Notre Dame Philosophy Professor David O’Connor delivered a talk entitled “Socrates in Gethsemane: Philosophy and the Vulnerable Man” at the seventh annual Edith Stein Project. O’Connor spoke with THE ROVER about the liberal arts, masculinity, and vulnerability.
Could you recount your lecture at the Edith Stein Project a bit and expand on your conclusion that “Socrates makes me more comfortable, but Christ makes me more human”?
The figure of Socrates has been very important as something that could befit man, which is a positive, but which also has this ambivalence because it presents the ideal philosophical human life, the life attached to the truth, as itself a self-sufficient or invulnerable life. So the strongest emblem of that is in Plato’s dialogue the PHAEDO, about the day Socrates is executed, and when he is ready to drink the cup of poison that is given to him, he is still completely cheerful but all his friends burst into tears and are crying. He turns to them and said, “What’s all this noise? This is why I sent the women and children away.” He silences their mourning.
That image of how one would face the cup of death is very different from the image of Christ and the agony in the garden, where despite the fact that Christ is true God and true man, his response is to pray to his father that the cup may pass him by. I talked about mourning as a response to suffering particularly to death. Socrates forbids his friends from mourning. That strikes me as inhuman. It’s impressive, but I think it’s inhuman nonetheless. When Jesus comes to Lazarus’ tomb, he weeps. He doesn’t say, “Send these women and children away.” Jesus isn’t like Socrates in the face of death.
And so the Gospels give us an image of the full man, the exemplary man that is quite different than what this image of Socrates gives us. The willingness to face death as a sacrifice, which is what Jesus in the garden shows us, is something strikingly different from the cheerful embrace of death as something that won’t touch us.
Could you talk a little more about male vulnerability in society in contrast to the cultural paradigm of manliness and independence?
There’s always going to be a picture of the manly man as a rugged individual, the John Wayne picture. There are many good things about that because seeing yourself in light of that kind of exemplary man’s man. It organizes your aspirations; it makes you want to be something. And there’s something deeply good and noble in being that sort of man.
The danger comes, though, in the one-sidedness in that sort of ideal. And part of the point of a liberal education is to combat that sort of one-sidedness. A really successful liberal arts undergraduate program will show both to men and women that the development of a thoughtful attitude toward life is consistent with their own picture of themselves. In fact it brings that picture into a sharper focus and enriches it, makes it more beautiful. That’s the benefit of a liberal arts education, and I think that’s one of the reasons that students come to us.
So you think that a liberal arts education offers an education that results in a very unique, well-rounded person?
Yes, a liberal arts education is supposed to be liberal in the old-fashioned sense of liberty. An education in freedom doesn’t just mean a license to do whatever you want. It means an education that stops you from being a slave to this or that accident of the culture that surrounds you. That’s why there’s a straightforward integration – I don’t say a simple one – but a straightforward one between the more Catholic aspirations about a Notre Dame education and the aspirations of a liberal arts education. They come together in a notion of freeing us from the accidental pressures that the society has and open us up. And that is as important for women as it is for men, but there are specific ways in which that open thoughtfulness is under pressure for men in our society that is different than for women.
Can you elaborate on this idea that a liberal arts degree can help us avoid errors as a society?
We have all kinds of weaknesses, and we don’t have a curriculum that consistently offers an invitation to the life of the mind to our students. So, we face a real difficulty, both our men and our women in our failure to offer that consistent education, but part of the difference here is that you can’t make your students more liberally educated than your faculty. And unless your faculty can teach with enthusiasm and consistency in a way that draws the students to the life of the mind, all we have is a system of distribution requirements and our students are just box-checkers.
Certainly, 18 year olds tend to be diffident. But our job is not to let them sit there. This isn’t the student’s fault; this is our fault. If you don’t offer the invitation, there is no way that they’re going to take it. Students are very talented and they’re open to doing a lot of different things. But we don’t have the structure. You’re never going to get all the students, but we get far too small a percentage of the students. No university is going to get everybody. But you have to offer the invitation consistently enough and with enough structure that more students can find their way to it. And, in that respect, I think ND is a rather disappointing undergraduate place. I don’t think this is an institutional focus for Notre Dame.
How could we encourage this idea that vulnerability is not something that is undesirable?
I’m not sure I want to encourage the idea so described. I think we could get a bit of a cult of vulnerability. It does seem to me that certain kinds of rhetoric within the Church embrace the cross with the way in which Socrates embraced the cross rather than the sacrificial fear with which Christ died for us. I’m wary of offering the cross to people with great cheerfulness. So, I’m the wrong guy to ask if you want to celebrate vulnerability. I just want to acknowledge it. I’m at least as worried about distorted ways of presenting sacrifice as if it’s not sacrificial. I think that’s a mistake too.
So, while we shouldn’t necessarily focus on vulnerability as a society, it is real in that we are going to be affected by things around us? Should we be stoic?
Stoic’s a pretty loaded word. Stoicism is a particular inheritance of Socrates. I think it’s a one-sided inheritance. I think that Plato’s use of Socrates is much more complex than the stoic “you can be self-sufficient” inheritance. I think good things come from Stoicism, too. I think there are good things that come from a young man who aspires to be John Wayne. There’s something attractive about that aspiration.
The problem is that it becomes quite narrow. Part of the business of a liberal arts education is to help people to grow up. And part of growing up, part of maturity, is to appreciate the narrowness of your aspirations. That doesn’t mean you can’t build into your aspirations everything you find valuable. You necessarily have to narrow your aspirations, but narrowing them doesn’t have to go along with disparaging the things that you don’t do or can’t do as things that shouldn’t be done. And I think that happens quite a lot.
Madeline Gillen is a sophomore history and art history major living in Welsh Fam. She enjoys cucumber sandwiches when they are available for ready money. Contact her mgillen2@nd.edu.
