Graduation Address

"Of Excellence, or the Oath to Reason" (November 1978). (UA Case 69, Box 2)

Many years ago, I had occasion to listen to a Commonwealth Secretary giving an address to an assembly of some two hundred Commonwealth scholars, in the Senate Chambers of the University of London. Looking down at his audience, almost in his first breath, he expressed some trepidation at the prospect of trying to say anything at all to such an august body, as he put it, of the most distinguished minds in the Commonwealth. I thought then that it was a very silly remark for a man of his unquestioned eminence to make, especially to such a motley crew of sea and air-sick arrivals to the shores of the Mother Country. Standing here today, I’m not sure but that he may have had good cause to be awe-struck.

At the same time, I feel constrained to forewarn this distinguished gathering of scholars that the figure who now stands before them bears—scarcely concealed above his head,—the traditional insignia of the philosopher, to wit the letter "C". I have in mind one of the more delightful by-products of my own scholarly researches, discovered among the fragmentary, and now frayed, MSS. Remains of the eighteen-century Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid. Entered on a separate octavo leaf, within a bundle of what the author termed "Abstracts," there appears this notation:

"Oct 1766 Read the World unmasked, or the Philosophers the greatest Cheat, in twenty-four Dialogues. To which is added the State of Souls separated [sic] from their Bodies, an Epistolary Treatise &c Translated from the French Lond 1736."

You may perhaps take faint consolation from the fact that in what follows one of those "greatest Cheats" intends to limit himself to a single dialogue.

The taking of oaths is not generally supposed to fall within the purview of house of learning. Indeed, since an oath is usually taken, or sworn, in the presence, or under the witness, of some form of authority, whether divine, human or abstract (as in the case of the Law), it would seem to be singularly out of place in an institution which regards as the scholar’s weakest argument the appeal to authority. (One does, of course, in another context "cite authorities," but only in so far as these are the repositories or instruments of evidences either sought or entertained.) The kind of oath which I have in mind is the sort of which is formally pronounced, and under the aegis of a power purportedly superior to all.

Now as foreign and remote as the following may appear to you, I would ask you to imagine for a moment a Great Hall of Learning, filled with persons of every note and notoriety, who have assembled to take, or to witness, an oath-swearing. There is this major adjustment to the imagined scene, however: it occurs not at the terminus of the scholar’s period of studies, but rather at its outset. It is, in fact, a precondition of his, or her, ascent into the spheres of higher learning. As befits the dignity of the initiation ceremony, the language is set in an appropriately archaic key,

I swear in the Name of the all-seeing Deity, and before these Witnesses, that I will hence-forth be a slave to no sect or Party of Men,—that I will espouse no Principles, but such as I believe true, and submit myself only to reasonable authority,—that I will always look upon myself as a Part of the Society to which I belong, and therefore bound to promote its most extensive Interest above all private or personal Views; tho’ still in subordination to the two grand societies of my Country and Mankind. I likewise solemnly declare, that I consider myself as a Citizen of the intellectual World, and Subject of its almighty Law-giver and Judge;—that by him I am placed upon an honourable Theatre of Action to sustain, in the Sight of mortal and immortal beings, that character and part which he shall assign me, in order to my being trained up for perfection and immortality; and shall, therefore, from this time forth devote my life to the service of God, my Country, and Mankind. As I observe this Oath, may I be acceptable to God.

The oath which I have just read, but not taken, is peculiar to a philosophical treatise on education which appeared between 1745 and 1748, under the hand of one David Fordyce, a Moral Philosopher and Regent of Marischal College, Aberdeen, until his death by drowning in 1751. As foretold, this is my dialogue (concerning education)—for that is its title,—and it is fraudulent; for the oath-taking ceremony, although not untypical of academic representatives in that age, is actually less historical than it is the product of what Frank Kermode has called "fiction-invention." Nevertheless, like all fictions—at least the better ones,—it possesses a cognitive element, a certain capacity to give birth to new awareness.

