(gentle music) - Howard, you asked me an interesting question a moment ago.

That is, why is it difficult to talk to people?

Because I was explaining how I took up diving in order to find an activity that I can do with my wife for the rest of our lives.

The nice thing about diving is you don't have to talk to the person.

You're underwater looking at beautiful things and sharing.

And there's a kind of oneness in that.

But I'd like to return to that question in the following way.

And maybe I'll draw upon the Phaedrus.

The opening of that dialogue is very famous.

Socrates says to his friend, Phaedrus, where are you coming from and where are you going?

And that seems to me like a good opening question for anyone, even a stranger, to get a conversation going.

So where are you coming from?

What brought you to the college?

And where are you going?

- Well, on the question of why it's difficult to talk to someone, since we were talking about Henry IV, part one, because Hal says at one point, now I've learned to talk to everyone in his own language.

And so I think the real question is how do you get out of your own language into another's to be able to talk to him?

Because it seems to me increasingly in the work I do, both here at the college and out in the world, the fundamental skill that's necessary is listening.

And you can't talk to anyone, what I saw so frequently, both with me and my colleagues and students here.

That's strange being in this room.

I think I've spent 40 years of my life in this room.

- This is where we do our senior orals, yeah.

- I know.

Yeah, when I was a senior, just to shift off, I had my senior oral room, the old room 24.

- In McDowell.

- In McDowell, yeah.

- The famous 24.

- The famous room 24, right.

And it's interesting that listening is, it's so easy to superimpose, turn what you hear into a corollary of yourself.

And so somehow you end up, you think you're talking to another person, but you end up talking to yourself.

And very frequently, I think Socrates is accused of talking to himself.

I mean, you know?

By Thrasymachus, by people who were resistant.

- Well, you said to me a moment ago, you think Socrates does not listen well.

- No, I think he's a terrible listener.

- Really?

- Yeah, I don't think he's very open.

I mean, Plato must have been an extraordinary listener to catch the nuances.

- Where do you think that comes across best in the dialogues?

Are there any moments jump out at you where you say, ah, there's a failure of Socrates to really listen to this person?

- Well, I think that when Mino exasperated, you know, says he's a torpedo fish, or when Callicles says, you know, you're tricking us.

You know, you're not being straight.

You shift from one to the other.

And so certainly here at the college, the temptation has been to do a more dramatized interpretation of the sequence through a dialogue.

And that always troubled me, I think.

You know, I mean, I like Klein a great deal, but I think that the sort of dramatization sort of lets Socrates off scot-free.

The work I do outside the college, of course, is very much on what's involved in a discussion.

And I wrote a piece recently that I don't think I will publish.

In the form that it's in, it's called Beyond Socratic Seminar.

And it's subtitled Socratic Seminar, An Oxymoron on the Loose.

- Interesting.

- Yeah, you know, in other words, why Socrates becomes the image of something called a discussion or listening to another.

And it's always, of course, I would think Hal is a better image.

In order to turn to be a king, in this world, I mean, in a post-Richard II world, where you have a sort of divine justification, or imagine you do, where you have to sort of reconstruct the sense of legitimacy, that you really need to be attentive to really listening to where other people are.

- Yeah, Hal has a mentor, though, in Falstaff.

- Oh, you think he does?

- Yes, I think so.

I mean, do you need that?

I mean, do you need someone to get you into that world?

Someone that you can be a friend with, and then that opens the doors to everything.

- Well, maybe temporarily.

I mean, when Falstaff comes in, I'm sorry to shift this off from the futurist onto, because if you're an actor, you do like- - I have a great interest in Hal, and more so in Falstaff.

- But when Falstaff, when they first see, or in exchange with one another, and what is it, Falstaff asks Hal, what time of day is it?

And Hal responds, what do you have to do with time of day?

And then Falstaff goes into how he is minion of the moon, a counterfeiter, essentially, the moon being the goddess of counterfeiters.

And then at the end, that whole Hotspur scene about counterfeiting.

And you sort of wonder, is counterfeiting important?

- To listening?

- To listening, yeah.

And I'm wondering, I'm not sure, maybe at some point he had to learn something from Falstaff, but what it is, I'm not sure.

Perhaps it is to be an actor.

- Or to improvise.

- Possibly, yeah.

- I mean, one thing that they teach you when you're trying to be an actor is how to listen.

Because it's easy not to, because you have a script.

So you memorize your lines, and then you know what you're supposed to say when you're supposed to say it.

