2 page reading and write
follow the instructions and read
Dear students, you are asked to write a short essay in response to this lesson that has presented you with many meandering ideas. How will you write? There is no official format to write in. You will have to invent one for yourself, maybe even as you write. In doing so, you will discover who you have been, and that is the point of this freedom in writing. Since that is the point of the arts and humanities to become your own human art. Will you write like Mona Lisa or will you write like Number 12? Will you write like Lucian or will you write like me? Hopefully you will write just like yourself.
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EDUCATION AND CIVILIZATION
What is the meaning of education? This philosophical question doesnt require looking the word
up in a dictionary. Like all philosophical questions, it requires only looking clearly at everyday
life. If you look at yourself and regard your experience as a student, you will see most vividly
what the meaning of education has always been. And most ironically, it is especially now, in our
online phase of education, that you can see more clearly than ever before what the essential
meaning of education has always been. What do students generally talk about when they talk
amongst themselves about their classes? What constitutes the bulk of the content of most of the
syllabi for your classes? What is the main topic of most communications between students
and teachers whether by email of at office hours? What is the real subject of online classes
that tends to override everything else making a history class essentially indistinguishable from
an accounting class? I think, I have observed, that the answers to all these questions is the same:
work. When students talk amongst themselves about their classes they generally, only talk about
workloads and point systems, grades and stress. Those things, which seem like the form of the
classes are in fact their real content. Most classes syllabi contain more pages of rules than
pages of content and that is because the rules are the real content of the class. Most
communications between students and teachers are about nothing else but workloads, rules,
deadlines and grades – and again, that is because those things are the real content of your
education. As for online classes, their real content is transparently nothing else but their form
every online class is essentially about how to use Zoom and Canvas. The form is the content.
The experience is the education. So what have you learned through your education? What have
you experienced? You have learned how to follow rules, how to work, how to feel stressed and
unhappy, and how to be absorbed by technology. And you have been taught these things
which are all apparent at the most immediate level of life, experience because the purpose of
your education is to train you to be a worker. An office worker, of course. A care-provider
worker perhaps. An entrepreneur in someones fantasy yet an entrepreneur is really nothing
but a more extreme version of a worker.
My point is to indicate to you a certain magic implicit in education, which is still often
overlooked as though it were hiding in broad daylight. When students say, as they often do, that
they are learning nothing and are just feeling stressed, that is the essence of their education: to
get you used to doing a lot of meaningless work that amounts to nothing (now for the purpose of
a grade, later for the purpose of a paycheck) and to get you used to feeling overwhelmed and
oppressed (stress, you will find out, is a code word for exploitation). The true meaning of
education has never been to teach you information or skills that is always secondary, despite
what youve been told and what you believe. Trust your experiences, not your beliefs. The
true meaning of education has always been to teach you how to exist and to feel and to behave
to make you a certain way, as a matter of habit.
Now, not all forms of education are the same because the experiences they impart, which
become the students habit are not all the same. Imagine for a moment that your experience in
school was not guided by the principle of training you to be an office worker. What would it be
like? The obsessive importance given to punctuality, and also punctuation, are strictly forms of
training for the world of work. What if the teaching of writing in school was dominated by the
idea that all school writing was just a training to write a business letter one day? What if instead
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of teaching you how to obey, your education taught you how to be free? To be free means to
direct yourself and not be directed by someone else, and rely on someone else for constant
approval and your sense of self-worth. To be free means to follow your own interests, or at least
to know how to create your own interests. And to be free means to be happy, which very few
students are nowadays.
