Love and Culture: The Three Ecstasies of the Spiritual Life

Welcome to the web site of Gregory Desilet.

LOVE AND CULTURE

by W. B. Macomber

Chapter One) THE THREE ECSTASIES OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

Chapter topics and synopsis: The importance of group discussions and the need for students to become active, initiatory, adult; the philosophical and religious attitudes towards reading; talking with superiors, peers and juniors; how I would like to play God; how to start talking, and what's getting in the way; the tragedy of history: that greatness produces mediocrity; why little old ladies are not as happy as they might be; how language influences (or determines) life; good words and bad words; making learning fun, following William James and John Dewey; Platonic love, the subject of the course.

Discussion groups, I'm convinced, are the key to the education of the future. Groups, however, which you form on your own to "do your own thing" parasitic on my thing. Real education begins where the student is free and mature and responsible and "doing his own thing." I had a magnificent program laid out to present to you; I only needed $20,000. But, of course, $20,000 wasn't forthcoming. The natural and social sciences get most of the money, so I can't provide you the course I would like to. All the better then, I say, because this puts the initiative on you.

If you have a seminar on Plato, as well as my lecture course, form your own group of six or eight or ten. Ideally, I think, one could have a group of about ten, meeting Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the late afternoon to talk about some of the things I brought up that morning. If you have a group of ten, you wouldn't have to come all the time; you come whenever you feel like it. But you have continual running discourse of five or six or seven of you who are present at any time, and you will come to know other people, come to know their minds, as you will come to know my mind by listening to me for 30 hours.

The point is to have a running seminar of your own, a kind of discussion group, a "circle." You'll belong to a circle, like Dr. Johnson's, and you'll have a proper seminar, where you can talk not two minutes a week, as you do in the present section-meetings, but something more like 20 or 30 minutes as your contribution to these running dialogues. When you begin talking philosophy, you'll begin to learn it, see what the terminology is all about, and make it your own. When you hear the ideal from on high, from this stage, from me, from God (laughter), that is not the ideal at all. You have to enter into dialogue with me, with my thoughts, with Plato.

That's the trouble with Christianity. Christians don't enter into dialogue with Sacred Scripture, as I have, and as Algernon Charles Swinburne did. Not an average Christian, but a great man like William Jennings Bryan three times candidate for President of the United States, Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, and one of the architects of the League of Nations. In the Scopes Monkey Trial, Bryan talked about the Bible, a book he had read all his life, and, cross-examined by Clarence Darrow, he admitted he saw nothing strange in the notion that the sun should have been created on the fourth day. That's very extraordinary, that there's no problem about the sun being created on the fourth day. Bryan had read those words hundreds of times and they hadn't meant anything to him. He didn't know how to read—and neither do you. Darrow asked him, "When you say that all miracles are equally possible, do you mean that it would be as easy for Jonah to swallow the whale as for the whale to swallow Jonah?" And Bryan replied, "Yes!" That's not an average Christian, that's a great Christian—and his mind had been debased beyond our power of imagining. He doesn't know how words work, he doesn't know how to think.

So, I want to propose a Bible-substitute. Plato is a Bible-substitute, something you can go back to again and again for inspiration—oh, that's a bad word--for insight, for expansion of your mind and imagination, not the elevation of your heart. Plato is the most imaginative man who ever lived, next to William Shakespeare. The difference between religion and philosophy is that in religion you are asked to accept, and in philosophy you are asked to inquire, to become active, not passive, to challenge and respond. You'll find Plato drives you to ask the question: Why? Why does he say that? What does he mean by that? What's he driving at? He wants you to respond, not fall on your knees. You don't get anything out of it unless you respond. He doesn't just tell you what life is all about, no man can. He challenges you to think, think for yourself. Alas, so few people do.

