Intellectual humility for structural integrity

Instilling an appreciation for duality and nuance is a key aim of education

Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is a fascinating work of art. I use it every year as a starting place for discussions about what it means to be human – and, specifically, a balanced man. Not a bad place to start for a humanities course in a school brimming with testosterone.

The artist was influenced by the Roman architect Vitruvius (hence the title of the drawing), and the image evokes a structural analysis of human form rendered in architectural fashion. Perhaps the most intriguing dynamic is that the man’s extremities – depending on the position of his limbs – fit symmetrically within either a circle or a square.

The picture is a useful metaphoric reference for numerous sub-themes within that broader subject of balance. There’s a rich tapestry there, because concepts like balance, imbalance, proportionality, excess, restraint, and tension underpin almost everything. But among my favorites to use in my courses is that of duality; i.e., that we (and the world around us) are simultaneously natural and supernatural. That we are possessed of both mortal body and immortal soul. And, by extension, that we are complex in our nature – and always in tension.

Consider the two shapes in which the figure of the man is centered. Circles are the abstract infinite. We use an irrational number to ‘calculate’ their area, which is bounded by a perfectly curved line with no beginning and no end, which makes all points on it both the beginning and the end, and neither the beginning nor the end. The alpha and the omega. Its three-dimensional manifestation, the sphere, evokes even more puzzling conceptions of the infinite.

The square, on the other hand, is very much down-to-earth – a symmetrical affair built of four right angles and equidistant straight lines. Calculating its area is straightforward; beginnings and ends are clear. It’s a practical shape – so much so that its three-dimensional manifestation, the cube, is (literally) the basic building block we give to children. It’s a practical shape for all things human.

Vitruvian Man depicts mankind ‘in touch’ with both the square and the circle – the mortal and the divine. I think it’s a great way to represent this duality, and duality in general – the idea that two things can be true at the same time. The longer I’m in teaching, the more convinced I’ve become that this is one of the primary tasks of education – if not the primary task: to counter reductive, zero-sum, this-or-that reflex with the habituation of expansive thinking.

When students are invited and encouraged to develop an eye for duality, they get better at considering things more deeply. An eye for complexity becomes the default. They see the complexity of a character like Macbeth, instead of reducing him to a simplistic monomaniacal tyrant. They recognize that Victor Frankenstein’s creative capacity – and all the brilliance intrinsic to it – can yield remarkable forces of destruction. They see that the boys on the island in Lord of the Flies – even the most virtuous ones – have depth and complexity that makes them both angels and demons. They become sensitive to nuance.

In short, they get better at seeing humans – and how we all fit within both the circle and the square. When I begin my courses by investing in a several-days-long Socratic Seminar about the image and this concept, its value compounds and the dividends play out all year. Barely a day goes by without at least one student saying something along the lines of, “well, I think maybe there’s both circle and square going on here…” They develop an eye for duality and tension. Sometimes I’m amazed by the observations they make.

I suppose it’s important at this point to clarify that to teach students to embrace both/and thinking is not to suggest that there’s no place for either/or, or to steer them into a lifetime of equivocation or indecision. In fact, a core aim of a liberal education is just the opposite: to equip them with the ability to think sufficiently well as to be able to make good decisions based on habituated moral virtue. A key part of that is instilling intellectual humility. David Brooks puts it more eloquently in A Road to Character: “Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty.”¹

Reading good literature is a powerful tool to that end. I’d like to think that even as students develop a ken for observing literary figures through this lens of duality, they likewise use it as a baseline for understanding themselves and the world around them. I’d like to think each one of them recognizes that like the characters we study and discuss, he himself fits both ‘circle’ and ‘square,’ and so too do his parents, his siblings, his friends, teachers, and coaches. So too public figures and celebrities. The circle and square are metaphoric proxies for all sorts of dualities: the capacity for good and evil, the impulses of the physical and the spiritual.

I hope it engenders a more charitable disposition toward self and others than is typical in the current public discourse. I hope that it instills and informs an intelligently critical disposition that isn’t reductive by default – rather, a critical disposition aware of the power of heuristics, particularly the type of confirmation bias so effectively leveraged by today’s social media. I hope that it creates a tendency instead toward a mode of interpreting the world that isn’t zero-sum from the outset. Ultimately, I hope it encourages intellectual humility – at least enough to stave off the arrogance of assuming we fully understand a deeply complicated world.

1. Brooks, David. The Road to Character. Random House Trade Paperback edition. New York, Random House, 2016.