Honors Day

 

April 19, 2007

 

Dr. Philip W. Neale, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy

 

 

Honorees, I want to join your families, friends and teachers in congratulating you who are being honored today. Most of you are being recognized for your ability to apply your minds to academic tasks with special proficiency. Academic work is not the only thing minds are good for. And, at least as psychologists define it, learning can be pretty mindless – witness a paramecium in a maze. Of course, the sort of learning we celebrate today is related to the acquisition of what we call ‘knowledge;’ the sort of thing which, perhaps, gives rise to what we call ‘understanding.’ You are skilled at coming to know and achieving understanding, and in a moment I want to relate this to what Aristotle called human rationality, but first this matter of honoring.

 

Why do we honor you? Maybe because you deserve it. But you didn’t come to have all of your exemplary abilities through some act of your own will. Are your brains better wired than those of your peers – bravo (I guess)! Did you have better parents, teachers, older siblings and all the others who taught you how to use that hardware with more success than most – bravo (I guess)! Bravo for good genes; bravo for significant persons, opportunities, experiences, all dependent on the varied circumstances in which we find ourselves. Perhaps we are really praising your capacity for hard work, your ability to ask questions with confidence, your focus, your ‘stick-to-itiveness,’ your capacity to endure ambiguity until reason points in this direction or that. In other words, perhaps we celebrate your willingness to put all your advantages to work in the service of a certain range of tasks. In short, we are celebrating your diligence. But . . .

At least in my own case, I’ve come to think that diligence and other such personal qualities are things that happen to me, not characteristics which I create, so to speak, “out of nothing” as if I were some little god.   Shouldn’t we really honor your parents and their parents, your teachers and their teachers in turn, your friends and their friends who made your friends the helpful friends they were, for you? In short, to honor you as individuals is to honor all those persons and things which have made you the excellent students you are. (Perhaps we ought to call Shazad and tell him to count on a few more guests at the reception after this ceremony.)

 

There is a second approach to this business of honoring – forward-looking, rather than retrospective, based on future hope rather than past accomplishment. Maybe we honor you today because we happen to value some of the intellectual qualities you possess, and we want to increase the frequency of these qualities in other students---- up ahead. We want to cause others to be more like you than they would otherwise be. In other words, we honored students last year for your sake and for the sake of all your runners-up, and we honor you today for the sake of all potential future honorees and their runners-up, and the runners-up to the runners-up; not for your sake, but for the general positive effect that honoring you will have on future others, whether they are actually honored or not!

 

Now, why might we want to encourage the skills involved in coming to know and understand? There are all sorts of practical reasons of course (like the avoidance of avoidable and tragic wars), but let me suggest a reason of a very different kind. And let me begin to draw on that Greek philosopher I mentioned a moment ago. For Aristotle, what distinguishes us from the brutes, the other brutes that is, is our capacity to reason. We are rational animals. We are able to base our claims to know, and our choices of ways to understand, upon reasons. We investigate, we marshal, we weigh, we balance, we conclude. It all has to do with reasons. And because this capacity for reason constitutes our human nature, and because, Aristotle teaches, a being is at its best, and happiest, when it acts in accord with its nature, the exercise of our ability to reason will be accompanied by happiness. The use of rationality as a basis for understanding, “contemplation” to use Aristotle’s word, is our highest good as human beings. If anyone knows this, you do! Aristotle writes,   “…[H]appiness is coextensive with study,” and he goes on,” . . . the greater the opportunity for studying, the greater the happiness.” (Aristotle, 193). For Aristotle, the contemplative life, the life of the mind, is the most pleasant and the most humanly fulfilling imaginable. The best life is the life of contemplation. No wonder we give prizes to encourage that sort of life.

 

Now, let’s follow Aristotle one more step – a step which, I think, is important to you as you prepare to leave McKendree University. We’ve seen that the life of knowing and understanding – the life of contemplation – is the sort of life we should aim at. But Aristotle thinks that even this life is incomplete. And what we need to make it complete will surprise you.  It is, of all things, “true friendships”.

