The Single Book Course

A few years ago I started joking that university teaching is not difficult, and can be easily accomplished in two steps:

1. read book

2. talk about book¹

At a certain level of abstraction this joke describes how I actually do teach. If pressed, I’ll say that good undergraduate teaching in the humanities requires asking just the right questions: considering the particularities of the book, the specific students you’ve got, and what you want the question itself to put together for them. But trying to get into too much more detail about a method obliges a discussion of the specific books and students which generate those questions, quickly becoming too particular to be useful for discussion

The problem with teaching this way is that it is, truly, an endless amount of work. Teaching prep is a sort of temporal spray foam, expanding to occupy whatever gaps I introduce it into. Teaching this way makes my life fairly straightforward, manages the freedom of the academic life: what should I be doing? Well, I’ve got to prep. I really do appreciate this simplicity, which is probably a moral and intellectual weakness.

I have long had an incurable desire for abstraction, parsimony, simplicity. This why I like the thinkers I like—Plato, Kierkegaard, even Derrida—since the complexities of their modes of writing are aimed at recovering the basic questions as they present themselves to human beings. My mother-in-law, whose aesthetic is warmly maximalist, and my mother, whose tastes tend toward tasteful shades of grey, both note that our house has almost entirely white walls. That said, given my druthers, I’d like to live in one of those houses you might see in a European appliance commercial: concrete, floor-to-ceiling windows, few possessions. The sort of house with ample square footage, that seems like it would be very cold and somehow always clean, which might house objets d’art more naturally than actual people. You know what I mean. I’m not defending this impulse, which I recognize as a failing; merely expressing it. It doesn’t take all that much insight, besides, to see how this desire is conditioned by an immature reaction to my warmly chaotic living situation, among so many children and so much stuff.

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One of my frustrations with the way university education is conceived and delivered these days is that the fundamentals are neither complex nor expensive. My own little act of protest in coming back to teaching after the pandemic and sabbatical was thus to teach a course on a single book: Plato’s Republic. We’ve struggled to place the Republic in our Great Books Program in recent years: it’s not the best introduction to Plato on account of its length and difficulty, so we’ve moved away from teaching it to our first-years. During the pandemic we decided to keep our readings a little bit shorter to accommodate online instruction, and our students’ generalized misery. But this led to an entire cohort about to graduate from our Great Books program who have not read what is surely, if anything is, a very great book indeed.

“Socrates” by Hari Mitrushi (2018)

So this, plus the success of a few of my friends teaching similar courses, proved a compelling justification for the adoption of the single book course.

The single book course is good because of its simplicity. There is no real question of competing priorities: we are going to read Plato’s Republic and then get together and talk about it. And while I did assign a few secondary readings because the class is an honours seminar, the reduction in distractions and background noise, the unity, the clarity of purpose, were as pleasing in practice as they were when I conceived this idea last spring.² These students, this room—sunny at 9:00am on Wednesdays and Fridays—this book. One paper.³ One book, students, conversation, writing. Pleasingly atavistic, a sort of vengeance on the complexity of the years spent teaching online. It has been one of the best experiences of my time in the university.

No doubt this is also due to the opportunity it has afforded me to study the Republic itself with sufficient care. And, of course, oddly enough, the desire for simplicity is also at the heart of that book. Thrasymachus dyspeptically tells Socrates he wants to know what justice is without prevarication, and Glaucon will then say Thrasymachus gave up too easily—like a snake, charmed too quickly. He therefore challenges Socrates to show the power of justice in itself, in its effects, and for its wages, to hear it “extolled all by itself.” The city that arises from this request consequently aims to expunge faction, to be perfectly united in purpose. To the extent possible, it is a city where public good and private inclination align. The people who live in the city are simple as its vision of justice, and the philosophy that supports the city and for the sake of which it exists is unconcerned with anything that can’t be purely intellected. The city is a complete whole, and those who inhabit it, though parts, experience something of that wholeness. Complete control over education is also critical to the foundation and maintenance of the beautiful city. The education of the philosophical rulers seems even to bend the cosmos to its purposes: things are perfectly commensurable, and so reason is calculative, corresponding to forms which are apprehended in the same mode as mathematics.

