The Gift of Fire, by Richard Mitchell

7/30/2019 The Gift of Fire, by Richard Mitchell

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Richard Mitchell is a superb shatterer of icons. InThe Gift of Fire, passion, commitment, exquisitereasoning, and Mitchells unique sense of humorare trained on the vital question: How do we useand, more commonly, misuse our minds? Animportant work. Thomas H. Middleton

There exists in every age, in every society, asmall, still choir of reason emanating from a fewscattered thinkers ignored by the mainstream.Their collective voices, when duly discovered acentury or so too late, reveal what was wrong with

that society and age, and how it could have beencorrected if only people had listened and actedaccordingly. Richard Mitchells is such a voice. Itcould help make a better life for you or, if it is toolate for that, for your children. Ignore it at yourand their peril. John Simon

The Underground Grammarian is back with themost important book of his career. RichardMitchell, author of the classics Less Than Words

Can Say, The Graves of Academe, and TheLeaning Tower of Babel, delivers in The Gift ofFire a series of fiercely witty, brilliantlyconsidered sermons on an issue as old asSocrates but still controversial today: What is the

role of morality in education, and therefore in ourdaily responsibilities? And how do we decidewhatmorality should be taught, and why?

Those familiar with Mitchells legendaryUnderground Grammarian will recognize thesound of Mitchells voice crying in thewildernesswith considerable humoras he usestelling examples and wicked, witty parables toillustrate his belief that the American educationestablishment and society itself have failed toteach us mental discipline, independence of

thought, individual responsibility, or even theright books. From The Gift of Fires first chapter,Who Is Socrates, Now That We Need Him? tothe books stunning, emotionally movingconclusion, Mitchell decries feel good, ImOK, Youre OK American public educationbased on teaching to the lowest commondenominatorand argues for a return to studiesbased on the work of thinkers like Socrates,Aquinas, and Ben Franklin. In this way, all of uslearn to think for ourselves, not just the privileged.

Here, too, are Mitchells beautifully written,exquisitely argued explorations of not what buthow to think about the knotty moral issues thatface us every day: ambition, violence, nuclearweapons, political conflict, patience, duty, love,and even child-rearing. In the spirit of RalphWaldo Emerson, Mitchell considers the worldaround him in a manner that is thought-provoking,fascinating, and entertaining.

Thousands of enlightened readers know RichardMitchell as one of our most brilliant, passionate,

funny, and quintessentially American thinkers.Join them in reading The Gift of Fire. It willchange your lifeor at least how you think aboutit.

Richard Mitchell is editor and publisher of TheUnderground Grammarian and professor ofclassics at Glassboro State College.


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Introduction

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

That, in itself, is nothing new. I have never yetwritten anything, long or short, that did notsurprise me. That is, for me at least, the greatestworth of writing, which is only incidentally a wayof telling others what you think. Its first use is forthe making of what you think, for the discovery ofunderstanding, an act that happens only inlanguage.

I have habitually found it convenient, andperhaps just a little too easy, to look forunderstanding by paying close attention to failuresof understanding, which always take the form ofbad language. Just as there is nothing butlanguage in which to make sense, there is nothingbut language in which to make nonsense. So, inmy works, at least, the examination of sense andnonsense has ordinarily been a sometimes cleverand amusing castigation of fools, who can beshown to imagine that they make sense when theydont.

The castigation of fools is, of course, an ancientand honorable task of writers and, unless verypoorly done, an enterprise that will usuallyentertain those who behold it. No matter what elsewe imagine that we believe about the propriety ofcompassion for the unfortunate, we do like to seefools exposed. Its funny. And it is not onlyfunny; it is the great theme of Comedy, and amild, domestic counterpart of the great theme ofTragedy, in which we rejoice, however sadly, tosee villains brought down.

So it is that the habitual contemplation of folly,

which does not seem to be the worst thing in theworld, leads little by little to some considerationof vice, which does seem to be the worst thing inthe world. It is troubling to notice that when weare foolish or only foolish, as we easily deem it,we find ourselves all the more likely to do badthings. And when we can see, as I think I have sooften managed to demonstrate, that some veryfoolish people are in a position to bring theconsequences of their folly not only on

themselves but on others, we do have thesuspicion that something bad is going on. Surely,if we could certainly pronounce certain personswise, we would think it a good thing to fall undertheir influence, and it seems only natural and

inescapably right to expect some badness from theinfluence of fools. So it was that I graduallyfound, in my own considerations of nonsense, lessplay and more brooding, less glee and moremelancholy, and the growing conviction that thesilly mind, just as much as the wicked mind, ifthere is such a thing, makes bad things happen.And my meditations on foolish language, my ownincluded, grew somber and satirical.

Satire is a cunning, landless opportunist whopoaches along the borders of the two great realmsof Tragedy and Comedy. The hunting is good, no

doubt, for the satirist is nourished by folly andvice, of which there is said to be never anyshortage. But, perhaps because I was reared inComedys fair land, I am not convinced of that.Folly is thick on the ground, no doubt, but whereis vice? I know, I truly do know and candemonstrate, just as surely as one can provide aproof in geometry, that certain influential persons,especially in the schools, do bad things to otherpeople. But they are not villains. They do not willbadness. On the contrary, probably far more thanmost of us, they deliberately intend to do good

things. And I am certain that they would do goodthings, if only they could make sense.

But all of that, obviously, could be said of anyone of us. Outside of the pages of fantastic fiction,there is no one who says in the heart, I will doevil. We all intend the good, and would, at leastoften, do it if we could. But we dont alwaysunderstand what the good is.

That is hardly a new idea. But, while I haveknown about it for a long time, heard it with thehearing of the ear, as it were, I havent trulyknown it. Between those conditionsknowing

about, and knowingI think there is a very bigdifference. The point of this book was, for me, thediscovery of that understanding. True education isnot knowing about, but knowing. It is the cure offolly and the curb of vice, and our only hope ofescaping what Socrates once called the greatestperil of this our lifenot sickness or death, asmost of us would say, but the failure to makesense about the better and the worse, and thus tochoose the wrong one, thinking it the other.


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This is, Im afraid, a presumptuous book. It is abook about how to live by a man who doesntknow how to live, but who has begun to learn thathe doesnt know how.

Chapter OneWho Is Socrates,

Now That We Need Him?

WHEN BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was hardlymore than a boy, but clearly a comer, he decidedto achieve moral perfection. As guides in this

enterprise, he chose Jesus and Socrates. One of hisself-assigned rules for daily behavior was nothingmore than this: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

I suspect that few would disagree. Even mostmilitant atheists admire Jesus, while assuming, ofcourse, that they admire him for the right reasons.Even those who have no philosophy and wantnone admire Socrates, although exactly why, theycan not say. And very few, I think, would tell theyoung Franklin that he ought to have made somedifferent choices: Alexander, for instance, orFrancis Bacon.

Jesus, just now, has no shortage of would-beimitators, although they do seem to disagreeamong themselves as to how he ought to beimitated. But the imitators of Socrates, if any therebe, are hard to find. For one thing, if they aremore or less accurately imitating him, they willnot organize themselves into Socrates clubs andpronounce their views. If we want to talk withthem, we will have to seek them out; and, unlesswe ourselves become, to some degree at least,imitators of Socrates, we will not know enough towant to seek them out. Indeed, unless we are

sufficiently his imitators, we might only knowenough not to want to seek him out, for some ofthose who sought Socrates out found reason towish that they hadnt. Unlike Jesus, or, to be moreaccurate, unlike the Jesus whom many imagine,Socrates often brought not the Good News, butthe Bad.

Nevertheless, people do from time to time cometo know enough about Socrates to be drawn intohis company, and to agree, with rare exceptions,

that it would indeed be a good thing to imitatehim. The stern poet-philosopher Nietzsche wasone of those exceptions, for he believed, and quitecorrectly, that reasonable discourse was theweapon with which the weak might defeat the

strong, but most of us often do think of ourselvesas weak rather than strong, and what seemed a badthing to Nietzsche seems a good thing to us.However, when we do try to imitate Socrates, wediscover that it isnt as easy, and as readilypossible to millions, as the imitation of Jesus issaid to be.

