, while few are on the stage in any given
scene, they are all waiting, some of them panting, in the wings. They all
hold the script, to say nothing of the plot, in the deepest contempt, barging
on stage whenever they please. And, while the turmoil they cause is quite
enough to make life, over and over again, into a tale told by an idiot,
signifying nothing, far behind them there lurks the constant threat of the
Great Idiot himself, skulking in the subbasements like the Phantom of the
Opera, and waiting for his chance. You know him as well as I do. He is the
one who suddenly appears at center stage and takes over completely when
you discover a tarantula in the glove compartment. The Idiot is in charge
when you fall into rage, or panic, or utterly into appetite. 

Who can direct these actors? How shall these citizens be governed? If the
land is to have order, and the plot, meaning, who is to be at once their
author and king? Can their proper roles be found, and can they be brought
to play them, so that each can contribute usefully both to the health of
the body politic and to the theme of the piece? Will some of them just have
to go, incurable sociopaths beyond all hope of rehabilitation? And who can
send them away? After all, they can all claim to have been born here, and
they all know that they have their rights. 

Such a state of affairs makes a sad story indeed, and it is all the sadder
because the king seems to be dead. There is no one in charge. Accident and
happenstance spin the plot. It is as though my life were a story being written
by no one, but also by anyone, or anything. It has no consistent theme,
and not even a clearly identifiable main character. Which of this motley
crew is me? Do I have a choice? Who is the chooser? What will the others
say, and, even worse, what will they do next? 

Those are all political questions, questions about government. That it happens
to be my own government makes the answers not less important but actually
more important than the equivalent answers for the land in which I live.
A citizen who governs himself but poorly, to say nothing of a citizen who
will not govern himself at all, lays upon his fellows not only the terrible
burden of doing what he could do for himself but won't, but also the temptation,
often, indeed, the necessity, to resort to coercion and violence. In that
degree to which I am unable to govern myself, I become to you exactly the
opposite of the ``occasion of education,'' for you will be driven,
in handling me, to choose something other than Reason. 

And my self-government is more important than ``the government''
for another reason. About the latter, I can do almost nothing, and that
``almost'' is only a quibble. About the former, I can do something.
Will I? Even about the willing, I can do something. Perhaps if I stop to
think about some Petronilla, whose own powers of self-government will depend
on mine, I might strengthen even my obstinate will. And if I go on to think
about my own child, the whining brat that interrupts some of my best scenes
and writes his own script by lung power alone, and remember that unless
I can govern him all the rest of you will have to, and in a way that I may
find as unpleasant as he will surely find it, I may suddenly discover that
self-government and self-interest are sometimes happily served at once.
That should make it easier. 

All I need is a good king. 

The examples of the world, however, will not provide one. The kings of this
world are just like me, and perhaps even a bit worse off, owing, for kings,
a surprising amount of obedience to all sorts of powers and pressures outside
of themselves. Plato once took a job with a king, Dionysius of Syracuse,
who had been his student. He wanted to test whether wise and just government
could be established out there in the world. The result was bad. And poor
Voltaire, even knowing what had happened to Plato, undertook to make the
philosopher-king out of the amiable and enlightened Frederick the Great.
The result was bad. 

As to the government of the self, however, there is no shortage of models,
not in the kings of the world, but in the kings of the mind. We have all
seen them, and we can all recognize them for what they are.




\chapter{Home Rule}




There are such nourishing and reasonable, and even obvious, ways of describing
and understanding education, and then pursuing it, that some strange species
of credit must be given to our schoolers, who have ingeniously concocted
countless other ways that are debilitating, silly, and unlikely. Then, having
made themselves an unlovely idol, and bowing down before it, they have licensed
themselves as nothing but ``realistic'' in its service, as though
it were simply part of the world, and not of their own making. So too, somebody's
notion of intelligence is granted the rank of ``reality'' and the
power to bind us all. 

But education, like intelligence, is not a thing in the world, and what
it ``is'' is, truly, nothing more than a ``manner of speaking.''
It is what we say it is, and what we say it is comes not from a process
that might be called ``discovery,'' but from invention. We make
it. Accordingly, you do not have to listen to anybody else. You can say
for yourself what education is, and what you say is not subject to the judgment
of those who say something else, but only to the judgment of Reason. If
they say something else by the power of demonstrable Reason, then you should
pay attention, but otherwise, they are talking rubbish, and deserve no attention
at all. The first and most obvious understanding of education comes from
the fact that anyone who can not tell Reason from rubbish is not yet in
a condition to know that he can not tell Reason from rubbish, a disability
which, you would suppose, can hardly be one of those put forth as education.
But it is. 

For your own purposes, and for the sake of Petronilla, which is really the
same thing, consider the consequences of adopting, as an understanding of
education, the ability to tell rubbish from Reason. Nothing more. Nothing
but the power, and the propensity, to discover that a statement is worthless,
or a term without meaning, or a proposition absurd. That would also be the
power to make statements that are  {\bfseries not} worthless, and propositions
that make demonstrable sense. That seems little enough to ask, although
a moment's reflection will suggest that it is far more than it looks, and
perhaps far more than we can imagine. But consider also the alternative
of your adoption of such an understanding of education. Would you be willing
to hold, as it seems to me that our general understanding of education does
in fact hold, that the condition called ``education'' does  {\bfseries not} 
require the ability to tell rubbish from Reason, but only some powers by
which to get along in the world? 

From Epictetus, we can take another possible understanding of education.
It is power over the inner world, the ability to know and judge the self
and to do something about it. It is not, therefore, the same as whatever
it is that gives us power over the outer world, the stubborn public world
of Nature and Necessity. The two powers neither preclude each other nor
include each other. In any mind, either may exist alone, both may exist,
and, of course, in any mind, both may be absent. 

The two powers are not exactly equal counterparts, however, for the power
over the inner world can make judgment of the power over the outer world.
By the latter, we can do something; by the former, we can decide whether
we should do what we can do. 
Should we, in fact, destroy most of the world and its people, future generations
might say of us: 

They did what they could. They did anything and everything they could. They
seem to have had no way of knowing, and were not especially interested in
asking, whether they  {\bfseries should} do whatever they could. 

The ability to know and judge the self may seem a rather minimal, and, to
some, even a selfish and antisocial definition of education, but imagine
instead some understanding of education from which it is excluded. Such
an understanding is what is stuck in our heads by popular beliefs about
schooling. Out of it, we suppose that a brain surgeon -- why is it always
brain surgeons? -- is educated. And we suppose the same, but without expecting
to pay as much for it, of our teachers and professors, especially of those
who have stuck us with the idea that education  {\bfseries is} the power to work
change in the outer world of Nature and Necessity. And then we say that
it is all those overeducated theorists and physicists who are going to blow
us all up. 

And then there is the understanding of education with which I began, education
as that which makes us able to be good. Able. A disarming proposition. Who
can be against the ability to be good? Granted, the ability is only that,
and easily permits us to imagine someone who is perfectly capable of being
good but would rather not. Nevertheless, there is nothing ``mere''
about the ability, for without it there is no hope of goodness at all. 

Those three views of education all hang together. Indeed, they are only
slightly different views of the same quality or power. Not one of them could
exist without the others. He who has no reliable way of telling rubbish
from Reason can have no knowledge of the self that he is to judge and control,
by which judgment, and only by which judgment, he is able to choose the
better over the worse. It will not only be the voice of the world that deceives
him; his own voice will deceive him. As to his own beliefs and propositions,
which may not even be his own, but only his recitations of what the world
says, he will not be able to tell rubbish from Reason. That condition, however,
need not hinder his effectiveness in bringing about changes in the outer
world. He may be perfectly capable of what is nowadays called ``excellence,''
which is the new name for a particularly visible combination of efficiency
and success, a high and measurable degree of effectiveness in problem-solving.
It has to do with such things as the marketing of blow dryers, in which
sort of enterprise the words ``better'' and ``worse'' have
not the same meanings as they had for the men who didn't throw stones. 

To most people, those understandings of education seem at once lofty and
insipid, idealistic and impractical, however ``noble.'' And that
is precisely because they do not include problem-solving. If Western culture
had had such understandings of education for the last two thousand years,
would we now be flying through the air at twice the speed of sound? Would
we be sending men to pick up rocks on the moon? Would we have conquered
polio and diphtheria? Would we have air conditioners and blenders? Or even
matches? Would we have, as the author of  {\bfseries Missile Envy} asserts, ``the
secret of atomic energy locked in our heads forever''? 

I don't know the answers to such questions. Nobody knows them. Some questions
are interesting and important because of the answers to which they lead,
and others are interesting and important because of what they say about
those who ask them. The questions above are of the second kind. To ask them
at all, we have to make some astonishing assumptions. 

They are all asked in the Land of We All. Only out of a great delusion would
I say, We have learned how to send men to pick up rocks on the moon. No
such thing is true. We have not. Somebody has, to be sure, but not ``we.''
We have not wiped out polio, nor have we learned the secret of atomic energy.
A few of us, and a very few of us, have done all such things. Unless I remember
that, I am continually subject to the delusion that tells me that  {\bfseries I} 
am somehow ``better'' and more ``advanced'' than my very
distant ancestors who painted pictures on the walls of caves, and just because
I happen to be a member of we. 

Ah, I say, those poor, ignorant savages. They could paint, all right, no
one denies that, even Picasso said so, but what is painting? It's some sort
of gift, I guess, and they were lucky to have it. But could they even do
so simple a thing as make fire? No. They had to find it, and then preserve
it carefully. I, on the other hand, to name only the very least of my accomplishments,
can make fire just like that! Whenever I please. I can, with a tiny movement
of a finger, bring light into a dark place, and the very images and voices
of distant sportscasters right into the room where I sit. Even these trifling
powers, to say nothing at all of internal combustion and refrigeration,
bear witness to the progress that comes of problem-solving, and to the betterment
of all humanity. 

