EDUCATION AND CIVILIZATION

“ 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. ”

EDUCATION AND CIVILIZATION

What is the meaning of education? This philosophical question doesn’t 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 someone’s 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 you’ve 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 Carl’s 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 resumé” 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 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 imagination’s landscape. Which is just like when you look out at your city’s 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 educación 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 didn’t complete much schooling, or how had a low GPA? No. In Spanish, educación, whether bien o mal, refers exclusively to a person’s 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 instrucción (instruction) to indicate the first, and the word educación 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 educación. 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 education’s “true” meaning. “True” in the sense of the meaning of its origin, considered linguistically. The word education, or educación, 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 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 s 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 s 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 beauty’s 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 don’t 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 s, 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, women’s 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 don’t 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 don’t understand every word and every reference, don’t 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 fortune’s 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 father’s 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 mother’s father) and both your uncles practiced it, and it brought them credit. If you will turn a deaf ear to this person’s 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 men’s 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 other’s 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 neighbor’s 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-woman’s 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 yesterday’s 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 lawyer’s 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 father’s 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 family’s 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.” Lucian’s “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. In his dream two women appear representing two different courses that his life can pursue. Which will he chose, since he cannot chose both? The first goddess is the goddess of Statuary, or more specifically, the goddess of the life of work. What does she say to lure Lucian to her side? She says, “If you work then the parts of your body that you work with – your arms – will become strong. And you’ll have a stable income too.” But with her words she only says a part of what she really says overall, since people, always, speak with their bodies and presence as well as their words. How does the goddess of Statuary look? – Since how she looks is part of what she communicates. She looks like a manual worker. Covered in her work’s remnants: dust. Her movements are not graceful, because they are all guided by the logic of performing tasks. The goal of her movements lay outside of themselves, in the object they are directed to. Her movements are not goals in themselves – meaning they are not meant to be enjoyed and admired in themselves – and therefore they are not graceful. On the other side of Lucian’s dream is the goddess of Culture. Culture here means the arts and humanities, or more specifically, the life of freedom. What does she say to attract Lucian? She says, “I will ornament your soul with beautiful things that will always be with you. Your being will always be able to put its hand on the balloon of happiness, even when you think that it might be flying away.” The goddess of Culture speaks also with her presence, which you’ll have noted is the opposite of the goddess of Statuary’s. And so Lucian chooses to follow the goddess of Culture. He indeed became a writer, a writer mostly of plays which are quite famous and which Shakespeare drew extensively from when composing his own. Lucian became a writer from a working class family. I have presented this story to you for a very specific purpose. The purpose is this: Why does it have to be either/or today? Why should a young person like yourself be forced to choose either a life of work or a life of freedom? Why can’t you do both? Why shouldn’t you do both? If we have made any “progress” in history, then people today should not be segregated into either a mass of cultureless workers or an elite of idle dilettantes. Why can’t we be both things at once? Why can’t an accountant read poetry? Why can’t an engineer admire art? Why can’t a “customer service provider” contemplate philosophy? These figures “can’t” do these things because they’ve been trained to hate them and to not understand them. They’ve been badly educated. And this is a form of servility. The reason why this class in the arts and humanities is

 

 

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a General Education requirement is specifically so that an absolute, definitive, dis-associative choice does not have to be made between work and the freedom that culture imparts. They can both be yours. Lucian represented his choice in the dramatic form of choosing between two women, which inherently implies that it is an either/or choice. But maybe this metaphorical form does not befit us today, or should not befit us today. Or maybe, if we wanted to be sinister, we could say that if we today are Lucian then we should learn how to have affairs: married to work but having an affair with culture. This is just a metaphor, don’t be scandalized unless you like to be scandalized. Not long ago, a student who read Lucian’s “Vision” painted an image of how she imagined the story. Here it is:

The figure on the left, dressed in blue with covered in dust is the goddess of Statuary, and the figure on the right in bright orange is the goddess of Culture. Notice that Lucian, in the middle, does not have a face yet – he does not have a self yet – because he has not yet chosen who he wants to be. We do indeed become ourselves in what we choose to do, and especially in what we choose to write.

