Perhaps, ever so often, it becomes essential to one’s readers, however select their ranks may be, and to oneself, to affirm both the importance and the value of the enterprise I have in mind: the studia humanitatis. It is my thought now that one must not assume  a priori the importance of such studies and their centrality, but that these values and efforts are in constant need of reaffirmation. This is not a major change of stance from my earlier position, namely that the humanities must not be affirmed in relation to present events, but that the humanities must be valued because they lay bare to the dedicated student the human condition itself; this is as close to thought, thinking itself as one can come without staring precariously into the domain of the otherworldly.

    The value and vitality of the humanities rests precisely on these assumptions, assumptions that are under constant attack: that there is something fixed to human nature, that virtue and hierarchy are important and can coexist peacefully with freedom and liberty, and that government and law are necessary — and not merely necessary evils. Reason ought to be exalted in its rightful domain, and guided to its proper station in that where it ought not to infringe. Language is beautiful, and an exponent will never ransom its cadence and fluidity at the altar of simplicity. And, perhaps above all, the love for that which is right, and for wisdom and prudence in general, is the rightful domain of exalted individual action. Justice may or may not be, but the other cardinal virtues have in their beginning the individual, and at their end bliss and honour.

    The paradox, however, of the time spent in the studia humanitatis is that I sought it only in the cardinal texts of political philosophy, but I forgot that poetry, prose, and music do not exist in walled off gardens that are only meant to beautify, but rather for the general enrichment of all who are perceptive enough to find in their hearts and minds a genuine love and appreciation for these constituent elements of humanistic elements. I have learnt as much about the ‘state of nature’ from Orwell and Huxley as I have from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; about obedience, loyalty, and love from Michelangelo and Gibbon as Aquinas and Hooker. It is this sole garden that I seek membership in, not divided into supposedly sovereign and exclusive domains where there can not be an overlap. The polis does not demarcate its domain to be the protection of property or some other quotidian goal, but the highest possible good. The highest possible good cannot be truly so without the enchantment provided by art and literature and culture. There can be no mistake of the hierarchy of things: I am a humanist first and foremost. However, one can only be human without the polis; an affirmation of humanist thought can only exist with the existence of the polis, of its appearance to reason, and of thought, thinking itself.

    There is always hope of the ebb and flow of time, with which cynicism and its abatement are markers. When man foresakes his social existence and the rituals that mark the passage of time and prevent the days from blurring into the misty fog of time, there are fertile grounds for the most unprofitable thoughts that threaten to transform one’s healthy scepticism to the domain of emptiness. A ‘social life’ is what gives meaning: it marks the passage of time in an immutable way; it provides comfort and companionship; it shows that the vita contemplativa is neither a solitary pursuit nor a loner’s life. Yet, even more so, the importance of physical interaction, of shaking hands and waving goodbye, is all the more important when it is least available. If nothing else, the importance of man’s standing a social animal comes before his being a polis animal, though an unsurmountable argument can, in fact, be made that they are merely two facets of the same object, and not two disparate features.

    Philosophy, like love, cannot happen alone. If it does, it seeks to only confirm what one may opine to oneself, seeking no more than the empty smiles and nods of others. It takes two dedicated partners to tango; one may not be out of step with one’s partner unless one intends to hurt one’s beloved. To have a conversation of substance, one must seek a conversation partner; if Socrates sought out his poor victims in the marketplace, he made sure to expend his (thin) patience to find interlocutors who were of standing and who could have, if they possessed eternal knowledge, stand a chance of learning from. To read and to converse it to always risk what one knows, or learn what one does not know about what one thinks one may know. But with the studia humanitatis, once one peels back the layers, one reaches the core, observing it from a different perspective each time it is viewed. There is value: in this form of knowledge. But the value can also be sought in the journey itself, for the means are as important as the ends. At its heart, I think, there is a radical lucidness, the sort that Winckelmann once phrased as ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’, and it is this that keeps one going.