But I am deluded. I can not make fire any better than the cave painter of
twenty thousand years ago. Indeed, I can not make fire at all, having failed
that requirement of Cub Scouting along with the tying of the sheepshank.
What I can do is strike a match, but I can not even claim to strike a match
any better than he would have struck a match, had he had one. I can not
make a match any more than he could have made a match. I can flip a light
switch no better than he could have, but I can not make the enormous system
that makes the light switch work, or even any small part of it, although
I may sometimes be able to rewire the switch without stabbing myself with
a screwdriver. I can buy my ticket and board a plane, and I can pay my taxes
toward the work of those few who  {\bfseries can} send men to the moon to pick
up rocks, and who {\bfseries  do} have the secret of atomic energy in their heads,
but that's it. I am, in every one of the ``great advancements of mankind,''
as we understand them, a sort of passenger, a freeloader at that. I have
not been a party to any one of them. I am along for the ride. And, while
I gladly take whatever ``profit'' comes from the work of a very
few, I must also take whatever ``loss'' may just as often come from
that work. And the same is true of almost everybody else, including those
very few who do all such things. The one who has the secret of atomic energy
locked in his head does not have all of the secret. He needs some other
very few. Nor can he wipe out diphtheria, nor make fire.

What {\bfseries  is} there that he can do any more than I, or any more than our
common ancestor who painted the walls of the caves? What is there that all
three of us can do equally well, or ill? Leaving aside the particulars --
the secret of atomic energy on the one hand, and the secret of yellow ochre
on the other, neither of which I happen to share -- what is  {\bfseries the} difference
by virtue of which I suppose myself somehow ``advanced'' beyond
some ``worse'' condition in the cave painter? 

The details, I admit, seem important. I would prefer not to trade lives
with the cave painter, although I'm not sure how much that means, for I
would prefer not to trade lives with  {\bfseries anybody}. I am likely to live
longer. I like that. But I have not understood any principle, except for
my liking of it, by which to know that a long life is better than a short
one, or even by which to decide what long and short might mean in that context.
I am vexed by wanting a life that is at least ``long enough,'' but
by not being able to say what it ought to be long enough  {\bfseries for}. The
cave painter may have had the same vexation. 

I have certain comforts that the cave painter did not have. I will -- perhaps
-- suffer less pain, unless it is one of the disadvantages of a longer life
that it provides more time for the possibility of pain. And it does occur
to me that, as I sit here in no pain at all, some not inconsiderable number
of my contemporaries are suffering every bit as much pain as any ancient
cave painter ever suffered, and asking themselves exactly what principle
it is by which a long life is thought better than a short life. And of fear,
the same is true. Indeed, if there really are people who live in active
and continual fear of the threatened nuclear holocaust, a fear of a particularly
modern kind, do they also suppose that ``we'' represent some sort
of ``improvement'' over our ancestors and that our lives are, in
any deeply important sense, better? 

Did the cave painter dream of me as I do of him? Did he say, Someday, my
descendants will not have to lead the short, nasty, and brutish life that
has fallen to my lot. Someday, they will fly through the air at great speed
to attend sales conventions in distant cities, which I, alas, can not do,
and buy their yellow ochre in neat little tubes. Their teeth will not rot
and fall out, and most of their children will live. I, in my bad time, must
struggle daily against not just hunger, but starvation, suffering pains
and fears that they will never know. 

The only differences between his life and mine that I can be sure of are
details and particulars, differences of the outer world that now changes
so quickly, and, in his time probably seemed a permanent reality. What differences
can I suppose in the inner world, the world of the mind? What does his Petronilla
face that mine does not, aside from the particulars? That question I am
willing to answer, because I know, and you do too, what is sure to befall
in every life, provided only, by a troubling sort of irony, that it is a
life that is ``long enough.'' 

These things lie in wait for Petronilla, any Petronilla ever born: Pain.
Vexation. Disappointment. Anger. Humiliation. Loss. Sorrow. Fear. Sickness.
Bewilderment. Grief. Death. The list is partial. For me, and you, and for
the cave painter alike, they are all certain. Only the details will be different.
In the grip of those certainties, I will take no more advantage from my
ability to fly through the air than the cave painter will take disadvantage
from his inability to fly through the air, and in no {\bfseries  important} way
will I be able to think myself ``advanced'' beyond him. 

I have to confess that, in the years I have spent as a schoolteacher, I
have learned much more from my students than they have from me. While that
will surely sound like a feigned humility, it isn't feigned, and it isn't
humility either. If it is a less than worthy thing to say, it is because
it exhibits my presumption that I am more {\bfseries  able} to learn than my students.
In any case, the same things happen to them and to me. We're all there.
We all read and hear the same words. But the same things don't always happen
 {\bfseries in} them and {\bfseries  in} me. 

We often read, for such is the proper business of literature, works that
deal with Happiness, with our search for it, with our loss of it, even with
our finding of it. My students are keenly interested in Happiness. They
want it and seek it, without being ashamed of either, for they deem the
wanting and the seeking legitimate, by which they mean, Good. They are not
impressed by intellectual speculations as to whether and when we {\bfseries  should} 
be happy. While they have been led to believe that the point of life is
to make the world a better place for  {\bfseries other} people, most of them not
yet born, they do not truly believe that their own deliberate choice of
the life of contentious altruism will actually have that effect. They are,
it seems to me, wiser than I. They would not need, as Alyosha did, and as
I do, the gentle encouragement of Father Zossima, who reminds us that Happiness
is our proper destiny, and that we ought not to be ashamed of wanting it,
or feel guilty for finding it. And those same students prove themselves
wiser still when they sometimes decide to reject Happiness. 

In the study of literature, discussions of Happiness and its worth are inevitable.
I find, whenever I can, an opportunity to offer the students perpetual Happiness.
Suppose, I say, it were in my power, or someone's power, to grant that.
Suppose there were a pill. Swallow it, and never again know a moment's unhappiness.
Would you take it? 

There really are some rewards in the schoolteacher business. One of mine
is the fact that no one, even when pressed and cajoled, has ever said Yes
to that question. On the day when someone does, I will have to conclude
that I have at last found the one human being on the face of the Earth for
whom there is no hope of education. But I do not expect that. 

They can all easily see, especially fresh from the reading with which I
have loaded the dice, that the goodness of Happiness is related to the appropriateness
of Happiness, and that Happiness where Happiness is not  {\bfseries in order}, 
is a bad thing, not a good one. They know, having been spared no more than
anyone else, that they will suffer misery again, but they know too that
misery will someday be in order, and that one who is happy when misery is
in order is not quite human. And they know that Creon the king is wretched
at the end of the story, stricken by nothing less than terminal misery,
and that his condition is nevertheless truly a good one, for he has become
better. Nor do they see him as merely punished, properly chastised for his
earlier disorder. They see him as improved, sane where he was mad, just
where he was unjust. They see that his unhappiness is  {\bfseries in order},  and
that it is the natural consequence of his earlier monstrosity, which was
a neglect of order, and the substitution of his private desire for the rational
Justice to which a just king is supposed to be a voluntary servant. 

I am writing to you, obviously, as though I knew that you knew Sophocles'
 {\bfseries Antigone}. I don't know that, of course. But I write thus anyway for
two reasons. If you don't know  {\bfseries Antigone},  you do know an equivalent.
The same story is in  {\bfseries Lear}. Every classical tragedy is an equivalent,
and so is every serious book. They are all about deeds in order and deeds
out of order, and the great and terrible power by which order reestablishes
itself, bringing the tragedy that is also a cleansing, and replacing some
condition that was wrong with another that is right. So, even if you don't
know the story, you know the story. 

My other reason is this: I am also thinking about a story that we all know,
but that no one of us knows. For I do suspect that our distant ancestor,
the cave painter, knew just such a story, and that he heard it often, and,
in his turn, told it often to his Petronilla. Whether she grew up in the
habit of discussing it, I don't know. I doubt it. Among the particulars
in which our time is indeed different from hers is the fact that we have
found the free time in which to sit around discussing, and have, perhaps,
brought ourselves into the need of discussing, which is the only recourse
of those who don't understand. Nevertheless, I am ready to guess that that
prehistoric Petronilla would be remarkably like my students in some very
important way. 

And in some trivial ways, too. Petronilla would not be able to locate the
Atlantic Ocean or the Rocky Mountains on a map. Likewise, some of my students.
Petronilla would know of no principle by which to figure out whether the
Protestant Reformation came before or after the American Revolution. Likewise,
some of my students. Petronilla would be baffled, and even amazed, by the
proposition that in any collection of randomly chosen numbers there will
always be an underlying principle by which the next logical number will
be generated. Likewise, some of my students. Petronilla will suppose that
if two men assert exactly opposite propositions, that one of them must be
right and the other wrong. Likewise, some of my students. Petronilla will
not know how to find the area of a rectangle. Likewise, some of my students.
However, like all of my students, Petronilla will know that Creon is a bad
man at the beginning of the story and a good man at the end. She will have
heard his story before, and found in it the echo of what she knew without
knowing that she knew it. 

She will, thus, like my students, be able to make a truly kingly judgment.
It is a royal act to put aside natural desire and to decide that some condition
that we don't {\bfseries  want} might nevertheless be a truly better condition
than one that pleases us. It is not the act of a child who is governed by
appetite, but the act of a grown-up who can govern appetite. It requires
a knowledge of what is  {\bfseries in order} and what is not. And it brings {\bfseries 
into} order, if only for a while, the inner world that is the mind. It
is surely the power that Prometheus had in mind to give us. 

It seems to me that no human being born was standing behind the door when
that gift was handed out. I conclude that from the fact that I have never
encountered a student so mindless as to want the perpetual happiness pill.
If the thoughtful life, which alone deserves the name of true education,
calls for the ability to distinguish Reason from rubbish, the ability to
know and judge the self and to do something about it, and the ability to
distinguish the better from the worse, then I have never found a student
who was not a candidate for the thoughtful life. It seems to be the ability,
the likelihood, the propensity, the wiring, as it were, that makes human
beings human beings. 

