In 1867 Matthew Arnold wrote a book titled Culture and Anarchy in which he held up two saving springs of our civilization: Athens – from which we get the inner urge to “see things as they really are” – and Jerusalem, from which we get the directive “to set doing above knowing.” 

I don’t know if I would draw the contrast between these two civilizational sources in the terms that Arnold used. But I do know that, in studying, teaching and loving philosophy as I do, while at the same time feeling myself to be Jewish at my self’s core, I must in some sense resemble the human type that Arnold was talking about.

On my last day of teaching at Brooklyn College, I passed around the attendance sheet for the Intro course and later found that the students had penned their own farewells. Since those attendance sheets now hang in my study, I can quote a line or two: “I am sure that, speaking for everybody, you touched many minds and lives. Thank you for portraying philosophy in such a user-friendly way …” or again, “Just know that you made a difference in many peoples’ lives, especially mine.”

It’s in the light of recent developments on university campuses that I’ve cast this backward glance over the terrain of my working life. What did it feel like to me, to work in the precincts of the academy – the House that Plato Built? What did it mean to me, teaching philosophy to students at Brooklyn College – that is, to young people from all over the world? My graduate school teacher of philosophy, the Straussian Stanley Rosen, described it as the disclosure of “beautiful and sacred things.” I remember Leo Bronstein – who was a celebrated teacher of art history at Brandeis – marveling, in his Russian/Catalan accents, that “the kids are forced, fo-r-r-rced (!) to learn sublime matters!”

In my turn, I viewed teaching philosophy as the transmission of a civilizational power and presence. If it was an Intro course, I would make the case for the importance to each of them of this transmission. “This will help you to decode the life you will face. It’s not true that you are what you eat. You are what you think! When you notice the way people behave, the way they frame their challenges, and the reasons or rationales they reference in explaining their decisions – you will be better able to lift out the thinking that lies back of all that.”

Sometimes I referred to the saying of Socrates that the unexamined [i.e. philosophically unsituated] life is not worth living. He meant, you’re not making the best use you can of your time here if you can’t identify and make good use of its philosophic assumptions. It’s not about choosing the “best philosophy” to live and steer by. They all have limitations or shortcomings, as does any attempt to understand a topic. No topic can be plumbed to every depth conceivable. But to know how to get to the available depths and to plumb that is a great power – empowering in the best sense – provided that (as with any power) it’s not used for harm.

So much for recalling what it was like for me to teach philosophy to real students. That said, we can fast forward to the present. What is it like to perceive young people who wear the name of “student” but mask their faces, menacing fellow students and teachers, injuring the working people who keep their academic classrooms and buildings functional? To what can I compare the predicament of a real teacher facing such defilements? Perhaps to the situation of a farmer whose field has been sown with salt and rendered barren by those means?

And what would I say to the so-called students who seem to relish doing precisely that kind of harm? If you attack the precincts of learning and teaching, you desecrate your own ability to learn or later to teach what you learned. You will still be able to be indoctrinated, and to indoctrinate others, but you can’t learn and you can no longer teach what you learned. And it’s not merely self-harm that you inflict. You injure your city, your country, your civilization. The wound you inflict has concentric circles of wounds that lie all round it.

And as for me, I wouldn’t know how to cure such wounds. Whatever healing modalities I possess – they don’t stretch that far. 

At present, I have yet to reroute my life so that the powers I’ve acquired have some further riverbed channel down which to flow. I can’t just stand at the river’s edge and forever shed tears for what’s been lost.

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