In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes on the seeming impossibility of the invention of language. “I leave to anyone who would undertake it the discussion of the following difficult problem: which was the more necessary: an already formed society for the invention of languages, or an already invented language for the establishment of society?”. Rousseau’s mythic past imagines people as solitary, independent beings with latent reason, people who, apart from occasional satisfaction of their sexual drives, neither need nor desire others. They bed down randomly each night and, when a child occurs, the mother nourishes it only until it can nourish itself; fidelity and familial ties are non-existent. Thus society is absent; but with society absent, and, despite Aristotle and Donne, with man being for Rousseau a naturally apolitical being, language lacks a starting stimulus. There is both no one to speak to and no reason to speak. Thus language is absent; but with language absent, and with humans having no desires that require language to fulfill, society lacks a starting stimulus. The prerequisite for society, Rousseau thinks, is language, but the prerequisite for language is society. We can thus sympathize with his likely disingenuous suggestion that language arose by divine imposition: given the paradoxical nature of linguistic origin, perhaps only the Word could give man words.

I suggest the relationship between education and free society is similarly paradoxical. Certainly free society is necessary for education, when education is construed not just as the mere teaching of technique but as the cultivation of a person’s soul. But education seems just as necessary for free society; while born with free will, we are hardly born free: the passions pull, the body distracts, and laziness plagues. I will first clarify each side of the paradox and then suggest a solution to it. Let us start, where many things do, with Plato.

“For clearly if you do this thing it will not be better for you here, or more just or holier, no, nor for any of your friends, and neither will it be better when you reach that other abode”. The quotation comes from the Laws in Plato’s Crito, and “this thing” to which they refer is Socrates’ escaping from jail. Found guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth, Socrates waits in jail for his cup of hemlock, and Crito tries to persuade him to escape by appealing to his concern for his friends and family. The appeal is unsuccessful, and, faced with Crito’s confusion about his motives for submitting to his (putatively unjust) sentence, Socrates introduces the Laws to explain how, in escaping, he would be harming that which he ought least to harm: the polis that raised and educated him. Since “we ought neither to requite wrong with wrong nor to do evil to anyone”, showing that he would harm the polis by escaping enables Socrates to conclude with confidence that he should not escape. That, anyway, is the popular account of why Socrates decides not to escape from jail. A more interesting interpretation focuses on the fact that escaping would not provide Socrates a ‘better, more just, or holier’ life than what awaits him in the afterlife.

In brief: Life in exile would not allow Socrates to ‘question, examine, and cross-examine’ others with intent to exhort them to virtue and shame them for “scorning the things that are of most importance and caring more for what is of less worth”. Since this practicing of philosophy constitutes for Socrates the examined life, and since “the unexamined life is not worth living,” life in exile would not be worth living; thus Socrates should not escape, and thus he does not escape. The argument implies that were philosophy possible not only in Athens (were it possible e.g. in Sparta or Crete), Socrates should have escaped and would have been right in doing so. Thus arises the crucial question: Why was philosophy possible only in Athens and not in the surrounding cities?

We get some hint from Plato’s Protagoras. Protagoras portrays the Athenian educational system as designed to cultivate morality: poetry is taught so children might desire to imitate the heroes of Homer; music is taught so that they might live gracefully; and gymnastics are encouraged so to ready them for courageous deeds in the future. But certainly poetry, music, and gymnastics were not unique to Athens; the educational agendas of Sparta and Crete, for instance, included all three, and even quite heavy-handedly imposed moral beliefs on citizens. What Sparta and Crete lacked, however, was the grace and courage to permit free speech. Dover 1976, 54 argues that “toleration of the free expression of intellectual criticism was at most times and in most circumstances a predominant characteristic of Athenian society.” His historical analysis accords with Socrates’ first-hand account in the Gorgias: in Athens “there is more freedom of speech than anywhere else in Greece”. And the implication for the Crito is that without the degree of freedom that Athens permits, philosophy — the exhortation of others to virtue by Socratic cross-examination — is not possible. For Socrates, a free society is a prerequisite for philosophy; and insofar as philosophy is an essential component of education, it is a prerequisite for education, too.