It is the popular view, of course, that everyone can be ``educated''
in something or other and to some degree or other. By that, we mean that
some can aspire to brain surgery -- there it is again -- and others to accountancy
or automobile repair. But all of these ``meanings'' are related
not to what is the same in all of us, but to the countless and accidental
attributes that are different in all of us. In all of us, mind is mind.
Education does not provide the mind with newly invented powers; it is possible
only because certain powers are in the mind from the start. I'm tempted
to say, and will say, that it is, like language, which grows out of a power
that is there from the start, not just possible, but inevitable. 

But, again like language, it can be stunted, so that some Petronilla here
and there can always be found in whom the power of language is small, and
in whom the power of the mind is accordingly small. Although it is not routinely
understood in this way, thought is talk. What we think, like what we know,
or imagine that we know, exists in the form of sayings. And sayings about
our sayings. When the power of saying is small, the power of thinking is
small. An obvious example is visible in the simple fact that of those things
for which we have no words, we can not think. If our words are few, we can
say little. And if our words are mostly the words of communication, those
words that name publicly visible things and events, then we can make sayings
that are mostly ways of pointing to something. We have not the words to
make sayings  {\bfseries about} our sayings. And, even more important, we have
not the words with which to make sayings about the sayings that others say
to us. 

I am, like you or Petronilla, considerably outnumbered by others. Their
massed voices are loud, and every one of them is, and has to be, a foreign
influence in my own kingdom. To which of them shall I attend, and why? Which
of them have I heeded, without testing and considering them, and performing
on them what might be called acts of education, looking to distinguish between
rubbish and Reason, and between better and worse? How can I rule in my own
kingdom without having done that? 

The practice of Reason is the secret of home rule, but it would be an imprudent
king who neglected foreign policy and the defense of the realm. Every border
is threatened by wandering bands and smugglers, and  {\bfseries agents provocateurs}, 
and single spies, and thoroughly regimented armies as well; and the higher
his tower, the farther a king can see. I think that Epictetus was right,
and that true education, which he called philosophy, has power only within,
but that is also the power to understand and judge whatever comes in from
the world outside. True education is not an adjustment to the world, but
a defense against the world, and those who would have it must know the world
as best they can. Fortunately, true education is also the best possible
way of knowing the world for what it is.



\chapter{Colonialism}




When you use the power of Reason as strictly as you can to make judgments
about the voice of the world, some unsettling things can happen to you.
Consider the frightening results of a little experiment in thinking that
anyone can perform: 

The dramatic power of the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman is not
great. Although the punishment she faces is indeed lethal, her crime seems
trivial. She is not a monster of depravity. We have reached an interesting
and useful understanding of that story, but is it the understanding we might
have reached if we had been able to share the supposed moral outrage of
her would-be executioners? If her crime had been truly monstrous, would
we still be ready to conclude that Jesus had brought those men out of a
bad condition and into a good one? 

Suppose the culprit were not merely a self-indulgent woman, but a different
sort of criminal, one who arouses in us no sympathetic sentiment whatsoever.
An Adolf Eichmann, perhaps, of whom we will  {\bfseries not} say that he merely
succumbed, as we all might, to a natural human weakness. Ought Jesus to
deal with his case as he did with the woman? Will we be pleased with the
end of the tale, when the accusers drop their stones and walk away, having
become better? Will we still believe them bettered? And whether they are
better or not, can we still suppose that justice has been done when this
culprit is let off with nothing more than advice? 

I imagine now, that, having heard of my deliberations in these matters,
Jesus, troubled as to whether he may have set a bad example, and hoping
to do better, comes to me seeking understanding. 

How shall I, from now on, he will ask, learn to find the mark that must
lie somewhere along the line that runs from a silly and self-indulgent woman
at one end to Adolf Eichmann at the other? At what point should I put aside
the business of awakening the accusers and take up instead the business
of the accusers? 

Or should I, he asks, simply withdraw, saying to the accusers: Who am I
to tell you what is right? And saying that, don't I also say, Seek some
 {\bfseries other} to tell you what is right? If that is what you would recommend,
then I must point out that it is exactly what I did. To each man I said:
Ask  {\bfseries yourself} that question, and be advised by the one authority that
has no other axe to grind but yours. Is there some better authority to whom
I should have sent them? Do you have some suggestions as to who that other
should be? 

So I explain that, in sense that goes deeper even than the customs and the
laws, a ``criminal'' is one who does harm. I talk about harm, the
various degrees of harm, and even different kinds of harm -- physical harm
and psychological harm; harm that lasts, and harm that goes away; harm that
sometimes actually helps, and harm that never helps; harm in a good cause,
and harm in a bad cause. In the original case, Jesus has himself done no
harm. Indeed, he has made the accusers better than they were, and may even
have done some good for the accused, beyond saving her life, although she
wasn't all that bad to begin with. She hadn't really done much harm, I guess.
But if the culprit were Eichmann, who did harm beyond our powers to believe,
although believe it we must, then Jesus would do a terrible thing indeed,
not only to turn aside his accusers, but to say thereafter, Doth no man
accuse thee? Neither do I. Go, and sin no more. 

At the same time, though, I know that I am also talking about that mark
on the line that runs from one culprit to the other. That mark is now all
the harder to find, too, for I have made it dependent on all those marks
by which the various sorts of harm, which can be told from one another only
by finding some other obscure marks along another line. If I am to instruct
Jesus, for instance, in distinguishing between harm done in a good cause
and harm done in a bad one, is he not likely to ask for some way of finding
a certain mark along the line that runs from one cause to the other? And
will he remind me, as Plato does, that everybody always thinks that his
cause is good. No one says, Aha! I will now do some evil in a bad cause.


Is there any point, Jesus asks, sounding more and more like Socrates, in
asking whether a cause is good or bad? A cause is not a person, that it
can will its deeds. And if the ends do not justify the means, neither do
they condemn them. No matter what the cause, bravery is bravery, and cowardice,
cowardice. Can I truly judge of deeds by judging, instead, of the cause
in which they were done? 

His questions make me wary. Suppose, for instance, that I am so frightened
by the prospect of the next great war that I insist that there can be no
justification whatsoever for warfare, and that the harm it will certainly
do is utterly out of proportion to the supposed and merely possible good
of any ``good cause'' in which it might be done. Few will accuse
me of irrationality for that view. But I have already put it to Jesus that
there is some cause, in this case the punishment of Eichmann, in which we {\bfseries 
must} do harm, if we are to be just. And still there are few who will
accuse me of irrationality, but Jesus will be one of them. 

And what of the stone-carriers, he asks, Must I do harm to them, in the
name of a good cause? Before, I brought them into some goodness. Must I
 {\bfseries now},  because the cause is great, leave them in some badness? 

His questions bring me into that deep discomfort of which Socrates spoke.
I am unsure of everything. I would rather not stay around to hear the argument
out. I would prefer to go to a ball game. And ball games, like all their
uncountable equivalents, if taken in strong enough and continual doses,
provide the hope of never falling into such discomfort. I would like to
wash my hands of the whole business and just live. I would like to rule
my own little kingdom, and keep it simple, and not be bothered by questions
that have an unsettling look of ``the ultimate'' about them. When
the time comes to do harm, or to refrain from doing harm, well, presuming
that I can control myself at all, I'll just try to figure something out.
Besides, there already are all sorts of answers to such questions. You could
look them up. And a fat lot of good they have done us in all these thousands
of years, so that we can still bother ourselves with them. As to advising
Jesus as to how to handle the Eichmann case, I'll just forget the whole
business. 

But, having suffered at least partial and occasional education, I find myself
just as troubled by forgetting the whole business as by remembering it.
I can not forget utterly that wretched Petronilla, the child who lives in
me, and whose rearing seems not only my obligation, but my  {\bfseries natural} 
obligation, far stronger even than a legal or social obligation. I also
have in my little kingdom a certain nagging counselor, who seems to have
appointed himself Petronilla's advocate. He keeps asking questions that
do  {\bfseries not} smell of the ultimate, and can not be dismissed out of hand
as beyond my powers to answer. 

He insists upon asking, Which would you say, O King, is the better parent
and most likely to consider whether harm might ever be remedial, one who
gives thought or one who does not give thought to the difference between
Eichmann and the woman taken in adultery? What king, he asks, is the more
likely to rule well in his own country, he who bothers his head as to the
distinction of the good cause from the bad, or he who goes to the ball game?


Unfortunately, those questions are not at all hard to answer. Indeed, of
their answers I must say that I know them, and not merely that I am informed
of them. 

Accordingly, I know better than to say, Listen, many have already considered
such questions, and their conclusions are easily found; when I have need
of them, I'll look them up, and, somehow or other, choose among them as
to which is wisdom and which is not. 

He would surely say, And who then, O King, would be ruling in this little
country of yours, when you choose to follow the counsel of this one or that
of a host of foreign advisors? 

To that I would have to answer,  {\bfseries I} will still be ruling, for it will
be I who chooses. 

And he will ask, How, O King, will you know to make that choice wisely unless
you have given thoughtful consideration to some principle by which to distinguish
between good causes and bad causes, which will also be a principle by which
to distinguish between the better and the worse, and to distinguish among
the many answers in your collection of foreign sages? 

Here is a truth that most teachers will not tell you, even if they know
it: Good training is a continual friend and a solace; it helps you now,
and assures you of help in the future. Good education is a continual pain
in the neck, and assures you always of more of the same. When training is
not called forth into service, it lies quietly in its place. Neither the
accountant nor the chemist nor even the tuner of engines is vexed by thoughtful
doubting right in the middle of the ball game by the murmurings of his skill.
But any one of them, all unmolested by an obedient training, may notice,
even at the ball game, that he has not tried to understand something that
he knows he  {\bfseries should} try to understand, and be vexed. Training is a
good dog, a constant companion and an utterly loyal and devoted friend,
and everyone should have one. Education is a nagging counselor. And, I am
convinced, everyone does have one. It happens, however, that some nagging
counselors have grown strong by a certain kind of nourishment. Others are
weak and puny, even infantile, having never been nourished at all. 

