Gigi posed an opening question: “How were the Western classics themselves educated? Between the lot of us, we must have read the works and deeds of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Metternich, Montesquieu, de Tocqueville, Darwin, Voltaire, Napoleon, Hemmingway, Swift, Smith, Locke, Franklin, Jefferson, Hobbes, Maddison, and so forth. But who educated them and how? What can we learn from how they got to be classics? And was it different from the Eastern classics, like Ibn Khaldoun, Tagore, or Lao Tse?”
It was somewhere early in 2023. Me and Gigi were discussing what ALM should aim for: its basic orientation and feel. Should we be like a monastery, a gymnasium, the old Ivy League, Oxbridge, or the Library of Alexandria? Should we concentrate on reading classics, teaching skills, or discuss cases from business and politics? Should we aim to raise better bureaucrats, better priests, better artists, better thinkers, or better leaders? Online or in person? Lots of questions.
When you have too many questions, it helps to start with a very practical question about the past. Gigi’s question was a great place to start.
Our first instinct was to put Gigi’s question into ChatGPT and see what other people had concluded about the education of the classics. We did do that eventually, but doing it immediately would have killed our own creative juices and made it harder to access what we ourselves already knew about the subject. So we took a different tack.
“Let’s talk about a few of these people we know something about and see what we can learn,” I replied.
“Ok. You’re the one who comes from the European tradition. Impress me with what you remember, or think you remember,” Gigi grinned.
Socrates
“Plato was educated by Socrates, who was a man of questions. Socrates believed that one should ask oneself and others probing uncomfortable questions so as to learn the truth. He would talk in a circle to his group of students – all smart young Athenian men – and discuss issues by asking questions and homing in on details when someone proposed answers. What is the nature of a tree? Why can it not talk? Why can we talk? Might there have been a talking tree? Is there another way to communicate with a tree? Why not? How can we be sure? Do we only communicate by talking? And so on. Endless questions.”
“Was Aristotle also one of his students?” Gigi asked.
“No, he came later. He studies with Plato though, the most famous student of Socrates, so you might think of Aristotle as the grandson of Socrates,” I said.
“Ok, sorry to interrupt, but interesting to note that Socrates indirectly also raised Aristotle. He is the father of biology, no?” Gigi asked.
“Yes, I think so. He got a lot wrong though, which took centuries to undo. However, let’s continue with Socrates. Socrates admired people who worked with their hands for he thought they truly knew something: when he, for instance, asked a carpenter how he made a chair, he would get amazingly clear answers to every ‘what about’ and ‘what if’. Conversely, he made people who actually knew very little extremely uncomfortable because he exposed their ignorance relentlessly. Those included the leaders of Athens at that time, who promptly killed him to shut him up. Socrates had to drink a glass of poison, which he did in the company of his students who wept. You might say that the bullshitters of his time got rid of him to shut him up: that was how angry they were with him, which also tells you how uncomfortable it must be to realise you know nothing. Cancel culture got Socrates more than 2,000 years ago.”
“Very interesting. So how did Socrates view his pupils and how did they view themselves?” Gigi asked.
“I think he saw them as sons to start out with, brothers eventually, so very much a community of thinkers. They did everything together, even visits to the brothels if I recall my reading correctly. I don’t think we should bring back that tradition today, though! Socrates had quite a few famous pupils who went on to write books and define whole fields of study. Plato is one of the fathers of political and moral thinking, founding the first ever Academy. Xenophon became a military leader and historian. Several others started their own school, including the ‘Cynics’. Pushed by Socrates, his students came to very well formulated opinions which they used to lead their societies. You might say they were the intellectual aristocrats of their time.”
“Aristocrats?”
“Well, like Socrates, they were prepared to disagree with everyone around them and thus stand aside from society. But they cared about Athens and its people, so they used their talents to help their people. Socrates cared so much, he refused to run away even when told that if he stayed in Athens, he would have to drink poison. He let his death be his last gift of knowledge to his people. That is the essence of a true aristocrat: a free-thinker to the point of annoyance but still serving by showing the way.”
“That’s also the kind of attitude we admire and want,” Gigi mused.
“Indeed,” I said. “We have not yet been offered the poisoned chalice, but its not unthinkable anymore, is it?”
Machiavelli
“No, not unthinkable. So, what about that great hero of yours, Machiavelli?” Gigi asked.