So we make this interesting distinction: Wedecide that the imitation of Jesus lies in oneRealm, and the imitation of Socrates in quiteanother, The name of the first, we can not easilysay, but the name of the second is pretty obviously

mind. Even the most ardent imitators of Jesusseldom think of themselves as imitating the workof his mind, but of, well, something else, thespirit, perhaps, or the feelings, or some otherfaculty hard to name. But those who wouldimitate Socrates know that they must do somework in the mind, in the understanding, in theintellect, perhaps even in the formidableintelligence of the educational psychologists,beyond whose boundaries we can no more go thanwe can teach ourselves to jump tall buildings. Wemay apparently follow Jesus simply by feeling

one thing rather than another, but the yoke ofSocrates is not easy, and his burden not light, nordoes he suffer little children to come unto him.

And we say that, while it would be trulysplendid to imitate his example, it really cant bedone as a general rule for ordinary life. Very fewof us are as smart as Socrates, after all, and thesmartest of us are already very busy in computersand astrophysics. Socrates appeared once and onlyonce among us, and the chances of his comingagain are very slim. We may hold him up as ashining example, of course, but as a distant star,

not a candle in the window of home. He is one inbillions. So we must, it seems, resign ourselves toliving not the examined life but the unexaminedlife, responding to the suggestions of environmentand the inescapable power of genetic endowmentand toilet training.

Nevertheless, millions and millions of uscontemplate no serious difficulty at all inimitating the example of Jesus, who, as ithappens, is also held to be one in billions. We do


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notsay, Ah well, a Jesus comes but once amongus, and we lesser folk must content ourselves withremembering, once in a while, some word or deedof his, and trying, although without any hope oftruly 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, tobe sure, provided that we do in fact understandhim correctly, which is by no means alwayscertain, we might come near the mark. But it ischildish and idealistic to imagine that we can,especially in this busiest and most technicallydemanding of worlds, plainly and simply live asJesus lived. No, we do not make thosereservations, but suppose rather that, in the case ofthis one life among billions, we can launchourselves, all at once, and as if by magic, into the

Way in which he walked. And this is because weimagine that the Way of Socrates is barricaded bythe wall of an intelligence test, and the Way ofJesus is not, that the regularly examined liferequires a lot of hard mental labor, and that thegood life is as natural and automatic as the singingof the birds.

But there was at least one man who held, andwho seems to have demonstrated in a veryconvincing fashion, that Socrates was not at allspecial, that he was, indeed, just as ignorant as therest of us. We can not dismiss him as a political

enemy or an envious detractor, or even as a moreadvanced philosopher who had the advantage ofmodern information to which Socrates had noaccess. It was Socrates himself who made thatdemonstration. And, although Plato is surely themost humorous and ironic of philosophers, it isjust not possible to read Socrates Apology as awitty trick at the jurys expense. It is a soberautobiography. Socrates explains that he hassimply spent his life in trying to discover what thegod could have meant in saying, by an astonishingoracle, 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 wastrue of everybody else. The oracle meant, ineffect, that the wisest of men was just as unwiseas all other men. But we seem to befundamentalists about the oracle. There is acurious contradiction in us when we say thatSocrates is an inimitable one in billions because ofthe power of his mind, and thus deny the power ofhis mind to judge truly as to whether he was an

inimitable one in billions. Our minds, which arenot up to the work of imitating him, arenevertheless quite strong enough to overrule him.Strange.

In old age, Franklin admitted that his plan for

the achievement of moral perfection had notentirely succeeded, and that he had not, after all,been able perfectly to imitate either Jesus orSocrates. But he did not say that such imitationswould have been impossible, or excuse himselffrom them on the grounds that they would havebeen impractical or unrealistic, or even, as themodern mind seems very likely to say, that theywould have been counterproductive and littleconducive to success. He says that, all in all, whilehe was but an occasional imitator, even so he hadthus lived a better and a happier life than he would

have otherwise had. And I do suspect thatSocrates himself might have said much the same,for he, too, was surely an occasional imitator ofSocrates.

The Socrates we have in the dialogues of Platosimply must be a perfected Socrates, amasterpiece every bit as much artistic asphilosophical. I have lived, and so have you, inthis world, which is the very same world in whichSocrates lived. Only its temporary particularshave changed. He did, if only when Plato wasntaround, or perhaps before Plato was around,

worry about money. He quarreled with his wife,and fell out of patience with his children. Hespoke, and even acted, without considering thefull meaning and probable consequences of hiswords and deeds. He even, if only once or twice,saw Reason clearly and completely, and wentahead and listened to Appetite instead. And oncein a while, from time to time, he lost his grip onthat cheerful and temperate disposition withoutwhich neither the young nor the old, neither therich nor the poor, can hope for that decent andthoughtful life of self-government that is properly

called Happiness. And such outrageous andunconventional charges I can bringas can youagainst Socrates or anyone, with calm assurance,for Socrates was just a man. To do such things, ashe himself very well knew, was merely human.

So now I can see before me one of thosepersons whom I call, in a very strange manner ofspeaking, my students. There she sits, as closeto the back of the classroom as possible. She isblowing bubbles with her gum, and not without


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skill. She intends to be a schoolteacher. She hasread, in their entirety, two books, one about somevery frightening and mysterious happenings in amodest suburban house on Long Island, and theother about excellence. I now have reason to hope

that she has been reading Emerson, and sheprobably has. She is not a shirker, but, at leastusually, as much a person of serious intent as oneshould be at her age and in her condition. Herunderstanding of Emerson is not perfect, butneither is mine. The essay she has been reading, Ihave read many times, and every time with therealization that my understanding of it, up to now,of course, has not been perfect.

I know this as surely as I know that Socrateswas once exasperated by a yapping dog:Someday, perhaps this day, when I have explained

some difficult propositions exploration byEmerson, that young woman, or somebody elsevery much like her, will raise her hand and askthequestion, and ask it just as Socrates asked, out ofwhat she knows to be her ignorance, and herdesire not to be ignorant. And her question willremind me that I am ignorant, and that I didntknow it, and that I do not want to be.

I probably give less thought than I should to thequestion of whether the world exists, but I oftenconsider the question ofwhen it exists. When I amthere in class, considering that young womans

question before me, that is the world. Socratesexists. As though she were Socrates, this blowerof bubbles asks the question. She has neverthought out or named undefined terms,unbounded categories, or unexaminedpropositions. She can not say that a likenessshould be noted where only difference waspresumed, or a difference where only a likeness.But she can ask as though she had consideredsuch things. And in that moment, in the world thatthen and there exists, who is the teacher and whothe student? Who is Socrates?

If I have any good sense at all, will I not giveherquestion as much thoughtful consideration as Iwould have given to the same question had itcome from Socrates himself? And for tworeasons, both of them splendid?

Rather than effectively dismissing Socrateswhen we suppose that we praise him as one inbillions, we might do better to attend to ourwords as though we were poets, looking alwaysdeeper into and through them. We could thus also

say that Socrates is one who is truly in billions,the most powerful confirmation that we have ofwhat is, after all, not merely an individual but agenerally human possibilitythe minds ability tobehold and consider itself and its works. That

power is probably unavailable to infants andlunatics, but, in the absence of some such specialimpediment, who can be without it? Can it be thatsome of us are empty, and without that powerwhich is the sign of humanity? My bubble-blowercertainly is not, and she is real. I have seen heroften. And in that moment when she is Socrates, Imay well be seeing the first moment ofthoughtfulness in her life. Education, realeducation, and not just the elaborate contraptionthat is better understood as schooling, can benothing but the nourishment of such moments.

____________

I imagine some well-informed and largely wisevisitor from another world who comes to Earth tostudy us. He begins by choosing two people atrandom, and, since time and place are of noimportance to him, but only the single fact ofhumanity, he chooses Socrates and me, leavingaside for the moment every other human being.He begins with an understanding of the single buttremendous attribute that distinguishes us bothfrom all other creatures of Earth. We are capable

of Reason. Capable. We can know ourselves,unlike the foxes and the oaks, and can know thatwe know ourselves. He knows that while we haveappetites and urges just like all the other creatures,we have the astonishing power of seeing them notsimply as the necessary attributes of what we are,but as separate from us in a strange way, so thatwe can hold them at arms length, turning themthis way and that, and make judgment of them,and even put them aside, saying, Yes, that isme, in a way, but, when I choose, it is just athing, not truly me, but only 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 degreeto which they conform to what human means inhuman beings. With those superiorextraterrestrial powers that imagination grantshim, he will easily discover:

That I have notions, certain sayings in mymind, that flatly contradict one another; believing,for instance, that I can choose for myself the path


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of my life while blaming other people for thedifficulty of the path. With Socrates, this is not thecase.