This is why the groups are so important, and why present day education, where there's no opportunity for you to respond, is like religion in disguise. In my smaller classes, I like to hold the class as a dialogue. I come in without any preparation, and students fire their hard, interesting, suggestive questions at me, and I follow the lead which they set with their questions. That's the way I'd like to do this course, if we can, at least partially, except that I have so much material to get through. Imagine trying to do 150 pages adequately in ten weeks! Isn't that extraordinary? That means we have to move very quickly, but I'll try some dialogue in the course of time where you present questions.

Back to the groups again. I imagine the ideal university with lots of these independent seminars, working in your own time, in your own way, free of professorial direction—meeting regularly to talk about what I'm into, to respond to it, and through responding to it, to make it your own. This is entirely up to you, and I would suggest that you meet frequently.

When you have a group formed, I have a list by my office, and you simply put up the name of the group-leader and the address, and I'll send along a graduate-student TA to be a consultant, advisor, critic. He won't lead; he won't lay anything on you, the way I lay things on you here in class. It will be your discussion. He'll listen carefully and try to give you the benefit of his greater background with terminology you're just beginning to practice with—philosophical terminology.

This is not obligatory. I only have 10 TAs and 10 volunteers from my upper-division Plato class, so I have 20 people to work with. The 10 volunteers, by the way, are doing this because participating in this sort of educational enterprise is the best education for them. They'll learn more philosophy, more Plato, talking to you about Plato than talking to me (or hearing from me) about Plato. Because you need to know it, and I don't, and consequently, when they talk to you, it's real talk, not like talking French to the French teacher.

One of the troubles with our educational system, from kindergarten through graduate school is that we only talk to our superiors. It remains always like talking French to the French teacher. I'd like to get real discourse going, in each of the three dimensions of discourse: talking to "inferiors," if you will, people with less experience in the field than yourself, with peers, and with superiors. We talk quite differently in each of these situations, as differently as you talk with your parents, or a professor, or your girl or boyfriend. Yet, two-thirds of this we have left out in our educational system. We have students talking only to us. And, it gets harder and harder to talk to us because we talk so well, in our tiny area of expertise. Which is not philosophy, not modern philosophy, and likely not even to be Kant, but the transcendental deduction of Kant—that tiny little area of expertise in which all your professors relate to you. Each professor in the present-day university represents a tiny area of expertise in which he talks superbly, absolutely superbly—so superbly that the effect on you is likely to be discouragement and eventually despair. "If that’s what thinking is, I'm afraid I shall never be able to think." It's as though we try to teach you German by lecturing to you 16 hours a week in High German on High German.

We have to unseal your lips! That's what our God does, unseals lips, and that's what I want to do. I stare across the centuries at Christ, and like Algernon Charles Swinburne, I don't fall on my knees—I remain standing and say to that mysterious figure that confronts me across the centuries, "What is it you're after?"

I can't get much guidance from reading the Bible, because it comes out of a completely different situation from mine. Galilee 2,000 years ago and Santa Barbara today are two completely different worlds. Think about how different those two worlds are! If Christ were to pop into my apartment, I wouldn't know what to say. I wouldn't even know what to ask him. "How do you do it?" That's the only question I could conceive. I look in the Bible for guidance and what do I find? Matthew 19: He unseals lips, cures leprosy, brings people back from the dead. That's no challenge to thinking, like Plato. It may be inspiring, but it doesn't teach me anything—except perhaps by way of analogy. I'd like to unseal your lips, heal the affliction of your flesh, and bring you to life, to "new and higher life." I'd like to play God—I'm such an egoist. So "learn to do by doing": John Dewey. Join together as seminar-partners and talk five to seven hours a week (if one has to get quantitative about it). You should do at least as much of your work with your seminar-partner as by yourself, reading the text and reflecting on it. Then, if you have your group-meetings three times a week, organized on your own, you become active; you're no longer in the childish position; you're no longer Aristotelian prime matter: the passive recipient of all the energy which pulsates through the University. You're doing something, and you'll learn three to four times as much.

You can do it, all by yourself. Talking is easy. "What do you think about Plato?" is like "What do you think about your brother-in-law?" If I asked you what you think about your brother-in-law, you'd come up with something! And, it would be interesting. We'd start there. You might have a very one-sided or even nonsensical view of your brother-in-law, but we'd get started. What do you think of Plato, Kant, or anything else you are studying in the University? Silence. "God, I don't think anything! I can't think of anything to say!"

