English 12: The Literature of Justice
History 12: Ethics, Political Theory, and Philosophy
Exam Date: May 23, 2014
Name: _________________________________________________
Please complete the essays and responses below for your final exam, bringing two printed copies with you into the exam and,
prior to the exam, sending Mr. Duethorn, Mr. Rigney, and Mr. Osar, one Microsoft Word document containing all of your
final exam work labeled with your last name. Please email this document by 10:00 PM the night before the exam, using the
subject and document title: “Last Name, First Name - E&E Final Exam.” A printed copy of your exam and your artistic
presentation must also be delivered by 10:00 PM to the fireplace room the night before the exam. All sections of the final
exam should be collated together into one final document when turned in. As always, please use MLA standards for
composition and citation. Each question should be numbered, have a title that indicates the topic, and include a word count
in parentheses at the end.
The first, second, and third questions are the most personal. The fourth essay is directly related to your scholarship regarding
justice, ethics, political theory, and philosophy.
Thanks for everything,
Mark, John, and Dan
1.
Discovering Unique Potential through the Hyde Education
What is the Hyde Education and how does it help individuals come to terms with the terms of existence?
Respond to the question above, defining the “Hyde Education” and its function. (You should not describe Hyde
School but rather the lessons and values that apply to all stages of life.)
FCA#1= your minimum three paragraph response should be at least 250 words in length.
FCA#2= your explanation of Unique Potential.
FCA#3= through each word and principle describe what you have discovered about your Unique Potential.
What have your experiences with each word and principle, like the great tiger in the “Tiger Cub Parable,” revealed
about your Unique Potential? Consider the role of the great tiger in the tiger cub’s life and Hyde’s role in your own.
Reflect upon and write about each word and principle, and the hypothesis each has posed in your journey through
this process.
Curiosity
Courage
Leadership
Concern
Integrity
2.
Destiny
Humility
Conscience
Truth
Brother’s Keeper
“Song of Myself” Analysis and Artistic Presentation
In “Song of Myself”, Walt Whitman celebrates himself and the experience of being alive in myriad ways. Through this
rambling, thoughtful poem, Whitman unites himself with every person, capturing in words the spirit of universal
appreciation. Using IPSES as a framework, consider how Whitman explores and understands himself as a whole
person. What do you learn from this? What draws you out? Read your section aloud a number of times over. When
developing responses to the three FCAs, focus on the IPSES framework and how you view yourself, your surroundings,
and your past, present, and future, experiences.
FCA#1= your minimum 300 word analysis of “Song of Myself” should focus on Whitman’s word choice, train of
thought, presentation, and context (within the section and poem).
FCA#2= a 2-D (or 3-D) visual presentation (min. of 12” x 12”) that reflects a “personal celebration of self” using a
medium that you can display before your peers. Suggested mediums include painting, photography, 3-D
representation, extended poem, photography, etc.
FCA#3= your minimum 200 word artistic summary should detail the significance of the medium and components
you have chosen to create.
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3.
In relation to our studies this year, define and, then, describe the moral, ethical, and political visions with which you now
engage the world.
The second essay asks that you thoughtfully reflect upon your year and frame your learning in three directions.
FCA#1= Your minimum seven paragraph response should be at least 750 words in length. Paragraph structure: 1,
introduction; 2, moral vision; 3, ethical vision; 4, political vision; 5, English; 6, Ethics; 7; senior
curriculum.
FCA#2=Paragraphs 2-4: (2, moral vision; 3, ethical vision, 4, political vision). Include separate paragraphs explain
how your assignments and experiences this year have helped you discover your moral, ethical, and political
visions. More explicitly, clarify your moral vision, the values you hold for yourself; ethics, values and
norms you expect to give to others and receive from others; political, what are the just relationship between
the individual and society. Provide a centered, underlined subtitle for each.
FCA#3= Paragraphs 5-7: (5, English; 6, Ethics; 7; senior curriculum): In separate paragraphs for the English and
Ethics use two specific text citations from each course (four, in total), and two explicit personal references
to how you have applied academic learning beyond the classroom. In paragraph 7 describe the most
important things you learned in senior curriculum. Provide a centered, underlined subtitle for each.
Through the literature read this year, the activities, and experiences purposefully designed, you have come to better
understand your relationship to yourself and your beliefs in how you work with others. This has been and explicit and
implicit self-interrogation, and a conscious and subconscious reflection. Through this process, you have been asked to
discover modes of being, ways of thinking, and practice, or test, behaviors and attitudes that lead to success or failure.
So what? What have you discovered about your moral, ethical, and political vision through the experience of being a
guardian of conscience?
The texts and literature provide the backbone for this learning. Framed in a social contract and called to become “dual
citizens”, you’ve been asked to “speak in [your] own tongue” even when you did not know it. Martin Luther King, Jr.
ends his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by referring to the old Negro woman (whom he refers to as a hero) who refused
to ride buses in favor of walking in order to make her point. She says, “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” In the
fight for justice, King explores the role of action and inaction when facing difficult questions and challenges. The
lessons of Dr. King provide a framework for our ethical interactions – the relationship between ourselves and others –
while also raising questions for us.
