We Should Walk and Teach

Last updated on: October 26, 2016 at 7:51 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

We Should Walk and Teach 2016-10-26T07:51:25-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Our trail twixt city and field.

Why do we sit in rooms when Aristotle walked and talked? Socrates would walk out to the country and dialog. Plato pictured conversations that often were in motion. That was a hard question my students asked and I had no good answer, so we went outside and we walked our fields and talked. One student pointed out some acorns and we discussed Fall and death, but the life that comes from death.

We kept walking and because it was Houston in October we got warm and a bit uncomfortable Why weren’t we in the air conditioned classroom? Why didn’t we just sit and discuss the text?

Partly this was because the text we were reading, Euthyphro, began by asking why Socrates was not in his usual place, but walking toward a new place. The book was more active than we were being! Somehow as we walked in the city, we were able to see better, because they were walking in city that was also a blend of country and urban. We were in a field, but cars were driving by us. Socrates was approaching the court of the King Archon, but (by modern standards) no ancient Athenian was ever far from fields. We were in a city, but not far from nature just as Socrates was.

The students were interested in the places and plot of the dialog and this is something academic philosophy might miss.

The Euthyphro is famous for a dilemma: is goodness good, because God say so, or does God say so, because He loves the good (to give a more modern version). Yet this dilemma sometimes consumes the text and causes us to miss the main point: how does a young man grow up to be such a swine that he is utterly impious toward his parents? Euthyphro is prosecuting his dad and he probably should do so, but he has an ugly confidence. He is too happy to do a dirty duty.

Even this, however, was less important to the students than questioning why Socrates was “out of his place.” Why was Socrates off doing something new instead of educating young people as he usually did? He is on the move as we so rarely are in modern schools.

Why is he in motion? Why do we sit?

We sit (obviously), because it is easier. The room is comfortable: air conditioning, chairs, a table for notes. When we walk, we cannot take notes easily and we are hot. We are also alive . . . walking, The students thought it was no wonder that old men sitting in rooms would ignore the setting of the dialog. Only the worlds, not the motion, could count to men who only move their lips!

Euthyphro centers in the tension between piety, the love of parents, and justice, the abstract intellectual idea. The rural values of piety are natural, but civilization needs the ideas of justice. What are we to do? It is not obvious, because our hearts (should) want to save our parents while our minds demand justice. If we are sitting, if we are where we always talk, then we don’t see one possible resolution to our problem: we keep moving between piety and justice. We need both and so cannot stay either in the Lyceum or the King Archon’s court.

It is not the first time I have seen the tension, but it was the first time I saw that motion was part of the (potential) solution. If we rest, we have chosen, if we keep walking, then we can stay between and between allows us both.

I appreciate the willingness of these students to demand attention to these details.

They were in seventh and eighth grade.

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