“Well, he came from a privileged family, so got an education in the classics: learning Greek, Latin, the history of Rome, and how to do business. He worked in Florence for the Medici and at some time for the Borgias, two very powerful families in Italy. He was a diplomat, good in writing and analysing people. His real education though came by very closely watching the politics in Italy around 1500 AD. He basically trained himself, though styling himself on the Greek philosophers.”
“How did he do that? What attitude and mindset did it involve?”
“In a famous letter to a friend he described a normal day. He would misbehave in the morning, perhaps having an argument in the pub where he ate. He would then come home, wash, put on his finest clothes, and enter his study where he had many books about the history of Rome and other places, like Persia. He describes how he would ask the leaders described in his books what real reasons they had for their actions. ‘In their humility’ they would answer him with the truth, he said. And a terrible truth it often was, because Machiavelli had no hesitation in depicting the majority of the Roman emperors as bumbling, depraved idiots. He called the knowledge he gained ‘food only meant for him’.”
“Hmmm,” Gigi said. “There is a real worship of truth there: why else dress up and make real learning such a ritual? It’s like going to church. And also a willingness, even hunger to adjudicate motive and skills, or lack thereof, in leaders and populations. That is rare. Most people look up to leaders either far too much to delve so deep, or far too little to pay attention to what is really going on. He must have had his enemies.”
“Yes, indeed. He pissed off his employer so much that he was thrown in jail, which is where he wrote his classic work ‘the Prince’. He originally had Cesare Borgia in mind as the person he wrote it for (and whom he wrote about), but Cesare died before publication, so instead he dedicated it to one of the Medici, who was apparently totally disinterested in reading it. Dear old Nicolo indeed had trouble getting the powerful to see his worth, even though he flattered them tremendously, viewing leaders as above morality and religion. The Medici probably thought his flattery was unconvincing.”
“But giving highly practical advice, deduced from history and his own observations, taking humans how they actually are rather than how they would like to be seen?”
“Totally. He pointed to institutions as the real memory and wealth of a country, using the examples of the waterworks in Persia as their true source of power over the centuries. He was full of very insightful remarks displaying a deep knowledge of humanity, such as saying that a leader should prefer to be feared than loved. He also, by the way, was an Italian nationalist, thus a Romantic idealist, once saying he loved Italy more than his own life.”
“I get why he is your hero,” Gigi said. “So again, an aristocrat with the willingness to die for the cause. He is a bit different to Socrates though: he is willing to guess motivations and deeper structures from what he reads in history books. He is in that sense more similar to Plato and Aristotle, but a bit more hands-on and policy case-driven.”
Darwin
“Agreed. Let’s then take Darwin, perhaps the intellectual of the Anglo-Saxon tradition with the greatest impact on society. Also classically educated with lots of Socratic questioning and reading. Super broad though. He got information from the early economists, demographers, animal breeders, physicists, botanists, and gardeners. That was the time in which those fields were still close enough that you could read all of it without getting lost in jargon. He combined insights from lots of fields in his own head, together with lots of close observations on long travels to far away islands, to get to stories about the evolution of species, which he then used to speculate about the origin of life.”
“Ok, so a bit like Machiavelli with his institutions, and like Aristotle with his biology, but more informed by details, by observations of the real world. He participated with the object of his study, like Machiavelli I suppose. Again, very aristocratic. And in what kind of environment was Darwin educated?”
“I would have to look it up,” I said. “Probably one of the colleges in Oxford or Cambridge: there was little else in the UK at that time. They were small colleges back then, with a few hundred people each at most. Physical campuses where small groups of students live with their professors who run the place. Far away from the cities, immersed in a world of thinking, debating, reading, and discovery. Probably only boys in the early 19th century. They would have done quite a bit of sports and arts, like all classical European education. Healthy mind and healthy body. They would also have been raised to think of themselves as intellectual leaders of their country. It was the age of reason, so reason was in high esteem.”
“Also sounds like us,” Gigi remarked. “Ok then, a last one. What do you know about Elon Musk, the current guru on all things tech. Who taught him?”
Elon Musk
“He’s from South Africa, so would have been raised in one of these posh elite schools there, almost surely moulded on the English Grammar school system. Hence like the central European Gymnasiums, so similar to what Darwin would have gotten. Also big on the physical alongside the mental. They have a real winner mentality in those schools in South Africa. Then I think he went to one of the US Ivy Leagues, which was even then going downhill but would still have been pretty good, certainly when it comes to networking.”
