My Last Class

I gave my little last lecture (after admitting that I wrote it at 2 a.m. and that it might be sentimental) and they clapped! And then I was close to tears and so I shoved the course evals at them and ran out the door. I managed to not cry. Just to give you an example of how silly I am, this is the last bit:

What do I want you to leave this class—these twenty-five days of conversation—with? First, I want to see the ways in which tradition affects you and the ways in which you can’t get away from it. I want you to think of yourselves as rooted in particular cultural, religious, and philosophic traditions. I want you to see that as something that you can’t scrape off and pretend isn’t part of you. Sometimes you change from those things, we always do, in fact, but their formation on you is important. Second, I want you to see that as you read widely and travel and reflect, you may be able to see where the traditions in which you are raised are not sufficient. I want you to be able to analyze arguments—to see where they’re weak or don’t make sense all together or don’t correspond to the world that we live in. I want you to do this because you read old things—not just new things. You have a depth of thought and won’t be easily led astray by every new, very persuasive argument that you read. Rather, you will be able to think of it in a much deeper context, among other thinkers. Third, I want you to see the importance of having these discussions within a community—we have people in this class of different ages, different backgrounds, different nationalities, and different personalities. The insights you each brought to the discussion were valuable and enlightening. Different people responded to the texts in different ways; different people like different things. Through our conversation with each other, however, I think we were all able to learn much more than we would have been alone. There’s a sort of friendship that we engaged in with each other (sure, it’s a friendship of utility), but in the context of that friendship, we could pursue and seek the good together. Fourth, I want you to take what we’ve discussed this summer and the ways of thinking that we’ve encountered into your future professions. I know that that may be awhile away for some of you, but for others it’s very close. If you understand that the philosophic way of life is the highest, as Plato and Aristotle showed us, and if you understand that you may have to engage in practical politics regardless (we are constantly being called to practical work in the world), then no matter what you choose to do—whether it be law school or graduate school or farming, you can see where it fits into the whole social and political order and you can reflect on your relationship to the whole. Without this way of thinking, you could just be a farmer to get food for your family, which is fine, but I hope that you all will be more reflective after reading the authors that we’ve read this semester.