What becomes of one who is not nourished at all, and does he fare any better
if he is wrongly nourished, like a child fed on cookies and pop? Who has
been the counselor's parent, to make of him the worthy parent of the child
who dwells in the same kingdom? If it is the counselor's job to keep the
king on the right path, who is the king who keeps {\bfseries  him} on track? 

Here in my kingdom, everyone seems to be an immigrant. And some of them
seem more correctly understood not as immigrants in good faith, looking
to make new lives in a new land, but as covert agents of a foreign power
living in deep cover. Some of those, once I think to seek them out, are
easy to spot. They are voices from the world, all the sentiments and prejudices
who crossed these borders in my childhood, and will continue to arrive and
find homes so long as that childhood persists in me. They are the proponents
of all those learnings that we have lately come to distinguish as -isms
of all kinds, who cause in me responses so automatic that I am always in
danger of deciding that ``automatic'' is the same as ``natural.''
For that reason, they all seem to carry licenses of authority, and some
of them look so official that I seem to have appointed them a National Commission
and given them the name of ``conscience.'' 

Anyone who undertakes a program of self-government must sooner or later
deal with the unpleasant possibility that what culture and tradition celebrate
as conscience may not in fact be the same sort of advisor as the wise and
nagging counselor who asks hard questions. 

What, exactly, do we mean by conscience, and, even more important, what
exactly could we {\bfseries  choose} to mean by conscience? It is surely not a
thing out there in the world, but rather a something here inside, like intelligence.
It is an idea, an idea that we can work on, changing it or enlarging it,
or even, as the history of anyone will sadly tell, distorting it into a
remarkably convenient set of rationalizations. ``Always let your conscience
be your guide'' is advice of doubtful value. Conscience must be, among
other things, a list of sayings, an anthology of quotations and precepts.
Where did they come from, and who first wrote them on my empty slate, and
why? Have they been tested for sense and consistency, so that, by doing
such a test for myself, I might confirm them and truly adopt them as though
they were indeed the result of my own thoughtfulness? Up to now, I have
adopted them only as the nightingale adopts the cuckoo; they were dropped
in my nest. I imagined them ``mine.'' They all came to me in some
personal equivalent of a prehistoric age, like admonitory dreams in the
long sleep of Petronilla. When I awoke, an event that I can not remember,
there they were, and I could only have thought them a part of me. 

If a true education is the process that makes us able to be good, and if
obedience to conscience is all that we need to be good, then education is
nothing more than the inculcation of the collected sayings of conscience.
That inculcation will be all the more effective if those sayings are recited
in the ears of sleeping children. They thus become, to every awakening child,
a body of ancient lore, for there is no more distant past than the past
within, beyond the reach of examination, and long, long out of mind. The
unexamined sentiments, beliefs, and precepts that flavor all my thinking
have been around in me forever, for this life is all the forever that I
can possibly know. But they all came, in the beginning, from somewhere else.
They are not natives. I have to suspect that a thoughtful examination will
lead to the naturalization of some, and the deportation of others, and that
the business of a true education is to be able to discover which are which.


Home Rule in one's own kingdom can not truly come from the expulsion of
all foreign agents. With, perhaps, one very puzzling exception, every agent
in my kingdom is a foreign agent. Each one is somebody from outside, because,
except for the one somebody who is just plain me, there is no place else
to come from. They can not truly be deported, however reprehensible and
disruptive, for that would require nothing less than self-inflicted, seductive
and deliberate amnesia. The men who didn't throw their stones did not merely
disregard the law by which they took them up, and they certainly did not
deport it; they annulled it. They governed that which had governed them.
This is why self-government is such a tremendous undertaking, and one to
whose mere beginnings a whole life might easily be devoted. It is a task
thrust upon an infant king, who must rear himself and come to govern all
those much older and stronger inhabitants of his land whose natural tendency
is to govern the king. That it can be done in any degree at all is truly
a wonder, which is why we have come to see it as nothing less than the gift
of a god. 

A prudent king will do all that he can to understand the inhabitants of
his land. He needs somebody like a Madison, to write his own version of
the tenth  {\bfseries Federalist Paper},  which considers the problem of factionalism
in a constitutional republic. How shall government go well, when parties
with opposing interests and desires are all citizens who merit representation?
How will small parties be protected from the greater power of large parties,
and, most important of all, what will become of the republic should some
faction grow large enough to constitute a majority? If we don't trouble
ourselves much with such questions anymore, it is because we usually suppose
that the Constitution Madison was defending has provided the answers, but
also that we suppose, quite wrongly, that ``faction'' is just another
word for a group of people who want pretty much the same thing. But that
wasn't exactly what Madison had in mind, any more than Plato, who spoke
of faction as the root of all social disorder and catastrophe. 

He was thinking of opinion clubs which, by the nature of their opinions,
simply can not compromise. We might best see his meaning by thinking of
Palestinians and Israelis, or Indians and Pakistanis, or even northern Irish
and southern Irish. Between one man who claims that God says A, and another
who claims that God says B, there is no road that leads to a middle ground,
nor is there any hope of rational argument and demonstration that may bring
the one to agree with the other. If there are disputants who are willing
to kill each other over that disagreement, then they will kill each other
forever, and in perfectly good conscience at that. 

Such factions cause quite enough trouble out there in the world, where I
can do nothing at all about them, but their internal equivalents cause just
as much trouble right here in me, where I ought to be able to do something
about them, and don't. What I have just said reveals a factional disagreement
in my own kingdom. 

I have one counselor who says, Listen, you are what you are because of powers
and influences not of your choosing and beyond your control. You have to
learn to live with that. 

Then there is another, who says, Well, let's not quarrel as to whether you
are, right here and now, the product of outside influences. Indeed, how
could that be very far from the truth? But are you not also, as of now,
one who sees that he is a product of outside influences, and has thus separated
himself in some sense from them, as the seer must be separate from the seen,
and has thus constituted himself an  {\bfseries inside} influence? Therefore,
while it would be only decent and humane to excuse all your past vice and
folly as utterly beyond your poor power to control, your future vice and
folly will have to be seen as failings to which you contribute as an inside
influence. 

And to this the first responds, Bunk. That ``seer'' is an illusion,
a rationalization. There is no self at all, but only what nature and nurture
have written. 

What compromise can they strike, these counselors who are also leaders of
populous factions? One of them is made up of fears, and the other of hopes.
They are not exactly the same as people who claim to know what God says,
but they are like them in a very important way. The difference is in detail,
not in principle. They can not be shown either right or wrong by Reason.
They can not be converted, nor can they be ignored, for they are forever
scuffling in the streets, like the Montagues and Capulets, although they
will by no means be reconciled in the end. My best hope must be that they
can be governed. 

The understanding of philosophy that I can best fathom is the one provided
by a character in one of Plato's dialogues, the  {\bfseries Theatatus}. It is
a certain Theodorus, a genial old mathematician, who defines philosophy,
without intending anything grand and complicated, as the habit of ``quietly
asking and answering in turn.'' That ``quietly'' is very important.
Thinking is a conversation, not a confrontation, and it proceeds by argument,
which is not anything like a quarrel. It is typical of factionaries, and
of the factionaries in me, the dissolved beliefs and prejudices, the voices
of tradition and authority, and the conclusions of my own disorderly thinking,
that they are not quiet. They behave like peace marchers and gun collectors
whose parades have unfortunately collided. They shout and interrupt. They
``ask'' only in some peculiar sense, for their asking is a challenge
rather than a search for understanding. To their questions, they do not
truly expect new answers. And they ``answer'' not by walking along
the line of the question, but by breaking it. They do not wait their turns,
but interrupt whenever they feel like it, for  {\bfseries feeling} is to them
the great enabling principle that justice would be in the well-governed
self. 

I once paid attention to a priest who was being interviewed on television.
He was asked whether he {\bfseries  himself} was willing to ``condemn''
the violent tactics of the IRA. His answer was remarkable: 

How can we, he said, bring ourselves to condemn the violence of a few individuals
unless we first condemn the official and much greater violence of mighty
nations? How can we call ``evil'' the terrorism of some men, until
we have denounced as evil the hideous and inhuman terrorism of the arms
race, far more threatening than the bombs of the IRA? He spoke solemnly
and sincerely, a deep pain in his look. His questioner was satisfied. He
paused a long moment, reverently, and went on to talk about the St. Patrick's
Day Parade. The discussion was over. 

I wondered a lot about that priest's inner kingdom. What voices were shouting
in him, and which had fallen silent? Where was his nagging counselor, or
for that matter, the official nagging counselor of his persuasion -- Aquinas,
who held that there was only one Reason, and that it pertained to all that
we could know? Mine, had I made such an answer, would at least have asked
me about the strange fact that when asked what judgment  {\bfseries I} had made,
I answered by talking about some judgment that  {\bfseries we} could not make,
as though I were somehow licensed to speak for every person in the world.
Most of all, my counselor would ask some reconsideration of my truly astonishing
contradiction. I can easily imagine the conversation that would follow,
the quietly asking and answering in turn for which television does not have
time. 

You have just said, have you not, that  {\bfseries anyone} who would condemn the
violent tactics of a few individuals would first have to pass a test, a
test that would require some prior condemnation of other violent tactics?


Well, yes, that is what I have said. 

Did you also intend to give the impression that you yourself had already
passed that test, that you were indeed ready to condemn what you describe
as the greater evil? Or are you disqualifying yourself as one who would
condemn the lesser because you have {\bfseries  not} condemned the greater? 

I must admit, nay, affirm, that I have condemned the greater evil, and I
can hardly imagine how Reason might demonstrate me wrong in doing that.


So you have passed the test. Why don't you just go ahead and condemn that
``lesser evil''? 

What can I say to that, except to admit that I hadn't been making sense.
So my questioner would want to consider further the possibility that I had
been irrational not by oversight, but because certain voices in me were
shouting. 