I will present to you an alternate scenario of education, with a different form/content and a
different resulting experience, that you may imagine in contrast to your own. I will present to
you my education. UC San Diego, the nineteen-nineties, campus was a fun place to be, there was
an abundance of real things going on not just advertisement events and so being on campus
was always about exploring and discovering life, and new people, and new ideas. No one was
ever really that stressed. Stress was not a constant topic of conversation. Students tended to talk
to each other about the subjects they were studying, because the point of it all was that each
student was forming her, his, own view of the world and not just getting the right answer for
the grade. We were not inundated by a totalizing ambiance of propaganda/advertising for the
University itself or its corporate sponsors (like Carls Jr.), and we were not taught by living
example that free speech means simply tolerating the screams of fanatics in the quad holding
signs that invoke death and fear. Getting involved in campus activities was rarely motivated by
the idea of adding a line to your resum and hence making the activity itself as empty as most
of the classes you are now taking instead getting involved with something on campus was
generally motivated by pure interest in the thing itself, which tended to be interesting. As an
experience it was idyllic when compared to the typical experience of a student today at Cal State
Fullerton. And yet this is the most important thing: we learned better because it was more fun.
Not in spite of the fact that it was fun, but because it was fun. You, dear students, have generally
been taught that fun and learning are opposite things. Your experience has taught you that. That
is because in your experience learning has meant little else than training for work. And work, by
definition, is not fun. I decided to go on to graduate school and become a teacher because I
enjoyed my experience as an undergraduate student so much. Do you see the irony in this? If
something is fun, it makes you want to do it. And that is a totally different mentality than saying,
life consists of doing a lot of things I hate because I have to in order to survive. In your
education you are not really supposed to reach higher, you are supposed to get used to being
and to feeling mediocre. Which means that you are supposed to get used to feeling that you have
to be mediocre because all other possibilities in life have disappeared from your imaginations
landscape. Which is just like when you look out at your citys landscape and see only corporate
box stores.
To further elucidate the meaning of education, I draw your attention to the word itself, whose
meaning is not biblically defined in a dictionary. Consider how the word educacin is used in
Spanish. What does it mean to be bien educado or mal educado? Well educated or badly
educated? but what education is being referred to by these terms? Is una persona bien educada
someone who has completed a lot of schooling and holds many degrees? Is un mal educado
simply someone who didnt complete much schooling, or how had a low GPA? No. In Spanish,
educacin, whether bien o mal, refers exclusively to a persons behavior. Because the teaching
of behavior by example and through ingrained experience is the meaning of education.
Education teaches you how to behave, how to act, how to experience the world in such a way
that it becomes your habit. You really learn this while you thought you were learning something
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else. Una persona bien educada is pleasant, polite, agreeable, composed. These are all qualities
of behavior. Un mal educado is rude, unpleasant and not the master of his own actions. And this
is all visible in behavior. Someone can be bien educado without ever having attended school.
And someone can have the little word Dr. in front of their name and be unbearably mal
educado. To distinguish between the learning of information and skills and the learning of
behavior in Spanish, as in all neo-Latin languages, there is the word instruccin (instruction) to
indicate the first, and the word educacin to indicate the second. In English this distinction is
not generally made. And so we often end up with an education that is nothing but instruction,
hence una mala educacin.
I draw you attention to Spanish because many of you know the language, and also because it is a
conduit, or a path we can follow, to the word educations true meaning. True in the sense of
the meaning of its origin, considered linguistically. The word education, or educacin, comes
originally from Latin, the language of the ancient Romans. In Spanish, which is a neo-Latin
language meaning that its essential grammar and most of its vocabulary come directly from
Latin, as they do in French and Italian and Portuguese in Spanish the original Latin concept of
the word remains more intact than it does in English. English contains many Latin words, and
also many Greek words (as does Spanish) but in many cases the words meanings have been
altered significantly. The Latin word from which our word derives is educationem. This word,
which is a noun (meaning that it indicates a thing) is formed around a verb (which indicates an
action). The formative verb in the noun educationem is ducere, which means to lead. You can
see it in the duc in educationem. To be educated means to be led. To educate means to lead.
But to be led and to lead where? To what? To the living example of the behavior of your
educators. Children, students, and even adults remember very little of what they are told but
very much of what they see. They see behaviors and replicate them, mimetically. This is how
we learn our first languages, by simply repeating what we hear, and this in fact is how we learn
most everything else in our lives, by simply becoming like our experiential environment.