Our present-day University studies are cast at much too high a level—too intricate, too specialized. You're supposed to learn 48 things when you're in University. How absurd! Four things a quarter, 12 a year, 48 in the course of 4 years, and we stamp B.A. on your rump and send you out into the world as "government inspected, prime beef". You're supposed to be an educated man or woman! For the last 30 or 40 years you have been leaving the University to become the Silent Majority, the silent, utterly inarticulate majority, that don't know what they think about anything.

Sometime in the course of your studies, if you're to become properly educated, you're going to have to learn to write. You'll have to learn to write and to love writing. Why? Because writing is what I call "thinking for yourself." When you write an essay or letter or paragraph about anything, you are called upon to say something to this or that subject all by yourself. Now, it's common parlance to say that you don't read any more after you graduate. We force-feed you 200 or 300 or 400 books in your 4 years at university—at least 10 times too many—10 to 20 times too many. We force-feed you 10 to 20 times as much material as you can possibly handle. And, after 4 years of this, your attitude towards books is primarily one of loathing. So you don't read much any more. But, you do read after you graduate—Time Magazine, the newspapers. This is still reading, and what you read is thinking. You are still in contact with thinking through your reading, even if it's only Time Magazine, or (God forbid!) the Santa Barbara News-Press.

You know the tragedy of history? I thought of it when I read the recent accounts of the death of Storke—what's his first name? Thomas? —when I was reading the accounts of the death of Thomas Storke. There was a big man, a pioneer, a man with ideals and ideas, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize! It makes my knees go weak; I worship that sort of thing—Nobel Prizes and Pulitzer Prizes. That that great man should leave as his enduring contribution to history—that newspaper! That monument of mediocrity! Who can remember anything the News-Press ever said about anything? That's the tragedy of history: you're a great man, and you only contribute to the flood of mediocrity!

Nevertheless, when you leave college and read Time Magazine or—even the News-Press—you are still in contact with what I call thinking. But writing you do buchstablich nicht mehr—absolutely none! You sign your name on checks. That's the extent of your writing after you graduate from college. Not even letters; not even correspondence! Interestingly, the woman handles correspondence after college—sorry, after marriage. When you marry, it's the woman who writes letters to stay in contact with people, never the man. That's amazing, since the woman is supposed to be "body"; the man is supposed to be "mind". Why is letter-writing relegated to the body?

I'll be talking a lot about Women's Lib. I want to liberate whole segments of the population. In fact, all of us need to be liberated in some way. So I'll be talking of Women's Lib and little old maiden-ladies, and blacks, and fags. (Pause.) I'm a "fag." That's why I'm interested in liberation. I've never confessed it publicly before 900 people! (Applause.) But don't worry about me. (Laughter.) I'm okay—now. Think of that little old maiden lady!

I was thinking about the little old maiden-lady the night before last. She lives out her life thinking she has simply missed it. She's missed it completely; she hasn't fulfilled her being as a woman. How do you fulfill your being as a woman? Kate Millet has taught us this. You marry and bear and rear children. That's the only way in which the woman can fulfill her womanly being. Otherwise she's an oddball. Little old maiden-ladies sit there looking at television or whatever, in their immaculate little apartments thinking that they're not quite human. That's what I thought about myself until about three or four years ago, when Plato began bringing me to life.

Three things brought me to life: Plato, living with students, and a third thing I'm not going to tell you. (I'm going to let you guess.) Ah, maiden-ladies—yes—have missed their being, you see, because the woman is expected to go through a certain life-course; she's expected to marry and be the life-companion of a man, and have children and wipe their bottoms. And if she doesn't do that, she is not really a woman; she's not womanly, just as I'm not really a man, not a “real man."

