<aside> 💡 The document explores the role of myths, novels, and facts in shaping human understanding and education. It suggests that myths and novels, through their narrative and emotional resonance, can convey truths about human experience more effectively than abstract facts or philosophical systems. The text also discusses Plato's views on the limitations of written instruction and the value of dialogue and personal discovery in learning. It concludes by questioning the modern emphasis on empirical knowledge and the devaluation of moral education, suggesting a need for narratives that can guide ethical understanding in the same way ancient myths once did.

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IN ancient Greece, the philosophers and poets, who were the teachers of the time, believed that the substance of communicable education was to be found in myths. "Plato," Werner Jaeger has written, "wanted the future citizens of his ideal republic to begin their literary education with the telling of myths rather than mere facts or rational teachings." Jaeger, scholarly lover of the Greeks, seems to agree. He makes this case, speaking of the Greek of the classical age: In early childhood they [the myths] were the first food for his spirit, which he sucked in, as it were, with his mother's milk. And as he grew older, he returned to them on a higher plane when he was introduced to the masterpieces of the Greek poets. Now it is true that even today millions of people learn the ancient Greek myths through reading Homer in modern translations; but at that time the mythical tradition reached Greek youth through hundreds of other channels, besides the stories of the Trojan cycle which survive in the Iliad and the Odyssey, for the poetry as well as the art of Greece was chiefly concerned with shaping the traditional legends. What the boy had eagerly absorbed as exciting stories, the youth found brought in its most perfect form in the art and poetry of his people. And later, when he grew to manhood, Homer's characters passed before his eyes on the stage of the Greek theater, in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, where their destinies no longer seemed a tale of long ago, but of immediate dramatic interest. The audience which filled the benches at these performances regarded the events and sufferings they beheld as the most profound expression of the meaning of all human life. This seems a way of saying that the Greek myths gave the people a moral vocabulary for thought about their own lives. Is there a modern way of thinking about these things? That will perhaps confirm Jaeger's evaluation of the educational value of myth? There may be a parallel in one of the essays of Joseph Wood Krutch (in If You Don't Mind My Saying So, 1964), titled "Novelists Know What Philosophers Don't," in which he dares to say "that art is more convincing than philosophy because it is, quite literally, truer; that, to take cases, Proust is truer than Bergson and Mr. Farrell truer than Marx." Krutch continues: The novelists are, to be sure, less clear and less precise. But for that very reason they are truer. Every philosophy and every "ideology" must sacrifice truth to clarity and precision just because we demand of a philosophy or an "ideology" greater clarity and precision and completeness than is compatible with human knowledge or wisdom. What is most true and most valuable in any philosophy is not the tight and inclusive system which it presents but those glimpses and divinations and apercus which the philosopher later formalized into his philosophical system. Most of us are not Platonists or Spinozans or Nietzscheans. We have accepted insight from each while rejecting the whole which each pretends to present. And it is just the philosophical superiority of art, not only that it suggests the complexity of life and human character, but also that it is everywhere closer to the most genuine and the most justifiable portions of man's thinking about life. . . . The best as well as the most effective works of art may sometimes be those in which the author is in pursuit of a truth, but the only reason for composing a novel or a play instead of a treatise is that the author is unwilling to reduce to a formula an insight which he can present without violation only through a concrete situation whose implications he can sense but only sense. Once the meaning of a work of art can be adequately stated in abstract terms it ceases to have any raison d'être. It has ceased to be truer than philosophy and has become at best only a sugar- coated pill. If those are right who maintain that the field of what we positively know and can state with precision is constantly growing, that even the uncertainties and ambiguities which still surround every insight are destined to disappear in the light of clear and positive knowledge until there is nothing important about man which we do not know with scientific precision, then the field and utility of art are shrinking, and the time will come when it will cease to have any function at all. But art will continue to exist and to be truer than philosophy just so long as—but no longer than—there are truths which elude formulation into laws. This is the point of Plato's distinction between apodictic truths—truths that cannot be disputed— and truths which require the individual assent of the learner, which lack the manifest verity of "two plus two equals four." Such manifest truths require no effort, no struggle on the part of the learner for their admission. They have the coercion of the obvious. The effect of this, as Plato makes clear in the Theatetus, is that the learner becomes the servant of argument instead of its master. It is Plato's view that conclusions adopted through logical necessity are second-class truths which allow the learner no freedom to dissent. In this case the master of a large number of "facts" feels wholly justified in becoming a dictator, since freedom is irrelevant in the discovery of such truth. The inner growth which results from the individual struggle to know for oneself does not take place. This makes Plato suspicious of didactic instruction, in which the teacher "reveals" the truth to his student. Like Socrates, who claimed to know "nothing," and only to involve his auditors in his search, Plato attacks the written words of instruction in two ways. Toward the end of the Plaedrus he has Socrates ridicule books by telling a story about the inventor of writing, an Egyptian named Theuth, who proudly describes this art he has originated to the king, Ammon, only to be told that he has invented a disaster— that practice of the art of writing will implant forgetfulness in the souls of men, giving them only the semblance of knowledge. They will seem to themselves to know much, reading in books having given them the conceit of wisdom, while they still know little or