Education, which means the process of being led to a certain model of behavior, is in its essence
a passive experience for the student. Passive in the sense that you essentially just take in what
you see (and this becomes your feeling) while you put out very little of your own. Being
educated means essentially being trained. Yes, like a pet. But it is undeniable that at some level
education, or being trained, is necessary and unavoidable. We have to be educated, we have to
mimetically learn something from other people in order to function in society (also known as
civilization). Yet you should be aware that there are two essentially different types of education,
or formings of behavior (especially mental behavior, but also physical behavior): there is one
that leads a person to the point of being able to think for her, or himself, and then there is the
other that renders this impossible and which reduces the student to not knowing how to do
anything else but follow and rely on orders and the all encompassing voice of authority. The
first type of education is called an education in freedom. And the second type might rightly be
called an education in servitude.
But the differences go further. An education in freedom consists in acknowledging that
education in itself is essentially a passive experience for the student, and hence that real thinking,
or independent thinking can only occur beyond education, or at a distance from education, in the
space where a person is left free to reflect. An education in servitude on the other hand contains
no irony regarding itself, it is what it is is its motto simply following rules is an absolute
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value in life that must be beared like a sacred burden. Attached to that burden by an invisible
string is a sacred reward in an invisible future. Or even worse, an education in servitude
misrepresents itself as an empowering experience for students which somehow implies that
following orders and getting good grades is synonymous with becoming your fullest you. But
your true powers as a person lay elsewhere and elsewhere besides just your earning potential,
which is the continuation of a servile education. Your education, if it is one of freedom, may
leave you with some souvenirs called habits of free thinking and curiosity about the world that
you might draw upon as you exert your power in a life that is always lived elsewhere from the
actual site of your education that elsewhere is the world you create for yourself.
I have taught this class for many years, and I know that for most students in this class it is one of
the only classes they will ever take in the arts and humanities. Most students in this class have
chosen majors that are specifically geared towards finding a stable job after graduation that
promises, hopefully, a decent income. And there is nothing wrong with that. And my purpose in
pointing this out is not to suggest to you that you should change your major or that your choices
are wrong. My purpose in pointing this out is to say that in your schooling there can perhaps
be room, even just a little room, for something else besides job training. Because in its essence
what is called the arts and humanities is not job training, it is strictly and exclusively and
education in freedom. What does this mean? The arts we will study the arts in the material
sense of the term it means we will look at art, especially paintings. But what for? Not certainly
to memorize names and dates or to learn compositional techniques, nor either to simply learn
what people in the past were thinking through their art. No. We will study art to learn how to
see beauty in the world. Talking about art without mentioning beauty is like being in a
relationship without being in love. It is a waste of time. Art, historically, in all civilizations, has
been essentially a representation beauty. Beauty does not consist in the outward qualities of an
object or a person, beauty is a feeling first and foremost. And so because beauty is a feeling, its
essence is actually invisible. What is beautys relation to the visible? There are things in the
world, including people in the world, who may stimulate that feeling of beauty in the person who
beholds them. Or who knows how to behold them. Or who knows how to find beauty wherever
it hides. Or who knows how to create it where it does not exist. In different cultural codes,
different things in the world and different attributes of people have been designated as inspiring
of the feeling of beauty. But these designations, as you can intuit, are simply a matter of
training, or education. The objects of beauty might change, and indeed they do change
historically, but the feeling of experiencing them does not really change much at all. If anything
it simply gets lost, and we end up living in a world without beauty because we dont know how
to create it, experience it, and see it all at the same time. Imagine for a moment that looking at
art, or studying art is like going to the gym to train your eyes, and your spirit, to see, experience
and create the phenomenon of beauty outside the museum in the real world. Museums are gyms
for your aesthetic sensibilities. Aesthetics means the apprehension of beauty. We need a
training in seeing beauty because beauty hides in the world. It hides because our minds are
usually too focused on ugly things, or banal things. Things like reality, logic and ethics. To see
beauty means to see the world in a different way than we normally do. To see beauty means to
dream with your eyes open. To feel beauty or to feel beatitude means to feel that you are
living in a dream. Beauty is the absolute contrary of being focused on orders, obligations, stress
and success. It exists in the domain of existence that can never be made into an object of value,
because it is always and exclusively its own value. Art is generally a representation of what the
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artist saw in the world that inspired him, or her, with the magical wondrous feeling of beauty.
