What Benefit Can Young People Derive from Classical Education? (Part 2)
[ This post originally appeared on my classical teacher site, Locus Classicus. ]
For myself, I desire to take the classical Christian tradition with the utmost seriousness, meaning that I do not simply reject something found in it because it is not immediately apparent to me how that thing is sensible and might be true. On the other hand, our tradition itself permits us to imagine that, if we have a proper formation in the disciplines and a proper sense of the communion of saints, we ourselves may be able to converse with our fathers as rational equals. For with proper training, since we ourselves partake of the same human nature as did our fathers, we ourselves should be able to reason out things in the same fashion they did, even if that means we eventually arrive at different conclusions than they did.
So it is not necessary for us simply to contradict Aristotle and Musculus – since again, speaking generally they are both quite right – in order to realize that we can do something about the problems they noted. And since in this case of matters of virtue we can do something, we ought to do something. Interestingly, since I began this inquiry with some seemingly depressing words from Aristotle about the task of educating the young, the very next section of his words may be taken, I think, as offering hope. Let me first read them, and then briefly unpack them:
Let us not fail to notice, however, that there is a difference between arguments from and those to the first principles…For, while we must begin with what is known, things are objects of knowledge in two senses- some to us, some without qualification. Presumably, then, we must begin with things known to us. Hence any one who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just, and generally, about the subjects of political science must have been brought up in good habits. For the fact is the starting-point, and if this is sufficiently plain to him, he will not at the start need the reason as well; and the man who has been well brought up has or can easily get starting points. – Nicomachean Ethics, I.4 (emphasis mine)
At the start, Aristotle distinguishes between “arguments from first principles” and “arguments to first principles.” To put that another way, he distinguishes between the matter of philosophy (or the what one is talking about) and the ground of philosophy (or the why that thing is the way it is). These correspond to two ways in which any person may rightly say that he “knows” something. One way is rather common-sensically, that he knows something because it is just a given of ordinary experience in the world. The reports of our physical senses are basically trustworthy, and may be taken for granted as starting points for inquiry. The other way a person may know something is more complex, and perhaps not really for everyone, namely, he knows something because he has by a rigorous reasoning process penetrated past the given of experience and found the underlying – I think Aristotle would happily let us say, metaphysical – reason for that given being a given in the first place.
Critically for us, Aristotle notes in what I just cited that not everyone needs the reason why a thing is merely in order to understand that a thing is. And if he understands that a thing is, he is at least able to listen to, and perhaps profit from, lectures about the why. But note the key context Aristotle gives for the knowing-that: “he must have been brought up in good habits.” This remark should lead us to Aristotle’s remarks on the two kinds of habits, moral and intellectual, in Ethics Book II, a topic which will require another lengthy talk to adequately address, but about which I will briefly say something at the end of this one.
To wind down here, let’s hear how Aristotle ends the section of Book I from which I have been quoting. Having said that there are two kinds of knowledge, knowledge that and knowledge why, and that anyone who has been “well-brought up” will have little trouble getting starting points for reasoning, he goes on to say:
And as for him who neither has nor can get [starting points], let him hear the words of Hesiod:
Far best is he who knows all things himself;
Good, he that hearkens when men counsel right;
But he who neither knows, nor lays to heart
Another’s wisdom, is a useless wight.
Note here the different qualities of men who claim to know: best is the one who has philosophically reasoned things out for himself, good is the man who listens to wise counsel, and useless is the man who neither knows for himself nor listens to the wisdom of others. As classical teachers, we should put all this together with the glue of the very thing we are aiming to do with our students: training them in good habits. For in the opening section of Book II of the Ethics, Aristotle remarks that, “Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time)…”
So we can see, I think, that while it is generally true that young men are disposed to follow their passions, and that if they do so, they will be unfit hearers of lectures on political science, it is at least possible through educating them via experience and over time to create young men who have good habits of mind, who can identify the proper starting points in the facts of experience and then use those as stepping stones to reason out the whys behind them.
Might we then say that hearing lectures on politics might be useful to a young man in the sense of acquainting him with the critical distinction between action based on prudent deliberation versus action based on following the passions? And might we say regarding theology that lectures might be useful to a young man in the sense of acquainting him with, on the one hand, the critical distinction between prideful disputing based on very little knowledge, and on the other hand, piously reverent disputing based on very serious, long-term reflection not merely on the matter of theology but on the severe limitations that human reason has with respect to that subject?
It seems, then, that after all of this we have arrived at the place we already were before the inquiry: yes, of course young men can derive a great deal of benefit from classical education, so it behooves us to continue to do what we are already doing with them. But here at the end, there is a surprise, and it is that the remarks of Aristotle about politics and those of Wolfgang Musculus about theology seem to turn back around and point at us classical teachers ourselves.
For as Aristotle said in the final quote I produced, the only way for a young man to really profit from lectures on politics is for him to have been “brought up in good habits.” Such a remark is not about the young man, actually, but about his teachers, who are the ones training his habits. We ourselves must be fit hearers of lectures on politics because we ourselves possess good habits of thought and speech about politics. As classical teachers – not, I say, just teachers – we ourselves must not derive our own political thoughts and speech from debased sources, or allow our own passions about political matters to run away with our prudence and moderation. To fail in this way ourselves will be to train the habits of our young charges badly, and so merely confirm them in their present condition of debased political thinking. As Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:14, if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a ditch.
Similarly with theology, if we are to train our young men in good habits of thought and speech about high and holy matters, we ourselves must exhibit the profound and sober reverence about which Wolfgang Musculus wrote. We ourselves must not take the Scriptures for granted, let alone tacitly confuse our own surface-level thoughts about the meaning of Scripture with Scripture itself. We ourselves must be more attentive students of the elements of our religion, never forgetting that we ourselves are in the spot Musculus called the “abject and vile” condition of having “imbecilic and vanishing power of understanding” right along with our students – the critical difference between us and them being that we know how pathetic we are, and so we teach them to know themselves likewise.
And so here at the end of my examination of these two provocative classical passages, I would like to suggest that since we already know that our students are the way Aristotle and Musculus say they are, we ought instead to hold up their words as a mirror for ourselves, and dare to ask the uncomfortable question, Are we ourselves fit speakers of political lectures to others, and are we ourselves any better than animals, who, though destitute of reason, are better able to understand human things than we, made in God’s image, understand divine and heavenly things? We cannot, after all, teach our students to know themselves and the world and God aright if we have not preceded them in that exact kind of self-knowledge.
