Nearly 12 years ago now, while moving into my office in the Kellogg Library, I discovered a box of audio cassettes marked only - ominously - "Sources of Creative Power," - nothing else. It was like finding a bottle on the beach. Since I was commuting to the job from Western Massachusetts, two hours away, I had to take them and listen. I was not prepared for what I found on them, in that lovely way one should never be prepared. Of course it was like nothing I'd ever heard. It was wild, bristling. It could have been a parody - that voice - BOOOdah; HeraCLItus; ZOCKrates. But it was luminous, not polished, not smoothly organized, or even always convincing, but edgy and insistent, powerful and purposeful.

Soon after I found the tapes, I found some of the transcripts, a few letters, a photo, and all of Hannah Arendt's books. To make a long story short, I could feel the excitement thrown off by the material, but I couldn't see how to do anything with it. Until now.

Digital technology, available in the last few years, has made it possible to preserve fragile materials and, more importantly, to share ideas - ideas shaped by years of talk back and forth in classrooms and living rooms and pacing and looking and being looked at. The idea with this archive project is to give it back, to place it back in the community of people trying to see what they can do, how we could think our ways toward to courage to be, as Blücher might say. They aren't merely tapes and transcripts, they are the story of the struggle to achieve the highest aspiration of the free personality - and across generations of students here in Annandale.

So what we're doing here is the second phase of the archival work - we are rescuing the sources of creative power by beginning the talk again.

These lectures, developed at the New School for Social Research in the fifties, and later at Bard, are finally available to the public for the first time since then. The scope of the lectures is grand, encompassing both the history of philosophy and the philosophy of education. When Heinrich Blücher speaks of Socrates or Homer or Jesus, his interest is not in biography, but rather in exploring the means of philosophical action. His emphasis is on application to the present, on the use of philosophy and history in confronting both the greater moral, ethical, and philosophical challenges of the age and in helping us approach the tasks of everyday life. Through Homer and the Greek myth of the binding of the Titans we may understand something of the actual nature of the atomic age; through the power of free philosophical reasoning itself, the student takes up the task of education, "to become free men and free women," in other words, the possibility of self determination.

For more information about this site and archive contact Betsy Cawley at [email protected] or (845) 758-7064 or write to her at Stevenson Library.