Plato vs. Aristotle and the Soul of Education

Plato vs. Aristotle and the Soul of Education

McCann and Fitzgibbons

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Einstein

You don’t hear much in education circles these days about inspiration. What we hear is about differentiated instruction, data driven instruction, vertical and horizontal alignment, ya day a da. Listen to the metaphors. They sound like math. There’s a reason for that.

When I ask people about their best teachers or best classes, what I hear most often is that the teacher they remember best had the ability to bring the material to them or communicate the ideas on their level, or that the teacher aspired them to see things from a point of view that they had never considered before. Not to borrow too much from religious imagery, but the experiences of the most profound and lasting impact are often described as “eye opening” or “challenging one’s world view.” There is an almost evangelical quality to a course or instructor who can do that.

One of my first instructors to bring such good things to my life was Kevin McCann. An Irishman in the most stereotypical ways, but even more, a teacher of poetry who made you feel like you knew who Seamus Heaney was up close and personal. When it came to writing, my memories include feeling both freed and at war simultaneously. I was a newbie to fundamentalism in the late 1970s and was exploring issues of my faith, and had chosen to write a research paper on the very topic for my Senior Seminar. It was a half year devoted to researching and writing a 10 page paper on any topic. While I had a particular agenda in mind for my paper- to save people’s souls- Mr. McCann carefully engaged me to move my thinking toward a more objective stance. The paper was certainly not perfect (grammatically, I was only barely readable), it demonstrated a student who had gone from one place intellectually to quite another. I can still remember my graduation day, introducing him to my mother. He said with a wink in his eye, “this is the smartest of all of them…” He was comparing me to four other siblings he’d known in his career. It was a compliment that would change how I saw myself.

The only other memorable teacher was a guy named Fitzgibbons. He was my drawing teacher. Mechanical drawing. He was an elvish looking little guy with a bushy brown beard. ‘Fitz’ was easy going and encouraged creativity from his drawing students, even while demanding that line weights be correct and that papers stay free from smudges and erasures. From my young days, I had mistakenly believed my uncle in Georgia was an architect because his house there looked like Mike Brady’s. Much to my surprise, I discovered that he was a professor of political science. Nonetheless, with this myth in place, I wanted to become an architect, and so I took Fitz’ Drawing I and went on to Architectural Drafting and Design the year after. Somewhere along the line, we all decided I was not going to be an architect, but I can still remember designing my house with a water ski slip its basement instead of a garage. I can still remember competing against other groups to create solar thermal units to heat water in the fields behind the shop.

By and large, the rest of my high school career was a blur. I remember getting a passing grade on my Trig Regents; I remember my physics teacher cooking hot dogs on a filament wire. I remember Avogadro’s number- 6.02 x 10 to the 23rd… I remember a great deal of time learning how to use the ‘Readers Guide to Periodical Indexes’. These beauties were the be all and end all to research. It was a very complicated system that took years to master. All totally useless today. I remember getting our super cool computers to draw a smiley face on a printer using xs and os.

When I teach these days, I hear kids saying the same things I said: why do we have to learn this stuff? I have to be honest, and say ‘because they said so’. Most of what you learn, I tell them, is completely pointless and due to be outmoded within five years. You are here to learn how to learn- not to learn anything of real value. Or, better, you are here to learn what you might want to learn something more about, and what you might want to avoid learning more about.

My time with the Irishman and the Scot taught me those two lessons. I learned from the Irishman that writing, reading, and the liberal arts were my strong suit. I learned from the Scot that I was far too careless to be a draftsman or an engineer. The other thing I learned from both men was how to learn. Both teachers engaged me by bringing their course material into my life. I was able to explore my faith in one and my water skiing fantasies in the other. My assumption is that these two also shared this ability to inspire other students.

Here’s the basic phrase I want to hear from a kid who finishes a course with me: “I’m not sure I know much more than I did before, but I sure did think a lot.” I want students to walk away from a course understanding that the field we’ve studied is so wide and so interconnected to so many other fields, and to their daily lives, that one cannot help engaging the subject moment to moment and never feeling like you’ve come to a conclusion- these are lofty and high minded goals indeed. Very difficult to quantify. Very difficult to create grade level benchmark assessments for. Quite a step from analyzing data response graphs.