 

One of the things I’ve done during my first year of retirement is to visit, and be visited by, a half dozen friends who go back to the four years I spent in Ohio as an undergraduate student. Aristotle has a lot to say about friends. He writes about different kinds of friendship, the prerequisites for these different types of friendship, friendships between what he calls ‘equals’ and between ‘unequals,’ how friendships begin and dissolve, and even the number of friends we should have. (Perhaps you wonder how Facebook might modify his count. I suspect not at all.)

 

First there are three varieties of friendship. Some friends are valued because of their usefulness – the classmate who shares good class notes after you are out sick, the friends with whom you network to find out about jobs, or good child care-givers. The modes of usefulness are legion. Secondly, there are the friends we have because of the pleasure they provide. “We love witty people,” Aristotle writes, “. . .not for what they are, but for the pleasure they give us.” (218)

 

In contrast to the friends we value because they are useful or give pleasure, there is a third kind of friend, “…those who wish for their friends good for their friends’ sake.”  (219) This is friendship in the “truest sense,” and while Aristotle is unwilling to talk of this “highest” kind of friendship in terms of its usefulness, he certainly does recognize a surprising and very important “benefit.” Those good persons who wish good for their friends “… neither go wrong themselves, or let their friends do so.” (230)

 

Our “truest” friends are those who keep us on the right track, those who help us to be better, those who can serve as moral examples, moral guides, moral advisors, moral critics – the ones who keep us from “going wrong.” And, given the moral difficulties of life, the vicissitudes of virtue, Lord knows we need them!

 

I would argue, for a variety of reasons, that the friends one makes during college may be especially adept at being friends in this “truest” sense. After all, these are the friends I made (as we say) during the time I tried to use reason in new and more fundamental ways, questioning the things I thought I knew and experimenting with novel ways of understanding. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed enough leisure over a long enough time – Aristotle thinks this is important – to allow you to get to know some others as true friends. These are the kinds of friends with whom I’ve touched base at the important junctures in my life during the past 40 years, because these are the friends I feel know me best. 

 

André Aciman is a teacher of comparative literature in New York City where, by the way,  I grew up. He has also become a novelist recently. His first novel (for I think there will be more) is entitled Call Me By Your Name, and focuses on the development of a friendship. The narrator, Elio, a young man, Italian, develops a friendship over the period of a summer with a young American academic, a teacher of philosophy, who is spending his summer on the Italian coast getting some assistance in translating his book on Heraclites into Italian. Heraclites, you may recall, was one of those very early, pre-Socratic philosophers we know about largely through Aristotle (of course). He was the guy who held that reality was all flux, all change, all becoming and that permanence was an illusion. You know, “You can’t step into the same river twice” - type stuff. In the novel, as the summer draws to a close and the American philosophy teacher prepares to go home to get ready for the fall semester, Elio, the young Italian, recounts, “I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, and that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more.” (Aciman 162).

 

It’s April my friends, the month which that poet from St. Louis, T. S. Eliot, called “the cruelest month … mixing memory and desire.” (“The Wasteland”) Now there’s a recipe for friendship! This April you, honorees, are living on borrowed time. It’s time now for you to select, and perhaps consolidate, time to make explicit what has been implicit, time to prepare to take with you what will be “beneficial” up ahead – not only knowledge and the possibility of understanding, but that additional component of the best life, true friendship. Today we honor the life of the mind -- your minds. I would suggest that in addition – it’s really Aristotle’s addition – you honor your true friendships as you come to the end of your college experience, the friendships which may prevent you from “going wrong” up ahead.

 

Let me end half in jest, but only half. For the past few years you have sailed under the colors of McKendree University. Emblazoned on McKendree’s flag (for better or worse) were three adjectives :   ‘classic,” ‘caring,’ and ‘contemporary.’ As you prepare to sail forth from here I would suggest a new banner in honor of friendship, and conveying three admonitions. Those admonitions, supportive of friendship, are the following:  ‘cultivate,’ ‘reciprocate,’ ‘appreciate.’ Good luck at enjoying the best lives humans can lead. Good luck at being rational animals with true friends.

 

 

 

Aristotle, (Martin Ostwald, trans.), Nicomachean Ethics (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co.), 1962.

 

André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2007.

 

T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.). 1962.