Art is a souvenir of experience. And so, by looking at art you might then look at the real world
in a different way and discover (or create) its hidden treasures. What is the value in doing
this? It is liable to make you happy with things that are free. And that is very dangerous in a
capitalist society.
The humanities, the other part of our class, what is that? Concretely speaking since we are
always surrounded by concrete the humanities indicates the disciplines of history, literature and
philosophy, as well as their more recent offshoots: anthropology, psychology, sociology, ethnic
studies, womens studies, American studies, etcetera. But what do all of these disciplines, whose
separations from each other are really quite artificial and self-damaging, actually concern
themselves with? What is their common content? Could it be to learn how to live your life well
and be happy? These disciplines all study how life is lived on the individual level and on the
collective level, which are always related to each other. But what would be the point of studying
how life has been lived in the past, in an elsewhere, in an anywhere if not to bring you, the
student, to a reflection on how you are living your life now? How to find, or to create, happiness
and well-being in the world (in your life) is the purpose of studying the humanities. Just as
learning how to find, or to create, beauty in the world (in your life) is the purpose of studying art.
It will already have occurred to you that these things beauty and happiness are subjective,
which means that they dont have a fixed, mathematical definition. And that is the point. That is
why a class in the arts and humanities is an education in freedom. Because its purpose is to give
you just the tools, and the space, to build your own definitions and experiences with. So that you
may cultivate yourself and be more human. And less of an apprentice robot.
Now, for this lesson I want to share with you an ancient story that you might very well see
yourself in. It is called The Vision, and it was written by Lucian of Samosata in ancient
Greece, in around 150 AD. To bring the story closer to yourself, imagine that its title is Lucian
Chooses a Major. Please bear with the older English in which it is translated, it is the most
recent translation of the story I could find. If you dont understand every word and every
reference, dont worry. I think the basic point of the story will be clear to you. Bon voyage:
When my childhood was over, and I had just left school, my father called a council to decide
upon my profession. Most of his friends considered that the life of culture was very exacting in
toil, time, and money: a life only for fortunes favorites; whereas our resources were quite
narrow, and urgently called for relief. If I were to take up some ordinary handicraft, I should be
making my own living straight off, instead of eating my fathers meat at my age; and before long
my earnings would be a welcome contribution.
So the next step was to select the most satisfactory of the handicrafts; it must be one quite easy to
acquire, respectable, inexpensive as regards plant, and fairly profitable. Various suggestions
were made, according to the taste and knowledge of the councilors; but my father turned to my
mother’s brother, supposed to be an excellent statuary, and said to him: With you here, it would
be a sin to prefer any other craft; take the lad, regard him as your charge, teach him to handle,
match, and grave your marble; he will do well enough; you know he has the ability. This he had
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inferred from certain tricks I used to play with wax. When I got out of school, I used to scrape
off the wax from my tablets and work it into cows, horses, or even men and women, and he
thought I did it creditably; my masters used to cane me for it, but on this occasion it was taken as
evidence of a natural faculty, and my modeling gave them good hopes of my picking up the art
quickly.
As soon as it seemed convenient for me to begin, I was handed over to my uncle, and by no
means reluctantly; I thought I should find it amusing, and be in a position to impress my
companions; they should see me chiseling gods and making little images for myself and my
favorites. The usual first experience of beginners followed: my uncle gave me a chisel, and told
me to give a gentle touch to a plaque lying on the bench: Well begun is half done, said he, not
very originally. In my inexperience I brought down the tool too hard, and the plaque broke; he
flew into a rage, picked up a stick which lay handy, and gave me an introduction to art which
might have been gentler and more encouraging; so I paid my footing with tears.
I ran off, and reached home still howling and tearful, told the story of the stick, and showed my
bruises. I said a great deal about his brutality, and added that it was all envy: he was afraid of
my being a better sculptor than he. My mother was very angry, and abused her brother roundly;
as for me, I fell asleep that night with my eyes still wet, and sorrow was with me till the morning.
