But Mr. Arnold ... Nobody's Perfect!

Poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Hats off to the eighteen hardy souls who braved Monday night’s northeaster for our discussion of four essays from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. We held a lively conversation, and there were spirited critiques of Arnold’s view of individualism in a liberal society, and his apparent lack of interest in scientific endeavor.  One participant mused, What if Arnold could have looked at images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope?

We spent some time homing in on Arnold's definition of “culture.”   At various times he calls it “the love and pursuit of perfection,” “a study of perfection,” and something that “originates in the love of perfection.”

In the part called “Hebraism and Hellenism,” in which Arnold compares these two wellsprings of his Victorian England, he writes, “And yet the lesson must perforce be learned, that the human spirit is wider than the most priceless of the forces that bear it onward, and that to the whole development of man, Hebraism is, like Hellenism, but a contribution.”

Indulge with me if you will in a “thought experiment.”  Reflect on a person dear to you and who had a great influence on you: a parent or grandparent, mentor, friend, spouse, teacher, clergyperson.  Now the Arnoldian trick question: Did that person achieve perfection?  The answer is obvious.  Nevertheless, for you, that individual human being possessed a wideness of spirit that qualified her or him as a person of culture, as Matthew Arnold would have it.

Matthew Arnold

In addition to producing prose writings, of which "Culture and Anarchy" is perhaps the most famous example, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) wrote poetry (e.g., the well-known "Dover Beach"), traveled around England as a school examiner, and served as a prototypical public intellectual.  He rebuts various other thinkers in the essays in "Culture and Anarchy."

Looking back at 2016

Once again, in the spirit of the year-end retrospectives so popular this time of year, I offer up a list of our past year's offerings:

January 25th: "The Second Sex," by Simone de Beauvoir
February 22nd: "An Interest in Life," by Grace Paley
March 28th: Selected Poems by Wislawa Szymborska
April 25th: "Discipline and Punish," by Michel Foucault
May 23rd: "Interpreter of Maladies," by Jhumpa Lahiri
June 27th: "The Prince," by Machiavelli
July 25th: "The Meno," by Plato
August 22nd: "Life of Nicias," by Plutarch
September 26th: "To Perpetual Peace," by Kant
October 24th: "The Chilean Earthquake," by Heinrich von Kleist
November 28th: "Where I Lived, and What I Lived for," by Thoreau.

Here's looking forward to another year of personal growth in 2017, aided and abetted by the mysterious and miraculous power of talking and listening to others.

The U.S. Post Office Loved Henry David Thoreau Unrequitedly

Post Office's 1967 Thoreau stamp

"For my part, I could easily do without the post office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life -- I wrote this some years ago -- that were worth the postage."

--"Where I Lived and What I Lived For," from Walden: or Life in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, Monday's selection.

Kant's "To Perpetual Peace"

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

The selection this month, "To Perpetual Peace," by Kant, was first published in the year (1795) of the Treaty of Basel, which ended hostilities between France and her combatants of the so-called First Coalition (Prussia, Spain, and Hesse-Kassel).

Historian David A. Bell reflects in his book The First Total War that "To Perpetual Peace" was a product of an era when the so-called "Enlightenment thinkers," including the giant among them Kant, "began to argue that permanent warfare might not, in fact, be the permanent fate of mankind,"

Napoleon Bonaparte was about to bestride the scene in revolutionary France, however, and a new round of wars followed.  More on Monday night...

First edition of "To Perpetual Peace," published in 1795 in Kant's hometown of Königsberg, in Prussia.

"Life of Nicias," by Plutarch

"Nicias" by Joachim von Sandrat (1606-1688)

"Life of  Nicias," our selection this month, comes from Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. The work is also known as the Parallel Lives, as it contains side-by-side biographies of noteworthy personages of Greco-Roman antiquity, with commentary on the successes and failures of each pair.


Nicias was an Athenian political and military leader of the 5th-century B.C., and the selection relates tales of his penchant for pomp and circumstance, his political rivalries (especially with Alcibiades), and the Athenian military expedition to Sicily, which ended disastrously in 413 B.C.

Bust of Plutarch (ca. 46-ca.119)
in his home village of Chaeronia, Greece

It's a rich narrative, worthy of an epic motion picture.  At its center is the personage of Nicias, the reluctant warrior. He vied with more hawkish elements in Athens's political arena, and negotiated a truce with Sparta and her allies that bears his name.  In Plutarch's telling, is Nicias a hero or anti-hero?

You decide.

"Better Men, Braver and Less Idle": Meno's Paradox

In our meeting on the 25th of last month of Plato's "Meno," what's commonly known as "Meno's Paradox" came up.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the dialogue returns again and again to the question of what virtue is. Here's Meno:

"How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?" (Section 80d in the Grube translation)

The demonstration with the slave boy ensues, in which Socrates proves, and Meno accepts, that a slave boy raised in his household is able to work his way through a geometry problem (with what some consider "leading questions" by Socrates), despite having had no formal training in the discipline.

Socrates concludes that universal truths are embedded in the boy's soul, which he has the ability to "recollect."

"Meno's Paradox" is: if we know something, inquiry is unnecessary, however it we don't know something, inquiry is impossible.  How will we know the truth if we see it?

Socrates reply: "...I would contend at all costs in both word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it." (Section 86b).

In other words: Dare to know.