That my mind is full of ideas that are trulynothing more than words, and that as to the

meaning of the words I have no clear and constantidea, behaving today as though justice were onething, and tomorrow as though it were another.That, while wanting to be happy and good, I haveno clear ideas by which I might distinguish, ormight even want to distinguish, happiness frompleasure, and goodness from social acceptability.With Socrates, this is not the case.

That I usually believe what I believe notbecause I have tested and found it coherent andconsistent, and harmonious with evidence, butbecause it is also believed by the right people,

people like me, and because it pleases me. Andthat furthermore, I live and act and speak asthough my believing were no different from myknowing. With Socrates, this is not the case.

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

That I seem to have a great need for things, andthink myself somehow treated unjustly by an

insufficiency of them, and that this insufficiency,which seems strangely to persist even after I gethold of the thing whose necessity I have mostrecently noted, prevents in me that cheerful andtemperate disposition to which I deem myselfentitled. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That I seem to know what I want, but that I haveno way of figuring out whether I should wantwhat I want, and that, indeed, it does not occur tome that I shouldbe able to figure that out. WithSocrates, this is not the case.

And that, in short and in general, my mind, the

thing that most makes us human, is not doing thesteering of this life, but is usually being hustledalong on a wild ride by the disorderly andconflicting commands of whole hosts of notions,appetites, hopes, and fears. With Socrates, this isnot the case.

How could the alien enquirer help concludingthat there is something wrong with me, and thatthe humanness that is indeed in me has beensomehow broken, which he can clearly see by

comparing me with Socrates? Must he not decidethat Socrates is the normal human, and I the freak,the distortion of human nature?

When he pronounces me the freak, and Socratesthe perfectly ordinary, normal human being, living

quite obviously, as perhaps only an alien cansee, by the power of that which most makes ahuman a human, shall I defend myself by appealto the principle of majority rule? Shall I say: Well,after all, Socrates is only one human being, and allthe others are more like me. Would I not provemyself all the more the freak by my dependenceon such a preposterously irrelevant principle? Ifthat visitor were rude, he might well point out thatmy ability to see, on the one hand, what is naturalto human beings, and to claim, on the other, thatits absence is only natural, and thus normal, is just

the sort of reasoning that he would expect of afreak, whose very freakishness is seen in hisinability to do what is simply natural to hisspeciesthat 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. Allthat I can do, he can do; he just doesnt do it. Andif he doesnt do it, it is because of something elsethat is natural to human beings, and just as humanas 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 fromother human beings, we sleep our lives away, andnever come into those powers. But we can beawakened.

In that respect, my friend is not a freak. Hemight better be thought a sleepwalker, movingabout in the world, and getting all sorts of thingsdone, often on time, and sometimes veryeffectively indeed. But the very power of routinehabit by which he can do all that has become theonly government that he knows. And the voices of

his desires are loud. He is just now not in acondition to give his full attention to any meaningthat might be found in all that he does, or toconsider carefully how to distinguish between thebetter and the worse. He might be thought a child,and a perfectly natural child, who lives still in thatcurious, glorious haze of youth, when only desireseems worthy of obedience, and when the mightyfact of the world that is so very there loomsimmeasurably larger than the fact of the self that


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is in that world. He might grow up, and it is themightness in him that makes him truly human,however he may look like a freak just now. Fromtime to time, we are all just such freaks, andmindless, for mindlessness is the great

background of noise out of which some fewcertain sounds can be brought forth andharmonized as music.

___________

I am often worried and vexed about the colossalsocial institution of schooling, of which I am apaid agent. My quarrels and complaint withschooling are beyond my counting, and also, Imust admit, valid but trivial. Looming behind allof the silly things that we do in schools, and passoff as an education that would have startled

Socrates, there is nothing less than a great,pervading spirit of dullness and tedium, ofirksome but necessary labors directed completelytoward the consolidation of the mundane throughthe accumulation of the trivial. In school, there isno solemnity, no reverence, no awe, no wonder.We not only fail to claim, but refuse to claim, andwould be ashamed to claim that our properbusiness was with the Good, the True, and theBeautiful, and that this business can be conductednot through arousing pleasant feelings, butthrough working the mind. Thus it is that

education is exceedingly rare in schooling, andwhen it breaks out, it is as the result of somehappy accident, an accident that might havebefallen a prepared mind, or maybe any mind atall, just as readily in the streets as in the schools.

Education makes music out of the noise thatfills life. And from the random and incessantbackground noise of what we suppose the mind,meaning really the appetites and sentiments,education weighs and considers, draws forth andarranges, unites the distant with the near, thefamiliar with the strange, and makes, by Reason,

the harmonious music that is Reason. If we canknow anything at all about How to Live, it is inReason that we must seek it, for the only otherpossibility is to seek it outside of Reason, in thedisorder of noise. I am convinced that Socrates isright, that anyone can make that search anddecide, not what the Meaning and Purpose of Lifeis, but what the meaning and purpose of thesearchers life shouldbe, and thus to live better.

Chapter TwoThe Square

of the Hypotenuse

WHO FIRST CALLED REASON sweet, Idont know. I suspect that he was a man with veryfew responsibilities, no children to rear, and nopayroll to meet. An anchorite with hereticaltendencies, maybe, or the idle youngest son of awealthy Athenian. The dictates of Reason areoften difficult to figure out, rarely to my liking,

and profitable only by what seems a happy butremarkably unusual accident. Mostly, Reasonbrings bad news, and bad news of the worst sort,for, if it is truly the word of Reason, there is nodenying it or weaseling out of its demands withoutsimply deciding to be irrational. Thus it is that Ihave discovered, and many others, I notice, havealso discovered, all sorts of clever ways toconvince myself that Reason is mere Reason,powerful and right, of course, but infinitelyoutnumbered by reasons, my reasons.

Let me give an example. Socrates oftenconsidered with his friends a familiar but stillvexing question: Which is better, to suffer aninjustice or to commit one? He brought themand me tooto consider the question in some newways. Which, for instance, is uglier, the personwho suffers or the person who commits? Whichperson has surrendered himself to the rule ofinjustice, and which person might still be able toavoid it? Which might still be free to choosebetween the better and the worse, and which not?Out of the consideration of such questions, andcountless others that flow from them, I know thatit is better to suffer an injustice than to commitone just as purely and absolutely as I know aboutthe square of the hypotenuse. If there were someacts possible to me, some ways of living anddoing, that could be based in principle on myknowledge of the square of the hypotenuse, whata splendid fellow I would be. In all my dealingwith you, and with everybody, I would be strictlyon the square. I would no more cut a corner than aright angle would decide, well, just for this once,


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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 thatsuffering injustice is better than doing it, my first

reaction to what I consider an injustice done to meis probably just the same as yours. I hate it. I justcant wait to get even. And sometimes, much tomy satisfaction, I do. When I do, I call it Justice,not omitting the capital.

So, for some reason with a small r, I actuallyfind 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 thereceiving end of injustice. From the point of viewof Socrates, I guess, I might just as wisely andsanely 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 thatcircumstances alter cases, to which he wouldprobably reply, perhaps even with passingreference to that exasperating square of thehypotenuse, that cases dont seem to alterprinciples, but that, on the contrary, it is preciselybecause we can detect some underlying principlethat we can recognize a case. Nor would I be ableto convince him that, in getting even, I hadactually done my persecutor a big favor, bringing

him to his senses and making him a wiser andbetter person, which outcome was not really myintention at all. If he had, in fact, been made abetter person by my revenge, the credit would notbe mine but his, for having managed to find thebetter in spite of having been dealt the worse.Therefore, on those all-too-rare occasions when Ido manage to take a swift and sweet revenge, Idont mention it to Socrates.

Now that is strange behavior, and it is evenstranger that it is generally called nothing butnormal 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 theyfind themselves treated, as they see it, unjustly.Lots of those people know every bit as well as Ido that Reason does indeed show that it is betterto suffer than to do an injustice.

