In his novel, Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell describes the graduation address at a girls' college in New England.
Here is part of the account:
Mr Daudier spoke for -- for years, we felt... Gertrude had heard him give the speech before; so had I; Gottfried never had; yet Gottfried knew it better that we did, because Gottfried was older than we were, and had heard that speech more times than we had.1
Despite this nearly unavoidable element we still have the graduation address; we seem to be the kind of beings that need to mark those periodic occasions when a shift is made in a life between one stage and the next. The graduation ceremony is a rite of passage.
My title comes from the plaque attached to the body of NASA deep space probes. To tell other beings of us the text, in the translation that I know -- the original is in symbols -- says that we are
`bilaterally symmetrical, sexually differentiated bipeds located on one of the outer spirals of the Milky Way, capable of recognising the prime numbers and moved by one extraordinary quality that lasts longer than all our other urges -- curiosity.'
What other beings will make of the symbols we can hardly know. What can we make of it? Like any description of reality it makes choices; it puts things in and leaves things out.
Graduation is the ritual celebration of a successful step. From undergraduate to Bachelor; from Bachelor to Master; from Master to Doctor. Every study is an ordered set of questions and so every study is driven by curiosity. For the past few years ordered curiosity has been one of the driving and organising forces in your lives. Not, of course, the only one but still one. Graduation, then, is a celebration of curiosity.
In the text curiosity is said to be a `quality that lasts longer than all our other urges'. Were curiosity not an urge, universities would not exist but the natural urge is not enough; there is a fundamental choice involved here and it is this choice, not simply the natural urge itself, that is at the root of our civilisation. Our civilisation is the fruit of many choices -- some good, some bad, some intelligent, some immensely stupid, some kind and some consumed with hatred; one of them is the decision to give free rein to curiosity; we have decided that enquiry is valuable for its own sake. That decision is not irreversible. Indeed, in different ways it is often attacked. But at graduation we celebrate it.
We are bilaterally symmetrical and sexually differentiated bipeds. As are apes. We are curious but so are apes. To describe us as bipeds is one of the choices made in the text. To describe us as curious is yet another. What of the statement that we are all `capable of recognising the prime numbers'? Not all of us do recognise them. Not all human cultures and civilisations do recognise or have recognised them. The choice of this feature in the description is startling. It is, obviously, a choice made by people within a civilisation where prime numbers are recognised. But the writers need not have chosen them.
`Bilateral symmetry', `sexually differentiated bipeds', `curious' -- these are fairly predictable. `Capable of recognising the prime numbers' wakes us up. Imagine a group of intelligent aliens coming across a probe. They would be curious about it because curiosity is simply the manifestation of intelligence. Suppose that they had succeeded in deciphering the symbols. Being intelligent they would be capable of recognising the prime numbers because that is a capacity of intelligence but suppose that they had not yet recognised them. What would they make of this unknown object `the prime numbers'? They would assume that these unknown objects were of immense importance to the civilisation whence the probe had come. Had they discovered numbers and mathematics they would infer that mathematics was central to that culture. And, of course, the probe itself is a message.
We do recognize the prime numbers are and we appreciate something of their importance and fascination. We recognise them because our forebears did and passed mathematics on to us. In short, we recognise them because we have been educated; that is, brought into the civilisation. At graduation we celebrate not only curiosity but also the tradition into which we have been educated.
Our intellectual tradition is profoundly mathematical and, ever since the Greeks and even the Babylonians, mathematics has been the central symbol of enquiry -- the word in Greek originally meant `learning'. So the choice of prime numbers is both good and traditional. A culture is a way of being in the world and ours is an immensely differentiated culture beyond the capacity of any single mind; we are co-operatively responsible for it. Intellectual responsibility is care for the world through taking care of thought and language and the graduate is responsible particularly for that part of the civilisation in which he or she has become learnèd.
At a graduation we celebrate the intellectual life and the achievements of the new graduates.
Less obviously, we celebrate the assuming of responsibility. `To graduate' doesn't mean `to have passed an examination' -- it does of course include that -- it means to have passed from the state of pupillage to intellectual adulthood with its attendant responsibilities.
For different things we are differently responsible. For a precious object handed down to us, say, a great painting or sculpture, we are responsible for its safekeeping and for passing it on intact to the next generation. The civilisation as a whole is not an object of that kind; the tradition -- that which is handed down -- is not something finished that is to be handed on intact. This is the route of stagnation and the way of the reactionary who `pulls [the past] out of the sphere of vitality, and, thoroughly dead as it is, he places it on the throne so that it may rule over our souls'2 Because the civilisation -- what is handed down -- is the fruit of curiosity, to be responsible for it is to carry it forward curiously.