And I wonder if that has something to do with the problem you're talking about.

- I think it does.

I mean, what the difference is between hearing.

- People lead scripted lives.

- That's right.

- To really listen to someone who can surprise you at any time with something unexpected, maybe that's what listening is.

- Yeah, I think that's the problem that you find brought a lot of people to the college.

You know, I think that dissatisfaction with the kind of education that they had had.

- Scripted.

- Well, their past had been, they're there as a listener.

And there's always someone who's the authority of sort of the judge of legitimacy.

And so, do you have a voice?

And so the question of voice, I think, and that's the question, I think that's always the case in Socrates, is he speaking for another?

- You mean for Plato?

- No, no, for Socrates.

Is he putting words into another person's mouth?

- Well, it seems to me that, to get back to Hal for a moment, that Hal has this ability to make people forget that he's the next king.

That he's just one of them.

He can play that part very well.

- Right, and it's a part that he earns.

I mean, except when, again, he has to speak, it's the problem.

You get three sort of views of language with Glendower, Hotspur, and Hal, and they're very, very different.

And Hotspur, in some sense, is almost, he is the son of Henry IV.

I mean, he's a complete nominalist who feels he can bring the world into existence through language.

He can change the course of the river.

There's nothing natural, right?

And Glendower, of course, is so embedded with the spirits that he's a kind of Richard II, but writ large, written for the whole world, and Hal's got to sort of work in between those two.

And I guess.

- Yeah, I wanted to ask you in a moment more about that river, but, so do you think, again, with Hal in mind or with Socrates in mind, that to listen well requires somehow giving up who you are in order to be the other?

- No, I think you have to become incredibly aware of who you are, right?

Because you have to block yourself from imposing yourself on another when you imagine that you're not.

That's what happens so much in our classes, of course, you know, and there's always that danger.

I mean, one of the, is that if the tutor is going to be the tutor and not professorial and open the floor to students as peers in many ways, then I think that the tutor must be very, very careful to be able to judge when people are or are not listening to one another, when they're simply listening to themselves.

- How did you learn how to do that?

- To listen?

I'm not.

I'm a terrible listener.

(laughs) I'm really a terrible listener.

And I know some of the programs, I'm not as bad as some of the people I've met, but I'm very bad.

When I'm involved with a group and in a seminar of some sense, then I can, I have to listen, and I do, because I have to listen to what is really so much between the lines.

But the real issue of being able to listen, I think previously requires being able to genuinely question yourself.

And to notice those things that you are imposing one way or the other.

And probably having some practice as an actor trains you for that in a way.

I can see that.

I mean, I think we should, you know, there's always a question of whether we should have one of the arts.

It would be interesting if everyone had to do some performance.

Do some performance.

- Well, I'll tell you one thing.

I just saw a production of Hamlet, which was extraordinary.

One of the reasons why it was extraordinary, and I found this out afterwards, was the director would tell the performers privately before curtain to do a certain scene, a certain line a little differently than they had previously done it.

So, and the other actors would have to respond to this on the spot, not knowing what was coming up.

So the performance was always, in that sense, like a rehearsal.

You never knew what could happen.

And when that's the case, you really have to listen and bravely be prepared to respond to anything.

And the other effect that that had was it slowed things down a little bit.

And you would think that would be bad in a stage production, but it wasn't.

It just created this incredible sort of tension in the moment where you think anything can happen.

- Yeah, and I think our class is here.

We were talking about that they're not scripted, that they're incredibly unpredictable.

I mean, you can take control, but if you want it to happen in a genuine way, it has to be unpredictable.

- But then there's also this element of time that you have to be willing to, you know, not feel rushed to fill the silence just for the sake of doing it.

- You have to live with it.

- I mean, listening doesn't imply silence, does it?

- Absolutely, and you have to hear what is not said.

You have to begin to understand who is about to speak because you, as a faculty member here, you really are a bridge.

I mean, you have a number of roles, but one of them is to be a bridge.

And you're really trying to sense who it is in the room who needs your help because we're not gonna call on somebody.

We're not gonna say, you know, Lewis, what did you do?

And so you have to find other modes of being attentive to, it's like in live, and that's, you know, how things go into motion.

You know, they have this infinite solicitation toward motion and that's what happens when someone's about to speak.

You know, it's like that first step into motion when it's, you know, finally Mv squared, you know, and you're always being attentive to that.

And it's interesting that we're talking about things at the college.

We're also talking about the other work I do that someone has asked us to do work with people in special forces as part of their training.