In itself the irrationality was quite outrageous, but all the more so because
it was committed in what seemed a studied pretense of rationality. It was
worded  {\bfseries as though} it were logic. You ask me if I can say Y? Well, {\bfseries 
no one} can say Y without having said X. I do, of course, say X, but
I will still not say Y, thus suggesting that saying Y is not enough to bring
me to say X, and revealing that something else must be necessary for the
saying of X, and that the relationship between X and Y is not quite as direct
and ``logical'' as I have implied. But it did {\bfseries  sound} logical,
didn't it? What was the need of such pretense? What factions required it?


Orwell provided us a memorable understanding in saying that the strange
language of government grew out of the need of government continually to
``defend the indefensible.'' That makes us comfortable, because
``government'' is somebody else, and we think ourselves unindicted
by Orwell's fine phrase. But I too am government. Whatever nonsense I may
talk comes straight from my throne. It is an enunciation of nothing less
than ``policy,'' some internal principle by which I work, and which
dictates not only my deeds, but my thoughts and my words, which are also
deeds. 

My counselor would surely ask me just  {\bfseries who} is making the policy in
this little kingdom. Is it one certain brand of Irishness, perhaps? Can
it be Catholicism? Is it some homegrown version of the one or the other,
some private misunderstanding of special ethnic or religious beliefs, traditions
and customs? Is it perhaps much simpler? Some desire to make friends and
influence people, or some fear of offending certain people? Surely, in a
mind that {\bfseries  can} take the grasp of itself, such an astonishing, and
apparently deliberate, crime against your own mind must rise from somewhere
deep in the belly, from the demanding voices of those who do not quietly
ask and answer in turn, but shout, and will neither ask nor answer, but
only proclaim.



\chapter{The World of No One At All}




Fears shout even louder than appetites. In one way, it is good for us that
fear blots out thought and turns us into its robots. In emergencies, nothing
is more useful than utterly unthinking fear, which turns on automatic and
instantaneous responses, and the person in whom acute fear does not have
that effect will not last long on the roads. But fear does not limit itself
to immediate physical emergencies, and imagination easily provides it nourishment
by picturing an endless anthology of all the bad things that can happen
to us, as well as those that surely will happen to us. Even in quiet reflection,
fear scrambles thought. 

So it is that we are inclined to reject as simply preposterous a notion
of Epictetus which holds that nothing bad can happen to a good person. We
have plenty of evidence to the contrary, ranging from flat tires and toothaches
at one end of the scale to death and destruction at the other. 

Toothaches and flat tires some of us may actually escape, but not death
and destruction. Death and destruction, however, which are the natural destinies
of all creatures and things, are not the killers and destroyers, and it
is a strange understanding of the world by which we think the former as
``bad'' as the latter. Stranger still, we actually take comfort
from believing that, since we are regularly victims of what we call bad,
then we must be the good, and the innocent. To be stricken with a lethal
disease, therefore, is to be persecuted by an implacable and irresistible
tyrant, and the sufferer wins not only sympathy, but moral approbation,
as the aggrieved party in an unfair proceeding. He seems, all guiltless,
to have been condemned. Therefore, he must be the just party to this transaction.
That a ``bad thing'' has happened to him, proves him one of the
``good people.'' It is as though sickness and every other condition
of suffering were a vast prison, in which every single prisoner has been
given a bum rap, unjustly accused, unlawfully convicted, and sentenced to
death. 

In what passes for an age of pragmatic materialism, that is a remarkably
superstitious view of the natural world. There is no ``progress''
in the mind that moves from the belief that the trees and rivers have certain
intentions, to the belief that viruses and molecules have intentions. Nor
is that mind any the better for admitting, as most will, that it ``knows,''
of course, that a virus has no intention, but that it nevertheless still
 {\bfseries feels} as though that were so. That's what the belly says. 

Epictetus was doing no more than reaffirming, simply and literally, a very
old idea. He could see no sense at all in presuming the existence of goodness
or badness where there was no intention, no will. He knew that people fell
sick and died, and that they maimed and killed each other routinely, either
in the name of the Law or out of it. He was not a childish dreamer who imagined
that the ``good,'' if only they believed something or other with
all their hearts, would somehow be magically protected from the natural
processes in the world and in themselves. He knew, and anyone can, through
nothing more than a little reflection, that it comes to pass with the good
exactly as it comes to pass with the bad. Chance and the world happen to
them all. And it is the same, whether we imagine that the world includes
inordinately touchy gods who take revenge for affront, or implacable diseases
lying in wait for those who don't eat enough fiber. 

But I suspect that for Epictetus the question was not how to escape the
gods or the diseases; it was rather, how to remain a good person when stricken
by either, as we all must be in one way or another. To be sick, or to suffer,
is inevitable; but to become bitter and vindictive in sickness and suffering,
and to surrender to irrationality, supposing yourself the innocent and virtuous
victim of the evil intentions of the world, is not inevitable. The appropriate
answer to the question, Why me? is the other question, Why not me? Those
who can ask the first, must have already devised some answer to the second,
however unconsciously and incoherently. It is the most important implication
of Epictetus' strange assertion that a good person would know better than
to devise that answer, an answer that would have to be irrational, setting
the deviser above or beyond the natural order in which life takes place.


The curious proposition of Epictetus can be easily understood in the simplest
of examples. I find myself once again in the tollbooth line, the shortest
one, into which I have audaciously and cunningly found my way, and actually
escaped, this time, serious injury or even death, while also, this time,
failing to visit either on other drivers. I am, of course, going somewhere.
My mission, unlike that of the woman ahead of me, is important. Much, much
will depend on my timely arrival at my important destination, where those
who await me will be able to do nothing, nothing at all, without me. I have
already asked the usual question, Why me? Now I am busy trying to provide
a convincing answer to the neat question, Why not me? I have made and accepted
my own version of the natural order of things, and actually supposed a universe
that has, or damn well ought to have, my convenience in mind. And there
she sits, pawing, all in vain, through eighteen pounds of purse. Harm is
being done. Notice that I have cleverly put this in the passive, a traditional
and convenient way of suggesting that there can be a deed without a doer,
and harm without a harmer. 

But harm, real harm, truly  {\bfseries is} done; a badness has been brought into
being. And there  {\bfseries is} an agent of harm; a person who could choose either
to do it or not, has done it. I am the agent. There is no other possible
agent in sight. The changeless woman is, in this case, as utterly without
intentions as the rain that might fall before I reach that stupendously
important destination. Should that happen, will I blame the rain, and fume
at the Great Order of Things, which is obviously against me? In this context,
of course, such a reaction seems preposterous, even ludicrous, in fact,
hardly to be believed. But an honest inventory of the past compels me to
notice that I have, quite contrary to what seems just now nothing but simple
good sense, occasionally done such a thing. Others have, too, I think. How
strange. 

The event, perhaps, is trivial; the condition it brings is not. It is supremely
important. It is a temporary destruction of a person, and, for all I know,
a harbinger of a permanent destruction, a lifelong absence of self-rule.
(Can such a condition be possible?) If I fail to take it seriously  {\bfseries because} 
of the supposed triviality of the event, which I have already taken seriously
enough to bring about my own derangement, Epictetus will surely ask me how
I intend to measure events, so that I will know which are worth the effort
of self-rule, and which may be shrugged off as no big deal. He will also
ask me exactly how I intend to instruct Petronilla in this matter, so that
she too, like me, will be perfectly capable of thoughtful self-government
in the great matters but practical enough not to waste her mental energies
on the small. My answers would be, well, certainly entertaining, provided,
of course that I made any at all, which would depend on whether I judged
the questions themselves a great matter or no big deal. If I am truly to
answer Epictetus, and not simply to declaim against him, I can answer only
in Reason, only in reasonable conversation, in rationally measurable sayings,
in quietly asking and answering in turn. 

There is no secret in the art of distinguishing between the better and the
worse. The consideration of the questions of goodness and badness is no
more mysterious than the consideration of the square of the hypotenuse.
Talking about Goodness, the crime that Socrates promised to commit every
day, requires no faculty that you and I do not possess by Nature. It requires
no special knowledge that only a special few can claim, and no official
licensing. It depends not at all on the authority of others, who are all
nothing more, or less, than other parties to the conversation, and all of
whose sayings are subject to the same rational testing as ours, and whose
worth is not in the mouth that utters them, but in that mind that can test
them. Nor is the rational consideration of questions of goodness and badness
dependent in any way upon feelings, except insofar as such a consideration
may be impossible in the presence of certain feelings, as my self-government
at the tollbooth is impossible because of what is not only a feeling, but
equally a desire to have that feeling -- a not uncommon perversity. 

That perversity seems to me one of the great mysteries of human behavior.
Why is it that I can so often discover, in looking carefully at what I have
done, that I have clearly wanted to be irrational? Especially in anger or
desperation, I can see, by stepping back only a little way from the ``front''
of myself, the public display, that I have found in deeds and events exactly
the excuse I was looking for to put on a display of anger or desperation.
Evidence, both the evidence of the daily world, and, even more conclusively,
the evidence of thoughtful literature, suggests that this perversity is
not unique to me. It is, indeed, general. That fact has often been taken
to support the convenient belief that ``man'' is, deep down where
it really counts, an irrational creature, whose momentary outbursts of rationality
are aberrations from the normal. It is another face of the belief that Socrates
is a freak, a marvelous and admirable freak, but a freak nevertheless. Those
who take that view, whether through serious thought of their own or merely
because they have often heard it said, are naturally scornful of those who
believe, or seem to believe, in the ``perfectibility of man.'' Between
the two parties, there is incessant disagreement, and their quarrel certainly
has about it the look of either/or, so that those who have joined neither
party are nagged by the thought that they will eventually, if they want
to understand how it is with us, have to take one side or the other. That
is bunk. It is a quarrel, on both sides, made entirely of worthless statements
in the World of We All. 