Ah, so it's necessary that you learn to write, and love to write, in order that you think for yourself, because that's what writing is. I have what I call the three ecstasies of the spiritual life (not to be confused with the three ecstasies of discourse). "Ecstasy" I got from Jean-Paul Sartre, who talks of the "three ecstasies of time": past, present, and future. I talk of three ecstasies of the spiritual life.

Ecstasy means literally a "standing out"—ec- or ex-, "out," and stare, "to stand." Standing out, transcendence, getting out of yourself, liberation, is ecstasy. Most men know "ecstasy" only in the act of love. The act of love stands for ecstasy, when we know relief, release, transcendence, ecstasy. I take it this is why Ferlingetti says, "God is F***."

The first time I heard that line, it took me a bit aback. Like Tolstoy, I have a deep religious background and an inordinate sense of propriety, and this struck me as irreligious and improper. But, of course, Ferlingetti wanted to take me a bit aback. And, then I immediately said: How marvelous, of course! Of course! God is transcendence. God is when the whole of life comes together in one moment. God is when you are "out of this world," with all of its troubles and cares and limitations and boredom. And that is what most men know only in the act of love. That's why Ferlingetti writes, "God is F***!”

There is one more point there though, another reason Ferlingetti might say, "God is F***." Because he wants to take a "bad word" and ennoble it. The word "f***" is a bad word. D.H. Lawrence makes this the central passion of his life, to redeem sexual terminology in order to redeem sexuality. Notice the way Mephisto corrupts Faust by working on his terminology: "Look at that little box—wouldn't you like to twitch her bottom?" That sort of thing. You must watch the language in which you think of things. If you think of things in ignoble or degrading language, they become ignoble and degraded. "In the beginning was the word." I had to work through the word "fag " which I use only for effect, to show that I can apply all possible predicates to myself, and fear nothing but sticks and stones.

You see, "f***" is a bad word because what it designates is a lowly, dangerous, degraded, sinful activity—throughout 2,000 years of our Christian heritage. The Christian will say: we Christians don't make sensuality sinful. I say: you make it lowly, base. For 1,700 years of our collective background, if you want to be a superior man—if you want to come up out of the misery and degradation of life, for 17 centuries, from the time of St. Paul to the time of Descartes—you have to pledge never to touch a woman, never to look at her as a woman. You must turn your back on the woman wholly and entirely. If you are not to be a "common man," if you are to be a superior man, and know how to read and write.

For 17 centuries clerics are the only men who know how to read and write. That's why the word "clerical" is ambiguous; it describes someone who has taken Holy Orders, and someone who knows how to read and write, the cleric and the clerk. This is because, for 1,700 years, the two concepts were identical. The only men who knew how to read and write were those who had taken Holy Orders—they could lift themselves up out of the misery and degradation of life. The only escalator up was Holy Mother Church. And to get on that escalator? First of all, no woman and then no man who did not turn away from women entirely, could get on.

I claim the Church is misogynist, woman-hating. The Church replies: Oh no! No, no! We don't have thoughts like that in the back of our heads. To which I reply: I'm not talking about your thoughts in your heads—I'm talking about your visible power structure. No woman can become a member of the hierarchy of the Church. No woman can become a pope or cardinal or bishop or monsignor or even a parish priest. Those are the commissioned officers, the men who make the decisions as to how life will be lived, what is important, what is valuable, what is noble. For 1,700 years how we are to live is a game played by celibate priests and ecclesiastics. Women can't even become non-commissioned officers—deacons, sub-deacons and the like (offices which have more or less fallen out now). Isn't that a bit sick? Look at what St. Paul has to say about women in the Second Letter to the Corinthians, and you'll see the deep misogyny that lies behind the Christian message. I sometimes wonder whether Christians read their own sacred writings!

Oh yes, so sex is lowly, degraded, sinful. St. Augustine is the first great Christian figure. St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, the three great mediaeval Christians—St. Augustine rails at his sinfulness. And when it comes right down to it, all the "lust" and "lewdness" he talks about: he lived with one woman for 17 years and had a son by her. And when he had his moment in the rose-garden, when he found "truth," when God spoke to him directly, he kicked the woman and the son out of the house and became a "superior man." In the Confessions, he never even tells us her name.