“We should look it up. And also look up a few of the others. Voltaire, Metternich, some Russians, and those Eastern thinkers. Check whether the recipe is as it seems: probing questions, dissecting history and current politics, some reading of the classics, healthy living, a campus environment, a broad integrative curriculum, and above all an aristocratic mindset. That is almost gone from today’s university where they treat you like a pesky consumer they want to get out of the door as soon as possible – not a real person who might matter to them or their society. We need to look it all up and then go another round,” Gigi said.
And many more rounds did we have – not just me and Gigi, but over time also with Tjeerd, David, Erika, Lodewijk, Robert, ChatGPT, and many others. None of the ‘classics’ had computers or were exposed to social media and AI when they were educated, so we faced challenges in developing top education with technology their generations did not possess.
But we still do ‘healthy body in a healthy mind’. We still do Socratic teaching (among other styles). We are bringing back broad and integrated. We do artistic education and community-building activities. But above all, we ‘do aristocratic’: developing minds capable of standing alone against the crowd when necessary, while remaining oriented towards helping their communities. We would like to be similar to the old school of Socrates, a recognised rebel in his own time, raising a whole band of highly successful rebels.
4 Pythagoras (from my essay Music and Mathematics)
The first true school in history was founded by Pythagoras.
Our word “school” comes from the Greek scholē, which originally meant leisure, quiet contemplation, and the stillness needed for music. Yet Pythagoras did not call his community a “school.” He called it an akousma—a gathering of listeners.
Only when we truly learn to listen can we create and hear music.
And we long to create and hear music because music has the miraculous power to purify the soul. For that purification to happen, silence must first be present—so that music, the highest instrument of education, can sing its song.
The day for the Pythagorean listeners began at sunset with singing or the gentle plucking of strings, driving away the heaviness of sleep.
At night, before bedtime, music dissolved the strange echoes of the day and granted wise and healing dreams. In the morning, after waking, each listener first walked alone through silent temples and sacred groves, quietly ordering the dreams and thoughts of the previous day.
Only then did they gather with the others for the master’s teaching in the temple garden. Next came physical exercises and wrestling, followed by a bath and a simple lunch of bread and honey. The afternoon was devoted to the city: how to govern it justly and how to live in harmony with neighboring cities. A second bath marked the close of the day, leading to supper—wine, vegetables, bread, and occasionally meat. Finally, before the listeners returned home to sleep, the youngest member of the community would read aloud from ancient scrolls. Thus every day given by the gods flowed from the soft strings of morning to the songs and dances of evening—everything Homer had once celebrated and sung about .
One day in the company of Pythagoras’ listeners is like stepping into a tradition that has lived for two and a half millennia.
6 The Lyre (from my essay Music and Mathematics)
Socrates was famously illiterate—yet an extraordinary speaker.
He was an unemployed (or rather, retired) sculptor and homosexual (and deliberately avoided brothels).
In his view, music and mathematics were unnecessary luxuries. His student Plato, by contrast, had been trained in both music and mathematics, but as long as Socrates was alive he was not allowed to pursue them openly. For Socrates, philosophy took the place of music. Because Socrates was accused of introducing new gods, he was sentenced to death and forced to drink hemlock (conium, a poisonous plant). Three months before his execution, however, Socrates suddenly began to learn the lyre.
In a dream, a voice had repeatedly told him: “Socrates, make music.”
After his teacher’s death, Plato developed the vision of the eight celestial spheres: the sphere of the Moon, the Sun, the five known planets, and the sphere of the fixed stars—eight in total, corresponding to the eight notes of the musical octave. On each sphere he placed a Siren who sings a single, eternal note. Together, the eight Sirens produce the inaudible “harmony of the spheres.” Centuries later, the Greek word harmonia gave us our term “octave.”
For Plato, true music is celestial and silent; the music we hear on earth is merely its faint shadow. In a sense, he denied the value of audible music altogether. Even Emperor Nero is supposed to have mocked the idea: “Music we cannot hear deserves no respect.”
When the Romans later destroyed the great Greek cities, music and mathematics almost vanished. It was not until the Middle Ages—some 1600 years later—that both disciplines began to revive. Ever since, music and mathematics have largely been kept apart. Today, we are bringing them back together again.