Posts Tagged ‘Stuart Warner’

JMC Chairman's Award 2009

Comments by Stuart Warner of Roosevelt College, announcing Ralph Lerner as the first recipient of the Jack Miller Center’s “Chairman’s Award for Academic Excellence.”

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In less than a fortnight’s time, another book of Ralph Lerner’s will cast light upon darkness—Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times, a collection of six essays on the

Stuart Warner

art of careful writing as found in More’s Utopia, Bacon, Bayle’s Dictionary, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy—Burton, yes Burton—Franklin, and Gibbon’s History, distinct authors all, but taken by Ralph as an ensemble.

Without exception, the essays spring from courses he has lately taught at the University of Chicago, the university that has been his spiritual home for over half a century, some taught on the cusp of retirement, others after he had officially retired.  Indeed, while most scholars—approach their twilight years seeking to be relieved of the activity of teaching, Ralph’s loving embrace of that activity might even have increased.  For in the past ten years or so Ralph has tackled books he not only had not previously taught, but in a few cases had never even opened—teaching providing the occasion for reading something that simply must be read.  So, in the last decade or thereabouts, Ralph could be found teaching Hume’s History of England (yes:  all of it); Gibbon’s History (again:  all of it), Bayle’s Dictionary (as David is my witness), and Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws.  But why?

I have been most fortunate in the last five years to have co-taught with Ralph three times, twice on Montesquieu and currently on Plato’s Phaedrus.  Three weeks ago we were chatting before class about getting more out of the students then they seemed willing to give.  And as Ralph talked more and more about how we might do this, he grew more and more excited about going in there to teach them, finally remarking, “You know, Stuart, this is why we live.”  For Ralph, teaching is part of a certain kind of life—the life of the mind, the very best of a human life.  The activity of teaching places demands upon both teacher and learner, and Ralph has never been shy about making certain that students understand exactly what kind of engagement is demanded of them.  The students come to understand this not only when awakened to the world of learning through Ralph’s constant prodding, but also when they receive the most probing and exacting comments on their papers once returned.  Indeed, those of us privileged to have had Ralph comment on our own writings, know all too well the excruciating painful pleasure it is.

To the world outside of the University of Chicago, Ralph is best known and appreciated as an author.  The collection to which I’ve already referred may be offered as evidence of the range and scope of Ralph’s interest and abilities.  However, such an offer would do a disservice to Ralph’s truly colossal achievement, an achievement that spans the intellectual realms of eighteenth-century America and the medieval Judaic-Islamic world.  At the deepest level, in The Thinking Revolutionary and Revolutions Revisited, Ralph reflects upon the American Founding Fathers’ understanding of the human passions, an understanding that was at the core of a conception of human nature and virtue that animated at every turn the American Founding principles.   These principles, of course, needed some form of institutional instantiation, and Ralph’s recognition of that helped lead him to the work he did editing, with the late Philip Kurland, the five volume, 3,200 double-column paged, Founders’ Constitution, a work the Columbia Law Review called “the Oxford English Dictionary of American Constitutional History.”

But if Ralph Lerner’s work on America has to do with the political life of human beings, his work on medieval Judaic-Islamic thought has to do with our philosophical life, or the possibility thereof.  Informed along the way by things he learned from Alfarabi, Ralph’s translation and meditation upon Averroes’ commentary on Plato’s Republic and his partial translation and essays on Joseph Albo’s Book of Roots set into sharp relief the tension that exists between revelation and reason on the one hand and the conventions of civic life and the questioning examination of philosophy on the other.  Through these writings one can gain some understanding of the problematic possibilities of locating the place of the human being within the cosmos.  That problematic character is explored with a rarely matched depth and deliberate opacity in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed.  As everyone knows, the great edition of that work in English, in 1963, was by Shlomo Pines and Leo Strauss; much less known is that Ralph englished the whole of the work, for which we remain in his debt.  More recently, Ralph edited, translated, and commented upon other, smaller, writings by Maimonides on the paradoxical theme of popular enlightenment in an age of belief, a theme that is never far from Ralph’s mind’s eye.

Ralph Lerner is a great teacher and a great scholar.  But, no, that’s not quite right. For that formulation implies that teaching and scholarship are distinct undertakings, but for Ralph they are not.  They are merely aspects of a life that attempts, encumbered by the fragility of being human, to enter into and transfigure an ongoing world of learning.  Greatness, however, that does apply, but it applies to the whole that is Ralph Lerner.

Please join me in honoring the recipient of the inaugural Jack Miller Center Chairman’s Award for Academic Excellence, Ralph Lerner.

Ralph Lerner