Freedom Through Formation
Learning to Think Under Guidance
I’ll start by putting my cards on the table: I don’t want my students to learn to think for themselves, or to think critically.
Let me explain.
I recently listened to a conversation between Bishop Robert Barron and philosopher D.C. Schindler on the general subject of “Catholicism and Liberalism”—but, more particularly, Schindler’s recent work in political philosophy as found in his The Politics of the Real (2021), although themes from a handful of his other works came into play as well.
For those not familiar with Schindler’s work over the last decade and a half, the conversation serves as a good introduction to some of the themes of his work in political philosophy as well as his work on the nature of the transcendentals (truth, goodness, and beauty) and their anthropological correlates (reason, freedom, and love, respectfully).
I’ve enjoyed reading Schindler’s work and listening to interviews with him for a while; having first encountered his work through his conversation with Ken Myers on Volume 142 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal where he discussed his, at the time, recent book Freedom From Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (he also appears as a guest on Vols. 120, 132, 147, 154, and 160); and I would be well served to spend more time with his work if I were to be honest.
What jumped out to me on my listen—being somewhat familiar with the contours of Schindler’s work—was the topic of conversation for the last 5 minutes of the discussion on the purpose of law. In those last few minutes, Bishop Barron and Schindler discuss the role of what Aquinas called “human law” (ST I-II. Q 91. A 3) in both orienting our souls towards and habituating our souls in goodness. And in the course of the conversation, they both advanced the line of thought that when a law licenses particular actions, that licensing becomes a de facto endorsement of the goodness of the action(s) associated with that law. Likewise, if the law prohibits particular courses of action, it similarly signals to the soul that there is something there to be avoided.
There is an intimate relationship between the law and the good—both were arguing—and as such our laws should reflect, endorse, and serve to form the good in us.
What interested me in these closing minutes of their conversation were what I perceived to be connections to Schindler’s work on the idea of freedom.
Beginning in his 2012 monograph The Perfection of Freedom: Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel Between the Ancients and the Moderns Schindler has argued against the modern understanding of freedom—freedom as open-ended possibility and therefore a function of both choice and power—and in favor of a more ancient conception of freedom as a sort of completeness or wholeness which is ultimately grounded in the nature of a thing.
The problem with the post-Enlightenment view of freedom is not that it has too high a view of freedom, but one that is too superficial, too narrow.
-Ken Myers, Interview with D.C. Schindler, MHAJ Vol. 142
This conception has two components which deserve mention here. The first is that an adequate understanding of freedom requires as a precondition an adequate understanding of how freedom relates to the good. It is the attractive power of the good (and along with it truth and beauty) which alone is capable of providing our wills the inertia to move. As Schindler notes in his conversation with Myers, on the classical tradition human freedom begins beyond us insofar as the movement of the will takes the form of attraction; and attraction necessitates something outside of the will towards which one can move.
Second, at the foundation of the classical tradition’s conception of freedom lies a distinction between actuality and potency. Drawing on the classical tradition as found in Plato and Aristotle—and also as it works its way out in the works of Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel—Schindler argues that while there is a sense of freedom at play when considering my ability to sit down at a piano, for instance, and to start banging away at the keys (I am free to do so insofar as I am not inhibited from any outside force), nevertheless there is a deeper, truer sense of freedom on which I am not, in fact, free to play the piano since I have never disciplined myself to the study of the instrument, or having had my crude potentialities cultivated through hours of study, finger exercises, memorization of scales, and more. True freedom is a completion; a realization of something within us that requires being formed, shaped.
In the case of my playing the piano, my potency—my power or my ability—to play the instrument, is something that grows the more it is formed, the more it is trained. That is, the possibilities of what I am able to do when I sit down at the instrument only increases the more I undertake to cultivate my potency through the discipline of lessons. The same is true, for example, of many (if not most) athletic endeavors. The adolescent standing on the starting blocks of a swimming pool before her race is, yes, free to swim. However, if she has never trained let alone learned how to swim, that sense of freedom as pure unrestricted possibility is clearly an impoverished sense. Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky, Summer McIntosh are all importantly more free to swim when they step up on the blocks; free because of the training and formation they have undertaken which has only grown they potentiality in this regard.
Human freedom, then, both begins beyond us—it first requires our seeing the good, something outside of ourselves—and it requires formation.
I had this conversation in the back of my mind a few weeks ago as end of term duties were wrapping up at my college. Oral examinations were being conducted, term papers were being marked, semester presentations were given and assessed, and, of course, faculty meetings were called to order and adjourned.
In addition to my regular collegiate responsibilities, I have had the privilege—over the last three years—to teach two different courses for our high school. During both the 2021-22 and 2022-23 academic years I taught an “Introduction to Political Philosophy” course for our juniors which surveyed the development of the Western Political tradition from Plato through Rawls (with stops at Aristotle, Cicero, the Old and New Testaments, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Burke, the Federalist Papers, Mill, and MacIntyre). Then this year, I got to teach a group of students who I had had the previous year in the political philosophy course in a senior year capstone course given over to studying ethical theory (Plato, Aristotle, MacIntyre, Ayer, and others appeared in the readings for this course).