So here we are, they and I, whoever they mightbe, not only doing what we know to be contrary tothe perfectly demonstrable conclusions of Reason,bad enough, but then going on to call that

normal, a lot worse. It is as though we werewilling to say that it is normal for human beings,in whom the power of Reason is the quintessentialattribute, not only to reject its conclusions buteven to despise them. We might just as well say

that sanity is, of course, a fine and wholesomecondition, but that insanity is normal.

I can not speak for others, but in my own case Ifind this a vexing conclusion, for when I say thateveryone is a little bit crazy, I am surely includingmyself, a member in standinggood standingseems inappropriate at the momentof thenumerous company called everyone. I do goaround in the world putting myself forth as aneducated man, whatever that means. And whatcan it mean, indeed, if an educated man has toadmit, and gladly takes the strange satisfaction

that goes with the admission, that he is at least alittle bit crazy and just as normal as anyone elsewho sees Reason but doesnt like it?

It would be one thing if I alone called myselfeducated, out of some profound misunderstandingof the meaning of education. Then, I could eitherbe set right, or left to my own special craziness.But the fact is that the world also calls me, andcountless other people just like me, educated. Theworld says, in other words: Here is a man who cansee some truth and choose not to live by it, a manwho excuses himself as normal for giving his

feelings and appetites domination over his mind, aman who might actually hate the square of thehypotenuse should it occur to him that hisbehavior might be circumscribed by the principleit reveals. All of which is to say, here is aneducated man.

That already seems to be approaching thepreposterous, but the world goes even farther.Here we have one educated man cunninglydevising the discomfiture and destruction of hisenemies, another cleverly contriving to takepossession of the goods of others by force or

fraud, and yet another passing out one-way ticketsfor long rides in boxcars. What sort of definitionof education must we have, that we suppose itneither in impediment to immoral behavior nor animperative to rational behavior?

I am driven, in search of some answer to thatquestion, to compare myself with my unluckycounterpart, the uneducated man. Here he stands,the poor ignoramus, knowing neither Dante norDebussy. He has never heard of Socrates or of


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syllogisms. He can neither write a grammaticalsentence nor read one. He is not impelled tomeditation by the square of the hypotenuse, andhe wouldnt for a minute swallow any of thatnonsense about putting up with injustice. Ah, how

different we are. He watches reruns of Laverneand Shirley, and I stick to Masterpiece Theaterand Nova. He and his pals, furthermore,outnumber me and mine enormously. No wonderthe world is always in such a mess.

I find myself feeling sorry for him, andimagining how much better a person he mighthave been had he only spent more of his lifepaying close attention, and some fees, to peoplelike me. I am, after all, a teacher. Have I notpledged myself to make people better? What apity it is that this poor slob never put himself

under my instruction and learned to be better, likeme. Ah, well, we cant all be that lucky, and, afterall, somebody does have to do all the hard andmessy work that I am too educated to do.

And how lucky I am that he is probably ratherinarticulate. And I do hope that he remainsinarticulate, lest he say what I should hear:

So, I would be better would I, if I were morelike you, eh? Do you mean that I too would thenbe able to recognize and coherently describe theconclusions of Reason before I reject them anddecide to do as I please? Is that what you teach in

your schoolhow to go beyond an unknowingobedience to appetite into a fully conscious andwillful obedience to appetite? Do you have thebrass, Jack, to tell me that it is better to know thegood and to refuse it than to be ignorant of thegoodas you suppose meand to miss it? Theimportant differences between us that I can see arethat you choose to be irrational and I cant helpbeing irrational, and that you have been rewardedfor the cleverness out of which you do thatchoosing with a handsome collection of diplomas.

Yes, diplomas. About that, at least, hes surely

right. I do have all sorts of information that helacks. I know the kings of England, and I quotethe fights historical, although I must admit thatIm no longer sure of the cheerfulness of thosemany facts about the square of the hypotenuse. Ofcourse, he might also have lots of information thatI lack, but the kind of information he has is ... well... a different kind of information, you know. Notquite as classy. Its about how to do some sort ofwork, perhaps, or maybe about baseball statistics

or something. Its not that educated kind ofinformation that I have.

Still, the difference does seem to be a matter ofinformation, and, of course, diplomas, which aretestimonials to the fact that some other people

with lots of the educated kind of informationwere willing to concede that I had acquired somesufficient amount of that too. And, thinking ofthat, a strange and unnerving thought strikes me.Its not as easy as I thought to define that educatedkind of information. Socrates and Aquinas werealso utterly ignorant of Dante and Debussy, andthey didnt watch any television at all, not evenMasterpiece Theater. They never readDostoyevski or Kant, and they never even heardof calculus or quantum mechanics. (I, of course,am informed about those two mysteries, which is

to say, needless to say, that I have heard of them.)And Socrates never read Aquinas, who did, atleast, read Plato, and especially Aristotle, whomSocrates also never read. But it would be veryhard, even for me, educated as I am, to deny suchminds the rank, if rank it is, of educated.

On the other hand, I suspect, no, I know, thatthey would not admit me to that rank. Theyshared, across many centuries, an idea abouteducation, and about its absolute dependence onReason rather than information, that we do notshare. Im not so sure about Aquinas, for he was a

schoolman, after all, but Socrates cared nothingfor schools or diplomas. Both, however,understood that education had no necessaryrelationship to schools or diplomas, and both heldthat the true goal of education was to make peopleable to be good.

I think its important to put it just that wayable to be good. That phrase contains someremarkable suggestions. We do suppose that theaim of education is to make people able to dosome sort of work, to be engineers or physiciansor social workers or something else, and we do

hope that as many of them as possible will begood at what they do. But by that, we meaneffective. And we are pretty clear about what itis that will make them effectivesomecombination of talent, information, and practice,producing, of course, some visible and measurableresults in the world that we all can see. ButSocrates and Aquinas would not want us toconfuse any persons effectiveness, his skill in hiscalling, with his Goodness, quite another thing.


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But thats a fairly elementary suggestion ofable to be good. It also suggests that being goodis not, as it often seems, and as it surely pleases usto 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 powerand a propensity, both of which can be learnedand consciously applied.

I do have some practical experience of the factthat lots of people find that notion either just plainsilly or astonishing. I often ask my students toread at least some parts of Benjamin Franklinsautobiography, and there, as I intended, they sooncome to that passage in which Franklin describeshis youthful ambition to achieve moral perfection.So how hard could it be? He knew, after all, theroots 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 adeliberate act of will, he would certainly be ableto pay them strict attention and to keep them allunder control.

He made a little chart, the sort of thing on whichmy earliest piano teacher, and yours too, Iimagine, used to stick little stars in recognition ofsome slight improvement in arpeggios. Franklinschart was a list of virtues to be practiced everyday, and every evening he gave himself grades. Itis a bit Eagle Scoutish, and the whole idea seems

bizarre to my students, and that for at least twovery important reasons. First, they do not see anyreason to call patience better than impatience,but only different, and second, because even ifpatience were for some unaccountable reason tobe thought the better, those who dont have it, justdont have it, and thats the way it is. To them, animpatient person is impatient in the same way thata left-handed person is left-handed, and trying tomake some change in the first case might be, forall they know, as dangerous and disabling asenforcing change in the second. They dont see, at

first, that patience, even if it can be understood asa virtue, is something that anyone can do anythingabout.

Socrates, and Franklin too, would haveremarked on the extraordinary convenience of thatbelief. But, in fairness to my students, it is notbecause of its convenience that they have comeinto that belief, nor did they choose it. It was, infact, thrust upon them, like so many other ideasthat they dont notice that they have. Indeed, it

doesnt take more than a little discussion, saltedwith just the right questions, to bring themwell,quite a few of themto see just how convenient abelief it is, and to wonder, a bit suspiciously, justhow they came to believe it in the first place. And

then, the conscious and deliberate practice ofpatience seems less bizarre, and not dangerous.Perhaps, even, good, whatever that means.

This invariable resultit truly never failsconvinces me that an ancient idea of the meaningof education is a better one than whatever it is wenow assume. It says first that if we can know theGood, it is by the power of Reason; and second,that there is in all of us a hunger for the Good, sothat, as Reason little by little seems to reveal it,we are delighted and enthralled. It is as though wewere hearing, at last, what we have always longed

to hear, without having any idea at all what it was.My students still see Franklins chart aswell,overoptimistic, to say the least, as Franklinhimself saw it from the distance of many years,but they also see that it is based on an idea thatmakes some sense, and that can be known. Theysee, furthermore, that to this idea they were, forsome strange reason, simply blind. They justhadnt thought of it, nor had anyone proposed itfor them.

