Raphael, "Socrates and Plato"
This week being our college’s exam week, I find myself in that tunnel-vision mindset that every end-of-the-semester seems to require. In the upcoming days essays will get graded (I know not how), exams will be given (I have one to compose), seniors will present their St. Mary’s Projects, and awards and diplomas will be handed out.
We had our major awards ceremony this past Saturday. As is tradition, we began with a poem by Lucille Clifton that she allowed us to adapt slightly for the occasion. Here it is:
the light that comes
comes in a shift of knowing
when even our fondest sureties
fade away, when we understand
that we have not understood and are not mistress even
of our own off eyes. then
the man escapes throwing away his tie and
the children grow legs and start walking and
we can see the peril of an
unexamined life.
we close our eyes, afraid to look for our
authenticity
but the light insists on itself in the world
a voice from the nondead past starts talking,
we close our ears and it spells out in our hand
“you might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”
Indulge me as I boast about a couple of my students who have been very good at answering that door. Melanie Kokolios, the student who will be the peer mentor for my Jane Austen freshman seminar this coming fall, won the English Department’s scholarship award, and Meredith Powlison, who wrote her senior project for me on novelist Milan Kundera, won the Female Scholar Athlete of the Year Award. Meredith wasn’t on hand to receive the award as she was out in California qualifying for the national team sailing championship. Over the past month Meredith has led the women’s team, the co-ed dingy team, and now this team to a place in June’s three national championships, all while doing extensive revisions on her senior project.
Our president then gave one of his patented speeches, this one centered on Plato’s Meno. It was exactly what I wanted our students to hear: a full-blown defense of the liberal arts. To those who handed in their senior projects the day before, Joe’s talk may have been particularly meaningful. Here’s an excerpt:
By Joe Urgo, President of St. Mary’s College of Maryland
In August at Convocation I opened the academic year with a brief reference to Meno’s paradox, in Plato’s Socratic dialogue of the same name. I return to it now to bookend the academic year, with a slightly fuller consideration of its significance to us today.
Meno is exasperated with Socrates early in the dialogue and asks why it is that Socrates, as “a perplexed man yourself,” is in the habit of “reduc[ing] others to perplexity” on such important matters as the definition of virtue. Socrates responds,
It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself, I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.
Regarding virtue, Students, Socrates’ next words to Meno may sound close to your professor’s advice on your own research and creative projects:
So with virtue now. I don’t know what it is. You may have known before you came into contact with me, but now you look as if you don’t. Nevertheless I am ready to carry out, together with you, a joint investigation and inquiry into what it is.
Philosophy majors in the arena today may recall Meno’s deep frustration at this response. Here are his words:
But how will you look for something when you don’t in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don’t know as the object of your search?
Well, after 2500 years we know this process to be the prime differentiator between a liberal arts education and vocational training or pre-professional preparation. But Meno’s exasperation goes one step deeper:
To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you have found is the thing you didn’t know?”
Students, take Meno’s paradox with you in the years ahead. Consider all you have found while a student at St. Mary’s College and reflect upon the question, did you find what you were looking for? Are you sure it’s the thing you didn’t know?
Socrates’ systematic response is in what we know as the Socratic method – the conviction that “seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection.” Which brings us to our focus today, the discoveries made when we engage in open-ended learning, when we collaborate as seekers, when we discover, recollect, and reveal.
Giving Socrates the final word,
we shall be better, braver, and more active men [and women] if we believe it right to look for what we don’t know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don’t know we can never discover.
To put it succinctly, seeking is finding. Students, if you remember little else, remember always the inspiration you found in looking for what you don’t know, in being held captive to that inspiration. That recollection will never fail to enlighten.
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