Speaking of interconnectivity and the idea that we cannot come to conclusions, I have been reading Stanley Fish lately, and Fish is very concerned about the idea of cultural studies, fearing that his discipline (literary criticism) will be corrupted by other disciplines. He seems to favor keeping his p's and q's all in a row so that each discipline can maintain a sense of order and structure and procedure. This is because he has abandoned theory, in theory if not in practice. His book, The Problem with Principle, is a pragmatic attempt (through theory) to repair damage he and others have done to the discipline by allowing the taint of relativism in the door. His solution is to leave behind any claims to universal principles like freedom and reason. His only sacred cow left is the word "truth." He still claims to aim for this, but as a practicer of rhetoric, his only stable goal is truth. This was the battle Plato waged with the Sophists of his day, and it still goes on. These are the kinds of conversations that have and will go on forever, and they are the kinds of conversations I want students to be aware of. So let's get to Plato.

Plato and Aristotle

Two other teachers I need to bring up (since they are in my title) are Plato and Aristotle. Plato was Aristotle’s teacher. Socrates was Plato’s mentor and Aristotle went on to tutor Alexander the Great. Much of what I say about these two is gleaned from my memory or my impression of these two and I use them as two magnetic poles, each attracting a certain type of approach into their vastly different spheres. At times, I may mis-represent them or one could find passages to refute issues I raise about them. For my purposes, they are convenient poster children for two significantly different approaches to the philosophy of education. Other paradigms might be more effective, other “isms” might work better, but by and large, I see these two as offering teachers two ways to approach the nature of instruction and learning. As you will see, one might easily use Skinner vs. Rogers (if one were to use ed psych paradigms), or some other pair of thinkers as well as my choices. Be that as it may, I am not alone in arguing that throughout the history of philosophy after Plato, one is either a Platonist or an Aristotelean. I am the former.


Plato’s notion of learning is tied up with his teacher and his character, Socrates. In Socrates’ classroom, there was no large screen computer display, no smart board, no desks, and no tests for that matter. When Plato constructed his own academy years later, the sign to its entrance read “let none enter here not well schooled in geometry.” There was no one ‘on one aide’ there, and no one was given extended time. To be fair, everyone was given extended time because you came or went as you pleased.

The mode of instruction was dialectic. That’s it: talk. How were students evaluated? Talk. How did students learn? Talk. Through a process of give and take, Socrates “educed” from his students what they seemed to already know. The Greek word ‘educe’ means to draw forth, and it gives us our starting point about how one might approach the role of a teacher. One becomes, not the giver of data, but the helper who shows one how to find the well of knowledge. Socrates is later described as the great midwife for others’ ideas. One of my students was frankly grossed out about this image until I explained the etymology of the word “concept” and its relation to “conceive” and how our language has built into it this rich metaphor of ideas and babies being beautiful correlates. Hamlet wisely reminds Polonius, “Conception is a blessing, sir.. look to’t”

Of course, my students are often quite flustered by Plato’s silly notion of innate ideas, of the soul as an indestructible thing that comes back again and again, each time remembering what it may have known from the past. Such superstitious ideas are so passé in our modern (and Aristotelian) era. In his defense, I point out that there is much we still have to learn about the brain and about genetic imprinting and evolutionary biology. There may indeed be much more to our baby brains than the simple blank slates that empiricists like Locke have imagined for us.

Still, it is difficult to create a curriculum in this day and age with such mystical underpinnings. To argue that each of our students comes to us with all they really need to know buried deep in some cavern of their mind is tantamount to psychoses. But to argue its polar opposite is equally absurd. To argue that the mind is simply a repository for images and “facts” and “skills” that need to be “covered” or, better, installed on our hard drives, is equally loony. The mind is not a hard drive or a black board or a map or any thing else. It is something we still do not understand very

When I consider the minds of my students, I see them as characters on a journey. I step into the road and begin to ask them questions, or better yet, sit off on the side of the road with some refreshment in the shade, and when they stop by, I engage them in conversation. “Ever seen the movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?” I might ask, and before long… well…we’re cooking.

No real education occurs without a student being the one in the driver’s seat. Well, at least they have to be in the front of the car for Pete’s sake. Much of a typical student’s career is as passenger or observer, not as participant, and rarely as driver. While I may select the material to read in class and I’m the guy who takes attendance and turns in the grades, the last thing I want to do is come prepared with a learning objective. I want to pose some questions perhaps, but better yet, can I set things up so that the kids have the questions? And then, when I have no answers, they can work on some? Sounds like a pretty shaky plan that wouldn’t pass muster with the state ed department. But it works. It really can. It really can work.