They see, too, and I think this a terriblyimportant realization, that they are perfectly

capable of understanding it, and that theirunderstanding has nothing to do with having takenthe right courses and having gotten good grades,and nothing to do, either, with the so-calledlessons of experience. Experiences they havesurely had, but it is only now, in the light of somehitherto unsuspected principle, that thoseexperiences can suddenly be construed as lessons.

My students do, Im sure, put all of that out oftheir minds the next day. And why shouldntthey? So does their teacher. Having discussedFranklins ideas about the practice of patience on

Tuesday, their teacher gets in his car onWednesday and rushes across the nearest bridge,carefully switching from lane to lane lest he findhimself in any tollbooth line but the shortest.Then, ending up behind some woman driver whothought she had exact change, he curses theinexorable destiny that seems to follow himeverywhere, and the folly of a government thatgives driving licenses to women.


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But they do not forget forever. Someday,somewhere, the idea reappears, at least in many ofthem. It has a quality that schoolwork often lacks.It is seductive, enticing, it will not leave the mindalone. I know this not only from their testimony,

but from my own experience, when I do happen toconsider experience in the light of principle. Fromtime to time, while fuming in the tollbooth line, Ido think of Franklins chart. I am, to be sure,rebuked, but also enticed; troubled, but alsoconsoled.

Those are attributes of true education, but theenticement and the consolation do not begin toappear until the rebuke has been delivered and thetroubling begun. Socrates was well acquaintedwith that unpleasant onset, the first stirring notunlike a small and suspiciously unfamiliar pain in

the belly that tells you that you may be in for bigtrouble. He was speaking of people who had nophilosophy and wanted none, meaning byphilosophy not the elaborate and esotericdiscipline that we have instituted in our schools,but only a certain way of the mind, a certainhabitual resort to Reason, and a certain propensityto talk about Goodness. Such people, he said, ifonly they will stay around and hear an argumentout, begin to get a little twitchy. They are vexedby something that they know they dont like, butwithout knowing why they dont 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, thatsomething or other about it does not please them.But they can hardly say, No, no, it isnt that wayat all! So they brood. They go away at last,discontented, and unable, at least for a while, toreturn to their former states of well-being. Some,of course, will never come back for anothersession of the mental equivalent of root canal. Butsome will.

Nevertheless, even those who come back also

go away again. And that is why I am always soready to take revenge. I know better, but I dontdo better. That is not a good condition, not acondition of Goodness. However, there is a yetworse condition. I would be in worse condition ifI did not know that I am in bad condition. Thatworse condition, whatever its proper name, mustbe the condition out of which education can leadus.

The word education does suggest someprocess that leads outward, and its best oppositewould be a word we dont have, inducation, aleading inward. The idea of liberation suggests agreat metaphor, a picture of a place, the Waiting

Room of the Mind, perhaps even the Prison Campof the Mind, out of which, someday, somehow,the mind might be led, or in which it mightlanguish, or even, worst of all, in which it mightbe forever held captive.

I must see myself, then, as one at the door of thewaiting room, one in whom the enterprise worthyof the name of education has only begun. I havecome out of something, but I havent come veryfar out of it. There is more outing to be done. Howshall I do it? How shall I even learn to wantto doit, for I am, I must confess, very reluctant to give

up the delicious pleasures (as I now find them) ofsuch things as revenge and just complaint againstwomen who imagine, contrary to all experienceand common sense, that they can find threequarters in their purses.

I would like to say, of course, since that wouldat least make the enterprise seem easier, thatmere 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 nothingcan or should be done about perfectly naturalendowments like patience or impatience, a

remarkably convenient belief. I often wish that Icould share that convenient belief but to do sowould be to conclude, and to claim, that I havealready done everything that the power of reasonpermits, which I havent. I have done only enoughto see, but from a distance, some better conditioninto which reason might yet bring me. I can notyet say, therefore, that Reason will not lead meout. I dont know that. I have heard others sayingit, as we all have, but that is not the same asknowing it, knowing it for and in myself.

Education, I am convinced, must be nothing

more than this: The journey toward the limits ofReason, if any there be. And if any there be, sothat some other and even better condition thaneducation may lie beyond them, we can hardlyhope to enter into the greater mystery withoutpassing through the lesser.

If I have come but a short way on that journey,diplomas notwithstanding, I would like to pass atleast some of the blame for that to inducation, avast and diverse condition of life, ordinarily as


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impalpable to us as air was to our ancientancestors. Inducation, in terms probably much toosimple to be entirely accurate, but good enough, Ihope, for now, includes all the forces andinfluences that, whether by accident or design,

make it difficult for us to think clearly. There isno counting of them. Some of them are in us, andsome outside, in the very air we breathe, as itwere, and those inside we exhale into the worldwhere they afflict others with clouded thinking,thus making the air we breathe what it is. All ofthose forces and influences, we made, for there isin the whole universe, as far as we can tell, noother thinking creature, and thus, happily, Isuppose, no other mis-thinking 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, wedo not become our kind. We need captivity. But,unlike the other animals, whose originalendowment is also their ultimate endowment, wecan be born, as it were, in one world, and come atlast to live in quite another. By our nature we cando something that no other creature we know of isable to do. The equivalent act in an oyster wouldbe to discover that it lives in the sea, and not inthe jungle; and that it is an oyster, and not someother creature; and that it is only the oyster that itis, and unique; and that its countless and

complicated natural functions, taken all together,do not quite add up to its self.

When we make the equivalent discoveries, wesee that there is one world of We and another of I.From the latter, an I can behold and consider theformer, but it doesnt work the other way around.

Chapter ThreeThe Land of We All

ONE OF THE FIRST FACTS about thinkingseems too obvious to be worth mentioning, but, itisnt always obvious, and we often behave asthough it werent a fact. Only a person can think. Idont mean by that to point out that trees androcks cant think, but to say, rather, that even iftrees and rocks could think, only a tree or a rockcould think. Thinking can not be done

corporately. Nations and committees cant think.That is not only because they have no brains, butbecause they have no selves, no centers, no souls,if you like. Millions and millions of persons mayhold the same thought, or conviction or suspicion,

but each and every person of those millions musthold it all alone. And that it truly is the samethought in all of them, the very same thought,each must guess of all the others, for into eachothers minds we can not get. All I can ever knowof what you think is your testimony, which maywell be as inexpert or self-interested as mine oftenis. Every thinker is unique, since every person isunique.

From a certain point of view, thinking ispreposterous behavior, and astonishing. If itsappearance among us is truly the result of some

evolutionary save-the-species development, it isclearly one of Natures great mistakes, for it, andit alone, has made of us the only species not onlyable to destroy itself, but very likely to destroyitself. Of course, I might have that wrong if it isreally in Natures great plan to save all the otherspecies by planting in the most dangerous one alethal seed, but that requires in Nature a lowcunning which seems beneath her. In any case,however, it is perfectly clear that other creaturesdo very well indeed without thinking, withoutseeking the meaning of their deeds, without

making and testing propositions, and withoutreading or writing. All such acts, and countlessrelated ones, from the point of view of all the restof the universe that we know of, must beaccounted nothing but unnatural.

In thinking about thinking, and in thinkingabout anything, for that matter, it is always usefulto think about something else instead. Give somethought to the playing of the violin. Imagine thatsome great team of skilled researchers has givenitself to, and at last accomplished, a study ofviolin-playing, a detailed and comprehensive

description of absolutely everything that ishappening in a human being who is playing theviolin. Their work has been tremendous, and theirfindings occupy a whole shelf, maybe a wholewing, for their considerations begin at least at thesubmolecular level of neural signals, and reach, atthe far end of some unimaginably long line, allthose things that we vaguely point to when wetalk about the imagination and understanding of


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the artist. And all such things the researchers haveweighed and measure and counted.