So much of my tale is ridiculous and childish. What you have now to hear, gentlemen, is not so
contemptible, but deserves an attentive hearing; in the words of Homer:
As I slumbered in the shades of night, a dream divine appeared before my sight.
So clear and plain, as to have all the appearance of truth.
I am speaking of a dream so vivid as to be indistinguishable from reality; after all these years, I
have still the figures of its persons in my eyes, the vibration of their words in my ears; so clear it
all was.
Two women had hold of my hands, and were trying vehemently and persistently to draw me
each her way; I was nearly pulled in two with their contention; now one would prevail and all but
get entire possession of me, now I would fall to the other again, all the time they were
exchanging loud protests: He is mine, and I mean to keep him; Not yours at all, and it is no use
your saying he is. One of them seemed to be a working woman, masculine looking, with untidy
hair, horny hands, and dress kilted up; she was all powdered with plaster, like my uncle when he
was chipping marble. The other had a beautiful face, a comely figure, and neat attire. At last
they invited me to decide which of them I would live with; the rough manly one made her speech
first.
Dear youth, I am Statuary the art which you yesterday began to learn, and which has a natural
and a family claim upon you. Your grandfather (naming my mothers father) and both your
uncles practiced it, and it brought them credit. If you will turn a deaf ear to this persons foolish
cajolery, and come and live with me, I promise you wholesome food and good strong muscles;
you shall never fear envy, never leave your country and your people to go wandering abroad, and
you shall be commended not for your words, but for your works.
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Let not a slovenly person or dirty clothes repel you; such were the conditions of that Phidias
who produced the Zeus, of Polyclitus who created the Hera, of the much-lauded Myron, of the
admired Praxiteles; and all these are worshipped with the Gods. If you should come to be
counted among them, you will surely have fame enough for yourself through all the world, you
will make your father the envy of all fathers, and bring your country to all mens notice. This
and more said Statuary, stumbling along in a strange jargon, stringing her arguments together in
a very earnest manner, and quite intent on persuading me. But I can remember no more; the
greater part of it has faded from my memory. When she stopped, the others turn came.
And I, child, am Culture, no stranger to you even now, though you have yet to make my closer
acquaintance. The advantages that the profession of a sculptor will bring with it you have just
been told; they amount to no more than being a worker with your hands, your whole prospects in
life limited to that; you will be obscure, poorly and illiberally paid, mean-spirited, of no account
outside your doors; your influence will never help a friend, silence an enemy, nor impress your
countrymen; you will be just a worker, one of the masses, cowering before the distinguished,
truckling to the eloquent, living the life of a hare, a prey to your betters. You may turn out a
Phidias or a Polyclitus, to be sure, and create a number of wonderful works; but even so, though
your art will be generally commended, no sensible observer will be found to wish himself like
you; whatever your real qualities, you will always rank as a common craftsman who makes his
living with his hands.
Be governed by me, on the other hand, and your first reward shall be a view of the many
wondrous deeds and doings of the men of old; you shall hear their words and know them all,
what manner of men they were; and your soul, which is your very self, I will adorn with many
fair adornments, with self-mastery and justice and reverence and mildness, with consideration
and understanding and fortitude, with love of what is beautiful, and yearning for what is great;
these things it is that are the true and pure ornaments of the soul. Naught shall escape you either
of ancient wisdom or of present avail; nay, the future too, with me to aid, you shall foresee; in a
word, I will instill into you, and that in no long time, all knowledge human and divine.
This penniless son of who knows whom, contemplating but now a vocation so ignoble, shall
soon be admired and envied of all, with honor and praise and the fame of high achievement,
respected by the high-born and the affluent, clothed as I am clothed (and here she pointed to her
own bright raiment), held worthy of place and precedence; and if you leave your native land,
you will be no unknown nameless wanderer; you shall wear my marks upon you, and every man
beholding you shall touch his neighbors arm and say, That is he.
