Not everyone appreciates 2500+ year old poetry. If that’s you, give an expert a chance to convince you. In this episode of EconTalkRuss Roberts talks to Claudia Hauer about war, education, and humanitarianism. Hauer is an expert in making the case for the importance of studying ancient texts and he had to be as a visiting professor at the US Air Force Academy. Hauer, a faculty member at St. John’s College (Santa Fe) where students study ancient Greek as part of their education, and he is a writer Strategic Humanism: Studies in Leadership in the Ancient Greekswhich is the focus of this discussion.
Dr. Hauer talks about teaching these two very different student populations: US Air Force officers in training and students at St. John’s College, who specifically sought a “good books” style education. Hauer asserts that both groups of students, different as they may be in their methods and goals, have something to take away from people, especially the ancient Greek poetry they teach.
Hauer’s students from the Air Force Academy often entered the classroom convinced that the ancient war poem had little to offer them. On the surface, the weapons and fighting methods depicted in Homer are far removed from modern life and warfare. During the discussion of Hauer and Roberts, they refer to this idea of practical knowledge: τέχνη (technê) in ancient Greek.
Technê a concept that can be translated (in most cases) as manual labore.g How we reach beauty (Greek: ἀρετή [aretê]) in a specific domain. It is technical knowledge, experiential knowledge that comes from doing something. It is, as Roberts says, the root of our voice technology but it doesn’t mean exactly the same thing.
Hauer argues that the Greeks, even for non-experts, are worth reading, and he describes how he successfully convinced his classes of officer trainees that they would find the reading of Homer worthwhile. He says the Greek tradition of how good a man is, is still worth discussing several thousand years later, and in the case of those training to lead in battle, these texts are especially important:
I think it’s important that we read it just to witness some of those conflicting situations during the war. But, even more than that, it teaches us some timeless lessons about relationships during war, and those cycles. Jonathan Shay has this book, Achilles in Vietnam, where he points out that the cycles, the cycles of emotions that we see being released from Achilles over time The Iliad-betrayed by a commander, withdrawn from battle, death of his best friend, then a cycle of grief leading to murderous, barbaric rage. Jonathan Shay points out that these cycles are timeless: that they continue to play out on battlefields.
And so I think, in relation to what is happening The Iliad it is still part of the world of war, I think it is important that we study it. Can we go beyond that? Can we really get into a place that suggests it’s worth studying for ourselves? I think, the similes—I think the way Homer sets the backdrop of war against the natural world, and he explores how men fight like lions, or like forces of nature, like floods of rain or thunder—I think it really starts this work. that the Greeks will continue in their books, namely: How do we begin to find a human place against our powerlessness as creatures in this world of power and might?
And, we don’t do it always fully understand our relationship with nature, our relationship with animals. And that is the problem the Greeks are working on everything in their books—that is, because the gods did not give man a tablet, they said they should work for themselves. In that sense, I would argue that The Iliadwe have to learn it for ourselves.
Like most educated moderns, I will spend most of my adult life using a laptop. What kind of technê does that require? Did my education equip me in any way technology? Do you know the best way to be a kind person technê? Is it something that can be taught or passed on? Technê as the concept is ubiquitous in Greek literature and philosophy. In Meno, Plato it begins with the question: “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by doing; even if it is not through teaching or practice, then whether it comes to a person by nature or in any other way?” Except very far in the Greek text (Plato uses a different word like meaning technê), it is clear that students are invited to think about the consequences of knowledge about the good and the true.
Aristotle treats similar questions in Metaphysics, when he distinguishes between the knowledge of the craftsman and the craftsman. For Aristotle, experience is a necessary but not sufficient condition for knowledge. Wisdom is what enhances experience, although he notes that simple experience can also be very useful to people, as “It may seem that for practical purposes experience is not so much worse than art; indeed we see men of experience succeeding more than those of uninformed opinion.”
In their philosophical debates, poems and plays, the Greeks had complex and sophisticated ideas about practical knowledge, and there are many more examples than I can list here. These conversations are accessible to us (in particular the services provided on the Internet such as Freedom’s online library) whether we are soldiers, sailors, academics or autodidacts. We are still asking these questions of people.
Here are some questions to consider:
1- Dr. Hauer convinced his Air Force Academy students to read the book The Iliada poem about war. Is it related to us not participating in the development of the technê war or technê to study Greek literature? How is that possible? Is it more important or less than Odysseyas mentioned in the podcast episode?
2- Humanity can be viewed as impossible, because it is rarely directly linked to job training. However, the ancient Greeks were more interested in the practical implications of ideas about knowledge. Why did the Greeks distinguish between merely meditative knowledge and practical knowledge? What can their approach to knowledge teach us about education today?
3- What parallels can we draw between physical skills, such as carpentry, running, medicine, or art, and the way we create beauty?
4- Would the ancient Greeks have considered mankind as we think of them now as a species technê? In what ways is humanity similar to the types of technê are they in professional fields, such as medicine, military, etc.?
5- What types of humanities studies do you believe would benefit most from the ancient Greek ideas on the transmission of knowledge, and how? What can humanities students learn from modern practical studies?
Related Services
Liberty Matters: Why You Should Study The Elderly? Articles by Roosevelt Montás, Anika Prather, Aeon J. Skoble, and Jennifer A. Frey
“A hierarchy from the ancient world”, essay by Josiah Osgood
“Mr. Truman’s Degree”, essay by GEM Anscombe (1956)
τέχνη, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon
Technē in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Nancy Vander Veer has a BA in Classics from Samford University. He has taught high school Latin in the US and hosted programs and fundraising roles at the Paideia Institute. Based in Rome, Italy, he is currently completing a master’s degree in European Social and Economic History at Philipps-Universität Marburg.
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