I’ve begun teaching again; I began drafting this post when the first week of classes was nearly over, and now we are more than halfway through the fall semester. I missed this work a lot. The company of enthusiastic students who are eager to learn is not quite the fountain of youth, but it is bracing in a way that even the company of my most brilliant friends—people whose conversation never fails to convince me that it it is worthwhile to want to know more—can’t quite replicate. There is something especially marvelous about watching students encounter a text for the first time and experiencing the ways that their peers can open that text to them.
Teaching seminars is supposed to be hard. In a lot of ways it is, in the sense that it’s tiring because of the attention required and agonizing when nobody wants to talk. But it’s the way of teaching that comes most naturally to me, probably because I was educated this way when I was young by people who really knew and valued what they were doing. My teachers really wanted us to carry the class on our own, and they insisted that we learn to do that at a pretty young age. Some of them, the really committed ones, even articulated that their dream was to fall asleep in their own class, rendered unnecessary by their own success.
The result of this is that seminars come easily to me, and I’ve been told by people whose judgment I trust that my seminar classes are genuinely great. I’m not sure, however, that this is the same thing as being skilled at teaching seminars. I could not for the life of me teach other people how to do this, because I don’t myself "know” in the sense of having a process that I can explain and break down into components or steps. This is very much an instinctive thing, what Plato would call an ἐμπειρία or “knack,” as opposed to a τέχνη or “art.” There’s a thing I want to convey and I do whatever I need to do to convey it amid the conversation.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t say anything about what I’m doing, because what I’m trying to convey is the most important part of the whole thing, the make-or-break element in any kind of teaching. Good lecturers do it just as much as good seminar teachers, because without it their lectures would be worthless. What’s necessary to convey is love of the thing you’re teaching. Your own joy needs to be palpable and visible in the course of whatever you’re doing to teach, because in the end that’s what you’re trying to show to your students. You are trying to show that something is beautiful, is lovable, is potentially something worth devoting your life to. It isn’t that you’re trying to make them fall in love with it themselves; that’s something that will happen or not. You don’t have much control over it and it would be silly to judge your success by that metric. No, what you’re trying to convey is that something can be loved with a ridiculous, embarrassing, head-over-heels kind of love.
This, incidentally, is what makes Plato’s Symposium the greatest text on education ever written. Plato knows what we’re really about here; he knows that philosophy is the love for wisdom, the yearning after wisdom by those who do not have it. The most important message of the Symposium is about who can be a teacher, because we tend to think that the best teachers are those who were the best students. Plato is wiser than this, because in the Symposium the greatest teacher is also the worst student. Socrates has just given a speech on love in which he conveys the wisdom of Diotima that seems to take in, integrate, and transcend all the speeches that have come before. It’s a marvelous conclusion, but it’s not actually the conclusion of the dialogue. Just as Socrates finishes, in storms Alcibiades, a drunk and messy ex-boyfriend whose obsession with Socrates has quite possibly ruined his life. After attempting to flirt with Agathon, the honoree of the evening, he notices Socrates and absolutely loses his mind. Pausanias attempts to integrate him into the evening’s activity (giving speeches on Love), but all he can talk about is Socrates, so that becomes the subject of his speech. In telling us about Socrates, he shows us better than anyone what makes Socrates so compelling; he knows, better than we ourselves do, why we keep reading these dialogues.
Perhaps the best teacher of all would be someone who is wise, but I have not yet met a wise teacher and I have no illusions about my own likelihood of becoming such a person. But the example of Alcibiades shows us that we need not actually be wise to teach well; we don’t even need to be particularly good students. Teaching and learning are a single activity—they must be, or else they could not be the basis for friendship—but that’s not because being good at one makes you good at the other. It’s because this unity lies in all of us, teachers and students, beholding something beautiful together and, through dialectic, drawing one another toward it and toward the Beauty that is itself of itself with itself, in which all of us partake and to which we long to return. This is what teaching has to be; the rest is details that we can sort out in due time.
This is one of your best pieces of writing.