Eliot writes, “As we grow older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated / Of dead and living”. It would be naïve to think that this pattern — this picture frame that, placed around the past, makes sense of it for us — happens merely and effortlessly with the sequence of time. It is rather a product of human discovery; our understanding of the past allows us to impart order to the past and thus to the present, just as our understanding of physical laws allows us to see nature as ordered. But when the past is unknown to us — or, perhaps worse, when it is perverted for us –, our present is somehow false. It is as if we thought (with Hume) the falling of leaves no more ordained than that they should float skyward. Education without a free society inevitably becomes a fabrication, the pet project of a government wanting to rewrite history so to shape the present. It falsifies the pattern, and so creates a false world. Here too, free society is the condition for the possibility of true education.

Let us now turn to the necessity of education for free society. We should note that education would not be necessary for free society if free society were natural to us. Education, for instance, is not necessary to teach us self-interest or to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Indeed it is only because free society is unnatural that education is necessary for it. ‘But,’ one might object, ‘we are born free; we have the freedom to make choices and do as we please: we can do whatever we want. How is a free society then unnatural? Wherever two are together, there is a free society.’ We should respond that this libertine’s freedom is not freedom at all; if we take Plato seriously, it is the exact opposite of freedom. Hume famously said that ‘reason is the slave of the passions’; he meant that, when we consider ethical education, we should focus on the education of the passions, not of reason. He was at least partly right: reason is the slave of the passions; thus the precondition for freedom is the liberation of reason from passion’s chains. To pull an image from Plato’s Phaedrus, reason is the charioteer of two wayward and warring horses, the passions and the noble emotions, and for the chariot to proceed anywhere both must submit to reason’s direction. Were reason’s mastery natural, education would not be needed; since it is not natural, and since until it is established we are slaves to the passions, education is necessary for freedom. And no matter what one imagines defines a free society — whether it is that the sovereign be free himself or that the citizens be free or that freedom in this ethical sense be promoted — education is likewise necessary for a free society; without it, passions and self-interest reign.

I hope by now to have depicted the paradoxical relationship between education and free society. Each is the prerequisite for the other; both must come before the other to make the other possible. But this is obvious nonsense; both can never come before, because only one can come before. Should we want a free society, then let us have education; but we will never have education without a free society; then let us have a free society!; but, for that, we need education. Rousseau’s solution — deus ex machina — seems to be the only solution, but I will now suggest another to which the above already alludes. In doing so I aim to elaborate on what I take to be the true nature of education and its utter necessity to freeing already free humanity.

Humanity, most think, is already essentially free; no matter the circumstances into which one is born, one is born with free will. Certainly in my experiences I feel myself to have free will. I could now rise and walk outside, or I could pour more tea. I do really seem to be free, in the same way that my desk seems to be blue and, when I stare at them receding into the distance, train tracks seem to converge. But train tracks do not converge; despite appearances, they remain straight. This opens the door for doubt. Although I do seem to be free, perhaps I actually am not.

To put it in Kantian terms, all we can ever know are appearances. I can for Kant know nothing about the desk itself; I can only know the desk as it appears to me. Likewise I can never know anything definite about my soul, about my “I” or my self; I can only ever know how it seems to me, and I have no reason to think that how it seems or appears corresponds to how it actually is (the actual convergence of train tracks to my eye, after all, does not correspond to their actually remaining parallel). To make matters worse for the problem of free will, the world of appearances is determined without exception by cause and effect; nothing in the world of appearances happens without a cause, and so nothing happens freely. My billiards stick causes one billiards ball to move another, and friction plus gravity eventually cause the billiards balls to stop. Free will is non-existent in the world of appearances; and since how a thing appears is all we can ever know about it for certain, free will, if we choose to assert its existence, can only ever be a happy myth for us. Were we strictly rational, allowing ourselves to believe nothing that reason could not absolutely prove, we would not believe in free will.

