Wielding the Philosopher's Stone
By Ted Knight '97 and John Buettner '89
What is the liberal arts experience without philosophy?
For more than two decades, philosophy professor Robert Anderson has been helping Washington College students relate the ancient insights of Greek philosophers to modern times. His honors class, "Plato: Love, Happiness and Immortality," gets to the heart of what makes us human.
Virtue, as we have seen, consists of two kinds, intellectual virtue and moral virtue. Intellectual virtue or excellence owes its origin and development chiefly to teaching, and for that reason, requires experience and time."
-Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II
The Symposium
It's 12:25 p.m. Wednesday. The general bustle in William Smith Hall begins as students change classes. In a small seminar room on the first floor, students arrive, one by one, and assemble around a table. They could be shoveling food into their mouths in the dining hall, but today they have been invited to a drinking party instead.
In Bill Smith Hall?
Of course, the students will not really be drinking. You see, this is not a fraternity party, this is a philosophy class, and the students are reading Plato's Symposium.
"Can one find happiness if you are ugly, if you have 'funny looks'? Can the beauty of the soul still shine through despite misfortune?
"In ancient Greek, symposium means 'drinking party'," explains Dr. Robert Anderson, professor of philosophy. The announcement produces several grins and chuckles around the classroom.
But the material these students are reading is actually extraordinarily complex, consisting of some of the most difficult concepts in Plato's work. Who would have thought that some of the most searching questions about life, love and happiness might be discussed at a ribald drinking party?
Anderson begins to lead the class through difficult portions of the text with simple, direct questions that have profound implications, addressing members of the class respectfully by "Mr." or "Ms." followed by their last name-a trademark of his teaching style.
"Can one find happiness if you are ugly, if you have 'funny looks'? Can the beauty of the soul still shine through despite misfortune? Mr. Cioni?"
His response generates more fuel for discussion, and Anderson silently motions for other students to add their thoughts with a simple, encouraging nod in their direction. As the conversation develops, Anderson gently steers the course through the ever-expanding labyrinth that is Plato. With each carefully directed question he asks, the intensity of the discussion builds. Looking around at the faces in the room, there is not a trace of the distracted and drowsy indifference one might expect to see in a typical lecture hall. These students are focused, absorbed, compelled.
"Is Alcibiades better or worse for meeting Socrates? Ms. Ridolfi?"
When the conclusion about the issue seems uncertain, Anderson shifts gears entirely.
"Do you blame Alcibiades for running from Socrates?" he asks with a grin. "How many of you would want to be interrogated by Socrates? I know I wouldn't. I'd be on the next plane out of Baltimore!"
"Yes. Philosophy absolutely answers the question 'What does it mean to be happy?'
No other discipline can answer it the way philosophy can."
Using his characteristic animated style, he adds humor to the intensity, releasing the pressure valve of the discussion and drawing students further into the conversation by making the atmosphere comfortable and informal.
This is representative of the incredible dynamic of the average Anderson class, which is, in fact, anything but average. Alumni remember small details from his classes, such as his chalkboard model for Descartes' empirical observer, a character who invariably was depicted with an enormous nose. There is something undeniably special about being a part of any of Anderson's courses. Perhaps that is why for nearly 24 years, Washington College students have sought out his courses and seminars.
"I'm not a philosophy major, and I don't need this course for distribution. I just really enjoy taking classes with Dr. Anderson," one student in the Plato class tells us.
"I get the students who don't mind a hard teacher and who don't mind reading very difficult books," Anderson says. "Over the years, I have taught a really strong nucleus of people who are really great students."
Anderson's unique teaching style, sense of humor and approach to difficult original texts embody what is special and essential about the small liberal arts classroom at Washington College.
The Allegory of the Cave
Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, Anderson at first was not inclined to follow a philosophical life. In fact, it was probably the last thing on his mind.
"I began life very much as an anti-intellectual. In the working-class neighborhood where I grew up, intellectuals were regarded as geeks, and the only thing I cared about was playing ball. I didn't want to be a geek."
Later, after finishing high school, he entered Drexel University with the intent of becoming an engineer, a field that seemed practical and useful.
"I flunked out and retreated to the liberal arts," he says. He then went on to sample a number of majors at Temple University before taking a philosophy course. He admits that his first philosophy class had the dullest of teachers, but when he took his next course, a course on Plato with Temple professor Victor Gourevitch, he reached a turning point for his whole life.
Crawling out of the cave, Anderson first realized that he had been "doing philosophy all along without knowing it." Finally, studying with a brilliant teacher, he found himself thrust into the illuminating rays of philosophy.
The World Stood on Its Head
"Apply this comparison, then, to the soul. When its gaze is fixed upon an object illuminated by truth and reality, the soul gains understanding and knowledge and is manifestly in possession of intelligence. But when it looks toward that twilight world of things that come into existence and pass away, its sight is dim and it has only opinions and beliefs which shift to and fro."
-Plato, Republic, Book VI
"The first time that I read Plato, I got nothing out of it," says Anderson. But studying under Professor Gourevitch changed that initial reaction.
"I realized the absolute literary control that Plato had," he says. "Plato had absolute mastery of the literary form and every word mattered."