The motif behind this is that St. Augustine is not interested in begetting on a woman. He wants to beget on centuries. So he turns away from the woman to beget on centuries. And he does, by God! Next to St. Augustine, Lenin is a small boy in a sailor cap with a ribbon. For 1,700 years St. Augustine says how life shall be lived. For 1,700 years his voice is the voice of God. He himself says, "When I speak truly, not I speak, but God speaks through me." And if I make a mistake—that's me. (Laughter.) See the double-edge of that? And where that humility comes from? I'm not humble! I'm an egoist. I want to liberate ego, liberate your ego.

Well, now we have five minutes more, and I haven't gotten through every thing I had to tell you. Form groups quickly. You might try techniques of getting to know one another, ice-breaking techniques, so that you feel good with one another. Two possibilities strike me. Take over an apartment or a house for a weekend. If your parents live in the area, say to them: Hey, we want to do a thing, take over the house for a weekend—would you mind going to Las Vegas? Or join us! That would be one technique: over the weekend get to know one another in a crash program, getting to know one another in all different combinations. Another possibility: Take a week or 10 days (if you have 10 people) and each evening one person lays himself on the line, tells about himself, what he thinks his life is all about. What's life all about? Gnothi seauton: Know thyself. That's what Socrates is after. What are you about? What are you after? Think about that. That's why you have to learn to write.

By writing, you'll formulate your views on things, find out what you think about this, that, and the other, and when these views begin to cohere into a pattern, as they will (for it's the nature of words to form a system), you'll begin to discover what your life is all about. You are the unity of all your views, attitudes, and recollections, and the only way these take concrete shape and cohere in a unified pattern is through words. That's why I urge you to practice writing constantly, in order to give shape to your life and discover what you think, all by yourself.

And then there are the groups (and seminar-partners), where you learn to talk, to formulate views on the spot for other people and respond intelligently—sympathetically and critically—to other people's views. Writing is where we get clear about things by ourselves, and talking where we get clear about things with, and in direct response to other people.

So the "three ecstasies of the spiritual life" are: reading, writing, and talking. Not something sublime, and far above you. I'll bet that's what you were expecting. By "spiritual life" I mean something quite different from religious people, something which makes perfect sense, and is not veiled in mystery, like "higher states of consciousness," or "oneness with God, or the cosmos, or the ground of being," or whatever. Typically, the "spiritual life" is associated with priests and gurus, with meditating and praying and observing strict dietary regulations, performing activities and leading a life which is quite beyond the range of the common run of mankind. But I associate the "life of the spirit" with Plato and Shakespeare, and mean something quite ordinary and common-sensical by it, something which is accessible to any man: thinking, looking (peering), expressing, interacting, creating—manifestly creating (sounds and shapes and explanations and conversation and hospitality and deeper, better human relationships).

Reading is opening yourself to another mind, writing is exploring the contents of your own mind, and talking is the play and interaction of mind on mind. And they are the three fundamental components of the life of the mind—quite self-evidently. Where any one of the three is lacking, there can scarcely be the full life of the mind, and the life of the mind, as it draws the heart and the genitals into its movement, is what I call the "spiritual life" or the "life of the spirit"—meaning, obviously, something quite different (toto coelo different) from the way those expressions are ordinarily understood in a religious sense.

Clearly, modern American education (U.C.S.B.) is not promoting the life of the mind in this sense—or, to my mind, in any appreciable sense. Your education consists some 90% in reading (and listening), 10% in writing (and then mostly not real writing, but faking things which are much too difficult for you) and talking, the play of mind on mind, almost none at all (occasionally you will ask a question in class). There is an ecology of the mind as much as an ecology of nature, and when we become aware of this, the dreadful imbalance of our present system becomes unmistakable.

Consider the amount of words you consume, reading and listening to lectures, and the amount you return to the environment, talking and writing. The ratio must be upwards of 100-1. It is absolutely absurd! You take in an unrelenting stream of words, literally millions of them, and do absolutely nothing with them. Of course, they go in one ear and out the other, to disappear down the drain without a trace.