Imagine now the immensely distant future,when we have ceased on the Earth, and whenthere are no singers, no songs, and no violin-

playing. Visitors from another world arrive, andfind some few remnants, among them, the greatexhaustive study of violin-playing, complete withpictures and charts and tables of figures, to saynothing of ear-witness accounts of the feat itself.Will they not be astonished and reach pretty muchthe same conclusion that even you and I wouldreach should we be able to read such a study? Willthey not say: This is too much. Any fool can seethat the playing of the violin is simply impossible.

When such a task is seen in all of its details, ittakes on the look not only of the impossible, but

even of the unnatural. To one who considers all ofthe great and harmonious workings of Nature, thedeep and continual principles that inform them, allthat might be called not only Order but even TheOrder, nothing could seem more contrary andunlikely than that a person should bring forthravishing beauty from a dinky wooden box.

But in fact, as anyone can see, that is only oneof countless unlikely things that persons do. Andthinking is another such. If the great study ofviolin-playing would fill a whole wing, the greatstudy of thinking would need a few libraries all to

itself. But it can be done. Andan even morestartling factit can be done by a person who canalso play the violin.

Playing the violin or writing a poem are specialways of paying attention. They are acts at oncesmall and great. Although only one person cancommit them, they require orderly marshallings ofcountless and diverse forces, something like thegreat landing of armies in Normandy, butincalculably bigger and more complicated. Andsuch a comparison leads to another important cluein thinking about thinking. Playing the violin, and

thinking, and landing in Normandy areindubitably human accomplishments, for better orworse, in either case. But they areaccomplishments very different in nature, forwhile human beings, and only human beings, canachieve them all, only an individual person canachieve the playing and the thinking, both ofwhich are the more difficult, and complicated, andunlikely. The great study of the invasion can in

fact be written, and even read. It was. But thegreat study of violin-playing will never be done.

It is an obvious but simple distinctionthoughrarely madethat there are some things that wecan do because we are humanity, and some things

that we can do because we are persons, and thatthere is some radical and absolute differencebetween the two classes of things. They do notoverlap. A person can no more invade Normandythan an army can play the violin. Furthermore,while the deeds that pertain to humanity arefrequently very large and very visible, so that wecan all see just how stupendous they are, and thedeeds that pertain to persons seem very small andare often utterly invisible; it takes only a littleredirection to conclude that the latter are fargreater accomplishments than the former,

beggaring description and final analysis, and, atlast, unlikely.

But the deeds of humanity are given, in ourminds, a superiority over the deeds of persons. Bycontrast with the waging of war, the playing of theviolin seems immensely less important, a trifle, infact. It is an interesting opinion, for its validitydepends entirely on what meaning we are to takefrom the word important. It isnt true, of course,that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and I dontknow what meaning I would take from the fact ifhe had, but if Oistrakh had fiddled through the

siege of Leningrad, as Dame Myra played Mozartthrough the Blitz, I would see a person doing onesort of thing and humanity doing another sort ofthing, and I would wonder about what I mightlearn to mean by the word important.

About this I dont have to wonder: Dame Myra,or Oistrakh, or perhaps even Nero, for all I know,could also have wondered about what they mightmean by the word important, but humanity couldnot. Humanity does not wonder. Only a personcan wonder. And the list is very long of verbs thatcan be added to the words Only a person... . If

you will make yourself such a list of verbs, andthen another of the verbs that go with Onlyhumanity can... you will discover a lot of thingsto wonder about, and one of the more importantones will be the meaning that you might learn toassign to the word important.

While it may well be that few persons everhappen to notice and consider the strange andunique powers that they have as persons, and notas humanity, including the power to decide what


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important should mean, I suspect that we all havesome inkling of that strange state of affairs. Thatis why we are warned in schoolswell, maybe insome schoolsagainst what is generally calledgeneralization. Generalizations often name

many minds and then go on to speak as thoughthey were a mind. Right from the start, they speakof what is not, for the Italians can not believe onething and the Belgians another. Only a person canbelieve or thinkor feel, for that matter. Andwhen we undertake to talk about what is not, weare in danger of falling into nonsense and talkingrubbish.

But the warning against generalization isordinarily provided not for intellectual reasons butfor social reasons. It is certainly true that vaguegeneralization provides an easy way to insult lots

of people all at once without having to proveanything, but it also provides an easy way topraise or flatter lots of people all at once withouthaving to prove anything. If I say that Jews arestingy, I will be accused first of some socialdepravity, and only thereafter, and rarely, too, ofintellectual disorder. Furthermore, my intellectualdisorder, speaking as though Jews were an agentwho could be stingy, will be at least partiallyexcused should I back off a bit and say, to whatwill surely be general assent, Well, some Jews arestingy. Who can deny it? Some Eskimos are also

stingy. I will not be required to specify apercentage.

Having corrected myself socially, I will not berequired to correct myself intellectually. And Iwill suffer no correction at all if I say that Jewsare diligent and productive. Now, I am OK, andlisteners will nod approvingly. Nor will I berequired to say, even approximately, how manyJews are diligent and productive, or which ones.

In one of the worlds in which I live, the Worldof We All, the first assertion is a Bad Thing, andthe second a Good Thing. But in another world in

which I also live, the world where the mind doesits work, the two statements are perfectly equal invalue, and their value is zero. They are worthlessstatements. It is not sufficient to condemn them asgeneralizations, for that condemnation is really anexoneration as well. The most we require of ageneralization is that it be toned down. Come on,now, they cant all be stingy. And when wedeclaw our generalizations, we suppose that wehave come out of the Wrong and into the Right.

But we have only come out of one worthlessnessand into another.

There are several ways by which to detect aworthless statement. One of them is making it intoits opposite, and considering the statement and its

supposed negation side by side. The opposite of aworthless statement is always worthless. If we testthe proposition that fat men are jolly by assertingalso that fat men are morose, we do not notice thatlight has been shed on the ordinarily expectabledisposition of fat men. Neither propositionsuggests any possibility of verification or offalsification. We can not ask, If the first were true,what else would be true? We can not look forevidence for the support of the one or the other,because we can not find, in the world, the realsubject of either sentence, as we could if the

subject were something like a cannonball droppedfrom a leaning tower, or a certain fat man wellknown to us. We can not find fat men. At whatweight will we set our definition? Will we omitsome men who fall short by three ounces? Willwe include those who were three ounces tooskinny in the morning but somehow manage tosatisfy us as fat after lunch? And what will we doabout jolly, and morose? Or stingy andproductive, for that matter? Where will we settheir limits? How closely will we be able tomeasure them?

Worthless statements can thus be understood aspropositions that we simply can not use forthinking. They just dont work. It is not becausethey are mysteries or concepts that transcendthought, like the nature and substance of the HolyGhost, or circularity in the absence of circles, butbecause they do not rise to the level of thought, inwhich we find that we need to make meaningfulstatements 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, its good to see you. How haveyou been? But, at their worst, which is where theyusually roost, they are dangerous deceptions of themind. They leave us, if we are not attentive, withthe vague impression that we know something,when we dont, thus providing us with the chanceof going on to suppose that we know somethingelse as a consequence of something that we dontknow. No good is likely to come of that, except bythe happiest accident, and for harm to come of it


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requires no accident at all. This is especially truein that part of life which is social, for it is exactlythere, where great masses of people are made intothe subjects of propositions, that the worthlessstatement 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 isa quotation from a book, and it was printedalongside a review of the book, as an example ofgood work. The reviewer did not like the book.The author seems to be a decent and energeticwoman who gave up a successful career as aphysician to devote herself to what is perhaps aneven higher calling. She is dismayed, as I am too,by the prospect, perhaps the likelihood, of anunimaginably destructive nuclear war. She now

devotes her life to arousing others to the danger ofthe threat, and the book in question is part of herwork 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 representsexactly that sort of education I think is the onlytrue one, an education in Reasonthat work ofthe mind by which we can, if it can be known,know the Good. And know the evil too, and see itfor what it is, and turn away from it. If we can notsave ourselves from nuclear destruction by the

work of the mind, then our future will be just amatter of luck, and where war is concerned, weseem little likely to be lucky. But if it is the workof the mind that will save us, then the work of themind badly done will destroy us, unless, again, weare lucky. Read now what she says and considerwhether the minds work in this case be done wellor ill:

It is true that we have the secret of atomic energylocked in our brains forever. But this does not meanthat we cant alter our behavior. Once we practiced

slavery, cannibalism, and dueling; as we becamemore civilized, we learned that these forms ofbehavior were antithetical to society, so we stopped.Similarly, we can easily stop making nuclearweapons, and we can also stop fighting and killingeach other.