So back to Plato. The real paradox of Plato is that as you read his dialogues, there’s this consistent image of an avuncular and lovable fat man sitting around making fun of the stuffed shirts of his day, pulling slave boys from their chores to teach them math, or quietly accepting his own inevitable execution with the firm peace of an ascetic monk. The paradox is that Plato is not Socrates. In fact, the Socrates we read about is Plato’s Socrates, not the real thing. The fellow who asks leading questions in Plato’s dialogues, and draws his fellow dialecticians into impossible contradictions, is highly ironic and not fully honest. See note below Plato does not begin with a proclamation and go on to prove it using his data. He begins with Socrates asking a question, and his pupils often answer as audience and Socrates bends the discussion around using various metaphors and analogies. His favorite game is to ask not for a virtue or a single definition of love, but for the over reaching common idea linking each individual exemplar. In his classes, facts are not to be memorized for standardized testing. Instead, the goal is what we today call moving from concrete operational to higher order thinking.

Notes
1] Education derives from the verb educe, which means "to draw forth from within." The original teaching method of Socrates of drawing from within has been largely displaced by professorial deference to received scholarly authority. Students are taught how to take exams but not how to think, write or find their own path. I took this from a blog.
2] The mind is the seat of perception of the things we see, hear, and feel. It is through the mind that we see the beauties of the earth and sky, or music, of art, in fact, of everything. That silent shuttle of thought working in and out through cell and nerve weaves into one harmonious whole the myriad moods of mind, and we call it life. Charles Fillmore Source: The Revealing Word
3] This notion of “working” is pretty loaded, and I will address this issue in more depth later. Suffice it to say that my definition of “works” here is equivalent to “I feel kids are getting pretty jazzed.” Or something equally kooky sounding.
4] Jasper Neel indicts Plato for his rhetorical treachery in Plato, Derrida, and Writing

On Placing a Service Dog

Can I help you?

The biggest obstacle any service dog raiser has is answering the constant question: "How do you give him up when you're done?" The answer to this varies with the raiser, but my answer had always been, "well, when you see him work with a client and see what a difference he makes in her life, and you know he is doing great things for someone, you feel great." This has been my standard reply as I raised my second dog.

My first dog (that I raised), Brennan, is now working joyfully for someone in Albany. I have heard that he has a nick name around the office he goes to daily, and that he is essentially the 'BMOC.' These kinds of placements can make all the difference for puppy raisers.

My second dog, Inde, left for Dobb's Ferry two days ago to be placed through an organization that uses at risk teens to raise dogs for war veterans. I'll most likely never see him again. I won't know who will get him, and I won't see him work with a client. I now need to construct the best narrative I can to deal with this loss for myself and for my family. When people ask me if I am going to take on another dog, I have to say no. It's not this last placement that led me to this decision. It's more about the fact that I've been raising these dogs for 5 years now, and I simply need a break.

However, to be frank, this placement is not what I had in mind when I signed up to raise Inde. I had hoped to meet the client, see him work with him or her, tell about his idiosyncracies, and explain that he loves to catch Frisbees in the back yard. That we like to call him Gary (from the song...) and some other nick names that are just too ridiculous to repeat. That he rolls on his back to tell you he likes you. That he loves to do agility courses, especially tunnels and a frames. That he will run full speed down a hallway for a set of keys and bring them back to you, wagging his tail, ready to do it again...

I will never get this chance to say these things, and while Inde will most likely lead a fine life and be a terrific help to a very deserving person, I'll never see it with my own eyes.

This is what you need to know when you become a puppy raiser. It can be like it was with Brennan, or it can be like it was with Inde. You don't raise the dog for yourself; you raise him to help someone, and you have to accept that when you start. If you can't accept that, don't get involved.

I have this nagging desire to write some corny phrase about... if you see Inde... tell him... I knew it would sound maudlin. It's time to construct that positive narrative....

A revision of the Problem with Elbow

The problem with Peter Elbow's Epistemology

Just some quick thoughts here. Peter Elbow challenges the intellectual community to attack his notion that "good thinking" should be constituted by both doubting and believing and not just doubting. He points out that James Berlin accused him of being a Platonist who believes that knowledge is private... It seems to me that either Elbow misunderstood him, or Berlin is confused about what it means to be a Platonist.

Plato saw knowledge as innate, but not private. True knowledge did not come from inside one's self, but rather from seeing the higher realities in the world of forms. While self knowledge was part of the path to truth (the unexamined life is not worth living…), the social component was the key, in that one must participate in the dialectic process. If that process is solipsistic, the process fails. This is why Plato condemns writing. Writing is, at least in its creation, a solo flight. It may later be subject to the social meat grinder, but in its purest form it denies any voice but the writer’s. Thus, if the only attack we can make on Elbow’s epistemology is the one Berlin launched, we are in trouble!Back to Elbow... his challenge engages the very same doubt system he wants to challenge in order to test his ideas. If we were to agree with his epistemology and engage him on his own terms, we must not say what is wrong with his ideas, but to say what is more right with another epistemology. To be fair, he is not replacing doubting with believing; nevertheless, we can only "attack" his epistemology by believing him, and simultaneously posing yet another more attractive notion. What that new notion or epistemology would be now becomes our problem and not his.

