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Review Sp 06 The St. John’s Review Volume XLIX, number one (2006) Editor Pamela Kraus Editorial Board Eva T. H. Brann Frank Hunt Joe Sachs John Van Doren Robert B. Williamson Elliott Zuckerman Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant Sarah Navarre The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President; Michael Dink, Dean. For those not on the distri - bution list, subscriptions are $10 for one year. Unsolicited essays, reviews, and reasoned letters are welcome. Address correspondence to the Review , St. John’s College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800. Back issues are available, at $5 per issue, from the St. John’s College Bookstore. ©2006 St. John’s College. All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. ISSN 0277-4720 Desktop Publishing and Printing The St. John’s Public Relations Office and the St. John’s College Print Shop 2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 3 Contents Essays and Lectures In the Beginning. The Genesis of the St. John’s Program, 1937............... .5 Charles A. Nelson Understanding Quantum Mechanics with Bohr and Husserl............................................... 33 François Lurçat Eve Separate............................................................... .71 Eva Brann Going in Silence....................................................... 111 Abraham Schoener 4 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW 5 In the Beginning. .The Genesis of the St. John’s Program, 1937 Charles A. Nelson The transformation of St. John’s College in 1937—with the introduction of what was then, and for many later years, called the New Program—set on foot a way of learning and teaching that has now enfolded, inspired, and perplexed students and teachers for lo these sixty-eight years. I shall attempt to describe and explain what took place here on this campus in 1937. Let me say parenthetically that this is not an exercise in nostalgia, a yearning for “the good old days.” On the contrary, I can assure you that the College is much stronger now than it was then, the faculty is better, and the entering students are, on the whole, smarter, a bit better educated, and a lot better looking! On Tuesday, September 21, 1937, the student newspaper here in Annapolis, announced that, under the new leadership of Stringfellow Barr as president and Scott Buchanan as dean, the fall term would open with a “different set-up” for the arriving freshman class. A different set-up indeed! Probably no other educational institution anywhere has undertaken so radical and so swift a transformation as took place at St. John’s in the eighty-three days between July 1, 1937, when Barr and Buchanan took office, and September 22, when the fall term began. Before describing what took place on this campus that summer and fall, I will provide some of the context by recounting activ - ities of our two “transformers” in the preceding years. Perhaps as good a place as any to begin is at the University of This lecture was delivered at St. John’s College, Annapolis, September 30, 2005. Mr. Nelson is the author of three books about the founding of the Program at the College and about the founders, Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan. 6 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW NELSON 7 Virginia at Charlottesville, and then to go backwards and and that the textbooks assigned are not worthy of forwards from there. serious study. In his more charitable moods, he Stringfellow Barr had been a history teacher at Virginia recognizes that, given the present student body, the since 1924, and, since 1930, a full professor and the editor of professor is not much to blame. Observing this the Virginia Quarterly Review . Buchanan had been teaching low morale on the part of both professor and philosophy there since 1929. student alike, the publishers have done their best Before Buchanan was appointed to the faculty, Barr had to supply increasingly “easy” texts. .The self- been consulted. He recalls: respecting professor has consoled himself with research. .Or he has found consolation in The head of the philosophy department accosted graduate courses in which “real work” may be me and asked what I knew about Scott Buchanan attempted. .The able undergraduate has turned . .I said, “He’s the most remarkable man I’ve ever to athletics and other “activities”. .He comes to met, but he’s not an easy person, and I would look on the strictly curricular exercises of the rather not urge his appointment. It would mean a university as interruptions that must be borne great deal to me personally to have him here, but patiently but which he quite sees through. .you might find him a very difficult customer to handle.” They decided to risk it and got him. The second section of the report is a detailed plan for a two-year “college within the college,” a required program of Despite that rather ambiguous endorsement, the tutorials, laboratory work, lectures, and discussions, all based friendship prospered. Both men developed formidable on the reading of the great books of the Western tradition, reputations as teachers. They also shared a deep concern including a substantial number of mathematical and scientific about the inadequacies of the undergraduate curriculum. works. This section was written by Buchanan. The range and Buchanan reported that “The college at the University was depth of the plan are extraordinary; it bears a strong resem - being squeezed, exploited, and reduced to the size and blance to the program installed here at St. John’s. functions of a secondary preparatory school for the graduate Buchanan contended that the best materials for the schools.” proposed curriculum are the literary and scientific classics of This concern was sufficiently widespread that it led Europe. He states that “all instruction will be based on the President John Holcomb, in 1934, to appoint a Committee reading, analysis, interpretation, criticism, imitation, and on Honors Courses. He asked both Barr and Buchanan to discussion of the books in the following list.” That list serve. This small group of six met almost weekly for a period includes over a hundred authors, and it will look familiar to of about six months and issued its report in March 1935. The anyone with a St. John’s connection. When the report was report has three sections. The first is an exposure of the grave circulated on the Charlottesville campus, the most startling weaknesses of the existing undergraduate curriculum, drafted feature, I feel sure—apart from the very notion of an all- by Barr. It must have offended many members of the Virginia required two-year program for a select twenty of the best faculty more senior than he. Here is an excerpt: undergraduates—is the inclusion on this list of numerous The able student, on his part, feels. .that many of works in Mathematics and Science, a grand total of forty-two the lectures now given are not worth listening to titles, ranging from Euclid, Nicomachus, and Hippocrates to 8 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW NELSON 9 Darwin and Faraday and Lobachevski and Mendel, and part, for lack of funds. But in retrospect one can readily including those giants Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, imagine how Buchanan’s plan would have been chopped to Newton, and Harvey. pieces department by department if it had ever emerged as a In Winfree Smith’s insightful book A Search for the serious proposal. Liberal College , published by St. John’s in 1983, he So by this time, Barr and Buchanan had developed not comments on Buchanan’s proposal: only a deep conviction of the necessity for college curricular reform but also this specific plan for its radical transfor - When one considers that the plan was to read in mation. It was no doubt frustrating to have worked so hard two years almost as many books as St. John’s and so productively in developing their proposal and to see undergraduates now read in four years, and to no result. (If it can be said that a seed was planted at Virginia, read in their entirety books many of which are it must be added that the seed was not nurtured there, and a now read at St. John’s only in part, and that list transplant would be required to keep it alive and growing.) contained Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae , Meanwhile, at the University of Chicago, what appeared Part I, Newton’s Principia , Kant’s Critique of Pure to be a more favorable climate for curricular reform had been Reason , Hegel’s Phenomenology , Maxwell’s created by President Robert Maynard Hutchins. He had Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism , etc., one earlier enticed Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon from sees the impossibility of the task. Columbia, and Adler had persuaded Hutchins to invite Barr To that one might add that there were also included and Buchanan to come and join Hutchins’ Committee on the works not so inherently difficult, but very long—Gibbon’s Liberal Arts. They accepted, though Barr was reluctant to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , the Bible, Marx’s leave his native Virginia and the University he loved in spite Capital , Dante’s Divine Comedy , Tolstoi’s War and Peace . of all its shortcomings. Although there was considerable What Buchanan in this report called the “machinery of muttering on the Chicago campus about Hutchins’ uncon - instruction,” was to be conducted in four modes: once-a- ventional opinions and appointments, it soon transpired that week discussion of the assigned reading for the whole class the Committee members themselves were the chief cause of (of no more than twenty), with two instructors in charge; what turned out to be a farcical failure.
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