joe ferrare's blog

Bust of Socrates at the Louvre by Eric Gaba.

Just got done reading Plato’s Cratylus, which is a dialog between Socrates and Hermogenes and Cratylus.  It’s about names, and whether or not names represent a thing because they convey or represent some truth about, or the essence of, that thing, or if they are just a bunch of name tags we’ve all agreed to use so we don’t confuse each other. There’s a lot of talk about the nature of things and lots of tracing Greek words back to their original meanings — sometimes their constituent letters. For a bit there is was kind of like reading Genesis: and the oo sound, which is the essence of the expression of awe, begat goo-goo ga-ga, which begat good, which begat goodness, which begat the Goo-Goo Dolls.

This dialog is under the Great Idea of language, hence the 30 or so pages about the naming of things.  Oddly enough, this is something I wrote about back when I was writing commentaries.  It’s not at all surprising to find out somebody else has done a much better job of thinking about it, and that I wrote a confident commentary without any knowledge of the existence of classic texts on the subject, much less what those texts said.

My main point before, which came up when we were deciding on a name for our daughter, agreed with the position that there was something inherently appropriate about a good name. That the name, or the sound of the name, was somehow right for that person or thing. I was very conscious, for example, that the fact that my two favorite first names for our daughter, Alexandra and Regina, said something.  Nothing “my little princess” about those.  Of course another thing I said in my old commentary was that people with the wrong name — a name that didn’t suit them — usually ended up being called something else. I have a brother-in-law and an old friend called Butch. I also know a guy who outgrew “Butch” and went back to his given name. So I don’t think there’s any one perfect name for a person — at least no one a parent can pick out while the child is in the womb — but I do think you can saddle a child with something so far from his personality that he’ll end up being called Butch or Rusty.

Knowing that to be the case, I argued for our daughter’s middle name to be very different from her first name, hence Alexandra Skye.  At the time it was more about wanting a nice flow and after the long Alexandra the simple Skye seemed to fit.  But also, I knew she might end up not wanting to carry around a big name like that, or might be some kind of retro-hippie-vegan, and then Skye would come in handy.

Well, the upshot of all that Socratic dialoging was that to know the name of a thing is not the same as knowing the thing — at least it’s not sufficient. That was kind of the start of the discussion, and kind of the end, too.  Here’s how Socrates put it:

How real existence is to be studied or discovered is, I suspect, beyond you and me. But we may admit so much, that the knowledge of things is not to be derived from names. No; they must be studied and investigated in themselves.

It struck me as I typed that quote that it’s a pretty good argument against book learning, which is kind of ironic.

Interesting Op-ED at the NY Times today about how universities ought to change to meet new challenges.  I don’t think most people realize the modern system dates back as far as it does, and that it was apparently adopted from Germany. The Germans have an even more rigid system where your future academic life — and in some ways your ability to educate yourself into a better life — are set early on — 3rd or 5th grade. Can’t recall which.

The author beats on the tenure system pretty well, and I must say that, while I’d like to protect academic freedom as much as the next guy, that system is probably a little too protective of professors.

The thing I really got from it was what the author said about specialization.  They make kind of a big deal about this in The Great Conversation, one of the cornerstone books of the program I’m in at Harrison Middleton.  I never really thought about it much, except that I was personally lucky to be able to do what I wanted at the undergraduate level and then wrap it all into a BA in liberal arts.  I had to do some interdisciplinary work, of course, but that was the good part for me (except for the math parts, of course), as my goal was to become a better writer.  So I wanted a wide range of things.  At the graduate level I was narrowed down quite a bit, of course, but still, the writing classes let me investigate some other things.  That, combined with my electives and the ability to range from hifalutin theory to green-eyeshade journalism made it a good program.

So I think more people could benefit from things like the Great Books, that expose you not only to a wide range of things, but to famousely smart people who were themselves extremely well-versed in a wide range of things.

I’m reading a book called Write for College for school.  Kind of funny, considering my background (journalist, editor, public affairs guy, master’s in journalism), but not hard to stay with.  Writing is one of those subjects I can keep reading about and reading about. There is always, I’m sure you’ll agree as you read this, room for improvement.

This is, I think, functionally my last assignment for this course.  There’s actually one left, but that’s just designing my program.  I’m turning in what I assume will be a draft with this assignment, so the last assignment will (barring a complete failure on my part) just fine-tuning my proposal.

My proposal is still too big, and that’s holding me back from finishing.  After the initial course you have to do two 24-hour blocks and an final project.  I filled the first 24 hours with just the language part of what I want to do, and that’s not right.  I need to fit some more in there if I want to look into a couple more Great Ideas and also hit a few literary highlights — Shakespeare, Montaigne, and so on.  Have to dig in deeper and narrow things down.

I’ve narrowed my focus a bit — 35 of the 102 great ideas.  That seems ambitious, so I’ve appealed for help to my school mentor.  It looks like I’ll need to look at three areas to think about leadership and communication: government of man and all it entails (law, democracy, duty, etc.), the language of men (rhetoric, definition, sign and symbol, etc.) and prinicles (will, wisdom, opinion, etc.).  Seems daunting, but I guess that’s the idea.

Spent the evening digging into my homework assignment, which is to do the first draft on my plan for my next degree.  It’s one of those programs that has you design your own degree, then do it.  With help, of course.  My school is Harrison Middleton Univeristy, a Great Books school.  So there are 102 Great Ideas, with 3,000 or so topic below them.  I have to figure out what I want to study, then how to go about it using the Great Books of the Western World.

The problem is, I have two things I’d like to do.  I’d like to concentrate on leadership and communication.  Those are the two things I’ve focused most on, and to which I’d most like to contribute some Great Thoughts.  On the other hand, one reason I started this program is because I feel my education has been too focused on my career, and thus too specialized.  So I’d like to do a kind of classical education for (old) boys.  You know, read Aristotle, Shakespeare, Montaigne, and so on.  But I don’t see how to do both.  More thinking required.

In between looking at the Great Ideas to get mundane ideas I found a site about Bento.  I think I’m going to try this.   I love Korean food, so I’m going to put the Korean food in a Japanese wrapper, so to speak.  Kind of appropriate, as the last time my wife went looking for dang jang at the Korean store she steered her toward Miso.  And we use Japanese kim (seaweed).  So we’ll see what I can come up with.  Also swilled some of the scotch a friend gave me.