When I last had the privilege to address all of you on behalf of the faculty, it was convocation, and I asked us, naturally, to contemplate beginnings. You may recall that I quoted an ancient Chinese prayer for the start of a journey, part of which ran, “May you mount the chariot and have the road open before you. May the Wind Monarch and the Rain Legions wet down the road [to reduce the dust]. … May the Green Dragon travel at your side. May the White Tiger help you on your way”; and it ended,” May you have joy without end.” And I also quoted a companion passage from the ancient Greek philosopher-poet Parmenides, in which a youth mounts a chariot and is placed by the Daughters of the Sun upon a “path that can carry a man with understanding as far as the stars.” In that poem, once the youth passed through the gates of the paths of Night and Day, the Goddess, Wisdom, welcomes the youth and says: “it was no bad fortune that sent you forth to journey down this road that humans so seldom travel, but Right (themis) and Justice (dikê). And it is right that you should learn all things….” And on that note, we began.
I hope the Green Dragon and the White Tiger and the Daughters of the Sun, have been at your side as you have gone down this path that we call the global learning semester. Now, as we reach this point in the journey, when we say goodbye to one another and declare a job well done, you may think that I will want us to contemplate endings. But I do not. Instead, I want to remind you that we are —all of us— still on that path, a path that embraces both “joy without end” and an “understanding that reaches to the stars” as its goals. Note, though, that however joyful we are and however much we think we understand, we have not reached either of those goals.
As many of you know, I have been getting together with some of the students to read a few works of Plato, the great Greek philosopher, who writes about the wisdom of Socrates, his master. Among what we read was the Apology, the speech that Socrates spoke in his defense when he was on trial for his life. In that there is a famous passage in which Socrates talks about the fact that the oracle at Delphi declared that “no man was wiser than Socrates.” Socrates was perplexed at that, thinking himself far from the wisest, and so he spent the next years going up to everyone who had a reputation for wisdom —other intellectuals, statesmen, poets — and for each one he examined them, exploring every question until it was exhausted; and at the end he concluded, “I at least am wiser than they, for they know nothing and think that they know; whereas I neither know nor think that I know” (21d). That is a crucial trait in Socrates, that he knows that he does not know enough to have true understanding, that there is always a gap between knowledge and Understanding. Now I have also been reading, on my own, the Sayings of Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher. I almost dropped my book when, the other day, I came across saying 8 in book 9 of Confucius, in which he says, “Do I have knowledge? I have no special knowledge. But if an uneducated fellow comes to me with a question, I attack it with all sincerity, explore it from end to end until I’ve exhausted it.” That is, Confucius too sees the critical difference between knowledge — which can be examined and explored and shown to have limits —and true understanding; and, if I am reading this correctly, he too sees an inevitable gap between knowledge and Understanding. Thus something I had always thought an essential characteristic of Socratic philosophy turns out to be there, independently, in Confucius, at roughly the same time period. [1]
So: you have knowledge, and some of it you have gathered here. You know more, much more about all sorts of things, among them Global Health, Ethics, Cognitive evolution, Bioenergy, Water ecology, academic writing; and a favored few even know how to analyze classical sculpture, what hybris and até are, and which historian first divided the world into East and West. You also have more understanding. You know now that a University can exist in a hotel; or, more seriously, how it changes perspective to be able to see things through the eyes of others who have grown up in different cultures, with different sets of attitudes and beliefs; and we the faculty in particular want to believe that you have improved your understanding, as well as your knowledge, about all sorts of things having to do with your coursework— that part of learning that we call “critical thinking.”
But more knowledge, indeed more understanding, only brings you further along a path that I hope you now can see more clearly as a life-long path, a striving not just to acquire more knowledge, but also to acquire better understanding; and it is my urgent wish that this understanding will be enhanced by the truly global learning experience in which we have all participated this semester.
So, let me now return to where I began. We are not at an end, but a new beginning, and as you set upon whatever path you now take, I again wish you again an auspicious start, and urge you as you continue your path towards better understanding to recall these three quotes. First from the Greek poet:
“It is Right that you should learn all things”
and
“This is a path that can carry a man with understanding as far as the stars”
and finally, from the Chinese prayer:
“May you have joy without end.”
You’ve represented us faculty well in your scholarship, teaching and public remarks. You also accepted the unenviable task of leading our ad hoc faculty as a nascent deliberative and policy making body.
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to know you through DKU collaboration that was not afforded to us on Duke’s main campus. My wish is that you experience the poets’ and sages’ inspiring aspirations for yourself and your family.
I echo what Jeff said about you so eloquently. All the best for you and your family’s transition back to Durham, Lijing