You should take steps in your own behalf. Put down your reading—read selectively and carefully—and do something with everything you read. Take notes on your reading, and in lectures. That's initial practice in writing, and has you doing something with the material, even if it's simply condensing and deciding what merits note. That alone involves your judgment, and is practice in judgment. Wherever you are active, you're learning and growing; wherever you're passive, almost nothing is going on. Think of how much your reading disappears immediately without a trace—what is the point of it, then?

Find someone to pair off with in all your classes, and discuss the lectures from day to day, while they are still fresh in your mind. Realize that it is not enough to "follow" a professor's lectures, so that it makes sense as it passes by, and you think you could get it back on the day of the examination. The point is to make it yours, to work it into your active vocabulary, and you can only do this by discussing endlessly: with another student in the class or your roommate or girl-friend—anyone who will get into it with you, because you're trying to learn, and it's interesting—far more interesting than all the small-talk with which we ordinarily pass time together. Try to get and spread the idea that learning is the most important and most interesting thing in life—it's life qua life, so to speak. (Everything else is life qua sleep.) If you discover, as I have, how this can be the basis of more interesting and exciting human relations, you'll have experienced the real point of learning and the mystery of "Platonic love," and your education will finally get off the ground. Everything before will be pre-Kitty Hawk.

In this course, I want to give you the opportunity of your lives. I want you all to pair off as seminar-partners and do at least half your studying together. You should spend no more than half your time reading the dialogue and thinking about it by yourself, in what I call the "Cartesian posture." At least 5 hours a week, I want you discussing your reading with your seminar partner, and trying on the best things you came up with thinking about it. Practice talking—there is really no other way to learn how to talk. And that’s what philosophy is all about, really all philosophy is about. (This is a profound and controversial claim: think about it!)

Don't talk simply about the Symposium, or Plato. Talk about yourself, your problems, things you’ve been through, your other courses, the movie you've just seen or book you've read—everything. Talk about one another. Show interest in one another. That's what's so tragically lacking in this day and age. People are simply not interested very much in one another, and don't try to draw one another out. Most students seem so insecure, and wholly immersed in their own problems, that they can't get into the things going on around them. The things we find most interesting or pressing we mostly keep to ourselves, on the assumption that other people are not interested.

Your principal problem (and I don't even know you) is learning how to relate to one another, beginning with Emily Post—but mostly how to talk, how to explain things, make them interesting, how to project yourself to and respond to the people. You should be practicing this constantly with your seminar-partner in a great open, free-swinging dialogue-relationship, centering on the Symposium and the issues I raise in my lectures, opening out from there onto everything else. That's the way you'll be learning philosophy: bringing everything together in words. This is learning in what I call the "Platonic posture." With your seminar-partner, you will have a "Platonic relationship" (being together through words), which might eventually become "Platonic love," the subject-matter of the course.

The important thing is to get things off to a good start. For Plato this is the function of sensual attraction, otherwise so mysterious. We feel more ourselves, more outward-going and effusive, with someone we find beautiful. That's what Phaedrus suggests in the first speech of the Symposium, which you should get into immediately. So I offer you an opportunity which you may never have again for the rest of your life. There are some 900 of you out there. I want you to pick the most interesting person you can find from that vast number, someone you would enjoy being with and studying with and getting to know and telling about yourself, and walk up to them and propose pairing off as seminar partners.

Then start at once studying together and getting to know one another, having an intellectual and personal relationship. Get your personal and professional life, pleasure and achievement—the two sides of life—pulling in the same direction. Enjoy yourself studying. You'll study better. This has been America's great contribution to the theory of education—William James, John Dewey: we must make learning fun. But how? I can't get you into games (building blocks and so on), although I'd like to see you in furious chess games, volleyball games, and the like—for reasons which will become apparent as we go on. What do you think of when I say the word "Greece?" A lot of people would think of a philosopher, or a sage in a toga—anyway people sitting around talking endlessly—and games, the Olympics; the thinker and the athlete. These two belong together like mind and body. Plato makes them the two "parts of the soul": nous and thumos. They're both distinctively Greek, prominent aspects of the Greek soul, which I will introduce you to in this course.