Let us note that Kant’s arguments are the quite excellent products of education. One does not come to write the Critique of Pure Reason without the influence of education. Thus, let us note, the effect of education here is to deny the rationality of free will; in other words, it is to oppose what I have been trying to establish, that education is the precondition for free society. Education here is the destroyer of free society; it proves free will a myth and confesses to not having within its powers the ability to ever prove otherwise. Two options thus seem left to us: either we can become misologists and forevermore hate arguments, or, what is perhaps no worse, we can become strict determinists and deny our free will. Interestingly enough, Kant did neither. What he did do, I suggest, is what the product of true education must be if free society is to be maintained. It is the apogee of education, not only despite its acting in spite of education, but because it acts so.

I quote from the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics:

“The aim of this natural tendency [of pure reason to transcend all possible experience] is to free our concepts from the fetters of experience and from the limits of the mere contemplation of nature… in order that practical principles might find some such scope for their necessary expectation and hope and might expand to the universality which reason unavoidably requires from a moral point of view”.

Kant knows that we cannot justify free will; to assert free will would be to assert a property of something we cannot know, a thing-in-itself, which is precisely the sin for which he faults the entire history of metaphysics. Nevertheless, Kant thinks that human nature is not exhausted by metaphysical speculation; humans are foremost for Kant ethical beings (not by chance, but by purpose), and so the truths of metaphysics, even if we cannot know them, must accord with our ethical life. Since free will is the cornerstone of morality, and our highest purpose is to be moral, free will must be asserted for the sake of practical life, even if it cannot be proved by speculative reasoning.

Free will cannot be proven; but let us believe in it, for by doing so we will be better people. This is, I suggest, the pinnacle of education: to know when education construed as rational life must resign to education construed as moral life. Were this knowledge absent, or were it never realized, free society would be betrayed by that which I have argued is its very foundation; education — the type of education that deduces the impossibility of ever proving free will — would reject freedom as a falsehood, and thus would end our noble calling toward an ethical life, which is to say, and thus would end true education. Unrestricted hedonism would prevail.

We observe the same noble insistence on preserving the virtuous life despite reason’s inability to justify it in Plato’s Meno. Meno doubts the possibility of inquiry, for it seems that one can neither inquire after what one knows nor after what one does not know. If a person knew something, then he could not inquire after it, because he already would know it; if he did not know something, then he could not inquire after it, because he would not know what to inquire after. Were this paradox to stand, learning via inquiry would be proved impossible, thus putting the possibility of education in serious peril. To topple it, Socrates invents the myth of recollection; souls knew all the Forms before birth, and so ‘learning’ on earth is simply the remembering of what one already knew, as one might remember an forgotten friend from a photograph of her. He then confesses that he cannot “confidently assert” this metaphysical account, but that, nevertheless, it is imperative that we believe in inquiry: “That the belief in the duty of inquiring after what we do not know will make us better and braver and less helpless than the notion that there is not even a possibility of discovering what we do not know, nor any duty of inquiring after it — this is a point for which I am determined to do battle, so far as I am able, both in word and in deed”.

Socrates’ vehement defense of the duty of inquiry stands in stark contrast to the deference with which he usually admits that he knows nothing. Were we to think Socrates educated, it could not be for some knowledge he has (for he admits he knows nothing), but for the values that guide his action. And here we glimpse a crucially important one: the belief in the duty of inquiry. Like Kant with freedom, Socrates cannot justify this duty, but he insists upon it. We should note that this is not the surrender of the rational for the irrational; rather, it is I think the preservation of reason’s most noble task: to know which of its arguments to endorse and which to not. Likewise Chesterton writes, “There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped… Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first”. I have suggested throughout this essay a similar point for freedom: once freedom is questioned, and education insists upon a cold rationality, the noble purpose of humanity is imperiled. Only through education’s preservation of free society can it preserve the best of itself, and only through free society’s preservation of education can it preserve the best of itself. The solution to any looming paradox is to cultivate the free will that we already have — both so that reason might be free of the passions (and true freedom thus secured), but also so that any disastrous conclusions of reason might be resisted in the way that Kant resisted the rational condemnation of free will and Socrates that of inquiry. Thus education is enabled and protected from self-destruction; thus free society is secured.