The Wabash Commentary

Plato forever cast Socrates as a pursuer of virtuous living and truth. If the College still aims to educate men so they become not merely smart sophists but principled statesmen, let it look no further than a Platonist. The Wabash Commentary’s Jacob Stump sat down last month for an exclusive talk with Platonist and recently tenure-tracked philosophy professor Mark Brouwer, and what follows is the first interview given by Professor Brouwer to a student publication since his coming to Wabash in 2003. Can true philosophers believe in God? Are Plato and Christianity compatible? Must gentlemen always follow the law? Is Wabash the 12th best school in the nation? We didn’t know – we asked a Platonist.  

Mark Brouwer:  Woah. The first would have to be my grandmother, a public educator for her whole life. She went to college in the thirties, so she was in some sense a liberated woman way before her time. She had a very demanding and somewhat stern personality. I think my own teaching style certainly follows in her footsteps. In some sense I discovered my love of philosophy at her kitchen table. I kept my grandparents up until three o’clock in the morning, talking about justice.

Also, my dissertation director had an enormous influence on me – enormous. 

TWC: In Paris?

MB: No, in Pittsburgh, at Duquesne University. Even to the point of my mannerisms and my teaching style. If people were to sit in on one of his classes, they would say, “Oh, that’s where Brouwer gets all that stuff!” Unlike many graduate students, as a teaching assistant I spent a long time sitting in on undergrad courses with my mentor, even though his primary role was to teach me to do Platonism and to be a scholar. Clearly everything I understand and believe about Plato is stuff he already thought. 

TWC: And you admit that? You don’t pretend originality?

MB: No, no. He may not know he’s thought it, but he has. 

TWC: What about the writers or thinkers whose books inspired you? 

MB: Oh, Dostoevsky comes right up. And Plato is too obvious. I clearly do consider myself a Platonist. I think that Plato is right about most everything. 

TWC: What does that mean, that you consider yourself a Platonist?

MB: It means I actually believe Plato, as distinct from just being a Plato scholar. 

TWC: And when you say you believe Plato, do you mean that you think what Plato writes is true, that his arguments are sound, or…

MB: It’s true.  The hard part is figuring out what is true.  Still, whatever it is, I’m pretty sure Plato got it just right.  The Socratic enterprise is constant vigilance in not assuming we have it.

TWC: Do you, then, agree with Dante putting Plato in the first circle of Hell?

MB: [Laughing] Why would I want to put Plato in the first circle of Hell? 

TWC: That is a different question. Do you agree with Dante’s placement? Or, do you think Plato’s, what I thought of as very figurative and poetic, even bizarre views of the afterlife are…

MB: Fiction. Complete fabrication. It’s a ruse. I don’t think Plato believes in the afterlife. 

TWC: So you believe in what Plato believes of Plato?

MB: Yes, that’s the whole thing. I consider myself a Platonist, but only I know what Plato actually thinks. It’s an interesting little game I have, and I’ve thought a lot about it. The way I read Plato is as if it were, quite frankly, divine revelation. That there is something true in it, but we just can’t quite put our finger on it. And so I have to be very vigilant with myself, because the trap is that maybe I am wrong about what is true, and so I am forcing Plato to say something that I think is true.

With regard to Dante placing Plato in Hell, it’s very hard to get a Christology out of Plato. In fact, it may be impossible, even as much as I want Plato to be deeply consistent with Catholic teaching and Christianity more generally. However, I don’t think there’s anything inconsistent.

TWC: In light, then, of your desire to unite Plato and Catholicism, how do you reconcile Plato’s view of the separation between soul and body – such that the body is merely a vessel to the soul –and the Church’s teaching that the body is equally as important as the soul, sharing in the dignity of the image of God and to be reunited with the soul upon the raising of the dead?

MB: It’s very clear to me in my reading of the Phaedo that Plato does think the body is in some sense a vessel and subordinate to the soul. Certainly subordinate, and certainly not as important. That I think Plato does believe, but doesn’t everybody believe that? I thought that was just true. 

TWC: Well, with the Catholic Church teaching that the body is the temple of the spirit…

MB: Yes, it’s necessary, it is certainly necessary, but I think Plato agrees that the body is necessary for the soul, but not as important. Do Catholics really have to believe the body is just as important as the soul? Here is my caveat for all things Catholic. When I do not know, I can always say this: the Church teaching is true. I may hold views that are false without knowing they are false, but until I am convinced of their falsehood, I am just going to continue believing them. 