Yes, if we have encountered America's two great thinkers, William James and John Dewey, we know that we must make learning fun, to get the most out of ourselves. Everyone in this University knows as much about John Dewey, and almost as much about William James, as I do. And, yet we still go on acting as though these two great figures had never existed.

America has turned its back upon its two greatest spokesmen. American education has not a trace of the spirit which Profs. James and Dewey discovered, articulated, and promoted. Is your education fun—exciting, exhilarating, imaginative, a wonder and a marvel? No. I’m guessing here, of course; I'm thinking, as we say in philosophy, a priori. (Mark that word; it's very important.) No, I wager your education is not exciting, exhilarating, fun; it's onerous, complicated, tedious, dull. You're going through it in order to get a better job—that's all. (Soon this reason may become more or less obsolete. Many of you will work parking cars, and in markets and in clothing stores.) This is why we can't get you into it, by the millions—why the apathy, drop-out, and failure-rate are so high. (I'm convinced that these three are all basically the same phenomenon).

It's amazing. America now desperately needs the vision of two of its greatest thinkers, men who have made America famous throughout the world. When we no longer believe in principles, in priests, parents and politicians—as with so many of you—what other source of motivation can education draw on but our desire for a fuller, richer, more interesting, more exciting life? Yet, we all behave as though Profs. James and Dewey had never existed. Education goes on being arduous and onerous—involving, for the student, nothing but sacrifice—often heavy, heavy sacrifice. I see no pleasure, excitement, enthusiasm—no real communication or sense of shared endeavor—on the 6th floor of Ellison Hall. I see primarily harried, haggard expressions, high tension, and, not infrequently, twitches. I don't believe anyone would describe it as a "happy" place—as I maintain it should be, as Profs. James and Dewey, two of America's greatest thinkers, first claimed it should be. To judge by what one sees, one would conclude that almost no one at U.C.S.B. had ever heard of John Dewey, or the claim that learning can be an exciting, joyous adventure, and a shared endeavor.

So, I want to make your education more interesting; I want to make learning fun. But how? Well, from this stage I will pour at you all the most interesting contents of my mind, in the most interesting way possible. I don't want to enlighten and instruct you as much as entertain and delight you. Someone has said that "enter-taining” is the characteristic activity of the philosopher—meaning actually entertaining ideas, but the various senses of a word, however different, often hang together. But this won't make much difference. The way to make learning fun is to make it a part of personal relations, especially the love-relationship. Bathe your studies in libido. (That's my secret.) What this University needs most desperately is a bit of libidinous warmth. We can think about light after that! Plato's analogy of the sun in the Republic emphasizes how light and warmth always go together—and warmth is the more primal. Warmth gives life and causes to be, while light only confers visibility, so that a living being can see.

Warmth is what is most tragically missing in American higher education, of which I take U.C.S.B. to be typical. There is so little personal feeling, so little genuine human communication, so little humor or acceptance—on either side. In my 7 years at U.C.S.B., I have never heard a man give a point—or even flat out accept something another man said. There is so little laughter here! We exalt only the ideal of specialized expertise and do not think it a part of education to promote wit, as in the 18th century, when "wit" was synonymous with intelligence. It strikes me that U.C.S.B., and American higher education generally, is very nearly out of its wits. Especially among graduate students in philosophy, who have apparently had it all drummed out of them by years of hard-edge arguments. Without warmth and humor, education becomes purely technical, like electrical engineering, and then it's bound to be onerous and dull.

