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Is the Good Man the Good Citizen?: An Essay on
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10549 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
4,818 Words |
| Author
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Robert D. Hickson
Robert D. Hickson is a scholar in international education at
the U.S. Department of Education. He holds a doctorate in
comparative literature and classics from the University of
North Carolina. |
What T.S. Eliot gradually comes to say in his second lecture, building upon the first, he further clarifies two years later in his introduction to Josef Pieper's profound book. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. In his Chicago lectures, his key premises are largely implicit. His assumptions may be not yet fully conscious, even to himself. Later comes clarity.
Near the end of his first lecture on education, Eliot says: "I do not suggest that we should abandon the attempt to define the purpose of education (and the definition of the purpose in an inevitable step from the definition of the word itself). "But, he adds, if we define education, we are led to ask, "What is Man?" and if we define the purpose of education we must likewise respond to the question "What is man for?" Thus, when we come to inquire into the purpose of education, "we get deeply into the area of conflict." And here is where Eliot starts to meander.
"Every definition of the purpose of education," Eliot further concludes, implies some concealed or rather implicit philosophy or theology. In choosing one definition [of purpose] rather than another, we are attracted to the one because if fits in better with our answer to the question "What is Man for?" we may not know what our own answer is, because it may be not fully conscious, and may be wholly unconscious; our answer is not always in our minds, but in the unconscious assumptions upon which we conduct the whole of our lives.
Eliot is not at all clear how or why one chooses or is attracted to such guiding unconscious assumption. He is not clear how one can be free and responsible with respect to one's directive, unconscious assumptions, upon which we somehow conduct the whole of our lives.
PURPOSIVE OBSCURITY
Moreover, concerning the purpose of education, "each answer is a clue to what education means to somebody; an incentive to finding out what it means for oneself … so we have no reason to deplore the fact, if we find the meaning of education. Elusive." So ends Eliot's first lecture, "Can 'Education' Be Defined?" Are we to suspect here a purposive obscurity?
His second lecture ends with words that are, it seems, comparably obscure and morose:
They [who "refrain from action," desiring or dreaming of "only imaginary goods"] sail along
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