But the desire for perfection and abstraction needs to run roughshod over the complexities of human souls and bodies alike, and so, bit by bit, the impositions required for such wholeness are slowly unveiled—with some help from that obstreperous middle child, Adeimantus. It was an unmixed pleasure to watch my students attracted and repelled—sometimes from one moment to the next—by Socrates’ communism, his vision of equality according to nature, his scheme for philosophical rulers, and the outrages required to bring it about. The imposition of complete form—with its mirror image in the formlessness of tyranny—cannot be justice. Why do we want it? Because the complexity and the messiness of human life make unity impossible, and really do produce no end of troubles for human beings.

The not-completely-un-self-reflective teacher is therefore led to wonder: Is my desire for a single book course correspondingly tyrannical?

Perhaps. Except the pursuit of simplicity is endlessly complex, and requires a plurality of visions and voices to sustain. The manifest difficulty of our task in reading and grappling with the Republic gives the lie to any sense that what we’re doing is easy or even altogether abstract.

The single book course exaggerates the goods of a regular university course in the same way the Republic exaggerates the goods of a city. In our single book course we benefitted from the esprit de corps, the shared intellectual endeavour, the challenge, the opportunity to learn from others, the inside jokes, the sense of self-importance, and thus the quality of the learning and the work. The course seems more of a whole than a course can be because it is unusually more one than many.

It could not be as significant as it seems. But imagination is necessary for really loving to learn. It sort of has to feel urgent in a way that might be embarrassing to you five, ten years later.⁴ This, too, is one of the lessons of the Republic. The city-in-speech is an image, and we need to be first taken in by its serious appeal before recognizing its despotism. Getting to live in the city in speech together is fun: trying to really inhabit the beautiful city at its centre, not as its actual imagined denizens do, but as someone who can think about it from some distance. From there you might consider the city Socrates and his friends build together—what my teacher Mary Nichols calls a “dialogical community”—a community of speeches which is more pluralistic than kallipolis, leaving space to talk all night about justice, where it’s possible to have your soul exaggerated and abstracted, presented to you for your consideration. And finally to the recognition that the real city is still there, and that we might fail it as it inevitably fails us. After that, we might soberly appreciate what Plato may have wanted in having us consider all these things in relation to one another, and to think with others who have loved the Republic before we have.

The experience of reading the Republic is, it seems to me, a synecdoche for education. Its education is not, in other words, either of the educations it depicts, but an education in learning to love images of wholeness while retaining the ability to see them as images. Glaucon is the ideal interlocutor for the dialogue because his love of abstract simplicity leads him to want to know the secrets hiding within our souls—he has no patience for images. The single book course, especially about the Republic, is something sort of elemental because it is an attempt to embody the process of education itself.

My students are currently entirely given over to their seminar presentations and term papers, and every one of them is promising to do extraordinary undergraduate work. They’re still chasing wholeness and it’s requiring their entire selves, but I have to guide them and grade them, keeping half of my vision on scholarly norms and university policies. I’m already half somewhere else, even when I’m not planning next semester, writing book reviews and book proposals, driving kids to final rehearsals for Christmas recitals. Teachers have to be grown-ups. Unlike Socrates, I can’t stay up all night.

I’m thinking about how the end of a course on the Republic means, oddly enough, the coming of dawn. Plato’s two most compelling dialogues happen at night, and whatever gravity the sun has as an image in the Republic, we’re left a little bit sad about the prospect of the sun rising and the conversation ending. The most notable “morning” dialogue is a reminder that the disproportion of philosophy and the city is only surmountable in speeches. So the point of the single book course is to permit and encourage exaggeration and a certain love of abstraction, but not to stay in the seminar room forever. This is, I suppose, a good thing for someone who has tried to never really leave to keep in mind, too.

1. This is also my approach to scholarship, if “talk” is replaced by “write”

2. We were even lucky enough to have my friend Mary Townsend to campus to talk about “the woman question” in the Republic

3. Lest I be accused of contemporary pedagogical malpractice, it is a thoroughly scaffolded approach to one paper, with many small steps being required along the way before the actual paper is due. I’m not a monster.

4. Incidentally, this is why good teachers have to remain oddballs, a little bit immature.