And if some great moment come to try your friends or country, then shall all look to you. And
to your lightest word the many shall listen open-mouthed, and marvel, and count you happy in
your eloquence, and your father in his son. Tis said that some from mortal men become
immortal; and I will make it truth in you; for though you depart from life yourself, you shall keep
touch with the learned and hold communion with the best. Consider the mighty Demosthenes,
whose son he was, and whither I exalted him; consider Aeschines; how came a Philip to pay
court to the cymbal-womans brat? How but for my sake? Dame Statuary here had the breeding
of Socrates himself; but no sooner could he discern the better part, than he deserted her and
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enlisted with me; since when, his name is on every tongue.
You may dismiss all these great men, and with them all glorious deeds, majestic words, and
seemly looks, all honor, repute, praise, precedence, power, and office, all lauded eloquence and
envied wisdom; these you may put from you, to gird on a filthy apron and assume a servile
guise; then will you handle crowbars and graving tools, mallets and chisels; you will be bowed
over your work, with eyes and thoughts bent earthwards, abject as abject can be, with never a
free and manly upward look or aspiration; all your care will be to proportion and fairly drape
your works; to proportioning and adorning yourself you will give little heed enough, making
yourself of less account than your marble.
I waited not for her to bring her words to an end, but rose up and spoke my mind; I turned from
that clumsy mechanic woman, and went rejoicing to lady Culture, the more when I thought upon
the stick, and all the blows my yesterdays apprenticeship had brought me. For a time the
deserted one was wroth, with clenched fists and grinding teeth; but at last she stiffened, like
another Niobe, into marble. A strange fate, but I must request your belief; dreams are great
magicians, are they not?
Then the other looked upon me and spoke: For this justice done me, said she, you shall now
be recompensed; come, mount this car and lo, one stood ready, drawn by winged steeds like
Pegasus , that you may learn what fair sights another choice would have cost you. We
mounted, she took the reins and drove, and I was carried aloft and beheld towns and nations and
peoples from the East to the West; and methought I was sowing like Triptolemus; but the nature
of the seed I cannot call to mind only this, that men on earth when they saw it gave praise, and
all whom I reached in my flight sent me on my way with blessings.
When she had presented these things to my eyes, and me to my admirers, she brought me back,
no more clad as when my flight began; I returned, methought, in glorious raiment. And finding
my father where he stood waiting, she showed him my raiment, and the guise in which I came,
and said a word to him upon the lot which they had come so near appointing for me. All this I
saw when scarce out of my childhood; the confusion and terror of the stick, it may be, stamped it
on my memory.
Good gracious, says some one, before I have done, what a longwinded lawyers vision!
This, interrupts another, must be a winter dream, to judge by the length of night required; or
perhaps it took three nights, like the making of Heracles. What has come over him, that he
babbles such puerilities? Memorable things indeed, a child in bed, and a very
ancient, worn-out dream! What stale frigid stuff! Does he take us for interpreters of dreams?
Sir, I do not. When Xenophon related that vision of his which you all know, of his fathers
house on fire and the rest, was it just by way of a riddle? Was it in deliberate ineptitude that he
reproduced it? A likely thing in their desperate military situation, with the enemy surrounding
them! No, the relation was to serve a useful purpose.
Similarly I have had an object in telling you my dream. It is that the young may be guided to the
better way and set themselves to Culture, especially any among them who is recreant for fear of
poverty, and minded to enter the wrong path, to the ruin of a nature not all ignoble. Such an one
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will be strengthened by my tale, I am well assured; in me he will find an apt example; let him
only compare the boy of those days, who started in pursuit of the best and devoted himself to
Culture regardless of immediate poverty, with the man who has now come back to you, as high
in fame, to put it at the lowest, as any stonecutter of them all.
Translation by F.G. and H.W. Fowler
Lucian was born into a working family. His family wanted him to learn a trade the trade of
statuary, or the art of making statues. Essentially his family chose his major for him, like an
arranged marriage with the familys destiny, or identity, or static idea of itself based on what it
always had been: we have all been workers, so you will be a worker too. Lucians first day of
school as he apprentices with his uncle goes badly. He breaks the first object he is supposed
to work on, and then his uncle symbolically returns the gesture to him by breaking him
physically by beating him. The tearful Lucian goes home and sleeps. He has a dream that
contains a vision. I