So the problem (Elbow asked for "someone [who] would try using it [the doubting game] on my argument to see what we can learn) that we are to solve is: to find the error in his epistemology. His epistemology is that knowledge is available either through doubt or through belief. The easiest attack I can suggest is to divide and conquer. First I can take on doubt as a methodology.Epistemology based on doubt goes back to Descartes and Plato. For Plato, the Socratic method exposed all faulty systems to continual definition, rendering these systems and or statements derived from those systems either empty or contradictory. Of course, Plato never allows his own writing to be exposed to the same refining fire, at least not in his own text. As Jasper Neel points out in Plato, Derrida, and Writing, Plato steals writing from the rest of us and hogs it for himself...

Neel asks, “but why is Plato so reluctant to speak himself? Why does he always pretend not to be there? What is he hiding? And above all, why is he so careful as a writer to write what “looks” like speech?” Neel’s answer is “because behind it the man holding the pen is not concerned with the witty banter of two dead men but rather with the project of defining what counts as thinking…” Later, Neel says, “Plato, master writer that he is, has manipulated us without our realizing it…that is the evil of Phaedrus: its delightful surface turns those who look for the man with the pen into mean spirited cavilers. But there was a man with a pen…”(12).

The man with the pen proposed an epistemology based on innate knowledge tested through the use of reason and dialectic. When we examine Plato’s example of dialectic, it is no dialectic at all. It is a man with a pen. The interlocutors are fictive. Only Plato’s voice survives. Thus, Plato’s “soul writing” perhaps returns to Berlin’s critique- a voice in the desert claiming authority over writing.

This charade of Plato’s is the case in most uses of the doubting game that Elbow speaks of. For Descartes, his attempt at epistemological certainty (cogito ergo sum) fails despite his rigorous methodological skepticism. Like Plato, Descartes retreats into the individual perceptions of clear and distinct ideas which are supported by other clear and distinct ideas.

Okay, so doubt doesn’t lead to certainty. Can belief?

Is it possible to find a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion?

Camus’ essay (The Rebel- 1956) is really a reaction to Dostoyevsky’s claim that if God is dead, then all things are permissible. Camus cannot accept nihilism like this. He rejects Sade’s cruelty and the waste of life that his age committed. Still, he cannot return to the safety of the sacred, to the state of belief in God for the sake of having a justification for action. Rather, the existentialist in him posits the individual as his own justification for all actions. And yet this doesn’t satisfy him either. By 1956, Camus sees that he cannot leave the individual on his own. In his forward to the essay, Sir Robert Read says, “if we decide to live, it must be because we have decided that a human society has some positive value” (vii).

The rebel, he asserts, aspires to “give a definite answer to the question implicit in the blood and strife of this century”(4). He cannot be satisfied with the idea that “evil and virtue are mere chance or caprice”(5). He condemns Hitler and others by saying that such a position of absurd nihilism makes the universe a place where “there is no pro or con: the murderer is neither right nor wrong. We are free to stoke the crematory fires or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers”( 5). In a sense he rejects Nietzsche’s amorality, but then praises Nietzsche for his recognition of the necessity for having values, even if one destroys all others. Such thinkers’ “greatness is measured by the extent to which they have rejected the complacencies of absurdism in order to accept its exigencies….. to escape complacency, absurdist reasoning then discovers renunciation…” (9). He concludes his introduction by saying that the rebel’s drive is to transform, demanding to know “whether murder is legitimate” (10). His evidence for consideration is the existence of rebels. He suggests that in looking at rebellion, “we may discover in its achievements the rule of action that the absurd has not been able to give us…and finally, hope for a new creation” (11). His ultimate goal is to “discover the principle of reasonable culpability”(11).

The rebel says no, affirming a borderline, a limit. A saying of ‘no more’ is equivalent to saying that there exists a higher truth or value beyond the individual. He argues that when a rebel rebels it involves “we” and not “I”. He rejects the condition of slavery, demanding to be treated as an equal. He says to himself that it is “better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees (15). He is willing to “sacrifice himself for the sake of a common good” (15). He risks everything for the sake of his natural community, and therefore it is not an egoistic act. Thus, human solidarity is metaphysical!