nothing, since they have not found anything out for themselves. Then, in the second Letter, he warns Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, of the harm he does by pretending to explain to others Plato's teachings, without really knowing them and without regard for the readiness of those who might read what the tyrant wrote. Plato said: Consider these facts and take care lest you sometime come to repent of having unwisely published your views. It is a very great safeguard to learn by heart instead of writing. It is impossible for what is written not to be disclosed. That is the reason why I have never written anything about these things, and why there is not and will not be any written work of Plato's own. What are now called his are the work of a Socrates embellished and modernized. In the seventh letter (to the friends of Dion) he returns to this subject, saying: One statement at any rate I can make in regard to all who have written or who may write with a claim to knowledge of the subjects to which I devote myself—no matter how they pretend to have acquired it, whether from my instruction or from others or by their own discovery. Such writers can in my opinion have no real acquaintance with the subject. I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period of attendance on instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining. Plato believed that living dialogue is the best form of instruction, and while he wrote many books, they are all in dialogue form—an "imitation," so to speak, of spontaneous speech between two individuals. While writing it down did violence to the spoken word, it was still of value if no one made the mistake of taking what was written seriously, as "truth" rather than at best a provocative. This comparison applies also to Plato's view of laws. The wise ruler, Plato maintained, cannot be bound by any laws. As Paul Friedlander explains in his Introduction to Plato: For laws are rigid and impose limits upon the fullness and complexity of life. "It is impossible that a simple principle be applied to a state of affairs which is never simple." To be sure, in order to make his task easier, the wise ruler will also use laws. But they must not limit him, and as he has laid them Volume XXXVIII, No. 17 MANAS Reprint April 24, 1985 3 down, so he will disregard them according to his own judgment. Yet Plato is the last person to give a free rein to arbitrary caprice. The judgment of the ruler can only be based upon true wisdom speaking through him; and as long as there is no such true statesman, that is, in all the empirical states, the laws must be observed all the more strictly. For whoever disregards the laws would throw matters only into a worse state than that which the written laws seem to have brought about. After all, laws are the precipitation of much experience, and good counselors urged the people to write them down. Laws are "copies of the truth." Strictest observance of the laws is the "second-best journey," when the best is impossible. If ignorant people presume to live without a law, this would truly be a bad copy of that pure wisdom which, in the ideal state, makes written laws superfluous. Here the contrast between the two greatest Platonic writings on the state becomes apparent: the Republic constructs the kind of state in which true wisdom prevails and which, therefore, does not need laws; the Laws, proceeding along a "second way," since the first, the way "for gods and sons of gods," cannot be realized, is designed to preserve the structure of this second-best state through strictest rules. Yet Plato wrote all those books! We can understand this if we take into consideration that again and again Plato warns his readers not to regard his books as forthright exposition of true philosophy. Thus may we say that even the writing of books is playfulness—play compared with the seriousness of Plato's philosophizing and teaching, and yet serious play—precisely because it is related, under the aspect of imitation, to genuine seriousness? Because it is also, in some way, a form of education—thus not only a mimesis of something already created, but rather a demiurgic creation with a view to the prototypes? Plato lived at a time when the myths were losing their hold on the minds of the Greeks. Accordingly, he developed the dialectic to take their place, yet also invented new myths for his philosophic purposes, and, as Friedlander says, created the great myth of Socrates himself. The concluding paragraph of Friedlander's chapter on Plato's written work rises to lyrical heights: Human life a play, man a plaything—yet what ethical strength did the old Plato, who said this, expend upon this life and with what sense of responsibility did he always look upon it as a task! Legislation a play—but is not the picture of the old man unforgettable, writing laws despite the failure of all his political aspirations, laws for the founding of yet another Utopia, this time called Crete? Literature, the new form of art, the whole set of dramatic philosophical dialogues a play-—what aesthetic passion and seriousness went into this play for half a century. Thus we are perhaps not entirely untrue to his spirit if we interpret, in a preliminary way, the meaning of his written word according to the model of the world of appearances, which, to be sure, is only a copy of the eternal forms, but a copy of eternal forms, though afflicted with all the limitations of transitory existence, yet, to the eye which has learned to see. pointing toward eternal being and toward what is beyond being. What is the educational effect of the myth of Socrates? One answer would be to recall something that happened years ago in a Great Books discussion group. The topics under consideration were three Platonic dialogues, the Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo, on the trial, imprisonment, and death of Socrates. This was the first cycle of discussion of the selections for the first year, and near the beginning. A woman new to the group, one who had not before read or learned about Socrates, exclaimed in wonder, "I never knew there was anyone who stood up for his principles and spoke out as Socrates did!" It was as though courage had been born in her, through that discovery. Socrates was for her what Galahad was for the child brought up on the stories of King Arthur's Round Table, what the tale of Sigurd the Volsung was for the children of the Norse, and what Rama and Arjuna became for the young of India. The world of myth, of gods and heroes, is a world of moral forces. Its concern is with the decisions of human beings who are subject to the play of these forces, and mainly with choices by the best men and women within the memory of man. Wondering about the modern idea of knowledge and what we regard as education, Joseph Wood Krutch said in another of his essays in the book quoted earlier:

According to one theory of history, the degree to which a civilization may be called "advanced" is measured by the amount of power it has at its disposal. Although we command power to an extent that would have been unimaginable at any previous time, we summon it by the exercise of abstract thought, and it appears (or rather doesn't appear at all) in the form of invisible forces and fluids. We used to see the water wheel working until we exchanged it for the somewhat less obvious steam engine, and then exchanged the steam engine for the electric motor that goes round and round for no visible reason. The vacuum tube in which almost nothing seems to be happening gives way to the transistor that performs its miracles soundlessly without motion or any visible or audible activity. So far as any naíve observer can see, it is pure hocus- pocus—not technology but mere magic. To most of those who snap switches and push buttons it is all as mysterious as it would be if they were summoning genii by rubbing a lamp. Even the engineer or theoretical physicist lives in a world which is retreating further and further from the reach of the five senses that remain useful chiefly, not to make any direct contact with his world, but merely to read the instruments by means of which that world may be inferred. Approaching the prevailing opinions of the modern mind from another stance, Krutch says:

If nature knows no purposes and makes no value judgments, and if, at the same time, man is himself a part of nature, then from whence came his concepts of purpose and value? If they came from nature, then they are part of nature. If they do not come from nature, then man himself is touched by something outside nature's realm. The concept of purposes must be either immanent or transcendent.

He quotes what seems an echo of Platonic thinking from Samuel Johnson:

The truth is that knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong, the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and Justice are virtues and excellences of all times and of all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance.

Was Johnson right, or as a modern man might say, altogether wrong? Krutch goes on:

Today the vast majority of thinking men assume without argument that "knowledge of external nature" is the great, the frequent, and almost the only legitimate business of men. It is, they think, upon such knowledge of external nature that both our safety and the prosperity by which we set so much store depend. We are not perpetually moralists and geometricians only by chance. We have become geometers perpetually and moralists only by chance— if at all. The most obvious result of the decision to consider knowledge of external nature the greatest, most frequent, and perhaps the exclusive business of the human mind—actually quite well formulated before Johnson's time—is the physical world in which we live with all its wealth, power, and convenience, as well as its perhaps illusory security. The second most obvious result is the loss of Johnson's faith that "Prudence and Justice are virtues and excellences of all times and all places," with the substitution for it of the various relativisms which have persuaded us to believe that prudence and justice are merely the traditions of a given society and that a moralist is merely a man who has not yet learned that morals are only mores. Although Johnson was no doubt thinking only of physical sciences, Darwinism is merely an extension of them. One more result of the conviction that "knowledge of external nature" is, in fact, "the great and exclusive business of the human mind" is the Darwinian world in which man is merely an animal, and the animal merely a machine. Ample confirmation that this is indeed the outlook of the modern mind, and of education in our time, is provided by an article in the American Scholar for last summer. The writer, Christina Sommers, is a teacher of philosophy at Clark University, one who has had much experience of the now "maturing" generation. The present—perhaps prevailing—form of moral education in the schools amounts to "a system of moral education that is silent about virtue." There is something called "Values classification," in which the student is taught "awareness of his preferences and his right to their satisfaction in a democratic society."

Some typical questions are: "Which animal would you rather be: an ant, a beaver, or a donkey? Which season do you like best? Do you prefer hiking, swimming, or watching television?" In one strategy called "Values Geography," the student is helped to discover his geographical preferences; other lessons solicit his reaction to seat belts, messy handwriting, hiking, wall-to-wall carpeting, cheating, abortion, hit- and-run drivers, and a mother who severely beats a two-year-old child. The advocates of this sort of "education" speak highly of the precious legacy we can leave to "generations of young people if we teach them to set their priorities and rank order the marvelous items in life's cafeteria." As a college teacher coping with the motley ideologies of high school graduates, I find this alarming. Young people today, many of whom are in a complete moral stupor need to be shown that there is an important distinction between moral and nonmoral decisions. Children are queried about their views on homemade Christmas gifts, people who wear wigs, and whether or not they approve of abortion or would turn in a hit-and-run driver as if no significant differences existed among these issues. Will these children turn out anywhere near as well as the Greeks who absorbed, as it were, with their mother's milk, the stories of Perseus, Theseus, and Hector? Or the children of India brought up on the wonderful tales in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana? With our growing appreciation of the complexity of the natural world, has not our understanding, if not our information, about it become mythical? Is human excellence no longer of any account in education? One could say that people no longer believe in the old myths, and fabricating myths with didactic teaching in them cannot be the right thing to do. Perhaps so, but Plato managed to generate the functioning equivalent in his time for the inherited myths, and even if we are not Platos, some imitation of him may now be in order