Aristotle, Acorns, and Oak Trees: On Stunted Growth, Real Mentorship, and How to Cultivate a Fully-Developed Human Being
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle provides a useful metaphor for thinking of human development and personal growth. According to Aristotle, human development is similar to the way in which an acorn develops into an oak tree, given the proper conditions, cultivation, nurturing, and environment. In some sense, the potential to become an oak tree is inherent within the acorn itself, lying dormant and waiting to come alive and come to fruition in its own due time.
The reason I like this metaphor for human development is that it captures the notion that proper human development, personal growth, and flourishing are dependent on countless external and environmental factors. An acorn sitting alone on a floor of concrete won’t develop into an oak tree, despite the inherent oak tree potential the acorn holds within itself. Think, for example, of the many environmental conditions that are necessary for the acorn not only to sprout but to develop into, and eventually flourish as, an oak tree:
Soil
Nutrients
Sunlight
Water
Cultivation/pruning
And so on….
Especially important is that these ingredients for growing a healthy oak tree must come in the right proportions. Too little water and the sapling will dry out, wither away, and die, or its growth will be stunted. Too much water, and the roots will rot, and the acorn or sapling will drown. Too little sunlight, and photosynthesis can’t occur. Too much sunlight and the acorn will likewise dry out. Too little pruning and the oak tree will grow out of control. Too much pruning and the oak tree’s won’t develop properly.
Humans require the same balance of proportions to become the rational, social, political animals that Aristotle claims we should become. The potential to become rational, social, and political animals—to truly flourish as a human being—is present in every healthy newborn baby. But humans require the right environmental conditions to reach their full potential: education, love, support, social structures, and so on. And these ingredients must be provided in the correct proportion, or else human beings will become unbalanced:
Too little education (or the wrong kind of education), and humans won’t become fully rational agents and critical thinkers.
Too much education, however, and students can become bookish or academic in the negative sense of being overly focused, tunnel-visioned, or impractical.
Too little social conditioning, and humans can become isolated, antisocial, and agoraphobic.
Too much social conditioning, however, and humans can have many acquaintances but no real friends.
And so on….
Looking at human development and growth through an Aristotelian lens, as I would argue any educator worth his or her salt must ultimately do, the lack of the necessary ingredients for proper human development can result in humans whose growth—either literal in terms of physical development or figurative in terms of intellectual, social, moral, or academic development—is stunted. And, sadly, once a life form’s growth has been stunted, whether an oak tree or a human being, it’s often impossible for it to develop fully and reach its full potential from there.
This is the situation in which we philosophy instructors often find our undergraduate students (and sometimes each other!). Our students haven’t received the training in careful reading, structured writing, critical thinking and logical reasoning, or even the social skills needed to genuinely engage in philosophical dialog and debate in the context of today’s college and university classrooms. We philosophy instructors try our best to make up for our students’ deficiencies, sometimes being frustrated by those deficiencies but knowing full well that those deficiencies are not the fault of our students but of their parents, their prior teachers, their school districts, their families, their friends, and by many aspects of our contemporary life and culture.
A radical existentialist like Jean-Paul Sartre might say that we are never at the mercy of our upbringing. (See Existentialism Is a Humanism by Sartre.) And, to some extent, that’s true. You can always go back to school, improve your reading and writing skills, practice your logical reasoning and critical thinking skills, and even develop your social skills. It seems to me, though, that some people are simply too far gone—too stunted and too underdeveloped—to be able to turn back the hands of time on their own inadequate cultivation as human beings; their minds (or souls or hearts) are simply too underdeveloped to ever reach their full potential.
To some, this is a challenge, and more power to them! If there’s anyone I can respect, it’s someone who refuses to believe in the constraints of their own limitations. But struggling to overcome one’s limitations isn’t the same thing as developing fully from the very beginning, and the latter takes more cultivation than most contemporary students are getting from their educational, family, and social environments.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m the first to say that proper human development and upbringing involve a healthy disrespect for authority—or for anyone, for that matter, who would dare to tell another human being what life is all about, how one should or shouldn’t live his or her own life, or what meaning and potential are yet to be discovered in the human spirit. But that level of drive and personal authenticity, too, takes cultivation and habituation. It takes practice to have enough courage and self-knowledge to know when to stick with the herd and when to break with it for one’s own good, or for the good of humanity as a whole, just as it takes training and habituation to develop every other virtuous character trait we find desirable in our fellow human beings, and to train them out of the ones that hinder their growth instead of causing them to flourish and to thrive.
In other words, one needn’t be hopelessly conformist or hegemonic, too objective or universalist, or too old-fashioned to be an Aristotelian about education and the necessity of the right kind of educational, familial, and social environment to bring about the development of humans capable of living up to their true potential. After all, the greatest potential of any particular individual may be, and probably is, wildly different than the potential of all the rest of humankind put together, even having started out first as an acorn, then a sapling, and only then discovering what his or her own fully-authentic and creative potential, in some Nietzschean sense, really is.