What we can perhaps begin to glean from its lofty intellectual tone drives as much from the context in which the oath is reported to be sworn, or not sworn (for some scholars are said to retreat from its awesome strictures at the final hour), and from its long-term effects on the scholar’s behaviour, as from its formal diction. The Master of the Academy, Euphranor or the "merry-maker" by name, himself infuses the atmosphere of the "admission-chamber" with the appropriate sentiments of dignity and "grand purpose": prefacing the oath-taking with a statement of the institution’s principles of learning, he reminds each candidate in turn that he is "a Freeman both in Body and Mind, and therefore under no Controul [sic] but that of Reason, and Authority founded upon it." I leave it to you, however, to conceive, as best you may, this solemn prelude to the moment of decision itself, trusting that in the general absence of concrete instances today you will at least know how to find your way back, historically, to a suitable, perhaps even Platonic, model or form.

For their part, the consequences of this affirmation under oath are apt to strike the modern reader as severe, if not openly seditious. The scholar’s life is drastically altered, and the transformation is felt by all. Might we perhaps have something to fear from a community of scholars who, upon taking the Oath, become

"Animated with an irreconcilable aversion to every species and degree of bondage, whether intellectual, or civil, and a most sovereign contempt and scorn of every thing that looks like tameness, or a servile truckling to the opinions or conduct of others, whether in public or private life?"

It is possible that our own society would not immediately recoil, as from a gang of ruffians, from "a set of young men" whom the congenial Sophron, or the "sensible one" of my Dialogue, describes as that rare breed, who

...inveigh, with a peculiar indignation, against all kind of public vice and corruption [and cannot] bear to sanctify the fraud and knavery either of the corrupted, or the corrupters, with an of those soft names by which they are often disguised villains, and no set of mortals more contemptibly little than those men of Rank and Fortune, who betray their country for a bribe, and after they have cast off public virtue themselves, laugh at it, as a mere chimaera, in others?

The laughter of that last phrase ought to have for us an all-too-familiar, and recent, ring about it. But my concern lies back a pace or two, in that fervour which ignites our young scholars.

Rather like the American liberals who survived the dark night of McCarthyism to herald in the false dawn of the Kennedy years, these oath-takers are committed to an attitude towards learning, as well as to life, which is tough-minded, public spirited and, perhaps not surprisingly, hopelessly and infectiously romantic. This last-named characteristic—still in 1745 very much of an infant among terms,—is itself singled out for criticism by the narrator of my Dialogue, named Simplicius, the "simple-minded" one, if you like. Scholars so "inflamed," he argues, will be given to rash "Heroism." Their "situation" in life will never grant them an opportunity to exercise their tough-mindedness, and no country, he implies, will ever be large enough to contain the "full scope" of their public-spiritedness. What I should like briefly to suggest to you, on this day of honours, is that these are potentially damaging, and certainly enervating, critiques of that body of scholars termed the "university," and indeed of Learning itself. They are so, at least, to the extent that they are allowed to remain unchallenged.

The conditions of that oath, you will recall, were such as to bind its taker to the duties as well as the santities attendant upon a "Citizen of the intellectual world." Being a free mind, he commands respect; as the slave of Reason, the only "Authority" he can acknowledge is that of the ultimate Law-giver itself. His "Theatre of Action" is a "training up" or improvement in advance of Perfection, but one which places the improvement of Mankind above that of either society or self. Finally, and here one wishes that our current educational language were less given to the consignment of students to terminal patterns of study,—the undertaking to this harsh, but noble Citizenship is of life-long duration. The fact that these conditions are avowed before witnesses no doubt heightens their solemnity and the emotional frame of the participants, but it does not in itself, of course, guarantee their observance. Perjury is obviously possible in education as under the law. I shall reserve this head, however, for my concluding remarks.

"The modern mind," wrote Camus in his Carnets during the Nazi occupation of France, "is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold." It certainly seems to lack that fierce open-mindedness, coupled alike with wit and grace, which so characterizes the citizens of my Dialogue, and which seems to anchor their minds. The degree of that independence of mind is amply demonstrated by their imperviousness to every assault or bribe, "Tameness" as (Fordyce puts it) or deception, such is their intellectual Virtue, their strength or capacity (in the early Greek sense) for rational endeavour, that their studies, or in a very real sense their lives themselves, become unassailable. No power, in short, can reach to corrupt them.