There is no such reality as ``how it is with  {\bfseries us}, '' any more
than there is some reality in which ``we'' have given up slavery.
Must I conclude, fuming in the tollbooth line, whether man -- or, in this
case, woman -- is truly a rational creature, who might someday reach the
perfection of a truly rational life? ``Man'' is just a tricky way
of saying we. It is not my job either to make man perfectly rational or
to figure out whether that can ever be done. It is my job to {\bfseries  be} rational,
and I have no doubt at all that I have that power -- sometimes. I am not
appointed to decide, for now and for always, whether the omniscience of
God, if there is such a thing, is an absolute impediment to the free will
of man, if there is such a thing. If I set aside the task of my own self-government
until that happy day when ``man'' shall have learned it, I will
continue to do harm for quite a long time. I will also continue to imagine
that the world is a place in which bad things, great and small, befall good
and innocent people -- especially me. 

The sense of persecution, or of just plain bad luck, that many people carry
through life is really a twisted testimony to their inklings of rationality.
He who supposes that the deck is stacked, must begin by supposing that there
is a deck, an order of things, and one that can actually be either a right
order or a wrong order. By ``wrong'' and ``right,'' to be
sure, he means wrong or right {\bfseries  for him},  by which he also means, usually,
wrong or right for the fulfillment of his desires or the alleviation of
his fears. 

Nevertheless, he is right in principle. There is a deck, and it is stacked.
But decks don't stack themselves. It takes a cheater to do that, and there
is no cheater in the natural order of things, a fact that is demonstrated
not merely by the findings of science but simply by the  {\bfseries possibility} 
of science, which could not exist at all if someone were able to fool around
with Mother Nature. If the complainer's deck is stacked, some  {\bfseries person} 
has stacked it. It is because I have stacked my own deck, making trumps
of all my desires, that I do not notice the irrationality of my expectation
that the tollbooth lanes will open at my coming. Like just about anyone
else, I  {\bfseries want} my road open. When I find it closed, whether by a woman
without exact change, or by sickness and the threat of death itself, what
I find is perfectly natural, and neither bad nor good. It is what I do to
myself in such adversities that can be either bad or good. 

There is another, and better, way to think about what I have called the
World of No One at All. It was also known, in earlier times, as Necessity.
Ancient thinkers did indeed mean by that term some of what we mean, all
that is summed up in our recognition of the fact that we do have to eat
and sleep. But they seem to have meant something more, the fact that the
world does have to be the world that it is, that all things are subject
to principles, by which they are what they are, and by which they also become,
inevitably, what they become. In that understanding, there is no possibility
of escape from Necessity, of course, but, even more important, there is
no {\bfseries  good} to be taken or supposed in the escape from Necessity. Far
from it, for the dream of escape from Necessity, of special dispensation
from the order of the world, is a lie about the world. When I fume in the
tollbooth line, I am not a good person to whom a bad thing is happening.
I am a liar who is getting what he deserves. 

Many pages ago, I made a dismal list of many, but surely not all, of the
``bad'' things that will surely happen to Petronilla, and, given
only enough life, to any child. It was not out of some especially gloomy
cast of mind that I chose those disasters, but only out of common knowledge.
And out of the same, I could equally have made a very cheerful list of ``good''
things that will befall, given only enough life, the child whose rearing
has fallen to me, and any child. While chance may share them out in varying
measures, all of those conditions are, like eating and sleeping, nothing
but Necessity. They are not exactly ``what happens'' in the world,
for the world knows neither joy nor grief, but they are what happens in
persons  {\bfseries because} of what happens in the world. 

I do not have the power to see to it that no harm or unhappiness befalls
Petronilla. Neither do I have, as Saint Peter is said to have had, the power
to put her to sleep. She will have to live in the world, and take what comes.
In misery, what will she do to herself? Will she add to her misery the injury
of making herself bitter or vindictive? Will she compound disappointment
and loss with vain imaginings, supposing the world her foe, and mistaking
her desires and appetites for the justice which has been denied her? Or
will she -- and this is the true alternative to all those unhappy possibilities
-- learn to make sense? 

Sense can be made. Indeed, it must be made, and made by a person, for it
does not simply appear in the world. With the making of sense in mind, it
may be that one of the most important powers that I can nourish in any Petronilla
is the power of language, and the habit of thoughtful attention to language.
Consider my wily passive at the tollbooth. It is a way of speaking that
allows me to think what I  {\bfseries want} to think. Another way of speaking
would show me that I am thinking nonsense. If I had used an active verb,
saying that somebody  {\bfseries is doing} harm, I would have seen at once the
need for identifying that somebody. And I would have been led to myself.
That habitual passive now seems remarkably convenient for those times in
which I prefer not to understand. 

There are also many words that we customarily use for that very purpose
-- the prevention of understanding. If I think myself the victim of persecution,
I have made an invisible passive. Any sensible person would ask me, Just
who is it who persecutes you? Where there is persecution, which argues the
existence of intention and will, there must be a persecutor. Where there
is oppression or deprivation, there must be an oppressor or a depriver.
Where such agents are not to be found, there it must be the case that I
am {\bfseries  not} persecuted, oppressed, or deprived, but something else. What
is that something else? Is it mere Necessity? Is it something that I myself
am doing, all unwittingly? 

But, while such thinking might prevent me from being a fool, it does not
have to make me a simpleton. I have, and I think everyone has, incontrovertible
evidence that some persons do sometimes persecute, deprive, and oppress.
Where is such evidence found? While I may have my suspicions of other persons,
of course, simple reasoning requires me to admit that I can not  {\bfseries know} 
the wills and intentions of others, but only speculate about them. They
are not {\bfseries  in} my experience, as my own will and intention would be,
if only I would consider them carefully. The incontrovertible evidence that
I do have, therefore, comes from my knowledge that  {\bfseries I} sometimes persecute,
deprive, and oppress, combined with what seems a fairly safe belief that
I can hardly be the  {\bfseries only} person on the face of Earth who does such
things. Some others may do likewise. But who, exactly? And why? 

I don't mean to answer those questions. They can be answered only in particular
cases. But if Petronilla had the inclination and power to {\bfseries  ask} those
questions in particular cases, the answers might be very useful both for
the health of her mind and the alleviation of needless misery. And should
the questions prove unanswerable, that fact itself brings some new realization
into her mind. When she can not answer them, she {\bfseries  can say} -- privately,
thank goodness -- Maybe I am not making sense when I talk to myself. 

Thinking is talking to oneself. I can not think outside of my mind, or in
anything other than my mind. The mind's work in thinking is a continual
conversation, an asking and answering, which is why it is a good idea to
talk to yourself as much as possible. If you'd rather not do it aloud, you
might at least try to move your lips. The same is true of reading. There
is no advantage to be taken from reading or thinking quickly, and often
much harm. We are, after all, bodies, and it is, in spite of some suggestions
in Plato, not easy to conclude that we can ever know anything that didn't
first come to us in the flesh, in experience. Words and statements have
a puzzling double life; they must live in the mouth before they can live
in the mind. Thus it is that our own thinking has a puzzling double life.


There is in thinking a quality that I do not mean to call ``sexual,''
but which nevertheless seems very like the process of sexual reproduction.
From the point of view of the species, if a species could have a point of
view, the great advantage of sexual reproduction is the endless variety
of possibilities to which it leads. Every creature born of sex is absolutely
new and unique. Our thinking, on the other hand, is often amoebic, born
only of itself. If it is to be continually renewed, it needs new seed. If
we think only the thoughts that are customary to us, and listen only to
the words of those who are ``of our mind,'' we are little likely
to find refreshment and renewal in our minds, and thus all too likely to
suppose that we have come to the end of all deliberations that we have to
make. 

Although it often seems that some people live entirely by accident or at
whim, following now this influence or that appetite, it is simply not possible
to live a random or disorderly life any more than water can run downhill
by any but the shortest path. That random, ``blindly floundering''
life out of which Prometheus led us is simply the life of unknowing animals.
Now that we are minded animals, our floundering has a different quality.
There is always  {\bfseries some} order, some principle at work in all human deeds,
and some new seed of thought being sown in us whether we know it or not.
Should the governing principle of one's life be the satisfaction of desire,
or the service of some belief, the result is the same -- a governed life,
to be sure, but a life whose governor does not live in the kingdom he governs.
Anybody at all can engender thought in me by whetting my appetite, and arousing
not only my habitual desires, but also novel desires, and all the more alluring
for their novelty. 

Many can bring me into or out of this or that belief. Like everyone else
-- I might better say, like every other child -- I know what I want, and
I believe what I believe. What I do not always know is whether I  {\bfseries should
} want what I want, and whether what I believe makes sense. And into that
condition I must fall unless I have some understanding of what I might mean
by my ``knowing.'' If I am stuck in that condition, not even knowing
that I am stuck in that condition, then my fervent partisanship in any company
of belief whatsoever is not, as I might well pronounce it, a Great Affirmation
of Meaning and Purpose. It is no less an accident of history than my blood
type, and has no more meaning or purpose than my social security number.
Thus, in the search for new seed, Christians should listen for a while to
Marx or Hume, and Marxists should spend some time with Thomas a Kempis or
Marcus Aurelius. 

But Petronilla, who is my child and me at the same time, is not, and should
not be, either a Christian or a Marxist, or any other kind of -ist. She
is a child. To be an -ist of any sort may be suitable to a mind that has
already taken the grasp of itself and reached the determinations of Reason
possible to such a mind, but I suspect that such a mind is not likely to
find an acceptable -ism. Jesus himself, in the story of the would-be stone-throwers,
led those men both to lead and to follow not an -ism, but themselves. He
called forth in them the willing of grown-ups, not the willingness of a
child. 

His words were to them the seed of a new birth of thought, and the parent
of any child is put by nature in the role that Jesus plays in that story.
I do not mean to suggest by that, or depend on, any religious belief, but
only nature. Parent is parent, and child is child. They are given to each
other in a perfectly natural process, and that perfectly natural process
has an analog in a larger but equally natural process, the provision of
the seed of thought. 

This is the great value of literacy, that by its power our parents long
dead can speak to us, and we can listen to them. And if they do not seem
to answer when we ask, it may be only because we have not turned the page.
And this is the great value of a thoughtful parent, or any other true teacher
in any other guise -- that he has turned many pages. 