Pedagogically the Ethics course was unlike the Intro to Political Philosophy course in two ways. First, the course this year operated less as a survey course, and more as a slow read of and careful investigation into only a handful of the dominant normative and metaethical theories. We spent significant time, for example, slowly reading Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and MacIntyre’s After Virtue a book or chapter at a time. Second, as part of their year-long work, the students researched and wrote senior thesis papers of ~3000 words on a topic or an issue of their choosing in either applied, normative, or meta- ethics rather than a shorter paper at the end of each term. This longer paper was then delivered to an audience of their peers as well as to any faculty from the school who wished to attend.
One student wrote their thesis on the nature of role-based obligations as pertained to legal ethics, another on whether a particular account of virtue ethics entailed moral relativism, another on the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic moral skepticism, and so on. It was gratifying to both direct their work and to witness my student’s philosophical acuity and command of their material when it came to the Q&A portions of their presentations by the end of the year.
It was during these presentations that I made a connection between Schindler’s articulation and defense of the classical notion of freedom with the pedagogical choices made in my ethics course and also in our college’s Oxbridge tutorial system. For as I watched my students presented their theses and defended them during their open question periods, it became clear to me that while the work of each student bore the unmistakable fingerprints of each of their own personalities and interests and authorial voice, nevertheless their work also bore traces of me. Of my interests, training, and concerns.
This recognition—this seeing of aspects of my intellect in my students—brought back to mind those last few minutes of the conversation between Bishop Barron and Schindler. During the closing moments of the discussion Bishop Barron made a reference to the theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas who has reported quipped (see also here):
I do not want students to think for themselves. I want them to think like me.
On the face of it, as both Bishop Barron and Schindler acknowledge, the claim is quite bold and borders on arrogance. However, as Hauerwas—and Bishop Barron and Schindler for that matter—acknowledge, he does not wish his students to think like himself because he considers himself to have some privileged intellectual vantage-point or the set of keys to some great theological system.1 No, rather, as he remarks elsewhere in his The Work of Theology, “In particular I should like to think Hannah’s Child suggests how I learned to think by being taught to read by great teachers.”
Someone, somewhere once wrote that it is the task of the educator to maintain the wealth of the tradition she has inherited until such a time as she encounters a pupil with a mind capacious enough into which the tradition may then be poured.2 I think it is in precisely this sense that Hauerwas wants students to learn to think like him. He has labored to inherit a tradition, and that labor has formed his mind. And he desires that his student’s minds be likewise formed by those same teachers and thus similarly oriented towards the truth.
Intellectual formation is a precondition for the possibility of intellectual freedom.
In order to think well, in order to think freely, one’s intellect requires formation.
What is true of my raw potential to play the piano is true of my raw intellect. Unformed, undisciplined, my intellect is free only in the narrow and superficial way discussed above.
When formed, when perfected, however, the intellects potential only grows and as it grows it becomes ever more free to search out and recognize truth.
This, I think, is what Hauerwas wants for his students. It surely is what I want for mine.
Paul Griffiths in the introduction to his work Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar notes for his reader that apart from only two exceptions, each of the subsequent chapters is “without quotation or discussion of any authority’s work or words.”3 However, lest one be tempted to think Griffith’s heads up to his reader a way of avoiding “doing research”, he is quick to head off that concern writing that
every Christian thinker does and must write under authoritative guidance, scriptural magisterial, and so on; and no Christian thinker should prize originality or the significance of his own contribution to thought. One of the marks of a well-catechized intellectual appetite is that it has learned not to be interested in originality. […] writing in this way checks the desire to display erudition at the expense of constructive thought… Among the hardest things in the world to do is thinking and writing with clarity about a difficult topic.4
Intellectual freedom requires intellectual formation.
This is what my senior Ethics students experienced this year. A year spent in slow, sustained engagement with three authors. A year spent writing one project, and having my feedback given to them over and over and over again. A year spent forming their intellectual potentiality. A year spent learning to think simpliciter; not to think originally. A year spent learning and inheriting a tradition.
A year spent becoming more free.
I think it worked.
Or I’d like to hope so.
Here’s to giving it another go next year.
I am reminded as I write this of Bertrand Russell’s remarks on the philosophical prospects of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his student, after Russell had warmed to him: “I love him & feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve ... He is the young man one hopes for.”
I’m kicking myself that I cannot, for the life of me trackdown the passage I am think about. If you have any leads, leave a comment below and I’ll update and give credit where credit is due! For what it’s worth, I can’t shake the suspicion it is St. Newman. In The Idea of a University he makes an important distinction between the educational role of the university and the discovery roles of academies.
Although Jonathan Parsons suggests it was Yoda.
In the meantime, I’ll just avail myself of the route made infamous by Nikolai Berdyaev, and just say “This was once revealed to me in a dream.” (See his book: The Divine and The Human, p. 7, fn. 1.
Griffiths, Paul J. Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press), p. 6.
Ibid, p. 6-7.
I don't know who first came up with the piano analogy but it's one of my favorites.