Similarly, Jacob Needleman writes: “Ethics refers to outer actions, what you do. But inwardly, you are moral. That is,
you are in touch with something that’s truer, more your right nature, your real nature. As a result of being, moral, you
act in a way that could be judged ethical.” Conscience constitutes a harmonizing force among our moral, ethical, and
political lives calling us to remember that to which we must be true. This spring, we witnessed Candide’s resolution to
“cultivate [his] garden” following his arduous journey. Our most recent reading, that of Walt Whitman’s “Song of
Myself,” calls us to celebrate our gifts, our individuality, ultimately, our uniqueness. As you address your moral, ethical
and political visions, consider what you must celebrate in yourself, and how you’ve come to both understand and
cultivate these gifts.
4.
How does Brother’s Keeper, through the activity of speech and dialogue, lead to moments of aporia and, through the
public display of judgment and concern (that is, visible, phenomenological action), generate ethical moments of beauty?
The third essay requires the greatest degree of synthesis and depth of understanding.
FCA#1= your minimum three paragraph response should be at least 500 words in length.
FCA#2= summarize how Brother’s Keeper affects one’s doxa.
FCA#3= using at least one direct citation from Dana Villa and Jacob Needleman, explain how imaginative judgment
demonstrates political action and generates moments of beauty.
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You will need to read the excerpt below and the section from Dana Villa’s Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the
thought of Hannah Arendt, regarding aporia and conscience, dialogue, authority, power, and determinate versus
reflective or imaginative judgment (pp. 157-164) and synthesize it with the excerpt below as well as with your
understanding of Jacob Needleman’s The Heart of Philosophy.
In “Philosophy and Politics,” it is the second simile—Socrates as midwife—which Arendt emphasizes, to the
virtual exclusion of the other two. According to Arendt, Socrates practiced the art of midwifery in order “to help others
give birth to what they themselves thought anyhow, to find the truth in their doxa.” This enigmatic statement requires
some unpacking. Arendt wants to underline that for Socrates (unlike Plato) there was no opposition between truth and
opinion: whatever truth was available to human beings was necessarily part of the world of appearances and of speech.
Dialectic as practiced by Socrates was not what it became for Plato, namely, a specifically philosophical form of
speech, one defined by its opposition to persuasion and rhetoric. Rather, Socratic dialectic was a “talking something
through with somebody,” a conversation among friends which aimed at elucidating the truth of an individual’s doxa or
perspective on the world: “To Socrates, as to his fellow citizens, doxa was the formulation in speech of what dokei moi,
that is, of what appears to me.”
But “what appears to me” is not what is given, unthinkingly, to an individual in the largely reflexive attitude of
everyday life. Doxa cannot be reduced to shadows on the wall of the cave nor to what the “they” think. Nor does its
lack of universal validity render it arbitrarily or merely idiosyncratic. Rather, we tend, in everyday life, to be radically
unaware of our own doxa, our own perspective on the common world. It needs to be worked on, drawn out of us, in the
painful manner the midwife simile implies. To be delivered of one’s own doxa is to be made aware of oneself as an
individual member of the community possessed of a unique perspective, not as an adherent to some creed or ideology
shared with a group.
Thus, one’s doxa is by no means a matter of course, and the specific truth of one’s doxa even less so. If, as
Arendt asserts, “every man has his own doxa, his own opening to the world,” then the revelation of its specific truth can
be brought about only by a questioning which makes sure of “the other’s position in the common world.” This is where
Socratic cross-examination comes in. It ascertains the other’s position in the world through questioning, and then
draws out the truth of his particular perspective by forcing him to give a consistent account of otherwise half-formed or
barely articulate views. One’s doxa is the result of this process, a process few perform unless relentlessly prodded by
the Socratic midwife. Thus, the last thing Socratic dialectic aims at is the destruction of opinion. Socrates himself is
neither the teacher of an absolute truth nor the practitioner of a relentlessly dissolvent rationality. He is, rather, a
“citizen among citizens,” one whose philosophical activity is motivated by the desire to “make the city more truthful by
delivering each of the citizens of their truths.” Unlike Plato, Socrates “did not want to educate the citizens so much as
he wanted to improve their doxai, which constituted the political life in which he too took part.”
…Thus according to Arendt, Socrates’ philosophical activity grows out of a profoundly political concern,
namely, the imperative of containing the more Hobbesian tendencies of Greek agonistic individualism. Where the
“fiercely agonal spirit” animates political life (to use her formulation form The Human Condition), with every citizen in
competition with every other to prove himself “the best of all,” there the preservation of the community is continually
threatened. Socratic dialectic serves to beautify the world, to make citizens more fully aware of its richness and
variety; but it also serves to make those who were previously competitors into conversational partners, into friends who
gain an increased appreciation of what they have in common as they talk things through outside the press of daily
business.”
Bonus, support, and supplemental information and options may be available via the English & Ethics wikisites.
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