When my Petronilla, or the Petronilla in me, is  {\bfseries truly} oppressed,
truly the victim of a person's ill will, I will at least be able to offer
to her consideration, if I have turned the pages and listened, what some
of my many parents have offered to mine. How better could I begin, for instance,
than by telling her, in whatever terms best suit her condition, what Marcus
Aurelius had to say? ``When anyone does you a wrong, set yourself at
once to consider what was the point of view, good or bad, that led him wrong.
As soon as you perceive it, you will be sorry for him, not surprised or
angry.'' 

If I had leaned out the window and shouted obscenities at the woman in the
tollbooth line, which of us would {\bfseries  surely} have already been made a
worse person, and which would still have some chance of avoiding that badness?
Which of us is pitiable? Which of us stands in greater need of some help,
of some wise parent, of some occasion of education? Such questions are not
at all too hard for a child to consider. Of that, too, I have incontrovertible
proof, the hard evidence of experience, for I am the child in the tollbooth
line who now considers them.



\chapter{How to Live (I Think)}




I have habitually imagined  -- ``guessed'' might be the more honest
word -- that Reason is high, very high, a lofty and distant realm where
``matters of the greatest import'' dwell, and where mighty minds
move among them. And accordingly, I have supposed Unreason, a complete irrationality,
as low as Reason is high, the very pit, the abyss, the frozen floor of hell.
I tend to populate the two realms, therefore, with the extremest of cases,
Socrates and Jesus above, and Hitler and Jack the Ripper below. Thus, while
intending to distinguish the former from the latter, I end up making them
all alike in one supremely important respect. I set Socrates and Hitler
both beyond my grasp, far, far away from me, and console myself for being
unable to sit with the former by supposing that I am, and by virtue of the
same limitations, in no danger of joining the ranks of the latter. It is
all bunk. I can easily do either. Or both. That I seldom realize that is
testimony to the fact that I have habitually mistaken schooling for education.
The idea that careful and attentive rationality can be achieved only by
those who have taken the right courses is profitable for schools. 

No mind can be more rational, or more irrational, than another. One mind
can be more or less often more rational, or irrational than another. In
my occasional lucid moments, I have as much light as Socrates, and in Unreason,
I am as benighted as Hitler. In certain moments, it is only by humanity's
good luck that I am not empowered to direct the destinies of nations, and
in others, that may be a pity. And the same is true of you, and of each
of us. Reason and Unreason are never far away from any mind. They are neither
far above us nor far beneath us. It is one and the same thing to be rational
in considering the beginning and the end of all things, and to be rational
in telling yourself how to behave in the supermarket checkout line, which
might even be the more difficult task, the more likely to be influenced
by strong feelings and desires. There is surely a difference between a man
who would slaughter millions for the sake of his appetites and beliefs,
and a man who turns, however briefly, into a monster of rage when a woman
driver turns out not to have exact change in the exact change lane, but
it is not a difference in degrees of rationality. 

The clearest and most honest assessment of my own life that I have been
able to make seems to suggest that I am not called to undertake the great
consideration of the beginning and end of all things, the one consideration
by which, in the opinion of Aquinas, a person might be accounted truly wise.
It is not for me. On the other hand, I am not so situated in this life that
I will have to prevent myself, by a scrupulous and rational examination
of my appetites and beliefs, from bringing about the slaughter of millions
in an evil cause that I can not understand as evil. 

But that same assessment makes it pretty clear that I  {\bfseries am} called to
rear Petronilla, and any child that is mine, inwardly or outwardly. And
I  {\bfseries am} so situated in this life that I  {\bfseries will} have to prevent
myself, by that same scrupulous and rational examination of my appetites
and beliefs, from bringing about the slaughter of a human being in the exact
change line, leaving in his place only a monster of Unreason. Slaughter
is slaughter. In a purely material sense, of course, my act of slaughter
is different from Hitler's or Jack the Ripper's, for it leaves no corpses,
and the victim may -- this time -- live again in reasonable self-government.
But in principle, it is the same act: the destruction of a person in obedience
to desire unchecked by Reason. Against that charge, I would make what seems
a lame and ludicrous defense by pointing out that, after all, I {\bfseries  have} 
refrained from the slaughter of millions. If I have, it may be just by luck,
and proves no special virtue or restraint in me. Whatever other punishment
my deed might merit, it would surely be enough for any sane and thoughtful
judge to pronounce me an unfit parent of any Petronilla, and one who could
not possibly provide her a true education. 

Here is another definition of education that we might choose to adopt. I
have to take, again, a little page from Epictetus, who was convinced that
any human being has what it takes to distinguish the better from the worse,
and needs only some instruction in  {\bfseries using} what it takes. One of the
ways in which he used to make the case for that opinion was in saying something
like this: 

Look around you, near and far, and find someone whom you can praise, and
that without any consideration of self-interest or the profit that you might
take from your praising. Whom do you find to praise? The just or the unjust?
The patient or the impatient? The courageous or the cowardly? Those who
are owned and operated by their appetites, or those who can govern themselves
and their appetites? And ask yourself, Whom do I know, or know of, who is
a better person than I? And not just a better surgeon or mechanic or cook,
than I, but a better  {\bfseries person} ? What makes that one the better? What
is it in me, or what lack, therefore, that makes me the worse? Is the better
one the more temperate or the less temperate? More moderate, or less? More,
or less, given to thoughtful consideration, and to quietly asking and answering
in turn? 

I have elaborated outrageously on what Epictetus actually said, but I think
he would not accuse me of falsifying his intent. And his intent was simply
to demonstrate a perfectly natural propensity to distinguish between the
better and the worse, a propensity that works in us even when we do not
take thought consciously and deliberately to make that distinction. But
he was not a childish dreamer. While he did take that propensity to be nothing
less than natural to us all, he was not deluded as to our powers to distort
the natural in us. ``There are certain things,'' he said, ``which
men who are  {\bfseries not altogether} perverted see by the common notions which
all possess.'' The emphasis is mine. 

I know some people, and I'm sure you do too, to whom I would rather not
put the question of Epictetus: Whom would you praise, and why? Since I do
not move in the appropriate circles, I probably do not know anyone who would
choose to praise Jack the Ripper for being consistent in purpose and very
good at his work, or anyone who would praise Hitler for being an astonishingly
skillful and powerful politician, but I do know people who would choose
to praise certain others for exactly those reasons, as though particulars
were more important than principles. And I know many more who would think
that by ``praise'' I meant also ``admire'' or ``envy,''
or even ``adulate'' and ``emulate,'' seeing no particular
or pressing reason to distinguish among those mental deeds. I even know
some, including myself, who would praise me for the skillful audacity by
which I manage so often to get into the shortest line at the tollbooth.


While I can not deny my suspicion that the ``altogether perverted''
do indeed exist and move among us, I do not suspect that such interesting
answers are always signs of the altogether perverted. They are, often, merely
the answers of fashion and trend, the answers of posers. And those who pose
in this context will often find themselves, unlike the altogether perverted,
utterly unable to pose -- unable even to want to pose -- in the presence
of the truly praiseworthy. Even in our popular literature, seen mostly these
days in motion pictures or in television, goodness is celebrated. Whether
in war, or sport, or business, or in the smallest enterprises of ordinary
life, the appearance of steadfastness, courage, loyalty, temperance, and
of the bright dawning of self-knowledge, can make even the thoughtless rejoice,
however they know not why. We imagine ourselves relativists, and think ourselves
sophisticated and modern to suppose that virtue depends on fashion, but
even third-rate hack writers in Burbank know better. 

The Great Hitler War is now far behind us, and the children among us now
know surprisingly little about what we considered an epoch of monumental
importance, and even a true display of the difference between Good and Evil.
Now, we watch in our homes retrospective documentaries, fuzzy film clips
of what has already become ancient history. There are the brave young men,
standing by their fighter planes, their uniform caps appropriately askew,
their arms around each others' shoulders, smiling and waving at the camera.
Into the gray sky behind them, soon they will fly and disappear, some forever.
They go bravely and willingly, and heavily armed, but not heavily enough,
by the conviction that they choose to fight and die out of exactly the power
that Socrates understood as the goal of true education -- the ability to
distinguish between the better and the worse. 

I imagine my grandchildren's grandchildren watching the same old films.
Will they be able to distinguish at once, as I can, between the brave and
virtuous, doomed young men in one set of uniforms, and the deluded slaves
of Unreason in the other? Will they perhaps be able to see, better than
I, that persons can be good in a bad cause, and bad in a good one? Or will
the struggle of causes in whose shadow  {\bfseries they} live lead them to imagine
that goodness and badness can be acquired out there in the world by anyone
who will attach himself to the right cause and fight against the wrong one?


Consider the ``great causes'' in which we now bring, and threaten
to bring, not merely death and destruction upon each other, which will surely
come anyway, but deliberate and untimely death and destruction, thus cutting
off forever in millions of persons not merely goodness itself, but the very
possibility of goodness. Consider all the causes in which persons can justify
themselves in tremendous and appalling acts of violence and coercion, acts
that they themselves, unless altogether perverted, would find unspeakably
vile if committed by a single person for nothing more than his own reasons,
justified by nothing more than his own beliefs, and for the gratification
of nothing more than his own appetites. Such causes tend to come in pairs.
Just now, there are communists and Christians, and communists of a different
stripe, and Christians of a different stripe. There are fundamentalist Israelis
and fundamentalist Moslems, and antifundamentalist Israelis and antifundamentalist
Moslems. There are black and white, and even dark brown and light brown.
There are Protestant Irish and Roman Catholic Irish. There are Indians and
Sikhs. There is no counting them all. 

We generally imagine great warring parties as utterly opposed to one another,
true opposites, and even, for those who are members of either party, Children
of Light and Children of Darkness. But the proper work of intelligence is
to discover how things similar to each other are also unlike each other,
and how things unlike are also alike. And it takes only a small, deliberate
act of intelligence, and certainly not a high I.Q., to notice that all such
great, implacable enemies have one important attribute in common. They all
depend, at bottom, on some belief, some sentiment, some table of delivered
precepts, or some idea of what the real world really is, which is simply
not testable by Reason, not demonstrable by logic. 