But understanding the multiple levels of meaning in Plato required a teacher. The profound insights and meanings of Platonic dialogues were not immediately obvious to the student. That was a lesson in and of itself about the essential nature of studying philosophy.
"I really don't think that you can learn philosophy on your own without a teacher," he says. "Even a dialogue such as the Euthyphro has many levels of meaning. Particularly with Plato, you need a teacher to penetrate all the inner depths of his dialogues."
Teaching and having a teacher are essential to the discipline of philosophy-there is no way the student will be able to probe all the depths of meaning on his or her own. Victor Gourevitch was that teacher for Anderson, a legacy in teaching that he has given in return to Washington College.
"You will need a teacher and, if you continue studying philosophy, you will have to seek out teachers for the gems of wisdom that are often found only below the surface."
Music of the Spheres
A life of quiet contemplation might characterize most philosophers, but it is not a life without passions. For Anderson, these passions include baseball, raquetball and music. The latter subject, in particular, he discusses with zest.
"I am a passionate fan of music," says Anderson. "Music is mathematical. It harmonizes the soul, stretches the mind!"
Anderson began listening exclusively to classical music early in his college years, and spent his youth absorbed in Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Beethoven and Bach. Later, he discovered Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and was blown away by the intensity of their music. He first purchased Coltrane's "Ascension," unaware that the album was widely regarded as Coltrane's most complex and difficult work to digest and appreciate. Starting off with this advanced jazz material, Anderson developed an ear for complex and intricate contemporary music.
"Music should always be in the foreground, never in the background to something else you are doing," he says. Listening to music is an activity in and of itself, a divine madness and desire for the beauty and complexity hidden in nature.
Anderson also has developed an appreciation for rock music in the last several years, explaining that he missed out on much of it in college when he was absorbed in classical music. His favorites include Phish, the Allman Brothers and David Bowie. He occasionally trades new music suggestions with students.
"Many rock groups have the mathematical dimension essential to all great music," he says.
Anderson has been an avid baseball fan since his youth. His favorite figure in baseball history was a man named Branch Rickey. Rickey developed the farm system for baseball, allowing even the worst teams to slowly cultivate talent through their minor league affiliate clubs. He enjoys "adopting" bad teams, rooting for them as they slowly build their club through the farm system, then moving on to root for a new mediocre team after the previous one achieves success. In between the baseball season, teaching and ongoing research on Plato and Emmanuel Levinas, he fits in racquetball with fellow philosopher and Washington College professor, Dr. Kevin Brien.
"It is all part of the old Greek ideal and the balance between music and gymnastics. Music is as emotional as it is mathematical and helps to harmonize the whole person."
Eudaimonia
Philosophy and Phish? They may be hard to reconcile for most people, but for a philosopher like Anderson, they are the essential complements for a happy life, one in which contemplation is an essential quality of being human.
Philosophy is still difficult to learn. The questions run ever deeper and the students return year after year to drink long draughts from its deep well. Philosophy does pose many profound questions, but does it reach answers?
"Yes. Philosophy absolutely answers the question 'What does it mean to be happy?'" he says with no hesitation. "No other discipline can answer it the way philosophy can."
While Anderson attended graduate school at Yale, he was struck most by the brilliance of his peers, and found himself in an atmosphere where students regularly gathered outside the classroom to discuss these basic questions about happiness, virtue and living well. Ultimately, this is still the purpose of philosophy-to answer such fundamental questions as "What does it mean to be good?" and "How can I learn to live well and do well?"
Anderson describes himself as Aristotelian in ethics and Platonic in metaphysics.
"I call myself an Aristotelian because that is an ethic that somebody who is not Socrates can live by," he says. The concept is known as eudaimoia in ancient Greek, a term loosely translated as happiness but which has more to do with living and practicing a good life, of good habits that enrich the person as a whole. It does not merely mean being in a "happy" state. Happiness is "flourishing self-actualization," according to Anderson.
"Philosophy enables one to discover oneself, to learn who one really is," he says, but the questioning inspired by the Socratic dialogues does not stop at the self, and it is a passion for Plato's metaphysics that engrosses his intellect and drives his life-long pursuit of the deeper insights of Plato.
"There has never been a satisfactory account of Plato's theory of ideas," he observes. "It is my goal to fathom the depths of his theory. Like Bach is to music, Plato is the highest that philosophy has attained.
His book on Plato's Theatetus, more than 30 years in the making, is now being reviewed for publication.
"Plato is brilliant, scintillating, but 90 percent of philosophers have only a superficial understanding of his theory of ideas," he says. "It is the other 10 percent that I am striving to be part of and to which I devote my research."
"So the philosopher, with his passion for wisdom, will be one who desires all wisdom, not only some part of it."
-Plato, Republic, Book V
Ted Knight '97 and John Buettner '89, staffers in the college relations office, were both philosophy majors whose lives were profoundly influenced by Professor Robert Anderson. Knight, the College's webmaster, gave up a corporate position to advance his alma mater's web presence, and Buettner, the College's media associate, left commercial advertising for the opportunity to promote the liberal arts and sciences.
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