The words “aging” and “maturing,” when applied to wine, mean the same thing. Such is not the case with human beings. It is possible for them to age without maturing. Growing older does not mean growing wiser. Sigmund Freud viewed immaturity as the inability to postpone gratification. This is a reasonable and useful rule of thumb.
The immature person wants the rewards without going through the trouble of earning them. The philosophy teacher’s dilemma, in dealing with immature philosophy students, is to convince them that, just as in life, there is a certain order to things and you cannot enjoy the benefits of philosophizing unless you are unwilling to respect its rational order.
Let us resort to the imagination and construct an analogy to illustrate the point.
A client approaches a builder and informs him that he wants him to build a new house. But the client insists that he wants to occupy the second floor and does not want there to be a first floor. The builder, naturally, tells the client that such an arrangement is impossible, that a first floor is needed in order to hold up the second floor. It is quite impossible, the builder adds, to construct a second floor that stands in mid-air without any underlying support. The client goes on to express his fondness for second floors and his disdain for first floors.
Try as he may, the builder is unable to convince the client that there is a certain rigor to reality that does not bend to personal whims. The second floor needs the first floor, no matter what a person’s private preferences might be. As G.K. Chesterton has reminded the world, “There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”
I do not believe I have ever encountered a student who was anything but enthusiastic about equality, justice, and liberty. Surely, these are great ideas and their supporters should be commended for their idealism.
At the same time, it seems that most people throughout history have also cherished and promoted these values. It should be puzzling, therefore, why they are in such short supply. The simple answer is that they are second-floor concepts and require a first-floor grounding in order to flourish.
And yet, paradoxically, the first-floor values of truth, goodness, and beauty are greeted, respectively, with attitudes of skepticism, relativism, and subjectivism.
Without these fundamental values, equality, justice, and liberty cannot thrive. Equality presupposes that there is a common dignity and goodness about all human beings, that no one human being is superior as a human being to another. If this notion of universal goodness is missing, equality has no valid basis. Justice can be rendered only if truth is acknowledged.
When Pontius Pilate famously declared, “What is truth,” he left an innocent Christ to the injustice of the mob. A judge renders his verdict once all the evidence is examined.
“Verdict” is derived from the two Latin words meaning “to tell the truth” (verum + dicere). Beauty is the conjoining of truth and goodness. It is a critical factor in loving relationships. Love, by its nature, is the desire to promote the good of the other, which is the antithesis of the desire to exploit or commit other sins against a person’s liberty. Equality, justice, and liberty need truth, goodness, and beauty the way the lungs need oxygen. Without oxygen the sturdiest lungs in the world are unable to function.
We live in a world in which many athletes feel that it is better to take performance enhancing drugs than to train, where many students believe that cheating is more practical than studying, where many people judge that style is a more reliable ticket to success than substance. To take the short cut is a powerful cultural temptation.
The road to equality, justice, and liberty is paved with truth, goodness, and beauty. It tolerates no shortcuts. Idealism is fine, as long as it does not exclude realism. “If you build castles in the air,” Henry David Thoreau advised, “Your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”
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We all feel within ourselves the desire to help bring about a better world. And the possibility of that achievement is rooted in and depends on us. But desire alone is ineffective.
We cannot bring things about by merely wishing them into existence. We must understand that truth, justice and goodness are not esoteric matters that philosophers endlessly dispute, but the very cornerstones upon which equality, justice, and liberty stand. There is a direct proportion between the elusiveness of equality, justice, and liberty, on the one hand, and the neglect of truth, goodness, and beauty on the other.
The philosophy teacher’s dilemma, then, is to encourage his students to maintain their idealism, but to convince them that they should promote, with equal enthusiasm, the foundations upon which they rest. And he, himself, must not avoid the hard work needed in order to bring his teaching to fruition.
Dr. Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International. Doctor DeMarco is a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life and he is Professor Emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College & Seminary in Cromwell, CT.
He is the author of 22 books, including; Architects of the Culture of Death, The Many Faces of Virtue, The Heart of Virtue, and New Perspectives on Contraception. He has authored several hundred articles in scholarly journals and in anthologies, and articles and essays appearing in other journals and magazines and in newspapers; and innumerable book reviews in a variety of publications.
His education includes: B.S. Stonehill College, North Easton, MA 1959 (General Science); A.B. Stonehill College, 1961 (Philosophy); Gregorian University, Rome, Italy, 1961-2 (Theology); M.A. St. John’s University, Jamaica, NY, 1965 (Philosophy); and Ph.D. At. John’s Univ., 1969 (Philosophy). His Master’s dissertation was “The Basic Concept in Hegel’s Dialectical Method” and his Doctor’s dissertation was “The Nature of the Relationship between the Mathematical and the Beautiful in Music”.
He is married to Mary Arendt DeMarco and they have five children.