TWC: Let’s leave Plato aside, but still retain Christianity. In Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s revealing fictional account of the late University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, Bellow writes that “no true philosopher could believe in God” – that is, in order to be a philosopher, you must be an atheist. What do you think?

MB: I am quite confident that is what Bloom thought. Now, did Leo Strauss, Bloom’s mentor, think that? Strauss is smart, and Strauss saw that theology and philosophy were very, to say the least, odd bedfellows. I was for years very comfortable with the quote you read from Ravelstein, that philosophy is basically atheistic, and, if you happen to believe in God, you do that on your own time. For years I said this. I’m a Christian in private life, and in my teaching life I’m an atheist. I have only recently begun to bring this into question, but I think still that for most practical purposes it might as well be true. There is just no reason for my religious faith to enter necessarily into the classroom. It does so only as a biographical detail about my own life. I don’t hesitate to tell my students about my Christian beliefs, because I think it is sometimes helpful for them to know something about me. But I don’t tell them that because I think it is important to know about Plato. 

On the merely philosophical level, the banal way of saying the question is, ‘Does Socratic commitment to questioning demand of us that we question God? Do we question the existence of God through Socratic questioning?” And I think Plato’s answer in a very direct way is “No.” What God means is that there is a True, a True and Eternal Thing that cannot be questioned, and that you either must believe in this or questioning becomes impossible. This is my current stance. This is why I don’t think, back to Ravelstein, that philosophy and theology are at odds – because I think that philosophy, if it is understood as this constant questioning and searching, is grounded upon a transcendental commitment. 

TWC: An assumption of God. 

MB:  Yes, but Plato doesn’t call it “God” exactly. He calls it “The Good”, but it’s effectively the same thing. It’s the truth beyond being – literally. But Plato never claims, contra-Aquinas, to know that God is real or God is truth; rather, it’s just an opinion, a true opinion, perhaps: a true opinion that is necessary for the possibility of philosophizing, that if you want to engage in this philosophic enterprise, you have to believe in Truth, and if you don’t, then you might as well give up. 

TWC: So no capital-T Truth without God?

MB: Well, at the very least, Truth and God are consistent. Certainly Plato’s conception of Truth is deeply consistent with a Christian notion of God. Whether Plato saw it as God is to me not really the issue. Dante can worry about that. 

TWC: Two weeks ago, the Crawfordsville Assistant Chief of Police Hal Utterback was quoted in the Bachelor as having said, “A gentleman never breaks the law.” What do you think? 

MB: That’s preposterous. It can’t be true. I read that. Not that students should break the law, because maybe outside of the realm of higher education the law is an orthodoxy to which we all should sort of bow down. So, I think it’s important that Crawfordsvillians hold their chief of police in a certain respect and obey the law. But my answer to this depends upon a pretty hard and fast distinction between life – real world of living – and liberal education, which, by the way, the Gentleman’s Rule is designed to further. The purpose of the Gentleman’s Rule in my mind is to further a liberal education. 

TWC: It’s not for real world manners?

MB: Certainly not. It is for the sake of liberal education, for academic honesty, real inquiry, forthrightness, and courage, which is required in this kind of enterprise. Gentlemen follow the law just sort of by accident – not because it is the law, but it just happens that is what they do. I do not think gentlemen should break the law on purpose, either. But it might happen that, through their commitment to critical thinking and genuine liberal education, they would come to question laws. Indeed, I would hope they would come to question laws. 

TWC: Does what you’re saying, then, this excusing gentlemen from a strict abiding of the law, point toward a Nietzchean ubermensch? 

MB: Good question. It’s the right question to ask. The answer has to be no. The Nietzschean possibility is one that liberal education can’t avoid. Let me just briefly explain a little bit more about that. To me, the key to political life, actual political life, is that it will always rest on some concrete decision. And decisions are necessarily the end of any inquiry. Anytime you render a decision and go act, you have stopped thinking about what you should do, and that is just necessary in political life. You can’t not live that way, but the goal of liberal education – per impossible, by the way – is to not act, is to not decide, and to continue inquiring ad infinitum. There is never a time when we ask our students finally to come down by saying, “Do you agree or not?” It doesn’t matter. You can just sort of stay forever agnostic, and that is part of the goal of this place. You are free from the political exigencies of real life. That to me is very important. So now we’re back to this issue of why the Gentleman’s Rule must pass through this Nietzchean phase. It’s important for adolescents to discover there might not be any higher order, and they might be utterly free to do whatever the hell they want in this Nietzchean sense. 