I get the sense that many of my students know that they’ve been done a disservice up until now, that they’ve been screwed over and given the short end of the stick by the educational system and by those who should know better, even by their most well-intentioned, loving, caring, and supportive teachers, counselors, parents, and family members. Real education, in the sense of Aristotelian training and cultivation, can’t and shouldn’t merely be a matter of the blind leading the blind, which it sadly often is in our culture:
How do we expect teachers to raise courageous students when they themselves have never demonstrated courage?
How can we expect school counselors to steer students to a truly unique path in life when they themselves have only ever played it safe and stuck to the beaten path?
How can we expect parents to raise students who love learning if they themselves stopped learning anything new the moment they graduated from high school?
How can we expect mentors to teach personal authenticity when they themselves are conformists?
How can we teach genuine social and political engagement when these aspects of our contemporary society are degenerating before our very eyes?
And how can we expect students to think outside the box to solve the big problems of society when they are being told to play it safe and stay between the guardrails of life—by everyone from their helicopter parents and uninspired teachers to their bad-advice-giving school counselors and tunnel-visioned professors?
No, mere teachers and parents and schools aren’t enough, to say nothing of the bismally inadequate support and direction (often misdirection!) most students receive from today’s educational environment and institutions. No mere teacher or administrator can make up for the lack of their students’ proper cultivation in the course of a single school year before passing the buck to the next teacher, from kindergarten all the way through college.
Real education takes mentoring, not mere instruction. Aristotle himself studied under his mentor Plato for 20 years—two full decades! Compare that to the pitiful amount of mentoring that can be accomplished by any particular teacher in the course of a school year, or, even worse, in the four months we philosophy teachers get our college students in the course of a typical semester of college. This tells me that we philosophy teachers, and teachers in general, if we take our role as mentors—not just educators but mentors for life—seriously, then we need to take it upon ourselves to form the lifelong bonds with our students that will allow us to make a real impact in their lives, to see to it that they cultivate the character traits they should have in order to live up to their full potential in life.
Although the relationship between Plato and Aristotle, despite their philosophical differences, is almost archetypical for the teacher/student mentoring relationship, a more contemporary example can be found in fairly recent popular culture in the form of the character Mr. Feeny from the 1990s television show Boy Meets World. In the show, Mr. Feeny (portrayed by William Daniels) becomes a type of long-term mentor to his neighbor and student, Cory Matthews (the main character of the series, portrayed by Ben Savage) and his cohort of students, all the way from elementary school through college, doling out much-needed wisdom, perspective, advice, and even correction, as needed to ensure that Cory Matthews (affectionately and ironically called “Mr. Matthews” by Mr. Feeny—perhaps with an eye toward the long-term potential that Mr. Feeny sees in Cory, as true educators do in all their students) develops the ideals that Mr. Feeny sees for Cory’s life—personal responsibility, authenticity, self-reflectiveness, and so on. Mr. Feeny wasn’t just a teacher but a lifelong mentor.
In short, we philosophy teachers need to make the shift from being mere philosophy instructors to philosophical mentors and life mentors for our students, much in the same way that the ancient Roman stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger became a kind of long-term mentor to his younger friend, Lucilius Junior. (See Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic.) This kind of life mentoring is an under-appreciated aspect of the history of philosophy worth exploring, for it is only through these kinds of relationships that virtue, culture, character, and genuine human flourishing get passed down from generation to generation, both within and outside our tiny—almost insignificant even—philosophy classrooms.
Sadly, though, I worry that most philosophy teachers themselves are wildly underprepared and under-qualified to serve as genuine life mentors to their students. Most philosophers and philosophy instructors have philosophical tunnel vision and have lost sight of the forest for the philosophical trees, lost sight of the role they play in turning their acorn-esque students not merely into fully developed philosophers but into the oak trees of fully developed human beings.
Too many would-be philosophical and life mentors would sadly turn out to be yet another instance of the blind leading the blind, in a twisted reversal of the primary lesson of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (Republic, Book VII) and a pathetic perversion of the primary role we serve as philosophical mentors who supposedly have some wisdom to hand down to our students while we drag them kicking and screaming outside the cave of illusions. No, most philosophers, contrary to popular opinion, are still stuck in some cave or other, if not the cave. So why would we trust them, and why should they trust themselves, to be genuine life mentors—in that sacred role? What a sad, sorry state contemporary philosophy and philosophers are in if they can’t rise to the occasion in this regard to serve as genuine mentors. Plato and Aristotle—both of them—are rolling over in their graves at the lot of us.
No matter what we might think of Aristotle’s ethics, his metaphysics, his epistemology, his political philosophy, or his overall role in the history of philosophy, our educational system in general—and we philosophy teachers in particular!—need an overdose dose of Aristotelian mentoring in our own approach to philosophical instruction, just as our own students need genuine mentors—mentors about life, yes, but lifelong mentors as well—more than they need teachers, parents, instructors, school counselors, or professors, and definitely more than they need the overhyped policies, programs, quick fixes, and bandaids of our school districts, college administrations, and the department of education. Only mentors grow fully-fledged human beings, in the Aristotelian sense, with all the virtues, character traits, habits, social skills, perspective, critical thinking skills, political conscience, self-awareness, and ultimately wisdom to be fully authentic individuals, to be genuine citizens (rational, social, and political animals), and to live up to their fullest individual and human potential.