You will undoubtedly recognize the Platonic root of my analysis here. Any virtue—whether that of wisdom or courage, self-restraint or justice,—becomes untouchable, argued Plato, immune to the infectiousness of power (the Greek term for this is ate), if it is pursued for its own sake. The "romantic" intoxication, perhaps belligerence, which Simplicius had noted among the oath-takers is in fact a kind of joy in excellence itself: the just man in society revels in his very justness; the student atop the world in his garret flat is positively gladdened by knowledge itself. (You will understand now why the wise Euphranor has to be the "merry-maker") Theirs is the sort of Joy which perhaps only the woeful and love-lost Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, ever really understood for our time: a Joy which, finding a thing’s center and holding to it, simply withstands the attacks of every expediency.

Well, one might ask, what shall we do with all this inebriation of virtue, of excellence, if not to commend and to celebrate it further? Unfortunately the philosopher, that "greatest Cheat," must return the argument whence it began, and so stay your desire for immediate satisfaction. We have still before us the sobering thoughts that on the one hand our oath-bound student will never able to exercise his tough-mindedness, and on the other that no country will receive, let alone contain, him. In facing such a challenge one is, of course, courting social criticism. Although that is not my prerogative, nor my intention here, it is difficult to escape the thrust of this attack on education in general, and on Excellence in particular.

Among the numerous rallying-points, both negative and positive, of the American liberals to whom I previously alluded was a resistance to the technology of modern culture, in the name of a finer and richer cultivation of the mind. Significantly, the fighters of yet another Resistance, one of whom I have already named, were equally set against any encroachment on the mind by the Tyranny of bureaucracy in any form. Cultivation, or the furnishing of the mind—interestingly, an eighteenth-century Scottish phrase adopted by those liberals of only a few decades ago,—was thus contrasted with Tyranny or false authority. The University was seen to stand somewhere at the juncture of education and accommodation, a defender of the principle of what might be called resoluteness with malleability. The sort of liberal voice which I have in mind here is that of Reinhold Neibuhr, a voice heard, for example, in a collection of essays published in 1958 under the title Pious and Secular America. "No educational enterprise," he asserted at that time,

Can completely free itself of that dominant forces of culture. But it is fair to ask whether there has been a sufficient conscious resistance in the universities to the perils of standardization and conformism in a technocratic society; or a sufficiently patient and resolute determination to guard the long-rang ends of humanistic learning against the short-range pressures of a business civilization; or a sufficient imagination in preserving the richness and variety, the breadth and depth of the arts, against the vulgarities of mass communications.

This is the last voice of our Dialogue, now very much between the centuries, and it leads us back to this gathering and to the tribute which we are paying today to excellence. In spite of the fact that the period of Admission has long since been passed by most of us, the question might arise whether it is not timely even now to consider some form of oath to Reason, or to its handmaiden Tough-mindedness, as a precondition of our continuance as a college of scholars. There is, of course, the daunting problem of perjury, or what moral philosophers like to call back-sliding (the Greek Akrasia). What is to hold us to our oaths, particularly in troubled or desperate times? Is it not more judicious perhaps to attend the Academy’s briefing, to enjoy a momentary sense of its high purpose and dignity, and then to bow out—with regrets of course,—so that the mind may find its own way to the market-place?

In answer to these probes, and as a concluding note, I would only suggest that such painful decision-making is both misguided and unnecessary. The focus is wrong, although firmly fixed by our tradition, and the terms badly jumbled. It was the tragedian Aeschylus who, in a fragment which has survived, addressed himself to the oath in such a way as to illuminate our apth at the end of this long, and for you undoubtedly tortuous road. The shifting of terms is suitable, but telling. "It is not the oath that makes us believe the man," he reasoned, "but the man the oath" (Fr. 222/394). I would humbly entrust it to these excellent young scholars, and I hope scholars of Excellence, to unmask the world of that Man.