Camus rejects the sacred (knowing that religion too can create human solidarity), but he claims that “we live in an unsacrosanct moment in history” (21). This, he says, is our historic reality, and “unless we choose to ignore reality, we must find our values in it” (21). After looking at countless examples of revolution and rebellion, Camus limits rebellion to rebellion that is “moderate” meaning that it cannot justify murder and mayhem. Such actions deny the value of other humans. This, he argues, is illogical. Paradoxically, he moves from individualism to a form of communism (with a small c…). He says, “at this limit, the “we are” paradoxically defines a new form of individualism… I have need of others who have need of me and of each other” (297). This collective action requires discipline without it, Camus says, we are “a stranger”(297). Such discipline is a constant Sisyphusian struggle. Reminding ourselves that others are part of our struggle, we must see that there “does exist for man… a way of acting and of thinking which is possible on the level of moderation to which he belongs” (303).

His final answer, “at this meridian of thought”, is that “we shall choose Ithaca” (306). My first reading of this was simply that, like Odysseus, we must not choose war. Instead of leaving Ithaca, we should stay with our families and not fight a pointless war. However, I am indebted to Kit Collins for her insightful moment of epiphany, reminding me that Odysseus chooses Ithaca at another key moment in the story. He chooses not to be a god with Calypso. He prefers to “learn to live and die” in his “faithful land.” Along with Marx, Lenin, and the martyrs of 1905, we must all learn to accept the “thin yield” of our own fields, accepting from the others “that he is not God”(306).

Does Camus’ plan from 1956 work today? One must ask if we are in a similar history. His answer seems to include people from all walks of history, from Odysseus to Marx, and so I would assume that his answer does work, and that our history is not so different from his. Is it possible to find a rule of conduct? Yes. Is it absolute? No. It is the product of a constant struggle to remember that we are not Gods, and therefore, we need each other and therefore must act within moderation, respecting all other humans who have likewise chosen Ithaca.

So the problem (Elbow asked for "someone [who] would try using it [the doubting game] on my argument to see what we can learn) that we are to solve is to find the error in his epistemology. His epistemology is that knowledge is available either through doubt or through belief. The easiest attack is to divide and conquer.

Epistemology based on doubt goes back to Descartes and Plato. For Plato, the socratic method exposed all faulty systems to continual definition, rendering most of these systems and statements either empty or contradictory. Of course, Plato's writing was never exposed to the same fire. As Jasper Neel points out in Plato, Derrida, and Writing, Plato steals writing from the rest of us and hogs it for himself... more later

The problem with Peter Elbow's Epistemology

Just some quick thoughts here. Peter Elbow challenges the intellectual community to attack his notion that "good thinking" should be constituted by both doubting and believing and not just doubting. He points out that James Berlin accused him of being a Platonist who believes that knowledge is private... Seems to me that either Elbow misunderstood him, or Berlin is confused about what it means to be a Platonist. Plato generally saw knowledge as innate but not private. True knowledge did not come from inside one's self, but rather from seeing the higher realities in the world of forms. While self knowledge was part of the path to truth (the unexamined life is not worth living), the social component was key in that one must participate in the dialectic process. If that process is solopsistic, the process fails.

Back to Elbow... his challenge engages the doubt system to test his ideas. If we were to agree with his epistemology and engage him, we must not say what is wrong with his ideas, but to say what is more right with another. Since he has opened up the process from a restriction to doubting only, replacing it with doubting and believing, we can only "attack" his idea by believing him, and yet simultaneously posing yet another more attractive notion. What that new notion or epistemology would be... Hmmm

Prophet of Justice

We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, the generosity of the man who understands. In the light, the earth, the earth remains our first and last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again renounce to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter food, the harsh wind off the sea, the ancient dawn forever renewed.
With this joy, through long struggle, we shall remake the soul of our time, and a Europe which will exclude nothing. Not even that phantom Nietzsche who, for twelve years after his downfall, was continually invoked by the West as the ruined image of its loftiest knowledge and its nihilism; nor the prophet of justice without mercy who rests, by mistake, in the unbelievers' plot at Highgate Cemetery; nor the deified mummy of the man of action in his glass coffin; nor any part of what the intelligence and energy of Europe have ceaselessly furnished to the pride of a contemptible period. All may indeed live again, side by side with the martyrs of 1905, but on condition that they shall understand how they correct one another, and that a limit, under the sun, shall curb them all. Each tells the other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism.
At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of his fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent rages. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.

Questions: Who is the deified mummy (man of action) in his glass coffin?
Who is the prophet of justice without mercy?
Who are the martyrs of 1905?
What is the arrow he wanted to shoot, and toward what target?

I'll take any offers...