I am talking only of the so-called "heart humanities." I assume the situation is not nearly so bleak in the natural sciences and engineering. There, I take it, there are closer personal relationships (and more respect) between professors and students, who feel more vitally part of a collective undertaking and have a sense of "team spirit." I assume there is more humor and humanity there. The trouble is that the heart humanities mime the natural sciences and engineering in an area where it is inappropriate, with their exclusive concern for technical expertise and objective validity. I certainly want a primary or exclusive concern with technical expertise and validity in the training of men who design our elevators, but on the 6th floor of Ellison Hall I would lay greater weight on humor, imagination, gentility, and culture.

So, let us begin right here. Make your education more exciting by weaving it with your personal relations—which is what it is all about in the first place. And, I might add, make your personal relations more exciting by weaving them with your studies. Because the real question in love, after the flush of sensual attraction has finally worn off, is what to do together. If your relationship is not about something (your studies, your creativity, your program of self-improvement), it inevitably gets into the dialectic which Pausanias describes in the second speech of the Symposium. Look at Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Swann's Way. You won't be able to give one another the fulfillment you're in search of, as Aristophanes puts it in the fifth speech of the Symposium, and eventually, inevitably, you'll come to take one another for granted. The first flush of mystery and romance will be dulled by habit and familiarity, the tragedy that attaches to peanuts, fine weather, expensive stereos, peace, and everything else in the physical (or so-called "real") world.

It cuts both ways, this plan of mine—which Plato has fully worked out in the Phaedrus. It should make your studies better and it should make your personal relations, and especially your love-life, better. It should promote both warmth and light by recognizing that they belong together. If you enjoy being with a person, for whatever reason, you should work better together, and if you learn to work effectively together, you'll enjoy being together more. After the first flush of sensual attraction has worn off, it will leave something else, of enduring value, in its wake. Besides, the experience will be valuable in itself, even if it doesn't produce anything. Human relations are an end in themselves; sociability is man's deepest nature and highest calling. Not any goal which a man can achieve on his own: winning his personal immortality by "faith" or "good works," becoming famous or making a contribution to world history, discovering some vital formula, publishing a book or article, etc., etc. That is not the point. All that is something we do to keep life interesting, and because our sociability finally opens up to include the entire species, of which (even if we're William Shakespeare or W.B. Yeats) we're an infinitesimal and unimportant part. Love is the goal and crown of human life—being together. To this entire University, I want to say: Little children love one another!

So, you can get it started by pairing off with the most interesting or fascinating person you can find in this sea of possibilities, and doing the majority of your work together—learning how to talk, teaching one another how to talk, simply by responding. You have all gotten so little response to the things you've said—things you thought good—no wonder you are finally rendered mute and inarticulate. And I don’t mean simply from your teachers and professors. I mean from one another. We must start changing all this in a single stroke. We must work together for a better University and a better world—for we will never get the latter without the former.

For Plato, this is the whole point of sensual attraction, which in our culture has only been seen to figure in the propagation (not the improvement) of the species, leading to copulation, marriage, the family, and the begetting of children. It can do far more than that: it can make talk more interesting. It can make your studies come alive, if you can share them with someone you find fascinating, even for purely sensual reasons. (There are no "purely sensual reasons" until after we have done considerable violence to our being, until our lives break up into home and office, Saturday night and Sunday morning, making love and the graduate seminar, routine and the pornography which swills over our newsstands.) For Plato, this is the mystery and telos of sensual attraction, the key to that much maligned notion, "Platonic love": that it gets human communication off to the best start, gets talk going—the sort of communication and talk which is now frozen in a cold and loveless world, both within the University and without.

This is the chance of your lives—and I've set it up for you. To be able to walk up to anyone you like out of this sea of possibilities and initiate a relationship of your own choosing. Doubtless you've often seen people you'd like to get to know but had no basis in which to begin. Well, here's your chance! The basis of the relationship will be studying together, practicing talking together, and it will be a deliberate and purposive relationship rather than random and casual, like getting to know the person next door, the neighbor ("Love thy neighbor!"), or whoever you chance to fall in with. If there is a bit of sensual attraction, libidinous pleasure, so much the better! Put it to work deepening your life and improving your education. This is what "Platonic love" is about, and Platonic love is the subject of the course.

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