In trying to keep your mind clear, it is always agood idea to be on the lookout for the pronounwe. If fat men make up a category too big andshapeless for us to say anything accurate about,

we is clearly much larger, and, unfortunately, notat all shapeless. Except where some definedcontext limits it to exactly these or those of us, wehas to be all of us. Every one. And people whomake moral propositions have a way of talking

about we, and making thus the same kind ofworthless statement that I can make by talkingabout fat men.

And, because we is everybody, it is nobody. It issimply not a person, not a center of consciousnessthat can think and feel and do, and is thereforecapable of no one of those acts named by theverbs that go with the statement Only a personcan...

I am a bona fide member of we. So are you.About you I can not speak, but for myself I cansay, 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 survivalof our species, on the fact that I have learned toalter my behavior and have thus forsworn slavery,then you are leaning on a weak reed, and thefuture of our species is not bright. Nor do Isuspect for a minute that I am just one of the die-hards, still holding fast to the practice of slaverywhen almost everyone else has learned better. Irather suspect that, among we, there are actuallybillions 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. Isuspect, furthermore, and the history of anespecially bloody war leads me to that suspicion,that many who did give up slavery, did it not outof some moral reawakening, but under duressthat is to say, not as a result of what a person cando, but as a result of what humanity can do. Theirgiving up was an outer event, and not an inner act.And I have to wonder about the author of thatpassage. Did she have some inner reason to giveup slavery? And did she proceed, by a consciousand 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 atleast enough goodness to grant our slaves theirfreedom, we say what is not so. Somewhere inNorth Africa or the deep jungles of Borneo, it maybe possible to find a chieftain or two who has infact done exactly that, but I think it unlikely thatwe can depend on them to save us from war.


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I will have to say the same about dueling andcannibalism. I have never given them up. In thoserespects, I am not the better person implied in thatwe. And there is very probably hardly anyonewho is. Where will we find all of those people

who, having learned better how to order societyand become better persons, will now be the betterpersons 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 thosepropositions simply doesnt exist. There surelyhave been people who did once give up thosewicked practices, but they are gone from us.Could they hear us boasting that we made thosedecisions, they might be a bit put out. Perlmanmight do little more than raise an eyebrow if Iwere to claim that we had learned to play the

violin, but the heroes of Marathon might actuallyturn nasty if I were to boast that we found on thatlittle beach the strength and determination to turnback the stronger force of tyranny. The Bs ofthose propositions, however, do indeed exist. And,if we can understand them not just by their titlesbut by their principles, it may become clear thatpractically no one has ever given them up.

Here is another way in which our language cantrick us into imagining that we are thinking. Thenames of things are not the things, and we havemany names that point to no things at all, but to

ideas. What is slavery? In one sense, it is easilyidentified. Where one person is allowed to have,by law, possession of another person, ownership,with all the rights that traditionally go withownership, that is slavery. In our own nation, thatlaw was changed, but not by those who owned theslaves. As to whether those who made the changesought the moral betterment of those who resistedit, or something else, there is at least room forspeculation.

But what is the root of slavery? What is it inprinciple, 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 andintrospection. Which of us can say that he hasnever used another person as though that personwere an object? Which of us has resisted everyimpulse to control or govern another? Which of ushas never deemed himself better and morevaluable than another? Which of us has neversought to put some fence around the mind of

another? Is there one of us who has not thoughtwhat even Plato thought, that there are certainpeople who arewell, just inferior, by nature, justnot 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 oranother?

I will plead guilty to all of those charges, and Iwould be very eager to meet a person who isinnocent of them all, for then I might best studyGoodness. But, thinking not in terms of laws andsocial conventions, which are always changing,and for reasons that have nothing to do withGoodness, but only with Necessity, I will have toadmit again, but for a very different reason, that Ihave not given up slavery, for indeed, I stillpractice it.

I can be very specific about that. I can, and do,so overpower the minds of my students, those, atleast, who want to pay attention, and who havelittle defense, that they come to believe what Iseem to believe, to judge as I judge. When thathappens, I have to start contradicting myself, andpointing to the uncertainties of my own reasoning,until they too come around to the new course, andthe process begins again. Is the root of slavery notin them as well as in me? Who of us has notsought to be led? Which of us has not, from timeto time, abandoned the difficult task of

understanding for ourselves, of governingourselves, even of supporting ourselves? Which ofus has not wanted a master, so that we might be aswell taken care of as a puppy, fed and watered andcleaned up after? Why is it that my students, whenthey come to be entirely of my mind, think thatthat is what they are supposed to do? What taughtthem that, if not some cultivation and even someencouragement in them of whatever it is in us allthat fears the perils of freedom? And thecultivators and encouragers, or even thepermittershave they given up slavery?

Nor have I given up dueling. I still duel. I stillseek to avenge my honor. I still incline toanswer fire with fire, and injustice, whatever Imean by that, with justice, whatever I mean bythat. That I do not go out at dawn with pistols isnot 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 neverknowingly practiced it. It is, in any case, not at allthe same sort of crime or depravity as slavery


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or dueling, or even as fighting and killing, notrooted in what may well be some permanent anduniversal facts about human beings. We do knowthat it was usually practiced only as a religiousritual, and we also know that our supposed innate

abhorrence of cannibalism disappears quitereadily under the clear and imminent threat ofstarvation, as survivors of airplane crashes in thehigh mountains will testify. But cannibalism, too,might well have been given up by some personor persons who did indeed come into some newmoral understanding. Where are they now? Whatrole will they have to play in the moralreawakening by which we will all escape thecoming storm?

If you were to ask the next three persons youmeet in the street to give a few reasons for the fact

that so many people seem unable to thinkcoherently, consistently, and logically, you wouldhear some obvious answers. Some of thoseanswers would refer to what is calledintelligence. Well, some people are just smarterthan others, and thus naturally capable of moreand better thought. You would hear answers aboutsomething called judgment, and very likelyaccompanied by the complaint that the schoolsjust dont teach judgment anymore, as though theyalways had, of course, in the good old days wheneveryone was consistently able to think

coherently. Your most sophisticated informantmight well point to the notorious difficulty ofstrict and formal logic, which the schools alsodont teach anymore. After all, are there notdozens and dozens of those syllogisms, each witha name of its own, and each indispensable to clearand correct thought? Just think of all those famousfallacies, and how easily the untrained mind willstumble into them. And then, of course, there isignorance, in this context to be strictly construednot as dullness of mind, but as the simple absenceof information, and thus a widespread impediment

to clear thinking even in the smartest. And justthink how much information there is! Who couldhave it all, or even any considerable share of it?

There is some usefulness in all of thoseunderstandings, but they seem to me quite unableto explain the thinking we have been consideringhere. The author of those thoughts on slaveryremains, whether she practices or not, a skillfulphysician. She must indeed be what we callsmart, and diligent as well. Her profession

requires logical thought, and lots of it, and thedrawing of correct inferences from the evidenceof knowable facts, a process which must begranted the rank of judgment. I would put the careof my body under her supervision with no

misgivings at all, knowing that where she hadknowledge she would act effectively, and thatwhere she had not enough knowledge, she wouldknow that she had not enough knowledge, andsend me to someone who did.

Nor would I say, of the thoughts we have beenthinking about, that she has wandered out of herfield. There are some people who do putthemselves forth as experts in the mysteries of thehuman heart and soulall sorts, frompsychiatrists and economists to preachers andpoliticiansbut those mysteries are, and in fact

shouldbe, everybodys field. Who are you, whoam I, who is anybody, to be disqualified as to thatinquiry? If there is any special expertise to be hadin contemplating human mysteries and speakingwhat truth can be had about them, it might be inour poets and dramatists and novelists, or even inour myths and music, but who surely knowswhich? No, we are not dealing here with someonewho is just out of her depth in a highly technicalsubject. The impediments to her clear thinking arenot to be found in any of the answers given above.They come from pains in her belly.