- Oh, really?

- Yeah, because when they're in the midst of whatever mission they have, everything is completely uncertain and unpredictable as well as rank, you know, and so everybody has to respond to take on leadership and know when you should do that.

And so that would be an interesting thing to do.

We're supposed to do a workshop out in UNLV.

- With book seminars or?

- Well, with a touchdowns program, and supposed to do one at UNLV for people who manage crises, you know, but it's the same thing that you're bringing up in terms of listening, right?

That you've got to both appreciate the silence, you know, and it was very, very interesting.

I mean, some people are very uncomfortable with silence.

I'm not particularly comfortable with it, but I know in terms of what I do, both at the college and here, that how many times in a seminar have you asked the opening question and to be greeted by six seconds of silence?

Six seconds of silence is infinite.

It's an infinitude of time.

- Where do you think that comes from?

Is it a cultural thing with us as Americans?

- Oh, I think in part it's cultural, but in part, I think there's just- - We feel that we have to just fill the voids all the time with something there?

- Yeah, when people are very, very uneasy when nothing is happening, and they don't understand that sometimes- - Reminds me of Pascal, too.

- Right.

- Most of human misery is traceable to the fact that someone- - Chasing rabbits.

- You can't sit alone with yourself in your room.

- Yeah, right.

- There has to be a kind of busyness going on.

But you know, another place this comes up is in our math program, which I know you've done a lot of thinking about, but when a student goes to the board, in a way, they have a script.

Because they know what they're going to demonstrate, and they probably prepare it a little bit.

But then you could ask a question, and suddenly the script sort of disappears, and you have to start improvising, or saying what you're doing.

Or just being at the board changes your perspective on anything.

It's very different from being on a paper in a book.

- Yeah, it's very present for us here in mathematics.

It's most for the undergraduates.

I mean, I think the GI does not face this problem, but every undergraduate we have who comes in is carrying a history of habits, having to do with what they think of themselves in terms of mathematics.

You know, are they good at it, or are they not good at it?

And it really comes to the surface in the beginning of the junior year.

- When they're doing calculus, Newton and the like.

- Right, right.

And so I remember once starting a junior math tutorial, knowing that within weeks the class is going to fragment, to try to avoid that fragmentation.

And so you have some people who are convinced that they can't do it, and others who are convinced that, well, they've been told that they're wonderful at it.

And so I asked the class who here was told that they were very good at mathematics.

Three or four raised their hands.

And I said, tell us what it's like from the inside.

(laughing) And so they started talking about how yes, they were very, very good at mathematics, but they were very bad at other things.

You know?

And especially that their ability in mathematics often set a model for what they would expect for themselves in non-mathematical realms, toward people and other things, and that it was terrifically difficult, you know?

And suddenly it was all out on the table, so that the people who were supposedly not good at mathematics were now able to talk about why they weren't good at mathematics.

You know, that we weren't gonna have the fear at the board.

Because I think it's always the problem in our classes, and that's one of the beauties of the college, I think, is, and also the GI, so many people have said, you know, I really changed my mind about what I can do, what I'm like, you know, through some class that they had.

Often it happens in the GI math, math tutorial, that they'll say, you know, I was never able to do it, and now suddenly I feel different about myself, you know?

And I recommend that you have your wife attend the GI math tutorial.

You know, something to talk to her about, you know?

- Well, speaking of that again, I mean, you know, I sometimes wonder if mathematics is the one area where a group of people from whatever background can find a true common ground and experience oneness of mind as they're doing, say, a Euclid demonstration or calculus, because it's not so much a matter of your differences and your feelings and your opinions.

I mean, it has a kind of sort of absoluteness and purity that is beautiful and that allows you to disappear into the work that other things don't.

Do you think that's right?

- I'm not sure.

I think they can have a oneness of mind on other things.

- Has that, have you had- - Yes, I mean, I don't think that, yeah, and I don't think it, I wouldn't push the mathematics too much.

I mean, I think that there's a sense of, you know, what you're saying, the kind of atemporal dimension to the mathematics.

And I think that, that- - Pure reason.

- Yeah, I understand.

I'm not a big pure reason person.

(laughs) I mean, in one sense, I'm a very big pure reason person.

I mean, because I think the one author that was always on my mind here was of course the critique of pure reason, you know?

And are we all neo-Kantians?

I mean, do we all believe that we are, we emerge at birth with a language and the language contains categories and that shapes our view of the world.

And the question is just that some of the categories or none of the categories are a priori.

