Thanks again professor. A beautifully written tour through the foundations and the ways they are crumbling. To have to say or have need or cause to say:
“We simply must have men and women with ‘heart”.
…is itself a marker of how far they have crumbled.
We are lucky and blessed to have signs of the path back and a guide so cogent as you.
Professor, extremely honored by your comment. Yeah, it seems like we shouldn’t need to say that but I think very few of our social/cultural/educational institutions think anything like that is their mission.
The crazy inspiring person I’ve had too. As Tom Bertonneau had. It’s what I aspire to be as a teacher. It doesn’t seem to matter if they turn out to be charlatans. Maybe they are more often than not. The list of the Harvard guy’s intellectual heroes suggests that he was one of them.
I won’t call him a charlatan. Very good teacher. He was just interested in people that don’t (mostly) interest me at this point. But again, he taught me to read Plato (and Aristotle, and Augustine) as well. But, I agree that how people end up influencing us is not always straightforward or without complication.
I'm not sure what it means about learning how to read Plato. I learnt only how NOT to read Plato. I was horribly mistaught Plato in New Zealand. They would attempt to reconstruct the arguments by putting them into something closer to formal logical form without regard to rhetorical context. That's because they were analytic philosophy dufuses. As a result, I hated Plato. When I finally started reading him for myself I realized that I had a great affinity with him and quickly came to love him. Having a sense of humor was also a great plus. I typed The Republic nearly word for word onto my computer with multiple translations of difficult passages and spent two years reading and re-reading it (among other things I was working on) back in the 1990s.
Yes, I feel for you. That is a horrible way to approach to Plato. Some of the things my teacher taught we were: though he was not a Straussian, he had a definite sense 'the great books' and as the Tradition representing to a degree a conversation between the great books, so to read Plato with reference to other texts; he taught me about the different sorts of interpretations of texts which led me to Bloom's Republic and other translations along those lines; to value the literary and imaginative characteristics of the text as central to its interpretation; I think it was he who pointed me to the role first lines or first scenes often play in the dialogues (I'll illustrate this in my next series, a 7 part series on the Apology), and probably other things. Mainly to see them as rich, multi-layered, texts embedded in a tradition. I've picked up other insights along the way over the decades.
I’m a bit allergic to humanism. Why not theism? Berdyaev asserted that without God we cease to be human and even that God is the most human of all. Without God there is no Way or Tao to follow. We live in the metaxy between brute and God. Take God away and we oscillate between those two extremes- at least in our now impoverished imaginations. We can add “machine” to “brute.” I’ve taught The Abolition of Man too for whatever that’s worth.
Nothing against theism. Certainly any adequate humanism would have to account for the spiritual aspects of our nature. The term is a bit iffy, I grant. I think it’s worth rehabilitating though. I think it will be hard enough for us to get some sense of own nature back.
Thanks for the series! John Trudell gives a concise insightful definition of "human being" in "we are shapes of the earth" and "they're mining us", and the whole album ("DNA: Descendant Now Ancestor" is well-worth listening to:
Thanks again professor. A beautifully written tour through the foundations and the ways they are crumbling. To have to say or have need or cause to say:
“We simply must have men and women with ‘heart”.
…is itself a marker of how far they have crumbled.
We are lucky and blessed to have signs of the path back and a guide so cogent as you.
Professor, extremely honored by your comment. Yeah, it seems like we shouldn’t need to say that but I think very few of our social/cultural/educational institutions think anything like that is their mission.
The crazy inspiring person I’ve had too. As Tom Bertonneau had. It’s what I aspire to be as a teacher. It doesn’t seem to matter if they turn out to be charlatans. Maybe they are more often than not. The list of the Harvard guy’s intellectual heroes suggests that he was one of them.
It’s a good thing to aspire to be. Given I know you somewhat well, I’m sure you are ‘that person’ for some of your students.
I won’t call him a charlatan. Very good teacher. He was just interested in people that don’t (mostly) interest me at this point. But again, he taught me to read Plato (and Aristotle, and Augustine) as well. But, I agree that how people end up influencing us is not always straightforward or without complication.
I'm not sure what it means about learning how to read Plato. I learnt only how NOT to read Plato. I was horribly mistaught Plato in New Zealand. They would attempt to reconstruct the arguments by putting them into something closer to formal logical form without regard to rhetorical context. That's because they were analytic philosophy dufuses. As a result, I hated Plato. When I finally started reading him for myself I realized that I had a great affinity with him and quickly came to love him. Having a sense of humor was also a great plus. I typed The Republic nearly word for word onto my computer with multiple translations of difficult passages and spent two years reading and re-reading it (among other things I was working on) back in the 1990s.
Yes, I feel for you. That is a horrible way to approach to Plato. Some of the things my teacher taught we were: though he was not a Straussian, he had a definite sense 'the great books' and as the Tradition representing to a degree a conversation between the great books, so to read Plato with reference to other texts; he taught me about the different sorts of interpretations of texts which led me to Bloom's Republic and other translations along those lines; to value the literary and imaginative characteristics of the text as central to its interpretation; I think it was he who pointed me to the role first lines or first scenes often play in the dialogues (I'll illustrate this in my next series, a 7 part series on the Apology), and probably other things. Mainly to see them as rich, multi-layered, texts embedded in a tradition. I've picked up other insights along the way over the decades.
I’m a bit allergic to humanism. Why not theism? Berdyaev asserted that without God we cease to be human and even that God is the most human of all. Without God there is no Way or Tao to follow. We live in the metaxy between brute and God. Take God away and we oscillate between those two extremes- at least in our now impoverished imaginations. We can add “machine” to “brute.” I’ve taught The Abolition of Man too for whatever that’s worth.
Nothing against theism. Certainly any adequate humanism would have to account for the spiritual aspects of our nature. The term is a bit iffy, I grant. I think it’s worth rehabilitating though. I think it will be hard enough for us to get some sense of own nature back.
Thanks for the series! John Trudell gives a concise insightful definition of "human being" in "we are shapes of the earth" and "they're mining us", and the whole album ("DNA: Descendant Now Ancestor" is well-worth listening to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK6tP23oCes&list=PLOnzFQVEgXSRNdJSYF4KWAJm_nnzsX-dW&index=3
&
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eegs9FfZMxo&list=PLOnzFQVEgXSRNdJSYF4KWAJm_nnzsX-dW&index=5
Thanks for the links.
You're welcome.