 

 

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In art, what does a person attached to the goddess of Culture look like? What are the physical attributes apparent to this way of living? To state the question in the most rudimentary of terms: How do educated people appear in the world? The history of art shows us how they appear. They appear thoughtful because their education is actually written on their face. As all educations are. Their thoughtfulness might be serene, or it might be stormy, but it is never nothing. The representation of thoughtful people is a longstanding motif in art. Just as nude portraits are. The reason why the representation of thoughtful people is a longstanding motif in art is because thinking is beautiful – it makes you beautiful – and art is concerned with representing beauty. The most famous of representations of a thoughtful person in art is Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, made in Florence in 1504:

It has often been said that the Mona Lisa conveys an enigma: Is she really smiling? Is she really happy? How does she really feel? These questions already locate the focus of the painting on the face, which in art as in life, is where character is revealed. The object of this painting is not an admiration of the figure’s physicality (her body) – although there is nothing wrong with an art whose object is this. Instead, the object of this painting is an admiration of the figure’s spirituality (her inner world) which must be made visible and manifest through physicality – through things you can see – since it is after all a painting, on object of vision. The Mona Lisa is a portrait of a person’s life. Both the life she has lived (her past) and her inner life which she

 

 

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always carries with her (her present). The two lives, you will note, are essentially the same. The Mona Lisa is not a portrait of a moment in time. Or to put it differently, it is a portrait of a moment in time only inasmuch as a single moment in time may reveal all of a person’s life at once. All of a person’s life at once. And that is why the face is enigmatic. That is why there is a smile plus something else, which both diminishes the smile and adds to it, in the same moment. Leonardo was a master at conveying a wide spectrum of emotions (and hence of experiences) in a single face. He was able to paint faces that were happy and pensive at the same time. Faces that are not one feeling, like an emoji, but all feelings like all the emojis transposed upon each other. That is thoughtfulness. It is not a separate activity removed and quarantined from the rest of life, it is an aura that abounds in all of life’s instances. It is not simple, and it is not just one thing at once, for if it were it would not be thinking, it would merely be calculating, which is different. But there is more. There is the background – the world outside the central figure that symbolically composes what is going on inside the central figure’s soul. In portrait paintings, which are representation’s of a person’s life and not just how they look in a particular instance, the backgrounds are never arbitrary and are never just “filled in” to complete the canvas. They are always symbolic. Symbolic of the central figure’s inner world. It is as though the central figure’s “minds” are depicted all around them, so that we, the viewers, may see them and understand them better. What is in the background of the Mona Lisa? Mostly symbols of nature, with only a couple of manmade things. Look to the left of her and you see a path. A path. A symbol of a journey. What is a journey if not an experience of discovery and becoming. A mystery and a surprise. A memory and a past. Look to the right of her and you see a bridge. A symbol of crossing over. A symbol of transformation. Of metamorphosis. How many lives has Mona Lisa lived? How many have you lived, on your journey? Behind her is water, a symbol of depth, pensiveness, serenity, but also occasional turbulence. Yes, just like a Pisces. And behind her further are mountains’ peaks. Jagged and rough, but always high and far away. Because life’s peaks we can only peek at in rare instances of blessing. There is a spectrum of life and experience in the symbols that surround and background Mona Lisa, and that spectrum appears too on her face, which can be looked at for a long time and always seen differently – since there are many things (many feelings) there to see. The Mona Lisa is a higher, human form of those images of geometric patterns that seem to move as you look at them. She “moves,” she reveals to you new things the longer you look at her – and depending on how you look at her. For invariably you will see yourself in her, like a magical mirror. But since you, like her, are composed of many “selves” – you will see many different things. Looking at the Mona Lisa is a training in how to look at people. How to appreciate them and understand them, slowly. In the end, it should be no surprise, that the thoughtful person of the portrait becomes you, the viewer, who has learned to look more thoughtfully at the world. A magic trick called education. Art, especially modern art, has also represented what the life of work, or better, the life consumed by work looks like. As an example of this I show you a painting by the German artist George Grosz made one hundred years ago. It is called Republican Automatons:

 

 

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The title merits a moment of explanation. Republican Automatons. Republican refers the Weimar Republic in Germany that existed from the end of the First World War (1918) to the installation of Nazism (1933). Automaton means self-running machine. Or perfectly running machine. Or in our context, perfectly badly educated worker-machine. The artist, Grosz, used the same format of portrait painting as Leonardo did – with a focus of a central figure’s face and a symbolic depiction of the central figure’s mind in the background. But the common format is used only to highlight the differences in the figure – or the type of person – being portrayed. Note that there are two central figures, not one. But note also that there is no relation of recognition between the two figures – they exist in isolation from each other even though they are right next to each other. Note that they are dressed exactly the same, with only a difference in their ties. They are not really two people, but two mass-produced products – two mass- produced human products. Like all mass-produced products of the same line (candy bars, cars, movie stars) they are interchangeable. There could be one of them or a hundred of them, but they will never be either an individual or a community. Note also that there are no faces – no significations of inner life or character, no complexity or depth. Instead of a face there is an identity – an identity number: Number 12. “I am Number 12, I belong to the infinite series called numbers. And all numbers are equal.” An identity, beware, is not an indication of selfhood, but a mask under which selfhood hides. “I belong to this category” – whatever the category is. But the individual is always something less and something more than the model of his or her identity

 

 

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category. Saying, “I am American,” or “I am a Kinesiology Major” leaves unsaid just much about the person as it indicates. A person is always a mystery, beyond anyone’s apprehension into categories – even his or her own. To be nothing but an identity – to identify completely with one’s identity – as Number 12 does, or has been made to do, means that personhood itself has been crushed and suffocated. Observe Number 12’s and his “neighbor’s” bodies – they pose like machines and are in fact attached to machines. Compare their posture to Mona Lisa’s. Remember the differences in the physical presentations of the goddess of Statuary and the goddess of Culture. Consider how your own body has been trained to sit still and also to move spasmodically by the extended time in your life you have spent in front of screens. Observe Number 12’s neighbor, the empty headed one, who is receiving his thoughts directly from the mass media. In Grosz’s day it was the radio and the newspapers. Their voices were already “in the air” and easily absorbed by whoever refused to breathe differently. What is the message that enters his head? 1, 2, 3 Hurrah! A cheer. A cheer for what? It doesn’t matter. The important thing is to cheer in unison with the others and not think critically, not think for yourself, not think at all. Political propaganda and commercial advertising have the cheer in common. It is their elementary form of addressing their audience, who are indeed one and the same mass. Both propaganda and advertising only tell you what is “good” about the idea, or person, or object, or illusion they are trying to get you to need. 1, 2, 3 Hurrah! Everything is great in the world of propaganda and advertising, except the rival party, or company, or worker who asks a question. Behind our two office workers – for that is what they essentially are – what do we see? We see the campus of Cal State Fullerton, dear students, and there is no point in denying it. Look at the parking structures and classroom buildings on campus. It is the same architecture. Boxes. Human storage units. Why are they like this? So that you can see no hope to distract you from your fear. This is the mentality of the modern workplace in physical form. The efficient nothingness that surrounds the central figure times two also constitutes the automatons’ inner worlds, or inner black holes. Empty surroundings, empty faces, empty lives: the perfect conditions for exploitation, wherein a person has nothing to hold onto expect emptiness itself. Grosz’s painting is a cautionary tale from the twentieth century that is still worth reciting, still worth marveling at, because it is still us. 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. Dimitri Papandreu August 27, 2020

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