Sometimes we use the word `tradition' as if what it referred to was to be kept inviolate and unchanged; as if the tradition were a thing to be treasured like a sculpture or painting. But, in the intellectual life [not, of course, only in the intellectual life but utterly central to the intellectual life] , learning the tradition is learning what has been discovered so far, sometimes rediscovering what passing fashion has forgotten. Learning the tradition is learning how to examine received knowledge critically -- for great discoveries often begin with the suspicion that what has been taken for granted need not be taken for granted but may be mistaken. Learning the tradition is learning how to carry the tradition forward. When we try to carry the tradition forward we turn from what has been understood and, carrying the tradition within us, turn to what is yet to be understood; from questions that have been answered to questions that have not been answered and to questions that have not yet been asked. But to ask a question is to assume responsibility for it and, through it, for the world about which the question is asked.
Newman, in his The Idea of a University, wrote that university graduates would not by that fact be better, more moral, people. And yet, when the Dean calls a class forward for conferring, he vouches for the students as `fit for graduation both in morals and in learning' [idoneous...tam moralibus quam doctrina]. And I have been talking of responsibility which is a moral demand. Newman was, I think, speaking of the moral life as a whole and there he was quite right; learning does not confer goodness. But it does make a very specific demand just as does each profession.
You are graduating in the intellectual life and your general responsibility is for its development. Others may graduate into that life less publicly, less formally, less institutionally, for the intellectual life, is not confined to university graduates. But that life is formally and publicly yours and others may rightly expect of you what they need not always expect of others. Your very specific responsibility is to retain and develop your curiosity; to remain always a student even if no longer a pupil. Without critical curiosity, as the servant in the Aeschylus' Choephori says, `the dead kill the living'.
I have been commenting on the NASA description of ourselves. Like any description, it is the result of choice and that inevitably requires both inclusion and exclusion -- choice, as economists say, involves cost, that is, whatever is foregone. What does the description exclude? The obvious, but somewhat unenlightening, answer is that it excludes everything that it doesn't include.3 It mentions the capacity to recognise prime numbers but make no reference to the capacity to make ice cream. There is, however, one hugely important aspect of ourselves excluded or only obliquely included: our capacity for feeling. If it is present at all, as some may think it is, in the reference to sexually differentiated bipeds, it is present only as a shadow. You may remember the Vulcan, Mr Spock,4 in the early Startrek. Vulcans were presented as wholly intellectual; the NASA description fits them perfectly. What Spock lacked was feeling or emotional response. This lack was a significant element in the story; it is also a significant exclusion from the NASA description of ourselves. But it is not immediately startling. Certainly it did not strike me until I began to think about exclusions. Exclusion of intellect in even a brief description of humans would strike us as odd. So why are we not immediately struck by the exclusion of feeling? Properly to answer that question would be difficult anywhere and impossible here. I would suggest a general and sketchy answer: our civilisation -- that is, the civilisation of the West -- has not well integrated feeling into the account of the human and we are the heirs of our tradition. There are, as Pascal's aphorism says, `Two excesses. Exclude reason, admit only reason.' 5 Intellectual responsibility requires the avoidance of both.
Universities are immensely expensive institutions often paid for by those not in them including many who have not directly profited from them. That is one reason why your knowledge is not unambiguously yours. But there is a deeper reason that I can best express in metaphor. When you undertake the intellectual life you don't own it; it owns you. To become intellectually responsible is to allow enquiry to take you over. And this is the final thing that we celebrate here to-day.
There is a small feast after this and many of you will go on to other feasts. We celebrate two kinds of things with feasts. There is the feast to mark something done and finished -- a match or competition won, for example. But we also feast to mark something taken on -- marriage, for example. To-day's feasts celebrate both: an achievement, work properly done, something worthwhile accomplished; a responsibility taken on. And so there were two parts to what at the outset -- years ago you feel -- I said that graduation speeches were about. The first part is congratulation; the second is or, in the tradition used to be, and may still survive in a hidden way that we hardly notice when we say `Best Wishes' - blessing. Blessings were commonplace in the Torah or Old Testament. I don't know when they went out of secular fashion but, because I have spoken of tradition, I shall risk taking them out of hiding and say , first, Congratulations on work well done and, finally, Go, with our blessings on your heads.