The Greeks supposed that the belly was thenursery and dwelling place of the appetites anddesires, just as they supposed that the head wasthe home of thought, and the chest the place ofright feelings, a reasonable mediation between thetwo. Their knowledge of anatomy would not havegotten them through our medical schools, but theirmetaphor provides powers of the mind that are notinstilled in our medical schools, or any other. Thatmetaphor has this great virtue, that it gives us thebeginning of a way to distinguish internal andinvisible events from one another by family, as it

were. We can be almost as clear in our mindsabout 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 mayknow, about a long essay by C. S. Lewis, MenWithout Chests. It is about what seems to Lewisa general and growing inability either to dethroneor harmonize technical information or prowessand gut feelings. It is good to read. Once a year.)


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Consider again that, even in the company ofthose we call intellectuals, I would sufferrebuke or disapproval in saying that Jews arestingy, and escape both in saying that Jews arediligent and productive. As thinking, both

statements are equal. Both worthless. If I can getaway with the second, even in lofty mentalcompany, it is because what I say probably makesevery belly in the room purr with satisfaction,while the first makes them all growl with unease.

Of course, it may be a bit more complicatedthan that. Some belly may be in spasm, trulypleased to hear Jews called stingy, but fearful lestits owner be revealed as bigoted. That owner willvery likely permit his belly its secret pleasure andsend his head forth to do a little sociallyacceptable lying. I will still get the rebuke and

disapproval. To escape it, and thus get away withan utterly worthless proposition, all I have to do ismake the bellies purr. Lots of people know thatsecret, and live very well by it indeed.

The passage cited earlier will make many belliespurr. There are probably very few people who arelooking forward to nuclear war, and thus anxiousabout all the rest of us who are hoping to findsome way to prevent it. Who but a maniac out ofan old-fashioned science-fiction novel wouldcontemplate with glee the destruction of all life, oreven of lots of it? Who would not lament the

destruction of the butterflies, which is actually,and just a little bit unfortunately, one of thehideous possibilities used by the author in herargument?

But if it is by reasoning together that we mayescape nuclear war, then her thinking may kill usall. In that marvelously pliable land of we all,anybody can get away with anything. Heropponents, and there must be some, for otherwisethere could be no threat, can write books claimingthat we have learned, through bitter lessons, thatforce succumbs only to force, and that we have

thus given up, or certainly should give up, ourchildish dreams of perpetual peace. Just ascogently as she, which is to say, not at all, butwith just as much hope of making bellies purr,others can say that we have learned that the priceof freedom is supreme sacrifice, and thus given upthe belief, which might also be called antitheticalto civilization, that we can enjoy its fruitswithout paying its costs.

There is lots of talk these days about teachingchildren to think, a presumed function of theschools, which they are either executing well orill, depending on which expert speaks. Of whatcan that teaching of thinking consist, I wonder.

What exercises can be done? Are the answers inthe back of the book, or only in the teachersmanual? What would I do, if I had to teachchildren to think?

The first thing I would do, I hope, would be toget out of the land of we all, and recognize thatchildren do not constitute an entity capable ofthought. So I would set out to discover how toteach aperson to think. And, since the task seemsformidable, I would prefer, for my first try at suchwork, to pick the person myself, one who showssome promise. And I would pick, of course, a

person who says that we have given up slaveryand dueling and cannibalism.

And where would I begin, with a person who isalready, as we understand the term, not onlyeducated, but highly educated? With thebelly, of course, which in this case hasoverpowered the head. The greatest failures ofthinking do not come from any incapacities of themind, nor are they prevented by great skills of themind. They come from the interference emitted bythe feelings, which can be both detected anddisarmed 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 FourThe Right Little Thing

THERE IS A STORY ABOUT THE importanceof self-knowledge in the Fourth Gospel, but I

think it is traditionally misunderstood because ofcertain disorders of the belly, some feelings thatare little examined because they are generallythought to be simply right. One of the thosefeelings, of course, is that Jesus ought not to beincluded in the company of those who weremerely Great Teachers, such as Socrates andConfucius. They were all proponents of self-knowledge, of course, but Jesus.... Well, he mayhave thought self-knowledge a good thing, but he


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really set his sights far higher, we say, and hadsome greater sort of knowledge in mind. And,since many will assert that thatknowledge is nottruly 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 wasa supremely educated man who undertook to leadothers in the paths of education. But I will have totake that risk, and say further that he urged aneducation that begins, and ends, in self-knowledge.

He was surely a stern teacher, who knew whento rebuke the ignorance of self. Whats wrongwith you people? he said. When the wind blowsfrom the South, you know that the day will be hot;and when it blows from the East, you knowenough to prepare for the coming storm. So how

come you cant read the signs in yourselves? Andin the famous story of the woman caught inadultery, known even to unbelievers, he can beseen setting the model for that enterprise that wenow find so necessary and so difficult: Teachingthe Children to Think.

What a strange and wonderful story that is.Behold their dire approach, the righteous menwho have caught a naughty girl in the very act, aposse of vigilantes, we usually think. And up tocunning tricks as well, for we see them setting atrap for Jesus. All right, Mister Master, what

about this? You know the Law, and you knowwhat has to be done in this case just as well as wedo. So how are you going to wriggle out of thisone, with all your sweet talk of forgiveness andmercy? What a poser. And isnt it just like them,those unregenerate, stiff-necked Pharisees?

But wait. Is it the mind or the belly that paintsthat portrait? Are they not citizens doing whatthey do believe, and what all their societypresumably believes, their civic duty as well astheir religious duty? Are they not charged with thedeed they intend, just as we are charged, both by

law and whatever we mean by morality, to reportour knowledge of crime? And do they not respectthat charge, as we do, finding it both worthy andnecessary for the orderly life of us all? Therefore,whether adultery can be accounted a crime or notaccording to our law, is not the point; it is theobedience to law that matters.

Do we see those men as cruel vigilantes becausewe 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 certainother culprit with them? Because we dont chooseto observe our own laws against such things as

adultery, having come to consider them vestigesof a primitive moral system that we have givenup, just as we have given up slavery? Do we thinkthem devious, because we are on the side of Jesus,and we presume that they are not? And, mostimportant of all, do we try to answer suchquestions by listening to our feelings, or byconsidering the evidence?

The only evidence we have is in the story, andthere is no hint in it that Jesus makes any suchjudgment of the men who ask him what theyought to do. Nonchalantly, almost as though

shrugging, he seems to say, Fine, go ahead. I doknow the Law as well as you do. But since youare men who say that you want to know what isright, just be sure that he who throws that firststone is one who knows that he is in the right, andthat there is no wrongness in him. I, beingpedantic, and thus cagey, by profession, talk aboutwrongness, but he said it right outwithout sin.

The religionists of our time would produce somany candidates who would fight for the privilegeof throwing that first stone that they would haveto raffle it off, thus, as a happy side-effect of

righteousness, raising a substantial amount ofmoney for the doing of Gods work. But thosesupposed vigilantes, those rigid dogmatists, thosevindictive and self-righteous taunters of a goodman, did no such thing. They thought about it, andthey dropped their stones, and they went away.

But that isnt exactly true. It is only a mannerof speaking, and manners of speaking, of whichthere are more than we can count, have a way ofdeluding the mind. I said that they thoughtabout it, but, of course, they didnt. He did. Thatone right there. And he did too. The man to the

left. And that one. And that one. They did notform a committee. They did not hold a meeting.They did not discuss it, considering options andcalling for testimony as to opposing points ofview, hoping to discover some compromise moreor less satisfactory to all parties concerned.

Each one, all alone, considered himself, andnothing but himself. In an act that has come to bethought of as selfish, each one looked into his owngoodness without any consideration for the


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goodness of others, or for their badness either.Each one minded his own business, which is tosay that each one put his mind to work on himself,seeking his own betterment. And each one foundit, and became better.

In this vexatious life, it is not at all uncommonto meet people who call themselves educators.They swarm. There seem to be millions andmillions of them, so many, in fact, that it isnothing short of astonishing that there is anyoneleft uneducated on the face of Earth. If there werethat many orthodontists, you would have to makeyour way deep into the jungles of Mindanao tofind buck teeth. The next time you meet a personwho calls himself an educator, ask him this: So,whom have you educated lately? Make sure hegives you their names and addresses.

If you had asked that question of Jesus, as thestone-carriers went their ways, he could haveanswered, although he probably wouldnt have.He would rather have seen you as the smart-alectaunter, and would have found the right littlething to say that would cause in you what he hadcaused in the departing

The Gift of Fire, by Richard Mitchell

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