I imagine some great convocation on neutral ground, to which every such
cause sends a representative. Just for the day, they check their bombs and
guns at the door, and sit at an enormous round table to discuss, not compromise
and peace, for their certainties forbid both, but survival. No such cause
ever wants to go out of business. What is it, they ask themselves, that
they  {\bfseries do} share? What great need have they in common, the very food
on which they feed and grow fat? If they could somehow engender just one
attribute in every person living on the face of Earth, what one attribute
would serve them all equally well? What else could it be but irrationality,
the condition in which we imagine that we can know the unknowable, in which
we act on the orders of the belly and under the authority of the untestable
dictates of belief, and by whose strength we can bestow upon credulousness
the rank of virtue? What better and more faithful followers can there be
than children, governed by their desires and unmindful of their minds? Every
great cause in which we hate and kill persons whom we do not even know,
and injure ourselves whom we also do not know, is a Children's Crusade.


But my metaphor of the great convocation of warring parties is not truly
apt. There is no club of arch-villains out there in the world, whose aim
is to seize my mind for evil purposes, and who would, if they could, release
the virus of Unreason upon all the world. Each warring party, to be sure,
does sometimes -- perhaps often -- presume such conscious and deliberate
ill will in each and every member of the opposite warring party, but, in
every case, any disinterested third party can see, on both sides, nothing
but true believers, sadly sincere. In a famous phrase, which ought not to
be restricted only to certain religious persuasions, a nonpartisan can easily
detect the deceivers and the deceived, and also the supremely important
fact that they are one and the same. No one, except a practicing criminal,
or anyone altogether perverted, is truly out to trick me into believing
that which he himself does not believe, or suppose that he believes, if
such a distinction is possible. If I am to be tricked into believing what
can not be known or affirmed by Reason, I must perform the trick for myself.
Thus it is that an important benefit of the mind's grasp of itself is the
power to make for oneself some coherent idea about the meaning of the word
``knowledge.'' 

If you will please read that last sentence again, you will find it, I hope,
pale and puny. Neither stirring nor unsettling. Just the sort of insipid,
dull, pussy-footing talk you would expect in an academic. Cowardly, in fact,
for it is so impersonally phrased that no one, that is to say, no {\bfseries  person}, 
is likely to demur or demand justification. There is great danger in such
a way of talking, which you will surely recognize as the language of the
Land of No One at All. It permits me, or anyone, to speak what is meant
to pass for ``truth'' without taking responsibility for my words.


So let me now put that idea in another way, moving into the world of a real
person: If  {\bfseries you} do not know what you mean by the word knowledge, your
mind is in disorder, and you will be an easy victim of any suggestion, accidental
or designed, that seems to promise, whether you are conscious of it or not,
the satisfaction of some appetite. If you happen to want the moon, or anything
at all that is simply not to be had in the natural order of things, and
if you happen to have no way of certainly knowing that some object of your
desire is not in the natural order of things, then you will be an easy mark
for all promisers of the moon, and you will often be miserable. To all other
miseries, you will add the misery of believing that ``bad things,''
like being deprived of the moon, are always happening to ``good people''
-- you. 

I am not leading up to some definition of knowledge. This is not an exercise
in problem-solving. To the question, What is knowing? there is no answer,
but only the continual business of answering. But in this case, as in all
true thoughtfulness, {\bfseries  any} answering at all is better than none. Since,
in understanding something, the worst possible condition is never even thinking
about it at all, any thinking at all will bring a better condition, and
provide the necessary step toward an even better one than that. Here is
one person to whom it has never occurred to wonder what he means by knowing,
and whether it is the same as believing, or imagining or supposing, or to
ask whether there is some clearly identifiable difference between evidence
and testimony, or whether certain things might be unknowable. And here is
another person to whom it  {\bfseries has} occurred to wonder about such things.
Which is in better condition? Which would you rather have for a parent,
if you happened to be Petronilla? And here are two more people, to both
of whom it has occurred to wonder. One of them, now curious about knowing,
asks me what it really means to  {\bfseries know},  and I tell him what  {\bfseries I} 
think, and he goes away content. The other, having overheard my answer,
says, Well, that may give me something to think about, but I still wonder.
Which of them is in the better condition? 

Of those two, it can also be said that one of them must suppose Reason lofty
and remote, an esoteric power best left to the experts. The other finds
it near at hand. Perform, now, a little experiment in thought with those
two people. Consider again the question of Epictetus, Whom do you choose
to praise? And recall the interesting idea that lies behind his question,
the opinion that all persons are equipped, by the very nature that makes
them persons, with the ability to tell the better from the worse. Which
of the two, then, would you praise, and why? Be specific. If this were school,
you would have a blue book to write your answer in. You would have to do
it. But this is not school, and you don't have to answer. So ask yourself
another question: Whom would you praise, one who chose not to answer, or
one who answered? Would you have to guess which one to praise, or would
you know which one to praise? And, having answered all those questions,
what would you have to say about the strange opinion of Epictetus, which
runs quite contrary to all of our popular beliefs about the transience and
relativity of all ideas of better and worse? 

And what have you to say about yourself? Has Epictetus described you correctly,
as one who, being not altogether perverted, can see certain things by the
common notions that all persons have? 

After about half a century of life, and having already written almost every
great work for which we remember him, Tolstoy decided that he was living
to no important purpose, and that he would change himself. Thomas Aquinas,
shortly before his death, although he did not know that he was soon to die,
decided to write no more, saying that everything he had written was nothing
but straw. What moved those tremendously accomplished men to such drastic
action, I can not know, but I am willing to characterize such deeds in a
perhaps uncustomary way. I would, for the sake of doing some thinking, call
them artistic, and even literary. It was out of a curious mixture of self-deception
and truth that Macbeth could call ``life'' a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing. That was true of {\bfseries  his} 
life, for the teller of his tale was indeed an idiot, a mindless power,
compounded of an utterly irrational company of appetites, beliefs, and feelings.
But to us, it seems very unlikely that such lives as those of Aquinas and
Tolstoy were being told by idiots. Those men, however, seem to have decided
something like that. They said, in effect, The teller of my tale has been
wrong. I will take charge of this work, and make it better. I will compose
the harmony that the natural order of things will not provide, and find
the theme according to which all the possible contents and deeds of this
life will be measured, and chosen or rejected. 

That is exactly the work we call ``art.'' It is to make of life
as it comes, always at random and at the will of others, an artifact, the
result of intention and design, both informed by the power to distinguish
the better from the worse. It is to make of the inner life something other,
and better, than the routine product of the outer life. It is to make literature,
to tell a tale that makes sense, because it is told not by an idiot but
by a governing mind. If Aquinas and Tolstoy seem to us to have stood in
but little need of such a resurgence of mind, it may well be because they
had learned more than we about idiocy and could see it even in its subtlest
manifestations, where we have come to see only its grossest. Each of them
said to himself, on a certain day, that his education might now begin, that
some sleeping child in him could now be awakened. 

It does us all significant credit that we make jokes about the search for
the meaning and purpose of life, and find it most suitable for sophomore
beer-busts. Epictetus would be delighted to know that, for he would find
it yet another confirmation of his opinion that in our very nature there
is some permanent spring of good sense. But the phrase itself, like Macbeth's
maudlin effusion, points only to a world that can not be, a world where
there is ``life,'' a nonentity, a non-being. There is no life. There
are living creatures. Without them, life would not persist, waiting quietly
in some corner of the universe for something to inhabit. Meaning and purpose,
if they appear, can appear only at the call of a living, and willing, person.


I'm pretty sure that Tolstoy and Aquinas, on their critical days of decision,
were not interested in the meaning and purpose of life. They were rather
interested in the meaning and purpose of the one life to which they could
 {\bfseries give} meaning and purpose, no matter what the world might do to those
lives. 

There is a strange quality in religiousness. In the greatest of the ``religious
thinkers'' -- why do those quotation marks seem right? -- we can always
find, again and again, ideas and understandings about persons and self-knowledge
that they all share, not only with each other, but with such as Epictetus
and Socrates, and countless others far outside of the religious traditions
of the West. But in the less than great, who are numerous, and especially
in the meager of mind, who are countless, there is an admonitory and truculent
concern primarily for the virtue of  {\bfseries other} people. If such as Thomas
a Kempis and Bernard of Clairvaux are generous providers of the occasion
of education, rather than reciters of precepts and beliefs, it is because
they are seeking to {\bfseries  be} virtuous and to compose their own lives, rather
than worrying that {\bfseries  others} might be vicious, leading discordant lives.
Such teachers do the best that a teacher can do. In their own deliberations,
they cast enough light that I may see something by it, if I happen to be
looking. 

Such teachers do not truly write books that might be called  {\bfseries How to Live}.
Nor should there be such a book. There should be millions and millions of
books, written down or not, called  {\bfseries How to Live (I Think).} We would
doubtless take some profit from passing our books around, from holding converse
with each other, and quietly asking and answering in turn. But we would
take nothing but discord and enmity from requiring of each other, as we
regularly do, obedience to this or that version of  {\bfseries How to Live (I Think).} 
The best that I can do for Petronilla -- or for anybody else -- is to make
of my book something that will help her to write hers. 

This is not that book.  {\bfseries How to Live (I Think)} is a book that can not
be finished. But it is all too often a book that never begins. The first
line is the hardest part, but whoever writes even that one line has passed
at once into what Socrates called the examined life, the life that is worth
living. So it is that we do well to listen to our wise parents, and borrow
a line or two from them. Many a version of  {\bfseries How to Live (I Think)} 
can begin with the words of Epictetus, or Socrates, or of Tolstoy or Milton,
or of some stranger on a train, or of some letter to the editor. The occasions
of education that have been left for us by our parents are beyond counting,
and so too are those we provide each other every day. That is the natural
duty of any parent -- to provide, again and again, that occasion for any
child. 

The largest and simplest definition of true education that I can imagine
is this: It is all that is absent in the lives of those who aren't composing
 {\bfseries How to Live (I Think)}. 


\end{document}
