Benjamin Jowett once said that the most difficult thing to teach (and learn) is how to deal with unequal conditions of knowledge. I think it is reasonably easy to present finished lectures that will induce student awe. Easier still is to strike a pose of intellectual egalitarianism by melting into a free-to-be-me-and-you discussion. What is hard is to show students how to function effectively in the twilight between these two extremes, the very intellectual twilight in which most of us live most of our lives.

I have not been able to settle on a single method to achieve this end. Sometimes I will try to use discussion — as in 1A-1B when we move from matters of agreement to matters of dispute, the latter providing the theses for papers while the former provide the bases for reasoning. Sometimes I will arrange the readings to move from works about which I have settled opinions to works on which I have none (beyond that they are worth reading); for instance, my last course on the rhetoric of history moved from Gibbon's Decline and Fall (on which I have published) to Burckhardt (whom I know well, but not the particular work we discussed) and ended with Da Cunha's Rebellion in the Backlands (a powerful work I'd never taught before), with four or five other stops along the way. Sometimes I will try to set up the dialectic by assigning a series of texts written on similar issues but from incompatible points of view; I will then assume successively each point of view, taking care occasionally to allow the earlier works to voice their objections to the later so that the students are not permitted the comfort of thinking some progressive evolution is being revealed.

Perhaps my approach to teaching is best shown in the one book I've written for use in our classes. Figures of Speech tries to represent the old stylistic definitions not as hypothetical structures in linguistic things but as real potentialities within ourselves. My point is to emphasize the choices afforded by language so that we never see it as dead and rigid. I write in the conclusion: "Language has all the suppleness of human flesh, and something of its warmth. And that is true whether we choose to follow the strict discipline of the isocolon or the polymorphous perversity of the anthimeria."

So in the end I am trying to present my students with choices and to show them how to make those choices critically. For the class to be a genuine inquiry it is essential that I genuinely be participating in it. Hence I have resisted having any strict syllabus beyond a list of books in the order in which they are probably going to be read. No schedule should be allowed to inhibit a fruitful line of inquiry.

Another implication is that I must be constantly changing my courses, if not simply teaching entirely new ones. Only in this way can I come at the material with a fresh eye. Da Cunha's Rebellion , which was at the end of my reading list last year, will next time be in the middle, and will eventually pass out of my repertoire entirely.

Kant distinguished between sedentary and nomadic philosophers. Sedentary philosophers were the systematists who settled down and worked out their principles to the bitter end. The nomadic philosophers were the skeptics, never at rest, always trying new things in their search for truth but never expecting to be satisfied fully in any one place. I think this skepticism finds its fullest expression within the rhetorical tradition. I want my students to see that such an intellectual nomadism is not the rejection of knowledge but the persistent pursuit of it, to see that rhetoric does finally become an aspiration to dialectic.