And I think I wrote my senior essay.

I think I told you that I wrote my senior essay on, you know, how Kant, how there can always be an a priori, but the a priori changes over time.

You know, in other words, so Kant and Hegel, how do you get them together?

That, and I think I'm still, I mean, I've always been on that issue about, you know, how do you get conceptual change?

How the world, how does the world change?

And yet how do we deal with the fact that we have systems of beliefs and faiths and whatever?

And it's precisely those things that are invisible to us.

I mean, Mill said it's kind of the second nature that becomes first nature to us, you know, the socially aspects of social dimensions that I think is a great deal of the importance of the college and having to sort of think through who we are and where we came from.

The way you opened the feed, I mean, where'd you come from?

Well, I come from, you know, thousands of years of history and tradition, you know, whether I lived for those 3,000 years and certainly coming out of a certain environment that is filled with books and expectations and habits that I've got to know how to deal with those and how to make those visible so that I'm not just, you know, sort of responding to my own habitual attitudes, which I don't even know, yeah.

- One can see that even in mathematics.

- Absolutely.

- Because you have, say, 2,000 years of Ptolemy.

- Yes, right.

Now, when I left high school, I left early.

I needed to get out as quickly as possible and I was supposed to be very, very good at mathematics.

So I went to a place where a very important mathematician was teaching.

And when I was there, I was in a class with six kids, six other students with him, and suddenly I realized that, yes, I could understand it, but I was not creative in mathematics.

This was not what I was gonna do.

So I left.

And so I had had a lot of mathematics when I came here, because I went back again.

When I came here, I had a great deal of mathematics.

And certainly, Euclid, from the perspective of mathematics, is bad mathematics.

You know, it's, anyone writing Euclid now would, you know, lose their professional credentials, you know?

And so it becomes very interesting to look at Euclid - You mean some of the definitions and- - Well, just the whole structure.

- The axiomatic structure, yeah.

- I mean, it's so very different from what Hilbert created.

Hilbert is mathematics, you know, the model of mathematics, not Euclid.

- So I also was very good in math coming to the college.

But one thing I learned here, which you just mentioned, is that the Euclid can be approached as a story.

That is, it's not this necessitated machine.

That is, it's telling a story.

It has a kind of plot, has characters, themes.

And then, and that really helps a lot with students who, as you were saying, might feel themselves to be, you know, the poetic types, not the math types.

Then they read it as a book.

- Right, that's what they should be doing.

It should be a text, in other words.

And I think that it's interesting that the college began as, I don't know if I should say as an attack on, or certainly taking a serious distance from the departmentalization of knowledge.

You know, so that there was mathematics, there was physics, there was literature.

And even though we have tutorials, you know, named that, you know, so we have a mathematics tutorial.

Nonetheless, the mathematics is not anything that I would have done majoring in mathematics somewhere, or you, you know, doing mathematics.

It's all mathematics that is both the source of our current mathematics, and yet radically different, with a very different perspective.

And what's interesting is that, it's always been interesting to me that sometimes tutors, my colleagues, whenever I'm archonning a math, I try to get them not to do this, because, except when they ask students to do alternate proofs.

I mean, there are no alternate proofs in Euclid.

The question is, when do you first see an alternate proof?

And what's interesting is that in the introduction to the phenomenology, Hale's Phenomenology of Mind, he talks about the difference between philosophy and mathematics.

And in mathematics, you start in a certain place, and you have a path, and you get to a goal.

And every path is equal to every other path, in a sense, as long as you get to the goal.

Whereas in philosophy, the getting there is itself the important thing, you know, as part of the there that you're getting.

I believe that Euclid was more like what Hegel says about philosophy, than what he says about mathematics.

And for us, certainly, the way there is irrelevant.

For us, meaning modern mathematics.

I mean, one way can be better, can be simpler, can be more beautiful, but what you want to do is get to point B.

- So that sounds like everything tends towards being philosophy.

Whereas I would have said everything tends towards being like literature, a story.

- Well, I think that's true, because it's almost- - Including Hegel.

- Yeah, and then I think that if you look at a Euclidean proof, each proof is like a poem.

You know, in other words, there's no substitutability on propositions, even though they have these little brackets in the margins, which is probably something Theano and Alexandria did.

You know, in other words, what the reference was.

But in other words, the way there and what you see when you're there are connected.

And I think for Hegel, that's the case, that it should be read more the way we read a poem, that the pieces are inseparable.

(soothing music) (soft rhythmic music)