TWC: And not, you mean, just inside these metaphorical Wabash walls, but also once they leave the College?

MB: But that would become a decision. While at Wabash, it ought to be a possibility. It could be that there is no higher law, and that I am ultimately free to create law as I see fit. But I would hope that students would not leave here with that as their ultimate commitment, because it strikes me as deeply adolescent – it’s what young men always think of. It’s just that Nietzsche, in addition to being a fantastic writer, was also writing in a time in which the real possibility of the annihilation of genuine truths was, well, a real possibility. It was very conceivable for Nietzsche to imagine a world without meaning, without purpose, without truth – but I want no part of that world. I don’t think you should either. I don’t think any sensible person would look that world in the face and say, “That looks fun.” They would say, “That looks disastrous.” 

TWC: Let’s change gears. Is Wabash the 12th best school in the nation? 

MB: Who says it’s the 12th best school in the nation?

TWC: Forbes, of course. 

MB: Oh, Forbes, because in US News and World Report we’ve been plummeting. Is Wabash the 12th best school in the nation? I don’t even like answering that. It depends on what standards you use. In some very important sense, Wabash is better than the 12th best. I think that Wabash is one of the very best, one of the two or three best schools in the country, but not by any normal standard. By just normal standards, I think Wabash would fall significantly lower – normal standards being incoming SAT scores, selectivity, and the like.

TWC: No question about it.

MB: So I think that we shouldn’t be naïve, and just be honest about the fact that on normal standards, Wabash is just a very, very average school, and in some sense below average, if we want our peer institutions to be Oberlin and Grinnell and Swarthmore. We’re very much worse than they are, but I think that, having direct experience with Grinnell and indirect experience with other liberal arts colleges, Wabash is significantly better. 

TWC: Significantly better on what points? 

MB: On what they call student engagement. The student-teacher relations here are quality-wise very elevated and quantity-wise remarkably wide spread, so there’s this double play. Let me put this in very concrete terms. I think that, if I were teaching anywhere else and one of my students like you came to me and started asking me questions, I would not see this discussion in the same way. I would be being interviewed by a magazine, and I would be saying something for a magazine. In some sense I want you to see me in a certain way, and I want you to learn something from me, but I don’t want it to be something too specific. So there is this really interesting dynamic between young men and their faculty here that I just think is very, very remarkable. It makes the education better for a lot of the students – most, maybe not all – and it makes it better than Grinnell, so there you go. They call that student engagement. 

But, if everybody here thought this place were great, it would suck. There are always just enough people who can look at this place for all of its bizarre flaws and still like it, and that’s what makes it great. Half the people don’t even see the flaws, and whatever. They just don’t. But enough of you see the flaws and still like it. 

TWC: How do you define a “life of the mind”? 

MB: One of the first things I would point to is that in the life of the mind you are not only comfortable with but indeed actually enjoy being confused. That is part of the way that I understand philosophy, but I think of philosophy largely as what the life of the mind even is. And maybe I’m idiosyncratic, but the life of the mind is actually being confused for it’s own sake. I actually get excited for being confused. Part of my job as a teacher is to exemplify learning, and you have to be confused and perplexed with a genuine perplexity to really engage in learning.

TWC: With your definition of the life of the mind – in effect, the pursuit and enjoyment of confusion – do you think Wabash students emulate this lifestyle?

MB: There is absolutely no question in my mind that it happens for a great number of students. I think that it happens in different ways, and I am perfectly comfortable in saying that there are different things that we offer to different students. But let’s talk about most guys, and I think that what we’re giving them, at least what I’m trying to give them, are some basic abilities to live a full life – to get married, to take a job working at wherever, to have kids or not. Sometime in their lives they’re going to stumble upon some problem – maybe their mother is dying of cancer and they must decide how they’re going to react to this. I don’t want them to say, “Oh Professor Brouwer said…”, but rather that there’s something about having gone through this exercise of thinking through things that their thinking about it would be richer, and they would be happier as a result. If we really want to measure outcomes, what we should do is measure happiness, and ask ourselves how many of the guys who graduate from this place are happy – not one year, not five years, but twenty years after they have left. I suspect many are, and I suspect their liberal education has a decisive role in their own happiness.